Russian Capitalism Today: A Case of ‘Primacy of Politics’? 23.06.2022 by Jairus Banaji
Integrationism: Trotsky believed it was impossible for the nascent Soviet state to industrialize without drawing on the resources of the world economy. Hymer’s conception of the integration of the world economy being driven by a cross-penetration of each others’ domestic markets. It foregrounds the growing mobility and integration of capital against either overwhelming unilateral dominance or conflict-ridden rivalry between firms and their respective national states. In other words, economic integration across national boundaries presupposes peaceful relations between capitalist states.
‘Sectors of capital’:earlier dominance of the steel and mining industries was now more or less over.
Primacy of Politics’ Reviewing Tim Mason’s argument in 1970, Peter Sedgwick summed up its essential thesis by saying that National Socialism displayed a ‘primacy of politics’ in which ideological goals determined ‘the performance of the economic sphere so radically that the whole system cuts loose from any rationality of self-reproduction’. under capitalism ‘there is always something irrational about the assertion of a primacy of politics’. major shift that occurred in the balance of power between private capital and the state as Putin promoted state corporations and recovered control of the oil & gas industry against the earlier dominance of the oligarchs. But the oligarchs or billionaires themselves were not a static group. The most powerful of them, Khodorkovsky, was destroyed by Putin after he was arrested and jailed in the mid-2000s, On the other hand, many more billionaires would emerge in Russia in the 2000s and while the global financial crash destroyed many of those fortunes, especially in banking, the bulk of this class of capitalists could show a more diversified economic base by 2015 compared to the assets they owned in 2005. By 2015, however, real estate, trade, chemicals and telecom had all emerged as newer sectors of capital accumulation The late 1990s and early 2000s saw staggering levels of hostile takeovers which were simply coerced or violent seizures of capital assets that made up a corporate raiding industry in which state officials and businessmen worked closely together.
Putin set out to reverse the relationship between state and capital by recentralizing the state (not least against the hold of regional governors), consolidating its command over business and enormously tightening his own grip over its various apparatuses, especially the security services that he sprang from. A key difference between Yeltsin’s regime and the one that followed is that Putin broke the political power of the oligarchs.
As oil and gas production replaced coal as the backbone of Russia’s economy, this weakened the structural position of industrial workers, Stephen Crowley arguesLike working classes worldwide, it has to build more powerful union organizations before it can start flexing political muscle, but it’s worth noting that in Belarus, in the mass demonstrations of 2020, workers formed strike committees in leading state-owned enterprises and were a conspicuous part of the movement against Lukashenko, with demands denouncing his rigging of elections and police brutality. This was Lukashenko’s ‘traditional constituency’ rising up against him and he was visibly shocked. The lesson here is that workers acted as part of a wider mass struggle for democracy, as indeed they did in Egypt in 2011. So that leaves the Russian grassroots opposition which has partly coalesced around Navalny.