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" Let the administrators stand in line at the ordinary stores... that way we'd get rid of the long lines which people are fed up with."

N. Nicolaiev-a worker i trom Kazan The following article is reprinted in an abridged form from the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism (March 1987, No. 39), a monthly magazine published in New York by the Fourth Internationalist Tendency.

Lovell joined the Trotskyist movement in 1935. He was a member of the National Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) from 1942 until 1983, when he and scores of other party members were undemocratically expelled for upholding the SWP's traditional Trotskyist program and heritage. Lovell is currently a member of the editorial board of the Bulletin in Defense of Marxism.

Current political developments in the Soviet Union are signs of economic instability and deep social unrest. They indicate sweeping changes in the economy and the society that are destined to evoke responses in the capitalist world from both the ruling class and the working class.

The ruling class has responded almost reflexively in all the major capitals of the Western world, sending signals to the Soviet bureaucracy that it is ready and willing to invest in industrial enterprises inside the Soviet Union provided capitalist property: rights are recognized and protected.

Capitalist investment

In Moscow on Jan. 5, Yuri A. Kislenko, a top Soviet trade official, announced that U.S. and other foreign companies are being encouraged to enter into joint ventures with Soviet industries.

Kislenko revealed that negotiations with capitalist investors have resulted in a plan to protect their investments. According to a New York Times report, the plan provides tax exemption, independence from central Soviet economic planning, freedom to experiment with capitalist labor/management techniques, free access to both the Soviet home market and the world market, and joint ownership.

Kislenko said that a new law, "broadly worded," will allow foreign investors to hold a 49-percent equity in Soviet industrial facilities, and will describe tax regulations. He said such matters as labor-management relations, prices for labor and raw materials, and financing would be worked out in individual contracts for each joint venture.

Foreign investors that had signed agreements included 11 U.S. companies, among them the Monsanto Bureaucracy fears development of Polish Solidarity-type upsurge by Soviet workers.

Company, Occidental Petroleum, and SSMC Inc. (Singer sewing machine). Fifteen others are in negotiations.

Kislenko said U.S. government restrictions on the export of advanced technology to the Soviet Union and on imports of joint venture products to the United States are serious obstacles to overcome.

If this joint-venture plan materializes as projected, it can undermine the state monopoly of foreign trade in the USSR and open up paths for reestablishing private ownership in the means of production-conceivably even threatening socialist property relations in the long term.

Bureaucratic waste

Such desperate measures are dictated by the terrible wastefulness and inefficiency of the bureaucratic apparatus, and by deep social unrest. These factors are also the stimulus for recent political reforms proposed by 8 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1987 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

A pledge to combat the inertia of the bureaucratic system is what brought Gorbachev to the top almost two years ago in the power struggle within the Soviet bureaucracy. He promised to drive out the bureaucratic drones and eliminate waste.

At a closed meeting of Soviet writers, on June 19 last year, Gorbachev exposed the crisis of the bureaucracy and the turmoil within it. What he said has not yet been published in the Soyiet Union, but notes taken at the meeting have veen publishea in europe, first in Italy and later elsewhere. Excerpts first appeared in The New York Times on Dec. 22.

Even these snatches reveal the convulsive state of the bureaucratic regime.

Gorbachev told the writers that "a very profound and serious struggle lies ahead." Why?

"Take Gosplan [the government agency in charge of production plans]," Gorbachev said. "For Gosplan there exist no authorities, no general secretaries, no central committees. They do what they want. The situation they like best is for someone to come into their private office and ask for a million, for 20 tractors, for 40,000-to beg them."

Gorbachev said, "We have very many people who take advantage of their position. Nothing is exploited as much as official position."

He continued, "Our enemies...have begun a campaign against our leadership using all means, including terror. They write about the apparat that broke Khrushchev's neck, and about the apparat that will now break the neck of the new leadership."

"Disordered economy"

"The economy is very disordered," Gorbachev said to the writers. "We lag in all indices. In 1969 we had a problem in Stavropol-what to do with meat and milk. We were awash in butter. Today there is nothing. The relations between money and goods, income and goods have been lost.

"We have forgotten how to work. Not only that, we have forgotten how to work in democratic conditions. This is very difficult.

"Not a few people are drunks, profiteers, embezzlers, but mostly, of course, bureaucrats-those people who do not want to part with their rights."

What must be done?

"Those who think that we can restructure in a month or two are naïve!" he said. "This has taken shape over years and will demand massive efforts and titanic labors. If we don't involve the people, nothing will come of it. All our plans depend on influencing the people."

Gorbachev invoked the Leninist tradition. "Why do I constantly sit with volumes of Lenin, looking through them, looking for approaches? Because it is never too late to consult with Lenin."

He talked about the meetings of the Politburo [of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. "There are clashes, arguments," he said. "For two, three years we postponed things, but now we want to act."

Bureaucratic dilemma

These revelations of Gorbachev grasp at the problems facing the Soviet bureaucracy. Yet the bureaucracy is incapable of reconciling these problems. It doesn't know how or where to act.

"The restructuring is progressing with great difficulty," Gorbachev said. "We have no opposition party. How then can we control ourselves? Only through criticism and self-criticism. Most important-through glasnost (openness). We're learning here, too.

"We're restructuring everything, from the general secretary to the rank-and-file communist. Democratism without glasnost does not exist. At the same time, democracy without limits is anarchy. That's why it will be difficult."

This is the terrible dilemma of every bureaucrat. They call upon the masses for help to make their system work. They speak in the name of democracy. But they don't want to give up their privileges. Proletarian "democracy," if properly controlled, is alright. But too much decision-making by the mass of people becomes "anarchy."

Deep ferment

Since Gorbachev made his appeal to the Soviet writers, a series of important developments occurred as the old year closed out Un Dec. 20, Gorbachev phoned the exiled dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov to inform him that his cruel exile to the isolated city of Gorky, where he had been kept under virtual house arrest since 1980, was ended. Sakharov was invited back to Moscow to resume his work as a physicist. Also Sakharov's companion, Yelena G. Bonner, was released and invited back to Moscow...

Almost simultaneous with the announcement that Sakharov and Bonner were released, the Soviet press agency Tass reported riots in Alma-Ata, capital of the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan. Several hundred students were said to have been involved in anti-Russian rioting.

Roy Medvedev, the well-known author and critic of the bureaucracy, was reported from Moscow as having sper may mol ethr in o and the con pro US: inte but COI SOI pro wit the for bur the the Sta left Par the Me unr pol to 1 unk the bur pac an Re pea ser: Dis the its kul deb this die in ' con Sta VIC of: tha anc inc Ge ma br Stri in CO1 rev by FO SUJ mc ser cla "th

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Gorbachev's reforms are designed to try to involve workers to spur economy. To accomplish this, the bureaucrats are trying to walk a IO he are we nS is DW sm ISt ral im le, ill ey ey an les et as int el en id. liS at SS he ed an he ng speculated that the unusually frank report of the rioting may have been an excuse by the bureaucracy to begin a more extensive crackdown on political cronyism among ethnic Kazhaks and send a warning to ethnic minorities in other republics.

Another example of the palsied hand of the bureaucracy and efforts by the Gorbachev faction to "restructure". is the open discussion of public issues in the Soviet press.

This centers upon disputes, wrangles, and delays in the construction of hydroelectric power plants and irrigation projects. Such projects involve adjoining republics in the USSR and are complicated by conflicting national interests and cultural heritage.

Trotsky's heritage

In his efforts to cut a path through the welter of bureaucratic confusion and sloth, Gorbachev said he consults the writings of Lenin. He should also spend some time with the writings of Leon Trotsky, where the problems and dangers created by the bureaucracy are dealt with more extensively.

Lenin was only beginning to devote full attention to the alarming growth of the bureaucracy in 1923. He formed a bloc with Trotsky at that time to curb the bureaucracy which had already found its representative in the person of Joseph Stalin, who as general secretary of the party was protecting bureaucratic privileges.

Lenin died in 1924, before the struggle against the Stalin degeneracy could be organized, and Trotsky was left almost alone in the top leadership of the Bolshevik Party to continue the tasks that he and Lenin had set for themselves.

For the next 16 years, until his assassination in Mexico by an agent of Stalin, Trotsky continued his unremitting struggle against the reactionary policies and political crimes of the Soviet bureaucracy.

'Trotsky's collected writings, all of which are available to the Gorbachev faction in the bureaucracy but almost unknown to the Soviet public, trace the degeneration of the Soviet state under the impact of the rising bureaucracy from 1923 to the signing of the Stalin-Hitler pact and the start of World War II.

In 1936 Trotsky, then in exile, wrote his most famous analysis and indictment of the Soviet bureaucracy, "The Revolution Betrayed." There he made a prediction:

"On the historic order of the day stands not the peaceful socialist development of 'one country,' but a series of world disturbances, wars, and revolutions. Disturbances are inevitable also in the domestic life of the Soviet Union. If the bureaucracy was compelled in its struggle for a planned economy to dekulakize the kulak, the working class will be compelled to debureaucratize the bureaucracy."

Much has happened in the last half century to confirm this...

Fissures in the bureaucracy When Stalin, the blood-thirsty tyrant in the Kremlin, died in 1953, his heirs divided in a fierce faction struggle in which Khrushchev emerged the victor. Some other contenders were shot or otherwise disappeared In 1956, Khrushchev exposed some of the crimes of Stalin, "rehabilitated" some of the most prominent victims who had been murdered, and released thousands of others from concentration camps. There were signs at that time of a new awakening of intellectuals, students, and workers in the Soviet Union.

This anti-bureaucracy sentiment and striving for greater individual freedom extended to the states of Eastern Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, where mass uprisings occurred during this period and were brutally suppressed...

This series of developments within the Soviet orbit strengthened the hand of a regrouped right-wing faction in Moscow, fearful that relaxation of bureaucratic controls would lead to a genuine working-class revolution against the bureaucracy.

Khrushchev was removed from office in 1964, replaced by Brezhnev, the cautious and conservative bureaucrat. For nearly 20 years, dissidents were hounded, initiative suppressed.

By 1980, with the rise of the magnificent Solidarnosc movement of the Polish working class, it was clear that a new resurgence was in the making and that important sectors of the new socially powerful Soviet working class would sooner or later become affected.

That time has now arrived...When Gorbachev says, "the society is ripe for change," he knows what talking about. He knows change is coming. He hopes to influence the direction of that change.

Today's realities

In a recent article on Soviet culture and the new glasnost—or political openness (Dissent, Winter 1987), Roy Medvedev tells about a popular play in Moscow, "The Dictatorship of Conscience," which he says takes up the contrast between Lenin's ideas and what has happened since his death.

One of the characters, called the "Outsider," is played by the author, who gets into the argument and invites audience participation. In one of the early presentations, a spectator argued:

"My grandfather was a socialist and a Menshevik. He was executed in the 1930s. We talk a lot about democracy these days. But experience tells us that there can be no real democracy as long as there are no opposition parties."

The Soviet people have learned, conversely, from one generation to the next that without an organized opposition there can be no democracy, not even the freedom to protest. But when this freedom is suppressed, forbidden by law or by an uncontrolled and illegal police apparatus, the opposition forms and develops underground.

Some efforts are now being made to control illegal arrests. A Jan. 8 report from Moscow (Philip Taubman, New York Times) says several high-ranking KGB [Soviet secret police] officials were dismissed for the illegal arrest last year of a Soviet newspaper reporter who exposed government corruption in a coal-mining region of the Ukraine.

The arrest was made in collaboration with and at the behest of the corrupt mining officials. The head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, announced "additional measures to ensure the strict observance of law in the activities of the state security organs."

These "additional measures" are not specified. Nor is it known whether this comes as a result of the factional struggle within the bureaucracy or organized opposition to the bureaucracy—or a combination of both.

What is clear is that news of such developments, as its meaning begins to be better understood, is bound to have profound repercussions in the organized labor movement, and the radical and socialist movement, in all capitalist countries.

Destroying a crude amalgam Workers in the United States, especially those in the conservative union movement, have been led to believe that the Soviet bureaucracy is an inevitable consequence of the 1917 workers' revolution against the czar. They are constantly told that the bureaucratic regime in the Soviet Union is communism. An uprising against the bureaucracy will destroy this crude amalgam.

But illusions about the Soviet Union and the bureaucracy among the working class of the capitalist world are more complex.

Millions of workers and peasants, especially in the colonial and semi-colonial countries, look to the Soviet government for military and financial help in their struggles against imperialist oppression.

They also look to the Soviet government for guidance, which is usually connected to whatever other assistance they may receive. This "political guidance" is the class-collaborationist politics of the bureaucracy, an extension of Soviet diplomacy which seeks "peaceful coexistence" with the capitalist nations and is presently offering to open the borders of the Soviet Union to private enterprise and capital investment. [See article on "peaceful coexistence" on back page of this section.] The revolutionary overthrow of the bureaucracy by the Soviet working class will reestablish solidarity with the workers throughout the world and bring the full weight of the gains of the 1917 Russian Revolution behind the struggles for national independence and social transformation everywhere...

A program for the USSR When Leon Trotsky drafted the transitional program for socialist revolution, "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International," in 1938, he included a section on the Soviet Union and the problems of the transition there.

This draft program was adopted later that year at the founding congress of the Fourth International and remains the basic programmatic guideline for that world organization.

At the time he wrote, Trotsky was acutely aware of the divisions within the Soviet bureaucracy and knew about the different factions. He understood and tried to explain that the privileged strata of Soviet society which the governmental bureaucracy serves and upon which it rests was not homogeneous. There were many divisions within it. These divisions were also expressed in the governing circles, as is the case today.

Trotsky entertained no illusions that the bureaucracy was capable of self-reform. Its grip on the economy and government could be broken only by a revolutionary uprising of the Soviet workers, according to his analysis.

The programmatic demands for the Soviet section of the Fourth International at that time included the following:

against social inequality and political oppression; for the freedom of the trade unions and factory committees, for the right of assembly and freedom of the press; return to the soviets not only their free democratic form but also their class content...drive the bureaucracy and the new aristocracy out of the soviets; legalization of soviet parties; ravicinn of the nlanned ernnnmu from ton tn bottom in the interests of the producers and consumers, reorganization of the collective farms in accordance with the will and in the interests of the workers there engaged; replace the reactionary international policy of the bureaucracy by the policy of proletarian internationalism. Down with secret diplomacy!

This section of the "Transitional Program" ended with declaration: "There is but one party capable of leading e Soviet masses in insurrection-the party of the surth International.

"Down with the bureaucratic gang of Cain-Stalin!

"Long live socialist democracy!

"Long live the international socialist revolution!"

The best service the workers' movement throughout the world can render to the peoples of the Soviet Union today is to help ensure that these inspiring and prophetic words reach the ears of the Soviet workers.

production in a crisis-ridden "democratic" tight-rope.

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