RUSSIAN MAOIST PERSPECTIVE (translated)
http://maoism.ru/20292The unrest that broke out in the west of Kazakhstan and quickly engulfed the entire country became a natural result of the long-term policy of the oligarchic dictatorship. The Nazarbayev-Tokayev regime, which became a consequence of the decay of Soviet state-monopoly capitalism, has been holding on to police truncheons for three decades and pursuing a tough neoliberal policy of shock therapy, most seriously from which the most vulnerable sections of the working people suffer. The trigger for the January events was a twofold increase in gas prices, and at first the petty bourgeois strata of car owners apparently participated in the protests, but the urban poor and the working class, tired of poverty, lawlessness and corruption, quickly joined the unrest.
The protesters, in particular, demand the departure of Nazarbayev and the complete resignation of the government, the return of the 1993 Constitution, the release of political prisoners, lower prices for food and fuel, lower retirement age, higher wages and pensions, and other measures.
Due to the mass and organization of the protests, and especially because of the radical mood of the masses (the seizure of administrations and the fight against the army and the police), caused by the active participation of the working class in protest, which continues thanks to the declaration of the strike, the regime was forced to make concessions: to partially cancel “ gas "innovations (initially it was about the return of the previous prices for hydrocarbon products only in the Mangistau region), and then to make gas prices lower than the pre-reform ones, to dismiss the government and even to deprive the" Elbasy "of Nursultan Nazarbayev of his lifelong post of head of the Security Council, as well as promising re-election of parliament. But these measures seemed insufficient and cosmetic to the Kazakh masses, and people remained on the streets of cities in all regions of the republic. The response to the escalation of protests was the habitual move of the elites,symbolically "returning" gas to the people in the form of a tear mixture to disperse the demonstrators, as well as flooding the streets with military equipment and disconnecting the Internet and telephony. Judging by the incoming news, this did not stop the rebels, who in a number of cities repulsed punitive units and disarmed them, seized administrative buildings and destroyed the offices of the ruling bourgeois Nur Otan party. This was followed by reports of the departure of representatives of the elite from the country, but quite expectedly, the country's President Kassym-Zhomart Tokayev promised to crack down on the rebels, whom he called “banditry elements” and “financially motivated” “conspirators”, introducing a state of emergency in the country. According to partially confirmed information, Russian security forces allegedly also went to Kazakhstan, although the Kremlin officialdom claimswhich considers what is happening as an internal affair of the neighboring state. However, it can be assumed that the fall of the Nazarbayev dictatorship could hit Russian imperialism, so it is possible that the results of secret diplomacy may be measures to save the fraternal regime connected with Moscow both politically and economically. Even the cosmonauts of the Republic of Kazakhstan with serious faces are asking the Russian military to save the frightened Kazakh people, but in fact the oligarchy of Kazakhstan worried about their power.Even the cosmonauts of the Republic of Kazakhstan with serious faces are asking the Russian military to save the frightened Kazakh people, but in fact the oligarchy of Kazakhstan worried about their power.Even the cosmonauts of the Republic of Kazakhstan with serious faces are asking the Russian military to save the frightened Kazakh people, but in fact the oligarchy of Kazakhstan worried about their power.
An important point of the current protests and a lesson for all subsequent ones is that the protesters were organized by the support of the labor collectives of some enterprises, which not only participate in street protests, but also organize political strikes and economic strikes, which largely unsettled the regime and forced it to serious, albeit formal, concessions. It is worth noting that Kazakhstani workers have accumulated a lot of strike experience and struggle against violation of their rights in recent years, and grapes of anger have ripened since at least 2011, when the authorities staged a bloody massacre of striking oil workers in Zhanaozen. By the way, this long-suffering city has become one of the epicenters of the January "gas" protests.
Now the future of Kazakhstan depends precisely on the working class, its awareness of its role in what is happening and its ability to rally around itself the working people of the country. If he manages to stand at the head of the protests and turn the often spontaneous riots of a desperate people into an organized movement for a truly democratic reconstruction of the country, there will be a chance that the uprising will not be crushed or turned into a formal transfer of power from one capitalist clan to another without changing the economic base.
The movement towards a new democracy - democracy in the interests of the majority of society - is possible only if the new government of the country is represented not by the next oligarchies, systemic or non-systemic politicians and bureaucratic clans, but by representatives of the working masses. The interests of the majority of workers can only be represented by political structures independent of the establishment, representing the working class and ready to become the communist vanguard of all the oppressed. And such forces in Kazakhstan, alas, are weak, although we dare to assume that this country, despite the 30-year capital-bureaucratic despotism, has the most vivid experience of the struggle of workers for their rights and freedoms in the entire post-Soviet space.
The movement of workers and the oppressed in Kazakhstan is represented by the Trotskyist tendency, which is relatively rooted in the country's large cities, despite the repressions of the regime, in places close to the working collectives, as well as by the retrograde communists of the Brezhnev persuasion, who have long been on the sidelines of the class struggle. It is clear that these forces are unlikely to automatically become the political vanguard of the lower classes.
There is still no powerful party of the working class and all oppressed groups in Kazakhstan, as well as in most of the republics of the former USSR due to the many years of domination of the revisionists and their direct heirs, who became the new tsars and beys. Therefore, alas, there is no need to talk about a socialist perspective for Kazakhstan in the near future. But if the working class manages to build its line in this element and show independence in its actions, this can be an important step towards the emergence of such a force that can become a compass of the movement towards socialism, and not a cog thrown from the working ship of our time, whose optics are disgusted any bursts of popular unrest in the ex-USSR as "external intrigues" or "wrong revolutions." After all, this is what, as a rule, the majority of post-Soviet and “red” guards are engaged in today, in the worst traditions of opportunism, in solidarity with rotten governments and seriously fearing that her majesty history will rock their cozy sectarian sofas.
We wish the proletariat, the oppressed masses and the people of Kazakhstan success in the struggle for their future and the future of their country!
From our side, the Russian Maoists, it is necessary to direct all our forces to provide class solidarity to the workers of Kazakhstan, to do everything possible to reveal and prevent the plans of the Russian and Kazakh capital to suppress the protests by the force of the tracks of Russian tanks. The fight continues!