(Militant International Review, No. 41, Autumn 1989)
Peter Taaffe explains how the political revolution against Stalinism in Eastern Europe has begun.
The MIR has long predicted that Gorbachev’s attempts at ‚reforms from the top‘ would provoke revolution, political revolution, from below. The mighty strike wave of the Soviet miners in July confirms that analysis. Like a prairie fire it swept from Siberia to central Asia, to Estonia and to the Ukraine.
The Ukraine is the bread-basket and industrial powerhouse of the USSR. 300,000 miners out on strike was bad enough but the prospect of the strike spreading to the railwaymen on 1 August, with the movement threatening to trigger off strikes in the Russian federation itself, introduced the greatest panic in the ranks of the ruling bureaucratic elite.
All factions of the bureaucracy drew together in common terror at the re-emergence of the powerful proletariat of the USSR. The conservatives, led by Ligachev predictably, pinned the blame on Gorbachev for these upheavals. Gorbachev sought to lean on the movement as a whip against the bureaucracy, particularly the middle layers. At the same time he threatened the strikers with dire consequences as it looked as though the movement was likely to get out of hand. Yeltsin, spokesman for the liberals, also urged strikers to return to work.
The economic, social and ecological demands of the miners shook the Kremlin, representing as they did a searing indictment of the bureaucracy. But the elite must have reached for the panic button at the directly political slogans and demands of the miners, which struck at the very foundations of bureaucratic rule.
They called for ‚a new constitution‘. Taking up Gorbachev’s slogan ‚All power to the Soviets‘ (which are still firmly controlled by the bureaucracy), the Siberian miners issued a call: „For the Communist Party to abandon its leading role under the Soviet Union’s constitution; for a transfer of real power to the elected Soviets; for the cancellation of elections to the Supreme Soviet from public organisations (such as the party and the official trade unions); and direct elections of the President and the heads of local government bodies by secret ballot.“ Financial Times, 25 July 1989.
A deputy to the Supreme Soviet from the Ukraine declared „people have been pushed onto the streets not by a shortage of soap but by a shortage of justice. The miners of Donetsk trust nobody and nothing“. The Financial Times ruefully commented: „deputies listened often in almost funeral silence (as) the miners‘ deputies attacked the party and trade union bureaucracy which had stifled the demands of their electors for so many years“.
The tendency of the miners to bypass the official ‚trade unions‘ to establish their own fighting organisations, in effect embryonic Soviets, was intolerable to the bureaucracy, including its most liberal wing.
Gorbachev reacted like the bourgeois in the West when faced with an insurgent proletariat. He threatened to introduce anti-strike legislation prohibiting stoppages in ‚vital services‘. In vain! No amount of legislation will be able to hold in chains the proletariat of the USSR which has now tested its strength in action and has completely lost its fear of Stalinist mass bureaucratic terror.
These events signify the beginning of the political revolution in the USSR which will not be one act but a protracted process. They also underlined the contagious effects of the movement of the proletariat in the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Not occidentally the miners adopted the name ‚Solidarity‘ for the ‚independent trade unions‘ that some sought to set up. No doubt in 1980-1 the Russian bureaucracy thought that their cordon sanitaire around Poland had successfully inoculated the proletariat of the USSR from the Solidarity ‚virus‘. But the account of those tumultuous events, particularly in the neighbouring Ukraine, obviously found a powerful echo among the proletariat of the USSR.
Poland is the flashpoint for a possible social and political conflagration throughout the region, but not one of the Stalinist states is now stable. Any further real development of the productive forces is strangled by the obsolete bureaucracy, on the one side, and the perpetuation of the nation state on the other. Poland and Hungary express this in the most vivid fashion.
But Bulgaria and Romania, seemingly among the most stable of the Stalinist regimes and with certain social reserves in the agricultural population, have resorted to the most hooligan persecution of the Turkish and Hungarian minorities in their respective countries.
The spectacle of 150,000 refugees expelled to Turkey in May and June of this year has been a gift to the veiled military dictatorship of Özal in Turkey. Yet this insane policy is a manifestation of the crisis of the regime.
The attempted ‚assimilation‘ (destruction) of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria is revenge for the Ottoman empire’s ‚assimilation‘ and virtual obliteration of Bulgaria for over 500 years. A more important explanation, however, is the search for a scapegoat to divert attention from the chronic shortages, the grey mediocrities who dominate Bulgarian society and, above all, the slowing down of the economy.
In Czechoslovakia, where the slightest protest has been met with ruthless repression in the past, last January saw the biggest demonstration since 1968. This is merely a foretaste of the social explosion that looms in Czechoslovakia once the regime moves to implement its ‚reformist‘ policy of closing down ‚obsolete‘ plant and evicting one quarter of the workforce (2.25m) from the factories.
East Germany, once the ‚industrial high-tech‘ showcase of Eastern Europe, is grinding to a halt, with a growth rate of less than 1 %. Moreover, the ‚technology gap‘ between East and West Germany has widened, as it has with all the Stalinist states in relation to Western capitalism. The unreconstructed Stalinists, led by Honecker, who rule East Germany with an iron fist, react with hysteria to the slightest disturbances in any of the Stalinist states.
Thus the ‚gang of four‘ (Bulgaria, Romania, East Germany, Czechoslovakia) denounce the ‚anti-socialist‘ events in Poland and Hungary. The Stalinist gangs that rule these states joined with Castro in Cuba in applauding the massacre of the heroic students and workers in Tiananmen Square.
The attempt of a group of East German youth to present a petition at the Chinese Embassy in protest at the slaughter in Beijing was met by police repression on two occasions. There is massive discontent at the electoral fraud perpetuated by the regime in May’s ’single candidate‘ municipal elections. Demonstrations in protest against this fraud in East Berlin and Leipzig were dispersed by the police and army.
The advantages of a planned economy have meant a big development of industry and of living standards of the population of East Germany. Up to the recent period, the East German people lived as well or even slightly better than the British. Yet it is precisely the development of the economy, with the raising of the cultural level of the people, which makes the stranglehold of Stalinism so insufferable.
One observer commenting on the effect of visits to the West by East German youth wrote: „It is not just the shops (in the West). What gets them is that they can drive to Brussels or Luxembourg, or they can stand up in a bar and say what they think without a policeman coming round to their home the next day. Then they come back here (East Germany) and realise what a claustrophobic place they live in.“
Twenty per cent of the population have fled from East to West Germany since the establishment of the state in 1949. A new exodus is now taking place, which the East German Stalinists turn a blind eye to because it rids them of potential ‚dissidents‘. Yet so terrified are they of the Polish and Hungarian plague spreading to their state that they are now considering, as they did in 1980, a ban on all travel to these countries.
The stagnation of the productive forces, and even regression in some fields, together with ruthless repression of the slightest dissent, are the ingredients for a colossal upheaval. East Germany could very well be the first to trigger upheavals throughout the Stalinist states.
So could Yugoslavia, where inflation rose by 313% in the first half of 1989. This led for the first time in history to the National Bank running out of banknotes! The Yugoslav media, instead of giving a cash figure for the amount of money exchanged at the main border crossing with Austria, reported in early August that 14 cubic metres of dinars had changed hands!
Yet, it is probably Poland, and only a little behind, Hungary, which are the weakest links in the chain of Stalinism. The impasse and demoralisation of the bureaucracy is expressed most sharply in Poland.
Jaruzelski’s attempt to lean on the Solidarity leadership to carry through his ‚austerity programme‘ is an exercise fraught with enormous difficulty. At the same time, it has allowed some bourgeois commentators to conjure up the vision of a future Poland with completely ‚free‘ elections, the ‚Communist Party‘ evicted from office which, in turn, leads to the liquidation of the planned economy and the restoration of capitalism.
The crisis of the Polish regime results from two factors. Firstly, there is the economic and social catastrophe created by Stalinist mismanagement and waste. Then, there is the seeming success of capitalism in the West.
Despite the widening gap between the rich and poor, capitalism appears to be an attractive proposition for a section of the bureaucracy and even to layers of the working class in the Stalinist states. Marxism has pointed out that such is the crisis of the Stalinist regimes now, at least in the advanced industrial states of eastern Europe and the USSR, that a return back to capitalism cannot be theoretically ruled out.
But it would not be the internal situation in Poland alone that will be decisive, but world factors. If it was possible for capitalism to experience a world economic upswing on the scale of 1950-75, capitalist restoration would be a real possibility, not just for Poland but for the other states of Eastern Europe and the USSR.
Trotsky in The Revolution Betrayed emphasised that it would not be military intervention alone which posed the danger of a bourgeois restoration. It would be ‚the cheap goods in the baggage train‘ of invading imperialist armies. The Nazi invasion, with their programme of insane racial superiority and genocide of the ‚inferior Slavs‘, only repelled the populations of the USSR. An intervention of US imperialism, on the other hand, with its ‚cheap goods‘, may have brought a different outcome, with the possibility of a return to capitalism.
However, Trotsky stressed that a bourgeois counter-revolution, no more than a revolution, could not be carried through by piecemeal ‚reformist‘ methods. It would be impossible to ‚run the film of reformism backwards‘. It would be necessary to carry through a social counterrevolution, the restoration of bourgeois rule, which would inevitably meet the resistance of the proletariat as it became clear what colossal price they would pay for the re-establishment of capitalism.
The scenario today is entirely different to that envisaged by Trotsky. Rather than a long period of economic upswing, capitalism faces in the next few years a slowing down in growth of production, a recession or even a slump. Even if a slump on the scale of 1929-33 is not the most likely perspective immediately, such a development is entirely possible in the 1990s. This would cut across the tendencies toward bourgeois restoration which are now evident in the Stalinist states, including China as the recent events have shown.
Trotsky envisaged that a bourgeois restoration would begin by breaking the monopoly of foreign trade. Former bureaucrats would separate out as a new bourgeois, first of all in light industry. There would be the development of a kulak class in the countryside, beginning from the richer co-operatives and agro-enterprises. Some of these features, in some cases all of them, have recently been present in the Stalinist states.
In China, the establishment of 7,000 ‚joint ventures‘ that directly traded on the world market, represented a breach in the state monopoly of foreign trade. The ‚reforms‘ of Deng also created a powerful kulak class in the countryside which threatened grain and other food supplies. These tendencies towards bourgeois restoration have now, however, been cut across. This will also be the case in the other Stalinist states.
Bush’s recent visit to Poland has dashed the illusions widespread at the top of Solidarity that US imperialism would launch a ’new Marshall Aid‘ to help restore capitalism. The economic ‚aid‘ Bush promised amounted to $3 per head for every Pole and just over $2 per head for every Hungarian. Hardly the economic bait to tempt Poland to restore capitalism!
US imperialism was able to launch a Marshall Aid programme after the Second World War when it possessed 50% of industrial production in the capitalist world and ~75% of the world’s gold reserves. Even then it was able to undertake its rescue operation only after the Social Democratic and Stalinist leaders had saved capitalism by entering coalition governments as a means of politically beheading the revolutionary wave of 1944-47.
The bourgeois are quite content to use the difficulties of the Stalinist regimes as a means of reinforcing the ‚advantages of capitalism‘. The capitalists have traditionally used the totalitarian one-party Stalinist regimes as a scarecrow against socialism.
After the massacre in China and the colossal crisis in Poland and Hungary the Wall Street Journal was prompted to declare: ‚We’ve won!‘ The bourgeois ideologists now claim that capitalism has demonstrated its ’superiority‘ over decaying Stalinism. In reality, the serious spokesmen of capitalism entertain no such illusions that the regimes of Eastern Europe are likely to fall so easily into their embrace
Bush went out of his way to endorse Jaruzelski as President of Poland and, it is believed, was partly responsible for convincing Wałęsa to do likewise. The Polish bureaucracy had concluded by the beginning of this year that they could not rule in the old way.
The military repression imposed in December 1981 had failed to check the Polish proletariat. Its immense power, the collapse in support for the regime, combined with economic embargoes applied by the West and the explosive social situation, compelled Jaruzelski to retreat and concede ’35 per cent democracy‘. A majority was guaranteed for ‚Communist‘ Party-nominees in the new parliament. More crucially, the levers of state power remained firmly in the hands of the ruling elite.
Jaruzelski sought to establish a Gorbachev-model regime. Bonapartist powers have been invested in the President who is responsible for foreign policy, police, defence and the appointment of the government. Engels pointed out that in the final analysis the state could be reduced to ‚armed bodies of men and their material appendages, prisons, etc.‘. The bureaucracy has no intention of allowing the levers of power to fall from its hands. Jaruzelski was quite clear that the Solidarity of 1989 was an entirely different animal to that of 1980-1.
Like the Social Democratic and Communist Party leaders in the West, Wałęsa and other Solidarity leaders have demonstrated their ‚fitness to govern‘ — by distancing themselves from the demands of the Polish workers and sometimes actively breaking strikes.
In 1980-1 Solidarity had 10 million members in the urban areas and three million in ‚Rural Solidarity‘. Because of its support for Jaruzelski’s ‚democratic opening‘, millions of workers have become disillusioned with Solidarity. Wałęsa urged support for the ‚reformists‘ in the party bureaucracy in the first round of the recent elections. Consequently, all but two of them were defeated! The 40% who abstained obviously included a big section outraged at the Solidarity leadership’s decision to allow the Stalinists back into power by the ’side-door‘.
The trade union base of Solidarity has contracted since the heyday of 1980. Before it was legalised in early 1989, Solidarity’s leadership were claiming five to six million would enter its trade union wing. But only 120,000-140,000 workers joined in the Mazowsze region which includes Warsaw, less than one seventh of Solidarity’s membership in that region in 1980, The union had 4,000 branches in the region in 1980, now it has only 1,200.
Wałęsa, Geremek and even former ‚ultra-lefts‘ like Jacek Kuroń now form a rival Solidarity bureaucracy to the Stalinist party elite. One of the Solidarity leaders, seeking to justify participation in the ‚elections‘, declared „both Solidarity and the authorities saw that we were never going to be to able to destroy one another, so we decided to try and work together.“
Thus a revolutionary threat to the regime no longer emanates from the Solidarity organisation, at least from its leading layer. In this situation the entry of Solidarity ministers into the government to assume full responsibility for the savage price increases imposed on 3 August and the wholesale closure of factories could not be opposed but indeed positively welcomed by the more far-sighted representatives of the regime — both in Warsaw and the Kremlin.
With the authority of the Polish Communist Party completely used up, the only faint hope for securing the implementation of the austerity programme lay in the involvement of the incipient Solidarity bureaucracy in some form of power sharing arrangement.
Faced with extreme social crisis and upheaval. Solidarity has finally decided to form a government in alliance with the small Peasants and Democratic Parties (former puppets of the CP). But they also have agreed that the CP should continue to hold the key ministries of defence and the interior (i.e. army and police). The ministries of finance and media remain to he decided.
Control of the state machine, the civil service and the media, is critical to maintaining bureaucratic rule. So long as these remain in the hands of reliable representatives of the bureaucracy all kinds of ‚coalitions‘ or ‚power-sharing arrangements‘ can be resorted to. This would not be the first time that the bureaucracy has used sham coalitions.
The establishment of the Polish and Czech Stalinist states involved ‚coalitions‘ between the Communist party and the former representatives of the bourgeois gathered together into small parties which were in reality mere appendages of the Stalinists. In the long protracted decay of Stalinism the bureaucracy will be forced to use all kinds of elaborate manoeuvres, ensuring at all stages that state power remains firmly in its hands.
Is it possible then for completely free elections to take place in four years time as the Solidarity leaders envisage? Is it possible in Hungary that free elections can take place next year as some Hungarian Communist leaders have promised?
A form of elections, all kinds of peculiar arrangements along the Polish pattern, are possible as a means of safeguarding the rule of the bureaucracy. The MIR has argued that it is impossible in the Stalinist states for the bureaucracy to tolerate for any length of time independent mass organisations of the working-class, with the unfettered right to strike, and other democratic rights. The bureaucracy is a complete excrescence whose very existence would be called into question once the masses possessed the right to criticise freely and to organise independently.
Thus any ‚democracy‘ in the Stalinist states can only assume a mangled form with all kinds of ‚qualifications‘ involving the banning of parties which seriously threaten the rule of the bureaucracy. Solidarity may be legalised but the Solidarity Student Union, the NZS, with the natural inclination of youth to go further in criticising the Stalinist regime and organising to replace it, is banned. Independent trade unions which inevitably seek to organise politically will probably meet with repression — similar to Gorbachev’s measures in Russia.
In Hungary the move to ‚free elections‘ and untrammelled democracy appears on the surface to have gone much further than in Poland. The inflation rate has reached 17%, the foreign debt is $12bn with the servicing of the debt swallowing up $1.6bn annually. The slump in the authority of the Communist Party (called the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party), is reflected in the fall in its People’s Daily newspaper circulation from 1.5 million to 400,000. Opinion polls indicate that in completely ‚free‘ elections only 36% would support the HSWP. Yet the Hungarian working-class have not yet moved into struggle as in Poland.
Their conditions are every bit as desperate as in Poland, in some respects worse. They have suffered a drop in living standards every year for the last decade. One factor which stays the hand of the working-class is undoubtedly the memory of the 1956 uprising. However, such are the desperate conditions of the masses that they will not for long continue to tolerate this situation.
It is this which has prompted the frantic attempts at reform from the top by sections of the bureaucracy. Its most prominent representative, Imre Pozsgay, recently declared that „the anonymous masses have not spoken“ but „when people cannot tolerate any more they will burst in rebellion“. The bureaucracy are terrified of the slightest provocation which could bring the workers out onto the streets.
Feeling the developing opposition from below, the reformist wing led by Pozsgay has looked for agreements with the ‚opposition‘. These latter are a motley bunch of at least nine parties with the Democratic Forum the most prominent. They pose no serious threat to the continuation of bureaucratic rule. One of the opposition pointed to one rotund figure of the ruling party on TV and commented „to the woman who buys chicken-feed for the Sunday dinner all of us look and sound alike“!
Therefore it is likely that a form of ‚elections‘ which carefully circumscribe the power of any real socialist or workers‘ opposition will take place. However, despite all the clever constitutional dickering of the bureaucracy, they will not be able to avoid provoking social explosions.
‚Reforms‘ from the Polish national Stalinist Gomulka failed. His successor, Gierek, tried to mollify the Polish workers by going to the world market. This led to the accumulation of the colossal foreign debt which now cripples the Polish economy. Since 1980-1, Jaruzelski has attempted first repression then a combination of repression and concessions. This has also failed. The attempt to lean on the Solidarity leaders will also prove them to be a very weak reed.
Solidarity will split. The existence of ‚Fighting Solidarity‘, despite its ideological heterogeneity, indicates the class polarisation that will develop with the best of the working-class, particularly the youth, finding a road to the genuine ideas of socialism and Marxism.
Eastern Europe is on the brink. It is only a matter of time before one or other of these states erupts. In the course of this movement will be created the forces, rooted in the working-class, which will forge the weapons to over throw the obsolete Stalinist bureaucracy and establish workers democracy.
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