The action was directed "against the appointment of the Perm Grid Company of the oligarch Vekselberg as a single heat supply organization in Perm." In addition, the event had a pronounced anti-governor position.

The day before, the organizers were required to move the venue to Gaiva  -   in connection with the sudden plans of the mayor's office to hold a subbotnik on the site already agreed for the rally. District police officer and city hall employee "on duty" at the entrance of Alexander Zotin, chairman of the Perm Standard Association of Homeowners' associations. They also tried to hand him a document against signature, which contradicts the initially declared goals of the rally.

The start of the rally was announced at 13:00, but the organizers, expecting possible provocations from the mayor's office, decided to start preparations from 12:00. In the square itself, where the subbotnik was supposed to take place that day, all the garbage had already been put away in bags.

Photo: Maxim Artamonov

In a conversation with Zvezda, one of the organizers of the rally, Vitaly Stepanov, said that the subbotnik had been held a few days ago.

A few hours before the action, special equipment for garbage removal was parked around the square, some people walked around with rakes and shovels, pretending that they were cleaning up the territory. In fact, the garbage was raked first simply in one direction, and then in the other.

Photo: Maxim Artamonov

The leader of the rally, public activist Yuri Bobrov, warned the participants from an impromptu rostrum about possible provocations, which, by the way, did not exist.

Representatives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, A Just Russia, the Parnassus party and other political and social forces were invited to participate in the action and support its demands. Not everyone came.

Photo: Maxim Artamonov

The rally participants were urged to sign for the resignation of the incumbent governor.

Photo: Maxim Artamonov Chairman of the association HOA "Perm Standard" Alexander Zotin Photo: Maxim Artamonov

Alexander Zotin, Chairman of the HOA "Perm Standard":

Now a bill is being submitted to the State Duma, according to which exit from the management company will become virtually impossible. Up to five years, people will have to be in communal slavery. Our task is to condemn this practice and prevent it. The second  -  inflated tariffs. This is the fruit of the Regional Tariff Service. In fact, this is a division of the Government of the Perm Territory, which is headed by Governor Basargin. We have repeatedly pointed out their groundlessness, and these are not empty words, but a position proven in court. Many houses have managed to get rid of high tariffs for heating. My house is Komsomolsky prospect, 77. Our people pay less. In order to free everyone, we are trying to deprive the Perm Grid Company of the status of a single heat supply organization. These are not heat suppliers, they are crooks, which has been repeatedly proven in court, and they are covered by the Regional Tariff Service and the governor. And the third threat - instead of repairing our houses, which needed such repairs at the time of privatization, the government wants to collect from us. Some fussed and were able to organize their own special accounts, but, unfortunately, most fell into slavery to the regional operator. And now we are discussing in court the issue of the legality of the regional overhaul program.

Zotin called on all participants to come to the final meeting on the abolition of the regional overhaul program, which will be held on April 26 at 11:00 in the Perm Regional Court.

Photo: Maxim Artamonov

Rimma Sherstnyova, chairman of the HOA "Komsomolsky prospect, 94":

We started fighting with the Perm Grid Company five years ago. And now the second series begins. As soon as we fought them off, kicked them off in the courts, only they were recognized as swindlers, and that the nets suitable for our house do not belong to them. But suddenly they again decided to plant this PUK, which is cheating. We live in a crumbling house. Our house was supposed to be renovated in 1995. There is a court decision. Now we have a lawn near the house repaired  -  3 thousand square meters. m. Recently, all the earth was taken out of it with buckets, then a new one was brought in, then seeds were sown, and then a roll of lawn grass was also covered on the grown seeds  -  10 cm. The administration found money for this, as well as for a fountain that does not work: there is winter water with garbage. So we live in a crumbling house, renovating it ourselves, with a beautiful lawn of rolled grass and a marble fountain in front of our house, which has dirty and smelly water with garbage.

Lawyer Vitaly Stepanov Photo: Maxim Artamonov

Vitaly Stepanov, legal consultant of the Association of HOA "Perm Standard":

For eight years we have not left the courtrooms, defending our rights with you. Eight long years. What have we installed? The fact that you and I were robbed of at least 1 billion rubles. This is according to the report of the Chamber of Control and Accounts of the Perm Territory. We've found that you and I are being heavily swindled through antitrust violations. This was also established by the court, and things are still there. The money has not been returned, and will not be returned under this government. There is some kind of smooth flow of officials into the structures of the oligarch Vekselberg and back. And all this is crowned by Viktor Basargin, who honestly from the blue screen has actually admitted to us that he is ready to sue the city of a million people, defending the interests of oligarchic structures. He said it directly. But we must understand that Basargin is a cog in the system. The basis for his vigorous activity is Vekselberg.

Deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Perm Territory Ilya Shulkin Photo: Maxim Artamonov

Ilya Shulkin, Member of the Legislative Assembly of the Perm Territory:

I fully support the goals that were announced during the organization of this rally. The entire policy in the housing and communal services sector in the Perm Territory is a failure. We do not have a program for major repairs, there is no resettlement of dilapidated and dilapidated housing, tariffs are constantly growing. We pay an investment premium to repair the networks. These programs also constantly fail. Court cases are won not only at court hearings, on the pages of newspapers, from TV screens, they are won at such rallies as this one, because the authorities are afraid of public opinion, and we, not being afraid to express it, also contribute to a positive decision for us. Yesterday Minister of Housing and Public Utilities and Construction of the Perm Territory Fedorovsky, but I am not satisfied. The activities of the minister, the ministry and the regional tariff service have not been assessed; no results have been summed up of the activities of the capital repairs program in the Perm Territory over the past few years. And this person (Fedorovsky - MA) is now planning to be elected to the Legislative Assembly, having left one post for another.

Leader of the Vybor movement Konstantin Okunev Photo: Maxim Artamonov

Konstantin Okunev, ex-deputy of the Legislative Assembly of the Perm Territory, leader of the public movement "Choice":

I fully share all those experiences and the struggle that is being waged, but the situation is catastrophic not only in housing and communal services. Today I drove from the dacha for three hours - 100 km. Our roads are full of holes, and it is impossible to move faster. Health care is dying. There are not enough doctors, no one wants to go into the industry. You can list all the projects that the current governor Basargin started. Everyone calls him Mr Promisekin. This is an airport, a gallery, theaters, roads, a third bridge over the Kama - all those promises that this comrade repeats year after year and adds new ones. It's like we've forgotten what he came here with. Perm is a city in which, thanks to Basargin, nothing good happens, only degradation.

The rally ended with a call not to let the Perm Grid Company into their homes and dismiss the governor of the Perm Territory, Viktor Basargin.

Reforms in China have led to impressive economic growth. And at the same time, several social bombs were planted under it, ready to explode as soon as the economic situation worsens.

ALEXANDER ZOTIN, Senior Research Fellow VAVT

Mao Zedong urged never to forget the class struggle. Under Xi Jinping, who is often compared to Chairman Mao, the Chinese are embarrassed to use the word "class", let alone "struggle". That does not prevent them from distributing each other by class. Everyone familiar with the Chinese Internet knows that people are divided, among other things, into diaosi (literally - male pubic hair), that is, men with a "triple absence" - without an apartment, car and savings, and their opposite gao fu shuai (high , rich, beautiful). The gap between these two groups is only widening.

Faithful Bukharinites

Almost 40 years of economic reforms in the PRC have been accompanied by powerful property stratification. The equally poor society of "blue ants" in the same blue jackets and with the same bags began to change rapidly. Almost everyone got rich, but some were much faster than others. Official estimates of the Gini coefficient (the higher it is, the more pronounced inequality) show an increase from approximately 0.3 in the 1970s (as in today's Scandinavia) to 0.47 in 2014 (as in Mexico; in Russia - 0, 42). However, numerous studies show that the real figure is higher than 0.5. However,

even according to official data, China is one of the most unequal countries in the world, far from the “harmonious society” that Deng Xiaoping advocated for.

This dynamic was not predetermined. As the Chinese economist Yasheng Huang (author of the fundamental study “Chinese Capitalism: State and Business”) notes, during the first stage of economic reforms, from 1979 to 1988, inequality practically did not increase, despite very rapid GDP growth and even more dynamic growth. income of the population.

The first stage of the reforms was rural - political liberalization gave impetus to grassroots capitalism and the growth of settlement and volost enterprises. Incomes in rural areas grew almost twice as fast as incomes in cities. However, after the events on Tiananmen Square in 1989, the development strategy shifted from rural grassroots capitalism to state capitalism.

Yasheng calls the Chinese model after 1989 Bukharin's state capitalism. That is, the state retains control over the "commanding heights" of the economy - heavy industry, the financial system, transport, the largest enterprises, etc., giving everything smaller into private hands. It was this version of the development of the USSR that was proposed by Nikolai Bukharin in his work “The New Course of Economic Policy” in 1921 (and it was implemented until 1929) and later, in 1928, in a dispute with a supporter of collectivization, Joseph Stalin.

In fact, what happened in the PRC after 1989, Yasheng interprets as the Chinese version of the Soviet NEP, only not curtailed in 1929.

To what extent the state now controls the Chinese economy is a debatable issue. The problem lies in the non-transparent structure of ownership of enterprises and the lack of consensus on which companies are considered state-owned, which are private, and what is the share of companies with mixed ownership. Fresh analysis from the Reserve Bank of Australia (Australia has become very dependent on China, hence its close attention to the Chinese economy), however, speaks of the absolute dominance of the public sector among enterprises listed on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges. The sample is not ideal, since only large companies have listings, but still indicative.

poor people

Be that as it may, one of the effects of the change of course from grassroots rural capitalism to "post-Tiananmen" state capitalism is a sharp income gap between the city and the countryside. In the 1980s, the average urban income was 190–220% of the rural income, and in the mid-2000s it was already 360%.

Geographical disparities have also grown strongly, for example, between coastal regions, which are most successfully integrated into an export-oriented economy, and backward inland provinces.

A class of migrant workers from rural areas has formed, moving to work in cities. The number of migrant workers, according to statistics for 2014, reached 274 million (about 20% of the total population and 36% of the labor force), of which 168 million are long-distance migrants.

This is the largest labor migration in the world; migration from Mexico to the United States is a miserable trickle against the backdrop of this flow, not to mention guest workers in Russia.

Migrant workers (in Chinese - nongmingong, literally - peasant-worker), as a rule, are infringed in civil rights, most do not have urban registration. Hukou - The propiska system excludes nongmingong from the most important social security networks used by citizens (primarily education, health care, social insurance, housing, pensions).

In fact, the life of a significant part of the Chinese population is not much different from the life of illegal migrants in other countries. For example, usually migrants cannot send their children to urban schools; China Labor Bulletin estimates that in 2010, 61 million children were forced to stay in villages without their parents and not see them for months. And sometimes, for years.

Over the past 20 years, the authorities have gradually relaxed the hukou system. However, most of the changes are still cosmetic.

The integration of migrant workers into urban welfare networks has been slow. And the average salary of nongmingong is several times lower than the salaries of citizens: 2.5–3 thousand yuan versus 7–10 thousand. At the same time, migrants do not have urban housing and are forced to give half of their earnings for renting a room in a communal apartment.

The housing cost bubble in China's 70 largest cities, which has inflated to grotesque proportions over the past few years (a 100-meter apartment an hour from downtown Shanghai costs just under $1 million), makes it impossible for nongmingong to even dream of buying an apartment and getting an urban hukou.

Apartheid without racism

As a result, a huge underclass of disenfranchised and poor citizens has formed in the cities. Despite the fact that the Chinese Communist Party continues to talk about creating a harmonious society, the country has actually developed a rigid class system, which some researchers compare with apartheid in South Africa and castes in India.

Chinese society, according to David Goodman, author of Class in Contemporary China, is distinctly structured. The upper class - 3% of the population, almost all of these people are prominent members of the CCP and their relatives, businessmen.

Surprisingly, Goodman, based on his surveys, claims that

82-84% of today's upper class are the direct descendants of the elite that existed before 1949, that is, even before the establishment of the communist dictatorship on the mainland.

One of the explanations is the preservation of cultural and social capital by the former elite, as well as the diversification of life strategies (for example, to marry one daughter to a Kuomintang nationalist, the other to a communist).

The middle class is very small - 12%, it is primarily urban professionals. Well, the vast majority of the population are various subordinate classes, among which one of the most deprived is the aforementioned nongmingong .

As University of Sydney professor Wannin Sun notes, Chinese intellectuals and public figures, unlike Goodman's Anglo-Saxon, prefer not to use the word "class" at all, replacing it with the more politically correct "suzhi" - "quality". Nevertheless, social barriers do not disappear because of this. The Nongmingong are often portrayed as backward, uneducated people unable to shake off their rural past. They live in cities, but are separated from other citizens by "invisible walls".

big things

Deng Xiaoping let some people get rich first. But most of the population has not gotten rich so far

The CCP replaces its historically traditional discourse of class struggle with the ideology of consumerism. Consumption gives hope and confirms the achievements of a person in life: someone is diaosi, and someone is gao fu shuai. Moreover, the ideology of consumption makes it possible to focus on the growth of the quality of life in the era of reforms, which is beneficial to the party.

The "three big things" (san da jian) of the 1960s - a watch, a bicycle, and a sewing machine - were replaced in the 1980s by a new big triad: television, refrigerator, washing machine.

And now it's a house, a car, and a computer (in recent years, the computer has fallen off this list: gadgets have become too cheap, and it has been replaced by savings with jewelry).

However, the slogan of consumerism generates social problems. According to an American journalist, author of the bestseller “The Age of Ambition. Wealth, Truth and Faith in the New China" Evan Oznos, a young man with a "triple absence" (that is, without an apartment, car and savings) - and most often a migrant worker from rural areas - has very little chance of starting a family.

Unavailable BMW Girl

It is the young man who has little chance, and not the girl. In the group of socially stigmatized labor migrants, men were in the most unenviable position.

Since 1979, the PRC has been pursuing a policy of "one child per family". One of its consequences is a sharp increase in the proportion of boys born. The natural biological level in the world is considered to be the ratio of 105 boys to 100 girls, while in China the average level was 117/100.

Such a noticeable bias is explained by the fact that in traditional Chinese families, sons are more desirable (they must take care of the spirits of their ancestors, help their parents in old age, etc.).

As a result, in cases where ultrasound determined the female sex of the unborn baby (the only one in the family, according to birth control policy), many women had an abortion.

The one-child policy turned out to be a ticking time bomb placed under the social stability of the country. According to the UN forecast, by 2020 the number of young men (from 15 to 44 years old) will exceed the number of women of the same age by more than 25 million. Actually, the current situation is almost the same.

So far, the consequences are clearly visible only in popular culture. Certain stereotypes of the behavior of young Chinese can be identified on numerous shows on Chinese television. For example, "Feichang Wurao" ("Only if you're the right one") is the most watched Chinese-language dating TV show on Jiangsu TV, according to CSM Media Research. A meme in social networks was the statement of one of the participants: "I'd rather cry in a BMW than smile in the back seat of a bicycle." The “BMW girl” is far from the only person with high self-esteem, besides her, the “200 thousand girl” participated in the show, who stated that she would not allow herself to be touched for less than 200 thousand yuan (about 1.7 million rubles), as well as “girl-big house”, etc.

The show began to receive criticism from the CCP for being vulgar, and the producers decided to make a special politically correct program with pariah migrant workers. Alas, the episode was a failure. Opposite, 24 nongmingong girls seated 24 guys of the same social status, but none of the young ladies showed interest in them (but the young people were not at all against meeting them). Chinese intellectuals, Wanning Song notes, were indignant - they say, why the organizers did not give the girls the opportunity to get acquainted with more decent young men (fu er dai - the second generation of the rich or guan er dai - the second generation of officials, which, however, is often the same thing)?

Attack class

The lack of life prospects (including the chance to start a family) for a significant part of society, and its young part at that, is a hidden threat to social stability. The situation is somewhat reminiscent of the "Arab Spring". The driver of the latter, as you know, was the unemployed youth, outraged by the corruption of the existing regimes.

In China, corruption and inequality are perhaps even more grotesque.

The sexual aspect is equally important. Orientalist Andrey Korotaev, a witness of the Egyptian revolution, notes that in early 2011, mostly unmarried men came to Tahrir Square in Cairo. In recent decades, the age of marriage has been rising throughout the Arab world - for both men and women. This is due to the fact that wedding rituals are becoming more and more expensive. 10-15 monthly salaries are needed for a wedding and mahr (kalym), which is a lot even with help from parents and other relatives. As a result, in the contemporary Arab world, the marriage age for men is 32–33 years. Korotaev notes: “In this respect, the Arab countries are similar to Scandinavia. But there is a detail: in Scandinavia there are no problems with premarital sex.”

In China, the situation is somewhat different. There is no disproportionately high proportion of young people in the demographic structure (the so-called youth hillock, which is now characteristic of the Arab countries). However, the masses of class and sexually deprived rural male migrants in the cities are quite significant. They are not unemployed - so far there are no economic preconditions for political upheavals. "The tide lifts all boats", although very unevenly.

But in the event of a slowdown in growth, which is very likely in the coming years, a class of potential rebels will be ready to act. At least under the leadership of middle-class intellectuals, as is usually the case during revolutions.

Iran has been living under sanctions for decades. And he reached a certain perfection in their detour. However, even the mass of tricks does not help him fully protect the economy.

Iran came under US sanctions almost 40 years ago. After the Islamic revolution that won in 1979, this country became a theocratic state under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The United States was declared the great Satan, and Israel was to be destroyed. The godless USSR also caused disapproval.

The impetus for the imposition of sanctions was the hostage-taking on November 4, 1979 of employees of the American embassy. The United States retaliated by freezing Iranian assets worth $11 billion. The sanctions included a complete ban on American citizens and companies from doing business in Iran and conducting transactions with Iranian enterprises.

Sanctions for sanctions violators

Despite the sanctions, Khomeini declared that "isolation is one of our great blessings." The Iran-Iraq war was added to the break in relations with the United States, as a result, by 1988, per capita GDP fell to $ 3.3 thousand, more than double from the peak of 1976, reached under the Shah.

However, the isolation was not complete. The fact is that the sanctions were imposed by the United States, and other countries supported them only to a certain extent.

American sanctions are extraterritorial. This, by the way, is the biggest problem for the citizens, companies and countries that fall under them.

What does it mean? The United States may impose sanctions on any non-U.S. company trading or otherwise dealing with a sanctioned entity. Lawyers call this construction secondary sanctions or secondary embargoes.

The Americans can impose "secondary sanctions", but they do not always do this. European and other US partners are often dissatisfied with the actions of the States and call the extraterritoriality of sanctions a violation of sovereignty. Sometimes they try to protect themselves legally. In some cases, the Americans give in - they do not want to quarrel with the allies.

For example, in May 1998, the Canadian branch of an American retailer wal mart faced a dilemma. The US authorities demanded that he remove Cuban-made clothing from the salesrooms in accordance with US sanctions. At the same time, the Canadian authorities ordered wal mart to continue selling Cuban goods as part of their counter-sanctions, and if the merchants did not do so, they were threatened with a fine of 1.5 million Canadian dollars. In the end, first wal mart removed everything Cuban, then, considering that Canadian sanctions were more significant than American ones, two weeks later he returned the Cuban “sanction” to the stores.

The extraterritoriality of US sanctions has gradually grown and expanded, but today's scope, when almost everyone shies away from a company that is on the sanctions list like a leper, has reached relatively recently. In the same case with wal mart extraterritoriality extended to the company only because wal mart was the Canadian branch of the American structure. The idea to try to punish any companies, even those that have nothing to do with the United States and American citizens, appeared only in the late 1990s and finally matured in the 2000s.

Iranian case

From the very beginning, American sanctions did not prevent European and other companies from trading with Iran, and most importantly, from buying oil from it. The restrictions concerned only certain types of economic relations. For example, "secondary sanctions" were supposed for investments in the oil and gas complex of Iran.

Even here, however, the US has sometimes backtracked. For example, in May 1998, President Bill Clinton, despite pressure from Congress, refused to impose sanctions on a French oil and gas company. Total for investing $2 billion in the development of Iran's South Pars gas superfield.

Which is quite understandable. Times were soft then - in 1997, the moderate reformer Mohammad Khatami became president of Iran, who held office until 2005. During that period, relations between Iran and the United States warmed somewhat, and the latter preferred carrots to sticks. And the idea of ​​extraterritorial sanctions has not yet been as advanced as it is today. However, Khatami was replaced by the radical Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who entered into a new conflict with the West.

From soft to hard

President Ahmadinejad immediately disliked the West with extremist statements (like Holocaust denial). The formal reason for international sanctions was Tehran's nuclear research, which jeopardized the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In December 2006, the UN Security Council adopted the first, and in March 2007, the second sanctions resolution. However, rather toothless - they limited the supply of materials and technologies for the nuclear program, and also concerned the assets of individuals and legal entities associated with it.

Subsequently, the sanctions were gradually tightened. In 2010, after Iran reached the uranium enrichment level of 20%, a new UN Security Council resolution recommended "to be vigilant" when dealing with Iranian banks. The petrochemical industry has also been targeted.

However, all these sanctions, both American and UN, although they had a negative impact, still rather slowed down domestic growth than really stifled the economy. Everything changed when the US agreed with the EU to act against Iran as a united front.

In July 2012, after much persuasion from Washington, the European Union nevertheless joined the US embargo (already from 1979) and refused to import Iranian oil, and also banned its companies from insuring tankers that ensure the export of oil from Iran. It was a real shock for the country.

In addition to oil sanctions, financial sanctions were also introduced. In March 2012, Iranian banks, many of which were subject to US sanctions long before, were cut off from the interbank transfer system. SWIFT.

In parallel, the United States began to take the extraterritoriality of the sanctions seriously. In 2014, a French bank BNP Paribas paid the US a whopping $8.9 billion in fines for dealing with US-sanctioned Iranian, Cuban and Myanmar companies. The number of European banks that got off with a fine of up to a billion is about a dozen. All this discouraged European bankers from clients on the US sanctions list. SDN (special designated nationals).

Life under sanctions

Countries that did not join the US and EU sanctions may, in the depths of their national souls, sympathize with Iran, but act primarily in their own interests. The remaining major oil buyers (China, South Korea, India) took advantage of the situation and pushed through Iran, demanding discounts. Despite Iranian officials denying the discount, it was only through price cuts that they were able to retain some of the remaining customers. In particular, we are talking about the Indians and the Chinese. In June 2013, Indian Oil Minister Verappa Moili stated that the main reason for the cooperation of oil refineries of his country with Iran was discounts. The latter reached 10-15% of the market price.

Life under trade sanctions is almost unthinkable without smuggling. Of course, she flourished. The easiest way is to falsify accompanying documents that pass off Iranian oil as someone else's, often Iraqi. The second way is the use of shell companies registered in third countries, whose tankers supposedly accidentally end up off the Iranian coast and after several hours of sailing return to their home port loaded with Iranian oil.

The third way is to reload oil on the high seas with navigational instruments turned off. It is no coincidence that in 2010-2014, the Iranians significantly increased the tanker fleet, building new ships and buying up old ones prepared for scrapping. Tankers went to sea under the Iranian flag, without declaring their destination, drifted and, if an oil deal was concluded, turned off navigational GPS-transponders, and then followed to the meeting point with the buyer's tanker.

The technology is not new, it was used as early as the 1980s to bypass the oil embargo on South Africa (then under sanctions due to apartheid).

One of the main intermediaries in circumventing the sanctions was Dubai. The combination of geographical proximity to Iran, a liberal business climate with a minimum of regulations, as well as the presence of a huge seaport and a large Iranian diaspora with business ties at home made Dubai an Iranian Hong Kong. There are 100-400 thousand ethnic Iranians in the UAE and about 8 thousand companies owned by them. Most ethnic Iranians in the UAE live in Dubai. On the Iranian side, transactions with the Dubai "offshore" were mainly handled by the local secret police - the "Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps".

Dubai became a hub for re-exports even during the period of milder sanctions (in Tehran, you can safely buy many American goods that are formally prohibited from exporting to the country), so by the time of tougher sanctions, the infrastructure to bypass them was already in place.

In general, re-export is a classic problem in circumventing sanctions and trade restrictions. For example, after President Obama imposed anti-dumping duties on some types of steel products from China, imports from neighboring Vietnam suddenly increased dramatically.

It is interesting that the political disputes between Iran and the UAE did not particularly interfere with business. Iran controls two modest islands in the Persian Gulf - Big and Small Tomb, which the UAE claims as its own. But business is above all.

Other intermediaries in Iranian re-exports were Iraq, Singapore (the world's largest port) and neighboring Malaysia.

After 2012, traditional financial intermediaries from the same Dubai were forced to curtail their business under pressure from the United States. For example, in the UAE, banks have asked businesses related to Iran to close their accounts. But external transactions have not disappeared - just the forms of payment have changed. For example, Turkey paid for oil in gold and silver. This is indirectly confirmed by Turkish statistics: in 2013, the volume of external supplies of gold and precious stones amounted to $7 billion, in 2012 - $16.7 billion (the main export item). And in 2011 - before shutdown SWIFT in Iran - only $ 3.7 billion. In Turkey, an entire industry has arisen for melting down scrap gold into ingots, raw materials are bought up both on the official and black markets of Greece, Portugal and Cyprus. India paid for Iranian oil with grain, tea and rice.

However, in some places financial isolation was overcome successfully. system POS, similar Visa and mastercard, Iran developed and implemented independently, cards POS work pretty reliably. Keep dollars or euros on deposits after disconnecting from SWIFT it became impossible, but the state did not limit the cash circulation of the currency and even managed to finally bring the official dollar exchange rate closer to the market one. The stability of the Iranian rial was hindered by high inflation - the peak (45% year-on-year) occurred in October 2012. Demand for gold coins (Bakhore Azadi - "Spring of Freedom") and products made of gold and silver have grown - there are few savings instruments left in sanctions Iran.

On the other hand, the medieval hawala came to life - an informal Middle Eastern financial and settlement system based on the mutual offset of claims and obligations. If you want to transfer money to your grandfather in Iran, you need to contact the khawaladar, give him money, give the grandfather's name and address. The broker will contact the partner in Iran and indicate to whom to transfer the money. In response, he will be asked to transfer the money to someone in Russia. According to some estimates, the volume of hawala transfers per year is about $20 billion, the main intermediary countries are Kuwait and Turkey.

The medieval institution of hawala, which successfully helped Iran to circumvent financial sanctions, is being revived on a new technological basis by the creators of cryptocurrencies.

Nevertheless, after the anti-Iranian Donald Trump came to power in the United States, the issue of reimposing sanctions again became relevant: Trump sharply criticized the agreement concluded by Obama and his European partners with Iran during the election campaign. As part of JCPOA The US should periodically extend the lifting of sanctions against Iran. Trump last signed such an extension on January 12, 2018 (with obvious displeasure and reservations).

The next extension, scheduled for May 12, may not be signed by Trump (possibly under the influence of new "hawks" in the team - Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton), and American anti-Iranian sanctions will come into force again. However, this event is unlikely to have a significant impact on Iran's oil exports and on the oil market as a whole. A full-scale oil embargo requires the participation of the EU, and the Europeans are unlikely to fully support Trump, rather limit themselves to partial measures that are not so painful for Iran.

The internal political situation in Iran, meanwhile, is far from calm - the unrest in December 2017-January 2018 was the largest since 2009. Apparently, initially they reflected the internal political struggle - the dissatisfaction of the conservative mullahs with the actions of the "liberal" President Rouhani, but then turned into a rebellion that threatened the entire system. Now everything is relatively calm, but a new explosion is not ruled out. The resumption of sanctions, albeit partial, may well contribute to this.

Despite the lifting of sanctions and the growth of the economy, the authorities cannot achieve macroeconomic stabilization. Inflation is still very high, around 10%. On April 9, the Central Bank of Iran announced the introduction of a new official rate - 42,000 rials per dollar. One-time devaluation amounted to almost 10%. However, the official rate lags behind the black market rate of 60,000 rials to the dollar.

This spring, the problem of water shortages has also become more acute, especially in Isfahan and Khuzestan. People are angry that water is redistributed through corrupt schemes while farmers suffer from drought. This theme was heard during the protests, and it is heard now. The civil war in Syria began with similar, largely domestic, problems.

If the economy does not deviate from its current path, perhaps we are waiting for super-capitalism with super-inequality. The share of labor income will tend to zero, while the share of income from capital, on the contrary, will approach 100%. Robots will do all the work, and most people will have to sit on benefits.

ALEXANDER ZOTIN, Senior Researcher, VAVT

What is capitalism, humanity has more or less figured out. One option is an economy in which a substantial proportion of income comes from capital (equity dividends, bond coupons, rental income, etc.), as opposed to income from labor (wages). What then is supercapitalism? This is an economy in which capital generates all income, and labor generates almost none, it is practically not needed at all.

The classics of Marxism did not reach such a theoretical construction in their works: as is known, for Lenin the highest degree of capitalism was imperialism, for Kautsky ultra-imperialism.

Meanwhile, the future, quite possibly, belongs to supercapitalism, a technological dystopia in which the exploitation of man by man will be abolished not because of the victory of the oppressed classes, but simply because of the uselessness of labor as such.

Difficult lot

Labor is gradually becoming less and less in demand. American economists Lucas Karabarbunis and Brent Neumann in the NBER study "The Global Decline of the Labor Share" traced the evolution of the share of labor in income from 1975 to 2013. This share has been gradually but steadily declining around the world - in 1975 it was about 57%, and in 2013 it dropped to 52%.

The decline in the share of labor income in developed countries is partly due to outsourcing to countries with cheaper labor. Shut down a refrigerator factory in Illinois and relocate it to Mexico or China—the savings on the wages of relatively expensive American workers are immediately reflected as a lower labor share of income and an increase in the share of capital, which now employs less picky Mexicans or Chinese.

Another factor in favor of capital is that the labor force remaining in developed countries is losing support from trade unions due to the fact that in the new conditions they have few trump cards for bargaining: “Do you want wage increases? Then we close you and transfer the enterprise to China (Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia - underline as necessary).

However, in developing countries, the share of labor is also declining, which does not fit well with the classical theory of international trade (the development of trade, in theory, should reduce the share of labor in countries with a surplus of capital and increase it in countries with a surplus of labor).

The explanation is most likely in labor-saving technological breakthroughs in certain industries. And sectoral changes are translated into changes at the country level (an exception is China, where the dynamics is explained by the relocation of the labor force from the labor-intensive agricultural sector to the industrial sector). In addition to this tricky explanation, there is a simpler one: in China, out of migrant workers from rural regions, in accordance with the policy of internal colonization, they squeeze everything that can be squeezed out. Although their earnings are growing, their share in income is declining.
Brazil and Russia are among the few exceptions: in these countries, the share of labor against the global trend increased slightly, but increased.

IMF economists suggest that in some developing countries the lack of a decrease in the share of labor is due to the insufficient use of labor-saving technologies: initially there is little routine work in industry - there is nothing to automate. Although for Russia, with its historically distorted labor market (a lot of low-paid and inefficient jobs, in fact, “hidden unemployment”), this can hardly be the only explanation.

Skinny middle class

What does the macroeconomic abstraction of a decrease in the share of labor turn out to be for a particular person? A higher chance of falling out of the middle class into poverty: the importance of his work is gradually devalued, and for the middle class, wages are the basis of everything (in high-income groups, everything is not so bad). A particularly strong drop in the share of labor in income is noted for low- and medium-skilled personnel; among highly paid professions, on the contrary, growth is observed both in developed and developing economies. According to the IMF for 1995-2009, the total share of labor income decreased by 7 percentage points, while the share of highly paid labor income increased by 5 percentage points.
The middle class is slowly but surely disappearing.

A recent IMF study, Income Polarization in the United States, notes that between 1970 and 2014, the proportion of households with average incomes (50-150% of the median: half less, half more) decreased by 11 p.p. ( from 58% to 47%) of the total number of US households. There is polarization, that is, the washing out of the middle class with the transition to low- and high-income groups.

So, maybe the middle class is shrinking due to its enrichment and transition to the highest? No. From 1970 to 2000, the polarization was even - almost the same number of "middle peasants" rose to the upper class and fell to the lower (in terms of income). But since 2000, the trend has reversed - the middle class is rapidly descending into the low-income group.

The polarization of incomes and the washout of the middle class is poorly reflected in the statistics of inequality, which are accustomed to operating with the Gini coefficient. When the Gini is 0, all households have the same income; when it is 1, all income is received by one household. The polarization index is zero when the incomes of all households are the same. It rises when more households' incomes approach the two extremes of the income distribution, and reaches 1 when some households have no income and the rest have the same (non-zero) income. That is, two poles without a middle between them. An "hourglass" with a small upper cup instead of the typical welfare-state "pear" (thick, or rather numerous, middle between the few rich and the poor).

If the Gini coefficient in the US increased quite smoothly from 1970 to 2014 (from 0.35 to 0.44), then the polarization index simply soared (from 0.24 to 0.5), which indicates a powerful washout of the middle class. A similar picture is observed in other developed economies, although not so clearly.

Automate it

The reasons for the erosion of the middle class are similar to the reasons for the fall in the share of labor in income: the transfer of industry to countries with cheaper labor. However, outsourcing is largely history. The new trend is robotics.

recent examples. At the end of July, the Taiwanese company Foxconn (the main supplier of Apple) announced plans to invest $10 billion in a factory for the production of LCD panels in the US, Wisconsin. The economist here will be struck by one detail - despite the colossal volume of the announced investments, only 3 thousand people will be employed at the factory (though with the prospect of expansion, since the state authorities insist on creating as many jobs as possible).
For life on a star
For life on a star

Foxconn is one of the pioneers of the current wave of robotics. In China, the company is the largest employer, with more than 1 million workers in its factories. Since 2007, the company has been producing Foxbots robots capable of performing up to 20 production functions and replacing workers. Foxconn plans to bring the level of robotization to 30% by 2020. The longer term plan is fully autonomous individual factories.

Another example. Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine AG recently invested €100 million to build a steel wire plant in Donawitz with an annual production capacity of 500,000 tons.
The company's former production facility with the same output, built in the 1960s, employed about 1,000 workers, but now there are ... 14 workers.

In total, according to the World Steel Association, from 2008 to 2015, the number of jobs in the steel industry in Europe decreased by almost 20%.

Investment in modern manufacturing is likely to be less and less parallel to job creation (and blue-collar jobs will become rare). The examples cited, where one job is created per $3-7 million of investment, contrast sharply with figures typical for the end of the 20th century (for example, the database on foreign direct investment in the north-east of Great Britain from 1985 to 1998 gives an average of nine jobs). £1 million investment).

Fully autonomous factories (lights out factories) are still exotic, although some companies already operate factories with zero labor (Phillips, Fanuc). However, the general trend is clear: in some enterprises, and then, perhaps, in entire industries, the share of labor income will decline even more rapidly than it has declined over the past two decades. Not only do industrial workers have no future, but in many ways they no longer have a present.

Impoverished but still employed

Kicked out of industry, the ex-middle class is forced to adapt. At the very least, he finds himself a new job, which is also confirmed by the current low unemployment rate, especially in the United States. But with rare exceptions, this job is with lower income and in low-productive sectors of the economy (non-skilled nursing, social security, HoReCa, fast food, retail, security, cleaning, etc.) and usually does not require a serious education.

As MIT economist David Outa points out in his article "Polanyi's Paradox and the Shape of Employment Growth," the dynamics of the labor market in developed countries in recent decades is a manifestation of the "Polanyi's paradox." The famous economist Michael Polanyi pointed out back in the 1960s that a lot of human activity is based on "tacit knowledge", that is, poorly described using algorithms (visual and auditory recognition, bodily skills like riding a bicycle, car, the ability to do hair, etc.). P.). These are areas of activity that require “simple” skills from a human point of view, but difficult for traditional twentieth-century artificial intelligence.

Top 10 Professions with Projected Maximum Job Growth in the US (2014-2024)

Growth for 2014-2024, thousand people Growth for 2014-2024, % Median annual salary (2016), $
All professions 9779 6.5 37040
Nurse 458 25.9 21920*
Certified Nurse 439 16 68450**
Home caregiver 348 38.1 22600*
Waiter 343 10.9 19440*
Seller 314 6.8 22680*
Nurse assistant 262 17.6 26590*
Customer Service Specialist 253 9.8 32300*
Cook 159 14.3 24140*
Production manager 151 7.1 99310**
Construction worker 147 12.7 33430*

It is in these areas of employment that the ex-middle class, released from industry, headed (which partly explains the paradox of slow productivity growth in the US and other developed economies).
Eight of the top 10 fastest growing jobs in the US over the past few years are low-paid, poorly algorithmized “manual” labor (nurses, nannies, waiters, cooks, cleaners, truck drivers, etc.).

However, now the “Polanyi paradox” seems to have been resolved. Robotization based on machine learning copes with previously unsolvable tasks (which are based on visual and auditory recognition, complex motor skills), so the pressure on the middle class should continue, and employment growth in these areas may be temporary. Polarization and a further fall in the share of labor in incomes also appear to continue.

Numbers don't help.

But maybe the new economy will save the middle class? “In the next 50-60 years, there will be 60 million small and medium-sized enterprises that will operate via the Internet, and the leading place in world trade will pass to them. Anyone with a mobile phone and their own ideas will be able to create their own business, such a prediction was made recently by the president of the Chinese e-commerce leader Alibaba Group, Michael Evans, at the World Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi. company and business will participate in world trade.”

Alibaba owner Jack Ma was also optimistic at the Open Innovations forum in Skolkovo: “There is no need to worry that robots will replace people. This problem will resolve itself. People worry about the future because they are unsure of themselves, they lack imagination. We don't have these solutions now, but they will in the future." True, Ma noticed that people are already losing to artificial intelligence: “You can’t compete with machines with intelligence - they will still be smarter than us. It's like racing cars for speed."

Evans did not bother to confirm his prediction with any calculations. Do smartphones, mobile applications and various other information technologies promise us such a wonderful future, already achieved by Evans and Ma? Maybe. And it’s probably not worth worrying about robots replacing someone either - if your fortune is estimated at $ 39 billion and the mass of these robots belongs and will belong to you.

But here's something for others to think about. An analysis of how mobile apps and internet technologies actually work and what impact they have on the labor market paints a somewhat less rosy picture of the future. In China, despite the dominance of Alibaba's B2B applications, inequality is only growing so far, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for small private companies to break through under state capitalism under the supervision of the CCP. But, if you believe the reporting figures (the key word here is “if”), Alibaba has crushed almost all online commerce in China.
In any case, Alibaba is neither a democratizer nor an incubator of future millionaires, but rather a winner-take-all-company example in the new digital winner-take-all-economy.

Or take another new economy pioneer, Uber, the app that revolutionized the taxi industry. The advantages of Uber are obvious (especially from the point of view of customers), and there is no point in listing them.

Uber has several thousand employees, and about 2 million drivers around the world work under contracts for the company. Uber's few employees earn good salaries, although their wealth is not comparable to the owners of the company, the capitalization of which is approaching $70 billion (the structure is non-public and does not disclose either the exact number of employees or their salaries, and capitalization is estimated by offers of shares in ownership to private investors). But 2 million drivers have, according to Earnest, a median income of just over $150 per month. Uber does not consider drivers to be its employees and does not provide them with any social package: it simply takes a 25-40% commission for the driver's contact with the client.

Development of another model

Already, Uber is a classic example of a winner-take-all-company in the new winner-take-all-economy (the richest companies in the digital economy, the so-called FANGs—Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google—are the same). But Uber is not going to stop there: the goal is to completely get rid of the weak link, 2 million drivers. Undoubtedly, driverless cars are the business of the next few years, and Uber shareholders will not need people at all: they will have capital, which is quite enough to replace a person.

The latest IEA report "The Future of Trucks" assesses the potential of autonomous road haulage. They are the first to be automated. The transition to autonomous trucking could free up to 3.5 million jobs in the US alone. At the same time, truck drivers in the United States are one of the few professions with a salary significantly higher than the median and at the same time do not require a university degree. But the new economy does not need them.

And then there will be no need for other professions that are traditionally considered creative and indispensable - engineers, lawyers, journalists, programmers, financial analysts. Neural networks are in no way inferior to a person in the so-called creativity - they can write a picture and compose music (in the indicated style). Mastering fine motor skills by robots will kill both surgeons (work in this direction is already underway: remember, for example, the half-robot surgeon da Vinci), and hairdressers, and cooks. The fate of athletes, showmen and politicians is interesting - technically, their replacement by robots is possible, but the binding to the human in these areas seems to be quite tough.

Erosion of white-collar employment is not yet so noticeable, but in a hidden form it is already underway. Here's how Bloomberg columnist Matt Levine describes Bridgewater, one of the world's largest hedge funds with $200 billion in assets under management: “Bridgewater co-founder Ray Dalio mostly writes books, either tweets or gives interviews. 1500 employees are not engaged in investments. For all this they have a computer! Bridgewater invests according to algorithms, and very few employees have even a rough understanding of how the algorithms work. Employees, on the other hand, are involved in marketing the firm, investor relations (IR), and, most importantly, criticizing and evaluating each other. The main problem of the computer in this model is to keep 1500 people busy in such a way that this does not interfere with its super-rational work.

However, the really high-paid white-collar workers are definitely not threatened by the new economy. Sitting on the bloated board of directors of a large company often requires no physical or mental work at all (other than, perhaps, the ability to intrigue). However, being at the top of the hierarchy means that it is at this level that all or almost all personnel decisions are made, so the corporate and top bureaucratic elite will not replace themselves with computers and robots. More precisely, he will replace him, but he will keep the position for himself, and increase his salary. The elite, again, combines labor incomes with ever-increasing capital incomes, so even the unlikely destruction of labor incomes will not particularly affect them.

Who will save education

The American Pew Research Center published in May a detailed report on the future of education and work, The Future of Jobs and Jobs Training. Review Methodology - A survey of 1,408 IT professionals, economists and innovative businesses, of which 684 provided detailed comments.
The main conclusions are pessimistic: the value of education will devalue in the same way as the return on human labor - these are interrelated processes.

If a person is inferior to artificial intelligence in everything, then his education will no longer be of particular value. To understand this, a simple analogy, once proposed by futurist Nick Bostrom, author of Superintelligence, suffices. Suppose that the smartest person on Earth is twice as smart as the stupidest (conditionally). And artificial intelligence will develop exponentially: now it is at the level of a chimpanzee (again, conditionally), but in a few years it will surpass a person immediately by thousands, and then by millions of times. At the level of this height, today's genius and today's stupidity will be equally insignificant.

What should education do in such a context, what should one prepare for? Workplaces? What other jobs? “After the artificial intelligence revolution that has already started, it will be impossible to maintain a post-industrial level of employment. Worst-case estimates call for 50 percent global unemployment as early as this century. This is not a problem of education - now it is easier than ever to educate yourself. This is an inevitable phase of human civilization that must be dealt with with a massive increase in public welfare (for example, universal unconditional income),” the report notes.

strategy for the hare in

Experts interviewed during the study point to the futility of changes in education. “I doubt that people can be trained for the work of the future. It will be performed by robots. The question is not to prepare people for work that will not be, but to distribute wealth in a world in which work will become unnecessary, ”says Nathaniel Borenstein, a research fellow at Mimecast.

Algorithms, automation and robotics will lead to the fact that capital will not need physical labor. Education will also be unnecessary (artificial intelligence is self-learning). Or, more precisely, it will lose the function of a social lift, which, although very poorly, it nevertheless performed. As a rule, education only legitimized inequality along the chain - decent parents - decent neighborhoods - status schools - status universities - status work. Education can only survive as a marker of social status for wealth owners. Universities in this case, perhaps, will turn into analogues of the guards schools under monarchies until the twentieth century, but for the children of the new elite "the owner of capital gets everything-economy." What regiment did you serve in?

From communism to the ghetto

Inequality in the world of supercapitalism will be incomparably higher than it is now. Huge returns on capital can be accompanied by zero returns on labor. How to prepare for such a future? Most likely not, but perhaps this version of techno-utopia is a rather unexpected motivation for entering the stock market.
If the income from labor gradually disappears, the only hope is for the income from capital: the only way to stay in business in the world of supercapitalism is to own these same robots and artificial intelligence.

Financier Joshua Brown gives the example of a friend who owns a small chain of grocery stores in New Jersey. A few years ago, he noticed that Amazon.com was starting to push small retailers out of business. The shopkeeper started buying shares of Amazon.com. It wasn't a traditional retirement investment, but rather insurance against a total collapse. After the ruin of his own network, the businessman at least compensated for his losses by multiplying the shares of the "winner takes all-companies."

The fate of those who will not have capital is vague in the world of supercapitalism: everything will depend on the ethics of those who, on the contrary, will have an abundance of capital. It can be either a variation on the theme of communism for all at best (super-equality levels itself - the productive forces of society will be infinitely great); or universal unconditional income in the average case (if the tax redistribution of excess income, which has been slowing down in recent times, works); or segregation and the creation of social ghetto reserves in the worst case.