Global confrontation: Russia in the modern world

GLOBAL CONFRONTATION: RUSSIA IN THE MODERN WORLD*

Startsev Alexander A.
Chairman of the Board regional office in St. Petersburg, Political party «Russian ecological party “Green”»; Director of the North-Western International cleaner production Centre, materials and products (St Petersburg)

Sokolov Aleksey M.
Dr in philosophical Sciences, associate Professor, Professor of chair of social philosophy and philosophy of history of SpbU

Abstract: The article is devoted to examining the problem of contemporary civilization emerging from a systemic crisis. The authors proceed from a proposition demonstrating that the impending global ecological catastrophe is a consequence of the inappropriate impact of capitalist structures on nature, societies, and the human being. The authors conclude that the current crisis manifests as a global conflict between the artificial bourgeois-capitalist system, supported by private consumer interest and private initiative, on the one hand, and the cosmic order of all things, expressing the universal principle of being, on the other hand. On the basis of a cultural and historical analysis, the article demonstrates that the Russian experience of social construction and theoretical development has always carried a tendency to overcome the model of bourgeois-capitalist modernization. At the present stage, a number of fundamental scientific discoveries in Russia confirm the priority significance of universal principles in social construction. The article reconstructs the intellectual and historical continuity between the Russian thinkers of the past and the scientists of contemporary Russia.
Key words: biopolitics, national policy, a cosmological imperative, modernization, historiology, natural history.

“We are living through not a crisis that agitates weak souls,
but the greatest turning point in the scientific thought of Humanity,
occurring only once in a millennium. Standing at this
turning point, surveying the unfolding future with our gaze,
we should be happy that we are destined to live through
this, to participate in the creation of such a future!”
V. I. Vernadsky

The history of Russia represents a sequence of several relatively “autonomous” stages, in each of which our country made a civilizational breakthrough initiated by some external, constructive or destructive impact. The first stage was determined by Prince Vladimir’s adoption of Christianity, as a result of which a unified spiritual community of Russian lands was formed. The second stage of Horde rule contributed to overcoming the political fragmentation of the appanage principalities of Ancient Rus and culminated in the creation of the all-Russian Tsardom of Muscovy. The third stage was the period of Russia’s entry into the “concert of European powers” and at the same time into world history. This phase of our history began with the revolutionary transformations of Peter I and concluded with the revolutionary upheaval of the beginning of the twentieth century. For all the differences among the listed periods, stages, and phases of our history, they have one common, fundamental similarity. Kievan Rus, the Tsardom of Muscovy, and Imperial Russia successively learned religious asceticism from Orthodox Byzantium, political discipline from the Golden Horde Khanate, and economic initiative from the capitalist West. In other words, the first three phases of Russian history were three phases of apprenticeship.

Russia probably entered the fourth phase through the three revolutions of 1905 and 1917: the restriction of the autocracy, the destruction of the autocracy, and the rejection of the bourgeois-capitalist path of development—such is the brief summary of a long historical preparation. And while the first two events “fit” into the historiology of Western civilization, the anti-bourgeois ethos of the October Revolution largely remained beyond the comprehension of both “official” theoretical scholars and practical politicians. Today it is becoming increasingly obvious that the meaning of the process of transformations that began in Russia in the autumn of nineteen seventeen was not so much socialist as anti-bourgeois. In favour of such an understanding of Russian reality at that time is the absence of objective historical conditions for the emergence and development of a socialist mode of production, and consequently of a socialist way of life as a whole. After all, even V. I. Lenin, on the very eve of the February Revolution, did not entertain the thought of an approaching fundamental turning point in the fate of the Russian state. Moreover, whatever may be said today about the capitalist prospects of Russia at the beginning of the last century, fairness requires a reminder that a large share of the capital located in our country belonged to foreign owners: 52 per cent of the mining, metallurgical, and metalworking industries, 100 per cent of locomotive manufacturing, 90 per cent of electrical and electrotechnical enterprises, and 90 per cent of tramway companies [Kara-Murza 2002]. There is therefore nothing strange in the fact that the rate of industrial growth in Russia significantly exceeded the growth rate of Western countries, while the growth rate of the standard of living was the lowest. These data make it entirely legitimate to suppose that the bourgeois revolution in Russia was by no means Russian. The February coup and the subsequent abdication of Nicholas II were in the interests of not the Russian bourgeoisie.

The example of the “capitalization” of Russia reveals not merely the exploitative essence of capitalism, but an alienating essence. Moreover, the matter was not limited to the obvious alienation of the direct results of labour. As can be seen from the cited facts, alienation also extended to the profits of Russian entrepreneurs, who were forced to follow in the wake of Western capital. Furthermore, in Russia, perhaps as in no other country, the alienation of human nature itself was felt most acutely, which led to a mass uncontrollable protest that culminated in revolution and civil war. And the total ruin in which Russia found itself by the nineteen twenties of the last century both really and symbolically epitomizes the catastrophic culmination of unregulated capitalist expansion.

The Bolsheviks’ abolition of private property was aimed, of course, primarily at socio-economic goals. But it also entailed profound civilizational, if not “cosmological,” consequences. The point is that private property as the fundamental principle of the bourgeois world order presumes the priority of individual initiative, manifested in the activation of the intellectual and volitional potential of human subjectivity¹. The most immediate manifestation of this circumstance is activity that reshapes the entire order of being in accordance with the private conception of the entrepreneur. The world is thus systematically reconfigured into the reality of a virtual, transformed order in which the logic of “sober” calculation prevails. “Soberness of calculation,” in turn, is verified by profit extracted from any element of the universe, that is, by the fact of alienating that part of the world to one’s own advantage. And here a question arises: on what basis is one or another part of the world alienated? The property of the entrepreneur can only be the result of his activity, that is, what has in fact been produced by him out of himself. Everything that he engages from what lies outside him, if it can be used in private interests at all, can be so only on the condition of full compensation for the expended resources.

The anti-bourgeois protest of the revolutions of the twentieth century encompasses, apparently, not only the socio-political and anthropic realms of being, but also the entire cosmos in its integral fullness of nature. Our country, with its immeasurable wealth, found itself at the epicentre of civilizational upheavals not by chance. The entrepreneurial activity of the capitalist proved disastrous in conditions of unlimited resources. Let us recall that classical capitalism itself was largely initiated by the actual exhaustion in medieval Europe of the natural sources required for further development. The last thing that remained accessible was the intellectual and volitional potential of individuals who in one way or another stood out from the ecumene of the ecclesiastical world. It is understandable that the institutionalization and theoretical justification of private property in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries became a consistent expression of the worldview transformation of Western culture. And so long as personal potential truly dominated in capitalist enterprise, both private interest and private property were productive in the civilizational process. But as the exploitation of external resources became the predominant factor in enterprise, the proprietary essence of capital came into conflict with the world order as such.

For a long time, the capitalist strategy was predominantly extended to that part of the world in which it originated, into which it fitted more or less organically, and which it successfully transformed. Capitalism unfolded its internal potential, modernizing traditional agriculture, developing industry, finance, the information space, the communications system, and education. But by the middle of the nineteenth century the natural limits of growth had been reached. Capitalism proceeded to the development of captured colonies. Of course, as is well known, even before that, capitalist prosperity depended on exported colonial wealth. However, this “import” was not systematic and comprehensive². The entrepreneurial spirit did not yet fully understand how to conduct itself in overseas territories. The second half of the nineteenth century became decisive in the destiny of humanity. Almost the entire world was divided among the “advanced” powers, which resolutely moved to full-scale bourgeois-capitalist expansion. Most regions of the planet, inhabited by tens of millions of people, proved helpless before intellectually sophisticated techniques of introducing an alien, artificial element into their life spaces. And countries that for centuries had lived in harmony with the conditions bestowed by nature were turned within a single century into the sanitary and raw-material periphery of some unknown “world centre”³.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russia represented primary interest for growing world capital. This was easily explained, first, by the abundance of natural resources; second, by an excess of trained labour resources (which could not be said of the inhabitants of colonial territories proper); third, by the presence of reliable transport communications; fifth, by a little-developed consumer market; and, finally, by the ideological and political disposition of the Russian elite towards the values of bourgeois civilization. It seemed that the Empire had confidently fitted into the reformist rhythm of capitalization. Formal economic indicators were convincing of the imminent achievement of leading positions. And suddenly—revolution, unpredictable, uncontrollable. Today one can complain for a long time about an anti-Russian conspiracy, about the intrigues of British and German intelligence services. Impacts of this kind could facilitate the course of the destructive element, but could not be its cause. The cause nonetheless lay in the moral outrage that arose among the people, who suddenly encountered the new order dictated by competition, greed for gain, and the desire for personal success. And what had been constructive under conditions of resource scarcity led, under conditions of “unlimited opportunities,” to a disruption of the balance of the spiritual and material potentials of the organization of life.

In our national self-consciousness, private property has never played a leading role. And theoretical thought in Russia treated this institution with great distrust. A critically negative attitude towards private property was one of the few common points in the doctrines of Russian Marxists, anarchists, Populists, Cosmists, and Sophiologists. And this seemingly formal commonality indicated and indicates an essentially shared understanding in Russian thought of the human being and the world in which he lives. In terms of goal-setting, the experience of socialist construction in Russia did not contradict the value principles of the main currents of Russian thought. For ultimately it was not simply a matter of establishing social justice, but of achieving a perfect world order combining the cosmic, social, and anthropic levels of being. And since the bourgeois-capitalist strategy is guided by the speculative calculation of private interest, which does not perceive any of the three levels, the elimination of such interest arises as the primary task of reformist activity. The elimination of private property is not the goal of transformative activity; it is a necessary condition for affirming an activity model whose result will be the regular restoration of anthropo-socio-cosmic integrity. In other words, the activity of private interest must be transformed into the activity of a genuine purpose as an expression of world integrity.

Studies by scientists from various countries show that the continued existence of natural ecosystems in the form in which they have supported the well-being of civilization in recent centuries is under threat, and humanity has ten years left to avoid a global ecological catastrophe fraught with irreversible consequences. More than twenty years ago, the German scientist E. von Weizsäcker, citing studies by Canadian scientists, emphasized that in order to provide the six billion inhabitants of the Earth with consumption standards and comfortable environmental conditions like those of an average Canadian, three planets such as the Earth would be required [Vajczekker & oths 2000]. NASA’s searches in neighbouring galaxies for planets similar to the Earth appear ironic.

New challenges and threats—precursors of global destabilization and the kindling of a world military conflict—force us to return to the key questions of the present moment: what must be done, and in what way, in order to stand firmly against the destruction of the very foundations of Life. The natural environment of Russia possesses an almost unlimited economic potential for a fundamentally different direction of social development, the creation not even of a new human being or a new civilization, but of a new being. Embedded in the natural environment of Russia is also an enormous philosophical meaning of the new being: spiritual-moral, natural-scientific, socio-economic, creative, and universally humane. It is no coincidence that our national self-consciousness originally proceeded from the conviction poetically expressed by F. I. Tyutchev:

“Not what you think, nature:
Not a cast, not a soulless face—
In it there is a soul, in it there is freedom,
In it there is love, in it there is language...”

Hence the exhortation of Elder Zosima, “relayed” by F. M. Dostoevsky: “Love all God’s creation, the whole and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” Hence the “philosophy of the common task” of N. F. Fedorov, contrasted with the industrial-capitalist “pursuit of gain”; hence the teaching on Total-Unity of V. S. Solovyov, who foretold the union of “humanity and nature” in “one universal divine-human organism.” Russian science stems from the same intuition. It is sufficient to recall K. E. Tsiolkovsky, inspired by Fedorov’s ideas. But one cannot fail to recall the founder of Russian soil science, V. I. Dokuchaev, who saw in soil a “natural-historical body” that arose and arises as a result of regular interaction “between dead and living nature, between plant and mineral kingdoms, on the one hand, and man, his way of life and even his spiritual world, on the other.” In general, the figure of V. I. Dokuchaev is to a significant extent a unifying, key figure for Russian scientific and philosophical thought. First, because his methodological stance directly derives from his worldview principle: “In the world there reigns, fortunately, not only the one law of the great Darwin, the law of the struggle for existence, but another, opposite law also operates, the law of love, fellowship, self-help, which manifests itself particularly vividly in the existence of our zones, both soil and natural-historical” [Dokuchaev 1948]. And, second, because this principle was adopted and developed by Dokuchaev’s student, one of the creators of Soviet science, Academician V. I. Vernadsky, who in his natural-scientific experiments achieved generalizations of a philosophical level. Within the framework of this synthesis, the member of the Russian (Imperial) Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences of the USSR put forward, as early as the first half of the twentieth century, three fundamental tenets of ecology:

• the first, on the role of living matter in the formation of the environment (1922);
• the second, on the necessity of cycles of biogenic elements;
• on the impossibility of the free development of humanity without the coordination of its activity with the laws governing the functioning of the biosphere (1944).

Vernadsky’s follower N. V. Timofeev-Resovsky developed his ideas and on their basis formulated in 1968 the concept of the regulation of the environment by the biota—the community of all living organisms: “The Earth’s biosphere is a gigantic living factory transforming energy and matter on the surface of our planet; it forms both the equilibrium composition of the atmosphere and the composition of solutions in natural waters, and through the atmosphere, the energetics of our planet. It also influences the climate.”

The ideas of Vernadsky and Timofeev-Resovsky were finally substantiated and formulated in 1995 in the form of a coherent scientific Theory of Biotic Regulation by Doctor of Physical and Mathematical Sciences V. G. Gorshkov. In brief, the essence of the theory is as follows. Natural ecosystems are structural units of the biosphere, analogous to natural landscapes and the biogeocoenoses that compose them. The latter serve as the primary indivisible cells of the ecosystem. Life materialized in the biota (the entire community of plants and living organisms; 99% of which consists of microorganisms and fungi) builds the environment and controls it in the interests of the biota itself, ensuring the dynamic stability of the environment, including the maintenance of a mean annual temperature of about 15 °C suitable for life on the surface of the planet.

Moreover, this biotic control of stability in the biosphere has already been carried out for hundreds of millions of years like an ultra-fast supercomputer, where information flows move at speeds of approximately 1×10³⁶ bits/s (twenty orders of magnitude higher than what civilization has at its disposal). That is, this is evidence that an insurmountable informational abyss lies between civilization and the biosphere. Therefore, all human efforts at so-called “environment management” and “combating global warming” appear questionable, to say the least.

The theory of biotic regulation also defines the limit of permissible destruction of natural ecosystems by human economic activity, which is called the ecological carrying capacity or the economic carrying capacity (in contrast to demographic carrying capacity). Approximate estimates have shown that to ensure a stable state of the biosphere, the use of no more than 1% of its products is permissible. However, humanity currently consumes about 6–8% of the primary production of the biota directly. In addition, it destroys another 30–32% indirectly, using for this a power of 12 trillion watts, 90% of which is obtained from fossil fuels. A similar situation exists with regard to the evolution of global biogeochemical cycles of matter. Thus, in the opinion of scientists, civilization is already in the development stage of a global ecological catastrophe, as further evidenced by the increase in the number of natural disasters, the reduction of biodiversity, and climate change.

Deserving of special attention in the context of the Theory of Biotic Regulation and the global significance of Russia’s natural environment is the outstanding scientific discovery by V. G. Gorshkov of the “Forest biotic pump” [Gorshkov (a); Gorshkov (b)]. The irrefutable scientific evidence obtained (still little known to the scientific community) shows that the presence of fresh water, the fullness of rivers, and precipitation on land are determined by the activity of undisturbed aboriginal forests with their natural ecosystems.

Virgin forest is not only a regulator of carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere, including providing a sink for anthropogenic carbon, but also represents a living pump. Driven by solar energy, this natural pump draws onto land the atmospheric moisture evaporated from the surface of the ocean, which then falls as rain and precipitates as snow. The possibility of moisture transfer from the oceans to land lies in the physical characteristics of water vapour. The mechanism of the pump’s action is as follows: natural forest cover, having a high degree of evaporation, maintains dense condensation of water vapour over land. As a result, low-pressure zones form over the ground. Such zones, like a pump, draw highly humid oceanic air deep into the land, which then falls as rain. The clearing (logging and burning) of forests leads to the disruption of moisture evaporation processes on land. Erosion of low-pressure zones occurs. The mechanism of transporting the flow of moisture from coastal marine zones deep into the continent is weakened, and as the territory undergoes desertification, it ceases altogether. The operating mechanism of the forest biotic pump, in particular, convincingly proves why it does not rain over a desert—there the wind always blows from land to sea.

The discovery by our scientist confirms that droughts, fires, floods, as well as hurricanes and tornadoes on land are a direct consequence of the disruption of virgin forest cover, and of the failure and cessation of the action of the forest pump that draws in moisture. Central Europe, where for many centuries the development of the forest “virgin lands” took place, had turned by the beginning of the twentieth century from a territory completely covered with oak, beech, and in the north coniferous forests into a treeless expanse occupied by agricultural lands. In China, 3/4 of the virgin forests have been cleared, with virtually all relict zones destroyed. Logged but re-grown (secondary, so-called successional) temperate forests are increasing in area, but they are poor in nutrients, and the recovery of biodiversity in them does not occur. The mechanisms of biotic regulation do not work in them. As far as one can judge, for the sake of a policy of economic growth and ignoring the laws governing the functioning of the biosphere, both in the countries of Europe and in Southeast Asia the point of no return in ensuring the stability of natural ecosystems has been passed, and the future in these territories is very unenviable. For many centuries now, to secure their water needs, these cradles of civilization (Europe, China, and Central Asia) have made use of the draught of the Eurasian forest belt (pump), which stretches across the territory of Russia for seven thousand kilometres. It is this belt that determines the flows of moist air from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans onto the Eurasian continent. That is, they are in fact dependent on Russia for climate and fresh water.

In the prevailing situation, the question of changing the strategy of the relationship of the human being and society to the environment arises in the most serious way. And an adequate response to it can only be one that, first, will take into account the entire extensive spectrum of anthropogenic destruction; second, will take into account the actual availability of material resources; third, will receive support from the political elite; and, fourth, will be accepted by the society whose interests this elite represents. In other words, what is at issue is a systemic worldview transformation encompassing the value-motivational and activity realms of the being of human and society. The new strategy of civilizational development can be built on a number of postulates:

• the laws governing the functioning of the biosphere are primary, political and legal norms are secondary;, that is, nature is the measure of all things (and not man, as follows from the super-ideology of modernism that dominates today);
• the natural environment is not an unlimited economic resource, but a condition of Life on the planet, including for man.

From these postulates follows an imperative that it would be most correct to call cosmological. The cosmological imperative is substantively broader than an ecological one, since it extends not only to nature, but to the entire world as a whole; since requirements to observe particular norms can be put forward only by man, the sphere of implementation of the imperative encompasses all areas of human activity. In the socio-legal sphere, as universally regulating the life of society, the imperative prescribes regarding the natural wealth of the country as common indivisible property belonging forever to all citizens of the country. A prototype of such a state of affairs can serve in part Norway and certain Arab monarchies; in the international legal field, this is a serious guarantee of preserving state sovereignty. But in a broader sense, sovereignty, formally confirmed by nationwide property, is genuinely threatened by the involvement of the state and all structures subordinate to it in the system of global capitalism. Rather, one should recall here the principles of social construction in the Soviet Union. Principles specifically, since practical adherence to them was by no means always maintained. What is at issue is restoring the principle of a people’s state in which any private interest is aligned with the nationwide interest. Moreover, in practical implementation this does not mean direct revolutionary decisions—for example, expropriation of property. The consistent application of state regulatory acts governing entrepreneurial activity may well resolve this problem. It is another matter that natural wealth can neither be sold, nor mortgaged, nor subleased.

It is obvious that economic growth in the form we know it has ended once and for all. Therefore, the adequacy of a new calculation cannot fail to take into account the following factors: (a) the depletion of resources vital for life activity; (b) material costs associated with the destruction of natural ecosystems, biodiversity, and the dynamic stability of life as a whole; (c) the global expansion of negative impacts on the environment; (d) the adaptability of monetary, banking, and investment systems to the three preceding factors, that is, the servicing by financial institutions of huge public and non-public loans by means of which damage caused to nature is compensated.

It is equally obvious that the existing paradigm of production and consumption is untenable, and therefore requires revision. The price of any product and service must contain the “ecological truth” (accounting for all externalities that today are not even taken into consideration). Manufactured goods must be reliable, durable, maximally safe, repairable, and upon the end of their service life easily recyclable on the principles of resource and nature conservation. Producers, suppliers, and advertisers bear joint responsibility for the declared usefulness, consumer qualities, and safety of the goods and services offered. Hence, gross domestic product is calculated taking into account factors of socio-economic development that influence ecodynamics (including the introduction of composite indicators of environmentally sustainable development, including the so-called “well-being index” of territory and person).

With regard to Russia, yet another consideration must be taken into account. The development of vast, cold, and unfavourable regions with virtually no infrastructure and high energy and transport costs is economically disadvantageous, but above all environmentally damaging. Territories with such natural ecosystems are uninhabited and sparsely populated territories of the North, Siberia, and the Far East, where economic development is unprofitable, with the exception of extracting an optimal number of strategically justified minerals. On the contrary, for the future real sector of Russia’s economy, environmental restrictions for the survival period under conditions of a global transition to a new model of being prove advantageous both economically and socially. This meets the tasks of maintaining stability in the “nature–society” system, preserving the cultural-historical code, and conserving the people. Given the prospects for transitioning to innovative development, it is necessary above all to preserve that vast expanse of undisturbed or slightly disturbed natural ecosystems (especially forest and wetland systems) that occupy 65% of the country’s territory. The value of Russia’s undisturbed or slightly disturbed natural ecosystems will only increase over time. Even an expert assessment of their current value as accumulators of excess atmospheric carbon dioxide has shown that it is greater than the value of the entire profitable portion of Russia’s mineral reserves.

All economic activity should be concentrated in the long-settled areas of the central and southern parts of the European territory of Russia and in the south of Siberia and the Far East. Here there is an economic and household infrastructure that can be modernized and which is also a prerequisite for reducing freight transportation costs and lowering energy consumption. There is available labour, the number of which can be increased by creating decent working and living conditions. Finally, these areas have long been familiar for population settlement. And in this matter, the entire burden falls upon state forms of regulation and management.

Moreover, seemingly purely national interests unfold on a planetary scale. Regional centres of power are emerging on the geopolitical map of the world. Russia has been, is, and will remain a leader throughout the post-Soviet space. For this space to be homogeneous and united, it is necessary in the overall design of development to outline a new conceptual framework and then fill it with concrete substantive developments.

For the successful positioning of Russia as a regional centre of power, the development of cooperation with the countries of the EAEU and further with BRICS, the SCO, and APEC, and counteracting the fracturing of the world along cultural-civilizational and religious lines, fundamental questions will have to be resolved.

The revolutionary events of 1917 brought our country into the leadership of world history. The scale of the consequences of the victory of Soviet power on one-sixth of the landmass could not fail to be global. It was precisely internal self-sufficiency in all necessary resources, material and non-material, that allowed the USSR to break the colonial circle of world imperialism, which answered us with a fascist invasion and the Cold War. The current state of the world brings us to decisive actions that reveal in a new way the content of value orientations, labour, technical, organizational, and financial resources. Perhaps only Russia hypothetically has a chance to initiate a full-scale reorganization of international cooperation. The experience of socialist achievements, in any case, allows one to count on success in creating an alternative model of planetary cooperation.

The rejection of the ideology of bourgeois-capitalist modernism, which caused a global systemic breakdown in the development of civilization, which rests on an elementary axiom. Its essence is simple: the human being is inextricably linked with the natural environment in which he lives; he is a specific function of the biosphere, and while being an individual personality, every human being is inseparable from the whole of humanity. Humanity is the fruit of the biosphere’s development, and the biosphere is the result of the planet’s development. Hence, people must act in the interests of the entire planet. By virtue of the fact that the economy in the modern world plays an exceptional role, the shift of the ideological vector must affect it first of all. And from this point of view, if we inevitably always return to the question of wealth and well-being, it would be more correct to bear in mind that neither the former nor the latter can be considered either the result of private initiative or an indicator of the dignity of human existence. The socio-cosmic order of human being prescribes that we affirm the universal disposition of our con-sciousness (there is no private consciousness), which actualizes the universal meaning of good and wealth⁴. Hence, in a global economic sense, truly rich countries can be considered only those that have preserved ecosystems undisturbed and slightly disturbed by economic activity, and not those that have oil, gas, gold, diamonds, and the like.

In the end, one must truly grasp the Aristotelian distinction between economics as the art of household management and chrematistics as the art of moneymaking. Today, an in-depth study of the laws of the biosphere, of the place of man in the biosphere as a biological species, and of ecology as the science of the dynamic stability of life and the biosphere and of the mechanisms ensuring this stability turns out to be an indispensable condition for conducting economic activity. As the Russian philosopher S. N. Bulgakov wrote: “We are given to expand life, to animate nature, perhaps, in the opinion of the boldest thinkers, to resurrect extinguished life… The task of the cosmic and historical process consists in this, that … the fire [of life] should penetrate, warm, and illuminate all creation, all nature… The content of human economic activity is … the defence, recreation of the living and an onslaught upon the dead. One may assume in the limit that everything must come to life as a result of economic labour and life will be restored in all its power.”

From this point of view, the meaning of “anthropogenic burden” changes fundamentally. The world is not rebuilt in subjugation to the intellectual and volitional arbitrariness of an individuality that has separated itself from and counterposed itself to the world, which can act both as an individual person and as a certain community. The world is realized and transfigured by the efforts of a universal subject that is aware of the source of its origin. The “universal subject” is understood in this case in the literal and strict sense: the one who actualizes the genuine, underlying essence of the cosmos.

References

Dokuchaev 1948 — Докучаев В. В. К учению о зонах природы. Горизонтальные и вертикальные почвенные зоны. — Dokuchaev V. V. K ucheniju o zonah prirody. Gorizontal’nye i vertikal’nye pochvennye zony. Moscow: Geografgiz, 1948. 64 с. — URL: https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/К_учению_о_зонах_природы (дата обращения: 5.08.2016). (in Russian)

Gorshkov (a) — Горшков В. Г. Роль биоты в жизни Земли. — Gorshkov, V. G. Rol’ bioty v zhizni Zemli — URL: http://sobiainnen.livejournal.com/159749.html (дата обращения: 5.08.2016). (in Russian)

Gorshkov (b) — Горшков В. Г. Физические и биологические основы устойчивости жизни. –: Gorshkov, V. G. Fizicheskie i biologicheskie osnovy ustojchivosti zhizni. — URL: http://sobiainnen.livejournal.com/159749.html (дата обращения: 5.08.2016). (in Russian)

Kara-Murza 2002 — Кара-Мурза С. Советская цивилизация. От начала до великой победы. — Kara-Murza, S. Sovetskaja civilizacija. Ot nachala do velikoj pobedy. Moscow: Algoritm, 2002. 528 p. (in Russian)

Lenin 1969 — Ленин В. И. Имприализм как высшая стадия империализма // Ленин В. И. ПСС. М.: Изд-во политической литературы, 1969. Т. 27. — Lenin, V. I. Imprializm kak vysshaja stadija imperializma, in Polnoe sobranie sochinenij. T. 27. Moscow, 1969. 643 c. (in Russian)

Vajczekker & oths 2000 — Вайцзеккер Э. фон, Ловинс Эймори Б., Ловинс Л. Хантер. Фактор четыре: Затрат — половина, отдача — двойная. — Vajczekker, Jernst fon, Lovins, Jejmori B., Lovins, L. Hanter. Faktor chetyre: Zatrat — polovina, otdacha — dvojnaja. Moscow: Academia, 2000. (in Russian)