The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: Civilizing Russia, or whitewashing Neoliberalism?

Dr Tobias Rupprecht’s seminar at St Antony’s College was The Tragedy of Soviet Market Economists: The Failed Quest to Civilise Russia, 1972–2022. But sitting through the discussion, I was left wondering whose tragedy we were really talking about, and who gets to define what it means to civilize a country. The nitpicking Oxford event kinda made sense, but pull back and my impression was that this was an apologetic account of the #neoliberal project in Russia: a story that gives market liberalism respectable historical roots while leaving too many of its own political responsibilities unexplored.

This guy looks so uncomfortable presenting his book, not surprising as his book is about rejuvenation of shock doctrine neoliberalism in Russia. This should feel uncomfortable, as for the last 20 years this same mess has ripped apart the global economy and society. Its a mess we need to compost not something to nitpick thought as liberal apology.

One of the striking things was the attempt to present Chicago School economics as something that grew naturally out of Russian experience. What was missing was any account of the international circulation of neoliberal ideas, the networks promoting them, and the ideological project that had been developing since the late 1940s. #Neoliberalism did not emerge from Russian soil, it had a history, a political purpose and powerful international connections.

The discussion of perestroika seemed equally uncomfortable. Liberalism was presented as having little or no role in the process, which was instead framed as purely Communist. But this leaves the central question hanging: how did market liberalism become such a powerful force in the transformation of the Soviet system?

Then there was the constitutional crisis, the bombing of parliament and the question of political responsibility. The impression he gives was that the liberals had clean hands. Anatoly Chubais was presented sympathetically, despite his central role in the “reforms” and upheavals of the period. The liberals helped bring Putin to power, then found themselves pushing back against the system they had helped create. The Chechen wars and the retreat of democratic liberalism formed part of this story, but the larger political responsibility seemed to dissolve into the narrative.

The Russian liberals were not simply neutral democrats caught in somebody else’s tragedy. They were also participants in a project of internal imperialism: a vision of modernization that treated Russian society as something to be managed, reorganised and disciplined from above. Chubais was described as a democrat while simultaneously expressing deep distrust of the Russian people. That contradiction deserves more judgement than it received in the talk

The comparison with China raised another uncomfortable question. Russia’s industrial development and social security were presented as obstacles to the transformation being attempted, while China’s large peasant population and overseas connections offered different conditions for market reform. But if the argument is that existing social protections made a country harder to reshape for the market, perhaps we should ask what kind of progress this version of liberalism actually represents.

At one point, a question about soviet algorithms prompted laughter in the room. Yet the wider discussion seemed to leave the basic assumptions of neoliberalism untouched. That was the most revealing part of the event for me. The room was bowing before the #deathcult, the belief that the market is the inevitable measure of progress, that societies must be remade in its image, and that the damage caused along the way is a regrettable but necessary price.

Nobody was willing to challenge the underlying framework directly, nobody in the room had any clothes on – the ideological assumptions were exposed – but the performance of respectable scholarship continued. Only one question near the end felt genuinely sane: an older woman asking something that cut through the comfortable narrative.

The tragedy is not that Soviet market economists failed in their quest to “civilise” Russia, it is more that the idea of civilizing a society through market discipline was part of the problem from the beginning. Liberalism presents itself as common sense, modernization and freedom. But when its advocates distrust the people they claim to liberate, excuse the violence of transformation, and treat social protections as barriers to progress, we should ask whose freedom is actually being served.

This is the wider problem with our worship of the #deathcult,turning blinded ideology into an unquestionable reality. Once that happens, the discussion examines every historical detail except the assumptions that hold the whole story together. We need to stop treating neoliberalism as the neutral destination of history. We need to examine the power behind it, the social damage it leaves behind, and the alternatives that have been pushed aside.

That means building from the grassroots, through open processes and shared power, rather than imagining that societies can be perfected by economists, markets and elitists who do not trust the people they govern. The question is not whether Russia was sufficiently civilised for the market, it is whether the market’s self-appointed civilisers were ever willing to recognize the people whose lives they were reshaping.

The event was about teaching the young people that liberalism was not responsible for the mess… and the polite youth lap it up, no critical questions from them in the Q&A

END.

#Oxford #Talk #Event

Who or What Has Consciousness?

A simple question: who – or what – has consciousness? Humans, animals, #AI, or perhaps matter itself? What is consciousness, and why is it different?

Philip Goff (Philosophy, Durham University)
Consciousness is everywhere

Heather Browning (Philosophy, University of Southampton)
Evidence for consciousness in non-human animals

Patrick Butlin (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
The case for AI consciousness

One recurring theme was that consciousness is not just another scientific object to measure. We already know consciousness from the inside, we are born into subjective experience. Science can describe physical processes mathematically and externally, but subjective qualities – feeling, sensation, the experience of “I am” – resist straightforward physical explanation.

This creates a gap where physical science explains structure, behaviour, and observable mechanisms, but not questions about experience, just function. #Philosophy enters here, asking not only what consciousness does, but what it is.

Some perspectives suggested a spectrum, simple systems may have simple forms of consciousness, while complex organisms have richer ones. This takes physical reality and asks what happens if consciousness is treated as a fundamental feature rather than an emergent accident.

The discussion of non-human animals focused on suffering, feeling, and ethical implications. We cannot directly access animal minds, so researchers rely on behavioural and neurological markers to infer consciousness. Despite this, there is growing consensus that animals experience subjective states, especially those capable of learning, emotional responses, and adaptive behaviour.

The ethical consequences are obvious that if animals feel, they can suffer, if they suffer, human systems must reckon with this. The discussion touched on animal cruelty and the moral responsibilities emerging from this understanding of non-human consciousness.

The most contentious section involved #AI consciousness, intelligence vs experience. One argument suggested that modern AI has reached human-level inference in certain domains, even systems trained purely on historical text. From this view, sufficiently complex information processing might be enough for consciousness.

But tensions emerged that AI systems are not embodied. Solving “geek problems” does not imply subjective experience, highlights the divide: Computationalists – see consciousness as potentially arising from information processing. Where biological or embodied perspectives, argue that lived, physical existence may be essential. The discussion felt unresolved.

Cultural observations of the event: the engineers and “geek” audience clustered at the back of the room, reflecting the broader cultural divide between technical and philosophical approaches. Much of the debate mirrored this tension, information-processing models versus lived experience and embodiment. There was also a sense that many people rarely reflect on their own use of consciousness, how we attend, choose, or engage with the world.

No clear resolution emerged – and perhaps none is coming soon. What became clear is that consciousness sits at the boundary between disciplines. Science struggles to capture subjective experience, while philosophy cannot avoid engaging with empirical discoveries.

The question of who or what has consciousness remains open, but the debate itself reveals something deeper: our theories of consciousness often reflect our cultural assumptions about intelligence, technology, and what it means to be alive.

#Oxford #Event #Talk

Oxford Martin School and the Chattering Classes

I made the mistake of going back to an Oxford Martin School event, this time for a talk on “How To Think About AI: A Guide For The Perplexed“. And perplexed they are, but not in the way they think.

Prof. Richard Susskind stood before a room full of white-haired privilege, clutching their free wine and clutching harder to their decaying certainties. Here was the techno-visionary they came to adore, telling them – soothingly – that everything will change, that AI will reshape the world, and that the path ahead is progress… as long as we just keep funding it and believing hard enough.

Susskind seams to be a long-time member of the #deathcult, confidently soft selling the same fantasy that this time, technology will save us. That AI, even though it’s still dumb and unreliable, is just a stepping stone to AGI, to superintelligence, to salvation. That the very market forces and institutions that got us into this mess will be the ones to rescue us. And of course, the audience clapped.

He spoke of risks, only to dismiss them. He nodded at ethics, only to brush past it. He dropped Marx as a flourish, then drifted into musings on AI-built virtual utopias. The whole performance was a flattening of thought, a parade of mainstream assumptions pushed as reassuring insight.

The discussion never left the orbit of privilege, there was a little talk of power, exploitation, and the social damage wrought by these systems, the was passing talk of the soon to torn apart communities by platform logic. Then onto half-baked fluff about “personalisation is only good, get over it,” and market adaptation as the highest concern.

A highlight, and I use that term lightly, was when he fluffed even the basic questions: What is intelligence? What is AI actually doing now? What are we regulating? But it didn’t matter. Because this wasn’t about hard questions. This was about feeding a room of retired professionals exactly what they wanted: the comforting story that they’re still in the loop, still part of the future, still the chosen class, even if only as spectators with signed books.

This is why I stopped going to Oxford Martin School talks a few terms ago. Tonight reminded me why. A dead-end of polite delusion, sipping Chardonnay while the world burns. They don’t want truth. They want reassurance, to believe that tech or economic fixes will save their world, that their system, capitalism, hierarchy, control, just needs a shiny new update. They’re terrified the market won’t adapt, but they’re not afraid of what happens to the rest of us.

This wasn’t a guide for the perplexed, it was a sermon for the faithful. A cult ritual for the mainstreaming elitists, draped in TED Talk syntax and academic credentials. He said nothing, he had to say nothing, because anything real would crack the facade.

#AI as a capitalist sticking plaster on social and political issues. #Oxford: still good at sounding clever while saying absolutely fuck all.

Empty and successful.

#Oxford #Event #Talk

The Philosophers Talking About AI: Context, Flow, and the #geekproblem

This is touching on the event as had to leave early.

I was recently at a talk from the Oxford University series, “The Philosophers Talking About AI”. There were some underlying themes that are deeply relevant to how we think about privacy, information, and our current techno-social mess.

Action vs. Paralysis, the talk opens with the tension between the strong and weak drives of human decision-making. This plays out in a constant oscillation between conversation and paralysis. Philosophically, we get stuck, debating endlessly, without acting. And in ethics, this inaction can be dangerous. If we don’t decide and act, we leave the field open for others to impose their decisions on us.

Rethinking Privacy. One of the more nuanced ideas from the talk is a definition of privacy not as secrecy, but as appropriate information flow.

"Privacy is not control, nor hiding – it’s about the right information flowing in the right way."

This is a key shift. Secrecy is often anti-human – it disrupts the flow of information, which is essential to human life and community. Instead, privacy is about appropriateness, about understanding which flows are legitimate in which contexts.

So what determines “appropriateness”? Social context. Contextual Integrity. Privacy, then, depends on social spheres, each defined by particular goals, values, and purposes. In each sphere, there are different expectations for how data should flow. These expectations aren’t always formal rules, but norms, often invisible until they’re violated.

The speaker brings in the idea of the transmission principle – that information shouldn’t flow without the right kind of consent or context. While consent matters, it’s not the only thing that legitimizes a flow. There are many transmission predicates in society that allow information to move in meaningful, appropriate, and socially beneficial ways.

But here’s the mess: our (post)modern systems, especially those built by geeks, often ignore or misunderstand this. This ties directly into what I often call the #geekproblem. The problem is that geeks, driven by abstract logic and rigid notions of control, block too many flows. They implement blanket rules and dogmatic blocks rather than engaging with messy human norms. Worse, they often start fighting among themselves about which blocks should exist, creating even more social dysfunction.

They don’t see the richness of the social world. They try to “fix” it by hard-coding overly simplified versions of reality into software, creating systems that are brittle, alienating, and to often oppressive.

This has real consequences for the #openweb and our attempts to build alternatives. If we don’t get privacy right – if we don’t understand the role of context and legitimacy in data flows – we’ll just reproduce the same broken #dotcons models we’re trying to replace.

Beyond policy and control, most privacy policies today are useless. They reduce privacy to a box-ticking exercise, just “terms and conditions” of control. But this is a dead end. Real privacy is contextual. It involves relationships between: The subject – The sender – The recipient – The nature of the information.

To build humane technology, we need to embed all these values into our tools and processes. That means ditching secrecy-as-default, dropping the obsession with control, and embracing appropriate social information flows.

#KISS #Oxford #talk

The current “debate” about AI is a distraction #KISS

Metaphors matter, composting the current paths in #AI

It’s a mess and building more #techshit is not helping, so back off with the #geekproblem path out of this mess, please.

World of war – The global battle for industrial supremacy

I just was at a talk from the Oxford University. The rise of economic nationalism and the return of state power – While the speakers skirt around key terms like socialism and justice, the implications of what’s discussed are clear, the #neoliberal era is ended, and what comes next is still being shaped.

For the current #mainstreaming the rise of Economic Nationalism is a reaction to the rise of China, the talk explores how China’s rise has catalysed a shift across the rich world – from the free-market dogma of the last 40 years to a new age of “industrial policy”. In essence, the old exploitive game of “global competitiveness” is giving way to nationalist state planning, even if the elitists are reluctant to call it mixed economy, social democracy or even socialism.

In the U.S., this has taken the form of tariffs and export controls, which, let’s be honest, function as subsidies for American corporations. In the #EU, there’s similar movement, more tentative, but real. One key example is the #ReArm Europe military initiative: a push toward industrial resilience, framed through the lens of security but rooted in state-led economic intervention. An example is https://cristinacaffarra.blog/2025/02/03/we-have-to-get-to-work-and-put-europe-first-but-we-are-late-terribly-late/ in tech.

This Western new wave of competitive protectionism benefits the rich nations who already have resources, capital, and infrastructure. Developing countries? They’re simply left behind, again. But, we might actually be on a different path, this time, China’s alternative model is working, the Global South is watching, and in some cases, benefiting.

The result? We’re seeing cracks in the global order that’s been in place since the 1980s – a system that privileged Western elitists while systematically extracting from the rest. A new international economic order may be emerging, and it might – on balance – benefit the South more than the North?

In the USA we see two faces of the same coin, it’s worth noting that both Biden and Trump have walked similar paths. Biden sells this industrial policy as justice-driven, future-focused action. Trump dresses it in nationalist bluster. But the outcome is largely the same: a shift away from free markets and toward controlled, strategic planning – just with different elitist backers benefiting behind the thin curtains.

This opens up the #deathcult for a need for reckoning. Here’s where we need to be blunt: the last 40 years of #neoliberalism – of #mainstreaming market worship – was a mistake. A disaster. A #deathcult. It failed to deliver for most of the people in the west, and was a disaster for the rest of the world. And now, with #climatechaos accelerating, that failure is no longer academic – it’s existential. The current shift to state-led green transitions is a tacit admission that capitalism, cannot handle any future. To shift this, we need strong, progressive states, and we need them fast.

Yet nowhere in the talk does the word socialism come up, despite the obvious trajectory. Nor do we hear the word justice, even though that’s what’s at stake. This silence says a lot about #mainstreaming transitioning. But here’s a constructive provocation: where are the academic voices of responsibility?

On this subject I have a plan – Think Globally, Act Locally – in Oxford and similar elitist institutions, generations of economists, political scientists, and technocrats trained the youth to believe in the religion of markets. Now this mess making is over, can we now ask – kindly but firmly – for these same institutions to stand up and apologize? Not in shame, but in honesty.

Apologize for worshipping failed ideologies. For pushing a worldview that has brought us to the edge. And crucially, explain why they were wrong and what they’ve learned. This act alone could unfreeze some of the apathy among the youth – many of whom intuit the coming crisis but feel trapped in a world still pretending business-as-usual is viable.

We are In transition, yes the language in the talk is still dressed in #neoliberal garments, but the substance is moving toward planned economies, redistributed investment, and long-term thinking. It’s socialism in practice, even if not yet in name. So let’s get on with composting the ideology of the last 40 years. Let it rot, fertilize something new with what’s left. It’s past time to act. Not with nostalgia, but with clarity.

#Oxford #talk

The Said Business School is a temple of the #deathcult