Trump Needs Putin, Putin Trump, and Russians Need Both of Them, Khazin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 20 – In three interrelated articles, Mikhail Khazin argues that Donald Trump is out to destroy the power of finance capital around the world, needs Vladimir Putin to help him complete his effort, and that Russians must not blame the American president for the sanctions others in the US have imposed on them.  Russians need both presidents, he says.

            Trump seeks to destroy the pre-existing world order and to achieve his goals, he needs Vladimir Putin’s support and the understanding of the Russian people, the Moscow economist who is a prominent member of the influential Izborsky Club says (iarex.ru/articles/58923.html, iarex.ru/articles/58924.html and iarex.ru/articles/58925.html).

            According to Khazin, Trump is seeking to reverse the de-industrialization of America that has resulted in an ever greater share of workers being employed in service rather than productive industries and whose wages have stagnated because services even more than industries are subject to withering competition from abroad.

            As a result, most of the population has seen its incomes stagnate or fall; but there is one big winner: finance capitalism and the educated elites who support it. Trump has thus decided that he must destroy finance capitalism and especially its international network that was established after World War II.

            The forces arrayed against him are enormous, Khazin says; and that is why Trump needs Putin as an ally. Putin too is interested in destroying the international order which has left Russia on the margins. And consequently, the two men have reason to come together and to fight the liberal elites that surround finance capitalist operations.

            Despite this common ground, created in Khazin’s telling by “objective circumstances,” the United States government has imposed sanctions on Russia. Some Russians are thus inclined to blame Trump for this; but doing so, Khazin says, “is just as stupid as accusing Stalin of organizing the Great Terror.”

            The Great Terror, he continues, was organized by “those political forces in the USSR which had put as their goal the task of liquidating ‘Stalin’s group’” and possibly Stalin as well in order to drive out the Old Bolsheviks and replace them across the board with “patriotic Soviet technocrats.”

            Much of the political crisis in the United States now, Khazin says, resembles that. The Clintonites and the international financiers standing behind them view Trump as “an open threat because they constantly need the emission of new money which they will not receive as long as Trump is in power.”

            These two superficially very different situations lead to a single “conclusion,” the economist argues. “When a new force appears in politics which begins to push on the old … then the old begins to use against it purely ideological measures, and with their help increases ‘social tensions’” to try to block the new leader.

            That is what the finance capitalists and the Clintonites are doing now; but Khazin says that he thinks Trump is going to succeed just as Stalin did. Russians need to remember that and thus not to fall into the trap prepared by the world’s financiers that Trump is behind sanctions against them.

            “That is just as stupid,” Khazin says, “as accusing Stalin of organizing ‘the Great Terror’ or Lenin of organizing the murder of the tsar and his family.”

            To rephrase Karl Marx, Khazin’s ideas are not powerful because they are true but rather because, while fundamentally false, they are easy for both Moscow elites and the broader population of Russia which grew up on such pseudo-Marxist analysis to take them without much question and at face value.