Putin wins parliamentary elections:
Russian politics still struggling for new directions
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by International Minister, December 11 2003
Vladimir Putin lines up supportRussian president Vladimir Putin put his stamp on the Russian parliament called the Duma in elections December 7th. The only party receiving at-large delegates that does not support Putin gained 12.7%--the phony communists led by Zyuganov. In the days leading up to elections, MIM received a credible report which it did not confirm that pro-Putin activists associated the Yabloko ("Apple") party with Chechen "terrorists" in the media. Putin controls most of the mass media, so outside observors criticized the Russian election campaign for the information that voters received. The pro-Western Liberal parties received no at-large faction rights in the Duma by virtue of falling below 5% of the vote. However, Zyuganov claims that an independent tally shows that Putin's party stuffed the ballot box to deprive the Liberals.(1) On the other hand, none of the critics are saying the two Liberal parties received much more than 6% a piece in any case. We received the following report from Chairpersyn Dar Zhutayev of the Russian Maoist Party. "Only four parties made it to the Duma, out of which 3 are 100% pro-Kremlin and far-right politically: 'United Russia'--the official pro-Putin party, Vladimir Zhirinovsky's 'Liberal-Democratic' Party (you must have heard about it), and a new bloc called 'Rodina' ('Motherland'), artificially composed by the Kremlin's political technologists out of ex-Soviet generals and industrialists, Orthodox clericals and Russian fascists plus some bought-off labor leaders and espousing an ideology they call 'people's patriotism.' The fourth party is Zyuganov's 'Communist' Party that has suffered a very serious setback as compared to the previous elections and, though not explicitly pro-Kremlin, cannot be even defined as a revisionist organization, but as a pro-imperialist party with elements of fascism. No workers' deputies in this Duma and extremely few bourgeois democrats. The extremely rightist and authoritarian presidency has now been complemented with an extremely rightist and compliant Duma." Comrade Dar Zhutayev commented further: "Our position on it was to call upon the people to vote 'against all candidates' and quite a few people did so (approx. 4.5% of the voters)."(2) Initial reports indicated some fluidness in the political situation after the election with Yabloko (Apple) (led by Grigory Yavlinsky) and Union of Right Forces (led by Anatoly Chubais) parties preparing to ditch their leaders. There was a lot of hand-wringing about it from Liberals ranging from Gorbachev to the Washington Post. As long as Putin faced Zyuganov's having most of the Duma power, the Western media was all for lop-sided state control of the media. Now that Putin's allies have crushed the Liberals too, they all cry foul. Many mentioned a return to the Brezhnev era given the ideological unity of the new Duma. (The irony of this is probably lost on those Western pundits and most Kremlinologists who thought the Brezhnev era polity was monolithic and "totalitarian.") The Washington Post even aired a view that the makings of a new Hitler are in place.(3) Although it is well-known that the Kremlin did everything possible to split its opposition, less well-known is the extent of Western intelligence agencies' assistance to the Kremlin. MIM is uncertain on that point. However, the Kremlin claims that Bush congratulated him on his "impressive victory." Whether true or not, it makes friendly politics with the West to say so. It's an ugly picture. In three months, the Kremlin split Zyuganov's party in half. To counter the pressure, the phony "Communist Party"'s top of the ticket included anti-Semites. It's an ugly picture, because it shows the Russian people allow themselves to be manipulated in politics. The various disgusting combinations of backward ideas have rushed in to fill the vacuum left by a destroyed proletarian internationalism.
Notes:
Corruption may have been central issue in Russian voters' mindsThe most popular thing that Putin did lately was arrest an oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. In no way was that arrest getting ahead of public opinion, and so Putin retains rightist credentials. Some members of the Western business press also celebrated Putin's victory and the Russian industrialists recently greeted Putin at a meeting in unity. When the Soviet Union dissolved, instead of handing over state assets to all individuals for private ownership equally, under the corrupt advice of Western "economic" consultants, people like Gaidar & Chubais allowed certain individuals to become overnight billionaires. Ever since that time, Russia has been one giant competition of mafias and the people are stuck wondering if there is any capitalism that is not corrupt. The people wonder if there is any dividing line between a capitalist business deal and a bribe. It does not take much of a push for the Western media to adopt it's outsider's-Liberal -posture-against-the-barbaric-foreigner. Western papers were full of stories supporting corrupt business leaders in Russia and egging on the most corrupt to challenge Putin for political power. Any Russian who happened to be reading was sure to punish the Liberal parties in Russia. Rarely have phrases like "human rights" and "democracy" so directly correlated with the fate of a single corrupt capitalist such as oil magnate Boris Berezovsky or the more recent Khodorkovsky arrest. Western articles seemed calculated to connect "democracy" to white-collar crime, while also leaving out the blood and guts involved in the Russian mafia's rise. On the other hand, while admitting Khodorkovsky's corruption, the Western press rarely admitted that he was the major funding behind their beloved Western-Liberal style parties, Apple and Union of Right Forces. In other words, the corruption they admit to have occurred was the reason for the success of their beloved parties.(1) In a very rare feat of materialism, in an article we recommend, old-style-Republican/libertarian Justin Raimondo crushed the numerous weenies of the Anglo-Saxon press who complain about a lack of democracy in other countries without comparing what is happening in their own or others: "When the Republicans run television ads featuring Bush's Top Gun landing on that aircraft carrier, I wonder if these same monitors will lodge complaints about inappropriate use of taxpayers' money."(2) Although Justin Raimondo single-handedly demolished these chauvinist Liberals, Ralph Nader also could tell these weenies a thing or two about getting media coverage in the united $tates, when government regulated media allow exclusion of candidates from debate counter to their own by-laws.(3) That's not to mention the countless media outlets whose profit margins rest on government ads. Google censors MIM while taking military and Republican Party advertising, which means that the government is giving tax-dollars to partisan media.(4) This is not to mention that after Florida in 2000, it seemed that the Anglo-Saxon world should have kept its mouth shut a good decade. As MIM always stresses there is no truth about any grand concept whether "democracy" or "liberty" or "communism" that is valid without a comparison of realities. It goes to show that the propagandists running the Western media indulge far-flung fantasy as long as it can be done safely at the expense of a bourgeois several time zones away. For those that honestly do not know it's not any better in the united $tates or England, we feel only pity. In some aspects the Russian government is more at Putin's campaign disposal and in other aspects it is less compared with other "democracies." MIM's position on corruption is this: yes, it's unfair to arrest just Mikhail Khodorkovsky and a couple other oligarchs. Western consultants like Jeffery Sachs, Liberal lap-dogs like Gaidar & Chubais and of course their political sponsors Gorbachev and Yeltsin would have to be arrested too. The transfer of wealth took corruption at the highest levels of government. Yet, MIM would not stop there. In truth, someone in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union put those scum Gorbachev and Yelstin in power. So, there would need to be an arrest of the bourgeoisie in the party, inside the highest ranks of the communist party itself. Upon thinking of all the people who would be arrested, though a relative handful compared with the murderous mafias now running wild that made Russia as dangerous on the street as the united $tates, many proletarians lose their nerve. State power is indeed an awful thing that will always repel the refined sentiments of the proletariat. Yet the choice is between better and worse. Arresting Mikhail Khodorkovsky is not enough. A decisive struggle against the bourgeoisie in the party in the Brezhnev era would have prevented the massive death of men and the elderly that has occurred in Russia, not to mention inter-ethnic wars brought on with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Arresting and preventing the development of the bourgeoisie in the party is not a simple matter either, but we have the example of Mao's Cultural Revolution as a starter to address that problem. Mao's critics whined about the repressions and brutalities of the Cultural Revolution when the people became more fully politically active, but say what they may, the Cultural Revolution did not lop off a fraction of the people's life expectancy. Capitalist corruption in Russia did.
Notes: We do not know all of whom Khodorkovsky gave money, but the two Liberal parties seemed most dependent on the aid. One paper noted that Amerikkkans moved in to take over the Yukos oil company as managers with Khodorkovsky out of the way, but they may be more willing to pay corporate taxes than Khodorkovsky was and hence more "patriotic" as Russians than Khodorkovsky. http://msnbc.com/news/998436.asp?0sl=-13&cp1=1 A similar story arose in connection to Alex Konanykhin, another Russian millionaire banker who lost his visa in the United $tates under Russian pressure. The Sun (Baltimore) again equated corruption with democracy while admitting how Kononykhin came about his money while complaining about the corruption of Russian justice (25Nov2003, p. 12a).
2. http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j121003.html
3. Just some escapades by Ralph Nader that could be by
anyone organizing a third party in the united $tates: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0416-06.htm ; 4. http://www.etext.info/Politics/MIM/agitation/censor/ads/index.html
The missing voice: proletarian internationalismOne of the leading obstacles to a proletarian internationalist line in Russia is the belief that Russians became poor because they subsidized the rest of the republics in the Soviet Union and WARSAW as a whole. When it came to why the Brezhnev Soviet Union was not social-imperialist, revisionist fools stepped forward to say that the Russian people subsidized poorer countries like Cuba and even richer ones like Czechoslovakia. This line took hold in the Russian labor aristocracy and spread false consciousness among the Russian proletarians. The same revisionists are no where to be found today to explain why the Russian economy collapsed so badly when all its inter-republic and international trade agreements collapsed. It's very similar to the line of many and maybe most deluded Amerikkkan labor aristocrats who believe the united $tates is the most generous country in the world. Without much concern, they believe that Amerikkkan military aid is some kind of benefit to starving Third World peoples provided out of the largesse of overtime shifts of tax-paying Amerikkkan truckers, instead of a subsidy to U.$. corporations that receive the purchase orders for weapons and services delivered to select scoundrels in governments around the world willing to serve the Amerikkkan master. Within bourgeois economics concerning the division of labor--and bourgeois economics is all we can reference in connection to the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev era--all economies do better the more they trade, if each trader exports goods that it is relatively (not even absolutely) efficient in producing. When nationalities go off to their republics to stare at their navels and trade agreements fall apart because of associated national conflicts and the overall collapse of the USSR, the bourgeois economy suffers and that would be true of any economy, socialist or bourgeois. We would only point out that periodic national conflicts causing a contraction in the economy are inevitable under capitalism and only communism is the sure-fire basis for free trade. When MIM says it is for national liberation struggles, that means genuine national liberation struggles that weaken imperialism and create operating room for smaller nations. We are not for switching imperialist partners and cutting off economic relations with neighbors. One's neighbors will always be the most logical trade partners in a bourgeois or socialist world until transportation is free as in a Star Trek transporter beam. Currently, the ex-Soviet people are in the stranglehold of various ideas of political economy spread by the West and Brezhnev revisionism. A decade of wild capitalism did not produce the overnight economic success that many thought it would based on a simple comparison of U.$. living standards and Russian living standards. That comparison in the back of the minds of the Russian people and people around the world is the wrong comparison. The United $tates was also richer than Russia before 1917. It is not a fair race where one competitor starts a step from the finish line while the other starts 1000 meters away. The many Chinese, Russians and others who thought that the Gorbachev road would bring a better living standard to Russia should by now confess to their scientific error and do more to study relative economic development. The reason for the popular misconception is a misunderstanding of how U.$. and Russian wealth came about. Had the Russian economy sprinted to affluence in the last decade, we would have seen Gaidar-type Liberals succeed instead of falling to around 5% of the vote. In fact, even if Russia had been instantly accepted as a partner of imperialism like Germany, it is doubtful that it would have achieved overnight success from super-exploitation of the Third World. As our FAQ page on Stalin shows though, the Soviet Union was catching up with the West very quickly when Stalin was in power. Western-style development is an economic mirage created only in two cities-states--Singapore and Hong Kong, and two provinces, Taiwan and southern Korea. The other rich countries in the world were also in the top 20 richest before Bolshevism existed, if we exclude the tiny and artificial Arab states that enrich every citizen thanks to wealth only in oil. The examples of the new rich countries cannot be copied elsewhere and they involve a tiny percentage of the world's population. As the world exists, the united $tates is not big enough to make Russia, China and India rich through the same preferential trade terms granted to its anti-communist allies on the one-time front-lines of war. This is the question Mao referred to as "the way out." Imperialism simply does not have the capacity to absorb the economic aspirations of the whole world. It can only bribe people that are a minority on the global scale. Though it be a cause of much bitterness to some bourgeois-oriented Russians today, the Russian bourgeoisie was too late in developing to bring the Russian people complete imperialist wealth with an entirely bourgeoisified country and nothing can be done about it now. The chance to become a top-dog imperialism arose in the late 1800s. By the time the Russian bourgeoisie's day was dawning, the German bourgeoisie was already developed enough to flex imperialist muscle. That's why the Russian people concluded --and only by trying every other possible political approach first--that only Lenin and Stalin were answers for dealing with what imperialism had in store for Russia. Though imperialist itself, Russia was the weak link and socialist revolution broke through. Today, the relative military power of Russia tempts the bourgeois-minded to militarist-fascism to make up for Russia's relatively weak economy, which is in essence still a "weak link" in the global capitalist system. When the Russian people realize that neither Putin nor the Amerikkkans nor the EU are coming with real bribery involving the bourgeoisification of Russia, they will turn again to socialism. Bush's most recent exclusion of Russia, China, Kanada, France and Germany from business in Iraq is only the most recent proof that complete Russian bourgeoisification under imperialism is a pipe-dream. While he gains himself votes in the united $tates, Bush speeds up the revolution in Russia. The Russian Maoist Party's internationalist voice and other Russian internationalist voices may seem isolated now, but imperialism is bound to hand the internationalists some gifts on the silver platter.
Note:
Dealing with the psychological depression regarding overall imperialist political realityRight now, much of the Western and Russian media is sounding a note of sadness regarding the Putin party's electoral success. Many are concerned that Zyuganov and the Liberals lost so much power. There seems to be something disconcerting on how Putin can will something and it will be done, because if he can really get what he wants in the superstructure the way he did, many conclude that the political fight is useless, possibly because the people are too stupid. We at MIM have dialectical optimism. Zyuganov's alleged "Communist Party" was so far off the mark, it would be better for the Russian mind to start from the wildly unpopular pro-gay/lesbian, anti-Chechen war and pro-Stalin and pro-Mao line of the Russian Maoist Party. The Russian people have not had a period of study sufficient yet to have a critical mass of people able to separate from both Western bourgeois politics and Brezhnev-era bourgeois politics. It is better to be unpopular and start the development on that path of thought than to trade scarce resources for small temporary political gains. In other countries, such as the Philippines, the national liberation forces can even decide which landlord puppet of imperialism comes to power, but in the united $tates and Russia the political temperature is lower and obtaining quick political gains depends on knowing crucially the answer to the question "relative to what." Without the correct question "relative to what," answers will tend in extreme right opportunist and left-idealist-nihilist opportunist directions right from the beginning of a party's existence. The temptation will be to be the tail wagging the dog and so we have to insist on materialism in even the most abysmal situations. The "left" opportunists will say we can do more than we can only to make us the tail on the imperialist dog. The right opportunists will deny that we can improve rapidly from our abysmal positions. At MIM we believe our Central Task Report nicely encapsulates this problem. In our Central Task report we are not tracking figures on how many members of Congress MIM has. Chasing after Congress seats would be ultra-left opportunism ending up in dogshit right opportunism. Giving up completely and endorsing Democrats would be regular rightist opportunism that dissolves the reason for the existence of a vanguard party. This is an important distinction, because the threat comes from both sides--the "left" and the right. People who come to us and say that MIM can keep its principles and win seats in the Congress, grow its faction and seize power are ultra-left. It's important when confronted with such a belief to spread "pessimism" and say "it cannot be done." That's part of having a grip on the fact that MIM at this point does not have multiple billions of dollars to unsettle everything in Congress. Having multiple MIM seats in Congress might be nice, but people who leave questions at that level are not as yet scientific. The trick is to capture what the party is doing now and then adopt measures to improve on that quickly. All this is to say that the Bubba vote in the United $tates is depressing and the vote in the Russian parliamentary elections is depressing, but we have to stick to improving our forces and their influence. If Zhirinovsky, Putin etc. decide to go off the fascist deep-end, the species may have earned it, and it is doubtful that the Russian Maoist Party could stop them today, but fretting about that and wondering if we can be the tail on the dog does not make anything better. That's why the Russian Maoist Party found itself opposing all the candidates. Often, outside observors transfer their conditions to those of others and cause political mistakes as when the Moscow-trained Bolsheviks landed in China in Mao's day and did not study China's own conditions. Recently, MIM faced a ridiculous criticism from someone quoting Stalin on the nature of vanguard parties. The passage quoted was on principles Stalin used to choose among various European parties, especially the German ones. This was at a time in the 1920s when Stalin was talking about how to choose among parties wanting Comintern recognition that already had hundreds of thousands of members and millions of voters. Here was Stalin in his day trying to choose among these parties and factions and our contemporary dogmatists do not realize that those same principles from Stalin do not apply when there is no such choice available in the material world. Stalin enunciated principles for dealing with the material reality he faced. Those principles on sorting out the European socialists becoming Bolsheviks do not apply in a situation when there are no Bolsheviks or Bolsheviks are just starting parties. Measuring rods of progress have to be appropriate for the situation they are applied to. That is basic materialism. It is very easy for dogmatists to be the ones who cause a breakdown in dealing with reality that leads to both "left" and right opportunism. Once a breakdown in the materialist method occurs, the dogmatist will also end up clearing the way for an opposite of dogmatism which is eclecticism, an opposition to taking sides and applying science--taking up random ideas instead of theories and changing overall strategy day-to-day. With regard to anyone claiming to bring qualitatively new ideas to the party, we also ask people to prove them in practice, whether their own practice or even better, some group of people's practice. In situations as in most countries in the world where the vanguard party is as yet weak and undeveloped, usually one persyn can start (or more likely, point to) a political practice, the way Mao did in the countryside before the Communist Party of China made him a leader. It's not that Mao started the peasant revolt. He only noted it and said the communists should lead it better. For him, it was a relative question of how the authorities could not successfully repress the reds in the countryside. Mao did not just read a novel and one day decide that peasant rebellion is what strikes his fancy relative to other strategies. In MIM, we did not always have prison outreach either. Others started sending in MIM publications to prisons and prisoners circulated them quite a bit before MIM started directly sending MIM publications into prison. So what MIM did is note someone else's practice as proof that something could be done and its usefulness as demonstrated by all the letters of high political consciousness that MIM received from prisoners before starting a prison outreach program. So as the example with Mao and the peasant rebels or MIM and the prisoners demonstrates, when we say "practice is principal," it does not mean "my practice is principal." People who approach the party advocating unproven ideas should be encouraged for thinking but upbraided for not proving. Mao and others in the countryside gave the party ideas and thorough studies on how things could be done. Mao went so far as to know the names, business, consumption items, taxes etc. of every persyn in a single village. Political participation for its own sake in the party is not positive, especially if it ends up unsettling proven strategies and tactics that are advancing the central task. Such participation is ulta-democracy founded on ultra-left ideas on the merit of ideas for their own sake or participation for its own sake. That is for anarchists or Titoites. The task of the party is to settle down on a common framework of admitting what it is doing now and how is it improving or can improve over time. From there, that framework must be defended against right opportunism and ultra-left nihilism. When Mao has peasants marching armed for land, it does not do much good to say it cannot be done. If bandit bands are expropriating landlords without even the benefit of a vanguard party, and surviving years and decades at a time as some of the famous ones did in China, again, it becomes right opportunism to say the peasants cannot carry out a revolution for land reform strictly because the armed aspect is not possible. We know overall that the class system is headed for a fall. So the question is what we can do to see to getting on the best road for that fall. We do not become too depressed both because we have strategic confidence in imperialism's fall and because we have adopted our own materialist approach. That means in any tactical situation, the enemy may in fact win an overwhelming victory. That's what Mao called "strategic confidence but tactical respect" for the enemy. If we dwell on the enemy's dominance too long, we are likely to lapse into right opportunism of the Menshevik paralysis sort. If the anti-slave rebels dwelled on slavery's existence for thousands of years, they may have become depressed too, but their depression only delayed the downfall of slavery, which is now only occupying a small percentage of the globe. It is key to materialism to recognize what progressive capabilities already exist.
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