The basic history of post-Soviet Russia goes something like this. Throughout the Soviet era, there were no real rates because of the Communists’ perpetual, blanket meddling in financial activity. No one understood what anything was really worth. Not a loaf of bread, not a mine loaded with uranium. It was all owned and redistributed by the state. When the Soviet Union collapsed, the state naturally vanished. Suddenly, there were no prices, and no owners. It resembled a gigantic economic free-for-all. A “Wild West,” as the saying goes. Everything was up for grabs.
In a fashion that Mises readers will immediately comprehend as textbook Hoppean-Rothbardian, in the midst of this mayhem the worst of the worst increased to the top. The hyenas relocated to tear at the Soviet carcass. Ruthless and cunning opportunists took control of formerly state-run factories and extraction operations. A kind of national gang culture emerged, and the reasoning of this organized crime mentality worked to sort out the spoils among the strongmen. Some individuals, those who were particularly well endowed with craftiness, came out ahead, appropriating to themselves billions upon billions of dollars’ worth of oil, gas, and mineral rights, among other commodities. Those nouveau riche from the Russian criminal class we now call “oligarchs.” And the king of all the oligarchs, the baddest dog in the junkyard, ended up being a former KGB colonel and deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
A by-now-infamous 2009 episode in the Russian town of Pikalyovo sums the whole thing up completely. Prime Minister Putin (then on theatrical break from his primary job of president) appeared to purchase a factory complex rebooted so thousands of income producers could get back to work. One of the factories was owned and provided by Oleg Deripaska, among Putin’s rival oligarchs. Putin humiliated him at a public meeting, buying Deripaska to sign an agreement which would resume the factory complex, therefore revealing the world that Putin supervised of every operation in Russia. When Deripaska had signed the contract, Putin twisted the knife by making Deripaska return to him his pen. Oligarchs gon na oligarch. Putin is the male, and he will show up in any town to have a shootout with anybody foolish sufficient to cross him. One huge O.K. Corral: this is how most of us in the West comprehend Russia today.
However let us think a bit more carefully, going back to our Hoppe and Rothbard for aid. What is a state? A state is a gang of wrongdoers. A state is arranged crime on a huge scale. A state is oligarchs all over. It always is, constantly has been. Political researcher James C. Scott’s latest book, Versus the Grain (2017 ), information how the “earliest states” preyedon human endeavor. States extract protection money (euphemistically called “taxes,” in some cases also called “tribute” or “war bonds”) from as many individuals as the lawbreakers who sit in the state’s main chambers or on the state’s throne can reach.
Russian oligarchs post– Soviet era are hardly distinct. States are just this, simply as we see in the relationship in between Putin and the beta oligarchs. The only thing shocking about the Russian case is that it is more transparently corrupt than usual. Many states clothe their theft behind anthems and flags and tales of brave deeds. The Russian Federation lost its politico-mythic backing when it increased out of the ashes of the USSR. However it is trying to get it back. Stalin has been restored in Russia as a terrific guy. Putin’s intrusion of Ukraine will one day be remembered as the wonderful sacrifice of the brave for the motherland. All states are gravity fields for propaganda and phony news. Offer Russia time, and she will look similar to all the other states again. You will not have the ability to see through the shop windows the smash-and-grab going on inside. Everything will look grand and state-like. The Russian state will normalize, and no one will call its elite “oligarchs” anymore.
Therefore, statists have a natural reward to legitimate one another’s plundering schemes. Presidents and prime ministers and kings drink to one another’s health at sumptuous galas spent for with private property drawn from all the rest of us (who never get invitations to the ball). I would not be amazed to discover crowns and ermine capes coming back in fashion amongst state leaders soon. Statists think they’re gods, and they imitate they own everybody else’s money. Not simply Russia, not.
Indeed, this Hoppean-Rothbardian insight, that states are generally groups of oligarchs who offer themselves titles and medals, can be broadened far beyond the Russian example. For if the present crop of Russian oligarchs are simply standard statists, then the narrative about the collapse of the Soviet Union must also be called into question. It wasn’t that the Soviet Union collapsed, in this sense. It was that one type of oligarchy gave way to another, with a messy period of shift in between. The Soviet Union was “Communist,” but communism was never about the equal circulation of wealth or the relief of social problems. As Hoppean-Rothbardians, we must not take statist excuse making at face value. Communism was, and stays, a system for gathering total social and financial control into the hands of an extremely couple of. Simply put, a cover story for oligarchy. The existing Russian oligarchs aren’t doing anything brand-new. Before them there was Stalin, naturally, and Brezhnev and Khrushchev and Lenin, and the handful of other divines who took whatever from the Russian individuals and resided in opulent palaces with servants and harems and caviar.
And it isn’t just Russia. What state does not have oligarchs running it? It’s a technique rhetorical concern, because, as I’ve been saying, states and oligarchies are the exact same thing. Communism, democracy– it’s all from the same barrel. Unjustified enrichment can be found in many different tastes. But the primary ingredient is constantly tax and combination of ownership into the hands of the elite. The exemption of the hoi polloi from the fruits of their expropriated labor is what makes the state the state. There are grand halls and massive monuments in the state’s capitals, marble utterances of the state’s political faith scattered across the land. The state has its own saints and martyrs, its own calendar of holy days. The state is a sort of religious routine, only the tithe is not optional. And it’s a lot more than 10 percent. That’s what a state is, theft dressed up as solemn task. People pass away all the time for the state. Graveyards are filled with the state’s dead. The state charges the bereaved for those cemeteries’ upkeep. More taxes. No matter what happens, the state constantly wins in the end.
So let’s utilize this understanding to take a look at the present situation in Ukraine. A world-class oligarch, who unwinds in a Russian Versailles, is going up against a very minor Ukrainian oligarch to his west. This arriviste oligarch has the uncertain support of a massive cabal of big-time oligarchs in Western Europe and the United States. This cabal calls itself the North Atlantic Treaty Company, and it is a really exclusive club. Members have access to a remarkable variety of security choices, consisting of all the very best equipment of some of the greatest armed forces worldwide. The apparent leader is the American president, whose boy has actually grown extraordinarily abundant by conspiring with the oligarchy in Ukraine, where the North Atlantic Treaty Company oligarchs are now glaring throughout the borderlands at the oligarchs in the Kremlin. The Atlantic oligarchy wants to crowd in on the grass of the Russian oligarchy, and a Ukrainian oligarch is caught in the middle. The people who are normally taxed by the oligarchs are likewise the ones who are being shelled and who are being sent out in tanks to do the shelling. More deaths for the splendor of the state– which does not exist, being merely a euphemism for “oligarchy.”
There is more. An upstart oligarchy in Beijing hovers over the tense scene, appearing prepared to broker “peace” amongst the other oligarchs when its own interests will be finest served. And the Beijing oligarchy has its own coterie of beta oligarchs, including the tribute bearers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, the Korean Peninsula, and Japan, all of which are filled with political cronies with access to their own income streams eventually stemming from the paychecks of lowly taxpayers. When the time comes, the taxpayers in those places will also crave the oligarchs. American Marines are on Okinawa waiting their turn to pass away, too. The oligarchs are going to live, though. They are going to do simply fine. War and peace– the oligarchs earn money in either case. “L’état, c’est moi!” Yes, exactly.
The fact that the United States Department of Justice handled to slap sanctions on Russian “oligarchs” in record time after Putin’s intrusion of Ukraine, and is now deploying a special “job force” to proper the property of Putin and his network of grifters, tells us whatever we require to understand about what is going on in Eastern Europe today. The job force– can you think the nerve?– is focused on “Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs.” Abbreviation: REPO. The state taketh, and after that the state taketh some more.
Lenin called World War I a war among the capitalists of Europe. He was incorrect. It was a war among oligarchs, statists who extract wealth from genuine economic activity at the barrel of a gun. And when some oligarchs get out of line, they are exterminated and the other oligarchs take the spoils. Ditto for Ukraine. It’s not the “West” versus the Russian oligarchs there. It’s the oligarchs versus the oligarchs versus the oligarchs. It’s oligarchs all the method down. Read Hoppe and Rothbard, and don’t fall for the latest round of phony news about the always, all over criminal state.