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Our comrades in the Red Wedge of Belarus have issued an update of their web page. On March 20th, Belarus held elections and President Lukashenko claimed his third term. The West tried to stir up another "Orange Revolution," but appears to have failed. Some Western news agencies admitted that President Lukashenko was polling 60% before the election, despite being most reviled by the united $tates and the European Union.
The comrades of the Red Wedge have reported their opposition to both Lukashenko and his electoral opponents such as Milinkevicha and Kozulina. In general, Red Wedge condemned electoral politics as a trap in Belarus. Red Wedge correctly predicted weeks in advance that the opposition politicians would not win.
According to Red Wedge, the nationalists of Belarus do have majority support including the 45% of the hired population that is proletariat. 55% of the hired people are in the unproductive sector.
The majority of people in Belarus are not employees. 21.2 percentage points out of the 54.5 that are not employees are pensioners.
Another substantial political grouping is the Liberals seeking Westernization. The Liberals come from the average bourgeoisie according to Red Wedge. There is also a 1 or 2% of the population in the state apparatus as bourgeoisie. Then there are the national-liberals and pseudo-leftists, mostly anarchists, but these are marginal organizations.
The Red Wedge comrades take the Russian Maoist Party's program as their basis. The Red Wedge comrades conclude their article for the red banner of "Marxism-Leninism" with the phrase, "may Stalin and Mao look upon us." Apparently, Red Wedge regards Stalin and Mao positively but sees them as practitioners of Marxism-Leninism. Thus there remains some struggle on that point. We can say that Red Wedge explains the origins of the bourgeoisie in the Soviet party, so there is no disagreement there.
MIM will add only the following comment and hope to hear more from our comrades in Belarus. To our knowledge, the Belarus case is one of a very interesting formation of gender aristocracy. In the united $tates it is nearly impossible to picture any but a migrant as joining the gender aristocracy without being petty-bourgeoisie first. In Belarus, class and gender separate a little more. Lukashenko offered models inside Belarus a classic gender aristocracy deal. He told them they would not be allowed to work outside Belarus as "models," which given their economic status would only mean prostitution in other countries. So Lukashenko does not let wimmin out of Belarus, but he also closed off advertising to foreign models. So now models sing his praises, saying they are well-paid and well-regarded within Belarus--big fish in small ponds.
Strictly-speaking, we should imagine that the patriarchy could see its interests differently in Belarus. The typical male chauvinist pig should have no problem in seeing as many different models as possible, including imports. However, what Lukashenko does is offer the gender aristocracy a deal without threatening the patriarchy. In fact, the gender aristocracy appears to have supported Lukashenko in the election.
It would be a mistake to say that what Lukashenko does is for the benefit of wimmin, because wimmin are an international group and Lukashenko closed the borders to most wimmin. The wimmin outside Belarus who would have been featured in advertising in Belarus lost out. So neither the male chauvinist pigs seeking access to all models and nor wimmin exactly gained from the move to close the borders of Belarus. We'd say it was an in-between solution, the attempt to form a gender aristocracy.
The other point that Belarus reinforces is something we stressed in being able to recognize the position of Amerikan female as man on the social scale. Namely, most countries are not comfortable letting their wimmin out into the world, served naked or semi-naked on a platter. Belarus cracked down on letting models out of the country, and we can see the reasoning. Although all people have problems and fears in travelling to other countries, Amerikan females have fewer than Belarussian females. We suspect that if Bush closed the borders to Amerikan models trying to leave the country, there'd be a major commotion just over that.