Revolution From Above argues that there is a strong popular revulsion in the USSR against military spending. ly surprising, given the extent to which Jomestic problems have multiplied cluded from any voice in the various global policies of the Kremlin, while forced to shoulder the economic costs script soldiers and their families have home the brunt of the painful ex- perience in Afghanistan. Tariq Ali correctly argues that this shows the interationalism within the Soviet working class: but what he does not committed inter- nationalist, marxist current is needed that will challenge both the present popular would still vote Communist. (The One pertinent question that could also be asked would be the extent of potential support for a Trotskyist ten- dency or puty in the USSR, based on a revolutionary platform of genuine soviet power, of free trade unions, of all bureaucratic privileges, and an in- temationalist foreign policy. It is like- ly that initial support would he small not lcast because so few Sovict thing but bureaucratic lies and distor- the Left Opposition against Stalin. However the existing level of support by no means the most obvious, casy path: Tariq Ali in his recent bonk and a leaning not towards revolution- ary internationalism hut increased isolationism. This would not be entire- and the working class have been ex- of the military effort, and while con- admit is that this will not happen spon- pared to 41 percent who said that they workers or intellectuals know any be tapped in the right conditions. ИЗБИРАТЕЛЯМ Guardian, March 27, 1989). revive a 60 could potentially become a Party faction. Yeltsin's proposal of a Congress caucus recognise as sovict parties'. (The •Democratisation of the soviets is impossible without the legalisation of recent elections. While 46 percent said pluralism and only ten percent against, only 16 percent were in favour of there heing a bourgeois democratic party to vote for (with 59 percent against), and vote for such a party. While 74 percent thought there should be a green party, only 16 percent said they would vote would vote for a socialist party, com- Forns of dissent, and has remained in Force ever since, In similar fashion the emergence of the socialist clubs and of candidacies of non-party members represent the embryonic stirringsof al- temative politics to those of the CP. which call either for recognition as distinct tendencies within the party or for the right to form alternative, legal parties. The rival parties to the Bol sheviks were originally only repressed tion to the revolution in the vexed period of the Civil War - not because Trotsky, in fighting the Stalinist degeneration of the revolution, was al- ways insistent in his call for the legalisation of soviet parties as a key component of any political mobilisa- sover parties. The workers and peasants themselves by their own free vote will indicate what parties they Interesting confirmation that the Soviet working class is not falling capitalist, restorationist parties came in an opinion poll held during the they thought there should be political for it, and only nine percent said they 1921, and which was then shameless ly exploited by Stalin to suppress all because they took the field in opposi- Lenin argued any virtue in a single- head over heels lo vote for pro Transitional Programme, 1938) only three percent said they tion of the working class: soviet parties. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 15 May 1989 by some of the non-party candidates Congress. This represents a senious Most publicised of the victorious oppositional candidates was Boris official Communist Party candidate, boss in Moscow, is still a member of the Central Committee; a vote for his the notorious Moscow party "mafia' with whom Yeltsin had clashed while in charge of the city. However Yeltsin tional figure, and spoken of grouping together up to 30 percent of the deputies in the Congress to vote on a positionists should secure placesin the more influential Supreme Soviet, which will he given increased powers Yeltin's proposal for a political caucas of deputies is not a long way different from forming an organised faction or tendency within the party - sues his stand would also be supported who managed to win election to the challenge to the ban on factions which under Lenin's leadership during the tensc, nervous situation in The spectacle of dozens of career rassing defeat in the election will have given new confidence to millions of Sovict workers. A Politburo member and some 14 regional party secretaries bit the dust, as well as the mayors of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev. The opportunity for voters to voice their disapproval of unpopular candidates Tot form produced humiliating defeats for bureaucrats in Leningrad, Kievand Tomsk in Siberia, who had all ar- ranged to run unopposed but still failed to secure 50 percent of votes figures rebuffed by voters (sometimes their own other ranks) were the com- manders of Soviet forces in East Ger- many, the Far Fast and the Moscow region, and admirals of the Northern and Pacific Flects: also rejocted was Yeltsin's landslide 9-1 win over the the boss of the prestige Zil limousine works. Yeltsin, though ousted as party populist denunciations of special pavileges is not a vote against the CP but against the establishment, not least has built his reputation as an oppost- common line on key issues if this hap- pens, a substantial number of such op- though it in probable that on many is was imposed as a temporary participate in such a process, and produced a numberof dramatic upsets. party bureaucrats tumbling to embar- by crossing out their names on the bal- cast. Among the red faced military shops and other bureaucratic Legalise factions and the head of the Estonian KGB. under Gorbachev's reforms. parties was imposed
workers, rank and file collective fames peasant end Real Amone (The Transitional Ar we have scen before several times in post-war castem Europe, so long as one 'reform" wing of the bureaucracy is seen as offering the solution, and the workersremain at the passive level of casting occasional in- dividual votes in mass ballots, the Programme) -
cause the working class is a property- workers will at hest be offered choices on which burcaucrat should take of fice and how far the USSR should move towards 'market' solutions. Be less class that must make its revolu- tions consciously, and defend them
It is through collective class action, power to the soviets!': the workers must make it their own, and give it a and re-assert the long-defunct powers must take shape. The Sovict working tinent could be carried out under Stalin's control in such a way as to strengthen and mobilise the working clans, Likewise there is no shortcut to revolution, in which Soviet workers must mobilise to take power in their The tark before the Soviet workers hamentary structures of bourgeois democracy - scen from decades of ex- perience to be largely irrelevant to the and state machinery. It is to regenerate of the soviets, the workers" councils revolution and which should now offer a constant challenge to the deadening, centmlised power of the thrugh the fight for workers control in the factories, through pressing for the full apening of the books of the *bankrupt enterprises and drawing up a workers' plan that the fight for genuine workers" management of in- dustry and of the economy as a whole class must fight as a class to win back the power that was so systematically taken from it as Stalin consolidated the power of the bureaucracy. Socialist discussion clubs and intel- lectuals have begun again to populanse the historic slogan All actively, there is no such thing as a real Though Napoleon could succesfully 'export the property relations of the French bourgeois revolution through use of bayonets and invasions, the sorry post-war events in castem Europe showed that even the huge his- toric step of expropriating capitalist property across vast tracts of the con- weaken and alienate rather than political revolution: it most be a real mun hands, wresting it forcibly from is not to replicate the bankrupt par- day to day ninning of the cconomy which were the key lo the 1917 SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 15 May 1989 proletarian "revolution from above' concrete expression. the burcaucracy. 1,500 deputies, while 750 more places: of universal clectoral rights - in the genisic and kulaks (rich peasants) were not permitted to enter the soviets. so now it is necessary to drive the nut of the sowers. In the soviets there is room only for representatives of the one until only the good guys we left? Europe and (more understandably) However we should rememberthal the bureaucracy is a social layer of some 15 million men and women with a privileged lifestyle to defend, all of which depends upon them keeping their hands on the levers of power al every level of soviet society. To im- small - if dramatic - changes in a par- 'official candidater rejected out of were allocated without public elec- tions, 425 of them directly controlled by the CP hierarchy) Soviet workers are really achieving control of the The most significant aspect of the clection is that it has helped develop a political process of awakening of the Soviet masses, who have discovered new ways of expressing their hostility to the burcaucracy, and are unlikely to be satisfied for long with the prospect of occasional parliamentary elections, Trotsky pointed out the contrast be- tween universal suffrage and the es The bureaucracy replaced the soviets as class organs with the fiction style of Hitler-Gochhels. It is neces- sary to retum to the soviets not only their free democratic foon but also hureaucracy and the new aristocracy Soviet working class can now simply vote its way to political revolution - ousting the "bad" burcaucrats one by Certainly this is the illusion that will be created among some more refor- mist-minded clements on the left in among soctions of Soviet workers. agine that by effecting comparatively liamentary election (100-200 "unofficial candidates elected or their class content. As once the bour- slate, in the most crass electoral il The Soviet masses have discovered new ways to express themselves politically. sence of soviet democracy: side and outside the Communist Party, possibilities of reforn achieved within popular mood and the Gorbachev line sion, but which has never given up on the principled defence of the USSR that would hreak the power of the bureaucracy and restore the power of the working class. The lifting of munist Party: it is possible to imagine different tactical ways in which forces independent political banner, possibly But the seeds of a Trotskyist party must be carefully planted in the fertile while focussing most attention on the In this respoct the Yeltsin victory - ax of intensified class collahoration, and spell out the necessity to break the isolation of the USSR and the other Such a political tradition already exists, and has a record of consistent the very outset: that in the tradition of against imperialism and the perspec- tive of a cleansing political revolution repression through glasnoat means that building of a distinct political cur- sibulity in the USSR. It is not a matter of principle that such a current must Redged and organisationally distinct "party" in competition with the Com- could initially be grouped around an as a de facto tendency within the CP. Already the March election has raised the political level of debate in- and through the party machinery itself. an expression of radical currents emerging within the CP = actually helps Gorbachev in his objective of reshaping and restructuring the party machine, Using pressure from below as a means to discredit and dislodge some of the more obstructive and Do the elections now mean that the struggle against Stalinist politics from the Trotskyist Fourth International, whose cadres were ruthlessly eliminated by Stalin's mass repres- rent on these lines is now a real pos immediately proclaim itself a fully- possibly as a wider "socialist club'. soil of today's historic debates. burcaucratised workers" states. powerfully-placed elements. bureaucracy and women million men their hands every level upon them lifestyle to defend, all privileged is a social society." of Soviet power at depends levers of some 15 of which keeping layer of ...the on the with a Page 20 =
I Q. The changing face of
security and the welfare state, and the erosion of the single European market. Here, in the first of two special articles for the Euro-elections, DAVE The European workers' movement is confronted unemployment, austerity, attacks on social fundamental democratic rights. These trends are compounded by the effects of capitalist rationalisation as the bosses prepare for 1992 and with economic depression, growing mass