Market `Reforms' Exacerbate Crisis, Struggle In Russia

(Below we print an excerpt from "Imperialism's march toward fascism and war" from the Marxist magazine New International no. 10. The article is based on talks by SWP national secretary Jack Barnes in 1994. New International is copyright c 1994 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., and reprinted by permission.)
.... Despite the horrors meted out to working people in the name of "socialism" by the former Stalinist regimes, workers were not so badly defeated by the bureaucratic castes in these countries that they have simply been ready to acquiesce to, let alone internalize, all the culture, values, and attitudes that are necessary to the expanded reproduction of capitalist social relations.

Virtually every step by the U.S. rulers with regard to Russia over the past few years -whether advocated and guaranteed by the White House, by Congress, by university professors or Wall Street technocrats - has ended up setting back attempts by the regime there to win broader layers of working people to the glories of capitalism and has undercut Washington's chosen favorites. It's not that the U.S. rulers consciously set out to destabilize Russia. To the contrary! They aimed to collaborate with the aspiring bourgeoisie emerging out of the privileged caste in Russia to reimpose capitalism and zap the workers and other toilers. Given the decades of police-state repression by the Stalinist regimes in the USSR, the imperialist rulers assumed the working class in Russia would be an easy mark. They condescendingly told Yeltsin to use "shock therapy" against the workers, go along with U.S. foreign policy as Gorbachev had done during the Iraq war, and turn over Russia's nuclear weapons. The job would be even easier in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the U.S. rulers assumed.

But Washington and other imperialist powers and agencies delivered on only a small percentage of the billions of dollars in economic assistance they pledged to Moscow and the other regimes. The "shock therapy" urged by finance capital's academic wizards and other "advisers"- wholesale plant shutdowns; elimination of food, rent, and other price subsidies; the slashing of education, pension, health, and other hard-earned and desperately needed entitlements - magnified impoverishment and social instability. The new regimes have repeatedly been forced to back off these draconian policies in fear of setting social forces in motion that could spiral beyond their control.

The big majority of toilers in these countries reveled in getting the Stalinist boot off their necks. But they are resisting efforts to make them accept as normal the joblessness, social insecurity, and dog-eat- dog competition produced and reproduced by the workings of capitalism. They're defending the social conquests that have survived in the workers state, in however tattered condition, despite decades of police- state terror and massive corruption by the petty- bourgeois castes. It's a class question.

In the past couple of months I've noticed that even opinion polls in Russia and eastern Germany reinforce this assessment. One taken by the Russian Academy of Science at the end of 1993 found that support for "economic reforms" in Russia had dropped from about 40 percent of those surveyed in 1989 to less than 25 percent. The majority of those polled agreed with the statement that "privatization is legalized theft." And according to the German Economic Ministry itself, a survey in eastern Germany in December 1993 found that support for the "market economy" had dropped to 35 percent from 77 percent in February 1990.

Of course, this doesn't mean that the working class in any of these deformed workers states has a class- struggle leadership, let alone a communist vanguard. Communist continuity was broken by the Stalinist murder machine in these countries decades ago and is yet to be reknit. As a result of Stalinism's counterrevolutionary legacy, even the most rudimentary support for socialism versus capitalism as a conscious alternative exists only among small numbers of workers and youth.

But as events of the past half decade have demonstrated, it would be dead wrong to conclude that workers in these countries have been transformed into warm-blooded robots to produce surplus value for the world bourgeoisie. Neither Stalinist police terror nor the procapitalist course of the new regimes has been able to crush and atomize the working class.

Having gone through two presidents, Gorbachev and Yeltsin; too many prime ministers and cabinets to remember; and two botched coup attempts, the upshot of half a decade of U.S. imperialism's efforts to advance capitalist restoration in Russia is that the economy and society as a whole have been driven into deeper crisis and social dislocation. As Moscow seeks to reassert dominance over the now-independent countries that once made up the USSR, rival factions among the privileged layers in those lands divide over relations with Russia. The grab for territory and resources is draped in Yugoslavia-style nationalist demagogy on all sides. Parts of the former Soviet Union are intermittently engulfed in civil war.

But the workers in city and countryside in Russia and other former Soviet republics have not been won to the course of capitalist restoration, or to acquiescence to its consequences.  

http://www.themilitant.com/1998/6212/6212_21.html

U.S. rulers' 'Cold War' failed to destroy workers states

 
 
....(Printed below are excerpts from U.S. Imperialism has Lost the Cold War, by Jack Barnes. The resolution was discussed and adopted by the 1990 national convention of the Socialist Workers Party. The entire resolution is published in New International no. 11 Copyright © 1998 by 408 Printing and Publishing Corp., reprinted by permission.)

1. The "Cold War" was the term used to describe the strategic military course forced upon U.S. imperialism and its allies in face of the limitations imposed by the international balance of class forces coming out of World War II. These limitations made impossible for the foreseeable future the use of massive armed forces to accomplish Washington's strategic goal--overturning the Soviet Union and Eastern European workers states and reestablishing capitalism there.

During the period just after World War II, Washington was blocked from pursuing this goal by the refusal of the GIs to go back to war, this time against former allies, the Soviet Union and the workers and peasants of China. Faced with a popular "Bring Us Home!" movement organized by the soldiers themselves, the imperialist rulers were politically forced to live up to their promises to demobilize the bulk of their armed forces.1
The U.S.-organized imperialist assault on Korea in 1950, which tested the "back door" military approach to the Soviet Union, failed in its objective to overturn the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, as the war ended in a stalemate at the thirty-eighth parallel.
The consequences of the aggression against Korea speeded the overturn of capitalist property and the consolidation of a workers state in neighboring China. Massive numbers of Chinese worker and peasant volunteers poured across the Yalu River to fight together with the Korean people to turn back the imperialist invading forces.
The imperialists concluded that the political price they would pay throughout Asia for unleashing nuclear weapons for a second time in the region precluded their use in the Korean conflict. The difficulties of maintaining a politically unpopular land war in Asia against a workers state foreshadowed the U.S. defeat in Vietnam some two decades later.
The war left a divided Korea, denied its national unification after more than half a century of occupation by Tokyo and Washington. This remains the most important and explosive unresolved national division imposed by the victors of World War II.
By the latter half of the 1950s, the USSR's development of nuclear weapons and space technology convinced the imperialists that the risks of massive destruction not only of capitalist Europe but also the United States were too great to consider a direct assault against the Soviet and Eastern European workers states. Since the end of the 1960s, the Soviet Union has had rough parity with U.S. imperialism in nuclear weaponry and delivery systems (parity not in the sense of equal numbers of warheads and missiles, but the capacity of both governments to inflict devastating damage against each other--Mutual Assured Destruction, or MAD, in Pentagon lingo).2

2. Given these realities, Washington was restricted during the Cold War to using its military power to attempt to contain any extension of the revolutionary overturn of imperialist domination and capitalist property relations. Its strategic effort to weaken the Soviet and Eastern European workers states became one of applying pressure on the bureaucratic castes to police the working class, squelch all political initiatives, and keep working people isolated from the struggles of workers and peasants around the world, with all the depoliticizing and demoralizing consequences that flow from such a separation.
For imperialism this was an unavoidable interlude, preparing for the day when the workers states would be sufficiently weakened by Stalinist policies that demoralized the working class to make possible their destruction in a direct imperialist assault.
Instead, what has culminated in 1989 and 1990 is an accelerating and irreversible crisis of the Stalinist parties and parasitic petty-bourgeois castes on which they are based, whose counterrevolutionary policies have been weakening the degenerated or deformed workers states for decades.
The workers states and their proletarian property foundations have proven stronger than the castes.
Although brutalized and depoliticized, the working class in the workers states has demonstrated its ability--even within the limits of bourgeois trade union consciousness--to resist the economic and social consequences of the deepening parasitism and bureaucratism of the governing castes.
This resistance, beginning with the Polish workers' uprising in 1980, has triggered the crises that are now ravaging the regimes across Eastern and Central Europe and in the Soviet Union.
The workers of these countries will resist the consequences of moving toward capitalist restoration even more fiercely.
These events confirm the continuing truth of the prognosis advanced by communists in the 1930s. As succinctly put by Trotsky: "As a conscious political force the bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution. But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a program and a banner, not only political institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it. The October revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown."3

3. With the betrayers--who have been the biggest obstacle to strengthening the workers states--either crumbling or on the defensive, and with prospects of a military assault against the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe less feasible than ever before, imperialism still confronts the same historic battle, but from a weakened position. Instead of waging a "Cold War" against the petty-bourgeois regimes of the bureaucratic caste, imperialism will have to directly take on and try to defeat the working class in order to overthrow the workers states and reestablish capitalism in Eastern and Central Europe and the Soviet Union.
 
 
1. See "1945: When U.S. Troops Said 'No!'" by Mary-Alice Waters in New International no. 7.
2. Despite John F. Kennedy's demagogy during his 1960 U.S. presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, alleging a "missile gap" that gave the USSR a military advantage over Washington, the truth was the opposite. In 1962 the U.S. government had some 5,000 nuclear warheads and 500 intercontinental missiles, while the Soviet Union had 300 or fewer nuclear warheads and only a few dozen missiles. The Soviet government stated that it reached parity with Washington in the number of missile launchers in 1971, although Moscow continued to have many fewer warheads. Currently Washington has more than 7,100 nuclear warheads on intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine launchers, and bombers; Russia has some 6,200 warheads.

3. Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (Pathfinder, 1972), pp. 227.
 
 

http://www.themilitant.co. m/2001/6517/651749.html

Are former Soviet states capitalist?

BY CINDY JAQUITH  
Tim Jones writes in a letter to the editor that “it’s pretty clear that capitalism has not been restored, at least not completely,” in countries such as Russia where socialist revolutions were successfully carried out in the past. He asks, “Are these countries still ‘workers’ states’ or are they somewhere between workers states and capitalism?”
This question is addressed in New International no. 11, “U.S. Imperialism Has Lost the Cold War.” It describes the foundations of what socialists call a workers state as “state property, a monopoly on foreign trade, and economic planning, established through the expropriation of the bourgeoisie.” This is a transitional state along the long-term road to establishing socialism as part of the world struggle against imperialist and capitalist exploitation and oppression. As such, a workers state can go backward toward a capitalist one, but so far none have.

The workers state is not simply a block of nationalized property. It is fundamentally a set of social relations conquered by the working class in its struggle for state power. It will take another struggle—a counterrevolutionary war, in fact—to reverse such relations. That war has not yet been joined anywhere in the world, although it remains a key goal of the imperialist rulers.

Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky explained this in The Revolution Betrayed, describing why the Soviet Union remained a workers state despite the takeover of the government and party by a privileged bureaucratic caste led by Joseph Stalin. “As a conscious political force the bureaucracy has betrayed the revolution,” Trotsky wrote. “But a victorious revolution is fortunately not only a program and a banner, not only political institutions, but also a system of social relations. To betray it is not enough. You have to overthrow it.

“The [Russian] revolution has been betrayed by the ruling stratum, but not yet overthrown. It has a great power of resistance, coinciding with the established property relations, with the living force of the proletariat, the consciousness of its best elements, the impasse of world capitalism, and the inevitability of world revolution.”

Today, proletarian property forms continue to dominate industry and agriculture in Russia and other workers states including in Eastern Europe. A 1998 report by the pro-imperialist Freedom House found that 95 percent of state and collective farms in Russia “are largely unreformed,” meaning the land has not been privatized. That situation has not changed much since then. And while a substantial amount of industry has been turned over to private owners, the core of industry remains nationalized.

The strike in October by 24,000 coal miners in Kazakhstan, formerly part of the Soviet Union, shows why many foreign capitalist firms are reluctant to pour money into the workers states. The miners walked off the job after a blast killed 41 miners at the Lenin mine owned by Dutch-based steel giant Mittal. They only returned when Mittal promised to double their wages and improve mine equipment.

The socialist consciousness Trotsky refers to no longer exists in the bureaucratized workers states. Decades of Stalinist miseducation and repression destroyed that. That explains the fact that today Stalinist parties in those countries are sometimes voted into office despite their anti-working-class politics.

What does exist in these countries is a trade union consciousness and the assumption by the working class of the right to a historically defined minimal social wage. These remain the first great obstacle that will lead to massive struggles in the workers states against the reimposition of capitalism.

One of the most important gains from the collapse of Stalinist governments and parties in the former Soviet bloc countries is that the myth that these counterrevolutionary gangs represented Marxism has been shattered. They are no longer able to derail revolutionary anti-imperialist and anticapitalist struggles in the way they did previously. That bodes well for the development, over time, of a new working-class leadership on a world scale, including in the bureaucratized workers states.
 

http://www.themilitant.com/2006/7048/704836.html

"The Unfolding New World Situation" by Jack Barnes [1973]

An international comrade has been motivating me to study the trove of Socialist Workers Party document bulletins on the Marxist Internet Archive.  This has also sent me back to my own bookshelves and files this weekend.

The book Dynamics of World Revolution Today [Pathfinder Press, 1974] contains many documents useful in understanding the international struggle to build communist parties carried out in 1963-1973.  One of the most interesting is the April 1973 SWP National Committee report  "The Unfolding New World Situation" delivered by Jack Barnes.  His summation then remains true today:  "We view the construction of Leninist parties not as a preferable method but as the necessary method to lead the workers to victory and to guarantee that victory.  That is the road we are determined to follow."

George Novack on "negation of the negation"

From the glossary in George Novack's Polemics in Marxist Philosophy

negation of the negation - one of the basic laws of dialectics, flowing from the unity and struggle of opposites and the transformation of quantity into quality.  Every object or condition is characterized by internal contradiction between a positive and a negative pole - that which exists and that which is coming into being.  At the first dialectical leap, or negation, the old framework is broken, the previously subordinate quality or object in the relationship becomes dominant, and a new framework is established with a new set of internal contradictions.  In both Hegelian and Marxist dialectics, this rupture is referred to as transcendence, rather than mere empty negation of the previous status quo, because there is an element of continuity and development as well as destruction.  The concept of the negation of the negation traces this element of transcendence over a longer period of time.  It is the logical means of conceptualizing evolution over time, on the premise that natural and social processes are sufficiently determinate to show long-term cyclical patterns.  Common examples given include the life cycles of living species, where birth represents the breakup of the previous unity of the parent organism for the first negation, with the stage where the progeny reach reproductive age representing the second negation, or the negation of the negation.  In social evolution, a common example is the negation of primitive social property by the rise of private property and class society, followed by the eventual emergence of the proletariat, which moves toward the second stage, the negation of private property and the reestablishment of social property on a higher level, for a negation of the negation.  From these examples  it can be seen that Marx's concept is not purely cyclical but more like a spiral in which the conclusion of the complete process also involved evolution and progress toward a higher level of organic or organizational complexity, and not mere repetition.

from Polemics in Marxist Philosophy [Pathfinder, 1978] page 315.

George Novack on Louis Althusser

George Novack's excellent collection "Polemics in Marxist Philosophy" (Pathfinder, 1978) ends with a thirty page glossary where Novack summarizes many left philosophical personalities untouched in the book's articles.

Whither Ukraine?

Ukrainians defy new law attacking right to protest
Fight against Russian boot fuels ongoing actions 

BY SETH GALINSKY 

Some 100,000 people demonstrated in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, Jan. 19 to demand repeal of new laws that curtail the right to protest. Underlying months of anti-government protests are national aspirations of the Ukrainian people, who — with the exception of the early years of the Russian Revolution — have lived for centuries under Russian domination.

Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovich pushed through the law in an attempt to undercut protests that began in November when he backed out of a deal to sign a trade and “association” agreement with the European Union and instead moved to maintain close economic and political ties with the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

At the time hundreds of thousands took to the streets, demanding that Yanukovich resign. A central slogan at opposition demonstrations has been, “Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the nation! Ukraine above all!”

The leadership of the protests comprises a heterogeneous coalition of bourgeois parties pressing for integration into the EU. Three of these parties have seats in Parliament: Fatherland, led by jailed former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoschenko; UDAR — punch in Ukrainian — led by Vitali Klitschko, a former heavyweight boxing champion who campaigns on an anti-corruption platform; and ultrarightist Svoboda (Freedom), which scapegoats Jews and has introduced bills to ban abortions and “communist ideology.”

The new law passed by Parliament last week bans the unauthorized public installation of tents or stages and the use of loudspeakers in public and imposes jail terms for participating in “mass disorder” and wearing balaclavas or helmets.

Some protesters who fought with police defiantly wore saucepans and colanders on their heads. Some 1,500 protesters needed medical attention after the clashes.

Centuries under Russian boot
The suppression of national rights in Ukraine goes back centuries. Eastern Ukraine became a possession of the Romanov Dynasty in 1654 and from that time on the feudal monarchy carried out a policy of Russification there. While rule over the western part changed hands between Austria, Poland and Russia over centuries, the tsars banned the Ukrainian language, suppressed the Ukrainian church and promoted Russian colonization, in the areas under its control.

By the early 1900s Ukraine made up 20 percent of the population of the Russian empire, which at the time was comprised in its majority of non-Russian peoples who faced varying degrees of subjugation. It was a “prison house of nations,” in the words of V.I. Lenin, central leader of the Bolshevik Party and 1917 Russian Revolution.

The Ukrainian bourgeoisie remained small and weak. The ruling class and urban middle classes were drawn from Russia and other nationalities. “In the Ukraine and White Russia,” wrote Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky in 1932, “the landlord, capitalist, lawyer, journalist, was a Great Russian, a Pole, a Jew, a foreigner; the rural population was wholly Ukrainian and White Russian.”

At the same time, Ukraine was a key conquest of the empire, serving as a breadbasket for Russia and major source of its coal and iron production.

Among the central tasks of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution under Lenin’s leadership was the emancipation of tens of millions of oppressed peoples — from the culturally more advanced people of the Baltic region to the Muslims of the Caucasus to nomadic tribes of the Far East.

The Bolshevik Party’s championing of the right of oppressed nations to self-determination leading up to the revolution was decisive in uniting, educating and organizing the working class to take political power, which included forging an alliance with the peasant majority from all backgrounds.

The Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party stated in November 1919 that Bolsheviks in Ukraine “must put into practice the right of the working people to study in the Ukrainian language and to speak their native language in all Soviet institutions; they must in every way counteract attempts at Russification that push the Ukrainian language into the background.”

The new policy of Ukrainization helped the Bolsheviks win over the Ukrainian Borotba (struggle) Party, which merged with the Ukrainian Communist Party in 1920.

Stalin murder machine
But by the early 1920s the degeneration of the Bolshevik Party had begun, personified by the rise to power of Josef Stalin after the death of Lenin in 1924. Stalin headed a counterrevolution representing the interests of a growing privileged social layer centered in the increasingly bureaucratic state apparatus. This reactionary caste reversed the Bolshevik’s course and resurrected the Great Russian chauvinism of the empire, including the re-subjection of oppressed people, this time under the false banner of “communism.”

“Nowhere did the purges and repression assume such a savage character as they did in the Ukraine,” Trotsky wrote in 1939.

Russification of Ukraine was revived. From 1959 to 1989 the number of Russians rose from 16.9 percent of Ukraine’s population to 22.1 percent.

When the Stalinist regime in Russia and Eastern Europe finally collapsed under pressure of growing social contradictions in the early 1990s, the new regime continued to dominate Ukraine, whose industry remained closely linked to that of Russia. Moscow supplies 60 percent of gas used in Ukraine and has turned off the spigot twice to force compliance with the Putin government’s demands.

Competing factions of emerging and aspiring capitalists arose following the collapse of the Soviet Union, drawn largely from remnants of the Soviet bureaucracy. In Ukraine, the factional contest was partially based on divisions of east and west, Russian and Ukrainian, orientation toward Moscow and the West. Meanwhile, the national aspirations among Ukrainian working people against the Russian boot remain strong.

At the end of 2004, in what became known as the Orange Revolution, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly from the western part of the country took to the streets to oppose the continuing Russian domination of the country and what they saw as a rigged election that gave the presidency to Yanukovich, who was then prime minister.

As a result, a new election was called and bourgeois opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko was elected president, taking office in 2005, but a series of corruption scandals left him with little support by the end of his term.

Today about four out of every six people in Ukraine are ethnic Ukrainians and speak the Ukrainian language. One in six are ethnic Russians who speak Russian and roughly one in six are ethnic Ukrainians who speak Russian. Russian is the main language in much of the eastern and southern part of the country, areas which are more economically developed.

Yanukovich returned to the presidency after winning elections in 2010. In July 2012 his Party of Regions successfully passed a language law that encourages making Russian an official language in some regions.

The Ukrainian Week reported in March last year that the top eight Ukrainian TV stations broadcast less than a quarter of their prime-time content in Ukrainian. Less than 5 percent of the songs on the top six radio stations were in Ukrainian. 

http://www.themilitant.com/2014/7804/780402.html