Now that the Congress of Peoples Deputies has administered a rebuff to Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and has thereby restricted his attempt to enlarge his political power, it has adjourned in a triumphant mood. The most urgent task facing the congress now is how to stop the surge in privatization of state property and the growing spiral of inflation.The current struggle in Russia is not merely the usual parliamentary tussle between the legislative and the executive branches that occurs so many times in the development of a bourgeois state. If that were all it were, the struggle would have considerably less significance for the working class and the progressive sections of society in Russia.
By contrast, consider the history of U.S. bourgeois politics. Often one special interest or another captures a branch of the bourgeois state. Sometimes very large corporations hold a branch of the government for a period of time. The most conservative elements, for example, generally make the judicial arm their province. While the struggles between the branches may be important to the special interests, they do not fundamentally alter relations between the workers and the capitalists.
In Russia the struggle between the two branches of government, between the Yeltsin executive and the Congress of Peoples Deputies, is an expression of the class struggle. That does not necessarily imply that the social composition of the congress is working class or that it directly represents the working class. But the outcome of this struggle is nevertheless fundamental to the class struggle.
Also, what is at stake in Russia is not merely the difference between public ownership and privatization as these terms are applied in bourgeois politics. For example, in Britain after World War II, the capitalist government headed by a Labor Party prime minister carried out nationalizations of the railroads, steel and other industries. But this still did not raise it above the level of bourgeois property, because the nationalizations left the bourgeoisie intact as the ruling class. Later, during the 1980s, much of the previously nationalized industry was handed back to private interests. Privatizing in Britain did not change the class content of the property.
The Bolshevik Revolution, on the other hand, was the first to expropriate the bourgeoisie both politically and economically, putting the nationalized property in the hands of a workers' state--a clear transfer from one class to another.
The issue in Russia is the privatization of socialized property and the dismemberment of socialist production. It is thereby fundamental to the class struggle.
Unless the Russian Congress of Peoples Deputies gives priority to the two fundamental issues of privatization and inflation and takes clear-cut measures to halt both these plagues, the country faces the danger of falling completely into the arms of the seven imperialist robbers, the so-called G7 countries.
The congress must say: `No more'
The issue is whether the congress will allow the bloodletting of socialized industries or will take immediate steps to say, "no more." It must at the same time order an exact accounting of the many state enterprises that have already been privatized. They should be immediately repossessed.
The congress must also order an accounting of what happened to the enterprises since they were taken from state control and privatized. What happened to the work force? How many workers were laid off or new ones hired? How much money was spent in the process? Where did the money come from? Was it borrowed from the central bank? Is the management under the direction of the congress or of officials reporting to Yeltsin?
These are the most important questions with respect to privatization or socialization. These are the acid questions. The future of socialism depends upon questions of this type.
One concrete example is the Moscow region's Zil factory, which produces limousines. According to a March 16 Associated Press report, it is now being privatized. By what authority is this state enterprise, which employs as many as 100,000 workers and has 14 other plants across the country, to become privately owned?
If the congress cannot take immediate measures to halt wholesale privatization of such important industrial complexes, then it must admit it has no authority whatever. This is not a question of privatization involving some small vegetable stores. It goes to the very heart of industrial projects built over decades of socialist construction.
The issue should not be confused with the question of who purchases the enterprises at the present time. That issue should be separated.
It is not enough for the congress to reduce the powers of Yeltsin. It is not even clear which of his powers have been reduced at the present time. The issue is how to halt privatization, to stop the bloodletting of socialist property, the most basic asset of the government.
Who controls the central bank?
An equally important issue concerns the central bank. Its borrowing and lending powers must be under the full control of the congress. Even in capitalist governments, whether monarchies, military dictatorships or capitalist democracies, the state bank is under the control of whatever parliamentary institution is in existence. In the U.S., for example, only Congress has authority to print and coin money and control the currency.
The Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. regularly has to report to Congress and give the details of its borrowing and lending operations. If in Russia these banking operations continue to remain in hands other than the Congress of Peoples Deputies, it means the congress does not have the power of the purse and thus has no control.
Now those are delicate matters, of course. They require considerable proficiency and knowledge of the inner operations of the bank. But this is not 1917 when the Soviet Union had none of its own experts and the bourgeois elements were deserting to the counter-revolution. Even then the Soviet government, as soon as it had defeated the White armies, established a stable currency and put the central bank under the government's jurisdiction.
The Congress of Peoples Deputies cannot permit any divided authority between the executive and itself. The two are at cross purposes. The Yeltsin reactionary forces cannot but play a destructive role for the economy of the country.
Now is the best time for the congress to move swiftly to arrogate to itself the powers that normally belong to a congress. The Yeltsin rapid-fire acceleration of privatization has demonstrated the complete bankruptcy of trying to foist on the country an old and easily recognizable form of capitalist exploitation and oppression. It's a model of what existed before the October 1917 Revolution. It's why the workers and peasants rebelled. It made richer those who were rich, took from the peasants what they still possessed and deprived the workers of the fruits of their labor.
Reaction of the Yeltsin forces
While the congress may feel triumphant, Yeltsin and his supporters are now sulking. They have taken as their best defense an ideological assault on the congress. They accuse it of moving toward establishing a communist state.
There is plenty in this latest development that could give Yeltsin pause to contemplate his new situation. Yeltsin started his career as an engineer and made his way to the top in the Sverdlovsk region basically on his engineering and technical ability. That was his strong point.
He early showed an aptitude for bulling his way through to the top in his varying jobs. All through that career he seemed to easily collaborate and even win his way with the party leadership, with the bureaucracy, which he later began to demean and finally to ferociously attack.
The problem he had as an engineer was how to collaborate in the party apparatus. This apparatus, as the political instrument of proletarian rule, found it essential, even indispensable, to recruit into itself the technical intelligentsia, not only scientists and doctors but above all the industrial managers who soon became "technocrats."
As long as the party was a revolutionary working class party true to its own goals, it seemed able to manage a more-or-less easy relationship between the "technocrats" and the party revolutionaries. It would of course have been fortunate for the party if the technical intelligentsia and especially the industrial managers of huge complexes were to become working-class revolutionaries intent on utilizing their skills and abilities to merge with the socialist goal, all with a view of remaking the old society of exploiters and oppressors into the new communist society.
In the rush to industrialize, which did achieve tremendous successes in the early decades of the USSR, it is easy to see how the great industrial progress and the raising of the living standards of the masses could easily mask the loss of revolutionary idealism: the struggle for socialist equality.
These are only some of the problems faced by the first socialist society. We leave aside, for example, the extreme harshness of the task of socialist construction in an ill-developed country intent, on the basis of its successes, on achieving a world standing comparable to that of the advanced imperialist countries.
Moving up the ladder
But much had changed by the time Boris Yeltsin became a full-fledged engineer and was moving up the ladder in the Sverdlovsk area, where he could rightfully boast of industrial success. Yeltsin was not of the generation of the early 1920s. He was not one of those inspired to industrialization on the basis of socialist idealism. Least of all was he a visionary who saw communism as the ideal for which he would strive.
Political conditions in Sverdlovsk at the time favored no such conception. In his autobiography, Against the Grain, Yeltsin does not in the slightest give the impression that he was striving toward communism. Reading it closely, one is easily convinced that he was a climber in the bureaucratic apparatus.
He, as a technocrat, as a climber, bulled his way through because the political machine in the party lent itself more and more to accommodation with the technical intelligentsia, with the industrial managers.
Who ran the party?
The issue is who really ran the party--was it the industrial aristocracy or was it the political apparatus nurtured through years in the struggle? This question was never sharply posed for solution. It was always compromised.
Thus Alexei Kosygin, regarded as a technocrat, could be selected as prime minister at the same time Leonid Brezhnev, a political organizer, could be elected party leader. When Mikhail Gorbachev brought Yeltsin from the Sverdlovsk region into the Moscow party leadership, it was a way (whether he intended it or not) to bolster Gorbachev's political leadership on the basis of having an ally clearly representing the industrial aristocracy, the technocrats.
Gorbachev's motives in elevating Yeltsin, however, were also to strengthen his views--then regarded as "liberal," actually bourgeois views--against "conservatives" such as Yegor Ligachev, also called the "hard-liners." Yeltsin soon began to go beyond anything that Gorbachev had anticipated in expounding his reforms. Yeltsin's view of accelerating Gorbachev's bourgeois reforms was to plunge into the wholesale abandonment of socialism. The imperialist press recognized very early that Gorbachev himself was at wit's end about what to do.
Yeltsin associated with the so-called Interregional Group for Democratic Reforms. As he put it in his autobiography: "There are not many points of principle that divide the so-called rightists and leftists of the [interregional] group. No doubt, the main one is the question of property. If one accepts the private ownership of property, then this means the collapse of the main buttress that supports the state's monopoly of property ownership and everything that stems from it. . . ." Essentially, this is what Yeltsin embraced.
This is how every capitalist politician understands freedom, liberty, democracy, and so on--the freedom to own property to exploit others. The property problem is the quintessence of the class struggle.
Compared to other capitalist politicians, Yeltsin has an Achilles' heel: a technocratic view of how to overthrow the socialist structures still in place in Russia. It is one thing when an engineer is given a job to construct a dam or railroad or drain a river. You can have all the ability in the world and yet not succeed if you are politically opposed by the central committee--or, in the capitalist countries, by the government.
Yeltsin's problem
But it is altogether different when you as an engineer, as a technocrat, also gain the political power to bull your way through, to push a political project as though it were an industrial one. Then you face your supreme test. This basically, is the problem of Yeltsin.
He was successful as long as the party leadership permitted him to push his bourgeois reforms and disregarded the dire consequences to the broad public of workers, peasants and intellectuals. It was something else when it became impossible for the party leadership as a whole to live with this.
Yeltsin's great fortune was the ill-fated attempt in August 1991 by the party leadership to overcome Gorbachev and his supporters with a coup attempt. Were it not for that, Yeltsin would have been removed, because he was antagonizing practically all sections of the population--except for the speculators, the thieves, the embezzlers, the quick-buck elite in the bureaucracy and in the bourgeois intelligentsia, not to speak of those who were already making their bundle in the flourishing private sector as a result of the Gorbachev reforms.
At this juncture, it would not be a bad recommendation to Yeltsin to ponder his situation. His fleeting popularity resulted from an unfortunate conjuncture of events in the USSR: Gorbachev's mistake, for instance, in bringing Yeltsin to the fore simply to undermine the Ligachev opposition, only to have Yeltsin turn against him.
Since the August 1991 coup attempt, with the experience of Yeltsin as president of Russia and not forgetting for a moment the dismembering of the USSR, what has been the result? Yeltsin's economic policies (and Gorbachev's before him) have been so devastating that it is virtually impossible to avoid a greater disaster if he continues to follow through.
The imperialists are shying away from any kind of real support for anyone whom they think might resuscitate the socialist system or strengthen the socialized aspects of the USSR. Yeltsin is certainly not in that category, yet because he has such narrow popular support in Russia, the imperialists have little confidence in him.
The Congress of Deputies, regardless of its divisions into right, left and center, is far more representative of Russia today than Yeltsin could possibly claim to be.