The crisis and instability of the world capitalist market is biting deeper and deeper into the plans and projections of the ruling bureaucracies in Russia and East Europe. Confounding all those who see the East European economies as somehow more rational, somehow immune and separate from the world crisis, the bureaucracies are fundamentally revising their plans and strategy to deal with the crisis.
The bureaucratic ruling classes of East Europe see their future, their stability and their rule, depending on competitive survival on the world capitalist market. Their ‘plans’, their investment and the rate of exploitation of Eastern European workers are structured accordingly. The underlying world inflationary pressure and the new cutbacks on world credit facilities and increases in interest rates have forced the Eastern European bureaucracies to rethink their plans.
Nowhere is this more clear than in Russia itself. Pravda has announced the results of the scaled down plan for 1976. Coal and steel production did not reach their modest projected targets. The amount of plant in operation in the Russian economy increased by only 1%. Projected targets for the next four years show a dramatic cut back in planned investment. Only a 1% a year increase in investment is envisaged in 1978 and 1979. In 1980 the Russian bureaucracy plans to increase investment by only 0.5%.
With cutbacks in world markets, with the inflationary spiral in world prices, the bureaucracies of Eastern Europe have only limited options to maintain their economic and political stability. They can increase their borrowing from the world banks and western European economies. But there are limits to such a strategy. Already by the end of 1975 Russia owed 13 billion American dollars in foreign debts. The Polish bureaucracy is finding it increasingly difficult to meet the interest repayments on the sums it has already borrowed from the west.
Most importantly the bureaucracies of Eastern Europe and Russia are being forced to scale down their investment plans, drop their promises to increase and improve consumer goods for the working masses and step up the repression of the forces of opposition and resistance in the Stalinist states.
The Eastern European bureaucracies are not unduly concerned at the disaffection of a small but articulate section of their intellectuals. Handfuls of disaffected intellectuals do not cause nightmares in the palaces and offices of the East Europe states. What concerns the ruling bureaucracies is that this disaffection will take root in the masses themselves. That the examples of the Polish workers in 1976 and 1970 — direct action to thwart the plans and projects of the bureaucrats — and the Hungarian workers in 1956 — will threaten the rule of the Stalinist bureaucracies.
Throughout East Europe, the forces of open dissent and opposition have grown considerably in the last two years. Excepting Bulgaria, underground oppositions have made their existence public on a world scale. In the last six months the repression of these forces has grown apace. The obscene exchange of Bukov sky for Chilean Stalinist Corvalan, the expulsion of Bierman from East Germany, one-way visas for Romanian dissenters and the persecution of the Charter 77 signatories in Czechoslovakia are only the surface of increased repression throughout East Europe.
However, the present waves of repression have clearly failed to silence the oppositions. Bierman’s expulsion prompted open opposition throughout East German opposition circles. The number of signatories of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia has increased despite bureaucratic reprisals and attempted expulsions. The Gierek regime in Poland has failed to silence the Workers Defence Committee formed to support the workers of Warsaw and Radom jailed and sacked for their part in the demonstrations and strikes that prevented Gierek from forcing up prices in the summer of 1976.
What should be the attitude of revolutionaries to the politics and resilience of the East European oppositions? Those publicised and broadcast by the western media have in general restricted their demands to individual rights of freedom of expression, of travel and organisation. Against the bureaucracies of East Europe we say that the workers in the Stalinist states will have to win these rights for themselves in the process of overthrowing the bureaucracies and establishing working class rule.
But against the leading oppositionists in East Europe and Russia we say that the workers of East Europe can only achieve those rights and freedoms as part of their struggle for power. The mass strike waves in Poland in 1970 and 1976, the formation of workers councils in Hungary in 1956, represent the only force that can consistently oppose the repression in the Stalinist states. The East European oppositions generally place their hopes in other forces.
In Poland the strength and centrality of working class action is most clearly understood. The Workers Defence Committee has succeeded both in supporting persecuted workers’ families and in forcing the Polish courts to cut back some of the harsher sentences on striking workers. However, the Workers Defence Committee itself has been used and strengthened by the powerful and reactionary Catholic Church in Poland — itself seeking to assert itself against the bureaucracy.
While giving all possible support to the Workers Defence Committee against Gierek, revolutionaries have to argue for the Polish opposition to develop its ideological and organisational independence from the Catholic Church. The only consistent force that can guarantee the freedom to organise against the Gierek regime is the force demonstrated by the Polish workers twice in the last seven years.
It is however to the right wing in western politics, to the Helsinki deal between the East and West and to the forces of ‘Euro-Communism’ that whole sections of Eastern European dissidents look in their struggle against repression.
The right-wing turn in the bourgeois political parties, the rhetoric of anti-Sovietism from the politicians of the West has provided the hope for many dissidents. Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Bukovsky and Almarik represent that tendency in the Russian opposition that sees Margaret Thatcher, the National Association for Freedom, US President Carter and Kohl in West Germany as their principle allies. Revolutionaries obviously will have no illusions that the bourgeois politicians of the West will prove allies of the workers in the Stalinist states. Such a perspective reflects the profound distrust of the masses, the elitist hostility to the working class that characterises whole sections of particularly the Russian opposition.
In their search for collaboration and respectability within western capitalism the western European communist parties have been prepared to distance themselves from the repression of the East European bureaucracies. Carillo of the Spanish CP has committed his party to entry into the Common Market and the maintenance of US bases in Spain. The Italian Communist Party has kept the Christian Democrat-based Andreotti government in power by deliberately not voting against its measures to cut workers’ living standards.
These same ‘Euro-Communists’ have lent their voice to the defence of the East European opposition — in search of respectability and credentials to enter bourgeois governments. It is no surprise that significant sections of the Eastern European ‘left’ look to the strengthening of class-collaborationist Euro-Communism as their principle ally in the struggle in East Europe. This is, for example the view of Roy Medvedev in Russia, of Jiri Pelikan, editor of Listy, the Czech socialist journal.
The Helsinki accords, the strengthening of the western Communist parties, clearly weakens the hold of the East European Stalinist parties over their own opposition forces at the present moment. The western European right wing, and the west European Stalinists have their own political capital to make out of opposing the bureaucracies of Russia and East Europe.
At a time of economic crisis and paralysis in the East, of drives for price increases and productivity, we must say clearly that only the workers of East Europe and Russia have the strength and the interest in breaking — once and for all — the hold of the Russian and Eastern European bureaucracies. Only a movement that builds on the experience of the Polish and Hungarian workers can settle accounts and win the freedom for workers’ parties, for workers’ rights of assembly and organisation, can free the enslaved nationalities of the East.
Such a movement would not only face bitter and brutal opposition from the bureaucracies of East Europe. It would be actively opposed by the right wing bourgeois politicians and the new respectable western Stalinists.
