In the spirit of a classical bourgeois parliament, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on Oct. 3 passed its first significant piece of anti-working class legislation.
This came in the form of a proposal by General Secretary of the Communist Party and President of the Supreme Soviet Mikhail Gorbachev for a 15-month ban on strikes and other, more serious emergency powers. These powers, he explained, are meant to "defend democracy against anarchy and complete economic mismanagement" (UPI, Oct. 2).
Gorbachev's original proposals were somewhat softened and restricted after hours of deliberations and negotiations between government officials and the Soviet parliamentarians.
The legislation was passed with virtually unanimous agreement among the various political groupings, who congratulated themselves on the accomplishment. Each had been given the opportunity to demagogue throughout the two-day session of the Supreme Soviet.
It should be taken note of that all of a sudden, the recent talk of a coup, military or political, has been suspended. It is being replaced by a barrage of panic stories regarding the total collapse of the economy.
Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov led the parade. "This country cannot stand another strike like the miners." Others called up the specter of immediate economic disaster.
They all seemed to chime in simultaneously. All but the workers. All but the proletarian masses who have built the mines, mills and factories. All but those whose sweat and blood have made the Soviet Union the second greatest industrial and technological fortress.
Where were they in all this legislative charade? Oh sure, there were parliamentary representatives of certain districts where workers live or work. But are they really workers, or are they lawyers, trained careerists in the Party apparatus, in the higher institutions of learning, or from the managerial elite?
Was any group of organized workers represented at the parliamentary hearings? Was even the All-Union Trade Union Council, the so-called official trade union, called in to testify? Were the leaders of the miners or the other unions that have been on strike throughout the country consulted? That's a question to ask the bourgeois parliamentarians.
Certainly there is a critical economic situation in the country. We have written about it in these pages for a considerable period of time. But these latest scare stories of the imminent collapse of the Soviet economy, are they true? It is necessary to separate fact from fiction.
Up until the miners' strike, the Gorbachev administration was trying to assure the country and the world that the crisis was exaggerated, that it was all manageable, and that improvement was gradually on the way.
But the miners, and for that matter the whole working class, had never been consulted on any of the plans of the Gorbachev administration. On the in were only this motley crew of technocrats, bourgeois economists and party careerists who have learned to hop from one ministry to another. And most of all, there is an utterly new layer in the upper crust of Soviet society: lawyers. Long looked upon derisively as practitioners of a petty bourgeois profession, they have slowly and gradually, since the end of the Leninist era, climbed to the top.
The labyrinthine structure of the bureaucracy and its artificially complex character has made lawyers the key profession in governmental affairs. Law is not just the art of jurisprudence, it is something akin to bourgeois politics, where the lawyers know the ins and outs of the bureaucratic and managerial apparatus.
Like in the U.S., it is not the able and talented students of the law who become most prominent, but those who know the ins and outs of capitalist politics and can attach themselves to or get bribed into the big corporate law firms. The real scholars write the briefs and get paid relatively low wages, whereas the others are just another form of capitalist exploiters.
Now we have a variety of this species in the Soviet Union, and they are at the top of the heap. Gorbachev symbolizes their ascendancy.
Of course, the Soviet economy is in great danger, but the hyperbole used by Ryzhkov is a fraud. "The country couldn't stand another strike." The country survived hundreds and thousands of military strikes by the Nazis that leveled the cities. Now this bureaucrat tells us to watch out for the great danger! There are strikes; the workers are on the march.
What was the real mission when Boris Yeltsin and Gorbachev's close associate A. Aganbegyan came to the U.S. last month hat in hand? To warn the imperialists of the coming economic disaster and get their help? But what concretely did they mean?
That they fear a tumultuous, nationwide working class upsurge that would endanger the bourgeois reforms, which the imperialists all over the world have been praising to the skies.
Aganbegyan let the cat out of the bag when he unburdened himself to none other than that stalwart pillar of big business and high finance, the Wall Street Journal in an interview with George Melloan (Sept. 12).
"We are in deep crisis," said Aganbegyan, "especially a financial crisis and a crisis of the consumer goods market." That much he has said over and over again in the Soviet press. But here he added something else. The crisis "provokes social unrest. The strikes of miners were the clang of the first bell. They were the first sign that we are moving toward economic disaster." How incredible! How utterly shameless!
He sounds more like a stool pigeon informing against the workers than a proletarian statesman meeting an imperialist interviewer.
Such is the real state of affairs. He not only came hat in hand on behalf of the Gorbachev administration to the imperialist colossus; he then tried to frighten them with the specter of a full-scale intervention of the working class, which could topple the whole ramshackle fantasy of market socialism, the precursor for the restoration of capitalism.
What about the workers themselves? The upsurge of the miners did in fact set off a wave of strikes. And it has all been done by rank and file workers and lower union, party and labor collective officials.
The specific characteristic of them all is their complete divorce from the governmental apparatus, and their defiance of it. This is the working class unshackled. They have rebuffed the maneuvers of the bourgeois opposition and made clear they want no truck with the likes of a Polish Solidarity-led union.
They also rebuffed Gorbachev himself when they called for the shutdown of the private cooperatives, which Gorbachev himself admits have become a scandalous form for raising prices and spending money not on productive work but on personal aggrandizement.
Just a few weeks ago Gorbachev was attempting a highly publicized and carefully crafted maneuver to coopt the miners and all the workers into his fold. Now, he has begun to denounce them for their "ultimatistic" demands. This reached a crescendo with his vicious characterization of the strikers in his address to the Supreme Soviet on Oct. 2.
"These measures are meant to defend democracy against anarchy and complete economic mismanagement." Defend democracy? This is a euphemism for defense of the bourgeoisie. Against anarchy? That's the working class. Complete economic mismanagement? That one's right on the mark. But it's the Gorbachev administration that is mismanaging and leading the country into an economic impasse from which it cannot disentangle itself without either falling into the arms of bourgeois restoration or facing the specter of an independent, truly revolutionary working class resurgence.
Let the world not be deceived by the fact that the working class resurgence has only reached the level of economism, that is, it is confined thus far to the bread and butter issues. The contemporary historical context is a struggle for power of only two significant forces. The new bourgeois elements have been slowly germinating over decades and are now coming into full bloom. The really new phenomenon is the resurgence of the working class.
The bureaucracy is in the middle. Gorbachev has correctly been called a centrist. He wavers between the two poles, but consistently gives ground to, continually appeases and feeds the bourgeois elements. He calls for the restoration of some collective and state farms into private hands and for wholesale decollectivization. He calls for decentralization, for economic independence on a small-scale basis.
The bourgeoisie demands decentralization of all industry and free rein for the capitalist market.
Once again, history is showing that there are only two world class social forces on the contemporary arena: the world bourgeoisie and the world proletariat, whose natural allies are all the oppressed peoples.
The most disappointing and indeed humiliating aspect of the proposal by Gorbachev is to use the military to move the railroads. This of course refers to the bitter strife between Azerbaijan and Armenia, where freight and passenger traffic have been stalled arising out of their dispute over the territory of Nagorno-Karabakh.
Using the military to settle an inter-ethnic dispute is an utterly incredible development in light of the history of the USSR. Proletarian internationalism and socialist solidarity among the workers was one of the prerequisites for the great success of the October Revolution.
That the threat to use military force to solve the national problem should be brought up before the whole world shows to what depths the current leaders of the Soviet Union have sunk.
Gone and altogether forgotten, as though they never existed, are the days when Bolshevik agitators and propagandists were the shock brigades of the revolutionary Marxist and Leninist party. They went everywhere and anywhere there were inter-ethnic disputes. On the basis of their own bitter experience resulting from czarist oppression, they were able to exchange experiences, draw lessons from the past, and apply revolutionary internationalist tactics to win the masses toward socialist solidarity and away from national animosities.
This is how the dozens of nationalities in the Soviet Union were welded together in a firm alliance, one great Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was the force of common experience, ideas and ideals which enabled Bolshevik agitators and propagandists to communicate and conduct dialogues with the people — not the monologues of the bureaucracy to the nationalities.
The use of military force to solve the national problem is a sign of the bankruptcy of the politics of the Gorbachev regime. They stimulated and brought to the fore ancient antagonisms which had been buried; they reignited them with the introduction of bourgeois reforms, which invigorated national egoism and hence national antagonisms.
Once the Azerbaijan-Armenia dispute was underway, it was late in the day to attempt to settle it simply on the basis of constitutional provisions. This was inadequate, especially since the bourgeois reforms, instead of being abandoned, were in effect strengthened. In effect the whole strategy of the Gorbachev regime was to bribe each of the administrations in the republics, rather than to find a truly internationalist and proletarian approach.
But how could they when they themselves have abandoned the proletarian internationalist approach?
How could they when they have regularly and arbitrarily ousted one leadership after another in the republics?
Now, after all of this, they are still scrounging around for leaders who have mass influence, after the masses themselves have become infected with the virus of nationalism.
It is not hard to find the reason for it. The first Kazakhstan rebellion, which the Gorbachev administration provoked by ousting the leader of the Kazakh Party and replacing him with an ethnic Russian, should have been a signal to them to earnestly search for an internationalist solution to the problem on the basis of whatever prestige or moral authority the Party itself had.
But instead of that, they dilly-dallied, called one small meeting after another without making a decision. They lectured the Azerbaijanis and the Armenians but never called into session the one authoritative body of the government which might have solved the problem, the Soviet of Nationalities.
Instead, they continually held up the prospect that solutions would be forthcoming at the 19th Party Conference. Which meant the nationalities waited and waited, while the antagonisms and animosities sharpened.
So what happened to the Azerbaijan-Armenia issue? Both delegations eagerly awaited the presentation of their cases and a decision. Now, more than a full year later, one can see that the 19th Party Conference was staged for the purpose of influencing the imperialist bourgeoisie with the reforms, of winning their confidence. It gave short shrift to the national question as a whole.
Mostly sound and fury came out of the 19th Party Conference. They sang paeans of praise to the economic reforms and denounced the past, indulging in orgies of bourgeois anti-Stalinism. The Party leadership, having lost its moral authority, sought refuge in makeshift concessions, a form of bribery to the upper crust of the nationalist elements in both republics. These have only aggravated the situation.
Those who squander the Leninist legacy of revolutionary internationalism ultimately resort to naked force. That is precisely the meaning of Gorbachev's emergency legislation empowering use of the military.
Only a classwide resurgence of the working class, which is at last making itself felt, offers hope for the future.
Last updated: 23 March 2018