Paul Goble
Staunton, April 2 – The term “deathonomics,”
introduced by Vladislav Inozemtsev to describe the way in which Putin has used
monetary payments to get Russians to die for him in Ukraine not only is far
more pernicious than many assume but is doomed to failure, according to Aaron
Lea and Borukh Taskin.
The two Israeli analysts of Russian
background say that Putin’s deathonomics is “rooted in the GULAG and not merely
as a metaphor but through an actual economic genealogy. The GULAG was the core
of the Stalinist economy, a system in which death was embedded within the production
plan as depreciation (kasparovru.com/material.php?id=69CE4433B2723).
“Stalin, at least, feigned the
construction of a civilization—canals, factories, mines,” the two analysts argue;
but “Putin creates nothing save for the short-term consumption of the payouts
issued for death. Operating within the Russian Federation today is the GULAG
motto: ‘You die today; I’ll die tomorrow.’"
This represents the quintessence of an ethics of survival
at the expense of others—a mindset in which the present feeds upon the future. Varlam Shalamov understood that the
Gulag’s primary product was the elimination of the "inner witness";
for a person who survives through complicity or silence loses the capacity to
bear witness against the system.”
In Putin’s Russia, they point out, “a family which accepts a death payout
has effectively silenced not only its own voice but also the very question of
meaning; the "coffin money" has purchased their consent, rendering
their conscience an inconvenient burden.” But this transaction does more than
that.
“When death becomes a private contractual arrangement between the state and
a contractor, the very space of shared existence—what the ancient Greeks termed
the polis—is abolished. Deathonomics supplants political will with a market
transaction, thereby rendering collective refusal structurally impossible while
engaging in an act of demographic cannibalism.”
As economists have shown, Lea and Taskin observe, this process costs “the
economy 30 to 40 years of potential labor, tax revenue, and innovation for
every person killed—replacing long-term human capital with short-term
inflationary demand, and effectively transforming into a financial pyramid
scheme where the interest is paid in the lives of those yet unborn.”
But as it does that, it also dooms the Putin system because that system “rests
on a temporal arbitrage as the Kremlin pays more for death than a life is
worth. Yet this reosurce is finite, the labor market is overheated, and wages
on the home front are rising even as the pool of individuals for whom contract
payouts exceed lifetime earning potential falls.”
And that means, the analysts say that “Putin has fallen into the trap of
escalating subsidies: lower the payouts, and recruitment collapses; raise them,
and budgetary ruin accelerates. The true civilizational tragedy lies not in the
fact that this pyramid scheme will eventually collapse, however, but in what will
be left in its wake.”
Russian society, of course, “will survive deathonomics, but it will continue
with a rewritten moral code, one in which the price of a human life having been
established, ‘the inner witness,’ the moral compass within [that survivors of the
GULAG talked about] has been abolished.”
“Consequently,” Lea and Taskin argue, the era of "Post-Putinism"
will not usher in a new, democratic Putin figure; rather, it will entail the
absolute dominion of the security services over a population that has unlearned
how to be human.” But even that is not the most serious consequence of Putin’s
innovation.
Whatever some think, “deathonomics is not the cause of the economic
catastrophe” now facing Russia. Rather I is the very embodiment of the maxim, ‘you
die today and I’ll die to tomorrow,’ an invoice for centuries of the systemic
devaluation of the individual, now being presented for settlement which
generations yet unborn will be obligated to pay.”
