Debate: How should we analyse Russia today? Can Yeltsin roll back the wheel of history?
Socialist Outlook newspaper1990sPaul ClarkeTranscribed or corrected by hand from the printed page.
Old socialist debates about 'the Russian question' seem positively antique in 1992. Surely, the real issue is what Russia and the other CIS countries are now and not what they were. Old categories (workers state, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist etc) are, surely, only of interest to historians of obscure factional conflict.
This view is only partly right. How we view Russia now must depend on what we think it was before the experience of perestroika, the collapse of that project and the seizure of power by Yeltsin and the pro-capitalist forces around him after the August 1991 attempted coup.
Authoritarian
During his London visit Yeltsin warned that 'right wing' forces may attempt to seize power; and that he might be forced into authoritarian measures to stop them (which of course would only be 'temporary'). These statements were a reflection of the huge conflicts now raging in Russia because of the attempts to restore capitalism.
Yeltsin's neo-liberal marketisation plans are being resisted by a wide spectrum of political forces, from the small socialist forces like the new Party of Labour, to the social democratic 'Socialist Workers Party of Russia', the Stalinist and nationalistic Communist Workers Party, to much more right-wing nationalist forces that lined up with the Stalinists in the National Salvation Front.
But behind these political alignments is a much deeper social reality; important elements of the old bureaucracy in charge of industry and the factories are resisting the destruction of state planning, state ownership and state subsidies to industry.
These forces are engaged in a bitter battle against Yeltsin's pro-marketisation prime minister Gaidar; they are organised in the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, part of the much wider anti-Yeltsin alliance 'Civic Union', which includes the right-wing Peoples Party of Free Russia.
Opposition to Yeltsin from sections of the old bureaucracy does not reflect any principled anti-capitalist approach; it is a matter of survival. While sections of the old bureaucracy can fit themselves into the new order, tens of thousands of bureaucrats and factory cadres cannot. Full marketisation means simple bankruptcy and the dole for them.
'Shock therapy'
So far, the attempt to introduce a market economy through 'shock therapy' has resulted only in shock and no 'therapy'; more precisely marketisation reforms have succeeded only in dislocating the old state-planned economy while not creating a new fully capitalist one. Why is this so?
Hundred of smaller firms have been privatised, generally by fake purchases and other pilfering by corrupt bureaucrats. But Russia and the CIS more generally, has tens of thousands of state-owned factories. To privatise these, to create full-scale capitalism needs capital; enterprises need to be bought. There is only one realistic source of that capital – the Western governments, banks and other financial institutions. But they will not invest without seeing the prospect of rapid profits; and that in turn means a docile labour force, a workable infrastructure and above all a guaranteed market for the goods produced.
The IMF has agreed a $24 billion package of aid to Russia, but it depends on progress towards marketisation which has been stalled by political opposition. Only $1 billion has been forthcoming.
In desperation Yeltsin and Gaidar invented a 'voucher' scheme for privatising the factories; it seems to have gone down like a lead balloon.
Clearly Russia and the other CIS countries have pro-capitalist, politically bourgeois, governments. But that does not equal a capitalist social system. Non-capitalist social relations predominate. Private capital is accumulated by corruption and the still relatively marginal private sector.
The character of the state depends on the fundamental question: which social relations does the state apparatus defend historically? That is the only possible theoretically coherent criterion. Thus, if a left wing or socialist government comes to power under capitalism, but leaves the state apparatus intact, the state is capitalist irrespective of the character of the government.
The old central Soviet state apparatus has collapsed and been replaced by the authority of the state machines of the republics. Russia has however incorporated whole sectors, especially the military and security apparatus, of the old central Soviet state apparatus into a reconstituted Russian state.
The provisional answer has to be that the existing Russian state politically defends capitalist social relations, but so far lacks the power to crush social opposition to a full marketisation programme which would radically alter the character of the economy.
But the social layer in power remains the bureaucracy, even if key sectors of the bureaucracy have the ambition to turn themselves into a capitalist class.
We thus have are faced with a hybrid, extremely unstable, social formation. Capitalism, because of world economic crisis, is having difficult birth-pangs; and maybe it will never succeed in being born.
Right wing
Without a big change in the world economy, or successful defensive struggles by the working class, the prospect for Russia is of right-wing, authoritarian government based on a still largely statised economy.
Should this configuration become stabilised, debates on the social character of Russia would be posed anew. Statisation of the economy, in itself is not a decisive criterion for the absence of capitalism.
State capitalist regimes have existed in the post-war world, in a series of third world countries, where the majority of industry was nationalised, but which were totally integrated into the world capitalist market and subject to the law of value. Nasser's Egypt is a classic example.
It would be premature to draw the conclusion that any form of capitalism is stabilised in Russia.
But in the long-term, in a capitalist world, some form of capitalism will be established, unless the working class can impose its own solution against the extreme right wing forces waiting in the wings to replace Yeltsin.