Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 01:53:25 -0500 (EST)
From: "Liam R.Flynn" <trinity-AT-hot-shot.com>
Subject: M-G: Machine Politics-then and now


>    Machine politics in the Soviet Union By Sam Marcy (Dec. 26, 1991)
> Following are excerpts from Workers World Party Chairperson Sam
> Marcy's opening talk to the Dec. 14-15 meeting of the party's
> National Committee. Comrades, the last time I saw a reference to the
>  word "Slavic" in the literature of Marxism or Leninism was by Karl
> Kautsky in a laudatory letter to the Social Democratic Party of
> Russia, praising their struggle and referring to the Slavic struggle.
>  At that time, czarist Russia included Poland, Moldova and others. I
>  bring it up because three republics, Russia, Byelorussia and the
> Ukraine, have formed what is being called by some a Slavic
> Commonwealth. That's not the way we would put it. That's not the way
>  a revolutionary working class party trained in internationalism and
>  on guard on the national question puts it. The Slavs as a race
> disintegrated along with the collapse of the old feudal order. Under
>  the impetus of bourgeois development, they became nations--Russia,
> Byelorussia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
> Hungary--divided into classes. Within these countries there were
> oppressed and oppressing nations. This is elementary Marxism and
> Leninism. How can one refer to them now in terms of the old racist
> and ethnic situation? To set up a commonwealth on that basis is to
> form a racist alliance. The southern republics can easily regard a
> meeting of these three--Russia, Byelorussia and the Ukraine--as a
> blow against them. Of course, after the leaders of these republics
> met in secret, they decided to invite in the others. They first
> invited the largest--Kazakhstan--which has a large Russian
> population. U.S. has foot in each camp Whatever comes out of this,
> the U.S. is looking on it favorably, while still holding onto
> Gorbachev. Gorbachev of course is opposed to it. He could not be the
>  president of a Soviet Union that doesn't exist. It's a convenient
> way to get rid of him. So initially he denounced this meeting. But
> true to his centrist habits of going back and forth, he's now
> thinking how he can fit into the new treaty. One of the aspects of
> this secret agreement is to transform the social system of the USSR,
>  to turn completely around to a market economy, allowing full
> freedom for entrepreneurs--a fancy word for capitalists. It's a full
>  turn toward a capitalist market. But the leaders of these republics
>  do not yet have the sanction of their states. This treaty may fall
> apart as soon as it is put in writing, like other treaties under the
>  Gorbachev administration. Let's remember that as early as 1922,
> when the Civil War had barely ended, a treaty was formulated under
> Lenin's guidance that recognized the sovereignty and equality of all
>  republics. What united them was the strong influence of the
> Communist Party. There was centralism on a working class basis. The
> party expressed the solidarity of the working class, the Soviets
> expressed the solidarity of all the oppressed masses. Together they
> reined in the centrifugal forces generated by nationalist tendencies.
>  It was a remarkable achievement. Both Lenin and Trotsky applauded
> it. It should be said that Stalin had a big hand in doing it. We
> don't want to overstate all this to make Stalin look great, but that
>  was when he was carrying out the program of the party and the split
>  between the left, right and center was still a considerable
> distance away. He was Chairman of the Nationalities Commission. It
> was then that the Soviet Union established a bicameral system. One
> house--the Soviet of Deputies--represented all the population, all
> the workers and peasants. The other one--the Soviet of Nationalities--had
>  a certain number of representatives for each nationality. For many
> years it was a very important area where the national question and
> other issues could be discussed. When there was disagreement, the
> leaders of both houses met. If a compromise or agreement was not
> arrived at, it was sent back to both houses. This was a new and
> remarkable achievement for a workers' state. In the years of
> reaction and repression it may have become a dead letter. Gorbachev,
>  however, wiped out the second house. This Commonwealth treaty
> abolishes the Soviet of Nationalities and destroys and invalidates
> completely the existence of the Congress of People's Deputies. Under
>  Gorbachev this body had become a bourgeois parliament, as distinct
> from Soviets organized on a working class, peasant, and popular
> basis. But a bourgeois parliament is better than a bourgeois
> dictatorship. And better than having centrifugal forces organized by
>  a few top leaders of the biggest republics. After the failure of
> the coup, Gorbachev called the parliament, the Congress of Deputies,
>  into session and virtually ordered them to give up all their power
> to the republics. Their pay would go on, however. So the Congress
> was virtually shorn of all its power. How 2,500 parliamentarians
> could take all this, I don't know. Why not have a sitdown strike and
>  say: You'll have to arrest us first! We remember the betrayal of
> German Social Democracy in August 1914, when they voted for the war
> credits. But we don't often remember their better days. Engels
> described with a great deal of pride how during the Franco-Prussian
> War of 1870, when the socialists were in the Parliament, one after
> another would get up and denounce the war and the government and
> hail the working class. No sooner was one deputy arrested than
> another got up and took his place and kept on talking revolutionary
> socialism. What everybody wants to know is, what's this fight
> between Gorbachev and Yeltsin about? They're all former communists,
> that's what hurts most. High-ranking members of the party, the
> Central Committee or the Politburo, all of them. Gorbachev was on
> the Central Committee, the Politburo and then was General Secretary.
>  Yeltsin became an alternate Politburo member. All these posts have
> to do with organization. And organization is especially significant
> and hard to decipher when politics are drowned out by monolithic
> conceptions inherited from the past, when no voice from the point of
>  view of the working class is allowed, and no inner-party socialist
> democracy. With socialist democracy, when there's no agreement
> there's a split. So what? It's not the worst of all things. If later
>  there's agreement, they'll unite. Or they'll work together as a
> coalition. But it's hard to have a split in an organization in which
>  there's so much privilege. Who wants to be out? So all politics is
> subordinated to the dominant political tendency. All struggles are
> hidden in organizational politics. Wherever there is a difference it
>  takes on an organizational form. Machine politics It becomes very
> much like what happens in bourgeois democracy, where each one
> develops a political machine. If you're in the Democratic Party in
> New York City, you won't get anyplace unless you build up your own
> machine. In the old days Tammany Hall decided everything. In Chicago
>  it's the same thing. And it's the same in the Republican Party.
> Once in a while a group of multi-millionaires decides to break the
> machine and get a new guy in, but this is rare. Bourgeois politics
> is machine politics. When somebody gets up and says "the great
> Senator from South Dakota," it's because he has a machine there. So
> Stalinist politics degenerated into machine politics. The differentiation
>  in the population grew, the differences in pay between a scientist
> or astronaut and a worker. Of course, they're all in the party and
> there they are supposed to be equal. But a mass party has to favor
> the workers and the more oppressed section. A party like our own has
>  to be geared first of all to the workers and at the same time to
> the national question and the woman question and the gay question.
> If you just have suffrage, if everybody is considered equal, you
> forget what's most important for party development. When the CPSU
> took on a monolithic character and machine politics became the order
>  of the day, the question became which machine controlled Moscow?
> Which controlled Leningrad? Everybody in the machine votes just the
> way the leaders expect them to. Early on it became obvious to Stalin
>  that this was developing. When Zinoviev and Kamenev were the party
> secretaries of Moscow and Leningrad, they were ideological leaders,
> not machine politicians. And as the struggle developed, Stalin got
> rid of them, and not by very courteous and gentle means. They were
> replaced with machine people from Stalin's group. In 1934, Sergei
> Kirov got to be very, very prominent as a party leader in Leningrad.
>  And it became all too obvious that he might be a challenge to
> Stalin. Then Kirov was assassinated. Stalin turned it around and
> used the assassination to frame up and oust his rivals and
> reorganize the Moscow party and the parties everywhere. Machine
> politics made it necessary to have a continual purge. Difference
> between Gorbachev and Yeltsin Coming back to the present. It became
> obvious to Gorbachev that Yeltsin changed the leadership in Moscow
> in a more bourgeois direction. Then two outright bourgeois figures,
> Popov and Sobchak, were elected as the mayors of Moscow and
> Leningrad. They're both business people. How that could happen is a
> phenomenon we have to think over. It showed that the two principal
> cities were gravitating in a counterrevolutionary direction. Who
> voted? How many participated? What kind of opposition was there? It
> gave Yeltsin a lot of leverage. The imperialist bourgeoisie are in
> on all this. The New York Times and other newspapers say Yeltsin is
> a populist. They never tell you what his ideas are. What is his
> stand on market relations, on joint ventures, on private property,
> on Stalin? It's all based upon generalities. He's popular. That's
> all. What is the difference between Gorbachev and Yeltsin? In a
> general way there is a difference. Gorbachev said in one of his
> interviews a year or so ago that the two things he wouldn't give up
> were state property and a central union of all the republics. Back
> in 1985-86, we noticed attacks against Levelers in Soviet literature.
>  The Levelers were an ancient form of communist organization that
> attacked the rich and favored bringing them down to the level of the
>  peasants, the level of subsistence. We as communists are not
> Levelers. We recognize the difference between skilled and unskilled
> work and that inequality of income will exist for a long time. But
> the workers generally tend towards equality of social conditions,
> and we're for that. We're for the workers being treated equally with
>  others. We're against privilege, and whoever cultivates privilege
> naturally gravitates toward a struggle against Levelers. Stalin
> first began the attack against Levelers in the 1930s. It coincided
> with a tremendous speedup. He stimulated a rat race over who would
> produce most and get the greatest income. This degraded working
> class solidarity in the interests of personal incentive. That
> campaign against Levelers was very much like when the bourgeoisie in
>  the imperialist countries attacks communists and anarchists and so
> on. In reality there might not be any; the real target is the
> workers. Gorbachev's attack against Levelers came amid promises of
> swift modernization of the technological-scientific apparatus of the
>  whole USSR. Everybody would be for that. And the workers would
> understand that certain jobs would be phased out, just like in
> capitalist society. But it would be the responsibility of the
> workers' state to compensate the workers and provide new jobs with
> no loss of pay. Otherwise it would be like under capitalism. So the
> workers were for the reforms that Gorbachev introduced, which, at
> the beginning at least, seemed to be almost entirely geared toward
> the scientific-technological revolution and to raise the living
> standards. Little attention was paid to the attacks against the
> Levelers. Then the directors and managers began calling for harder
> work. The workers have been working hard all along. Why this
> campaign to work harder? The head of the trade unions, who was of
> course part of the bureaucracy, asked some questions. In this new
> plan, how much would be devoted to consumer goods for the workers?
> Would there be compensation in case the technological changes led to
>  layoffs? There was no proper discussion of these questions. In
> particular at the 19th Party Conference, the only critical talk was
> the one made by the head of the trade unions. Lifting price controls
>  Reduced to understandable terms, the market economy meant lifting
> price controls from commodities that workers use. The prices of
> bread, milk, sugar, which hadn't changed for years, would suddenly
> soar. But the bourgeois economists knew people would be afraid of
> this, so they said it would be a gradual process. Some price
> controls would remain until the year 2000, they said. In the late
> 1980s that seemed far away. But as of today, they have lifted many
> price controls without compensating the workers. This explains a lot
>  of the chaos. To lift price controls means raising the price of
> everything. Who's going to decide it? How do you do it democratically?
>  They bourgeois elements say just lift the controls and the
> capitalist market will take care of it. But the capitalist market
> brings inflation, it brings hoarding, it accentuates shortages. That
>  is what is happening. You either have centralized planning or you
> have the capitalist market. You can't have it both ways. You either
> let prices be decided automatically by the blind operation of supply
>  and demand or you have administrative prices that can be controlled.
>  The top officials decided it couldn't be done democratically
> because the people were going to be against increases in prices,
> against layoffs and increases in labor productivity without
> compensation. Wherever they tried anything they came up against the
> mass of the people. Many of them didn't want to face this and left
> their jobs. Gorbachev thought he could have a socialist government
> with a free market. Then there'd be trade and friendly relations
> with the imperialists. Well, you just go ahead and try to get
> friendly relations with the imperialists--without them swallowing
> you up. The end result is that the U.S. is now sending military
> planes with food and medicine to the Soviet Union. What a humiliation.
>  They're sending what the Soviet Union has been producing for years.
>  There's not a single commodity being sent over that couldn't be
> produced there. But they've broken down the socialist machinery in
> their attempt to bring about a capitalist system. And it's not
> working. Otherwise they would be writing rave stories from Moscow
> and Leningrad about how the imperialists have brought advantages.
> Instead, there's disaster and chaos. The attempt to overturn the
> socialist economy has failed thus far. Echoes of Civil War What was
> the Civil War in the United States about? The struggle was between
> wage slavery in the North and chattel slavery in the South. The two
> were diametrically opposed social systems and they collided. There
> were exploiters on both sides. But chattel slavery was incompatible
> with the new and growing capitalist system. The moral issue of
> slavery was the subjective factor and affected the masses. But
> objectively it was a struggle between two irreconcilable social
> systems. In the Soviet Union there's an attempt to bring back wage
> slavery and to abandon socialism as a perspective. The first shots
> of the Civil War were fired from Fort Sumter in South Carolina.
> South Carolina had seceded from the Union, saying they were free and
>  sovereign and independent and calling on all the others to join in.
>  John Calhoun talked just like Boris Yeltsin. As soon as South
> Carolina enacted the secession ordinance, the property question came
>  up. The first priority was of course slavery--the Northerners
> wanted to take away their property, the slaves. But there was
> another aspect to the property question. Did Fort Sumter belong to
> the federal government or to South Carolina? South Carolina said: it
>  belongs to us and we, the South Carolina slavocracy, will own that
> fort and the merchant ships and all the other military and
> governmental institutions that were federal before. In the Soviet
> Union, Boris Yeltsin said: the military bases in Russia don't belong
>  to the federal government, they belong to Russia. And those that
> are in the Ukraine, belong to the Ukraine. The first thing they do
> is lay their hands on state property. Just like the Confederacy. But
>  this is not 1861. This is a highly integrated economy. You're
> splitting it up? That's crazy! And the would-be slave owner boss
> Yeltsin, who says it's all going to be equal now, everybody's going
> to own whatever is in their own territory, is a fraud and a liar.
> The U.S. imperialists know this best of all. No wonder Baker is
> running there almost every other day and talking on the telephone to
>  Gorbachev or Yeltsin or both of them at the same time. So, we find
> what they're trying to do impractical; their overturning of a social
>  system is not an easy one. There are latent revolutionary forces
> that have not come to the fore. It may take time. But we won't write
>  the whole thing off and say it's all gone. They must not succeed. =1a
>  - END - (Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint
> granted if source is cited. For more information contact Workers
> World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011; via e-mail: ww-AT-wwpublish.com. For
>  subscription info send message to: ww-info-AT-wwpublish.com. Web:
> http://www.workers.org)   Copyright =a9 1997 workers.org 


                                                       Liam R.Flynn
                                                  liam-AT-stones.com
                                                       ICQ*5031073
                     NEC/EUROPE/INTERNET*WIRELESS SERVICE////
                         Internet Wireless Broadcast/to=3dliam-AT-stones.com
                                 [information&internet:without a modem]
                                            
                                            


     --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---