[lbo-talk] Re: China [was: Blowing Up an Assumption]

Chris Doss lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com
Wed Jun 15 09:18:59 PDT 2005


Bingo! He is seen as Vladimir the Savior. Russians' living standards are better in almost every respect than they were 5 years ago. After 10 years of constant decline, that is a very big deal. Russia's GDP is back up to 90% of the 1989 level, as opposed to 60% in 1998. I have read that Russian consumption is now at levels higher than in the Soviet era, but I do not know how accurate that is.


> <
>
> to my mind [which, BTW, is mostly ignorant of things
> Russian], Putin's
> popularity is easy to explain.
>
> Almost everyone outside the anarchist community
> agrees with Thomas
> Hobbes, i.e., that the state must monopolize the
> legitimate use of
> force in the country (living up to Weber's
> definition). Otherwise, you
> get mob rule, bandits, poor-nasty-brutish-short
> lives, etc. Yeltsin
> either couldn't pull this off because he didn't have
> the power or
> wasn't the right guy for the job. On the other hand,
> Putin is the Man
> on the White Horse. It doesn't matter if he
> persecutes some corrupt
> oil baron for person political gain (while leaving
> similarly corrupt
> oligarchs off the hook) as long as he does "job
> one," maintaining order.
>
> In this view, the Russians see the
> "neo-authoritarian dictatorship of
> Vladimir Putin" as a _good thing_.
> --
> Jim Devine
> "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go
> your own way and let
> people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
>
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>
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>

Nu, zayats, pogodi!

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