The News Line: Editorial
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
BP HITTING RUSSIAN ROCKS
MANY senior foreign executives at oil giant BP=92s Russian partner****p
TNK-BP are to be forced to leave Russia after their requests for work
permits were refused.
The Russian authorities have turned down more than half of the
requests made by managers of TNK-BP as the battle for control and then
owner****p of the company sharpens.
BP described the latest blow as =91surprising and disappointing=92. In
fact it is following along the path blazed by Shell which had its
holdings expropriated, and received what it termed inadequate
compensation, after being taken over by a specially established state-
owned company, Rosneft.
What is happening is that the Stalinist bureaucracy, (particularly in
the KGB) which is running Russia found out the hard way that the bulk
of those (mainly Communist Party second-rank leaders) who seized
valuable state property or bought it for a pittance from the Yeltsin
family, at the time when the USSR was decreed to be dissolved, were
very susceptible to becoming agents of US imperialism inside Russia,
that is comprador capitalists.
There was also the question that the m***** of Russian workers were
furious with the capitalist =91shock therapists=92 and a revolutionary
uprising was developing.
The oligarchs had to be purged. The one-time right-hand man of
Yeltsin, Boris Berezovskiy, has currently got asylum in the UK, along
with a brace of Russian oligarchs who were run out of Russia.
It turned out that not only did the Bolshevik revolution save Russia
from being divided up between the major imperialist powers as part of
the spoils of victory, but as the Gorbachev-Yeltsin counter-
revolutionary experience proved, the continuing existence of an
independent Russian state depends on its vast resources being
nationalised, and being defended by world revolution.
Today with the US-UK imperialists desperate to secure large-scale oil
and gas resources throughout the world, and more than prepared to make
war to seize them (Iraq), the nationalisation of Russia=92s energy
industries is a strategic necessity.
Putin is on record as regarding the decree to dissolve the USSR as an
unmitigated disaster, and the correctness of this position is more
than proven by the subsequent developments.
But Putin remains a Stalinist, wedded to the remnants of socialism in
a single country and Russian nationalism.
The Putin-led bureaucracy essentially balances between the Russian
workers and the =91patriotic=92 sections of the capitalists, while on a
world scale he balances between the imperialist powers and the Russian
workers, alongside the anti-imperialist forces in the world.
That this is a transitory position is clear. It cannot last for long
and will be replaced either by a successful counter-revolution in
Russia, or the Russian working class overthrowing the bureaucracy and
its capitalist sup****ters through a political revolution that restores
rule through workers soviets.
Trotsky pointed to this development in his works Revolution Betrayed
and The Permanent Revolution.
In the introduction to The Permanent Revolution he points out =91that
the democratic tasks of the backward bourgeois nations lead directly,
in our epoch, to the dictator****p of the proletariat and that . . .
puts socialist tasks on the order of the day.=92
He described the second aspect of the theory as having to do =91with the
socialist revolution as such=92.
He adds: =91Society keeps changing its skin. Each stage of
transformation stems directly from the preceding. . . .Outbreaks of
civil war and foreign wars alternate with periods of =91peaceful
reform . . . .=92
He continued to describe the =91International character of the socialist
revolution=92 as the third aspect of the theory=92. He adds: =91The
socialist revolution begins on national foundations =96 but it cannot be
completed within these foundations. . . .If it remains isolated, the
proletarian system must finally fall victim to these contradictions.
The way out of it lies in the victory of the proletariat of the
advanced countries.=92 Precisely!
The Russian working class have fought desperately to halt the
bourgeois counter-revolution in Russia. It needs the victory of
workers revolutions outside Russia to win its struggle. The world
capitalist crisis is today driving forward the world revolution,
especially in the most advanced countries. This will make the third
aspect of Trotsky=92s theory a burning reality =96 the victory of the
proletariat in the most advanced countries.
http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/3327
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