From an interview with the independent Russian television station Rybar:
In the 1970s, the West reached the high point of its civilization, whether measured by living standards—or, more precisely, living standards relative to the available technology—education, human relationships, scientific progress, human happiness, the state of family life, or almost anything else. Even children born at the time were more intelligent than those born before or since. Barely a generation later, we find ourselves in a crisis so deep that the collapse of civilization has become an entirely conceivable scenario.
What happened in the meantime? The rise of neoliberalism is only one factor. Its prophet, F. A. Hayek, did indeed argue that morality was a “relic of tribal mentality” and that financial profit could be regarded as the sole measure of what is good, regardless of how that profit was obtained. It is not difficult to see what effect the spread of such an ideology has on human behavior and relations between people.
But there is a broader context. There are many reasons to believe that the heart of the problem lies in the end of the industrial-society model. This does not simply mean that a country has factories. In sociology, an industrial society is one in which society as a whole is organized to facilitate and support mass industrial production as effectively as possible. Such an arrangement entails a whole range of requirements, and those requirements cannot be avoided, whether you are a dictator, a democratically elected president, or the leadership of a Communist Party. They concern the organization of factories, education, the motivation of workers, transportation, housing, science, health care, and many other areas. This is why, for example, life in communist Czechoslovakia was so strikingly similar to life in capitalist France. They were two versions of industrial society.
In the 1980s, this model of society was abandoned. The new assumption was that wealth would be created not through production but through relocating production, financial services, advertising, entertainment, and so forth. This did not merely mean a different kind of economy. It meant an entirely different way of organizing society. The difference is greater than that between capitalism and socialism. At first, perhaps, it seemed that this post-industrial society might work. But with the benefit of several decades of hindsight, it is clear that the experiment has been one enormous disaster.
Today we face the question of how to create a new and more modern version of industrial society. Otherwise, we will end up like Great Britain, where British society is rapidly being replaced by a Pakistani one.
I fear that something similar applies to economies built on cheap labor. Once you become an assembly shop or a producer of simple components for somebody else, that model in turn pushes you toward other measures. Thus, this year the Serbian government is bringing in 100,000 workers from Egypt and Ghana; Belarus is bringing in 150,000 Pakistanis; and so on. And those figures are far from the whole story.
No one can reasonably suspect either the Serbian or Belarusian government of seeking population replacement or of importing voters in this way. The logic of the economic model they chose has simply driven them to it.