On Sat, 3 Mar 2007 17:05:20 -0500 "Charles Brown"
<cbrown at michiganlegal.org> writes:
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>
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> Chris Doss I have long been of the opinion that Russia dropped
> out of much left discourse around 2002 or so for
> precisely this reason. In the 90s when the economy was
> collapsing, it was appealing to use Russia as a poster
> country for the evils of capitalism, especially since
> it used to have a planned economy. Given that real
> wages have risen 10% in Russia every year since 1999
> and that there is enough money in the Stabilization
> Fund to maintain the current Russian budget for 4
> years at an oil price of $0.00 a barrel, that is not
> easy to do anymore.
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>
> ^^^^^^
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> CB; There isn't exactly anarchy of production in oil there now.
Russia seems to have renationalized much of its energy industry under Putin. In fact even if Russia hasn't returned to the kind of state socialism that it had in the days of the USSR, it seems apparent that Russia didn't begin to pull out of its economic nosedive until it began shifting away from the neo-liberal economic policies that it had been following so slavishly under Yeltsin. Seldom has a set of economic policies been so completely discredited in practice as were the neo-liberal policies that were followed in the 1990s.
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