Romanian miners illustrate a point

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... Soviet coup and U.S. left 18 SOCIALIST ACTION OCTOBER 1991 Fierce resistance by striking Romanian coal miners to "market reforms"

illustrates the difficulties facing the bureaucratic caste all over Eastern Europe and the USSR in restoring capitalism.

On Sept. 26, thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley arrived in trains they had commandeered to join 4000 compatriots in Bucharest who had stormed government buildings the day before. Battles with government forces lasted three days, as the miners were joined by Bucharest residents in protesting the regime's economic policies.

The miners in Bucharest were demanding higher pay, lower prices, and the resignation of the government.

The protests forced Prime Minister Petre Roman to resign. After President Ion Illescu promised to form a commission to study the miner's grievances, the miners went home.

But the state radio reported that a general strike continued by the Mining Trade Union Confederation, which does not represent the Jiu Valley miners, demanding government subsidies and a halt to the closure of so-called unprofitable mines.

Prime Minister Roman's "market reform" policies not only include shutting down mines and throwing miners out of work, but have "sliced standards of living, widened the gap between rich and poor and sent inflation soaring to 170 percent,"

according to the Associated Press.

Roman, himself a former member of the Stalinist Communist Party, (continued from page bureaucracy under Gorbachev to allow more "glasnost" or openness as the ruling caste tried to chart a course that would keep their privileges intact. This opening has been increasingly seized by the masses to further their interests, but we shouldn't be giving praise to Gorbachev for this any more than we should give praise to the U.S. Congress for "granting" Blacks the right to vote in the 1960s or to the Supreme Court for "granting" women the right to choose in 1973.

At best, Gorbachev's "democracy" is parliamentary democracy a la the capitalist West, and is counterposed to the regeneration of workers democracy through democratic soviets, trade unions and factory committees.

The reality is that the bureaucracy, under whatever "democratic" fig leaf, has to move towards a "strong state" in order to defeat the workers' resistance to the restoration of capitalism. Gorbachev's proven willingness to seek emergency powers is more important than his lip-service to democracy.

Any softness towards any wing of the bureaucracy in this situation will lead to disorientation. We must oppose not only the coup plotters, but also vigorously oppose the new government.

The choice looming before the working people of the USSR and Eastern Europe is stark. Either the bureaucracy will overthrow the still-existing working-class property forms and reintroduce capitalism or the workers will overthrow the bureaucracy and reestablish workers democracy. There will be no halfway houses.

Keeping this in mind, we now turn to the way forward offered by Solidarity. Their statement says: "The logic of such movements [trade unions, social movements, and political parties], particularly in the working class, would not point to creating capitalism.

"Working people, instead of turning the factories that they built over to foreign investors or bureaucratsturned-owners, will want to 'own' and control their workplaces themselves and attacked the miners' action as a "Communist coup." He charged the miners with seeking "the dissolution of all the democratic institutions in this country," in an interview on French TV. "Romania has broken with Communism for too short a time for the old structures and mentalities to be able to disappear," he said.

Roman thus tried to smear the miners as supporters of the hated Stalinist dictator Ceaucescu, who was overthrown in an armed insurrection in 1989. But these miners were in the forefront of the 1989 insurrection.

What Roman really fears and hates, are the "mentalities" of the workers who resist moves towards capitalist restoration. It is through their own struggles that the workers will come to understand the difference between Stalinism and real communism, which, after all, is just the generalization of the movement of the working class towards its emancipation. Roman, by calling them communists, will help their education.

After Ceaucescu was overthrown and executed, the bureaucratic caste reorganized as the National Salvation Front and established a new government. Like the other regimes in Eastern Europe and the USSR, it seeks a way out of the crisis it faces through the restoration of capitalism.

But the miners have shown that won't be so easy, especially in Romania, where the workers overthrew one regime arms in hand, and have given notice they can do so again.- B.S.

to negotiate contracts with other enterprises. This would be a first step toward workers' self-management, which can only succeed it worker-controlled demo. ratic planning replaces the ol bureaucratic 'command' system."

The idea of the workers owning and controlling their own factories and negotiating contracts with other enterprises is not a step toward workers' self-management. That would be a step away from state property and the goal of socialized property. It would amount to the factories becoming cooperatives, a form of private property.

The only way each factory would be able to "negotiate" with the others would be on the basis of the market and competition.

There could be no overall planning. The blind forces of the market would begin to dominate economic decisions, even if they were made democratically by the workers in each enterprise. This would lead to growing inequality and the imperialist attack in the second world war in spite of its bureaucratic deformations. Politically, they were bending to imperialist pressure, as was seen also in their refusal to defend colonial China against imperialist Japan during the war.

This anti-Marxist theory has been definitively refuted by the recent. events in the USSR. It is now clear that the bureaucratic caste does not represent a new historical system unforeseen by Marxism, but a temporary excrescence on the workers state-a parasite, not a new organism.

The bureaucratic caste itself has come to realize that the only hope for its members as a privileged minority lies not in the continuation of its old methods of enrichment through sucking the blood of the nationalized economy, but in a restoration of capitalism. There is no "third way"—either forward toward socialism on the basis of workers' power or back to capitalism.

We note that Solidarity is opposed to a return to capitalism and recognizes this would mean great hardship for the Soviet workers and peasants. This position contradicts the theory of "bureaucratic collectivism," but it is always better to be right than consistent. without similar measures.

"Contrary to what is implied by the Western bourgeois media, neither 'democracy' nor the partisans of a 'free market economy' have consolidated their hold on a post-coup USSR. The situation in the Soviet Union is extremely fluid. Powerful elements will attempt to plunder state property, unleash foreign investment, slash social benefits, and provide a bourgeois legitimization of already-existing economic inequalities within Soviet society. Already competing nationalisms, some assuming extremely reactionary manifestations, have begun to make significant headway among different sectors of the peoples of the USSR.

"There is a potential for immense class struggles waged by the Soviet working people, in some cases coexisting or combined with national liberation struggles. There is also potential for destructive inter-ethic conflicts and the emergence of right-wing, fascist-like movements. In more ways than one, there is the possibility of civil war.

"The outcome of this struggle is yet to be determined. While the fighting capacity of the Soviet masses cannot be doubted, they so far lack mass organiza-