Andrei Firsov is a Russian historian and sociologist who has written several important works, including his main book entitled “The Turning Point: The Future That Found the Past.” It must be noted here that Firsov belongs to the new Russian social school, which considers Russia the pillar of authentic European civilization, as opposed to the “degenerate” and “regressing” West.
In his diagnosis of the international situation resulting from the current technical revolution, Firsov believes that the world has entered the post-capitalist stage, the basic characteristics of which are the decline of the principle of the free market and open global exchange, with what this transformation means in the collapse of the integration institutions upon which traditional capitalism was based, most notably the state. Nationalism, civil society, work ethics, and the mass educational system. The first technical revolution in the eighteenth century was based on the steam engine and railways, while the second revolution was based on electric power, the telephone and the telegraph, while the current revolution is based on artificial intelligence and digital and electronic communication.
Contrary to the prevailing perception, which sees the globalization movement as an achievement of the path of capitalist expansion, especially after the collapse of the socialist system in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Firsov argues that the world is not heading towards unification and integration, but rather towards the establishment of large feudalism protected by new control technologies that have practically ended the differences between… Political systems of government. There is no longer a fundamental difference between liberal governments and authoritarian governments. The momentum generated by the political and social revolutions in Europe, with their ideological stock centered around the three conflicting tendencies: conservatism, liberalism, and socialism, has receded.
These three trends emerged from the same modernist, humanistic horizon from which Western Europe and the United States emerged, and these societies are today – according to the author – without value guides. The dynamism of modernity has swept away the traditional normative system, and globalization has undermined the civil and ideological components produced by modernity. Referring to Max Weber’s famous thesis on the relationship of capitalism to religious reform and work ethics, Firsov believes that experience has proven that non-Western societies have developed effective immunity mechanisms to protect their cultural stock, as is the case with China, India, and Russia. It is not our concern here to evaluate Firsov’s thesis, which expresses a basic aspect of the heated theoretical and political debate between Russia and Western countries. It is sufficient to point out three basic observations in this escalating debate.
First: In recent years, the new Russian thought has reinterpreted the Soviet experience that lasted seven decades, and enabled the building of a strong, far-reaching empire. It also led the process of economic and technical modernization in countries that were at the bottom of the European nations. What is clear from these writings is that the Soviet experience was not, as is usually thought, a mechanical import of Marxism, which is ultimately a European philosophy, but rather a faltering attempt to build an alternative modernity to Western liberalism that takes into account the cultural peculiarities of Russian society. Although this experiment succeeded in its modernizing approach, it made a mistake in rejecting its cultural heritage, which is today the frame of reference for the “corrective” movement led by President Putin.
Second: The transition from the modern technical industrial model to the current digital revolution radically changes the institutional systems of contemporary societies, including the form of the nation-state and its representative and executive structures. If, according to the new Russian thought, Western countries are trying without success to preserve their liberal gains, adapting to the qualitative transformations experienced by current societies, then non-Western global powers are able to formulate alternative mechanisms and systems that simultaneously guarantee the requirements of the specific civilizational identity that is… The basis of effective independence and the gains of legal and moral modernization in terms of individual and collective freedoms, human rights, and distributive justice.
Third: The new international equation cannot be reduced to narrow geopolitical considerations centered on power stakes and strategic competition. Rather, it is necessary to recognize the cultural and civilizational data that go to the heart of the current global conflicts. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the American political school has paid attention to the importance of the cultural paradigm in new international relations (Paul Kennedy, Huntington, etc.), and then the same model moved to Russian and Asian thought from a different perspective.
While the American school focused on the challenges resulting from the collision of identities and cultures, the new Russian thought went further by raising radical questions about the path of cultural and ideological Westernization in its relationship to the capitalist modernization movement, and its repercussions on non-Western societies. It is the pivotal problem that opens broad horizons for philosophies and ideas in the global South in its broad, comprehensive sense.
*Mauritanian academic
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