boddhisatva wrote: > C. Schwartz, > If policies favor the welfare state, the clans can use that as a weapon and > if policies undermine the welfare state the people are that much more > dependent on the wages that the clans dole out with an eye-dropper. > This is precisely the case. These are the paternalistic structures that have remained since the USSR's "labour collective" ideology, whereby unions, workers, and management all work for the good of the enterprise. Today many unions, including FNPR (Federation if Independent Trade Unions), continue to play this conciliationist role. (I touched on this in one of my previous posts.) They allow the enterprise directors (who belong to these 'clans') to exercise control over workers by simply buying them off. In fact, the blame for the non-payment of wages is not against the managers (many of them often protest with the workers; talk about paternalism!) but against the government in Moscow who either supposedly taxes the enterprises heavily or has failed to deliver some subsidy. This serves two purposes: 1). it reinforces the paternalistic hold of management over the workers and 2). strengthens the position of a given clan vis-a-vis the centre, through the support they garner from the workers. Effectively, this also severs workers' attempts to organise democratic economic and political structures. Lately, however, there have been signs that the workers have lost faith in this strategy, and have in some cases renounced any allegiance to parties that effectively represent these clans (like Zhyrinovsky's proto-fascist LDPR, General Lebed's power bloc, Zyuganov's Communist Party, to name a few). In one of my previous posts I attached an article that attested to this. > is there any move on the Communuist party's part to try and get the workers > to organize and use their formal ownership rights or is the party simply > trying to reinstate the welfare state? > I think I illustrated elsewhere that the Communist Party's real base is among such industrial-financial 'clans'. There is little that's communist about these Communists. As far as the welfare state is concerned, the CPRF is rhetorically committed to it and is most likely to offer it if it comes to power, for it is an effective element of control and because the workers themselves will not allow these provisions to disappear. Regards, 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
