Civil society in a Soviet straitjacket

Schools in Ukraine have already begun teaching a subject that focuses on civil society. This is beneficial and necessary, although it would be wrong to say that a civil society in the generally-accepted meaning of the word has been formed in this country. Ukraine is going to remain post-communist, post-Soviet, and post-genocidal for a long time.

A civil society emerges in the course of the free development of sociopolitical forces as a natural product of the decay of a traditional society. In Ukraine, the decay of the traditional society was triggered by the revolutions of 1848-49 (in the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and 1905-07 (in the Russian Empire).

The 1917-18 revolutions brought about the collapse of the empires to which the Ukrainian lands belonged. The collapse was accompanied by a colossal outburst of creative energy on the part of the millions-strong masses. Yet the main territory of Uk­raine found itself under the rule of the Bolsheviks, who destroyed all opposition and rebuilt all social structures in their own image, according to the principles of “democratic centralism.”

The Soviet Union lived an active and full-blooded sociopolitical life, beyond comparison with the surrounding countries of the free world. But it had one characteristic of a civilizational nature: all the structures and organizations, from the Bolshevik Party to societies of philatelists or fishing enthusiasts, were inseparably linked to one another. Society became a monolith that functioned by commands from the same center. The thesis that was formulated by the leader of the Bolsheviks before the communist revolution-that one cannot live in a society and remain free of it-proved to be prophetic. In the Leninist state commune, nobody could remain face-to-face with himself. The concept of the “free world” emerged only after this communist state had emerged on the historical stage.

The Soviet era left different impressions on the population of post-Soviet countries. Some shudder when they recall the past while reading newly disclosed documents on the Soviet state’s criminal actions against its own citizens, while others nostalgically conjure up rosy-colored pictures of their life under the Soviets. There are millions of both the former and the latter.

What attitude should people have to the Soviet past if they are guided by reason rather than emotions? How did Soviet society function? Why are the sociopolitical processes that are bringing us farther away from it and closer to what we call civilized countries so slow?

To answer these questions convincingly, one must examine the general laws governing the transition from a traditional to a civil society worldwide. Only against this background will it become clear why the revolutionary collapse of the traditional society in the former Russian Empire gave way to such a civilizational mutant as Soviet society – a civil society in a Soviet straitjacket.

THE COMPONENTS OF THE HISTORICAL PROCESS

It is impossible to analyze a society without defining its relationship to the state. The separation of state and society is a qualitative leap forward in the development of civilizations. At the same time, the relationship between the state and society immediately assumes an antagonistic nature. This antagonism can only be overcome after many centuries of historical development. Civil society is precisely the result of this process.

To find a cause-and-effect relationship in the development of society and state, one should be able to see clearly in retrospect and know the dynamics and the dominant vector of the historical process.

We should discard the teleological approach to studying history, which formed the basis of the theory of socioeconomic formations from the very beginning. Obviously, the past turns into the present without a preconceived vector. Yet it is easy to identify the dynamics of a historical process with the aid of Arnold Toynbee’s challenge and response formula. Whenever human collectives faced a challenge, they had to respond adequately in order to avoid disappearing into oblivion.

The first attempts to make sense of the course of history were made long ago. Trying to find a certain sense in social changes, the ancient thinkers formulated the circular concept of historical progress (similar to circular phenomena in nature). In their view, human life moved in a closed circle, from prime to decline and vice versa. Medieval Europe formed a providential understanding of the essence of the historical process. Thinkers believed that everything proceeded according to Divine Providence.

Providentialism was rejected during the Enlightenment (18th century). Under the influence of the steep growth of technology and the economy, the dominant trend in social development began to be assessed as positive. This is why the historical process was associated with historical prog­ress.

The optimistic view of the past lasted for one and a half centuries: neither the two world wars nor the Great Depression of 1929-33 could reverse it. The collapse of the Nazi “new order” was interpreted as confirmation of the positive trend in the historical process. It was not until the late 20th century that, owing to the exacerbation of global problems, hu­mankind began to assess the prospects of its development less optimistically.

Although history is a continuous process, it may be regarded as a number of isolated streams with a different dynamic (prog­ress-regress). In all probability, it is characterized by three dimensions: technological, socioeconomic, and sociopolitical. If a society develops with each of them having a different dynamic, contradictions accumulate, re­ve­aling themselves as crises, including those of a civilizational na­ture.

By the level of technological development, human history can be divided into three stages. Sociologists and historians clearly lacked the imagination to call them by different names, so they singled out a preindustrial (ag­ra­rian), an industrial, and a postindustrial society. An agrarian society is almost fully in line with the entire history of civilization. An industrial society in the West began to be formed as a result of the transition from manual-labor-based manufacturing to a machine-based one in the second-quarter of the 19th century. The transition towards a postindustrial society was triggered by World War Two.

The socioeconomic dimension of the historical process is primarily characterized by the degree of the development of money-commodity and market relations. We have seemingly traversed the entire distance from a natural to a commodity money economy, and the contemporary market is now global. Yet e-trade, which emerged recently and has already transformed the system of commodity money relations, is an example of the inexhaustibility of market relations. The Internet has fully bridged the temporal gap between the manufacture and sale of products.

The political process of the historical process is characterized by the development of humanity from the primitive horde to civil society, the highest achievement of civilization. Let us now focus on the key factors that form a society and a state. It is the relationship between these two formations that shapes the quality of the sociopolitical organization that we call a civil society.

THE CONCEPT OF CIVIL SOCIETY

This term can mean both a reality and a dream. Examples of a true civil society can be found in the countries of the “golden billion,” which have well-developed democratic traditions and a well-established social state. Sometimes post-Soviet political writers call these countries “civilized.”

Like other countries, “civilized” countries have many unresolved problems. Yet they provide – not only on the constitutional level but also in real life – equality of their citizens before the law, freedom of association, assembly, and demonstrations, an individual’s right to life and free development of their personality, the inviolability of the individual and his home, the right to own property and engage in entrepreneurial and creative activities, as well as social security, including the right to work, rest, and leisure, housing, medical care, and a decent standard of living.

The “golden billion” was formed in the past few decades. Until recently, the high living standards in Western countries were achieved mostly at the expense of the exploitation of colonial peoples. In the more distant past, they were beset by social contradictions, which at times resulted in bloody revolutions.

People differ along many lines. In the past, these differences were the source of interstate, civil, interethnic, and religious wars. Although the development of military technology has re­duced the risk of global wars, like before, the world today is rocked by local conflicts. Their numbers will diminish if people succeed in forming organizations that are capable of influencing governmental decision-making. The system of mutually-linked organizations that are independent of public administration and have sufficient political experience and economic potential is usually called a civil society.

Thanks to well-developed in­for­mation and transport communications, it functions in time and space as a single body. This kind of society determines the composition of the political elite during a free election and exerts influence on governmental decision-making. The state thus becomes truly dependent on society for the first time since its emergence.

THE FORMATION OF A TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

Let us consider how and why society managed to rise above the state, the very existence of which is impossible without a coercive and repressive machine that serves it. Owing to this factor, the state has always stood over and above society, although it was a creature and, to some extent, a component of it.

Traditional society began to form when primitive hordes gave way to tribal collectives, i.e., after the economy of appropriation (gathering and hunting) had given way to that of reproduction (land and animal husbandry). While the economy of appropriation was based on collective ownership of natural resources, the economy of reproduction introduced private ownership of capital goods and the products obtained by means of the latter.

Being essentially the monopoly of an individual on ownership and usage of property, private ownership gave rise to social differences. Collectives with a pronounced social structure triggered state-building processes, as a result of which they gained an advantage over others in the struggle for natural resources. When, owing to more perfect capital goods, man became capable of producing material wealth in a quantity larger than was necessary for his physical existence, man himself became a resource that could be owned, used, and disposed of.

Accordingly, the fight for land frequently became a struggle for the possibility of appropriating slave labor. However, in the state-building process the main object of appropriation was not a captive from a different tribe turned into a slave but the land populated by a peasant community. It is not correct to apply the word “slave-owning” to the ancient states, including Greece and Rome, because their state institutions relied on free tillers of land, who also formed the foundation of an army, without which a state is unthinkable.

We find some elements of civil society in the Athenian democracy in the fifth century B.C., the Roman Republic, which emerged as a community of equal citizens (civitas nostra), and the ancient Slavic viche system (popular assembly). Yet a civil society can only exist as an integral system. Athenian citizens should not be considered separately from the slaves whose work created favorable conditions for reflections on democracy.

The Roman Republic strove for prosperity with the aid of the resources that were confiscated from non-citizens in the conquered regions. The viche system of the ancient Slavs only sanctified with the authority of tradition the emerging power of the princes or Novgorod merchant stratum.

In its other dimension, the traditional society was agrarian. At this stage, the state could exist in various forms, but it was always based (except for specific nomadic communities) on land ownership. As a rule, the state’s ownership of land was personified by a monarch, i.e., this was a variety of private ownership. It was also a rule that a monarch exercised the right to land ownership by delegating some power to those who performed government functions, such as the military, the judiciary, administrators, etc.

Some powers were also delegated to peasants: they were al­lowed, on the condition that they fulfilled their duties, to use the common land which used to be their collective property in pre-state times. The necessity of forcing peasants to carry out compulsory duties led, in the course of time, to serfdom with respect to the monarch or his vassals. This brought about the multi-tiered feudal relations of land owners and land users in Europe.

The rule of “the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal” restricted the power of the supreme suzerain. It was not until monarchs could rely on the bourgeois strata, which emerged thanks to the development of market relations, that a political system called absolutism was formed. King Louis XIV of France had every right to declare: “I am the State (L’etat c’est moi).

What emerged in Russia, however, was not so much an example of feudal relations as of the slavish dependence of representatives of the privileged strata (including the patriarch) on the autocratic tsar, while peasant serfdom later practically degenerated into slavery.

At the stage when the agrarian society turned into an industrial one (the socioeconomic dimension of the historical process) and the traditional society into a civil one (the sociopolitical dimension), state property ceased to be the personalized property of a monarch. Even in pre-revolutionary Russia, which maintained the autocratic form of government to the very end, this kind of property was separate from that of the tsar’s family. According to a decree issued by Paul I in 1797, state peasants who worked land that was considered the property of the imperial family were declared a special estate of dependent peasants. They were freed of personal dependence a few years before the abolition of serfdom.

THE DECAY OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

The concept of “civil society” emerged well before it became a reality. In other words, civil society, which is a 20th-century phenomenon, was defined by a term inherited from the 17th and 18th centuries. It is all the more correct that Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and later Jean Jacques Rousseau and Charles Montesquieu, attached a different meaning to this concept.

Without indicating the cardinal difference between the categories of state and society, these thinkers nevertheless sought to differentiate between these concepts. Hobbes even attempted to validate the thesis of the supremacy of society over state on the basis of the theory of natural rights. Yet in his teachings this postulate was used to champion royal absolutism.

Unlike Hobbes, Locke be­lieved that public approval in the form of a social contract was the only source of royal authority. He said that when the king’s subjects are concluding this kind of agreement, they should create a civil society to make use of their natural rights.

Montesquieu advanced the idea of the rule of law, which all people, irrespective of their status in the state and society, were supposed to obey. He believed that laws could forestall the voluntarism of a ruler or the dictatorship of individuals who have formed political organizations.

The German philosopher Im­manuel Kant transferred the idea of civil society into the sphere of ethics. In his view, the ideal state of society is when each of its members is guided by a moral law called the categorical imperative: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” In his opinion, the categorical imperative ensured that every individual would be free and enjoy equal rights with other members of society.

After the American and French revolutions, the estate-based society began to disintegrate very quickly. Remaining a traditional society, it was becoming a class one. Whereas earlier monarchs had used the bourgeois strata only to strengthen their personal power, now the latter began to wield their own political clout in the state. The community of entrepreneurs pledged to support the state with taxes in exchange for favorable conditions.

On the other hand, the state, personified by the monarch, recognized the right of the bourgeoisie to capital goods and other property, and confined itself to levying taxes on profits. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel who spotted these social development trends. He was one of the first to distinguish clearly between the concepts of state and society. Hegel said that civil society is a community of people in which every individual can pursue his private interests. The state was based on, but not identical to, a civil society. The state is a political organization within which society can function.

(To be continued)