browderism

The Guardian has an interview with Bill Browder, grandson of Earl Browder, once head of the Communist Party of the United States of America. It makes much of young Bill’s ancestral interest in Russia, and of his job as an investment banker. Actually, it looks like junior’s a bit of a chip off the old block:

He says the oligarchs were destroying Russia and that only when Putin came to power did things start to improve - for all the population, not just wealthy western investors. "If these enormous companies are not misusing assets for the benefit of the management and pay their taxes, then their taxes are used to provide public services. It's win-win all round. The worst thing you can have is the situation you had in the 1990s, when 22 individuals got control of 40% of the country from the state and then took all of the money away, so nobody else got anything. As a result, professors had to become taxi drivers, policemen had to become security guards for the mafia, nurses had to become prostitutes, and the whole situation deteriorated into anarchy."

This, he says, underpins his support for Putin. "I saw what life was like under the oligarchs. It was like Somalia; it was chaos. Sometimes you need a strong man to pull together a country. Russians can objectively say that their lives are much better now - the average person's income is five times higher than when Putin came to power.

Note the use of “objectively.” Surely no accident, comrade. Browder senior once described communism as “20th century Americanism” and was expelled from the Party for saying that communism and capitalism could co-exist. Maybe in a Russian context, investment banking is 21st Century communism. In practice, both operate under the formula “to each according to his power.”