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“Paper inflated is paper discounted. The vouchers were quickly swept into the hands of insiders, traders, and the in-place management of the newly “created” enterprises: in short, an emerging bourgeoisie.
That was the infamous “voucher” program 1992-1994. At its end, the voucher program accounted for seventy-seven percent of the large and medium sized industries and 82 percent of the small industries. These accounted for two-thirds of prior industrial output and sixty percent of the industrial working place. The great dismantling could begin.
The voucher program was followed and supplemented by auctions to privatize state industries, cash purchases of shares from the government and the industries themselves. So…….state and privatized banks made cash loans to the “management” of the industries in exchange for privatization shares in the industry. The management used privatization shares as collateral for the loans, with the cash circulating between the banks and management in order to repeat this daisy chain through the purchase of privatization shares in other industries, or to purchase “distressed” shares from enterprises unable to obtain bank loans, and thus vulnerable to underbidding in the auctions.
It was a mess. Everything was in order. It was the crime of the century. It was the apotheosis of daily pettiness. There was bribery, deceit, insider trading, insiders trading on insider information. It had all the characteristics of a day or a week or a year in the life of the New York Stock Exchange. “
Good description there of how the current Russian capitalist class originally accumulated their capital — as a result of the Russian government following the advice of American “free” market economists. In other words, the West created the oligarchs they now want to punish.
This is good. I hope we are circulating it widely on social media. I will put him and Marx on a couple of French-language ones. Some will understand English.
I notice that Lenin has a Canadian accent, so he too was a colonial.
I think he meant outside Ukraine. For the past two days they have been bombing airfields in the West of Ukraine through which NATO weapons have been or are likely to be delivered. It looks as if some NATO “military instructors” may have been killed at one of them. the so-called (Orwellianlly-called) “International Peacekeeping and Security Centre (IPSC)” near the Polish border.
(Indeed, the ‘Almost-War’ article in this month’s Standard now looks risible. But hey! Even socialists aren’t always right.)
This a bit unfair. It doesn’t take into consideration that the Socialist Standard is a monthly publication whose articles are prepared two weeks before the beginning of the month, which means it can’t deal with events that happen in between or during the cover month.
You are right that most of us here wrongly argued that Russia wouldn’t invade (except Cassandra, not sure that name is apt as she was cursed with being able to predict the future but that nobody would believe her — and he is now predicting WWIII). But that article didn’t express that view. It simply left the options open, beginning:
“They told us that 16 February would be the day that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. But diplomatic discussions continued. What had happened? Did Putin really intend to go to war? Or were what appeared to be war preparations merely a means to exert pressure and win concessions from the West?”
And of course the rest of the article puts the subject into historical context followed by a socialist political analysis.
Our dilemma for next month is whether WWIII will break out before it is published. But we could announce that on the cover and then claim that it was an April Fool.
Ukrainian stamp honouring Ukrainian ultranationalist and founder of the Banderites.
‘There are moments in history,” Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said this week, “when the great struggle between freedom and tyranny comes down to one fight in one place, which is waged for all of humanity.”’
So that’s what it is all about ! I was wondering. The struggle between Good and Evil, perhaps even the last and final one. In other words Amaggedon as “the site or time of a final and conclusive battle between the forces of good and evil”, “the last battle between good and evil before the Day of Judgement.”
Who is this Christian Freeland? Is she a Jehovah Witness?
I looked her upon Wikipedia and the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister is not a JW but something else emerged:
“Freeland’s maternal grandfather, Michael Chomiak (Ukrainian: Mykhailo Khomiak), had been a journalist before World War II. During the war in Nazi-occupied Poland and later in Nazi-occupied Austria he was chief editor of the Ukrainian antisemitic daily newspaper Krakivs’ki visti (News of Krakow) for the Nazi regime. After Chomiak’s death in 1984, John-Paul Himka, a professor of history at the University of Alberta, who was Chomiak’s son-in-law (and also Freeland’s uncle by marriage), used Chomiak’s records, including old issues of the newspaper, as the basis of several scholarly papers focused on the coverage of Soviet mass-murders of Ukrainian civilians. These papers also examined the use of these massacres as propaganda against Jews. In 2017, when Russian-affiliated websites[which?] further publicized Chomiak’s connection to Nazism, Freeland and her spokespeople responded by claiming that this was a Russian disinformation campaign during her appointment to the position of minister of foreign affairs. Her office later denied Chomiak ever collaborated with the Nazi Germany. However, reporting by The Globe and Mail showed that Freeland had known of her grandfather’s Nazi ties since at least 1996, when she helped edit a scholarly article by Himka for the Journal of Ukrainian Studies.”
Apparently her links (not just family) with Ukrainian ultranationalists in Canada are well known.
Just received a circular email from Борис (no, not that one) who seems to be a “Marxist” supporter of the Russian invasion. What did you say to him? Sounds as if it might have been a home truth or two.
“Boris Ikhlov, secretary of executive committee of Russia’ Marxist political union “Worker”, 5.3.2022
PS. Some English (or American) fool, Robin Cox, was unable to master my text and therefore did not come up with a greater stupidity than to accuse me of nationalism. He, with his zero education and chicken brains, still decided to teach me down! He did not accuse Ukrainians of fascism, who consider themselves a superior race. He did not accuse Americans of fascism who consider themselves a superior race, he accused me, who opposes American and Ukrainian fascism! In fact, this Englishman proved that he, like the whole of Great Britain, is a corrupt cattle licking Biden’s ass.
Robin Cox is not Marxist. He is not communist. He is not internationalist. He is anticommunist. He is Nazi.”Keep it up, comrade !
Why are we being told to write and say Kviv, Lviv and now Odesa instead of the long-standing and well-established English names and spellings for these places: Kiev, Lvov and Odessa?
This recalls the biblical story and may yet come to it:
“The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.“
And if it is not Russophobia or Ukrainomania, why don’t we write and say Moskva, Warszawa or, for that matter, Roma, Lisboa or Athena?
Here is how that group interprets the Ukraine state’s defence strategy:
“Ukraine has no bright future to offer to its patriots. In his well-received speeches the Ukrainian president executes the Ukrainian defence strategy. This strategy is prepared to sacrifice everything and everyone in Ukraine for Ukraine. Assuming that it cannot win a war against Russia, the Ukrainian military strategy is to mobilise its entire society in multiple defence “waves” until the “international community” ends the conflict “on favourable terms for Ukraine” (hence the insistence on no-fly zones to draw NATO into a direct confrontation with Russia). The president’s pitch essentially is: “die for the fatherland until NATO intervenes.”
YMS, as our war games expert, does this make sense as a strategy? It does seem to be that that is their strategy, cynical and a mug’s game for those called upon to die for the Ukrainian state as it is.
This statement on the war is good too. It’s from a group that is against the so-called nation-state ( from an anti-nationalism rather than an anarchist point of view) as well as capitalism. In German they call themselves “Gegen Kapital und Nation”.
A further reminder of NATO atrocities in its 1999 bombing campaign against what was left of Yugoslavia.
Labour — the “party of NATO — was then the government in Britain.
Someone has pointed out to me that the ultimate cause of the present situation is the global capitalist system of economic competition both between capitalist enterprises and between capitalist states. The economic stakes being sources of raw materials, markets, trade routes, investment outlets, and strategic points and areas to protect these.
So, to blame just one side, as in the leftist slogan “No to NATO expansionism” is to exonerate Russia. This was why I was feeling uneasy about reaching the conclusion that the war might be NATO’s fault and so in a way exonerate Russia to some extent. But, to avoid this, is precisely why we do not support organisations like the Stop the War Coalition (of which Corbyn was once the leader) who campaign under this slogan — even though of course we do want the war to stop.
I suppose the situation is similar to the interwar period last century. The world was already dominated by America, Britain and France, so any other capitalist power wanting to challenge this such as Germany and Japan was bound to appear to be the aggressor and in fact to have to be more aggressive. But the blame them exclusively for the war exonerated the already dominant capitalist states and to take their side.
In other words, we always need to bring into any explanation the nature of the whole global capitalist system as creating the conditions for wars.
Yes, we were wrong in not expecting Russia to invade. I still don’t think that that was Russia’s intention from the start but that the massing of troops on the Ukraine border was a move to strengthening its bargaining hand.
Where we went wrong was in underestimating the West’s (ie America’s) intransigence. I thought they would back down. The fact that they didn’t suggests that it was America’s intention to do down Russia from the start.
I know this view aligns with the leftist position that the present situation is due to “NATO expansionism”, but can anyone think of another explanation?
