Hi pen-l'rs! I was away from my computer for a while and saw a whole new string about the last articles I posted when I came back. I shall speak about the financial crisis and then on its meaning for the working class in Russia. First, on the financial crisis. I think the "flu" is less simptomatic than internally developed. The Russian economy has been in ruin since before Gorbachev, and its situation has been steadily deteriorating since the acquisition of power by the Yeltsin croocks in 1992. The rouble has been naturally falling at an enormous speed since 1992. This is largely due to the wholesale decline in industrial output, the production of consumer goods and agricultural goods on the one hand, and an increasing import of Western finished goods, machinery and technology and food stuffs on the other. (Note: When I last was in Moscow I was amazed to find out that basic foods, like vegetables and fruit, were imported, this during their regular season which, if my childhood memories do not deceive me, was always abundant with all sorts of 'nature's gifts' during the Soviet times.) Basically, with a collapse in production and exports, there were fewer and fewer roubles in this steadily failing economy. Add to this the nature of the Russian ruling class (which has remained for the most part unchanged from its Soviet days), and you have a recipe for disaster. Basically, those in power during the Soviet era have for the most part remained. The bureaucrats who were in charge of enterprises and the economy in general have become the new 'owners' through the ridiculous 'privatisation' process, which has been no more than a formal process ascribing legal rights to the directors of the enterpeises who practiced control over them in reality. The main difference from their CPSU days being that, having no alegiance to the 'communist' ideology, they could (in the eyes of the Russian people and Western lenders) solicit loans from the West, in order to stabilise the faltering rouble and to get rich quickly through all sorts of privatisation deals and mysterious allocations of those Western loans (mainly to their Swiss accounts or investments in the West). Thus the main shift in policy has been continuous efforts by the impotent Russian state to implement IMF/World Bank policies in order to get those loans (which, as is well known, came with all sorts of conditionalities that would have seen Russia develop effectively into a dependency of the West. So, the idea to prop-up the rouble by increasing the reserves with borrowed dollars has failed to bring a recovery, contrinuting only to widespread speculation on the stock market and the non-payment of wages in this demonitised economy. I know the analysis is somewhat scetchy here, but I hope you can appreciate these internal contradictions of Russia, which have brough the country to this disaster. Now, so far as most Russian people were/are concerned, this crisis is all more or less bogus. With wages not paid on order of 5-8 months at a time, and with their savings lost during the liberalisation of rouble in 1992 and the inflation that followed it, they have nothing more to lose. One would be hard pressed to find a Russian worker who cares for the troubles of stock market speculators or the Western investors (for whom, it must be noted, the entire $22 billion IMF bail-out was engineered). In addition, the Russian working class can claim to have played a significant role in this crisis. The persisting strikes by workers primarily in the energy sector, but increasingly in every sector of the economy, have often brought the managers to the table with the leaders of the country in odrer to persuade the latter against implementing the IMF austerity measures, for fear of restitution by the working class. So, in effect, the period between 1992 and 1998 has been no more than a less-than-effective management of the crisis and, most importantly, a staving of of a possibility of a popular government with the workers at its helm. Having said that, it must be made clear that the Communist Party has been just as much a part of this effort of preventing a workers' state from coming about. They have collaborated with and contributed to the policies of the Yeltsin regime on innumerable occasions and their goals are explicitly not oriented towards building a workers' state! If they came to power, the regime would revert to no more than a regime of paternalistic management-labour relations, as a method of displacement of class conflict (much as was the case during the Soviet era). Also, understanding that they cannot go back to the radiant past, they are more than willing to cooperate with capital, so long as there is a more nationalist orientation in the Russian economic policy. But, it is quite interesting to note based on my reading of the party's economic platform, that they seem to reproduce the myths of the Soviet era (both pre-Gorbachev and Gorbachev) and of the Yeltsin regime. Basically the platform can be summed up as follows: we shall increase (labour) productivity at home (not through Yeltsin/IMF monetary constraint but through a more thorough plan, which includes grater centralisation and "Stalinisation" or production discipline; I was amazed when I read in their programme praises of Stalin for his ability to industialise the country with such stealth in the 1930's); thereby increasing the EXPORTS OF RAW MATERIALS - PRIMARILY OIL AND GAS; thereby acquiring new technology and equipment for the re-equipping of the Russian industrial sector; thereby increasing wholesale domestic productivity and relegating the reliance on the world market to the last instance. Sounds like the Brezhnev/Gorbachev/Yeltsin plan to me! And, as were the previous plans, this one will probably (though not definitely, if the party will not renage on its authoritarian promises) fail. The party's chauvinistic platform, based on references to the Tsar, God, Stalin and the motherland, stressed its undemocratic nature. But, having seen the fruits of was sold to them as "democracy" the workers might be disillusioned with the democratic idea entirely and would rather settle for "great power" politics the CPRF feeds them. Let's hope that the majority of them are not disillusioned by democracy as some of us on this list understand the term. Finally, to give you an example of what the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) is all about, I will include in the next two messages 1). an interview with Gennady Zyuganov, leader of the CPRF and 2). the views of the Russian workers on the increasing efforts of the Communists to use the victories of the working class for the party's own political advantage. In solidarity, Greg S. Frances Bolton (PHI) wrote: > On Wed, 19 Aug 1998, Rob Schaap wrote: > > > > But there's something else with which markets may have to reckon in this. > > Unsurprisingly, the fact, as I understand it, that the Commies took 47% of > > the vote in the last Russian elections, and that *with no access to mass > > media channels throughout the election campaign*, got little emphasis in > > Western media at the time. > > > Someone who works on Russia told me that the last election was actually > stolen by Yeltsin. Seems that the percentages at the beginning were > exactly the same as the percentages at the end, which never happens. > > Frances -- Gregory Schwartz Dept. of Political Science York University 4700 Keele St. Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Canada Tel: (416) 736-5265 Fax: (416) 736-5686 Web: http://www.yorku.ca/dept/polisci
