Billions of fortunes. Their origin and nature

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Forbes and Fortune magazines are considered the authoritative publications for individual wealth and regularly publish lists of the richest people in the world. In 2015, there were 1,826 billionaires in the world, whose total fortune is $ 7.05 trillion, which is 600 billion more than in the previous year.

On March 1, 2016, Forbes unveiled the world's 30th annual world ranking of dollar billionaires. The list includes 1,810 people. 16 less than last year. Their combined fortune is $ 6, 48 trillion, $ 570 billion less than a year earlier. The list is "getting younger": a record number of participants, 67, turned out to be under 40 years old.

The list includes 77 representatives of Russia …

An interesting map is published on the resource: tranche-invest.ru, on which the world of billionaires is displayed on a scale. Domestically, billionaires are divided into groups showing the official origin of billions.

The size of the countries on the map reflects the number of billionaires, where Russia roughly corresponds to China, India, Germany (I don't even know if you can be proud of this or quite the opposite?)

As for the structure of the "masters of life":

“There are practically no billionaires in Russia who have inherited their fortune (red).

3.4% are managers. People who are professionally self-employed (blue).

10.8% of Russian billionaires are company founders, i.e. who have built their own business (green).

21.6% are financiers, i.e. those for whom big money is a profession (yellow).

64% are billionaires who made their fortunes thanks to the state (orange).

This card can be interpreted in different ways. For example, let's take one of the colors - green.

It shows the proportion of billionaires who have built their own business. Those. big money made from successful startups, innovations, new products, etc. It can be seen that a huge share of green in Asian countries - Japan, Taiwan, China. Green is very high in the USA, France, Italy and Germany.

Or take the color blue. It turns out that Great Britain is a country of professional managers. And there is no other such country.

In short, this card is very interesting from the point of view of professional meditation on the topic of economics and business.

Universal advice from foreign expert lecturers is very good for their countries, but they are completely far from our realities. Our billionaire color layout is unlike any other country."

On my own behalf, I will add that the origin of capital indicated on the map, of course, does not provide any information about its real origin, but it provides an opportunity to "swing indirectly", especially since in Russia "capital" and "corruption" are one-root words.

The most systematic approach to the description of Russian capitalism, in my humble opinion, is Andrei Fursov, whom I will quote with pleasure:

“Our oligarchs do not represent an independent group - they are appointees. There is information that in the early 1990s, 50 thousand standard receipts were printed, which said that the name of the name receives some funds for management and is responsible for them.

Of course, those people whom we call oligarchs, they started as part of a certain cluster. True, in the 1990s, they gained somewhat greater independence within the country than was expected. I emphasize: within the country, since in the world market it is a dependent group operating within a strictly defined framework.

The task of the cluster in question and the oligarchs was fundamentally different from that of the leadership and the top of the PRC as a whole. If China carried out its reforms in order to become a superpower, then reforms in Russia were carried out with a completely different goal. The results of these reforms were recently announced by Gaidar. When asked why we cannot get out of the crisis as Americans, he literally said the following: we are not supposed to, we are a backward country in the Third World. But it was precisely the Gaidarochubays and their owners (curators) who turned the USSR into the Third World Erefia.

That is, the goals of the reforms were different. They were social, systemic. But these social goals led to different results. The Chinese reforms, the way they were carried out, drove China up. And the cost of turning the nomenklatura into a class of owners was the destruction of the Soviet economy and Soviet society, the expropriation of a huge mass of the population.

First

The reforms of the 1990s in Russia were carried out mainly for social rather than economic reasons. Their goal was to create a class society of the capitalist (it turned out - quasi-capitalist) type, included in the world capsystem as a dependent and largely controlled by the top of finance and information.

With the help of neoliberal schemes and foreign capital, part of the Soviet nomenclature solved the problem of becoming an owner-class, implementing a trend that has been gaining momentum since the early 1960s. If the revolution in Russia in 1917 was an element of the world uprising of the masses (partly spontaneous, partly directed by the closed structures of world governance) and, perhaps, somewhat overtaken the revolution and "uprising" of this type, then the Soviet counterrevolution of 1991 was also an element of the world process - the uprising elites, somewhat belated in comparison with Great Britain, the USA and even China.

Second

Although the economic reforms in the PRC also fit into the neoliberal logic of the global redistribution of the last third of the twentieth century, the reasons that directly caused them are of a slightly different nature than those in the Russian Federation. At the heart of the Chinese reforms is the original US-China economic and political alliance. Do not be mistaken, it was this alliance, and not the United States taken separately, that became the external factor in the destruction of the Soviet Union.

Third

The result of the Chinese reforms was the transformation of the PRC into a workshop of the world, into an economic power No. 2, and possibly No. 1. Its accumulation of gigantic, the world's largest gold and foreign exchange reserves allows China to influence the world financial web and its main spiders.

Fourth

The result of neoliberal reforms in the Russian Federation was: economic decline, social and demographic catastrophe, the collapse of science, education, the army, a sharp weakening of the military security of the Russian Federation. We are a dangerous society. We are a dangerous society not only in terms of our internal situation, we live in a dangerous geopolitical situation. In today's RF there is a high degree, if not external control, then external control. This is the first time since the Golden Horde.

Fifth

As a class society, the Russian Federation is clearly not a bourgeois society. It lacks not only a real market, but also civil society and politics - the necessary attributes of a bourgeois society. The Russian Federation is part of the world system functionally, that is, according to the function performed in the world capsystem, it is something capitalist. In terms of substance and internal content - no.

Sixth

The current Russian parasitic-predatory class of comprador-paracapitalists is a capitalist class not so much in relations with the population, not so much inside, as, firstly, in terms of its position in the global system, that is, in the world capitalist class - such a "six", and by the position in power and in power by the distribution and redistribution of what was left of the USSR. The late Vadim Tsymbursky called it "the Russian recycling corporation."

This originally accumulative being determines the consciousness of the oligarchs. This can be seen especially clearly in the example of our oligarchs. The ideology of the ruling groups of the Russian Federation is clearly expressed in the review of the banker Pyotr Aven from Alfa Bank on Zakhar Prilepin's novel Sankya.

First … Aven's thesis: in socialism and in general in the left views there is a spirit of destruction, all the evil from socialism and these views.

Second: anyone who, like the hero of Zakhar Prilepin, wants to change the order that developed in the 1990s, is a complete loser, unable to play by the rules of the system.

Third: suffering on the one hand, struggle with the other - things are superfluous and unnecessary, the main thing is comfort.

Fourth: all losers really only want to join the bourgeoisie, envy the rich, and therefore talk about suffering, struggle and social justice. The main motive of opposition to the current system, Aven believes, is a base motive, an elementary envy.

Fifth: the current elite did not steal anything from anyone, it makes a great contribution, creates jobs and should not justify itself for nothing.

Sixth: politics is an unworthy occupation, the lot of parasites, in the same way it consists of intellectual reflection, this is all for losers

To quote Belkovsky: “Aven informs us that only private property can be defended with arms if it is in good condition. Nothing else can be justifiably protected, therefore a poor person who does not have substantial property from the point of view of protection is completely useless. " This is the manifesto, this is the ideology of the layer that sawed through property in the 90s and early 2000s …"

Push:

No matter how we treat the oligarchs, this is an objective and natural phenomenon. That is, the current generation of billionaires is a logical result of objective processes that began in the USSR in 1953. And this objective phenomenon must be carefully studied and dissected in order to turn it into a resource … Well, at least, in order to correctly present the receipts mentioned by Fursov for payment. I wonder how much has run across them over the past 25 years?

I don’t believe you will not have to pay on these receipts. Debts - they tend to live their own life and be presented for payment in the most unexpected ways in the most unexpected places. In any case, not a single rich man I know has run away from his receipts. The only question was who to pay and when? The current "masters of life" will not go anywhere from this either. In the United States - it has already begun - on January 20, one billionaire is definitely moving into a rented social apartment, in which a black family lived before them …