A slumbering giant awakes
EDITORIAL OVER 100,000 Soviet miners are on strike in Siberia and the Ukraine as this magazine goes to press. They are demanding better wages and conditions - including consumer goods to spend their wages on - as well as cuts in government bureaucracy, improved safety (10,000 miners have died in accidents since 1980) and greater local autonomy in the mines.
In Siberia the strikes have been accompanied by huge public rallies, supported by other sections of industrial workers. They have established a regional strike committee to conduct their negotiations outside the framework of the 'official' trade union movement and Communist Party.
Though the economic clout of the miners is undoubtedly enormous (already there are warnings that power stations and steel plants could swiftly close for lack of coal) it is the political significance of this mass rebellion that brought Soviet Premier Ryzhkov, a deputy prime minister and a top Politburo economist post-haste to negotiate with the Siberian strikers.
The upsurge of militancy is the biggest show of strength since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 from that sleeping giant, the Soviet proletariat. Even more clearly than the recent elections to the Congress of Deputies, it shows workers taking full advantage of the increased freedoms permitted under glasnost to press home their own demands, despite the embarrassment it causes Mikhail Gorbachev and his co-thinkers. Having spread like a brushfire across the Siberian coalfields and into the Ukraine, the revolt could yet kindle much wider working class action in other industries, reminiscent of the Polish events of 1980-81.
Spokespersons for the Gorbachey leadership are quick to claim that the miners are striking to demand faster, not slower reforms, and assert that the concessions they are demanding are in line with perestroika. Yet coal industry minister Mikhail Shchadov has been desperately attempting to stem the movement with offers of more pay, better holidays, medical equipment, and better food: he, like his fellow bureaucrats, knows that as they begin to feel their own strength, workers' demands will become increasingly political and focus against the power and privilege of the ruling bureaucracy itself.
Already the official unions are being by-passed and the Communist Party machinery is seen as discredited. A full-scale Polish scenario of a mushrooming independent trade union movement with a comprehensive set of anti-bureaucratic demands could swiftly follow.
As if to rub this point home, in Poland itself the isolated General Jaruzelski, whose ruling stalinist party has been unable to win a single contested parliamentary seat against the recentlylegalised trade union Solidarnosc, is facing the tough question of who should form a government, and how. Having failed to crush Solidarnosc under its tank tracks in 1981, and seen its half-baked economic measures slide into ever-worsening chaos, the Polish bureaucracy now only rule on the strength of the armed forces and with the tacit consent of part of the Solidarnose leadership.
Yet this weakening of the bureaucracy has also exposed the political divisions and weaknesses of Solidarnosc itself. It was split down the middle over whether to participate in the 'round table talks' which preceded its re-legalisation and landslide electoral victories. Now it is torn into at least three schools of thought on how to respond to the governmental crisis. The choices are: to reject any cooperation with the regime; to form a Solidarnosebased government; or to form some form of coalition with Jaruzelski's stalinist Polish United Workers Party (for example with a Solidarnose President and a PUWP Prime Minister).
Of course Solidarnose is not a political party with a coherent programme of its own as a basis to form a government: it is a union, reflecting many political points of view. The debate is especially confused since Solidarnosc has been illegal for all but a few months since 1981, and thus denied any democratic discussion. It is even more confused by the fact that many of Solidarnose's main leadership figures appear to endorse Jaruzelski's recipe to resolve the economic crisis through a combination of 'marketisation' reforms and Western aid.
A coalition based on such polícies could only mean acceptance of the standard IMF-style austerity package of unemployment, wage cuts, príce increases and the removal of state subsidies on essential goods: Thatcher and Bush would not part with loans on any other basis. If Solidarnosc were to back such policies it would be forced to act in the same way as the old official unions, against which it was formed to fight; it would be seriously compromised in the eyes of its working class supporters, and would almost certainly split.
In Poland the revolutionary socialist alternative to the policies of Lech Walesa and others on the conciliationist wing of Solidarnose is presented by the small Polish Socialist party (Democratic Revolution). They are pressing for an urgent democratie congress of Solidarnosc, for legalisation of political parties, and against collaboration between Solidarnosc and the stalinist bureaucracy.
Similar political lessons will emerge in the development of the new Soviet workers' movement: as in Poland the unleashing of market forces (perestroika) has helped trigger the sharpened class struggle, while the bureaucracy, whose privileges rest not on coma the reten private ownership of the means of production, but in the last analysis on their ability to contain the working class, is finding itself vulnerable. Yet even as the independent union finds its strength, its very political independence can be jeopardised.
All this also comes with a warning. The Chinese bureaucracy, too, having carried 'marketisation' reforms much further than Gorbachev, and possibly even more corrupt than its Polish counterparts, also seemed instantly vulnerable when confronted by the growing movement outward from Tienanmen Square. But sooner than relinquish their power and privilege, the desperate old men of Beijing unleashed bloody violence, reminding us all that the armed bodies of men are the decisive factor in bureaucratic rule. There will be forces inside the Soviet (and Polish) bureaucracy pressing for similar action.
Only in the completion of a political revolution which smashes the state machinery that defends the bureaucracy and establishes the power of workers' councils can this threat be lifted: a political leadership is needed which can explain and popularise this understanding. However the Siberian events show yet again that such a scenario is no abstract Trotskyist pipe-dream: it is the logic of today's struggle of masses of workers in the stalinist states.