Vladislav Bugera: portrait of a post-marxist thinker

Source:
http://www.cdi.org

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The Research and Analytical Supplement (RAS) to Johnson's Russia List is produced and edited by Stephen D. Shenfield. He is the author of all parts of the content that are not attributed to any other author.


CONTENTS
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FEATURE

VLADISLAV BUGERA: PORTRAIT OF A POST-MARXIST THINKER

1. Introduction

2. My interview with Bugera

3. Interview: The Rarity of Love

4. Interview: The Great Bluff

Computerisation as a premise of the collectivist (socialist) revolution

To answer the question: "Why already now, 80 years after the October revolution, capital dominates above the world?" - a successive follower of the historical materialism will try, first of all, to clear: was the level of the development of productive forces of mankind (first of all in the most-highly-developed countries) in the 19th - first half of 20th centuries sufficient to make proletarians capable to organise the ruling over production, distribution & exchange by all the society as a whole (and so, to cease to be proletarians)?

Karl Marx wrote about the grounds of the coming proletarian revolution:

"Hand in hand with this centralisation, or this expropriation of many capitalists by few, develop, on an ever-extending scale, the co-operative form of the labour-process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common, the economising of all means of production by their use as the means of production of combined, socialised labour, the entanglement of all peoples in the net of the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalistic regime. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working-class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. Thus integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated."

Vladislav Bugera. Why does humanity need world revolution?

We live in a class society. For so long as it exists, there will exist competition and the struggle for power, looting and terror, big and small wars. Any attempts to get rid of all these calamities while preserving the foundation of class society - relations of property and management in which those productive forces that belong to me do not belong to another and vice versa and in which society is divided into managers and managed - are utopian and unrealisable.

But let us ask ourselves a question. Is it worth trying to get rid of these calamities? After all, people have been living in class society for nine thousand years. They seem to have grown accustomed to social alienation and all its consequences. Perhaps it is not worth our while to engage in risky experiments in the quest for some new way of life? To accept and live by the rules of the game that are now in force, and if you do try to change them somehow then only in particular minor details - that, you know, is safer than destroying the whole world of violence and building a new world in its place. What kind of new world exactly? And how is it to be built - in accordance with what models, by what means? And what for? Of course, many do not survive in this world. Many find life in it unbearable. But most adapt somehow and live - some better, others (the majority) worse, but somehow people get by. And what if the notorious new world turns out much worse than the old? What if humanity comes to ruin in its quest?