Against Pension “Reform" in Russia

On September 27, the State Duma approved the law for raising the retirement age[1] at its third reading

Since the government and the Duma do not dare to tax the oligarchs, they could not come up with anything else. Not wanting to introduce a progressive income tax scale, Russian capital made it clear that it would not only not sacrifice any of its economic and political domination as such, but not even a small bit of its income, which it might have thrown in the form of a “bone” to the people. It wants to preserve its position so the oligarchs get fat, buy villas and yachts and preserving their “fish”[2] in fashionable style.

The world has become too small for existing national capital. In each country, capital is forced to increase its productivity, that is, to take the exploitation of workers to the extreme, which includes an increase in the retirement age. The bourgeoisie of the old powers are faced with a difficult choice: international rivalry is becoming aggravated, the demographic winter is being felt more and more, and in the struggle for competitiveness, the major powers are looking for ways to reduce the burden of social spending. Russia is also joining this race, hastily preparing for the reform of the pension system.

With the decline of capitalism, humanity survives only at the cost of continuous destruction, by crippling itself. An unprecedented dehumanisation of relations in society, based on the complete lack of prospects for humanity under capitalism, is added to the physiological poverty afflicting Russia.

An alternative today can only be a constant and widespread struggle in the ranks of the organized vanguard of the working class against bourgeois ideologies, their frightening lies and fairy tales. This is a struggle to establish the principles of proletarian internationalism, the struggle for scientific communist consciousness, for the organisation of our class.

In today's conditions, the role of every worker and every student is important. Create workers groups of like-minded people at your place of work to fight for your labour and civil rights! Team up with other workers groups! Join the internationalist workers’ movement!

Self-organization of the class struggle and the exercise of power by the proletariat is the only way to save society from inevitable destruction.

Join the struggles of the working class! Lets get started now! Proletarians of all countries, unite!

The document above was written by the Krasnoyarsk Marxist Workers’ Group, International Proletarian Union, and machine translated by them.

October 6 2018

[1] Since the summer there have been hundreds of protests at this measure across Russia. In July alone 2.25 million took part in demonstrations against the proposal. Most of these demonstrations were organised or dominated by the old Communist Party but many of the slogans were not of their making. Protesting requires some degree of courage in Russia and the combination of state repression and a truly autonomous movement has allowed the State to do as it pleases.

[2] The word “fish” (ryba) here is a pun on the name of Nastya Rybka – sometime “paid” mistress of the pro-Putin oligarch Oleg Deripaska,

Sunday, October 7, 2018

Comments

"In today's conditions, the role of every worker and every student is important. Create workers groups of like-minded people at your place of work to fight for your labour and civil rights! Team up with other workers groups! Join the internationalist workers’ movement!"No doubt workers will not just take decimation lying down, no doubt that if the situation develops as we expect, there will be an upswing in struggle and resistance to the attacks, and nothing wrong with that. But I dont think as revolutionaries we can leave it at that, we have to say that there is no defending our (already bad) condition and our message is crystal clear and one we have to introduce with our intervention, along with sympathy for whatever resistance to whatever injustice. The Working Class, understood as the vast majority who do not own the means of production, cannot solve their problems within the framework of this society. Either we understand and gather around the banner of anti capitalist socialism, or we go down down down. The working class left to its own devices can do everything bar that. They can organise outside of the official labour movement, put forward demands and struggle autonomously around such demands. The only "missing" ingredient that the intervention of organsied revolutionaries can bring, whether already within a workplace with an ongoing dispute or as comrades seeking to introduce a political perspective as is possible, are socialist ideas, revolutionary socialist theory to challenge the fairy tales put forward by those who would seek to integrate the working class within capitalism and lead us down the path of destruction.

Steve - agreed. We have already underlined that weakness in the document to the comrades by saying workers have no "rights" under capitalism except those that they force the system to concede. It is difficult though to engage in debate with comrades when we don't share a common language. There is only so much the translation machines can do and we do not yet know enough about their positions. However as always we put these things in the public domain so others can join in.