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VILNIUS, LITHUANIA -- A tourist spent mid-November
in Lithuania, a former republic of the Soviet
Union. The tour confirmed that Lithuania exists in
economic conditions at the upper end of what would
be considered the Third World -- all in a country
closer to Sweden than Africa. According to the
right-wing Heritage Foundation, Lithuania has a
minimum wage, but the government never enforces
it. For this, the Heritage Foundation awards
Lithuania positive marks -- a good indication of
anti-proletarian politics.(1) If Lithuania did enforce its minimum wage, workers would be guaranteed the equivalent of just over $100 a month in a country of 3.7 million people, averaging a per capita income of $2200 a year. In 1999 the government raised the minimum to $115 a month -- about what minimum wage workers in the United $tates benefiting from imperialist super- profits make in less than three days. Because of inflation, the minimum wage has meant less and less to the Lithuanian people. "Between 1990 and 1996 the average gross monthly wage in Lithuania increased 206 times. Nevertheless, the real average net wage in 1996 was only 32.9% of the 1990 average and even lower in the private sector," said the Lithuanian Human Development Report 1997 of the United Nations. In 1990 the Lithuanians formed a country independent of the Soviet Union.(2) In contrast to $2200 a year, the per capita income of the United $tates was over $24,000 a year in 1999, more than 10 times higher than in Lithuania. The phony Marxists and labor bureaucrats of the imperialist countries say that such a difference is a result of the inefficiency of Lithuanian workers, not the exploitation of the Lithuanian people by imperialism. Alone in the world, the MIM and its fraternal allies confront this question scientifically. Other organizations including most calling themselves communist or even "Maoist" talk about overthrowing imperialism without quantifying what that means. They accept bourgeois economic canard about the relative efficiency of imperialist country workers and their capital -- as if such capital were not the plunder of the Third World and as if such capital were produced by those imperialist country workers using it. Should such phony "Maoists" come to power, they will set up the creation of social- imperialism from the beginning, for they shall fail to correct super-exploitation, never having measured it and having abandoned the labor theory of value long ago, usually in the guise of fighting ultra-leftism. An attempt to find something in Lithuania that is 10 times slower or more than in the U$A is a futile enterprise. Throughout the economy the tourist reporter found nothing justifying this gap. The taxi does not run 10 times slower when transporting people. The bus is every bit as fast and the cross-country trains may be ever so slightly slower than U.$. trains, but certainly not twice as slow,. never mind more than 10 times slower. The Lithuanian airline is every bit as fast as Western ones. There is nothing in the transport sector to justify saying that transport workers are more than 10 times as inefficient as Amerikan workers. Going into a restaurant, the chef does not cook the food and the waiter does not bring the food 10 times slower than in the United $tates. The tourist in fact found no difference in service. This is important, because service workers are over 58 percent of the workers in Lithuania, with about 20 percent in agriculture and 20 percent in industry, a much larger "productive" sector than in the United $tates. However, sitting in a shiny and clean atmosphere that would rank as upper-middle class in the United $tates, the tourist did pay $2.75 for a dinner that would cost $8 or more in the United $tates. At this, the phony Marxist is apt to pounce saying that the Lithuanian workers are the same as the Amerikan petty-bourgeoisie that the phony Marxists call "workers," because Lithuanians make less but their prices are also less. MIM has debunked this line of reasoning before with reference to global price indices. In many Third World countries, price indices are actually higher than in the United $tates. In the case of Lithuania, there is a particular history to consider in the question of prices. No doubt since the memory of Stalin lingers on, there is some limit to how far the ruling class can oppress the workers. Prices for some goods and services, especially energy and water remain under government control. In other words, a minority of the economy has price fixing. Even so, prices are not more than 10 times lower than in the United $tates. More importantly, the tourist translates prices into U.S. dollars. The ruling class of Lithuania has decided to fix the Lithuanian currency to the U.S. dollar at 4 litas to a dollar. $2.75 is not cheap for Lithuanians for dinner anymore than $30 is cheap for one persyn's U.$. dinner. $2.75 is cheap for Amerikans traveling there because of how the Lithuanian ruling class sees itself fitting into the U.$. world order. On the one hand, fixing the currency to the U.$. dollar means that speculators who want to attack the Lithuanian currency have to attack the U.$. dollar, something not apt to happen. In this world, where the Lithuanian bourgeoisie is the junior partner to the Western imperialists, the Lithuanian bourgeoisie has managed to eliminate the speculation question. On the other hand, the rate at which the Lithuanian lita is fixed to the dollar is a classic strategy of super-exploitation. The exchange rate does not represent a negotiation between Lithuanian producers and imperialist country consumers. The government sets the rate and allows the imperialists into the country without visas and without restrictions on so-called investment. The following is a list of prices found in the heart of Vilnius and its most tourist-oriented area.
*Candy bars, 13 cents and 25 cents Some items that are imported and left in their foreign forms are closer in price to what they are in the imperialist countries:
*Newsweek magazine in English, $4
Some such items would be clearly beyond the reach of the Lithuanian workers. The strategy of the Lithuanian bourgeoisie is to attract Western consumer dollars. Clearly, the Western consumer can walk out of Lithuania with quite a bundle of merchandise for very little money. The old parts of the Soviet Union still buy the plurality of Lithuania's goods, but Germany is now in second place. The fixing of the currency at its artificially low level by the Lithuanian ruling class is essentially a way of selling the Lithuanian working class to the imperialists cheap -- in one fell swoop. It is also a way of selling other Lithuanian resources cheap. When we say "super-exploitation" we cannot fail to mention the plunder of Lithuania forced on its people by its government propped up by the imperialists. Lithuania is not in the worst of Third World economic catastrophes by any means, but in Lithuania we can certainly speak of a white proletariat -- an exploited class of white-skinned people -- an important lesson to those who would deny the relevance of imperialism in class analysis. The imperialist country phony Marxists also take up the colonialist reasoning that poor countries are poor because they are lazy. In fact, the more Western imperialism has penetrated Lithuania, the higher the unemployment rate has become. Under Soviet social-imperialism, Lithuania had no unemployment, but in 1998 it stood at 13.3% according to the United Nations,(3) a tad higher than in other European countries with imperialist systems and 10 times higher incomes. The Lithuanian unemployment level is slightly high compared with countries with 10 times higher income, but it cannot account for why the Western imperialist countries have more than 10 times higher income per capita. Even if Lithuanian workers were 10 times more unemployed than in the West, thus accounting for the gap in per capita income, the fact would be a damnation of capitalist imperialism and not the Lithuanian worker. If capitalism cannot find anything for Lithuanian workers to do, then the Lithuanian proletariat can organize the economy for its own benefit as it was once under Stalin. Of course, in humyn terms, unemployment in Lithuania is much more severe than in Sweden, France or Germany, because Lithuania is not raking in the spoils of imperialism, so its welfare system is weaker. Tourists will observe beggars in the street, and the most disturbing part is that they are almost all older wimmin, disabled people and small children. The plight of the elderly and unemployment cause some people in the ex-Soviet Union to hanker for the days of Brezhnev social-imperialism. MIM would only point out that that system contained its own internal bourgeoisie -- the Yeltsins and Gorbachevs -- in the party who brought about the current state of affairs. In actual fact, going back to Brezhnev is not going back far enough. Brezhnev did not crack down on the Yeltsins and he would have had to have rehabilitated Stalin to do so. No Soviet leader after Khruschev rehabilitated Stalin's image or learned from Mao, and so the bourgeoisie in the party got stronger and stronger. Every year that Stalin receded in the memory of the Soviet Union, conditions for the proletariat in the Soviet Union got worse. Notes:
1. http://database.townhall.com/heritage/index/countr
y.cfm?ID=88
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