------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: God save Mother Russia from free mrarket quackery !!!
Date: Tue, 8 Sep 1998 08:22:13
The Independent on Sunday - Sept 6th, 1998
More free market quackery from the lame duck,
leaves Russians crying fowl !!
je
___________________________
THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY, London, September 6, 1998
Ian Aitken - God save Mother Russia from free market quackery
UNTIL BILL CLINTON went to Moscow last
week it had never occurred to me to compare
him to Dr Pangloss. But reading his preposterous
homily to the long-suffering Russian people, in
which he urged them to keep on swallowing the
medicine that had already reduced most of them
to penury, it was impossible not to think of
Voltaire's great comic antihero. Here was a
reincarnation of the good doctor, standing amid
the ruins of the Lisbon earthquake and uttering his
mantra: "All is for the best in the best of all
possible worlds."
His message to the Muscovites - or rather, to the
few who were not too busy battering at the
locked doors of their banks or trying to sell a few
sticks of their furniture in the street - was that the
free market still offered them the only true path to
a bright and prosperous future. They should stick
to the so-called reform programme, he told them,
and resist the temptation to return to their dirigiste
past.
The spectacle might even have been funny if it had
not been so terrifying. God knows what idiot
wrote the speech for him, but Clinton himself
should have had enough savvy to see, at the very
least, how insensitive it was. Free market, indeed!
When even Gasprom, Russia's natural gas
company, is having to conduct 80 per cent of its
business by means of crude barter - for the simple
reason that neither it nor its customers have any
actual cash.
Even a strong pro-reform Russian MP was
quoted by the Washington Post last week as
saying that Clinton's remarks may have been
theoretically correct, but were totally irrelevant to
anyone whose savings - if they had any - were
going down the drain, and whose job - if they still
had one - was on the block. What people were
worrying about, he said, was not some radiant but
distant future, but whether they would be able to
feed their families that night.
Clinton, he added, had lectured them about the
rule of law. "But the same day a Russian reads in
his newspaper that a deputy finance minister was
arrested for taking a bribe of $1m
(£625,000).What is the President talking about?"
Though he does not seem to have noticed, what
Clinton was actually talking about wasn't so much
a free market economy as a system which has
become known to Russians as "bandit capitalism".
It is a system in which Boris Yeltsin's backers
have become repellently rich by asset-stripping
the nation's industry while pauperising their fellow
citizens. And unlike the bandit capitalists who built
America but salved their consciences by way of
wholesale philanthropy, they have not given a
kopek back to the people they have robbed.
The point was well made a day or two before the
Clinton circus arrived in Moscow by the
communist leader, Gennady Zyuganov. He was
reported in the International Herald Tribune as
telling a gathering of Russian businessmen: "Your
Russian predecessors in the first 15 years of this
century were unable to share power or property.
In the West they understood the need to share
200 years ago. Those who didn't share either had
their crowns or their heads removed. Now you
are acting exactly the same way."
But before these reflections persuade you that it is
just Clinton who is at fault, it is worth reminding
ourselves that Britain has had a share in the
Russian tragicomedy, and that neither Old nor
New Labour is entirely blameless. Only a few
days after Tony Blair declared his support for
Clinton's rocket attack on a chemist's shop in
Khartoum, he also endorsed the President's
public instance that there must be no retreat from
Russia's commitment to the global free market.
Of the two, I find the second genuflection the
more alarming. After all, Bill's rockets had already
been fired, so Blair's declaration of moral support
had no practical implication; there was no danger
that Britain would start bouncing Trident missiles
off anybody, let alone at chemist's shops in
Khartoum. On the other hand, helping to keep the
Russians locked into the global market has a clear
practical implication. It also means that the
Labour government hasn't just acquiesced in the
triumph of Thatcherite capitalism, it is now up
there on the bandwagon, blowing a trumpet.
That development, of course, is entirely New
Labour's doing. But Old Labour can't be
absolved. Indeed, in one way its offence is even
greater. For it was during the Old Labour era that
Gorbachev made his doomed attempt to effect a
gradual retreat from the Soviet command
economy, rather than (quite literally, as it turns
out) to go for bust with the free market.
Gorbachev, it should be remembered, was the
Soviet leader of whom Margaret Thatcher
famously said: "He is a man I can do business
with." But when the crunch came, and he needed
her business, she let him down. Her prize for this
betrayal was Boris Yeltsin, with whom the West
has been desperately trying to do business ever
since, with the results we now see.
But that was par for the course from a woman
who saw herself as the sword-bearer of capitalist
ideology. Something better could have been
expected from a party which, at that stage, was
still committed to socialism of a sort. What Old
Labour actually delivered was virtually nothing.
While Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were
dispatching flocks of carpet-baggers to Moscow
to teach the Russians how to become
entrepreneurs, Labour simply chewed its
fingernails.
It could have countered the Thatcher-Reagan
offensive with a modest campaign of its own. It
might have sidled up to a few hapless Russian
apparatchiks (most of whom were punch drunk
from the free market onslaught) and pointed out
that the state intervention and controlled financial
system such as Britain had in 1945 would be
much better suited to a country with no
experience of markets whatever.
But by now the left in general, and the Labour
Party in particular, had suffered a collective and
catastrophic loss of bottle. Watching the
awesome collapse of the communist system
across the entire Soviet empire, they swallowed
the Thatcherite claim that this represented the final
proof that socialism - even Labour's democratic
version - simply didn't work. So the Russians
heard no alternative voice to counter the chorus
of Thatcherite propaganda. From the Western left
there was almost total silence.
We are perhaps entitled to some apologetic
noises from the free market evangelists whose
work has brought us this appalling capitalist
disaster. Alas, there is not much sign of it. Even
Professor Anthony Layard of LSE, a social
democrat who should have known better, has yet
to acknowledge any degree of error. He
describes himself in Who's Who as "Consultant to
the Russian government since 1991", and admits
to joint authorship of a book called (I'm not
joking) The Coming Russian Boom. Yet when
taxed with his responsibility on Channel 4 the
other night, he argued it wasn't he who'd got it
wrong, it was those pesky Russians. The trouble,
he pleaded, wasn't too much free market but too
little.
God save us - and Mother Russia too - from such
quackery. But would it not be a rare irony if it
turned out to be the collapse of Soviet
communism - and not its success - which
precipitated the ultimate crisis of capitalism?
Listen! Is that raucous laughter I hear from
Highgate cemetery?
_____________________________________________________
