A Secret Handshake between Enemies

What Gorbachev’s death obscures about socialism, capitalism, empire…

Today’s newsletter goes into history, geopolitics, strategies of socialism and how to actually achieve a world free of capitalism.

When Mikhail Gorbachev died a couple weeks ago, Western liberals celebrated his life and Stalinists celebrated his death. What they shared was that both camps were hypocritically obscuring their actual relationship to liberalization in Russia and its many effects.

Liberals claim to champion Gorbachev because he putatively put human rights and freedoms first; he let the Iron Curtain fall even though it meant the end of the USSR. However, poverty exploded in the ten years after the USSR’s collapse, with 3-7 million excess deaths as a direct result of the economic “openness” or liberalization Gorbachev promoted, so celebrating him is calloused, to say the least.

However, Gorbachev alone was not responsible: the dominant faction in the Communist Party was in favor of opening up the Soviet economy to a more free market style of capitalism. Throughout the 90s, Yeltsin directed a continuation of the economic policies associated with Gorbachev, and Putin, a rising figure in Yeltsin’s administration, also favored continuity. That Putin snubbed Gorbachev’s funeral was a purely political gesture, as Mikhail is associated with collapse and mass poverty and highly unpopular among the Russian public.

Putin’s politic sleight of hand is parallel to proponents of centralized state socialism, Stalinists, portraying Gorbachev as some kind of deviation in Soviet history; doing so places all the blame on a convenient figurehead and helps them dodge responsibility for some unsavory aspects of their own political project. We can understand this better by tracing the trajectory of the USSR and Russia before and after Gorbachev’s famous policies of the late ‘80s.

Let’s start with recent history. Putin has pushed poverty down in Russia, but only on the basis of a politico-economic model that grew out of the liberalization and collapse that are associated, simplistically, with Gorbachev. In other words, the growth that Putin wants to take credit for is predicated on the poverty he wants to pass off on Gorbachev.

Great leaders throughout history have known that poverty and hunger are effective tools for disciplining their populations, especially when they need to change the rules of the game. Starvation is great for structural adjustment.

All of Russia’s industrial infrastructure needed to be cannibalized and capitalized for structural adjustment to take place. Once the rules of the game changed, as signalled by the State, all the future oligarchs had to focus on amassing capital (as a rule, these oligarchs had Party connections). They had to do so as quickly as possible, because in the old economy, power was determined by proximity to the committees and other State organs that moved Capital, and above all proximity to the committees that policed those organs; in the new economy, power is determined by direct access to Capital and the financial organs that invest it. However, one of Putin’s main contributions has been to ensure that in Russia, Capital is not private to the extent it is in Western democracies. On the contrary, corporate enterprises manage and invest Capital but the State determines the strategic direction of Capital as a unified whole. Of the six largest companies or conglomerates in Russia today (three in oil and gas, one in finance, one in transport, and one in armaments), three are publicly listed but majority state-owned, including the very largest and also the only of the six in finance. Of the other three however, only one is private, while two are fully state-owned.

Putin clipped the wings of oligarchs who challenged his dominance (I am the State, his actions have declared), and he has pushed industry into a vertically integrated, nationalist model, creating State-directed companies that mark a halfway point between the state-organized industry of the Stalinist period and the major strategic corporations in the US model (like Boeing) that are privately organized but integrated with the State through a funding-lobbying-regulating feedback loop.

With this historical perspective, several things start to become clear. First of all, there are broad similarities between the Great Famine engineered by Stalin in 1932-1933 and the hunger, pauperization, and death caused by the Soviet collapse in the 1990s. (And as an act of primitive accumulation, the former is broadly similar to the Irish Potato Famine caused by the British in the 19th century.) By stealing people’s safety nets (whether peasants’ access to their own produce in 1840s Ireland or the 1930s Soviet Union, or the population’s access to income, healthcare, and housing in the 1990s), State leaders deliberately plunge them into poverty so as to terrorize them, discipline them, and to change the social relationship, allowing capitalism to advance to a new stage that requires the working population to accept a different kind of social contract, different rules and expectations.

Capitalism does not go through changes simply to satisfy the mathematical need of Capital to grow; rather, it always refers back to society, to non-quantifiable relations of power that Marxism typically has a hard time accounting for. This is due to a complex host of reasons, but one rather simple one stands out: in any given moment, society carries within itself the power to destroy the State, and with it, capitalism. When society has risen up in the past and destroyed or dethroned one capitalist class but has been convinced by a new set of managers to stop short of destroying the State, after a time capitalism always reëmerges, as if by magic. The truth is, it never went away.

Here we can see that the State has always been the guiding force of Capital, not the other way around. And we can also see a sad fact that many leftists are going to have a hard time with: socialism was never anything more than an alternative stage in the multilinear development of capitalism.

True, in the first half of the 19th century, the term socialism meant something different. It was a utopian concept, an imaginative and diverse concept, and one that was frequently anticolonial, at least in potential, rather than explicitly colonial as was the variant that would become dominant around the time the International was forced to die an ignominious death in New York to purify it of the “unscientific” variants.

Throughout the entirety of the 20th century, in dozens of experiments, socialism always led straight back to capitalism. There is no other real world experience of socialism. It’s nothing but willful self-delusion to believe that socialism exists outside of capitalism. In fact, it’s a more effective way for a state to allow capitalism to develop in countries that have been pauperized and destabilized by a parasitic, nonstrategic bourgeoisie or aristocracy like the ones that existed in Russia, China, or Cuba before their respective revolutions.

Socialism is a path for capitalist development that temporarily allows for a higher standard of living for the lower classes. This is always and exclusively a result of an armed proletariat participating in the revolutionary process. The new social contract forged in the revolution is just that, a negotiated contract between an empowered proletariat and the Party leaders who wish to rule them, who constitute the nucleus of the new State. And both the imperative of developing productive forces and strengthening a State that implements the correct strategy for that development process ensure a social model that is extractivist and exploitive at its core.

Socialism allows the lower classes to have a higher standard of living for a few decades because it was only thanks to their armed efforts that capitalism was allowed to survive and advance in that particular country, freed from the dead weight of a previous bourgeoisie too parasitic to push capitalism to flee its own decadence (“progress”) and rescued from the danger of revolutionaries who dared to build a world free of any semblance of accumulation, enclosure, and oppression.

One particular heresy of Stalin’s was socialism in one country, the official betrayal of the dream of global revolution in favor of the USSR’s geopolitical interests. The lens of geopolitics reveals that the love and the hatred aimed at Gorbachev turn on the same chain of events. In 1988, Gorbachev bowed to pressure from independence movements in the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Moldova, and allowed limited reforms. In 1989, he refused to send the military to crush rebellious movements in the Warsaw Pact countries, leading directly to the end of the one-party system in East Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.

The Russian Empire reached its greatest geographical extension during the USSR, and Gorbachev let that empire fall apart. That is why the political class of the countries historically at odds with that empire claim to respect him so much.

The claim of continuity from the Russian Empire to the USSR is not a simplification. Empires can change their nomenclature, their principles of organization, and even adopt measures of multiethnic sensitivity. We can thank Queen Elizabeth for reminding us of this with her timely death, as it is certainly the case with the so-called British Commonwealth. As argued by the Barefoot Battalion, anarchist antimilitarists from Greece, a state’s geopolitical interests do not change just because a different political party is at the helm. Soviet military adventures in Afghanistan, their political manipulation of the revolution in China, their invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, all make that clear.

And that brings us back to Putin. Putin is a revanchist, trying to recover all the ground the Russian Empire lost in the 90s. That’s what he’s doing in Ukraine, in Chechnya, in Nagorno Karabakh, and with his influence politics in Syria, though today’s world is much more multi-polar than it was during the Cold War. And as for the wayward Stalinists of the 21st century, claiming one of the most racist, homophobic, sexist governments in a major country today as “antifascist,” they’re doing what they’ve always done, cheering on the opponents of the states that they have decided are the worst, the most capitalist, the most imperialist, as though politics could be reduced to a game of good guys and bad guys. But instead of “socialism in one country,” it’s “well, whatever the hell is going on in one country,” because at this point there is no ideology vibrant enough in Russia, nor in China for that matter, that can mask what is going on as anything other than the accumulation of Capital and jockeying for military advantage in the pursuit of state power.

However, others on the Left could take note. This macabre funeral should be more than just a spectacle of the bankruptcy of those two opposing factions. In other, smaller countries today, there are vibrant ideologies being used to justify questionable state strategies. Always pragmatic, and even with a real possibility of improving the conditions of the lower classes. At least for now.

We will stand against the military and financial interventionism of the corporations, the US, the British, the Spanish governments, always, as well as the interventions of newer players like the states of Brazil and Colombia. But championing pragmatic ideologies, glorifying the leaders of states who are occasional dissidents to the big bad countries we already know are on the wrong side of history, rarely does a favor to the communities and movements on the ground actually building a better world.

Postscript: Citations and Tangents

I highly recommend this text, “Militarism in the Age of Syriza”, by the Barefoot Battalion.

The text itself is an astute critique of the progressive political party, Syriza, that ruled Greece for a few years, but it also delivers an anarchist analysis of geopolitics that readers can apply to other situations across the world.

Also, one cranky note, Gorbachev should really be rendered as Gorbachyov, accent on the last syllable. I blame the English and their wretched transliteration track record.

And finally, it’s always a good time to read Voline’s history of the Russian Revolution! The Unknown Revolution

Texts of the Week

The latest text of the week is highly appropriate, given our look at the state usage of hunger in our newsletter today. “Food anarchy and the State monopoly on hunger” by Hannah Kass

Search my Twitter feed for the last *TextoftheWeek* to find out how to get a free copy of the article.

And before that it was “People vs. the United States” by the Conspiracy to Start a Riot, an attractive bit of agit prop that was handed out in the hundreds or thousands to try to explain the concept of social war to disaffected seeming people in the streets. Something that should happen more often.