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Title: No Political Solutions Author: Laure Akai Date: September 25, 1993 Language: en Topics: Russia, Elections, 1990s Source: Retrieved on 3rd June 2021 from http://www.spunk.org/texts/pubs/ma/sp000299.html
The Russian people, it is said, are in a political crisis. More
correctly put, they are in a crisis of politics. The present problems
facing the country — from social to economic- are all resultant of
politics. By this the reader should not understand that these problems
are resultant of bad politics, but of politics in general.
Over and over again the Russian people are told that if they elect the
right politicians, reforms will be carried out and their lives will be
better. Whoever is in power will blame other politicians, past or
present, for whatever problems there are in the country (unless of
course they can find an enemy or national minority to blame); most
opposition political groups suggest that you help them into power to
remedy the situation (either by voting them in or making a revolution or
coup d’etat). This is the situation world round : politicians telling
the people that what will save them is only new politicians.
There is increasing evidence that people in many countries have lost
faith in political leadership. Take for example in America where there
is a large awareness that most politicians are corrupt and that no
matter who they vote for the government will work in the interests of
the rich. The people, by and large, don’t vote. Of the small majority
who do vote, many do so because they genuinely want to have a political
voice but usually wind up voting for the “lesser of two evils”. Many
also vote out of a sense of duty. By and large nobody cares enough to
find out about all the issues or a given politician’s stand on this or
that. They don’t feel a connection with these issues and feel that the
government will do what it wants anyway, so why bother. And this is fine
with the politicians. Only when they feel that they can mobilize people
around a specific issue to win a campaign will they try to inform the
voters. Then, of course once a campaign is won, the issues change,
promises are broken. Many people then wait for their chance to vote
someone out, vote someone in... But many also loose faith in politics in
general.
The Russian people are mostly looking for political solutions. For them
there is enough of a difference between the current political
pretendents to tend towards one side or another, if only in reaction
towards the policies of the other. Much of the present support of
Yeltsin is due strictly to the perception of his opponents as hard- line
communists (whether or not this is what they really are). At the same
time, many of those who support the parliament now do not actually
support their policies, but see in them the only safeguard against sped
up economic “reforms” and the only alternative to Yeltsin’s
dictatorship. Rutskoi was denounced by communists many times for selling
out to Western capital; he and almost the entire parliament supported
Yeltsin’s ascent to power and wanted to and still want to carry out
economic reforms (just not at the same rate as Yeltsin wants). Yet most
of the communists are now supporting Rutskoi.
There are some groups that have called on new elections, who want toget
rid of both Rutskoi and Yeltsin. This too is a politicalsolution, but as
they have not made the possible alternatives clear to people, it’s not a
popular one.
Seemingly the choice of government would make a difference in the life
of people here. There are however many factors which superscede the
people’s will. These range from foreign to extra-national intervention
to the designs of government. Yet, no matter what government is in
place, the people’s ability to understand their will and to exercise it
freely will be hindered.
The legitimacy of government lies on the belief that people cannot run
their own lives and coordinate society orderly. It lies in the belief
that if people had the chance to freely exercise their will, their greed
and violence would take over, and that they would hurt other members of
society to get what they want. It is aided by the creating and
perpetuation of increasingly more complicated structures which make the
running of society seem to be so incredibly complicated that it can only
be done with a large bureaucratic apparatus in place and that in no way
can it be run by the people themselves.
The Stalinists claim that greed and violence has taken over society, but
this is because there isn’t a strong government to control it. Fear and
law would stop this. But wasn’t Stalin the most effectively violent man
of the century? And what about the greed of the nomenclatura? These
things might have been seen, if it were not for the belief in the
government. These things could not be prevented because the government
protected itself with an enormous army.
The Yeltsinists imply that the prospective nomenclatura would rob the
people’s wealth and shoot people in the street. But isn’t it the greed
of Yeltsin’s supporters, the speculators, foreign businesses and bosses
who are growing rich off keeping the value of the rouble low and paying
peanuts for labour and resources that is responsible for the current
mass poverty and resultant upsurge in violent crime? People wouldn’t
tolerate this except they believe the lies of the Russian government
that suffering through this unbearable nightmare is the only way to a
better nightmare and that if this doesn’t make any sense to you then
that’s only because you don’t understand how to run a country.
In any case, the government, the army and the police (its henchmen)
orchestrate a system where most people cannot freely determine the value
of their labour, where industries can be legally owned by persons or
bodies other than the workers, rendering them unable to freely dispose
of the product of their labour — to use as they need or to trade with
other workers for goods they need or would like but cannot themselves
produce. Land cannot be freely acquired. If some individual or group of
individuals got it into their stupid heads that they would live better,
for example, if they kept the profits of their labour instead of
contributing to the bosses’ country club fund or the state’s nuclear
arsenal, if somebody, having no place to livebuilt his or her own house,
if a starving person, realising that a person who works 40 hours a week
should be able to feed themselves but sees they can’t now decides to
take over a piece of land and farm it -then the powers that protect you
and me from such irrational and greedy actions being carried out by the
people step in and exercise control. But any of these actions would be
rational given the situation. What isn’t rational is working your butt
off (for the good of everyone), receiving a wage on which you can only
afford bread, potatoes and tea (never a home or anything else), watching
the “democrats” getting rich off the property they sold to themselves,
or from the money (skimmed from your labour) that they invested in
buying your labour so that they can take what you make and re-sell it to
you at a profit for their efforts.
People, living under years of government, years of promises of political
solutions, have begun to think very irrationally. They begin to believe
outrageous claims and support people and conditions they really don’t
want to support because they have been convinced that there is no other
way. The Russian people are now going through a phase of optimal public
stupidity. One ex-Komsomol leader claims to be God and people
follow...people refuse to believe that Stalinist purges happened, and if
they did, then only to the guilty...there is an unprecented belief in
the horoscope and faith healers...people forget that Yeltsin was part of
the nomenclatura...people stand in line for hours to look in Western
department stores...workers who had their strike crushed by Yeltsin
blindly and fervently support him. The only remedy to this will be when
people begin to get interested in taking back active control of the
processes that rule their lives and work with each other to make life
enjoyable rather than crossing their fingers and heading off to the
ballot box.
Sceptics of course argue that this alternative may not — or definitely
will not- lead to any great life. The question is not whether or not
this will lead to a workers’ paradise (although what could be worse than
waiting 40 years to get an apartment, working all the time, being unable
to feed yourself or your family, hoping anxiously that there will be no
civil war, that the value of the rouble compared to the dollar won’t
fall, watching government corruption hopelessly etc. etc.?). The point
is to start a tradition where people will help themselves and each other
(a tradition which to some extent exists in many countries where people
take initiative to do something, without waiting for the government to
decide to set up the program, in other words, where people respond to
the immediate needs of the community in a timely and logical manner).
The Russians in many way have been conditioned out of such responses as
such initiative was threatening to the totalitarian nature of the Soviet
government. Still they are capable of organising things for themselves,
as has been evident in times of extreme crisis, such as during the last
coup when they organised shelter, free food, distribution of gas masks,
etc. for the diffence of the White House, all on their own initiative. I
would suggest, that as an alternative to political Russian roulette,
that people would be better off meeting with each other, trying to
create alternative institutions which can be influential paradigms for
the future. The pseudo-left are trying get together a “kinder, gentler,
platform” as they have some chance of winning some power in this
somewhat pluralistic government. They, in general, support the idea of
government and bureaucratic rule. They offer no alternative to it
whatsover. It is ridiculous to think that any politician will come up
with a program that will call for less government and more freedom. (If
any have that is because business is the substitute government.) Right
now there is no political solution for the Russian people. The
international business community has its eyes on Russia as the market
which will save it from crisis. Large investments have already been
made. There is probably only one forseeable course for the Russian
economy; this course may bring them a VCR in every home eventually, in
the very best of circumstances, but, as the market demands, it will be
at the cost of a constant underclass, and a steady rate of unemployment.
This is not the solution that people want, but it is the only one that
they will get.