Crisis in the East
We are issuing an appeal to the parties to withdraw their candidates in order to make possible a solution of the constitutional problem. The Christian Democracy should be the first to set the example.
Our General Command is ready to order a
FOR THE FIRST TIME since the bureaucracy usurped unilateral cease-fire so that the meeting can political power from the working class, elections will be be held. We propose that it take place on
Saturday and Sunday, March 4-5, in the held in the Soviet Union on March 26 that offer elements offices of the apostolic nuncio or the archof democratic choice (see also pages 27 and 28).
This vote for the new Congress of People's Deputies
We are awaiting a response from Duarte will be the latest test of attempts by the bureaucracy to
In this way we are making a positive regain some legitimacy and therefore greater political response to what Duarte proposed. However, we want to express our concern about maneuvering room. It is part of the policies of the fact that the context of some of his proreadjustment being pursued in a whole number of East posals does not favor the positive course that events have taken up until now. In this respect, we note:
The following article takes up these elections in their
• His clear intention, also noticed by the wider context. Eastern Europe is currently being shaken parties, to promote an electoral victory by the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). For by a crisis unequalled since the end of the second world this, he is counting on the support of the war. Undoubtedly, this crisis is most serious in Rumania.
armed forces.
The date of April 30, which was already
But Ceaucescu's repression is obscuring its political proposed and unanimously rejected at the aspects, except as regards the Hungarian minority. In meeting in Mexico, is only in the interests
East Germany, where the standard of living is higher, the of the PDC, since it facilitates the possibilities for electoral fraud.
crisis has not yet broken out into the open. But the
• The lack of seriousness implicit in the relative stability of these two countries will certainly not proposal of a unilateral cease-fire until June
1, 1989.
We do not see why, if there were readiness for this, there could not be agreement and the possibility for negotiating a definite cease-fire. So, there remains doubt about whether there is a -eal will to concretize a genuine cease-fire agreed by all of us in front of the people and the entire world.
• Perceptible in Duarte's proposal is his unaltered aim of getting us to surrender. It has already been demonstrated that this is unrealistic, illogical and impossible.
This objective is quite clear in the proposal for a closed agenda that would not take account of our proposals. *
General Command of the FMLN
El Salvador, February 27, 1989
Commanders: Salvador Sanchez
Ceren, Francisco Jovel, Shafick
Jorge Handal, Eduardo Sancho, Joaquin Villalobos
European countries. last. ERNEST MANDEL
N ALL OTHER East European countries, including the Soviet Union, we are seeing a dialectic between political and economic crises. A political awakening of major sections of the population is with attempts by a ruling bureaucracy in disarray to co-opt, to varying degrees, political opposition, and to find a pragmatic solution to a critical situation that is moving in the direction of dismantling the social gains of the working class toward a broader opening to the world market and and a widening of the the private sector of the economy. All these developments are arousing stronger and stronger reactions from the working class and youth against the consequences that these liberal bureaucratic solutions have for the masses.
This process cannot be understood unless it is put in its international context — pressures from the International Monetary Fund for payment of the debt and for austerity measures in exchange for new credits; the repercussions in Eastern Europe of Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union, which are making the maintenance of neo-Stalinist regimes more intolerable in the eyes of the population; repercussions of the 11 effects of the political reform put into pracApril 3, 1989 • #159 International Viewpoint
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'UMENT • USSR
USSR tice in some of these countries on those where this course has not yet been adopted; the impact of all these movements on the situation in the USSR and within the Soviet Communist Party apparatus itself.
Can we speak of the end of Europe as it was shaped at Yalta after World War II?
In any case, a Soviet military intervention such as occurred in Czechoslovakia in 1968 seems seems unlikely, if not impossible considering the public opinion that exists in the Soviet Union itself. On the other hand, we are seeing the coordination of a sort of anti-Gorbachev "international front, " including the "conservative" forces in Eastern Europe — Rumania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, neo-Stalinist minorities in Poland and Hungary — as well as the Communist parties in the capitalist countries that show scant enthusiasm for perestroika and glasnost.
Contrary to what a superficial glance might indicate, the European bourgeoisie does not look favorably on this destabilizations over the "reform." But the real "destabilizers" are clearly the rulers themselves. In the midst of negotiating over the reform, they are continuing to decree price rises and announce closures of working-class strongholds. These are fullyfledged provocations against the workers.
When the workers, driven to desperation by poverty, respond by strikes and demonstrations, the Polish and Yugoslav premiers declare that they are determined to defend "order" by repression. They send the police to club the demonstrators, to attack the strikers, to arrest working-class activists.
This clearly shows the hypocrisy of the argument that the opponents of an excessive recourse to market mechanisms are
"objective economic laws" is a choice of social priorities dictated by the different interests of different social forces — workers, peasants, bureaucrats, private entrepreneurs. It is a lie to say that there is no other way to stop waste and stagnation than to lower wages and impose, by the whip of unemployment, the rule of "work more, earn less."
There are other ways of getting out of the stagnation without touching wages and full employment.
First of all, all big investments other than in the consumer goods industry, agriculture and the services should be cut, until a general, public, democratic revision of the plan can be carried out, with a confrontation of different views. Next, a moratorium on the foreign debt should be declared, all expenses of the state apparatus should be cut, military spending should be drastically reduced, all luxury spending should be stopped, and the luxury stores that abound, as so many affronts to a population
ВЕЩЬ tion. It has no hope of recovering Eastern Europe for capitalism. At most, it hopes for a military "Finlandization" that is, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from some countries, other than East Germany. On the other hand, it is profoundly worried by the "destabilizing" effect of the crisis in Eastern Europe
/ called upon to accept austerity, should be shut down.
These initial emergency measures would make it possible to hold back inflation and conduct a discussion an economic reform without the workers' interests being harmed.
It is necessary to get out of the false dilemma that counterposes
3 on the situation in the Western
European countries themselves.
There are two aspects to the
"political reform."
On the one hand, there is official recognition of more than one party in
Hungary, but with the maintenance of an association with the
Communist Party, which itself is experiencing accelerated internal differentiation. On the other hand, there is a differentiation in the opposition, with the emergence of a working-class force ready to defend its immediate interests without subordinating them to reformist gradualism, or a social pact with the bureaucracy.
The bureaucracy has to face a more and more inflammable situation. This development has been marked by the explosion of strikes in Yugoslavia, of which the one by
Kosovo miners has been the most radical example so far; a wave of strikes, supported by minorities to be sure, but determined ones led by young people in Poland; and the formation of independent unions and an independent youth organization in
Hungary.
The radical advocates of using market mechanisms, such as the Polish premier
Rakowski and the Yugoslav head of govare accusing the workers of ernment,
12
"destabilizing" the political situation by i starting up strikes in the midst of negotia-
International Viewpoint #160 • April 3, 1989
### CEGENSTAND champions of a society of constraint. (In any case, a major area of market relations in agriculture and the services is inevitable and, before the advent of a society of abundance, an unavoidable corrective in the planned allocation of resources.)
The truth is the opposite. Revolutionary Marxists are adversaries of any command society, whether run by a state bureaucracy or managers and so-called experts. They are opposed to the crying injustice of a "solution" to the crisis that involves telling some people "enrich yourselves," and preventing others, the immense majority of the population, with clubs from defending even their poverty-level buying power.
No "objective economic law" imposes this injustice. Behind these so-called a market economy to bureaucratic planning. Socialist democracy involves the setting of priorities by working people themselves, organized in coun cils democratically elected on the basis of a multi-party system, with the broadest democratic freedoms and unlimited civil rights. The arguments against such solutions are not technical but only reflect conflicting interests concealed under the smoke-screen
"objective economic laws."
This is why it is necessary to accept glasnost unreservedly, while striving to assure that it does not stop half way, that it is carried through to the end, so that the working class can regain the full freedom of organization and action that the usurping and parasitic bureaucracy expropriated from it.
The legalization of Solidarnosc is a victory for the working class, regardless of the price that the reformist leaders are preparing to pay for it. But trade-union pluralism must be fully restored, with unimpeded freedom to organize, the right to strike, freedom of assembly, to demonstrate and freedom of the press for the working people.
The first moves toward real elections today in the USSR is a great step forward.
But there must be really free elections, with multiple candidates for all the seats in
the People's Congress and not just in some cases, with the right for citizens to put forward candidates of their choice everywhere, with the right for these candidates to group around distinct platforms, the freedom to form tendencies, factions and different parties, without ideological restrictions.
Behind the still limited and restricted dynamic of the political reform and glasnost looms a conflict of social forces.
This is why it is both significant and disappointing to note that the radical supporters of glasnost are not orienting, at least not yet, toward even the most minimally consistent defense of the workers' interests. In successive issues, the Soviet weekly Les Nouvelles de Moscou (Moscow News) has published the platforms of many "radicals." It is already a real step forward that different platforms exist and are being published.
They contain many positive elements — sharp attacks against the bureaucracy, denunciation of Stalinism, defense of the idea of "all power to the soviets," an initial defense of multi-partyism, a denunciation of the "new poverty," proposals for giving priority to improving the fate of the poorest.
Large part of the working class remains skeptical
However, these platforms do not contain a single proposal for defending the workers' interests. There is not a word about the right to strike, not a word about the right of working people to organize horizontally on local, regional, national and all-Union levels in freely elected bodies; not a word about the sliding scale of wages; not a word about a guarantee of full employment and, above all, not a single allusion to the one slogan that strikes at the heart of the bureaucracy — public workers' and mass inspection of production, transport and the distribution of goods.
In these conditions, it is hardly surprising that a good part of the working class is remaining skeptical, taking a wait-and-see, passive attitude toward the reforms.
It is hardly surprising that more than ever its "hero" is Boris Yeltsin. His candidacy in the elections was rejected by the Central
Committee, but put forward by dozens of factories, especially in Moscow, and finally had to be accepted.