Corruption as class rent. Why does Russia live by concepts?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

How does the spontaneous distribution of estates and hierarchies take place, which do not exist by law? Why do we live by concepts and what place does corruption take in our lives? The Kramola portal publishes the most interesting passages from an interview with sociologist Simon Kordonsky.

Our real rules are those that replace the official ones. Our real freedoms are those that are achieved through the centuries-old skill of finding the blind spots of the state. But if you live by concepts, you have to take them by rank. Some of the arrested and imprisoned governors probably had this situation: he was told to share. And he, maybe, even shared, but not enough, took out of order

There is a focus on the presumption of legality, on the transparency of citizens' activities for the state. But such transparency is not beneficial to citizens, first of all, because the state itself is not transparent for citizens and in many respects acts illegally. Or not illegally, but simply unconsciously, either reflexively, or instinctively.

An unimaginable volume of nominally state property does not officially have an owner, but unofficially, any thing has an owner. The state is clearly unable to manage what it considers to be the economy.

We have formed two regulatory systems. One is official, based on the law, and the other, built according to concepts. They exist in the same space, in the same people. People are divided: they live by concepts, but they interpret the behavior of others in terms of the law. And from their point of view, it turns out that everyone is breaking the law.

This, as I understand it, was nowhere to be found. Probably starting from the times of Peter the Great, we have a continuous modernization. Faced with this, people try to survive. Life in terms of concepts is a life-survival, a fishing life. A fisherman is a person who today assembles power lines for 10 kilovolts, digs toilets tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow goes to fur or forestry. This is not freelancing. A freelancer is looking for a job in a specialty, while tradesmen are learning a specialty. And when competitors appear (we now have Chinese), they move to other industries. And so tens of millions of people live.

It's a distributed lifestyle. Summer cottage, garage, cellar, apartment. Where the ends are convenient to hide, where there is nothing to grab a person. This is a way of getting away from the state, which modernizes everything that comes to hand according to imported models.

In Soviet times, for example, the party organization solved problems not according to Soviet law, but according to the party's conscience, that is, according to concepts. As at the party bureau all problems were solved, so they are still being solved, only instead of the bureau - what we call a civil society of service people. People with a status in the system gather in a bathhouse, in a restaurant, hunting, fishing, walking together - and solving problems.

There is also a very interesting institution of autonomization of communities living according to the concepts of social time. A municipal district, for example, has its own time course, which only partially coincides with the state one. It is determined by birthdays, in particular, significant for the district community of people and various memorable dates. People gather on such local holidays together, drink, eat and solve problems.

Moreover, birthdays are not necessarily local bosses, but rather significant people. In any administration there is some kind of inconspicuous person, a personnel officer, a secretary who keeps a book of memorable dates. The book says: so-and-so is Ivan Ivanovich's birthday, and so-and-so other significant people have a silver wedding. If the chief of the police is held in high esteem, a good man, then we will gather and celebrate the Day of the Police.

Last spring, my students and I had an expedition to one of the districts of the Tver region.

At the 10th minute of the conversation, the head of the district administration told the students (half were lawyers, half were government officials): “We live by concepts. And the law is for registration of already committed actions."

This is not only recognized but also used. For the state, which looks from the center at this region, it appears as a zone of natural disaster: low wages, unemployment, and a possible increase in social tension. But this information, which is generated by the district officials themselves in their reports to the center, is nothing more than a message: give money, otherwise you will be busy dealing with our problems. But in reality, people do not live so badly. With an official meager salary, prices there do not differ much from those in Moscow. They have cranberries there, and on cranberries you can make money in a season, for example, on a Chevrolet. There is a hunt. There is a forest that has grown on abandoned agricultural land, which is harvested, processed and exported. Naturally, this is all not even according to the law, but according to concepts.

The population of the region is 15,000 people, about 300 settlements. There are nine precinct officers for all of this, of which six work in offices, that is, there are three precinct officers for 300 settlements. There is a prosecutor, about my age, over 60 years old, angry at everyone. All, he says, need to be planted. There is a judge, one in two districts, good, judges fairly. And there is a notary, she decided, everyone goes to her - she solves problems. In other words, a dense, eventful life, in which the role of the law and its representatives is negligible in comparison with concepts.

Authorities. Watching

They can say: “I took it out of order,” “I didn’t give myself away,” “You were given an opportunity, you took advantage of it, but there was no gift on your part.” The concept arises at the moment of disassembly: "You are not behaving according to concepts." Some of the arrested and imprisoned governors probably had this situation: he was told to share. And he, maybe, even shared, but not enough, took out of order.

This is also due to the structure of the Russian language, which is three-dialectal. There is an official language, a language of documents - this is what the authorities tell us. There is a language of denial of officiality, a language that is shouted at protest actions. And there is a mat.

Only by knowing all three dialects, you can understand what the interlocutor means. It will not work to make the checkmate official. The fact that the first persons of the state, when communicating with the people, switch to argo, testifies to the same.

A significant component of the problem is also a superficial, introduced culture. Now - an English frame, which is broadcast by the education system. English, which is perceived as a native language by the professional community of economists, sociologists and the managers trained by them, cannot describe what is happening here.

This does not allow us to call the relationships in which we live our language, it does not even allow us to develop this language. That is, the language is developed, but with the use of math.

Corruption

It is possible only in the market, in the relationship between the market and the state. Since we have neither the one nor the other in full, it is better to describe what is happening not as corruption, but as class rent. Much more important is that the fight against non-existent corruption has gradually turned into a very profitable business of service people, into a means of redistributing relations of access to state resources.

Our law does not recognize estates and hierarchies. Who is more important - prosecutors or judges? Investigative Committee or Civilian Civil Servants? There is no clarity, therefore they are hierarchized in a natural way, and in each territory in different ways. Somewhere the prosecutor's office is under the Chekists, and somewhere under the Investigative Committee. To find out who is higher in the hierarchy, you need to understand who pays whom, who provides services to whom. The one who pays the rent is in the position of a subordinate class, a low-status one. Rent is the only thing that binds the state into a single whole.

Once sat at a meeting next to a general from the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Elena Panfilova, a fighter against corruption, spoke and talked about rollback as a form of corruption.

The general listened, listened, and then pushes me in the side and says: she's a fool, or what? If there is no rollback, everything will stop. Rollback is rent. Resources are not distributed free of charge. There are many contenders for resources, among them competition. Who will get access? The person who receives the resource rolls back a part to the giver. This is an analogue of the bank interest rate, and quite close, from my point of view.

There is the price of money, which comes at retail through the hierarchy of banks, and at each level it is different. And we have the same thing with resources. There is a monopolist - a state that distributes resources. And everyone who receives the resources rolls back a part of them in some form to the giver.

In a market system, the regulating mechanism is the bank interest rate, while in our country it is repression. The higher the level of repression, the lower the rollback rate. And accordingly, the economy is spinning.

In Stalin's times, there was a high level of repression and a minimum rollback rate. Repression as a system has disappeared and the rollback rate has increased. And the economy (what we call the economy) does not develop: resources are developed in the course of distribution. Now there is repression, but they are episodic, demonstrative and do not reduce the rollback rate. And if you cannot roll back, then resources may remain undeveloped.

Look at the backlog at the end of the fiscal year. If there is a fear of reprisals, then the resources do not reach the places, they simply are not distributed.

At the beginning of the 2000s, for example, very substantial funds were allocated to eliminate the consequences of a catastrophic earthquake in the Altai Republic, but under the strict control of the state. Three years later, it became clear: the consequences of the disaster were eliminated, but the money allocated by the state was not used, and it remains in the accounts. Because they could not be categorized by concepts.

If a person does not act according to concepts, then he is transferred under the law. This is not anarchy. This is a very rigid order - life according to concepts. They used to shoot for violation of conceptual norms, but now they bring them under the article of the Criminal Code.

We have thousands of laws that are very contradictory. There are also codes. But, for example, the Forestry and Land Codes often contradict each other, and moreover seriously. A local official is forced to choose between applying the law.

Here we had a rural cemetery, this land is not municipal, but it is not clear what kind. A forest has grown on it, and according to the law, according to the cadastre, this territory is assigned to the forest fund, but people need to bury it. So much for the general legal regime; and so in any business. These problems cannot be solved by law, so they are solved by concepts.

Reasonable people have always said that there is no need to rush to codify. It is necessary to systematize legislation, remove contradictions. But still they hurried and made codes. None of them are fully functional. We do not have a common legal space. It is torn apart, contradictory and internally conflicting.

All fantasies about the construction of the market and the concepts of reforms developed by all importers should be forgotten. The market itself emerges when the state leaves regulation and reform. The state wants us all the best and therefore breaks the way of life with every step, every new legislative act, and people are forced to survive in this system, to adapt. And to live according to concepts - there is no other way to survive.