By Alexander Perepechko

Published on November 27, 2015

The Kurginyan Matrix

Compared to earlier stages of Modernity, Late Modernity in the West is less “heroic.” Americans and Europeans do not want to go to war and fight. Together with small families and mammismo, changes in governmental regulations pertaining to illegal activities, illicit activities, and activities regulated by classified legal procedures partially explain this unheroic realism. What are these activities about? When did governmental regulations change for these activities? Why did these changes occur?

As a matter of fact, Modernity (and we live in Late Modernity), like any other epoch (except post-modernity), is about regulations. Regulations can be viewed in a variety of ways. We know that secular law is a key regulator in the epoch of Modernity. In the West, most of societal life is located within the domain of legal activities.

But this is not the only domain where societal life can be found in western societies. The elitologist from Russia Sergey Kurginyan (2007: 42-46, 52), l’enfant terrible of the methodological school of Georgy Shchedrovitsky, uses a normative matrix to define legitimate and other types of societal activities in the West. According to this matrix, there are 4 types of activities relating to legality: 1) legal activities; 2) illegal activities; 3) activities regulated by classified legal procedures; and 4) illicit activities authorized by powers. The first diagonal of this matrix is (legal activities) + (illegal activities) and the second diagonal is (activities regulated by classified legal procedures) + (illicit activities authorized by powers). Figure 13 depicts these two diagonals.

 

Figure 13. Kurginyan matrix presented as two diagonals (Source: Generated by the author based on Kurginyan, 2007: 43-44).

 What does the Kurginyan matrix describe in terms of regulations with reference to the securitization of post-heroic America?

The first diagonal depicts obvious things. Most of us live in an open society. We know that a system of control governing it is defined by law and is transparent. We have to obey the law and our behavior is outlined by law. Illegal activity in open society is in the realm of criminal behavior. So, it looks like the first diagonal shows things familiar to everyone.

The trouble is that many social scientists tend to see western society as entirely described by the first diagonal of the Kurginyan matrix: (legal activities) + (illegal activities), or (legitimate) + (illegitimate). In other words, instead of a normative matrix, they use a normative scalar: entries outside the main diagonal ((legitimate) + (illegitimate)) are equal to zero. Consequently, many scholars by default add closed social systems and organizations controlled by security and military elites into the legitimate and illegitimate domains of western society. When an independent mind questions the normative scalar approach, he or she should expect one of two politically correct answers: “You are a paranoiac!” or more civilly “You are a conspiratologist! Open democratic society has no closed, non-transparent systems!”

But political correctness of a small arcane sect of university academics in this matter does not concern us. Some observers point to a cognitive dissonance – a new puzzling behavior of American mass society in the period of Late Modernity (see Kalashnikov, 2015: 177-178). On the one side, citizens resent that the NSA and other intelligence services clandestinely monitor Americans. On the other side, Americans voluntarily publish personal information on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and other social networks. Mobile technologies create nonstop exhibitionism of human walking sensor platforms. These days, almost everything we do in real life is exposed on the virtual reality world. Perhaps this contradictory behavior can, to some extent, be explained by the human condition.

Ideally, open democratic society should not have closed, non-transparent systems. In reality, everybody knows that closed social systems exist. The closed systems consist of multiple specific components and occupy social territory (social space) where these systems and components work and develop. Many even would guess that unlike open social systems, closed social systems are non-transparent or semi-transparent (grey) to outsiders. After Kurginyan (2007: 39, 376), some analysts – and I am one of them – are inclined to think that specific components of closed social systems do not need to be interpreted as components of the criminal world (Kurginyan, 2007: 39, 376).

But unfortunately, the dead end analytical approach – where activities regulated by classified legal procedures and illicit activities authorized by powers are misconstrued or ignored – is quite common among social scientists. It is hard to blame the numerous adepts of this approach and to call them unsophisticated. These analysts are rather hostages of ideological and propagandist formats and frameworks. Many of them sincerely believe and will tell you 1) that a democratic society per se excludes non-transparent and semi-transparent social spaces and components and 2) that activities regulated by classified legal procedures and illicit activities authorized by powers are not specific domains and that they simply can be added to either the legitimate or illegitimate domain. This is not surprising because one can hardly find a curriculum for an advanced degree in elitology in American universities.

Indeed, analyses of the elite background and systemic multi-layered context of specific components of closed social systems are frequently ignored by social scientists. It is even worse when norms, criteria, procedures, and patterns proper for the study of spaces of open systems are wrongfully transferred and applied to the study of spaces of closed systems. When this happens we are faced with faulty methodological surrogates. It is axiomatic in elitology that norms, criteria, procedures, and patterns of space x of the open system X cannot be used to interpret space y of the closed system Y and vice versa. In the world of closed social systems, one is expected to act according to rules of closed systems. Within closed systems the rules allow behavior which may be forbidden in open systems by laws (Kurginyan, 2007: 75, 310, 347).

In terms of this study, it is crucial to estimate the significance of each of the 4 types of activities in the Kurginyan matrix before September 11, 2001, and the importance of each type today. To do this, the categorical values in the matrix need to be estimated before and after September 11, 2001 and mapped using the 4-axis chart (Figure 13). Then, the estimates for the two periods will be compared and discussed. To estimate the importance of each type of societal activity, three categories are established: 1 – “moderate,” 2 – “strong,” and 3 – “very strong.” We will do this at the end of this paper.

Increase of the Prison Population in America

As a matter of fact, illegal activities are a domain of criminals. The Russian Mafia, murderers, thieves, and drug dealers are a few examples from the criminal world. There are several ways to measure criminal activities. The rate of imprisonment is one of these measurements.

The rate of imprisonment in the United States (Mauer, 2003: 16) was and is high and keeps growing (Figure 14). Definitely, this country has a higher rate of violent crime than other developed nations. A partial explanation is found in the history of immigration. Keep in mind that American culture reflects to a large extent the immigrant experience. The many immigrants to the United States include some who were outlaws in their home country. Americans are not eager to discuss this sensitive topic. But the absence of this discourse impedes our ability to understand the roots of the high rate of violence in the United States. Some observers (for example, Cheremnykh et al, 2014: 122) hypothesize that the “outlaw” group of immigrants functions as a “shadow class” with its own motivations (such as escaping the danger of criminal activities in their home country), methods of appropriation (such as legitimizing the wealth gained from criminal activities in their home country), and means of self-affirmation (such as becoming a respectable citizen in the new country and starting a new life). But some in this group will continue their criminal activities in a new form, in relative safety. If this is true, then the history of immigration is a factor in sentencing practice and policy.

 

Figure 14.Total state and federal prison populations in the United States, 1978-2013. (Source: Carson, 2014).

Sentencing practices in America, especially for property and drug offenses, are more tough than in other western countries. The increase in the rate of imprisonment can be attributed to changes in sentencing policy, above all the move toward mandatory and determinate sentencing, restrictions on judicial discretion, and a greater emphasis on imprisonment as a preferred sanction (Mauer, 2003: 16). These changes in policy were adopted as a part of the war on drugs. Therefore, the utilization of the criminal justice system as a mechanism of responding to drug problems increased a great deal during recent decades.

From Organized Crime to Low Intensity Conflict?

As the most violent western society, the United States has at all times had events which look similar to low intensity conflicts (LICs). Like any war, a LIC is not only about one group killing another but about the readiness of members of both groups to be killed in return if necessary (Van Creveld, 1991: 221). With time, widespread organized crime in America becomes more violent and slowly but surely evolves into LIC by coalescing along religious, racial, political, and socio-economic lines (Van Creveld, 1991: 196). What is even worse is that America’s home grown bandits, assassins, and terrorists found and may find common ground with foreigners (many of them claim a link with God) waging LIC on America’s state territory along these lines.

With time, it is increasingly complicated to draw the line between criminals and terrorists in this country. For instance, the Iraqi government estimates that 17 of the 25 most important IS leaders running the war in Iraq and Syria spent time in U.S. prisons between 2004 and 2011. Some were transferred from American custody to Iraqi prisons, where a series of jailbreaks in the last several years allowed many senior leaders to escape and rejoin the insurgent ranks (Chulov, 2014). As we can see, the path from a criminal in these two countries to a “warrior” and even a charismatic “freedom fighter” can be short.

We need to admit a sad truth. Jihad ringleaders understood quicker than our political elites that in the age of telecommunications and modern means of transportation distance does not save the United States from mass legal and illegal immigration anymore. Moreover, the theorists of Jihad quickly learned how to use new telecommunications as a key component in the logistics of continuing terror in developed countries. This ability to use available human and information technologies allowed leaders of radical Islam to export wars and conflicts in the Middle East and other regions of the Third World to the multiculturalist West. Jihadists forced the West to fight LICs on its own territory. Terrorists target nodes and high density areas on demographic and economic geographic maps of western countries. Declining state structures in North America and Europe are failing to guarantee security and safety of citizens.

LICs in the United States today are a response to American trinitarian wars in the developing world. After the Second World War, the West and particularly the United States has repeatedly exported the liberal state (and liberal democracy) globally by conventional armed forces. The main result of this massive export of structures of authority has been a loss of the meaning of the liberal state in the country of import. This export from the developed countries injures relations between local elites and the population governed by these elites (see Badie, 2000: 169) and causes multiple, endless wars and conflicts in Third World countries. Besides, such an export in many cases destroys originally stable (yes, non-democratic) political structures and produces catastrophic consequences. It took too long for American elites to discover that the culture of a nation ideally controls the parameters of its political system. Each political system and each state should live and operate in accordance with a political code proper to the corresponding nation (see Birnbaum, 1975).

 

Figure 15. Radical Islam terror attacks on American state territory (Source: Generated by the author bases on Islamic Terror, 2015).

Radical Islam is one of the focus points where organized crime and LIC – home grown and imported from abroad – come together on America’s soil. It is probably next to impossible to stop or even to slow down this extremely dangerous process by using advanced, sophisticated information technologies and intelligence techniques only. Telecommunications and modern means of transportation provide infinite possibilities for masterminds of LICs and organized crime to continue and even intensify subversive activities. American elites have finally realized that after the Second World War each time modern regular, heavily armed, state-owned forces were used for counterinsurgency purposes, these forces were defeated (Van Creveld, 2009: 398). It is obvious that strategy in its Clausewitzian sense is becoming useless. 

According to TheReligionofPeace.com site, 3097 people were killed and another 1685 people were injured in 1972-2015 by radical Islamists in 75 terrorist attacks on American state territory (Figure 15). Thus, 4782 suffered as a result of attacks of radical Islamists. We can see two different patterns in the figure. In 1972-2000 terror attacks were rare (27 attacks in 28 years) and resulted in a high number of injured; 62.9% of the 1685 injuries were in 1972-2000. In 2001-2015, terror attacks were more frequent (44 attacks in 14 years) and much more fatal; 98.5% of the 3097 deaths were in 2001-2015).

These two temporal patterns of radical Islam terror attacks in the United States take us to two ambiguous conjectures. Firstly, to deal with specific problems right after September 11, 2001, new security and intelligence agencies were created that are nonetheless highly scattered and decentralized (there are 16 of them!). This compartmentalization of the security state apparatus might be not up to the task anymore. Huge supercomputer intelligence systems should be supplemented by dynamic networks of independent (yes, politically and ideologically neutral) analysts and small think tanks. Secondly, the facade of radical Islam mutates fast. Jihadists change strategy and tactics so often and operate so efficiently that the hierarchically organized bureaucratic intelligence and counterinsurgency machine may not be capable of reacting promptly. A highly dynamic network of motivated evildoers can sometimes beat slow, highly hierarchical structures and well-drilled public servants. But is this one pattern enough to support such a strong statement? Is the temporal pattern sufficient to understand the enemy’s strategy? In my next post we will look at another interesting pattern.

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Birnbaum, P. (1975) La fin du politique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

Carson, E. A. Prisoners in 2013. BJS, September 2014. Available at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf

Cheremnykh, K. A., Voskanian, M. B., Kobiakov, A. B. (2014) Anonimnaia voina [Anonymous war]. Moscow: Algorithm.

Chulov, M. ISIS: the inside story. The Guardian, December 11, 2014. Available at http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/11/-sp-isis-the-inside-story?CMP=fb_guAccording

Islamic Terror Attacks on American Soil. TheReligionofPeace.com. 2015. Available at http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/americanattacks.htm

Kalashnikov, M. (2015) Mirovaia revolutsia-2.0 [World revolution-2.0]. Moscow: Algorithm.

Kurginyan, S. E. (2007) The Weakness of Power. The Analytics of Closed Elite Games and its Basic Concepts. Moscow: ECC.

Mauer, M. (2003) Comparative international rates of incarceration: an examination of causes and trends. Presented to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, June, 20, 2003. Available at http://proxy.baremetal.com/november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Incarceration.pdf

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Van Creveld, M. (2009) The Rise and Decline of the State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Van Creveld, M. L. (1991) The transformation of war. The Most Radical Reinterpretation of Armed Conflict Since Clausewitz. New York: The Free Press.