Their oligarchs vs. our visionaries

The interview Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin) is interesting and thought-provoking—as Adam Curtis often is. Of course, I had notes, which I’ve interspersed with citations from the article.

“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of corruption in Britain, Canada, and the United States, especially since 2008. I still don’t think we got our heads around what quantitative easing was about, which essentially entailed a massive wealth transfer to a tiny elite, creating what is now known as the “asset class.””

I couldn’t agree more about the transfer, but disagree that we don’t understand it. We understand exactly what it is. He just described it succinctly. There’s nothing more to it than that. An elite guilted the world into giving it all the money. Having all the money allows them to sustain this situation indefinitely.

Just because they called one of the scams they’ve used “quantitative easing” doesn’t make it special. They already took all of your money; don’t give them all of your time, too. You’re only looking for deeper meaning because you have to believe that you weren’t fooled for a bagatelle.

“I think we may look back at the last ten to twelve years and say that the rise of the “asset class” was as powerfully significant as the rise of the oligarchs in Russia from about 1992 onward. They’re not the same, it’s not the same kind of society or the same kind of corruption, but it is the same extraordinary transfer of power and wealth to a tiny elite. I don’t think we’ve got our heads around that yet.”

He’s right again. It’s not the same in the U.S. as in Russia. It’s worse. There’s more to steal. I don’t think we can wrap our heads around how much they’re stealing, every day. We don’t know what billions even are. We think shoplifting by poor people is a capital offense, but then shrug our shoulders at wage theft, which is 1000 times worse.

The Triumph of the Oligarchs

“[…] the person in charge of creating that democracy overnight, a man by the name of Yegor Gaidar, came out of the technocratic establishment under the Soviet plan. I think he was trying to bring democracy to Russia in a “rational” way, and it was completely mad. He thought that if you got the right things in the right place it would work just like a machine. But as I’ve shown, it was ruthlessly exploited by the oligarchs for their own advantage, and it led to a total and utter, cataclysmic, disaster.”

Exploited? Or encouraged, and then exploited? With corruption and a complete lack of scruples, you never know. I don’t buy most of these “good intentions, but bad outcomes” stories. There’s almost always at least a kernel—if not much more—of personal interest that leads to the outcome that sucks for everyone but the perpetrator. At best, the person has utterly convinced themselves that a decision made in a way that is personally lucrative is also fortuitously the moral thing to do.

“It is extraordinary that politicians seem unable to stop the corruption — we all know it’s happening and they know that we know it’s happening. And they know that we know that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s absurd.”

I don’t agree that it’s extraordinary. I think it’s absolutely ordinary. It’s not true that corruption exists despite the politicians. It exists because of them. Politicians are in on it. They don’t stop it because they don’t want it to stop—it benefits them personally. I think it’s extraordinary that someone who’s made as many documentaries as Adam Curtis can still describe the world through a lens of “how can we stop these poor politicians from being corrupted despite their best intentions?”

“We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be.”

Dude, your prime minister is Rishi Sunak and you’re mystified about why he’s not part of the solution? He’s the main problem, a massive force of corruption and greed. Again, I don’t agree. We know the solution. It’s just not easy to see how to implement it because the biggest part of the problem—capitalism and its fetishization of wealth and power, regardless of how it was acquired—will actively prevent us from replacing it.

“[…] somehow it became a way of avoiding having to face the fact that none of us, whether it’s Donald Trump or nice liberals, have any idea of how to create an alternative, fair, and just society that would work. We have a lot of dreams, but we know we don’t know what to do. And we know that those in power don’t know what to do.”

No. Wrong. Those in power are not interested in fixing anything because they are doing just swimmingly. There’s nothing to fix, in their eyes. How can you be so dense, Adam Curtis? Are you trying to be an optimist? Suggesting that there’s an easier way that we’ve not thought of? There are people who know what to do, but, as I noted above, the system we have will actively resist being eliminated. Arundhati Roy knows what we need to do. It’s Utopic and perhaps Quixotic, but it’s a plan.

“While outside the theater they [the politicians] were locked in too, money and assets were moved in vast quantities into the hands of a tiny elite, and they did nothing to stop it.”

I repeat: politicians ARE the elites. They are deeply corrupted.

“Everyone performs. The politicians perform as politicians, but they’re shit and everyone knows they’re not going to do anything. Some of us perform as indignant, outraged liberals, but we know in our heart of hearts that it’s not going to have any effect. The Right does its pantomime culture war thing, but it’s all just performance inside the theater. What we seem to lack is the ability to leave the theater and understand what’s going on outside its walls.”

This seems to be his thesis statement: we don’t understand. It feels disingenuous. I think he’s trying to excuse himself for not trying harder to fix it. I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know what to do to make things better for more people and to stop building systems that enrich only a tiny elite.

I’m pretty sure I have some serviceable ideas about what we could do better. I don’t know how to put it in motion or to get people on board because they seem to fragment as soon as they think that they might become—or already be—part of that tiny elite. The problem is that people don’t really have scruples. They just don’t want to be on the bottom. I know what we should do, but I don’t know how to get us to do it.

Hell, I don’t think we can ever get people to stop pushing buttons in trains or elevators that are clearly already lit up and engaged. I don’t take elevators very often at all, but I can imagine that people push those lit-up buttons for all they’re worth—just to make it go faster. That’s what people do in trains to get the doors to open—push buttons that clearly indicate that the doors are going to open as soon as possible anyway. Click, click, click, click.

This may seem like a weird digression, but these are the same people we have to convince not to want things that would be taken away from other people. If they think they can be part of the elite pirate group, then they’ll absolutely do that. If they think that they’re not in the elites, then they’ll be against them—until they think they’re either in the elites or they could be.

If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist, then the greatest trick the elites ever pulled was convincing their slaves that they don’t need to revolt because they’re actually in the elite.