Russia's ideologies

My project manager this week has been a young, Russian, married came every morning with the Wall Street Journal under his arm. This slightly encouraged me after the blow to freedom struck by Russia’s political establishment at the last Russian presidential elections.

I asked him whether he had voted in them, to which he replied that he had not bothered: lots of Russian people's votes don't count or, rather, are miscounted appropriately by the government. We have just seen how Russia has decided how to overcome its lack of confidence after the collapse of the USSR: to regain their pride with the restoration of the "Warlordism" or the cult to a powerful violent leader. Long after the Stalinism, we have seen the emergence of the Putinism.

The Bolshevik revolution was just a copy of the popular revolutions that broke with the Old Regime of Absolutism some 100 years earlier and brought the New Regime to Europe. However, Russia has never left the aristocratic regime. The Communist revolution in Russia (as in any other Communist state) never introduced a real change of political system. It merely enabled a new limited group of people to seize the power via new economical structures and to retain it by means of threats or brainwashing. That is what the communist experience turned out to be: not a political breakthrough, but a shift of people in power.

After the collapse of the USSR and the languishing of all kinds of Communist ideology, subsequent generations have developed an enfeebled version called Neo-Communism. This is the new mind frame followed by lots of young progres (not my manager) and can be summarised in two characteristics:
a) The blissful ignorance about the differences between the various theoretical definitions of Communist/Socialist theories.
b) The focus on finding ways to spend the money which do not create wealth.

The first feature of the Neo-Communism or "Progre-ism" is due to their inability to discern between more than two types of things: for these progres, the only ideological alternatives are just Left and Right.
The second feature stems from the victory of the more realistic capitalism, which adapts better to the human nature. Progres do not want to accept that capitalism is right and hence that they were wrong: the resistance to accept that they are wrong is the main cause for their "social struggle". However, they wouldn't go and live in a non-capitalist country as no one actually wants the worse for themselves and so the only action they are able to fight with is spending the money against the advice of the wealth-generating capitalist system.

Love and freedom.