The
perspectives
of the
Marxist left
WE PUBLISH below an interview with well-known Soviet independent Marxist writer and activist Boris Kagarlitsky. The interview was carried out by David Seppo in Moscow on November 25, 1989.
ELL me about the socialist party that you are involved in establishing. Yes, we are setting up a socialist party. But any talk of this would have been meaningless were it not for the appearance of a labour movement in Russia for the first time in 60 years. And it is a movement that has moved with amazing speed through many of the historical stag es that the Western labour movements have experienced over decades: from spontaneous strikes to overcoming sectoral professional divisions (the initial mistrust and hostility of the other workers to the miners' strike) to the formation of independent trade unions and political
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GOR SMIRNOW
March 26, 1990 • #181 International Viewpoint movements.
We are the "Committees of New Socialists" and we exist in a number of towns and regions. A congress is planned for January, and it is possible that it will decide on the foundation of a party.
Since the July strike, a realignment of political forces has occurred. Before the picture was one of liberals against conservatives. But now it appears that, while the conservatives have kept their social base, the liberal front has fallen apart. It turned out to be a narrow group, centred in Moscow.
At the same, time a left has begun to emerge: this is the labour movement, as well as the New Socialists, who are seeking to build their base in the working class and already have very good ties with the strike committees.
• Who are the conservatives? This is a revolt of the apparatus, as well as the United Front of Toilers (UFT). There is no more frightening animal for Gorbachev. For half a year the liberals were shouting: We must have the next party congress early! And they achieved nothing. Now apparently the apparatus supports this demand. The mass party meeting organized yesterday by Leningrad party committee represents conservative populism.
This sector of the apparatus is trying to find a social basis in that part of the masses that not only has received nothing from the reform but that is not capable of resistindependently. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote of the reactionary socialism of the aristocracy directed against the bourgeoisie. This is
USSR similar: this is oriented to the past and to the masses against the new elite, and it threatens to shake Gorbachev's boat. • What do you think of the economist Sergeev (professor at the Higher Trade Union School), who has emerged as the main theoretician of
Sergeev and Co. in practice, though not explicitly and perhaps not even necessarily consciously, appeal to the conservative part of the apparatus and through it to those strata of the working class that have not yet awoken and still follow the apparatus, either organizationally or ideologically. When a crisis breaks out, we go to the workers; they go to the party committees.
We do not in principle reject the possibility of cooperation with the UFT to the