Short article about the situation in Russia. Has been released as an introduction to the ARS magazine «Maximalist«.
One must be lazy to not talk of the crisis nowadays. In a song defiantly titled “Anticrisis”, Seva, a popular Russian Internet rapper, even raps about smiling more and taking chances to free ride as the crisis endures. While in Kiev, an open-air cinema in one of the city’s parks displayed a pop video where a singer and his revealingly dressed female crew insisted on forgetting about the crisis and relaxing.
Show business certainly gives interesting advise, but it’s hardly possible for all those ordinary working people to relax while bearing the brunt of the crisis on their shoulders. And there’s all the less reason to smile for those millions who were laid off. Even more so for the students – who, having graduated into a dead labour market, can all but free ride. Let alone the pupils who will face a lack of free places in universities.
The CIS countries have been hit the worst by the capitalist crisis (the second quarter of 2009 brought a fall of 10.9% to Russia’s GDP). It makes it all the more bizarre that the crisis for some people is no more than smiling and free riding. Continue reading «Russia. At the bottom.»
Метки: eng
The recent massive proletarian uprisings in Iran have surpassed the mark of being one of the largest uprisings for the last 20 years irrespective of their final result. They also have surpassed the mark of invoking the most broad and selflessly heroic direct action when unarmed demonstrators faced the “revolutionary guards’” with machine guns. Furthermore, they have achieved a breakneck pace of radicalisation when within the space of a few days the protesters’ demands made a leap from cancelling falsified elections to overthrowing the Islamic theocracy under the slogan “death to Khamenei!” Continue reading «A declaration on Iran»
Метки: eng
The 4th anniversary of the Orange Revolution has been marked by yet another clash within the camp of its victors, and presents a good opportunity to debate the merits of this event. Its main merit is the dismal confinement to bourgeois character in a time of degenerating capitalism, when a bourgeois revolution has no capacity to solve any social problems. Continue reading «ARS. The Ukraine: An Unfinished Revolution»
Метки: eng
The current world crisis of capitalism is provoking a wave of proletarian protests, and will inevitably provoke them in the future. In the CIS, the first serious sign of things to come was the workers’ revolt at the Kherson machine-building factory this February. By now it is clear that the reactionary Party of Regions has subdued the workers’ struggle, and it is time to analyse the reasons behind this defeat. We have to learn from mistakes, and in order to save the approaching future struggles in the CIS and the world from a similar fate, we must pick out the key factors in the defeat. Continue reading «ARS. A Requiem for Nationalisation»
Метки: eng
SOURCE. Marlen Insarov, O prichinakh passivnosti proletariata [On the Reasons for the Passivity of the Proletariat], pp. 198-286 in Na smenu marksizmu i anarkhizmu [Beyond Marxism and Anarchism] (Gruppa proletarskikh revolyutsionerov-kollektivistov [Group of Proletarian Revolutionary Collectivists], 2004)
The author, an activist in a left communist (1) organization, surveys the condition of the industrial working class in contemporary Russia and Ukraine and discusses why the general level of its class consciousness, solidarity, and militancy is (from his point of view) so low.
The real wages of Russian workers fell sharply in the 1990s. The drop was comparable to that which occurred in the first phase of Stalinist industrialization (1928-33). In order to survive, most working class families were forced to supplement wages with earnings from work on the side (in the cities) or produce grown on garden plots (in rural and semi-rural areas). Continue reading «A PASSIVE WORKING CLASS?»
Метки: eng
The day after All Fools Day 2007 in the Ukraine was followed by April 2nd…
On the evening of that day all Ukrainians were glued to the television. But not because they were broadcasting “Umorina” (an annual comedy festival – translators note). They were broadcasting the speech of President Yuschenko in which he informed the Ukrainian people of his decision to dissolve the parliament, and to hold new elections on May 27th this year. The reason for this dissolution was that a great number of deputies have quit the opposition in order to join the governing coalition where they will earn more money. According to the President this violates the constitution which only allows for the formation of fractions on the bases of agreements between the different parties (which includes all their deputies) represented in parliament. Deputies cannot as individuals move from one fraction to another, swelling the ranks of the parliamentary majority as they spontaneously fancy. Someone in the governing coalition joked: perhaps the President has mixed up the First of April with the Second? Continue reading «The Dissolution of the Verhovna Rada (Supreme Council – Ukrainian parliament) or Will We have a New 1917?»
Метки: eng
In magazine of SPGB “Socialist Standard” (April 2007) was published article of Stefan “Bogdanov, technocracy and socialism”.
The name of Russian great revolutionary Marxist Alexander Bogdanov (1873 – 1928) is almost totally forgotten as in Russia, as in West. He is forgotten not only by academic science (devil with it!), but in revolutionary milieu too. In this milieu long decades of years he was known only as object of criticism of Lenin in Lenin’s work “Materialism and empiriocriticism”. Continue reading «Alexander Bogdanov – technocrat or collectivist?»
Метки: eng
If we shall study real history of the proletarian struggle, we can see, this history has 3 main stages, which has big differences one from other. This stages has correlation with 3 main stages of evolution of capitalism: revolutionary, reformist and reactionary.
First stage – it is proletarian struggle of epoch of Sturm und Drang of capitalism. In historical centre of world capitalism – in Western Europe – this stage had ended after defeat of Paris Commune (1871). Because capitalist unification of world is result of capitalist development, not it presupposition, in other historical areas of capitalism, where capitalist development had began later, then in Western Europe, chronology of stages is different from Western Europe, and, what is very important, this stages are intermingled. Force of Russian and Spanish proletarian movement of beginning of 20 century had its roots in first stage, weakness of this movement had its roots in second stage. Continue reading «M. Insarov. 3 stages of the proletarian struggle»
Метки: eng
