Grassroots Politics

The protests of December 10, held across Russia as a reaction against election fraud, were so big and loud that even the state-run TV stations were forced to give them coverage.

At the start of the global financial crisis in 2008, the authorities said that it was necessary to tighten our belts. It seemed as if people were frozen, waiting: the ratings of the tandem fell steadily, but protests were able to mobilize few participants.

But now patience has run out. Many have lost jobs, wages are galling, yet various tariffs and prices are rising. The government is cutting back social budget expenditures while the military budget is growing.

The elite are buying up real estate, while the rest of us have to scrape together to pay the rent and utility bills. Young people with no work experience have no future. The capitalists are able to f lee from instability, but the rest of us have nowhere to go.

© RIA Novosti. / Iliya Pitalev

‘I am not a sheep’ read the sign of one of the protesters on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow

The analysts are saying that it was representatives of the intelligentsia and middle class who turned out to protest. Yet the majority of low-wage workers consider themselves “middle class.” Teachers and civil servants prefer to call themselves “intelligentsia”. But this does not impact their actual social position.

Those who came out included women who no longer know how to feed their children; students who have nowhere to go to after graduation; workers who are tired of hoping for the authorities to help them.

The Kremlin has so meticulously constructed its power vertical, that even the most minor misuse of power by a bureaucrat is blamed on Mount Olympus. Because of this, United Russia has come to personify the politics of the ruling class, and Putin has become the face of repression.

That’s why people are protesting Putin and United Russia. But unlike professional opposition activists, the simple people in the crowd were talking about budget reform, about joining the WTO, about the need to nationalize natural resources and about the draft laws.

The protesters I talked to said they had only voted for the opposition “as to not vote for United Russia.”

Real democracy will appear at that moment when ordinary people can create their own party, independent of bureaucrats and business. There should be no limitations on the participation of rank and file folks in elections. The organization of the elections should be in the hands of elected committees of local residents, and not those under the thumb of the Central Elections Commission. There should be elections at all levels, including for judges and the cops, and control over their activities should be in the hands of the working people. Access to mass media outlets should not be limited to the leading politicians and showmen but to the organizations of working people – 99% of the population.

As long as ownership is concentrated in the hands of the few, all these demands remain no more than dreams. Political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Therefore production, natural resources and the budget should be controlled by the majority. This is impossible without nationalizing industry and the banking system under the control of those who work there. Only this will allow the education and health systems become free and of quality.

People left the Bolotnaya Square with frustration on their faces. They did not get the action program they were looking for. The next opposition demonstration may well be smaller, but that doesn’t mean the mood has changed.

The presidential elections are coming up. A whole number of harmful laws are being proposed for when the elections are over. The workers will no longer tolerate these without comment. But just protests are not enough. We need to turn the willing listeners into a real and independent force.

In the workplaces, strikes can be prepared – it is exactly this sort of protest that will worry the bourgeois class. At the end of the day, we need a new assembly, in which the working class and its allies, the overwhelming majority of society, can decide which government structures would best serve to represent their interests. 

Zhenya Otto is a socialist and feminist activist in Moscow, whose blog can be read at: http://socialistworld. ru/jane-otto The views expressed in this article are the author’s own, and not necessarily those of The Moscow News.