President Mikhail Gorbachev, in his speech to the opening of the Third Session of the USSR Supreme Soviet (condensed text published in Izvestia, Feb. 14), said the situation in the USSR today is characterized by "a colossal politicization of our society."
This term "politicization," as he and his colleagues should know, is altogether inadequate to describe this critical period. Politicization, the mass of the people becoming more politically aware or active, in itself could mean a great advance. But that's not what's involved. The term he should have used is polarization.
Gorbachev policies lead to polarization
Gorbachev had just told the deputies, "We all feel keenly the tragic turn of events in the southern part of the country, events that have led to people's deaths and mass expulsions from their home areas." Yes, death, destruction, expulsion, continuing growth of national animosities and the use of troops to quell rebellions. Hasn't this led to a polarization between the southern republics and the central government that threatens the dismemberment of the USSR?
But Gorbachev has an explanation. "For a long time, everything was done to find a political solution to the difficult questions that had arisen." Really? Everything was done to find a political solution?
Let us see how it all started.
The first significant rebellion came in December 1986 after the replacement of the leader of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan, Dinmukhamed A. Kunayev, with an ethnic Russian. That was a political solution?
The chauvinism of the center awakened nationalist sentiment, with accompanying violence. The imperialist bourgeoisie played this in low key then, out of solicitude for the new "imaginative, innovative" Soviet leader.
So the issue was laid to rest. But the sparks from it soon made themselves felt in the revival of an old inter-ethnic controversy between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabach. Whatever one may say about the predecessors of Gorbachev, under their tenure this dispute never reached the level of death, destruction and violence which we have all witnessed since the advent of the new reformers in Moscow.
So how was this very sensitive issue that so deeply concerns the integrity of the USSR dealt with? It was shoved from pillar to post in forums where Gorbachev sermonized on the virtues of taking an internationalist view, spending most of his time scolding the Armenian and Azeri delegations while postponing any specific recommendations until ... the next meeting.
It finally reached the 19th All-Union Party Conference in June 1988. This, as anyone can see now, was staged with the intention of demonstrating to the predatory Western imperialist powers that the USSR was moving towards democratic procedures. The restructuring of the economy would open wide the doors to private initiatives and there would be a multiplicity of views and organizations, all to the greater glory of establishing a bourgeois parliament, Western style.
The capitalist press loved it. They showered praise and flattery on Gorbachev and his colleagues. But what had happened to the Azeri and Armenian delegations?
Armenia-Azerbaijan struggle ignored
They were left out in the cold, treated as orphans. The territorial dispute remained unresolved. No wonder that soon after the delegations went home, violence and hatred exploded of the type that could only envenom their relationships, leaving them without even the modicum of a political solution within the framework of the USSR.
Gorbachev tells us that it then became necessary to act militarily. "But when there was nothing else to be done to prevent the deaths of thousands of people, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet took emergency measures. The situation there is now under control, if one may put it that way [Was this meant to be ironic?--S.M.], but tension remains."
There were two problems that needed solution: the underdevelopment of the southern republics, and their relation to the central government.
Great beginnings in development were made under the Leninist government, not only in economics but in culture, including literature and art. Not that they were able to wipe out the long-standing sharp divergence between the economic and cultural level of the southern republics and the center, but great strides were made in proletarian solidarity. Foreign accounts about conditions in the south, from friend and foe, wondered at the achievements. And while many were rightfully skeptical, all were aware that there was peace, stability and inter-ethnic amity. (For sources, see The Siberians by Farley Mowat and Soviet but not Russian by William Mandel.)
Gorbachev took office over 70 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, after stupendous progress had been made in science and technology--the keys in the struggle against underdevelopment. How can anyone overlook the significance of the Soviet Union's standing in space technology, nuclear energy, electronics, and the many related sciences which occasioned the imperialists to call it a superpower?
What they said then
When Gorbachev first announced his restructuring plans, it was assumed that they meant a new rationalization of industry, a further development of the scientific-technological revolution, more rapid mechanization, all of which would impart a rapid rise to the general social development of the southern republics.
Hearing the early speeches of this new bourgeois cabal of lawyers, technocrats and bourgeois politicians, no one would know that their eyes were cast in the direction of placating and accommodating the West rather than on raising the material and cultural level where it was needed first and foremost, in the southern republics.
Modernizing industry need not encompass worker layoffs, closing of factories, introduction of work norms which divide the workers, and above all, disruption of socialist production relationships which lie at the core of the new social system.
The new polarization of Soviet society, taking on the form of a struggle between the nationalities and the center, is only a reflection of the economic restructuring which is divisive, corrosive and thoroughly defeatist of socialist solidarity.
Economics determines politics
The experience of the last 140 years confirms what Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, that economics determines politics. You cannot champion steps toward bourgeois restoration without unleashing political forces that tend to tear the Soviet Union apart.
Nothing so much points this up as the latest legislative initiative emanating from the Gorbachev administration. It is the draft law on property in the USSR, which has consumed the attention of the entire Supreme Soviet. (Condensed text of the proceedings, taken from Izvestia, is in The Current Digest of the Soviet Press, March 21, 1990.)
This law is said to be necessary to redefine property. Why does it need redefinition? At least 99% of the Soviet people are now literate. Who does not know the meaning of the three forms of ownership in the USSR? There is state ownership, collective farm ownership, and the private property of individuals, i.e., property which is the product of one's own labor.
The accumulation of property from one's own labor has never been prohibited in the Soviet Union. On the contrary, the aim of advancing from the lower stage of socialism, the workers' state, to a higher form means a greater abundance and accumulation of private things, consumer items, the product of the labor of the people. Certainly, this doesn't need any great technical elaboration by the new legal camarilla in the USSR. It's understandable on the basis of experience.
Besides that, Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto were very alert to the lies of the bourgeoisie, who said the communists wanted to abolish all property. No, they said, it is not all property we wish to abolish. "The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property ... the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few."
The question of property didn't need great elaboration during the period before the Bolshevik Revolution, when social democracy was in its heyday, nor after the revolution. So what needs to be so fervently discussed today?
It is to sneak in the legalization of private ownership and the buying and selling of the means of production. This is what really lies behind the barrage of speeches, which are calculated to cloud rather than clarify the meaning of the new law.
Struggle over private property law
The discussion in the Supreme Soviet was characterized by fear of using the word private property. A report in Izvestia of Feb. 16 noted that "the following leitmotifs were sounded: `Private property is necessary, we mustn't be afraid of terminology.'" That's the voice of the outspoken, brutally frank bourgeois.
But this is countered by some who are altogether fearful of the consequences of tampering with the old concepts of bourgeois property vs. the socialist ownership of the means of production. "Any allusion to private property in the law is dangerous, because this will lead to the working people's enslavement by new exploiters," said one deputy. That could scarcely be made plainer. Unfortunately, we do not know who said it and how many approved the position as stated.
Izvestia reported that the draft merely refers to "residential buildings, apartments, dachas, garden buildings, plantings on plots of ground, means of transportation, cash, stocks and other securities, and household and personal items as this form of property. As for means of production, it names those that are necessary to engaging in peasant or auxiliary farming, the growing of orchards and vegetable gardens, and individual and other enterprise."
Not much to worry about, one would say. Moreover, the preamble states: "Socialist property serves the purpose of preventing the exploitation of man by man."
However, some see it as an opening wedge to go much further. For instance, Deputy V.P. Nosov said, "Let's assume that we nullify the gains of October, betray the blood of our fathers and grandfathers, allow mother earth to be bought and sold, and allow private property. Who will buy the land? Those who acquired money in ways other than the use of their toil-hardened hands, the wheeler-dealers of the `shadow economy,' or, to put it simply, thieves. We peasants will work for them as hired hands."
However, the Gorbachev administration has encountered great difficulty putting its restructuring ideas across through such laws as those converting collective agriculture into leaseholds with a semi-private character, or measures to dismantle state farms. The fear of the peasants and rural workers puts pressure on the lower echelons of the government and the bureaucracy, so that to this day, while the collective farm system has been undermined and many of the state farms dismantled, a great deal still needs to be done in order to liquidate them into private property. This has not happened, and is not likely to without encountering a life-and-death struggle from below.
By introducing the law on property, the Gorbachev grouping has opened the door wide to the most sensitive and critical issue facing the USSR. In fact, the most bourgeois, right-wing of the reformers, Leonid I. Abalkin, chairman of the commission on the law and deputy head of the government, said that the further course of political and economic reform in the country and the fate of the people would depend in large part on the wording of this law.
This is a bit of hyperbole. The fate of the people does not depend on the bourgeois restorationist reforms. The people will survive, regardless.
Not there yet, but heading toward capitalism
As we said earlier, the laws in and of themselves do not as yet mean the rapid dismantling of socialized industry. But they do clarify the direction taken by the governing group of the USSR. Some are in favor of a faster, some a slower pace, but all are moving along the downward course to capitalist restoration.
But it is by no means an accomplished fact as yet, and this is what has to be kept in mind when it comes to the capitalist press, which has been so eager to push further and faster lest something unforeseen and thoroughly revolutionary, from a working-class point of view, takes place which tumbles the bourgeois governing camarilla in the USSR out of power.
For instance, the Sunday, April 1 New York Times, News of the Week in Review section, carries the banner headline: "After Communism: Gorbachev, at a Dizzying Height, Prepares to Kick away the Ladder." An accompanying blurb says: "The party is now supposed to drop dead. It will be a dangerous few months."
The object of this and similar articles in the bourgeois press is to convey the impression that it is all over in the USSR, that bourgeois restoration is all but accomplished and that it is only a question of how quickly Gorbachev and his colleagues, with one foot in the party apparatus and the other in the new bourgeoisie, will ditch the party, allowing it to disintegrate into a variety of conflicting neobourgeois tendencies with no progressive, left-wing, communist opposition.
But we have seen funeral rites administered by the bourgeoisie to the workers' state over many decades, beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution itself. With every turn in a regressive direction, forces have always surfaced to check it.
Strength of workers' state
The workers' state has grown and developed, notwithstanding deterioration and deformation in its apparatus, and despite the negative, often acutely repressive tendencies arising from the legacy of backwardness under czarism, capitalist encirclement, and imperialist intervention over a period of decades costing millions of lives and untold destruction.
Unquestionably, the most severe and determined pro-capitalist restorationist group is now wielding power in the USSR. But it will take a lot more than the will of this narrow, bourgeois sector to overwhelm the working class, the peasantry, and the progressive and revolutionary intelligentsia.
Five years ago, when the reforms started, the Soviet public and the world working-class community were totally unaware of what this grouping was all about. The understanding was that perestroika was going to accelerate industrialization, bring new ideas and innovation, expand science and industry, raise the material and cultural level of the masses. They would be doing things differently, democratically, so they said, but the overall objective was to turn the huge scientific-technological apparatus around so as to make it more productive. As such it met with great enthusiasm.
But as time went on it became clearer that what this grouping had in mind was a fundamental change in property relations, that is, to scuttle the socialist relations of production and introduce bourgeois relations of production. Only after this is completed and made "irreversible," they now say, will there be progress in material wellbeing and living standards.
The programmatic documents at first said nothing about changing the relations of ownership, nothing about a free market, nothing about changing the entire price structure. (A fundamental upward revision of the price structure of basic commodities, as has been proposed, would amount to nothing less than a social counterrevolution, so deep would be the cut in living standards. No wonder Gorbachev and his group are fearful of putting it across, and therefore are resorting to piecemeal measures which aggravate rather than alleviate the economic situation.)
None of this was understood when Gorbachev took over as General Secretary of the Party. Had their real program been explicitly submitted to a popular referendum, this grouping wouldn't have lasted 24 hours. As matters stand, they have radically changed not only the leadership but the social composition of the party itself. Now they are calling a Congress of the party in July to confirm what has already been done, without having solved a single economic and political problem facing the masses.
Gorbachev has polarized society not only between the central government and the nationalities, but between the proletariat and the new bourgeoisie. Notwithstanding all the talk about bureaucracy, authoritarianism, etc., the regime that now holds the reins of power is more authoritarian, more bureaucratic than its predecessors.
Has the government told the masses how many workers have been dislodged from industry by the reforms? What real income the workers get in the light of price changes? Has the government divulged the results of their five years of tinkering with collective farming, with the aim of liquidating it? Or their fruitless forays in light industry and consumer goods?
Disastrous political results
Perhaps all this has brought political advantages? But look at the sorry spectacle of the Gorbachev policy toward the Baltic states. The first experiment in bourgeois reforms, it was virtually in the imperialist camp before the Gorbachev administration finally got down to considering what measures should be taken to retain the Baltic republics as integral parts of the Soviet state.
What's their solution? Not a return to proletarian solidarity, not addressing themselves to the workers to revive the revolutionary proletarian history of the Baltic states. No, they have reduced them to a small chip in the bargaining with U.S. imperialism. How in the world could this influence progressive, let alone communist, workers?
How did Lenin approach the national question? The party directed itself to the workers as a class whose liberation lifts all elements of society, including the bourgeoisie, from oppression and exploitation. That is the sense in which we call it a national question. The party promotes freedom, sovereignty and independence in that sense.
The Gorbachev approach, especially in the Baltic states where reaction is strong, is directed to the bourgeois elements as the key to resolving the problem. He abandons the class question, going so far as to never even mention the existence of the workers or the peasants as such.
The bourgeois press, in writing about the situation in the USSR, is not candid when it reports on the magnificent struggle of the coal miners last summer, or the 700,000 workers in the central Siberian oilfields whose demands for better pay and living conditions have received little attention from the government, or the threatened strike by railroad workers. The bourgeois press doesn't take into account the revolutionary potentialities of the working class.
The workers are at present still at the stage of economism, concerning themselves with the narrow, day-to-day struggles for survival. They have not yet addressed the larger classwide, life-and-death questions. Nor has any genuine, authoritative representative of the proletariat arrived on the scene at this date.
It's the polarization of these workers against the bourgeoisie which constitutes the essence of the contradiction in Soviet society. It will do no good to bring up cookbook panaceas from the old days of pre-Leninism, or pre-Marxism, in order to solve today's problems in the USSR. The many millions of proletarians in the Soviet Union will regain their stature without them.
The Soviet Union over seven decades has developed a strong centralized economy. The accumulation of false policies and the growth of a privileged sector have hindered further development, but this should not be the occasion for scuttling the socialist sector of the economy.
The enormous development of world science and technology shows more and more the need for centralization of the productive forces. The world economy is becoming more and more integrated. If the working class and the oppressed nations do not take hold of the means of production, do not work out a centralized economy on a thoroughly democratic, socialized basis, then the imperialist bourgeoisie will certainly continue to integrate it in their fashion, with resulting misery for the masses. Centralization will take place; the question is on which class basis?