Recently I was reproached for not writing detailed recipes for the authorities on how to reorganize Rabkrin. Honestly, it doesn’t even occur to me to write them recipes, and if someone perceives my modest notes that way, then, of course, they are mistaken. Everything I write is addressed exclusively to the dear reader and is not an attempt to whisper some useful advice into the ear of the leadership. Of course, earlier I did engage in writing advice—for free and for money—but if I were to write such advice now, it would only be for very large sums of money, and not so much because I don’t love the state, but because I understand the complete futility of my labor, and for me, meaningless labor costs very dearly.
What chance does someone like me have, when the great Rothbard himself back in 1991 wrote about how to and how not to dismantle socialism, and since then everything has been done exclusively the wrong way, and what should be done is not done, and the past 20-plus years only confirm the rightness of every word of Rothbard. And it is precisely for this reason that I no longer write advice for the leadership. In 20 years it has become clear that this endeavor is futile, and not because the leadership is bad, but because this machine is not controlled by the intentions of those sitting in it. Whether you write them advice or not, whether they consider it or not, whether they accept it for implementation or not—the details of the process that will go its own way depend on this alone.
Rothbard’s proposals were not accepted and will never be accepted, since they damage the process I am talking about—the process of state expansion. Even if something like that were to be formally implemented, it would always be with various “buts” and “howevers,” partially, reluctantly, and briefly. Then everything will return to where it was for very respectable reasons, and it will be as it was and even better.
The reason I write notes on near-political topics is that states not only expand but also collapse. That is, they live in cycles. These collapses can be quite local, visible only to those living there, and they can also be global, like the French or Russian revolutions. And so, how the next phase of expansion will proceed, what will happen to people and how they will live, depends on a banal and seemingly secondary thing—what people had in their heads and in their hands when the state collapsed. That is, it will depend on the practices and ideas that these people professed at the moment when the state went down the drain.
In principle, the cyclical nature of the state is not a law of nature—the state is a historical phenomenon, one can quite get rid of it and along with it the mirage of cycles. But in our case, we apparently have not yet reached this point. Ukrainian statehood after the dissolution of the USSR is developing exactly as if according to a textbook, about which the author of this column has written many times. Though, of course, not according to the textbook that is “Theory of State and Law,” but according to a textbook of state science that hasn’t been written yet. Everything that is happening with us has a theoretical description and is known to those who are interested in it more or less professionally.
And so, judging by these theories, we are already approaching the moment of another collapse. The state has entered a kind of reckless and carefree phase of expansion, it will not be able to not only stop but even slow down this process? No, theoretically one could “carry out radical reforms,” but for this one needs to do not what Bendukidze said, but what Rothbard said, well, who here would agree to that. Most likely, the state will collapse under its own weight, or if external creditors and all manner of “geopolitical players” deem it necessary—it will be placed on life support through international aid and will linger there dying slowly and tediously, as African countries have been doing for many years, whose “elite” is busy producing poverty, since their income is formed from Western funds for “poverty fighting” and for “reforms.”
In any case, what comes after depends on what we have in our heads. And so this is why one needs to write notes.