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1. Two Civilizations
- University of Washington Press
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Two Civilizations East is East And West is West And never the twain shall meet. —Rudyard Kipling 1 the sound and fury of 1987–91 has subsided, and we now realize that reducing the historic collision of forces in Russia to “a basic confrontation between capitalism and socialism” is hardly an adequate description of what took place during those years. At the time, the main thing was to pronounce socialism in Russia dead, to state loudly and unequivocally that our future lay with the market—but we cannot stop there. There is no denying that the vast majority of countries that currently boast a capitalist, market-oriented economy (or the rudiments of such) are hardly prosperous. In fact, many of them are plagued by poverty and economic stagnation. Most of them are far poorer than Russia, a country still new to markets. Yet these countries do have their millionaires—as do we. So it turns out that rejecting socialism does not automaticallyguaranteeeithergeneraleconomicprosperityoradecent standard of living—something that many Russians counted on in 1990, when they naively assumed that all we had to do was trade one fetish for another, a Communist birthright for a capitalist mess of pottage, Das Kapital for capital gains. The fact is that far more people inhabit the poor and dejected Third 1 3 World than the prosperous First. Moreover, the doors of the socialist Second World open into both. Critics of capitalism—“Russian patriots, Communists,” and their ilk—are absolutely right in noting this, but the trouble is that their plan for preventing Russia from slipping into the Third World, their prescription for her assumption of her proper social and economic place among nations, is completely cockeyed. Russia’s current historical dilemma comes down to one of the fundamental dichotomies of world history: the traditional confrontation between East and West that existed at least until the so-called awakening of Asia in the late nineteenth century. Since that time, many Eastern countries (including the “easternmost” of all) have made skillful use of selected Western principles of social organization. These are the very countries that are prospering today. Of course, a work of this small scope cannot pretend to describe global historical processes. Historian Arnold Toynbee designated twenty-one civilizations in the history of man, twenty-one types of social organization, only two of which might be termed “Western.” And even if one accepts Toynbee’s classification system, the remaining nineteen can hardly be characterized as “Eastern.” That is, the key features,thesystem-definingelementsthatIintendtoapplyinthiswork, when speaking of “Eastern” as opposed to “Western” civilizations, are more narrow and localized in nature. And while these criteria may not be applicable to the entire range and diversity of historical phenomena ,theyareabsolutelycrucialinanyattempttodefinetheoveralldevelopment of both society and state in Russia.1 The concept of an “Asiatic mode of production” is still relevant to Russia, because, unfortunately, Marx’s analysis all too accurately reflected Russian realities of the day. His analysis was grounded in traditional European denunciation of “oriental despotism,” as Europe strove to define itself as “not the East.” Marx saw the absence of private property in the East as “the key to the Eastern heavens”: If it is not the private landowners, but the state itself that stands in direct opposition . . . to manufacturers/producers[,] . . . if the state itself is the owner and proprietor and also the sovereign 4 Two Civilizations power, then rent and taxes are essentially the same thing, or rather, taxation does not exist apart from rents. . . . The state is heretheultimatelandowner.Thussovereigntyissimplylandownership on a national scale. In this case there is no such thing as private ownership of land, although private and/or communal holdings and land use do exist.2 Obviously, then, landownership lies at the heart of property relations . Societies in which there is no true private ownership, in which propertyownershipandgovernmentauthorityarejoinedatthehip(but where the latter is the dominant twin), in which o‹cial ties and relationships are the coin of the realm, the gauge of any and all societal relationships, societies where a bureaucracy rules both economic and political life—these are classically “Eastern” societies. Such features are typical of Third World societies even today, and are the chief cause of backwardness and of chronic poverty. These features also serve to ensure that the backwardness and the poverty will continue to exist, to perpetuate themselves, to take root and spread. Deep-rooted, too, are the historical reasons for this. The infinitely diverse non-European ancient and medieval world found certain...