ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From International Socialism, No. 60, July 1973, pp. 1–2.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg, with thanks to Paul Blackledge.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
‘Although most Western businessmen have been turning their thoughts towards the USSR as a source for long term supplies of raw materials and energy, a growing number is also beginning to see the Soviet Union as a potentially valuable source of low cost labour.’ (Guardian, 16.6.73)
Brezhnev’s visit to Washington marks a further stage in the developing co-operation between the super-powers. Nixon and Brezhnev have a common interest in preserving the status quo on a world scale. Neither power is able to dominate ‘its own’ bloc to the degree that was possible in the days of the cold war. Mao Tse-Tung and Charles de Gaulle started a process of fragmentation in their respective camps which subsequent economic development has carried forward. Both the pressures on the rulers of the USA and the USSR to co-operate and the possibilities of them doing so have increased and are increasing. The SALT agreement, Vietnam (on which Kissinger has said the USSR ‘recognises its responsibilities’ to control arms supplies) and the virtual settlement of the German problem – sealed with Brezhnev’s visit to Bonn – are milestones along the road to ever closer relations.
Each partner has internal problems which the other can help to alleviate. In the case of the USA, Nixon’s need for foreign policy successes to divert attention from Watergate is obvious enough but this is the least important factor. The long-term challenge of Europe and Japan to America’s economic dominance gives the USSR (and also China) very great potential importance as a field for investment and source of raw materials. The Europeans and the Japanese are beginning to get a little toehold in these areas. The US cannot afford to fall behind and it has the power, the capital and the technical expertise to draw well ahead.
Brezhnev’s problems are more urgent. The chronic weakness of Russian agriculture, which has persisted ever since Stalin’s forced collectivisation in 1929–32, ensures that any natural disaster precipitates a real food crisis. Russian grain production fell from 187 million tons (the target was 197 million) in 1970 to 181 million tons in 1971 to 167 million tons in 1972. Only the most massive grain purchases on record – two thousand million dollars worth in 1972 – staved off a catastrophe. Half this huge total came from the USA (which normally generates an embarrassing surplus of food grains), helped by a US government subsidy of three hundred million dollars. And it is not only bread that is in short supply in Brezhnev’s Russia. In March potatoes, the obvious bread substitute, had to be rationed.
More serious still in the longer term is the slowdown in the industrial growth rate in the USSR. From 1965 through to 1970 the Russian gross national product was growing by about 8 per cent annually, a very respectable rate though not a sensational one – the Japanese figure topped 12 per cent annually in the same period. In 1971 the rate fell to under 5 per cent and in 1972 to under 4 per cent. In an attempt to jack up productivity by concentrating resources on the most profitable units the number of new investment projects planned for 1973 has been cut back from 700 to 460. But expedients of this sort can have only a temporary effect. Russia suffers from lack of capital aggravated by a massive burden of military expenditure, a technology that is decidedly inferior to that of the USA in a number of important fields and a low productivity of labour. The obvious remedy is to import capital and know-how. The Fiat-built car plant at Togliattigrad, now operating, is an example but the US has much more to offer if terms can be arranged.
That is the main business of the Washington visit. A trade agreement was signed in October last year. Negotiations for eleven thousand million dollars worth of American investment in Siberian natural gas – to be sold in the USA – are well advanced. Brezhnev wants more. And as well as being able to offer raw materials he can offer what a State Department expert and former US Treasury official are quoted in the Guardian (16.6.73) as calling ‘dependable and inexpensive labour’. In plain words, low wages and no nonsense about trade union rights! Moreover there is no problem about remitting agreed profits. The USSR enjoys an excellent reputation for reliability in this respect and already Russian interest payments on foreign loans amount to about one fifth of export earnings. USSR Ltd is a capitalist with whom profitable business is possible.
How far will the import of US and other foreign capital plus the rapid increase in Russian foreign trade (USA-USSR trade is planned to triple by 1974) affect the internal regime of the USSR? That regime is effectively Stalinism without Stalin: a fact that is underlined by the promotion to full membership of the ruling politburo of police boss Andropov, the first of his breed to reach such heights since Beria was shot in 1953. This will not worry US big business. Far from it. Police repression is what keeps labour ‘dependable and inexpensive’, though it also helps to keep down productivity. But inevitably the effect of a significant increase in economic links with the USA (and Europe and Japan) must be to reduce the ability of the rulers of Russia to run the country as a single bureaucratic corporation. It must increase their dependence on world economic movements at a time when the boom-slump cycle is re-emerging. An additional stress will be added to the already enormous stresses that exist under the surface of Brezhnev’s despotic empire. One day, and it is perhaps not too distant, the resulting strain will be too great. The lid will blow off and the Russian and other working classes of the USSR will come back onto the political stage for the first time since the nineteen-twenties.
ISJ Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 23.9.2013