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The dictatorship of the pro-marketeers ALREADY president of the Soviet Union and head of its ruling Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev became even more powerful on September 24 when the Supreme Soviet granted him the authority to rule by decree. Gorbachev's new powers will be used to uphold the authority of the central bureaucracy in the Soviet Union in the face of the challenge from the Union's constituent Republics which are more and more taking matters into their own hands. The crucial challenge in this respect comes from Boris Yeltsin, now president of the Russian Federation.
At the same time Gorbachev is expected to push through an across-the-board pro-market reform, a project on which he and Yeltsin seem to be in agreement. The weakening of central authority comes at a time of acute economic crisis in the Soviet Union, with fears of food shortages in the winter. Catherine Verla looks at the current state of play. CATHERINE VERLA able to do their military service in their native republics and the recent positions taken by the Russian Soviet and the officers from the non-Russian republics, ruling out the use of the army against the people.
• Social divisions, finally, between those who benefit from the regime on the one hand and the new poor and declassés of the army on the other; this latter category includes the thousands who are now returning from the former brother coun tries where Warsaw Pact troops were stationed, or those who have lost in Afghanistan often much more than an arm or a leg, but as the saying goes, their soul.
A recent congress of mothers of conscripted youth gave some indication of the violence which reigns inside this divided army, with claims that more than 15,000 youth have been savagely killed in the last five years during their military service (as many as in ten years of war in Afghanistan). Yeltsin has promised these mothers protection for their children, pledging that they will be able to do their service in their republics of origin, on the one hand, and on the other, that the process of forming a professional army will be accelerated.
In short, the army would not be a stable point of support for a repressive policy. And yet in the face of growing chaos a strongarm policy is more and more expected. But expected by who, and to do
HE soviet of the Russian FederaT tion, newly constituted as a sovereign republic, and led by the currently very popular Boris Yeltsin, recently voted (without even having read the text) for Professor Stanislav Shatalin's radical "500 days" plan which proposes a rapid "transition to the market". . While agreeing to support the 500 Days plan rather than that of his prime minister Ryzhkov, Gorbachev has also taken some centralist measures with his new powers. The resulting confusion has meant that the implementation of the Yeltsin reform has just been postponed -perhaps for a few months.
Beyond these different programmes or divergent strategies, growing conflicts over ownership can be expected to break out when the question of privatization is discussed. This has already been seen in regard to gold and diamonds: do they belong to the Federation? To Russia? To the region where they are found in Russia — which has just declared itself autonomous? To the workers in the mines which exploit them?
The struggle over what privatization means is likely to express itself in powerful resistance to any decision of the "Centre"" which goes over the heads of the Republican parliaments. It will be the same for each of the republics, but it must be remembered that the Russian federation covers more than half of the Union's territory, and the essential supplies of many of its resources. Given this opposition to central decisions, and supposing (we will return to this point) that there are genuinely distinct "programmes"; what mechanisms will the supreme president have to impose his views?
Social divisions in army
The army is obviously the great unknown and a major stake. It has derived its unity from its function in the system of the single party/state. Far from being autonomous (whatever the specific interests that it expressed) it was the executive organ of the Politburo from the time when this body became the country's centre of power. Thus the challenge to the "leading role" of the party, the growing affirmation of political pluralism and the break up of the Union cannot but be reflected in the army as multiple lines of political, social and national disintegration.
• Political divisions; between conservative and liberal reformist currents but also, more broadly, between those who want the army to take the lead in (re)establishing order and those, more and more numerous in the officer corps, who declare themselves resolutely opposed to any use of the army against the people.
• National divisions; with the growing demand by the conscripted youth to be what?
### Disappearance of bread
It is being said that the breakdown of consumer supplies is the product of sabotage, undertaken so as to justify an army intervention. The sudden disappearance of bread has been the object of a multitude of speculations (not necessarily mutually incompatible); from the discontent of particularly underpaid workers to the decay of obsolete equipment to the deliberate sabotage of liberals or conservatives preparing to impose their respective policies by force.
Indeed, such an intervention could be aimed either to impose the market or to block the process of liberal reforms, or to bring both the tigers under leash. This last, even-handed, approach would seem to correspond to the pragmatism of Gorbachev whose policy appears ever more incoherent.
A return to the centralism of the past is now quite simply impossible, at least on the scale of the "Union". The conservative apparatus certainly remains rooted in the system, but it really has no credible orientation to offer. The shunting aside of the leader of the conservatives Yegor Ligachev at this summer's party conference, the moderation of the delegates from the apparatus during the same congress, the vote in the Russian soviet (very divided when it came to electing Yeltsin, then sudhis line for ly moanin us in support of 3
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The only forms of political expression which the conservative currents have today are the Great Russian nationalism of Pamyat and the United Front of Toilers
(UFT), which overlap to some extent.
But, for the moment, Pamyat is less strong in Russia than, for example, Le
Pen in France. It has had little electoral success and its meetings remain very small. The UFT meanwhile is a heterogeneous force, and has not succeeded in really breaking through among the workers.
The word "conservative" describes a fluid reality; the apparatus in itself is openly conservative, that is, against change, to the extent that it identifies this with its self-interest. In the context of the political crisis of the party/state (where being a party member no longer assures a person's future) and of economic crisis, the old mechanisms of power are no longer "paying"
Everything is a question of the relation of forces and the credibility of the different orientations; is it better to bloc with the centre against the workers, with the workers against the centre, or against the centre and the workers in favour of money and the market?
The reply changes, depending among other things on the behaviour of the workers faced with the reforms, and the position occupied with regard to the market. The factories
Or branenes in a good or branches in a good position to export, for example, will have directors who are more ambitious in their desire for emancipation from the central powers.
Yeltsin represents for now a radical liberal market course. And he benefits from a huge capital of confidence, linked to his past conflicts with the aPparatus, to his speeches apparatus, to his speeches against privilege, and finally to his role in the assertion of a sovereign Russian federation able to establish bilateral relations with other republics bypassing the centre.
But while the partisans of Thatcherstyle liberalism are proclaiming more and more vociferously the need for a strong hand to impose unpopular measures, Yeltsin (in line with the presentation made by Shatalin of the "500 days" programme) promises well being for all, and quickly.
Hence the paradox; the supposedly more "conservative" reform programme proposed by the Ryzhkov government has been criticized for threatening the people's living standards whereas the liberal 4 market orientated Yeltsin/ Shatalin pro• ject is supposed, by some operation of the
Holy Spirit, to protect this standard of living.
What are the differences between the two programmes? The ultimate objectives are without doubt the same — to establish a functioning liberal market economy. The real differences at the top are for the moment centred on questions of strategy (or risk evaluation). The issue is; how to go towards a generalized market economy, without losing power, that is, without a social explosion with an uncontrollable dynamic?
Ryzhkov accused of conservatism
The Ryzhkov project was accused variously of being too "administrative"
because it sought to retain price controls whilst changing their structure in the direction of world prices; of not placing its confidence in commodity mechanisms; and, moreover, keeping (at least during a transition to an undetermined future) a degree of centralization of investment and putting limits on privatization, notably in agriculture.
The Shatalin/Yeltsin project, on the other hand, would rely on the market to establish "real prices" and production decisions, but only after a so-called period of stabilization; to avoid an inflationary take off. It would also seek to diminish the quantity of money in circulation by selling the maximum quantity of durable goods — housing, privatization of the kholkozes (collective farms), sale of shares and diverse forms of destatization of enterprises. Faced with the pressing demand for consumer goods, it envisages an increase in imports, and the dismantling of the monopolies. Prices will then be freed, except for some essential consumer and strategic production goods. Subsidies and foreign aid will be drastically reduced. The way in which the radical Yeltsin/
International Viewpoint #192 • October 15, 1990
Shatalin programme was sold was far from being an appeal to inevitable sacrifice so as to gain the benefits of capitalism. The USSR is not (yet) Poland.
Liberty and human rights have been invoked to sweeten the pill, reference has been made to the "anti-popular" policies of the past which rested on a "concentration of virtually all property in the hands of the state", , property which should now be "returned to the people" (thus Shatalin in an article entitled "Man, Freedom,
Market" published in the big press on
September 4). It is stressed here that "privatization must be an absolutely voluntary process and not like forced collectivization in reverse", and reference is made to the "free choice" of each person and their right to "live better afterwards".
But despite this soothing tone, there is an irresistible evolution towards meeting the desires of the western creditors whose support is expected. There is an increasingly heavy censorship of all reference to a "third way".
Two currents essentially have the right of expression in the media; the conservatives, and the radicals who are presented as providing the sole hope of "living normally" (a common expression used to designate the Western way of life).
Furthermore, in addition to state censorship, there is also self-censorship, the difficulty of using devalued words and thus appearing to be in the same camp as the con110 servatives, or of appearing to be naive utopians blocking the way forward for those who have at last decided to do what is necessary to get out of the tunnel. In this situation, radicalism appears to be on the side of the market. The buzz word of the previous phase was "the regulated market", to be combined with the new rights (certainly still very ill-defined and contradictoPLANTE ry) of the workers collectives. But since last June, the law has modified these rights, which certain workers had here or there begun to put into practice. The tendency at work throughout Eastern Europe is manifesting itself also in the Soviet Union; we have passed from the era of reform to that of restorationist projects.
At the same time it is being said that capitalism is no longer what it was, that workers have been empowered by shareholding, and that socialism will flow from this in a natural manner; and that to go in this direction is equivalent to resuming the normal course of history. The crisis of Yugoslav self-management, and the need to be reason-
POTATO
COLLECTION
POTATO
COLLECTION
able to obtain foreign capital, give a "rational" basis to the calling into question of even the weak elements of workers' self-management which could previously be appealed to. Ownership, it is now said, must pay its way to make people responsible. In this theory, the main form of destatization must be shareholding.
Several factors are working against these trends. First, the amount of available money. The quantity of disposable savings has been estimated by the experts as at best amounting to only 20% of the value of the social funds which can be privatized - and this estimate lumps together popular savings with those of the millionaires or the mafia.
Beyond this, why buy shares in enterprises which are manifestly unable to stand up to the shock of world competition at the very time when the ending of subsidies has been announced?
The privatization of workshops and small service and commercial enterprises will not pose too many problems. But, as in Poland and Hungary, the stumbling block will be industry. The price of shares can certainly be fixed at a very low rate, indeed they can be distributed free, as has been proposed in the USSR, in spite of the talk about how only a person who has bought something will manage it well. But unis would only replace subsiales But this would only replace subsidies according to output/efficiency by pseudo dividends on profits, accompanied by the risk of bankruptcy or dismissal. How will the workers benefit? Bureaucratic/capitalist chaos A "front of the self-management forces of the left" has just been formed around an "open letter" expressing opposition to the process of transforming the USSR into a vast bureaucratic-capitalist chaos in hock to foreign capital. But the signatories represent very small forces; the new Socialist Party (some 300 to 500 members), the self-management wing of the Marxist Platform of the CPSU, what remains of the now very scattered socialist forces in the Democratic Platform, the anarcho-syndicalists, the ecologists and the left social democrats.
Parallel to this, a meeting was held in September of some 40 collectives of workers in the big enterprises, in the factory in Togliattigrad where the Lada cars are made. Their resolution protests against the law passed last June which reduces the workers' powers to the benefit of the directors. The aspiration to control of the process of destatization expresses itself in workers' reactions of this type, for simple reasons of selfprotection. But the workers suffer also from the lack of a coherent alternative project supported and articulated by significant forces.
We have said that the partisans of a third way have been stifled. On the other
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hand, in the face of conservatism the media are very open to liberal propaganda which receives substantial material support among the workers from the US trade unions, which have sent permanent representatives to the USSR and have invited miners' delegations to the US. These have then sung the praises of capitalism upon their return.
This is not only the effect of propaganda, of course. The conditions of work and the standard of living in the developed capitalist countries are incomparably better than in the USSR. The liberal propaganda works on the one hand to give the impression that the workers gains are the "natural" product of the market and of capitalism; and on the other and above es which can be consumed or exported, wants to control them — it is the logic of everybody for themselves. In the midst of this growing chaos there appear from time to time, here and there, and usually in a disjointed fashion, molecular processes of resistance which are both anti-bureaucratic and anti-capitalist. The front of the left which has just been established is starting off with very weak forces. But it is a solid point of support for rebuilding from below a socialism worthy of the name.
all, that the opening of the Fourth International is offering a unique USSR to the world capitalist Investment opportunity. This May we market will lead just as "natu- launched an appeal for funds to help make rally" to the same results. The our views known and to assist our supportmonstrosity of the bureau- ers In Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. cratic apparatus and its depre- As recession bites in the West, so the need dations lead the workers to for an alternative to both capitalism and Sta. wish for market decentraliza- lInism will become apparent In the (ex-7) Station - which they believe linist countries. will leave them free to react, You can help furn the tide of history by a pragmatically, against its side donation, however small. effects. The address to send donations to Is:
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