What the banning of the Soviet CP does and does not mean

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"It is entirely in the interests of Soviet workers an farmers that the CPSU be stripped of the billions il property they systematically stole from the wealth In the immediate aftermath of the attempted coup d'etat, wide-ranging measures serving to ban the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) have been taken by various governmental agencies in the USSR. Russian President Boris Yeltsin took the first and most aggressive actions against the CPSU and was soon followed by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and many others. (Yeltsin had begun to ban CPSU activity in the workplaces well before the coup.)

Along with the CPSU'S "dissolution," decreed by its General Secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, Yeltsin decreed the wholesale nationalization in Russia of the CPSU's vast holdings of real estate, printing plants, newspapers, and other property. Similar actions have been taken in the Ukraine, Byelorussia, Kazakhstan and other Soviet Republics.

At the same time, Yeltsin banned the party's publications, including mass-circulation dailies like Pravda and Sovyetskaya Rossiya. Most of the banned publications, however, were reborn days later with essentially the same Stalinist staffs-but now with an anti-Communist Party editorial policy.

Virtually all reports indicate that the destruction of the CPSU has been welcomed by the masses of workers and farmers who see it as a major blow to their bureaucratic oppressors. There have been no reports of protest demonstrations, nor any other evidence of anyone coming to the defense of the party of Stalin-even supporters of the coup have remained virtually silent.

Even so, the workers' movement needs to have a clear position on this question since it vitally affects the future of workers' democracy and its main enemy inside the Soviet Union, the bureaucratic dictatorship.

What was Communist Party?

The idea of outlawing a "Communist" party-Stalinist or not—evokes a justifiable apprehension in most progressive-minded people. But the CPSU was not just a political party, it was also the main political agency of repressive rule. It exercised exclusive control over every sector of the state; the government, the army, the police, the workplaces, the farms-everywhere. This massive apparatus still had 15 million members just before the coup—down from close to 25 million when it was at its height toward the end of the 1980s.

It played this role ever since this party was gradually transformed into its opposite by Joseph Stalin beginning in 1923. The coup de grace was delivered by the mass purge trials of 1936 and 1938. These staged, frameup trials "liquidated"-often by a bullet in the head—what was left of real communists inside the CPSU. From then on, membership in this blood-stained shell of the party of Lenin and Trotsky was largely restricted to bureaucrats, aspiring bureaucrats, secret police, and a smattering of broken ex-communists. It was a membership card into a life of privilege.

Complicating the matter further is the fact that it is the bureaucracy itself which has banned the CPSU. Virtually all apparatchniks who have recently transformed themselves into outspoken anti-Communists, had throughout their careers been leading members of the CPSU. They helped implement or at least acquiesced in every Stalinist atrocity-including those committed under Gorbachev's reign.

Now, the heroes of Stalinism are quitting their party as fast as they can and have become born-again "democrats" and champions of privatization. In one sense, it is no change at all. They seek only to maintain their privileges on the basis of property rights.

It is entirely in the interests of Soviet workers and farmers that the CPSU be stripped of the billions in property they systematically stole from the wealth created by workers and farmers over a more than 60-year period. It is also in the interests of Soviet workers that the CPSU, as a governmental and state institution of the bureaucratic dictatorship, be dismantled, and removed from all positions of power.

But working people should not give an iota of confidence to those carrying out these acts. The ex-Communist wing of the privileged elite cannot be entrusted with this task. They have a vested interest in destroying the CPSU for two reasons, neither of which has anything to do with why the masses hate it: first, because it has become an albatross around the bureaucracy's collective necks and, second, because it has become an instrument of a rival faction in the competition to grab the biggest shares in a Soviet economy based on capitalism. Workers and farmers should rule Is there a danger that outlawing a political party-in this case, the CPSU-could be turned against the workers? Of course. And we can be sure that when the presently small anti-Stalinist, anti-bureaucratic, anti-capitalist, created by workers and farmers…."

pro-socialist, workers' movement begins to grow under the impact of the attacks on their remaining social and economic conquests, there will be attempts by the legions of unreconstructed Stalinists to slander and smash it as a "rebirth of Stalinism" (!).

For this reason, revolutionary socialist workers and farmers must insist that only the class institutions of the workers—their strike committees, unions, and eventually the reconstitution of workers' councils (soviets)-should freely and democratically decide which parties to recognize as legal parties. 1 Gorbachev speaks for the whole of the grasping, self-serving anti-communist caste when he hypocritically declares his opposition to any "witchhunt." He had only just ceased being head of the party which had for over 60 years rooted out, imprisoned, and murdered genuine communists and other opponents of the totalitarian system he defended throughout his adult life.

Bureaucrats need not fear a "witchhunt" so long as the Gorbachevs and Yeltsins are in command! The real purpose, however, of Gorbachev's plaintive plea is to block the attack on the CPSU from becoming an attack on the bureaucracy as such. We can be certain, too, that his fear of a mass movement developing which will come to sweep the SOCIALIST ACTIO trol, is real. But in that case it would not be a witchhunt at all, it would be an organic and indispensable component of the democratization of Soviet society.

Perceptive bourgeois Soviet "experts" approaching it from their pro-capitalist viewpoint have noted. with great trepidation the likelihood of a pro-socialist, anti-bureaucratic upsurge ahead. Stephen F. Cohen, for instance, comments in the Sept. 4 New York Times:

...[FJor most Soviet citizens, Communism really meant a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Opinion polls tell us that popular demands for those social guarantees remain widespread. Some effective movement, probably dominated by Communist fundamentalists, will emerge in response to them.

After the defeat of the plotters But born-again "democrats" like Gorbachev, Yeltsin and the rest are fated to revert to their old ways. No sooner did the "democratic" bureaucrats defeat the coup plotters than did they initiate their own version of extra-legal government. For the moment it takes the form of a Yeltsin/Gorbachev-led bloc which has instituted the State Council, a transitional central government that includes leaders of ten republics. This is a rump body which for the moment supersedes the Supreme Soviet, the elected parliament of the USSR.

The State Council was sanctioned, after the fact, by the Supreme Soviet on a motion by Mikhail Gorbachev. But even such unconstitutional hat-tipping to legal procedures will soon be bypassed by whichever Bonapartist "man on a white horse" emerges from the dogfight among opposing cliques and factions.

Starting this winter, the class struggle will be heated to high temperatures by the measures necessary for restoring capitalist market conditions. Ultimately, if not this winter, workers will have no choice but to find their way to effective forms of organization of their struggle.

Despite superficial appearances of widespread rejection of socialism, the masses sense that it was bureaucratic dictatorship that failed, not socialism. They will also come to understand that socialism is not an impossible utopia, but that it is the absurdity of "socialism in one country"-and a backward country to boot— which is the pipe-dream.

Moreover, the appreciation of the authentic world-historic October Revolution, especially its example and lessons for today, have not been expunged from the collective memory of Soviet workers and farmers. It has temporarily been overshadowed by the crimes of Stalinism which falsely marched under the banner of socialism for over 60 years. This is evidenced by mass worker resistance to efforts to take away the remaining conquests of the October Revolution.

Under the impact of the sharpening class struggle, they will do what workers everywhere do; they will seek to learn from history, especially their own history. Furthermore, when the Soviet workers enter the political arena in their own name and for their own class interests, they will inevitably make their impact on the best of Soviet intellectuals. And the latter, inspired by the resumed march toward world socialism, will identify with the working class and help them separate historical fact from fiction.

The collapse of the CPSU, along with the developing crisis of world capitalism, means that the objective basis for the renewed forward march toward socialism by the Soviet and world working class is firmer now than ever before.

1. Leon Trotsky, the co-leader with V.I. Lenin of the workers' revolution of October 1917, and • the single most uncompromising opponent of the Stalinist bureaucracy, explained the fundamental guiding principle for understanding this problem of workers' democracy. He wrote in the Transitional Program: "Democratization of the soviets is impossible without legalization of soviet parties. The workers and peasants themselves by their own free vote will indicate what parties they recognize as soviet parties."

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