I'm responding to these two posts of Joao's. This is not what I planned: apart from posting to the List mainstream media reports about Russia, I've been lying low. That's because we're having a Russia/globalism teach-in, trying to figure out where we and the world go from here. I'll be writing at length a little later I guess. But in the past few days, like most of you I guess, we've been a lot more talking than writing.
Today an old friend, a longtime socialist publisher, came to our house, cycled across north London's canal towpaths and dedicated cycle routes. He's 60 this year, looks brown and fit and is feeling cheery as we all are. He's a great gardener, keeps a big allotment and grows vegetables; Natalya's a gardener too and I watched the two of them from the kitchen window, in our own vegetable patch. They checked out our courgettes, cucumbers and tomatoes and some of the exotica which only Natalya seems to be able to grow in London's asthmatic air. But mostly they talked, their heads almost touching. When we lived in Moscow, this publisher friend was a frequent guest of ours (we have a dacha outside Moscow, with a big garden there too).
Before he left, we decided to put together a book on Russia and the crisis: Apocalypse Now! seems apposite for title. I'm going to get you all to help. The royalties will go to put flesh on the bones of Leninist-International.
An hour later a party comrade came around with his two-year old daughter in tow. She's the kind of kid who can trash a completely furnished room in 30 seconds of inattention. This comrade works in a big heavy manufacturing plant in north London (one of the few which two decades of deindustrialisation have left hereabouts). He's a production line worker. I don't want to romanticise horny-handed sons of toil, but the best of them have a certain moral steadiness, a steadfast ability to take the longer view. They're not in this for themselves, but for their children, and for their class, the class which will inherit the world, maybe sooner than we hoped. This party comrade is just the kind of guy the thieving SOBs who run the world now, most loathe and most fear: workers who are full of spiritual generosity, solidarity and willingness to share good times and bad. Any revolutionary party which attracts such people to its ranks can't be all wrong, I tell myself.
What do we think is happening in Russia? Will there be a revoltuion, or is it just a pipedream?
I trust Natalya. She said Yeltsin would be re-elected President at the time when Yeltsin himself didn't believe in it and his crooked bodyguard Korzhakov was proposing to call the elections off. The polls gave Yeltsin less then 5% support. That was the spring of 1996. I thought she was crazy: Zyuganov looked like a shoe-in. She made me angry, insisting coolly that Yeltsin would win. Why? I asked. You have no _arguments, gimme a break...
I yelled at her in fact. She knew because she was a Russian, looked at it this way: Zyuganov looked weak, and the people need a boss, a strong hand. Yeltsin was the only one around. So they voted for him, without believing in him, but knowing that the alternative probably meant western military intervention, civil war and worse chaos: and Zyuganov, after all, is no Vladimir Ilyich.
Things have moved on. Zyuganov, who thinks that he will be killed, and his family too, if he blocks Chernomyrdin - just as Berezovsky threatened to have him killed if he campaigned too hard against Yeltsin in 1996 -- this time looks stronger. Yes, this time Zyuganov's interviews show a man who has come to terms with his fate; sombre, a man who is reconciled to what must be, who's decided that if the Gods have given him a second chance, this time he'll find the courage to see it thru, and to pay the price if he has to.
Maybe he's found a way to threaten Berezovsky back. As for Yeltsin, he obviously knows that his number is up and his only thought now is how to save his own skin.
So that's what we've decided: not on the basis of profound Marxism or geopolitical analysis or all the thousands of clever, lying words I've been sharing with you, penned by the unscrupulous rascals, jackals of the western press. No, we decided on the basis of nothing more profound than the gleam in Zyuganov's eye, and the tone of his voice.
So take note, all you newcomers to this list, many of whom perhaps will not be with us for long -- the PR firm in Tbilisi; the US Chamber of Commerce in Moscow; the many AOL-aliases who've suddenly developed a burning interest in Leninism -- if this is the scintilla of rumour you're looking for, the whisper of backstage gossip -- the thing which will push you to one conclusion or another: we think that this time Zyuganov will see matters through. There will be no dirty deals in the Duma. He won't be bought off. He'll show principle. You'll be pissed off, but Hey! you had a good time plundering the place, and you knew it couldn't go on like that. All good things come to an end.
Well, as for you true Leninists -- what do you think? Have I sold out? We all know who these co-called Duma communists are: rascals, cynical poseurs, placemen, nightclub operators, embezzlers, political prostitutes, 'brown' leninists, closet Zhirinovskyites. Not an ounce of Marxism among them, right? All that died out three decades ago: this Duma-rabble of revisionist, Brezhnevite scum are part of the problem, yes?
Well, not quite. Maybe it's just the proximity of the Mausoleum and of Lenin. Maybe the mood change in Moscow is just much more profound than people really understand. Joao, whom I deeply respect, says: < By the contrary, one must remember that the most sound traditions of workers' militancy in Russia (scattered and inconsistent as they are) are based on the samizdat culture and a naive anarcho-syndicalism.>. I understand why you think so, Joao. But you are wrong. You have written off seven decades of socialism a little too easily. True, the Russian post-soviet soul is a hopeless amalgam of patriotic yearnings, blind anti-semitism, and half-remembered Leninist phraseology. Don't expect them to be enlightened in the way you and I are. But don't assume that it was all completely for nothing -- that this is a nation of total amnesiacs who remember nothing at all. Why, if even our own comrade Bilenko, starting from where he did, can think again about Stalin, then believe me there are at least 100 million Russians who will find such a step MUCH easier. And, unlike us more enlightened ones, Russians are generally-speaking prepared to die for what they believe in. That's why it takes them so long to make their minds up in the first place.
One more thing: Lebed? Nah, don't think so. For all sorts of reasons, it won't be him.
I'm not going to analyse Lebed now, so I'll just give you two. (1) His main backer is kiss-of-death Berezovsky (I've met him, BTW, and he really did seem much more second hand car salesman than maths prof). (2) Lebed has already been bought by the CIA and his main advisers are Harvard-men. But the day of CIA-funded quislings and Harvard-men is over.
So much for Lebed. He is not the Russian Peron (but actually that might be a 3rd reason: Russians know a little history, and do not aspire to become Argentina).
Of course, nothing is certain so excuse me if I end with a cop-out. Zyuganov, who as I say is no Ilyich, can get ground back into the Moscow crud form which he only just stuck out his nose. I can be wrong and anyway I don't even think this is the main thing right now: the main thing we need to start thinking about is the World Slump of 1999.
Nevertheless, we are in a qualitatively new situation. The logjam has begun to break up. In central and Eastern Europe, a new political dynamic has just been born, unannounced and unexpected by most people (but not me, sorry for feeling smug) and the region will slip more and more out of capital's control. A new situation in the world market. A lot does depend on how the market melts down. As my publisher friend says, 'things are MUCH worse than they are telling us...'
Mark
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)