Civil society and market transition
The Communist regime in the former Soviet Union was widely described as "totalitarian." The usual implication was that economic planning - whatever the nature of the state doing the planning - leads to dictatorship. This is rubbish. But the term also described a political system in which the ruling bureaucratic elite strove to control almost all forms of social organisation. This certainly was true in the USSR. It was the real meaning of the constitutional recognition of the "leading role of the Party." Not even the members of the party/state bureaucracy had the right to organise independently of state control. Many left-wing and liberal observers of the USSR argued that industrialisation, the slowdown of social and geographical mobility, and rising rates of urbanisation and education were creating social groups which, through conscious, concerted action, are capable, if not of defining state policy, then at least of setting limits to the state's actions. Such groups are collectively referred to as civil society. In the 1970s and 80s many western socialist scholars thought they could see an embryonic, but rapidly maturing, Soviet civil society that ultimately would burst the totalitarian womb. But today, more than ten years since that system began to loosen its grip on society, the embryo has made little progress. Far from adulthood, it is still like a child that cannot walk unassisted. David Mandel Most people would expect that the radical reduction of the state's direct organising role in the economy over the past years, and the end of direct political restrictions on the right of association would have facilitated the development of civil society.
But civil society as defined above is no more developed in Russia today than it was in Brezhnev's Soviet Union. In fact, today only the Chechen independence movement really meets this definition. The Chechen victory (at a terrible cost), against seemingly impossible odds, is a measure of the weakness of the Russian state. But that weakness only underlines the general helplessness of a society incapable of exerting effective control even over such a feeble state.
Apart from the Chechens, and the embryo capitalist class, organised labour is still the only social group that shows the potential to fill the "civil society" vacuum. Plenty of other groups ought to organise collectively to articulate their rights: women, students, peasants, ecologists, and pensioners. But so far, organised labour is making the most significant, though still very slow and contradictory, moves in this direction.
The present weakness of the labour movement is striking. Certainly its reaction is in no way adequate to the offensive being waged against it by the state. Recently, there has been a growing wave of collective protests, which are tending to become more militant in their tactics, and that is a promising sign. But these protests are, for the most part, uncoordinated and their principal demand, though directed mainly at the state, is very modest: to be paid wages that are owed, sometimes for many months. (Real wages have fallen on the average by more than 50% since the start of shock therapy.) Yet even that demand cannot be achieved, except on a partial and temporary basis.
It wasn't always like this. Rising worker political mobilisation and the state's justified fear of even greater mobilisation played a significant role in preventing the Gorbachev regime from proceeding with capitalist restoration, after it had despaired of the so-called "socialist market reform."
These mobilisations never put forward an independent political perspective - except very partially in the self-management movement of 1990 and 1991 - and ultimately they were exploited by the anti-Gorbachev liberal forces to ride Yeltsin into power.
But at the time, it wasn't clear to most people, myself included, that these worker mobilisations really marked the end of an era. not the birth of a new labour movement. This was a time when the old centralised economic structures, though weakened, still existed and the central state still claimed responsibility - and was held responsible by workers - for the state of the enterprises. All this, as well as the fundamental economic security that Soviet workers still enjoyed,
Russia * facilitated political mobilisation. These conditions were already changing, but rather slowly. Until 1992, when "shock therapy" radically accelerated the transformation, thrusting workers into a new world of profound economic insecurity and freeing the state from responsibility for the fate of the enterprises and their workers.
In fact, part of the thinking that went into "shock therapy" was the need to act quickly to pre-empt workers' resistance to the restoration of capitalism, once they realised what it entailed. In official circles, the clearly antidemocratic concern to make the reforms "irreversible" was repeatedly emphasised. The idea was to exploit the fleeting window of opportunity provided by Yeltsin's aura as the democratic slayer of the bureaucratic dragon to dismantle as rapidly as possible the conditions that facilitated worker resistance.
But the regime feared that "shock therapy" alone would not do the job of disarming resistance in society. Throughout 1992 and the first nine months of 1993 the threat of a "social explosion" was constantly evoked by government officials and the press. In fact, most workers seemed dazed by the blow they had received. But there were signs of a growing potential for effective resistance Most troublesome was the Duma (parlia-
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* Russia ment), which had the constitutional power and increasingly the will to block "shock
', even while it did not reject in principle the transition to a market economy. For various reasons, most workers remained bystanders in the conflict between the President and the Supreme Soviet, but the potential of the parliamentary majority linking up with the opposition in society was definitely there.
In the final confrontation in September 1993, the leadership of the main trade-union federation supported the parliament. In both Duma elections held since Yeltsin's castrated the parliament, the population voted overwhelmingly against "shock therapy". votes have not had the least effect on economic policy. The degree of violence and bloodshed perpetrated by Yeltsin in suppressing parliament had no military justification. The goal was to intimidate the population. At the same time, he threatened to disband the trade union federation if it continued to be disloyal. A few weeks later, a special union congress replaced the federation's president. The current leader has publicly stated that an open confrontation with the government would relegate the federation to the political dustbin. Though this is as much as an excuse as a cause for the federation's moderation.
Surgically applied, but ruthless, repression, and control of the major mass media, have played a key role in allowing therapy" to continue to undermine workers capacity to resist. During the first three years of "shock therapy" ', enterprises expelled most of their younger, more active and independent workers. There has been a quite dramatic decline in employment in large industrial enterprises. Fear of unemployment is pervasive and has greatly increased the power of management, which knows that the state and the juridical system offer no recourse against managerial lawlessness. De-classing the workers
At the same time, the working class is gradually becoming de-classed, in a process reminiscent of the civil war of 1918-1920. That destroyed the social basis for a democratic state in revolutionary Russia. Even among workers who are still formally employed, their economic ties to their former state enterprise's economic reserves have long since been exhausted. In the larger cities, they can often find some supplementary, usually undeclared, employment, but in the smaller towns, often the only additional source of support is the garden plot. There is a return of the widespread phenomenon of the turn of the century - the worker-peasant. It is futile to try to organise labour educational activities during most of the period from May to September because workers are busy with their plots.
Of course, to all the above factors, one has to add the heavy legacy of the past. Official Communist ideology emphasised that workers constitute a class with common interests and that they were in fact the leading class in society. The real impact of this on worker consciousness was superficial and contradictory. The dominant relations in the Soviet system were corporatist, authoritarian 6 International Viewpoint and paternalistic, linking workers not to each other but to their director and through him or her to their economic branch administration. For at least 60 years, workers had no experience of independent organisation or protest movement through which they might have developed an authentic sense of solidarity and class consciousness, as well as a feeling for their independent political potential.
A simple but clear indicator of the absence of this consciousness is the present membership dues structure in trade unions. Up to 85% of the total sum collected remains in the enterprise. The central union bodies usually receive only 2%. With the partial exception of the coal miners and the public service employees, it is every enterprise for itself, including during a strike. So weak is union solidarity that individual workshops in the same plant will pull out of a collective protest if they receive their back wages, even if the other workshops have not.
Despite the heavy burden of the past and the unfavourable economic and political conditions created by "shock therapy" and the Yeltsin dictatorship, much more progress could be made toward the development of an independent, militant, politicised labour movement if only there were a bolder, more independent leadership. One need only look at neighbouring Belarus, where the industrial unions have been able to transform themselves into democratic, independent labour organisations that are a central force in the opposition to the dictatorial intentions of President Lukashenka.'
Of course, Belarus has certain advantages over Russia, in that its industrial labour force is more compactly situated, much of it in the capital itself. Another difference is the experience of the general strike of April 1991, which shook up the Belarussian workers and unions. In Russia, only the coal miners have gone through a comparable
Belarussians also had the luck of not having national industrial unions until 1991. When they set them up, some new, genuinely dedicated people were elected from the enterprises to the national leadership. In Russia, which shared its capital city with the Soviet Union, more often than not the old union bureaucrats passed over from the old Soviet unions into the new Russian one. The leadership they deserve?
Today, there are no insurmountable institutional or political obstacles to a renewal of the union leadership. This can occur, however, only as a consequence of a strong spontaneous mobilisation from below.
On a small scale, this happened in a number of enterprises during the wave of activism at the end of the Gorbachev period.
That wave has fallen. But the present rise in collective action and militancy among workers over the wage debt, and contacts with rank-and-file workers and union activists does suggest that a union leadership that showed itself to be independent of both management and the state, that set significant, but winnable, goals, and that demonstrated its genuine determination to win these goals could draw many workers behind it.
Without being overly optimistic, one can point to a number of elements in the present Russian situation that make more likely than has been the case over the past few years a worker mobilisation that could, in turn, leac to a change in union leadership.
First, there has been a definite rise in activism and militancy over the past months even if the basic demand remains modest The latest national action on November 5 saw the biggest turnout of any since Yeltsin's coup d'état; even though little serious organising went into its preparation. Workers' tactics are also becoming more militant. Increasingly, workers, and pensioners too, are turning to civil disobedience - blocking highways, railway lines and bridges. There have been a few general strikes in some towns.
Most of these have been spontaneous. But in several cities in the Kuzbass, an industrial and coal region where the governor has blocked elections to the local governments the unions recently responded to the impoverished state of their members and to the authorities' failure to make adequate preparations for winter by forming city-wide "committees of salvation". Their stated goal is to take power in the city.
In addition, despite the continued predominance of the demand for timely payment of wages, openly anti-government and anti-Yeltsin demands are once again resurfacing, after having virtually disappeared at the start of the presidential electoral campaign last spring. (illustrating the real role of these so called democratic elections.) The reappearance of these demands is directly related to Yeltsin having broken virtually every important pro-election promise; to the increasing economic hardship caused by monetarist policy that is tightening even further; and to the public scandals and Byzantine intrigues that have characterised the top government circles over the past months. The regime is utterlv discredited in the eyes of working people, who long since have had shed their illusions. Any worker will tell you that this is an anti-popular, criminal regime, and many will add that it is controlled by the G-7 and their financial organisations. [...]
Despite the bankruptcy of the present regime and its bourgeois allies, and their real weakness. the labour movement still has a long way to go before it can play a decisive role on the Russian political stage
Russia faces the same problem as at the start of this century: the working class is the only force on which a democratic state in Russia can be built, but the transition to capitalism cannot be carried through without savage repression of the workers. In Russia. democracy and capitalism are still incompatible. * The author lectures on Russia in the Politics Department of Montreal University (UQAM). He is also involved in a Canadian-Russian trade union education programme. 1. See "Belarus: the 18th Brumaire of Aleksandr Lukashenka." by Vladimir Shmanovich and David Mandel. International Viewpoint #286. March 1997. pp.12-14