Local globalization, environment and archaic social relations

One of the striking evidence of local globalization is a sharp increase of crime and wide-spread corruption at a local level of rural communities in Russia. The bulk of shadow economy including its criminal and corrupted components is sized by Russian experts up to 40% GDP. At the beginning of 1990s the extortion racket (the systematic robbery of businessmen) was widely in use; over the last five years the corrupt practices are gaining the advantage. Many sociologists estimate the current situation in the Russian society as critical while using the term ‘system corruption’ to characterize it (the latter understood as corruption that have pervaded all the levels of social system and become an integral part of the system of government). In my paper I consider the economic banditry (racketeering) and system corruption as a form of parasitical (negative) economic relationship that lock out normal economic development through the deformation of the market relationship and systematic withdrawal of the considerable amount of social product. At the same time the specifics of my point of view would be making the parallel between the criminal-corruptive and some ‘archaic’ (primordial, pre-class, early class) economic relationships, which, in the situation of radical socio-economic transformation, are being brought back to life. Under the conditions of economic crisis the parasitical economic relationships characteristic of most developing countries as well as countries with transitional economies (countries of so-called ‘peripheral capitalism’) prove to block the effectiveness of struggle with emerged economic and social menaces; they are the phenomena worsening the economic crisis. All this raises a whole range of philosophical and methodological questions: what is the nature of post-Soviet societies? What conceptual apparatus has to be applied to the analysis of “transforming” societies? What is the proportion of “cultural-mental” and properly economic factors in the development of post-Soviet states?