michael perelman wrote: >Korean workers seem to be far more daring than the Russians, except for >the workers located far from centers of power [miners]. Am I wrong >here? May be I could respond to this post? Michael Perelman is right, but only to some extent and a lot of it has to do with the coverage the Russian strikes or other political (I say 'political' for I consider strikes just that) actions receive in the US and many other Western states. Basically, strikes - in every part of the country and by workers in every sphere, with miners dominating - have become so commonplace in Russia that the West does not deem them worthy of coverage. This is a more or less simple reason. There are more complex reasons the strikes are either not covered or, if they are covered, they receive less prominent attention than strikes in, say, Korea. It seems to me, another reason for the lack of coverage of the Russian strikes is that it is more difficult to demonize the Russian workers, who are not yet producing consumer goods on which many Western workers depend (Hyundai, Daewoo, Goldstar/GL Electronics, etc.). This ideological tool for breaking the working class the world over is also not salient in the case of the Russian workers because labour action is usually viewed with less terror by the leaders of the Russian industry, finance and the state. This is primarily because, as I mentioned in my last post: there is not much of value (particularly of value to the West) produced in Russia these days. There is little foreign direct investment which would be effected by labour unrest. Most foreign activity is in the form of speculation, which is why we have been hearing about the financial crisis day and night and not about the unpaid, financially/physically/morally impoverished Russian workers, who have worked in unsafe, often life-threating conditions for the past six years or so. Moreover, because the Russian unions have retained the central feature of the Soviet Unions - namely, they are of conciliatory rather than adversarial nature and act in concord with the paternalistic management - it seems to me, the strikes are resolved quicker than in the capitalist economies and/or workers usually settle for what might appear to us as 'less'. This is probably less because the Russian workers are not daring. The numerous (still quite unsuccessful) attempts to initiate new, more radical unions by some worker activists is evidence of this. But there are more weighty material reasons why many Russian workers continue to rely on old (paternalistic, conciliatory, class-struggle-displacing) union structures: when workers are not paid for months at a time and when the existing unions can provide generous social benefits and consumer goods which the workers can trade on the market for other goods (probably with workers from other enterprises) they are less likely to reject the old unions. So the strikes are more numerous but less prominent in the media, with the workers (except in some cases, like the miners, who are also more geographically remote from the centre) appearing less daring. As mentioned above, this is more or less at the level of appearances, and the corporate media (as well as some alternative media sources that in many cases rely on the big guys for their international news) is largely to blame for this. The Green Left Weekly (http://www.peg.apc.org/~greenleft/) is an excellent alternative media source which, thanks to Renfrey Clarke and Boris Kagarlitsky, has great coverage of events in Russia. Also worthy of consideration is The Hindustan Times (http://www.hindustantimes.com/) where Fred Weir publishes. All the best, Greg. -- 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
