Romanian miners rebel against marketisation
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
TEN DAYS ago thousands of miners from the Jiu Valley poured into Bucharest to besiege the government of president Iliescu and prime minister Petre Roman, who has since resigned. PATRICK CAMILLER, a member of the New Left Review editorial board was in Romania last year. Paul Clarke and Sam Inman talked to him.
Q. Just over a year ago the Romanian miners were defending the National Salvation front government, then under attack. Last week they came to demand the overthrow of that government. What has changed?
A. In June 1990 the miners came to Bucharest, a short time after the election were held giving the Salvation Front a two-thirds majority, and Iliescu a huge majority in presidential elections. They came to Bucharest because the results of these elections were not accepted by the right wing opposition, the National Liberal Party and the National Peasants Party - nor by some radical students.
The opposition occupied University Square, the central crossroads in the centre of Bucharest for two months after the election . When it was wound down and cleared by the police, there was a semi-insurrectionary attack on the government by the right-wing opposition - attacks on government buildings and the TV station, a key symbol of the anti-Ceaucescu revolution.
At that time the miners from the Jiu valley saw a threat to their government by the parties of the Romanian right wing - a government which was promising to defend their social interests, and to some extent actually doing so - against the rising bourgeois elites and their international allies.
What has changed since then is the government has itself adopted much of the social and economic programme of the opposition - a radical marketisation.
Subsidies on a wide range of goods and social services have been wound up. A big privatisation programme has begun.
This has seriously worsened working class living standards - they have fallen 40 per cent this year alone, as a result of inflation and lack of adequate compensation in workers wages.
This is what has undermined the support of miners, and other sectors of workers, for the government. No systematic attempt to explain this programme and consult workers was made.
I don't see the evolution of the miners as a great mystery. The miners, like other sections of the masses, had great hopes in this government.
These expectations have been cruelly disappointed, in a very difficult domestic and international political situation. The miners have attempted to stamp their mark on government policy again, but in a desperate and one-off way; they have not achieved very much.
Q. Is the Salvation Front government just the old Ceaucescu regime with a 'human face?'
A. The project of Iliescu and the National Salvation Front is best seen not as a continuation of the Ceausescu regime, but as an attempt to repeat the initial Gorbachev project in the Soviet Union. In other words attempting to unite elements of the old state apparatus, together with a project of political reform and reform of the economic system - in the wake of the devastating legacy of Ceausescu.
Q. How do you analyse the National Peasants Party and the National Liberal Party?
A. These two parties are the historic right wing parties, which continued to exist in emigration during the Ceausescu years. For many people they had become just a faint memory, but of course their leaders returned from emigration with the December 1989 revolution.
The National Peasants Party, as its name suggests, sees its main base among the peasantry; and although it did get a lot of peasant votes during the last elections, in the main the peasants have given short shrift to its programme of de-collectivisation.
National peasant party supporters trying to regain rights to ancestral land, now collectivised, have been seen off by local peasants.
The National Liberal Party, its traditional base has been in the intelligentsia, particularly in Transylvania. The Liberal Party has entered a protracted period of crisis, with a section of its youth trying to push aside the old guard, and adopt a programme like that of European Christian Democracy, instead of the inward-looking nationalism of the old guard.
Q. Does the privatisation programme push towards the restoration of capitalism? Is there an alternative?
A. As I already said, the Salvation Front's original idea was that of 'market socialism', a system of national planning with state industry, co-operatives and a significant private sector. Soon after their election victory , it was made pretty clear by the IMF, the West European governments and especially by the Americans that this was unacceptable.
They insisted instead on a rapid process of privatisation and marketisation, and lock, stock and barrel abandonment of a socialised economy. It was made clear that no opening to the world economy was possible otherwise. These pressures led to the programme of ending public subsidies.
The IMF promised in return $1 billion in aid. But this money has not been forthcoming, primarily because of the pressure of the USA.
The spontaneous direction of the programme now adopted is towards the creation of a new capitalist order. But Romania has remained starved of foreign capital. In the context of the catastrophic economic legacy of the Ceausescu dictatorship, one possible line of development was consolidating and extending its links with the Soviet Union, as a counter-balance to an opening to international capital. But this is becoming less viable because of the crisis in the USSR.
Because of this some sort of 'historic compromise' with international capital, on the lines of the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union after the revolution - but in a much less favourable international context - was indeed the only viable option.
But because of the blockade of Romania and the refusal of international capital to accept the National Salvation Front, such a compromise is no longer possible. The US is prepared to let Romania stew in its own juice until the National Salvation Front is broken.
The experience of Romania, like that of other east European countries, is that the greatest compromises with international capitalism are no guarantee of getting aid, and a rational integration into the world economy.
Q. Is there an independent union movement in Romania?
A. Details are difficult to come by. During the initial months after the overthrow of Ceausescu, small independent unions did emerge, but they were mainly regionally rather than nationally based. Apparently some independent unionist participated in the miners' demonstrations against the government.
Q. If there were organised revolutionary socialists in Romania how should they relate to the National Salvation Front? What programme would they advocate?
A. You can't answer a hypothetical question like that without knowing the circumstances of the emergence of such a grouping. It is impossible to imagine this kind of development without similar moves in the rest of eastern Europe, and probably the revival of the left in Europe as a whole.
A real change in the objective situation facing Romania could only come from a socialist left internationally which had state power in one or several countries, or could exert sufficient pressure on international capital to ease the enormous pressure on Romania. So it's very difficult to advance a 'Romanian' socialist programme in isolation.
But in my view in the initial period the only possible attitude would have been one of critical support for the National Salvation Front government.
Even today, if the National Salvation front came under the kind of insurrectionary attack which it faced last June, when the miners intervened to defend it, it would be the responsibility of independent socialists to defend it.
The Romanian working class remains strong, based on mining and other extractive industries. This core of the working class were the first to fight back against the Ceaucescu dictatorship, in 1977. Whatever the restructuring of the economy, these industries and this working class will survive. There is a long struggle ahead.
Q. So what are the prospects for such a renewal of the European left?
A. The way East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic, with the subsequent drive to destroy the traditions of the GDR, was a major blow - not only to the living standards of the GDR masses, but also to the left in Europe and internationally. Two or three years ago it seemed that the USSR might be able to intervene in world politics as a much more powerful and independent actor than has since been shown to be the case. The possibility of a German-Soviet core to the recomposition of world politics no longer exists.
In my opinion the form of the demise of the old system in the USSR and eastern Europe represents a major defeat for European socialism; this defeat exists as an objective fact, irrespective of your attitude towards it.
It is now a question of working out the premises for a new beginning for socialist politics on a European scale, preparing a refoundation. We can see in such forces as the Movement for Communist Refoundation in Italy, and in the similar types of division in Spanish Communist movement. Revolutionary socialist forces have to participate in that refoundation process in a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic way, while keeping their fundamental principles.