Let Them Eat Glasnost (1987)

Editorial from Issue 4 of the World Socialist Review

Everyone knows the old joke about Russia's top-down brand of state capitalism: capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, whereas communism is the opposite. In fact, of course, there are no socialist republics (socialism not being compatible with government), nor are any of the Soviet Union’s republics examples of socialism (which requires a classless, moneyless society functioning on a worldwide basis), nor are there even any soviets (councils acting as the workers' democratically elected delegates) in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. What's in the name, then? An immense majority who go to the market everyday to sell their only commodity—their ability to do work—to a small minority who. . . . roll up their shirtsleeves and plunge into the "work” of supervising and directing the country’s capital investments so as to make them yield a profit (someone' s got to do it, after all!).

And now that the USSR’s workers, women and men alike, have glasnost, Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of ’’openness,” they will presumably become happier and more productive and, not least, more accessible to multinational penetration. For even the spectre of communism has at last been incorporated into the marketplace!

Common Ownership

It is no academic exercise to point out that the word ’’communism” means only common ownership of the means of producing wealth: the right to decide on the use of the mechanisms by which society recreates and reproduces itself. The state is designed, on the contrary, to enforce the will of a minority against the wishes of the majority (in modern times, perversely enough, through the use of "majority rule”). As "open” as the CPSU and its politburo may now be projecting themselves, all the glasnost in the world (though there isn’t that much of it floating around anyhow) will not make them communists.

Are We “Commies” ?

As communists (socialists) ourselves, our policy has often been confused with theirs. During the second world war, when the Allied Powers calculated it was to their advantage to court Russia’s ersatz ruling élite, a great deal of treacle and syrup poured forth from the US government about the heroic Soviet Union, led by that epic working-class genius, Joseph Stalin.

If you were too young during the days of world war II, or not yet born, there are books and articles readily available dealing with the cooperation and friendship between the bolshevik-style Communists on the one hand, and the professed champions of "democratic” capitalism on the other. (For starters, try The Pocket Book of the War, Quincy Howe, Ed., Pocket Books, Inc., Hew York, 1941.)

However, when the President of the United States and the Prime Minister of Great Britain were wining, dining and dealing with Stalin in the Kremlin, the World Socialist Party and its Companion Parties in other countries were openly opposing the war as a carnage not worth the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood. When the secret police of the Soviet Union and the secret police of the United States (the forerunner of the present CIA) were acting in unison, we were speaking out and writing articles attacking the war.

When the Communist Party was recruiting for the war effort, selling Victory Bonds, waving the flag and singing the national anthem of America, as well as that of Russia, we of the World Socialist Party were speaking from the rostrum on Boston Common as our comrades in England spoke in Hyde Park; continuing to urge our fellow workers to organize for the abolition of capitalism everywhere—the basic cause of war.

Are They Communists?

Thus, we are not Communists in the popularly accepted meaning of that much-maligned word. We do not support or sympathize with Russian or Chinese or Cuban or any other state capitalism. We are communists, though, in the classical meaning of the term. We are scientific socialists who advocate the complete and immediate abolition of the buying and selling system in all its forms around the world and the immediate introduction of a system of production for use.

If the workers of the Soviet Union want an ’’opening” that is socially authentic, they would do well to press for the immediate elimination of the system that keeps them exploited in more or less the same way as it does everywhere else. Perhaps glasnost will inadvertently give them some space in which to think about organizing for a real socialist revolution.

Russia's crisis congress (1990)

From the August 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The party is not quite over yet – but nearly. Everybody knows that the party has been a disaster. There was not enough food. The waiters got drunk on bad vodka. The speeches were foolish, uninspiring and full of lies. The books on the shelves, left there purposely so that guests could delude themselves with stories of the raving success of the party, were written by committees which were briefed to make hell look like a sunshine holiday. It was a useless, horrible, miserable party and now they are leaving in droves, despite threatening looks from fat guys in uniforms who stroke their Lenin badges.

It is the Communist Party of the Soviet Union which is marching steadily into its own shallow grave. Its past has been exposed as tyranny in the name of workers’ dictatorship. Its present is surrounded by a ruined state-capitalist economy and a disillusioned workforce. Its future is a fantasy in the minds of fat-cat bureaucrats who cannot conceive of the idea that they are no longer to be an unelected ruling class. In reality, the future of the Communist Party in the Russian Empire is about as optimistic as were the futures of genuine socialists and communists in the days of Stalin.

Death cries of Leninism

The 28th Congress of the CPSU last month was the most important since 1917. By comparison, the 20th Congress, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin after Stalin was dead and the damage had been done, can be seen as a bit of political posturing by politicians who wanted to distance themselves from the fascistic history of Stalinism. The second most important Congress since 1917 was the 27th in 1986; it was there that the newly-appointed boss of the Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, declared the need to reform the economy. There is a great deal of talk, mainly by naive leftists and media pundits, about the immensity of Gorbachev’s role in bringing about change.

Capitalist observers of history always need the Great Men: Stalin – Bad; Gorbachev – Good – and that’s that. The fact of the matter is that Gorbachev is a Leninist hack, a careerist political climber who worked his way up the party dictatorship without ever denouncing its undemocratic rule or false claim to be a workers’ state. Gorbachev is a Leninist, even though he is now having to play down such unpopular imagery .The difference between the 27th and 28th Congresses can be sensed from Gorbachev’s closing speech at the former:

“What can be said today is that our Congress was held in an atmosphere of Party-principledness and unity, exactingness and Bolshevik-style truth . . . It is precisely in this way, in Lenin’s spirit, that we have acted at our Congress. It is precisely in this way that we are going to act in the future as well.” (Tass, 6 March, 1986)

Since then the party has fallen to pieces. Monolithism, which was forced on the party by Lenin’s tyrannical resolution banning internal party opposition at the 10th Congress in 1921, has been abandoned. The article (number Six) of the national constitution banning the existence of other political parties was repealed in February. This did not happen because Gorbachev and his cronies fancied the idea of a little political pluralism. On the contrary, Gorbachev was persistent in declaring that Article Six could not be abandoned in the foreseeable future; in short, one-party dictatorship must prevail. The change came because millions of the party’s subjects no longer believe in “Bolshevik-style truth”. They see it as consisting of an Orwellian vocabulary where a state-capitalist prison is defined as a socialist paradise.

Gorbachev may have been certain that “we are going to act in the future” in the spirit of Lenin, just as Hitler thought that he would rule for a thousand years and Thatcher probably does too, but the utter bankruptcy of Leninism as a method of ruling over people has reached a point of crisis. By 1990 it became clear to those who would see that offering the workers a touch of democracy from above (glasnost) or attempting piecemeal reforms of the economy (perestroika) would not keep them obedient. The clamour for change was too loud to be ignored.

There were two options which were available if the 28th Congress was to be avoided. The military could try to stage a coup. There are quite a few Russian generals and KGB chiefs who think with admiration of the way that the Deng gang saved their skins in Tiananmen Square. That talk of a military coup is widespread in the upper ranks of the army is no secret. An attempted coup could still happen – certainly local attempts to use military force to hold on to state power by the party rulers could be envisaged – but it is uncertain whether the conscript soldiers would carry out such orders on a broad enough scale to make it effective. Remember that in Rumania, the only state capitalist dictatorship where the party men have so far attempted to resist the will of the majority, most of the soldiers, being workers themselves, went to the side of the majority. In the so-called Soviet army the workers in uniform have formed a union called Shield and the first article of its constitution is that its members refuse to fire on workers of their own country.

The other way in which Gorbachev could have tried to hold back the demise of his party would have been to cancel the 28th Congress. It is reported that he was advised to do this, but as soon as reports were circulated it became clear that the congress would take place whether it was cancelled formally or not. Communist Party branches from throughout the Empire (no, not the USSR – what is Socialist or Soviet about a one-party tyranny?) were determined to voice their anger at the condition they found themselves in.

Splits and factions

What was it, then, that delegates came to say at the 28th Congress? There were four main factions. Firstly, there were the so-called radicals. The term “radical” has a nice sound about it. It makes these people seem like fresh-thinking progressives. This is far from being the case. The “radicals” are those who have seen that state capitalism cannot be reformed and want to see a non-statist market economy set up in the Russian Empire as soon as possible. They are intoxicated by illusory information about the success of Britain and the USA. Just as media simplifiers have pushed the myth that Gorbachev invented the changes in eastern Europe, so they repeat the idea that Boris Yeltsin is the chief “radical”. To be sure, Yeltsin is the most popular politician amongst Russian workers who want quick change, but his radicalism is based upon populist posturing which appeals to Russian national chauvinism, and wholly ignorant economic promises about the benefits for workers within a free market. Amongst the other “radicals” there is much debate about how to run a market economy without the state. Their main concern is to become the beneficiaries of the capital that is now state-owned. The “radicals” are a private capitalist class in waiting. Indeed, some of them are already investing their roubles in the non-state co-operatives (private businesses, in fact) which have a major growth area in the economy. The “radicals” have formed a faction called Democratic Platform: although it only had less that 10 percent of the delegates at the 28th Congress, its grass roots support within the Communist Party is nearer to 50 percent.

Opposed to Democratic Platform are the conservatives. These are the party men whose whole lives have been spent on rising within the ruling class by means of spewing out its hollow Leninist clichés to order. Their main symbol is Yegor Ligachev, the last remaining Politburo Brezhnevite, until the Congress, when he was removed. Most of Brezhnev’s men have either died or been purged. The conservatives maintain that the seventy-year tragedy of Leninism has been a great success story. They are the ravers at the party, dancing away into the early hours as if it does not really matter that the peanuts have all gone and there is a lynch-mob at the front door. One should not feel sorry for these old swines. They have built careers on the harsh exploitation of workers who were forbidden by law to fight back. They dared to tell the wage slaves of the Russian Empire that a “Socialist Republic” had been achieved in 1917. While the mass of the population were miseducated by the propaganda of Leninism, the members of the Leninist vanguard were living in the country dachas, driving the limousines and shopping in special stores which stock luxury goods. Is it any wonder that they are now hated? They are fighting for their survival as a class. They deserve what is coming to them.

A third faction at the Congress were the nationalists. The break-up of the Russian Empire is very likely. The nationalist delegates want to be part of the new ruling class within the new states. Fourthly, there are the Gorbachev crowd. They want to hold on to party control over capitalism, but they know that they must make certain democratic concessions and introduce major economic reforms in order to do so. In order to please the “radicals” they are abandoning support for state capitalism and declaring full support for a market economy of the German or British type. This has kept some “radicals” within the party, but the more that centralised party planning fails the quicker the rush to leave will be. They do not want to take the blame. At the same time, the Gorbachev leadership must convince the conservatives that their power will not end with the demise of state capitalism. Frankly, unless there is a military coup, the conservatives have little choice but to sit tight and hope that Gorbachev is right. To the nationalists, Gorbachev is offering state funding and the chance to be part of a successful economy. To most nationalists the offer is not of the sort that leads to ecstasy.

Change beyond the Change

At the 28th Congress the Communist Party split. Having split it will now face competition from other parties – notably the party to be formed in the autumn by Lysenko and the “radicals” – and it is highly likely that millions of workers will respond, if only negatively, by voting for anything but the Communist Party. In some cases, this “anything” is not a very savoury entity. In the non-Russian republics the non-Leninist outfits will be nationalistic and will drift quickly into extreme right-wing economic thinking. In Russia, which is where the battle is really going to be fought out, the prospect of widespread support for chauvinistic, religious, racist and ultra-Thatcherite policies is high on the agenda. There is a degree of free-market utopianism which has affected Russian “intellectuals” which is similar to the kind of myopic instant love felt by many Western “intellectuals” towards the Stalinist utopia.

There are too many politicians playing with the dreams of the workers of the Russian Empire. One thing is for certain: these workers are going to be hurt terribly. After years of putting up with the illusion of socialism, they will now be forced to endure mass unemployment, price inflation and wage cuts to pay for Western loans. All of this in the name of capitalist freedom. Marxism is a dirty word amongst these workers. They were taught that Lenin and Stalin and Brezhnev were all good Marxists and they are sick of the product. The present writer wrote an article for a Russian newspaper called ‘Socialism Without Bolshevism’, but was advised by the editor to cut out the positive reference to socialism as it would stick in the throats of the paper’s sixty-million plus readers.

William Morris wrote of “the change beyond the change”. He was writing about people in late feudal society looking at the dawn of capitalism and how they must look not only to the change which was before them, but to the change after that. We socialists must do the same thing now. As we look at eastern Europe we have mixed feelings: the end of Leninism and the democratic struggle by which this has happened is a source of inspiration, but the changes which are happening . . .

We are Marxists who see change not as a single event with a beginning and an end. The victory of Bolshevism in Russia marked the defeat of autocratic Tsarism, which was a mighty advance, but it also marked the emergence of the myth of a socialist state, which was arguably the greatest obstacle that has since stood in the way of the revolutionary socialist movement. Now that Bolshevism is dying – almost dead, we would be foolish to waste time mourning the victory of the free-market antithesis. Our eyes are upon the struggle of the morrow, not for the victory of this faction of that party, or of this nationality or that reform, but for the realisation on the part of our fellow workers that however you organise this rotten system it will still be rotten. It is rotten under Gorbachev; it is the same under Bush, Kohl or Mitterand. And its rottenness will give rise to men and women who will not be content with less rotten: they will go for the change beyond the change.

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Property-Owning Democracy? (1987)

The Running Commentary Column from the March 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Property-Owning Democracy?

Remember the Tories' 1983 election promise of turning Britain into a "property-owning democracy"? The prospect of "owning” their own house was undoubtedly an attractive proposition to many workers fed up with the insecurity of renting their homes from unscrupulous landlords or penny-pinching councils. However for many the dream has turned into a nightmare. As fewer council houses are built and fewer properties are available to rent, many people have been forced to "choose" a mortgage, which the building societies have been only too pleased to give them.

But having encouraged people to become home owners, the government has now decided to punish those home-owners who have the misfortune to become unemployed. New rules have just been introduced which will mean that anyone who becomes unemployed will have only half their mortgage interest paid while they are in receipt of Supplementary Benefit and only for the first four months of unemployment. Under the old rules all the interest (but not the capital) was paid. This is bound to increase the rate of repossessions. Already one in ten homeless families are homeless because their home has been repossessed due to mortgage default.

Families faced with the prospect of unemployment and inability to pay their mortgage may decide to sell up to avoid arrears and repossession. If they do, however, the local authority would have no obligation to rehouse them since they would be deemed to be "intentionally homeless”.

For workers in this situation the security promised by the slogan "property-owning democracy" has turned out to be as illusory as it is for those who depend on paying rent in order to keep a roof over their heads.

It Pays to Advertise

It is even more profitable if you can get someone who has nothing to gain to pay you for the privilege of so doing!!

Strange as it may seem, the same person who objects strongly to paying a few pence for a carrier bag printed with the name of a supermarket, will pay pounds to advertise something else.

Guinness started the fashion years ago. In return for a cheque made out to them for the correct amount (something like 20 guineas if memory serves) you would receive a sweater with 'GUINNESS' — not even the toucan —  emblazoned across the front. Today for £18.95 you may buy a plain wool sweater by post; this price is already considerably higher than for a similar garment bought across the counter. However, for only an extra £ 1, you can have' The Times' discreetly embroidered on the left-hand side. Of course, if you don't have the odd £20 to spare, you can go downmarket and buy a Coca Cola — or if you prefer, a Pepsi — T-shirt. Slightly upmarket again, you could, in gold on black, advertise Biba. If you really want to dredge the bottom, feature the Sun with the screaming front page headline 'SID VICIOUS DEAD. Punk Star Killed By Overdose'.

One T-shirt we have not yet seen is the one advertising the fact that we are all being killed by an overdose — of capitalism!


Gorbachev the democrat?

"We need democracy like we need air to breathe", said Gorbachev in a speech to the ruling Central Committee. What he means by "democracy" is that there will be more than one candidate standing for office in elections and a bit more public debate with officials prepared to admit from time to time that things occasionally go wrong, that there are shortages and production quotas aren't always fulfilled.

Well it's better than nothing. But no-one should be conned into believing that the new, reforming Russian leadership is really concerned about giving ordinary Russian workers a voice in decision-making. What Gorbachev is undoubtedly concerned about is the failure of the Russian economy. Giving people a little in relatively unimportant areas is a time-honoured way of getting them to give back a lot more.

If Russian workers are made to feel that they do have a voice, that they are listened to, then it is quite possible they will be conned into working harder and producing more wealth for the Russian ruling class. A little bit of political liberalisation will not affect the fundamental division of Russian society into those with wealth and power and those without, unless Russian workers recognise that fundamental division and then exploit the small window of opportunity that Gorbachev has opened for their own political ends.


Bullets on the beat

Officially Britain has an unarmed police force. Unofficially things are rather different. A curious incident involving a car chase down the M1 which ended when the car being pursued ran out of petrol and shots were fired, led to revelations that for the past eight years traffic police patrolling the Nottinghamshire section of the M1 motorway, the A1 and Nottingham city centre have been carrying guns.

Charles McLachlan, Chief Constable of Nottinghamshire, said at a press conference:

  The vehicles are double-manned and weapons are carried in a locked container in the vehicle. They are two pistols, a pump-action shotgun and body armour. They are not allowed to take these weapons from the container which is permanently locked, without approval from a senior police officer.

No doubt this was meant to reassure people. But these words sound rather hollow given the trigger-happy mentality of certain armed police as shown by a series of tragic incidents over the last six years in which people have been "accidentally” shot by armed police.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the militarisation of the police is that the decision to arm police officers is not taken in public after debate and discussion but instead is made behind closed doors by the police themselves. As such decisions are deemed to be "operational" even the elected police authorities, to whom the police are nominally responsible, do not have to be consulted or even informed.

Russia and Private Property (1990)

From the April 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

The decision by the Central Committee of the CPSU at its February meeting to abandon its guaranteed, constitutional monopoly on power really could prove to be as momentous as the media claimed at the time. However this will not be for the reasons they gave – that it will open up a new era of freedom, prosperity and progress for Russia – but because it could lead to a change in the way that the means of production are monopolised by the minority owning class there.

Except for some of those that can be operated by individuals or by a family unit, all means of production in Russia are vested in the state which also has a monopoly in the hiring of wage-labour. This has meant that the group that has controlled the state has also controlled the means of production, has in effect owned them. However, the members of this group have not done so as individuals possessing legal property deeds in their own names, but collectively as a group. It is this group – as a group – that has been the collective owner of the means of production and the collective employer of the working class in Russia, in short the collective capitalist there.

So who are they? Who are those who make up this group that monopolises the means of production in Russia in this way? As Russia has been a one-party dictatorship since Lenin introduced this in 1921, they have been the leading members of the ruling party plus those appointed by them to key posts carrying with them a life-style based on privileged access to the best consumer goods, housing, health care, education for their children, holidays and officially known as the nomenklatura. Not possessing legal property titles in their own names, they have not been able to bequeath their privileged position to their children. So the group that has constituted the collective capitalist class in Russia has been recruited by other means than inheritance, in fact by rising up the bureaucratic hierarchy of the single party.

It is this party that has been the mechanism by which the collective capitalist class in Russia has monopolised the state and so the means of production and by which they have renewed themselves and recruited new members. This is why the political and ideological representatives of this class have proclaimed the “leading role of the party” to be a pillar of the Russian system. It is also why the decision by the Party’s Central Committee at its February meeting to abandon it could prove to be of immense importance.

Gorbachev wants a mandate
Of course abandoning a constitutional right to be the only governing party, indeed the only party allowed to exist – the notorious Article Six of the 1977 Russian constitution – is not the same thing as actually abandoning power. The leaders of the “Communist” Party still want, like Mrs Thatcher, to go on ruling for ever but from now on they hope to do so with a democratic mandate from the electorate.

There is a short-term reason for this: they feel they need popular endorsement to be able to push through the tough anti-working class measures perestroika involves. For although glasnost (openness) has progressed quite far, perestroika has not. Enterprises have been given legal independence from the government ministries that used to control them, but price reform – the key measure of perestroika and what it is all about, designed to bring prices into line with what the law of value demands – has not yet been implemented.

Price reform will involve ending government subsidies on basic consumer goods such as food, housing and transport and allowing their prices, along with those of industrial goods, to be fixed by the free play of market forces. Although the object is to get the stagnant Russian economy moving again, it is bound to mean for at least the short-term falling living standards and rising unemployment. Learning the lesson of the events in Poland, Gorbachev is clearly not prepared to launch into this attack on the working class without a mandate to do so. His conservative opponents in the Party hierarchy might not like his political reforms, but they don’t want him to go since they know that they would have even less chance of controlling the potentially explosive situation in Russia.

It is the longer-term implications of the decision to abandon the Leninist principle of one-party dictatorship that could prove to be the most significant though, as this could herald a change in the way the means of production are monopolised in Russia with the ruling class there changing itself from a class of collective owners into a class of individual owners as in the West.

Such a change has always been a possibility but until now only a rather remote one. It is a measure of the historic importance of events in Eastern Europe – which will surely have led to the liquidation of the nomenklatura system there by the end of the year – that they have forced what once seemed to be the immovable Russian Party-elite to reconsider its position.

The transformation of the Russian ruling class from a collectively-owning state bureaucracy into a class of private capitalists with private property rights vested in them as individuals certainly won’t take the form of the present members of the nomenklatura abdicating and handing over their power and privileges to the small group of privately-owning capitalists who have always led a precarious existence on the margins of the Russian state-capitalist economy. Nor would it need to take the crude form of them simply dividing up the presently state-owned industries amongst themselves. It would be more likely to take the form of the Russian government gradually introducing more and more opportunities for private capitalist investment – which only those who have already accumulated wealth would be able to take advantage of. Most of these will inevitably be individual members of the nomenklatura as the group which for years has enjoyed bloated salaries, cash prizes and opportunities to speculate on the black market.

Although there have been periodic drives against corruption, the wealth accumulated by the members of the nomenklatura has largely survived intact. Up to now, however, they have not been allowed to use their accumulated wealth as capital – as wealth invested in production with a view to profit – but have been obliged to hold it as non-productive assets such as works of art, vintage cars and cash held in low-interest bank accounts. That Gorbachev wants to remove this restriction and channel such funds towards investment in production can be seen from the reference in the new Party Platform to “the distribution of state loan bonds on advantageous terms” and to “the selling of stocks and other securities”.

Ligachev’s Fears
High-denomination state bonds were issued for the individually wealthy to purchase right up until the 1940s (when their holders were virtually expropriated when Stalin reformed the currency in 1947), but this time rich Russians are to be allowed to purchase not just government bonds but also to invest directly in particular enterprises by purchasing bonds issued by them too. It is not difficult to see how this could evolve into a system of shareholding. In addition, private enterprise in the form of “co-operatives” is to be encouraged. Such co-operatives are supposed to be collectives of self-employed workers but once again, over time, pressure to allow them to employ wage-labour and for some of their members to become sleeping partners, or non-working investors, can be expected to grow.

This whole issue of “private property” is still a subject of controversy within the Russian Party. It ought to be understood, however, that the issue at stake is not whether individuals should be allowed to own non-productive assets, sometimes considerable amounts, as private property which they can bequeath and inherit. This has long existed and all sides agree it should continue. Nor – yet – is the issue about whether individuals should be allowed to employ other individuals. It is about whether “co-operatives” of the self-employed should be allowed to own means of production and compete with state enterprises for sales and profits.

On the one side, there are the supporters of Igor Ligachev who was reported as saying at the February Central Committee meeting that “he opposed the introduction of private property with his whole soul”, adding: “I am also against turning our party into an amorphous organisation, a political club” (Independent 7 February 1990). On the other side, are those who agree with Boris Yeltsin when he says: “I am for private property, including the means of production. The limits are that it should not be sold, and not inherited” (Vancouver Sun, 21 December 1989).

The new Party Platform shows that it is the partisans of “private property” who are winning. Ligachev is nevertheless probably right when he sees “co-operative private property” as the thin end of a wedge that will open the way, despite what Yeltsin says, both to private property rights in means of production being sold and inherited and to the private employment of wage-labour. This latter is still regarded in Russia as a case of “the exploitation of man by man” – as indeed it is, though Ligachev is being inconsistent when he denounces the employment of hired labour by private individuals while accepting it by the state. Clearly, what he favours is the nomenklatura continuing to monopolise the means of production collectively as a group dictatorially controlling the state where the means of production are state-owned.

Gorbachev, on the other hand, realises that it is now no longer possible for the nomenklatura to role in the old way and that some sort of flexibility is called for, if only to be able to push through perestroika without provoking a workers’ revolt. He probably isn’t consciously working towards ushering in a Russia where the nomenklatura has disappeared as such and has succeeding in converting itself into a class of Western-type privately-owning capitalists, but it is in this direction that his reforms can now be seen to be leading.

Adam Buick

Limits of Glasnost (1987)

From the July 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Russia is just as much a class society with a capitalist economy as America or any other country in the West, only its ruling class monopolises the means of production in a different way.

Instead of doing so through legal property titles vested in individuals and enforced by the state, the ruling class in countries like Russia does so through a direct exclusive control of the state. So in an economy where most industry is state-owned, this gives them at the same time an exclusive, monopoly control over the means of production too. They control the state through their organisation into a vanguard party, the upper echelons of which decide all appointments to posts of any importance in the various organs of the state — the government, the bureaucracy, the armed forces, and the managements of the state industries.

This means that recruitment to the Russian ruling class too is different to that in the West; it takes place not by inheriting legal property titles but by joining and rising up the Party hierarchy. Similarly, the proceeds of the exploitation of wage labour are shared out differently; not by a legal property income in the form of interest, dividends, profit and rent but through bloated 'salaries", monetary prizes and various important privileges in kind (exclusive access to high quality shops, hospitals, holidays and so on).

Who is better off? Who is in the more stable position? The Western ruling classes or the Russian-type ruling classes? From the point of view of the exploited majority in both types of capitalism this question is of little practical importance. In both cases they are excluded from the means of production and so are forced to sell their ability to work to an employer or an employing institution which pays them in wages and salaries less than the value of what they produce. The difference goes towards the accumulation of further capital to exploit wage labour and towards maintaining the ruling class — however they monopolise the means of production and however they are recruited and renewed — in the style to which they are accustomed.

This question does, however, have some relevance when it comes to understanding the political institutions of the two different forms of capitalism. In the West governments act, just as much as they do in Russia, China and other such countries, in the interest of the capitalist ruling class but they do so without the members of this class having to themselves occupy posts in the government. Because the law, and in some cases the constitution, protects their legal right to monopolise the means of production and to draw an unearned income from this, they can delegate the function of running the government to professional politicians. Since the vast majority of wage and salary workers still see no alternative to the capitalist prices-wages-profits system, the capitalist class in the West can also allow which particular clique of politicians should form the government to be decided by popular vote. In fact, this arrangement suits them very well because this game of "ins" and “outs" ensures that no one group of politicians controls the political machine long enough to allocate itself privileges at the expense of the legal property-holding capitalists.

In any event a modern capitalist economy requires a fairly educated wage and salary working class to operate it. Which demands that the capitalist ruling class employ methods other than coercion and the threat of starvation to win our cooperation. The illusion of participation arising from having a say as to which gang of politicians should form the government is precisely one such other method.

Even though this arrangement, known somewhat facetiously as "democracy", suits the private capitalist class of the West, it was nevertheless still something that had to be imposed on them by mass popular movements such as the Chartists and the Reform League in Britain. The ruling class was originally against giving the vote to the wage and salary earning majority because they were afraid that we might use it against them, though right from the start the more far-seeing among them realised that this, besides being a way of undermining the political influence of their landed rivals within the ruling class, was also a way of integrating the working class into capitalist political life.

Universal suffrage and the relative freedom of speech and organisation that goes with it has one drawback for the ruling class however: it means that they cannot always expect to get their way. at least not without a struggle. In other words — and this is the advantage of these arrangements for the wage and salary working class — it allows us some elbow-room in which to better prosecute the class struggle. It also allows socialists some room to spread socialist ideas in a less encumbered fashion than otherwise and it provides the means, when a majority of workers have become socialists, for them to impose their political will for socialism on the ruling class in an essentially peaceful way.

The Russian ruling class is in a rather different position in this respect. They do not suffer the drawback of having to allow their workers the chance of organising to better wage the class struggle against them, nor of having to allow socialists and other opponents to openly criticise them. All the same, as Khrushchev realised thirty years ago. no more than the ruling class in the West can they run their now relatively modern capitalist economy by employing brute force, as in Stalin's time. The working class in Russia too have become more skilled and educated and so require a different treatment to get them to cooperate in production. Gorbachev's reforms are designed to take account of this.

But how far will he go? How far can he go? In the late 1950s and early '60s in the Khrushchev era. observers of the Russian scene looked forward optimistically towards an eventual evolution in Russia of the same sort of trade union and political freedoms as exist in the West. But this was not what happened. Economic development and economic liberalisation were not followed by a move towards political democracy. On the contrary under Khrushchevs successor. Brezhnev — who deposed him in 1964 — there was a regression, not to the brute force tactics of the Stalin era but to a strengthening of the Party's control over political, economic and ideological life.

An analysis of the way in which the ruling class in Russia-type societies monopolises the means of production shows why this was only to be expected and why in fact it is quite unrealistic to expect a straight-line progression from the present one-party political dictatorship in such countries to Western-type political forms. For the ruling class in these countries monopolise the means of production through their monopoly control of political power; which means that to give this up would be to give up also their monopoly over the means of production. In other words, the ruling class in countries like Russia can permit, in the interests of economic efficiency, a certain degree of liberalisation but this can never go so far as to threaten what they themselves call "the leading role of the Party".

This liberalisation can go so far as to permit the official trade union movement to criticise certain governmental actions (as in Poland), to allow more than one Party or Party-endorsed candidate in political elections (as in Hungary) and to allow private enterprise and investment to flourish (as in China). Since none of these exist in Russia itself this allows Gorbachev the possibility of introducing a certain number of innovations into the Russian political system but however far in this direction he and the group he represents within the Russian ruling class decide to go, they will stop short of allowing any real challenge to the Party's political monopoly. The Party will remain in the saddle since it is the organisation by which the ruling class there actually rules.

Since the fall of Khrushchev this has been confirmed on a number of occasions. Although strategic considerations were also involved, the Russian ruling class sent its tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 when the Party there under Dubchek appeared to be moving away from the principle of the leading role of the vanguard Party. In Poland in 1981 the government was compelled to declare martial law in order to try to suppress the Solidarity trade union movement which had refused to accept the leading role of the Party, some of its members having clearly identified exactly who the ruling class in Poland were and precisely how they ruled and monopolised the means of production. And in China the political liberalisation process was brought to an abrupt halt earlier this year when, following student demonstrations, there seemed to be a possibility of the leading role of the Chinese Communist Party (so-called) being undermined.

This is all quite understandable when it is realised that it is through the Party that these ruling classes control the state and through the state the means of production. To expect them to give up the leading role of their Party is like expecting the ruling class in the West to give up the state's protection and enforcement of their legal property rights. Neither of them can be expected to do that except under the pressure of a political revolution.

In other words, the Russian political system could only change into something along the lines of the political system that exists in the West after a political upheaval in which the present ruling class would be deposed. This is not impossible to imagine but highly improbable since the only group (apart from the working class of course) that could do this would be a class of legally-owning private capitalists. Such a class does indeed exist in embryo form in Russia and in China and Hungary in a much more developed form but they hardly have either the economic or the political clout to overthrow the incumbent state capitalist class in any of these countries. Another possibility would be for the existing state capitalist class to convert itself into a class of legally-owning private capitalists. Some of the members of the Russian nomenklatura have accumulated considerable fortunes in their own right and as this process continues there could be pressure from these and their inheritors to move in this direction, but once again this would seem to be highly unlikely.

This means that the only class capable of challenging the ruling class in countries like Russia is the wage and salary working class. As the case of Poland shows, if they are resolute and determined enough they can win a certain room to manoeuvre within the existing political system: a limited freedom to negotiate over wages and working conditions equivalent to that won by workers in the West. This could be conceded, under pressure, by the ruling class in Russia without their political control of the state being undermined any more than its existence in the West undermines the legal private ownership of the means of production there. So there is room for progress here and in the future the working class in Russia might be able to win the same sort of elbow room within the system as workers have been able to in the West. In fact this can be regarded as being a fairly likely development.

The ruling class in Russia-type societies may offer a choice of two or more Party candidates in elections since this would not represent any threat to the leading role of the Party which is the basis of their rule and the class monopoly they exercise over the means of production. If this comes, and experiments in this direction have already been carried out in Hungary, then workers there would be offered the same false choice as in the West between candidates who stand for the same basic thing: the maintenance of the existing form of capitalism.

Real change will only come in Russia and such countries in the same way that it will come in the West: through the growth of socialist understanding and organisation. This will transform the political scene in both types of capitalist country. In the West the political representatives of capitalism will be increasingly challenged at the polls by mandated delegates from the growing socialist movement. In the East this will be a little more difficult but. under pressure from the socialist movement, the authorities would be forced to permit socialist candidates to stand against those defending the Leninist principle of "the leading role of the Party". If at first they refused, the situation would become impossible for them until they gave in — after all, if they could hardly manage the emergence of an independent trade union movement as in Poland, imagine the difficulties they would have in managing the emergence of a growing socialist movement.

Adam Buick

Restructuring (1988)

Book Review from the February 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

Soviet Scene 1987. edited by Vladimir Mezhenkov  (Collets, £7.95)

This book is a collection of articles and interviews translated from the Russian press. Despite being produced by the foreign propaganda authorities in Moscow, it nevertheless contains some very revealing material.

The main themes dealt with are perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness, transparency). One illustration of the latter is an article that appeared in Pravda on 16 March 1987 denouncing what had been going on in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan under the local Party boss, Dimash Kunaev, who was deposed at the end of 1986:

   A select circle of leaders throughout the republic built themselves veritable stately homes — palatial residences and hunting lodges with saunas, greenhouses, billiard rooms, cinemas and swimming pools. These were luxuriously furnished with all the trappings of a princely lifestyle.

This circle also, explains the editorial introduction to the article, "kept their ’personal' cattle among the herds of the collective and state farms of Kazakhstan's Urals Region alone. Some of them had 250 and more sheep kept for their own benefit and dozens of heads of cattle and horses",

Gorbachev and his clique obviously felt that this was going too far as it brought into disrepute the whole nomenklatura and their system of institutionalised privileges (country homes, hunting lodges and the like, if not herds of cattle). Kunaev and his friends and relatives were purged, especially as Kunaev had been associated with Brezhnev.

Restructuring is introduced by an interview with Abel Aganbegyan, the economist closely associated with this reform. Restructuring is basically an attempt to revitalise the Russian state capitalist economy by freeing enterprises from bureaucratic central control by the state and telling them to go out and maximise their profits.

In Russia the main means of production are controlled by separate state enterprises which pay a percentage of their sales receipts to the state as a tax on their turnover and receive capital for further investment from the state either as direct allocations of equipment or as loans from the State Bank. Up till now the activity of enterprises has been closely controlled by the central state authorities by means of legally-binding directives whose application has been verified by a host of inspectors.

Restructuring involves giving enterprises freedom from state control, both to trade with other enterprises and to keep and invest more of the profits they make. This freedom is to be guaranteed by law. In return enterprises are going to be expected to seek to maximise profits and to practise strict profit-and-loss accounting, so as to build up a fund to finance more of their investments themselves as well as to repay, on time and with interest, the loans they get from the State Bank.

An article from Pravda of 12 January 1987 is very revealing in this respect. Entitled "Putting the Roubles to Work", it states:

   The role played by profits from production in accumulating money and strengthening the financial base of production is growing. Profits today amount to 200 billion roubles. For some time we have shied away from talking very much about profits. Many people still thought in old-fashioned terms taught by certain political economists to see profits as something pertaining only to a capitalist system.

By political economists such as Karl Marx, for instance. Pravda, however, has found someone to replace Marx: Micawber!

  The main law of the financial activity of any industry and any enterprise is that income should always be greater than expenditure. One of the characters in a Charles Dickens' novel said that if a person earns £20 and spends £19 19s 6d. the result is happiness. But if he spends £20 0s 6d. the result is misery
  In our day too, any enterprise manager has to assess income and expenditure and ensure a profit. Otherwise, the enterprise cannot be self-financing.

Enterprises in Russia have always sought to balance their books but until now it has only been the central state that has been concerned with maximising profitability and this only at the level of the economy as a whole. The change that restructuring is designed to bring in is that, from now on, enterprises will be given the green light to seek to maximise profits at enterprise level. This represents a change from a rigid state-controlled capitalist economy to a more market-motivated one.

A leading sociologist interviewed in Moscow News (1 March 1987) attacks the "free "health service in Russia and suggests that there should be charges for certain types of medical treatment. With such views being expressed in Russia, no wonder Thatcher and Gorbachev get on so well together.

Adam Buick

From Russia with profit (1989)

From the May 1989 issue of the Socialist Standard

Under the heading “Soviet Millionaire' in free-market fight", the Daily Telegraph (24 March) gave prominence in their foreign news to the Russian capitalist, Viktor Aksyutich. The newspaper did so on the grounds that he promised to sponsor "free-market candidates" in his country, to fight what he described as "conservative members" of the Russian ruling-class who are currently trying to cling to the state-capitalist monopoly of large-scale production and distribution and its resulting benefits.

Another reason for media interest is that Aksyutich is a director of a co-operative in Moscow, one of the consequences of the current reforms there, which has in eleven months of operation created capital of £2.5 million pounds. Indeed, the diversity of this co-operative's business operations is quite interesting since it includes cement, timber, computers, theatre groups, video shops, religious publications and management schools.

After Aksyutich's meeting with Alan Clark, Minister of Trade, to discuss joint capitalist ventures and current de-regulation in Russia which makes his kind of business operation legal, he told assembled journalists that he is under no illusion as to who are the "real enemy” to his company's future, naming it as the Russian Communist Party itself.

And like all fractional disputes within a ruling-class or the power struggle emanating between those on the periphery of political power and those wielding it for their own purposes, Aksyutich, and those like him who want political representation as a means to articulate their propertied interests, are now committed "to use our financial muscle to sponsor candidates for future elections". So in a manner reminiscent of Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, Aksyutich and other "closet capitalists", as the Telegraph called them, must search for a political party. Glasnost and Perestroika are seen as instruments in this process.

Workers in Russia should pay close attention to this struggle for political power and the representation demanded by new legal forms of private business, no matter what they are called, and learn from history to have nothing to do with it. Glasnost and Perestroika are structural reforms within Russian capitalism and have nothing to do with the interests of the Russian working-class. Private capitalism, whether co-operative or corporate on the one hand, or state capitalism on the other, all exploit workers within the degradation and servility of the wages system. Instead, workers in Russia, and those elsewhere in the world should, where possible, organise politically in their own socialist parties and rapidly push the class struggle to its final conclusion with the abolition of world capitalism itself and its replacement with Socialism.

Richard Lloyd

Maggie and Mikhail: A meeting of minds? (1987)

From the May 1987 issue of the Socialist Standard

Most political commentators, because they have for decades obstinately refused to see Russia as anything but "communist", now don't quite know what to make of what they themselves have dubbed the "Gorbachev revolution". Russia is still "communist" and intends to stay that way — we have Gorbachev's own word for that. So what are we to make of glasnost and perestroika — the Russian words for "openness" and "restructuring" that now trip off the tongues of TV news readers as easily as "communist threat" once did?

That there are reforms — both in the economic and political spheres — taking place in Russia at the moment is beyond question. In political terms, we are told that there is going to be "democratisation". This does not mean that Gorbachev and other members of the Politburo are going to stand for election or that rival political parties are going to be able to put forward candidates for election to political office. What it does mean, if Gorbachev gets his way, is that Party officials will have to compete for certain key posts and submit themselves for election to the next lowest tier. There may also be a requirement that industrial managers will have to be elected by their workforce (an introduction of an element of democracy to an area that has mostly been immune from it in the so-called democracies of the west).

There does appear to be some increase in the civil liberties enjoyed by Russian citizens. The more liberal political climate has meant that there is greater openness in the Russian media: criticism of certain aspects of Russian life is now not only permitted but officially encouraged. However it is important to notice that criticism is only tolerated when it is directed towards those areas which Gorbachev himself has indicated are legitimate targets — bureaucratic ineptitude, economic inefficiency, low productivity and corruption in particular. It is highly unlikely that political criticism of the system itself will be permitted. In the arts and cultural life there has been some liberalisation: literature, music, films and plays that were previously banned or at least heavily censored are to be made available, although "freedom of expression" still does not exist. Things are still under the watchful eye of the state censors; it is just that now they have widened the parameters of what is permissible.

Some political prisoners have been released, especially those like Sakharov, who have been the focus of western media attention. And while it is unlikely that there will be a general amnesty for political prisoners, there is an official commitment to release more. Similarly we are told that Jews wanting to leave Russia for Israel will have their cases reviewed but we are not likely to see much "freedom of movement" for Russian people in general.

In economic terms the reforms have mostly focused on two major problems the Russian leadership have been grappling with for decades: low productivity and the poor quality of the goods produced. In an attempt to revitalise the economy, Gorbachev has introduced greater private ownership and various incentive schemes. In an effort to overcome the problems of delay and inefficiency caused by the cumbersome, centralised, bureaucratic machine, managers of some factories are being given greater responsibility for decision-making so that all decisions are not automatically referred upwards to officials. In the service sector some small businesses are being reorganised as cooperatives. Managers are encouraged to run their businesses more cost-effectively by the state granting them a fixed wage fund. If they can then reduce their workforce and also maintain productivity then all will earn more money. There have been changes in rural areas too. Farmworkers have been organised into teams who are given responsibility for specific fields which they work in return for a guaranteed basic wage. When the crop is harvested they will then get a bonus which will be determined by the quantity and quality of their produce. In other words some Russian workers are being paid by results in an attempt to both increase quality and productivity. They will have to work harder in order to maintain or improve their living standards.

The media soap opera that was created around Thatcher's recent visit to Russia focussed on whether there had been a "meeting of minds" between the two leaders; whether Gorbachev really was a man who Thatcher could "do business with"; whether they could bridge the "ideological gulf" that separated them. Such questions were only possible because of the myth that the media has itself so long fostered. That myth is that the system in Russia is in some fundamental way different from that in the west; that Russia is "communist" and the west is "capitalist" — as different as chalk and cheese.

But the truth is that Russia and the west are not. and never have been "worlds apart" and so a "meeting of minds" between Gorbachev and Thatcher was not the quantum leap that it was made out to be. For Russia is a capitalist country: just like any other capitalist nation it produces for profit and not need; goods and services are exchanged on the market for a price; a minority control the wealth that is produced, while the majority sell their labour power in return for a wage or salary. The only significant difference between Russia and the west is that the state owns rather more of the wealth and means of production, distribution and exchange than do private entrepreneurs. And even this is not as significant a difference as it might first appear: many countries which would not be described as "communist" vest considerable ownership in the state and in Britain too there have been periods when there has been considerably more state ownership than is the case today.

So Gorbachev’s limited economic reforms — more private ownership and payment by results — do not mean that Russia is becoming "more capitalist". The current reforms represent no more of a fundamental change than does Thatcher's policy of privatisation of what were once state-owned industries.

In political terms the Gorbachev reforms are potentially more significant. But again they should not be misinterpreted as meaning that Russia is becoming less communist — it has never been communist. Capitalism — as an economic system — can contain a wide variety of very different political systems: the "liberal democracies" of western Europe, America, Australia and New Zealand; undemocratic and authoritarian systems such as that in South Africa; the fascist governments of Italy and Germany during the 1930s and 1940s; the one-party states common in parts of Africa; military dictatorships like those in some South American states; and the one-party states of Russia and eastern Europe.

In the political sphere as was the case in the economic, it is a question of degree. Just as there can be disagreements about the best proportions in the mix of state and private ownership without the fundamental nature of capitalism being affected, so too, exactly how coercive and repressive the state is, will vary. But in all capitalist countries the main function of the state machine is the same — to protect the interests of the owning class. How it goes about doing that is likely to depend on the economic and political conditions that exist in a particular country at a particular time — how secure the owning class feels its control to be and how divided it is. To maintain a highly coercive and repressive state machine, with all that entails for civil and political liberties, may be thought to be politically necessary but it can also have negative effects economically and politically.

In economic terms coercion is expensive: to maintain a large police force, internal security services, prisons and so on, is very costly. If the owning class can maintain its power by other, subtler and less expensive means then they may well decide to take the risk and loosen the reins a little. The risk, of course, is that workers may make use of their new-found political freedoms to press for more fundamental changes. On the other hand to maintain rigid, repressive state control is also risky: workers who are stamped on too hard are likely to feel disaffected, resentful and uncooperative. And. as Gorbachev has recognised, if workers feel that they have no stake in the system then they may well choose not to work very hard.

So what we are seeing in Russia at the moment is a regime that feels sufficiently secure politically to loosen the reins of state control and is aware of the economic benefits that can be won by conning workers that they are "free" and have a stake in the system. It's no wonder that Mikhail and Maggie got on so well — after all they have so much in common.

Janie Percy-Smith

The Rehabilitation of Bukharin (1988)

From the April 1988 issue of the Socialist Standard

After having him shot as a traitor and a spy in 1938 after one of Stalin's notorious treason trials, the Russian authorities have decided to "rehabilitate" Bukharin. They now say that it was all a frame-up and that the evidence used to convict him was false and obtained by torture. This was obvious at the time, except to those (and a long list could be given of eminent writers, scientists and artists) who thought that Stalin was a demi-god and Russia a workers' paradise.

Nikolai Bukharin was one of those Bolsheviks who knew what socialism really was. In The ABC of Communism, written jointly with Preobrazhensky in 1919, socialism is described as a moneyless society in which there would be distribution according to need. Bukharin was of course profoundly mistaken as to how to get socialism, favouring not majority action using democratic methods but the minority action of an elite vanguard using dictatorship and terror — of which he himself was eventually to be a victim.

Bukharin was also the author of a number of books which, once the Bolshevik nonsense about the political incapacity of ordinary workers and the need for a vanguard party to lead them, has been eliminated, are not too bad from a Marxian point of view. World Economy and Imperialism, written during the First World War, discussed how capitalism had become a world system dominated by competing national blocs of capital organised by the state. Historical Materialism and The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class deal with contemporary criticisms of Marx's views on, respectively, history and economics. Bukharin in fact showed much more knowledge about Marxism and the nature of socialism than did Trotsky, who was never able to understand the difference between socialism and state capitalism.

In 1918 Bukharin went on record as saying that Russia under Lenin was pursuing a policy of state capitalism. For this insight he was denounced by Lenin as a "leftist blockhead" but this did provoke Lenin's famous admission that Russia was indeed heading for state capitalism, forced on the Bolshevik government by the backward economic state of Russia at the time.

Later Bukharin came to accept Lenin's point of view and became an enthusiastic supporter of the New Economic Policy, officially described by the Bolshevik Party as "the development of capitalism under the control of the proletarian state", that was introduced in 1921. Indeed, after Lenin's death in 1924, he became its main advocate and ideological apologist. At first the new dictator, Stalin, went along with him but by 1928 the rich peasants (kulaks) and small businessmen (nepmen) that flourished under NEP were seen as a potential threat to Bolshevik rule by providing a social basis for a movement to "restore capitalism" in Russia. Stalin decided to crush and eliminate them and embarked on a policy of forced industrialisation and collectivisation. Bukharin, who from 1925, while still in his thirties, had been the number 2 man in the Russian regime, didn't agree and was excluded from the ruling Politburo in 1929 as a "rightwing deviationist" — the first step towards his final, humiliating end nine years later.

It is being suggested that one of the reasons Gorbachev wanted to rehabilitate Bukharin is that his own new economic policy bears some resemblance to that of the 1920s, in that it is also a policy of the development of capitalism under the control of a so-called proletarian state. This may be true, except that, while in the 1920s the Bolsheviks still called a shovel a shovel, this is no longer the case. Since Stalin's time what Bolsheviks like Bukharin once frankly admitted was state capitalism is now called socialism. Gorbachev is too much of a Stalinist to return to the old terminology.

In any event, it is to be hoped that Bukharin’s rehabilitation will lead to his writings becoming available in Russia, beginning with those in which he correctly defines socialism as a moneyless society and in which he rightly saw that Russia was heading for state capitalism. Then Russian workers could put two and two together and see Gorbachev for what he is: the political dictator of a state capitalist empire. But no doubt that would be carrying glasnost just a little too far.

Adam Buick