Putin and Capitalism

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Clarissa

March 21, 2014

The reason why the people of Russia are so enamored of Putin is that he protected them from capitalism.

In the 1990s, the FSU got a chance to experience capitalism and didn’t like it a single bit. You have to bear full responsibility for yourself, work a lot, compete, take risks and process losses, make yourself appealing to the job market – there is so much effort, and the result is, more often than not, far from spectacular.

Putin made a mutually convenient bargain with the citizens of Russia: they wouldn’t have to do any of these unpleasant things, wouldn’t have to work at all, just make some ideologically approved noises every once in a while, and pretend they are not noticing how he and his cronies are robbing the country. In return he’ll give them some scraps from his table, which will be tiny but still enough to muddle along without needing to do the one thing a Soviet person hates the most: work.

All of the components of the Soviet system have been restored in Russia: hospitals that are free but don’t treat, colleges that are free but don’t teach, persecution of the few dissidents, no freedom of speech, intense propaganda – and in the midst of it all, happy citizens who are floating aimlessly and contentedly, knowing that they don’t need to act or think because the Leader is thinking and acting on their behalf.

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21 responses to “Putin and Capitalism”

musteryou

March 21, 2014

Some people are good at capitalism, for instance Zimbabweans are very good at it so long as it is on a small, merchant scale. Some are very bad at it or disinterested, such as myself. It doesn’t mean we are not hard workers. I love working hard.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 21, 2014
  
  I always knew you were not a Soviet person. 🙂
  
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twicerandomly

March 21, 2014

Are you being deliberately provocative to start a discussion?
Because some of your readers do know something about history, and what you have just said pretty much glosses over the incompetence of the Chicago School experiment.

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 21, 2014
  
  The Chicago boys tried to have an influence in Russia but soon realized that they were dealing with a power much greater than anything they could have imagined and crawled away with their tails between their legs. This is a single thing I’m grateful to the oligarchs for.
  
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  1. musteryou
    
    March 22, 2014
    
    Yankees
    
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  2. el
    
    March 22, 2014
    
    \\ This is a single thing I’m grateful to the oligarchs for.
    
    Why? From what I heard the Chicago boys are for (almost?) unrestricted capitalism. Is their position far away from US reality?
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      March 22, 2014
      
      The Chicago school is stuck in the past, like a fly in a piece of amber. Capitalism’s greatest strength lies in its enormous capacity to transform and adapt. Yet these idiots want to go back 200 years to practice a ridiculously outdated form of it. This is conservatism at its worst: clinging to the long-gone past for no reason other than their fixation on it.
      
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cliff arroyo

March 22, 2014

In other words they can regress back to the safety of childhoold safe in the knowledge that Mommy Russia and Daddy Putin will take care of them.

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el

March 22, 2014

It has to be seen – the first picture is from today’s Moscow, the second – … :
http://yoshke.livejournal.com/853280.html

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 22, 2014
  
  Jesus. Horrifying shit.
  
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cliff arroyo

March 22, 2014

“The Chicago school is stuck in the past, like a fly in a piece of amber. Capitalism’s greatest strength lies in its enormous capacity to transform and adapt”

I’m also thinking maybe they didn’t have the first idea of how things in the USSR actually worked. I have no experience with that palce, but a mid 80’s trip to Poland was eye-opening. Not the socialist hardship and endless lines and greyness etc, But just beneath the service there was a huge no-holds-barred capitalist frenzy going on that was hard for a sheltered american to comprehend.

At the time I described it as no one believing the propaganda about the state taking care of them and wanting to provide for themselves. Everyone I came across seemed to have some kind of side-income/racket/second job/money-making enterprise going on and people were living on their wits in a way Americans are mostly incapable of.

Was there something similar going on in the USSR? If you didn’t imagine such a thing existed and it did then you’re going to have hopelessly wrong ideas of how things work and what’s going to happen with your ideologically-tested solutions.

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1. J. Otto Pohl
  
  March 22, 2014
  
  Yes, there was a huge gray and black market economy in the USSR. I already mentioned on here how farmers in the Caucasus would use their private kitchen plots to grow food to sell in markets in Moscow at incredible mark ups. But, there are all kinds of examples including whole illegal factories producing goods for private gain. This book compiled by my friend Sam Tranum has an interview with the KGB guy responsible for shutting down one of these underground factories in Kyrgyzstan.
  
  Here is what Geoffrey Hoskings (my internal PhD examiner) says about it in his popular book, The First Socialist Society: A History of the Soviet Union from Within, p. 382.
  
  “The shortcomings of the centrally planned economy were such that a thriving and ramified ‘second economy’ grew up to meet the population’s needs for consumer goods, transport, repairs and services. In agriculture, of course, as described elsewhere, the ‘second economy’ was legalized in the form of the private plot and kolkhoz market. In other sectors, however, it remained strictly illegal. It flourished, though, for quite simple reasons. The Soviet motorist who needed a windscreen wiper or a fan-belt may well have found that official suppliers were unable to help him, at least not without long delay; so, rather than stop using his car, he asked around among his friends till he located an unofficial supplier, who charged much higher prices but obliged immediately.”
  
  He goes on for a couple of pages with examples of how the ‘second economy’ worked in the USSR regarding the supply of goods and services. In Azerbaijan during the 1970s if you had enough rubles you could buy anything from this economy even the post of district party secretary (p. 384).
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 22, 2014
    
    The problem with this “economy” is that it required no effort and no actual work from anybody. People stole goods from their state-owned workplaces and sat on them, waiting for the customer to come to them. None of these skills turned out to be useful in an actual capitalist economy. As a result, many people got massively depressed and haven’t been able tot snap out of this state until now.
    
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Jones

March 22, 2014

I think what’s missing is that they haven’t started McTroika franchises where you can order state-approved dissidents to your table to discuss philosophy in the manner of Monty Python’s “casual table chatter” skit …

“Don’t trust a word he says luv, he’s a dissident.”

“But this is from a wholesome, homegrown Russian dissident — are you saying you’re against utilising local labour?”

“No, of course not, but he says disturbing things …”

“Well it can’t be all bad, after all, McTroika is state-approved!”

[we will now resume the sacking of those who conducted the previous sacking, who had not yet been sacked, before we re-brand RT as McTroika with three arches instead of two, making it 50% greater]

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1. Clarissa
  
  March 23, 2014
  
  :-):-):-):-):-):-) Hilarious.
  
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2. J. Otto Pohl
  
  March 23, 2014
  
  True, for the most part the “second economy” consisted of goods and labor siphoned off of the “official economy.” So you had two “economies” doing the world of half an economy. 😉
  
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cliff arroyo

March 23, 2014

“The problem with this “economy” is that it required no effort and no actual work from anybody. People stole goods from their state-owned workplaces and sat on them, waiting for the customer to come to them. None of these skills turned out to be useful in an actual capitalist economy”

I’m sure there was a lot of that, but to be fair running an entire illegal factory does take effort and ingenuity. The people who just sat on their asses (whether in an office or factory or store) are going to flounder in a different system but those running off the books factories or involved in complicated off the records operations involving unofficial circulation of consumer goods (for money or barter or both) are probably going to do okay though they will have no respect whatsoever for ideas like ‘rule of law’ or ‘honest dealings’…

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1. J. Otto Pohl
  
  March 23, 2014
  
  Oops that should have been “work of half an economy” 😉 But, yes running whole factories like happened in Central Asia and the Caucasus takes more doing than just stealing and reselling stuff. It is the difference between crime and organized crime.
  
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  1. Clarissa
    
    March 23, 2014
    
    This was a very Central Asian thing. In my part of the USSR there was nothing even remotely of the kind.
    
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2. Clarissa
  
  March 23, 2014
  
  There were maybe 4 or 5 of these illegal factories in the entire USSR. And none of them in Russia or Ukraine. We are talking about the total of maybe 15 people most of whom were executed in the 1970s.
  
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  1. J. Otto Pohl
    
    March 23, 2014
    
    There were some in the Caucasus as well as Central Asia. The “businessman” Lazishvili established a number of underground factories in Georgia under Mzhavanadze before Shevardnadze took over the republic in 1972. (Hosking, p. 385). There was a 1976 Pravda article about a whole village where most of the women knitted for such an illegal enterprise in the Caucasus. (Hosking, pp. 382-383).
    
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