HOW DO YOU SLAY A DRAGON?

As for social guarantees for wide swathes of the population, Russia is doomed to remain a welfare state where rudiments of Soviet socialism will be around for a long time. Experiments that the regime falls into in a panic from time to time, such as monetising benefits or raising the pensionable age, are unacceptable politically in Russia.

The democratic movement will gain mass support only if they’re able to take a firm and unequivocal position on this question. All financial and fiscal questions have to be solved by increasing the pace of growth of the economy, lowering the cost of corruption and introducing an inheritance tax; but not at the expense of the reserve for benefit payments, which must be left untouched.

To sum up, at the current time the tactical left-wing agenda of the democratic movement could be presented in two parts. On the one hand, phasing out over-consumption through a basic confiscatory tax on the inheritance of overly large fortunes. And on the other, guaranteeing to maintain (and even gradually increase) basic social benefits, primarily in healthcare, education and social security.

Over the last few years, the falseness of the regime’s social policy has been exposed for all to see. The left-wing programme has become a series of ritual excuses. Whilst they’ve continued occasionally to speak of their “national projects”, in reality the government has waged an actual war with its own population for the “optimisation” of social spending. Almost a third of educational and medical establishments have gone under the knife. They’ve even stabbed to death the sacred cow of the socialist past: the low pensionable age. And child benefit has all but faded to nothing because of the devaluation of the rouble, becoming just another miserly routine benefit, and so on.

But another sacred cow has survived: the windfall profits of the ruling clan, that have successfully passed through all the de-offshorisation, the capital increasing both when the funds were taken out of the country, and when they were brought back in. The height of cynicism was the massive redemption by the state of illiquid assets at inflated prices from well-fed entrepreneurs and granting budgetary compensation to those affected by sanctions.

This latter looks particularly disgusting against the background of “the parmesan war”: the counter-sanctions that “bombed Voronezh”, by removing from the middle class their access to quality food products. In this way, and in conditions of a crisis and an undeclared war against the West, the regime managed to realise in practice a typical right-wing agenda: making the poor suffer to compensate the rich. It was less a question of “Crimea is ours” than “Crimea has been taken at our expense”.

If these tendencies continue (and there’s no reason to suppose that they’ll change radically) then the subject of “the turn to the left” will become as relevant as it was 15 years ago. Social division will grow at triple the pace, now not only at the expense of the “new rich”, but also at the expense of the recently-created “new poor”, whose well-being has fallen dramatically as a result of crisis optimisation brought about by the undeclared war. And the subjects of poverty, social inequality and the unjust distribution of resource rent will return to the top of the political agenda. But the regime that’s sunk into a war to try to gather in the slivers of empire will no longer have the ability to take hold of this agenda.

We can assume that the resistance movement will again face the same dilemma as it had at the start of the century: should we make a “turn to the left” and take the democratic path, or choose the ideas of the right and face yet more political isolation?

In conditions of rapidly increasing inequality, when left-wing ideas are gaining ever more adherents in society, reckoning on coming to power by democratic means on the back of a right-wing and ultra-right-wing programme, that’s frequently libertarian, that acclaims the joys of the “small state” and the potential of the free market – this is all an absurd utopia. Acting in this way, that part of civil society that’s most ready to take on the fight risks disappearing forever from the political stage, and passing not just into the stalls but to the upper circle. The stage will be taken over by comedians and speculators.

Once again today we are facing the same conditions as there were when I wrote “The Turn to the Left”. For the opposition it would be an inexcusable luxury to pass up this chance to return to the world of live politics, instead of playing games on Facebook.