While in his book Future Shock Toffler fundamentally revealed the fundamentally new place of the factor of science and knowledge in the economy and society, at the same time he touched upon the new power functions of this factor. In The Metamorphoses of Power, he examined how the three main components – knowledge, violence, and wealth – are at different stages and the relationship between them determined the power in society. At the stage of post-industrial society, it is knowledge, according to his data, that becomes the determining factor of power. In this regard, Toffler cites Winston Churchill’s “prophetic” remark that “the empires of the future are the empires of the intellect.” Today, this has become true, writes Toffler8.
As we can see, one of the strategists of the domination of the capitalist economy has long drawn attention to the potential of the imperial functions of an order based on intellect (knowledge). Consequently, the post-industrial conception of progress does not at all exclude but presupposes the scope for the intensification of exploitation by one part of the world community of other parts of it. Failure to understand this delicate circumstance obscures the objective boundaries inherent in the dissemination of the concept knowledge-based economy. In any case, it is impossible not to notice that at the present stage its establishment is accompanied by an increasingly rigid division of the world in the socio-economic sense into highly developed and underdeveloped parts. At the same time, the implementation of a policy of deriving unilateral advantages from the possession of knowledge potential is far from an absolute trend.
The informatization of the economy and society, which has engulfed the world for some time, creates both the prerequisites for the realization of the power of the strong over the weak, and the prerequisites for the alignment of countries and regions at the socio-economic level. Many technological processes in industry and communications, in trade and finance are changing radically. On the one hand, the network structures that complement the matrices of vertical and horizontal relations complicate the trajectories of managerial impulses, make the subjects of control implicit, and thus weaken the resistance to pressure on the part of the governed, and, on the other hand, make it possible to form and implement actions in the depths of the controlled mass that compensate for and prevent their subordination to the centers of power.
Thus, the trend of widespread informatization of society based on network technologies leads to the possibility of eliminating the foundations of the centuries-old problem-free division of the world into the elite and the plebeians. Controlling the illiterate and uninformed is one technology, but controlling the masses, who already have wide access to information, including information about who exploits them and how, is a qualitatively different type of problem. Under these conditions, “feedback” can turn into a powerful force that counteracts the ambitions of contenders for absolute leadership in the world.
Resource Scarcity at the Heart of Transformation
The turn between the second and third millennia was marked by a series of achievements and crises caused by uneven access to natural and, above all, energy resources. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the energy problem came to the fore among all the world’s problems. The developments of scientists and the analysis of specific practice show that the level and quality of life of the population, the scale of production of GDP per capita, consistently correlate with the level of energy consumption per capita in the respective countries. The relationship between these parameters is not simple, non-linear, and it largely depends on the structure of the country’s economy, its territory, and natural and climatic conditions. But one thing is certain: all highly developed countries are guided by high levels of per capita energy consumption. This is typical not only for countries with low winter temperatures, such as Norway, Canada, Finland, but also, of course, for the United States, as well as Australia, Belgium, Sweden, etc.
If we take the United States, a country with a far from cold climate and focused not on the predominant development of raw material industries, then they, nevertheless, in the aggregate, not only consume, but also produce more energy resources than Russia. The data for the year 2000 given by Aleksey E. Kontorovich in one of his public analytical reports are interesting. At that time, the U.S. produced 495 million tons of fuel equivalent, while Russia produced 459 million tons of fuel equivalent, while Russia consumed 1,256 million tons of fuel equivalent, while Russia consumed only 173 million tons of fuel equivalent. At the same time, gas consumption in the United States was 753 million tons of fuel equivalent, while in Russia it was only 434 million tons of fuel equivalent. Up to 1991, as follows from the materials of the above-mentioned author, Russia was steadily developing (by the nature of the relationship between the level of energy consumption and the dynamics of GDP) in line with global trends, but as a result of the collapse of the USSR and the economic crisis caused by it, In the words of A. E. Kontorovich, “described a peculiar loop of hysteresis.” And from the trajectory of development typical of developed countries, over the ten years of reforms, Russia “has decisively moved to the trajectory of the most backward countries, in which the growth of energy consumption does not affect GDP growth in any way.”
The increase in the energy supply of life in developed countries has caused such an increase in the production of energy resources that has come into conflict with the stability of the Earth’s ecosystem. And today it is already a characteristic sign of the limits of the evolution of the old (and especially Western) economic system. An extremely difficult situation has emerged, when developing and post-socialist countries are trying to catch up with the trajectories of the economies of developed countries, which is impossible without a significant increase in energy consumption. But this (and maybe even larger) “delta” of energy resources is no less claimed by highly developed countries, since maintaining the existing lifestyle requires it. The Earth, on the other hand, will not be able to sustain the simultaneous development of these aspirations.
Overcoming Inertia: Opportunities for Progress
The problem of the objective limitation of the natural potential and the insufficiency of energy resources for the extension of the lifestyle of highly developed countries to all the inhabitants of the Planet is constantly hidden behind other problems that periodically come to the surface, although it is precisely this problem that is a concentrated expression of the content of the dead-end path imposed on humanity by the inertia of the experience once formed in a group of countries that have hitherto had the opportunity to grind down the overwhelming majority in production and consumption. part of the world’s total resources.
For many years, the 80-to-20 ratio has characterized the distribution of total resources between the rich and the poor (between the highly developed countries and the rest of the world), while the proportion between them is the opposite and looks like 20 to 80% in terms of population. This correlation seems to be known to everyone, but it is not considered to be the fundamental cause of the impasse to which the world has come.
With the exhaustion of extensive growth opportunities within the socialist countries, the problems that aggravated the socio-political situation in them in the 1980s were perceived by the masses and interpreted by the advanced politicians exclusively in terms of the vices inherent in the economic and political system of socialism. These vices did exist and irritated society. They had to be overcome. But the big look at the situation turned out to be superficial. Under