Re: [A-List] Russia: The Fruits of Reform

[joanna bujes <joanna.bujes@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:11 PM 12/18/2002 +0200, you wrote:
> This is also occurring in Britain, but you would hardly know it for all the
> triumphalist crapola pouring out of 10 Downing St and its media
> cheerleaders. Even tribunes of "common sense" (i.e. petty rightwing
> prejudice) like the Daily Mail cannot beat Blair too brusquely because the
> chronic underinvestment in infrastructure dates back to its own beloved
> Thatcher. So nuclear leaks at Dounreay and Sellafield (about which the Irish
> are much better informed), multiple train crashes, road congestion,
> dilapidated buildings housing hospitals, schools, day care centres, etc.,
> all get swept under the rug whilst gleaming new cool Britannia, exemplified
> by the preposterous dome fiasco, gets all the money and credit. Russia is
> easy to target because of "endemic corruption" and "the communist legacy" --
> contemporary equivalents of a not-so-subtle anti-slavic racism which Hitler
> is best known for having distilled to a particularly fine degree.


At the risk of being laughed off the list, I just wanted to mention that
I've seen this scenario played out before....in Ayan Rand's "Atlas
Shrugged." ( I spend a couple of years in early adolescence reading through
all her books.)

What's interesting to me is that Rand, albeit a nut, was able to anticipate
(in peculiar pprivate-mythical terms) the process we are witnessing today:
that is, the increasing parasitism of finance capital and the degeneration
of infrastructure and work ethic that occurs under its sway. Of course, her
solution is laughable: all the heroic entrepreneurs and "real"
(intellectual) producers run away to Colorado (?) where, having found a
mysterious eternal energy source (not workers...no, no, no...not workers),
they are able to live comfortably while waiting for the world to fall apart
and for the general population to understand the need for the return of
Randian heroes.

The glimmer of truth in her picture (which she formulated in the fifties)
has to do with that degradation of living standards and infrastructure,
with the increasing alienation of the professional/technical class, and
with the discrediting of the parasitic classes. The question which
interests me  is whether her notion of a strike by the professional /
middle class is the coming form of class struggle in the first world nations.

Any thoughts?

Joanna