September 25--The Supreme Soviet in an overwhelming vote--305 to 36--two days ago granted to Gorbachev sweeping powers to transform social and economic relations in the USSR.
The kind of authority the Soviet parliament gave him is on a par with that granted to prime ministers or presidents during wartime or in periods of acute economic, social and political struggle. It is reported that Gorbachev will have the authority to put into effect policies on wages and prices, finances and the budget and to issue decrees "strengthening law and order."
It would seem that this was a real vote of confidence from all the factions. Actually, the opposite is all too true.
Opposing factions pass the buck
Gorbachev's centrism is now based on the polarization of two opposing class camps. Each one refuses to take responsibility for fully dismantling the socialist system, which would precipitate a huge cut in living standards from spiraling prices, a fall in wages and surging unemployment. So they have passed the buck to Gorbachev, the miracle man, who is expected to satisfy both class camps. This explains the huge vote. A fine vote of confidence!
To understand the situation as it exists currently, one must take into account that Gorbachev just the other day appeared the classical centrist, veering from one side to the other, making concessions first to one and then the other.
Thus, last weekend, he seemed to have abandoned his old ally, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, by tacitly rejecting his economic plan and arriving at an agreement with Boris Yeltsin, the leader of the bourgeois opposition in the Soviet Union and the president of the Russian Republic. The essence of the agreement was to abandon and destroy whatever still remains of socialist planning and ownership of the means of production in favor of the restoration of capitalism.
The fine print of their document, allegedly drawn up by a team of economists and politicians reflecting the views of Yeltsin, and only in part those of Gorbachev, was not made available here. But reports indicate it is nothing less than a full-scale capitalist restoration, to usher in full market relations after 500 days.
Ryzhkov, whose plan for economic rehabilitation, while going very far in dismantling socialist construction, did not go far enough to suit the bourgeois elements, should by all rules of ordinary parliamentary procedure have resigned his post in protest at Gorbachev's desertion.
Then, however, Gorbachev recoiled somewhat. He proposed a national referendum on the privatization of land, which he borrowed from Ligachev, the former leader of the "conservative" CP position. This move is illustrative of his general political makeup as well as his personal idiosyncrasies. He, more than any other leader in contemporary times, both East and West, seems to be the incarnation of centrism.
Centrism in ordinary times
Centrism as a political tendency in the bourgeois parliamentary system thrives best when social relations are relatively stable and political struggles even take on a gentlemanly character. Under those conditions, obscure capitalist politicians who would ordinarily be regarded as little more than nonentities suddenly assume a posture of extraordinary importance, if for no other reason than that they lend themselves to becoming instruments of political compromise.
This happens most frequently when both camps in the parliamentary system see no great urgency to conduct an all-out battle which might lead to raised voices and hot tempers. Such a situation would make compromise difficult if not impossible precisely when compromise is what they need most.
Centrism as a political tendency, therefore, under those circumstances, may assume great importance in averting a political crisis. An individual who becomes the leader of the centrist grouping may suddenly appear as a tower of strength, tact and strategic conception. In a word, an eminent statesman. This happens frequently in all the bourgeois parliaments--British, French, Italian, Japanese, and of course, the U.S. Congress.
Such a situation can prevail as long as there is not one of those inevitable resurgences of class strife to upset the equilibrium of the social and political forces at work within the social system. But should there be a resurgence of the class struggle, the extremes of both sides of the bourgeois parliamentary system could become battered by the growing size of the centrist camp, of those who abhor the struggle and demand class peace and capitalist stability. That is when the centrist leader appears as nothing less than a miracle man.
When the struggle between the two social systems has not fully matured, compromise is still possible. And individual leaders, who otherwise are opposed to compromise, suddenly become its very incarnation.
Centrism in times of crisis
Matters are altogether different when centrism as a political tendency emerges at a time of really deep social crisis, a crisis of the system itself. When the social system seems to be fracturing, when the crisis is actually the result of the emergence of two irreconcilable class camps representing diametrically opposed social systems, compromise then becomes very precarious if not impossible.
Such, for instance, was the case of Henry Clay (1777-1852), a famous U.S. Senator from Kentucky. In the war of 1812 against Britain, he was a war hawk. But later, as the struggle between the slavocracy and the Northern bourgeoisie fully emerged, he became the representative of compromise. He often denounced the "extremists" on both sides, putting the slavocracy and the Northern bourgeoisie in one pot. He was the chief architect of the famous Missouri compromise.
But it was to no avail. The struggle between the Northern bourgeoisie and the Southern slavocracy was of an irreconcilable social character because one was based on the exploitation of wage labor and the other on chattel slavery. The two could not coexist for any length of time. The rapid internal dynamic of capitalist development was bound to collide with and overwhelm the stagnant slaveholding system, which could only expand geographically.
This analogy should help us in trying to understand the nature of the struggle in the Soviet Union.
Gorbachev's type of centrism
The ascendancy of Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union signaled the emergence of a new political tendency in the USSR.
Until yesterday, Gorbachev was universally recognized by the imperialist bourgeoisie as the epitome of centrism in the internal domestic struggle of the USSR. Centrism is not a new current in the political history of the Soviet Union. The struggle of right, left, and center marks the entire history of Bolshevism and the USSR.
However, all previous political struggles in the USSR, both during and after the Leninist government, took place on the social foundation of a workers' state, no matter how ill-formed, bureaucratized and debilitated by long and exhausting civil war and imperialist intervention it might have been. The struggles of left, right and center, whether mistaken in their approach or not, were all over how to preserve and retain that foundation.
As a matter of fact, Stalin's struggle against Bukharin, Rykov and Tomsky on the right, and Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev on the left, was characterized by the latter group as reflecting bureaucratic centrism on the foundations of a workers' state.
All the Soviet leaders after Lenin stood on the platform of achieving coexistence with the imperialist bourgeoisie. Abandoning the perspective of world revolution (which prevailed during the Leninist epoch) was a measure which strengthened the possibility, but not the inevitability, of coexistence. All the successors of Lenin tried to build a foreign policy on that basis.
But Gorbachev went far beyond that. Instead of the basic platform of coexistence with imperialism, Gorbachev went over to the thesis of the late Sakharov, the outright bourgeois restorationist, that there could be a convergence of the two systems.
As a sociological conception, this is proving to be an illusion altogether. The two social systems, which are based on two antagonistic classes, grew further apart. Gorbachev then abandoned his original hope for convergence and proceeded to attempt the integration of the Soviet system into the world capitalist economy, an altogether radical departure from any of the conceptions held by previous Soviet leaders.
What it amounted to in terms of practical politics was the opening up of the USSR to the imperialist monopolies. The Gorbachev program in foreign affairs could not but be the most devastating blow to the East European governments, especially Poland and Hungary, which already were burdened by heavy indebtedness to imperialist banks.
Imperialists caught on early
When Gorbachev first became General Secretary, he emerged under the signpost of glasnost and restructuring of industry, a virtually unbeatable program for his time. If only he had lived up to it!
But what did glasnost turn out to be? It was soon clear that it meant giving unfettered rein to bourgeois elements in the Soviet Union while restricting, if not muzzling (certainly not making available to the broad public) any progressive, let alone revolutionary socialist, criticism of the Gorbachev regime and its ultimate program.
It did not take long for the imperialist bourgeoisie to recognize that the Gorbachev leadership represented something new, not the classical centrist tendency in the framework of the existing social and political structure of the USSR. It was preparing a departure from the very framework of a planned economy, from state ownership of the means of production buttressed by collective and state farms.
Before too long, his economic program revealed itself to be not a major forward step in the scientific and technological revolution, but rather a restructuring of the social groupings in the USSR. While his first pronouncements seemed to promise a narrowing of social inequality, consonant with the goal of communism, the practical impact of his reforms was to widen and deepen social inequality.
Sooner than anyone expected, the attack against the working class took on the ancient form of the early bourgeoisie against the proletariat. A vicious struggle was unloosed in the Gorbachev-controlled press against unnamed "levelers," workers who sought not so much to tear down the considerable privileges of the few, but to raise their own level, to improve their social and economic condition.
As we said at the time, this social engineering proposed by the Gorbachev regime was recognized by the imperialist bourgeoisie almost from its inception as a step backward to capitalism. Margaret Thatcher was the first to hail Gorbachev with her statement: "I like him."
It was a signal to all others that the time was ripe for all kinds of overtures to the Gorbachev administration. Praise and flattery poured upon him in an unending stream, and has only recently been moderated.
The right, however, were all too eager to move faster in a capitalist direction. On the left was a conservative Party leadership with no program of its own which had voted for the Gorbachev reforms. It had given unanimous endorsement to the Gorbachev program to introduce private property, even though on a small scale, in industries on the periphery of the infrastructure of the USSR. This meant small doses of capitalist competition and free marketeering, freer rein to small business, partial decollectivization of farms, greater autonomy for the managerial elite, and the beginning of decentralization of the planned economy.
From nibbling to the whole bite
Yet, serious as the introduction of the bourgeois reforms was when they came into full swing in 1988, it still amounted to nibbling. It did not go to the heart of the matter: the privatization of the basic industries and the untrammeled restoration of private property.
This is the essence of the so-called 500-day agreement between Gorbachev, the centrist, and Yeltsin, the thorough-going bourgeois restorationist.
How could such a scheme possibly gather momentum in the land of the October Socialist Revolution?
Gorbachev and his leading supporters could never have gone that far with his bourgeois reforms had he not had the freedom in foreign policy matters which he lacked as a centrist politician in domestic affairs.
Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Shevardnadze embarked on a wholly new foreign policy in relation to imperialism which all other Soviet leaders had scrupulously avoided. They linked overtures to the imperialist bourgeoisie with Gorbachev's domestic plan for bourgeois restructuring and glasnost. This was breaking new ground.
The Gorbachev administration abandoned what had been a scrupulous refusal to let the imperialist bourgeoisie in any way interfere, let alone have a hand in, the domestic affairs of the USSR. Slowly and gradually, he opened the door wider and wider to the imperialist bourgeoisie.
Importance of the Greenspan visit
Probably the most dramatic example of this was the invitation by the Soviet economic and banking establishment to Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the central bank of the U.S. As leader of the financial system of the imperialist bourgeoisie, he went to Moscow for secret consultations on how to restructure the banking system of the USSR and realign it with the imperialist financial structure by taking whatever economic or financial measures were necessary to make the ruble convertible with the leading currencies of imperialism--the dollar, yen and deutschmark.
This development, so little written about in either press, completely exposed the real perspective of the Gorbachev administration. It envisaged the realignment of the Soviet banking system with the financial structure of the imperialist bourgeoisie, supposedly to help rehabilitate the USSR and to give a new impetus to the bourgeois economic development in the country.
One would think that such a dramatic offer would be eagerly accepted by the leaders of the imperialist banks. Why didn't Greenspan grab it with both hands? The answer, as we must now acknowledge, was the weakness and the critical situation of the imperialist banks themselves. A realignment of the banking system and the currency of the USSR would still further debilitate the shaky imperialist financial system itself.
The bourgeois reforms which the Gorbachev regime thought would take hold swiftly have proved to be a protracted process. Peaceful restoration of capitalism in the USSR, as imagined in the West, has met with the resistance of the masses. The bureaucracy (especially the economic planners) fear colliding with them if they speed up the process of bourgeois restoration. That is why, after five years of the reforms, they must talk of a 500-day plan.
The chaos created in industry and in agriculture is the result of quiet sabotage by the bourgeois elements. It will not be long before this is fully understood by the masses.
Capitalist restoration? Not yet
One would think, as the bourgeois press intimates almost every day, that socialist planning and public ownership of property are all but gone in the USSR. Unfortunately for the bourgeoisie, this has not yet really happened.
It is true that the process of dismantling socialist industry and abandoning socialist planning in favor of market relations has taken a heavy toll and continues to do so; but the thoroughgoing transformation the imperialists expected has not happened.
It is not for the progressive movement anywhere to attempt a finished formulation of such a great historical phenomenon when it is still in the process of development. Furthermore, it is daily being affected by the entire global situation, especially by what is happening to the global capitalist economy, on which the bourgeois elements in the USSR are depending for significant assistance and cooperation.
The imperialist system upon which they are counting is in the throes of the worst economic situation since pre-October 1929. One cannot but notice that the imperialists are not rushing to invest in the collapsed East European socialist countries, nor in the USSR.
Even the Johnson and Johnson heiress, which was ready to invest $100 million in the privatization of the Gdansk shipyards, is now holding back. Not a day passes but one or another bourgeois economist presents a gloomy forecast of the economic situation.
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that a so-called shortage of capital is weakening the structure of the world capitalist system. But it's not a shortage of capital that is frightening the bourgeoisie; it is an accelerating flight of capital from the U.S.
What does that signify? The precariousness of the capitalist system. The constant shifting of funds from one capital to another indicates nervousness over a potential economic collapse.
The October 1987 crash was passed over as a mere aberration of the capitalist economic system. The collapse that might have followed was averted by an infusion of funds from the Federal Reserve Bank, the Bundesbank of Germany, and Japan. That created an inflationary current and a huge speculative wave that has now engulfed the subsidiaries, the so-called savings and loans banks.
Is it really possible to pass off the failure of hundreds of banks as an ordinary phenomenon?
Was it an ordinary phenomenon for the capitalist government to give free rein to the distribution of fictitious capital--junk bonds--and glut the financial markets with it?
Or is it the beginning of a great crisis?
The Securities and Exchange Commission has just granted a license to J.P. Morgan & Co. to sell and distribute stock. Congress prohibited such activity by the banks in 1933, following the so-called bank holiday declared by the Roosevelt administration when the banking system was on the verge of collapse.
The National Association of Security Dealers has pointed out that this move violates an act of Congress, but the SEC has freed the Morgan bank from this restriction anyhow. It can be seen as a confession by the central bankers that this time they are not able to prime the pump as in 1987, and hope the market can do it. It is in this context that one must view the layoff of 5,000 Chase Manhattan employees, a bank controlled by one of the richest families in the world. It is a strong indication of the impending crisis in the U.S.
For Soviet economists to believe that this system, the system of capitalist exploitation and oppression, is now in a position to invest its fortunes in rehabilitating the USSR so it will have a thriving capitalist economy is to indulge in one of the worst delusions possible.
It is infinitely more realistic to anticipate that the workers in the USSR will be awakened to their real interests and stem the counterrevolutionary tide.