February 7 — Whoever tries to understand the nature of the deep-going crisis in the USSR merely on the basis of popular slogans such as democracy, pluralism, abolition of the single-party monopoly, will forever be deceived. One must go behind these political slogans and examine the materialist basis behind them, the class groupings which are the main motive forces in the struggle.
The fundamental struggle is between those who want to retain and strengthen public ownership of the means of production and a planned economy in the USSR, and those who want to abandon it. The imperialist bourgeoisie is a very significant factor in their support for the latter.
What is involved is nothing less than an attempt to change the social basis of the USSR, to fundamentally alter its class character as a workers' state, or as it has been popularly called, a socialist state, and foist upon it a series of adventurous so-called reforms which at bottom are anti-socialist. If allowed to run their course, they will end up with the restoration of capitalism. This must be said plainly and clearly.
This article is written at a time when the Central Committee meeting is still in session, and no definitive conclusions about it can be made. Nevertheless, some matters have already become crystal clear.
The first question we must ask ourselves is: Who organized the hostile, flagrantly bourgeois demonstration in Moscow on the day before the opening of the Central Committee meeting? Who inspired it? Who promoted it? Who in fact gave the go-ahead? Was it not the Gorbachev administration itself?
This was evident from the fact that the radio, television and the press gave the demonstration favorable publicity beforehand. This clearly indicates coordination between the Gorbachev governing group and one of the fundamental pillars of the Soviet state, the publicly owned communications industry. The press should be neutral, nonpartisan when factional issues are involved. But the Gorbachev grouping used the press and the media for purely factional and partisan reasons, negating their democratic pretensions.
This demonstration was the organized expression of the nascent bourgeoisie in the USSR. No, no, this is not a bourgeoisie which already owns the means of production and thereby has the right to exploit the workers. It is not the classical bourgeoisie reborn. It is bourgeois in the sense that its world outlook is bourgeois, that its social and political cravings are for individual ownership of the means of production.
Where did they get the temerity to organize a demonstration right before the opening of what could be a decisive struggle against them? Those who usually are so subservient and obedient got their courage from Gorbachev and his grouping.
This indicates coordination to appease the bourgeois elements and at the same time to conspire against those elements of the Central Committee now called hardliners or conservatives, but who in reality are more progressive on the fundamental question of public ownership of the means of production.
Gorbachev was afraid to face up to the Central Committee, which had to deal with the disasters in Eastern Europe and with what could be the beginning of the disintegration of the USSR as a multinational state — the result of his management of the crisis in the Baltics as well as in the southern republics.
One of the participants in the meeting, the eye surgeon Svyatoslav Fyodorov, told an Associated Press reporter that in addition to the 249 Central Committee members, there were more than 700 other officials from around the Soviet Union present and voting at the meeting. Who invited them? How were they selected? Even if the number is exaggerated, this deprives the Central Committee of unimpeded deliberation.
Combined with the demonstration, all this appears to be a clear attempt to intimidate the relatively progressive opposition to Gorbachev on the Central Committee.
It's quite impossible to believe that the demonstration could have taken place without the more progressive faction getting wind of it. That they did not organize their own counterdemonstration, or at least introduce a Party resolution denouncing the demonstration and calling on the workers, is a sign of their weakness in the face of this attack on the Central Committee.
Unless it is put squarely that perestroika is anti-socialist, the workers will become bewildered, as they have been in Eastern Europe, with all the dire consequences of spiraling prices, unemployment and ownership of plants by foreign imperialists.
The very idea that the Party leader should take such a benign attitude toward an outside, bourgeois grouping that is trying to intimidate the rest of the Party! It's altogether repugnant to any genuine communist, if not disloyal altogether to the Party membership. And this in a Party which once was genuinely in the vanguard and devoted everything to the cause of the revolution and the proletariat.
Such an event would have been incredible years ago, but the policy of the Gorbachev regime in a nutshell is to have one foot in the camp of the Party and another in the camp of the openly bourgeois, pro-imperialist grouping.
Gorbachev invites leaders of the so-called radical reform group, thoroughly bourgeois, to attend the Central Committee meeting. At the same time, he also invites some of the miners, all with the purpose of protecting his left and right flanks and making ready to jump from the camp of the Party to the camp of the outright bourgeoisie.
He sends the Red Army to occupy Azerbaijan (which will earn the enmity of the people) while fawning on and playing with the pro-imperialist popular fronts of the Baltic republics, the eager-beaver bourgeois elements now in the leadership who already consider themselves part of the imperialist camp.
The meeting is reported to have voted to drop Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution, which defines the Communist Party as the "leading and guiding force of Soviet society."
It's true that in Lenin's time no such clause existed in the Constitution. However, the Party exercised effective power as the vanguard of the revolutionary working class and the peasantry. It was able to exercise leadership in the Soviets, which were democratically organized to represent the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers.
The constitutional provision has in reality become a dead letter, since the Party in fact validated the existence of bourgeois organizations after the 19th Party Conference. This includes infusing life into such right-wing organizations as Pamyat. These were a handful of lunatic fringe elements, considered subversive, but the Gorbachev regime has validated their existence and given them free rein to promote not only chauvinism but racism and anti-Semitism.
As for the view that the Party is "giving up its monopoly on power," there hasn't been a monopoly in the sense that a single political tendency has dominated the government, since the bourgeois reformers have been inside the Party for a considerable period of time.
How can these policies be confounded with Marxist-Leninist strategy? How is it possible for Gorbachev to do all this at this stage?
In the first place, one has to bear in mind the 19th Party Conference of June 1988, which made the imperialist bourgeoisie delirious with joy. Whoever believes that democracy was the issue, or a minor byproduct of the conference, is deceived. It opened the gate to the bourgeoisie.
That conference was packed by the Gorbachev grouping with its supporters. He had openly declared that only those supporting perestroika should be selected as delegates. The previous formulas, or quotas, which guaranteed a certain proportion of workers, of women, of national minorities, were thrown overboard. All this was explained in the media worldwide as the flowering of democracy.
When it comes down to the nitty gritty, the political struggle is really over the extension of arbitrary power by the Gorbachev leadership. It is keeping a foot in two antagonistic camps: on the one hand, in the Central Committee, and on the other in the camp of the bourgeoisie. It attempts to balance between them in the most opportunist way, meanwhile not having solved a single problem with its bourgeois economic reforms, which can neither build socialism nor topple the social system in favor of the bourgeoisie.
The resort to extending the political authority of the president is a time-honored practice of all Bonapartist regimes that seek to straddle warring class camps.
No one in the working class movement is really opposed to democratization as such. But in the name of democracy, the form of the Soviet government has been changed in an undemocratic direction.
The 19th Party Conference was supposed to have discussed the relative merits of having a ministerial form of government or a presidential form. Our constitutionalists from Harvard, Yale, Princeton and UCLA all know the difference between the two. They know that both are in reality forms of government originally best suited for the bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, one is more democratic than the other. But which one do the imperialist well-wishers of the Gorbachev regime push for the USSR? The more democratic form, the ministerial one? Or the presidential form, which is less democratic?
Their biggest playing card is Gorbachev himself, and trusting him with an extension of power is more important than being consistent to abstract democracy, even in the bourgeois sense.
Why is one more democratic than the other? In the ministerial form of government, the cabinet and the prime minister are all responsible to the parliament or the congress. By a mere vote of lack of confidence, without the necessity of impeachment, the government falls, and a new one can readily be formed from the same parliamentary forum.
The fall of the governing group does not mean the destruction of the state, or even its impairment. It just means that the governing group may for a time be unable to take significant decisions until a new government is formed. The authority to do so is strictly within the framework of the parliament or congress.
How is it with the presidential form of government? The president is not really responsible to the congress or parliament. Only in rare cases can he or she be recalled, such as when charged with a high crime like treason. There is no provision for recall by the masses. (Under the Paris Commune-type of state, the original model for a workers' state, each individual representative of the Commune could be recalled by a popular vote at will.) There have occasionally been recalls of congress people, but never of the president of the United States. The presidency was originally conceived as a compromise between a monarchy and a republic. The longer the tenure of a president, the less the involvement of the masses.
There has been an undeviating tendency in all bourgeois parliamentary governments for the power to continually shift from the more popular legislative branch to the executive branch. This is of enormous importance in evaluating the true significance of universal suffrage, which in itself does not enlarge the role of the masses. The processes of a capitalist government, even the best of them, invariably tend in the direction of strengthening the executive branch as against the legislative, with the former becoming more independent of popular control rather than less.
The 19th Party Conference ended with a seeming shift of power to the much-touted, broadened, more popular Congress of Soviet Deputies, but at the same time real power was shifted into the office of the presidency (Gorbachev). In the time since the 19th Party Conference, the presidency has become over-stuffed with a bureaucracy as powerful, if not more so, than that of Brezhnev, Andropov or Chernenko. How come the bourgeois press has scarcely mentioned that?
Gorbachev has mentioned over and over again that he need not have two legs, one in the camp of the Party and one in the camp of the presidency, which is wholly supported by the bourgeoisie. It is frequently rumored that he might leave the job of Party secretary and confine himself, as they say, to the real job of governing as president.
The presidency as now constituted is unlike what it was. Under Andrei Gromyko, for example, it was mainly ceremonial, whereas now it has become the center of political power. Some of the bourgeois elements, prompted by U.S.-controlled "think tanks," have suddenly become amenable to the idea that the transition to "true democracy" may come in the form of authoritarian rule. Such is the real meaning of the democratic forms that the bourgeoisie has in mind! It has not the slightest resemblance to socialist, proletarian democracy. Indeed, it is the very opposite.
What emerges from this plenary meeting is that Gorbachev is not more democratic, in the proletarian meaning of the term, but more bourgeois than his predecessors. The democracy is all funneled into the area of the neobourgeoisie, not to the proletariat.
The Central Committee is confronted with a virtually new power base since the 19th Party Conference. For instance, there has been a significant change in the chairmanship of the Defense Council. This post has been transferred from the General Secretary of the Party to the president. So while formerly under the jurisdiction of the Central Committee, the armed forces, as well as the security forces, are now under the office of the presidency. (New York Times, Feb. 1, Op-Ed by Elizabeth Teague.)
How could such an important shift away from a more democratic procedure to a more authoritarian role for the presidency fail to get more attention? Only because there is such solicitude for Gorbachev among the imperialists.
Changing the Constitution clears the way for a multiparty system. What do they mean by that? Do they mean, for instance, that various working-class parties — left-wing, ultra left-wing, or moderate factional groupings — will now organize themselves on the programmatic basis of proletarian dictatorship in defense of socialist construction? Parties that will struggle against social inequality and so on? No, they don't mean the organization of working class parties. They mean bourgeois parties.
The last thing they want is an organized, progressive, left-wing communist organization. When Yuri Afanasyev said "Long live the February Revolution" at the bourgeois rally on Feb. 4, he meant the bourgeois revolution in 1917 that brought Kerensky to power, and which was overthrown by the Bolsheviks, supported by the workers and peasants. By a pluralistic regime he means the Cadets, the Constitutional Democrats, and the Social Revolutionaries who went over to the bourgeoisie.
Look at history. In pre-war Romania, the Peasant Party was the party that decimated the peasantry. The Liberal Party, supposedly liberal toward the workers, killed workers. The names had no correspondence to the reality. One has to seek the class roots and composition and the orientation of the social groupings from the materialist interpretation of history, not on the basis of political slogans.
The reason the bourgeoisie is pushing a strengthening of the presidency is to weaken the Party and, as Elizabeth Teague rightly says, to enable Gorbachev to govern without the Party.
The neobourgeoisie in the USSR, after being nurtured and developed over many decades, is attempting to demonstrate its full maturity. To understand what stage has been reached in its evolution, let us first of all examine the historical evolution of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe, toward which it expresses much kinship.
Let us recall, as explained in the Communist Manifesto, that the bourgeoisie was an oppressed class in feudal society. It went through several stages as it gradually developed to full maturity, climbing to supremacy over the feudal lords and domination over the proletariat.
In its earlier stages when it was still an oppressed class, long before it turned into an opposition party, it learned to ingratiate itself with the monarchy, to become its most loyal servant. In Western Europe, and in Russia under the czar, the nascent bourgeoisie enthusiastically served the great monarchies, especially when they were in need of funds, and supported them with loans and with credits.
Let there be no mistake about it. Before it gathered enough economic strength to challenge the feudal regimes, the bourgeoisie was their most loyal servant.
In Russia in the early 20th century, the development of the bourgeoisie was at the same time creating a profoundly revolutionary proletariat. This inhibited the bourgeoisie from the very beginning from becoming the principal opposition to the monarchy.
Once the 1905 Revolution began, the bourgeoisie became frightened, not so much by the czar's repression against it as by the revolutionary momentum of the proletariat. It began to turn back any kind of opposition to the tyrannical autocracy and to accommodate itself in whatever way it could. It showed subservience to the czarist regime as long as its own class interests were most endangered by the proletariat.
How relevant is all this to the history of the Soviet Union after the conquest of power by the working class?
Immediately after the revolution, the overwhelming body of landlords, industrialists and bankers fled for their lives. What was left were the bourgeois intelligentsia. Their skills were badly needed in light of the backwardness of Russian capitalism and the meager cultural background of the proletariat and especially the peasantry. During the Leninist regime, the intelligentsia seemed cooperative, acquiescent, indulgent and ingratiating. They had to be because their role was really hated by the proletariat who looked on them as an unavoidable necessity.
The same phenomenon in China led to the expression "radishes" — red on the outside, white on the inside.
In the regimes that followed the Leninist era, with the growing chasm between the working class and the bureaucratic apparatus, these bourgeois elements grew in strength, amassing privilege, social status and a modicum of political power. But they lacked what is fundamental to complete the process of a bourgeoisie — ownership of the means of production. That is what they crave. That is what will make them a classical prototype of the bourgeoisie.
What stands in the way of their ownership? If you read the documents and speeches of the Gorbachev regime at the present time, the phrase "private forms of property" is being alluded to more and more. Why does it need some new definition that legislators have to ponder? What is so complex, that it needs redefinition?
Communists are always accused of wanting to eliminate all personal property. But this is a slander. The distinguishing feature of communism, says the Communist Manifesto, "is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is 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."
And then comes the coup de grace to the neobourgeoisie in the USSR. "In this sense, the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." That's how Marx and Engels defined communism.
This new bourgeoisie, that chatters endlessly about freedom, about pluralism, about different forms of property, what is it that they really are for? The restoration of bourgeois private property.
This is the rock-bottom issue. All else is camouflage and deception.
But how can this new bourgeoisie, which doesn't own the means of production, attain its objective? The means of production are legally in the hands of the proletariat. Five years of nibbling away at the socialized property belonging to the workers and the peasants have produced chaos, but have been unable to transfer the means of production from the hands of the working class to the hands of the neobourgeoisie.
That's what is at the bottom of all the chatter, all the sloganeering, all the attacks on a "command and administrative economy."
Changing all this was given the green light at the 19th Party Conference. However, the attainment of the objective has proved impossible, up to this very day. What stands in the way?
The Party bureaucracy, is the answer of the bourgeoisie. They direct all their fire against the privileges of the Party, but they leave out the even broader stratum of Soviet society which enjoys even greater privileges and compensations and stands in sharp contrast to the workers and peasants: the managers, directors, the network of academic and scientific institutions, some of which are second only to the U.S. in number.
Regressive though the politics of the Communist Party apparatus are, weakened and debilitated as it has become over the decades, it is nevertheless the trustee of the proletariat when it comes to the ownership of the means of production. The Party bureaucracy are the ones who hold its reins. One can say they are the trustee in bankruptcy, but they nevertheless are the trustee. And what the bourgeois elements are trying to do is dislodge them. All the fire is against the bureaucracy.
But we must distinguish who is firing at whom. If we confuse the shots from the bourgeoisie with the early attempts of the workers themselves to raise their level and begin to participate in the political struggle, there is only hopeless confusion.
The miners and other workers have awakened from long years of torpor and risen on their own spontaneously; they are now in the early stage of what Lenin called economism, without political direction and perspective. And precisely because of this they are being cajoled and flattered on all sides.
The historical mission of the proletariat is being submerged in all the maneuvers and deceptions of the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic apparatus.
Last updated: 19 February 2018