June 20 — The miners of Romania! They have done more in 36 hours to clarify class relations and expose the true political situation in Romania than all the hundreds and hundreds of bourgeois reformist new thinkers in Eastern Europe and the USSR put together.
They have unmasked the imperialist bourgeoisie and their minions in Romania. They have shown up the class character of the new government. They have beaten back the new faces of the old Iron Guard. And more than that, by their so-called vandalism, they have demonstrated that they understand and know in their bones who the class enemy really is.
First, who called them in to the capital? The president, Ion Iliescu. Why did he do it? Because he feared a complete fascist takeover. He was worried, and still is, that the army brass, which overthrew the Ceausescu government with a fascist coup, might be ready to go whole hog this time around.
It was fear of the extreme right, fear of a full fascist takeover by the military camarilla, that urged the Iliescu government to, for the third time around, call upon the most class-conscious elements of the working class to come to the rescue.
The capitalist media here and throughout the imperialist world say the government feared the neofascist, vigilante-like bands which for 53 days had taken over University Square, clamped down on the internal security building, and occupied various other governmental and civic institutions.
Were these neofascist bands the great danger to the Iliescu regime? Not at all. A few hundred police could have easily gotten rid of them in no time.
They are the political descendants of the old royalist riffraff and terrorists, the Iron Guard, which tortured and killed hundreds of communists and progressives before and during World War II. They are well remembered in working class history in Romania for the horrifying Jilava massacre in November 1940 when Nazism was on the rise. The royalist government and the army allowed the Iron Guard to enter the Jilava prison and shoot down and kill scores of imprisoned communists.
But this time around these neofascist bands are a narrow social grouping, and their 53-day deliberate vandalism for the purpose of goading the military into a complete takeover failed, just as the miners were moving in on the capital.
Just what did the miners accomplish that earned them a glorious place in contemporary East European working class history? It was not just that they scared the hell out of the neofascist bands, who ran for their lives. Here is what the "grimy, slovenly, uncouth, grim-looking" workers did.
First, they shut the mouth of the poisonous, deceitful and lying Romania Libera, the largest reactionary organ in the country that disseminates imperialist propaganda. Its executive editor, Florica Ichim, was said to be roughed up and hiding in her apartment in the fashionable district of Petre Cretu street in Bucharest. How the Wall Street Journal wept for her! But it never printed as much as a word about the atrocities of the neofascist bands when the military was carrying out its coup last December.
The miners also shut down Dreptatea, the daily paper of the misnamed National Peasants Party, and Viirtorul of the Liberal Party.
Even the imperialist press has to acknowledge the class gulf between these bourgeois groups and not just the miners but the workers as a whole. In the words of the New York Times (June 17, News of the Week in Review), "This social division played itself out last week in the streets of Bucharest as workers in from factories on the city's outskirts watched approvingly as the miners chased down suspected government opponents ... ."
Why did the workers shut the bourgeois papers down and break much of their equipment? Vandalism? No. It was forced upon them by the fact that they don't as yet have their own editors and writers in order to take possession of the plants and equipment and turn the press into an organ of working class resistance to the bourgeoisie. All these bourgeois papers have been operating freely, while there is no working class opposition press in Romania.
The Iliescu government, in a demonstration of its spinelessness towards the imperialist bourgeoisie, has now allowed these papers to reopen by granting them newsprint, which of course is from a nationalized industry. Earlier, newsprint was distributed on the basis of circulation. Now it can be utilized for private profit and imperialist propaganda.
In a Bonapartist manner, the government arrested several of the leaders of the neofascist vigilante groups, such as Nica Leon and Dumitru Dinca, in connection with the 53-day occupation. But these are small-fry. They are not where the great danger of a fascist and military takeover comes from. They are the vigilante fronts for the military and the imperialists.
This leaves the situation totally unresolved. The imperialist governments are not only disappointed with the so-called Front for National Salvation, but are outraged at what has just happened. The U.S. government has boycotted the inauguration of Iliescu and a new campaign of destabilization has begun.
The miners have saved the government, but for how long?
The workers are said to have "ransacked" the home of Ion Ratiu, the illustrious leader of the National Peasant Party. Only the imperialist bourgeoisie can pass this group off as a peasant party and Ratiu as a national leader. The name "Peasant Party" is not just a misnomer or an exaggeration, it is an obscenity. For all this century up until the social transformation after the Second World War it was almost universally recognized as the party of the Romanian landlords! The peasants knew that, and still do.
For the miners to attack the home of the Ratiu family is a ripple on an ocean. Only the imperialist press can make much of that. Its symbolism is more significant than the act itself. It does show, however, that the miners knew who to go after, who is the incarnation of the class interests of the landlord-bourgeois elements.
The attack on the so-called Peasant Party headquarters showed how far the miners were ready to go. But that was just one aspect of their intervention in Bucharest. In order to complete the job, the miners next went to the headquarters of the National Liberal Party. Here again, we have not just a misnomer or an exaggeration. It too is an absurdity, for the Liberal Party has for decades been known as the party of the bourgeoisie, the party of the bosses. It may have a so-called new leader, Radu Campeanu, but it represents the same old oppressors.
Thus, for the moment, the Iliescu government remains in power, or should we say is holding the symbols of authority. One can only characterize it as a bourgeois Bonapartist regime, with a leg in each class camp. On one side it leans on the workers. On the other it is beholden to the imperialist bourgeoisie and the army brass, or at least that section of it which carried out the military conspiracy culminating in the military takeover in December. It is a temporary regime of crisis and instability and cannot long exist.
The miners did one more thing that is extremely illuminating and should help open the eyes of the workers in the imperialist countries as well as elsewhere.
When the military camarilla overthrew the Ceausescu government in December 1989 and executed Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, as well as an untold number of other communists, the imperialist press in all the Western metropolises, from Washington to Paris to Rome to Frankfort, hailed it as a great revolutionary development. A genuine people's rebellion! This was echoed by the accommodators, the Gorbachevs and their bourgeois allies in the East, who by their reforms stimulated and encouraged the whole process.
But what did we actually see? This seemingly spontaneous, nationwide, popular insurrection was ushered in by the military in tanks and in personnel carriers following hordes of armed bands. The neofascists were ransacking government buildings, arresting, beating, and shooting down whoever, and then calling them Ceausescu loyalists. Those were the earliest TV pictures, the only ones made available by the new regime.
There were no scenes of masses of workers. No miners, no factory workers. The bourgeois press was jubilant. They called it a real revolution.
But now, when real workers, without whose labor the vast industrial complexes of Romania cannot run, enter the arena, what happens? That same imperialist press begins to denounce the workers as vandals. And the imperialist governments, with the Bush administration orchestrating them, not only excoriate the miners but have begun a campaign of threats of an economic and political character.
They threaten to stop so-called humanitarian aid. They threaten to cut off MFN (most favored nation) status for Romania. Where have we heard that before? Thus Britain, France, Germany, and the entire European Community follow through like obedient servants. Even Switzerland, the very epitome of bourgeois neutrality, joins the pack.
No wonder. Whenever the workers take an independent class approach and show that the political struggle is in reality a class struggle, the bourgeois press and its minions come clearly into the open. The bourgeoisie begins to draw not just its ideological weapons but even more its economic ones.
What is the class character of the Iliescu regime?
It is a transitional regime whose class character and orientation are bourgeois through and through, even if its Bonapartist political line is opposed by the imperialist bourgeoisie at this point. It has its origin in a conspiracy conceived by U.S. imperialism and aided by both France and the Gorbachev regime. The French press has of late begun to show that the French and the Soviet leadership were aware of the plot. The fact that they are allowing this to be said is an indication of their disappointment at the fact that the military camarilla didn't finish its appointed job.
The military went halfway in its task of overthrowing the Ceausescu regime. Before long, it dawned on them that the fascist element on whom they relied for popular support was too narrow for a full-dress military takeover, which in the context can only be fascist in character. Complicating things for them was the imperialist press, which was daily making promises and pushing for a national election.
In haste, the military condescended to the formation of a so-called Front for National Salvation, to give them a popular cover. But would the royalists, the bourgeoisie, the landlords have any semblance of credibility with a population that was hostile to any mention of the old pre-war political parties? Who could they pick? Only those Communist Party reformists who had fallen out with the Ceausescu regime and were veering towards a Polish or Hungarian solution.
Pushed forward were those renegade communists who would do the bidding of the military. The military wanted an election like the one set by Hitler after the Reichstag fire which secured him parliamentary control. They needed to sanctify the new regime and give it a popular cover, even while it was firmly under the control of the military.
But something funny happened along the way. The military realized more and more that no matter how the capitalist press lied, there really was no popular support for either a military takeover or an outright bourgeois government. Slowly and gradually, the military retreated into the shadows and allowed this so-called salvation government to conduct an election. And, in a way somewhat similar to what happened recently in Bulgaria, the election returned to office a great many former members of the now virtually illegal Communist Party.
It proved that the counterrevolution had no significant social basis, unlike for instance the Nazi Party in Germany, which drew substantial sections of the declassed petty bourgeoisie and some of the workers as well, particularly among the unemployed who in 1933 were desperately seeking an immediate solution to their economic problems.
So where do things stand, now that the Iliescu government has been saved by the miners?
The military is standing aloof temporarily. It refused point-blank to disperse or break up the neofascist descendants of the Iron Guard, but at the same time it also refused to move against the miners.
The Iliescu government, with its pretensions to democracy and its allegiance to imperialist plutocracy, is rapidly losing all the capital it might have gained as a result of an election in which the mass of the people looked upon it as an improvement over the Ceausescu regime, not as one which would destroy root and branch the social and economic achievements which have been won by the workers in years of socialist construction.
The next phase of the struggle will decide the fate of the Iliescu government and the direction the workers will take in the coming period.
Last updated: 23 March 2018