Once again, it takes a truly momentous development to separate fact from fiction.Only the intervention of an objective event finally crystallizes stubborn facts from the lies, the deceit, the fictitious theories that pass for truth at other times.
We are talking, of course, about the drastic decline in living standards that has led to a critical political struggle over the bourgeois reforms in the former USSR.
The proponents of the bourgeois reforms can discourse in small groupings or with large masses of people and raise all kinds of theories, all kinds of justifications for the existence of capitalism. As long as the economy remains stable, fiction can predominate and hold the attention and belief of the masses.
But once a catastrophic economic decline takes hold, it breaks through the tissue of lies and deceit; once again objective facts predominate and begin to mold the consciousness of the masses.
Runaway inflation
Just look at what has happened in the last several days. The Russian public, the city and farm workers in particular, and the intelligentsia as well, have become painfully aware that inflation is running at a monthly rate of 25 to 30 percent, with not even a promise that the situation will materially change in the near future.
That fact having become clear, it became absolutely inevitable that Boris Yeltsin and his cabal of counterrevolutionaries had to find some way to backtrack on their lofty promises of a better, easier, and even prosperous life for the masses. The simplest way was to unceremoniously dump Yegor Gaidar, the presumed chief architect of the transformation of what was still left of the socialized economy into the hands of private capitalist entrepreneurs and industrialists.
It is for this reason alone that Gaidar has now been removed as prime minister. The removal was a wholly involuntary action on the part of Boris Yeltsin and his fellow counterrevolutionaries. Nor was it the work of the Congress of People's Deputies.
It is true that a huge majority of the deputies had clamored for the resignation of Gaidar and had indeed voted to reject him as prime minister. But in doing so, they left open a loophole for Yeltsin to retain him as acting prime minister, or failing that, to keep him on the mercenary team of bourgeois economic advisers and functionaries who make up the real cabinet.
So the fact that Gaidar was rejected by the People's Deputies was not really the principal factor in Yeltsin's asking for his resignation.
It was the grim reality of the economic catastrophe that has been ravaging the country that forced the hand of both Yeltsin and the Congress, which stood in the vanguard against Gaidar.
Once again, as has been shown throughout history, it is imperious objective developments that determine the political course.
Kozyrev shocks Western foreign ministers
As a side event, it is most instructive to see what happened Dec. 14 at the 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe held in Stockholm. This was the same day that Yeltsin was caucusing with the People's Deputies.
Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev took the podium and delivered a scathing attack on the Western imperialist countries! It was reminiscent of the most militant days of Soviet diplomacy in the struggle against the NATO imperialists.
The audience of capitalist foreign ministers was shocked. They wondered what had happened.
Well, a short time later the Russian foreign minister told the stunned audience that he had only been pretending, that his speech was meant to shock the Western capitalist countries to come to the aid of the Yeltsin cabal of counterrevolutionaries. Otherwise, he implied, there might be a return to power of revolutionary forces who would restore a planned and centralized economy and all the political appurtenances that go with it.
But the shock therapy fell completely flat. The bankers and industrialists, especially those from the International Monetary Fund and the Club of Paris who hold the purse strings of the most powerful banks in the imperialist system, showed no inclination to come to the aid of the Yeltsin regime.
Gaidar's replacement
After Gaidar, what next? His replacement as prime minister is said to be Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has been occupying a Cabinet position as deputy prime minister for fuel and energy.
Chernomyrdin, according to a biography in the Dec. 15 New York Times, was originally an industrial worker from the Orenburg region of Russia who graduated from a technical institute through correspondence courses, became a machine operator at an oil refinery, and then worked in the industrial department of the Orsk city Communist Party. In 1982, he became deputy minister of the gas industry and a full minister in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. In 1989, he turned his ministry into the first state corporate complex, Gazprom, and was its chair before joining the Gaidar government in May of this year.
In office, he has moved to raise energy prices, but not as fast as the West has been urging.
Gaidar says about Chernomyrdin, "He sees the priorities of reform in a slightly different way. But on the whole, Chernomyrdin wants reforms to be carried on."
Chernomyrdin asked the members of the Gaidar Cabinet to stay on, and restated his support for "a market-oriented economy." But in his first interview after the appointment, he said, "No reform will work if we destroy industry completely. We should switch to another stage--pay serious attention to production. This will enable us to do more for agriculture, for boosting output. We will rely on basic, key industries that will help revive the rest."
Chernomyrdin and the reforms
Although the dumping of Gaidar represents the complete bankruptcy of the program of capitalist restoration, the new nominee is not, as would be generally believed, fully opposed to capitalist restoration. Nor is he for the reintroduction of the planned economy. He has made it clear that he is only for slowing down the pace of the economic reforms. He is for the same course, only at a slower pace.
It is a recipe for failure. Slowing down the reforms, if it is meant seriously, has to begin with a reevaluation of the significance of the transformation of the socialist into a capitalist economy. This is not what he has promised.
Any serious effort to end the current downward spiral has to begin with some very significant and urgent steps to halt the galloping inflation and the decline in industrial production.
These twin evils, if they are not arrested, will only precipitate further devastation. It is true that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Gaidar and all those who have championed bourgeois reforms have also railed against inflation and the slump in industrial production. Nevertheless, they have proceeded, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly, with the privatization of the socialized economy.
What must be done
The way to start the retreat from the chaos of capitalist restoration is to first of all undo the principal damage carried out by the Yeltsin reactionary cabal when he issued the decree decontrolling prices. In theory, this was supposed to be a return to "realistic" prices, that is, prices should reflect the real values of commodities.
Real prices, in Marxist terms and as explained by the early progressive bourgeois economists, means prices that conform to the amount of socially necessary labor incorporated in a commodity. The price is supposed to be merely a monetary expression of value, and value in turn is supposed to express the amount of labor time necessary to produce the commodity.
It took years and years of socialist planning to arrive at merely an approximation of the relationship between labor time and its monetary expression in price. However imperfectly that may have been done, it nevertheless avoided the scourge of inflation, in wartime and in peacetime.
Sometimes it might have created unnecessary scarcities. However, most of the scarcity suffered in the USSR was not the result of the planned economy or of systematically attempting to measure productivity in relationship to time, but was the imposition of a hostile capitalist world which sought to ostracize the Soviet Union from normal trade and commerce.
The principal fault of the Soviet economy when Gorbachev took over was that it was stagnating. It was not keeping up with the higher standards of the most powerful imperialist countries. The USSR had become a superpower, but its productivity was flat.
Now, however, since the bourgeois reforms, the economy has declined drastically to the level of Argentina, Brazil, and other countries of the Third World. At the time Gorbachev took over, the USSR was the most credit-worthy country in the world. The imperialist bankers, rather than refusing it credits, were competing with each other to make loans to the Soviet Union. Such was the situation then.
If the economy is to be resuscitated, it is most necessary to roll back the prices. Inflation is now at the dangerous level of 25 to 30 percent a month (New York Times, Dec. 15). Rolling back prices will once again make the savings of the workers safe and secure, while decontrolling the price structure led to an interminable string of vicissitudes.
Task of Congress
The other indispensable element, if there is to be any type of improvement, is for the Congress of People's Deputies to assert complete jurisdiction over the Russian central bank and its credit institutions, to the exclusion of the counterrevolutionary cabal. The Congress has that right. Even an ordinary bourgeois parliament has authority over the country's purse. Without that authority, the parliament is merely a talking shop.
At the present time, the Congress is not exercising its authority. Its jurisdiction is spread over a number of administrative agencies that are under the control either of the Yeltsin forces or of the central bank, each more or less acting on its own. Such a situation cannot exist for long.
The third element that is absolutely indispensable is for the Congress of People's Deputies to unequivocally assert that the ownership of the basic means of production is completely under the jurisdiction of the Congress and that the officials of the government, and in particular the directors of the plants, the offices and all the ministries, have to be nominated and approved by the Congress.
As we wrote last week, the Congress has to reassert its constitutional authority. It must openly declare that all the economic, financial and banking authority is under the jurisdiction of the Congress.
This would be a real new beginning. Anything else is patchwork at best. The continuation of the bourgeois reforms will be once again trying to put a saddle on a cow. It won't work and will only continue the disastrous economic situation.
Only the working class can supply the necessary impetus and momentum for a real change in the course of Soviet politics and economics. In a word, it is only the working class and its allies that can return Russia and all the former Soviet republics to a course of resuming socialist development.