There is a world of difference between the seizure of state power by a group of counterrevolutionaries and the transformation of one social system into another.This must be steadily kept in mind as we observe each and every attempt by Boris Yeltsin, the chief counterrevolutionary, demagogue and charlatan in the Soviet Union, as he tries to bring about what he calls accelerated reform. That is his choice terminology for demolishing all vestiges of the socialized economy in favor of a full-blown capitalist system.
There is no doubt that the Yeltsin grouping now has the support of Washington and the Wall Street financiers, the bourgeoisie elements in the USSR and world finance capital.
Of course, U.S. support is not altogether 100 percent. They have their doubts and fears. As a safety valve, they are also supporting the "independence" of the other republics.
No hip, hip hooray
Shouldn't one expect a tremendous show of rejoicing in the camp of reaction here and in the USSR now that Yeltsin is at the helm? The red flag has been hauled down and the flag of blatant reaction hoisted. Isn't this the truly historic turning point they've been waiting for?
What could be more significant than the projected transformation of socialism back to good old capitalism? What could bring more joy to the hearts of all the reactionaries, merchants, entrepreneurs, all the shady, thieving, crooked elements in and out of the state apparatus? Shouldn't one expect a great triumphal march, a celebration with Yeltsin at the head?
Yet everything seems so subdued. Where is the great exhilaration and anticipation?
Boris Yeltsin has made his New Year's speech to the nation via television. What he said was far from the heroic proclamation of "liberation," delivered to the applause of his minions, that he had earlier promised.
Yeltsin projected what all the other reformers before him--from Gorbachev to Ryzhkov and all their economists and advisers--have delivered all these many months: more hard times. What an inauspicious beginning for a liberation!
It is not masses of people that are being liberated but prices. Government control, which in the past kept them low, is being lifted. The crafty bourgeoisie, who have grown fat especially in the years since Gorbachev took over, are rubbing their hands at what this will bring them. Uncontrolled prices can only mean riches galore to fill their coffers.
The many bourgeois economists elevated during the Gorbachev administration, beginning with Tatyana Zaslavskaya, all projected the end of price controls. Free market pricing was the panacea that was to bring socialist prosperity. But they all proposed going slow. None dared talk of completely ending subsidies on necessities before the year 2000.
Each one of these plans came up against an insurmountable obstacle. It wasn't just the bureaucratic apparatus, although that's what they usually blamed for their failure. It was what lies underneath: mass opposition.
What's popular about high prices?
The Gorbachev economists and advisers went backward and forward and could not proceed in an orderly fashion because higher prices, no matter how you looked at them, could only reduce the living standard, not enhance it as they were promising.
A higher standard of living was the key element needed to make the Gorbachev administration more popular.
How many times did these "planners" go over the plans to undo the achievements of the socialist revolution?
The Bush administration and the Wall Street financiers have dispatched hordes of specialists, the brightest boys and girls from Harvard business school and other eminent institutions of higher learning, to teach the "incompetent Russians" how to do what makes American capitalism so prosperous. Has anyone there noticed that these instructors cannot but be embarrassed that their own imperialist colossus is in the deepest capitalist crisis since the early 1930s?
Yeltsin more than anybody else attacked the Gorbachev reformers in the most vicious way for lack of progress toward speedy capitalist restoration. He was the one who demanded an acceleration of the capitalist reforms. Now the man of the quick fix is in full authority. Gorbachev is out of the way and Yeltsin's people are in. So what does he really propose?
Price controls on consumer goods will be lifted, so he says, after Jan. 2. As though prices had not already been rising! As though there had not already been hoarding in anticipation.
"I will not conceal that 1992," said the new liberator in his New Year's speech, "and especially the first half, will not be easy." Great news for New Year's!
The price increases will be "the most painful and unpopular" of the reforms to come--words taken almost literally from Gorbachev's many, many speeches.
"I'm certain," Yeltsin said, "we will get through this difficult period." All this has been said before. "It will be hard, but the period will not be long. We are talking of six to eight months." There is the real Yeltsin. The real demagogue. The real liar.
When the price is right
To get consumer goods to the ordinary worker at the present time can only be done by getting the hoarders, the thriving, thieving bourgeoisie, the nouveau riche to bring out the commodities. But they'll only do it if the price is right.
What Yeltsin really relies on, to the extent that he's not lying to the masses and to himself as well, is that the imperialist bourgeoisie will extend credit for massive imports of consumer goods.
How else can it be done under a capitalist system? Before you can get the wheels of industry going, it is first necessary to have the agricultural products necessary to bring food to the table. This means starting with agriculture--the problem of problems that has plagued succeeding administrations in the Soviet Union.
What must be done in relation to the state and collective farms? Didn't Gorbachev begin his remedies by trying to "free" agriculture? How many times did he say that freeing the ``instinctive drive`` of the collective farmers to privatize would increase the food supply?
So why didn't it happen? Not for lack of trying.
Of all the crises that the Soviet Union has faced, the most acute has always been in the field of agriculture. But it cannot be denied that even in the darkest days, during the anti-Nazi, anti-fascist war, heroic efforts provided bread for the army and the people. And after the war, rationing supplied everyone with bread--unlike today.
Gorbachev himself said a number of times that one of the main problems with the "command economy" was that bread had become so cheap children were playing football with it. So why should there be such a shortage today?
Yeltsin's answer is that the dismantling of the socialist economy did not go fast enough. He, the new helmsman of the new commonwealth, will now do it on a crash basis. But before there can be any benefits, there will--of course, of course--be hardship.
His plan is to ``privatize at least half of light industry, food production, construction and services by the end of 1992 and to lift all subsidies from unprofitable enterprises, including state and collective farms.`` (New York Times, Dec. 30)
The abolition of government subsidies to agriculture and the food processing industry eliminates a major source of income for the masses. The subsidies act as a counterweight to constantly rising prices.
Where does the constant clamor against subsidies come from? The profiteers, the merchant bourgeoisie, and their servants--Gorbachev and now Yeltsin. Decontrolling prices gives a green light to the merchant bourgeoisie, who want to control the distribution and sale of consumer goods.
Scarcity is due in large part to hoarding by speculators, merchants and operators in the illegal economy. It is not due basically to the inefficiency of collectivized agriculture or the work force in the food supply industry.
Gorbachev's fatal assumption
Gorbachev started with the assumption that a market economy would bring about an abundance of food and other consumer items and would raise agricultural production. The capitalist market would stabilize prices even if at first they rose significantly.
Where Gorbachev got a warm welcome, as with glasnost, was on his promise to carry out the scientific-technological restructuring of the USSR, to make it an industrial country as efficient if not more so than any capitalist power. But let's not forget that Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko also promised this.
Where Gorbachev's plan differed from the others in material terms was his scheme to decontrol prices and bring about the capitalist market. This is where he invariably infringed on the living standards of the masses. The lifting of price controls, begun in a limited way in 1986-87, was solely and exclusively at the expense of the mass of consumers, the workers and collective farmers.
This is the source of the problem. To say that the present crisis is solely due to the entrenched bureaucracy, the administrative apparatus of the Communist Party, is to falsify the contemporary history of the USSR. Having begun with a preconceived notion that the only way to elevate the economy of the country to the level of the capitalist world was to go backwards and retreat towards a capitalist economy, the Gorbachev grouping opened the road to the destruction of the USSR.
At the 27th Party Congress (February 1986), Gorbachev had characterized the problem of the food supply and agriculture as in a ``pre-crisis`` situation. Was there a way to push the economy forward with new, innovative methods on a socialist basis, or was it only possible to go back towards a fundamental mechanism of capitalist economy, the market?
Even granting that the economy was somewhat stagnant, and that the agricultural problem was acute, was it necessary to retreat to the capitalist market? Wasn't there a genuinely socialist road that could solve the crisis?
Gorbachev chose the market, opening the road to the ruination of the economy as well as his own career.
Medvedev on Stalin and Gorbachev
Roy Medvedev, a Soviet historian, surprised the New York Times (Dec. 27) by telling its reporter that Gorbachev's resignation as president was no loss to the nation. Even Stalin, Medvedev said, "against whose ideology and practice I always struggled, took the country in an appalling state in 1924 and left it as a superpower. I think no one needs to prove that the country that was the Soviet Union in 1985 when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power was incomparably better, given all its deficiencies, than it is today."
Medvedev's statement is important because his work, "Let History Judge," is the best documented and earliest of the anti-Stalin biographies to be published in the USSR. He is not one of the new quasi-historians legitimized by the government. He not only studied the period of Stalin's repression but suffered its ravages.
What was it that saved the Soviet Union from ruination in the tumultuous period of the 1930s and '40s? It was the planned economy based upon the public ownership of the means of production, which went into effect at the same time that the New Economic Policy was gradually phased out. The NEP had been a temporary retreat to the capitalist market after the destruction and rigors of the Civil War and imperialist intervention (1918-21).
It was socialist construction that made the USSR a "superpower"--a term that really shouldn't be employed by Marxists because it connotes equivalence on the basis of naked military power and obscures the class character of the social systems. The system in the USSR has been based on public ownership of the means of production and a planned economy, and is diametrically opposed to the imperialist system based on monopoly capital.
Only in the last few years have Soviet authorities started to use the term "superpower," in a concession to militarism.
It was not the military strength of the Soviet Red Army as such that defeated 14 invading imperialist powers during the revolution. It was the power of the workers and peasants based on a proletarian dictatorship.
One of the merits of collectivization is that it made possible a higher rate of productivity and at the same time released millions of peasants from the land who thereafter filled the factories, mines and mills of the USSR. None of this could have happened without collectivization. Deplorable as was the harshness of the method by which it was achieved, it effectuated a profound social revolution in the countryside.
The ensuing increase in the rate of productivity in agriculture, however, was by no means sufficient to feed the country adequately considering the harshness of the weather. Nevertheless, there was no acute food crisis of the kind we are seeing now. The army was well-fed, the population had bread. If there were lines, it was not for lack of food.
Evolution of property forms
Collectivization itself is a compromise between private and public property. Only the state farms are completely the property of the workers' state.
Socialist agriculture, to be successful, has to evolve in the direction of communizing the vast and rich soil of the whole Soviet Union. It must eventually complete the evolution from private property to collective property, from collectives to state property, and from state property to the property of the entire people with the gradual dissolution of the state.
Instead of thinking in this forward, progressive way, the Gorbaches and Yeltsins think only in regressive terms, of going back to earlier property relations. Their thinking is one-dimensional and thoroughly anti-dialectical.
This is not to insist on the eradication of small private plots, which don't in themselves hinder the success of socialist agriculture and can under certain conditions supplement the produce from the farms.
If the privatization of the farms on the scale which Yeltsin and all the others are projecting were possible, it would have been tried, at least in a large degree, by the Gorbachev administration.
Soviet agriculture reached a plateau sometime in the late 1960s. The collective farms, a big advance over private ownership, had to move to a still higher stage in order to become more productive.
This was made all the more necessary because, as in most capitalist countries, the young people tend to flock to the cities where the standard of living is higher and opportunities for advancement are greater.
One effective measure taken by the earlier leaders of the Soviet Union was to attempt to proletarianize the rural areas, particularly the state and collective farms, by extending the benefits of social security, health care, daycare centers, and all the other rights factory workers are entitled to. This happened not only in the machine and tractor complexes, but on the farm itself.
In order to make agriculture more productive, it was Khrushchev himself who hit upon the idea of creating agrotowns, which would be a leap forward in mechanizing agriculture. Agriculture would then become an industry integrated into the great industries in the scientific-technological field. In other words, it would be a step in the direction of communism.
It would go along with a great restructuring, especially in transport and warehousing, to reduce crop loss due to the very harsh winters. That plan, however, bogged down, not least of all because it required large infusions of capital and was opposed by the high-tech, military-industrial complex.
Khrushchev also attempted to solve the agricultural problem with his virgin soil venture. Hundreds of thousands of idealistic youths were mobilized to settle in Kazakhstan and Siberia and raise crops. But this was extensive farming that used a lot of labor. It benefited little from the scientific-technological revolution.
Private farms not popular
Gorbachev began to privatize agriculture in small steps but never got very far. There are only 40,000 private farmers in the Soviet Union today, according to Chuck McCullagh, the vice president and publisher of Novii Fermer magazine, a U.S. publication pushing the privatization of farms in the USSR. He finds that ``the Soviet people don't necessarily support [bourgeois] democracy or a market economy.`` (New York Times, Dec. 23, letter to the editor)
Why have so few farm workers been interested in privatization? The answer should be plain to all who don't close their eyes.
On the collective and state farms the workers get benefits from the government. Once they leave, once the land is privatized, they lose them.
Why has this been hidden? Why has there only been a clamor against subsidies to the collective farms? It is an attack on the agricultural workers, meant to take away their social insurance. But the workers are opposed to privatization because they are getting benefits from the government which would be ended.
Yeltsin wants to privatize the farms. The working farmers are opposed to it. The reckless pursuit of his scheme is bound to arouse insurgency among the masses.
With all his bluff and bluster, his New Year's message contained one element of truth. He is now commander in chief, if not of the whole Red Army, at least of the Russian Army with more than half the troops.
Now that he commands millions of soldiers, we learn he's planning for a National Guard of 30,000-40,000 troops. Why have a special force when there are millions in the armed forces to protect the presidency? He didn't need it during the days of the August coup, so why now?
To revive ``an old Russian tradition.`` Really? The guards will be ``all of one height and wear old Russian uniforms.`` Is that to gladden the hearts of the remnants of the old aristocracy?
It's not the old tradition that he is concerned with. That's baloney for the consumption of the deceived masses of right-wingers. He aims to establish an inner core of special units within the army, or a new military force altogether.
What historical precedent is there for this? The prototype is Hitler's special forces, the SS.
The basis for it is fear of the masses, the knowledge that his program is a bluff, a cruel deception of the broad masses, and that the return to capitalist exploitation can only mean the reopening of the class struggle.
Agriculture and technology
What was the objective factor that created the crisis or made it more formidable and acute?
Critics of the Soviet Union in recent years have not fully brought out the historical picture: that agriculture lags behind industry and technological devlopment. That's a universal truth in capitalist development. It is the application of science and technology which has raised the productive capacity of countries like the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and others. Even so, agriculture lags behind industry.
The imperialist bourgeoisie has seen to it that agriculture has become more and more collectivized under their aegis, through the expropriation of the poor and middle farmers. In the U.S. as everywhere else, there has been a ghastly reduction in the farm population. The vast farmlands are controlled lock, stock and barrel by agribusiness in collusion with the banks.
The problem in the USSR is of a different character. There was more than the usual lag of agriculture behind industry, especially taking into consideration the cultural level of the peasant population. The scientific-technological revolution that swept through such industries as nuclear power, space exploration, and others, especially those related to the military-industrial complex, never reached the field of agriculture.
This became decisive for the very existence of the USSR.
The objective basis for this immense problem lies in the great urgency to develop a powerful defense against military aggression by the U.S. The USSR leaders were forced to keep pace with the scientific-technological revolution as it affected the military-industrial complex.
It posed the question of guns vs. butter in the most acute way, yet the great danger was not recognized. Moreover, the influence exercised by the workers and collective farmers shifted to a different stratum of the population.
The heroes lauded by the Soviet government were no longer of the Stakhanov type--a factory worker in the 1930s whose high productivity was considered a model to be emulated. The heroes were now the Sakharovs and Sagdayevs--scientists in the nuclear and space fields, respectively, who became symbols of the bourgeois opposition.
While the failings of the USSR reflected poor planning, they most of all showed the urgency of the military situation. Did the USSR ever achieve military equivalence with U.S. imperialism? An article in the Dec. 29 New York Times on the Strategic Air Command estimates total U.S. military expenditures spent on fighting the USSR as from $4 to $6 trillion! Besides this there were the hundreds of billions spent on mobilizing the whole imperialist world, including NATO and such clients among the neocolonialist bourgeoisie as could be gathered in Latin America, Asia and elsewhere.
How could the Soviet Union keep up with this?
Any serious analysis of the subjective factors in the collapse of the Soviet economy and the apparent but by no means certain victory of the counterrevolution must first examine the objective situation, of which the imperialist encirclement is the principal factor.