Date: Mon, 17 Aug 1998 20:20:01 +0100 From: Mark Jones <Jones_M at netcomuk.co.uk> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5b1 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: ru MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Crisis in Russia heralds new stage References: <l03130300b1fe099bfca8@[166.84.250.86]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
We are entering a period of the naked use of unbridled force in international affairs. The world-system has entered a historical impasse. The collapse of the USSR, itself a symptom of a general and profound crisis which had already consumed the economies of Latin America and Africa, has greatly intensified and accelerated the general world crisis of capitalism.
Now the full force of this crisis is felt on East Asia. The ferocity of this process will not abate and indeed has scarcely begun: it will throw Japan into unparalleled economic slump and China into social crisis made worse by the global-warming induced flood catastrophes which have already affected 250 million Chinese- a quarter of the population). Now the headlong collapse of the Russian comprador-fascist state has begun, heralded by the disintegration of its baning system and national currency. The heroic Russian working class will find its own answers to the criminal Yeltsin regime. The miners of Gorbaty Bridge, writing new pages in the glorious history of the Russian workers' movement, have already begun to create the shadow institutions of a new Soviet power, a new dictatorship of the Russian proletariat. Let the imperialist schemers in their chancelleries in Washington, London and Bonn understand that history has after all not come to an end: when the masses speak, the enemies of the people shall fall silent.
But not even the Russian workers can overthrow the comprador-fascist state unless they are armed with revolutionary theory and led by the Communists. No other social force but the workers can prevent Russia sliding into an abyss of inhuman conflict, strife and mass sufferring on a colossal scale, unprecedented even in the darkest days of the Civil War and the Great Patriotic War. But only if the workers constitute their own Communist Party anew, from out of their own ranks, can they hope to succeed. For they face not just the rotten, criminal regime cowering in the Kremlin, but the entire weight of the imperialist world. The most resolute, united and disciplined actions will be needed, to root out and to destroy with the utmost ruthlessness the enemies of the people: the armed and specially equipped and trained mercenary forces created in secret and stationed in the Far East of the country; the more than two million strong private armies of the criminal oligarchies and mafia gangs; the virulent new strains of Black Hundreds and open fascist formations; the mind-boggling ideological war waged against the whole people by the world's most corrupt and cynical mass media; the stranglehold on the necessities of life, on the conduits of food supplies and essentials, now in the hands of western monopolies; the tens of thousands of imperialist agents, of US AIDers, 'charity-workers, western journalists, special forces, CIA and intelligence services from every Nato country who infest Russia and who are present in every military base; the massive technical, communications and satellite surveillance systems which mean that every single internal telephone conversation, every email and fax message, are routinely intercepted by western intelligence; and all the other instances of enemy power in this occupied and devastated country.
Only a Party capable of organising armed detachments of workers in complete secrecy, capable of guaranteeing the safety of its own lines of communication, capable of ruthlessly crushing opposition and enforcing the Soviet power in the towns and regions it liberates, can hope to seize and hold power in Russia. And only a Party armed with a truly Internationalist politics, can advance its cause beyond Russia, beyond even the space of the former Soviet Union.
Such a Party does not yet exist although formations of communists and armed workers are now developing with great rapidity in Russian provincial towns, particularly in the Urals, in parts of Central Russia and the Kuzbass. In Moscow there has been a sea-change in popular attitudes, reflected in the favourable attitude of ordinary people to the miners and other strikers now besieging the seat of government, not yet as an unstoppable mass movement, but as the moral nucleus of mass working class power and insurrectionary resistance.
The descent into crisis and chaos of the capitalist world system provides the necessary breathing space for our Russian comrades to act, to organise, to launch new forms of mass action, to prepare the hammer-blows that will sweep away the comprador-fascist Yeltsin regime, to organise the insurrectionary overthrow of this quisling state.
This overwhelming, truly global crisis has developed with fantastic rapidity but is actually still accelerating. The disintegration of the world market embraces the destruction of the most advanced sectors of capital, as well as its effects on the poorest and most marginal social layers and classes. The collapse of webs of international trade and commerce and of information flows entails incalculable social losses and is bound to increase unemployment, hunger, homelessness and despair. As communities and nations, and even whole regions, are thrown onto their own resources, fascist movements and ideologies are bound to find new resonance amid rising levels of intercommunal violence and ethnic war. The world slump is a breeding ground of fascism.
US imperialism is the heart of the vortex, and this is the pole which draws profit and superprofit to itself, bleaching white the world system. Germany, the second-strongest imperialism, was unable to resist the centripetal process and today, despite its huge subsidising of east German reconstruction, the wasteland of unemployment and despair which capitalism creates in all its neocolonies is as much in evidence in east Germany as anywhere else.
China, too, under the Deng Xiaoping clique, has become fully incorporated into the circuits of world capitalism. The Chinese revanchists have raised the banner of renewed Chinese imperialism and aspire to compete with the existing imperial powers. Explosive social contradictions have opened up in the space of former Chinese socialism but the drive to construct a world-centre of capitalist accumulation in the Shenzhen-Hong Kong axis has failed. China cannot escape the dramatic crisis unfolding in Asia, as cannibal-capitalism gnaws its living tissue. China is inescapably caught in the apocalyptic spiral of crisis now dragging the capitalist world system down into chaos, disintegration and war. And a terrible price has already been paid by the Chinese working class for the benefits its parasitic rulers hoped to gain from joining the imperialist club.
The achievements of Chinese socialism have been demolished, the assets painfully accumulated since 1949 are being gutted with the same frenzy as in the former Soviet Union, while tens of millions of dispossessed Chinese workers -- robbed of their socialist birthright -- are conscripted into the cauldron of the Chinese coastal enclaves. The collapse of the world system is proceeding at an ever- increasing pace, and the tempo of Chinese accumulation has proven wholly insufficient to drag Chinese capitalism free of the vortex. At the same time, a whole new dimension of crisis is revealed beneath the growing rents and tears of Chinese capitalism. It is daily clearer just what terrible price future generations of Chinese workers will pay for the alleged benefits of economic growth experienced in China since the fall of Chinese socialism. A terrible whirlwind of environmental and resource depletion has been sown by the so-called Green Revolution which has produced agricultural growth in China and throughout Asia.
The mechanism of boosting crop-production also led directly to the dispossessing of hundreds of millions of peasants, decanting these discontented, hungry masses into the vast new megacities of Asia, from Bengal to Shenzhen. But this Green Revolution was won not only at terrible social cost; it has resulted in a wholly-unsustainable agriculture which is ravaging the environment and depleting water resources and soil fertility at an unprecedented rate. At the same time, environmental pollution has created a nightmare world for the multimillioned Asian masses.
'Booming' Asian capitalism has created this stinking environmental hell, characterised by the pollution of water bodies, coastal seas and the land, covering vast regions with global-warming induced forest fires, turning the megacities into uninhabitable death traps.
The 'Keynesian' reformers seek to refuel Asian capitalism, but if they succeed then these fundamental resource and environment crises will only be intensified to an intolerable degree; in the next decades the collapse of Asian ecosystems will only accelerate, made worse as global warming raises sea levels and inundates coastal regions where almost a billion people now live. Thus Keynesian reforms, insofar as they are implemented successfully, will serve only to exacerbate the underlying crisis and to hasten the final day of revolutionary reckoning.
The contradictions of Asian capitalism are ripening at a furious pace and this is producing political aftershocks which are already beyond the capacity of world imperialism to direct or control. The mechanism of crisis has assumed a capricious, uncontrollable character and this tendency itself is accelerating. Imperialism, which in the past has eagerly sought to intensify crises, in eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere, is now in a desperate struggle to slow down and contain evolving crisis, but does not know how. Whereas crisis has always been welcomed as a mechanism for destroying the working class, for increasing the tempo of exploitation through constant speed-ups and restructuring and the retirement of 'obsolete' capital (i.e., the productive systems painfully built-up in the course of development and often perfectly suited to the specific conditions in the neocolonies), today imperialism wants to apply the brakes to a world crisis spinning out of control.
The political confusion this abrupt change of direction produces is best evidenced in the response of the West to the Asia meltdown. The shock troops of world imperialism -- its parastatal organs such as the World Bank and the IMF - responded to the Asian crisis by applying the tried and tested' methods of crisis INTENSIFICATION. Thus the IMF introduced shock-therapy regimes designed to intensify the rate of exploitation in Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere and to further bind these neocolonies into the straitjacket of world capitalism; but the immediate result was to exacerbate the crisis and further destabilise these states and the Asian economy as a whole.
This has led to turmoil, confusion and loss of political direction within imperialism, evidenced by the astonishing public criticisms voiced by leading IMF and World Bank bureaucrats and their political masters in Washington, who now openly prescribe the sort of 'Keynesian' social reforms they previously strove with might and main to bury forever. Now the IMF itself speaks of 'labour rights' and 'social protection', and has begun to address the need to reflate collapsing economies and to stimulate demand, all of which flatly contradicts the mission given to these policemen of finance capitalism.
Such is the terrible fear felt in high places, now that the working class has begun to stir and to waken from its slumbers. Do the new reformers ave any chance of success? With their vocal and enthusiastic supporters in the whole gallimaufry of Non-Governmental Organisations, 'left' social democrats, trade unions, and so-called 'Communist' Parties, these craven lickspittles of world imperialism are seizing their chance, voicing loud 'critiques' of the IMF strategy and urging their imperialist masters to 'relent', to be more 'forgiving' -- i.e., to forgive not just the debts run up by their fellow predators, the banks and speculators who have got caught in the collapse of Asian financial markets, a collapse their own greed catalysed, but also to 'forgive' the peoples of Indonesia, Korea and elsewhere the doubling and tripling of food and fuel prices and the other usurious exactions the IMF and Washington sought to impose.
But the crisis of world capitalism has no precedent since 1945, and not even since the shattering dramas of finance capitalism and imperialism which destroyed the Pax Britannica in 1914 and which led directly to both the Russian Revolution of 1917 and to the installation of the United States as the 20th century's imperial hegemon. Thus we can say with certainty that the whole historical cycle which began in 1917 has ended, and that the collapse of the USSR was only the harbinger of still more striking and apocalyptic events, in which the stake is not just the safety of US imperialism, but the survival of world capitalism itself. Therefore it is clear that the present world crisis is still in its early stages and that its further development will be marked by a rising tide of working class resistance.