this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Capital in Russia isn't controlled by a bourgeoisie structurally aligned with liberal values as in classic Marxism; it's controlled by an oligarchy descended partly from imperialist Soviet officials (e.g. Mr. Putin of the KGB) and partly from organized crime.
Sooo... what's the difference, again?
Capitalists can compete with one another without being thrown out of windows. Oligarchs can't.
Capitalists are oligarchs - so what's your point?
Mr. Bezos felt free to oppose Mr. Trump in ways that nobody in Russia feels free to oppose Mr. Putin, because they will be poisoned or thrown out a window if they do.
I'm no fan of Mr. Bezos, but this is nonetheless true. Capitalists in the West get away with shit that oligarchs in Russia would get murdered for. That is a distinction worth thinking about, even if they are all buttheads.
Again... capitalists are oligarchs - western media just refers to Russian capitalists as "oligarchs" because they want to (falsely) distance themselves from those "bad" Russian capitalists.
And no... Bezos's (supposed) "opposition" to Trump doesn't mean squat. The US oligarchy doesn't rest on a single strongman - there is no need to push oligarchs out of windows if all the oligarchs will act in the interests of the oligarchy anyway. This is not the case in Russia.
I hope you understand that what you're saying looks like an unfalsifiable conspiracy-theory to someone who doesn't share your specific assumptions.
There is no such thing as a "non-oligarchic" capitalist society - it's a feature of the system and not a flaw.
But you don't have to believe me.
There are things that are true about "Russian oligarchs" as a group that are not true of "American capitalists".
For example, the former are much more likely to be murdered by their own government.
That's an interesting fact and deserves explanation!
If X is just the same as Y, then X and Y should have all the same attributes. But they don't. Ignoring that observation is frothy madness.
I'm not exactly sure what it is you're having such difficulty with here... are you trying to say Russian capitalists aren't capitalists simply because they have to toe the line under a weak and paranoid strongman regime? I really wish capitalism was that fragile... but I'm afraid it isn't.
Your Marxism might not, but actual Marx certainly distinguished between England-style capitalism and what he called the Asiatic mode of production.
In classic Marxism, the economic conditions of a class generate political ideology as a superstructure.
Liberalism is the political ideology of the Western bourgeoisie, generated by an interest in both private property and social and industrial innovation. The bourgeois capitalist seeks to preserve private ownership of property while securing independence of his investment venture from the disapproval of earlier elite classes; thus the bourgeoisie favors liberal ideas such as "freedom of contract" and "freedom of the press" while scorning both traditional authorities (the church, the aristocracy) and populist or "Digger" radicalism.
The Russian oligarchic elite is not in that sort of socioeconomic situation, and so they don't generate the same sort of ideology.
I hope you've noticed that there's not really any separation between Russian "industrial capital", Russian "government", and Russian "organized crime". That is not the case under bourgeois liberal capitalism; those things are normally at least somewhat separated from one another by rival interests. In modern Russia those interests are united.