91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳

BORIS KAGARLITSKY is a former deputy in the Moscow City Soviet, a leading member of Russian Party of Labour (PL) and the author of several books about socialism after the fall of the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. He writes regularly for 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly. In the early 1980s, he was jailed for 13 months for publishing an underground socialist journal. Kagarlitsky was a featured speaker at the Democratic Socialist Party's Marxist Educational Conferences, held throughout Australia over the Easter weekend. GLW's NORM DIXON and Actively Radical Television's JOHN REYNOLDS asked Kagarlitsky to discuss the challenges facing the re-emergent left in Russia today.

The most immediate challenge, explained Kagarlitsky, "is to form a viable left-wing alternative, not just in terms of forming a party — there are already various [left] parties, some strong, some weak — but to form a left-wing alternative which goes beyond the parties. That's why the new left [including the Russian PL] and the old left [the major party being the remnants of the CPSU now named the Communist Party of the Russian Federation] have to cooperate."

This cooperation is aimed at winning a majority in Russia's next general election, should Yeltsin allow them to go ahead.

In the medium term, the left must also "develop a viable economic program to get the country out of crisis. It is one thing to confront the regime in the elections, in the parliament and on the streets. It is another to change society through continued mobilisations and struggles.

"Even if there is a left majority in the new parliament, it will not guarantee anything. It will not be the end of the struggles but the beginning. It will be a very stimulating thing which will create a lot of momentum because people will see there are real chances of changing things. But the people, and the left, should not develop some kind of wait-and-see attitude [towards a left parliamentary majority] because then it would be a failure."

The key task for the left in the long term, Kagarlitsky stressed, is to "develop a real democratic socialist movement in Russia". For this, "the new left is absolutely crucial. We have the ideas, we have activists, we have people of the new radicalising generation with new approaches."

A genuine democratic socialist movement "cannot be achieved just with the old Communist Party", Kagarlitsky said. Efforts towards left unity for the elections were a "short-term action". "We are ready to co-operate with [the Communist Party]. We want to act together, and we will act together, but it doesn't mean that we have to stop doing what we are doing at the moment."

Kagarlitsky believes that there is a greater chance for left unity following the experience of the past several years, but the old left has many limitations. "The old left has learned a lot of lessons, but it doesn't mean that they have the ability to act according to those lessons. The Communist Party understand that they have to be different, that they have to change and offer a more democratic alternative to be attractive for the younger generation that is now radicalising. But, no, they don't have the capacity to do it very often.

"One of the lessons they learned is that they need some kind of cooperation with the 'rogue forces' on the left, the new left movements ... We have a culture of campaigning which the Communist Party lacks."

Despite suffering several setbacks in recent times, the new left is now gaining strength, Kagarlitsky believes. When Yeltsin dissolved local councils, many elected positions held by the left were lost. As the trade union leadership has shifted to the right, many PL activists who had previously been advisers to the unions were marginalised or lost their jobs.

"We are already recovering. The chair of the party, a senator, is our parliamentary voice, but we don't have any real parliamentary representation, and that's a weakness. We are regaining strength through working with particular industrial unions, like the oil and gas union. We're regaining the capacity to address the broader public. We were very important in the antiwar movement [against the war in Chechnya]. In Moscow, and some other places, it was created by the new left, and the Party of Labor in particular."

The war against Chechnya has led to a radicalisation of young people and many older people as well. Also, Kagarlitsky explained, "It has disorganised and marginalised the liberal mainstream [which formerly backed Yeltsin]; they're fighting each other and losing support dramatically. Secondly, it has led to the weakening of the relations between the Communist Party and nationalist groups. As a result, the Communist Party has moved to the left and opposes the war."

Developments in Russian politics have forced the PL to reassess its direction, he added. "We are openly saying that we have to rethink the project. The original project, as it was two or three years ago, was that the PL would be the political expression of the radicalisation of the trade union movement as a whole.

"The trade union movement now is divided, and the radicalisation is not taking place in the whole trade union movement, but within particular layers of the unions. Since we are now connected with particular movements inside trade unions rather than the trade union hierarchy, we have to think in terms of forming an activists' party.

"The party we want is an 'elitist' party, not in the sense that we want to be socially privileged, but in the sense that we want to gather the best activists, the politically educated, the people with more class-conscious politics ... We are discussing the possibility of changing the name of the party to reflect a more explicitly socialist, organisation."

After experiencing first-hand the return of capitalism, people are not very impressed, Kagarlitsky told 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly. "Most Russian people don't discuss things in terms of capitalism and socialism. What they want is free education, free health care, secure jobs, decent salaries and to participate in decision making.

"They don't want private ownership of big industry. They want some kind public control over the resources of the country. Isn't that socialism? I think spontaneously people are socialist, and now they are also becoming more and more attracted to the very term socialism, because capitalism is now very discredited."

Despite ideas now fashionable in many parts of the world's left that state power is no longer necessary for fundamental social change, Kagarlitsky remains adamant that socialists cannot achieve their aims without the working class taking power and creating a new state. He agrees the dominance of capitalism and the world market sets real limitations on what can be achieved by a such a radical state these days, "but still it doesn't mean that we don't have to think in terms of taking state power. We just must be realistic in understanding what the consequences would be. We still need the state, and we need to transform the state."

Kagarlitsky also had some interesting views on the "reform or revolution" debate: "Many forces which present themselves as reformist are not reformist. They are in practice conservative. Many revolutionary forces in practice are reformist. So the debate must be must be shifted somewhere else. We have to discuss real politics. And we have to say that revolutionary or reformist tactics should serve the strategy of transforming the society through class struggle, democratic participation and public ownership. That's crucial."

Socialism cannot come about by appeasing the ruling class, he adds. "What isn't possible is a non-confrontationist approach. Because even when you are a gradualist — when you are very cautious, when you're very moderate — if you change things seriously, sooner or later you'll confront [the ruling class].

"You cannot make everybody happy. You have to make your own supporters, your social base, happy. If you want backing of the workers, you have to make them, not the entrepreneurs, happy. Sooner or later you'll come to some kind of confrontation."

Later in the interview, Kagarlitsky expanded on his views on social democracy and reformism. "The main problem of today's social democracy is not that it is reformist, but that it is not reformist. Today's social democracy has a total lack of reformist strategies. What are the reforms introduced by any social democratic government in the last 10 years? There is nothing, there are no social democratic reforms any more. The problem of social democracy is that it has became a conservative force, a force which tries to manage the system, not reform the system. To be reformist today means to reject social democracy decisively."

In this period, Kagarlitsky continued, to be a genuine reformist you must be prepared to take revolutionary action. "You can move from reformist change to real revolutionary change. Many revolutions started as reformist movements ... You have to be a revolutionary, in terms of your goals, in terms of your aims. In terms of your tactics, you can be a revolutionary and you should be a revolutionary when there is a revolutionary situation. Where and when there is no revolutionary situation, you're forced to be reformist, but you should be a real reformist, not a fake reformist.

"For example, when the workers rally for full employment and some [ultralefts] say full employment is not possible under capitalism, so why bother? They don't understand that the pressure for social transformation will be generated from inside the movement for full employment within the capitalist system. Gradually, the movement may acquire the potential to go beyond capitalism because people begin to understand that if they want full employment, they'll have to change the system.

"So okay, we say, let's try. So we start changing the system bit by bit. But at a certain moment, a gradual accumulation of socialist reforms becomes impossible because the bourgeoisie will simply fight back. That tells [the people] that gradual socialism will not work ... The bourgeoisie will fight back, and we will have to crush them."