The Catastrophes of "Real Capitalism" (original) (raw)

Werewolves of Stalinism: Russia's Capitalists and their System

Modern Russian capitalism has dual origins, in the decay of the Soviet system and in the impact on Russia of world capitalism. An important transformation of the Soviet society, with private appropriation growing up on the basis of state property, became incarnate in today s private property when decisive support was provided by the West for Russia’s market reforms. Modern-day private property in Russia bears the birthmark of Stalinism in the violent reality that lies behind the facade of joint-stock companies, and it is because of this reality that the Russian bourgeoisie focuses on the extraction of short-term income in the form of insider rent. The latter is in fact a specific form of surplus value that distinguishes modern Russian capitalism and defines its fundamental character. The business culture that has arisen on this basis is not conducive to long-term investment or to the efficient management of production, while the predatory methods of labour exploitation that are employed serve to ensure that Russian society is characterised by mass poverty and profound social conflict. With private property resting on violence, there is no possibility of creating a real democracy.

The Shallow and Uneven Diffusion of Capitalism into Everyday Life in Post-Soviet Moscow

2010

A small but rapidly growing body of scholars of contemporary economic development in both Eastern and Central Europe and beyond have begun to question the narrative of impending capitalist hegemony. The aim of this article is to contribute to this emergent stream of thought by first developing a conceptual framework to map the incursion of capitalism and persistence of multiple economic practises in any economy and second, applying this to understanding the everyday economy of post-Soviet Moscow.

Utopias of return: notes on (post-)Soviet culture and its frustrated (post-)modernisation

Studies in East European Thought, 2011

This article discusses the role of representative strategies in twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Russia interacted with Europe in the Marquis de Custine’s time via discourse and representation, in the twentieth century Russia re-entered European consciousness by simulating ‘socialism’. In the post-Soviet era, the nation aspired to be admitted to the ‘European house’ by simulating a ‘market economy’, ‘democracy’, and ‘postmodernism’. But in reality Russia remains the same country as before, torn between the reality of its own helplessness and poverty, and the messianic myth of its own greatness. Post-Soviet culture is a product of Stalinist culture. ‘Russian postmodernism’ was created less by artists, writers, poets, and film makers, than by theorists and critics. At the beginning of the 1990s, a need to describe contemporary Russian culture emerged. In this way, ‘Russian postmodernism’ arose from the desire to ‘sell’ projects in the West—from the simple obligation to describe socialist experience in concrete, transferable terms that Westerners could grasp. The nostalgia experienced by the post-Soviet era creates its own simulated postmodernism, in which the matrices of the construction and functioning of culture cease to be connected with specifically Russian (Soviet) history, and instead reproduce Western models almost exactly. We are facing yet another attempt at radical cultural modernization. If the first attempt (revolutionary culture) was the most original and fruitful, and the second (Stalinist culture, Socialist Realism) was less productive but still original, then the third, post-Soviet, attempt (rich in individuality, but lacking in original ideas or style) is for the moment the least productive and original. If we exclude sots-art (conceptualism) from ‘Russian postmodernism’, there would be nothing left. Clearly, an original cultural model in post-Soviet Russia will not take shape until original strategies for processing the country’s cultural past are developed. In their turn, these strategies can only result from a radical transformation of post-Soviet identity into a new, genuinely Russian one.

Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

Continuum, 2012

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus to founder in order to escape and express itself. This paper takes a different view, arguing that the transformation of Soviet citizens into the self-regulating, entrepreneurial subjects of liberal democracy and the market economy was no less impressive a feat of social engineering than the transition from state-owned to private property and unfettered business competition. Maintaining that mass entertainment was one of the critical means employed by the new post-Soviet business elite for preparing Russians to embrace an unregulated model of capitalism and a consumerist culture, we offer a multi-faceted analysis of one of the ideological apparatuses of the post-communist condition – the Russian adaptation of the television game show, Wheel of Fortune – which were mobilized to dismantle and reshape a complexly overdetermined system of values, beliefs, and attitudes in the process of what we call the production of the capitalist subject.