As Often in Past, Few Russians are Protesting but Many Sense Collapse Looming, ‘Open Expanse’ Telegram Channel Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 18 – Because of the system they live under, one with historical roots that extend far back into the past, few Russians are now protesting the worsening of their situation but ever more sense a looming collapse, one that will be the result of a new struggle for the redistribution of rents, according to the Open Expanse telegram channel.

            As Marx understood, Russia is a country characterized by “the Asiatic means of production” in which wealth is redivided periodically rather than created and in which those redivisions become inevitable when those who have seized wealth created by others go to (t.me/openexpanse/26584 reposted at kasparov.ru/material.php?id=691C5FE437CC6).

            Put in less Marxist terms, the economy of Russia “never has rested on the foundation of a free market: it grew, divided and died together with the rent” that one or another group seized for itself or allowed others to have some part of. Such an arrangement led to the rise of various forms of a special kind of social class, the strata, and struggles over redistribution.

            “In the 1990s,” the telegram channel writes, “the struggle for a new redistribution of wealth broke out with a force comparable to the fratricidal battles of the feudals,” with the chief participants being new businessmen and the old party nomenklatura. But “unexpectedly,” the battle was on by a third: a criminal world “operating on the basis of the force structures.”

            That led to “a new union of power, property and force,” with business subordinated, property only nominal and distribution controlled by those who had the levers of force and who shipped their wealth to safe havens abroad, even as the rest of society was kept quiet by force and a limited amount of wealth both legal and semi-legal.

            That arrangement was based on an unspoken agreement that “you don’t touch us, and we won’t touch you, by loyalty in exchange for the possibility to somehow continue to live.” But that accord began to collapse “when the resources available for theft began to run out,” an outcome that had become obvious by 2012.

            Once that became clear, society began to ask for justice and a new redivision, although it has been kept in check by the use of force; and the elites began to struggle to get a larger share of wealth by taking it away from others when they could, the telegram channel continues, a process that is only intensifying.

As in the past in Russia, so now again, “the ruling caste is splitting apart with some clinging to what they have while others are ready to exploit popular discontent to break the old order and build a new order, just as much based on rent seeking rather than wealth creating but with a different distribution of the spoils.”

“The ephemeral tandem of Prigozhin and Kadyrov was only the first shadow of future possible leaders of justice,” Open Expanse says. “One is gone, the other has been sidelined – but the demand remains. And where there is demand, there will inevitably be those who want to take advantage of it.”

As a result, it concludes that “Russia is once again on the verge of another redistribution of power. In our country, redistribution is like the changing of the seasons: you never know exactly when it will begin, but you are always sure that it is inevitable.”