The Party of Labour, Russia's best-known "new left" formation, is holding its official founding conference on October 9 and 10. IRINA GLUSHCHENKO reports from Moscow on the impact the party has already made.
An organising committee for the Party of Labour has been operating only since the end of August 1991. But while reports of the party's activity are often biased, and sometimes slanderous, scarcely a week now goes by without the Party of Labour figuring in a major Moscow newspaper.
What lies behind this impact? Although the founders sought to establish a broad mass formation, that goal is still a long way off. Adherents of the Party of Labour hold a number of influential posts in the trade unions; members include the second-ranking leader of the Federation of Independent Trade Unions of Russia (FNPR), Vladimir Kuzmenok, and the deputy president of the Moscow Federation of Trade Unions, Mikhail Nagaitsev. Nevertheless, the unions do not provide the party with significant material help, and the party's actions have met with strong opposition from many union officials.
Nor can the party be described as well organised; it lacks both experienced cadres and effective structures. Nevertheless, it is a growing force, as its opponents acknowledge.
Disillusionment is spreading with the neo-liberal policies of government leader Yegor Gaidar, but the neo-Stalinists grouped in the Trudovaya Rossiya ("Toiling Russia") movement have not grown more attractive as a result. The Party of Labour is the only grouping which is linked neither to the old regime nor to the new. It does not counterpose democracy to social justice, but campaigns on the basis that "democracy is impossible without socialism".
It is also the only grouping in Russian politics to have arisen as the result, not of a split, but of a fusion. This has made it an organisation with rich intellectual resources, each current contributing its own experience and concepts. Founding members include the anarcho-syndicalist ideologist Andrei Isayev; the self-management theoretician Alexander Buzgalin; the noted economist Andrei Kalganov; supporters of populist socialism who publish the newspaper Revolutionary Russia; and the former Socialist Party leaders Boris Kagarlitsky and Vladimir Kondratov.
A particular strength is the ability to combine extra-parliamentary activity with effective parliamentary work. This is the case in the Moscow City Soviet, where the Labour
caucus stands out sharply against an undistinguished background, and in the Russian parliament, where the party is represented by Oleg Smolin.
While making use of parliamentary institutions, the party rejects the illusion that the rights of the masses can be guaranteed through the work of deputies in parliament. Anna Ostapchuk of Nezavisimaya Gazeta was quite justified in remarking that "members of the Party of Labor ... do not rely particularly on their parliamentary lobby, since the party is preparing for a long struggle in opposition".
To many journalists who are beginning to doubt the redemptive powers of liberalism, the Party of Labour appears an attractive alternative. For government propagandists, the party presents a flagrant challenge which they can no longer ignore as they did the earlier Socialist Party.
The Russian press is divided into three categories. There are newspapers with a clear pro-government line, but which have pretensions to objectivity; these include Izvestiya, Nezavisimaya Gazeta and Komsomolskaya Pravda. There are openly propagandist liberal organs such as Kuranty, Stolitsa and Moskovsky Komsomolets. Finally, there are journals of the left-wing opposition, such as Novaya Gazeta, Solidarnost and the now formally independent Pravda.
(The communist and nationalist newspapers inhabit their own ghetto. Almost no-one reads these journals except supporters of the currents that produce them.)
The plans to set up the Party of Labour won immediate support from the publications of the democratic left. Pravda found itself in a more difficult position, and its editors vacillated. The paper now stresses both its independence of political parties and its adherence to socialist values, which it interprets in a rather diffuse sense. News of the activities of the Organising Committee of the Party of Labour has appeared more or less regularly in Pravda, as a rule without comment.
In the liberal press, until the late autumn of 1991, references to the Party of Labour were extremely sparse. However, it was impossible to refrain from discussing the trade unions. Despite the collaborationist position of FNPR leader Igor Klochkov, who frequently declared his support for the government's reforms, the official press portrayed the actions of the trade unions in a consistently negative light.
"All the nomenklatura cadres who made their careers out of defending the interests of the workers have concentrated themselves in the FNPR", Moscow News reported in
November. "Where the economy is weak, strong trade unions represent a great danger", argued Nezavisimaya Gazeta. "Playing on people's despair and their fear of the future", wrote Komsomolskaya Pravda, "the trade unions ... may win numerous supporters for populist slogans".
But from the mid-autumn of 1991, it became impossible to write about the trade unions without mentioning the Party of Labor. Party supporters were playing an increasingly active role in the labour movement, criticising the collaborationist positions of Klochkov, and were expanding their influence. In response, Klochkov made an unexpected turn to the left. The FNPR leaders, who had initially reacted to the Party of Labour with open hostility, by the summer of 1992 were forced to make a show of sympathy.
The Moscow trade union paper Solidarnost, edited from August 1991 by Andrei Isayev, played an especially important role in helping to create an intellectual climate in which the Party of Labour could build its support. Isayev and his journalists quickly transformed this dull official news-sheet into a lively and original newspaper. Solidarnost took on a broader role as a mouthpiece for new ideas and trends.
In responding to the left-wing challenge, the liberal press faced a particular problem: neither Solidarnost nor the Party of Labour could be slotted into the schemas favoured by the pro-government propagandists. Often, the liberal press tried to depict the party as one of the neo-communist grouplets. However, its leaders and activists included many people who had fought against the Communist Party during the days when leading "democrats" occupied high posts in the apparatus. There were also attempts to portray the new party as "Trotskyist" or anarchist.
The journals linked to the Moscow city government were particularly aggressive. In issue after issue, Kuranty threw mud at the activists of the organising committee, even calling for repressive measures to be used against them.
Moskovsky Komsomolets, through its commentator Artem Rondarev, declared that party activists were principally to blame for the subversive acts of the Moscow trade unions. According to Rondarev, the Moscow section of the Party of Labour in the autumn of 1991 had 11,000 activists (the actual number at that time was fewer than 200). A particular target was Anatoly Baranov, a Party of Labour leader who had once worked for Moskovsky Komsomolets. Baranov was subjected to personal abuse in language which readers are not used to seeing in a paper with a print run of 1.5 million.
In respectable liberal organs, such as Nezavisimaya Gazeta, some journalists described the leaders of the party as "former communists", while others sought to categorise them as "left Social Democrats".
There are in fact some union officials from the Klochkov camp who would have liked to establish a Social Democratic party on the basis of the Party of Labor. But such hopes were doomed. This was not simply because the party leaders rejected Western Social Democracy as a bureaucratised force devoid of creative ideas. Much more important was the fact that the situation in Russia provided no openings for Western-style Social Democratic parties.
In the more advanced countries, the capitalist class is not only used to making compromises, but has the resources to do so. In Russia, the new bourgeoisie has few crumbs it can drop from its table, and the idea of "social partnership" appears at best in the form of patriarchal tutelage over serf-like workers.
The Party of Labor has already won a place for itself. But this success can be consolidated only by the creation of a strong and relatively broad organisation. This task will be far from easy; millions of people who have been disappointed by perestroika and by the reforms have become demoralised and have lost faith in their ability to change society. Every day, however, the conditions of life are driving broader layers of working people into struggle against the new regime.