WORLD WORLDWIDE RUSSIA News Journal Update - (en) Russia, Avtonom: On the periphery this is the way it is: "Trends of Order and Chaos", episode 123 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 Elections, elections... ---- This time we will allow ourselves to expand

the scope of the podcast a little and touch on the events of the
previous week. What do you think the Russian authorities can do in 3
days? They cannot take Kyiv during this time, but they can win their
pseudo-elections. And these took place in Russia from September 8 to 11.
We, as supporters of the immediate direct struggle of workers for their
rights and interests and workers' self-government at enterprises, are in
principle very skeptical about representative parliamentary democracy,
but here we are forced to admit that instead of it we only have "voting
on the stumps". And, of course, the general coercion of state employees
and employees of state-owned companies to vote for United Russia and its
candidates.

As usual, workers were forced en masse to register for electronic
voting. Here are Sverdlovsk doctors, teachers and other public sector
employees from the Moscow region, housing and communal services workers
from the Moscow Zhilischnik, employees of the Russian Post and officials
from Dzerzhinsk, teachers and employees of the Ministry of Agriculture
of Nizhny Novgorod and many many others. We did not conduct special
monitoring on this matter, but there was a lot of similar news, and
Moscow metro workers left a review on our website about this:

"On September 9, in all Moscow metro services, employees with Moscow
registration were forced to vote online through the mos.ru websites,
government services and through PEC validators. Employees were called at
odd hours and were detained at work. There were threats of deprivation
of the bonus and other classic methods of coercion and suppression of
one's own will."

And by the way, this is not the first case of metro workers being forced
to vote.

The leader of the Moscow Metro trade union, Nikolai Gostev, reported in
2021 how the management of the State Unitary Enterprise obliged
employees to hand over personal contacts of their loved ones for use in
the upcoming elections to the State Duma. As evidence, he provided an
audio recording, where the order set the task to collect and provide
personal data: full name, phone numbers and dates of birth.

A similar story with the elections happened in 2018 - the metro union
talked about how all workers were forced to come to work with absentee
ballots in order to vote at the workplace under control.

As in previous "elections," workers were required to provide a photo
report of their vote. But this time technology has gone even further;
employees were asked to report on voting by transmitting their
geolocation via smartphone.

Well, in the end, the workers were brought directly to the polling
stations and forced to vote for the "correct" candidates. So, for
example, this time it happened in the Altai village of Ongudai.
Ambulance workers were brought there, attention, in the same ambulances.

For some of the conclusions that will be drawn at the end of this
podcast, we need to remember that in modern Russia, the employer's
control over the employee often extends beyond the scope of their
immediate economic relations and also extends to the political sphere.

Prisoner labor
Meanwhile, against the backdrop of a total shortage of personnel in the
country, a new trend is gaining wild popularity among Russian employers
- hiring convicts to work. Unlike migrants and still free citizens of
the Russian Federation, prisoners will not go anywhere - they are always
available and have already been convicted. Employers are snapping up
those sentenced to forced labor "like hot cakes" - the Federal
Penitentiary Service notes that at the end of 2022, labor coverage of
such convicts was 99%.

The Federal Penitentiary Service also reports that from October 1, 2023,
changes to the Criminal Executive Code of the Russian Federation will
come into force, which will make it possible to attract convicts to
forced labor from individual entrepreneurs.

Such giants as Sberbank, the Lenta chain hypermarket, Russian Railways
and, of course, Ozon have already left rave reviews about their
experience in employing prisoners in the media.

Ozon told Vedomosti that they are "extremely satisfied with the
employees from behind bars": now the efficiency indicators of the
company's employees are a quarter higher than average, absenteeism has
decreased by 17%, and staff turnover has decreased by 9%. The best part,
of course, is low salaries. After all, the prisoner is "happy" with any
money and cannot demand an increase in wages.

The executive director of the Gofron enterprise, Alexey Belodvortsev,
also shared his impressions: "We initially set the salary at 19 thousand
rubles per month. The law does not allow less - this is the minimum wage
for the Moscow region, but they have not deserved more yet."

Of course, prisoners cannot replace hired workers, but in order to
understand what the Russian state is, knowledge about such methods of
attracting labor, which are not very capitalistic in the traditional
sense, will help us a lot.

"Heroism of Chiefs"
Well, now about labor feats. On Tuesday, an Airbus A320 plane made an
emergency landing in a field near Novosibirsk. From the transcript of
the pilots' conversations, it was found that the ship had a complete
failure of the hydraulic system.

The crew worked highly professionally and heroically, because the safe
landing of the plane in such a situation is a real miracle. Failure of
any type of hydraulic system is extremely dangerous - the aircraft's
hydraulic system is responsible for controlling the rudders, stabilizer,
extending and retracting the landing gear, and landing and takeoff
mechanization.

The Airbus was preparing to land in Omsk, but the landing failed: the
plane's flaps did not extend. The pilots managed to steer the ship
towards Novosibirsk - the local airport has a longer runway. In Omsk,
the plane would fly off the runway at full speed.

Due to the emergency condition of the vessel, increased fuel consumption
resulted, so the plane did not reach the Novosibirsk airport. The pilots
decided to land it in a wheat field, which they successfully did, saving
the lives of 167 passengers and 23 children among them.

After the incident, the head of Ural Airlines, Sergei Skuratov,
immediately hastened to report that the sanctions, due to which the
maintenance of aircraft in Russia is catastrophically difficult, had
nothing to do with it, and that "with difficulty, but we find all the
spare parts" (c).

Skuratov decided to present the abnormal number of emergency situations
recently as an advantage of the Russian airline: "[Emergency]landings
should restore confidence in the airline as such."

In the end, Skuratov suffered, he felt heroic and said that it was
possible to save the lives of almost 200 people thanks to his superiors:
"We know how to train pilots, that's for sure."

Well, Russian pilots, well understanding what such heroism is and what
the most catastrophic consequences it could have, even before the war
and sanctions, went en masse to work in China, Vietnam, the United Arab
Emirates and other countries. We would venture to suggest that now,
thanks to the wise leadership of airline companies and the even wiser
leadership of the Russian Federation, this trend will only intensify.
Perhaps new pilots will still be born, or they will be replaced by
prisoners. We can only guess.

The fact that industries that require high technologies, serious
training of personnel and careful treatment of them are literally dying
in our country also very, very eloquently shows the nature of the
economy built in our country.

What then, what now
Now let's turn to history. It would seem that the events that took place
back in the 18th century do not concern us in any way, but reading about
what happened almost 3 centuries ago, we can be amazed at the similarity
in the attitude of the authorities in our country towards their
subordinates, their way of thinking and their "strategic calculation"
for the resigned mass of the working people.

And we'll talk about Pugachev's uprising, because it began on September
17, 1773, however, according to the old style. More precisely, not about
the uprising itself, but about its causes.

Catherine the Second was then just finishing off the remnants of
democracy among the Cossacks. Previously, the Cossacks could choose
their atamans and decide a wide range of issues in the Cossack circle by
voting, but now these procedures were abolished and they began to
appoint bosses from above from the Cossack elite. The Cossacks tried to
rebel, but to no avail; their strength alone was not enough to extract
concessions from the tsarist government. Here we can't help but remember
those ill-fated pseudo-elections that took place a week ago, and all
similar past elections that were turned into a farce by the authorities.
They were not abolished, like the Cossacks, but they were made a
completely useless tool.

But the Cossacks were not alone in their grievances against the
government. The peoples whose territories the Russian Empire seized and
began to develop in their own way, giving them over to the landowners,
were also dissatisfied. Tatars, Bashkirs, Kazakhs, Kalmyks, Udmurts,
Chuvashs, Mordovians and other peoples of the Volga region, the Urals
and Siberia took part in the Pugachev uprising. And although Pugachev's
uprising is called the "Russian revolt," in fact this rebellion was
international, when Russians united with other peoples in the fight
against oppression from the authorities. It is obvious to any normal
person that it is necessary to be friends not with the oppressors, but
against them, and then this was exactly the case, and, to be honest, it
is precisely this kind of friendship that our society should repeat, and
not go to war with its neighbors.

The bulk of Pugachev's troops were peasants. We think our listeners are
aware that in the Russian Empire of that time the overwhelming majority
of the population was the property of the landowners and had virtually
no rights, and it is not at all surprising that people rebelled against
this situation. But we also suspect that few people know - a
considerable part of these peasants were peasants assigned to the Ural
factories. They were also called "attached".

What does attributed mean? This means that state peasants, who had not
previously belonged to any landowner, were required to work at certain
times of the year in factories, which were often not even state-owned,
but belonged to various rich people, mostly of noble origin, and less
often to merchants.

It is interesting that just in the middle of the 18th century,
"successful privatization" took place in the Russian Empire, when former
state-owned factories were given into private hands, and to make it more
convenient for these private hands, in addition to these factories,
state-owned peasants were distributed personally independent (from the
landowners) and paying taxes directly to the state treasury.

Peasants had to work at the factory not only for themselves, but also
for the entire population of their village, that is, those able to work
also worked for those unable to work, and these often made up more than
50 percent. In addition, the production standards established by the
government were then increased by the government, which naturally
increased the duration of this factory corvee. Well, and finally,
villages could be very far from factories. For example, even at a
distance of 600 km. from them. And the peasants had to get to them on
their own. This time was practically unpaid. Peasants were often forced
to work in factories or go to these factories at a time when they should
have been tending to their farms.

As a result, these personal farms fell into complete ruin. Landowner
peasants directly worked in the factories, as well as hereditary workers
directly attached to the factory. Free wage labor was used extremely
little in the large metallurgical industry, which was located mainly in
the Urals.

It is interesting that Soviet historians were never able to determine
which formation such an economy belongs to. On the one hand there is
large-scale industry, on the other hand there is serf labor. And since
Karl Marx did not illuminate this problem in his works, in the Soviet
Union his teaching, turned into dogma, required scientists to fit this
phenomenon into either feudalism or capitalism.

In our opinion, this problem is partly resolved by world-system
analysis, which suggests that capitalist relations at the center of the
world economic system often require non-capitalist methods of
exploitation on its outskirts. More precisely, they do not require them,
and they often turn out to be beneficial for local authorities: forced
labor is cheaper, and it is not always necessary to introduce new
technologies. Often they can be replaced simply by more workers and
longer working hours. Well, this is obviously beneficial for the elite
at the center of the world-system, since cheap labor produces cheaper goods.

In general, those in power are happy in both places. Only the population
of the capitalist periphery is unhappy. In this sense, Russia, then and
now, occupies an intermediate position: on the one hand, instead of
developing high technologies, it pumps oil and gas abroad, and on the
other hand, it itself is not averse to exploiting neighboring countries,
for example, taking advantage of the cheap labor of migrants from the
countries of the former USSR or buy up the main pillars of the economy
(gas, electricity, railways) of an entire country such as Armenia.

But an equally important factor determining how economic relations will
be built is the political regime. It is obvious that under
authoritarianism, such as existed in the Russian Empire and as exists in
our country today, it is much more convenient to use non-economic
methods of pressure on workers. In particular, harsh repressions against
active people can prevent the formation of public associations
independent of the authorities, including those directly aimed at
supporting the rights and interests of workers. Thus, the class struggle
can be driven into the farthest corner, and the ability of wage workers
to organize will remain in its infancy. This is what we actually observe
in modern Russia.

Democracy, even if not the most perfect one, is a necessary condition
for the development of the labor movement in our country.

Well that's all for today! We remind you that in Trends in Order and
Chaos, members of Autonomous Action and other authors give anarchist
assessments of current events. Listen to us on YouTube, SoundCloud and
other platforms, visit our website avtonom.org, subscribe to our weekly
e-mail newsletter!

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