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Title: Jeffrey Sachs: Useful Idiot Author: Kevin Carson Date: October 7, 2005 Language: en Topics: eastern europe Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/10/jeffrey-sachs-useful-idiot.html
Great profile at Left Business Observer of Jeffrey Sachs, the brains
behind the Great “Progressive” Bono and Geldorf Travelling Dog and Pony
Show.
Sachs was a key adviser to Yeltsin, during the neoliberal transformation
of the Russian economy.
In Poland, like Russia, Sachs wanted to establish corporate capitalism
on the American model.
In Poland, Sachs was firmly on the side of rapid transition to “normal”
capitalism. At first he proposed U.S.-style corporate structures, with
professional managers answering to many shareholders and a large
economic role for stock markets. That didn’t fly with the Polish
authorities, so Sachs came back with a Germanic idea — large blocks of
the shares of privatized companies would be placed in the hands of big
banks. (As Ellerman recounts it, “Wherever the parade was going, [Sachs]
had to be in front.”) In both versions the point was to end any hints of
worker or social control and institute a conventional capitalist class
hierarchy.
In Slovenia, likewise, he had nothing but contempt for “idiots” and
“self-management imbeciles.”
Of course, it was a foregone conclusion that “any rapid privatization
would immediately lead to the creation of a new corrupt elite through
massive theft of state property.” Post-Soviet elites have acted through
the state to accumulate capital in a manner reminiscent of England’s
primitive accumulation process a few centuries ago (see, for example,
this excellent article by Nancy Holmstrom and Richard Smith comparing
Russian gangster capitalism to the enclosures and other land thefts in
England). And Sachs acted as their useful idiot; of course, he denies
any share of the guilt, since he technically didn’t actually tell them
to steal everything that wasn’t nailed down.
Alternative models of market transformation based on “hybrid forms of
ownership,” like worker self-management of former state enterprises,
were advocated by leftish figures like David Ellerman, among others. But
right-wingers like Murray Rothbard and Hans-Hermann Hoppe were also
numbered among the “idiots” and “self-management imbeciles,” arguing
that the best way to privatize state industry in the former Soviet bloc
was to treat it as unowned property, to be homesteaded by those actually
occupying and using it--the labor force. As usual, the libertarian left
and right have more in common with each other than with the kind of
so-called “liberals” and “conservatives” who appear on Crossfire, half
and inch to the left and right, respectively, of the corporate center.