Produkt

KlappentextPutin's war is a 'special operation' against modernity. The invasion has been directed against Ukraine, but the war has a broader target: the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor. By trading oil and gas, promoting Trump and Brexit, spreading corruption, boosting inequality and homophobia, subsidizing far-right movements and destroying Ukraine, Putin's clique aims at suppressing the ongoing transformation of modern societies.

Alexander Etkind distinguishes between Russia's pompous, weaponized paleomodernity, on the one hand, and the lean, decentralized gaiamodernity of the Anthropocene, on the other. Putin's clique has used various strategies - from climate denialism and electoral interference to war and genocide - to resist and subvert modernity. Working on political, cultural and even demographic levels, social mechanisms convert the vicious energy of the oil curse into all-out aggression. Dissecting these mechanisms, Etkind's brief but rigorous analyses of social structuration, cultural dynamics and family models reveal the agency that drives the Russian war against modernity. This short, sharp critique of the Russian regime combines political economy, social history and demography to predict the decolonizing and defederating of Russia.

Alexander Etkind is a professor at the Central European University in Vienna.

Details

Weitere ISBN/GTIN9781509556595

ProduktartE-Book

EinbandartE-Book

FormatEPUB

Format Hinweis2 - DRM Adobe / EPUB

FormatFormat mit automatischem Seitenumbruch (reflowable)

Verlag

John Wiley & Sons

Erscheinungsjahr2023

Erscheinungsdatum04.04.2023

Auflage1. Auflage

Seiten176 Seiten

SpracheEnglisch

Dateigrösse205 Kbytes

Artikel-Nr.11426638

Rubriken

Genre9201

Inhalt/Kritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction

Chapter 1. Modernity in the Age of Anthropocene

Chapter 2. Petrostate

Chapter 3. Parasitic governance

Chapter 4. The So-Called Elite

Chapter 5. The Public Sphere

Chapter 6. Gender and Degeneration

Chapter 7. Putin's War

Chapter 8. Defederating Russia

Endnotes

Indexmehr

Leseprobe

1
Modernity in the Anthropocene

Before and during the Russo-Ukrainian War that began in 2014, modernity was as big an issue for Russia as agency was for Ukraine. A harbinger of progress - this was how its sympathizers thought about the Soviet Union, and Putin s Russia wished to be its heir. In 1992, Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish-born sociologist who saw it all, wrote that communism was modernity s most devout, vigorous and gallant champion â¦ It was under communist, not capitalist, auspices that the audacious dream of modernity â¦ was pushed to its radical limits: grand designs, unlimited social engineering, huge and bulky technology, total transformation of nature. 1 In this conglomeration of steel, oil and gunpowder, there was very little place for men and women. The all-powerful state subordinated both people and nature to a turbocharged modernity that looked increasingly stagnant, even obsolete, with every passing decade. This was paleomodernity, and the Soviet Union was its most vigorous champion.
Argument

Putin s war was a special operation against the Ukrainian people, their statehood and culture. It was also a broader operation against the modern world of climate awareness, energy transition and digital labor.

Any concept of modernity comprises descriptive and normative components. The Anthropocene has accelerated their fusion. A new type of modernity - reflexive, sustainable, decentralized - would help us to survive the Anthropocene.2 Negotiated between the planet and its humans, the new order is very different from the previous types of modernity, such as Max Weber s bureaucratized modernity of the late nineteenth century, or the paleomodernity of the early twentieth. I call it gaiamodernity, deriving the name from Gaia, the planetary system of life and matter that includes us all.3 Paleomodernity defined progress in terms of the expanding use of nature: the more resources were used and the more energy consumed, the higher was a civilization. For gaiamodernity, in contrast, the further advancement of humanity requires less energy used and less matter consumed per every new unit of work and pleasure. The two types of modernity present opposite relations between nature and progress.

Gaia s time is infinite, but it changes with history because we do. In its new condition, humanity will have to overcome the global pollution and corruption that were created by paleomodernity. It will have to abstain from burning fossils and forget about fetishes such as growth. It will have to develop immunities to natural threats. Small is beautiful in this era, whether it is a matter of vehicles, computers or weapons. But this modernity also affirms the vitality of the state, which only grows bigger when faced with natural challenges. We cannot respond to these challenges without the state, and our politics is vital for Gaia.

Unlike the premodern Leviathan, a hypermasculine monster who frightens his people into behaving and producing, the modern state is a part of Gaia: a feminine organism that includes nature and humans in one mammoth body, benevolent but unforgiving. While the purpose of the Leviathan was to halt history for the sake of the ruler, Gaia lives and changes with us, and our history is one. Our society is still a risk society, but our state is developing into the new state of nature.4

Gaiamodernity is real, but not quite; it is also utopian. This modernity is utilitarian, provided that it includes the elements of nature and people in its calculus. It is democratic: experts represent nature, but judgment is left up to the people. Most importantly, it is reflexive. Having failed in so many other tasks, we contribute our reflexivity to the life of Gaia.
A taste instead of a plan

Gaiamodernity is both a permanent revolution and a world revolution. Unlike Trotsky, who coined these terms, our leaders have no time for trials and errors. Is this why they are so hesitant to do anything?

Gaiamodernity develops a certain taste, a system of aesthetic preferences, that is very different to that of paleomodernity. Imagine Greta Thunberg conversing with Donald Trump, or Putin talking to Zelensky, both sides harboring an intense repulsion towards the other. While two regimes of modernity meet routinely in the public space, their mutual aversion takes first an aesthetic and only later a political form. Ironically, cultural factors are more consequential in authoritarianism than in democracy. In democratic governance, political choices follow economic and ecological realities, as the people articulate them in their debates and elections. With authoritarians at the helm, it is their idiosyncratic preferences - aesthetic tastes, cultural and sexual prejudices, historical views and ethnic stereotypes - that shape social structuration and dictate the policies of the realm.

With its need for natural resources such as fossil fuel and metal ores, paleomodernity was based on resource colonization, settler imperialism and war capitalism. Valuable resources were always located far away from population centers - this was what made them valuable. New lands had to be occupied, annexed and colonized. The people already living in them were abused, resettled or killed, and new productive - or rather, extractive - populations were settled in their place. Seeking raw materials as the basis for its economy and society, paleomodernity had two historical forms, external and internal. The former was created by overseas colonization; the latter was specific to large territorial empires, of which Russia was a perfect example. Internal and external colonization turned into one another with every occupation and annexation, and with every imperial collapse. What was external became internal, and vice versa; the key processes - racism, genocide, exploitation, creolization - were the same.5

Gaiamodernity turns the legacy of paleomodernity on its head. Progress should be green and safe, sustainable and decentralized. Using renewable energy, autonomous prosumers will abolish their feudal dependency on distant deserts and marshes. The new modernity will eschew the transportation routes that were the darlings of paleomodernity. With no pipelines or tankers to feed us there will be fewer pirates and terrorists to harm us, and fewer security experts to exercise control over us. This utopian modernity will differentiate between public goods and public bads, which were stuck together in paleomodern society. Cherishing anthropological diversity - racial, sexual and intellectual - the new modernity will abhor monopolies and oligarchies. It will digitalize education and entertainment, saving materials and emissions by going online. Gaiamodernity will be cosmopolitan: it will not profit from globalization but will work for the good of everyone because, as in certain Gnostic heresies, either all will be saved or all will perish. Gaiamodernity is a utopia in the making. We are living through its birth pangs, and history is accelerating.

But there are many who wish to protect their old habits and treasure, and they have launched their counter-offensives. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was one of these. The growing awareness of climate change and social inequality was the real threat to Putin s oil-fed officialdom. This mixed group of oiligarchs and bureaucrats perceived the advance of history as an existential threat: it would damage the oil and gas trade, depriving Russia of its main source of income; it would rob Russia of the unique advantages it would supposedly gain from climate change; and it would introduce unpredictability into the established, and highly unequal, social and gender order.

The Russian state confronted modernity by drilling for oil and gas, occupying foreign countries, accumulating gold, subsidizing far-right movements around the world, and destroying Ukraine. Its politics was not inertial but the opposite - active, even proactive, determination. Russia s demodernization was an intentional activity, a mode of structuration that was freely chosen by the Russian elite and imposed upon the broader population, and subsequently upon the global arena.6 Russia had some allies in this venture, but the project of reversing modernity was its own special operation : stopmodernism.

Demonstrating an unexpected focus and creativity, the Kremlin used various strategies to resist and reverse gaiamodernity, from climate denialism to electoral interference to war. There was no secret, long-term plan that coordinated these efforts in advance. Anthony Giddens s theory of structuration provides a better perspective: agency creates structures that modify the opportunities for a new action, and this action changes the underlying structures that open or close the new opportunities.7 Instead of a master plan for future change, the ruling group had preferences that defined its choices at every step: a taste rather than a plan.

Russia s all-out war against Ukraine and the world turned its slow, hesitant demodernization into a disruptive campaign against modernity. Prepared in secrecy but known to the American and British intelligence services, the invasion shocked the vast majority of Russian, Ukrainian and European intellectuals. Even in January 2022, my friends and colleagues both in Russia and Ukraine considered the chances of invasion negligible, and the very idea laughable....
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