Development cycles are linked by transition periods during which situations occur where the historical choice of the next road to take must be made. These are seen as the bifurcation points, the arborization of the trajectory of historical development. Each cycle is looked upon as an evolutionary niche, while the transition during which a possible path of development for local or global social community is chosen is seen as a choice and the mastering of a new niche. At the same time, according to Azroyantz, the possibility of fatality cannot be ruled out for local civilizations and for humankind in general in the current global crisis as one of the variants of the development of the situation.
Azroyantz justifiably believes that humankind is experiencing a civilizational crisis that corresponds to the transition from the second cycle – i.e. the establishment of society – to the third one, the establishment of the social megacommunity.
In view of this, according to Azroyantz, the contemporary liberal model of globalization (globalization of scientific and technological progress and of financial capital) precludes moving onto a new level of development, which is why the creation of a qualitatively new “humane’ model of global development is required.
However, as Azroyantz rightly believes, social agents capable of and interested in resisting scientific and technological progress and managing the process of globalization on behalf of humankind have not yet been formed in the contemporary world.
At the same time, Azroyantz supposes that the spiritual and technological development of society are heading in opposite directions and, as a result, technological development under certain conditions objectively gives rise to social regression, which can be observed in the sphere of social relationships. Both cultural-civilizational unification and the general deterioration of culture occur during neoliberal globalization.
However, appeal to the networks, characterized by shapelessness and lack of obvious leadership centres and popular in the age of artificial social networks, serves only to stress the agentless nature of Azroyantz’s approach, which has no place for real political actors in the global process and their interests.
On the whole, Azroyantz’s theoretical approach is limited to relating the facts of globalization, highlighting its typical system of gradually increasing internal contrasts. It does not go further than reproaching the new world order.
At the same time, Azroyantz, while declaring the civilizational approach as a methodological system, is de facto offering his version of a formation-based approach under the guise of historical cycles. He repeats the main premise of economic reductionism (and liberal fundamentalism, as one of its varieties) in terms of the fatal inevitability of the convergence of cultures and civilizations as a global economy is formed.
Therefore, the works by Yakovets and Azroyantz, as typical contemporary works on the sociology and culturology of civilizations, are illustrative of the passive reflection of local social groups (including local civilizations, such as Russia), who find themselves and their systems of interest forced by globalization onto the periphery of social life.
Typically, this civilizational approach is based on a convergent, effectively multi-stage model of the development of social communities, the development of which occurs through the convergence of preceding communities until a global culturally homogenous society (“social megacommunity’, “global human ant hill’, “cheloveynik’ and others) is created.
At the same time, obvious contemporary tendencies towards ethnocultural divergence, fragmentation and a sharp increase in the importance of ethnicity and religiousness are being ignored.
Pivovarov141 raises the issue of the contemporary state of the formation-based and civilizational approach as complementing each other. He stresses in particular that the formation-based approach borrows key ideas from Christianity, including the universality of history, its patterns and the possibility of singling out periods within history.
Fursov142 stands out among the supporters of a formation-based approach, since he sees history not only as a fight among classes, social groups and state bodies within a certain societal formation, but as long cycles of standoffs between elites and lower classes that spread to the larger civilizational space and up to the global level during the last historical cycle. According to Fursov, the current moment is characterized by the global vengeance of the elites and, as a consequence, the global crash of social achievement of the masses.
Fursov sees a mutual need for social cooperation that requires a certain structure of the “social pyramid’ as a factor that determines the equilibrium of the higher and the lower classes coexisting within a society. In this regard, the lack of population after wars or the epidemics of the Middle Ages led to the emancipation of the third estate. Industry’s need for workers and then for markets for manufactured goods led to constraints upon elites and the rise in the social standing of the masses, the appearance of socialism first as a school of thought, then as a social system, and the creation of a middle class in industrialized bourgeois states.
Nevertheless, according to Fursov, globalization is yet another revenge of the elites who have lost connection with the nation state basis and who reap benefits from the privatization of the welfare state created in the industrial epoch.
The important task set before the theory of globalization is to create a theoretical world model (or several compatible models showing different spheres and aspects of social existence and collective consciousness), allowing us to model and compare variants and models of global development and global management. This will at least allow the introduction of qualitative criteria of efficiency and comparison of various models and trajectories of potential development.
Globalization engenders strong contradictions touching upon deep ontological foundations of the being of humankind as well as local communities at all levels. It would seem that the structure of contradictions should be an objective depiction of globalization. However, theoretical views of globalization are essentially subjective and usually reflect interests and points of view of a certain social agent.
Pirogov143 says that: “Globalization these days is perhaps the most fashionable world in political slang. However, everyone understands it differently. The differences in understanding are an estimation and this leads to a new ‘Babel confusion of tongues,’ threatening to crash the Babel tower before it has been built. Strong interests are behind each understanding of globalization. The process of globalization is permeated with sharp contradictions.” A detailed list of key contradictions can be found in the work by Timofeyev.144
The current stage of economic globalization, whose point of departure is Western victory in the Cold War, is characterized by the ubiquitous and clichéd commercialization and privatization of state monopolies (housing and utilities, power, transport, defence). Commercialization and privatization have affected other, initially non-commercial spheres and institutions of social life (education, science, medicine, culture). At the same time, the objective tendency of the capital to expand and the expansion of the effectiveness of money-for-goods exchanges even at this time, during the peak of corporate globalization and privatization of welfare state, is not absolute and is always within certain non-economic limits. These limits may be material (limited space or resources), political (state borders), technological (transport and communications), related to social stability (social stratification is simply a downside of capital concentration), security and long-term needs for modernization and the construction of infrastructure, which require long-term investments.
Correspondingly, economic globalization, with its typical ultra-liberal economic model, should be seen not as an irreversible process, as neoliberal ideologues usually see it, but as a reversible and even cyclical shift of equilibrium of powers and interests between elites from various levels and other social groups.
The objective nature of the labour theory of value (LTV) does not signify the need to cancel limitations of a non-economic type, as the limitations of the LTV allow human social communities to exist. The constant tendency does not cancel out contrasting objective and subjective powers. The objective truth of the law of universal gravitation influences evolution, but does not cancel the living organisms on Earth that exist in constant contradiction with gravitation.
Liberalization and commercialization engender the degradation of extremely important – especially long-term – non-commercial spheres of social life (science, culture, education, marriage), that make up an essential part of human existence.
It is quite likely that crises in the global economy and internal affairs of certain states that are prompted by liberalization, commercialization and deregulation will in the future logically lead to the movement in reverse – namely to deliberalization and regionalization, as well as to the reinvigoration of such social institutes as nation states and ethnicities.
In any case, we see the example of Roosevelt’s New Deal that came to replace the decade of post-war liberalism of the twentieth century. Many other examples of successful deliberalization and deprivatization exist, above all the creation of the European model of the welfare state145 and the construction of a whole range of viable models of socialism and compromise social models based on a number of civilizations and cultures.
The economy has seen global changes linked to the appearance and growth of transnational corporations and globalized banking and financial structures.
Manufacturing has long since ceased to be merely national. It is becoming more and more transnational: only some of the work on a certain product is done in any given country, while the item has to go through a long process from raw material to completeness through manufacturing cycles in many countries. Transnational corporations deal with this type of manufacturing, but they do not focus on one activity or one product.
In the 1990s, the joint sales of 500 largest global transnational corporations were responsible for over a quarter of the world’s GDP, over one-third of global exports of the manufacturing industry, three-quarters of the trade in goods, and four-fifths of the trade in technologies. At the same time, about 40 per cent of global trade happened within transnational corporations.146
However, it follows from these figures that only about 30 per cent of the economy is globalized, considering national markets, including several exclusively local but very important economy sectors, such as housing, utilities and infrastructure. At the same time, only the high-technology sector of the economy, which is related to basic sustenance, has been globalized alongside finance and its specifics.
1991 may be considered the watershed moment of the update of another component of globalization – the global crisis of resources and demographics, which was officially declared a global threat by the experts of the Club of Rome. The reports of this elite group of experts ordered by the UN147 were created in correlation with representatives and structures of the global elite. Therefore, the reports of the Club of Rome and its members are not exactly independent research, but rather the position of global elites in relation to the problem of a global crisis of resources and demographics camouflaged as research and illustrated by certain scientific computations. The policy of the “nucleus’ states and international political and financial institutions (UN, IMF, World Bank, etc.) is based thereon.
The leading cause of the crisis of resources and demographics was the “baby boom’ in non-industrialized countries on the global periphery (South, “third world’ countries), coupled with the growing depletion and, by consequence, the growing prices of natural resources. These days, the baby boom in countries on the global economic periphery has led to a migration tsunami, irreversibly destroying the ethnocultural integrity of European nations and Russia.
On the cusp of the 1990s, the growth of the population of the “third world’ exhausted the results of the green revolution – the technological modernization of the agricultural sphere of the third world, initiated by industrialized countries and meant as a means of social rehabilitation of former colonies. The end to the growth of productivity against the backdrop of the growth of population and conversion of arable lands into space used for other purposes resulted in lower per capita grain production as an objective indicator of the lower food security and life standard in general.148
The stabilization of the fast pace of economic growth typical of the first stage of the industrialization led to the population growing faster than the GDP, which stamped out newly industrialized countries’ hopes for a new consumption level characteristic of the countries in the old industrialized and financial nucleus of the global system.149
As a result, the contradiction between the limited resources and the unlimited growth of population in countries with a traditional model of demographic growth left the confines of the third world and took on a new quality, becoming a global problem. At the same time, the crisis of resources and demographics is not only manifested as a growing lack of balance between the global population and world’s resources, paving the way for a global catastrophe, even based on an average model from the Club of Rome. The inconsistency of the demographic development, which put demographic and migration pressure on the countries at the nucleus, as well as on the countries of the industrialized periphery (for example, Russia) is no less dangerous.
How many billion men can our planet feed if the population of the Earth may reach eight billion by as early as 2020? This issue is becoming a matter of life and death for billions, rather than millions, of the inhabitants of the world’s periphery and half-periphery, who do not “fit in” with the competing projects of a post-crisis lifestyle.
At the end of the 1960s, Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defence in Kennedy’s administration, who later became, characteristically, the President of the World Bank, spoke about the threat of the “demographics explosion” and impending lack of resources. In fact, it was McNamara who brought the term “demographics explosion” into the political vernacular.
At the beginning of the 1970s, a secret directive on the policy on global population elaborated by a similarly famous figure, Henry Kissinger, was adopted by the United States National Security Council, wherein the policy on “containing’ the growth of the global population was equal in importance to the defence programmes in terms of US national security.
Similar reports on the inevitability of the deficit of resources and ecological crisis were received by other expert groups, which is not surprising: the problem of the finite nature of the global mineral and biological resources was up in the air: in particular, it was clearly formulated within Vernadsky’s theory of geospheres. The problem of the limits of growth was posed and solved in the USSR largely independently from the West and based on own scientific potential.