By Markar Melkonian  

Twenty-five years ago, Free Market Moseses in Yerevan announced that socialism was dead in word and in deed, forever and ever.  In a country that the U.S. Strategic Air Command had targeted for nuclear strike by forwardly deployed bombers stationed in Turkey, demonstrators in Opera Square hoisted portraits of their Free Market hero, American President Ronald Reagan, the savior of the Captive Nations.

Fast forward to 2016.  Bitter regret now seizes the former Captive Nations, from Budapest to Belogorsk.  In Armenia—a country that western pundits describe as a rare post-Soviet success story—the years since Freedom have plunged the majority into poverty, as the population has shrunk to less than three-quarters of its Soviet size. A USAID survey conducted in 1999 showed that 54% of the sample population preferred life in Soviet Armenia to life in Free Independent Armenia. Six years later, researchers at the United Nations calculated that, barring unforeseen events, Armenia’s population would drop by another 500,000 by 2050. (Arminfo, March 2, 2005) 

Meanwhile, a new generation of“democratic socialists” has descended on what used to be Ronald Reagan’s front lawn.  According to a YouGov survey earlier this year, 43% of Americans under thirty have a favorable view of socialism, while fewer than one-third have a favorable view of capitalism.(https://www.washingtonpost.com, 5 February, 2016) 

Of course, one could ask what the word socialism might mean to the young Americans surveyed.  Whatever it might mean, though,some freemarketeers are worried: “It is safe to say that billions of dollars have been spent over the past two decades promoting and educating the public on the benefits of capitalism and free markets,” the pro-capitalist website breitbart.com noted shortly after the survey results were published, “Yet, something has gone horribly wrong.”

What went horribly wrong, for young Americans in the bottom 99% at least, was capitalism.  In America, the global showcase of capitalism, a new generation has come of age with a devastating recession,stagnant wages, poor job prospects, eroding benefits, crippling student loan debt, a declining middle class, and a huge and expanding gap between the super rich and the rest.

It would be interesting to hear from Armenia’s old champions of The American Way--Levon Ter Petrosyan, Vazgen Manukyan, Paruyr Hairikyan, and all the rest of them.  What do they have to say about developments in the United States of America, their model of Free Enterprise?

Armenia’s majority--the poor, the under-employed, the unemployed, pensioners, displaced farmers, working class women, youth, and consumers—they don’t have much to celebrate in their diminished and impoverished homeland. They have been provided with plenty of Free Enterprise indoctrination, but not much in the way of jobs, affordable housing, safe streets, legal redress, or decent schools.  The champions of The American Way have gutted Armenia’s industrial infrastructure, lengthened the work week, lowered the legal working age, and massively privatized public property without compensating the dispossessed.  They have logged out forests, poisoned rivers, polluted aquifers, and washed out swaths of topsoil. They have cut healthcare, slashed teacher’s salaries, and raised university tuition beyond what most families can afford.  They have presided over escalating domestic abuse and driven women back into their “traditional roles” in the dark.  Their Free Enterprise has caused wave after wave of emigration, produced tens of thousands of abandoned families, and emptied the countryside.  They have rigged elections, pushed poor families out of their homes, neighborhoods, and farms, and allowed capitalist gangsters to get away with murder, literally. 

For everyone except a small minority at the top, much has gone horribly wrong in Free Independent Armenia. The capitalists, clearly, are waging class war, but it is a war that acompact, well-equipped capitalist army is waging against an unarmed, aimless, confused mass of workers who, so far,have not revealed the faintest most fleeting spark of awareness that they constitute a class under attack. Unless and until resistance rises from below, Armenia’s capitalist rulers will continue to drive the rest of the population into the ground like a tent stake.  And this does not bode well for the nation’s future. 

There is reason for hope, though. The Dem.Em (I Oppose) protests two years ago against attempts to privatize the pension system achieved victory, however limited and revocable that victory may be.  So also in the case of strong popular resistance to bus and electricity rate hikes.  There are clear lessons here:  it was only thanks to broad-based solidarity and direct action that workers, commuters, and consumers were able to push the ruling class back from its maximalist plans. 

Armenia, a country ravaged by capitalist rule, needs proactive unions.  But where are they?  The Confederation of Trade Unions has little influence in the private sector, where the worst abuses take place.  When the owners ofthe privatized Kimprom and Nairit chemical plants get away with nonpayment of months of back wages to workers, they are loudly announcing that wage earners should not expect anything in the way of even the most basic workers’ rights in Armenia. The captains of industry are themselves teaching workers in Armenia that if they want a better future for their children and their fellow workers, then they had better get organized to fight along class lines.In other countries, workers facing such extreme abuses have occupied factories, mines, and offices and operated them in their own interest. 

Armenia has dozens of self-styled political parties, including a few one-man shops run by oligarchs, egomaniacs, and divinely anointed saviors.  To the extent that these parties have any discernible platforms at all, they are indistinguishable:  one party or another might be more or less hostile to Moscow, but they all pretty much accept without question the same assumptions of liberalism that have done so much harm over the course of the past three decades.  There is a common feeling that elections are just a stage-managed spectacle involving back-room haggling, vote buying, and ballot stuffing.  No wonder, then, that electoral politics arouses little excitement. 

The level of political debate in Armenia is worse than a joke. What we hear for the most part are the old free market fairy tales and jumbled-up NGO jargon, combined with a noxious mixture of nationalistic emotionalism, Turk-hate demagoguery, conspiracy theories, and Russo phobia. Thebest way to clear this fetid air and to raise the level of political debate in the country would be for young people to start educatingthemselves in Marxist theory. 

Among the dozens of nominal political parties in the country, there are several that call themselves socialist.  But none of these parties have a record of fighting back in the class war that the oligarchs have been waging against Armenian workers.  There are a couple of titular communist parties, too.  But until now, even as events have prepared the ground for a popular reception, these parties have for some reason remainedinert.

All of this underscores what more and more of our compatriots have been observing in recent years:  the conditions exist for the emergence of a strong working class party in Armenia--but none has yet been forthcoming.

The poor and disenfranchised majority needs a party of its own.  They need a party of, by, and for wage earners, women, youth, pensioners, and consumers.They need a militant party of labor—a party organized to defend workers and to fight back in the class struggle that the plutocrats are waging against the rest of the country.

Where is our communist party?  Sitting on its hands, waiting for a sign from Moscow?  The day is past due.  Comrades, get to work! 

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).