By Markar Melkonian

Addressing the National Assembly on Wednesday, September 14, Armenia’s newly appointed Prime Minister Karen Karapetyan acknowledged the “grave” state of Armenia’s economy and said that his new government would tackle that challenge through systemic changes to enhance economic “efficiency.”

There is that word again:  efficiency.  Even after twenty-five years of impoverishment under obedient neoliberal tutelage, Armenia’s ministers, entrepreneurs and NGO’s are still obsessed with an “efficiency” that, as a matter of historical fact, has had little to do with the welfare of the majority population of a country.

Armenia’s New State Religion

Armenians like to think of themselves as a Christian nation.  But if religion is unquestioning faith in things unseen, then the state religion of Armenia today is Capitalism, with its faith in unseen Free Market progress.  

We have sustained this faith even as a generation has wandered in the desert and the next generation is wandering, too, with no Promised Land in sight.  It seems our faith always comes up short; our capitalism is never quite pure enough.  So the economist-priests call upon yet another generation to sacrifice its children to the god of the Free Market, the most efficient of all gods.  

To placate this wrathful god, Karapetyan wants to start with tax breaks to private companies—companies that already pay little if anything in the way of taxes—and he has initiated a bill to rename the Ministry of Economy. It should, he says, be renamed the Investments and Business Support Ministry.  “I want to make it clear to entrepreneurs and investors,” he explained, “that there is an agency to which they can present their grievances, demands, objections and advice.”  (BNE Intellinews, Sept. 26)

How very efficient.  A couple of questions:  Where is the agency to which the residents of the resort town of Jermuk may present their grievances when it comes to cyanide runoff from the Amulsar gold mine?  

Where is the agency to which families evicted from their homes around Northern Avenue can present their grievances?  Or the farmers along the Yeghegis River who have been deprived of irrigation water by privately owned hydro plants?  Or the unpaid Nairit and Byuregan Glass World workers?  Or the hundreds of thousands of families swindled into poverty by privatization?  Where is the agency to which they can present grievances? Clearly, the current Republican Party of Armenia administration, like the two post-Soviet administrations before it, is implacably opposed to workers and the poor.  These observations, plus hundreds of others that we could mention, combine to form a blinking Jumbo Tron confirming the Marxist-Leninist observation that every state is a class state.

The Opposition Is No Better

Yes, the current Sargsyan administration is hostile to workers and the poor.  But the opposition is no better.  

Consider the six parties with the largest number of representatives in the National Assembly.  These parties may describe themselves as liberals, conservatives, nationalists, or any combination of these words, but when it comes to their actual policies and practices, each and every one of these parties has tried to promote one or another faction of Armenia’s big capitalists.  And in the context of Armenia in the twenty-first century, this means support for neoliberalism.  

Neoliberalism, in turn, has meant:  the massive privatization of public property; cutbacks in state provision of healthcare, education, and public transportation; deregulation of private industry, including the removal of environmental protections and provisions for occupational safety; and the shift of the tax burden squarely onto the shoulders of the working class.  The overall effect, in Armenia as elsewhere, has been an enormous transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top.

To be fair, there is one partial exception to the claim that the top six parties in Armenia invariably side with neoliberalism.  The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) has been trying to brand itself as Armenia’s social democratic alternative to the full-throated Free Market cheerleaders.  We know about the oligarchs who are members of the ARF, but even if we set that aside, a review of the record will confirm that the party’s best efforts in the social democratic direction have amounted to little more than attempts to soften the worst effects of neoliberal policies and to salvage some few threads of a social safety net.  ARF leaders sometimes grumble about it, but when push comes to shove, they too line up behind neoliberalism.  

Armenia’s Workers and the Poor Need Their Own Party

On those rare occasions when this or that minister, representative or opposition figure acknowledges these problems, he (gender intended) will almost invariably do so in order to advocate ever more Free Market Reform.  Indeed, the word reform has become an abbreviation for “Free Market reform,” as if no one could imagine any sort of reform other than the Free Market variety that has been failing to live up to its promises for more than thirty years now.

As a result, we have the spectacle of ministers, opposition politicians, MPs, and NGO bureaucrats striding up the podium one after another, each one promising, even more loudly than the one before, to give the country an ever-bigger dose of “market reforms,” to accelerate this famous, never-ending “transition to a market system.”  The same thing over and over again, with no end in sight.  

Meanwhile, the “reforms” in Armenia have worked the same magic they have worked in Chile, Mexico, Peru, Greece, Italy, and Spain.  And so it was that, five days after the 25th anniversary of the final destruction of the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, UNICEF reported that one-third of Armenia’s children are “poor and deprived.”  According to the report, about one third of children in the country aged five years and under are nutritionally deprived, and 23% of children aged three to five are deprived when it comes to early childhood education; moreover, more than half of the country’s children are deprived when it comes to water supply and heating, housing, and access to recreational facilities.  The same month, the Armenian office of the British organization Oxfam reported that 19% of children under the age of five are malnourished, while overall, 60% of the population of Armenia is malnourished, with most adults receiving 2000 or fewer calories daily, compared to the adult requirement of 2410 calories.

Under these circumstances, it should not be surprising that the overriding concerns of the population of Armenia have been unemployment, housing, education and healthcare.  (See, for example, “Armenian General Public Opinion Survey,” Armenia National Voter Study 2007.)  

But to listen to the opposition politicians, one would never guess this.  These days they are busy trading accusations of corruption, applauding two weeks of Sasna Dzrer street theater this past July, and trying their best to foment hatred of everything Russian.  The opposition politicians, it seems, are too busy to bother themselves with Armenia’s real problems.  

So why should the poorest 90% of Armenians lift a finger to support any of these parties?  If the poor and working class majority is to have a voice, it will need a party of its own.  One would think that the Armenian Communist Party holds out promise.  For one thing, it continues to have supporters and some small organizational presence in the countryside; more importantly, the party could benefit from renewed popular appreciation of the achievements of Soviet Armenia, compared the sad post-Soviet reality.  But if the ACP cannot step up to the task, then for the sake of future generations, a new party of working class fighters will have to pick up the red flag.  

The most formidable obstacle to this happening, of course, is a lack of class consciousness among workers in Armenia.  As usual, the lack of class consciousness at the bottom goes hand in hand with acute capitalist class consciousness at the top.  But this is another topic for another time.  

Markar Melkonian is a teacher 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)