File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9707, message 69


From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Wed, 9 Jul 1997 13:20:30 +0000
Subject: Re: M-G: Russian Worker Speaks


> Date:          Tue, 08 Jul 1997 19:24:39 -0400
> From:          Vladimir Bilenkin <achekhov-AT-unity.ncsu.edu>
> To:            marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> Subject:       M-G: Russian Worker Speaks
> Reply-to:      marxism-general-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


 Vladimir,

I appreciated the translation and posting of Shishkarev's speech.
But what is the point of the posting? Is it an example of the leading 
forces in the workers movement? Do you agree with its politics or 
not?  I agree with your often made point  that no revolutionary 
movement can arise without its roots being in the material conditions 
of the day.  But that also includes an analysis as to why this MUW 
speech  focused on a partial and pre-revolutionary  reading of Lenin?  

It seems to me that Malecki's point directed at you is correct.  
It is one thing to base onself on today's conditions. But not to 
critique workers' speeches today as themselves the products of 
material conditions, in this case capitalist restoration after 
decades of Stalinist dictatorship, is not marxism. It is fatalism. To 
select from the past some lessons of Lenin before the revolution,
is to revert back to the stage of an incomplete  bourgeois national 
democratic revolution, without first doing a serious balance sheet 
of the development of the USSR or of  the causes of restoration.    

As Maleki points out, the soviets without the Bolsheviks, were simply organs 
of workers democracy contained within the bourgeois state.  Where are 
the other references to Lenin's "What is to be Done" which challenged 
the accommodation to economism and spontaneity? Where is the 
insistence on the leading role of a vanguard party?

Without the conscious leadership of a revolutionary party, how can we 
defeat the bourgeois propaganda? -  e.g. that the Bolshevik revolution was a 
Leninist coup, or that Trotsky or the collective leadership betrayed 
the revolution. All of these explanations point to revolution
as being spontaneous/fatalistic, either on time only to be subverted 
by enemies of the working class, or premature, in which case lets try 
again by reviving the soviet!. None of these accounts of history has 
any place for the role of revolutionary marxism in the form of the 
vanguard which unites objective and subjective reality in its programme. 

Dave


> I have received an issue of newspaper "Workers Council" (Feb 97) with 
> some materials from the last  "Lenin Readings" conference (Jan 97) in
> Moscow.
> A number of advanced cadre workers took part in this conference.  Below
> is
> my translation of a speech by V. Shishkarev, a worker from the Moscow
> car 
> plant  ZIL, the  chairman of the Moscow Union of Workers (MUW), and the 
> co-chairman of the all-Russian Workers Committee (RWC).
> 
> Shishkarev makes references to some events of Russian history
> and personalities that cannot be widely known even to M-G members:
> 
> "Semiboyarschina" or "seven-boyars rule" is the name of the early
> period of Ivan the Terrible reign when the country was ruled by
> a clique of seven boyars whose rivalry for the control of the regency
> plunged the country into strife.  Shishkarev uses this term ironically
> to refer to the common for Stalinist "social scientists" argument that 
> that the end of socialism in SU was brought about by selfish
> non-entities
> of the post-Stalin "collective leadership."
> 
> "Karamurza passions" _ a sarcastic jibe at A. Kara-Murza, a notorious
> nationalist journalist and "social scientist,"  widely published by
> Pravda and 
> other organs of  the "opposition."
> 
> T. Khabarova is a Stalinist political scholar, or rather, witch who
> asserts
> that Marx was wrong and that the goals of communism find their
> realization
> in the state rather than in its  "withering away."  She is a fine
> specimen of 
> a tribe unknown in the West, the (former) teachers of "scientific
> communism"
> in the SU.  This is one of the most reactionary and obscurantist groups
> of
> the intelligentsia that continue to plague Russian communist movement.
> To give an example of Khabarova's lunacy, she organized a conference on
> Trotskyism whose centerpiece was her theory that Trotsky's RB has been
> proved correct because this book was actually a plan, submitted to the
> West,
> how to destroy the SU.  
> 
> Vladimir
> _______________________________
> 
> Today capitalism is being restored in Russia.  Active workers have
> realized
> this long ago.  As an example, I can refer to the book by ZIL worker V.
> Kirsanov
> _Restoration of Capitalism in Russia. Roots and Causes_ that he
> published in 
> 1993 on his own money.  
> 
> Yet many social scientists reject class analysis in their interpretation
> of our
> present period and look for any other causes: from "Sevenboyarschina" to
> geopolitics.  And very often the result of these speculations is what
> one
> MUW worker calls the "karamurza passions."  
> 
> One cannot understand present conditions, let alone future developments,
> without evaluating from class positions everything that happens to us, 
> without analyzing the main enemy of workers _ capital.
> 
> The previous speaker criticized our working class for passivity and said
> that our peasants struggle for Soviet power more actively .  But tell me
> what is so different between the work of a driver in a collective farm
> and a driver at our plant?  The only difference is that the former
> transports
> fertilizers to the fields while the latter parts from one shop to
> another.  What 
> social group or class they belong to?  Let us consult Lenin.  Here is
> what
> he writes on this issue in "A Great Beginning":
> 
> 	Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the
> place they
>      occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by
> their relation (in most
>      cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by
> their role in the social
>      organization of labor, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the
> share of social wealth of
>      which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups
> of people one of which
>      can appropriate the labor of another owing to the different places
> they occupy in a definite
>      system of social economy.
> 
> If we accept this definition, then a collective-farm driver is a worker
> who 
> works in the countryside.  Yes, today toilers in the countryside are in
> a more
> difficult situation than those in cities, especially in "commercial"
> Moscow.
> But Moscow workers also begin to come forward.  The number and size of
> their
> actions are still incomparably lower than in other regions.  But in
> comparison
> with the past, there has been a significant growth of labor movement in
> Moscow.
> For several decades workers did not take any independent actions.  They
> did
> not take part in the early democratic manifestations during perestroika
> nor did
> they give their support to the opposition to president in the fall of
> 93.  But to
> defend their own rights workers do rise more and more often.
> 
> As a ZIL worker, I see this right on my workplace.  In 96 there six big
> disruptions
> at the plant and they took place in the shops with up to 500 workers. 
> In the press
> shop the workers struck for a week.  And the last wild-cat strike took
> place in the 
> welding shop in December.  
> 
> True, so far our workers raise only economic demands.   Their actions
> have
> not produced so far any workers organizations, strike committees or
> soviets.
> But they have already realized that they themselves have to take care of
> their 
> rights.  The MUW tries to help those workers who want to defend their
> rights.  For instance, we took part in the meetings by the workers of
> the
> car plant "Moskvitch."  The plant has been idle for over a year. 
> Production
> has been destroyed, the workers have not been paid since May.  However,
> they organize meetings and pickets.  At the last meeting by the Mayor's
> Office they demanded him to step down. 
> 
> The growth of labor movement is much stronger everywhere in Russia
> outside Moscow.  But this will be the topic of the next speaker, D.
> Igoshin,
> a worker from Nizhni Novgorod and a co-chairman of RWC.
> 
> The previous speaker, T. Khabarova made a point that workers' actions 
> most often have anti-Soviet character.  This is absolutely wrong.  Let
> me
> give you one example.
> 
> At one of the RWC meetings in Nizhni Novgorod I had an argument with
> some representatives of the Workers Committee of the city of Vorkuta
> who were against the red color of Councils.  Deceived by democratic
> propaganda, they slandered Lenin for "being sent by the Germans in
> a sealed train car."  I interrupted A. Khidirov, the Chairman of the
> Vorkuta Workers' Committee and said
> 	_ Let's talk about what we know well, our own business.
> 		Tell me how you elect the members of the Committee.
> 	_ Each mine arranges a meeting and the miners elect their
> 		best man.
> 	_ Does he report back to the miners about his work in the Committee?
> 	_ Yes, regularly.  And if the miners don't agree with something they
> 	replace him at once.  Or they replace him by the request of the
> Committee.
> 	If we see that the man is no good we tell the miners.  They have a
> meeting
> 	and decide what to do with him. 
> 	_ What salary do you get?  
> 	_ We are paid by the mines the same wages we received as miners.
> "Now listen.  These are exactly the principles of workers'
> power that Lenin taught workers his entire life" _ I explained to
> Khidirov and
> his comrades, trying to lead them from their concept of power for
> workers to
> the understanding of the entire experience of labor and communist
> movement.
> 
> What is to be done today, in continuing Lenin's cause?  Today, we all,
> workers-
> activists and intellectuals must work on bringing self-consciousness and
> organization into the labor movement. This task was posited by Lenin.
> He wrote:
> 
> 	We are not Utopians.  We know that a laborer and a kitchen maid
> 	cannot administer state affairs right now.  On this we agree with the
> 	cadets, Breshkovskaya, and Tsereteli.  But we differ from these
> 	citizens in that we demand immediate rejection of the prejudice
> 	that only the rich or state servants taken from rich families are
> 	capable of administering the state and conducting its day-to-day
> 	affairs.  We demand that education in state administration be taken
> over 
> 	by advanced workers and soldiers and that it begin immediately, i.e.
> 	that this education be given immediately to all toilers, all poor.
> 
> This is the task that we face today, in my view.
> 
> 				-------------------------
> 
> 
>      --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> 

Dave Bedggood


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