Putin: Great Visionary or Just Lost

[Lauren Johnson]

Just been revisiting this old Peter Dale Scott article in light of recent events & thought others might be interested:

http://www.lobster-magazine.co.uk/articl...l-drug.htm

Thanks for putting this up. I'm still reading, but it is most interesting!

[Lauren Johnson]

The global system: gangsterism.

Turning Russia into a resource colonial, mono-(anti-culture) appendix of global capitalism under Putin and his cronies:
Putin's and the Kremlin's non-existent "economic genius" and performance is almost entirely (by 95%) determined by the world prices of oil and gas and their fluctuations (besides the unsustainable levels of theft, plunder and graft for which they are fully responsible). In other words, world prices of oil and gas explain nearly all the overall dynamic (that is not the use or distribution) of the Russian economy under its regressive oligarchic rule:

In the 1930s the USSR went on accelerated industrialization in order to save the country and win the war with fascism. In Yeltsin's and Putin's Russia, the ruling mafia went on accelerated looting of the corpse of the Soviet Union and the plunder of the country in order to catch up on the riches and fun they "missed" because of the Bolshevik revolution and socialism, trying to make fast the trillions needed to boost their confidence and self-esteem. Destruction of the country is for this mafia but a collateral damage which only adds yet another kink to their criminal high.

The problem of capitalism in Russia is greatly exacerbated and even multiplied by the character of Russian post-Soviet capitalism, which is predatory, colonial and atavistic.

Russian oligarchs and their ruling Putinist system cost Russia trillions of dollars siphoned off and hidden largely in the "anti-Russian" West, while legislating one of the world's lowest minimal wage of some $100 a month. So who is in this situation the most successful manipulator? The West? Russian oligarchs? The Putin regime? The liberals? Or the believers and investors in Putin's genius?


The Western strategy is thus almost fabulously fail-safe--having cultivated thieving mafia oligarchs in Russia, they have also cultivated together with the Kremlin (just like Yanukovich also helped to cultivate the Ukrainian nationalists and fascists) the official opposition (and seemingly the only possible opposition) to it, thus seemingly leaving no choice between these two wings of oligarchs. This strategy is fail-safe because what used to be independent thinking has been largely shut down. Hegel would have approved.


As times goes, Navalny is reminding me more and more of Vaclav Havel who was jointly cultivated both by the West and the late Soviet regime looking for betraying all and everything as their mutually acceptable anti-communist.


"All the friends of the Russian mafia unite around the head and PR image of its head V.V. Putin!"

Source