DOUBLE STANDARDS IN DEFENDING CORRUPTION AS A CHALLENGE TO PUBLIC CONCENT

Presently, in Russia rent-class and class-market ontologies of corruption coexist, stipulating contradictory principles of its definition and opposition. The political actors of these ontologies offer mutually exclusive views on the phenomenon of corruption, due to the general context of the competition of social groups over the legitimate principles of the distribution of public resources, various goods, and types of capital. The hypothesis is suggested that in the global world, and Russia as its part there is a background trend towards strengthening the rent-estate stratification of society, which presupposes the strengthening of non-market (non-economic) factor of social groups' access to public resources. In this model, the key element of class formation is the national state, but not the free market. Accordingly, the level of legitimate citizens' access to resources is increasingly determined by the position of citizens in the hierarchy of the state, but not by their competitiveness and requirements of the market. In such a rent-class system, relatively universal and egalitarian value-institutional spaces are suppressed being oriented towards the formal equality of citizens, and sensitive to the distortion of this equality. In terms of the rent-class order, the growing inequality of citizens' access to public resources according to estate, industry, official, geographical, and other criteria cease to be qualified as corruption. There is an increase in hierarchical inequality in access to resources, legitimized by new estate ethics of virtues, in which corruption appears as acceptable status, class or political rent. The identification of corruption is increasingly reduced to relative quantitative indicators like the excess of the estates and their individual representatives of the amount of political rent legitimated for them. Nevertheless, the rent-class order could receive wide support if the majority of the population is involved as beneficiaries, and the criteria for the distribution of political rent are relatively transparent and legitimized by public agreement of key social groups.