Gorbachev uses emergency decree to ram through pro-capitalist laws

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been important experiences for today's new generation of activists.

There is also a growing awareness that it will be the young men and women from African-American, Chicano, and other oppressed nationalities who will be dying if fighting breaks out.

Campus groups against U.S. intervention in the Middle East are forming rapidly throughout the country. Students from over 30 campuses in the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, attended the Sept. 14 Berkeley teach-in.

Immediate opposition to this war has also been expressed by youth in the Armed Forces. Jeff Paterson, an active duty marine, and Eric Larsen, a marine reservist, have refused to go to Saudi Arabia to fight for oil company profits. While they are the best known, others are taking similar stands.

When soldiers start coming home wounded or in body bags, we can expect that opposition will sharply increase.

A nationally coordinated series of demonstrations on Oct. 20 have been called in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, (continued on page 22)

Barely one year after the much-heralded Supreme Soviet was convened, President Mikhail Gorbachev is ruling through emergency governmental decree.

With unprecedented food shortages gripping the capital city of Moscow and national rebellions in most of the 15 Soviet republics, Gorbachev appealed to the Supreme Soviet to grant him emergency powers to push through his far-reaching perestroika pro-capitalist "reforms" at an accelerated pace. The Supreme Soviet, he explained, had the chance "once and for all to end the total state monopoly ownership that is ruining us" and to adopt a system based on private property.

Leonid Abalkin, Soviet vice premier in charge of economic reform, was even more blunt about why emergency rule was required. "The country's economic situation is so perilous," he told the Soviet newspaper Sovietskaya Rossiya, "[that] we are at the edge of an abyss. Any careless move can push us over."

Gorbachev's top economic adviser, Stanislav Shatalin, is proposing the adoption of the "500-Day Plan," which has already been approved by the Russian Republic under the leadership of its president, Boris Yeltsin.

Gorbachev has accepted in principle the avowedly pro-capitalist "500-Day Plan" as the solution to the mounting Soviet crisisbut he wants to make a few adjustments in order to preserve "maximum accord in society and not confrontation." Realizing that his perestroika economic program will victimize millions of workers and peasants—as similar pro-capitalist policies in East Germany have already visibly done, the seasoned Soviet president wants to avoid a civil Gorbachev's five-year plan For the past five years, since he first admitted the Soviet economy was in shambles, Gorbachev has proposed a series of capitalist market reforms aimed at resolving the crisis of bureaucratic mismanagement that has ravaged the Soviet economy.

But rather than return to the example of genuine soviet rule and democratic planning of the early years of the Russian Revolution-prior to its degeneration under Joseph Stalin-Gorbachev looked to the capitalist West for a solution to the crisis.

Gorbachev's perestroika program had noth(continued on page 17)