MICHAEL HUDSON: The Russian kleptocracy made its money from economic rent, basically natural resource rent. The United States’ promise to the Russians was, well, if you just give all of the property to the owners, give every factory to the factory manager, give the gas company to the heads of managers of Gazprom, if you give it to them, then nature will take its course and they will all be led by the invisible hand to invest and act just as the United States did. But, actually, this is the exact opposite of every way that the United States got rich. And the Russians did not even have a progressive income tax for all of this.

迈克尔：
俄罗斯盗贼统治通过经济租金赚钱，基本上是自然资源租金。美国对俄罗斯的承诺是，如果你把所有的财产交给所有者，把每个工厂交给工厂经理，把天然气公司交给俄罗斯天然气工业股份公司的经理，如果你把它交给他们，那么自然就会顺其自然，他们都会被看不见的手引导去投资，就像美国一样。但实际上，这与美国致富的方式完全相反。俄罗斯甚至没有累进所得税

Well, here’s what happened in 1994, 1995, when Russia decided to privatize, essentially, there was a scheme that was put into its hands to privatize all of the nickel and the raw materials and the oil companies. And so the government borrowed money from the banks. The banks would write a check to the government, let’s say, for $5 billion. The government would take this check, and it pledged as collateral, the holdings and Neurolch nickel and other oil and others. And the government then deposited this $500 billion check back in the bank that wrote it. So the bank wrote a check, it was redeposited there, it was free. The banks created free money. That’s what banks do. They create it on their computers, on a balance sheet. And sure enough, Russia ended up giving all of its natural resource rent to the kleptocrats.

这是1994、1995年发生的事情，当俄罗斯决定私有化时，基本上，有一个计划将所有的镍，原材料和石油公司私有化，以及政府找银行借钱。银行会给政府开一张50亿美元的支票。政府将接受这张支票，并以所持股份和Neurolch镍及其他石油等作为抵押品。然后政府把这50亿美元的支票存回开支票的银行。银行开了一张支票，钱被重新存入银行，免费的。银行创造了免费的钱，它就是这么做的。它们在电脑上，在资产负债表上创造它。果不其然，俄罗斯最终将其所有的自然资源租金都交给了盗贼统治者。

Well, you mentioned that they wanted to get dollars. Well, how do they get the dollars? Here they have the stock in Neurolch nickel and Yukos oil. The only way they can get money from the stock is to sell it abroad in England and America because the Russian savings were wiped out with the hyperinflation. So the Russians didn’t have any ability to buy their own rent-yielding natural resources. Only the foreigners did. And from 1995 to 1997, Russia’s stock market was the leading stock market in the world. And that was because it was a bonanza. It was free money from the public sector.
And if you look at the last 2,000 years of history, almost all the fortunes in every country in every century have been made by getting money from the public sector. Fortunes are made by privatizing what was in the public sector and by insiders giving it to themselves. That’s how the Roman Empire made its money, by seizing land right down to the United States, grabbing land from the Native Americans.

你提到他们想要美元。他们怎么得到美元呢?这里有纽洛克镍和尤科斯石油的股票。他们从股票中获得资金的唯一方法是将其卖到英国和美国，因为俄罗斯的储蓄在恶性通货膨胀中化为乌有。
所以俄国人没有能力购买他们自己的自然资源。只有外国人有。从1995年到1997年，俄罗斯的股票市场是世界上领先的股票市场。那是因为它是一个财源滚滚的地方。这是来自公共产业的免费资金。
如果你回顾一下过去2000年的历史，你会发现几乎每个世纪每个国家的所有财富都是通过从公共产业获得资金而获得的。财富是通过将公共产业的东西私有化，以及内部人士把这些东西分给自己来创造的。这就是罗马帝国赚钱的方式，一直到美国，从美洲原住民手中夺取土地。

So you had all of this privatization, and needless to say, the kleptocrats’ modus operandi was that of a rentier. It was a rent-seeking economy that the neoliberals advised Russia to do, not a profit-making economy where industrialists would hire labor to produce more goods and services. The fact is that the factories, as you know, stopped paying the labor.
And the one thing that Russia did not privatize and give away freely was the housing. I made three speeches before the Duma in 1994 and 1995, and I brought over America’s former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and others, trying to convince them that you should give everybody their housing, just give it in their own name, then they wouldn’t have to buy it. You’d create at least their own housing, you’d create an internal market. That wasn’t done until very, very late in the game, until a point was reached where the Russians and also the Baltic states and all the post-Soviet states had to pay enormous amounts of money just to get housing, while all of the rest of the land and natural resource wealth was given away freely by the kleptocrats. That was the neoliberal travesty of rentier capitalism.

所以你有了所有这些私有化，不用说，盗贼统治者的手法是食利者的手法。新自由主义者建议俄罗斯实行的是寻租经济，而不是实业家雇佣劳动力生产更多商品和服务的盈利经济。事实就是，工厂，如你所知，停止了偿付劳动力。
俄罗斯唯一没有私有化和免费赠送的是住房。1994年和1995年，我在杜马前做了三次演讲，我请来了美国前司法部长拉姆齐·克拉克(Ramsey Clark)和其他人，试图说服他们，你应该给每个人住房，只要以他们自己的名义提供，这样他们就不必购买了。你至少会创造自己的住房，你会创造一个内部市场。直到游戏进行到非常非常晚的时候，直到俄罗斯、波罗的海国家和所有后苏联国家不得不支付巨额资金才能获得住房，而所有其余的土地和自然资源财富都被盗贼统治者免费赠送。这是对食利者资本主义的新自由主义嘲弄。

I think that’s why when you read the speeches of President Putin today or Secretary Lavrov, you can see just the disgust that they feel almost for themselves for ever having been suckered into this kind of neoliberal plan. I think that’s spurred them to say, well, look, we have to turn east, not west. This is how all of Europe and America are making its money. They’re turning into a rentier economy. We’ve seen what that did to us, and as President Putin said, Russia lost more of its population economically in the 1990s as a result of neoliberal rentier policy than it lost militarily in World War II. Well, it’s never going to do that again, and that is what has set its mind so much on to creating an alternative. When there’s a will, there’s a way, and there’s now the will, and that’s been the precondition for creating a much sounder basis for growth in Russia, China, and the rest of the global majority.

我认为这就是为什么当你今天阅读普京总统或拉夫罗夫国务卿的演讲时，你可以看到他们对自己一直被这种新自由主义计划所吸引而感到厌恶的原因。我认为这促使他们说，好吧，看，我们必须转向东方，而不是西方。这就是整个欧洲和美国赚钱的方式。他们正在变成食利者经济。我们已经看到了这对我们的影响，正如普京总统所说，由于新自由主义的食利者政策，俄罗斯在20世纪90年代失去的经济人口比它在第二次世界大战中失去的军事人口更多。
它永远不会再这样做了，这就是它下定决心要创造另一种选择的原因。有志者事竟成，现在有了这样的意愿，这是为俄罗斯、中国和全球其他大多数国家的增长创造更坚实基础的先决条件。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


GLENN DIESEN: You mentioned the will, but what would be the way, because do you see, I guess, Russia following the same path now as China has? Because when we began this program, I mentioned the American system, because I sometimes feel like this is the model maybe at least China, but also to a large extent, Russia might be following because they were in a very similar situation now as the Americans were in the early 19th century, in which the Hamiltonian economics all transformed itself into this American system where the Americans said, we can’t be dependent on British manufacturing, its infrastructure, ports and such, and its national banks, and later on currency. So they began to develop their own system through a lot of protectionist policies, one would have to add.
And you also saw towards the end of the 19th century how people, I know you referred to many times economists such as Simon Patten, who viewed the idea of building a physical industry that is, well, at least the infrastructure to be something imperative investment for the government to make, because it has a dual effect, on one hand, it makes industries more competitive by having the infrastructure in place, but it’s also something that elevates the standard of living for the average citizen. So it seems at least for the Chinese that physical industries has been a key focus of its economic policy.

格伦：
你提到了意愿，但你认为俄罗斯现在会走和中国一样的道路吗?因为当我们开始这场讨论时，我提到了美国的制度，因为我有时觉得这是一个模式，也许至少这是中国的模式，但在很大程度上，俄罗斯可能也会效仿，因为他们现在的处境与美国人在19世纪初的处境非常相似，当时汉密尔顿经济学都转变为美国的体系，美国人说，我们不能依赖英国的制造业，基础设施，港口等，以及国家银行，后来是货币。所以他们开始通过许多保护主义政策来发展自己的体系，人们不得不补充说。
你也看到在19世纪末，有人，我知道你多次提到经济学家，比如西蒙·帕藤，他认为建立一个实体产业的想法，至少是基础设施是政府必须投资的东西，因为它有双重效果。一方面，它通过基础设施的到位使行业更具竞争力，同时它也提高了普通公民的生活水平。因此，至少对中国人来说，实体产业似乎一直是其经济政策的重点。

But I was therefore curious if it’s the same in Russia, because the same three pillars of the American system, I seem to see it in both countries, in one hand, where they seek technological sovereignty, that is what Alexander Hamilton would have focused on manufacturing. But now of course, they look at digital platforms and their own, well, it was in critical industries and technologies that there’s some level of autonomy, they both seek this very vast infrastructure projects to find new areas of connectivity to avoid, you know, American choke points. And last, they both focus on de-dollarization, their own banks, to not end up paying all the rent to the not just Americans, but the Europeans as well.
So I was just curious if you can say something about this. Do you see Russia effectively having learned its lesson from the 90s and following that path or what is the way that the Chinese and Russians are going?

但我很好奇，俄罗斯是否也能一样，因为美国体系的三大支柱，我似乎在这两个国家都看到了，一方面，他们寻求技术主权，这是亚历山大·汉密尔顿会关注的制造业。但现在，他们当然会关注数字平台和他们自己的平台，在关键的行业和技术中有一定程度的自主权，他们都在寻求这个非常庞大的基础设施项目，以寻找新的连接领域，以避免美国制造的瓶颈。最后，他们都专注于去美元化，他们自己的银行，不只是支付所有的租金给美国人，还有欧洲人。
所以我很好奇你能不能对此说点什么。你认为俄罗斯有效地吸取了90年代的教训并走了这条路吗?或者中国和俄罗斯正在走什么路?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, both the Russian economy and the Chinese economy are operating on an ad hoc basis. There’s no economic theory or doctrine that either countries develop to explain what they’re doing. In fact, China is still sending its economic students to the United States where they’re taught neoliberal financial policy. And my students tell me that the American educated students get priority in being hired over domestic students.
So China and Russia are acting pragmatically in a way to create an alternative to the neoliberal growth. But they don’t have, they haven’t systematized it in the way that industrial capitalists in the United States and England spelled out. Here’s our strategy. Here is our set of laws that we have.
I guess you could say what President Putin is doing is jawboning the kleptocrats, the wealthy class saying, okay, you can keep your money, but you have to invest it in ways that we agree will help the Russian economy become self-sufficient, independent, productive and more prosperous. So it’s all done on an ad hoc basis.

迈克尔：
俄罗斯经济和中国经济都是在临时基础上运行的。两国都没有经济理论或学说来解释他们的所作所为。事实上，中国仍然在把经济专业的学生送到美国，在那里他们被教授新自由主义的金融政策。我的学生告诉我，受过美国教育的学生比国内学生更容易被录用。
因此，中国和俄罗斯正在以务实的方式创造一种替代新自由主义增长的方式。但是他们没有，他们没有像美国和英国的工业资本家那样将其系统化。这是我们的策略。这是我们的一套法律。
我猜你可以说普京总统所做的是在向盗贼统治者和富裕阶层施压，说，好吧，你可以保留你的钱，但你必须以我们都同意的方式投资，这将有助于俄罗斯经济自给自足、独立、富有成效和更加繁荣。所以这都是临时需要的基础上完成的。

One of the problems is that Russia by the 1990s was probably the only country in the world that had no background in Marxism at all. Largely, this was a result of Stalin’s popularization of volume one of Capital to say, well, capitalism is an exploitation of workers by their employers. Well, all that indeed was in volume one, but Marx wrote volume two and three all about finance and rent seeking. And the one thing that Russia did not see coming in the 1990s was rent seeking and financialization and simply using the banks as a means of creating and backing monopolies as their source of income in a non-industrial way.
Marx would have called this a pre-industrial way. And Marx said, well, the revolutionary contribution of industrial capitalism was to free Europe from feudalism, from the legacy of feudalism, from the hereditary landlord class. We’re going to get rid of the landlords so that there can be popular ownership. And yet there’s still, they never got rid of land rent. But land rent is now, instead of being taxed away as the tax base, it’s paid to the banks as mortgage interest in the United States. And in Russia and China, if you want to buy a house, the land rent still, as China becomes more prosperous, people can afford to pay more and more for the housing they buy. And this, they take out a larger loan in order to buy the house and the rent is paid to the bank.

其中一个问题是，到20世纪90年代，俄罗斯可能是世界上唯一一个完全没有马克思主义背景的国家。很大程度上，这是斯大林普及《资本论》第一卷的结果，他说，资本主义是雇主对工人的剥削。这些都在第一卷里，但马克思写的第二卷和第三卷都是关于金融和寻租的。俄罗斯在20世纪90年代没有预见到的一件事是寻租和金融化，以及简单地利用银行作为创造和支持垄断的手段，以非工业方式作为他们的收入来源。
马克思会称之为前工业化的方式。马克思说，工业资本主义的革命性贡献是将欧洲从封建主义中解放出来，从封建主义的遗产中解放出来，从世袭地主阶级中解放出来。我们要摆脱地主，这样就可以实行全民所有制。然而，他们仍然没有摆脱地租。
但现在，土地租金不再作为税基征税，而是作为抵押贷款利息支付给美国的银行。在俄罗斯和中国，如果你想买房，土地租金仍然存在，随着中国变得更加繁荣，人们可以为他们购买的住房支付越来越多的钱。他们借了一笔更大的贷款来买房子，然后把房租付给银行。

So China is letting a rentier financial sector develop in its midst because it hasn’t really defined what is the model of growth that we want to have. They’re doing it by experimentation, ad hoc, I think. And what needs to be done and what obviously is going to emerge in the kind of, is a consciousness of how are they going to make the economy more productive, more efficient, and use the economic surplus to raise living standards instead of to create a wealthy rentier financial and rent-seeking landlord class monopolist that you’re seeing in Europe and the United States.

因此，中国正在让一个食利者——金融部门在其中间发展，因为它还没有真正定义我们想要的增长模式。我认为他们是通过实验来实现的。我们需要做的是，显然会出现的是，意识到如何使经济更有生产力，更有效率，利用经济盈余来提高生活水平，而不是创造一个富有的食利者——金融和寻租的地主阶级垄断者，就像你在欧洲和美国看到的那样。

ALEXANDER MERCOURIS: The interesting thing is, when you say ad hoc, you’re absolutely correct in the sense that in Russia you get the sense that at the very high level of government, Putin himself, very frustrated right from the outset with a neoliberal model, but at the same time very intimidated by the oligarchs around him, very, very wary of taking on neoliberals within the finance ministry and the central bank, but at the same time as if frustrated himself and going gradually, ever so gradually, with the grain of what is needed to try to bring the system back to some kind of stability.

有趣的是,当你说到“临时需要”,你是完全正确的。
在俄罗斯你感觉政府水平非常高，普京本人，从一开始就对新自由主义模式非常沮丧。与此同时，他又被身边的寡头们吓坏了，对财政部和央行内部的新自由主义者非常非常谨慎，但同时，逐渐采取行动，非常缓慢地采取行动，努力使体系恢复某种稳定。
原创翻译：龙腾网 https://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处


So you can see this. You can see this, for example, in the banking system. I mean, the banking system, which people don’t know about this or think much about this, I mean, the banking system has been changed completely in Russia over the last 30 years. I mean, it’s become…it had become almost completely private. The Sverbank was still functioning as a state bank, but there was always the possibility that it would be privatized. Now, we’ve gone from a largely private banking system with banks…a Russian banker once said to me, Russian banks are black holes, they’re black holes in the economy, they are a disaster as they are. We’ve gone from a private banking system to one that is almost entirely state-owned.

你可以看到这一情况。例如，你可以在银行系统中看到这一点。我的意思是，银行系统，人们不了解或不太了解，在过去的30年里，俄罗斯的银行系统已经完全改变了。我的意思是，它已经变得几乎完全是私人的了。联邦储蓄银行仍然是一家国有银行，但它一直有可能被私有化。
现在，俄罗斯已经从一个主要由银行组成的私人银行体系转变为……一位俄罗斯银行家曾对我说，俄罗斯的银行是黑洞，它们是经济中的黑洞，它们本身就是一场灾难。俄罗斯已经从一个私人银行系统变成了一个几乎完全国有的银行系统。

There are a few Russian private banks still, but the big banks, the really important ones, are state-owned. We’ve also…but we’ve also had other things happening. We have now the emergence of industrial policy. But all of this has been reactive, and to some extent it’s been…it’s happened in response to pressure from the West. So we have financial sanctions, which in effect almost oblige the sort of state control of the financial system. We’ve had a shift in the way in which the ruble is managed from, you know, policy go full convertibility towards now we’re getting capital controls coming back. We’re starting to see a kind of protectionism imposed on the economy from the outside. But it is all completely reactive up to this time.

俄罗斯还有一些私人银行，但真正重要的大银行是国有的。也有其他（利好的）事情发生。俄罗斯现在有了产业政策的出现。不过，所有这些都是被动的，在某种程度上，这是对西方压力的回应。
俄罗斯面临金融制裁，这实际上几乎迫使国家控制金融体系。俄罗斯已经改变了对卢布的管理方式，你知道的，从政策上的完全可兑换，到现在俄罗斯又回到了资本管制。我们开始看到一种从外部强加给经济的保护主义。但到目前为止，这一切都是完全被动性的。
（未完待续）