In the first half of the 19th century, Russian writers created a kind of romantic anti-hero – a man of talents, education and sensitivity who is unable to find a place for himself in the contemporary world. Based on the title of Ivan Turgenev’s novel, this lot came to be called “superfluous men.”
I recently attended a lecture by an African-American artist Theaster Gates, who brought up this concept in a refreshing new way. In his work, which is centered on Chicago’s South Side, Gates recycles abandoned stuff – an unused schoolhouse, trees cut down at public parks, bricks from a demolished church, etc. He sees this as a metaphor for the black experience in America. Brought over as slaves to work Southern plantations, they were cast upon their own devices in an alien, hostile environment when slavery was abolished. Lured to the industrial North by the promise of good jobs in the first half of last century, they became marooned in urban ghettos when those jobs also disappeared. They became America’s “superfluous people” – except, in this case, not by choice.
In the 21st century, such involuntary human superfluity – if I may be allowed to invent the term – is becoming widespread, with ominous implications for the existing political system. The modern economy is evolving in a way that simply can’t meaningfully employ most of the people in the world. Meanwhile, the world population is projected to grow by another three and a half billion people – or nearly 50 percent – by the end of this century. In the developing world, superfluity has been a problem for a while and it is a key factor in the massive social and political turmoil in Muslim countries, making a number of them ungovernable.
Radical Islamic terrorism has impacted the West as well, but a far greater risk is presented by the superfluous people in the world’s leading military powers – in Russia, which is also the world’s largest land mass, and in the United States, which is an indispensable nation for the global economy and political system.
In Russia, talk of “extra population” started around 2005, when revenues from oil exports began to flow in and an overvalued ruble made it cheaper to import rather than produce at home. This completed the destruction of the Soviet-era industrial base.
Back then it was said that Russia’s already shrinking population was 20 percent “too large” for the oil economy to provide adequate income. Even though the ruble has since dropped, there is little sign of Russia’s industrial base being rebuilt. In fact, other projections now put superfluity at 30 percent or more by mid-century.
The United States has a remarkably low unemployment rate – it stood at 4.2 percent in September – but it only serves to mask America’s own superfluity problem. The labor force participation rate fell from around 66 percent to 63 percent over the past decade, which represents at least 4-6 million people dropping out of the workforce. In addition, most jobs being created are low-paid, no-prestige service sector employment which can’t be considered a career and which often don’t even provide a living wage. And, as the 2008-09 financial crisis showed, such jobs can disappear overnight.
They will do so again the moment the current asset price bubble bursts.
These superfluous populations are starting to control the national agendas in the world’s two nuclear superpowers. In their domestic and international policies they are displaying traits typical of nations that do not have much a stake in preserving the status quo – i.e., rogue nations: recklessness, aggressiveness, disrespect for their weaker neighbors, disdain for the law and unpredictability.
The fact that this is happening in the United States is likely to spell the end of liberal democracy. It is fulfilled human beings who need liberal democracy. They are different and one of a kind; they are minorities by definition and need the protections provided by liberal democracy.
Superfluous people, on the other hand, tend to be more or less the same, or undifferentiated, regressing into a mob. They are filled with resentment for the world and are liable to fall for a dictator who channels their hatred.
Not surprisingly, people living in successful economies on both coasts of the United States remain unstintingly liberal, whereas most depressed regions of the interior have turned right-wing Trump cultists.
Superfluity cheapens human life. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union life has fallen in price in Russia and it remains horrifyingly cheap there. Note the carnage on Russian roads and the high murder rate. Human life is being wasted on a daily basis by alcoholism, drug addiction, the AIDS epidemic and generally low life expectancy which kills off Russian males in what should have been their most productive years.
Russian volunteers who poured into eastern Ukraine at the start of fighting there are the clearest example of the superfluous people and the low value of human life. The dead were often not identified and buried in unmarked graves.
Life is getting remarkably cheap in the United States as well. The country has become inured to gun violence on a scale unprecedented in civilized societies, such as massacres in New Town, Orlando and Las Vegas – to say nothing of daily mass shootings around the country involving at least four victims.
Add to this an opiate addiction that has become an epidemic not in inner cities but among once productive industrial workers.
Ironically, much of it has been predicted by Karl Marx. He saw this process as alienation and lumpenization of the working class. It is exactly what we are seeing both in Russia and the United States. Contrary to Marx’s prediction, however, the leadership of the two countries have come to reflect the vicious nihilism of their lumpenized constituencies.
The lumpenization of these two countries threatens world peace and, ultimately, the survival of the world, given their nuclear arsenals. Despite the seeming affinity of the two countries and their leaders, the lawless and reckless nature of the two regimes makes them more likely to go to war with third parties and, eventually, with each other. The risks are far greater now than when they were locked into the ideological battles of the Cold War.
