By Markar Melkonian

Another May Day is upon us.

International Workers’ Day has its origins in the U.S.A., but for more than a century American politicians have tried to rebrand the date.  They proclaimed May 1 “Americanization Day,” then “Loyalty Day,” and then “Law Day.” 

So far their efforts have failed. For millions of American workers, and for workers in scores of other countries, too, May 1 is still International Workers’ Day, a day of working class solidarity and pride.

For decades, though, working class solidarity has been unfashionable in countries under neoliberal tutelage.  It was every man for himself in the post-Soviet era.  According to the “new thinking,” the highest virtue was not responsibility to others, or loyalty, or even hard work. 

The highest virtue, we were told, was entrepreneurship.  Each individual was to either sink or swim, and if he sank he had no one but himself to blame, because he had failed to adapt to the Free Market reality.  Unemployment was the Market’s moral judgment against him, and his punishment too. 

Back in the final days of the Cold War, no one better exemplified the “new thinking” in Yerevan than Levon Ter Petrosyan, the soon-to-be first president of Free Independent Armenia. 

In an interview, Ter Petrosyan claimed that his Soviet predecessors had “wrested criminally” from Armenians their “natural aptitude in business.”  (Armenia at the Crossroads, ed. Gerard Libaridian, 1991, p. 116.)  Thus, Ter Petrosyan added yet another crime to the long list of real and imaginary crimes of “Stalinist totalitarianism.” 

Our Natural Aptitude in Business:

Armenians like to believe that they have a natural aptitude in business.  But if this is true, then we are hardly special in this respect.  If Armenians have such an aptitude, then we share this trait with Greeks, Haitians, Lebanese, Gujarati’s, Egyptians, Jamaicans, Filipinos, and many other notably business-smart nations.  

In 2015, for instance, we learned that Uganda, not Armenia, was the world’s most “entrepreneurial” nation.  (https://www.good.is/articles/why-uganda-is-the-worlds-most-entrepreneurial-nation)

On the other hand, one seldom hears about the business acumen of Norwegians, New Zealanders, or Canadians.  The natural aptitude for business seems to thrive in the soil of generalized poverty. 

Thanks in part to leaders like Ter Petrosyan and the “family businessmen” they helped to empower, Armenia now has generalized poverty.  Visitors to Free Independent Armenia may notice the unemployed loiterers on the streets of poor neighborhoods, the children in unheated classrooms, the private restaurants on confiscated park land, the empty villages, the thousands of single-parent families in the hinterlands, the polluted rivers, and the vast open-pit mines.  Evidently, our fabled aptitude in business is gloriously unhindered. 

The big NGO’s portray Armenia’s businessmen as heroic saviors of the nation. But as long as there have been Armenians, the vast majority of them have worked for a living. 

The wealth that the oligarchs scoop off the table is produced by their own dear compatriots—the Armenian workers who dig up and manufacture the raw stuffs of the earth, who drive cabs, write code, harvest and pack food, wait on tables, work the assembly lines and lathes, teach in the schools, stock warehouses, operate computers, and staff hospitals and clinics.  

The return to capitalist rule was supposed to unleash invention and innovation and result in a new prosperous Armenia, but instead it has enriched swindlers, gutted public education, demoralized the citizenry, and squandered the considerable achievements of Soviet industry.

Fact and Fallacy

The belief used to be widespread and pretty much uncontested, at least by some of our compatriots:  Armenians thrive under capitalism.  We are natural-born wheeler-dealers. 

Individual Armenians have of course done well by capitalism.  We all know their names.  And yet Armenia’s return to capitalist rule has, as a matter of fact, diminished the country’s population and impoverished the majority of its people.  

Some readers of these lines will protest that capitalism in Armenia is not the genuine article.  (See: “Capitalism Run Amok Is Just Plain Capitalism,” Hetq Online, 17 Jan. 2015.) When pressed to describe their preferred “true capitalism,” they fall back on recommendations to rein in Free Enterprise, to regulate it and make it less “free.”  But they have failed to explain how this is supposed to take place without an organized working class opposition that can challenge the political monopoly of the capitalist class.

So how did we get from the fact that:  

(A) Individual Armenians have prospered under capitalism,

to the conclusion that:

(B) The nation as a whole will thrive under capitalism? 

Clearly, there is a difference between the prosperity of individuals and the prosperity of a society as a whole.  And yet toastmasters, business incubators, and Junior Achievement speakers regularly present these two claims as an argument that is close to self-evident.  This argument is what still gives business conferences in countries like Armenia their peculiar patriotic and millenarian tone. 

Notice, however, that the argument is valid only if we supply the missing premise: (A2) if individual Armenians prosper under capitalism, then the nation as a whole will thrive under capitalism.  Without this premise, conclusion (B) does not follow with either certainty or probability.

Unfortunately, the missing premise, “If individual Armenians thrive under capitalism, then Armenians as a people will thrive under capitalism,” is false, since the first part of the premise, the If- part, is true, while the last part, the then- part, is false:  it so happens that Armenians as a people have not thrived under capitalism, and there is not much reason to believe that they will in the foreseeable future.  The fallacious argument may be satisfying to some people, and it may serve the ideological purposes of the big NGOs, but it is no less fallacious for all that. 

The next time you hear about our natural aptitude for business and the wonderful future this portends for the nation, you might request evidence of a positive correlation between business acumen and the prosperity of the nation as a whole.  And in the absence of evidence, you have the right to reject that assumption. 

*        *        *

For young people entering the labor market these days, the neoliberal slogans and buzzwords do not sound as exciting as they did to the counter-revolutionaries thirty years ago.

There’s not much enthusiasm in Yerevan these days for philanthropists, election monitors, business incubators, or the big NGO’s.  But there is a new surge of initiative and creativity in the streets, public squares, and social media.  A new generation has been mounting protests and campaigns against election fixing, the privatization of pensions and public land, violence against women, the nonpayment of back wages, the dumping of toxins into rivers and ground water, fee hikes for public transportation, and rising electricity rates.  Perhaps a new generation of workers is tired of being ashamed that they are workers. 

Protests alone, however, will fail to achieve their goals without a sustained organizational foundation. 

Looking forward to the May Days to come, let us recognize that if Armenia’s poor and working class majority is to fight back effectively in the class war that their capitalist rulers are waging against them, then they will need their own organizations—strong unions and a militant party of labor capable of mounting and sustaining the fight for workers’ power.

 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). 

Photo: armenpress.am