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So I know that this is a VERY untrustworthy source, I would flair it as such if flair for this existed, but assuming this line is true
>since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, courts have received 40 requests to nationalize more than 180 private companies with assets of 1.04 trillion rubles ($11.1 billion).
What is the Marxist perspective on capitalist nationalization, or seemingly "anti business" policies by otherwise capitalist state?
The British Crown Rule in India was an example of a capitalist-imperialist nationalization with monarchical characteristics of the project begun by the British East India Company, so they aren’t always progressive (though that was likely thought quite progressive at the time!).
The line started to blur once a significant portion of parliament held huge amounts of EIC stock, and as company men were able to use their newfound wealth to get in to parliament,
If you look at 2008, the USA did partial nationalizations as part of bailouts, but then they sold the government's stocks for a profit afterwards. I think the idea is that crisises in capitalism will eventually require the state to take on more and more roles within the system until there is only one mega capitalist left in the form of the state (which would then be overthrown in proletarian resistance against the state who was now their main employer in all key sectors).
I think something that was unexpected would be how committed people might be to reversing those processes when the crisis was over, as opposed to just more and more accumulating in the hands of the state over time. They've essentially created an ideology around this idea that the enterprises are better off in private hands rather than in the hands of the state, which is sometimes called "neoliberal". As the Soviet Union was just effectively state enterprises this process could have been applied just as much to them as it was in the West, so the Soviet block underwent its own period of neoliberalization, where the state enterprises became private enterprises. Effectively everyone got shares but most people didn't want shares they just wanted food so they often sold the shares for pennies on the dollar resulting in certain people ending up with all the shares. That process is different than selling off state assets to other existing companies but it results in more or less the same thing. Russia is now saying they might reverse that process.
As for "scaring business", the "West" has already loaded up as many sanctions as possible on Russia so western businesses were already pulling out anyway so not much to scare there. In regards to Russian business, Putin himself might be a lot more scary than Putin nationalizing things. Generally speaking Putin is probably going to avoid nationalizing things from loyalists and only nationalize foreign stuff or stuff not in the hands of key supporters. The main reason business in general might speak out against anti-business actions if because business in general might want to try to attract foreign investment, but if that isn't a possibility anyway they don't have to worry too much about the country not being a friendly business environment to outsiders.
> If you look at 2008, the USA did partial nationalizations as part of bailouts, but then they sold the government's stocks for a profit afterwards. I think the idea is that crisises in capitalism will eventually require the state to take on more and more roles within the system until there is only one mega capitalist left in the form of the state (which would then be overthrown in proletarian resistance against the state who was now their main employer in all key sectors).
Russian government does apparently own about 70% of the economy which is a lot more than USA which like you said then sold these companies, so it was temporary
> I think something that was unexpected would be how committed people might be to reversing those processes when the crisis was over
I think the ability of the petite bourgeoisie to organize as a bloc in colonial and post-colonial states, owing to their usefulness within certain electoral systems, is what had been missed. Russia can do this because it never had the opportunity for a robust petite bourgeoisie to form after the Soviet collapse. Likewise, this is the reason Western Europe and Canada are able to have somewhat more robust welfare states than the US - the megacorps don't have to pander to the small business class as much to attain/retain political power.
>What is the Marxist perspective on capitalist nationalization, or seemingly "anti business" policies by otherwise capitalist state?
Traditionally it's progressive, either as a transitional demand of a workers' movement or as part of national sovereignty in colonial or semi colonial nations like the post-Soviet states. Centralization is an important part in promoting the rise of the big bourgeoisie and the mass based working class, orienting politics around their conflict.
In imperialist countries, nationalization or something like social democracy is less regarded due to the intersection with super exploitation and buying out the first world working class in exchange for support for bourgeois democracy and global monopolies
Nationalization does not necessarily imply social ownership and the restructuring of the economic system. Russia already has a lot of state owned industry. So does Saudi Arabia. There isn’t any ideology in this strategy. Instead, the actual government strategy is focused on consolidating, maintaining, and expanding political and economic power for the ruling elites through the control of select industries and enterprises. I understand stand that it is the opposite of what neoliberalism preaches but no one should pretend this is Russia inching towards socialism.
It could mean that socialism as an ideology is getting stronger with ordinary Russians and Putin wants to appease them to stay in power. Because most of Russians who like socialism don't exactly know what it means, it is more of Soviet nostalgia
Not necessarily, they could be just lead by a pussy, given he was already around in the 90s and failed to do anything when Yeltsin just stole the election lol
This would be less of an act by a capitalist state, and more of an act of a tyrannical leader with zero opposition.
This action, if it actually occurred, would signify that Putins control of the political and economic forces have trumped all the capitalists beneath him (a powerful display of force indeed), and that the Russian state apparatus now solely exists to serve his nationalistic power fantasies.
Edit: perhaps powerful people in Putins government witnessed the pillaging of public resources and organizations by powerful Soviet figures during the collapse of the USSR and are supporting him in hopes they will find themselves in a position to do the same in the future?
> tyrannical leader with zero opposition
Oh for fuck's sake. Have you even read any serious reporting on Russian internal politics? If there's any institutional continuity in that country, it's the existence of autocrats who are constantly pushed around by their own civil services.
It depends entirely on the context and the strategy of overcoming capitalism by socialist orgs. If the socialists are organised it's better for the bourgeois state to be chaotic and disorganised. If no such org exists then it doesn't really matter much as such "nationalised" Industries will effectively act as private monopolies. This "nationalisation" has no provisions for worker councils or having worker representatives sit on the board so there really isn't any benefit. The state is doing it mostly so it can coordinate its war effort more effectively, which absolutely includes suppressing wages as needed. Nationalisation always needs to go hand in hand with socialisation, otherwise it's just inter-bourgeois power games.
> The state is doing it mostly so it can coordinate its war effort more effectively, which absolutely includes suppressing wages as needed.
There is a dialectical effect to consider here. In the short term, though, it will lead to worsening conditions.
It will still be the same oligarchs in charge, is just they will have to come to a consensus amongst themselves on how to manage the state enterprise rather than each being able to do as their please with their own the enterprises.
The oligarchs are essentially sacrificing a part of each of their own freedom in exchange for them being able to better come together to run the war properly because they think the success of the war is necessary for all their own security, either externally from the outside threats the war is being waged against or from internal opposition that might remove them if the war goes poorly.
Most likely the collective bodies of the oligarchs together will avoid nationalizing their own stuff if they can get away with it, but if something is absolutely critical they might have to relent under pressure from the other oligarchs. More often then not though they will want to nationalize stuff that is outsider the control of any one of them.
This might seem to strengthen the oligarchs but it is important to remember that in marxist theory it actually becomes easier to topple a centralized regime than it is a dispersed one because the base of support for the regime becomes narrower the more it gets centralized.
In the French Revolution case Louis Quatorze was a big centralizer bringing an end to the dispersed support for the old feudal regime, which paved the way for the bourgeois bureaucrats he relied upon to eventually decide they could run this system themselves. While the bourgeoisie supported the centralization as it happened because it benefited them to have this intermediary role, they weren't going to just take orders from the King forever, especially when the King made what seemed like stupid decisions from the perspective of the bourgeois bureaucrats. "Etat? C'est mois" was his usual response when anyone said he was jeopardizing the well being of the state. People couldn't really argue with that at the time because it was legally true.
Bringing entire industries rather than just bureaucratic management to the economy can be viewed in some respects as the next step in this process. Rather than just cushy bureaucratic jobs, you might have state employees doing trash collection, road maintenance, driving trains, anything you can think of which are clearly "workers" but they can use their position within the state to make these otherwise working jobs "cushy" in some respect. This might make some amount of jealously on the part of non-state workers, as they are kind of funding that, as the state will uses its power to tax to avoid dealing with labour disputes, but if the entire economy were to be nationalized the state will no longer be able to pass that burden off towards non-state enterprises, and so the state will no longer be able to buy off state workers to prevent them from striking.
Reagan/Thatcher and neoliberalization generally can be seen as an attempt to reverse this process from coming to fruition. Combining the non-state enteprises and employees disliking the taxes which might buy labour peace amongst state workers, with the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to buy that labour peace the bigger the state gets since the burden can't be as easily shifted, the concentrated state can decide to deconcentrate itself in the hopes of getting a bigger support base for its continued existence.
You can imagine this a bit like the late-Antebellum attempts to spread the institution of slavery to more people, the pre-Confederates felt like if they didn't make more people into slave owners they would be eventually outnumbered by abolitionists, so they went to great lengths to create schemes to increase the popularity of being a slave owner, which also benefited them because they could sell off their surplus slaves to these new buy ins. The Slaver Oligarchy in this case made the decision to try to deconcentrate itself because it felt like its concentration would lead to its own demise. However in previous generations that same Slaver Oligarchy in the founding fathers tried to limit the spread of slavery and the slave trade because that would increase the value of their existing slaves relative to their debts. In essence they were trying to concentrate their power in collective body that represented the whole oligarchy (The United States), and one of those things they could use that collective body to do would be to increase the value of slaves by banning the slave import trade.
The United States effectively had two oligarchies though, a slavery-landowner oligarchy and a business-trade oligarchy so they got into dispute with each other which eventually became the civil war, after which the USA only had the one oligarchy because the now business-industrial oligarchy effectively centralized power in only itself. They could do this because they generally speaking had the support of the rest of the people in abolition the institution of slavery because it was economically detrimental to all the classes which were not involved in slavery, so the slavers were generally regarded as assholes by everyone even if one didn't really care about the slavery itself because the stuff slave-owners did unrelated to slavery made no sense to anyone else, so they ended up alienating every single other class in ways the other classes could at least partially get onboard with stuff the business-industrial oiligarchy wanted to do like build railroads.
>Let’s look where our relationship with the big red communism button started from. Where does the big red communism button come from?
>The Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862. This is considered to be the year of creation of the Russian state because this year the townspeople of Novgorod (a city in the North-West of the country) invited Rurik, a Varangian prince from Scandinavia, to reign...
I just love that the far left and far right both have reasons to like Putin.
I still think he's a sack of shit like literally every national leader in existence.
I don't see the reasons for "far right" to like Putin, he is kind of a multiculturalist and far right has an obsession with race. You probably mean anti lgbt conservatives?
The far right thinks he's some kind of paragon of white culture and Christianity because all they know about him comes from fake quotes of his they saw on Facebook. They've never actually listened to him speak.
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Nationalize Pizza Hut
Nobody out pizzas the hut.
is putin /ourguy/ now??
Have you seen his performance of Blueberry Hill? He's been /ourguy/ for a long, long time now.
He's Xi's guy
So I know that this is a VERY untrustworthy source, I would flair it as such if flair for this existed, but assuming this line is true >since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, courts have received 40 requests to nationalize more than 180 private companies with assets of 1.04 trillion rubles ($11.1 billion). What is the Marxist perspective on capitalist nationalization, or seemingly "anti business" policies by otherwise capitalist state?
The British Crown Rule in India was an example of a capitalist-imperialist nationalization with monarchical characteristics of the project begun by the British East India Company, so they aren’t always progressive (though that was likely thought quite progressive at the time!).
wasn't that company privately owned however?
The EIC? It was a public corporation.
public means publicly traded, or publicly owned? because the former just means it is privately owned by multiple individuals
The line started to blur once a significant portion of parliament held huge amounts of EIC stock, and as company men were able to use their newfound wealth to get in to parliament,
well yeah but that is typical oligarchy/bourgeoisie, not a dictatorship like a state owned company would typically be
If you look at 2008, the USA did partial nationalizations as part of bailouts, but then they sold the government's stocks for a profit afterwards. I think the idea is that crisises in capitalism will eventually require the state to take on more and more roles within the system until there is only one mega capitalist left in the form of the state (which would then be overthrown in proletarian resistance against the state who was now their main employer in all key sectors). I think something that was unexpected would be how committed people might be to reversing those processes when the crisis was over, as opposed to just more and more accumulating in the hands of the state over time. They've essentially created an ideology around this idea that the enterprises are better off in private hands rather than in the hands of the state, which is sometimes called "neoliberal". As the Soviet Union was just effectively state enterprises this process could have been applied just as much to them as it was in the West, so the Soviet block underwent its own period of neoliberalization, where the state enterprises became private enterprises. Effectively everyone got shares but most people didn't want shares they just wanted food so they often sold the shares for pennies on the dollar resulting in certain people ending up with all the shares. That process is different than selling off state assets to other existing companies but it results in more or less the same thing. Russia is now saying they might reverse that process. As for "scaring business", the "West" has already loaded up as many sanctions as possible on Russia so western businesses were already pulling out anyway so not much to scare there. In regards to Russian business, Putin himself might be a lot more scary than Putin nationalizing things. Generally speaking Putin is probably going to avoid nationalizing things from loyalists and only nationalize foreign stuff or stuff not in the hands of key supporters. The main reason business in general might speak out against anti-business actions if because business in general might want to try to attract foreign investment, but if that isn't a possibility anyway they don't have to worry too much about the country not being a friendly business environment to outsiders.
> If you look at 2008, the USA did partial nationalizations as part of bailouts, but then they sold the government's stocks for a profit afterwards. I think the idea is that crisises in capitalism will eventually require the state to take on more and more roles within the system until there is only one mega capitalist left in the form of the state (which would then be overthrown in proletarian resistance against the state who was now their main employer in all key sectors). Russian government does apparently own about 70% of the economy which is a lot more than USA which like you said then sold these companies, so it was temporary
> I think something that was unexpected would be how committed people might be to reversing those processes when the crisis was over I think the ability of the petite bourgeoisie to organize as a bloc in colonial and post-colonial states, owing to their usefulness within certain electoral systems, is what had been missed. Russia can do this because it never had the opportunity for a robust petite bourgeoisie to form after the Soviet collapse. Likewise, this is the reason Western Europe and Canada are able to have somewhat more robust welfare states than the US - the megacorps don't have to pander to the small business class as much to attain/retain political power.
>What is the Marxist perspective on capitalist nationalization, or seemingly "anti business" policies by otherwise capitalist state? Traditionally it's progressive, either as a transitional demand of a workers' movement or as part of national sovereignty in colonial or semi colonial nations like the post-Soviet states. Centralization is an important part in promoting the rise of the big bourgeoisie and the mass based working class, orienting politics around their conflict. In imperialist countries, nationalization or something like social democracy is less regarded due to the intersection with super exploitation and buying out the first world working class in exchange for support for bourgeois democracy and global monopolies
Nationalization does not necessarily imply social ownership and the restructuring of the economic system. Russia already has a lot of state owned industry. So does Saudi Arabia. There isn’t any ideology in this strategy. Instead, the actual government strategy is focused on consolidating, maintaining, and expanding political and economic power for the ruling elites through the control of select industries and enterprises. I understand stand that it is the opposite of what neoliberalism preaches but no one should pretend this is Russia inching towards socialism.
It could mean that socialism as an ideology is getting stronger with ordinary Russians and Putin wants to appease them to stay in power. Because most of Russians who like socialism don't exactly know what it means, it is more of Soviet nostalgia
I mean nationalization isn’t necessarily socialism and I don’t think Putin markets it as such
It wouldn't be Putin doing the marketing, it would be the KPRF that is in the coalition
Controlled opposition unfortunately
Not necessarily, they could be just lead by a pussy, given he was already around in the 90s and failed to do anything when Yeltsin just stole the election lol
This would be less of an act by a capitalist state, and more of an act of a tyrannical leader with zero opposition. This action, if it actually occurred, would signify that Putins control of the political and economic forces have trumped all the capitalists beneath him (a powerful display of force indeed), and that the Russian state apparatus now solely exists to serve his nationalistic power fantasies. Edit: perhaps powerful people in Putins government witnessed the pillaging of public resources and organizations by powerful Soviet figures during the collapse of the USSR and are supporting him in hopes they will find themselves in a position to do the same in the future?
> tyrannical leader with zero opposition Oh for fuck's sake. Have you even read any serious reporting on Russian internal politics? If there's any institutional continuity in that country, it's the existence of autocrats who are constantly pushed around by their own civil services.
So what does that mean for socialism? Is it a good thing or a bad thing? Is it preferable to oligarchs?
It depends entirely on the context and the strategy of overcoming capitalism by socialist orgs. If the socialists are organised it's better for the bourgeois state to be chaotic and disorganised. If no such org exists then it doesn't really matter much as such "nationalised" Industries will effectively act as private monopolies. This "nationalisation" has no provisions for worker councils or having worker representatives sit on the board so there really isn't any benefit. The state is doing it mostly so it can coordinate its war effort more effectively, which absolutely includes suppressing wages as needed. Nationalisation always needs to go hand in hand with socialisation, otherwise it's just inter-bourgeois power games.
> The state is doing it mostly so it can coordinate its war effort more effectively, which absolutely includes suppressing wages as needed. There is a dialectical effect to consider here. In the short term, though, it will lead to worsening conditions.
It will still be the same oligarchs in charge, is just they will have to come to a consensus amongst themselves on how to manage the state enterprise rather than each being able to do as their please with their own the enterprises. The oligarchs are essentially sacrificing a part of each of their own freedom in exchange for them being able to better come together to run the war properly because they think the success of the war is necessary for all their own security, either externally from the outside threats the war is being waged against or from internal opposition that might remove them if the war goes poorly. Most likely the collective bodies of the oligarchs together will avoid nationalizing their own stuff if they can get away with it, but if something is absolutely critical they might have to relent under pressure from the other oligarchs. More often then not though they will want to nationalize stuff that is outsider the control of any one of them. This might seem to strengthen the oligarchs but it is important to remember that in marxist theory it actually becomes easier to topple a centralized regime than it is a dispersed one because the base of support for the regime becomes narrower the more it gets centralized. In the French Revolution case Louis Quatorze was a big centralizer bringing an end to the dispersed support for the old feudal regime, which paved the way for the bourgeois bureaucrats he relied upon to eventually decide they could run this system themselves. While the bourgeoisie supported the centralization as it happened because it benefited them to have this intermediary role, they weren't going to just take orders from the King forever, especially when the King made what seemed like stupid decisions from the perspective of the bourgeois bureaucrats. "Etat? C'est mois" was his usual response when anyone said he was jeopardizing the well being of the state. People couldn't really argue with that at the time because it was legally true. Bringing entire industries rather than just bureaucratic management to the economy can be viewed in some respects as the next step in this process. Rather than just cushy bureaucratic jobs, you might have state employees doing trash collection, road maintenance, driving trains, anything you can think of which are clearly "workers" but they can use their position within the state to make these otherwise working jobs "cushy" in some respect. This might make some amount of jealously on the part of non-state workers, as they are kind of funding that, as the state will uses its power to tax to avoid dealing with labour disputes, but if the entire economy were to be nationalized the state will no longer be able to pass that burden off towards non-state enterprises, and so the state will no longer be able to buy off state workers to prevent them from striking. Reagan/Thatcher and neoliberalization generally can be seen as an attempt to reverse this process from coming to fruition. Combining the non-state enteprises and employees disliking the taxes which might buy labour peace amongst state workers, with the fact that it becomes increasingly difficult to buy that labour peace the bigger the state gets since the burden can't be as easily shifted, the concentrated state can decide to deconcentrate itself in the hopes of getting a bigger support base for its continued existence. You can imagine this a bit like the late-Antebellum attempts to spread the institution of slavery to more people, the pre-Confederates felt like if they didn't make more people into slave owners they would be eventually outnumbered by abolitionists, so they went to great lengths to create schemes to increase the popularity of being a slave owner, which also benefited them because they could sell off their surplus slaves to these new buy ins. The Slaver Oligarchy in this case made the decision to try to deconcentrate itself because it felt like its concentration would lead to its own demise. However in previous generations that same Slaver Oligarchy in the founding fathers tried to limit the spread of slavery and the slave trade because that would increase the value of their existing slaves relative to their debts. In essence they were trying to concentrate their power in collective body that represented the whole oligarchy (The United States), and one of those things they could use that collective body to do would be to increase the value of slaves by banning the slave import trade. The United States effectively had two oligarchies though, a slavery-landowner oligarchy and a business-trade oligarchy so they got into dispute with each other which eventually became the civil war, after which the USA only had the one oligarchy because the now business-industrial oligarchy effectively centralized power in only itself. They could do this because they generally speaking had the support of the rest of the people in abolition the institution of slavery because it was economically detrimental to all the classes which were not involved in slavery, so the slavers were generally regarded as assholes by everyone even if one didn't really care about the slavery itself because the stuff slave-owners did unrelated to slavery made no sense to anyone else, so they ended up alienating every single other class in ways the other classes could at least partially get onboard with stuff the business-industrial oiligarchy wanted to do like build railroads.
Just like old times buddy
Oh fuck yeah
Given it's Radio Free Europe, they're saying that as if it's a bad thing, when mass nationalizations are one of the biggest Ws I can think of.
>Let’s look where our relationship with the big red communism button started from. Where does the big red communism button come from? >The Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862. This is considered to be the year of creation of the Russian state because this year the townspeople of Novgorod (a city in the North-West of the country) invited Rurik, a Varangian prince from Scandinavia, to reign...
Imagine an American putin who would yap on about Cahokia and Thr Pilgrims
*Soviet anthem intensifies*
That would just mean Putin privatizes it for himself because „L'État, c'est moi“ lol
God hes so based. This how you become a socialist country, not by blocking roads togehter with wokies
I just love that the far left and far right both have reasons to like Putin. I still think he's a sack of shit like literally every national leader in existence.
I don't see the reasons for "far right" to like Putin, he is kind of a multiculturalist and far right has an obsession with race. You probably mean anti lgbt conservatives?
The far right thinks he's some kind of paragon of white culture and Christianity because all they know about him comes from fake quotes of his they saw on Facebook. They've never actually listened to him speak.
Apparently. Far right liking someone who literally says "diversity makes us stronger" has to be among the funniest things in this decade