Following are excerpts from Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy's opening talk to the Dec. 14-15 meeting of the party's National Committee.
Comrades, the last time I saw a reference to the word "Slavic" in the literature of Marxism or Leninism was by Karl Kautsky in a laudatory letter to the Social Democratic Party of Russia, praising their struggle and referring to the Slavic struggle. At that time, czarist Russia included Poland, Moldova and others.
I bring it up because three republics, Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine, have formed what is being called by some a Slavic Commonwealth.
That's not the way we would put it. That's not the way a revolutionary working class party trained in internationalism and on guard on the national question puts it.
The Slavs as a race disintegrated along with the collapse of the old feudal order. Under the impetus of bourgeois development, they became nations--Russia, Byelorussia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary--divided into classes. Within these countries there were oppressed and oppressing nations. This is elementary Marxism and Leninism.
How can one refer to them now in terms of the old racist and ethnic situation? To set up a commonwealth on that basis is to form a racist alliance. The southern republics can easily regard a meeting of these three--Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine--as a blow against them.
Of course, after the leaders of these republics met in secret, they decided to invite in the others. They first invited the largest--Kazakhstan--which has a large Russian population.
U.S. has foot in each camp
Whatever comes out of this, the U.S. is looking on it favorably, while still holding onto Gorbachev. Gorbachev of course is opposed to it. He could not be the president of a Soviet Union that doesn't exist. It's a convenient way to get rid of him.
So initially he denounced this meeting. But true to his centrist habits of going back and forth, he's now thinking how he can fit into the new treaty.
One of the aspects of this secret agreement is to transform the social system of the USSR, to turn completely around to a market economy, allowing full freedom for entrepreneurs--a fancy word for capitalists.
It's a full turn toward a capitalist market. But the leaders of these republics do not yet have the sanction of their states. This treaty may fall apart as soon as it is put in writing, like other treaties under the Gorbachev administration.
Let's remember that as early as 1922, when the Civil War had barely ended, a treaty was formulated under Lenin's guidance that recognized the sovereignty and equality of all republics. What united them was the strong influence of the Communist Party. There was centralism on a working class basis. The party expressed the solidarity of the working class, the Soviets expressed the solidarity of all the oppressed masses. Together they reined in the centrifugal forces generated by nationalist tendencies.
It was a remarkable achievement. Both Lenin and Trotsky applauded it. It should be said that Stalin had a big hand in doing it. We don't want to overstate all this to make Stalin look great, but that was when he was carrying out the program of the party and the split between the left, right and center was still a considerable distance away. He was Chairman of the Nationalities Commission.
It was then that the Soviet Union established a bicameral system. One house--the Soviet of Deputies--represented all the population, all the workers and peasants. The other one--the Soviet of Nationalities--had a certain number of representatives for each nationality.
For many years it was a very important area where the national question and other issues could be discussed. When there was disagreement, the leaders of both houses met. If a compromise or agreement was not arrived at, it was sent back to both houses. This was a new and remarkable achievement for a workers' state.
In the years of reaction and repression it may have become a dead letter. Gorbachev, however, wiped out the second house.
This Commonwealth treaty abolishes the Soviet of Nationalities and destroys and invalidates completely the existence of the Congress of People's Deputies. Under Gorbachev this body had become a bourgeois parliament, as distinct from Soviets organized on a working class, peasant, and popular basis. But a bourgeois parliament is better than a bourgeois dictatorship. And better than having centrifugal forces organized by a few top leaders of the biggest republics.
After the failure of the coup, Gorbachev called the parliament, the Congress of Deputies, into session and virtually ordered them to give up all their power to the republics. Their pay would go on, however. So the Congress was virtually shorn of all its power. How 2,500 parliamentarians could take all this, I don't know. Why not have a sitdown strike and say: You'll have to arrest us first!
We remember the betrayal of German Social Democracy in August 1914, when they voted for the war credits. But we don't often remember their better days. Engels described with a great deal of pride how during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when the socialists were in the Parliament, one after another would get up and denounce the war and the government and hail the working class. No sooner was one deputy arrested than another got up and took his place and kept on talking revolutionary socialism.
What everybody wants to know is, what's this fight between Gorbachev and Yeltsin about? They're all former communists, that's what hurts most. High-ranking members of the party, the Central Committee or the Politburo, all of them.
Gorbachev was on the Central Committee, the Politburo and then was General Secretary. Yeltsin became an alternate Politburo member. All these posts have to do with organization. And organization is especially significant and hard to decipher when politics are drowned out by monolithic conceptions inherited from the past, when no voice from the point of view of the working class is allowed, and no inner-party socialist democracy.
With socialist democracy, when there's no agreement there's a split. So what? It's not the worst of all things. If later there's agreement, they'll unite. Or they'll work together as a coalition.
But it's hard to have a split in an organization in which there's so much privilege. Who wants to be out? So all politics is subordinated to the dominant political tendency. All struggles are hidden in organizational politics. Wherever there is a difference it takes on an organizational form.
Machine politics
It becomes very much like what happens in bourgeois democracy, where each one develops a political machine. If you're in the Democratic Party in New York City, you won't get anyplace unless you build up your own machine. In the old days Tammany Hall decided everything. In Chicago it's the same thing. And it's the same in the Republican Party.
Once in a while a group of multi-millionaires decides to break the machine and get a new guy in, but this is rare. Bourgeois politics is machine politics. When somebody gets up and says "the great Senator from South Dakota," it's because he has a machine there.
So Stalinist politics degenerated into machine politics. The differentiation in the population grew, the differences in pay between a scientist or astronaut and a worker. Of course, they're all in the party and there they are supposed to be equal. But a mass party has to favor the workers and the more oppressed section.
A party like our own has to be geared first of all to the workers and at the same time to the national question and the woman question and the gay question. If you just have suffrage, if everybody is considered equal, you forget what's most important for party development.
When the CPSU took on a monolithic character and machine politics became the order of the day, the question became which machine controlled Moscow? Which controlled Leningrad? Everybody in the machine votes just the way the leaders expect them to. Early on it became obvious to Stalin that this was developing.
When Zinoviev and Kamenev were the party secretaries of Moscow and Leningrad, they were ideological leaders, not machine politicians. And as the struggle developed, Stalin got rid of them, and not by very courteous and gentle means. They were replaced with machine people from Stalin's group. In 1934, Sergei Kirov got to be very, very prominent as a party leader in Leningrad. And it became all too obvious that he might be a challenge to Stalin. Then Kirov was assassinated.
Stalin turned it around and used the assassination to frame up and oust his rivals and reorganize the Moscow party and the parties everywhere. Machine politics made it necessary to have a continual purge.
Difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin
Coming back to the present. It became obvious to Gorbachev that Yeltsin changed the leadership in Moscow in a more bourgeois direction. Then two outright bourgeois figures, Popov and Sobchak, were elected as the mayors of Moscow and Leningrad. They're both business people. How that could happen is a phenomenon we have to think over. It showed that the two principal cities were gravitating in a counterrevolutionary direction.
Who voted? How many participated? What kind of opposition was there? It gave Yeltsin a lot of leverage.
The imperialist bourgeoisie are in on all this. The New York Times and other newspapers say Yeltsin is a populist. They never tell you what his ideas are. What is his stand on market relations, on joint ventures, on private property, on Stalin? It's all based upon generalities. He's popular. That's all.
What is the difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin? In a general way there is a difference. Gorbachev said in one of his interviews a year or so ago that the two things he wouldn't give up were state property and a central union of all the republics.
Back in 1985-86, we noticed attacks against Levelers in Soviet literature. The Levelers were an ancient form of communist organization that attacked the rich and favored bringing them down to the level of the peasants, the level of subsistence.
We as communists are not Levelers. We recognize the difference between skilled and unskilled work and that inequality of income will exist for a long time. But the workers generally tend towards equality of social conditions, and we're for that. We're for the workers being treated equally with others. We're against privilege, and whoever cultivates privilege naturally gravitates toward a struggle against Levelers.
Stalin first began the attack against Levelers in the 1930s. It coincided with a tremendous speedup. He stimulated a rat race over who would produce most and get the greatest income. This degraded working class solidarity in the interests of personal incentive.
That campaign against Levelers was very much like when the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries attacks communists and anarchists and so on. In reality there might not be any; the real target is the workers.
Gorbachev's attack against Levelers came amid promises of swift modernization of the technological-scientific apparatus of the whole USSR. Everybody would be for that. And the workers would understand that certain jobs would be phased out, just like in capitalist society. But it would be the responsibility of the workers' state to compensate the workers and provide new jobs with no loss of pay. Otherwise it would be like under capitalism.
So the workers were for the reforms that Gorbachev introduced, which, at the beginning at least, seemed to be almost entirely geared toward the scientific-technological revolution and to raise the living standards. Little attention was paid to the attacks against the Levelers.
Then the directors and managers began calling for harder work. The workers have been working hard all along. Why this campaign to work harder?
The head of the trade unions, who was of course part of the bureaucracy, asked some questions. In this new plan, how much would be devoted to consumer goods for the workers? Would there be compensation in case the technological changes led to layoffs? There was no proper discussion of these questions. In particular at the 19th Party Conference, the only critical talk was the one made by the head of the trade unions.
Lifting price controls
Reduced to understandable terms, the market economy meant lifting price controls from commodities that workers use. The prices of bread, milk, sugar, which hadn't changed for years, would suddenly soar. But the bourgeois economists knew people would be afraid of this, so they said it would be a gradual process. Some price controls would remain until the year 2000, they said. In the late 1980s that seemed far away. But as of today, they have lifted many price controls without compensating the workers. This explains a lot of the chaos.
To lift price controls means raising the price of everything. Who's going to decide it? How do you do it democratically? They bourgeois elements say just lift the controls and the capitalist market will take care of it. But the capitalist market brings inflation, it brings hoarding, it accentuates shortages. That is what is happening.
You either have centralized planning or you have the capitalist market. You can't have it both ways. You either let prices be decided automatically by the blind operation of supply and demand or you have administrative prices that can be controlled.
The top officials decided it couldn't be done democratically because the people were going to be against increases in prices, against layoffs and increases in labor productivity without compensation. Wherever they tried anything they came up against the mass of the people. Many of them didn't want to face this and left their jobs.
Gorbachev thought he could have a socialist government with a free market. Then there'd be trade and friendly relations with the imperialists. Well, you just go ahead and try to get friendly relations with the imperialists--without them swallowing you up.
The end result is that the U.S. is now sending military planes with food and medicine to the Soviet Union. What a humiliation. They're sending what the Soviet Union has been producing for years. There's not a single commodity being sent over that couldn't be produced there. But they've broken down the socialist machinery in their attempt to bring about a capitalist system.
And it's not working. Otherwise they would be writing rave stories from Moscow and Leningrad about how the imperialists have brought advantages. Instead, there's disaster and chaos. The attempt to overturn the socialist economy has failed thus far.
Echoes of Civil War
What was the Civil War in the United States about? The struggle was between wage slavery in the North and chattel slavery in the South. The two were diametrically opposed social systems and they collided. There were exploiters on both sides. But chattel slavery was incompatible with the new and growing capitalist system. The moral issue of slavery was the subjective factor and affected the masses. But objectively it was a struggle between two irreconcilable social systems.
In the Soviet Union there's an attempt to bring back wage slavery and to abandon socialism as a perspective.
The first shots of the Civil War were fired from Fort Sumter in South Carolina. South Carolina had seceded from the Union, saying they were free and sovereign and independent and calling on all the others to join in. John Calhoun talked just like Boris Yeltsin.
As soon as South Carolina enacted the secession ordinance, the property question came up. The first priority was of course slavery--the Northerners wanted to take away their property, the slaves. But there was another aspect to the property question. Did Fort Sumter belong to the federal government or to South Carolina? South Carolina said: it belongs to us and we, the South Carolina slavocracy, will own that fort and the merchant ships and all the other military and governmental institutions that were federal before.
In the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin said: the military bases in Russia don't belong to the federal government, they belong to Russia. And those that are in the Ukraine, belong to the Ukraine. The first thing they do is lay their hands on state property. Just like the Confederacy.
But this is not 1861. This is a highly integrated economy. You're splitting it up? That's crazy! And the would-be slave owner boss Yeltsin, who says it's all going to be equal now, everybody's going to own whatever is in their own territory, is a fraud and a liar.
The U.S. imperialists know this best of all. No wonder Baker is running there almost every other day and talking on the telephone to Gorbachev or Yeltsin or both of them at the same time.
So, we find what they're trying to do impractical; their overturning of a social system is not an easy one. There are latent revolutionary forces that have not come to the fore. It may take time. But we won't write the whole thing off and say it's all gone. They must not succeed.