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On 6/2/15 8:24 AM, A.R. G wrote:
Why is an oligarch standing up to Putin some kind of good thing?
It is a relatively good thing. If the oligarch insists on democratic rights, then it is an advance. For example, when members of the German elite decided to organize a coup against Hitler and surrender to the allies, it was a good thing even if the resulting regime would have been capitalist. The right of a journalist like Anna Politkovskaya to live and write is important. She and over 400 other journalists have been either jailed or killed since 1993. If elements within the Russian bourgeoisie take a stand against this, we should not regard this with indifference.
Without romanticizing Putin, it sounds as though Putin's move was a good one designed to restrain the influence of Russia's financial elite on policy. My understanding was that this was one thing Yeltsin refused to do, and for which Putin earned some praise.
That's the entire basis of Stephen F. Cohen's campaign on behalf of the Putin regime. Putin has consolidated a kind of state/class bloc that was an advance over Yeltsin but at the expense of democratic rights. Workers need democratic rights in order to organize for socialist revolution. That was why Lenin was for a bourgeois-democratic revolution as a prerequisite to socialism.
Whether or not Putin was actually redistributing money from resources that are nationalized is another topic, but how does this narrative of Khodorkovsky prove that he's anything but yet another wealthy exploiter?
Well, I'd recommend watching the documentary I linked to. I'd also recommend Tony Wood's article in the NLR that I referred to in my review. As an NYU student, you have free access to it:
http://newleftreview.org/II/44/tony-wood-contours-of-the-putin-era _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
