Introduction
For most observers, the mass protests that began in Belarus following the announcement of the results of the presidential elections in August 2020 have been an unexpected but significant development. The debates (Carroll, 2020; Hartwell, 2020; Kuznetsov, 2020; Menon, 2020; Tokbolat, 2020) that started immediately thereafter have not dealt with several of the key questions: (1) who are the people who have been the main participants, prepared to risk their liberty, their health and even their lives and what do they really want? (2) the stated goal of the protesters is free and honest elections, but are there deeper problems that remain unresolved, problems that cannot be addressed by the current rulers in this Eastern European country? [1] Our observations, made ‘in the heat of events’, reflect a context that includes academic and political dialogues in Russia, and as preliminary remarks, they do not represent a thorough analysis of developments. Furthermore, by the time of publication some of the preliminary conclusions reached may have been overtaken by ongoing developments. The real value of these observations lies in the fact that underlying them is the research the authors have carried out over three decades on the economic and social processes in the post-Soviet expanse (Buzgalin and Kolganov, 2019; Buzgalin et al., 2016).
The Historical Context of the Events in Belarus
The Republic of Belarus arose following the 1991 disintegration of the USSR. The peoples and territory of present-day Belarus were an integral part of the Old Russian state from about the 9th to the 13th century. The enfeeblement of Russia that followed the Mongol invasion during the 13th century led to the incorporation of Belarus into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and later into the Rzeczpospolita. [2] After the partition of Poland at the end of the 18th century, Belarus become part of the Russian Empire.
This remote history is important since the Belarusian opposition sees the military conflicts played out between Russia and the Rzeczpospolita on the territory of Belarus from the 16th to the 18th centuries as a struggle for Belarusian independence from Moscow. Meanwhile, this same Belarusian opposition is shamefully silent about the lack of independence for Belarus within the structures of the Rzeczpospolita and fails to recognise as acts of national oppression the imposing of Catholicism and the suppression by Warsaw of the Belarusian national language.
After the October 1917 revolution, a section of the Belarusian nationalist movement called for proclaiming national independence and breaking ties with Russia. This policy was not put into effect, and in March 1918 Belarus was occupied by the German army. Under the German occupation the nationalists announced the founding of the Belarusian People’s Republic (BPR), a state that in practice never existed, since its organs did not exercise sovereignty over Belarusian territory. Moreover, the borders of this ephemeral formation were not precisely defined, even unilaterally. With the end of the German occupation the BPR nationalists fled Belarus, and on 1 January 1919 the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic (BSSR) was proclaimed. The Belarusian opposition regards the country’s independence as dating from the foundation of the German puppet structures of the BPR and represents Belarusian statehood with the coat of arms and flag of the BPR, that uses the symbols of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. This BPR flag is the one currently used by most of the protesters.
On 30 December 1922 the BSSR was one of the four founding republics of the USSR. On 24 October 1945 the BSSR became one of the founding countries of the United Nations Organisation, in acknowledgement of its contribution to the struggle against Nazi Germany. [3] During the years when Belarus was part of the Soviet Union, a highly developed industrial sector and efficient agriculture emerged. Following the August putsch of 1991 in Moscow, the BSSR adopted a constitutional law of independence and its current name, and on 8 December 1991 the President of the Supreme Soviet of the Republic of Belarus, Stanislav Shushkevich, joined with the presidents of Ukraine and the Russian Republic in signing the agreement that ended the existence of the USSR.
In Belarus as in most countries of the post-Soviet expanse, the market reforms that were begun after the proclaiming of independence (for example, the simultaneous liberalisation of prices, blanket privatisation and so forth) brought hyperinflation and a dramatic fall in production. By 1995 GDP was 34.7 per cent below the level of 1990. Income levels decreased by half, and the number of people living below the poverty line rose from 5 per cent to 80 per cent. In 1994 the inflation rate reached 2,200 per cent (Papko and Kozarzewski, 2020: 11). The economic crisis brought a growth of opposition moods in society, and in the 1994 presidential elections Aleksandr Lukashenko rode to victory on a wave of popular discontent.
The Lukashenko Presidency
Lukashenko substantially altered economic policy, slowing privatisation while partially restoring price controls. He implemented a system of centralised administration in the state sector, and his industrial policy sought actively to modernise manufacturing. This ended hyperinflation and restored economic growth; between 1996 and 2001 Belarusian GDP grew at an average annual rate of 6.1 per cent (Papko and Kozarzewski, 2020: 11). Unlike Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic countries, Belarus managed to preserve a substantial portion of its industrial enterprises, above all in the area of machine-building (production of trucks, tractors and many other items).
Lukashenko’s policies underpinned a steady rise in living standards, while maintaining low levels of income inequality. In 2018 the Gini Index for Belarus was 25.2, compared to 37.3 in neighbouring Lithuania, 37.5 in Russia and 41.1 in the United States; it was also below that of Sweden, with 28.8 (The World Bank, 2020a). The Lukashenko regime maintained a relatively high level of financing for education and health care, which until recently remained mostly free and generally available. The proportion of the population earning less than $5.50 per day (in 2011 PPP) fell dramatically from 38.3 per cent in 2003 to 0.4 per cent in 2014 (Kremer, 2019). ‘Healthcare in Belarus is freely available, accessible and of adequate quality. There is no wide-spread health insurance system, mostly because until recently there was no need for it as most of the health services were offered for free. The World Health Organisation recently placed Belarus among the top countries in terms of access to healthcare and praised its achievements in lowering infant mortality’ (Dobrinsky et al., 2016: 69). Belarus did not experience the criminalisation of society that characterised most post-Soviet republics during the 1990s. Together, these achievements won Lukashenko a substantial level of trust from the population.
These socio-economic moves accompanied a moderate political authoritarianism that included a formal multi-party structure, state control over the main television channels, and the existence of an opposition press as well as a free internet. Lukashenko’s authoritarian tendency to concentrate all important decision-making in his own hands, and a series of uninvestigated murders and disappearances of opposition politicians, did not prevent the majority of workers, peasants and members of the ‘rank and file’ intelligentsia (teachers, medical personnel and engineers in industrial enterprises) from continuing to support the president. Opposition demonstrations failed to attract mass support.
The Changing Landscape
The situation began gradually to change starting in 2010. Economic growth fell to between 2 and 3 per cent per year, inflation increased from 11 per cent to as much as 59 per cent between 2011 and 2016 (The World Bank, 2020b), and the value of the national currency declined. The living standards of the population started to worsen. While inflation declined, to less than 6 per cent in 2017 (The World Bank, 2020b), the economy shrank in 2015 by 3.8 per cent, and in 2016 by 2.5 per cent (The World Bank, 2020c).
The model of authoritarian modernisation was no longer successful, and the Lukashenko administration was incapable of proposing new drivers of growth. Adding to the decline in Belarus was the economic slowdown in Russia, the outlet for most exports of Belarusian industrial products. Exports to Russia of Belarusian machinery declined dramatically (Favaro et al., 2012: 12). Able to buy oil from Russia at less than world prices, Belarus had long been a significant exporter of petroleum products, also benefitting from the resale of unrefined Russian oil. For Belarus, the exporting of petroleum products and the re-exporting of crude oil remain very import sources of state finance, and this has created a degree of vulnerability to fluctuations in world oil prices greater than that of Russia (Favaro et al., 2012: 8).
At the heart of these increasingly acute problems in Belarus over the past decade has been the nature of the country’s socio-economic and political system. The last few decades have witnessed the formation in Belarus of a highly distinctive model of semi-peripheral capitalism – of a system in which economic and political power does not, fundamentally, lie with private capital but with a bureaucratic-paternalist state apparatus, whose symbol (though not its owner) is Lukashenko.
This state apparatus has managed to avoid a collapse of the economy but has not succeeded in improving the efficiency of state-sector enterprises. Although the level of budget support provided in various ways to state-owned enterprises (SOEs) declined from 11 per cent of GDP in 2011 to 7 per cent in 2018, the total sum of SOE loan liabilities still amounted to 14 per cent of GDP (Kremer, 2019). The state support provided to these enterprises and the relatively high standards of social welfare enjoyed by the population came at the cost of increased state debt. ‘The ratio of government debt to GDP increased in Belarus from 22.3 percent as of 1 January 2015 to 39.4 percent as of 1 January 2017’ (Rudy, 2020).
Unlike the situation in the Russian Federation and most other countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, large-scale oligarchic capital is only weakly developed in Belarus, and its relationship to the state apparatus is for the most part a subordinate one. The share of private firms in the Belarusian economy has gradually increased; in 1995, 40.1 per cent of the workforce was employed in the private sector (Natsional’nyy statisticheskiy komitet Respubliki Belarus (Belstat), 2020), but by 2018 this proportion was 56.1 per cent, which included 19.6 per cent of the workforce in enterprises with state participation (Natsional’nyy statisticheskiy komitet Respubliki Belarus (Belstat), 2019: 15) The state sector remains dominant in all sectors of material production, and private capital that has not become intertwined with the state bureaucracy finds itself in a relatively inferior position. Private entrepreneurs are restricted in their initiatives, pay high taxes and lack the degree of access to political power and ability to use state resources for the accumulation of private capital that are common in most other post-Soviet countries and especially in Russia. It is important to note that their subordination is not just economic, but also administrative, political and even cultural-ideological. This applies to small, mid-sized and large businesses alike. [4]
It is significant that in Belarus the state is at once both paternalist and bureaucratic capitalist. In the first instance it devotes a substantial part of its resources to maintaining industry, the rural sector, the infrastructure and the population. In the second the bureaucracy, intermingled with capital, subjugates and exploits the majority of working people in both economic and administrative-political fashion by acting as a state capitalist. Like any capitalist enterprise, state capitalist firms appropriate the surplus created. But as an administrative state-run firm, its workers cannot mobilise in opposition to the employer. During Lukashenko’s first decade in power the economic exploitation practised by state capitalism in Belarus was weaker than in other post-Soviet countries, as witnessed by a level of social inequality barely half that found elsewhere, and in particular, by the country’s relatively low Gini coefficient (around 0.25 in Belarus, compared to more than 0.4 in Russia and other countries). In recent years, however, economic exploitation by the state (involving not just the appropriation of surplus value, but also various other forms of the subordination of labour to capital) has grown. The pension retirement age has been gradually increasing: or women it rose from 55 to 58, and for men from 60 to 63. Furthermore, a newly adopted Labour Code has made conducting strikes extremely difficult. Throughout the system, administrative-bureaucratic subordination remains relatively intense, but in the context of a high degree of state paternalism, citizens have long been reconciled to this situation. As the economic pressure on labour has increased, working people in Belarus have finished up subject to a dual oppression, and their attitude to the Lukashenko administration has changed. Nevertheless, Belarus to this day retains some of the most extensive social provisions in the post-Soviet expanse, and the situation in the political field differs little from that in, say, Russia.
The Barricades of Protest: Working People and the Opposition
By 2020 in Belarus the working people (a concept now rarely employed in the post-Soviet world, but once used widely in the USSR, and in Belarus in particular) were in a sorry position. The years of stagnation had been accompanied by anti-worker social reforms. As noted, the pension age had been increased, and new labour laws imposed. At the same time, the administration had introduced a system of contract hires that placed workers in an even more subordinate position relative to employers in both private and state enterprises. Wages and social welfare provisions had stopped growing.
Since the late 1990s, the workers had been relatively well-protected, but were subordinate and passive, lacking real civil rights. By 2020 their conditions had become intolerable, and when the attacks on their social and economic rights were added in, the situation grew potentially explosive. Nevertheless, the level of social well-being, one of the highest in the post-Soviet world, and the overall stable political situation in the country (especially significant against the background of the situation in Ukraine) ensured that the antagonism to Lukashenko of the overwhelming majority of workers, peasants, teachers and so forth would not find active expression. The masses of the population held to a wait-and-see position. [5]
For all that, Lukashenko’s exclusive reliance on force during the protests shook the equilibrium; ‘ordinary’ citizens were waking up and coming to realise that paternalism implies not just stability, but also stagnation. Meanwhile capitalism, even of the paternalist-bureaucratic variety, involves exploitation and subjection. This is the position of the majority of ‘ordinary’ workers. Other social and class forces, however, have also arisen and developed in Belarusian society, and there are other attitudes among working people. The fundamentally capitalist nature of Belarusian society fosters an orientation in the majority of the population, especially the youth (and still more, the ‘elite’ youth), towards the liberal-consumerist system of values [6] that dominates the world in the 21st century.
Primary in this system of values is self-enrichment, which is directly associated with the consumption of prestige brands, with being ‘part of the trend’, and with individualism – that is, with everything that forms the basis of the ideology and psychology of neoliberalism. We should add that the capitalist education system in Lukashenko’s Belarus has always taught young people in accordance with American precepts, whether in economics, management, philosophy or political science. In paternalist-capitalist Belarus the aspirations of young people are on the one hand cultivated (by capitalism) and on the other hand are blocked (by bureaucratic paternalism). The result is a contradiction that is leading to an explosion. Hence the opposition to Lukashenko includes a significant section of the middle and petty bourgeoisie, as well as of free-lance professionals and of all those who consider themselves to be the owners of a substantial ‘human capital’.
Further, we would note the lack of any legal opportunity for self-expression or for criticism of the existing system. All this occurs in the context of an objectively inevitable economic, informational and cultural intermingling with global politico-economic capital (i.e. ‘the West’). As a consequence, the majority of the so-called ‘middle class’ in large cities (in reality, these are the uppermost 15 to 20 per cent of the population), have come to represent the opposition to the Lukashenko system. These people, active in political and media terms, are far from being an overall majority. To this we add the bureaucracy, remote from the actual lives, interests and problems of the people and of the country as a whole. The bureaucracy is not subject to control by the citizens, and reacts less and less adequately to their growing problems; divorced from the real life of the majority, it simply fails to perceive the dilemmas the population faces. As a result, the protesters in most cases are winning the information and communications war with the authorities. By responding with increasing levels of brute force, the administration multiplies the number of its opponents.
Finally, we must consider the external factor. Belarus is bordered to the north and west by member countries of the EU (with the support of the United States), to the south by Ukraine, and to the east by Russia (and China, in the political if not geographical sense). In its struggle for Belarus as an economic, political and military bridgehead, the ‘West’ acts forcefully; against ordinary Belarusians, especially younger ones, it deploys not just money and sophisticated political messaging, but most important, modern methods of cultural, ideological and media manipulation. The ‘East’ is losing, acting weakly and employing outmoded methods. It is attempting to solve the problems it confronts exclusively on the level of personal relationships between leaders, of economic deals and of operations by secret police services. Taken together, this provides an answer to the question of which people are joining the protests, and why.
The basis of the protests of 2020 is the objective rejection of the existing Belarusian economic and political system by the majority of the so-called ‘middle class’; with organisational and media support from the ‘West’, this rejection has gradually ripened into protest. Adding to the readiness of the middle layers of Belarusian society to come into the streets are additional factors nurtured especially to serve this end, including nationalist sentiment, money, provocations and the work of political and other specialists. The broth of protest has come to the boil. On the other side of the barricades are the state apparatus and its mechanisms of coercion.
What about the Majority of Workers?
At the time of writing (October, following the 9 August 2020 election) most Belarusian workers remain on the sidelines, declining to take part directly in the protests. They sense, half-consciously, that for working people in their country, a victory for the neoliberal opposition would turn into an even worse evil than if the existing system were to prevail. The workers, peasants, teachers and medical personnel of Belarus will not win political freedom as a gift from the neoliberal system. This is obvious from the experience of Russia in the 1990s. In 1993 the Russian Federation’s first democratically elected parliament was first blockaded, then shelled by the government’s tanks (Nadezhda, 2018). At best, the popular layers of Belarusian society will be granted formal concessions that conceal the manipulation of public opinion by global corporate capital and its political representatives. At worst, the Belarusian masses will finish up beneath the dictatorship of nationalists that exhibit pro-fascist inclinations, in circumstances where private capital, absolutely disinclined to paternalism, subjugates the workers with the help of a repressive state while using nationalist propaganda to justify its power.
Economically, the worker majority (including the naïve young protesters) will not receive anything from neoliberalism except the curtailing of now-scant social benefits, and the opportunity to transform themselves from a paternalistically defended proletariat (though one without political rights) into an impoverished, politically unorganised precariat, that serves as a perfect nutrient medium for nationalism and dictatorship.
Taken all together, this situation has accelerated the development in Belarus of oppositional moods. The crisis in the country is intensifying, and even if Lukashenko manages to retain his hold on power, his authority will remain precarious. In Belarusian society, an understanding of the need for change and a preparedness to struggle for it will ripen still further. However, as the situation develops, it is clear that Belarus (and not only Belarus) will no longer be the same as during the past quarter century. We might ask whether citizens, members of the left and governments in the post-Soviet countries will succeed in understanding the events now unfolding in Belarus, and in drawing the appropriate lessons (of which more later). A further question, no less perplexing, is: what will be the content of these lessons? To the first of these questions, we are inclined to answer in the negative. More than likely, the people involved will once again be unable to properly assess and internalise lessons from these events, but this should not spare left-wing theoreticians from trying to spell out their meaning. The time has not yet come for definitive conclusions, but some initial thoughts can and should be ventured.
Initial Lessons from the Belarusian Protests
Let us begin with the obvious: systems that appear completely stagnant, in which economic and political power lies fundamentally with the bureaucracy and in which citizens have become passive consumers of more or less significant ‘beneficent deeds’ on the part of a paternalist state, exist at most for a few decades. Such stagnation cannot last forever. The reason for the degeneration of such systems is well known: if economic and political power is exercised basically by the state bureaucracy, the systems are unstable as a matter of principle. They are able to exist only as transitional forms in an overall process of development. The trend of this development is either towards the economic and political power of the workers, who subordinate the bureaucracy to their interests (that is, socialism), or else towards the economic and political power of large-scale capital (in the current conditions, transnational capital), which employs the state apparatus to serve its ends. The prospects for socialism in the post-Soviet space make up a topic that has been discussed intensively over many years, and in this text we shall set that topic aside, since it needs special examination. For the present, the authors see no such prospects. But we repeat: the reasoning that surrounds this thesis requires a separate text.
Now to the second variant. For the sake of brevity, we shall designate it as the ‘Lukashenko’ system. Its essence is a bureaucratic-paternalist capitalism, and in the course of its existence, new forces with an interest in its transformation have emerged. The first of these forces is private capital, including small-scale and ‘human’ capital, whose accumulation and power the old bureaucratic system has begun actively blocking. The bearers of this ‘human capital’ deserve special mention. Most of these people are young, aged between 16 and 30. They have been educated, or are being educated, in a neoliberal spirit that reproduces ‘market fundamentalism’, and inhabit a totally commercialised, so-called ‘Western’, cultural and informational environment. They possess a certain potential for making money (some more so, others less, the latter for the most part only in their imaginations, inflamed by advertising), with the goal of acquiring brand-name goods and being part of the trend. Without question, the Lukashenko system blocks their path since it can no longer sustain both economic and political stability required for the acquisition of greater wealth.
A second force is the new generation of the Lukashenko ‘nomenklatura’, in essence inhabiting the same neoliberal environment and whose entire social setting consists of people (from spouses and lovers to children and grandchildren) who live according to these (‘Western’) standards. For the members of this stratum Belarus, its people and even jobs in the state hierarchy are no more than a basis for accumulating their private power and capital. For a certain time, these people have found life within the bureaucratic system quite advantageous. But as soon as the opportunity appears for them to break out from beneath the power of the hierarchy and win the ‘freedom’ to become private entrepreneurs, they will begin with enviable enthusiasm to demolish the very power structures they so recently embodied. Even now, significant numbers of people from Lukashenko’s entourage are doing this, especially those playing secondary roles.
What about the majority of working people – the industrial workers, the teachers, the health staff? Before attempting to answer this question, we should stress that the nature of bureaucratic capitalism is that it moves inevitably from extensive growth to stagnation. The masses then shift from enforced support for the system as a lesser evil to vague but growing resistance. This is what is now occurring in Belarus. For the past two decades an attempt has been under way to combine the country’s semi-peripheral capitalism with bureaucratic paternalism. But bureaucratic-paternalist capitalism is doomed to stagnation and crisis if it does not move in the direction of socialism. Lukashenko has taken the road of strengthening the role of the market and capital, resulting in the stagnation of real incomes, the constriction of the interests of working people through the Labour Code and pension reform and so forth. All this has undermined support for the system that has taken shape under his rule. Even ‘ordinary’ people in Belarus have begun changing their attitude to Lukashenko, after 25 years of referring to him in jocular fashion as ‘Daddy’.
So long as the bureaucracy and capital provided certain increases in living standards, with guarantees of security and a stable existence, working people nurtured a vague hatred for the system but nevertheless tolerated it, subordinating and reconciling themselves to it and choosing it as a lesser evil. They did not believe in their own strength, or in that of the left opposition which, for the most part, was either genuinely powerless or had gave way to the authorities at each decisive moment.
But when an old system enters into stagnation, if not crisis, people start to wake up. From that point the ‘ordinary people’ – workers, farmers, teachers, medical personnel – will be ready at a decisive moment to declare: ‘We are not scum!’ [7] It was this very slogan, ‘We are the people, not scum!’ that workers for Belarusian enterprises carried on placards at one of their demonstrations. This is why we venture to assert: the root of the problems faced by Belarus in 2020 lies in economic stagnation, social inequality and the bureaucratic-capitalist subjugation of working people, not simply in the absence of formal political liberties and the lack of freedom of speech.
Hence the first lesson, one for the authorities (who, of course, find addressing it inconceivable): if the state-capitalist nomenklatura is unwilling to cooperate with the majority of workers and will not guarantee timely and thorough socially-oriented reforms (a progressive income tax, education and health care for all, strong trade unions and so forth), along with accelerated growth of the national economy, then it is an enemy not only of the pro-liberal forces but also of the majority of citizens, and moreover, will sooner or later be betrayed by the new generation of cynics within its own ranks. This, properly speaking, has begun to occur in Belarus.
A comparison with the somewhat different situation in Russia is instructive. There the state bureaucracy has not so much subordinated itself to large oligarchic capital but rather has become entwined with it. For the most part, the Russian bureaucracy serves the economic and political interests of big capital, and hence possesses a more durable economic base than the Lukashenko system. Underlying the power of the state in Russia are the trillions of dollars owned by the Russian oligarchs. But this alliance is not eternal either. In the Russian Federation, moreover, stagnation and antisocial policies have lasted now for more than a decade, and the patience of the majority, it would appear, is at breaking point. Hence, and unlike the situation in Belarus, it is possible that the outcomes may not be limited to political perturbations, and may extend further and deeper, to socio-economic revolution.
Flowing directly from this is the second lesson: the people are not scum, and the key problems cannot be solved through force. Let us begin with a thoroughly controversial thesis: there is no need to fear the activism of one’s own citizens. The steady development and growth of a country requires socially and politically active citizens, united on the basis of initiatives from below, and it needs them the way we need oxygen. Profound social and democratic reforms, implemented on the basis of initiatives from below, are a condition for the socialisation (at least) of 21st century capitalism, not to speak of an advance toward the society of the future, toward socialism.8 Passively tolerant and obedient citizens, who (as it seems to the authorities and the bosses) have submitted to the status quo, constitute a basis for the breakdown and decay of the state power and even of business.
This is the case with the state power since it is increasingly forced to rely on the organs of coercion and on political and ideological manipulation – to be quite frank, on deceit and violence. Such a system cannot exist for long, much less develop. Business too loses out strategically under such a system, since in an economy where the main factor of development is human creative potential, workers need to be talented and creative, and this means that they need the opportunity for social and political self-organisation. Meanwhile, neoliberal capitalism is indifferent to strategically oriented development; it is driven by short-termism and the dominance of financialisation (Fine, 2019; Sifakis-Kapetanakis, 2019) orienting business toward speculation, to ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004), and at times, to straightforward feudal plunder. This would not be the best path forward for Belarus.
Where politics is concerned, the neoliberal economic and political system provides only imitation freedoms, replacing democracy with political manipulation on the part of those who have control over capital (Parenti, 2010). In Belarus and Russia, the majority of ‘ordinary’ citizens sense that Western democracy does not operate in the manner that is portrayed, even if they do not understand why with any clarity. As the great poet of the Russian ‘Silver Age’ Aleksandr Blok declared a century ago, we need democracy, but not American style. We need real political rights and freedoms, the real opportunity to form unions and associations, to control the authorities, and to realise initiatives that emerge from below.
This text is not the place to elaborate on what ‘basic democracy’ is and on how it functions. Nevertheless, it should be said that where people lack any real opportunity for joint, constructive social and political action, street protests will occur, with all their contradictions. This is true of Black Lives Matter in the United States and of the ‘yellow vests’ (Michael-Matsas, 2016) in France, and it is true of Belarus as well. The organs of state coercion will not be able to stop these developments. That is the lesson of Belarus.
What Took So Long?
Spelling this lesson out makes it necessary to answer a further question: why did Belarus remain silent for so long? There is an explanation for this. Still operating in the post-Soviet expanse is a belief, formed over centuries, in the concept of the ‘good tsar’. In the USSR (and until recently in Belarus as well) this belief rested on a genuine solicitude of the state with regard to ‘ordinary’ people. We Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians and so forth – that is, all of us who lived together first in the Russian Empire and then in the USSR – believed, (and to some degree still believe) that the ‘good tsar’ would punish the ‘evil boyars’ (ministers, deputies), excessively greedy bosses and thieving bureaucrats, while defending the country from external enemies (and they are real!) with the help of a strong army, and that in general the leader would solve all our problems. Unfortunately, this is not an exaggeration – it is what the authorities set out to instil in ‘simple people’ in Belarus, and elsewhere. These ‘simple’ citizens of the post-Soviet countries, however, are in fact far from simple. The culture and practices of former citizens of the USSR, Russians, Belarusians and others, and thirty years of semi-peripheral capitalism, have not entirely degraded us. This holds for the majority of citizens of Belarus, and not only of Belarus, whatever may be the case for the privileged elites who have adopted neoliberal values.
If bureaucratic capitalism perpetuates, or worse, strengthens economic stagnation and social injustice, if it increases the political lawlessness to which the majority is subject, then working people who supposedly have been hypnotised forever will rise up in protest. Here an important reservation is required: the real level of activism of the majority of workers, peasants, health staff, teachers and so forth in Belarus is nowhere as great as the leaders of the liberal opposition try to make out. In most cases the actions that are described as ‘strikes’ are in fact protest demonstrations organised by political activists. Of the real strikes, a certain proportion are indirectly supported by enterprise chiefs who regard the Lukashenko regime as not serving their interests, or by top managers who, as in the USSR on the eve of its collapse, hope that this wave of struggles will give them the opportunity to privatise enterprises that for the present are in state hands. In a few enterprises – and this is the aspect that is most important for us – there is now a real potential for strikes to break out. However, such actions are almost impossible to organise because of draconian legislation and the repression directed at the leaders of strike committees. Where workers in these circumstances have been able to organise so-called ‘Italian’ strikes (‘work-to-rule actions’), it is possible and necessary to speak of real labour protest. But even here, there is not yet an independent opposition, aimed at defending workers’ interests and not at carrying out the transition from a bureaucratic to a neoliberal model of capitalism.
A Final Lesson from Belarus
Here, however, a third lesson comes to the forefront: the lack of a left alternative is driving workers into the camp of the neoliberals. When the popular masses begin rising up in protest, the question becomes critical: what will the people call for? Who will they stand alongside, and at whom will their anger be directed? If, at this time, there is no left opposition in the country, strong, organised and capable of constructive, positive action, the people will finish up as puppets whose strings are pulled by neoliberal politicians, by politicians who will, unsurprisingly, be described as ‘pro-Western’ (it should be pointed out that this is not a matter of geopolitics but of political economy – standing behind these politicians will be the economic, political, media and military power of global capital). If working people finish up as puppets, subject to this control, they will lose, as will the rest of us. The reason is simple: in the post-Soviet countries, neoliberal capitalism brings with it an even greater degree of economic degradation, social inequality and deprivation of mass political rights than the systems that preceded it.
We offer the following for the authorities, for citizens, and for the left opposition:
For those in power in the post-Soviet countries, by turning the citizens of your countries into extras in your stage show, you doom yourself to isolation at the ‘moment of truth.’ Furthermore, attempting to rely on the apparatus of coercion will prove useless. Not only will force prove ultimately unable to solve the problem, but at the decisive moment the people applying those measures may simply abandon you when it now appears those people may finish up on the losing side. This is what happened in the USSR in 1991, and again in the Ukraine in 2014.
For the mass of the population: if, at the moment of conflict, they have not developed a mature social and political consciousness, if they fail to understand who they are, to understand for what they are struggling, who they are defending and where their strategic interests lie an remain passive like sheep, then at best they will be herded into a new sheep-pen, and at worst, slaughtered. The authorities will exploit the public’s activism, whether they are the old authorities who have convinced the public that they represent a lesser evil, or the new holders of power now hanging out the sign of neoliberal ‘freedom’ while all the while strengthening our subjection to the market and capital.
For the left opposition: if, by the ‘moment of truth’, this opposition has not become powerful and constructive, the role its members will finish up playing will not even be that of extras, but of onlookers. They will be onlookers to the tragedy of a missed opportunity for a liberatory outcome through struggle.
It is clear that the time has not yet come to draw definitive conclusions concerning the protests in Belarus, or to formulate the corresponding final lessons. The authors of this article understand perfectly that these conclusions and lessons can be derived only through taking into account the broader socio-spatial and socio-temporal context through analysis of the contradictions of Ukraine since 2014, of the ‘colour revolutions’ in the Arab world and the post-Soviet space and of the protests that have occurred during recent years in the United States and Europe. The task in this brief text is to identify the main causes of the Belarusian protests and the social forces involved in this ongoing situation, while drawing, in however preliminary a fashion, the basic lessons to be had from this examination.
A.V. Buzgalin
A.I. Kolganov
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