[lbo-talk] Russia's economy

[Marvin Gandall]

Doug writes:
>
> On May 11, 2007, at 9:15 AM, Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
>> Politically, it seems to me the Putin regime has played the same
>> historical
>> role in relation to emergent Russian capitalism as the TR
>> administration in
>> relation to the bucaneering US robber barons.
>
> It's easy to forget the intense working class militancy that led the
> U.S. bourgeoisie into the progressive era. There were populists,
> socialists, and labor radicals who severely disturbed the peace, and
> TR & Co. were in large part a response to that. (I was just reading a
> history of the events surrounding the Ludlow massacre that brought
> that home.) There's nothing analogous in Russia.
=======================================
That's quite true. But in addition to the need to dampen labour militancy
through labour market reform, it was also necessary to curb the family-based
monopolies which had become fetters on the further development of US
capitalism. There were pressures on the system from both the top and the
bottom. At both levels, it was a question of constraining anarchic relations
of production and promoting more orderly expansion within a framework of
greater state control. So too in Russia a century later - at least, in
relation to the freewheeling young capitalists who dominated the chaotic
Yeltsin era as surely as the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies did during
America's Gilded Age. Breaking or containing them was the task that awaited
the Putin government. That's what I had in mind in drawing the parallel.