Russia's Changing Universe: Resources, Networks, Locations

Abstract

Oleg Yanitskiy — Leading Researcher, Institute of Sociology, Russian Academy of Sciences. Address: Bldg. 5, 24/35, Krzhizhanovskii St., Moscow, 117218, Russian Federation. E-mail: yanitsky@mtu-net.ru

Globalization tends to alter the essence and meaning of such key theoretical notions as resources, networks and ecosystems. This article focuses on theoretical and practical questions of restructuring the social space of Russia in the course of interaction between the system of ‘power-property’ and the global network of civil society. There is an evident competition of ideologies within the contemporary ruling elite: ‘modernization("Go, Russia!") vs. conservatism as an ideology of the ruling party’. This is basically a reflection of the social divide between the minority, who realize the necessity of a quick (and, most likely, mobilizing) modernization, and the majority, which includes, first of all, the elites themselves and the servicing class in the broadest sense of its meaning; both of whom are unwilling to change anything. Yet the slower it goes with the modernization, the more resources it will require to support the stability within the ecosystem by means of security structures.

Knowledge itself is a powerful resource for modernization. It spreads along the networks and is further put to use by various individuals and organizations. As a result, the world gets ‘more ecological’. But what precisely is such knowledge? — That is the key question. At the moment there dominates a ‘from-top-to-bottom’ model of interaction: science keeps investigating, people get educated, etc. This is an enlightenment or, more precisely, a directive model of interaction between science and society, as the latter is regarded as a bunch of ‘dunno dummies’. The other side of the story is that ignoring local knowledge, accumulated in the course of an individual’s assimilation with the given location, has a complex ‘procedural’ structure and has to be used in local planning as it shifts the logistics of decision-making from an in vitro to an in vivo situation. It makes procedures more democratic, it is economically cheaper and produces a more just distribution of environmental risks in the local community. Finally, local knowledge is a process of filling things with meanings in a certain local context.

The market has become a central institution of exchange between tangible and informational resources. By expanding itself, it is steadily producing a re-evaluation of the local and global ecosystems. In the last 100 years, two very important events have taken place. The first one led to a dissociation of the once necessary proximity of the locus of final consumption and the locus of resource extraction. It is known as a spatial inversion. As a result of the second event there formed a financial market that exists as a separate entity and is independent of any certain territory.

In our own case, an ecosystem can be represented by a solid ‘power-property’ alliance that privatized a large part of the resources required for modernization and saving the population. This ecosystem rejects the responsibility for the vitally important processes of social development and ecology improvement. The form of ‘social contract’ (the loyalty of the population to power structures in exchange for its relative well-being) practically separates the power from the society. In other words, the power shapes the society according to its own needs. It lives in a different universe and is regulated by rules different from the ones that regulate the life of the majority of the population.

Not only is its network structure developing faster than the networks of human communication, but it creates a different ecology of the state — a so-called ‘pipe-network’ — as it embraces all of the financial, material and human flows, the whole of building and installation complex, the networks of settlements and temporary villages, etc. This structure creates a nomadic way of life for people. The ‘pipe-network’ is a tool of integration of nomenclature and its servicing class, relying on the values of consumption society. All this ‘elite ecology’ starts with fortified housing and helicopter pads, autonomous life systems, and extends to its basic structure — the security system. Eventually, this self-contained ecosystem quickly becomes ex- and super-national.

For this, one could partially blame Russian sociologists and political scientists. They have practically excluded themselves from studying social movements, explaining to the public that these movements are a natural part of the modernization process, while the Western scientific community has been improving such knowledge for over 70 years. But what is most important is that social movements create communities of people who are capable of directing their energies towards the modernization of the existing ecosystem. Demonstrations are only the first form of social movements. Today, they have become quite professional, flexibly organized and capable of performing multiple tasks, starting with education and up to developing projects or future agendas. That is exactly where one would look for the human resources of modernization. For some reason our sociologists have forgotten the lessons of the past: that is, how the Soviet Empire was eventually brought down.

Stiglitz’s idea of necessity for ‘democratizing globalization’ is not a utopia, but it requires resources, such as the development of ‘clever’ networks of the global civil society. The inclusion of Russian initiative groups, public organizations and NGOs in this process should be the basic strategy of their enhancement as a social and political force, as well as the accumulation of their intellectual potential and network resource of the society as a whole.

As for the relations between science and civil society, the old (vertical) ‘science to practice’ paradigm of sociological research is being gradually replaced by a paradigm of ‘partnership’ analysis, where rigorious scientific analysis from above meets perception, knowledge and action from below. That is why sociology today faces a far greater challenge: from now on, a sociologist has to perform both, insider and outsider, tasks and be capable of understanding the organized universe of meanings that constitute local social worlds and their social order. In this situation a sociologist acts as a participative researcher, rather than just a bystander.