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I greatly appreciate David Bell’s recent article; it is full of good points and typically deeply insightful. I have always found his work interesting, and along with my Ukrainian colleagues, we have especially valued his support for psychoanalysis in Ukraine. David Bell’s paper focused on the investigation of human destructiveness, particularly war. However, I was surprised by one part of David Bell’s reasoning – the search for the causes of the current war in so-called neoliberal politics. He writes:
The criminal assault on Ukraine is unconscionable and unjustified. But recognizing the brutality of the aggressor does not release “the West” from examining its own historical responsibilities. I have in mind the catastrophic socio-economic consequences of the (post-1990) violent entry of the market into a world which had no structures to manage or contain it - described by Will Davies as “‘(the) shock therapy’, which aimed rapidly to privatise and liberalise the Russian economy according to the dominant tenets of American economic thinking, resulted in economic collapse and a fall in life expectancy unprecedented in an industrialised nation-state” and, as many would argue, the provocation caused by the expansion of NATO bases along Russia’s borders (Bell, 2022, p.688).
This sort of argumentation is not new for David Bell. For instance, in the note to his 1999 paper he wrote with irony about the collapse of the Soviet regime:
Of course the Soviet system is blamed for its current economic collapse (it has nothing to do with the collapse of the prices of their principal exports, the economic crisis in the far east and certainly nothing to do with the escalation of interest rates on Russian loans – from 20-200 per cent!) (Bell, 1999, p.23).
As someone who’s spent a significant part of my life in the Soviet Union, I can testify that it was not the collapse of the regime but the very existence of the regime that was a tragedy for its citizens. The state of total demoralizati