Vladimir Putin: The Russian Bureaucratic Collectivist
In Ukraine, a war for bureaucratic globalist supremacy
In the U.S., the most recent example of a bureaucratic collectivist president—an active partner/proponent in the transfer of power to the administrative state—was Barack Obama. That aggressive transfer of power has continued with Joe Biden, though, as with most everything else, he is a most passive actor given his cognitive decline. Biden accepts and even advocates for what his handlers tell him; Obama was an architect of it, along with the Democratic Party.
Way over there, in Russia, the counterpart to the Democratic regime was and is Vladimir Putin. Russia is not the U.S., of course. Modern America and the western world in general have devolved over time from democratic capitalism to state capitalism and are now in the throes of bureaucratic collectivism, which is, to over-simplify, a kind of neofascism in which the central levers of power reside within immense vertically integrated bureaucracies, rather than within a diverse democratic ecosystem or, in less democratic countries, within a single political party or in ruling dictators. Those countries have their ecosystems and parties and dictators, who entertain their corporate agents, but they are, more or less, front men for the main act of the bureaucracy.
Thankfully, in the U.S., the transformation to bureaucratic collectivism is not complete. In The New Bossism of the American Left I chronicled this trend pre-Trump. In The New Bossism, Volume II, I am going revisit the bureaucratic collectivist state after the Trump years and the pandemic years—Trump’s push back against the administrative state and how successful or unsuccessful he was, the rise of the public health bureaucracy and its sudden and majestic grasp for permanent power, and how successful the bureaucracy has or hasn’t been, plus what happens next.
But, for today, let’s look at the question of bureaucratic collectivism through a different lens: The lens of Russia. Specifically, what about Vladimir Putin? Is Putin a strong man who is not bound in any meaningful way by a collectivist bureaucracy? If he is, what happens if there is a forced regime change? One can argue that if a collectivist bureaucracy was part of the ruling structure, it would provide stability but that without such stability that nation’s nuclear arsenal could indeed fall into the hands of mad people, as some have cautioned.
On the more academic front, the question is whether the theory of bureaucratic collectivism applies to Russia and to states outside the western nations whose arc once formed the sphere of democratic capitalism. After all, the theory of bureaucratic collectivism emerged from Max Shachtman’s critique of what he called a deformed workers’ state in the Soviet Union run by a unrepresentative and decidedly unrevolutionary bureaucracy.
So, to cut to the chase, the answer is yes …