The strike of the Soviet coal miners, which began in western Siberia, spread to the Donets region of the Ukraine, and then virtually enveloped most of the coal mining regions of the USSR, is the most dramatic and significant development in the Soviet Union in all the years of the Gorbachev administration.
The strike is now over, and the very fact of a settlement is in itself an enormous phenomenon in Soviet labor relations. What makes this so?
It is not so much what the workers won, although this is estimated to be considerable and substantial. It is the fact that they have won it. That the Prime Minister of the Soviet Union, Nikolai I. Ryzhkov, met in the Kremlin with the mine workers' strike committee is itself a fact of formidable significance.
By this act alone, by having to "storm the heavens" (to borrow a phrase from Marx in a different historical context), the workers have leaped from being a mere economic category to being a class unto itself.
The picture of Ryzhkov meeting with the strikers cannot but make every progressive, every class conscious worker and every collective farmer feel that a new day has arrived. Pride and solidarity with the workers is bound to soar. The long period when the workers seemed dormant, inarticulate and indifferent is coming to an end.
The workers are now in a transition period. Their political consciousness is being transformed. They will no longer be a bourgeois economic category, like, for instance, wholesale or retail trade, raw materials, or transportation — inanimate categories which are manipulated by the higher-ups.
They will again become the most formidable political entity, which is the foundation of the USSR. They will return to what their early leaders aspired — to make the working class the most developed, educated and consistently socialist class in the construction of a communist society.
Imperialist ideologues dream of returning the Soviet working class to the antiquated bourgeois system. This, however, is a reactionary utopia and an anachronism from the past which does not fit the immense socialist potential of the USSR.
It is no wonder that all Soviet society is now convulsed by the sudden appearance of this truly extraordinary phenomenon. For the moment, all groupings, political organizations and strata of Soviet society are groping with how to define their attitude, not just toward the miners, but also toward the working class as a whole, which is represented by the miners at present.
There is no question that sympathy is overwhelmingly on the side of the mineworkers. Gorbachev himself has been obliged to all but declare his own solidarity with the miners and to move expeditiously to settle the strike and put it on the agenda for discussion and review by the Supreme Soviet, the parliament.
For too long we have heard the voices of the so-called dissidents in the USSR who are really bourgeois elements hostile to socialism and full of praise for the wonders of the capitalist West. Indeed, this narrow stratum of Soviet society has occupied the political arena almost to the exclusion of any but official government spokespeople.
Now, at last, the whole world will hear the voice of the Soviet working class through one of the most critically important detachments of the great proletarian army of the USSR. They are now the topic of discussion in the Supreme Soviet, the Central Committee of the Communist Party and the Council of Ministers (the cabinet).
Only yesterday the important topics under discussion were how to appease the growing bourgeois interest in private cooperatives, the mushrooming of independent private entrepreneurs, plans for a volunteer and professional army, taxation, and the national budget. But now all this has disappeared from the agenda. The settlement of the miners' strike and what it may portend for the future is suddenly the main focus of all these central bodies of the Soviet government.
The miners' strike is, of course, not the first strike in the Gorbachev administration. There have been perhaps dozens of strikes by workers ranging from bus drivers to librarians. Although these have been of a sporadic and localized character and of short duration, they nevertheless should have offered a clue to what was in the offing. At the least, the government should have been publicly occupied with a critical examination of this data and made recommendations. It did not.
Gorbachev supporters, however, are quick to point out that the central government acted rapidly to deal with the strikers, dispatched a high-level delegation of politburo members to meet with the strikers and made substantial concessions to the miners. This means, they say, that greater attention will be paid not only to the miners, but also to the working class as a whole. Of course, what is conveniently forgotten is that the pressure of the strike has done this and nothing else.
This is why Gorbachev himself had to make a special appeal on television to the miners in the Ukraine in the Donets Basin. Had the Gorbachev administration acted on its own two or three years ago, that would have demonstrated foresight and keen interest in the condition of the workers. Moreover, if a settlement like the one made with the miners had also been made with steelworkers, textile workers, transportation workers, etc., that would have been an altogether different matter.
To carry the point further, if all of the really bona fide negotiations with representatives of the working class had been carried out pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan first proposed in skeleton form at a 1985 plenary session of the Communist Party Central Committee, it would really have been exemplary of proletarian democracy and socialist, centralized planning.
The Gorbachev administration has staked so much on this plan. As it turns out, however, in document after document and decision after decision issued by the Central Committee on this plan, which promises to revolutionize society and its basic institutions, there was no provision made for the unanticipated intervention of the workers. No one really knows what provisions, if any, were made. It was all shrouded in vague generalities.
Gorbachev cannot but be aware that the miner's strike has brought him face-to-face with a most serious political crisis for his complex plans for restructuring Soviet society have. The crisis is not solely caused by the conservatives among the party cadres, or their "unwillingness to change." The crisis has a social character in that the new managerial system shifts the burden to the vast majority of the workers while a thin layer of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois elements thrive handsomely.
No matter how much Gorbachev may blame the lower echelons of the party, no matter how much he may excoriate the coal industry officialdom or the trade union apparatus, as he has done in the face of the resurgent workers, this will be of no avail, for neither personnel nor organizational difficulties are at the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the bourgeois character of the reforms. Relentlessly, they gravitate toward the capitalist market and they foster the growth of social inequality among the masses.
How interesting that only a short while ago the top administrators were still scolding the workers for "wage leveling" and for "petty bourgeois egalitarianism," barbs that are aimed at undermining working class solidarity in the struggle against bureaucratic privileges. It would be interesting to see whether this vicious and slanderous campaign will finally come to an end.
However, Gorbachev is not altogether in a strong position to blame the party which he has headed for four years, long enough if not to make the necessary changes then to have made his position clear on precisely such matters as the miners have brought to his attention. It is he who has cultivated a variety of neobourgeois elements from the periphery of Soviet society and helped them to win posts and occupy prominent roles at the 19th party conference a year ago.
These elements are now the principal critics of his policy from the right, yet he relies on them in the struggle against genuine left elements. Gorbachev stands with one leg in the camp of the outright bourgeois reformers and the other in the party. But the middle ground is being cut from under his feet.
His attempt to coopt the strikers with his ingratiating TV speech and the expeditious manner in which the strike was settled may temporarily strengthen him. But he cannot but know that on the whole he has lost ground.
Gorbachev, who eagerly breaks ranks from a parade to shake hands and kiss babies in the metropolitan capitals of the imperialist world to show that he is a man of the people, was not the one to go down to the Siberian miners or to the Donets basin in the Ukraine donned in miner's clothes.
He did not go underground with the miners to emphasize solidarity with them. He might have done this had he felt he would be well received.
Gorbachev and his associates must also ponder the significance of the suppression of the counterrevolutionary elements in China. Some in the West see a possible similar development in the USSR. That, too, is the product of the total misunderstanding of the driving forces both in China and the USSR.
The Chinese government was confronted with a bourgeois opposition which had grown to counterrevolutionary proportions. The Gorbachev administration is confronted not with a bourgeois opposition, not with an opposition oriented to Western imperialism, but with a veritable working class rebellion of potentially revolutionary dimensions
Nor is the Polish situation analogous to what is happening in the Soviet Union. The Polish state is not a workers state that issued from a proletarian socialist revolution, as did the USSR. True, it was a revolution, but the main task of defeating the Nazis and the Polish bourgeoisie fell to the Soviet Army.
It should not be forgotten that the Polish People's Republic, which subsequently established itself and gained recognition by the Western imperialist allies, is the historical survival of the coalition forced upon the Polish revolutionary movement at the Yalta Conference of 1945.
The strikes by Solidarity under the current regime in Poland, no matter how meritorious their economic grievances may have been in the past, have long been the tool of the imperialist powers, mainly the U.S., with Britain, France and Germany as junior partners. Most of all, the Polish economy is completely dominated by Western banks.
And now, a coalition government with Solidarity is a coalition in which the bourgeoisie dominates and the more progressive anti-imperialist elements are forced to toe the line laid down by the IMF. Such a situation has no relevance to what is taking place in the heart of the Soviet working class today.
The world bourgeoisie is not at all a disinterested bystander in the miners' struggle in the Soviet Union. It follows closely every development for possible political intervention and subversion. At this early stage in the reemergence of the working class in the political arena, the world bourgeoisie is still trying to assess the situation and to define its attitude to this utterly unanticipated phenomenon.
It is thus with malicious delight that the Wall Street Journal said on July 21 in an editorial titled "Soviet Workers Arise" that "For those in the West who are rooting for reforms in the Soviet bloc, an aggressive, determined, independent and organized labor movement ... would be an optimistic development indeed." So thinks this organ of high finance.
Another view shared by most of the capitalist press at this moment was expressed by Flora Lewis in the New York Times of July 23. She is more cautious and much more solicitous of Gorbachev. In fact the tone of her column is one of hope that Gorbachev will succeed with his "courageous" and "wise" tactics to win the confidence of the striking workers. Lewis says, "It's a moment of tremendous delicacy. So far Mr. Gorbachev's skill and audacity seem up to it. The test is at hand."
The imperialists fully understand the significance of democratic centralized planning for socialist development and are all too eager to see it disrupted, if not wrecked, as has happened in Yugoslavia, Poland and Hungary.
The imperialists hope that the miners' strike will encourage other strikes of long duration that will disrupt the economic plans of the USSR and thereby open it more for capitalist inroads. But this scenario, like that of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, is based not upon fact, but on wishful thinking and deep-seated hatred of the socialist countries.
For many years, and even at this moment, the size and influence of the bourgeois elements in the Soviet Union have been highly exaggerated. There may be many articulate petty-bourgeois intellectuals, professionals and scientists who enjoy inordinate privileges in this workers' state, but their influence over the workers and peasants, if any, is highly questionable.
The main danger is not from outright bourgeois elements, but from the bourgeois liberal reformists, both in and outside of the Gorbachev administration, who have in the last few years been more allured by the fraudulent capitalist prosperity of the West and the capitalist market rather than by the potentialities of reforming Soviet society in a genuine communist direction.
In marked contrast, the bourgeois reformist character of the Gorbachev program does not appeal to the proletarian elements of Soviet society. According to an article in the July 26 New York Times by Bill Keller, the miners have called "for the abolition or curtailment of the private entrepreneurs." These elements, the Times said, while having amassed wealth under the new economic order that Gorbachev is trying to build, are strongly resented. The workers, who are the absolute majority of the population, are not at all as enthused by it as the capitalist press would have us believe for all these months!
According to the Keller article, the blue collar workers are not supportive of modernizing and restructuring plans if that means closing so-called "bankrupt industries" deregulating prices (i.e., raising prices of consumer goods) and laying off "surplus" workers. These practices, so characteristic of capitalism, would be a wholly new concept in the USSR if the Gorbachev plans go through. The workers are for modernization, but on the basis of a socialist, planned economy.
There has been much made about the miners' demand for autonomy. Local political autonomy is a correct demand within the framework of a multinational state. Economic autonomy, however, oriented to the capitalist market, disrupts socialist planning.
The fact that some in the media in the Soviet Union at the moment are giving emphasis to the workers' interest in greater economic autonomy, profit-sharing, etc. — bourgeois reforms which have drained proletarian socialist consciousness — does not necessarily mean that this is what the workers are basically concerned with. Time and experience will demonstrate that this is only a momentary concern.
The miners have heard about these reforms for four years precisely because that is what the Gorbachev administration has been pursuing in the promise that these measures will ultimately bring about social and economic benefits.
The miners' strike and the world attention focused upon it has once again pushed to the fore fundamental questions of theory and practice regarding the nature of the state in general and of the social character of the Soviet Union in particular.
For example, both the extreme rightwing stand of the Wall Street Journal and the more moderate bourgeois view of the New York Times have this in common: They view the miners' strike as a challenge to the Soviet state. However, it is not the Soviet state that is being challenged.
What is happening? The state itself is challenging the governing group of the state. The difference is fundamental and worth pondering over.
The state is an instrument of a specific class defined by its relation to the means of production. The governing group, on the other hand, merely administers the state. Confusing the state with its administrators merely obscures the real relationships that govern society.
The governing group of a worker's state may administer it well and efficiently and in a revolutionary manner, as was done during the early years of the Bolshevik era. Or it could represent the state badly, inflict untold hardship on the masses and enact policies that erode the very class foundation of the state. Nevertheless, it is and remains the state of the workers and peasants.
The identification of the Soviet state with its bureaucratic governing groups and its political apparatus is a gross misconception disseminated by the bourgeoisie to obscure the class character of the Soviet Union. Imperialism must hide the fact that the ruling class in a socialist state is the working class. Even if for many years the workers' voice has been stifled, their capabilities limited and their freedom and initiative seriously curtailed, nevertheless, this is still the state of the workers and peasants. No part of this state is owned by the administrators.
In fact, the miners' strike has shown that while the Soviet Union has gone through periods where the working class foundations seemed endangered, periods of erosion have been followed again by periods of vigorous and dynamic growth.
The USSR has experienced a number of governing groups over the last 70 years while the state itself has remained fundamentally unaltered. The governing groups have never been anything else but the administrators of the state, even in the brightest days of the Leninist period. At that time there was, of course, the greatest identity of interests between the administrators of the state and the workers' and peasants' state itself.
It is altogether different under capitalism. For example, when Donald Regan resigned as head of the Treasury and also as chief of staff for the U.S. president under the Reagan administration, he did not take a legal portion of the capitalist state with him. Nevertheless, since he owns vast amounts of property, he remains a capitalist.
On the other hand, if Nikolai Ryzhkov or Gorbachev himself should leave office, they do not take along with them any ownership of the means of production. Their social status could be that of pensioner, or they could find another occupation. Whatever other occupation they may take up, they do not become capitalists.
To confuse the governing group of a state with the state itself serves the bourgeoisie well. It most often gets them off the hook in times of struggle with the workers, and focuses attention on the governing group which may be easily dispensed with, legally or otherwise.
Throughout its long and bloody history, the bourgeoisie has always tried to confuse the class foundations of its states with its governing groups. The bourgeoisie is almost always displeased with its governing groups, whether they be conservatives or liberals, Christian Democrats or left-wing socialists, or an occasional coalition of communists and socialists.
The last 50 years have seen a vast number of governing groups of the bourgeoisie come and go as through a revolving door. But the class foundations of the bourgeoisie, that is, the industrialists, the bankers, the multinational corporations that hold and have legal title to most of the resources, remain the same. Indeed, the bulk of the wealth in the world remains in their hands.
The bourgeoisie does not like to popularize this aspect of the Marxist conception of the state. It is much more to their interest to pass off a particular governing group as the state rather than to show what the real basis of the state: who owns the means of production, distribution and exchange, transport and communications. All this makes up the state.
The problem of the Soviet state is the problem of the relation of the social structure to the superstructure; it is the problem of the relation of the economic foundations to the political administration, that is, the relation of the class to its leaders.
The Soviet state has survived decades of struggle between the structure and the superstructure, now hidden, now open, and sometimes even violent. The governing group, the officialdom or the bureaucracy is not the state. It can act on the state's behalf, ignore it or even repress it, but it is not the state.
There comes a time, however, when the relation between the structure and the super structure reaches a crisis. Such is the time when the workers step into the political arena, as the miners have done, and reveal to the whole world who in fact is the state.
This is of world historic significance. It is the real meaning of the miners' strike.
Last updated: 23 March 2018