In 1990, there was a historic chance to disarm, partition and de-ideologize Russia in exchange for food. That chance was pissed away because of the inane “free market” dogma. The idea was that free markets usher in democracy. It was a majorly stupid idea and it’s been priven wrong.
Free markets are utterly indifferent to political regimes. They don’t have much use for the concept of a “country”, so what countries do politically is unimportant to them.
Still, if another historic opportunity comes by to disarm Russia and bring it to heel, it will once again be pissed away because of the same free-marketeering dogma that refuses to die. We are not learning anything, is the problem. Free marketeering means open borders. It’s in the name. Markets are to be free to transcend all limits and drag workers / consumers wherever it’s convenient at any given time. You can’t be for one but not for the other.
Be a free marketeer, by all means, but at least look at what it actually means.
Clarissa's Blog 
Ricardo, retardo.
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Russia doesn’t have free markets since all critical industries are controlled by the Kremlin. A real free market requires private property and rule of law, neither of which exit in Russia.
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This is the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Russia is a fully neoliberal, capitalist country. Like in every neoliberal capitalist country, the state plays heavily on the side of large corporations against small and medium-sized business. That’s all that “free markets” mean everywhere in the world.
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By this logic the USSR was the world’s most capitalist country since it was completely dominated by state backed corporations.
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Not “state-backed” but “state-owned.” Walmart is privately owned, yet nobody can deny that the US government handed over small business’s share of the market to it during COVID.
The Soviet “corporations” were not privately owned and did not extract profit. The profit motive was entirely alien to them. Nobody was officially allowed to extract profit from anything. That is socialism. It’s a major,most important difference with capitalism.
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“The profit motive was entirely alien to them”
Which is why stores were mostly empty. Were store employees in business for themselves? In Poland it wasn’t rare for clerks to hide away most merchandise and customers had to deal directly with them to buy anything (at much higher prices).
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It was completely illegal, of course. In rare cases, you could get capital punishment for it. Scroll down to Yeliseevsky affair:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliseyevsky
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I was trying to decide whether to say state backed or state owned. Either way it is government favored monopolists over small business.
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There was no small business in the USSR. Or any business of any sort. There was no private ownership over the means of production.
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Well, how could you be more favorable to big business than by eliminating small business?
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There was no business of any kind in the USSR.
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Yes, no doubt. But a state backed/owned monopoly is still much closer to the Soviet model than any kind of free market.
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“There was no business of any kind in the USSR.”
It is so hard to get across the reality to people with no experience of it (or even fairly broad historical knowledge).
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I don’t disagree with the reality of the USSR. I disagree that Russia could be considered any kind of free market.
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“Russia could be considered any kind of free market.”
Well no neoliberal system is really a free market… it’s always about favoring some sectors/players over others.
In early stage neoliberalism (thatcher, reagan) free market rhetoric was used as a distraction but there’s no longer any pretense.
And of course russia always ends up with an utterly grotesque and dysfunctional version of whatever western trend/idea it’s trying to follow (that’s been the case for at least 300 years).
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Russia as a dysfunctional mirror of the west makes as much sense as any other theory. But state backed megcorporations is just 17th century East India Company capitalism. It’s hardly neo anything.
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Was raised with the whole libertarian idea of “free markets” and it was so strange to realize as an adult that we didn’t have them, and that what politicians mean by ‘free market’ has no relation to what individuals on the ground experience. They’re talking about huge companies, and removing barriers to international trade… which we can now clearly see has a lot of downsides. Meanwhile, the average American in his town, his neighborhood, is far less free to engage in ‘free trade’ of goods and services than your average Viet villager (in a nominally communist country), thanks to exciting things like regulatory capture, taxes, and professional licensing cartels.
I no longer have any idea what people are talking about when they say “free market”. It seems like at a national/international level it just means competing for jobs with whoever is willing to tolerate the most pollution, toxic exposure, and crap working conditions, while almost nobody is even talking about ‘free market’ anything at the local level, where the rules are rigged to make it as difficult as possible for individuals to start and successfully run long-term businesses (licensing, zoning, denial of market access).
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