[pamphlet „Stalinism in Crisis“, p. 2-5]
The western press’ enthusiastically applauded Gorbachev’s performance at the June 1988 special Communist Party conference. They praised his ‘democratic reforms’, his courage and steadfastness. Many workers and young people in Britain are now asking: Will Gorbachev really clear out bureaucratism, will the Russian workers now be able to enjoy all the rights and freedoms guaranteed in the constitution? Of course the capitalist press adds that Gorbachev’s ‘democracy’ will not be complete. Opposition parties are still not allowed and state ownership of the economy still severely limits that essential democratic right to exploit others!
Gorbachev is not in the process of establishing the elements of western capitalist democracy, where elected governments come and go, but control of the economy, the press and the state remains firmly in the hands of the ruling class. But nor will he ever take any real steps in the direction of workers’ democracy. Like all the privileged bureaucratic elite, Gorbachev is mortally afraid of an active, aroused Russian working class holding them to account.
Perestroika aims to exert some accountability and pressure on the top layers of the bureaucracy by the lower officials and even by the working class. But rule by the bureaucratic elite is being preserved intact. Rather than decisions being arrived at secretly by top Communist Party functionaries, some check will now be established. A new working national assembly which will debate and discuss is to replace the old, sham Supreme Soviet that met for three days twice a year to supposedly ratify decisions.
A 2250 strong Congress of Peoples’ Deputies will be elected by the Russian people, and partly from trade unions, youth, women’s and cultural organisations. It will meet once a year to elect a state president, and a permanent assembly of 400. This will be mirrored at regional level, where the powerful regional party secretaries will become the heads of the regional ‘soviets’. The state bodies rather than the party committees are to be seen to be in control.
Gorbachev went out of his way to reassure the Stalinist bureaucracy, especially the old guard, that the ‘leading role of the Communist party’ will be maintained. While there may be more than one candidate for seats in the People’s Congress or for regional bodies, they will all be Communist Party members or CP-endorsed candidates. And who are the members of the CP other than the bureaucrats, defenders of a system of organised privilege from which the masses are jealously excluded?
Gorbachev even invoked the name of Lenin to justify what he means by the ‘leading role of the party’, and the continuation of the one-party state. But it was with a heavy heart that Lenin felt compelled to ban other parties, while trying to sustain socialism in a ‘besieged fortress’. Facing economic boycott, armed intervention by imperialism and civil war, other parties were banned only as an exceptional measure when they went over to support the armed reaction against the infant workers’ state.
Seventy-one years after the Russian Revolution, Gorbachev and the bureaucracy now preside over the second most powerful country on the planet. What possible threat to state ownership of the economy could be posed by parties that even called for the restoration of capitalism? The ban on alternative political parties is aimed to prevent new workers’ parties, parties standing on the programme of Lenin and Trotsky. They would pose no danger to state ownership but would be a mortal threat to the bureaucratic elite.
Gorbachev recalls the party of Lenin. But there is nothing in common between the Communist Party of Lenin and that of Gorbachev except the name. Lenin’s party comprised the most self-sacrificing, class conscious and advanced workers, who led the Russian masses to power. Gorbachev’s CP is a party of bureaucrats, careerists and place-seekers. At its lowest level it attracts those who in capitalist society would be supervisors or management spies. No class conscious worker would join. In fact, whenever the masses of Eastern Europe move into action against the bureaucracy, among the first victims of their anger are the offices of the Communist Party. They correctly see them as symbols of the domination of society by a privileged bureaucracy.
Of course there are vast differences between Gorbachev and the tops of the Communist Party and the lower levels. There are 20 million members of the Russian party. In Hungary in 1956 in the political revolution to throw off the bureaucracy, the lower levels of the CP, the majority, fell in behind the struggle of the working masses. The top bureaucrats were left with no support in society whatsoever. But the CPs in Russia and Eastern Europe are still the parties of the ruling bureaucracy.
The multi-candidate elections Gorbachev proposes merely offer workers the choice between one bureaucrat or another. Those elected will represent the interests of the bureaucracy and will act as ruthlessly against any threat from independent, democratic organisations of the working class like Poland’s Solidarity of 1980-1, or against the struggle of the oppressed nationalities for the democratic right to self-determination.
To Gorbachev, ‘openness’, elections, a working assembly are weapons against the worst excesses of the bureaucrats, against the most openly corrupt or indolent who are dragging the economy into stagnation. By this means he hopes to protect the dominant position of the bureaucracy as a whole.
Lenin in the last months of his life tried to combat the dangers of any bureaucratism. He recognised the toll that revolution, civil war and the economic privations of an isolated workers’ state had take on the energy of the masses.
Workers’ democracy depends upon the active involvement of the workers in the running of every aspect of society. The bureaucracy grew in the climate of shortages, weariness and indifference. Standing at the front of the queue for the distribution of scarce resources, they then took measures to prevent the involvement of the masses. Gorbachev will never change this. He will never tolerate the four points laid down by Lenin for day one of a democratic workers’ state: election and recall of all officials, the rotation of official jobs, no standing army but the armed people and no official to receive more than a skilled workers’ wage.
No section of the bureaucracy will ever accept the wages of the workers. Ten-year maximum terms are apparently to be introduced for leading positions. But will the incumbents then go on to the shop or office floor, or will they merely move to another position within the ruling elite or to comfortable retirement? Gorbachev’s resolutions won unanimous support at the special conference. The old guard, who fear that his ‘reforms’ will open the floodgates to criticism and opposition, also recognise the danger of mass upheavals if they seriously try to thwart or remove Gorbachev at this stage.
There is justified suspicion and hatred of the bureaucrats by the working class. But after decades of clampdown, there is also an attitude of giving Gorbachev and his changes a chance. In early February, the demonstrators in the troubled area of Nagorno-Karabakh carried portraits of Gorbachev. They have also carried placards pronouncing ‘Ligachev is a Stalinist’, referring to the leader of the hard-line faction. So far perestroika has brought little material change to everyday life for Russian families. The queues and shortages have not been eased. But as Gorbachev pushes on with the real perestroika, economic ‘reforms’ – price rises, profitability tests for workplaces, even closures and unemployment – disillusion will spread, especially as any initial economic impetus fades under the weight of the bureaucracy.
Gorbachev aims to widen inequalities rather than to close them up. Paying workers in relation to results will fuel workers’ grievances. A Bulgarian bureaucrat, in fact the Bulgarian TUC leader, explained brazenly what this aspect of perestroika would mean: ‘It is no longer possible to set salaries on a national level … Up to now we have paid according to labour – not the results of labour. We paid for the time people worked and nobody asked what was done in this time.’ This amounts to a harsh disciplining of labour, trying to boost production by use of the stick, when production could be enormously raised by relying on the initiative and control of the workers themselves. But that the bureaucracy will never do. Instead their policies are a recipe for intensified hostility. The Russian working class will rediscover the ideas of real democracy, workers’ democracy, the programme of Lenin and Trotsky, and they will settle their accounts with the bureaucracy that oppresses them.
Schreibe einen Kommentar