--- On Sun, 2/22/09, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Well in Russia the state renationalized most
> of the energy industry several years ago.
> Putin, as president, went a long way towards
> reestablishing the leading role of the state in
> the management of Russia's economy. The
> state is a major stockholder in many of
> Russia's largest companies. One of Putin's
> big achievements was to rein in the oligarchs
> who had taken control of much of Russia's
> economy under Yeltsin.
>
> All this course takes us back to a lot
> of the old debates over the nature of
> the former Soviet Union: was it socialist?
> was it state capitalist? a degenerate workers
> state? a bureacratic collectivism?
>
> And to those old debates we can now
> can add debates over the nature of contemporary
> post-Soviet Russia. The post-Soviet regimes
> of Yeltsin and Putin had the avowed aim of
> restoring capitalism, but it seems that the
> reality there is perhaps more complex.
> They never could entirely obliterate Soviet-era
> institutions and practices, and now, I suspect,
> that the current world economic practice may
> force the current government of Medvedev
> and Putin to revive many of the old Soviet policies.
> I suppose that we might characterize the
> current Russian economy as a kind of
> state capitalism with some socialist characteristics.
>
> Jim F.
^^^^^^^^
CB: The overall historical process
might be zig-zagging toward
socialism, rather than moving
in a straight line. One step forward
two steps backward...one step right
two and a half steps to the left.
You do the hokey pokey and you
turn yourself around. That's
what it's all about.
>
>
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