State monopoly capitalism AT THE END of 1990, Dick Forslund, a leader of the Socialist Party, the Swedish section of the Fourth International, visited Leningrad and talked to personalities in the antibureaucratic movement. The following
USSR account of one such discussion was published in the December 20 issue of Internationalen, the Socialist Party's weekly newspaper. DICK FORSLUND
A J. SHERBAKOV is one of the
social democrat leaders in the Leningrad soviet. The Social Democratic Party is a new formation, and has seven out of the 385 seats.
"In the city of Saratov, the local government decided to privatize all trade. But this aroused little interest among the population. The people do not want to take risks, or else lack the money to buy any enterprise. So, after a while representatives of the mafia turn up, who have tentacles in the political apparatuses. 'We can buy tomorrow anything you have to sell,' they offer."
Sherbakov thinks that the same thing is now happening in Lithuania, where the mafia is extremely strong.
"The top levels of the nomenklatura also want to get in on the act. Managers, administrators, people in leading posts in the Communist Party collaborate. The development here in Leningrad is striking.
"A separate complex of 26 big industrial plants has been formed. This enterprise employs half a million workers. If we include their families, 1.4 million people are affected by this operation. A gigantic monopoly has been formed that is to compete with similar monopolies in other
"This is a huge concentration of power. Right now, workers are being laid off from this industrial complex. On November 1, we had 60,000 jobless in Leningrad. At the new year, we are going to have
300,000 unemployed. Some 80% of industrial production in Leningrad is military. This is shrinking now, without being replaced by other kinds of proThe other source of growing unemployment is people being laid off from institutes. Of the 300,000 expected to be without work at the turn of the year, 160,000 will be technicians, engineers and administrators; 140,000 are industrial workers. The 26 enterprises are going to have full control over building materials, the lumber industry, fuel, food, everything. This is no 'free market'!
"I can give an example of how unemployment is being created just now," said Viktor Komarov from the Socialist Party in the Soviet Union, who also took part in
"I am a data technician at a plant in Moscow with a workforce of 5,000. The management has formed six subsidiaries, Which are formally state property. They have transferred to them the most skilled workers from the mother enterprise. These new companies are going to use the old contacts in the nomenklatura to get their own customers. Also, producers' goods have been transferred from the mother enterprise.
"The great mass of employees have nothing to say in this process. We are tinally just employees in an abandoned big enterprise, which cannot produce anything, which is condemned to death.
"It is not our fault that the bureaucrats under the command economy hired as many people as possible in order to get the biggest possible share of resources. We are trying now to form an independent union to try to stop this process, to try to consolidate the situation, get a breathing space." • Is this the so-called 500-day plan?
"The "500-day plan" is only the best known of any number of plans, " both said But the the most important thing is all that is going on without any kind of control
"The nomenklatura is reshaping the sys tem and giving itself a new role," answered Viktor Komarov.
"The local bureaucracy is striking out independently of the central power, and continuing in a new form," Sherbakov added. "In the industrial complex I described, the top manager is the former head of the local tax bureau and a former secretary in the Leningrad local. party
The third force leading the privatizations is the Communist Party in the full sense, Sherbakov continued. The regional party committees create the network for the "new enterprises.' The managers of these enterprises are also leading cadres in the party. The party is investing directly in
"An example is the Russian bank that was set up in Leningrad in August. The bank was established to serve the new industrial giant. In three months it became the biggest commercial bank in the Soviet Union. The Central Committee in Moscow invested 15 million rubles in it from
Then Sherbakov and Komarov started to talk indignantly about the phenomenon called joint ventures.
"People who have had leading positions in the apparatus go, say to Britain, and register a company pounds. Then they come back and say, "Hello, I am a representative of a British company." They make contact with bureaucrats they know in some big enterprise, which provides them an office. The state enterprise puts in a few million rubles, and the "foreign representative" forks out 20 pounds. Then juridically, this becomes a 50-50 relationship!
The new enterprise produces nothing, 7 employs no one, but it makes its director
International Viewpoint #198 • January 21, 1991
USSR and his accomplices rich. The tax laws are different for joint ventures, and so other big enterprises hide their assets there. And
"enterprise" is supplied sought-after things, such as metals. "They just steal. When there is a delivery of 10 tons of prime aluminum, a ton is simply classed as scrap. The little "joint venture" gets it. It is then taken abroad by various routes, exchanged for computers or Mercedes, which are brought into the country and sold to bureaucrats.
"We voted out the Communist Party in March. Democrats of various sorts got the majority. We thought that the nomenklatura should go off to pasture. But they are only restructuring their power," Sherbakov said ironically. "A party leader told me: 'Before we were the party of the working class. We can now become the party of big capital.' The old bureaucrats have the international links. The regional party committee here in Leningrad invited a delegation of seven persons from the Catalan CP. In reality only two of them were party mem-
"The other five were businessmen who want to start, or make contact with, joint ventures. We are trying to hold back the process. We have lost time. Here in Leningrad, serious political life only began in March 1990." * with the human rights movement and philosophical clubs in different cities, but in the period before perestroika they were very severely repressed. We can only talk of an ecological mass movement from
The development of this broad movement has many features in common with what happened in the West. First came initiatives in the local communities movements concerning a specific issue, for example, the inhabitants of a neighbourhood demanding an end to the building of a polluting factory. In beginning only legal methods, like colsignatures or appealing to authorities, were used. This was a bit of a waste of time since the local authorities were in a "dual position": On the one hand they themselves lived in the area, but on the other they were a part of the
Shades of Green centralistic system, and had to follow the orders from above. So, even if the authorities wanted to do something, they were
This resulted in actions of protest: one
Interview with Soviet ecological activist of the first actions of this type was in the holiday-resort of Svertoschina, near Kiev, where a lake was to be replaced by a system of canals. There was strong resis tance against this, and as the ordinary
DISASTERS like Chernobyl and the drying up of the Aral Lake have become symbols of the devastating ecological consequences of sixty years of bureaucratic planning, the results of which are felt every day by tens of millions of people suffering from the pollution of air, ground and water.