Excerpts from the speech of Workers World Party Chairperson Sam Marcy to the opening plenary of the June 1991 WWP National Conference.
Let me point out that two other conferences going on today are of extreme importance to us. One is in Boston at Harvard University. The other is at the White House in one of those many rooms they have.
The one in Boston involves a delegation of Soviet economists led by Grigory A. Yavlinsky, whom we are now told is young and bright and imaginative and all those other adjectives that make one look attractive. His group of Soviet economists is meeting their counterparts in the U.S.
My talk today will be a modest attempt to contribute to that discussion — if it were open to the public, open to other communist parties and socialist countries which might have something to say because the interests of the whole world are involved.
Why should we have to rely on the capitalist press to give us a little tidbit here and there as to what is going on? We want an opportunity to hear and to have our say in public — a good old communist tradition since 1848.
There they are at Harvard University discussing an internal question of the USSR. I asked myself how could the USSR — the second greatest world power that rose from the ashes of a civil war, a revolution, two imperialist wars, and a nuclear struggle to avoid a war — how could you go and discuss your internal problems with the enemy of humankind?
Then there is the White House discussion. They are not only economists. Yevgeny Primakov, who leads the delegation, directly represents Gorbachev. They are going to discuss the question of loans — how much the USSR wants and how much to give it.
It may be necessary to get loans. A workers' state has the right to borrow from whomever it can whenever it needs to. And we know that capitalism will do anything in the world, including selling rope to hang themselves, for profit. Maybe that's what is involved. I would hope so.
But that is not the way it looks. In yesterday's New York Times (May 30), an administration figure was reported to have likened the Soviet Union to a drug addict or a drunk, saying they have first got to check in at a rehabilitation center "before we pay their room and board." When I read that, I said to myself, where is the Soviet Embassy? Years ago, if somebody said something like that about the USSR, there would be an immediate protest from the ambassador charging undiplomatic conduct for raising national animosity against the USSR, for urging on imperialist propaganda.
We don't want to discuss the internal reforms in the USSR. We have covered them very concretely in our paper. We want to discuss what the imperialists are saying to our friends and comrades in the USSR.
The first and most important thing the imperialists want to sell to the USSR is the free market.
The word free market at one time had an odious connotation, even in the United States. When somebody wanted to attack a character who was disreputable and whose conduct was unbecoming, they would say that person had the morals of the market — meaning he had no morals.
But of late, and especially since the late 1980s, there has been a steady drum beat of building up the free market. The free market allows equality between buyer and seller. You can buy whatever you want. You can sell whatever you want.
Reagan called it the magic of the free market. The Voice of America broadcast this all over the USSR. What's wrong with the socialist countries? The bureaucrats set prices. The market isn't free.
This White House person who speaks so disparagingly about the USSR says the Soviet Union is talking about loans in terms of an elephant and what we have to offer is peanuts. See how arrogant they are.
Let's take an example of the free market — a peanut. I think it is worth considering. We're meeting today in a high school. They have sandwiches in the cafeteria for the kids. Beginning next month, they won't be giving out peanut butter. Kids who like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches won't get them. You know why? It has to do with peanuts and the free market.
It's interesting to know and understand this everyday example. It is not about the magicians and the capitalist market, but about the real operators.
There are some 45,000 licensed producers of peanuts in the United States. Is this the free market? No, because the government of the United States has put a ban on the import of peanuts, which come mostly from Ghana, Senegal and other oppressed countries. You see how the free market works.
So, who set the price of peanuts and made it so high that now the Agriculture Department has dropped peanut butter from the school lunch program? It was a group of bureaucrats representing the U.S. peanut planters, who wanted a higher price.
So this is the free market? This is how buyer meets seller on equal terms and no bureaucracy sets the price? No, it's set by a bureaucratic grouping from the government, acting in the interest of some planters.
Maybe this was to help some poor farmers. But there are no poor farmers here. They are largely absentee landlords who employ rural workers, a lot of them Black. The small farmers who once grew peanuts — most were Black — were wiped out. Out of the 45,000 remaining, only about a dozen represent a cartel — bureaucratically controlled — which decides how much to grow and how much not to grow. Most of this was mentioned in a New York Times editorial of April 21.
We say to our friends now visiting Harvard, why don't you go outside and buy a bag of peanuts and ask yourselves if the price was arrived at automatically and freely, so that you can copy it in the Soviet Union? Are you so gullible?
Economics is a dreary subject to bring up at a Party conference. We prefer talking about exciting events like picket lines and struggles. But it is very necessary that we don't get hoodwinked — don't get pulled in by the glorification of the free market that is flourishing all over the world.
Of course, there was a free market once. But it hasn't thrived for almost a hundred years.
Take milk. There is a surplus. In the 1930s when there was a surplus of milk and they couldn't sell it, they dumped it into the river. Right now, there is so much milk, all the schools should be getting milk free.
So who steps in? It's not the free market. It's like what they say about the Soviet Union — it's a bureaucratic grouping. It's called the Federal Milk Marketing Board, created by an act of Congress. There are hundreds of bureaucrats who see to it that when the price of milk gets too low, when there is "too much milk" — in a world that needs milk — some of the farmers are saved and the others go under.
The price is controlled. The market can be free only up to a certain extent. Then, you know, the capitalist government steps in to save an ever smaller group that constitutes a monopoly of the dairy industry.
Is this what they want to exchange a planned economy for? To have an economy run by bureaucrats in the interests of the giant corporations — the dairy cartel, the giant combines in sugar, wheat, corn, all the others?
We would like to call this to the attention of those who are discussing the virtues of the capitalist market, who want to strengthen it in the Soviet Union, who say hurry, hurry, don't go half way, go the whole way with the free market.
I would like to ask Comrade Yavlinsky, is this what you are bargaining for? Is this what they are trying to shove down your throat?
But, you'll say, I've only given agricultural examples. Suppose you or I were to go outside and make a telephone call. Could you bargain with the telephone company? The New York Telephone Company is a seller and we are a buyer. If we're equal, there is freedom of trade, to buy and sell. Well, go out and buy a telephone call for 24 cents.
You are talking to a monopoly that sets the price. They don't do it directly. There is a Public Service Commission composed of five bureaucrats appointed by the governor. Whenever AT&T wants to set up a new price regulation, they approve it.
The high-tech industry is controlled by a few monopolies. The military-industrial complex is composed of a few monopolies. There is no way that we can adequately categorize the capitalist economy as a free market capitalist economy. It is not. It is a monopoly capitalist one where the most decisive element in the price structure is artificially set by the industry through the medium of a number of bureaucrats.
Do we have to tell this to the Soviet leaders? Do we have to remind them about it? No. We want to make sure that we ourselves don't get pulled in to believe all this, along with millions of other workers.
What will come out of the Harvard discussions is important because the White House has given the USSR an ultimatum. You come up with a free market. Don't come and tell us it will be five or 10 years. We want it sooner.
Some in the Soviet Union, among them Yavlinsky, said we will bring the capitalist market in 500 days. Gorbachev got worried that this was a ridiculous timetable and said they couldn't do it. So it was scotched.
Now they are back and that scheme is too slow for the White House, which is saying they have to come up with one that will bring the capitalist market faster, and that the capitalist market means privatization of industry.
But this is not the end of the Soviet struggle. When all is said and done, the dismantling, the disruption, the sabotage in order to introduce capitalist relations has not succeeded. It has not gone the full length in order to be able to establish a capitalist system. And this is where we differ from those who, in their haste to go to the funeral of the socialist camp, make rash statements in an effort to say that socialism is dead.
No, the struggle is not over. What we are passing through is a phase in the degenerative development of the current grouping leading the USSR. It is not the breakup, the complete and definitive end of the social system. That is not true.
In the USSR, we have had a new social system that for the first time in history showed that the workers can rule, can take over. And it is this which has brought all of the violence, deceit and fraud that the capitalist governments could possibly bring together to defeat the efforts of a socialist government to stay in power and build socialism unhindered by an outside capitalist environment.
The decisive battles are still to be fought. This is only a phase in the struggle where we are set back temporarily. There have been darker days during the course of the proletarian struggle for socialism.
There was a time when the world movement was united in the Socialist International. Built partly during the time of Marx and Engels, and then Lenin, it was strong, even though it veered continually in the direction of opportunism. It was something that the working class movement had, an organization, an anchor. But what happened? It collapsed at the outbreak of the first imperialist war. Wasn't that proclaimed as the end of socialism? But it was not.
Small as Lenin's group was, smaller yet those with Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the groups in France, the Yugoslavs, and even in America, they began to rebuild the movement on a new foundation.
And this is what our great task is.
Last updated: 19 February 2018