Maoism in Russia

Dear MIM: Regarding MN195, you are to be commended for covering 
the Maoist movement in Russia, and it is encouraging that one is 
starting. I think that these young people have made some serious 
mistakes, and your coverage should have contained some criticism. 
The worst of these mistakes is concentrating on young people 
instead of the proletariat in general. I have nothing against 
organizing young people, but neglecting the middle aged and 
elderly proletariat is inexcusable. This mirrors MIM's strategy 
for the USA, and while I have already explained the differences I 
have with that, at least you can defend your thesis on the grounds 
that most Amerikan workers live in economic privilege (setting 
aside for the time whether this privilege is relative or 
absolute).

This is certainly not the case in the Fifteen Republics. In 
addition to reports in your own paper, Northstar Compass, and the 
Workers World (as well as even the bourgeois press), I have 
personally corresponded with several people living in those areas 
(I belong to an organization called International Penfriends), and 
it is quite clear to me that with very few exceptions neither 
Russian workers nor those of the other republics are living in 
privilege. They are paid less than most Latin American workers and 
only slightly more than African workers (my friends the professor 
of computer science in Novocherkassk earns $100 per month). Many 
go without pay for months at a time, still expected to work. Many 
are malnourished, and in some areas chronic power failures cause 
people to freeze to death in their apartments.

You claim that the reactionary character of the Amerikan worker is 
not false consciousness. Any reactionary character of Russian and 
other former Soviet workers surely is false consciousness. These 
people have nothing to lose but their chains. If ruschevism, Great 
Russian chauvinism, or other bad influences have caused older 
generations of Russians to react badly, it is wrong for Russian 
Maoists to throw up their hands and give up on them. They need to 
get off their backsides and spread progressive consciousness to 
all generations! With the elderly this is particularly bad. Many 
of them remember what they fought for in the Second World War.

Whatever problems there are with Russian nationalism, Kruschevism, 
or Soviet nostalgia, these ideologies are all against western 
imperialism, and since western imperialism is the main enemy, 
these comrades cannot afford to be so sectarian as to refuse to 
work with such people towards that goal. If we concede that 
nationalists, Kruschevists, and nostalgists have as their long-
term goal the creation of Russian imperial power and have designs 
on other nationalities, they are at least in the short term 
enemies of the more powerful enemy of western imperialism, and the 
comrades must make a temporary alliance with them to defeat that 
enemy.

Mao knew the Kuomintang were rotten, but he allied with them to 
bring down monarchy and imperialist control of China. Just so 
Russian Maoists, Kruschevists, nostalgists, and nationalists must 
unite against the imperialists and the compradors to drive them 
out of Russia. This is the successful strategy that worked in 
1917. Lenin united with non-Communist elements to rid Russia of 
the common enemy of tsarism and feudalism. Then the Bolsheviks 
united with anyone opposed to Kerensky's continuance of the war. 
Out of this strategy came socialist victory.

The comrades are also wrong to oppose armed struggle. NATO is at 
the door. They are plundering Yuoslavia and will soon attack 
Belarus. I know plenty of Russians are ready to fight....

-- Western U.$. reader October 1999.

Unfinished reply from Russian comrades

Comrade Dar replies: The reader is quite right that the only 
problem with the overwhelming majority of Russian workers is false 
consciousness. I say with the majority and not with the working 
class overall, as there are substantial sectors of the working 
class (especially in and around Moscow and some other such 
metropolises) who are intimately linked with Western capital or 
Western-capital-backed companies and who constitute a genuine 
labor elite -- materially, ideologically and in all other respects 
interested in maintaining the status quo. But, I repeat, for the 
overwhelming majority of post-Soviet workers the reader has 
pinpointed the problem quite correctly.

Then -- so what? Isn't false consciousness a determinant factor of 
social life in its own right? Can it be dismissed so lightly? 
Isn't it false consciousness, the sphere of the superstructure, 
that generates counterrevolutionary elements within the Communist 
Party after the victory of the Revolution? Isn't that ultimately 
responsible for the capitalist ruin all around us here in Russia?

The recipe the reader offers us is go to a factory or a coalmine 
and wave the Little Red Book in front of the workers' noses. It is 
not as easy as that. Let him believe me -- things like this have 
been tried. Take the ultimate worshippers of the working class 
wherever it is and whatever it does, the Trots. A Trot activist of 
my acquaintance -- after years of selfless effort to organize the 
working class here, backed up by generous aid from Western 
Trotskyist orgs -- had to give an inspecting Western emissary a 
guided tour of Moscow, explaining to him/her en route that Moscow 
was an ill-industrialized city and there were few industrial 
workers there! So negligible were the results of his work. Take 
the biggest and most influential left-of-Zyuganov party, the 
Russian Workers' Communist Party (RKRP in Russian), touting the 
ideology of pre-Maoist, dogmatic Stalinism. It is workerist to the 
marrowbone, ensuring 50% of delegates to its Congresses are 
workers from the assembly line. And where's the beef? In about ten 
years of struggling and organizing they have had a hand in some 
dozen scattered strikes and other protest actions and most workers 
don't even know such a party exists. So much for the efforts of 
our self-styled Communists to guide the proletarian masses.

And it is not only their revisionist ideologies that are to blame. 
After all, if any dude, a Trotskyist, a Stalinist, hell, some 
Pannekoekian or Bordigian or Dengist, comes to the factory and 
tells the workers: "Comrades, the bosses are sucking you dry. You 
haven't received your salaries since I don't know when. You are 
trampled under, fired on the slightest provocation. There is no 
social security. Let us organize and get our own from the bosses!" 
-- then the workers ought to react positively. They don't.

The class consciousness of the workers is at an extreme low. Sure, 
everybody hears about the Yasnogorsk factory seizure in 1997, 
about last year's "railroad war" and the miners' picket of many 
months' duration on Gorbaty Most outside Moscow's White House, 
about the rising (and ebbing) tide of strikes and all that jazz. 
But these are exceptions proving the rule. The Yasnogorsk saga was 
an impressive, but isolated event, with every leftist group, 
Stalinists, Trots, crypto-Trots, greedily preying on it ever 
since, trying to claim it for their own. It took a financial 
magnate, Berezovsky, settling his own scores with his opponents in 
the government, to organize the workers to block the railroads and 
to bring them to Moscow, feed and entertain the protesters on 
Gorbaty Most every day, etc. I don't have the necessary 
statistics, but it is my strong suspicion that there aren't as 
many strikes by far as the desperate (really desperate!) condition 
of the workers should warrant, and those that do occur either put 
forward very tame economic demands (pay us back our salaries, 
please), or don't go beyond demanding the resignation of the 
government (with which the Fuehrer Boris obliges every few months 
anyway).

Most workers -- I glean this both from personal contacts with 
workers in my home town and from the press -- just doggedly go to 
work, are happy when (and if) the salary gets paid, are mortally 
afraid of being sacked and shudder to think of any collective 
action or protest -- there are lots of unemployed breathing down 
any worker's neck. If there is no salary paid, they go to work 
anyway, out of habit, hoping it WILL be paid some day. Many, 
especially privately-owned, enterprises don't even have anything 
in the shape of a trade union (not that the existing trade unions 
are any good). The workers may come to a factory in the morning 
only to hear the boss tell them there is no work to be done today, 
so they'd better scram and don't come till they're wanted. And 
they are happy to oblige. 

What is the root cause of this situation? Yep, you got it  --  
Khrushchevite-Brezhnevite revisionism. Since 1953, the regime 
systematically did everything to eradicate any traditions of self-
organization, self-reliance, class consciousness and dignity 
inherent in the Russian working class. It was done by means of 
mind-dumbing propaganda: everybody was expected to repeat the 
meaningless mantras of the castrated official version of Marxism 
and publicly endorse things they never believed (hence the almost 
ubiquitous aversion to ALL Marxism, ALL Leftist ideology). Leftist 
dissidents were persecuted with much more ferocity than rightist 
ones. It was also done by creating a system of social parasitism -
- everybody who had a job (and everybody had) was guaranteed to 
receive a wage that at least fed and clothed him and to receive 
some other benefits from the top -- provided he toed the line and 
didn't ask too many questions. The trade unions were strictly a 
joke, their chief responsibility being distributing holiday trips 
to sanatoriums to obedient workers. And, why not resort to 
outright massacre from time to time? Have you heard about 
Novocherkassk, 1962? Regular troops were used to shoot at a 
demonstration of workers demanding higher wages. There were 
numerous victims. This was done in a so-called workers' state, in 
the peacetime, there being no emergency state in the country, on 
the express secret orders of Khrushchev. Compare this to the 
Chinese 1971 Constitution, expressly guaranteeing the workers' 
right to strike!

This long tradition of servility, passivity, reliance on somebody 
else to solve their problems for them, aversion to all, first and 
foremost Marxist, politics, cannot be eradicated overnight, just 
by shouting a few correct slogans or distributing a few correct 
books. A lot of effort, both by Communists (and, remember, there 
is no vanguard party right now in Russia!) and by the workers 
themselves, in the field of SELF-organization of the proletariat 
will be required. And the 35-plus age group of workers is the one 
most profoundly steeped in Khrushchevite-Brezhnevite habits of 
thought and behavior.

Of course, unlike MIM in Amerikkka, we don't have a STRATEGIC line 
that our working class isn't revolutionary and the genuine 
proletariat is located elsewhere. This is not true of Russia. Our 
workers (of every age) are proletarian, they OBJECTIVELY 
constitute the most revolutionary class of society, as well as 
(potentially) our own social base. We only have a TACTICAL line 
that at the present moment and in these concrete conditions the 
social strata most receptive to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and most 
capable of eventually joining the vanguard party are YOUNG 
workers, as well as some (but not all) students and other sectors 
of the youth. It is a question of priorities. 

As to the elderly workers, who remember what they fought for in 
the Great Patriotic War, the very youngest of the War veterans are 
nearing 70 and this group of the population is rapidly dying out -
- due to biological reasons, of course. As a distinct social group 
with undoubtedly progressive values (I even know some War vets who 
are sympathetic towards Maoism!), their influence is virtually 
nil. And the message of WWII is being systematically distorted 
both by the mass media and by rightist politicians -- not 
"SOCIALIST USSR vs FASCIST Germany," or even "Democracy vs. 
Fascism," but "Russia, period, vs. Germany, period."

[MIM adds: If you are reading this and have a few thousand dollars 
a year to spare, support the Russian Maoists in publishing a 
magazine. Send money to MIM marked for the ex-Soviet comrades.]