By ALEXANDER PENIN
There are two reasons for this: objective and subjective. The objective reasons for the weakness in the capitalist countries is that, the workers in these countries live not too badly if you measure this to other countries that are less developed. Imperialists, grabbing resources and cheap labour in the Third World countries, give some small gifts to their workers in order to stop any unrest. This is not done because the capitalist class wants to share their huge profits with the workers, and since these workers are more aware of the economic situation and how the system works, they are more tuned to the problems then the workers in less developed countries. Workers in capitalist developed countries for close to 200 years are fighting for a better life and wages. They know that they have to struggle for a better life, working conditions and cost of living. Therefore the bourgeois from time to time goes on giving small monetary gifts in order to placate any unrest.
But let us agree that even a strike situation has its negative aspects. Majority of the workers take advantage of these hard won gains from capitalists, thus putting a screen of inactivity on the workers and in many respects paralyzes further actions of the workers, since they only are thinking about the economic benefits. The question then arises as to how do we get these workers to be more active in the social-political struggle?
The second weakness is that the leadership of these workers get used to struggle for only economic gains, that it is enough to just organize a strike, demonstration – and their situation will be solved if only in a small way.
After a few of these strikes and demonstrations, it is very hard to bring them into a revolutionary struggle to overthrow the bourgeois system. Because, in this revolutionary struggle it is also easy to lose ones life, and why should they do it? Therefore a second question arises: can we in this present situation uplift the working class to struggle for the elimination of the dictatorship of the bourgeois and replace it with dictatorship of the working class?
The objective weakness of the left trade unions in former republics of former Soviet Union is that they do not know what is needed to struggle and how it is to struggle. The Soviet State supplied the working class with all the necessities of life, study, leisure and economic benefits, thus the workers and farmers did not have to strike or protest. In the 70 years of Socialism there grew up many generations, who do not know what class struggle means. Therefore we must be even more aggressive and teach them to rise up even if only for the economic gains, if not for political gains.
In many former Soviet enterprises and industries the workers still hold on to the image that there should not be any ongoing struggles between management and the workers. The middle rank trade union leaders do try to argue with top trade union leaders that there should be struggles, not only economic but political. There must be discipline in the workplace with no drunkenness and production discipline. This situation goes towards the scheme of the private owners to nullify any potential gains that might have been achieved.
It is also a problem that the present private Russian administration allows drunkenness on the job and in some enterprises there are still guaranteed sick leave…therefore it is hard to convince some workers to struggle harder, not only for economic gains but also for political gains. It s sometimes hard to convince some workers that the bourgeois are to blame for this state of affairs, and that their main efforts are to exploit the workers, even by allowing some drunkenness on the job…thus making some workers think that they have it good…so why should they struggle against the owners?
Russian bourgeoisie as Western capitalist class try with all of their means to keep the workers away from any class struggles. For this they use three methods: by trumpeting to the world the ills of Socialism and of former USSR, negating the successes of the CPSU and building of socialism and stop the working class from any kind of political activity.
The daily mass media, which is in private hands, do everything in their power to present the Great October Socialist Revolution as nothing but a wild orgy of drunken sailors. Collectivization is presented as drunken peasants grabbing some one else’s property and not knowing what to do or how to take care of agriculture. Of the thousands of heroes of the Soviet Union, dedicated communists and workers, they only speak about those elements that were "repressed" for crimes against the State, and traitors cooperating with German fascism. The ongoing, forever in the daily media, is the so-called Stalin Repressions. The present mass media even goes so far as to degrade the results of the Great Patriotic War. The Red Army is presented as a dumb, drunken bunch of hooligans and bandits. They state on and on that we won the war because we drowned the Germans in waves of our dead Red Army men! They try to convince the young generations that we won the war because we agreed to lose five Soviet soldiers for every German we killed.
(Remember, that these falsehoods in one form or another were ongoing since the late 1950s – Editor)
Such a struggle is also continuing in the present communist movement and trade union struggle. This is used to nullify the voices of the trade unions and the left opposition. And when these voices cannot be silenced or hidden, the lies are then put forward in the daily media and facts are turned upside down. Many of the ongoing strikes are presented as a bunch of demagogues that are trying to solve their own personal problems and put them on the shoulders of the whole society. When the strikes are for more working wage, the mass media try to influence the general public by publishing inflated wage figures that these workers were supposed to be getting. This method was used when there was the strike of the railroad workers in Leningrad in 1998. Sometimes they even show demonstrations organized by the communists, but they purposely have close-ups of faces of the pensioners only, eliminating other strata of population taking part in these demonstrations. In this way they silence other elements that are also demonstrating.
Subjective reasons in the present communist movement I shall try to do in another article.
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