Gorbachev backpedals to keep bureaucracy afloat

Scan page 13

Siberian coal miners, on third day of sit-down strike, resist perestroika. 12 SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1990 When Mikhail Gorbachev became head of the Communist Party (CPSU) in 1985, he was reportedly stunned by what he read in the confidential reports prepared for him. An economy which had been treading water for several years under former Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev was now beginning to sink.

But Gorbachev has received even worse news in the last few months. The four-year shock treatment of perestroika economic reforms has not worked. To paraphrase one top Soviet editor who was personally rebuked by Gorbachev for using inflammatory language, 'The economy is adrift in a sea topped with gasoline waiting to be lit."

Last summer's strike of 500,000 coal miners could have easily been the spark. The embers are still burning. In November, most of the 34,000 coal miners in Vorkuta (Siberia) voted to restart their strike because of government procrastination in satisfying their demands for more pay, more availability of food and consumer supplies, and official recognition of their strike committees.

Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhoy gave us a glimpse of just how bad it is when he reported to the first session of the Supreme Soviet that 40 million people live below the poverty line; 40 percent of the country's industrial plants are worn out; the annual budget deficit is around $162 billion; and the foreign debt is $50 billion and rising fast.

Reform measures put on hold Until recently, most facts and figures on the Soviet economy have been concealed from the public. But the long food lines, ... Romania (continued from page 11: “Dictator Ce Romania”) committees and soviets (or workers' councils).

Following the 1917 Russian Revolution led by Lenin and Trotsky, these councils, organized from the local to the national institutiens of workers enter. Tovey decided institutions of workers' the basic economic and political questions facing the newly formed workers' state.

The dictatorship of the few—of capitalwas replaced, for the first time in human history, by the rule of the vast majority through organizations of their own making, run in their own interests.

The destruction of the soviets under Stalin was accompanied by the murder of virtually every leader of the 1917 revolution, tens of thousands of their militant supporters, and the parallel slaughter of tens of millions of Soviet workers and peasants.

Soviet/American "partnership"

Worried about the armed rising of the workers and students in Romania, the Bush administration's spokesperson, Secretary of State James Baker, publicly suggested to Mikhail Gorbachev that the USSR seriously consider sending Soviet troops to aid the new government of still-tainted Stalinists.

This bold and thoroughly reactionary suggestion was made in the context of the new worldwide détente between the United States and the USSR. Previous agreements of this type, reached in the name of "peaceful coexistence," were based on the spurious idea embraced by Josef Stalin in 1924 that socialism could be built in the USSR alone.

In reality, peaceful coexistence meant bargaining away the struggles of the workers and their allies worldwide in exchange for the preservation of the privileges of the Soviet bureaucracy at home. Support for the working class, as it time and again confronted capitalist oppression, was subordinated to deals with imperialist goverments.

A key aspect of the new détente involves U.S. aid to the Soviet and Eastern European Stalinist bureaucracies for the purpose of helping them to maintain their rule over the masses. The United States is fully prepared to assist in propping up these discredited regimes, especially if their future investscarcity of most consumer goods, and rising prices are no secret to any Soviet citizen.

So it really is not too surprising that Soviet President Gorbachev recently announced that some key planks of his perestroika economic reforms would be temporarily abandoned. Gorbachev and Prime Minister Ryzhov warned the second session of the Congress of People's Deputies meeting in December that immediate steps had to be taken to diffuse widespread and growing discontent in the population.

Specifically, price subsidies to consumers will remain in effect until at least 1991. This will ensure the stabilization of prices for basic necessities and buffer the exorbitant prices being charged by private enterprises— which presumably still will be encouraged to prosper.

Private businesses (or "cooperatives," as they are called) primarily function in the rements are guaranteed.

The United States prefers a partnership with compliant Stalinists to the alternative of uncontrolled workers' mobilizations ed at defending the social gains which were achieved with the elimination of capitalism.

More than anything, the U.S. rulers fear the overthrow of Stalinist rule and its replacement with a democratic system of workers' rule based on the actual organizatjens of the workers themselves-that is, real socialism.

Hard as they look, the world's capitalist pundits have not been able to point to a single example of the Eastern European working class demanding an end to the social gains they have achieved. There have been no mass calls to end the system of free medical care, childcare, and education that still prevails today in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

Similarly, there have been no demonstrations to end the state's provision of housing, basic foods, and energy at below actual cost, not to mention the lifelong job security and associated pensions—which provide, unlike here in the United States, a livable income (albeit at low standards).

To the contrary, a key factor explaining the mass mobilizations in Eastern Europe is the explosive opposition generated by the austerity measures imposed by the various Stalinist regimes in consort with the dictates of the IMF.

Paying off the $32 billion IMF debt by increasing prices and lowering the standard of living of the Polish people in 1979, for example, was a chief factor in the rise of the independent trade union Solidarity.

Today, in exchange for capitalist investment to stave off internal opposition to Stalinist rule, the Soviet bureaucracy promises to assist the United States and its imperialist allies in maintaining the rule of oppressive capitalist regimes from South Africa and the Middle East to Central and South America.

In this context, while the Bush administation, in the name of saving lives and human rights, urged Soviet intervention in Romania, it proceeded to install its own regime in a bloody invasion of Panama that cost the lives of hundreds of Panamanian workers.

Likewise, in the name of "peaceful settlements of regional disputes," the USSR condemned the Sandinista government of Nicaragua for providing aid to El Salvador's Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, tail or service sector. While this may not be the most decisive part of a nation's economy, it is the one where the average citizen has the most contact. The number of cooperatives has grown from 13,921 in 1987 to 77,548 in 1988. Two million people are employed in these ventures.

Soviet newspapers regularly report the complaints of consumers concerning the high prices charged by cooperatives who take advantage of shortages to reap extensive profits.

To avert an immediate confrontation over this issue, Gorbachev's revised economic plan also calls for pumping $106 billion worth of consumer goods into the state-controlled market, nearly four times the annual increase in recent years. (Under Stalin in the years 1929-1952, industrial production received nine times more capital than light industry producing consumer items.)

Esteban Volkov. Pierre Broué, Susan Weissman, Nat Weinstein, Paul Siegel, Ralph Schoenman, ¿bigniew nowalewski, werry roley, mayaen retry and charbo which was struggling to topple the brutal regime of Alfredo Cristiani. A succession of U.S.-supported regimes in El Salvador over the past decade are responsible for the deathsquad murders of 70,000 Salvadorans.

Historic role of working class The events unfolding in Eastern Europe today are truly spectacular. It is as if history were on videotape, and someone was pressing fast forward. Each day, another myth is shattered-and with it comes an increased understanding on the part of the workers that they are the ultimate source of power and progress in society.

With the Soviet admission that the 1939 Stalin-Hitler pact constituted a violation of the sovereignty of the Polish and Eastern European people, the masses in Lithuania and the other Baltic nations press harder for their long-denied national rights.

With the opening of Czechoslovakia's borders to East Germans, the Czechoslovak workers themselves were inspired to take to These are all signals that Gorbachev is worried that a social explosion like the ones which are rocking Eastern Europe will derail his attempt to radically restructure the Soviet economy through the phased introduction of the profit motive.

It is these broader political considerations, and not Gorbachev's bureaucratic jousting with conservative apparatchiks-as most capitalist media analysts claim—which accounts for the latest retreat from some of his more ambitious market-type reforms (such as eliminating price subsidies and introducing unemployment in the name of costaccounting efficiency). Gorbachev's latest moves are also an admission that his market reforms will indeed cause severe social disruption.

Austerity takes hold in Poland In Poland, it is only the extreme popularity of government officials who were leaders of the once-banned Solidarity union that has temporarily blocked mass mobilizations against perestroika-type market reforms. Austerity measures there have led to 400 percent inflation, high prices, and the prospect of growing unemployment.

Janusz Trzcinski, a Communist Party member of parliament, said: "People within our party are amazed that Mazowiecki [the Solidarity adviser who was elected Prime Minister] can do all of this. If we had done one-tenth of that, the country would have gone up in flames."

Gorbachev must proceed more cautiously than Mazowiecki, who was previously jailed by the Polish regime. Unlike Mazowiecki, Gorbachev rose from within the despised bureaucratic machine, a machine which daily shows its kinship with another, newly emerging, privileged section of society seeking private profit at the expense of the majority.

In the short term, Gorbachev can sidestep an immediate confrontation with the Soviet working class, but he can't dance around the fact that the objective of perestroika reforms is to lower the living standards of millions of people for the profit of a few.

Walnut Publishing's new Publishing's book "Gorbacher's USSR: Is Stalinism Dead" (208 pages with photos) analyzes currer events in the Soviet Union against the backdrop of the struggle for socialist democracy waged by Leon Trotsky and his supporters against Josef Stalin the 1920s and '30s.

To order, send $9.95 (includes $1 for postage an handling) to Walnut Publishing Co., 3435 Army St., Rm. 308, San Francisco, CA 94110.

the streets to decide their fate, followed by the Bulgarians and now the heroic people of Romania.

Europe is alive with revolution. For the first time in 40 years, the working class is poised to resume its historic march for liberation from all forms of oppression— capitalist and Stalinist alike.

The victories achieved by massive working-class mobilization and organization will not be lost on workers the world over—including those in the United States, who have endured almost two decades of concessions and retreat at the hands of the capitalist class and its political representatives.

Revolutionary socialists welcome the uprisings in Eastern Europe with open arms and great joy. They look forward to lending whatever assistance they can as the working masses strive to build their own revolutionary parties, the necessary next step to forever sweep away the decaying Stalinist regimes and open the road to worldwide socialist revolution.

----- pull-quotes -----

Gorbachev's USSRs I's-Stalinism Dead: Ansallection ofiessays in defense- ai socialisi democracy