September 11 — It's been only nine days since the counterrevolutinary camarilla in the USSR led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin first moved to illegally dissolve the Congress of People's Deputies. The Congress was the only all-national political body elected on the basis of universal suffrage.
The ruling group claimed the country faced a "catastrophe" and that its collapse was imminent unless speedy measures were taken. The government is now to be run by a new, self-appointed grouping that supposedly has emergency measures in place, ready to save the situation.
Moreover, the whole country is supposedly to be restructured along "democratic" lines. The people's deputies were presumably too clumsy, too slow, too argumentative, too cantankerous, and had to dissolve themselves.
Threats and intimidation were there for all to see and hear, but it was necessary to put a good face on all this. The quicker they dissolved, the sooner conditions in the country would improve.
Now, just a week later, this camarilla has already demonstrated its complete bankruptcy in regard to the crucial bread-and-butter issues it so loudly proclaimed it would solve.
There are articles in the bourgeois media every day about the food crisis expected in the USSR this winter. Prices are rising sharply while harvesting and distribution of the crops are in disarray. Only where the state has returned to socialist emergency measures — such as deploying soldiers and students to help bring in the potato and carrot crops — is there hope of easing the crisis.
Privatization and individual private ownership of the means of production, the key staples of bourgeois counterrevolutionary propaganda, were widely hailed. Yet they seem farther off than ever.
Feeding the people despite harsh weather conditions has been the most crucial task facing the Soviet Union in all its years of existence. Even during World War II, the Soviet people and armed forces were supplied with food, while the Nazi armies came to grief in this respect.
Not long after the war, food was so plentiful that communist economists were preparing plans for the free distribution of bread within 15 years. This in a country where food production had been in a crisis since time immemorial.
Gorbachev mentioned on several occasions in the late 1980s that the price of bread in the USSR was so cheap that children used loaves as footballs. The implication was that bread was too cheap and should be more costly.
One of the most difficult tests came when the Carter administration in January 1980 imposed a total embargo on the sale of grain to the USSR as punishment for its support of the Afghan revolutionary movement and government. The U.S. not only denied farmers here at home a market for their grain but bludgeoned its allies abroad, including Europe, Argentina, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, in an attempt to force them to join the embargo.
The embargo lasted more than a year. Yet in that time no one starved in the Soviet Union. Grain was harvested and successfully transported, and the population was well fed despite U.S. imperialist economic aggression. The USSR was able to buy grain and other food supplies from the very allies the Carter imperialist administration sought to bludgeon.
Of course, there was hardship for the Soviet population. But in the end it was the imperialists who had to give in. Soon after taking office, in April 1981, Reagan rescinded the embargo. The U.S. was unable to bring the Soviet leadership to heel because the Soviet government had cash in hand. It was the most credit-worthy nation in the world. It had huge funds at its disposal, gold as well as foreign currency. Compare what happened a decade ago to the situation now, six years after this new wrecking crew led by Gorbachev began to attack socialist planning.
Newsweek magazine of Sept. 16 has a major article on the economic situation in the USSR:
"Food prices are going up; the price of potatoes at Moscow's state stores is expected to be 800 percent higher than last year. ... As the economy crumbles, food and fuel production is declining across the board. This year's grain harvest is expected to be about 195 million metric tons, down from 240 million last year. Oil production is expected to drop 10 percent and coal production nearly 12 percent. ... So far, economic reform has made some things worse."
It can now be clearly seen that the big campaign by the Gorbachev administration to cut subsidies to the principal ministries of the government, which they pejoratively called monopolies, was sheer demagogy. It was necessary to cut them down, said the reformers, because they were bureaucratic and based upon administrative and command methods. So a good many ministries were replaced, including the one for agriculture.
However, instead of bringing about democratic, less centralized and presumably more efficient ministries, as they had promised, they have merely displaced the old ministries based on socialist planning with bloated bourgeois ministries.
So it was not a change from autocracy to democracy, but from a form of socialist planning, with all its presumed faults and bureaucratic administration, to a bourgeois ministry based on the free market. This group of free marketeers is now in charge of a centralized, socialist agricultural infrastructure. And what has been the result? A precipitous decline in production, according to Newsweek and many other sources. Nevertheless, while these reformers are continuing to dismantle the old system, they are limited by the dire needs of the people.
Roy Medvedev, until last week a member of the Congress of People's Deputies and one who has been hailed in the West as a historian of the Stalin era, says, "The [Communist] party's running the Stavropol region [a rich agricultural area] — they have to. No one else can get the harvest in, and that's the most important job facing the country right now." (Boston Globe, Sept. 8)
At the 19th Party Conference in June 1988, Gorbachev admitted publicly that an acute food crisis loomed. But he cheerfully announced it would soon be solved. His new entourage of bourgeois reformist economists and reactionary bourgeois politicians had all counted on solving the perennial agricultural problem by quickly privatizing the collective farms or completely dismantling them.
Even before the 19th Party Conference, Gorbachev had begun to sing paeans of praise to individual farming. He showered compliments on the model family farms of the West. And he urged rapid reorganization of the collective farms in a bourgeois direction.
Once a decree was issued that promoted private farms, all the bourgeois economists, both East and West, expected there would be an avalanche of farmers abandoning the collectives. But that never really happened.
Much to the surprise of the new practitioners of bourgeois economics, the collective farmers showed resistance to the assault upon collective property forms. This was interpreted by the bourgeoisie here as resistance by the local bureaucracy. But why would they resist — except that they are closer to the masses? The local bureaucracy is only a transmission belt reflecting what the collective farmers want.
The bourgeoisie forgot that the farmers were wondering what would happen to their pensions, their social security, their children's free schools, kindergartens and the like if they embarked on private ventures. It turned out that only the rich, only those who had accumulated funds secretly, were able to take a chance. And that was on the basis of some government guarantees. So with all Gorbachev's innovations and reorganizing aimed at pushing decollectivization, only a small portion succeeded.
Gorbachev himself was becoming slowly disenchanted with the progress toward reorganization on a bourgeois basis. But he blamed it all on bureaucratism. He finally agreed to appoint Yegor Ligachev, a so-called hardliner, to be in charge of agriculture. That way Ligachev would bear the brunt of the failures. However — without going into the details of the various plans and reorganizations — the social and political structure of the collective farms is still strong and predominant as against the cruel incursions of private interest and the encouragement of the bourgeois reformists.
After more than six years of experimenting, the USSR now faces a disastrous situation. The very problem Gorbachev described as acute in 1986, 1987 and 1988 — food production and distribution — is now even worse, despite all the promises of help that would flow as fast as water once privatization took place.
What is this new wrecking crew's program as far as agriculture is concerned? It is and has been to privatize the agricultural sector and the food supply. But no matter what inroads they've made, no matter how much chaos and destruction they've brought about, the centralized socialist sector of the economy remains basically intact.
Of course, let's not underestimate the marauding, crooked, illegal bourgeois shadow market and all the phony manipulations with respect to food delivery. These go on. Nevertheless, the socialist sector is the only one capable of functioning for the masses. Only it can deliver food on the basis of state-controlled prices.
This is true even taking into account the increasingly manipulative character of the new top bureaucracy that administers agriculture, as well as the inflationary policies of the banking officials. The food sector, beginning with the collective farms, is still centrally organized according to bourgeois economist Grigory A. Yavlinsky, who is now a member of the interim economic steering committee appointed by the State Council that has usurped the powers of the Congress of People's Deputies. (New York Times, Sept. 9)
There is no way the new ruling camarilla can function in agriculture and food distribution except in what remains of the centralized socialist sector. They have to shelve the privatization they are so anxious to adopt. They can enact laws but they cannot make them operate.
This is the central dilemma of the new counterrevolutionary junta. They can't break up an ocean liner into small rowboats, especially if there are no buyers.
Privatization on a mass scale will only bring more chaos, as it has during all the Gorbachev years. This new governing group said the fundamental reason for dissolving the Congress of People's Deputies was the looming economic and social catastrophe. The Congress of People's Deputies presumably was too large and too balky to act quickly. But after a week of the new junta's domination, the State Council, which was created to "re-design" (wreck) a new union government, has "given no indication of economic plans" to do anything. (New York Times, Sept. 9) They have not met nor have they issued any "communiques on any meeting or plans for the progress toward recovery promised by Mr. Gorbachev."
Presumably this body of conspirators would quickly present a plan for a new union government. But it would have to be of a looser type. Indeed, the bourgeois economist Yavlinsky says there is "no place for reform on an all-union level." All they have been able to produce is a continuing process of disintegration.
In all the years of the Soviet Union since the end of the civil war and imperialist intervention, production increased. Now, during the last two years of the Gorbachev administration, the actual gross national product has declined. Inflation is rising. There is no plan of any kind — not even bourgeois, let alone socialist — for resuming production.
The new camarilla that has taken over is basically a group of technocrats, endlessly concerned with their own problems in each republic. But to be successful, each republic is in one way or another economically dependent on all-round union economic operations.
However, the country is moving in exactly the opposite direction. Nothing this junta does can reverse the process. They simply don't have an overall plan, as Yavlinsky himself admitted. And only an overall plan can possibly avert the looming economic catastrophe.
Hence the frantic calls for the imperialists to shell out more money from their swollen treasuries. But this is slow in coming.
The prospect of the camarilla acting in a united manner, with an overall resolve to overcome the impending economic catastrophe, is nil. It is only a transitional form incapable of establishing a full-fledged capitalist system. What is more likely to emerge is an increasingly authoritarian grouping leading to a fascist dictatorship.
This new group has been pounding into the heads of the masses that it will decentralize. It is copying from some bourgeois economists in the U.S. who think that smaller is better, when the whole reality of the Soviet Union has been to build large-scale, mass-production industrial, scientific and technological units. This should not, of course, exclude smaller projects, especially pilot programs and the like. What the Soviet Union needed, however, was not economic decentralization but greater democratization of socialist planning. Instead, this new crew opted for a bourgeois economy. Therein lies the problem.
There is certainly no way to restore a thriving Soviet Union or even a thriving Russia or Ukraine or Kazakhstan as long as the reforms stimulate national antagonisms and make them unable to agree among themselves on how to govern.
The workers are sure to commence their resistance movement as each new day reveals more sharply the ineptitude, gross incompetence, and venomous internecine rivalries and animosities promoted and stimulated by the bourgeois, pro-capitalist reforms.
Last updated: 19 February 2018