Boris Yeltsin, in a moment of complete and utter frustration at his inability to persuade the bankers, industrialists and heads of imperialist governments to quickly come to the aid of his regime, has made the kind of prognosis which ordinarily would frighten the daylights out of the capitalist establishment in the U.S.--or at least its liberal element.What he said should have been startling enough to move the capitalists of the West to open up their purses and begin a large-scale flow of loans and grants to the USSR. But it didn't.
Yeltsin's dire prognosis
Yeltsin said, as quoted in the New York Times (Feb. 7), that unless the Western capitalist governments come to his aid "the red shirts and brown shirts" will prevail.
This is not only a historical prognosis. It is also to some extent a diagnosis of the social and political situation in what was called the USSR.
Of course, Boris Yeltsin, the man with the quick fix, the demagogue and the charlatan, was hoping to scare the capitalist West into coming across with the money. To what purpose? To help establish "democracy" in what was formerly the USSR.
It is in the name of democracy, is it not, that the imperialist bourgeoisie has waged a more than 70-year-old battle to overthrow the Soviet government?
It is in the name of democracy that Gorbachev began his reform program. To the extent that there prevails a modicum of free speech in the republics, there is at least to that extent democracy, although this excludes revolutionary socialists, communists and others who are opposed to the restoration of capitalism.
But this is not to say that there exists in the former Soviet Union a bourgeois democracy. Time and again the capitalist press here refers to the political process there as a "fledgling democracy." But as far as a full-scale establishment of a democracy, capitalist or otherwise, it doesn't exist.
The Congress of Peoples' Deputies has been virtually abolished. Its powers have been taken away and allocated to the republics, which in turn have also reduced their deliberative bodies to mere academic debating societies. The fact of the matter is that the new so-called "commonwealth" is being ruled by decree rather than by parliamentary democracy.
Rule by decree
Each and every one of the important economic and political decisions have been made by the administrative machinery of the new ruling group. No really significant or substantive decisions have been made by any of the parliamentary bodies of what was formerly the USSR. Such is the present state of this vast country.
Thus, what Yeltsin blurted out in his moment of high tension and frustration was a basic truth: there will emerge either a proletarian dictatorship or a fascist one.
This isn't exactly how he put it for public consumption, however. Yeltsin's formulation made it sound as though the "red shirts" and the "brown shirts" might act in concert to bring about a dictatorship. All historical experience shows, however, that communism and fascism are diametrically opposed--as Yeltsin well knows. It was no historical accident that Hitler after taking power eliminated the Communist and Socialist parties in Germany, or that his armies directed their most terrible onslaught against the USSR.
Fascism is an extreme form of bourgeois rule, one that the German, Spanish and Italian capitalists resorted to in order to save their system from proletarian revolution and rebuild it through military expansion. For Yeltsin to equate red shirts and brown shirts is cheap demagogy meant to obscure the class character of the struggle.
The statement, however, was an admission on Yeltsin's part that there is no materialist basis for the existence of a bourgeois democracy today in the former Soviet republics. He is saying in so many words that the existence of a stable capitalist democracy is wholly dependent on whether the imperialist West is willing to support it economically and financially--and immediately.
Such, then, is the situation. It is so unstable politically that rule by decree is the only form of political rule under present circumstances. Even the circumstances which permit rule by decree are rapidly disintegrating.
What the bourgeois intelligentsia in the Soviet Union had hoped for--the establishment of a bourgeois democracy--cannot be fulfilled. For a genuine bourgeois intelligentsia to flourish, it needs a stable capitalist democracy. Moreover, the whole point of capitalist democracy is to foster and cultivate bourgeois relations on a scale which would permit a new class of capitalist entrepreneurs to mushroom up, a process which began with the Gorbachev regime and is continuing to this day.
But now all is falling apart. It turns out that mere privatization, no matter how rapid, is most often the result of robbery, embezzlement or corruption. This does not remotely add up to the restoration or the development of a capitalist economic system. The fact is that the transition of the former USSR back to capitalism has reached an unpredictable impasse, a gridlock.
Masses obstruct capitalism
It all comes from the opposition of the great majority of the people, workers and peasants alike. They see before their very eyes that the transformation from public to private ownership is not only a long and arduous process but works contrary to their interests.
Nevertheless, the country will have to move in either one direction or another. The latest strikes are the most eloquent testimony to the emerging polarization which we predicted earlier: a struggle between the working class and its allies on the one hand and the extreme right, bourgeois counterrevolutionary groups on the other.
The ground under the bourgeois democracy is rapidly sinking. Why should it? Why can't they depend on the kind of liberal compromises which for centuries have maintained the bourgeoisie in other countries?
Why can't there be a golden mean in between the new bourgeois elements on the one hand and the proletariat?
Why can't they compose their differences on the basis of compromise, of live and let live, and at the same time retain the foundations for a capitalist order of society in the way it has been done in the Western capitalist countries? That certainly has been the prospect that lured on the bourgeois intelligentsia in the Soviet Union. That's what they mean by "freedom."
Democracy and imperialism
The main difference between the state of affairs in the so-called commonwealth states and in the West is not merely the existence of capitalism in the West but capitalist imperialism.
Marxists reject the vulgar definition of imperialism as merely meaning military expansion. Of course, that is unquestionably true, but it is inadequate. Imperialism today means the domination of powerful international monopolies which have replaced the old competitive capitalist system, have reached out their tentacles all over the globe, and control the vital arteries of the world bourgeois system.
Nothing so graphically illustrates the imperialist nature of the present phase of monopoly capitalist development as the predominance of the so-called major oil companies, often called the Seven Sisters. These seven today are Chevron (it took over Gulf), Amoco, Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, British Petroleum and Shell.
With the destruction of Iraq by the imperialist allies, who all banded together, there has been much hypocritical rhetoric about the independence of Kuwait. The struggle the U.S. and its allies put up was supposedly to retain the independence of this small country. Certainly they did restore the ancient corrupt monarchy. But what is Kuwait really?
It is owned lock, stock and barrel by the seven robbers, who draw more wealth out of this tiny emirate than the total product of Bangladesh plus half a dozen other countries put together.
It has been considered a prize ever since 1938, when the fabulous oil field of Burghan was discovered. The word quickly spread that "never a dry hole has been hit." Kuwait's oil deposits even at that time were said to contain more than two-thirds as much crude oil as was left in all of the United States. That was some 50 years ago. Today it brings in 10, 20, 100 times more.
To Kuwait must be added Saudi Arabia itself, Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Oman, not to mention Iraq, Iran and a dozen other Middle East countries. None of these oil-producing countries, however independent they may appear, have ever gotten out of the reach of the imperialist octopus.
In 1973, when the OPEC oil boycott seemed to be in full swing, it appeared that the oil-producing countries, especially in the Middle East, had attained true independence from the oil companies and from Western capitalist governments. How little the public knew of the actual situation! In reality, the big oil companies were working with them. All this independence, to the extent it existed, was at the discretion of the oil companies, the banks, and the imperialist governments to which they are all so intimately allied.
How radically the situation has changed today. The real relationships have been brought into focus. When OPEC met last week, it hardly received any notice, even in the financial pages of the capitalist press.
`Surplus' wealth and class collaboration
There was a radical upsurge in the 1970s in almost all the oppressed countries. It found a significant response in the metropolitan imperialist countries. Those were the years of the Vietnam War and the heroic struggles of the African people to rid themselves of colonialist bondage.
The capitalist monopolies, most importantly but not exclusively the oil monopolies, have drained the wealth of the less developed countries to such an excess that a small fraction of this can be used to blunt the rough edges of the class struggle at home. This pittance over and above the extortionate super profits which the imperialist monopolists obtain is used to bribe the upper echelons, the aristocrats of labor. This is what lays the basis for capitalist democracy.
Otherwise, as Frederick Engels explained in a different context, the classes would devour each other were it not for the intervention of the capitalist state. In times of great crisis the state will utilize the excess of the super profits in the coffers of the imperialist banks and monopolies to avert a political crisis or a takeover by the workers.
When the capitalist system seemed to have collapsed altogether during the Great Depression, this excess of profits was distributed by the Roosevelt administration in the form of progressive reforms. This enraged the monopolists and endeared the Roosevelt administration to the hearts of millions of workers. The ruling class never forgave Roosevelt himself for it, even though he had contributed to saving the capitalist system from a revolutionary outbreak.
To establish the kind of capitalist democracy that prevails in the imperialist West, it is essential to have imperialist monopolies that ravage the oppressed countries. Thus, small Belgium has a capitalist democracy that is based on the enslavement and robbery of the Congolese people for years and years. It is that excess of super profits which enables them to keep the peace between the irreconcilable classes in that small country.
This is even more true of the Netherlands. How would they obtain a durable capitalist democracy without the robbery and enslavement of the Indonesian and other oppressed people? It shouldn't even be necessary to go over the subjugation of India, the rape of Africa by British and French colonialism--all of which made it possible to at least in part moderate the class struggles at home.
And of course, who can forget the capitalist democracy of the U.S. itself, with 300 years of slavery behind it? As of this day, the Senate has 96 white males, most of them millionaires and only two non-white senators, neither of them Black. The House has only a handful of Third World representatives out of 535, and a much smaller proportion of women than in the congresses of any of the former socialist countries. The Supreme Court is completely dominated by white men, with one Black man who is an ultra-conservative.
That is how capitalist democracy flourishes. Apparently that is what attracted the bourgeois intelligentsia in the Soviet Union and most of all the entrepreneurial strata.
Capitalist democracy won't grow on Soviet soil
There was no material foundation for capitalist democracy in the USSR. Certainly, there is enough oil in the ground, especially in Siberia, to rival the countries of the Middle East. But the USSR has no comparable grouping of capitalist monopolists, of imperialist oil companies which extract super profit from abroad and bring it home to moderate the collisions between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Full-scale bourgeois democracy cannot be artificially created by the Harvard whiz kids and errand boys and girls of the Pentagon and Wall Street who are now encamped in Moscow.
The truth is that the giant oil companies of Western imperialism are warily eying the oil resources of the USSR. They are slowly taking the measure of how to intervene, as a column in the business section of the New York Times of Feb. 11 makes clear. They're not rushing in pell-mell. They're carefully observing the situation, casing the joint, waiting for the appropriate moment.
That will not aid the establishment of capitalist democracy but will strengthen autocracy, if not fascism itself. That's what they're really good at.
For the cabal with Yeltsin at its head that is now running Russia, pleading with the capitalist West for cash, loans and grants to avert the transition to either a proletarian dictatorship or a fascist one is reminiscent of the pleas made by the liberal German bourgeoisie and its politicians in the 1930s. They begged for loans and grants from the bankers of the U.S., France and Britain to avert the coming catastrophe. But these "democrats" turned a deaf ear.
They were the same social, if not political, groupings that had earlier imposed extortionate reparations on Germany after World War I through the Versailles Treaty. The ensuing economic chaos gave rise to the early Nazi movement.
The imperialists are not out to aid what was the USSR--they are out to raid it. That is why the perspective must be posed correctly: either it will end up in the resuscitation of the workers' state--a proletarian dictatorship of the Leninist type, with socialist democracy--or the chaos, the disorganization, the continuing dismantlement and vandalizing of socialist property will lead to a fascist dictatorship.
The middle-of-the-roaders and the old party leadership seem incapable of doing anything, having discredited themselves by their collaboration with the Gorbachev grouping. What remains is for the proletarian vanguard elements in the USSR to organize for the struggle.