Said Zakirovich Gafurov (born 1967) is a Russian scholar, Marxian economist, orientalist, bureaucrat, and opera critic. After working in the government in his early career, Gafurov transitioned into the academic sector and is now Director of the Institute of Asian and African Countries in Moscow and an associate professor at Moscow State Linguistic University. His journalism centers on trade unionist activities and electoral politics. He also hosts the web shows Point of view: Orient, Point of view: Economy, and Point of view: Behind the Ocean on Pravda.
Early life
Gafurov was born into a Gorky Tatar (Mishar) family in 1967. His father, Zakerya Shagizanovich, was a revolutionary and his mother, Anisa Sofovna Khusainova, was an artist. He received his bachelor's degree in Asian and African Studies (1992) and his PhD in economics under Alexander Buzgalin (1997) from Moscow State University. Buzgalin considered him one of his best students.
Career
Gafurov worked as the Director of the Department of Finance, Credit, Insurance, and Foreign Trade within the Ministry of State Property under Prime Minister Yevgeniy Primakov. He later worked as a Counselor in the Russian Inter-Budget Relations office in the Ministry of Regional Development. In 2011, he assumed the role of Deputy Chief Editor for economic issues for the monthly journal VVP (Gross Domestic Product), a publication known for its active support of Vladimir Putin. Under Gafurov's guidance, VVP became one of the most significant sources of neo-Keynesian, Marxist, and anti-neo-liberal economic policy articles in Russia. He has also served as a consultant for various government ministries in issues of foreign economic relations. Since Putin's first term, Gafurov has elaborated the concept of Russian Bonapartism and the attempts by the bourgeoisie for Liberal Revenge. He has also had regular speaking appearances at international congresses, where he stresses the need for state-funded political-economic research.
Political thought
Gafurov is a Russian Marxist within Alexander Buzgalin's school of thought, though his beliefs subscribe more closely to positivism than Buzgalin's dialectical metaphysical beliefs. He rejects the concepts of the Asiatic mode of production and the USSR's state capitalism, which he based on analysis of the role of credit relations in USSR and other countries with a state capitalist system. He supports the reconciliation of Stalinism, Trotskyism, and Maoism as he believes the differences have only historical significance. He also supports the quantitative theory of imperialism, holding that stronger imperialism is better than weaker imperialism, a view that contradicts Leninist defeatism. Gafurov believes this position allows for tactical alliances with weaker imperialist approaches such as Russian and Iranian imperialism, though he rejects Chinese imperialism. Despite this, he supports China in all South China Sea conflicts except for the conflict with Vietnam over the Paracel Islands.
Gafurov's anti-crisis beliefs are rooted in Keynesian economics. Based on the financial crises of 1998-1999, 2008-2009, and 2014-2016, Gafurov elaborated on the concepts of mismatch () and imbalance () of credit-monetary and fiscal-budgetary policies as the main cause of anti-crisis policy's ineffectiveness. The Central Bank of Russia and the Ministry of Finance both rejected his hypotheses on grounds of the absence of said mismatch. With epistemological data, Gafurov is considered a nominalist. He views ethics as a narrative, "positive rather than normative" as "[e]thics and behavior are subject to the same laws." In the late 1990s, Gafurov wrote several articles for the journal Рынок ценных бумаг (Securities market), building on the Ergodic approach to equity research. He wrote that statistical methods could be used only when the time series of securities' prices are subject to ergodicity principles. The practical significance of Gafurov's thereom corollary, which he calls lemma, is based on the Bayesian approach. In 2013, Gafurov began working with Buzgalin on international political-economic network reorganization.
Gafurov disapproves of NATO, neocolonialism, and neo-racism and is critical of the European Union's parasitic capitalist policies in Africa and Europe, claiming that "capital is indifferent to everything except its profit. It needs to capture new markets and destroy their production." He is a leader of the Russian Social Forum movement and has participated in writing programs documenting the movement in defense of labour. In 2017, he was a key organizer of the World Festival of Youth and Students in Sochi, Russia and made at least 11 speeches during the festival.