The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.63/No.22           June 7, 1999 
 
 
Why The Yeltsin Regime Is In Constant Turmoil  

BY JACK BARNES
What's behind the instability in Russia? Why does President Boris Yeltsin sack one prime minister after another? Why can't the government put a lid on strikes by miners, sailors, and many other workers demanding their pay? And why are Washington and the other imperialist powers tightening a military encirclement of Russia?

The following selection helps shed light on these questions. It is from the fourth chapter of Capitalism's World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium, a talk presented in New York City on Nov. 7, 1992, four days after the presidential elections. Capitalism's World Disorder is copyright (c) 1999 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

Nixon made quite a sensation a few months ago, in March, when he gave a major speech in Washington, D.C., pointedly entitled "The New World," not the "New World Order." This supposedly discredited U.S. president warned his bipartisan colleagues to beware "the false premise" that "the Cold War is over and we have won it. . . . That's only half true," he said. "It is true, that as far as the Cold War is concerned, the Communists have lost it. It is not true, however, that the Free World has won it."

That question is not settled yet, Nixon said. And unless the U.S. rulers wage a successful fight to somehow transform Russia into a stable market economy, they will not be able to say they have won more than they have lost. Without that, he said, no durable regime - much less a reliable one, from the standpoint of Nixon's class - can be consolidated in Russia or anywhere else in the former Soviet Union.

Nixon's speech was front-page news, and not just here in the United States. It was televised live around the globe on CNN. It came only a few days after the publicizing of a memorandum Nixon had circulated to prominent ruling-class figures, in which he called Bush administration policy toward Russia "pathetically inadequate." That memo, entitled "How to Lose the Cold War," was also widely quoted in major newspapers in the United States and other countries.

"The hot-button issue in the 1950s was, `Who lost China?' " Nixon said in his memo - referring to the accusation-framed-as- a-question that he and others hurled at major bourgeois politicians as part of launching the McCarthyite witch-hunt.

"If Yeltsin goes down," Nixon said, "the question of `who lost Russia' will be an infinitely more devastating issue in the 1990s."

Nixon is well-qualified to make such a comparison, since he was a central instigator of the demagogic witch-hunting campaign four decades ago. The issue at that time was assessing blame for the revolutionary overturn in 1949 of the landlord- capitalist regime in China.

In his Washington, D.C., speech, Nixon said that the biggest obstacle to establishing a stable market system in Russia was what he called "the lack of a management class." The "lack of a class" is indeed the major problem the imperialists confront in the workers states - but not "a management class." The privileged bureaucratic castes in these countries include hundreds of thousands of managers.

What they "lack" is a capitalist class -a necessary social class that has accumulated massive amounts of capital; that has established its historical dominance over production and exchange; and that has imposed the social relations necessary for that domination on the toiling majority, and to one degree or another gotten them to accept those relations as their own. But the emergence of such a class involves sharp assaults on the working class - assaults that will meet resistance and threaten social stability - as well as bloody turf wars among the rival wannabe capitalists themselves.

That is the harsh reality behind what Nixon is calling on the U.S. rulers to look at square in the face.

 
 
 
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