Homie is threatening to shut down any businesses that aren't unionized lol. Chad move

  • Bedandsofa [he/him]
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    4 years ago

    the proletariat, which was generally on the side of the government, wasn’t organized enough to fight back against them.

    They weren't fighting back against the "staged" protests, because the protests literally began with a general strike against Lukashenko's government, which is absolutely guilty of advancing austerity policies (raising the retirement age, privatization policies, cutting benefits) and losing the support of a layer of the working class.

    From an article outlining the situation in August:

    "Grodno-Azot (chemical fertilisers), Belmedpreparaty (pharmaceutical), JSC “Grodnozhilstroy” (construction), Terrazit (PVC and aluminium), Minsk Electromechanical Plant (MEZ) and the Zhabinka sugar plant have joined the strike movement. Strikes and protests have also taken place at Agat Electromechanical Plant, and factories operated by the “Keramin” ceramics manufacturer. At the same time, the Philharmonic went on strike. And a number of small businesses too. Even employees of the Institute of Physics of the National Academy of Sciences are involved in the strikes.

    As we are writing these lines, news arrives that taxi drivers at Uber and Yandex have also announced they are joining the general strike.

    Most importantly, a strike started at the Belarusian Automobile Plant BelAZ. Today, thousands of BelAZ workers in the city of Zhodino were chanting: “[Lukasheno] Leave!"

    Earlier, enterprises such as Belarussian Steel Works BMZ, VIPRIL Control (flight controllers) and many others went on an indefinite political strike."

    The workers of the Minsk Tractor Works plant went on strike the day after that, and when Lukashenko showed up to talk to the workers, they shouted him down.

    Working class uprisings aren't especially likely to generate, and stick to, demands that go outside the bounds of capitalism without access to a revolutionary political leadership, and thats exactly what you see in Belarus. That doesn't mean the class composition of the general strikes was "petite bourgeois."

    Like the fact that there are competing forces at play, and that the liberal opposition is winning out in the absence of an organized working class leadership, doesn't retroactively transform the whole thing into a staged petite bourgeois "color revolution."

    Some of you have such an obsession with boiling down complexity and contradiction into black and white categories, good or bad, that you lose sight of the class struggle perspective in a situation where the working class struggle is erupting.