NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #30/NN_1992_30.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9454

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Subject: ANALYSIS: Behind the Gaidar Defeat
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Date: 18 Dec 92 20:32:59 GMT
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Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


                  WHAT'S BEHIND GAIDAR'S OUSTER
      CONGRESS OF PEOPLE'S DEPUTIES SHOWS GREATER RESISTANCE

                           By Sam Marcy


Once again, it takes a truly momentous development to separate fact
from fiction.

Only the intervention of an objective event finally crystallizes
stubborn facts from the lies, the deceit, the fictitious theories
that pass for truth at other times.

We are talking, of course, about the drastic decline in living
standards that has led to a critical political struggle over the
bourgeois reforms in the former USSR.

The proponents of the bourgeois reforms can discourse in small
groupings or with large masses of people and raise all kinds of
theories, all kinds of justifications for the existence of
capitalism. As long as the economy remains stable, fiction can
predominate and hold the attention and belief of the masses.

But once a catastrophic economic decline takes hold, it breaks
through the tissue of lies and deceit; once again objective facts
predominate and begin to mold the consciousness of the masses.

RUNAWAY INFLATION

Just look at what has happened in the last several days. The
Russian public, the city and farm workers in particular, and the
intelligentsia as well, have become painfully aware that inflation
is running at a monthly rate of 25 to 30 percent, with not even a
promise that the situation will materially change in the near
future.

That fact having become clear, it became absolutely inevitable that
Boris Yeltsin and his cabal of counter-revolutionaries had to find
some way to backtrack on their lofty promises of a better, easier,
and even prosperous life for the masses. The simplest way was to
unceremoniously dump Yegor Gaidar, the presumed chief architect of
the transformation of what was still left of the socialized economy
into the hands of private capitalist entrepreneurs and
industrialists.

It is for this reason alone that Gaidar has now been removed as
prime minister. The removal was a wholly involuntary action on the
part of Boris Yeltsin and his fellow counter-revolutionaries. Nor
was it the work of the Congress of People's Deputies.

It is true that a huge majority of the deputies had clamored for
the resignation of Gaidar and had indeed voted to reject him as
prime minister. But in doing so, they left open a loophole for
Yeltsin to retain him as acting prime minister, or failing that, to
keep him on the mercenary team of bourgeois economic advisers and
functionaries who make up the real cabinet.

So the fact that Gaidar was rejected by the People's Deputies was
not really the principal factor in Yeltsin's asking for his
resignation.

It was the grim reality of the economic catastrophe that has been
ravaging the country that forced the hand of both Yeltsin and the
Congress, which stood in the vanguard against Gaidar.

Once again, as has been shown throughout history, it is imperious
objective developments that determine the political course.

KOZYREV SHOCKS WESTERN FOREIGN MINISTERS

As a side event, it is most instructive to see what happened Dec.
14 at the 52-nation Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe held in Stockholm. This was the same day that Yeltsin was
caucusing with the People's Deputies.

Russian Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev took the podium and
delivered a scathing attack on the Western imperialist countries!
It was reminiscent of the most militant days of Soviet diplomacy in
the struggle against the NATO imperialists.

The audience of capitalist foreign ministers was shocked. They
wondered what had happened.

Well, a short time later the Russian foreign minister told the
stunned audience that he had only been pretending, that his speech
was meant to shock the Western capitalist countries to come to the
aid of the Yeltsin cabal of counter-revolutionaries. Otherwise, he
implied, there might be a return to power of revolutionary forces
who would restore a planned and centralized economy and all the
political appurtenances that go with it.

But the shock therapy fell completely flat. The bankers and
industrialists, especially those from the International Monetary
Fund and the Club of Paris who hold the purse strings of the most
powerful banks in the imperialist system, showed no inclination to
come to the aid of the Yeltsin regime.

GAIDAR'S REPLACEMENT

After Gaidar, what next? His replacement as prime minister is said
to be Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, who has been occupying a Cabinet
position as deputy prime minister for fuel and energy.

Chernomyrdin, according to a biography in the Dec. 15 New York
Times, was originally an industrial worker from the Orenburg region
of Russia who graduated from a technical institute through
correspondence courses, became a machine operator at an oil
refinery, and then worked in the industrial department of the Orsk
city Communist Party. In 1982, he became deputy minister of the gas
industry and a full minister in 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev came
to power. In 1989, he turned his ministry into the first state
corporate complex, Gazprom, and was its chair before joining the
Gaidar government in May of this year.

In office, he has moved to raise energy prices, but not as fast as
the West has been urging.

Gaidar says about Chernomyrdin, "He sees the priorities of reform
in a slightly different way. But on the whole, Chernomyrdin wants
reforms to be carried on."

Chernomyrdin asked the members of the Gaidar Cabinet to stay on,
and restated his support for "a market-oriented economy." But in
his first interview after the appointment, he said, "No reform will
work if we destroy industry completely. We should switch to another
stage--pay serious attention to production. This will enable us to
do more for agriculture, for boosting output. We will rely on
basic, key industries that will help revive the rest."

CHERNOMYRDIN AND THE REFORMS

Although the dumping of Gaidar represents the complete bankruptcy
of the program of capitalist restoration, the new nominee is not,
as would be generally believed, fully opposed to capitalist
restoration. Nor is he for the reintroduction of the planned
economy. He has made it clear that he is only for slowing down the
pace of the economic reforms. He is for the same course, only at a
slower pace.

It is a recipe for failure. Slowing down the reforms, if it is
meant seriously, has to begin with a reevaluation of the
significance of the transformation of the socialist into a
capitalist economy. This is not what he has promised.

Any serious effort to end the current downward spiral has to begin
with some very significant and urgent steps to halt the galloping
inflation and the decline in industrial production.

These twin evils, if they are not arrested, will only precipitate
further devastation. It is true that Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Gaidar and
all those who have championed bourgeois reforms have also railed
against inflation and the slump in industrial production.
Nevertheless, they have proceeded, sometimes surreptitiously,
sometimes openly, with the privatization of the socialized economy.

WHAT MUST BE DONE

The way to start the retreat from the chaos of capitalist
restoration is to first of all undo the principal damage carried
out by the Yeltsin reactionary cabal when he issued the decree
decontrolling prices. In theory, this was supposed to be a return
to "realistic" prices, that is, prices should reflect the real
values of commodities.

Real prices, in Marxist terms and as explained by the early
progressive bourgeois economists, means prices that conform to the
amount of socially necessary labor incorporated in a commodity. The
price is supposed to be merely a monetary expression of value, and
value in turn is supposed to express the amount of labor time
necessary to produce the commodity.

It took years and years of socialist planning to arrive at merely
an approximation of the relationship between labor time and its
monetary expression in price. However imperfectly that may have
been done, it nevertheless avoided the scourge of inflation, in
wartime and in peacetime.

Sometimes it might have created unnecessary scarcities. However,
most of the scarcity suffered in the USSR was not the result of the
planned economy or of systematically attempting to measure
productivity in relationship to time, but was the imposition of a
hostile capitalist world which sought to ostracize the Soviet Union
from normal trade and commerce.

The principal fault of the Soviet economy when Gorbachev took over
was that it was stagnating. It was not keeping up with the higher
standards of the most powerful imperialist countries. The USSR had
become a superpower, but its productivity was flat.

Now, however, since the bourgeois reforms, the economy has declined
drastically to the level of Argentina, Brazil, and other countries
of the Third World. At the time Gorbachev took over, the USSR was
the most credit-worthy country in the world. The imperialist
bankers, rather than refusing it credits, were competing with each
other to make loans to the Soviet Union. Such was the situation
then.

If the economy is to be resuscitated, it is most necessary to roll
back the prices. Inflation is now at the dangerous level of 25 to
30 percent a month (New York Times, Dec. 15). Rolling back prices
will once again make the savings of the workers safe and secure,
while unloosing the price structure led to an interminable string
of vicissitudes.

TASK OF CONGRESS

The other indispensable element, if there is to be any type of
improvement, is for the Congress of People's Deputies to assert
complete jurisdiction over the Russian central bank and its credit
institutions, to the exclusion of the counter-revolutionary cabal.
The Congress has that right. Even an ordinary bourgeois parliament
has the authority over the country's purse. Without that authority,
the parliament is merely a talking shop.

At the present time, the Congress is not exercising its authority.
Its jurisdiction is spread over a number of administrative agencies
that are under the control either of the Yeltsin forces or of the
central bank, each more or less acting on its own. Such a situation
cannot exist for long.

The third element that is absolutely indispensable is for the
Congress of People's Deputies to unequivocally assert that the
ownership of the basic means of production is completely under the
jurisdiction of the Congress and that the officials of the
government, and in particular the directors of the plants, the
offices and all the ministries, have to be nominated and approved
by the Congress.

As we wrote last week, the Congress has to reassert its
constitutional authority. It must openly declare that all the
economic, financial and banking authority is under the jurisdiction
of the Congress.

This would be a real new beginning. Anything else is patchwork at
best. The continuation of the bourgeois reforms will be once again
trying to put a saddle on a cow. It won't work and will only
continue the disastrous economic situation.

Only the working class can supply the necessary impetus and
momentum for a real change in the course of Soviet politics and
economics. In a word, it is only the working class and its allies
that can return Russia and all the former Soviet republics to a
course of resuming socialist development.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: [e-mail]; "workers" on
PeaceNet; on Internet: "[e-mail]".)


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