social design corporation
the network expert initiative

Social Design Corporation. The network expert initiative

Social Design Corporation's Manifesto

1

In all our activities, we propose to take as a starting point the following problematic situation. Nowadays, most political funds and organizations focus on discussing extremely short-term political prospects, which not only makes them sound like political journalists, but also greatly marginalizes all political science in Russia as a whole: any statement made by these funds can easily be interpreted according to the dividing lines between today's political power groups, making it thereby impossible to examine the longer-term prospects, which would be more interesting for Russia, and also significantly reducing the quality level of the discussion itself. Why strive for quality when all the theses involved boil down to the same, rather primitive opposition between «for» and «against»? Even the motivations for discussing prospects in the longer-term future are lost, since the market of political science has all too obviously been turning into a soap bubble of short-term discussions. We need to blow out this bubble and work towards de-marginalizing political science, which has become the hostage of random interests and ad hoc theories. Thus, the goal we are setting before ourselves is to achieve an interpretation of social reality capable of presenting and demonstrating the significance of new types of oppositions that would widen the horizons both for research and for political practice.

2

Short-term (or discrete) politics, which consists in a continuous process of change among the goals of existing policies and of their connections with so-called «current» topics, whereas such policies are incapable of acquiring the information that would be necessary to properly assess any current situation, inevitably leads to a crisis in people's trust towards politics as a whole (and to the development of opportunism). In a short-term political perspective, one of the few ways – possibly even the only one – to declare one's position is political scandal. This is an adaptative system: a scandal can only be fought against by means of another scandal, which shortens even further the political timeframe. As a result, politics as a whole comes to appear as an incoherent series of political scandals. Thus, politics, which was already based on a short-term timeframe to begin with, comes to lose all kind of identity. In the end, it turns into an overall competition of marginal phenomena that prevents the formation of a political mainstream. This, in turn, opens access for any arbitrary political force to occupy the leading position.

3

Our purpose here is to create a new dimension of socio-political culture. In this dimension, voluntary participation is the pre-requisite for any kind of politics or related problems, in order to open the framework of the existing political system that is so often closed. We therefore consider that such voluntary participation is not merely an addition to what is currently known as «politics,» but rather the «ground level» of politics itself, without which it is transformed into something else. By «voluntary» actions we understand anything that works against the conception of «exclusive politics,» i.e. anything that envisages politics as including new groups and theories. For instance, a group of people who are discontented with some new regulations on automobile parking might bring together anti-abortionists and free love supporters, conservatives and liberals, supporters of Michel Foucault and deconstructivists, by creating a new political force and a new type of discourse. It is only after such voluntary action has taken place, creating an initial political phenomenon, that political circles can begin to invest in it. In its own time, the Fabian Society acted not only as a platform for discussing progressist ideas, but also as the source of a new specific political culture, the culture of promoting reformist ideas, in which it was then imitated even by conservative circles. In this way, a new socio-political climate came into being, which, among other things, brought about the emergence of new party ideologies (such as the Labor Party).

4

Today in Russia, the political and intellectual elites that were in many ways the successors of the Soviet Union are gradually being replaced. Whereas previously these elites would, according to their own description, use a global-scale type of discourse and global opposition positions in the spirit of Francis Fukuyama's work, today what is placed at the forefront are social problems that no longer correspond to that type of description. Overall, this is due to a transformation of the «big parties» that had originally been created in a society based on a Ford-type production system. In the new context, what is becoming more important is no longer the decision to choose between this or that general program or ideology, but rather to study and work with existing situations (the status quo) which by definition cannot be structured from the outside.

5

It makes no doubt to us that today's tendencies of «political realism,» which are based on the assumption that the discourse as such is insignificant, must be seriously re-examined. The latest conflict about the appointment of Mr. Rocco Buttiglione as a member of the European Commission proves only one thing: even in a situation of shrinking trust from the electorate towards the European Parliament (with abstention rates continuously falling), the European integration process, of which the European Parliament is a symbol (as opposed to the Commission, which is only a demonstration of the levels of influence among the various member-states' national institutions), cannot rely exclusively upon secretly negotiated agreements, which serve as a basis in creating structures such as the Commission. Any integration process must be dependent on an integration discourse ; otherwise, those countries whose positions in secret negotiations are weaker will simply fall out of this process, since they will always be the losers in the negotiations, and no integration will therefore take place. Thus, the problem is not the line that separates public politics from secret politics, since even in a public political context many states are unable to achieve their desired results (as proven, for example, by the weak position of developing countries in WTO and UNO trade negotiations). The most important separation landmark runs between, on one hand, discursive politics (i.e. a kind of politics based on the premise that a certain level of equal rights recognition is necessary between the negotiating participants, precisely because no negotiation can take place without recognizing, to a certain extent, the weaker countries' requirements as the latter are themselves constituting elements of the negotiative structure as such) and, on the other hand, a type of politics based on the idea that stronger and weaker positions are self-evident. The latter type of politics already narrows the possibilities for negotiation by the fact that it fails to develop the language necessary for considering the reality of this or that negotiating member's demands. The conclusion is, therefore, that in today's politics, we need to abandon the straightforward, realistic type of theses that declare that the point is to do politics, not discuss it. Nowadays it is impossible to do politics without discussing it if we want to avoid isolating a political entity, i.e. we must take up the challenge of globalization. Russia cannot afford to maintain a position of isolationism.

6

Our project is a network structure, since from its very inception we have always used a pluralistic approach in examining any kind of problem. The conjunction of philosophy and politology research efforts is not a haphazard theoretical alliance, and it provides a methodological resource for our society by setting the necessary depth for our future work.