09.11.2006
Fuse workers' movement and Marxism
Boris Kagarlitsky looks at the prospects and possibilities for the Russian left
In Russia there has been tremendous disillusionment with everything associated not just with Stalinism, but also with socialism, Marxism and revolution. That is quite understandable, because Stalinist propaganda from the 1930s until the early 1990s kept repeating that the only true Marxist-Leninism was the ideology and practice of the Soviet regime. And, of course, liberal pro-reform propaganda said exactly the same thing.
Interestingly, if you compare what was said by the communists and anti-communists in Russia and internationally regarding the general explanation of events you discover that methodologically there was not much difference. Both said that the only alternative to capitalism was the system that existed in the Soviet Union. Both said that the only true communist policy was to be found in the anti-democratic, centralised Stalinist party. So in that sense anti-communist propaganda which was triumphant in the late Soviet Union and the so-called 'new Russia' in the aftermath of its collapse was actually rooted in and prepared by official Soviet propaganda. Ironically, that was exactly why it was so efficient in terms of gaining support amongst the Soviet intelligentsia, which got quite excited over all these 'new ideas' about privatisation, liberalisation and so on.
We ought not to idealise or misunderstand the dominant mood in the late Soviet Union or in the other so-called 'communist' states in the late 80s. People wanted more freedom and they wanted better and more consumer goods - and it was widely believed that these things were inseparable.
In fact there are more consumer goods. And there are, at least formally, a lot of freedoms not previously enjoyed - the freedom to travel abroad, for example. It is true that in the countries of the former Soviet Union - whether it is Russia, Ukraine or Belarus - the level of freedom is not much higher than the Soviet Union. In the case of Belarus the situation is dramatically worsening - over the last couple of years there has been a sharp deterioration in terms of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of expression and so on. But, even allowing for this, by comparison with the Soviet Union there is some improvement.
What people did not expect was that, together with gaining all these new freedoms, they would lose their jobs and their income. Consumer goods are all around, but they do not have money to buy them. Unemployment has worsened, enterprises are shut down, the cities are decaying and the gap between rich and poor is incredibly wide.
In a society where, according to official statistics, about 80% of the population is considered 'working class and poor' and about 12% 'middle class', then there can hardly be a properly functioning democracy. Democracy is not just about freedoms which are proclaimed or even respected formally and technically (they are often not). It is also about the capacity of a society to practise these freedoms. Russians are free to travel abroad - fine. But there is a problem with tickets: you have to buy them. And amongst other things you have to pay for visas and so on. So most people simply cannot afford to take up their freedom to travel abroad, along with other such freedoms.
Nor do I think there will be competitive elections in 2007, because elections are becoming more and more 'closed down', to use the Russian expression. In other words fewer and fewer forces are allowed to participate in the political process. But that does not meet with much resistance from a population which itself has been excluded from the political process.
Political campaigning is getting increasingly expensive. When the Soviet Union was fragmenting, I was elected as a deputy to the Moscow City Soviet. My whole expenditure was 100 roubles. Even though roubles then were of higher value formally than today, that is still the equivalent of about £100. Can you imagine a successful electoral campaign for the Greater London Assembly with that kind of budget? We cannot imagine that either any more, because now a campaign for a seat on the Moscow state duma will cost about £1 million.
Whole layers have been progressively excluded. More recently it has been the turn of those bodies that could sometimes raise enough money to stand, but have been prevented from doing so. The government decided it would be better to limit the number of candidates, just to make the process easier, more manageable and cheaper.
New stage
To cut a long story short, after this period of tremendous disillusionment and rejection of terms like 'communism', 'Marxism', 'socialism', etc, a new stage has arrived when the terms 'democracy', 'liberalism', 'free market economy' and 'capitalism' have themselves become discredited. The government insists that its programme of social reform is not part of a neoliberal agenda or the free market project. Instead it is necessary for Russia to become stronger. It is necessary from the point of view of the logic of a world capitalism that is already in place. Everybody in Russia now says that privatisation has failed - everybody. Even the neoliberals themselves say that technically wrong decisions were made: the policy was right, but the implementation was bad. Everybody accepts the fact that free market reform has been a major disaster socially.
However, none of this stops the continued implementation of these policies. All the main political forces in one way or another support them - but hypocritically, using different words or different ways to defend very much the same agenda. And that has produced a very strong alienation between society and the so-called political class. And when I say 'society' I do not just mean workers or wage-earners: middle class or petty bourgeois sections of society also feel extremely alienated because, whether they are leftwing or rightwing, they are not part of the political process either.
So it is no surprise that in this specific set of circumstances the ideas of socialism and Marxism are becoming fashionable and popular again. Just to give you one example, two years ago I got a phone call from one of the major Russian publishers. I had usually not had the luxury of being published by big commercial publishers, in Russia or anywhere else. But these people called me and asked if there was anything I could offer them. I said I could produce a book on Marxism, thinking there was a good chance they would be scared off. Instead, they said, "Oh, that's exactly what we're looking for!" I asked if this indicated a change in their publishing policy. They said: "We have no policies. Only if it sells." In the end they published a book based on a course of lectures on Marxist sociology which I had taught a year earlier. Now they are doing a second edition.
If you want a less anecdotal example, there were no leftwing publishers in Moscow in the 1990s. Now there are four of five of them. They are not necessarily Marxist, but they specialise in the production of leftwing books. A decade ago there was not a single left bookshop in Moscow. Now there is a very big one right in the centre. When it was first opened I predicted it would go out of business within six months, but it is now into its second year and making a profit. This despite the fact it had to be rebuilt after it was burnt down by fascists. People even expressed solidarity by buying half-burnt books.
A lot of works are now being translated and published. Not so many of them are original, however. Unfortunately the number of people who are capable of actually writing is limited, because it is one thing to have ideas and sympathies, but another thing entirely to generate them yourself; that requires a functioning milieu for a much longer period and more people involved in debate.
Nevertheless the renewed interest in leftwing ideas is good news. But there is also bad news. While there is a growing intellectual leftwing current and a growing interest in Marxism, the political landscape has not been changed as a result. This is partly because of the rigid nature of Russia's political system.
First of all it is a political system based on exclusion. There are more and more legal obstacles to prevent people launching a political organisation, for example. Electoral law is getting worse, making it harder to register candidates. It is almost impossible to establish a legal political party because in order to do this you have to present a list of 50,000 signatures - and Russia is still a society where it can be risky to expose your political views, especially outside Moscow. If you are in some provincial city and openly support a political party which is in conflict with the government, you know that you will never get a job in any state-sponsored organisation; if you are a student, you may have problems passing your exams; and so on and so forth.
The already quite considerable task of getting 50,000 signatures is made even harder by having to go through the ministry of justice, whose job it is to verify all the names. Everybody knows that unless the administration wants a new party to be registered, no matter how many signatures are collected or however genuine they are, they will always find a wrong detail, invalidating the application.
All these obstacles point to the increasingly authoritarian nature of today's Russia, as with many other post-Soviet states. This is not accidental - it reflects the logic of their development. Post-Soviet eastern European capitalism is a peripheral, dependent capitalism, based on very high social division and a very high level of social exclusion - much higher than the west - and unable to 'buy' support through welfare handouts. In the west there is still a residual welfare state: it is under attack and undermined, but it still exists. Specific welfare concessions are made possible through the hegemony of western capitalism. How can this be done in countries which are not part of the centre, which exist to subsidise the welfare policies of the west?
Of course, today Russia has oil money. This may seem to present an opportunity for the state to become more generous. In fact, this is illusory. We can speak of the $270 billion in the so-called 'stabilisation fund', which sounds like an incredible sum of money, but for a country lacking public investment of any significance for a decade, with an ageing infrastructure, with teachers living on miserable wages, with industrial equipment even in the most successful enterprises belonging to the 1960s, it is clear that this is not such a huge amount. When discussions started over what to do with it, immediately certain sections of the elite demanded that their problems be solved, that the infrastructure be developed in such a way as suits their needs, for their capital to develop.
Then another section of the elite cautioned against spending too much money, because it causes inflation. Rather, it was suggested, it should be invested in US government bonds. This is exactly what they are doing. Russian money is spent on financing the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and so on. So it is not only that the Russian elite does not want to spend money on social problems: it also has a very limited space to do so within the capitalist world in which they live.
This has created tremendous polarisation within society, which makes it virtually impossible for bourgeois democracy to function successfully. My personal point of view is that without a welfare state modern capitalist democracies are not possible. This means that those countries unable to achieve any proper welfare state cannot achieve a successful and stable democracy within capitalism either. This is also the case in Turkey, in Latin America, in many Asian countries, and to a certain extent it is even the case within the eastern European newcomers to the European Union. While they are in a better state than Russia in many ways, I think in the long run the contradictions are similar. The general situation is not favourable for democratic progress under capitalism in these countries.
So we are not only dealing with the social and economic problems of neoliberalism and capitalist restoration: we are also facing the political consequences of neoliberal capitalist restoration. The genie has cheated us: he did deliver the democratic rights we wished for, but not the means to sustain them. What is happening in Russia is not a transition to democracy, but rather an erosion of the democratic rights achieved in the early 1990s. Every year something has been eroded, starting in 1993, when following the coup d'etat Yeltsin dissolved parliament and changed the constitution.
'New' left
Those obstacles generated by the lack of democracy in the political system are very clear. But another set of obstacles faces us: those that come from within the left itself. It is now quite common to read articles in the Russian press about the crisis of the left. I consider this to be good news because five years ago they denied the fact that the left existed. They were partly right - in the late 90s, there was no crisis of the left because there was no left. There were individual leftists, or tiny groups here and there. But they did not compose a left as a political force that could be taken seriously, a left that could exert some influence on the political agenda of the country. Now there is such a left, but it is indeed in crisis.
This crisis was brought about by the fact that the left has had to adapt to a new set of tasks. In the first part of this decade, all the left groups started to grow: sectarian, non-sectarian, smart, stupid - everybody was growing, partly because of the general atmosphere, but also partly because of the rouble crash of 1998, which radicalised the middle class quite dramatically. In the early 1990s, the middle class was quite comfortable: they recognised that the situation of the 'proles' was terrible, but they argued that they only had themselves to blame for not being dynamic enough.
Then there was the rouble crash and their savings disappeared, along with their jobs; they were humiliated. So, whereas before they believed the system was rewarding them for their talent and ability, suddenly, after 1998, they were being punished by that system. This caused outrage and the realisation that the system itself must be unjust, leading to very rapid radicalisation, especially amongst the young. This is where many cadre of the new left came from.
It was a left which was lacking any clear political direction, not to mention a serious class base. This was very much the radicalised youth of the middle classes in the big cities. These people at least had money to buy books - Russian books may be much cheaper than in Britain, but Russian salaries are lower still.
However, this nice, radical, young, middle class left suddenly found itself facing two challenges. The level of repression started to increase because the state started to take this movement much more seriously.
This was seen at the time of the second Russian Social Forum in July 2006. The first social forum in 2005 had been a big success, with 1,200 people attending from different parts of Russia, and, although it was more or less ignored by the mainstream press (unlike the second Russian Social Forum), it represented a real step forward.
The second forum coincided with the St Petersburg G8 summit and was billed as a counter-summit. About 600 people were detained by the authorities or encountered problems of various kinds all around Russia. There is a story of a certain comrade who was trying to get to St Petersburg for the forum. As soon as he got on the train he was asked by a policeman to show his internal passport, which is usual practice. The policeman left the compartment with his passport, and then came back with a very strange expression on his face. He claimed that some woman had snatched the passport and thrown it out of the window! The comrade returned home, found his passport for foreign travel and, as he had some money and was now late, he decided to fly. Again he was stopped from travelling when his external passport mysteriously disappeared.
This comrade was not beaten up or arrested - his documents were simply 'lost'. However, in other places people were roughed up or detained for a few days - in some cases without any news about their welfare. The movement was suddenly starting to come under real pressure from the government.
Labour movement
Yet there is a much more positive and serious challenge, coming from below: the labour movement itself is starting to grow. The situation of the working class, because of the seven-year period of economic growth (the Russian economy is growing at an average of about 6% per annum), has changed.
Although Russian industry is still technologically very backward, it has experienced a certain growth. This should not be attributed purely to the rise in oil prices. Certainly oil money is stimulating demand and generating some industrial growth within the country. However, since Russia is not yet a member of the World Trade Organisation, it is free to apply protectionist policies, which allow industry to develop somewhat. Of course, industry is dramatically weaker than it used to be in the Soviet Union - at least in terms of size (obviously it is a point of debate just how efficient Soviet industry actually was).
Today industry may be smaller, but it is expanding. For example, certain household goods like refrigerators and microwave ovens are manufactured by western firms. All the major car makers are not just selling, but actually producing in Russia today - Volkswagen, Hyundai, Ford, BMW, etc.
We now have a situation where the Russian media are complaining that western companies have not just brought investment - they have infected Russia with western-style trade unionism. Obviously, people have to be taught how to use unfamiliar technology and equipment, so they are sent abroad to study it working. However, when they are abroad they not only learn about technology and equipment, but also about something else - how trade unions are organised. They are able to see that wages are higher there, not because the capitalists are more generous, but because there is a history of working class struggle.
It is noticeable that it is in the multinational companies where strikes started - many successful. Although they began in the 'foreign' sector and had little to do with the old unions, they are now spreading into the 'domestic' sector. There is a growing wave of working class militancy and it is important to relate to this new wave of workers that are entering into struggle. That is why we need to organise events like the CPGB's Communist University and to study pamphlets like Lenin's What is to be done? which correctly points out that workers coming into struggle take the first step themselves, but then need to be politicised.
Of course, Lenin was challenged on this and I think there is a lot more to it than that. But it is important that the left engages positively with the labour movement in order to stimulate political development and also to learn from these mass struggles, which are usually about wages and working conditions. However, this is a problem for the new middle class left, which has little experience of such struggles. For all their seminars about the workers and the proletariat, they have had very little to offer the movement.
Opposition groups
There is also another set of problems. The first is linked to the continued existence of the so-called Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which has been labelled a Stalinist party. This is not the case - it is much worse than that. The CPRF leadership was determined to distance itself not only from Stalinism, but from any remaining pretence of internationalism too - the slogan 'Workers of the world, unite!' was officially voted out 10 years ago. Now the CPRF is becoming a sort of fascist party.
The latest step was taken earlier this year, when all references to socialism were replaced in their documents with the term derzhavnost (statehood) - for the CPRF socialism is no longer the end, but rather an instrumental means by which to establish a strong state. They literally argue that Russia should seek to annoy its neighbours, which is very much in line with some of the things you read and hear from the government. There is a lot of anti-Ukrainian propaganda, for example. According to these 'comrades', it is the Ukrainians who are the bad guys.
In March 2006 the CPRF signed an official agreement with a leading neo-Nazi organisation called the Movement Against Illegal Immigration in Russia. The name says a lot about this grouping, which is an umbrella organisation for a number of neo-Nazi groups, united in their belief that all immigrants are bad. They are divided only over things like the theoretical relevance of Hitler and Mussolini to Russia today.
This organisation has been granted the right to speak at the Communist Party's rallies, and at the May Day demonstration this year it marched alongside the CPRF. This caused a scandal amongst the CP youth, because the relaunched Young Communist League was precisely born out of the new wave of radicalisation in Russia. The YCL includes segments of quite politically serious youth and there was open rebellion in its ranks, which is still going on. This opens up the possibility of a new revolutionary left emerging, because this rebellion has at its core quite a number of good comrades.
The second problem is the so-called United Opposition. We have many reasons to be unhappy with the Putin regime - the continuing neoliberal social policies, the anti-democratic practices and so on. But what about the opposition operating within the existing political structures? There is the United Civic Front of former world chess champion Garry Kasparov and the People's Democratic Union of Mikhail Kasyanov. The latter was a former prime minister renowned for his corruption. In comparison to others though, he was only moderately corrupt. He is known as 'Mikhail Two Percent', because of the modest cut he is said to demand on any deal. The National Bolshevik Party, which openly declares that Mussolini's model is one that should be followed, has made an alliance with this corrupt politician.
As you might expect, the economic and social agenda of this opposition is just as bad as that of the government we have now. They essentially want to push through the same policies of privatising education, attacking social welfare and so on. In one particular sense these people should make us wary about the future. We have to be quite honest - if a crisis erupts, and this may well happen, the left will not benefit, at least not immediately. It will either be either those in Gennady Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation or in the ranks of the so-called United Opposition, which is neoliberal, anti-communist and so on. To make things worse, these two groups are coming to an agreement.
A prominent United Opposition ideologue recently made a very interesting statement. He said Putin's regime must be overthrown as soon as possible, because this is the only way to prevent revolution. The labour movement is growing and will destroy everything if Putin's regime is allowed to continue. That is why the government must be replaced with one that can avert the danger posed by this proletarian movement becoming real.
Obviously the left should not side with such people. However, it is not necessarily that simple for everybody. Some are of the opinion that the opposition is not such a bad thing, providing it is able to achieve certain democratic reforms - it all depends whether you believe in stageism. If you do then it is possible to argue that it is permissible to have an alliance with fascists, neoliberals, etc to gain certain democratic reforms.
Left tasks
It was this that lay behind the split in the Left Front, which was launched in 2005. I think its establishment was a necessary and positive step forward, based around people who were socialists and critical of Stalinism, the Soviet Union, etc. Ideologically it looked good. Yet declared ideologies are not enough for real unity. Such unity requires a political project, which must be based upon your attitude to the current configuration of forces. What is your place within these political forces? The current society as it exists in Russia is undemocratic, not because Putin is a bad guy, but because of the socio-economic structures we have, which are incompatible with democracy. That is why I do not believe in this so-called 'democratic' stage. What is needed is a social programme.
The next question is whether this should be a reformist socialist project or a revolutionary one. My view is that one cannot overcome capitalism in one country. This is impossible. What is possible is a programme which involves social and economic transitional measures going beyond the current capitalist system. That would allow other countries to start their own revolutionary changes, so that these processes interact and feed on each other. The world is composed of different units which have different levels of development, different political configurations, etc. So it is not possible to attempt everything at once.
The important thing is that the socialist goal should be inseparable from democratic goals and that the programme adopted should be not bourgeois democratic, but, to use a phrase, social democratic in character. That also rules out involvement in any kind of deal with the United Opposition, who are our enemy and part of the preconditions for yet another disaster.
It was these questions that produced the split in the Left Front. The section I belong to is now discussing the need to form a new left party in Russia. Firstly, we need to overcome the confusion on the left, which is why we need a debate. Secondly, the important thing is that this new formation follows the example of Lenin in the 1890s in organising the historic linkage between the labour movement and the Marxists, which is precisely the task of the Russian left today.
We seem to be replaying the same drama which was once enacted by much more important political figures like Lenin, Trotsky and others. In one sense it is much easier for us - we are able to draw lessons from what was done at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Hopefully we will not repeat history as a farce. There is a very clear perspective and a field for our work, and what is different compared to the 90s is that there are people who are both willing and able to do this job.
In that sense I think there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic about the future of the left in Russia.