Socialist Action /October 2000
Prospects of Resistance by Workers to
Capitalist Restoration in Russia
By DAVE HUDSON
Following is the conclusion of a document that
is being submitted to the World Congress of the Fourth International, which
will take place next year. Socialist Action is in general agreement with
the views expressed in this document.
The author, Dave Hudson, is a British member
of the International Executive Committee of the Fourth International.
The first part of the document, in our September
issue, described the political circumstances of the working class under
the Vladimir Putin regime.
The human cost of the IMF inspired "shock
therapy" has been enormous and is seen by ordinary Russians as little
more than "economic genocide." In all the countries of the former
Warsaw Pact, to a greater or lesser extent, women, children, the disabled,
refugees, and pensioners have been especially devastated by the capitalist
neo-liberal offensive.
A UN Development Program report (Summer 1999) confirms
that the economic transition and upheavals of the 1990s "have been
calamitous for a vast swathe of Eastern Europe and Central Asia- leading
to widespread poverty, alarming falls in life expectancy, widening inequalities
between the sexes, falling investment in education, the collapse of public
health and the spread of disease, crime, nationalist violence and suicide."
It shows how these countries have been pushed into
a "Great Depression," plunging "more than 100 million people
into poverty, with many millions more hovering precariously above subsistence."
It cites World Bank figures showing that in 1989 about 14 million people
in the former Communist Bloc lived on less than $4 a day. By the mid-1990s
that number had risen to about 147 million.
After the Russian economic crash in August 1998,
the numbers falling below the poverty line shot up to about 40 percent.
Poverty is endemic while malnutrition affects millions. The UN report is
scattered with facts such as that the number of pregnant Russian women suffering
anemia trebled between 1989 and 1994. In Moldova, a survey showed that between
20 and 50 percent of children had rickets from a lack of Vitamin A.
The state's inability to pay wages or benefits
on a regular basis has been a major cause of poverty. In 1992 alone, after
the first year of "shock therapy," real wages fell, due mainly
to wage cuts and inflation, by over one third, and average personal consumption
fell by over 40 percent.
By 1998 wage arrears in Ukraine and Russia amounted
to more than 4 percent of GDP. This is the good news, for in Kazakhstan
they are estimated to amount to some 40 percent of GDP. This situation got
much worse with inflation at the end of the 1990s, reaching about 2500 percent.
The UN report shows that there is a widening inequality
in wealth and incomes. This is exacerbated by hyper-inflation, which tends
especially to affect the price of food, a large item in the budgets of the
very poor majority. Between 1991 and 1996, food prices in Armenia rose by
24,000 percent, whereas the prices of non-food items rose by only 7800 percent.
The weakest in society-pensioners, the disabled, single mothers-have been
exposed to the most acute financial difficulties by losing access to benefits.
There is also a devastating cost in human lives.
Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a decline in life expectancy
almost across the whole region, with falls of at least four years in countries
such as Russia, where the latest figures show that men are living only until
the age of 58 on average! This means that several million people have not
survived the 1990s who would have if the life expectancy levels had been
maintained.
Also, between 1991 and 1994 infant mortality increased
by nearly 15 percent, and things are much worse today. Accompanying these
developments is a grim rise in suicide and disease; tuberculosis and other
diseases have returned as big killers, especially in the former Soviet Union.
AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases are also spreading rapidly.
Women have increasingly been pushed out of public
life and out of the workplace. Consequently there is a growing inequality
between the sexes. Violence against women has also risen, with physical
abuse from spouses becoming more noticeable, and more women are falling
victim to crime.
Women desperate to find employment have found themselves
forced into prostitution both within their region and by organized crime
networks in Western Europe.
There is a dramatic deterioration of education,
due to sharp falls in spending on schools and universities. Almost everywhere
enrollment and attendance rates, especially at pre-primary schools, have
fallen. In the former Soviet Union, more than 30,000 pre-school facilities
were closed between 1991 and 1995.
Overcrowding, dilapidation, lack of heating, underpaid
teachers, and a lack of health checks have also taken their toll.
Underlying all this social deprivation is the economic
melt-down caused by forced marketization. Trotsky predicted that if the
bureaucracy was not overthrown by the workers and socialist democracy established
then it would eventually lead a counterrevolutionary movement and restore
capitalism, which he insisted could only result in the "emiseration"
of the Russian masses.
Today, Russian Banker Petr Aven advises Putin that
even more cuts in welfare and social provision are necessary if capitalism
is to be restored. The specter of a most brutal and untrammeled capitalism
haunts the region.
The class struggle.
There have been some big struggles beginning in
the mid-1990s, such as the actions taken by miners and teachers among others,
demanding back wages-or else. In the summer of 1996 (by then the economy
was already in ruins) over 100,000 Ukrainian miners struck over the back-pay
issue.
However, what is most notable about the situation
is that, despite the number of strikes and social struggles that go unreported,
the response of the working class to the counterrevolution and its terrible
consequences for the masses has been relatively feeble and weak. (Nevertheless,
struggles-as well as passive resistance-have been enough to maintain Yeltsin's
fear of a social explosion if he pursued the West's policy too far and too
fast.)
An explanation for the failure of the working class
to make a political revolution [to overthrow the ruling bureaucratic clique
and take power in its own name] is three-fold:
First and most obviously, the politicized generation
that made the Russian Revolution of 1917 is now dead. Second, the new generations
have lived through an oppressive Stalinist, national chauvinist, corporatist
and de-politicizing system.
Third, the growing widespread hatred of this system
(Stalinism, which is equated with socialism by the masses, particularly
of the younger, post-1968 generation) have combined [with the first and
second elements] in a negative way to confuse and disorient the Russian
masses. It may take some years of the experience of struggle, and probably
the new generation, before we see a revival of a new socialist politics.
Recently, some foreign buy-outs have faced resistance
from the workers. An example is the large Vyborg Paper and Cellulose Mill,
bought out by British investor Alcem UK in 1997.
The plant's 2100 workers, fearing massive layoffs
and saying they were owed more than $8 million in back wages, occupied the
plant. They posted their own armed guards, organized a democratic strike
committee to operate the plant, and fought for 18 months to keep out the
new owners. They ran the plant under workers management and used the profits
to maintain and feed their families.
The Vyborg workers gained wide support and active
solidarity from local and regional working-class organizations, and even
managed to block the highway running from Helsinki to St. Petersburg to
attract attention to their struggle.
In the autumn of 1999, when the strike committee
was planning to block the railway line, the authorities acted by organizing
a dawn raid by special heavily armed riot police, which resulted in a shoot-out.
The state won and occupied the plant, but the struggle continues. [This
information came from an article on the web site called "International
Solidarity with the Workers of Russia." It has also been reported in
various left papers.]
This struggle not only illustrates a high level
of solidarity and combativity with advanced experiences of democratic workers
control and management, but the use of special armed forces, the kind that
Putin will need to carry forward the counterrevolution.
In December last year, Kusbass miners at the Chernigovets
pit also saw their occupation violently smashed by armed police units. Many
such struggles will be necessary to rebuild a new independent workers' leadership.
Unfortunately, the existing trade unions are not
the legitimate expression of the working class or class struggles. It is
not just that they are massively bureaucratized; historically they are top-down
state structures designed to organize workers for production. Today they
are still mostly semi-corporate structures that bolster the power structure
rather than fight for the interests of the workers.
Consequently, in the early 1990s a number of small
independent unions were formed. Few have survived; some were dominated by
chauvinist and reactionary politics. Some regional and local unions have
been forced to take some actions in the interests of the workers.
However, the unions also enshrine some well established
legal rights considered normal before 1989. There are employment laws that
block factory closures, the firing of workers, and the imposition of certain
kinds of shifts-all of which require by law the agreement of the union.
Such rights in turn block the establishment of a capitalist free labor market.
Similarly, wage levels are given some legal protection, including laws that
block capitalist-style wage cuts.
Therefore, one of Putin's early objectives as president
has been to push forward a draconian new anti-union labor code (KZoT), which
had originally been drafted by Prime Minister Primakov just before Yeltsin
fired him.
The new code represents a wholesale removal of
the workers' rights mentioned above-including the right not to be made unemployed.
It also introduces short-term contracts, abolishes the eight hour day (substituting
a 12 hour day and a week of 56 hours) and makes the unions even more impotent
to defend the workers. Also, the generous "rights to maternity leave
that women have enjoyed for decades will be cut in half, and they will be
forced to work night shifts while pregnant.
We should support the campaign to defend these
gains while calling for independent unions to be formed to fight for arrears
in wages, against the privatizations, and to stop the Chechen war.
Despite the horrors of capitalist restoration or
the massive disillusionment with capitalist reforms, which (like the class
struggle) largely goes unreported, the IMF/World bank today pursues its
neo-liberal policy.
Meanwhile, Blair and Clinton, together with other
Western leaders, have cynically endorsed the new strongman in the Kremlin,
President Putin, despite the continuing brutalities of the Chechen war,
with which he has been closely implicated from the beginning. This is because
they suspect that the final act of the counterrevolution is approaching
and he is "their man."
Yeltsin had also been their man, but he finally
proved to be a disappointment, because he had pulled back and played for
time. The Yeltsin regime had encountered major objective and subjective
difficulties in carrying through the restoration of capitalism. Not least
of these difficulties was the traditional fear the bureaucracy has for the
working class.
At the same time, we can say that the reason the
process of restoration has made such advances is due to the political and
organizational weakness of the working class (compared to the generation
of 1917), which is being further debilitated by the social and economic
crisis and is resulting in increasing social and political atomization.
Unlike in a capitalist society, the struggle of
the workers nearly always becomes a directly political struggle. Despite
this, there is no major political party representing the interests of the
working class, while the far left is miniscule. The crisis of working-class
leadership is profound.
The power of the working class lies in its continued,
although much weakened, objective social existence-even if today it is degraded
and weakened-and in the possibility of resistance. Resistance, even if it
is not mainly expressed through collective action in the workplaces, on
the streets, or in the corridors of power, is an objective fact that no
bureaucracy, however apparently omnipotent, can ignore.
As Trotsky explained, a bureaucracy that is a caste
does not have the same power as a hegemonic class. However, the social and
economic crisis has softened up and fragmented the Russian proletariat,
and war and reactionary Russian chauvinism can be, and has been, whipped
up by Putin and the pro-capitalist elite as an added political weapon to
further divide and defeat them.
The war is not just against the Chechen peoples
fighting for self-determination, but is also a dagger pointed at the heart
of the Russian working class itself.
The Communist Party
Once again, we can see how national chauvinism
and racism can be whipped up for reactionary purposes. Nationalism in Russia
today is clearly a powerful ideological force in the hands of the pro-capitalist
political elite, which cuts across the underlying class polarization that
is taking place, dividing and confusing the masses.
Unfortunately, many of those who claim to speak
for the working class, such as the leadership of the so-called Communist
Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), have also played the nationalist
card and have supported the slaughter in Chechnya.
The media in Russia frequently describes the CPRF
as the left and the extreme left! Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Zuganov leadership of the CPRF are Russian chauvinists and nationalists,
anti-Semites, anti-Muslim and racist supporters of this war. Despite its
mainly working-class vote, the Communist Party remains a Stalinist party
with a pro-capitalist policy-but it is not a pro IMF/neo-liberal party.
Like Putin himself, it demands a strong united Russia that can stand up
to the West; but this is presented in purely nationalist terms.
However, the CPRF has spoken out against the corrupt
theft of national assets and made other noises in support of workers; consequently
important sections of the working class support it. Zuganov was the main
opponent of Putin in the March 2000 presidential elections, achieving for
the CPRF a significant increase in its vote (which reached 30 percent),
despite a lackluster campaign. This makes it by far the largest party in
the Duma.
Nonetheless, the CPRF is not the party of political
revolution and socialism, which is the only fundamental choice open to the
working class that is in their interests.
A new totalitarianism?
Putin will quickly have to address the issue of
the state and building new capitalist institutions. One of Russia's new
capitalists, Petr Aven-a prominent Putin supporter, president of Alfa (Russia's
biggest and most successful private bank), esteemed economist, and a former
Russian trade minister-understands this crucial issue. He supported Putin
in the March presidential elections and publicly argues that the new president
must now bring the chaos to an end by resorting to totalitarian methods.
First, Aven says, the new president must assemble
a reliable military force out of the ruins of the old state apparatus. He
suggests that Putin model his regime on that of Augusto Pinochet. In a recent
interview he said: "Pinochet tried to enforce obedience to the law
and sometimes that's difficult for a country. Sometimes you need to use
force. The only role of the state is to use force when needed."
And again: "The only way ahead is for fast
liberal reforms [more "shock therapy"], building public support
for that path but also using totalitarian force to achieve that. Russia
has no other choice" (The London Guardian, March 31, 2000).
Putin's chief economic adviser, German Gref, also
insists that they will make the transition to a normal market system, "in
the shortest possible time." Putin, Gref, and Aven understand that
such a policy requires the closure of many hundreds of enterprises and the
sacking of millions of workers on a scale that would make the Great Depression
look small beer. It was why Yeltsin pulled back from the brink and looked
foolish and compromised.
The bureaucracy fears that the working class would
be kicked into violent resistance if such a brutal, counterrevolutionary
policy were adopted. But can the former Red Army be relied upon to impose
the will of the emergent, and still narrowly based capitalist class?
Putin will first have to construct a reliable military
force that is entirely loyal to himself as the president. This is the symbolic
meaning of his New Year's Day visit to the army in Chechnya the day after
Yeltsin resigned as president.
Putin is not just a puppet. He has a program that
promises to make Russia powerful again-a country of which "the people
and the army can be proud." He lays emphasis on a powerful centralized
state, on patriotism, and on "collectivism." He told the assembled
military at the New Year awards in Gudermes that the war "is not just
about restoring honor and dignity to the country. No, this is about more
serious things. This is about how to bring the end of the break-up of Russia.
That is your fundamental goal."
Putin has been reported as saying that "to
the Russian a strong state is not an anomaly. ... It is the source and guarantor
of order, the initiator and main power behind all changes."
Already, the Yeltsin regime had effectively ended
the "partnership for peace" and begun to rebuild its alliance
with China and other major Third World countries while increasingly adopting
a confrontational stance towards NATO. In mid-January, a presidential decree
(No. 24) effected a shift in Russia's defense doctrine by placing the armed
forces in a higher state of combat readiness and new more aggressive ground
rules for the use of nuclear weapons and promising an increase in the defense
budget of 60 percent.
It is clear that Putin is a pro-West, pro-market
reformer like Yeltsin, i.e., a pro-capitalist neo-liberal. He is also the
strongman who will pursue Russian national interests ruthlessly-albeit within
a capitalist framework. Is he, however, quite prepared to clash with the
USA, for example, over defense issues, and new U.S. missile deployments?
If he intends to construct a national capitalism
that can survive and thrive, he will also have to rely heavily on the state
apparatus and on resources taxed and robbed from the socialized "collectivist"
sector. Some of the economic damage created by Yeltsin/IMF "shock therapy,"
which failed to create a viable free market but has wrecked the command
economy, may have to be reversed.
But a turn towards creating a national capitalism
based primarily on internal resources will be a brutal business, requiring
a strong centralized state based on a reliable army and a cohesive nationalist
even xenophobic ideology. Such a course will of necessity be a harsh capitalist
Bonapartism-an authoritarian regime able to smash working-class resistance,
both passive and active, in order to finally carry through the bourgeois
counterrevolution.
If such a regime became stabilized, it could in
the future constitute a kind of fascistic state capitalism with imperialist
aims in Eurasia. This will pose the danger of future wars-for example, in
the scramble for oil in the Caucuses and the Caspian Sea regions.
Socialist Action /October 2000 |