The best analysis that the press in this country can come up with is that Russia is simply having trouble with the transition to capitalism. A closer look reveals that there are much deeper problems than converting to a free market economy. In fact the Russian ruling class has always been aware of how western market economies work. It is a problem that goes straight to the marrow of the world economy. There are three points that must be made.
First, the Soviet Union was never a "socialist:" state, it had a system of wage labor where all industry was owned by the state, hence we use the overly convenient term to describe it, as STATE-CAPITALIST.
Second, What went on with the decline and fall of the Soviet Union was part of a tendency that can be seen at work all over the world as the welfare states of western Europe cut social services and as the United States eliminates the vestiges of its social programs.
Third, that the nations of the world can no longer afford to live up to their obligation to maintain a social welfare system. It is today in a globalized economy that wage workers, who now comprise a majority of the human race, are isolated from each other and can hardly struggle vigorously enough to keep what they have. The ex-Soviet conomy was the weakest link in the chain and therefore was the first to fall. Today in Russia workers are fighting back, it is not an offensive struggle that is being waged, rather it is a defensive struggle that marks all workers' struggles today. It is in this situation workers are trying to fight back.
Last February the government promised yet again to pay the workers all their back wages owed to them, in what was a long series of meaningless promises that Russian workers simply wont believe anymore. The strikes came to a head last September on the 18th, when a miners' strike that started in Kemerovo spread all the way to Vladivostock, caused both power shortages and sparked a power struggle between the mayor of Vladivostock and the regional governor. The quick response of miners in far eastern Russia to the miners in Kemerovo is an example of a tradition of solidarity that miners in Russia have had since the late eighties and early nineties.
The traditional litany of the mine owners is that no one is paying the bills and thus they cannot pay the workers. Tominskaya electric owes 10.3 billion roubles, Kuznetskaya electric owes 9 billion roubles. The joint stock company of Leninskcoal is owed 24 billion roubles. All this is belied by the fact that a small number of ex-stalinists and the group of bosses centered around Yeltsin have managed to take for themselves the majority of the Gross Domestic Product. According to the Financial Times these "new Russians" took 75% of the total Gross Domestic Product for the year of 1992, mostly from selling off state enterprises (FT 5/31/96).
Even air traffic controllers aren't being paid. On September 29th Russian air traffic controllers went on strike in 57 cities to force the payment of back wages. A Reuters bulletin on October 1, 1997 stated that workers at Luchegorskugol ended a strike after receiving 17 billion roubles (about $29 million dollars) nowhere near what they are actually owed. This represents the reality of the world bourgeoisie that asks for sacrifice and calls for greater efficiency solely because they are bankrupt.
Not only are the miners paid but the Russian rulers who couldn't afford to maintain safety standards yesterday, today cannot even maintain the equipment. On December 2nd of last year, 60 miners died in the Zyryanovskaya mine in Novokuznetsk due to badly deteriorating safety measures such as ventilation. It was the worst such tragedy ever in the Kuznesk basin. The tactics of hopelessness show themselves again and again. on the 20th of November four miners at the "First of May mine" went on a hunger strike over the payment of back wages.
Again on November 22nd families of workers at a lumber mill near Archangelsk resorted to stopping trains along the north railway.
The Russian version of a union is known as a professional committee. The professional committees of miners have agreed to start delaying the shipments of coal until back wages are paid. The inextricable mess that the economy is in is not merely the product of "trouble with the transition to a free market economy", but rather are a startling example of how the entire world economy is in a crisis, the crisis starts in the world's weakest economies and spreads to the world's stronger economies.
Obviously the decrepit old state-capitalist states could not survive crises that wealthy "free market" economies can overcome. This tendency to end all state subsidized industries and social welfare programs can be seen in even the most social-democratic states such as Sweden and Denmark. One of the main stumbling blocks to a unified Europe is the very question of subsidies especially to agriculture.
That the "socialist " economies always had a system of wage labor that was based on ownership of a ruling class embodied in control of a one-party state. Many non-communist countries serve as excellent examples of state-capitalism, like Israel, the ruling class and the state are the same entity. Whether through subsidies and direct control or through a board of shareholders the dynamic remains the same, to accumulate as much wealth off the backs of workers as possible. Hence, the ruling class must be fought in whatever form it takes and under whatever name they happen to call themselves.
Even in Russia workers still feel an obligation to their country, and so they are willing to keep up basic services even when they aren't being paid at all. This situation is very unstable and even bigger struggles are bound to occur as things get worse. This is a crisis of a global system of exploitation where the ruling classes of the world incrementally try to get more for less, in an endless race to the bottom, so that workers today are given a choice between accepting permanently worsening living conditions or taking up class struggle.
A.S.
'Communism is the Material Human community' is an introduction to the thought of Amadeo Bordiga. Though it may be useful as an introduction to his thought, there are some parts of this work that are misleading. That it starts by dismissing the term "state capitalism" and associating it with terms such as those of degenerated workers' state" and "bureaucratic collectivism", it doesn't seem as if Goldner wants to make a distinction between those ideas at all. That the discussion of the "Agrarian Question" is too lengthy, by stating that "Capitalism is first of all the agrarian revolution" it seems as if it attempts to measure the development of capitalism by measuring the absence of older, small agriculture economies.
These things represent the rather convoluted way in which the same logical end is reached as most other left-communists. However positive the ending may be when it states that "By freeing Marxism from its' statist legacy we can at last start to understand the world from the vantage point of "the real movement unfolding before our eyes", the text as a whole tends to delve into things such as the agrarian question while at the same time making negative generalizations about the view of the Soviet Union as a state-capitalist entity. Or making broad generalizations about the emergence of the "Newly Industrialized Countries" throwing peoples theories of capitalism into disarray. It is inherent in the very nature of capitalism to seek out the lowest labor costs. The perceived need for a change in revolutionary perspectives here has resulted in an overemphasis of the wrong questions to arrive at the same point of view that most Internationalist Communists already share.
The assessment of modern capitalism as being measurable in the corresponding lack of small agricultural economies is not unusual in this case. It is surprising that there is no mention here of the fact that for the first time in history the majority of the human race works for a wage.
They end this discussion of the agrarian question by correctly stating that today there is no agrarian question. The whole purpose of this discussion is to frame the entire revolutionary experience of 1917 to 1923 as the tail end of the bourgeois democratic revolutions, because that they like the Bolsheviks paved the way for the displacement of small producer agriculture practices and subsequently the development of industry. Goldner, at heart wishes to equate the counter-revolutionary evolution of the Bolshevik party with the very impulse of this revolution. It discounts the fact that workers for a couple of years were actually able to topple and then seize state power. It seems that in reaching for a palatable revolutionary ideology there is a desire to disassociate entirely from the old workers' movement. To go so far as to claim that the term "state-capitalism" was a conceptual for the completion of the bourgeois revolution (or at least that is how it sounds), is excessive. The term state-capitalism is a convenient term and is a useful way of describing an economic structure but was never meant to be an excuse like the way that trotskyists used the phrase "bureaucratic collectivism" (p.1) .
"Yet such a "third camper", accepting Lenin's "Imperialism" and a nexus of other prognoses from the first three congresses of the Comintern, with the Stalinist subterranean assumptions about the inability of the capitalist world market to industrialize any part of the Third World, and was thrown equally into disarray by the emergence of the NICs.", overlooks the fact that most "Third Campers" and indeed left-communists, always are very aware that industry and investment in industry goes where the labor costs are the cheapest.
On speaking of the Russian revolution Goldner betrays the basic desire to get rid of the experience of the Russian revolution as even a source of inspiration, "Had not the highest expression of the revolutionary worker's movement taken place in Germany and Russia? Had not everything since been disaster and bureaucratic nightmare?....Who could seriously propose China or North Korea or Albania, or the national liberation movements and their states as models for American or European workers? But such a view while correct, was not adequate." (p.20).. Such a view is not adequate, but the Russian revolution was more than just a revolution for the industrialization of backward economies, it was the first time in this century that workers managed to assert their own interests over a nations', however temporary it was. It remains a great inspiration, that it why so many people seem so interested in wiping out even the memory of the uniqueness of such an event.
The work is marked with a confusing academic tone and an underlying desire to create a revolutionary movement that is disassociated from the history of the workers' movement. Furthermore, the equation that capitalism equals the agrarian revolution is too automatic. However, this work does raise interesting questions and it is still worth reading. Anyone interested in reading this pamphlet should contact: Collective Action Notes, P.O.B. 22962, Baltimore, MD 21203. -A..S.-
1 Communism is the Material Human Community: Amadeo Bordiga Today. Loren Goldner. Collective Action Notes, Baltimore, MD. 1997.
The works of Bordiga can be obtained in various translations from: Partito Comunista Internazionale, Via Marnni 30, Schio, Italia.
Wildcat strikes are not illegal and cannot be punished with jail or fines, the catch is that the law effectively removes all protection from the organizers of the strike. The few situations where wildcat strikes are protected occur when working conditions are extremely unsafe or when a union is bargaining for a new contract and a group walks out in general agreement with union positions.
The definitions of unprotected strikes include almost all the most effective means of gaining concessions from the employers. Such strike actions include sit-down strikes, strikes in violation of collective bargaining contracts, slowdowns and partial strikes, refusing to work overtime, strikes that attempt to gain a political goal, and even intermittent strikes. The fact that the law condemns such a broad variety of actions shows that these actions must have some useful strengths and can even be made to work.
In the past such things were much more common but were largely ended through the actions of the government and the unions to regulate and control all dissent in the workplace. At one time it was extremely common to find large and well organized wildcat strikes occuring in every sector of industry including service industries.
Most often such strikes would occur to challenge the authority of the unions, to protest deaths on the job or unfair dismissals. One exellent example of autonomous organization in the workplace can be found in the former stalinist Soviet Union, where the official workers' organizations or professional organizations were run directly by the state, any actions on the job had to be started by the workers themselves, like the coal miners' strikes.
Today, the unions have no interest in fighting the employers.
Rather, their leadership would simply see it as a challenge to their privilege. In 1978 the President's Commission on Coal, headed by Governor Rockefeller advocated cultivating unions as an instrument to head off dissent by using workers' grievances as a litmus test to determine how much the owners can get away with and conversely how much the workers are willing to take. This report was written with the purpose of ending a wave of wildcat strikes in the coal industry in the 1970's. It serves as a perfect illustration of how the employers and unions work together against you.
Further, the tendency to greater part-time and temporary work has made the old practice of forming a union untenable even though the necessity remains that we must build organizations (whether official or unofficial) on the job to defend ourselves.
There are many ways that autonomous organizations can be started on the job. Starting an employee's newsletter or simply speaking with your co-workers about ways thing can be made better. Zealously adhering to health and safety rules is one way of slowing things down. In order for a strike to be effective first there must be an organizational structure that can serve as a focus for organizing for greater unity in the workplace to lay the basis for an effective struggle. The goal of striking on the part of workers should not have to be another lousy contract bargained by a worthless union, its' goal should be primarily to obtain the demands of the workers involved.
In keeping with a tactic that union organizers call a "quickie" strike a wildcat strike relies on an element of surprise. It is the same subtle principal that can make an autonomous workplace organization effective. Whether it is a policy of "running the plant backwards" by zealously following all safety proceedures or agreeing to a slowdown, it is our capacity to collectively fight for our own interests on the job, that can lay the foundation for much more vigorous forms of struggle in the future. The key is that with enough subtlety and discression you can still build a newer more revolutionary form of organized struggle, on the job that can still be effective. Don't be discouraged when people say to you that nothing can be done, we all can organize and fight to win!