The Other Russia

Lecture 9

Here are some theses about the working class:

1. The proletariat (excluding the top qualified workers) is rather a temporary category. The largest part of the proletariat is composed by a quickly qualified or lightly qualified proletariat. That is, such work specializations that are learned only from a week to a month – is mostly the learning of security technique. A significant part of the proletariat is composed by young people before and after the army (that is at the crossroads of life, when their fate is not yet decided), who had spent time in prisons, unsettled failures and those who naturally are less bright than the others. Those who nevertheless have the strength to put themselves together in life, to finish studies or by some other mean to rise a bit higher on the social scale, to discipline themselves – inevitably leave the factory or the plant.

2. The highly qualified worker in his essence an atypical proletariat because he suffers exploitation in the most insignificant level. He sells his labor relatively expensively. In what is he worse than a designer or a programmer?

3. The mentality of the proletarians, their psychology, worldview, individual behavior are completely cut off from their professional activity. They are workers only during their contact with the machines. During the epoch of banal, general, equal information propagated by television, the workers have an all-Russian mentality, characteristic of under-educated classes of society. This is a mentality and worldview of a petty bourgeois, its soviet kind – the commoner, consumer of TV-dreams. Television is today more important than everything, more important than the State – it is the class leveler. Television dictates an equal worldview for all, finally realizing the tendency of the lowest society classes remarked already in the last century by the French writer Gustave Flaubert to “reach the level of stupidity already reached by the bourgeoisie”. They’ve reached it.

4. The proletariat, like the other poorest and under-educated population classes is subject to the illnesses of the weak: alcoholism, apathy, lack of initiative, surplus weight, lack of a spiritual goal in life, untidiness, I-don’t-give-a-fuck psychology: in short he considers himself a life victim. And he is a victim.

5. A part of workers has some kind of a haughty desperation of people who have nothing to lose. A similar psychology can be observed in prisons among a part of cons – like, we are anyway inveterate people. These kinds of proletarians can be counted among the best ones because a defiant inveteration is still a form of pride.

6. According to professor Prigarin (leader of one of the small, competing with the KPRF “communist” groups) in Russia there are from 17 to 19 million of those, who could be called proletariat, in other words, hired workers, who have jobs in factories and plants for a whole week or partly. Prigarin mentioned this data on the congress of the left opposition in 1998, his statistics was detailed, with curious numbers and facts. Alas, not having in the Lefortovo castle the access to statistics I will just note that apparently Prigarin had in mind that in Russia there is from 17 to 19 million industrial workers. This is still an awful lot.

7. The working traditions of soviet times (that were laughed at already in soviet times) practically did not survive. Only sad memories about those times when the “class-leader”, even if it wasn’t a leader, but at least served as a large Potemkin village, behind which hided the true masters of life – the party apparatchiks. The workers of the beginning of the XXI century don’t feel the pride to be the proletariat, hired workers. They feel embarrassed. Some pride is left in the workers of defense factories. (They are also the ones who are in the best position.) The paralysis of revolutionism is seen from the Severodvinsk businesses of sub-marines construction and repair (“Sevmash and “Little Star” – there we have one of the oldest NBP organizations) to the frozen factories of Volgograd. The integrated pulp-and-paper mill in the town Sovetsky (near Viborg) in the Leningrad region and the machinebuilding plant in the city of Yasnogorsk, Tula region, where the workers did well, at first glance are examples of revolutionism. Alas, the revolutionism on the CBK [pulp-paper-cardboard plant] was stimulated by the participants in the fight for the possession of the business. As for the attempt of self-government on the Yasnogorsk machinebuilding plant it ended up by a banal bribing of the workers. That has been a year and a half now that the workers movement does not show any signs of revolutionism anymore.

8. The workers union movement in Russia is a direct heir of the State soviet workers unions. The authorities over the workers, exploiting the workers for their own purposes. Mr. Shmakov who presides the state unions (today they are insolently and in spite of the truth called “independent” unions) is the same soviet, full-belied functionary as Egor Stroev or Gennady Seleznev. The characteristic and all-revealing example. Having learned that the Ministry of Roads and Communications is preparing to fire more than a million of workers in the course of a few years, Mr. Shmakov calmed down the workers: it doesn’t matter, for everyone a program of requalification is prepared. (For a million of workers, in Russia? Who will believe that!) There was actually, a left union “Defense”, still a few years ago, but since a long time nothing is heard about it.

9. One can lead propaganda among the workers for another hundred years, like the RKRP does, the workers will not make the revolution. A flying column of losers, temporary and permanent, hard workers, infected by all the illnesses, physical as well as social ones, they look like a degrading class of unqualified hired workers. And if they dare to demand something then it is the payment of an arrear of salary or salary payment increase. Poor, nonviolent, they are tearful and quite in their mass. Revolution needs wild people.

10. On the most important question for every party: what is our revolutionary class, where to draw the personnel from? – NBP can answer with certainty: this is not the working class. The passivity of workers in Russia is depressing, it was such even in the years of mass uprising in 1992-1993. To realize what circumstances would it take, how they should occur, I personally cannot. The Russian worker will endure everything, the popular masochism is inexhaustible, they will work for bread, water and firewood. To propagandize such people does not make sense. We need the active part of the working youth and it will come to us but not as workers but as youth. Among the workers we need misfits. Come to us, brothers!

I worked a lot in soviet factories and plants. In particularly in 1963-1964 as a foundryman (chopping and filling the charge) on the plant “Hammer and Sickle” in Kharkov, as an assembly worker-spider man on a shop construction in the plant “Malishev” in Kharkov in 1960-62 and on other activities. Later I changed thirteen working professions in the United States. So I am qualified enough to reflex on the theme: proletariat.