workers: Gorbachev is trying different tactics to make them work. Gorbachev versus the
IN DEPTH THE PROLETARIAT is up in arms against its own government' said the Financial Times at the height of the miners' strike which shook the USSR last July. By October the same newspaper was still editorialising along the same lines: 'Workers' power has come to the First Workers' State, and it threatens to deepen the crisis'.
The response of the Soviet Union's rulers to the July action was complete capitulation to the miners' demands. But the hypocrisy of President Gorbachev's TV statement that "The workers are taking matters into their own hands thoroughly, and this inspires me greatly' was revealed by his attempt in October to get the Supreme Soviet to ban all strikes in every sector of the economy for fifteen months. In the space of ten weeks the official response to an escalating spiral of workers' unrest had tumed from climb-down to clamp-down.
Demonstrating a not insignificant degree of independence, the Supreme Soviet refused to go all the way with the president's wishes, instead issuing an emergency decree banning strikes in the energy, transport, chemicals and steel industries and introducing a comprehen sive new draft law on industrial disputes which provides, among other things, a framework for compulsory arbitration and a (restricted) legal basis for strike action. It also agreed to send in the troops to restore rail links between Armenia and Azerbaijan which were being disrupted by an Azerbaijani blockade - part of the ongoing dispute over the status of the Armenian-populated territory of Nagomo-Karabakh.
The emergency measures were not as draconian as Gorbacher wanted, but they nevertheless signalled a determination on the part of the regime to stamp out, or at least head off, a rising tide of working-class militancy which, according to Gorbachev, could have resulted in 'the escalation of a process which, if unchecked, can affect everything we are doing'. His fears were well grounded. SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 18, October 1989
workers By David Shepherd
The miners' strike last summer - the most significant strike to be reported since the 1920s - was merely the high-point of a rising level of working-class struggle which, according to first deputy prime minister Lev Voronin, had resulted in the loss of no less than five million working days through strike action in the first nine months of this year. In the first half of the year - before the miners' strike - strikes Tere averaging 15,000 workers out each day. The success of the miners' strike prompted further struggles, with a variety of demands, in most cases organised and led by workers' and strike committees which are independent of and opposed to the official trade union structures.
By the end of September the stage seemed set for a further escalation of industrial struggle: coal miners were threatening action in support of demands for reforms of their industry, railworkers had engaged in sporadic action with strikes in Azerbaijan, Moldavia, Ukraine and Lithuania and a Union-wide stoppage was on the cards, drivers on Moscow's underground seemed set to join them with action in support of their demand for a doubling of their wages to put them on a par with regular train drivers. The action on the railways - combined with the after-effects of the miners' strike and inefficient management - had resulted in their operating forty million tonnes below their target for the first eight months of the year: hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food and other consumer goods were still waiting to be unloaded in Soviet ports.
It remains to be seen what effect the strike ban will have, but all the indications are that the working class is set to give the authorities a bumpy ride through the winter. It is quite possible that Gorbachev will not be able to enforce his ban and that widespread industrial unrest will continue. But even if there is a big reduction in the level of strike action his problems are far from over.
The context of the Soviet workers' unrest is the deepening
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rather hollow ring to the boast of Valentin Pavlov, the former chair of ment of co-operatives and the disbandment of existing medical and
economic crisis. The situation is now so bad that people are looking back at the 1970s, officially dubbed the Brezhnevite "period of stagnation', as a time of relative economic well-being. Even the most basic consumer goods are difficult if not impossible to obtain: such items as razor blades, underwear, soap, sanitary towels and, in many areas, basic foodstuffs such as milk. These shortages have been combined with an increasing level of inflation which, in defiance of price controls, is up in double figures.
The inflation rate is not due to official price rises but is partly the result of 'back door' increases on the enormous parallel market and partly the ef fect of enterprises marking up prices through repackaging their products so as to avoid price controls. It gives a the State Prices Committee (popularly known as the Committee for Inflation!), that 'Not one direct price rise took place during my tem in office'.
The prices of many commodities are, nevertheless, strictly controlled and massively subsidised by the central authorities. This has contradictory effects, especially in a situation where wages are rising at an annual rate of 15.7 per cent while output this year has gone up just one per cent. One result is a very high level of liquidity in the economy in the context of massive shortages of all kinds of commodities. Increas ingly roubles cannot be exchanged for goods and services. Many people have money (indeed there is a huge level of savings); they simply have nothing to spend it on. It is this which accounts for the fact that, along with demands for higher wages, one of the main demands of the miners in July was for thousands of tonnes of food (sugar, meat, condensed" milk, tea, coffee) and other basic goods to be shipped in to their regions. You can't eat roubles.
For Gorbachevite economists such as Abel Aganbegyan a major price reform is an absolutely indispensable element of perestroika. But the social and political consequences of a price hike would be immense. It would be seen - quite rightly — as a major attack on the living standards of the workers, wiping out the value of their savings at a stroke. No doubt the authorities are aware that it was the attempted price rises in Poland in 1970-71, 1976 and 1980 that led to the strikes and mobilisations out of which Solidarnose was formed.
Since official price rises are a difficult option for the regime for the time being, the attempt to stem the flow of unspendable roubles into the economy is taking the form of wage-restraint. From 1 October any enterprise which gives an increase of more than three per cent to its workforce will be hit by punitive new taxes.
There is therefore a huge gulf between the hopes that all the talk of economic reform has aroused among the workers and the rapidly deteriorating reality of their every-day lives. In July the Financial Times quoted a miner: 'We called 1985 the year the dam burst, when Mr Gorbachev came to power. We have been waiting for results ever since." The conjunction of political liberalisation, rising aspirations for change and falling standards of living is an explosive one. Workers are not prepared to sit back and wait for Gorbachev to deliver.
But to say that the perestroika economic reforms are proceeding at a snail's pace would be an exaggeration - progress is even slower than that. Vladimir Tikhonov, an academic and member of the Congress of People's Deputies, has pointed out that the only real progress so far has been the promotion of co-operatives, 'the rest', he says, 'is slogans'.
The promotion of co-operatives (in effect, private businesses) has been one of the most unpopular of Gorbachev's policies. Indeed one of the demands of the miners' strike was for a prohibition on the establishPage 22
It may sound good to pro-'market academics, but it's no fun working for a Soviet cooperative food co-operatives. The reason is simple: the establishment of these businesses has led to the enrichment of a layer of Soviet Arthur Dalytype entrepreneurs, sniffing the chance of a 'nice little earner" at the workers' expense. In many cases they have made their profits by buying scarce (but cheap) state-produced goods and then selling them at vastly inflated prices- legalised profiteering.
The unpopularity of this particular market reform has even made it. self felt at the level of the Supreme Soviet which in October decided that local councils would be empowered to set maximum price levels for co-operatives in their areas. Other, tougher, controls such as banning state officials from participating in co-operatives and outlawing the practice of buying and reselling goods from the state sector were rejected however. So the development of the legal private sector remains a recipe for corruption and a source of considerable resentment and discontent among the workers.
In this context the most worrying thing for the Soviet leadership is the form that shopfloor anger is taking. The official trade union structures have in virtually all cases been completely bypassed. It is the dynamic of working-class struggles fowards independent organisational forms and a mixture of economic and political demands which is a real nightmare for the Gorbachev team - and which accounts for October's attempted clamp-down. To understand just what it is that frightens the Soviet rulers so much it is worth looking in some detail at the events of last July.
After the 1.4 million workers in iron and steel, the 1.3 million miners are the Soviet Union's second biggest industrial workforce. This gives some indication of the huge size and importance of the mining sector in the Soviet economy. Soviet miners are amongst the highest paid workers in the Soviet Union: in 1987 the average miner's monthly wage was R$450 (£450 at the official exchange rate) - more than double the national average of Rs210, while skilled miners were earning Rs600. Miners have better annual holidays, access to holiday homes, tourist camps and sanatoria than other industrial workers. This situation is the partly the result of the Brezhnevite legacy of prioritising heavy industry and guaranteeing certain basic conditions for the key industrial workforces.
Nevertheless, by July the economic crisis was beginning to bite hard and a whole plethora of grievances - from health and safety issues to shortages of consumer goods and housing problems - came to a head.
The strike spread rapidly, starting in the Kuznetsk region of Siberia on 10 July and embracing the Donets region in the Ukraine - the USSR's biggest coalfield - within days. By 19 July in Prokopyevsk (the main mining town in the Siberian coalfield) some 90 per cent of industrial workers were striking in sympathy with the miners. By 20
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 18, October 1989
some 250,000 workers were out. basic economic demands being rapidly augmented by overtly political ones. Miners were calling for a new constitution, for an emergency ses sion of the Congress of People's Deputies and (according to some reports) for the Congress to curb the power of the Communist Party Central Committee. In addition there were demands in some areas for pre-term elections to city coun cils, for the dismissal of various of- ficials and so on. The Guardian reported that the strike committees which organised and led the dispute in every city and town "have temporarily be come a kind of alternative government': as the effective power in many towns they kept order by means of workers' patrols acting in co-operation with the local police. Interviewed in the Morning Star in October, Soviet deputy Vladimir Samarin | com- plained that the strike committees established during the summer had tended to demand powers outside their competence': some wanted to set up regional and all-Union strike "This would committee structures, be dual power, which would not be positive', he said. That Samarin should be discuss- ing the role of the committees twelve weeks after the government's concessions on all the basic economic demands had ended the strike reflects the fact that these committees remained in existence, carrying on extended negotiations with the government. (In late September leaders of the strike committees from the Donbas field were in Moscow meeting deputy prime minister Voronin.) One concession made to end the strike was that strike committee members would be guaranteed full pay from their employer while carrying out full time (unofficial) trade union duties. Solidarity in Poland. The Financial Times reported one Novokuznetsk strike committee member as saying 'We're the new Solidarity. We don't trust Mr Gorbachev'. The Guardian quoted Yuri Yesterov, a member of the Kemerovo strike committee, who said that his aim was to fight that bureaucratic apparatus that sits on our neck - the people who don't work and live better than anyone else'. Miners in Cher- vonohrad demanded the establishment of an independent trade union to be called "Solidarity' The role of the official trade union structures and the workers' titude towards them is very well expressed by reference to one of the strikers' thirty-seven main demands: a reduction of fifty per cent in the number of official trade union staff! An official union leader was asked by western journalists if he could cite a single case of the union inter- vening to protect the interests of the workers in conflicts with the heads of mines and enterprises. 'I do not know of any such cases', said Mr A.F. Chebotayev, central committee secretary of the miners' union! To many it seems a travesty that the term "trade union' should be used to describe such an organisation. are beginning to attempt to develop some semblance of credibility SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 18, October 1989
IN DEPTH July the strike had spread to four other coalfields - Vorkuta (Siberia), Karaganda (Kazakhstan), Dnepr (Ukraine) and Rostov-on-Don. In all
The demands of the strikers evolved in the process of the struggle,
Many miners compared the developments to the establishment of
at-
However, shocked by the events of July, the official trade unions
decide how the profits of state enterprises should be spent. Gorby meets the Queen: is he more popular with monarchs than workers? votes (an 89.4 per cent Moscow majority in Yeltsin's case).
among the workers. In mid-October the official unions' council put for- ward a draft law that would give the unions major new powers, includ- ing the right to veto factory closures and lay-offs, to reverse unjustified price increases, to control the activities of the co-operatives and to The Economist commented: "These powers, if granted, would in ef fect bring Mr Gorbachev's liberalising economic reforms to a halt. There is little evidence however that the official trade union leopard is really changing its spots. Rather, it is attempting to head off the development towards independent trade unionism. In the Morning Star interview cited above, Vladimir Samarin suggested that 'the many good new leaders thrown up by the strikes should be put forward as candidates for offi- cial trade union and local council posts, to 'infuse the existing trade union ... bodies with fresh new blood'. It seems that a twin-track strategy of the strike ban, on the one hand, and the incorporation of workers' leaders in the official structures, on the other, is the favoured tactic for diffusing the situation. The official unions, however, will only gain credibility to the extent that they intervene actively to defend workers' interests. And this they are not well equipped to do. The mood of working-class militancy is reflected not only in the level of strike struggles but also through every that workers get for independent political expression. The results of the elections to the Congress of People's Deputies as long ago as last March demonstrated a mass popular sentiment of disillusionment with the progress of the reforms so far combined with an impatience for fur- ther more far-reaching changes. Those local party leaders who had been the strongest in opposing change were among the main victims. Those candidates such as Boris Yeltsin who attacked bureaucratic privilege and called for more rapid reforms were rewarded with huge An opinion poll published in Pravda on 16 October showed that only four per cent of those polled believed that the authority of the Communist Party was still 'high', almost fifty per cent said it was The row over Gorbachev's demand in October that Vladislay Starkov, editor of the mass circulation weekly Argumenti i Fakti, should resign was caused by the publication in that journal of an opinion poll which revealed that radical reformers such as Yeltsin and non-party members were far and away the most popular members of the Congress. Argumenti i Fakti is the single most popular publication in the Soviet Union, with a print run of twenty million. The Soviet president expressed his concern that the press was giving 'the impres- sion that we are in a place up to our necks in petrol, and all that is needed is one spark". If there is such an impression, however, President Gorbachev - with his panic demand for a total strike ban - must be seen as being as responsible for it as any newspaper editor, if not more Meanwhile the socialist left is beginning to adapt its perspectives in the light of the dramatic appearance of the working class on the politi- cal stage. In a tremendously exciting development, moves are under- Page 23
Who will Gorby help in
way for the establishment of a socialist party linked to the emerging independent trade union structures - and to socialist elements in- side the Communist Party. They have already established links with the Polish Socialist Party (DR). The proposal to organise support for a socialist perspective within the Communist Party is especially significant. With between nineteen and twenty million members the CPSU is bigger than the total population size of most member states of the United Nations. A very high proportion of its membership is ordinary workers. All kinds of political posi- tions are present among its members. Es- timates of the size of the nomenklatura (the system by which all the key bureaucrats are appointed) put it at about three million - which would indicate that any crude identification of the party member- ship with the bureaucracy as such is wrong. The new socialist club within the CPSU - ironically called Communists for Socialism! - has a massive potential audience for radical socialist ideas. Boris Kagarlitsky, a leading figure in the new socialist left, in Lon- don in September to give the Isaac Deutscher memorial lecture, ex- plained that the perspective of the new party would be for socialist self- management and democratic planning and that it would reject any idea of 'critical support' for the programme of any wing of the ruling On Wednesday, 18 October, Erich Honecker, leader of the GDR since 1971, was forced to resign by a mass movement which was taking the country to the brink of revolution. He was replaced by Egon Krenz, a 52-year-old conservative who has been groomed for the past six years as Honecker's successor. The replace- ment of Honecker by another member of the all-conservative 21-man Politburo is clearly a stop-gap manoeuvre while the regime struggles desperately to defuse the situation. The extent of discontent in the GDR has been obvious for a long time. Conversations with ordinary party members showed that within the ranks of the party there was widespread enthusiasm for Gorbachev-style reform. Outside the party anger and frustration were building up as the aged leadership refused to make any concessions to the popular mood. Some. despairing of change, left for West Germany: in the past year alone there were 100,000 legal exit visas granted. Then in Page 24
IN DEPTH