In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Primitive Capital Accumulation Far socialism, you are so near. —Boris Pasternak 1 today, we can draw some preliminary conclusions about the socialandeconomicchangesof recentyears.If weweretotrytoreduce these changes to a single formula, we might say it was simply a swap: power for private property. It was—and it wasn’t. Still, no other formula seems to work here. Swapping power for private gain might sound less than noble, but if we are to be realistic, if we are to proceed from the actual alignment of forces in the late 1980s, this exchange was the only peaceful way for the society to reform or the state to evolve. The alternative was civil strife, civil war, and yet another dictatorship—this time a dictatorship of a new nomenklatura. Russia could not be wrested from the nomenklatura by force, nor did she need to be. Her freedom could be bought. That is, if property was no longer tied to o‹cial position, if a truly free market subject to thelawsof competition,amarketinwhichpropertyconstantlychanged hands was actually created—this was indeed the optimal solution. It didn’t matter that the nomenklatura had dominated the market so far; this actually ensured the continuity of property rights. From now on all would-be owners and proprietors would have to back their claims. 5 83 Whatever else it was, this exchange of o‹cial position for private property was a step in the right direction: away from “imperialism” and toward a free and open market; away from the Asiatic mode of production ; away from a system in which the nomenklatura was a permanent , hereditary political-economic elite immune from the law of markets. This vision of an exchange of governmental authority for ownership of private property might have suited democratic forces, but the view from the other side was quite diªerent. Plant managers, high-level ministry o‹cials, high-ranking military and security o‹cers, and district and regional Party secretaries had certainly supported changing the system, and had indeed relinquished some of their administrative power. But they saw the overall equation in entirely diªerent terms. Their equation was this: acquisition of propertypluspreservationof power.TheywantedRussiatoturninthesame circles she always had, to stay within her same old magnetic field—safe from market forces. They wanted to carve up the system (i.e., state property) and take home what they could, but they also wanted to keep intact those parts of the system that guaranteed the primacy of the state. The nomenklatura was like a chick pecking its way out of its shell: inside, life was cramped; outside life was scary. The nomenklatura was hardly unique in feeling this way. Many people had long dreamed of “very private” ownership, in the sense that they or their clan would own (or manage, or control, or profit from) private holdings, while the state would take care of everyone and everything else. As our famous and eminently successful entrepreneur M. Yuriev has written: “Big business, unlike small or medium business (let alonetherestof thepopulace)isbestservedbyasemi-laissez-faireeconomy , which means laissez-faire for the big businessman, but not for anyone else.”1 So the ideal formula for the bureaucracy was this: power plus property ! Take the old bureaucratic market wherein the players’ positions weredefinedbygovernmentrankandauthority,andbuildthenewmarket on that foundation, meanwhile learning how to extract real cash revenue. In Russian “newspeak” there is a rather precise term for this— 84 Primitive Capital Accumulation a “regulated market” (regulated by the nomenklatura). The idea was to denationalize in such a way that (paraphrasing Lenin here) production (i.e., the expenses and the risk) remained public, but appropriation became private. The foundations of state monopoly capitalism/imperialism would remain intact. Privatization would not be recognized as o‹cial policy, would never be conducted openly, but would nonetheless go on, within the inner circle, “just for us.” The first stage would look roughly like this: control over property would remain in state (bureaucratic) hands, but the state would ease its control over the bureaucrats themselves, then eventually give it up entirely.Inotherwords,stateo‹cialswouldstillwieldenormouspower to manage and distribute resources, just as they always had. However, within the state system, within the inner circle, they could now shed their verbal camouflage and openly speak the language of the market. They could haggle with selected business partners over financial (lowinterest loans) and natural (quotas, licenses) resources now at their disposal ; they could dicker over “their” capital funds and product. The economist who coined the term “administrative-command system” once proposed...

Share