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Zhuravlev S.E. [The new bill on local self-government — a tribute to the communal, zemstvo and Soviet traditions of self-organization for the development of settlements, or a revolutionary rejection of the past?] Political Science and Technology, 2025, Vol. 5, Iss. 1 Available at: https://politicjournal.ru/PDF/03PK125.pdf (in Russian).

The new bill on local self-government — a tribute to the communal, zemstvo and Soviet traditions of self-organization for the development of settlements, or a revolutionary rejection of the past?

Zhuravlev Sergey Evgenievich
State University of Education, Moscow, Russia
E-mail: oko_sterh@mail.ru

Abstract. Human society evolves in accordance with the laws of nature, but scientists interpret the laws of evolution in different ways, even to the contrary statements. The prevailing point of view is about the supremacy of competition in evolutionary processes. The slogan «survival of the fittest» is sometimes perceived as an axiom. However, there are supporters of the supremacy of other driving forces of evolution, and one of the most prominent in this camp, Peter Kropotkin, defended and proved that mutual assistance promotes development in the first place, and the struggle for survival is secondary. But there is also a circle of scientists who are subjecting not only evolution, but also the very foundation of natural sciences — Newtonian physics, to revision, in particular, the Brussels School of Synergetics, whose bright leader was the Nobel laureate, the outstanding chemist Ilya Prigozhin, who claim that the processes of entropy in the universe are not guided by the laws of reversibility, i.e. for the most part they are irreversible, i.e. they cannot be repeated, and therefore predicted or calculated with high accuracy in the future. In their opinion, Chaos reigns in nature, in which, under certain conditions, the so-called. At the points of bifurcation, self-organization or harmonization effects occur, as a result of which systems are formed for a while. When applied to the organization of local life in settlements and small territories, both assumptions about mutual assistance and self-organization as the driving forces of evolution can be interpreted as a postulate of high variability, in which circumstances, migration, demography, technology, property and resources should not be considered as systemic stability. Local self-government, whatever it may become as a result of the next, expected reform, should be adaptive, and it is logical for local communities to restore communities in the modern interpretation as active territorial communities.

Keywords: mutual assistance; self-government; society; community; settlement; territory; self-organization

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