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Perestroika means hardship for workers 8 SOCIALIST ACTION AUGUST 1988 The recent conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) was designed to codify Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness) and perestroika (eco nomic restructuring) programs.

The June 28 to July 1 meeting of close to 5000 delegates was the first delegated party conference since 1941. When Gorbachev first proposed the conference in January 1987, his goal was to go over the head of the CPSU's Central Committee in his effort to block opposition to his "reform" program.

But in the weeks leading up to the conference, it became clear that the "hardline" wing in the party leadership headed by Yegor Ligachev was determined to use its role in the party apparatus to prevent Gorbachev's supporters from being elected delegates.

Many of Gorbachev's closest friends and allies, such as Yuri Afanasyev, the chief anti-Stalinist historian, were not able to get elected. This led to a momentary rift in the bureaucracy which the Soviet masses were able to take advantage of to express their own independent demands.

Discontent with the economic policies promoted by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev is rapidly mounting as the Soviet workers realize that perestroika means nothing more than austerity and belt-tightening.

The bus drivers' strike in the industrial town of Chekov in September 1987 was a dramatic example of the workers' refusal to take pay cuts imposed under a new wage system. Other signs of discontent are regularly reported in the underground, semitolerated, and even official press. One revealing account of the situation of the Soviet economy was provided by Alexander Amerisov, editor of the Soviet-American Review, who recently returned from the Soviet Union. Amerisov writes the following in the June 1988 issue of the Review, which is published monthly in For example, in the Siberian city of Omsk, 8000 people assembled at the initiative of pro-Gorbachev party members to protest the selection of delegates to the party conference. In Sakhalin, Kuybyshev, and Yaroslavl similar mass demonstrations took place.

But in a few instances, the rallies did more than demand the annulment of the mandates of the "hard-line" delegates. They also called for the removal of unpopular party officials, the legalization of independent unions and political organizations, and an end to the monopoly on political power by the ruling party. These demands, which hit at the very heart of bureaucratic rule, went far beyond the intentions of the Gorbachev reformers.

These rallies confirmed the fears of the bureaucrats who oppose glasnost on the grounds that the workers will seize the democratic openings and push them beyond the limits set by Gorbachev.

At the conference itself, the inter-bureaucratic contradictions and squabbles also surfaced. Politburo members were criticized from the floor, and for the first time since the early years of the Russian Revolution there were split votes on the arise Chicago:

"The three years of Gorbachev's rule so far have been a flop as far as a majority of the Soviet people are concerned. Gorbachev's policies, which aim to reduce government interference in the economy, ... have backfired, producing misery for the Soviet people, rather than benefiting them.

"Wages are down. Prices are up.

Shortages are even greater than under Brezhnev. Even sugar, of which the Soviet Union is the largest producer in the world, and which was never in short supply, is now rationed. During the nearly four months I spent in the Soviet Union, only once was I able to buy fish—a commodity that was always plentiful and cheap there.

"In a country with no unemployment insurance, Gorbachev's badly thought-through "staff reduction" policonference resolutions.

Inter-bureaucratic conflict

But it would be extremely shortsighted to think that the party conference reflected the new "socialist renewal" which, according to Gorbachev's fellow-travelers, is supposedly sweeping the Soviet Union.

The severe limits on democracy were immediately apparent. Criticism of the past was tolerated by Gorbachev, but criticism of the present that goes beyond the limits set by the ruling bureaucracy was shunned.

This was evident in the "debate" between Boris Yeltsin, the former Moscow party chief, and Yegor Ligachev. Even though Yeltsin was allowed to present his views, his demotion in the party was upheld.

Yeltsin's differences with Ligachev are not ones of political principle. Both uphold the basic institutions of bureaucratic rule. If, however, Yeltsin had defended the democratic rights of the workers to control and manage the production and distribution of goods—or if he had defended the Leninist principle of self-determination for the Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh—his fate would most likely have been similar to that of Paruir Airikyan, the Armenian dissident of ORDE cies are inflicting great hardship on the people. What's worse, a lay-off in the Soviet Union may mean not only a temporary loss in income, but the devastating loss of one's place on the waiting list for many of the vital necessities that are distributed through one's place of employment. Housing is one of them.

"An old friend of mine, Uncle Vanya, a blue-collar worker who is over 50 and lives with his wife and four children in a one-room apartment without running water, toilet, or shower, took his present job as a production worker because if offered him the opportunity to get a bigger apartment. That was eight years ago.

Now he is faced with the possibility of a lay-off, a new job, and a spot at the bottom of the waiting list for who was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the Soviet Union.

The conference was called to reorganize the ruling Communist Party bureaucracy to adjust it to the developing political unrest of the workers and masses of the Soviet Union. A central aim of the conference was to gain support for the new economic policies introduced by Gorbachev. To accomplish this task, the party leadership found it necessary to grant a limited and tightly controlled democratic opening to the Soviet people.

Reviving the sagging economy Following the examples of China and the Eastern European workers' states, the Soviet leaders are trying to revive the Soviet economy by making profitable offerings to world capitalism. This has entailed allowing the development of private enterprise in the Soviet Union and the use of capitalist "incentives" such as piecework, inflation, and unemployment to increase the productivity of the Soviet workers and farmers.

The Soviet bureaucracy is hoping that the current weakness of the world capitalist system, together with guarantees for repatriating large profits, will encourage the imperialists to risk investing in the Soviet economy. Gorbachev is gambling that his new economic policies will increase the production of consumer goods to quiet the discontent of the masses.

In his conclusion to the party conference, Gorbachev warned that "there is no alternative to perestroika." He also called for "serious critical analysis to work out the policy of perestroika and later to transform it into practical decisions on the main directions."

What Gorbachev means by "serious critical analysis" has been spelled out in numerous recent articles in Novy Mir, the Soviet Union's leading political and literary journal. These articles contend that the centralized planned economy is the basis for the bureaucratic mismanagement of society—not the bureaucracy itself. The articles call for the introduction of a Soviet market economy.

In a recent article in Novy Mir, one author, Vasily Selyunin, goes so far as to criticize V.I. Lenin for abolishing private property (San Francisco Chronicle, June 7, 1988). The author also accuses Lenin of laying the basis for the forced labor camps under Stalin, though he praises Lenin's flexibility in promoting the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the early 1920s. [During housing-—another eight or more years' wait. 'Bastard' is what he called Gorbachev.

"The wife of another friend of mine took a low-paying job as a technician in order to get their daughter placed in a kindergarten offered by that state-owned company. It was a year ago. Now she is laid off and looking for another job. Her husband asks: 'Will we have to wait another year to get our daughter into kindergarten? She will be ready to go to regular school in one year.' "Gorbachev is violating the social contract: The state pays people very little for their work, but takes upon itself the obligation to provide them with some vital services. Gorbachev wants the state to do less, but he gives people no more money to do it for themselves.

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the NEP, the Bolsheviks leaders allowed the introduction of limited capitalist market mechanisms to revive a war-torn economy.] The reference to the NEP is, of course, used by the pro-Gorbachev intellectuals to justify the present economic policies and to give them Lenin's stamp of approval. But Selyunin ignores the fact that the workers' and peasants' "soviets"—or councils— under Lenin were the pillars of the most democratic form of government in the history of the world.

Selyunin also overlooks the defeat of the revolution in Germany and the poverty— caused by the civil war and the invasion by thirteen capitalist countries, including the United States-which forced the retreat to the NEP and laid the material basis for the eventual rise of Stalin.

Stalin had "red professors" to justify himself as the continuator of Lenin. Now Gorbachev has his own "red professors" for the same purpose. In fact, the present policies more accurately reflect the views advocated by Nikolai Bukharin in the late 1920s. Bukharin's recent rehabilitation is a reflection of the rehabilitation of his economic policies.

An organ of the bourgeoisie An accurate description of the Soviet bureaucracy was written by Leon Trotsky in "The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International" exactly 50 years ago. Trotsky wrote:

"The Soviet Union emerged from the October Revolution as a workers' state. State ownership of the means of production, a necessary prerequisite to socialist development, opened up the possibility of a rapid growth of the productive forces. But the apparatus of the workers' state underwent a complete degeneration at the same time: It was transformed from a weapon of the working class into a weapon of bureaucratic violence against the working class and more and economy must take under the bureaucracy.

The reform section of the bureaucracy now dominant in the Soviet leadership, in seeking to cope with these crucial problems of the economy, has found it necessary to pursue a policy of greater openness concerning the past as well as the present. To deal with the restrictions of the command system, it was necessary to deal with the trials as a turning-point in history that enabled the command system to be built.

However, just as Lenin said of Alexander Il's freeing of the serfs in 1861, "Reforms carried out by feudal landowners cannot help but be feudal in nature," so it can be said that reforms carried out by bureaucrats cannot help but be bureaucratic in nature.

Movement from below

The reforms of Gorbachev, coming from above, have been halting, incomplete, and taken often at the expense of the workers. They have, however, begun to stimulate movement from below. In the continuation and acceleration of this movement against bureaucratic opposition by the masses lies the hope of the future.

So, too, the process of rehabilitation has proceeded slowly, evidently not because of a meticulous examination of the evidencethe trials had long ago collapsed of their own weight-but because of political uncertainty and a prolonged struggle behind the scenes.

Today, the big issue is the formal exoneration of Trotsky and the publication of the writings of the defendants, particularly the analyses of the rise of the bureaucracy in such works as Khristian Rakovsky's articles and Trotsky's "The Revolution Betrayed." But this is precisely where the greatest bureaucratic resistance is encountered.

When the historian Yuri Afanasiev called at a recent news conference for the rehabilitation of Trotsky and the publication of his writings, not a single Soviet

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