By Markar Melkonian 

A couple of days ago, as we know, Armenia’s National Assembly overwhelmingly passed a bill to accept a proposed package of amendments to the Armenian Constitution, to change from a presidential system of government to a parliamentary one. 

Opposition figures claim that the proposal is a power play by the incumbent Sargsyan administration, to extend the rule of his Republican Party.

A recent poll conducted by opponents of the proposed amendments indicated 60% opposition to it.  Whether or not the poll is reliable, the December 6 referendum will probably result in adoption of the amended constitution.

Such is the nature of the vaunted post-Soviet “democracy” that the sons of the Soviet nomenklatura set up twenty-five years ago, when they helped to destroy the last remnants of working-class power in the country.

The rumpus around the proposed amendments amounts to little more than a squabble among several cliques of plutocrats jockeying for advantage over each other.  The issue of how much weight the National Assembly carries relative to the office of the Presidency is important to Armenia’s “family businessmen” and the silly one-man shops that pass themselves off as political parties these days. 

Some of the plutocrats are on the Sargsyan side of the trough, and others are not, but they all want to push their snouts as deep as they can into the privatized chow.

There is no room at the trough for the poor and the working class majority, of course.  So why should they care one way or another about the proposed constitutional amendments?

The National Assembly and the Presidency are both institutions of, by, and for the plutocracy, and the office of the Prime Minister will be, too.  Perhaps the issue of the proposed amendments has some tangential bearing on the rest of society, but if it makes any difference at all to those at the bottom, then it does not make very much of a difference.   With or without the amendments, one or another faction of Armenia’s “big” capitalist class will continue exercise a political monopoly over workers, in the interests of foreign capital. 

In the debate over the proposed amendments, as in other debates, the Sargsyan administration claims the high ground of democracy and human rights, and so does the opposition. 

But our compatriots know what all of the pretty phrases from both sides are worth.  The Kimprom workers know this.  Abandoned mothers in half-empty villages know this.  So do the Voch Talanin (No to Plunder) demonstrators, commuters on privatized buses, and consumers of privatized electrical power. 

Jobless young people know that the pretty phrases are worse than worthless, and so do pensioners, dispossessed farmers, and plaintiffs in Armenia’s corrupt courts.

We all know that articles and provisions in the 1995 Constitution “protecting” human and civil rights were just window dressing.  We know, for example, that according to Article 2 of the 1995 Constitution, “The usurpation of power by any organization or individual constitutes a crime.”

At the same time, we have witnessed the impunity of the Nemetz Rubo’s, the Suren Khachatryan’s, and any of forty other brutal oligarchs and cronies of presidents, present and past—not to mention the sold-out judges and ministers, and the corporate bosses who have heaped one abuse after another upon workers, consumers, farmers, rivers, and forests.  We know about the pretty phrases in the 1995 constitution, and we have no reason to believe that the proposed amendments will be any different. 

On Baghramyan Avenue (where the Presidential Palace is located), the riot police in their flak jackets and boots push their shields against young people who demand that Armenia’s electrical system be made a public utility.

Judges certify the eviction of families from their homes on Buzand Street, for the sake of luxury hotel developers and casino operators. 

Officials raise bus fares and electricity bills for privatized bus systems and power grids that have fallen into the hands of their cronies, foreign and domestic.  Ministers green-light open-pit mining operations in Teghut, ignoring the appeals of residents of the region.  And on and on it goes.

At every turn, the repressive institutions of the state array themselves on the side of the plutocrats, against wage earners, against the unemployed and the underemployed, against small farmers, the poor, the disenfranchised, and those who must live with the poisoned water and topsoil. 

Clearly, the Republic of Armenia is a capitalist state:  it is a state dedicated to stabilizing and reproducing the political monopoly of big capitalists and their foreign benefactors, against the interests of the workers and the poor whom they themselves acknowledge, in their actions if not in words, as their class enemies.

There is a truth here that V.I. Lenin knew very well, but that the “new thinkers” who came to power twenty-five years ago have done their best to bury:  every state, properly speaking, is a class state.  Every state is forged in the image of a given class or alliance of classes, and functions to advance the interests of that class.

Radio Liberty and the liberals deny this.  They like to talk instead about “the rule of law.”  But clearly, laws do not rule.  (How could they?)  Our capitalist rulers make the laws, and when it suits their purposes, they break them, too.  This is as true in Germany and the USA as it is in the Republic of Armenia.

Moreover, ever since the beginning of modernity, it has become clearer and clearer that men do not rule, either:  classes rule. 

This explains why, over the past twenty-five years in Yerevan, policies have changed little at all from one administration to the next.  The reason for this is quite clear:  in the highly stratified societies that exist today almost everywhere on earth, economic power simply IS political power.   

Armenia’s capitalists know this instinctively.  And they know that by all means they must prevent this knowledge from spreading to the workers whom they exploit and the consumers whom they scam. 

Imagine for a moment what would happen if tomorrow the Kimprom workers in Vanadzor were to raise red flags emblazoned with the hammer and sickle.  Imagine how the fear of contagion would invert the smiles of the plant owners and the provincial governors, and how the capitalists would start hacking to cough up the back pay that they owe “their” workers.   

The capitalists will always have their little dramas, their rigged elections, their personality conflicts and proposed legislation.  As long as they think they can get away with it, they will continue to produce distractions that are supposed to fire up our enthusiasm for one side or another in their intramural squabbles. 

But at what point will poor people and workers in Armenia start to sum up their own experiences and learn their own lessons?  At what point will Armenia’s workers get tired of being ashamed that they are workers? 

At what point will they start to organize an anti-capitalist opposition?

Markar Melkonian is a philosophy instructor and an author. His books include Richard Rorty’s Politics:  Liberalism at the End of the American Century (1999), Marxism: A Post-Cold War Primer (Westview Press, 1996), and My Brother’s Road (2005).