"When Liberalism for All Is Possible"

Recently Obshchaya Gazeta [OG] published an article by Grigoriy Yavlinskiy ("Liberalism for All") (OG, No 26, 28 June). Our regular author Dmitriy Furman continues the theme.

The chief trouble with our democracy is the people.  Without them it would work out perfectly.   It is easy to show that if, for example, 80-90 percent of the population, everyone but the most educated and wealthiest people, were deprived of voting rights, we would have a fine liberal republic with all the human rights and freedoms (except the right to vote for the majority), where two parties would fight for power in a sophisticated way--Yabloko and the SPS [Union of Rightist Forces].   But with the universal right to vote, somehow a liberal state does not work out in our country.   In our country today, even just the mention of the name Gorbachev, to whom we are primarily indebted for our rights and freedoms, can send ordinary people into fits of rage, while Putin, who is trying to cut back these rights and freedoms as much as possible, enjoys great popularity.   The people in our country do not vote for the SPS or Yabloko, but for the CPRF [RF Communist Party], the Zhirinovskiyites, and now increasingly for Unity.   But why do our people dislike "human rights" so much, and what is the liberal elite to do with such a people?

Above all, despite all their cultural and psychological characteristics, our people are not so very different from all the others.   Everywhere any liberal rights have always excited above all those who had no problems satisfying the most "basic" needs--for food, clothing, and a roof over their heads--and who could hope to exercise those rights.   Freedom of speech is important above all to those who read a lot and talk a lot.   Freedom to go abroad is important to those who can pay for a ticket and a hotel or whom the "receiving party" can invite at their own expense.   Freedom to form associations is important to those who have the time and energy to participate in these associations.   Even the freedom to vote is needed above all by those who have the opportunity to take an interest in politics.

Slave-owning and gentry republics with their human rights for the slave-owners and gentry have appeared in history many times, but liberal democracies with the universal right to vote arose relatively recently.  And their establishment is always a difficult and painful process.  "Simple people" everywhere (although to varying degrees depending on the culture, customs, and traditions) are always prepared to reject "human rights" for the prospect of an improvement in their material status or even for the prospect of a decline in the material status of the rich, who make them envious and indignant.   In many, many countries which have now reached the point of stable democracy, the transition from liberal systems based on the participation in political life of a narrow elite stratum to universal voting initially failed and led to the emergence of various types of dictatorships.   We are not the first and we are not the last.   Others have already gone through all this -- we have only a certain "lag in development."   And besides, this is already the second time around all this for us.

In 1905-1917, we had a relatively liberal system based on the non-democratic curial right to vote, when the vote of the professor, the landowner, or the capitalist was the equivalent of many votes of workers and peasants.   When the broad popular masses invaded politics in February 1917, all the rights and freedoms were destined to live for eight months.   The peak of our liberalism the second time around also dates to a time (a very short time, 1989-1990) when we had a system that was surprisingly similar to the curial system--with the "people's deputies of the USSR" from the CPSU and "social organizations," that is to say, once again from our nomenklatura "landowners and capitalists" and liberal professors.   And just like the first time around, the transition "from liberalism to democracy" did not work out in our country.   But why didn't it work out and why has what others ultimately achieved not worked out for us yet?

In order to explain this, we can point to the different cultural and historical factors and we can compile various complex sociological and political science analyses.   All these are very important and necessary. But all these should not close off certain very simple and guileless (on the level of popular sayings) dependencies from us.

If you want to get something from people, you must give them something in return.   If the liberal elite want to get recognition of those human rights which they alone can exercise directly (and the people themselves can exercise only at some indefinite future time), they must give these people something and give up something that benefits those people.   Once again, that has always been the case when there have been successful transitions to democracy.   The elite groups always gave up something, and everywhere the transition to democracy meant reducing the gap between the rich and the poor.   The "simple people" accept the rights and freedoms needed primarily by the elite only if they are "in one package" with what those people need above all: land reform that transfers the land from the landowners to the peasants, a reduced work day and improved working conditions, the introduction of universal education, and so forth.

But in our country in the era of perestroyka, when the words "democracy" and "human rights" had not yet become swearwords, they were "in the same bundle" as other words closer to the people--the fight against the nomenklatura's privileges, the participation of workers in managing production, the transfer of closed sanatoriums and vacation lodges to children, and so forth.   But soon the elite realized that there was the prospect of getting rich at the expense of state property and at the expense of the people.   (If production is reduced in the country, the poor get poorer, and the rich at the same time get even richer, they can get richer only at the expense of the poor--that is not even economics but simply the law of preservation of matter.)   Then all of this, which is part demagoguery and part "starry-eyed liberal idealism" and naivete, began to be forgotten.   It was explained to the people, who for the first time had only just begun to try to elect someone themselves and begun to resolve things themselves, that they have the right to vote as they would like, but there are uniform laws of economics that though perhaps tough, "are not optional."   These laws say that the transition to the market cannot fail to be painful, and during it the weak must perish and the strong survive.   Human rights are also a science.   There are real rights and things that merely seem to be rights.   For example, the freedom to go abroad is a great and inalienable human right, and the right to get wages for work already done is, of course, also a right, but not a very great or general human right, while there is no general human right to light and heat in the home at all.   As a result of all this, now a politician who makes up his mind to talk with the "simple people" about human rights risks getting a fist in his face.

Combining liberalism and the universal right to vote is difficult but possible.   But combining liberalism, the universal right to vote, and enrichment of the liberal elite at the people's expense, as far as I know, has always failed everywhere.   And it has failed in our country too.

One has to pay for everything in this world.   The liberal elite have already paid for privatization, first by the elimination of parliamentarism, which they would in principle want if only the people would elect "decent people" who would not prevent them from getting rich and enjoying the rights and freedoms.   And then came their complete elimination from the process of appointing the supreme presidential power and establishing a "Yeltsin dynasty."   Now they are paying with the fact that they are observing the erosion of their precious rights and freedoms under the second ruler of this dynasty.   And most likely that is not yet the end.

"We have already finished this period of play."   At this point combining liberal rights and freedoms with the universal right to vote, as Yavlinskiy says in Obshchaya Gazeta, the creation of "liberalism for all," is already a task for the next generation.   World experience proves that since people have accomplished this tens of times before us, we will accomplish it.   But to do that our elite (or the children of our elite and those who will take the place of the families that have disappeared from the elite) will have to give up a great deal.   They will have to give up something in any case.   But only when the elite deliberately and voluntarily give up not 13 percent of their income but substantially more will they manage to combine the rights important to them, the universal right to vote, and their own elite position.
 

13 оборотов = перл сезона (делица надыть, как учили Лифшиц, Дзержинский и Карл М1).
Кто б мне пояснил чем фрукты отличны от ко=мунизьма?