By Martin Thomas
Genuine socialists in Russia face hard times. All the traditional phrases and slogans of socialism are discredited by decades of Stalinist abuse; almost every-one looks to free-market economics; the working-class movement is extremely weak.
The least they can ask from us their more fortunately-placed comrades in the West, is that we try to understand, to help, to criticise constructively. Yet the two biggest socialist newspapers in Britain, Socialist Worker and Militant, are offering the Russian socialists only peevish and arbitrary
denunciations.
Socialist Worker, in September last year, seized on a phrase from the founding statement of Boris
Kagarlitsky’s new Russian Party of Labour - “civilised forms of market” - to sneer, “That’s a good slogan for Neil Kinnock’s (or indeed John Major’s) election manifesto”.
On 21 February Militant followed in similar style. An article supposedly reporting on “new left wing parties in Russia” gave half its space to the Party of Labour - the other groups it mentioned were the Stalinist retreads and Militant’s own Moscow grouplet, Rabochaya Democratiya - but claimed that the PL represented nothing outside “the cosy rooms of Moscow State University”.
Militant went on to claim:
• The Party of Labour does have support from the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions, which embraces the new independent unions as well as formerly state- controlled unions, but this counts for nothing since the leaders of the Federation are “old union apparatchiks” and “a well-known anarcho-syndicalist”; it “has called for strikes", but, so Militant claims, is “scared stiff of strikes”.
• The Party of Labour identifies with “the traditions of Kinnock - a few MPs but no democratic debate or control”.
• It is “pro-market. Kagarlitsky said in November he opposed ‘bad privatisation’. The slogan they use is.. 'Market wages for market prices'."
• ”Two professors” within the Party of Labour find “their model for workers’ democracy” in the USA. “The idea that workers should have democratic control of the state is a million miles from their approach”.
Now Boris Kagarlitsky has never claimed to be a Trotskyist or a Leninist As Workers’ Liberty pointed out in 1990, when Socialist Worker was boosting Kagarlitsky’s group as the be-all and end-all of the East European left, “Kagarlitsky is a sort of left social-democrat. ‘In my view’, he writes, ‘Martov and Allende were right, not Lenin’. He seeks a ‘middle way’ to a new society, between reform and revolution”.
Western Marxists can reasonably criticise Kagarlitsky's current advocacy of “left Keynesianism” or “New Deal” economics as his alternative to Yeltsin’s free-market programme, though we should do so with some understanding of the difficulties that lead him to try such formulas as a way to get a hearing and escape being marginalised. We can suggest the ideas of workers’ control of food distribution (as championed by Solidarnosc in Poland in 1980-1) and supervision of prices by committees of workers and housewives (as proposed by Trotsky in the 1930s).
But many of the criticisms from Militant and Socialist Worker are exaggerated or downright stupid.
If the initial group of socialists are mostly university-based, it is good for then to seek alliances with left-moving old union apparatchiks and with influential anarcho-syndicalists in order to find a path to the workers.
The Party of Labour calls fur "economic democracy... democratic regulation of the economy... self-management and a strong authority of people's representatives". It may be that their democratic demands are not precise or clear enough, but it is plainly slanderous to claim that they oppose the workers having democratic control, or see the USA as a model.
Kagarlitsky favours privatisation of small shops and suchlike, but the transformation of big enterprises into a "social sector" under workers' management. When he opposes "bad privatisation", he is denouncing wildcat rip-off privatisation by the old bureaucrats, but making clear that he does not denounce small private shops and workshops.
"A civilised form of market" sounds feeble and conservative in Britain, but in Russia, where people's lives are dominated by very uncivilised markets, it is not so feeble. "Market wages for market prices" is an answer to Yeltsin's policy of letting prices rip but holding down wages.
For Russian socialists to say "we demand planning instead of the market" would be pointless or counter-productive Planning by whom? By the old bureaucrats? By the workers? But the workers are not organised, and do not yet want to plan.
Writing to Marx on 23 February 1877, Frederick Engels joyfully cited, as evidence that the Italian workers' movement was turning towards class-struggle socialism and away from anarchist phrases, a declaration that: We believe that we shall, by this means agitation for factory laws and general suffrage achieve the emancipation of the proletariat more promptly and more thoroughly than if we were to stand for years and generations baying at the moon and waiting until Mother Revolution should deign to come and break the workers' chains.
If Socialist Worker and Militant had been around to comment then, they would have been denouncing the Italian workers, and probably Engels too.
Socialist Organiser 517, 19 March, 1992
