Shock therapy in Russia was carefully coordinated so as to limit any substantial transfer of economic power out of the hands of the pre-collapse Soviet establishment. Decades since, the present Russian elite continues to rely on Soviet-era forces of production, infrastructure, and supply chains with rather little in the way of fundamental economic innovation. The Russian Federation period appears more as an interregnum of Soviet power rather than a reaction or revolution, because a ‘new’ state of affairs hasn’t actually come into being, only an interruption and degradation of the previous one, an interruption dated to before the ‘collapse’ officially took place, culminating in the ironical tragedy of the abortive hardliner coup. Certain ambiguities surrounding Yeltsin's ascent and the popularity of the hardliners opened a two year question violently ‘answered’ by the shelling of Parliament and the fraught post-’93 political consensus. Subsisting by rentier extraction, the ruling strata of young Russia consists of vestigial Soviet bureaucrats, a repetitive parody of late feudal Europe's aristocracy, alongside auxiliaries provided by younger generations moulded in the image of their nomenklatura forebears and a refracted image of the Western pragmatic realist. Rare instances of (local) economic innovation in Russia are interpellated by stifling rentier despotism, rigid complexes of fealty and patronage; capitalists are not, and never have been, in positions of determination within the Russian economy. Without the emergence of capitalist determination decades after Soviet collapse, Russia is at a juncture wherein the still open question of what ‘ends’ this interregnum has been given something in lieu of an adequate answer by Vladimir Putin and the renegotiation of the relationship between industry and state. The Special Military Operation is as much directed inward as it is outward. Attempts to simulate a Chinese economic arrangement has been given cosmetic form by the mobilisation of Soviet and imperial “Great Russian” imagery, channeling spirits and tying up loose ends frayed by the anti-Sovietism of the 90s-00s, and the anti-czarism of the Soviet period; evidence, then, that liquidation is reversible, at least virtually. Liquidated assets may be reappraised given a change in circumstance, a ‘new spin on an old IP’.
Processes of liquidation aren't particular to economy and administration, or essentially ‘local’ in character. The 1990s saw mass, world-historical expropriation and looting of the properties of socialist states and Parties globally, mutilation and hollowing-out of both the infrastructural and intellectual bases of world Communism. In Eastern Europe, Africa, and Latin America this typically amounted to cosmetically restructuring Marxist-Leninist entities into Social Democratic ones, in most cases with their elite maintaining identical positions within managerial hierarchies, articulating preoccupations and objectives more palatable to the emergent order of that period. The Communist Party of Great Britain was shuttered, replaced in time by an infinitely multiplying complex of pretenders. As decades proceed and the institutional memory of Communist politics has been eschewed and consigned to distant memory and romance, the kinds of preoccupations formerly belonging to Socialists and Communists have now found themselves, as with Russia’s factories, fields, and supply chains, in new markets: Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has emerged as a viable leading force for a kind of tepid social democracy, for the unleashing of the productive forces, and for the satisfaction of a litany of social, moral, and economic demands from Britain’s dispossessed working classes. At a rational level the Reform Party has concluded that lasting sovereignty requires engendering higher productivity, that competent domestic energy and manufacturing sectors invested by a commitment to the ‘common good’ are desirable for the ends of self-determination, charged by a preoccupation for tighter border policy and demographic control. This is most likely a lesson drawn from studies of the Russian or Hungarian approach of late, and – as with the analogous shift in America’s industrial & economic policies – covertly or subconsciously informed by the Venezuelan or Iranian experience of western sanctions and the unlikely viability of rogue state economies in the face of an increasingly uncertain global dollar regime.
Roughly twenty years prior to the Soviet collapse, Harold Wilson’s government proved incapable of resolving endemic crises spurred by a terminally collapsing rate of profit which amounted to British dependence on IMF bailouts, a breakdown in the relationship between the state and the labour movement. This led ultimately to Margaret Thatcher’s ascent to premiership in 1979, the subsequent revolutionising of British economy and civil society, the dissolution of Fabian socialism on institutional, economic, and reputational levels. The right and left wings of British social democracy intensified in their antagonism, giving way to the Trotskyite Militant Tendency coupled with Thatcher’s new economic order spurring on Labour’s opportunist-bureaucratic element to gradual internal reformulation and an eventual takeover of their Party machinery. Both poles in British Socialism became irreversibly incompatible by the end of the 1980s, with a renewed wave of leftist militancy leading to concurrent breakdowns, ultimately to terminal decline in reputation amongst key (voting) sections of the metropolitan working classes, themselves enjoying a period of greater economic security and quality of life, elevated from reliance on the social democratic state to a relative state of financial independence through home ownership. The untethering of vast amounts of fixed capital from the collapsed Soviet state in the 1990s, the former Soviet territories now pried open for Western markets, led to a brief but significant spike in the hitherto falling rate of profit, granting legitimacy to the post-Fabian order in Britain, providing sustenance to western economists relieved that Marx's proscription had been apparently falsified. Farage’s present ascendency is evidence of this myopia finally coming to its limit; profitability must be salvaged at all costs, therefore a repetition of Thatcherism, a Thatcherism-against-Thatcherism, comes to the fore.
Basic left-wing accusations against Farage, that he is inconsistent or opportunistic, fall on deaf ears. Thatcherism, as any romantic revolutionary sentiment, is an exhilaration for novelty and a desire to break from decay, in the present instance the post-Thatcher order itself. The socialist idea in Britain through post-war social democracy, as well as in Soviet Marxism-Leninism, amounted more or less to a conception of historical progress tending towards ever-increasing efficiency and order, wherein excesses are excised, obliterated, or re-enter the circuits of state coordination, converted to utility at higher levels by intense state-led socioeconomic pressure. Thatcher’s revolution against ossified formal social democracy began a runaway process which, ultimately, has run far ahead of any expectation, un-grounding its inciting premises and originary justifications. The ultimate consequences of her revolution (rather, her contribution to the real revolutionary movement) are opened up to scrutiny in this period, in the moment of their foreclosure. It's not by error or misunderstanding that the inheritors of Thatcherism in Britain, as with those of Reaganism in America, are the forces championing the replacement of neoliberalism and globalisation with systems commensurate to the emerging international order: In Thatcher’s own time the libertarian impulse to shrink the state amounted to a lasting increase in state expenditure, the state-driven breakdown of domestic economic protections in Britain, our submitting to both the European Economic Community and the United States, along with the subsequent obliteration of the Soviet planned economy and the concurrent development of the liberal unipolar world order leading not to the strengthening of private property or the diminishing of the state, but rather the intensification of the process of private-public interconnectedness initiated in (yet developing significantly further than) social democracy. Economic financialisation wouldn’t have been possible without the prior phase of social democratic rationalisation and dirigisme, as Mitterrand was to De Gaulle, with the new arrangement built for the 1980s and 1990s being thoroughly conditioned in the novelty and efficacy of the postwar order, just as the Russian Federation is ultimately little more than a derivative form of the USSR, quite opposite to the radical break between the late Russian Empire and the early Soviet state. Farage’s apparent reversal of Thatcherism is still essentially Thatcherism, to what Thatcherism is at its heart, motivated by the same anxious desire to artificially stem the falling rate of profit, by a scapegoating of one or another symptom of economic decadence.
To re-engineer the dynamics of an earlier period under the state’s direction, the notion that a certain political-economic order can be instituted from the top down based on whim and preference, is a reasonable indicator that the terminus of historical necessity has been reached; an actually existing communism cosmetically charged with identity to an older world order, an order before Lenin. The actuality of ‘post-liberalism’, as useful a term as ‘post-war’, the vector of which extends to infinity. The call to re-industrialise Britain and America is less a demand for productivity as it is a means of “settling” or “winning” the culture war. The site of communal meaning for the post-liberal is the ‘modern’ (19th and 20th Century) workplace – if people are working they have little time to enjoy the ‘postmodern’ frivolities of identity politics and so on. This is another property of socialism extracted and set to work by ‘the right’: labour/capital and the associated struggles therein are ‘authentic’, whereas free time and the excesses engendered by it are inauthentic at best, actively harmful at worst. Re-industrialisation then is reduced to a romantic function, to a sign of the authentic and the solid against the apparent regime of the virtual and the fluid. In a recent conversation with Vince Garton I asked him what he thought of the idea that Communism might be properly called the self-consciousness of capitalism. In his response he elaborated how this is, at root, “the goal of the [Chinese] Communist Party as regime: to replace the endlessly successful conspiracy of capital with its own, conscious, therefore philosophical conspiracy, which involves a process of ruthless dialectical identification and contradiction. If Western capital manifests a kind of socialism in more or less mute forms, in its self-constellation in the form of a Metacartel, its subordination to the credit pipework of the central bank, and so forth, in China this process is highly conscious, explicit, and accelerated—that is in effect the central conceit of China’s socialism”. Therefore we may extend this premise as less-so something Chinese, and more-so something socialist, the motor of socialism as real movement against utopian projection or imaginary. Essential to this distinction is post-liberalism’s renewal of the utopian imaginary, the imagined community – rather, a Communist in this period would be the person who, at the outset of their analysis, identifies a post-liberal actuality over and against a ‘post-liberalism' in thought. In this manner the Communist can proceed to wash away the dross of ideological inheritance and be what Communists were always meant to be: active participants in the real revolutionary movement.
In other words, the ‘authentic’ is a weapon of the virtual to circumvent any comprehension or identification of the virtual. The struggle for authentic life, the ideological cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon post-liberalism, is boundless and ahistorical, wraps about itself to no particular end or another (their critique of ‘liberalism’ is just mere liberalism; Marx’s figure of the ‘critical critic’). Post-liberalism’s big symbolic achievement in Britain is Poundbury, a simulation of the authentic English town, Potemkin village for the ‘Anglo Future’. In avowedly post-liberal or illiberal states like Hungary large-scale Poundbury-esque developments quietly erase the honest brutal megaliths of the Communist epoch, turning the real structures of the past into phantasms, memories to be swiftly forgotten in favour of more ‘essential’, ‘authentic’ memories — all about the Communist period is wrong, except for the ‘honesty’ of its factory labour, of the quiet and informal life of workers working together, which is to be defended in terms of a fundamental conservatism which eclipses the possible with the fundamental, the contingent by the necessary.