Oligarchy Deficit
Do you think I want to write about how scandalously and deftly they are fooling the people? Or that they have amassed not so much and this is pardonable? Or that the demons of power have already opened their arms wide and are about to embrace the body of our long-suffering fatherland? Oligarchs are said to be wiping out the middle class and middle-sized business. They are. But somebody has to create big business. For instance, a huge stadium- sized market with an ocean of foodstuffs on sale has been built in Kyiv. 25 nearby small and medium-sized grocery stores closed and their owners, who initially tried to offer resistance, soon gave up. How can we evaluate this? For the fact is 25 entrepreneurs (business colleagues) have been ruined. But these are the ABCs of capitalism. The point is we are learning on the move, without textbooks, which is simultaneously funny and suspicious. But, frankly, what is going on?
What is going on is the natural process of capital accumulation.
What is going on is a transfusion of capital from one sector to another.
The question is who has to do all this work? We simply have not noticed that we have entered the second stage of our bourgeois evolution. Have you ever climbed a high mountain? You keep going, reach the peak, and then you suddenly realize the true peak is still further. The same is true here. Perestroika kick-started small-scale cooperatives and businesses. This is so hackneyed a clich
О that it never occurred to us to ask why there is no green light to big business. What can justify such discrimination? Do we not need big business at all? And if we do, especially technologically sophisticated ones, where will they come from?
We would rather take off the rose-colored glasses, use our common sense, and understand that small and medium business can exist in full measure only if there is big business.
Statistics say we have 300,000 small and medium enterprises, but it is not clear whether or not we have a middle class. In other words, we do have small fry in business, but no middle class. How can one find the latter? For something middle to exist, there should be something small at one pole and something big at the other. Thus, Ukraine has suddenly found itself in a situation characterized by a vacuum of big things.
There is no big business as a class! The biggest thing and most talked about with raised voice is that we have is natural gas and oil. This, however, is connected with distribution, not with extraction or production. We, a huge country which has set reforms in motion and wants to head for Europe and be respected for its strength, have only small cars, not the locomotives, of the current history.
For a country to restructure its industries, it needs accumulation and sector-to-sector transfusions of capital. It was expected that small business would in due time bring forth medium business. That was a very painful stretch of time with its heroes — Artiom Tarasov and German Sterligov in Russia (still remember them?), Semen Yufa and Serhiy Kychyhin here. It was a time when society was shown the way money was being made and what this money could make. But the always ruthless juggernaught of history quickly crushed the pioneers under its wheels as soon as those trailblazers had fulfilled their historical mission.
(See page CLOSEUP)
