Russia: The Liquidators Liquidated

Despite the much heralded change of government in Russia after 70 years of one party rule, and the much delayed confession of capitalism, still we say there is neither revolution or counter-revolution in Russia. In fact the whole affair has been so farcical that even the democrats themselves were probably rather embarrassed about it. The vulgarity of the dismissed national communists and those of unknown denomination who have replaced them has given a distinctly bourgeois flavour to the whole mise-en-scene of this ’failed putsch’; there is Gorbachev-the-Good, who spends a week at the seaside; then the main representatives of the state who organise a palace coup without arresting a single opponent or cutting a single telephone line; and there are the democrats, who neither wish to nor can really get rid of the old personnel, or indeed really change the old administered economy either – and they are patently unable to mobilise the working class since all they can muster are a few Moscow intellectuals. Meanwhile, the pope of liberty himself, George Bush, gives his blessings to the proceedings and promises his continued support. No doubt next thing there will be a big rock festival in the government square.

But underneath it all, certain things carry on as usual: namely the state, the police, the army and the banks, who have never for one minute lost their control over the subjected orders and classes – despite the fact that democratic behinds have succeeded to the armchairs of the bureaucrats.

Russian capital, which is a network of financial interests on a continental scale, is being strangled by the fall in the rate of profit, agreed, but no longer by its ’rich’ western and oriental rivals. Incarnated in a thriving bourgeois class of contractors, rentiers and commercial sector, now fully developed and emancipated from the protection of the state that constructed and accumulated on its behalf, Russian capital is giving its notices of dismissal to the huge caste of functionaries reared within the confines of the CPSU, bloated and inefficient. The Russian bourgeoisie wishes to free itself from the ’conservative’ party-state which until so very recently provided the required economic, political and ideological backbone needed to keep the empire in their hands both within and outside Russia. This apparatus now represents a net loss. First it loses the Afghan war, then its European territory, next the Iraqi ally is abandoned. Meanwhile within Russia, it retains its hold over the factory management committees, the Kolkhozes and Sovkhozes, and resists the actuation of restructuring, which would affects its hierarchy and various tinpot leaders. But the proposed expropriation of the personal property and real estate of the PCUS would certainly have effects on vested interests which go way beyond the mere dismissal of the highly paid functionaries, perks included.

At the end of the day, the democrats, all ex-national-communists in fact, can only make the most superficial changes: Russia isn’t just Moscow and Leningrad (now St. Petersburg… again), and it will be far easier to take back the Smolny than to change the directors of the kolkhozes… Kolkhozes and sovkhozes will only be taken by a revolution… a real revolution. The bourgeoisie can only expel them from without, starve them out with the low prices of the reformed market, but that in itself will need tens of years and a veritable social earthquake when we consider that fully a fifth of the population is still engaged in agriculture.

As to the rest, the change of personnel in the corridors of the Kremlin, in the republican parliaments, the changing colours of the flags, it won’t prevent the belated Russian capitalist crisis from going into a nose dive as it is just part of a generalised global end of the century crisis. Their problem is not one of finding a reform programme of liberal stamp, as a matter of fact all the parties have that in common, but putting it into effect. The shipyard workers of Gdansk know you can’t eat democracy, and probably the miners of Donbass already know it too, even if they do have more vodka to drown their sorrows with.

The various nationalisms themselves, whether great Russia or the independence movements, don’t, despite appearances, point to the breaking up of the Empire, they are rather a demagogic sop to the perennially nauseating petty-bourgeoisie, incapable of knowing any other ideals. The bourgeoisie now has one historic project alone – reaction – causing it to vigorously deny its own nationalist past. Only an imperialist war will significantly change the present borders, despite the reunification of Germany. But although the current lay-out of the world imperialist powers is certainly charged with enormous tensions ready to explode the old set-up, there are numerous conflicting interests which prevent this at present. The new Russian-American bloc serves primarily the interests of the USA, and secondly Russia, against their real competitors Germany and Japan. As for the Baltic republics – with two, three or four million inhabitants – they will never be really independent like the Ukrainians, the White Russians and the Asians, they are part of the same economic web and within range of the same nuclear arsenal of the same army.

At the end of the day the real problem for Russian imperialism is finding its bearings in the world of polygon of diplomatic and military forces, and the Russian bear might quite conceivably change its mind about lapping up the honey of American liberty, or being ’looked after’ in the ’common European homeland’; it could suddenly decide it would be better accommodated by sharing a ’common home’ with Asia…

Much as we deny that communism – the swindle of national communism that is – can ever be resuscitated to express proletarian interests, we equally deny that democracy has won the day: in the chromosomes of capital the peaceable democratic gene is recessive, whilst the bellicose fascist one is dominant. Who the next fascist Duce may happen to be, some ham-actor or other, is not of the slightest importance, but suffice it to say that it wasn’t peace and liberty which was established in Moscow this August, rather it marked the first stage in the moves toward war and oppression between states.

The ghastly hymns to the death of communism being sung by the bourgeoisie are directed against the proletariat alone. The bourgeois classes seem to think that by getting the lumpen-proletariat of the Russian metropoli to demolish statues of Lenin and Marx (a good thing too, one falsehood less), they have destroyed communism. As for real communism, remembered and understood by the exploited of the whole world (including Russia, where they instinctively didn’t line up on either of the bourgeois fronts) yes, our communism was defeated, not today, but in the middle of the 1920’s. It will go better next time. And there certainly will be a next time.