Putin and Ukraine: Making the World Safe for Plutocracy

By Steven Jonas

There is a wide variety of explanations for why Pres. Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine. Prime in the minds of many is that he was/is reacting to the threat that Ukraine might join NATO. This holds a special primacy of place in the context of the violation of every agreement made by the West vis-à-vis the Soviet Union/Russia on the matter, even since before the final victory of Western Imperialism (led by the U.S.) over the Soviet union, at the conclusion of The 75 Years War Against the Soviet Union. Then there is what some (including myself) see as his legitimate interest in holding on to Crimea. (It was annexed in the face of the possibility that a newly-installed, hostile, Ukrainian government might have simply cancelled the lease [whether legally-cancellable or not] under which Russia held its only warm-water port.) That, combined with the interest in protecting the Russian speakers under military and civil repression (language, no local government prerogatives) in the two “Eastern Provinces.” Obviously, there were the “Minsk Agreements” aimed at settling those localized conflicts, which each side charges the other with the responsibility for the failure of implementation. And so-on-and-so-forth. But I have to say that I see something else at play here, beyond “NATO” and “the provinces” in explaining the “why” of the Putin-Invasion.

Putin presides over a remarkable political structure in the context of those nations that comprise the developed (that is, industry-based), capitalist world. (To be sure, some are much more developed than others). Almost all of such capitalist nations are governed by some form of what is usually termed “liberal democracy.” What that might be? Well, while the ruling classes of such nations would not define the system in this way, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin put it succinctly:

“To decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies [which existed widely in Lenin’s day], but also in the most democratic republics.”

And, of course, modern bourgeois democracy takes the bourgeois/capitalist form not only in its governing structure(s) but also in how the ownership of the means of production are owned and controlled. That usually takes one form or another of corporatism. Shares may be widely or closely held, but there are shares and there are corporate structures. This is not to say that most capitalist societies do not have some very wealthy controllers (usually men). Of course they do. But in most instances they exert their control through corporate structures, under some kind of greater (under liberal governments) or lesser (under reactionary governments) regulation-by-the-state. Of course, regardless of how “liberal” a society is (or is not) there are always a relatively few wealthy folks at the top of the ownership/control pyramid and then everyone else. And then there is Russia.

Let’s start with the ownership and control of the means of production. No corporate structures (with any meaning or power), no shareholders (who have any at least potential power), little to no independent government regulation, virtually no influence of legislation over corporate functioning. There is a stock market and individuals can own shares in various companies. But as arranged by Boris Yeltsin and his cronies (as well as certain foreign operators), a system of directly private ownership of the means of production, by individuals, was set up.

And this an inordinate (inordinate in comparison with Western capitalist systems) amount of corporate ownership lies in the hands of a relatively few individuals. They have been given the quaint name of the “Oligarchs.” But they are really no different from the individual members of the ruling class in the early days of U.S. capital formation who owned an inordinate number of shares in their corporations and exerted an inordinate amount (that is inordinate in comparison to that exerted in the last century-plus under various kinds of governmental controls) of both ownership and control: Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, “The Copper Bosses,” Vanderbilt, (Jay) Gould, and so on and so forth.

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Source: OpEdNews