Transformation of Russia ctxt.es

Although apart from the meaning assumed by all the parrots seen in this video, it is true that the cause of the war is not NATO, nor NATO’s progress. Geopolitics is not the cause of Russia’s encirclement, but the result of a clash of interests between the two capitalisms.

In the 1990s, post-Soviet elites began enriching themselves by plundering national assets. Sociologically, they were recycled from an administrative caste into a property-owning class. I call this the “social reconstruction of the polity” (“nomenklatura”, to use a more familiar but much less precise term from that Soviet state caste).

Russia’s masters hoped to achieve rapprochement with their Western counterparts. They were confident that the West would allow them to enter capitalist globalization as ‘free and equal’ participants. They had forgotten everything that their grandparents had revolutionized in search of a solution to the problem of uneven capitalist development that was driving the Russian Empire to become a kind of colonized great power in the early 20th century . He believed that the Revolution of 1917 was a historical accident and that his country, along with the USSR, had moved away from the ‘civilization’ to which they were now returning.

Russia’s masters hoped to achieve reconciliation with its Western allies.

Moscow wanted to become New York, Paris or London, but capitalist globalization offered Buenos Aires, São Paulo or Bombay: a subaltern and dependent status quo in which there was a ‘Third Rome’ (Moscow in the imperial ideology adopted in the 16th century). To abandon its secular identity and great power reality, with its new bourgeoisie in the role of mere intermediary in the international trade in raw materials, in which Russia is number one in the world.

The 1990s were a time of immense personal enrichment for a few and misery and demographic decline for the majority. Internationally, they were a time of humiliation and impotence with the expansion of NATO and Western support for separatism in Russia. While the Russian army was defeated by several thousand Chechen guerrillas in the Caucasus.

In a world without respect for the weak, who would respect ‘Russian interests’ in the face of that spectacle? In the 1990s, Russian interests (actually those of the ruling elite) wanted to line their pockets through privatization. Pride and great ambition came behind the main thing: personal and group enrichment.

Once the social reconstruction of the ruling caste was successfully carried out, the reestablishment of Russian power began with Putin, and with it began the confrontation with actually existing capitalism. The Russian elite fell off the horse and began to develop plans to be respected by the West, which never well understood Russia’s internal processes or its realities. The first step was to subordinate the elite classes to the power of the state. In 2003, one of them, Yukos oil company owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who wanted to bring American companies into the energy sector and claimed that by spending $10 billion he could remove Putin from the country’s presidency, was arrested. Was put in jail. Year.

Today, the Russian predatory elite is composed of political capitalists.

Today, the Russian predatory elite is composed of political capitalists, that is, a social group that derives its competitive advantage from the benefits derived from state control. For this it needs global capital to recognize its personal patronage in Russia and its geographical surroundings. For example: The Russian energy sector is ‘national’ property controlled by Russia, i.e. by the Russian state owners. The Russian oligarchs are subordinate objects of the state, just as the Russian oligarchs were of the tsarist autocracy. (They are not worse, but they are different from their Western counterparts).

In the geographical environment of Russia, a domain, or at least a condominium, should be recognized in which the interests of the Russian bourgeoisie are taken into account and respected by Western international capital.

This is unacceptable to the Western hunter elite. Their companies, to which their governments are subordinate, do not accept any ‘protection’. Russia’s natural resources should be opened up to the plunder of global capital and Russian political capitalists should become merely a purchasing, underclass, and middle class. But the Russian elite does not accept that role. And thus conflict arises.

That is to say, if Western capital had free access to control of Russia’s energy and mineral resources, and if the Russian elite in that business were content with a subordinate and subservient role to foreign interests, then there would be no expansion of Would. NATO, Russia would not have been excluded or Putin’s regime demonized, whose known misdeeds and faults make it no worse but better than other “friendly” countries like Turkey or Saudi Arabia, and certainly , much less criminal in their international behavior than Western powers, who gave rise to more than four million deaths and 38 million displaced people in their wars and interventions after 9/11, according to the brilliant work cost of wars from Brown University in the United States.

So all this becomes very clear if it is read in the context of a conflict in which some people try to get recognition for their ‘geo-economic’ protection of what the Kremlin designates as “our legitimate interests”, while Others do not accept it because it is the entire world that is protected and Russia and its surrounding areas cannot be an exception.

The most interesting thing about all this is how does this conflict change, how will it change, how is it changing, the Russian elite, the Russian Bonapartist regime and Russian society as a whole?

The battle between Western international global capitalism and Russian political capitalism, as well as the Russian elite’s refusal to be treated as equals in the global club of predators, is pushing Moscow towards a certain ‘Sovietization’; Domestic policy involves replacing the social contract with more distribution, more state control, more Keynesianism and less markets and, of course, more repression. Externally, there is greater emphasis on anti-colonialism, anti-Westernism, enhancing the role of BRICS, relations with Africa, Latin America and of course Asia.

The fight against Western international global capitalism is pushing Moscow towards a certain ‘Sovietization’

The result is as captivating as watching President Putin, a staunch conservative, anti-communist and supporter of the market economy, praise Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and President Allende in his last speech before the Latin American Forum held in Moscow in September. Or the Secretary of the Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, a KGB cadre, attacking the “Western colonial-imperialist project” and its “predatory civilization” and offering the world, especially the Global South, an “alternative way out” of Russia. Are. This change is happening now and should be watched very carefully.

All this may have been quite disappointing coming from characters who were not as conservative and very left-wing as current Russian leaders, but in some ways it was the paradox of the USSR: an autocratic and tyrannical superpower in politics, conservative and traditionalist in many aspects, and a At the same time, egalitarian and socially levelling, and fundamental to its role as a counterweight to Western hegemony in the world.

Today’s Russia is not, and will not be, tomorrow’s USSR, but the logic of the battle between capitalism and Western international capitalism, subject to the state characteristics of Russia, is giving rise to very important changes for the whole world. ,