If knowledge markets and cognitive economies are key to contemporary capitalism, then it is worth considering how this factor plays out in liberal democracies and autocracies, both to make sense of geo-economic competition in an increasingly multipolar world, and to develop an emancipatory internationalist perspective that takes into account the politics of unevenly distributed knowledge. Zooming in on contemporary Russia, Keti Chukhrov takes stock.
*
My motivation for exploring the politico-economic divergences between autocracy and democracy stems from the continuing efforts of progressive political thinkers to claim that contemporary Western democracy is not so different from post-socialist, southern or eastern autocracies; that it makes no sense to rely on formalizations of democracy when certain autocratic states could also apply the democratically positioned constitution. In other words, skeptics see no systemic difference between contemporary autocracies and democracies. The left does so because it refuses to acknowledge any potential for emancipation in liberal-democratic Realpolitik by definition, and the right because it relies on the notion of ‘the people’ rather than civil agency.
In his paper, political theorist Greg Yudin, citing Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, argues that the civil agency of democracy, unlike the truly democratic federalist Soviets, is limited to plebiscite and suffrage, which could eventually lead to the support of a Caesarist figure. He makes such an assumption as a result of his belief that autocracy, just like democracy, is most often based on constitutional legislation. I would like to argue, on the contrary, that when the usurpation of power by autocratic governments continues to abide by democratic law or constitution, it is because under the conditions of autocracy, the authority forcibly and openly imposes an illegal falsification on the law with the support of ‘the people’ that it illegitimately wins through cooption or intimidation. Meanwhile, in Western representative democracy, in order to violate the law, one must rather conceal this falsification, it cannot function openly in the law and be exercised legally. In other words, autocracies, and post-socialist autocracies in particular, have developed their own infrastructural logic and vocabulary, which differ considerably from democracy on social, political-economic and cultural levels. (Even if we have to criticize European representative democracy for all its inconsistencies, it is important to keep this condition in mind).
Thus, I will explore the three above-mentioned levels – social, cultural, and politico-economic – in the infrastructural organization of post-socialist autocracy and reveal (1) the paradox of class redistribution, (2) I will discuss why repression in an autocratic state like Russia is actually a cultural revolution, and finally (3) I will ask what makes informal rule and the shadow economy more profitable for post-socialist autocracies than the democracy that was claimed after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The paradox of class reconstitution
Let’s start with the paradox of class reconstitution. While class confrontation has traditionally been posited between the rich and the unprivileged, in autocratic societies (including Russia) it is played out less between the rich and the poor than between wealthy autocratic ruling groups united with ‘the people’ (including socially vulnerable populations) and the educated and internationally oriented middle class. In this case, the enlightened middle class confronts both: conservative ruling class elites and the so-called people. Without the social gap between the enlightened middle class and the working and lay masses, the electoral success of autocratic elites would be impossible. In the absence of a powerful left-leaning opposition in parliament, ‘the people’ side with the paternalistic autocracy.
Liberal democracies are meritocratic, they rely on the minority of legal winners of competition, hence they operate in the knowledge markets and creative economy of cognitive capitalism. Such a system cannot achieve equality, but its inequality is eventually balanced by the social democratic agencies and non-governmental institutions of social welfare and civil rights. Their civic practices and cognitive products are governed by autonomy. Historically, however, for early post-socialist liberal democrats (especially in Russia), the struggle against former Soviet authoritarianism implied the complete demolition of the de-privatized welfare state and its social guarantees. It is not surprising, then, that the unprivileged populations rallied around the paternalistic political forces that guaranteed at least some minimal social spending. Autocratic oligarchic rulers like Vladimir Putin, Bidzina Ivanishvili and Alexander Lukashenko are making one and the same class-building move: They declare paternalistic social concern for ‘the people’ and therefore rely mainly on the loyalty of the masses, luring them with charity and façade of stability.
Cultural revolution of ‘the people’
Cultural revolution – as the second condition of the autocratic infrastructure – departs from the above-mentioned class reconstitution and conceals the failure of the transition of former socialist states to capitalism. What many have lamented since 2011 as the authorities’ repression of culture and education, pro-Kremlin cultural figures have hailed as a full-blown revolution of the masses against the intellectual elites. In other words, the plundering of educational and cultural institutions and intellectual production in Russia is interpreted by supporters of autocracies as an uprising of ‘the people,’ rather than any state repression. Such a raid on cultural institutions resulted in a displacement of cognitive and intellectual production unprecedented in Russia’s history. Cognitive sophistication and speculative abilities lie primarily in autonomy and critical thinking, and that is why they were expelled from the social space, leaving room only for services and consumption. It should be noted that the aim was not to prohibit knowledge as such. Rather, by restricting autonomy and critical agency, the production of knowledge was automatically made impossible.
Thus, while the post-socialist autocratic states maintain capitalist production, evade sanctions, and revive trade and services, they must simultaneously freeze the development of the most important contemporary capitalist commodity – knowledge, humanities, and information.
This means that despite the urban sustainability and relative prosperity of the larger cities, especially after 2011, post-socialist autocracies have not shown good results in the production of knowledge kits and technologies. The cultural innovativeness and political astuteness of public and educational institutions is now an inseparable part of such a speculative autonomous product. In the competition for the production of the most important item of contemporary cognitive capitalism – knowledge – Russia has ended up lagging behind. This is not because there were no agents of knowledge production. Rather, it was because the production of knowledge was not properly institutionalized. As a result, Russia inevitably found itself in the lower position in the global competition of cognitive markets and thus had to deal with the inability to dictate its conditions in global capitalist production. However, in order not to accept this inferior position, Russia preferred to withdraw from the competition when its ambitions to become a world power were not supported by its modest achievements in post-industrial production. The question of why the construction of a sophisticated knowledge infrastructure did not prove profitable for the post-socialist states is easy to answer: because their informal oligarchic regimes could not coexist with any cognitive or social autonomy and combine surveillance with civil liberties. The governing system of post-disciplinary democracy is able to function in the ambivalence between surveillance and liberties (including pathologies and pleasures). In this flexible system, as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler have shown, regulation and permissiveness are intertwined. Meanwhile, the autocratic system does not so much prohibit sexuality or gender representation per se, but rather cannot adapt to this very ambivalence of the managerial system of democracy, which includes both surveillance and critiques that undermine it.
Thus, the current war against Ukraine is for the Kremlin the means to finally eradicate the practices and institutes that had an ambition of intellectual autonomy in their production. Hence the desertion of the workers of knowledge and culture, i.e. the enlightened middle class, as an inevitable consequence of this kind of policy in Russia, Belarus, Georgia, Egypt, Iran or any other autocratic system.
In the Soviet period, the socialist states were able to maintain their position in the global competition for power due to their developed relations of production, which were an important humanitarian product recognized worldwide in comparison with the developed productive forces of capitalism. Once the socialist credo was discarded, the former socialist countries ceased to be the icons of developed humanitarian ethics – that is, of developed relations of production compared to their less developed productive forces. Now the post-socialist states had to enter the competition to demonstrate capitalist excellence: advanced productive forces. But in such a competition, Russia could only act as a normal nation-state – one among many others – and not at all as a player defining global capitalist politics. However, if the competition with the cognitive capitalist West is impossible or totally unsuccessful (I believe that the current capitalist competition is a cognitive-cultural competition), in the case of Russia’s voluntary degradation from the ‘second’ developed world to the developing ‘third world,’ symbolic capital can be gained otherwise: not through developed cognitive capital, but by imitating the anti-colonial critique of the West in the name of the emerging economies of the Global South. (The expansion of BRICS under the Kremlin’s curatorship is a good confirmation of this.) In this position of anti-colonial spokesman against Western domination, Russia can paradoxically do both: speak out against Western hegemony and preserve its own imperialist ambitions towards post-socialist countries.
Shadow economy and informal rule
The current war is, in a certain sense, a constructive component of the project of Russia’s ultimate secession from its aspirations to integrate into the ‘developed’ economies and a voluntary move toward the ‘emerging’ ones. So it was not the war that caused the isolation, but the need for secession from the ‘second’ and ‘first’ world, which could not escape the war. I mentioned the inability of autocracies to ground management in law. In the case of post-socialist states, this inability is due to the fact that they are stuck between two impossibilities. First, it is impossible to return to the socialist political economy, where there was no need to compete with the advanced agents of capitalism. Second, it was impossible to realize the project of a full-fledged capitalist economy backed by law, leaving the crucial sections of the economy and social management in the informal shadow zone. Meanwhile, the competitive capitalist system has to abide by the international law, even if it has numerous inconsistencies and even if it shows hierarchies. Respecting the law means that the international financial system demands transparency and legibility from all its members.
The reluctance to include cognitive production and the knowledge infrastructure as a product of capitalism’s progress makes it inevitable to insist on the shadow economy, on informal management, and thus to pass off this illegal model as legal. Maintaining the liminal zone between the past socialism and the unlawful proto-capitalism is only possible under the conditions of informal rule and informal justice, which also presupposes the regime of the informal economy.
As Boris Kagarlitsky has pointed out, in contemporary liberal democracies – especially in their social-democratic variants – surpluses are partly invested in municipal infrastructure, education, technology, contemporary culture, institutional upgrading, and so on, albeit unevenly and even as conditioned by the capitalist logic of property. In post-socialist autocracies, however, the surplus is often embezzled, invested in luxury goods and private property, in the beautification of facades and consumer areas, or in the military. Thus, autocratic governments have to embezzle surplus funds, but they do so, not necessarily because they always want to. Rather, they do so because they lack the know-how to invest surplus income in the knowledge and creative economy: they are either incapable of building an infrastructural network to redistribute the surplus into the knowledge and institution-building spheres, or they are reluctant to strengthen the cognitive and cultural spheres of sociality. As Kagarlitsky argues, even if only a few people in such a system are corrupt, kleptocracy and nepotism inevitably become the basic operating principle of the system.