by OLENA LYUBCHENCO
Note from LeftEast editors: In this mini-series we reprint two essays first published in Alameda Institute’s Dossier, The War in Ukraine and the Question of Internationalism. We provide the table of contents for reference and further reading.
In 2006, in his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia, the late sociologist Simon Clarke wrote that, “a voluntaristic and dualistic approach, which analyses the emerging forms of capitalism as a synthesis of an ideal model and an alien legacy, fails to identify the indigenous roots and real foundation of the dynamic of the transition from a state socialist to a capitalist economy and so fails to grasp the process of transformation as a historically developing social reality […] The liberal theorists of totalitarianism were taken completely by surprise when the apparently all-powerful soviet state disintegrated, not as a result of any liberal critique but under the weight of its own contradictions”.
The tendency that Clarke cautioned against in 2006 – to characterise capitalism in Russia in terms of a hybrid of an “ideal model and an alien legacy” – has been revived in the current moment. Just over a year into Russia’s war in Ukraine, most analysis of the war tends to emphasise political or ideological explanations at the expense of understanding the material interests that underlay its causes2.
The Russian regime’s imperialism, authoritarianism, corruption, and patriarchy are juxtaposed with Western liberal democracy, private property relations, universal human rights, and a non-negotiable commitment to the principle of sovereignty.
The Putin regime, particularly following the invasion of Ukraine, is presented as distinct from, and at times exceptional to, the “normal” and healthy workings of global capitalism. The stated reason for this differentiation often lies in Russia’s particular transition to capitalism, which resulted in an irrational, hybrid or mixed capitalism, with political-ideological interests driving Russian imperialism. This has led many to even question if the current Russian regime serves the interests of capital at all. Focusing on the political-ideological factions in Russia risks portraying Russia as external to global capitalism, in a way reminiscent of the non-materialist teachings of the Gospel of John – how to be in the world but not of the world.
In an effort to transcend the polarised debate between those who offer political-ideological explanations and those who offer material-economic ones, Volodymyr Ishchenko highlights how ‘the political and ideological rationales for the invasion reflect the [Russian] ruling class’s interests.’ Instead of Putin’s simple irrational obsession with domination, or national(ist) interests, he argues that since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the formation and reproduction of the Russian ruling class – “political capitalists” – has been tightly linked with the transformation of political office into a vehicle for private enrichment. Accordingly, this structure of accumulation, in part dependent on territorial expansion to sustain the rate of rent, originated in the process of primitive accumulation during the collapse of the Soviet Union, where the expropriation of the state became its very source.
Ishchenko’s analysis captures the relationship between the political and the economic in a way that does not reproduce dichotomous ideas of Russia exceptionalism and the idea that it stands external to global capitalism, gesturing instead toward what Clarke termed “the weight of its own contradictions”. In response to Ishchenko’s call for demystifying the connection between the political and economic interests of the Russian ruling class through the lens of post-Soviet transformation, my intervention offers two additional points.
First, I caution against using hybridity or mixedness to explain “Russian capitalism” and the invasion of Ukraine, because it contains an implicit assumption about capitalism as it should be: a pure system. ??Here I offer a critical response to Ilya Matveev’s call that we must account for Russia’s particularity – the primacy of the (geo)political – on its own terms, rather than fitting into economistic Marxist preconceptions. I believe this necessitates revisiting what capitalism really is, its global development, and the inter-relation between the “liberal-democratic” world and post-Soviet Russia.
Applying the “mixed capitalism” concept to supposed deviants from liberal democratic states risks emptying the capitalist mode of production of its political and social content. It juxtaposes “rational” and “irrational” capitalism, thus reproducing the myth that capitalism can be free from racialised, gendered, and environmental violence. To address this, I draw on Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) and the literature on primitive accumulation in order to demonstrate the integral relationship between production and social reproduction in capitalism. These insights reveal that oppression and expropriation are not limited to hybrid cases, but are instead essential to the workings of capitalism in general.
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