Reply To: Russian Tensions

TN states – “This is what an ideological snowflake looks like. Yes, Gazprom makes a profit but the shareholders are the Russian people not a select group of capitalist investors.”

Sadly TN once again trips over his ill informed boot laces. Gazprom is jointly owned between the Russian State (approximately 51%) and individual and institutional shareholders. So TN and the clown from the video are incorrect when they say that the profits from use of natural resources in Russia are not used to increase the wealth of a select few.

What then about the 51% state owned part of Gazprom. TN’s lazy source cites Marx to support his argument regarding state capitalism, yet Engels wrote in 1880:

“But neither the conversion into joint stock companies nor into state property deprives the productive forces of their character as capital. In the case of joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, too, is only the organization with which bourgeois society provides itself in order to maintain the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against encroachments either by the workers or by individual capitalists. The modern state, whatever its form, is then the state of the capitalists, the ideal collective body of all the capitalists. The more productive forces it takes over as its property, the more it becomes the real collective body of the capitalists, the more citizens it exploits. The workers remain wage-earners, proletarians. The capitalist relationship isn’t abolished; it is rather pushed to the extreme. But at this extreme it is transformed into its opposite. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but it contains within itself the formal means, the key to the solution.”

So presumably TN considers Engels an ideological snowflake.

As to the Leninist concept of imperialism, which Johnny Mercer correctly analyses as follows “It almost requires a kind of conspiracy theory to suppose that capitalists give their workers more than their labour power in order to bribe them.”

When asked about how this bribe occurs and what the mechanism is by which the surplus value of third world workers is exploited by one capitalist enterprise (capitalist A) and a portion of it is consciously identified to be redistributed by western workers and then consciously distributed by other capitalist enterprises (capitalist B), Leninist supporters of this theory tend to fall silent.

Similarly when asked why on earth Capitalist A would give up part of their profits to support capitalist B, they either remain silent or try to explain that the invisible cabal that run the system want to ensure that western workers are getting a more wealth than they produce in order to keep them from turning revolutionary!

This leads to the question, why are the third world workers not likely to turn into revolutionaries as a result of their double exploitation, when western workers need to be bribed not to become revolutionary.

Of course the whole shaky edifice of Lenin’s theory of Imperialism is full of holes. I wouldn’t criticise TN re this, it is very clear he has never read anything by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxembourg, etc. As his replies on this forum shows, TN wallows and basks in his lack of knowledge and his scant grasp on Marxist theory, rather like a pig wallowing in its own shite.