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What Happened In Russia? a contribution to a discussion, December 11, 2000 by Ernest Tate I'm sure I was not alone among socialists during the period of Gorbachev and the final days of "peroistroika", thinking that this was perhaps the opening phase of the "political revolution" and that the Russian working class would not permit the bureaucracy to dismantle the gains of the Russian Revolution. The idea of "political revolution", the need for the working class to mobilize around a program of "workers control" to allow it to realize its full creative possibility to overcome the crisis of stagnation resulting from bureaucratic control, was an essential feature of the analysis of the USSR developed by Leon Trotsky. This program for political revolution, to which supporters of the "degenerated workers state" theory subscribed, encompassed some of the demands of the bourgeois democratic revolution such as freedom of speech and association, the right to strike, demands for workers control around which the working class would mobilize through workers councils, and wh! ich would pose the question of "political power". There is little evidence of political revolution in the processes of change in Russia and Eastern Europe since the collapse. Rather , the drive for change, especially political change, has tended to come from those layers in society who are outside the organized working class. Looking at some of the changes in Russia, especially in the decades before Gorbachev, we can understand why. From Kruschev in the early 1960s, social and economic changes under the bureaucracy began to cause its disintegration. Despite Kruschev's claims that they would bypass the standard of living of the capitalist countries, by the early 1970s targets of the central plan for economic growth and labour productivity were not met. Before 1960 rates of growth under the two five year plans were 14% and 11% a year, respectively, remarkably high when compared to Western capitalist economies. Projecting this growth rate into the future, Kruschev could, with some justification say the USSR would bypass capitalism. But the reality was something else. During the 70s and 80s, the Russian growth rate fell to under 4%, says David Lane in his book, The Rise and Fall of State Socialism. (1) At the same time, important demographic shifts in the population began to undermine the regime. Two thirds had become urban -- from 22,000,000 in 1922 to 186,800 in 1989. (2) In 1950, the number of employees categorized as "non-productive", that is non-manual employees, in such sectors as science, education, culture, health, insurance and tourism, totalled 6,260,000. In the space of 17 years, that figure had jumped almost four times to 23,812,000. (3) It was this demographic group that had the most important impact on the history of the last twenty years. There was the rapid growth of television and other means of communication. David Lane writes that , "The population's expectations rose: a consumer mentality matured as did the bourgeoisification of aspirations."(4) "This led to a more wide-spread receptivity to alternate conceptions of socialism at the same time as there was a pervasiveness of illegal as well as private economic activity." Among petty -bourgeois layers in the society there was an increase in the belief that they would capitalize their special skills in a market relationship. "It was a mechanism to realize intellectual capital in monetary terms." Lane says.(5) In general, there had been a deterioration in the standard of living of these layers, compared to the pre-war period. There is a lot of anecdotal evidence of truck drivers earning much more that highly trained medical specialists. Loyalty and solidarity with the regime began to break down, especially among professionals, who had become disenchanted with their status: they were in turn cultivated by the leadership. Lane gives data on the sociological shift in the membership of the Communist Party from the late Breznev period to Gorbachev, towards non-manual and professional layers and the influx of these layers into the top leadership and a simultaneous decline in the number of individuals from working-class backgrounds. "The implication here," he says, "is that a dual class structure was developing in which 'intellectuals' and professionals had much potentially to gain from a market-type system. They had marketable skills and were not dependent on a 'nomenklatura' system."(6) "It is undoubtedly the case," Lane says, "that the reform leadership of Gorbachev shifted its political fulcrum of support away from the manual working class and the traditional party and state bureaucracy to an alliance with the more technologically inclined and modernizing forces of the intelligentsia..."(7) To deal with the crisis of the economy, two sets of solutions were argued within the regime: the development of markets in Russia and "a reform of the economic mechanism." Gorbachev could have chosen to stay with the central plan and rely on the working class to make the changes necessary to overcome the crises, but instead he opted for the market solution which only accelerated the crises. In a discussion of the various theories about the nature of the Soviet state and the reason for the crises, Lane examines in detail the views of the Trotskyists. He looks to see which theory more correctly explained the crisis of the regime. He also deals with reactionary and pro-capitalist theories of some Western academics (which he says were mainly wrong about Russia). Lane, who pays tribute to Ernest Mandel's work, states that Hilel Ticktin, who Mandel debated many times, "must go down as one of the few specialists...who correctly analysed the weakness and potential disintegration of Soviet type society."(8) Tictin's magazine Critique, is published in Glasgow.
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