Culture and law in the theoretical and methodological foundations of the study of social progress by domestic Marxists in the XXI century

Fedin Aleksandr Nikolaevich ORCID: 0000-0002-0267-4127 PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor, Department of State and Legal Disciplines, Saransk Cooperative Institute (branch) of the Russian University of Cooperation 430027, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Transportnaya str., 17 alexfedi@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

Kechaikina Elena Mikhailovna ORCID: 0000-0003-2439-2160 PhD in History Associate Professor, Department of State and Legal Disciplines, Saransk Cooperative Institute (branch) of the Russian University of Cooperation 430027, Russia, Republic of Mordovia, Saransk, Transportnaya str., 17 ekechaykina@ruc.su

By the 205th anniversary of Karl Marx, his ideas are again the subject of widespread controversy among scientists, politicians, and representatives of culture. The modern economic crisis that has engulfed the global capitalist system has logically led to the popularization of the philosophy of Marxism. For our society, Marxism is a kind of dividing line: part of the society firmly identifies it with the era of the USSR and the established dogmatic ideology, the other part sees it as a way out of the protracted anti-people policy of the state. A priori, these disputes raise the problem of social progress, which has been increasingly returning to the scientific discourse over the past decade. There is no doubt that the cornerstone of K. Marx's works was the consideration of society from the point of view of its continuous improvement in the cultural and legal field. The basis of the division of society according to Marx lies in the problem of man's attitude to work and the consolidation of this in the legal field of property rights. Due to multiple circumstances in the domestic socio-humanitarian knowledge, the model of social dynamics in Marxism was excessively economized and reduced to a scheme of transition from formation to formation with the improvement of productive forces. Therefore, in our article we will try to analyze a number of problems that take place, both in relation to abstract universal categories for describing social progress, and the development of Marxist theory in relation to specific practices of society.

It should be noted that the roots of modern domestic Marxism in the study of the problem of social progress are inextricably linked with the process of theory development in the 50-60s of the XX century in both Western philosophy and Soviet socio-humanitarian knowledge. Russian thinkers can be divided into groups of researchers who independently influenced the current understanding of progress in Marxism. The first group should include the works of historians L. S. Vasiliev, I. A. Stuchevsky ^[5], Yu. M. Kobishchanov ^[7]. All the above-listed authors tried to point out the fallacy of understanding that any society consistently follows the path of socio-economic formations. The idea of a single pre-capitalist formation in the works of Soviet historians was proved not only in relation to the development of productive forces, but also the consistent development of culture and law.

The second group consists of philosophers E. V. Ilyenkov, M. A. Livshits and D. Lukach, who strongly influenced them. The dispute between E. V. Ilyenkov and A. A. Zinoviev in the mid-50s of the XX century gave rise to different views not only regarding the logic of ascent from the abstract to the concrete, but also the philosophical understanding of Marxism itself. The authors mentioned above agreed on the need for a unified interpretation of Marx's works, putting the principle of historicism and human freedom as the main criterion for the progress of society at the forefront. As E. V. Ilyenkov himself noted, in such an approach to social progress there was no goal to "humanize Marxism", but only a desire to combine the theory of building a communist society and the urgent practice of educating a comprehensively developed individual inclined to self-government and cooperation ^[6]. Thus, it can be said that in the middle of the XX century. in domestic Marxism, in relation to social progress, ideas arose of revising the abstract-universal category of "social-economic formation" among historians and the need to concretize the theory of alienation among philosophers.

In the Marxist theory of social progress, the abstract-universal category of "socio-economic formation" remains a necessary element for interpreting the transition of society from one level of lifestyle to another. Thus, in the work of Y. M. Kobishchanov, it is shown that peasant labor, characteristic of various peoples of the feudal era, is culturally versatile, since it contains special relationships between labor, means of production and objects of production. In the legal aspect, with regard to the time dimension of the deployment of social progress, this leads to the consolidation of special rules of the life of society and its ability to transition to a more perfect socio-economic formation ^{[7, pp.178-179]}. Spatially, culture and law influence non-economic forms of coercion through community systems of various types (caste, workshop, religious community, tribe).

 Yu. I. Semenov in his "Philosophy of History" on the basis of the former Marxist model offers a more perfect global-stadial approach, taking into account the new categorical apparatus: "socior", "paraformation", "proformation ^{[12, p. 732]}. According to the historian, the traditional Marxist approach to the social transformation of society takes into account only the qualitative changes affected in the time scale, ignoring the spatial interactions of sociors, that is, the basic subjects of the historical process that form production relations, the legal forms of their regulation and the culture of interaction in society itself and beyond.

Yu. I. Semenov sees the development of Marxist theory in the need to transform the stadium model into a global-formational one ^{[12, pp.730-731]}, in order to establish spatio-temporal changes in society. In fact, the author proposes to synthesize classical European theories of social progress and methods of the civilizational approach. Based on this, social progress in the concept of Yu. I. Semenov can be considered on a time scale – from a pre-class society to a communist one, or on a spatial one. As for the latter, the author's approach denies the possibility of passing through more than two socio-economic formations. Therefore, it is logical to determine progress in the spatial dimension by those cultural achievements of the socior that formed the basis for the transition of humanity to a higher stage. For example, if there are a large number of sociores using the productive forces of the corresponding era of feudalism, a sociore that has spread a more perfect mode of production should be recognized as progressive, even if it physically ceases to exist. Let us add to this that a socior who has moved to a higher cultural level of people in the process of work will also create a legal field for a new attitude of society to property and means of production.

Highlighting culture as the main criterion for the development of society, V. M. Mezhuyev, unlike Yu. I. Semenov, is inclined to believe that only two formations should be distinguished for the study of social progress: a) primary (archaic) and economic (socio-economic formation). Thus, for V. M. Mezhuyev, the category of "socio-economic formation" logically performs the role of not abstract-universal, but only special and includes both slavery, feudalism, and capitalism ^{[10, p.68]}. The social transformation from an archaic formation to an economic one takes place due to the development of productive forces and the development of social relations. With the formation of the state, religion, commodity economy, as products of culture in the socio-economic formation, a person is alienated from the material goods produced by him. Gradually, these forms of alienation are fixed in the legal field.

According to V. M. Mezhuyev, all the works of K. Marx are culturocentric, since any culture is based on work. Hence, we can logically assume that the social progress of society should be determined by the way of production and the attitude of a person to work and the results of this work, respectively. This correlates with the basic ideas of E. V. Ilyenkov, for whom any work, if there are fixed conditions of existence of private property in the legal culture, turns a person into a function devoid of creativity ^[6]. With the development of private property and the improvement of productive forces, human labor has been reduced to an abstract function of the production of goods, depriving people of universal concrete connections between them.

The dialectic of the development of productive forces and social relations in the process of human creativity underlies the work of modern social scientists who pay attention to the problem of social progress within the tradition of critical Marxism. If in the first part of the article we considered the problem of social progress mainly through the category of "socio-economic formation", then the second part will be devoted to the category of "alienation". Critical Marxism of the XXI century continues to study the evolution of late capitalism or the era of globalism through the prism of the social reification of man. However, there is another important element of the analysis of the process of social progress, namely, the consideration of alienation on the example of Soviet society in comparison with modern society. K. H. Momdjian methodologically suggests to talk about social progress only when analyzing the effectiveness (volume) of productive forces in satisfying the material and spiritual needs of a person. Such an approach, according to the author himself, does not allow a scientific assessment of the substantial difference between the society of Ancient Greece and feudal England ^{[11, pp.55-56]}. The dialectic of development is considered by K. H. Momdjian in relation to the USSR society of the 50s of the XX century, where the progress of productive forces and cultural improvement coincided with the deprivation of basic constitutional rights and freedoms, that is, a new form of alienation.

Here we enter the field of another methodological problem in the works of modern Marxists – should socialism and the progress of society be considered as theoretical propositions, or did socialism have its real embodiment and gave rise to new forms of human cooperation, and with it new forms of alienation? A striking example of the difference in methodological approaches is the dispute between V. M. Mezhuyev and B. F. Slavin. Methodologically Mezhuyev analyzes socialism, its culture and legal aspects, a person's attitude to work, the transition to a new stage of development of social relations only as theoretical provisions ^{[10, pp. 164-168]}. If we consider historical reality from the point of view of this methodological attitude, then we will have to fix the validity of the conclusions of the neo-Marxists T. Adorno ^[1] and G. Marcuse ^[9] about one-dimensional, automated man and his alienation in the capitalist world. But already Ilyenkov in his article "Marx and the Western World" showed that this form of alienation is generated by private property and cannot be fully applied to Soviet society (the society of "real" socialism) due to differences at the economic, cultural and legal levels ^{[6, pp. 140-145]}. For Slavin, socialism is an established historical fact, therefore, a more perfect form of the structure of society's life, and the rejection of this vector of development led to social degradation in the form of the formation of the global world of capital ^[13]. If we accept this theoretical and methodological basis for the analysis of social progress, then, first of all, we must fix the overcoming of concrete historical forms of alienation described by Western neo-Marxists. Secondly, we should state the fact of the legal transition of public property into "personal" for each individual, as part of the whole, since this principle acts as the cultural basis in K. Marx's theory for the transition to socialism (communism).

 Therefore, the most productive as a study of the problem of social progress in modern Marxism should be recognized as the principle of analyzing the concrete historical form of formal legal socialization of property, which has not received universal cultural embodiment. The principle expressed in the already mentioned article by Ilyenkov found its development in the works of E. V. Mareeva, S. N. Mareev ^[8], A.V. Buzgalina ^[2], L. A. Pin-Buzgalina ^[4], A. I. Kolganov ^[3]. In our opinion, following the logic of the unity of the logical and historical, this principle should be considered in conjunction with the position of V. M. Mezhuyev about the existence of a single socio-economic formation in which the society of global capital represents the pinnacle of its development. Then the three-level scheme of social alienation, presented by A. V. Buzgalin, in which the pre-bourgeois forms of human subordination, wage, private, abstract labor and accelerating consumption, perfectly show the evolution and synthesis of various facets of economic formation ^{[2, pp. 159-160]}. In contrast to such a society and overcoming the listed levels of alienation of a person, the analysis of the concrete historical type of socialism by L. A. Pin-Buzgalina stands out. The category of "alienation" proposed by her ^{[4, pp. 77-78]} can be considered from several positions: a) the removal of alienation in general; b) the liberation of the individual from negative forms of subordination, that is, social progress; c) the process of "real" socialism in society.

Proceeding from this, we can say that the alienation in society of a person passing from private property to formally socialized, released the creative potential of a person in specifically taken historical conditions. Thus, new social relations were generated, which cannot be described within the framework of the neo-Marxist theory of T. Adorno and G. Marcuse. There is no doubt that both the Western European school of Marxism in the mid-60s of the twentieth century and modern domestic Marxists proceed from the basic principle of the emergence of new social relations in the process of social liberation of a person within the framework of the progress of society. Neo-Marxists talked about social progress and alienation in a society where a person's attitude to work can be expressed by the chain "economy-law-politics-culture". Recognizing the society of "real" socialism as formally more progressive, based on new forms of human relations to work and property, it is necessary to transform the chain in the following order – "culture-economy-politics-law".  

As Pin-Buzgalina notes, the creative process of alienation will dialectically lead to other forms of alienation generated by new concrete historical conditions. To this, the researcher adds that the peculiarity of the alienation of Soviet society is not only in the creation of new forms of alienation, but also in their synthesis with previous forms of alienation, and as a result, the confrontation of an active historical subject and the growing forms of subjectivity in the society of real socialism ^{[4, pp.79-80]}. Modern domestic Marxists attribute the synthesis of alienation and new forms of alienation to the era of Stalinism, and then social progress dialectically generates an economy of scarcity ^{[4, p.80]}, the elimination of the public subject ^{[2, p.162]} or the substitution of an active subject by a state-organized society, depriving the individual even of the right to life ^{[11, p.57]}.

Summing up all the above, we can state that culture and law in the ideas of social progress in the theory of modern domestic Marxists are developing at two levels. The first level is characterized by a theoretical rethinking of the category of socio-economic formation and the statement of social progress in the analysis of large historical epochs. The second level focuses on the development of Marx's humanistic ideas, which are based on the principle of identifying social progress with the acquisition of full freedom by a person. Within the framework of this methodological principle, the category of "alienation" is used by domestic scientists in the analysis of the society of "real" socialism. Concluding a brief consideration of the problem of social progress, we emphasize that despite the theoretical and methodological differences, critical Marxism of the XXI century. in Russia it contains a number of general postulates: a) social progress is impossible without overcoming the previous types of alienation and creating qualitatively new conditions for the existence of a creative subject (person); b) at the heart of any overcoming of alienation is the cultural work of a person, the transformation of himself at the expense of labor from a labor function into a fully developed personality; c) the society of "real" socialism represented a qualitatively different stage in the process of the development of a creative person, which gave rise to new forms of alienation, and at its destruction synthesized them with the previous types of alienation of capitalist society.