NO POLITICAL SOLUTIONS

By Laure Akai MOSCOW, September 25.  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.


