From: "ricardo" <davidb-AT-ak.planet.gen.nz>
Subject: M-I: Re: Re: Weir-Russia, A Slow Descent
Date: Sat, 27 Sep 1997 23:04:01 +1200


Dennis Redmond writes: 

 Regarding Fred Weir's article:

> Russia does NOT need massive new foreign investment. This is a canard
> repeatedly pushed by the vampires over at the IMF and the World Bank, for
> whom the only good Second Worlder is a dead, or indebted, 
> Third Worlder. Massive foreign funds would either be stolen, or would by
> up the country's crown jewels a la Brazil and Mexico (which have no
> indigenous auto industries) or Malaysia and Thailand (which have no
> indigenous electronic industries). Crazy as it may sound, Russia has it
> help itself: it needs to re-autarkize its financial system, tax the hell
> out of imports and push exports to those booming markets of the Eurostate
> like there's no tomorrow. Nor does Russia's size and distance from world
> markets necessarily doom them to servitude: Moscow's factories are only
> 550 miles or so from St. Petersburg and the shipping lines of the world's
> oceans. This is less than the distance between Munich and Hamburg, and
the
> last time I checked, BMW was kicking Japanese butt in overseas
> luxury car markets. Russia needs a developmental state which will force
> the oil barons to fund an industrial renaissance.

This sounds like a prescription for Russian national capitalists to take
charge and exclude international capital. This wasnt on in 1917 what makes
Dennis think that it can happen today? There is no indigenous bourgeoisie
capable of taking on international capital. International capital will
command the loyalty of a comprador bourgeois like Yeltsin many times more
powerful that any new nationalist productive capitalist bourgoeisie because
they make their profits in international trade, finance and speculation. 
The only class that can re-asset state control over the Russian economy,
restore state monopoly over foreign trade, and plan the economy, is the
working class. And to do this it will have to smash the Russian state and
expropriate the oil barons and all the parasites who have cashed in on the
collapse of the SU.
Dave.


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