So The Militant is joining the Democratic Party in its anti Putin project.
I've read a variety of analyses of his plan and not all of them assert that it
is a way for him to continue in power. I certainly don't know what's true. What
I do know is that he's the leader of the Russian nation and everyone in the
west, is anti Russia, regardless of what kind of government Russia has.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, February 8, 2020 11:25 AM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Putin moves to extend his rule, tamp down workers’
resistance
https://themilitant.com/2020/02/01/putin-moves-to-extend-his-rule-tamp-down-workers-resistance/
Putin moves to extend his rule, tamp down workers’ resistance article BY ROY
LANDERSEN Vol. 84/No. 5 February 10, 2020 With the help of the Red Army and
after two years of combat, working people in Odessa, Ukraine, took power in
1919, defeating reactionary pro-czarist forces.
Vladimir Putin denounces the Bolshevik Revolution for “time bomb” of
self-determination for oppressed nationalities. figure With the help of the Red
Army and after two years of combat, working people in Odessa, Ukraine, took
power in 1919, defeating reactionary pro-czarist forces.
Vladimir Putin denounces the Bolshevik Revolution for “time bomb” of
self-determination for oppressed nationalities.
With the help of the Red Army and after two years of combat, working people in
Odessa, Ukraine, took power in 1919, defeating reactionary pro-czarist forces.
Vladimir Putin denounces the Bolshevik Revolution for “time bomb” of
self-determination for oppressed nationalities. figure end Russian President
Vladimir Putin Jan. 15 announced “a major renewal,”
which looks a lot like a plan to keep him in office indefinitely. His proposed
changes to the constitution are being rolled out with great fanfare. This takes
place as his popularity is falling and his 20-year rule faces deepening
problems as workers confront falling living standards and social crisis.
Putin aims to shore up Russian capitalism in an era of world capitalist crisis,
and with an economy heavily dependent on oil and gas exports that is weak
compared to Washington and its other competitors. At the same time the Kremlin
is seeking to shore up its international standing and defend its allies — as it
did intervening in Syria to rescue the tottering dictatorship of Bashar
al-Assad.
The government reorganization includes the resignation of Dmitry Medvedev as
prime minister and replacement of much of the cabinet. It weakens future
presidents and bolsters the State Council — a committee of top regional,
security and military officials chaired by Putin — that would take on greater
executive power.
This interim government is headed by newly appointed Prime Minister Mikhail
Mishustin, a little-known but loyal former taxation minister.
In addition to paving the way for Putin to retain the reins of power after his
presidency ends in 2024, the new setup is tasked with implementing his 12-point
National Projects plan. This is a set of schemes to use state resources to
modernize and diversify the capitalist economy, squeeze workers to boost
productivity, and allocate some social spending to try and cushion the harsh
conditions of life facing working people to quell unrest.
Real income of Russian workers fell 1.3% in the first half of 2019. Some 65% of
Russian households have no savings. The government adopted new pension laws
that will force workers to wait later — many until after the average life span
— before they can claim a pension.
This social crisis is worsened by sanctions imposed by Washington and the EU
that the imperialist powers say were in reprisal for Moscow’s seizure and
occupation of Crimea in 2014.
Bonapartist regime
Putin, a former officer of the KGB, the Soviet secret police, rose to power as
a capitalist-oriented economy and government emerged from the wreckage of the
Stalinist police-state regime in the 1990s.
He acted as an arbiter standing above rival forces — the so-called oligarchy of
newly emerged capitalist exploiters that had looted the former state-owned
enterprises, and working people, who faced a deep social crisis. He put his KGB
methods to work, rising in power through patronage and the arrest, torture or
murder of bourgeois political opponents.
In 2000, the year before he became president, Putin said he would prevent
Russia from being “relegated to the second or even third tier of global powers.”
He has since sought to restore some of Moscow’s former sway over its “near
abroad” of former Soviet Republics like Ukraine. After Viktor Yanukovych, the
Russian-backed Ukrainian president, was toppled by the popular Maidan uprising
in 2014, Putin occupied Crimea and reinforced separatist paramilitary forces in
Ukraine’s eastern provinces to break from Kyiv.
Putin set up the Eurasian Economic Union in 2015 seeking to ensnare former
Soviet countries like Armenia, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Kyrgyzstan into a common
trade bloc.
Using oil revenues he modernized much of the Russian military, one of the
world’s largest, with a substantial nuclear arsenal bequeathed by the USSR’s
collapse. But even with these moves, Putin’s 2019 military budget was
$44 billion, compared to $716 billion for Washington.
Moscow’s rulers have tried to use their intervention in Syria to maintain
influence and gain allies in the Middle East.
Putin identifies with czars, Stalin
Putin combines a hatred for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Bolshevik
Party that led workers and farmers to power with bemoaning the downfall of the
czarist empire, overthrown by the revolution, which had stood as the bulwark of
semifeudal reaction in Europe for centuries.
The Bolshevik Revolution, under the communist leadership of V.I. Lenin, marked
a tremendous advance for the world’s toilers, the first revolution in history
to overthrow capitalist exploitation and oppression. A government was formed
based on soviets — councils of workers, peasants and soldiers deputies. This
example of workers and peasants taking power inspired millions across the
globe, hastening the end of the bloody imperialist slaughter of World War I.
Revolutionary-minded workers worldwide organized to build Communist Parties
modeled on the Bolsheviks to fight for power.
The Bolshevik-led government organized workers to take control of industry, to
learn how to produce for society’s needs, not for profit.
It supported peasants’
struggles by nationalizing big landholdings and distributing land to the
tillers. It led working people to establish new socialized property relations,
the foundation of the world’s first workers state.
Lenin’s proletarian internationalist course supported the right of oppressed
peoples within the old czarist “prison house of nations” to self-determination.
In the last year of his life, he led a fight — against a developing caste led
by Joseph Stalin — for a voluntary federation of these oppressed nations with
Russia, formed “on the basis of full equality.”
Many of these gains were reversed over the next decade. Revolutionary upsurges
by workers and farmers in Germany and elsewhere were defeated and the Russian
Revolution isolated. The workers and farmers government faced reactionary
forces in a civil war and invasion by over a dozen imperialist powers,
including the U.S. rulers.
In this context, Stalin led a rising bureaucratic layer seeking to reverse the
proletarian course followed by Lenin. Amid war and deepening economic crisis,
workers and farmers were pushed out of politics. Frame-up trials and the murder
of revolutionaries, forced collectivization of agriculture and “gulags”
of forced labor camps marked Stalin’s bloody counterrevolution reversing the
political gains of the Russian Revolution.
Despite this, the Soviet Union, however hideously bureaucratically distorted,
was still based on state property, not capitalist control, which workers needed
to defend. The workers state finally came to an end in the years after the 1991
disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Putin today says Stalin brought order to Russia, with whatever errors he might
have committed. He denounces Lenin’s Marxist policy on the right of oppressed
nations to self-determination, saying it created an “atomic time bomb”
that decades later blew apart the USSR.
But it was the Stalinist counterrevolution’s Great Russian chauvinist
resubjugation of smaller nationalities that made this rupturing along national
lines inevitable.
After over six decades of Stalinism’s anti-working-class rule in Russia, and
destruction of revolutionary communist parties worldwide, the Soviet Union
imploded and came apart. Capitalism was reestablished on its ashes, and Putin,
out of its political police apparatus, rose to power.
Today he is determined to maintain his rule, convinced he can carve out order
and security for “Mother Russia” in a world of growing capitalist disorder.
Small wonder he is determined to obscure the powerful history of the Bolshevik
Revolution that brought workers and farmers to power.
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• Join the Socialist Workers Party 2020 US presidential campaign!
• Meet the SWP candidates: Alyson Kennedy & Malcolm Jarrett • Back protests
against gov’t repression in Iran and Iraq • Solidarity bolsters copper miners’
fight against Asarco union busting • Victory! Indiana prison officials overturn
ban on the ‘Militant’
• Join the May Day Brigade to Cuba, see the difference revolution makes list
end Feature Articles list of 1 items • Cuba’s socialist revolution, China and
the world class struggle today list end Also In This Issue list of 6 items •
Fearing 2020 election defeat, liberals say: Convict Trump!
• Protest hits lack of Puerto Rico gov’t response after quake • Putin moves to
extend his rule, tamp down workers’ resistance • Miami Alianza Martiana
headquarters vandalized • Asela de los Santos, Cuban revolutionary leader •
Parents protest asbestos threat in Philadelphia schools list end On the Picket
Line list of 2 items • Locked-out Regina refinery workers fight to defend
pensions • Ontario teachers unions protest attacks on wages and class size list
end Books of the Month list of 1 items • SWP 1968 candidate takes antiwar
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Sam Harris
“Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen
yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence
as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it. Tell
him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who
will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every
incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence what
so ever.”
― Sam Harris,
