The state as an instrument of solidarity

Abstract

In modern philosophical theories, the solidarity appears contradictory. If we consider the insurance to be it’s prime phenomenon (distribution of support for the weak on the shoulders of all), then the solidarity, on the one hand, becomes a source of economic stagnation and deficit, moreover, it becomes morally illegitimate and fraught with totalitarian implications. On the other hand, it is clearly connected with loyalty to the interests of the society, which distinguishes citoyen, whose human dignity is intended to be realized through the state, from selfish bourgeois. A state which legitimacy in the era of globalization, in its turn, is called into question, turns out to be a mysterious point of transition from illegitimate solidarity to legitimate one. The ideas of K. Polanyi on the role of the state in functioning of the competitive market help to understand how it happens. Analysis of the issue made it possible 1) to establish the essential affinity of Polanian “fictitious commodities” (which the state should protect against commodification) and the conditions for the possibility of production in general, singled out by K. Marx, 2) to explain there by the origin of “fictitious commodities” and to root the solidarity in the subject-subject relation of production, which constitutes human culture as such. This conclusion allows us to reject the insurance model as improper image of the solidarity and to substantiate it as a constant of reproduction of the social conditions of human production. In capitalist production, that constant is institutionalized in the form of a democratic national state, the dysfunctionality of which leads not only to forbidding the reproduction for the weak market players, but also, as that processmoment, to a conservative revolution with its totalitarian outcomes.