On the whole, Azroyantz’s theoretical approach is limited to relating the facts of globalization, highlighting its typical system of gradually increasing internal contrasts. It does not go further than reproaching the new world order.
At the same time, Azroyantz, while declaring the civilizational approach as a methodological system, is de facto offering his version of a formation-based approach under the guise of historical cycles. He repeats the main premise of economic reductionism (and liberal fundamentalism, as one of its varieties) in terms of the fatal inevitability of the convergence of cultures and civilizations as a global economy is formed.
Therefore, the works by Yakovets and Azroyantz, as typical contemporary works on the sociology and culturology of civilizations, are illustrative of the passive reflection of local social groups (including local civilizations, such as Russia), who find themselves and their systems of interest forced by globalization onto the periphery of social life.
Typically, this civilizational approach is based on a convergent, effectively multi-stage model of the development of social communities, the development of which occurs through the convergence of preceding communities until a global culturally homogenous society (“social megacommunity’, “global human ant hill’, “cheloveynik’ and others) is created.
At the same time, obvious contemporary tendencies towards ethnocultural divergence, fragmentation and a sharp increase in the importance of ethnicity and religiousness are being ignored.
Pivovarov141 raises the issue of the contemporary state of the formation-based and civilizational approach as complementing each other. He stresses in particular that the formation-based approach borrows key ideas from Christianity, including the universality of history, its patterns and the possibility of singling out periods within history.
Fursov142 stands out among the supporters of a formation-based approach, since he sees history not only as a fight among classes, social groups and state bodies within a certain societal formation, but as long cycles of standoffs between elites and lower classes that spread to the larger civilizational space and up to the global level during the last historical cycle. According to Fursov, the current moment is characterized by the global vengeance of the elites and, as a consequence, the global crash of social achievement of the masses.
Fursov sees a mutual need for social cooperation that requires a certain structure of the “social pyramid’ as a factor that determines the equilibrium of the higher and the lower classes coexisting within a society. In this regard, the lack of population after wars or the epidemics of the Middle Ages led to the emancipation of the third estate. Industry’s need for workers and then for markets for manufactured goods led to constraints upon elites and the rise in the social standing of the masses, the appearance of socialism first as a school of thought, then as a social system, and the creation of a middle class in industrialized bourgeois states.
Nevertheless, according to Fursov, globalization is yet another revenge of the elites who have lost connection with the nation state basis and who reap benefits from the privatization of the welfare state created in the industrial epoch.
The important task set before the theory of globalization is to create a theoretical world model (or several compatible models showing different spheres and aspects of social existence and collective consciousness), allowing us to model and compare variants and models of global development and global management. This will at least allow the introduction of qualitative criteria of efficiency and comparison of various models and trajectories of potential development.
Globalization engenders strong contradictions touching upon deep ontological foundations of the being of humankind as well as local communities at all levels. It would seem that the structure of contradictions should be an objective depiction of globalization. However, theoretical views of globalization are essentially subjective and usually reflect interests and points of view of a certain social agent.
Pirogov143 says that: “Globalization these days is perhaps the most fashionable world in political slang. However, everyone understands it differently. The differences in understanding are an estimation and this leads to a new ‘Babel confusion of tongues,’ threatening to crash the Babel tower before it has been built. Strong interests are behind each understanding of globalization. The process of globalization is permeated with sharp contradictions.” A detailed list of key contradictions can be found in the work by Timofeyev.144
The current stage of economic globalization, whose point of departure is Western victory in the Cold War, is characterized by the ubiquitous and clichéd commercialization and privatization of state monopolies (housing and utilities, power, transport, defence). Commercialization and privatization have affected other, initially non-commercial spheres and institutions of social life (education, science, medicine, culture). At the same time, the objective tendency of the capital to expand and the expansion of the effectiveness of money-for-goods exchanges even at this time, during the peak of corporate globalization and privatization of welfare state, is not absolute and is always within certain non-economic limits. These limits may be material (limited space or resources), political (state borders), technological (transport and communications), related to social stability (social stratification is simply a downside of capital concentration), security and long-term needs for modernization and the construction of infrastructure, which require long-term investments.
Correspondingly, economic globalization, with its typical ultra-liberal economic model, should be seen not as an irreversible process, as neoliberal ideologues usually see it, but as a reversible and even cyclical shift of equilibrium of powers and interests between elites from various levels and other social groups.
The objective nature of the labour theory of value (LTV) does not signify the need to cancel limitations of a non-economic type, as the limitations of the LTV allow human social communities to exist. The constant tendency does not cancel out contrasting objective and subjective powers. The objective truth of the law of universal gravitation influences evolution, but does not cancel the living organisms on Earth that exist in constant contradiction with gravitation.
Liberalization and commercialization engender the degradation of extremely important – especially long-term – non-commercial spheres of social life (science, culture, education, marriage), that make up an essential part of human existence.
It is quite likely that crises in the global economy and internal affairs of certain states that are prompted by liberalization, commercialization and deregulation will in the future logically lead to the movement in reverse – namely to deliberalization and regionalization, as well as to the reinvigoration of such social institutes as nation states and ethnicities.
In any case, we see the example of Roosevelt’s New Deal that came to replace the decade of post-war liberalism of the twentieth century. Many other examples of successful deliberalization and deprivatization exist, above all the creation of the European model of the welfare state145 and the construction of a whole range of viable models of socialism and compromise social models based on a number of civilizations and cultures.
The economy has seen global changes linked to the appearance and growth of transnational corporations and globalized banking and financial structures.
Manufacturing has long since ceased to be merely national. It is becoming more and more transnational: only some of the work on a certain product is done in any given country, while the item has to go through a long process from raw material to completeness through manufacturing cycles in many countries. Transnational corporations deal with this type of manufacturing, but they do not focus on one activity or one product.
In the 1990s, the joint sales of 500 largest global transnational