ECM 2012, Contribution of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation [En.]

Speech by a representative

of the Communist Party

of the Russian Federation

Vladimir RODIN

Brussels, 1-2 October 2012

Comrades! Friends!

Let me pass you our party greetings and best wishes of success in our common struggle for the interests of the ordinary people from the leaders of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and its chairman Gennady Zyuganov!

We have gathered to discuss the problems of the communist and labour movement under conditions of the protracted global crisis that has hit many countries of the world. It gains the strength and leads to the ever-increasing pressure on a growing number of economies.

The global financial crisis of the recent years has once again confirmed the everlasting value of basic Marxist-Leninist concepts of the cyclic nature of capitalist production and inevitability of crises. However, it must be pointed that this time it has certain significant distinctions. In particular, it is not associated with overproduction in any way.

In the forefront of the global crisis we see the speculative banking capital and international stock market transactions that ignore national boundaries and differences in social and economic policies of states and leveling the conditions of exploitation and oppression of populations.

It should be marked that the financial and economic crisis in Russia has its specific national features. The destructive liberal economic course of the 1990s has resulted in Russia’s exclusive dependence on the export of hydrocarbons and, to a lesser extent, timber and metals. Over the past fifteen years, global hydrocarbon prices have been fluctuating on a very high level. They exceed the mid 1990s level by fifteen times on the average. It is the only reason why the destruction of industry has not had a major impact on the state budget. However, this oil and gas addiction has been damaging for the Russian people. Due to the forced transition to lopsided economic development the level of state security has dropped dramatically. Over 50% of food products is imported. Moreover, their quality is often dubious. The state sanitary control service has been virtually eradicated. The fire surveillance service has been destroyed; thousands of hectares of commercial timber burn out annually. Company hijacking has been replaced with property redistribution by way of legislative lobbying. Corruption has blossomed with renewed vigor with the adoption of the new land, forest and housing codes. The ratio between the aggregate income of the richest and the poorest 10% of the population has reached 40, testifying to the extreme wealth divide of Russia’s population.

Despite the full obedience to the state of formerly independent TV channels and a great number of mass media, diclosing information is leaking to people from our party’s printed editions with a total monthly circulation of some 10 million copies and liberal democratic press.

During the twenty years of domination of the national oligarchy that has brought about an intensive inflow of international capital to Russia, dramatic changes have occurred in the social and economic spheres. It can be said now that de-industrialization is practically completed in Russia. Domestic car making and mechanical engineering giants that constitute the basis of any developed industrial nation have been destroyed. Aircraft, agricultural engineering, food, textile and light industries have fallen to decay. The unified power system and collective farming have been shattered.

All these structural changes cannot but have an impact on our party’s working conditions.

On the one hand, the destruction of major industrial enterprises makes the working movement uncoordinated. The number of workers in our ranks has declined drastically since 1995. Many have melted into the de-classed mass of working people struggling for survival alone at the everyday level, doing unskilled odd jobs. Alongside with the destruction of large working groups, trade unions have also lost their significance with the majority of them turning into an appendage to the unjustifiably overgrown bureaucracy.

On the other hand, during this period small and medium business has fully experienced first-hand all the horrors and power of the corruptive pressure of bureaucracy and has drastically veered to the left. The same has happened to office employees. In the early 1990s, owing to the inflow of foreign capital and establishment of numerous joint ventures with high wages, the white collars became enthralled by illusions of the emergence of a stable middle class. However, actual labor productivity did not grow, and by the early 2000s this prosperity, which was based on the embezzlement of state-owned assets, threw away; the joint ventures eventually found themselves under command of Russian managers unwilling to pay much, and the well-being of hired employees vanished into thin air.

During the twenty years without any state-controlled system offering employment to graduates of higher educational institutions, young people have had a rough time looking for their first job. An overwhelming majority of them are not working in their specialization. The unemployment level acknowledged by the state has reached 7-8 %. Of course, in practice it is much higher.

Many regions are experiencing economic chaos and a complete breakdown of law and order. Prosecutors are giving cover to illegal casinos, officers of law enforcement agencies have strong crime affiliations, and it is now common practice when backbone enterprises are closed down overnight with thousands of employees left jobless. The prime minister has been repeatedly forced to intervene and control the situation manually to prevent social unrest.

Another problem is the wear limit of engineering facilities in practically all sectors of the economy. This problem is aggravated by the lack of technical skills of the staff of major enterprises and by the desire of new owners to cut costs by neglecting the maintenance of sophisticated engineering facilities. Consequently, man-made disasters have become more frequent. The wear level the housing and utilities sector exceeded 70% long ago. Collapses of apartment buildings and major railway and aircraft accidents have become common. In the summer of 2012, the criminal negligence of bureaucrats caused major floods in two towns in the south of Russia.

Until 2010, the country’s population had been decreasing by an average of 800,000 to 1,000,000 annually.

The Communist Party consistently exposes the inability of the ruling United Russia party and the state machinery to provide the required control over the situation in the regions, which leads to staff fluctuations and confusion. We regularly remind citizens of the inability of the authorities to honor their pre-election pledges and carry out numerous governmental programs announced in the not-too-distant past. We have witnessed the total failure of the pension reform in the recent years. Numerous facts of inappropriate use of funds and peculation have come out into the open. Most of them are left unpunished or are simply not brought to court, thus also raising the level of protest sentiments in the society.

In these circumstances, the onset of a global system crisis of capitalism has aggravated the discontent in all strata of the population, has led to a drastic growth of distrust to the announced course of state reforms and in turn compelled the government to take a number of unpopular measures. This is fueled by the lobbying in the State Duma for the ratification of the treaty on joining the World Trade Organization. Communists have consistently spoken not against joining the WTO as such, but against the totally unacceptable time and conditions of joining. Unlike most other countries that have joined the WTO, Russia has come to this stage completely unprepared. Over 400 regulations protecting national producers have not been adopted, and the texts of protocols describing the joining terms were not provided even at the time of voting on this issue. This autumn Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke about the need of immediate and efficient upgrade of the entire economy along the lines of the one undertaken by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s.

Understanding that the economy cannot be oil-dependent for a long time, the ruling oligarchy has been aggressively attacking the habitual rights of the Russian citizens in recent years.

For example, they in fact disavowed the constitutional right for free education and healthcare. The number of educational institutions of all levels has been reduced drastically; schools and hospitals are being made self-supporting. The communist faction in the State Duma proposed an alternative draft program for reforming the educational system. Its fundamental difference from United Russia’s program is a guaranteed level of state funding to cover the needs of secondary education in full. United Russia is stalling for time and hindering the discussion of the draft program at a plenary session.

This April, the ruling party made an attempt to push through the State Duma a bill to cancel the state’s obligations to perform capital repairs of apartment buildings. This obligation was imposed on the government by law in 1991, during the initial stage of housing privatization. Actually, this is an attempt to put on citizens’ shoulders costs exceeding 10% of the annual gross product. Besides, to prevent riots, they pushed through a number of laws, in particular the Law on Governor Elections legitimizing political filters that are almost impassable for opposing parties, the Law on Increasing Responsibility Related to Meetings and Demonstrations raising penalties up to USD45,000 for any violation, the Law on Non-Profit Foreign-Funded Organizations, etc. Trying to support the growth of protest sentiments, we successfully insisted on consideration by the State Duma of our bills concerning nationalization of enterprises that were unlawfully privatized and are currently run inefficiently; besides, we demanded the adoption of progressive tax. In September this year, opposing factions of the State Duma proposed a bill On State Control of Prices for Natural Monopoly Services to curb the galloping growth of public utility rates keeping well ahead of inflation. Needless to say, they were rejected by United Russia. This fact was widely covered by mass media controlled by or friendly to our political party.

This year United Russia, instructed by the ruling circles, proceeded with intimidation tactics aimed at the general public and, first of all, opposing deputies as the voice of public opinion. Unlawful repressive actions were taken against two deputies. One of them, representing the communist party, was deprived of his deputy immunity and the other, representing the Just Russia, party, was deprived of his deputy seat in violation of Article 98 of the Constitution without any court proceedings, but exclusively owing to United Russia’s stolen majority of 13 seats.

A social research carried out in 2011 revealed that United Russia’s rating had dropped so low that the government could not expect to get the required number of seats both in December 2011 State Duma elections and in March 2012 local elections. As a counter measure, a plan was adopted to falsify the elections. Of course, falsifications used to take place before, but only locally and their size was determined by the desire to please federal officials. In 2011, such falsifications were made a compulsory requirement and their scale was planned on the federal level and communicated down to the regional level as a compulsory directive. Moreover, regional authorities assisted in these falsifications by directly arranging the transportation of voters from nearby regions. Preventing this form of falsifications is hindered by the introduction of a computerized system for registration of voters moving from one region to another on the election day. For example, during the last elections held on 4 March 2012, the number of voters in large cities was increased by 8-9% by bringing in people from other regions.

Due to many years’ consistent attempts of the Communist Party aimed to reveal the falsifications and manipulation of public opinion both at the community level, through uneven coverage of election campaigns in mass media, and at the legislative level, by pushing through the State Duma laws providing preferences to the ruling party, the general public became widely informed of the scale of falsifications made in previous years. Well in advance in 2011, the Communist faction proposed a package of election-related bills based on the generally accepted international standards for protection of voting results. United Russia’s refusal to adopt these bills is just another evidence that large-scale falsifications were already planned.

As a result, the expectation of large-scale falsifications that had formed in the public mind was accompanied by a sharp desire to prevent them. Suddenly, it became popular with young people to act as observers at voting stations to secure free and fair elections. Hundreds of thousands of non-party people, who had never participated in the election process before, came to our party’s offices requesting to be appointed as election observers. Due to its long-standing consistent policy, clear and well-defined election program and principal errors in the social and economic policy of the ruling United Russia, the Communist Party got 50% more votes than at the previous parliamentary elections. In the presidential election, the incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin got less than 50% of the vote in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In Moscow, despite the unprecedented election falsification, the Communist party managed to get 13 percent of seats in local authorities, which is two and a half times as much as four years ago.

As a result, the Government got a mass public discontent with the scale of falsification; if earlier only communists spoke about the problem, after 2011-2012 elections the unprecedented falsification and rigging of election results became obvious for thousands of Russians.

This circumstance was capitalized on by the heroes of the 1990s representing liberal and democratic political forces that had successfully destroyed the USSR, broken down the Soviet economy and stolen everything they could lay their hands on using legal loopholes. The Communist Party’S relations with these forces are quite complicated. On the one hand, we cannot afford ourselves to stand together with militant anticommunist figures, on the other hand, tens of thousands of people took to the streets for protests. Many of them believed and still believe genuinely that they are not led by any forces. The Communist Party made a compromise decision. We agreed to partial cooperation. Our representatives stand for fair elections and support of working people’s social rights, but we hold our own mass street protests.

Therefore, summarizing the above arguments, I would like to note that in the context of the impending system crisis of capitalism the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is taking a pro-active stand to expose the essence of this phenomenon by clarifying the reasons why the current national government is unable to reconcile the basic differences between the interests of hired employees and the greed of capitalists, whose sole passion has always been making excessive profit by oppressing workers.

Socialism, without doubt, is the only system capable of settling these differences by ensuring effective government regulation of social and economic processes, repairing the devastated economy and protecting the interests of hired workers. We consider it inexcusable to pursue a wait-and-see policy, since it will invariably have a detrimental effect on the social status of communists. Only by the decisive disclosure of the essence of capitalist crises with their mimicry ability based on the current conditions, as well as by the decisive disclosure of and resistance to the antisocial policy of the oligarchic administration and United Russia as its obedient instrument, the communists will be able to save their place in the public mind.

On the contrary, delays and sluggishness in propaganda efforts and outreach activities will have dangerous ends for our party. There is no empty space on the political arena and indecisive political parties are quickly replaced by new leading forces.

Long live the unity of working and communist parties! Let our mutual understanding and common efforts in support of employees and the working class as an avant garde get stronger.