The Great Re-Disembedding

Is it possible that the most important thing that helps us understand Russia's war in Ukraine is not that it is for anti-fascist "liberation?" Nor that it is "simply" an illiberal-arch-nationalist political re-occupation of the "near-abroad." 

Instead, it may well be that it is a military-geopolitical attempt at controlling the resources of a neighbor (much of those resources had been, as we know, built up with resources of the USSR, including Russia) on part of one capitalist geopolitical power (Russia), aiming to avoid, prevent, deter the expansion of property and control by set of rival geopolitical-economic interests (US and EU)? Is it possible that, with Karl Polányi, the post-state-socialist "liberation" of the erstwhile-Soviet-"bloc" involved the re-disembedding of the state socialist economies, i.e., removing the social and political structures of property and control that had enveloped it until then? Would it not have been a reasonable thing to expect this kind of political violence on part of a large semiperipheral neo-capitalist state in the post-state-socialist context? 

Could this idea serve as a foundation of a materialist analysis of large-scale social change in the world today?

Is it possible, more broadly, that the end of the organizational / institutional forms of the state socialist project of emancipation (experiments that can be described, in terms of Karl Polányi's 1944 book, The Great Transformation, as the socio-political re-embedding of capital and the market, the re-submission of "the economy" of a set of semiperipheral capitalist countries in society's collective interests, with the latter expressed, albeit very imperfectly, by the redistributive state) was all about a naked resource grab by global capital? To put simply, is it possible that the historical "essence" of the destruction of the state socialist experiments is in the forcing of hundreds of millions of people to lose, and be forever deprived of, "their"--no matter how imperfect, undemocratic, yet at least potentially real, future--control over the means of production of "their" societies? 

Is it possible that the greatest stakes in post-socialist "color" (but never "red") "revolutions" were about grabbing the production infrastructures of the countries between the middle of Germany through the Pacific by private capital? In this sense, the re-disembedding of the industrial and service infrastructures, produced during the oft maligned ("Stalinist") and later, post-Stalinist industrialization campaigns as embedded institutions , i.e., produced for the satisfaction of the immediate social needs and, hence, the emancipation, of the region's semiperipheral societies, was the most important aspect of the great social change that took place after the mid-1980s?  

Figure 1: Share of State Socialist Economies in the World, 1980-2018. 

Computed from Maddison's dataset. (The arrows indicate 1989 and 1991, the years in which state socialist economies were "officially" re-disembedded in east-central Europe and Yugoslavia, and the USSR, respectively)

Is it possible that those were the most important stakes in the post-state-socialist transformation--the unraveling of state socialism involved an absurdly uneven, unfair, unjust geopolitics of resource grab? If this were more or less true, the most important single piece of information you want to know about the post-state-socialist context is the recent increases in the profitability of the erstwhile-state-socialist economies for the west European and north American capital that dominates the ownership structures to an absurd degree?

Is it possible that China's refusal to "let go" of the share of collective (central, provincial and municipal state) ownership in its vast and fast growing economy is "the west's" biggest current "problem" with China, simply because the PRC, in spite of its openness to foreign technology and even partial, private ownership, still represents the largest single remaining "chunk" of property in the world that is under effective non-private, non-individual ownership and control? Karen Lin and her co-authors reported in 2020 that, in 2017, 75 Chinese state-owned enterprises were on the Fortune Global 500 list. (To put this in perspective, the Fortune Global 500 list included only 27 non-Chinese state-owned enterprises.) 

As the graph above (Fan and Hope, quoting Chinese official statistics) suggests, while declining in relative shares, state owned enterprises still represented, in 2011, over 40% of the total assets, approximately 25% of the total industrial output, and slightly above 20% of the labor force in China.  

Is it possible that the world's "left" has almost totally missed the most glaring structural problems "of our time" (again to make a terminological reference to Karl Polányi's marvelous book quoted above) by not mobilizing against the re-disembedding of what little embedded economies continue to exist? Where are the Polányian countermovements--the collective social efforts "to transcend the self-regulating market by consciously subordinating it to democratic society"?