Building in Russia (1963)

From the June 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

During September and October, 1962, members of the Eastern Counties Federation of Building Trades Employers visited Russia and made a fairly extensive study of their building methods. Resulting from this visit, they have published a very revealing pamphlet, Building in Russia. They say:

“We believe we are the first group of British builders to examine the structure and organisation of the Soviet construction industry, our report covers a wide field, with the emphasis on housing. We hope it gives a broad but accurate picture of what we saw in a tour of some 6,000 miles extending from Leningrad, through Moscow to Volgograd in the South".

The British building trade unionist can, with this material, compare his wages and conditions with those of his brother in Russia.

In order to speed up housebuilding, emphasis has been placed on prefabricated factory built units, rather than the traditional brick-built house of this country. “The aim is to build compact residential areas with blocks of flats, 5,8 and 10 storey, densities being on average 150 persons per acre. Two room flats predominate . . .”

As the State owns and controls all capital for construction, area building Trusts are formed to decide upon design and the price of each contract. The chief of the Trust and his managers then negotiate with the Unions to determine site conditions. However, with a fixed price for each job there is a definite limit to the pay which can be offered! This has an all too familiar ring; haggling with the boss for terms that would hardly satisfy the militant on most British building sites. For example bonus earnings up to 50 per cent. of wages can apparently be earned with an efficient Trust. In comparison, British Union agreements have often settled for a minimum of 20 per cent. of earnings, but where union organisation is strong on the building site, bonuses nearer 100 per cent. and over are expected and negotiated.

The State apparently fixes the wages, determines the amount of bonus to be earned and insists on a 3.7 per cent. profit from all contracts finished at scheduled cost. When a profit is realised, an enterprise fund for the building worker within the Trust is formed, to be shared into workers’ bonuses, housing and holiday facilities; Living conditions of the unfortunates who work for an inefficient Trust clearly reveal the unequal equality of Soviet “Socialism.”

The standard of accommodation for the Russian working class is low compared with Britain’s New Towns’ traditional 2 and 3 bedroom terraced house. During 1964-1965, says the report, a suburb of Moscow will provide “90,000 people in flats, 10 per cent. of which will have one room, 60 per cent. 2, and 30 per cent. 3 rooms. Living rooms are used for sleeping in.”

To speed up house production, the Soviet Government have mass housing projects, with strictly narrow limits of layout and design. They say that the housing problem will be solved by 1970. One thing, however, which has resulted is monotonous city suburbs which are “depressing and oppressive despite open spaces.”

Building conditions for the wage earner under Soviet State and British private capitalism are so nearly alike that differences are hard to detect.

For a 40 hour week, typical wage rates in Moscow range from £6 per week (minimum) for labourers, £12 carpenters, £16 bricklayers to £20 for a general foreman and £40 for a building Trust manager. Lost time due to bad weather qualifies for half pay, whilst overtime qualifies for double time.

Building trade rates of pay in Britain are stated to be, at present, labourers £11 9s. and all skilled trades £12 7s. Soviet workers may pay less in rent which does not exceed 4 per cent. or 5 per cent. of the family income, but what they can purchase on commodities is small indeed. “Foodstuffs are two or three times dearer than in Britain, a poor quality suit costs £40, an overcoat £80 and a pair of shoes £15.”

Perhaps the most important difference between the two industries concerns strikes and tea breaks. Whereas the British trade unions clearly recognise the vital need to withdraw labour in times of dispute, and take refreshments and rest for dirty and arduous tasks, Soviet unions are denied these essential rights. The pamphlet drily comments “Tea breaks and strikes are not in the industrial vocabulary.”

All these comparisons show only too clearly that capitalism functions in the Soviet Union, with a working class living on a very poor standard. Although it was not the object they had in mind, the building employers’ pamphlet certainly exposes the claim that Socialism is enjoyed by building workers, or by any other workers, in Russia.

J. P.

Finance and Industry: Business Men in Russia (1960)

The Finance and Industry column from the August 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Business Men in Russia

A team of business men from the Institute of Directors visited Russia to meet the heads of Russian industry, “to get an overall picture of top Russian management policy in industry and commerce.” An interview with one of the team, Mr. Geoffrey Kitchen, Chairman of the Pearl Assurance Co., by Mr. Alexander Thomson, City Editor of the Evening Standard, was published under the heading, “This Capitalist was so impressed by Russia” (Evening Standard, 8/7/60).

When we read what so impressed him we may surmise that he is rather naive. 

He tells us:

There are no strikes. But not because they are forbidden, as we sometimes imagine. The reason is that everybody in Russia realises that strikes do more harm than good.

Mr. Kitchen accepts that this is true because his opposite numbers in Russia told him so, and, as he says, “all doors were thrown open to us. We were given every facility to ask questions. There were no barriers anywhere.” But are we to take this literally? Did Mr. Kitchen actually ask his questions of Russian workers themselves, in conditions safeguarding them against possible consequences? Or did he ask only the Russian bosses (rather like being assured by the governor of a prison that all the prisoners are happy!)

Did it not seem odd to Mr. Kitchen that in all the countries of the world where workers can organise and strike with comparative impunity they do so, yet the tens of millions of wage earners in Russia decide, unanimously, not to? And note the implied criticism of British, American and all other workers, all except those in Russia: every one of the latter realises that strikes are no good, but the rest of us just haven't enough sense to see it. Perhaps Mr. Kitchen hopes that British workers who have the habit of going on strike against the advice of the managements will be a little more co-operative when reminded of the example set by workers in Russia.

Mr. Kitchen was asked by Thomson to sum up his impressions of Russia:

Both our systems seem to be working towards the same end. We are approaching it from different directions. But we are both aiming at the prosperity and goodwill of our people.

Does it make Mr. Kitchen sad to see that while every Russian worker gratefully responds to the kindness and good intentions of his bosses, workers here still harbour unjust suspicions that their bosses have something else in view besides the “prosperity” of those they employ?

No Stability for Profits

In his last speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr. Heathcoat Amory, on 11th July, told the House of Commons that among his aims during his 2½ years of office had been to maintain full employment and price stability, and he was worried concerning the possibility that rising wages might endanger the stability achieved. One thing he did not achieve was stability of profits. According to an analysis of industrial company profits made by Exchange Telegraph Co. and reported in the Evening Standard (8/7/60) industrial profits of 2,387 companies were about 20 per cent. higher in six months of 1960 than in the first half of 1959. If the companies reporting on the rest of the year show a similar increase, 1960 will be a record year for shareholders since the end of the war. Though profits, with some setbacks, have been rising for a dozen years on no previous occasion has there been a jump of anything like 20 per cent. Between 1958 and 1959 the increase was about 6 per cent.

German Success Story

In Western Germany there are now almost no unemployed, though for years there were rarely fewer than a million. It is an interesting example of the way capitalism “proves” that there are first too many people and then too few. When trade was stagnant, work could not be found and many people in Germany deplored the inflow of refugees from Russian-controlled Eastern Germany. Then production and trade expanded, the unemployed were absorbed and hundreds of thousands of workers are now being brought in from neighbouring countries to fill the vacant jobs.

There are other instructive things to note about Western Germany. In Great Britain employers and politicians (including the retiring Chancellor of the Exchequer, Heathcoat Amory) warn us of the importance of boosting exports, of keeping up the exchange value of the £ and of piling up a larger gold and dollar reserve. They tell us that if these things are done all will be well, but if we fail to do them we shall be in trouble. Claims for a reduction of working hours to 40, and claims for higher wages are resisted on the ground that such measures would weaken the export position of the £ and be generally dangerous.

On occasion the employers have quoted Germany as a land in which the workers work harder and longer and complain less. Let us then look at Germany: truly a capital success story. Exports booming, the mark strong and getting stronger, a gold reserve twice as large as that in Britain and production increasing much faster. Surely in such a country the government and the employers must be coming forward to reward their diligent and faithful workers, showering higher wages on them and begging them to work less hard and take more leisure?

But not at all. The German Economics Minister, Professor Erhard, talks just like the British political and business heads. The following is from The Times (4/7/60), reporting Erhard:

He gave warning against the union's demand for a 40-hour working week, and wondered if a slump was necessary to bring people to their senses. He criticized employers for passing on increased costs to the consumer: an annual price increase of 3 per cent. was no bagatelle, he said, if it continued year after year.

Automation was not the universal panacea. German workmanship was not what it was, and craftsmanship had an important role to play if quality was to be maintained.

Dr. Amory’s "Cures ”

In our issue for March of this year reference was made to the claim that Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 budget was successful in curing the growing industrial and trade stagnation; and to the retort by Mr. Enoch Powell that the government’s budget policy had nothing whatever to do with it because in the normal fashion of trade contraction and expansion recovery was already taking place before the budget could have had any effect. As he put it, “the patient was up and playing golf before he could swallow the medicine.”

Now we are presented with the reverse side of the same problem. After expansion had been going on for some time, and seemingly in a manner regarded by the Chancellor as satisfactory—after all the patient was supposed to have been restored to health and vigour by medicine prescribed by him—notes of alarm were heard again and the patient’s incipient fever was to be damped down by the credit restrictions and then by the higher bank rate. But if the evidence shows that the patient was on the upgrade before taking the medicine in 1959 it now seems that the fever was already passing away before the new medicine of 1960. For the idea of the credit squeeze was to lessen the hire purchase buying of consumer goods, but many critics of the Chancellor’s action are arguing that sales were already falling off before the squeeze was imposed so the squeeze was unnecessary. A Guardian editorial (4/7/60) said:

The past week has brought fresh support for those who questioned the need for the Chancellor's latest round of credit restrictions. The Board of Trade’s admission that hire purchase sales in May dropped below last year’s level simply confirms the view, expressed by many manufacturers and traders, that the boom in demand for consumer durable goods had already slackened off. Reports continue to come in of growing stocks of household appliances in the hands of retailers; and Vauxhall has announced the ending of overtime on its car assembly lines. Since the pressure of the consumer boom is letting up just at the time when capital investment by industry is beginning to rise sharply, the Government ought to have been congratulating itself on achieving a desirable balance in the economy, rather than imposing new restrictions.

Mr. Andrew Shonfield, Economic Editor of the Observer, wrote (3/7/60) in similar vein: “There is now firm evidence of the official figures showing that production of consumer goods by the engineering industries actually turned down in the first quarter of the  year—well before the Budget.”

The Economist (2/7/60) took the line that the Chancellor had become alarmed about the prospect of demands for higher wages being met halfway by employers who hoped to be able to recoup themselves by charging higher prices, and that the credit restrictions were imposed by Amory in the desire to discourage that frame of mind and make wage increases more difficult. The Economist thinks that “once again, wages are becoming a key issue in British economic policy ”—as if there was ever a time when they weren’t.

Edgar Hardcastle

Recent events in Russia (1956)

Party News from the July 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

Report of Meeting at Denison House

As was reported briefly in the May issue of the Socialist Standard a successful meeting to put the Socialist estimate of recent changes in the situation in Russia was held at short notice at the Denison House Hall.

Two speakers stated the Party viewpoint. Comrade D'Arcy devoted his attention mainly to consideration of the international aspect of the question.

Comrade Young dealt chiefly with the Communist Party in this country.

Unfortunately, the raucous and rowdy elements who have been noticed around the Party platform at Hyde Park recently were conspicuous by their absence, preferring not to avail themselves of the opportunity to state the C. P. case inside the hall.

Even so, there were the usual individuals who heard for the first time that the Russian Government borrows vast sums upon which it regularly pays 4% interest

Comrade D'Arcy quoted from the election speeches of Kruschev, Bulganin and Molotov (delivered in 1955) to show that they were still eulogising Stalin a year after his death.

He further drew attention to the impact of the international economic situation on Russian affairs. He thought that the renunciation of Stalin and the appeals for co-existence were the reflection of the Moscow Government's need for a larger share of world trade. The economic development of Russia would be bound to produce its political counterpart. The growth of the working class in that country would make it more difficult to run by simple police state methods.

Several amusing instances were given by the second speaker of the ludicrous position of the British Communist Party throughout the years. After quoting the Daily Worker to show that the articles on the death of Stalin were completely repudiated two years later, the speaker gave examples of the antics of the Communists resulting from their lack of principles. Supporting the Labour Party in 1924—opposing it in 1929—supporting it in 1940 and 1945, supporting the war, opposing it—supporting it.

Calling on the unemployed to march to die military barracks at Burnley and fraternise with the soldiers, only to find them empty, and converted into slum property.

With reference to the so-called “day-to-day” struggle, the speaker read two extracts, one from the Daily Worker and one from the Workers Weekly. 

“Many times we light-mindedly call for strike action without the semblance of preparation having been made, so that in some districts, when workers see our comrades, they are apt to say, 'Hullo, what are we to strike for to-day?’ "—Daily Worker,  January 25th, 1932.

“ The unemployed have done all they can, and the Government know it. They have tramped through the rain in endless processions. They have gone in mass deputations to the Guardians.

They have attended innumerable meetings and have been told to be “solid.” They have marched to London enduring terrific hardships. All this has led nowhere.— Workers Weekly, February 10th, 1923. (Italics ours.)

Both speakers emphasised the repeated declaration of the Socialist Party that the fundamental mistake of the Bolsheviks was their illusion of minority action.

Socialism can only be majority action.—Democracy.

As a result their policies resulted in increasing disaster, throwing “Communists” in this country into even greater confusion and panic.

Numerous questions were answered and an interesting discussion took place in which various points of view were expressed. One contributor thought there might be a likelihood of a genuine democratic advance in Russia due to working class maturity.

Others questioned this view, asking for evidence for the statement that there had been any real change there, seeing in the "new Party line" just one more adroit manoeuvre.

A request was also made for still further consideration of this aspect of the business, which some thought inadequately dealt with by the meeting.

Correction (1979)

From the March 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

In our notebook piece, Gormley, The Scab, last month, there was a slip. The poor devil who wants to form a genuine trade union is not a Polish miner but a Russian one and the “union” leader whom Gormley met is also Russian. (The mistake occurred because the two scabs met at a jamboree in Poland.) It is worth adding that the Russian miner (who is now incarcerated in a ‘‘hospital" where Gormley’s friends pump him full of mind-bending drugs) is not even guilty of the crime of being a Jew. He is no more a Jew than the appalling Gormley himself. And what do communist members of the Anti Nazi League against racism say about the Russian government “accusing" a man of being a Jew?

The Class Struggle in Soviet Russia (1927)

From the December 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

Owing to the deplorable suppression of opinion and rigid censorship of news in Russia it is well nigh as difficult now to obtain reliable information as it was 10 years ago when the censorship was that erected by the Allied Governments. The policy of suppression is always deplorable and usually utterly useless for the end it has in view. Where there is smoke there is fire. Where there are the economic conditions for class conflict there will inevitably arise the discontent of the ruled class with the ruling class and its agents, followed by spontaneous attempts to organise for the removal of the cause of the discontent. It is impossible in the long run to prevent the individual members of a class with a grievance drawing the same general conclusions from the same set of facts. It is possible to delay the spread of ideas from one to another, but not to prohibit it for all time. In the last resort, if class demands are ignored or suppressed, there will inevitably arise organised movements to enforce them, peaceably if possible, but violently if need be. Suppression cannot prevent discontent, it can only direct it into secret and more destructive channels.

These elementary lessons of political history were forgotten in the turmoil following the Bolshevik seizure of power. Suppression of the voting rights, newspapers, and political organisations of the landowners and capitalists, led naturally to the similar treatment of every opponent and critic not only of the acts, but also of the persons of the governing party. The culminating point is the exclusion and threatened criminal prosecution of Trotsky and other once honoured revolutionaries. (One of the charges against Trotsky is the fatuous one of “insolence.”) This degradation into the methods of royalty, with their major crime of “lèse majesté,” is the normal course of all such suppression.

We are then compelled to seek for information about events in Russia, either in the columns of the official Communist Press (where it is naturally coloured in favour of the official point of view as against the critics), or else piece together the fragmentary reports smuggled out of Russia and reprinted (usually with exaggerations) in the opposition journals abroad or the capitalist newspapers.

For two years or more Trotsky has been the figurehead round whom various opposition groups have centred inside the Russian Communist Party. His main criticism appears to be based on his view of an old subject of controversy, that is whether it is possible to build up Socialism in Russia alone. Trotsky, like ourselves, says no. Russia, in his opinion, must aim at rapid industrialisation (with the aid of foreign capital but prohibiting, as far as possible, any foreign control), thus building up a numerous working class in Russia. At present the Russian workers represent at most 15 per cent. of the population, being hopelessly outnumbered by peasants, the great majority of whom are quite naturally more interested in maintaining and extending their private ownership of land than in Socialism. The development of Russian industry will, Trotsky argues, enable the Russian workers to withstand the reactionary pressure of the peasants until such time as the world working class come to their aid.

At present, so the opposition maintain, the trend of Government policy in Russia is steadily in favour of the peasants as against the workers. If this is so, then sooner or later working class discontent will manifest itself in organisation and attempted resistance, at least to the extent that the Russian workers understand their class position and have not been deceived by propaganda aimed at obscuring the fundamental conflict of interests between the workers, on the one side, and the peasants and capitalist traders and concessionaires, on the other. In justification of his view Trotsky maintains that the Russian workers and their trade unions are rapidly developing an attitude of hostility towards the Russian State, the relations with which being more and more clearly recognised as the normal capitalist relations between employers and employed.

The Manchester Guardian (November 15th) summarises a German translation of Trotsky’s programme which has been published in Hamburg. The following passages are taken from it and may help readers to understand the meaning of the present conflict. It is, of course, to be understood that this reproduction of Trotsky’s views is not an indication that we can guarantee the accuracy of his estimates of conditions, nor that we share all his views on policy :—

   “A new bourgeoisie of bureaucrats and of private traders is emerging in the towns and of kulaks (wealthier peasants) in the country, while industrial labour is losing its share in the management both of the Communist party and of the workshops and factories. Since October, 1925, the upward movement of real wages has ceased, although the output per man has risen by no less than 15 per cent. At the same time the rights and privileges of the managements and of the administration have grown.
 
   The increase in employment stopped this year, and there has been a big and rapid increase in unemployment. For two years the prices of industrial products have been nominally stable, but in reality they are rising, for the quality of the goods (especially manufactured goods) has conspicuously deteriorated. Wholesale prices have risen steadily since July, 1925, while the quality of wholesale articles has likewise deteriorated. Retail prices sank in 1924 and 1925, but rose again in 1926, and are now (if the inferior quality is considered) roughly as they were in 1923.
   
   The increased output of Russian industry has been accompanied by a deterioration of plant and machinery, and a steady increase in the number of accidents in the factories has resulted. 

   Although wages are not rising, the so-called intensification of labour is being steadily forced by the authorities. The maximum output of the most efficient workman is being made the standard for all. The sifting out and rejection of the more inefficient men is going on with ever-growing rigour, while the wages for piece work are not rising, and in some cases are sinking. Wages are at best no higher than they were before the war. Industry is worse equipped now than it was then, but the output per man is considerably greater. 

   Thus the wear and tear on the health and constitution of the individual workman is very great. Low wages do not allow workmen to enjoy tolerable housing. The amount of room space, allowed to each family is steadily diminishing. The reintroduction of 40 per cent. vodka has injured the health of the working classes, especially of the younger generation, and has increased the number of accidents. State revenues from the sale of alcohol are being won at heavy cost in human misery. 

   Economy in the factories is being enforced with growing severity. A system of penalties has been introduced under which a workman is dismissed if he arrives a minute late. Men who report sick are now assigned to so-called light labour and health insurance benefit is refused on the slightest pretext. Overtime is increasing in spite of the vast unemployment. Special labour is growing more frequent. Regular workers who cannot legally be dismissed without a fortnight’s notice are got rid of by being dismissed and then being re-engaged as casual workers after which they can be dismissed at one, two, or three day’s notice. 

  The power of the management is steadily growing. It has the exclusive right of dismissal for default or misdemeanours, and no appeal is possible. Men are also engaged by the management, the function of the factory Soviets being limited to mere registration. The workmen no longer share in the control and management of these factories. Their opinion and criticism are disregarded more and more. Conditions in the factories are again approaching what they were in Tsarist times. 

   The workmen are becoming indifferent or even hostile to the trade unions. Meetings are poorly attended, embryonic illegal unions have come into existence when illegal strike committees are formed (that is to say, when there is a strike, the men having lost confidence in the official! Communist trade union organisations, form a secret strike committee of their own). The struggle of Russian labour for better conditions is being conducted either in disregard of the trade unions and of the Communist party, or sometimes even against them. The election of trade union officials has become a mere formality; workmen join these unions because they cannot obtain employment without a membership card. 

   The Soviet State and system is undemocratic. Members of the Government and of the administration are not elected but selected. The electorate is denied the right to recall its delegate whilst the Communist bureaucracy has the right to get rid of any delegate whom it does not like without regard for the opinion of those who voted for him, nor are the delegates themselves in the least responsible to the electorate. For the working-class balloting has become an empty formality and an irksome obligation. 

   The prestige of the Soviet has sunk so low in the eyes of Russian Labour, that the authorities sometimes use compulsion so as to make the workmen vote at all.

 The “Proletariat Opposition” within the party is being expelled. In the factory “cells” only favoured persons receive promotion, and those in disfavour are degraded or even dismissed. There is a growing army of Oppositional unemployed. Dissatisfaction is being suppressed and hushed up, and there has been an epidemic of suicides.

  The broad Communist masses are excluded from some of the most vital discussions of the party leaders. The Communist bureaucracy exercises an uncontrolled and irresponsible domination. 

  Relations between the workmen and the management are becoming more and more what they were before the revolution.”

The Manchester Guardian’s correspondent states that the memorandum goes on to give a similar analysis of conditions in the rural areas, where the poorer peasants and the agricultural labourers are exploited by the wealthier peasants, whose power is increasing.

Among the points in Trotsky’s programme, the most important is the restoration of democracy within the Communist Party, which would, among other things, make impossible the suppression of such a document as the one quoted above.

Edgar Hardcastle

Class Struggle In Russia (1968)

From the November 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Class Struggle In Russia

Under capitalism the class struggle is a form of guerrilla warfare which is fought out continually between wage and salary earners on the one hand and the privileged minority who own the means of production on the other. But the trump card always remains with the latter, since it is they who manipulate the state machinery and can use it to suppress working class resistance if the struggle becomes really savage.

Russia, just like any other capitalist country, conforms to this pattern. In their Open Letter to the Party Kuron and Modzelewski revealed that in 1962 tanks had been used against workers in Novocherkassk, a small town near Rostov in southern Russia. Now the New China News Agency has come out with fresh reports of brutal suppression. According to Peking there were disturbances in Chimkent (Soviet Central Asia) in June 1967 which resulted in tanks and armoured cars being used against demonstrating workers. Casualties are reported as several dozen dead and numerous injured and arrested.

The New China News Agency also gave news of a strike by workers in Kharkov, in the Ukraine. The only details given were that once again it was “crushed by the force of arms".

Unemployment in Russia

In 1965 a number of Western newspapers carried reports of unemployment in Russia and we commented on these in the Socialist Standard (August 1965). These articles were mainly based on a paper by Professor Efim Manevich which appeared in the Russian economics journal Voprosy Ekonomiki (June 1965). Since, then the Novosti Press Agency in Moscow has published a rejoinder by Professor Manevich (USSR: Full Employment?) which gives details of "the employment problems solved and of those that are to be solved in the USSR in the near future".

Manevich states quite plainly at the beginning of his pamphlet that unemployment has been wiped out in Russia—and then proceeds to prove just the opposite.

The seasonal nature of much fanning work is a considerable problem, especially when it is remembered that 46 per cent of Russia’s population is still engaged in rural occupations. Professor Manevich writes that:

  Collective and state farms are taking measures to make better use of their labour resources in the autumn-winter period. It is at this time—from January through March and November-December —that more than a third of all able-bodied collective farmers have no work to do.

He refers to the work of another Russian economist (G. Sarkisyan) whose investigations have shown that "one able-bodied collective farmer is busy in the collective economy less than 200 days a year on the average which is even less than three quarters of the annual sum total of working time". In fact "at many collective farms in the western areas of the Ukraine and Byelorussia, as well as in the Daghestan, North-Ossetian, Chechen-Ingush, Mari, Mordovian and Chuvash Autonomous Republics, the labour force is only 40-50 per cent occupied."

But this is not only a rural problem:

   Random investigations carried out in a number of small and medium-size towns of Chelyabinsk Region showed that more than 18 per cent of the people who were not gainfully employed were unable to take part in social production because of lack of employment in their particular trade or profession or in the absence of housing facilities. For instance, in the town of Asha 21.1 per cent of all polled persons did not take part in social production because they could not find employment in their particular trade and profession.

Other workers can only find work by travelling long distances each day.

   This applies, for instance, to Noginsk, Mozhaisk, Pavlovo Posad and some other towns of Moscow Region where mostly textile enterprises are sited. That is why some of the men there have to find jobs in other towns and spend sometimes 2 or 3 hours traveling to and from work.

The overall situation seems to be that while the fraction of the able-bodied population not employed in social production is 6-7 per cent in Moscow and Leningrad, the figure for the whole of the Soviet Union is 20 per cent and in Siberia it reaches 26 per cent Yet Professor Manevich still denies that there is unemployment on the grounds that those not engaged in social production can occupy themselves with housework (which applies to the many women who cannot find work) or with their "individual auxiliary economies". This last phrase refers to the allotments which all collective farmers and state farmworkers, as well as many industrial workers, have. Professor Manevich argues that these people can’t be said to be unemployed since they can busy themselves on their plots of land and so scrape a living in that way. Ibis is largely a question of semantics—but Manevich can’t have it both ways, either they are employed or many are chronically underemployed. Whichever way you look at it, many Russian workers cannot find suitable work and we will quote the Professor on that:

   (There) are potential possibilities of drawing into social production a certain portion of the able-bodied population especially women, who wait to work but do not do it due to the inadequate development of local industries, services and other spheres which employ mostly women.
     Due to the inadequate development of industry in many medium-size and small towns the working people have to engage in their individual economies and housekeeping.

Russia: the left-wing fantasy (1982)

From the December 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sixty-five years ago a myth was born. A Dictatorship of the Russian Proletariat had been set up amid the chaos of World War 1. The simple slogan Peace, Land and Bread echoed from the cities to the remotest villages.

As the dust settled, facts emerged. The peasants had seized whatever land they could while the landlords, rightly fearing a repetition of the French Revolution, packed up and fled. Peace broke out as far as Russia's involvement in the World War was concerned but only temporarily: civil war was to follow. Bread was to be very scarce for a long time. The workers' councils, the Soviets, had no real power. The Bolshevik Party were in power and they meant to stay there. Within weeks the Cheka took the place of the Tsarist Okhrana — with unlimited powers. This was not a dictatorship of the proletariat, it was a dictatorship over the proletariat, and shortly over the peasants too.

The myth of a classless society — as socialism will indeed be — was widely publicised. Yet the reality was a society split by irreconcilable antagonisms. The Bolsheviks were desperate for food for the starving cities and sent raiding parties to rob the peasants, who fought back.

This conflict came to a head sixty years ago. The winter of 1920-21 was terrible; food in the cities was very scarce, rationing was arbitrary and chaotic, many workers fled the cities to join relatives in the countryside while those who remained starved on wages which were less than 10 per cent of the 1913 level.

The Kronstadt revolt highlighted real grievances, demanding better food supplies and new elections. “The Communist Party, master of the State, has detached itself from the masses . . . Countless incidents have recently occurred in Petrograd and Moscow which show clearly that the Party has lost the confidence of the working masses. [1] . . . Our cause is just. We stand for the power of the Soviets, not for that of the Party. We stand for freely elected representatives of the toiling masses. Deformed Soviets, dominated by the Party, have remained deaf to our pleas. Our appeals have been answered with bullets.”[2]

At the same time, peasant risings showed opposition to grain procurements. Lenin did a U-turn. In 1921, within weeks of Trotsky’s massacre of the Kronstadt garrison, he instituted the New Economic Policy. The collapse of Russian agriculture was halted and grain harvests increased through the twenties until the first Five Year Plan brought compulsory collectivisation and attacks on so-called kulaks. Food production nose-dived in the years 1928-32 and peasants slaughtered their livestock. Millions were liquidated or disappeared to concentration camps, others fled the hungry, terrorised countryside for the overcrowded cities. The gap between theory and practice widened:

  “From their bloodstained platforms they shout that the soil belongs to the peasants and the factories belong to the workers . . . [But] a new Communist serfdom arose. The peasant in the Soviet farms became a slave, and the worker in the factories a day-labourer.” [3]

From the time of the first Five Year Plan, which ended 50 years ago, we may date the completion of Russia's capitalist revolution. This was the third Russian Revolution. The first, in February 1917, toppled the Tsar and brought about a liberal bourgeois government under Kerensky; the second was the November coup by the Bolsheviks with promises of “Peace, Land and Bread". Between 1927 and 1932, the number of wage-workers in Russia increased by 30 per cent and the expropriation of the peasants proceeded by leaps and bounds.

Marx wrote of the “primitive accumulation" of capital — the process by which a landless proletariat is brought into being, with no means of livelihood except the sale of their labour power, renting themselves out for hire by the hour, the day or the week for wages. He pointed out that everywhere the methods employed "all employ the power of the state, the concentrated and organised force of society, to hasten, hothouse fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition "[4]. This ruthless, enforced process, was as cruel in the steppes of Russia as in the Highlands of Scotland. For Highland Clearances, read “de-kulakisation and collectivisation.”

But Russia, it was claimed, was different. There was no exploitation — it was illegal for individuals to own factories or mines, or to enrich themselves by employing a workforce. If there were no individual capitalists, there could be no capitalist class. Therefore this was not capitalism.

But. as Marx, Engels and Bukharin explained earlier, the wages system does not require individual capitalists. The capitalist class as a whole collectively exploits the working class as a whole. This can be done by means of institutional or corporate ownership of the land, factories, mines and so on as had already happened in the 19th century. (When Bismarck nationalised the railways, this had nothing whatever to do with socialism, as Engels pointed out.) Lenin's view was that in Russia what was needed was state capitalism, on the Prussian model. Yet to this day, it is generally believed that Russia's nationalisation is characteristic of socialism in practice. Later, Khrushchev tried to explain away the so-called "dictatorship of the proletariat". This, he said, had been superseded by a “government of the whole people": there was still to be coercion "but not in a class sense, since it was no longer necessary to suppress entire social layers and classes, but only criminals and individuals who violated Soviet laws.”[5]

Now. however, this policy is disavowed in Moscow. On a recent visit to Russia we were invited to take part in a discussion with two official spokesmen at the Marx-Engels Institute. In response to this point — that Russia had developed beyond the dictatorship of the proletariat and had become a classless society, a "government of the whole people” — the official spokesmen were anxious to reassure all present that nothing so terrible had happened. Khrushchev, he scoffed, talked a lot of twaddle. Yet this position had been endorsed as part of the CFSU's programme at the 22nd Congress (1961): “(the party had) transformed the state of the proletarian dictatorship into a state of the whole people"[6]. Evidently, the CPSU also talks twaddle.

Another Leftwing fantasy is that in Russia there is no unemployment. But with deportation to Siberia, pass laws which fix where any individual is allowed to live, black-listing of the system's critics, a paternalist state, gross waste of human resources in the overmanned and hopelessly inefficient farms, large scale unemployment would be unlikely. Yet there are unemployed workers in Russia.

Workers may be sacked for absenteeism or other infringements of the Labour Code. They may be sacked and blacklisted for complaining or protesting against abuses by management [7]. The only difference is that in Russia, unemployed workers cannot get any unemployment benefit and there are no published statistics. In any case, with or without unemployment, the wages system exploits workers.

If Russia is Utopia, it is Utopia only for the Male Chauvinist Pig. On my first visit, twenty-five years ago, I saw Moscow in sweltering summer. All the people queueing with buckets for water at standpipes were women — never men: This year I visited three cities (Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad) in the winter. In each city, snow was being shovelled off the pavements by women and only by women. I asked why such hard work is done only by women and why women do not reach the higher decision-making strata. The official response: "We don't like our women to be put under stress"!

Russia is said to represent a “transition stage’’, not capitalist (no individual capitalists) but not yet communist. But how long can a transition be expected to last? This one qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records: sixty-five years is an awful long time to be in transit.

The claim that in Russia there is no class struggle is fraudulent. In 1956-57 there was a wave of strikes (especially “Italian strikes", a form of go-slow); in 1962, the Army machine-gunned demonstrators, including children, protesting at food prices and work norms; and about ten years ago, 30,000 workers struck at the Kiev car factory. What has developed is a form of capitalism where most capital is state property.

As Engels wrote: “State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict . . . The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers — proletarians.” [9]

The history of Russia in the last fifty years has demonstrated the truth of this proposition.

Workers have learned to associate Marxism and socialism with a totalitarian dictatorship, ruthless and corrupt. The damage done by this to the socialist cause is immeasurable. Yet there is some cause for hope. Moscow’s magicians find it harder to support the illusion of a Workers' Paradise. In the last twenty-five years, the publication of samizdat material has become well established. The early critics wrote poems and novels. Later came scientists, historians, economists and engineers, and in the last decade a number of shop-floor workers. These usually follow Sakharov, who described the system as state capitalism. as in the 1972 leaflet:

   It is not towards communism that we are heading: all that is idle talk. Our system is state capitalism — the very worst, the most wretched political system possible . . . The Kremlin bosses and their hangers-on live better and richer than many Tsarist noblemen did before the Revolution — and yet they call themselves ‘the vanguard of the Soviet people', its servants! [10] 

Just as forthright are the comments of Pohyba arguing for independent trade unions: “ultimately it is the state which is the exploiter along with the State-party bourgeoisie which is in its service and which is the one wielding real power in the country . . . Our country is actually a State capitalist society with a totalitarian form of government’’. [11]

How can Left-wingers explain the existence of profits in what they claim is a socialist society? The Kremlin’s tame economists worry about new methods of measuring “the true rate of profit for each enterprise” (Nemchinov), and Liberman's Kharkov plan stipulated that a factory's rewards should be linked to the profits it could earn on its capital investment. [12] If there are profits, they can only come about by the exploitation of the working class. Profits arc part of our unpaid labour. Yet the myth of this “socialist state” confronts us still and debunking it is still a necessary chore for every socialist speaker or writer.

Charmian Skelton

References
1. 1st issue of Kronstadt Izvestya (3 March 1921) — see Ida Mett The Kronstadt Uprising.
2. Final Kronstadt appeal (same source).
3. Kronstadt Izvestya, quoted by Kautsky Bolshevism at a Deadlock (1930).
4. Capital I ch. xxxi (Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist).
5. Pravda, December 1964.
6. Quoted by Gollan in C.P. Pamphlet Socialist Democracy — some problems (1976) from The Road to Communism — The Proceedings of the 22nd Congress (Moscow, 1961).
7. See Workers Against the Gulag (Pluto Press 1979).
8. Censorship rules ban publication of information on accidents, epidemics and unemployment.
9. Socialism Utopian and Scientific.
10. An Underground Leaflet, June 1972. published in full in Socialist Standard. January 1973.
11. Cf. Nove, An economic History of the Soviet Union.

Russian Revolution: III State Capitalism (1979)

From the November 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

For the other articles in the series, click on the following links: ONE, TWO, FOUR.

Although modern Leninists expound the myth of ‘Russian Socialism' as if there was a transformation from capitalism to socialism in the post-October days, it is doubtful whether Lenin seriously had any such illusion. He recognised, and stated on many occasions, that only state capitalism could be established in Russia. Within months of receiving information about the October revolution, the Socialist Party of Great Britain, despite acknowledging the Bolsheviks’ anti-war policy, foresaw the inevitable state capitalist outcome of the coup. The Trotskyists, it should be added, maintain the most absurd position of all: they accept the Leftist myth that Russia became socialist in 1917 and then claim that it reverted to capitalism when Stalin fell out with Trotsky!

The establishment of state capitalism presented a problem for the Bolsheviks. How could a revolution designed to overthrow capitalism be considered successful when it merely initiated a new form of capitalism? The myth of the transition period between state capitalism (referred to as socialism) and socialism (referred to as communism) was created by Lenin in order to disguise the reality. Broken promises, persecution, murder and tyranny were justified because Russia was still in the first, socialist, stage of revolution. Much has been written about the theory of the transition period which need not be repeated here, except to say that the idea that there must be a transition between consciousness and unconsciousness, between oppression and freedom, between property society and common ownership, is both illogical and historical nonsense. Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Preobrazhensky appear to have swallowed the theory:

Communist society will know nothing of money. Every worker will produce goods for the general welfare. He will not receive any certificate to the effect that he has delivered a product to society; in other words, he will receive no money. Likewise, he will pay no money to society when he receives from the common store what he requires . . .
Socialism, however, is communism in the process of construction . . . and in the proportion that the work of construction is successfully carried on the need for money will disappear.

Like the English Fabians, they thought that the system would wither away. Before the Bolshevik seizure of power in September 1917, Lenin predicted the nature of the state capitalist economy: “All citizens become employees and workers of one all national State syndicate.” (State and Revolution)

On 14 November 1917 Lenin presented a draft decree on workers’ control to the Congress of Soviets. This decree, far from meeting the aspirations of the factory committees which wanted direct control of each productive unit by the workers employed in that unit, established a centralised hierarchy of state control. Significantly, the leading Bolshevik trade unionist, Lozovsky, only agreed to vote for the decree on the condition that “. . . the workers in each enterprise should not get the impression that the enterprise belongs to them.” Shortly after the decree was passed a Supreme Council of National Economy (Vesenkha) was set up “. . . to organise the economic activity of the nation and the financial resources of the government.”

For the first five months of the Bolshevik regime, despite the erection of the machinery of State control, the economy was anything but regulated. Anarchy prevailed, born of the frustration and poverty of the masses: before they had been denied the fulfilment of their needs, now they were going to take according to their needs. Money became worthless, production all but ceased, peasant producers resorted to barter. Harry Young, an SPGB member who was in Russia at the time, describes how he had to pay millions of roubles in exchange for the most basic commodities. Economic anarchy resulted in chaos and the short taste of freedom was a prelude to rigid state coercion. In March 1918 the government signed the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, bringing Russia out of the war. The Congress of Soviets which approved the treaty resolved to put an end to the anarchy in the economy. Larin and Milyutin, two dedicated state capitalists, replaced Bukharin, Obolensky and Lomov (with their idealistic thoughts of the future communist society) as leaders of Vesenkha. On 28 June 1918 Sovnarkom (the Council of People’s Commissars) issued a decree nationalising every important category of industry.

Nationalisation is not socialism. The soviet state was increasingly becoming the monopoly of the party leadership. As the control of the economy by the state continued, the pious ideals of fairness and equality dwindled. The party bureaucracy prospered at the expense of the exploitation of the working class. State capitalism is the accumulation of capital by the state officials. Where there is capital there must be wage labour and where there is wage labour there must be capitalism.

In the post Brest-Litovsk period, from 1918 to 1921, often referred to by historians as ‘War Communism’, two main industrial probems prevailed: excessive bureaucratisation and the erosion of the workers’ democracy which had developed in the post-revolutionary days.

A highly centralised economy required a bureaucracy which was removed from the centres of production and was primarily concerned with reaching planning norms. A division between state control and local needs developed. The former predominated.

Immediately after the revolution the workers did have a degree of control over their working lives. Committees were set up at the point of production to allow workers to have a say in the way things were run. Lenin, seeing the need for rapid industrialisation if Russia was to move on from its semi-feudal form of economic organisation, had no time for such democratic niceties as collegial management. In Current Tasks of the Soviet Power he argued that 

Unqualified submission to a single will is unconditionally necessary for the success of the process of labour organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry.

Some Bolsheviks, such as Tomsky, vigorously opposed the transition to one-man management, but their cries of protest were wasted. State capitalism meant the total subordination of the worker to the State. It is estimated that by 1920 one-man management existed in 88 per cent of nationalised enterprises. By then the trade unions had become sterile appendages of the state.

Leninists blame the failure of Bolshevism to make capitalism run in the interest of the working class on to external circumstances, such as the civil war. Certainly, the war did account for falling production levels and the absolute reduction in the size of the working class. But to portray the Bolsheviks as genuine socialists, overcome by unforeseeable events, is a gross distortion. Read what Lenin said before October 1917. It is clear that he advocated state capitalism, not world socialism.

Steve Coleman

(To be continued.)

Russia: Socialism or State Capitalism? (1977)

From the November 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

One of the permanent discussions within the “left” has been about Russia. Is it socialist? or is it the same sort of society as exists elsewhere? Since the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Socialist Party of Great Britain has always argued that what had to happen in Russia was the development of capitalism. It has been capitalism with the difference that, unlike in Western Europe and the USA where capital is largely owned and controlled by a minority of private capitalists, in Russia it is owned by the State. There is state capitalism.

What is the State? It is the machinery for imposing the rule of one class over another, i.e. government, law, armed forces, police, prisons etc. Where there are no classes dividing society, where there is freedom, there will be no State. The existence of a Slate in Russia means that it is a class-divided society.

Socialist society will be very different. There will be no State, because social relationships will be based on mutual cooperation and not on coercion. It will be a world society free of the problems and limitations of the profit economy. This is the Marxist conception of Socialism. The common, mistaken idea of Socialism is a sort of utopian capitalism where the working class control their own exploitation. Such an idea is absurd, as the essence of capitalism is the subordination of wage-labour to capital. It is because of this misconception that the “left” have experienced such difficulties in understanding what has taken place in Russia.

The Communist Party of Great Britain, though it is now falling apart, still holds on to the claim that Russia is an example of Socialism in practice. On another side, the Socialist Workers’ Party asserts that there was Socialism in Russia until Stalin came to power, but then it suddenly took a turn for the worse and went back to being capitalism. Others, such as the International Marxist Group, argue that Russia did have Socialism, but it degenerated under Stalin and is now neither Socialism nor capitalism but a “degenerate workers’ state”—which can only be defined by saying what it isn’t. If the CP line that Russia is socialist is hard to understand in the light of the last sixty years, it is even harder to grasp the Trotskyist line that suddenly in 1926 Stalin came along and changed Russia overnight from a socialist democracy to a capitalist dictatorship. In fact, the history of Russia does not bear out such a theory.

Capitalism in the Soviet Union was not a “Stalin phenomenon", as it has been called, but an inevitable result of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. Marx, by whose theories some of the leading revolutionaries are supposed to have been influenced, wrote in the Preface to The Critique of Political Economy:

No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces, for which there is room in it, have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society.

This is why the Mensheviks argued before 1917 that Socialism could not be established in Russia but that capitalism had to be developed first.

It can be argued that such a formulation was too simple. Marx’s statement applied to the world system of international capitalism and not to a single backward country in isolation. Until the death of Lenin it was assumed in Russia that

in one country it is impossible to accomplish such a work as a socialist revolution. (Lenin, November 1920.)

Even Stalin, in 1925, laid down that

for the definitive triumph of socialism the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country alone are not enough, particularly of an essentially rural country like Russia; the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries are needed . . . (The Theory and Practice of Leninism.)

Because the revolution had taken place in a backward country with a small working class there was only one course: to develop capitalism. But here was a problem. The Bolsheviks had won their support from the proletariat of Moscow and Petrograd and claimed to stand for its interest. Marxism argues that capitalism cannot be made to operate in the interests of the workers. And so the Bolsheviks began to tread the path already taken by the Labour Party in Britain, which led to trying to be the friend of the workers and their exploiter at the same time. How true was Engels’s statement:

The worst that can befall the leader of an extremist party is to be compelled to take over the government at a time when the moment is not yet ripe for the rule of the class he represents . . .  He finds himself necessarily in an insoluble political dilemma: what he can do is in conflict with his entire previous attitudes, his principles, and the immediate interests of the party; what he is supposed to do cannot be done . . .  he is compelled to represent not his party, his class, but the class for the rule of which the movement happens to be ripe. For the sake of that movement he must act for the interests of an alien class, and must feed his own class with phrases and promises along with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are really their own. He who gets himself into that false position is irredeemably lost.

(The Peasant War in Germany)

When the Bolsheviks first gained power they attempted to establish what is today known as “workers’ participation” by means of the Troika. Socialists see schemes to "give workers a say in management” as efforts to mask the class struggle. The builders of capitalism in Russia in the 1920s found trade-union interference inconvenient, and by 1935 the Troika had given way to industrial management similar to that which existed in the rest of Europe. Indeed, one text-book on Soviet industrial law stated:

One-man management is the most important principle of the organisation of socialist economy.

(Gintsburg & Pashukanis)

Soon after the suppression of the Troika came the legal prohibition of effective trade-unionism in Russia. Trade-union organization for the defence of wages and working conditions has existed in Britain since the last century, and socialists have always acknowledged its importance in the industrial class struggle. In state-capitalist Russia trade unions exist, but as extensions of State power over the workers. Immediately after the Revolution strikes were permissible: in 1922 there were 192,000 workers on strike in state-owned enterprises, in 1923 165,000, in 1924 43,000, in 1925 34,000, in 1926 32,900, in 1927 20,000 and in 1928 8,900. Since 1929 no official strike has ever taken place in the Soviet Union. Between 1932 and 1949 the Russian Trade Union Congress did not even convene.

When these facts are presented to members of the Russia-idolizing Communist Party of Great Britain they are likely to admit that it is all quite true, but deceptive. The fact of the matter, they will say, is that Russian workers have no need to go on strike against the State because they control it through the Soviets. Do they?

One of the Bolshevik revolutionary slogans was “All power to Soviets”. The Soviets were local councils through which delegates of the village or workplace were to be democratically accountable to the local people. The Soviets were headed nationally, until 1937, by the Congress of Soviets, which met five times in 1918, yearly from 1919 to 1932, and then not until 1935. After 1937 it was replaced by the Supreme Soviet. From 1937 to 1953 every decision of the Supreme Soviet was carried unanimously, nor was there ever a single abstention or a speech in opposition. In fact the Supreme Soviet is merely a rubber-stamp for the dictatorial leadership of the Russian Communist Party. For example, the first Five Year Plan began in October 1928 but was not given permission to go ahead by “the highest authority in the land” until April 1929.

Since there is no democracy in organization at the top in Russia, what about the bottom? Not much democracy there either. The local Soviets are totally dominated by Communist Party officials (usually full-time party bureaucrats) who are there to ensure that the Soviets approve all decisions which are made at a higher level. Elections to the Soviets are undemocratic: there is never more than one candidate standing for each place. The vote for that one candidate is invariably in the region of 98 per cent. Indeed, one book describes how in 1947 a candidate polled 104 per cent, in the election to his local Soviet by gaining 2,122 votes in a constituency which had only 1,617 voters. That candidate was Joseph Stalin!

Democratic Soviets never have and never will run capitalist Russia. “The dictatorship of the proletariat” is a myth. There is the dictatorship of the Communist Party. That is what the CP stands for in Britain. The Russian rulers use political power in the interests of capitalism.

In supporting and excusing a capitalist dictatorship, the Communist Party shows quite clearly which side of the class struggle it is on. The Trotskyists, while sensibly refusing to accept Russia as an example of Socialism, try to find ways of showing that it is not capitalism either. The reason for this is that they are taking the same road as the Bolsheviks took: calling for armed struggle, believing that workers are unable to understand Socialism, committing themselves to conspiratorial leadership rather than the democratic struggle. And the same road inevitably leads to the same destination. That is the dilemma of the left. For the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which rejects Leninist Bolshevism, the road to Socialism is not littered with nasty examples of past mistakes.

Steve Coleman

Running Commentary: Embassy siege (1980)

The Running Commentary Column from the June 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Embassy siege

May was a spiffing good month for jingoism and “those qualities which made Britain great”. Not only did the Arsenal beat those “Eyties” in Turin (a feat verging on the impossible) but we were all submerged in suffocating patriotism and national pride after “our boys” had shown those “Islam Wallahs” what we’re made of. No doubt the Iranian Embassy storming during which not many foreigners were killed — will be the subject of News of the World “I was there and our policemen are wonderful” exclusives for weeks to come, and a film starring Omar Sharif as William Whitelaw. True, Keith Joseph rather spoilt the month by muffing his presentation of the appointment of that Scots-American chappie to run “our” steel industry (what’s wrong with an Englishman?), but this was a minor abberration and surely Thatcher will take Sir Keith’s bootlaces out should he create any more bother.

On May Day Prince Charles set the tone for the month by defying his doctors and attending a five-course lunch at the Cafe Royal with an inch long sticking plaster reaching from the base of his nose to his earlobe; he had fallen off his pony during polo practice but could not be deterred from launching into a strong call to electrical engineers to buy British. This example of royal stiff upper lip was fallowed by noisy scenes in the House of Commons, when the Prime Minister reported on her tough stand in the matter of British EEC contributions. Anti- and pro-Europeans united in a “Wogs begin at Calais’’ atmosphere as she made clear her determination to defend the mythical “national interest”. Remind me not to send any more cheques to those greedy French farmers.

The Embassy storming, however, was enough to bring out the patriot in Anthony Blunt. We had the Prime Minister praising the SAS and police who “made all of us, on all sides of the House, proud to be British”; young Winston Churchill, an authority on Iranian affairs, contrasting the “heroic action of May 5” with the TUC’s intentions for May 14; and Tory MP Tony Marlow asking whether it wasn’t noticeable that there was a “new respect by which Britain is held by the rest of the world, based on the confidence, sensitivity and determination now abiding in Britain”. A group of about 100 British and Americans sang Rule Britannia and national anthems at Princes Gate and “Grateful” of Bexley wrote that she “certainly slept better last night . . . it (the storming) will give Britain a much needed boost after months of petty fogging wrangling in industry”.

It is not surprising that, in the midst of all this nationalistic ' fervour, reference should be made to the performance of the British workforce. The Daily Telegraph of May 1, under the heading “Modesty is ruining economy”, reported Trade Secretary John Knott’s speech to the Advertising Association’s annual conference. “Britain should cast aside its characteristic modesty and advertise its success more widely”, he said; it was modesty which did the greatest damage to the British economy and “workforces would continue to be demoralised if constantly accused of failure”. Yes, indeed. If only workers could be made to identify with, and feel proud of, “their” country and industry, think how much better they would work and how much more profit would be made for the employing class.

Labour discipline

The leadership of the Transport and General Workers’ Union also came in for some patriotic stick last month, after announcing its decision to contribute £5,000 of Union funds to the so-called Communist Party’s daily, The Morning Star. Possibly Moss Evans had been impressed by the Soviet government’s new plans for their workforce, announced in the Soviet press on January 12 but strangely unreported in the CP rag.

The Russian ruling class, which is working overtime to stir up patriotism in its less than contented population, issued a major economic decree last July to make workers abide by centralised instructions, thus destroying the last remnants of economic reforms of the 1960s which granted certain limited autonomy to factory managers. The present five year plan had forecast a very low rise in the output of consumer goods, but now not even this target is being met and some tightening up is therefore necessary. The new decree, on poor “labour discipline”, is a response to frequent absenteeism, alcoholism, wasting work time and constant job changing among a workforce deprived of any means to defend their interests collectively. Entitled “On the further strengthening of labour discipline and the reduction of labour turnover in the national economy”, it ties the receipt of various benefits, pensions and privileges to length of service. In future Soviet workers will have to repay any financial assistance they have received if they resign without showing due cause, and should they be absent from work without “valid reason” will lose their extra holiday entitlement.

What probably clinched it for the Transport and General was the-January 13 editorial of Trud (Labour), the Soviet trade union daily, which stated that: “We must actively struggle against slacking, disorganisation, absenteeism, which not only bring economic damage but do enormous harm to the work of educating the new man —the man of Communist society . . . to our regret certain trade union organisations have shown little interest in energetically taking up the task of strengthening labour discipline”.

Should we conclude that the TGWU prefers government controlled trade unions to discipline the workers to the inefficient method adopted in Britain, where private employers endeavour to follow government “guidelines” on how to control their workforce”? The “new man” of Soviet mythology might well have something to say about that. For our part, we advise workers to resist the attempts of union leaderships to involve their organisations in the campaigns of political parties, and to recognise that industrial action alone cannot achieve for them anything but modest and temporary improvements in their living standards. Unionists who want a society without imposed discipline —where the means of production will be commonly owned and democratically controlled — should examine the case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Cheques sent to 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN will be used in furtherance of this aim.

Melvin Tenner

Soviet Class Struggle (1969)

Book Review from the July 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia, 1957-65 by Mary McAuley, OUP, 48s.

Like most books based on doctoral theses Labour Disputes in Soviet Russia makes for rather dry reading. The masses of tedious details can be exasperating, but at the same time they do throw some light on the class struggle in Russia and the forms it assumes.

Mary McAuley spent eighteen months at the Labour Law Department of Leningrad University and this allowed her to study closely labour relations at a number of factories in the area. Particularly interesting are her accounts of some of the indignities which individual Russian workers, like workers throughout the world, find themselves subjected to. At the Karl Marx factory, for example, the shop superintendent cuts a worker's premium by 5 per cent for going to wash before time, and at a different plant the same penalty is imposed on another because — having been given a day's warning — she fails to report for work on a Sunday.

More amusing are the antics of various commentators who dismiss labour disputes in the Soviet Union as simply the result of such factors as "remnants of capitalist consciousness in individuals". The very frequency with which they repeat these empty formulae hints at the scale of the struggles to improve their wages and working conditions which workers throughout Russia must be engaged in.

John Crump

Workers against The Gulag (1981)

Book Review from the June 1981 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers Against The Gulag, edited by Olga Semyonova and Viktor Haynes. (Pluto Press £1.95)

"I am a Russian worker, aged 46. I have worked in production for 30 years, 22 on electrical work, repairs. The archives of the KGB hold three folders of documents confirming that I am a skilled electrician, conscientious in my work, practically don't drink, and don't smoke.

"I will list some of the reasons which led me in 1959 to take the risk of illegally crossing the border, and in 1964 and 1966 to ask for permission to emigrate.

(1) The low level of pay  . . . I have spent the best years of my life slaving for a crust.

(2) The lack of free Trade Unions.

(3) The cruel, humiliating treatment of men in Labour Camps. I spent many days in freezing solitary confinement in Camp No. * of the Omsk, UMZ.

(4) The continual ever-growing tendency of the KGB to use "psychiatry" to strengthen its punitive powers."

On the 21 December 1976, V. A. Ivanov appeared in Revolution Square in Moscow with a placard: "To the Soviet Authorities. I demand permission to emigrate. I have gone through Hell in your Camps and Gas-Chambers. What else is left?" Ten minutes later Ivanov was seized, spent 24 hours in the police station, and was then sent home, out of Moscow. In November he addressed a letter to George Meaney, President of the American AFL/CIO: "I am a Russian worker, a highly qualified electrician with thirty years record  . . . I ask you to help me leave Russia and thereby escape further persecution."

This book is one of the most damning indictments to come from Russia so far, consisting of a series of documents smuggled out and published, for the first time, in Britain. These documents tell the facts behind the glossy government propaganda tracts. Ninety per cent of the Russian working-class are on piece-work rates, based on impossible so-called "norms". The minimum official poverty line is 50 Roubles a week; 10,000 families in Leningrad alone fall below this line. Every Soviet citizen has to carry an "internal passport" (just like under the Czar), which is also a residential permit. In addition, every worker has to carry his Labour Book, giving his work record, and without which he cannot get employment. Food is dear, in winter often unobtainable, especially butter, milk and eggs. The average Russian citizen gets less than half as much meat as West European workers. Serious widespread strikes have broken out as in Novcherkass, and been brutally suppressed. These workers in their protests actually betray the same naiveté as their grandfathers did in 1905 when they appealed to the Czar (the Little Father); asking "Comrade Brezhnev to intervene on their behalf, and the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party to prevent the local Communist officials from persecuting them is as futile.

In their appeals they declare their support of the Russian system and say they want to "make it work". The most moving, harrowing parts of the book are the accounts of the brutal persecution and ill-treatment of workers by the criminal thugs of the KGB and the Russian CP. For daring to protest against corruption (more rife in Russia than in New York), thieving of state property, swindling workers of their pay, rigging elections to the official state "unions", workers have been dismissed, had their furniture and children thrown out on the street, in the depths of Russian winter, been beaten up in police stations, and sent to "Psychiatric Hospitals" and Labour Camps.

All of which shows how terrified the authorities really are. In spite of everything, with incredible courage, Vladimir Klebanov and his friends have formed a free Trade Union, demanded recognition, and appealed to the west for help, which the KGB with all its powers has failed to suppress. The first Russian Free Trade Union has been driven underground, but still exists. This book confirms our view of the anti-working class politics in Russia.

Horatio

Laying The Foundations (1996)

Book review from the December 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Workers Against Lenin. Labour Protest and the Bolshevik Dictatorship 1920-22. By Jonathan Aves. IB Taurus.

A so-called Workers' State that oppressed the workers was not just a feature of Russia under Stalin. It also existed under Lenin and Trotsky; in fact, it was they who laid the foundations for the reinforced dictatorship Stalin later built up.

In 1920 the Civil War ended and the Western powers' blockade of Russia was lifted. The workers, who had suffered terribly from food and fuel shortages and from harsh labour discipline, expected improvements in their conditions. The Bolshevik government, however, made no immediate steps in this direction. The result was a wave of labour discontent which lasted until 1922 and which Jonathan Aves here analyses in detail on the basis of contemporary Russian press reports and other archive material.

The coming of peace led to a debate in the Bolshevik Party as to how to deal with the working class. Trotsky, fresh from his military success as commander-in-chief of the Red Army, notoriously favoured the militarisation of labour; which would have meant that absenteeism would be treated as desertion and strikes as mutinies, to be punished in accordance with the terms of the military code of discipline. Lenin was more flexible; he wanted to maintain the Bolshevik dictatorship at all costs and was prepared to make some concessions to the workers to achieve this. Another group, known as the "Workers' Opposition", composed largely of Bolshevik trade unionists, was more favourable to the demands of the workers.

Russian workers at this time had many grievances. They objected to not being allowed time off to search for food and wood in the countryside. They objected to having to work compulsory unpaid overtime on traditional holidays, even on May Day. They objected to their unions being taken over by the Bolsheviks and turned into organs of managerial control, labour discipline and speed-up. In a number of places they went on strike and elected as their representatives members of the non-Bolshevik anti-Tsarist parties such as the Mensheviks and the anarchists.

Lenin was not amused. The strikes were suppressed. Many of the strikers were sent to labour camps. Some were shot. Some concessions were finally made but not until 1921 when Lenin announced to the 10th Congress of the Bolshevik Party a "new economic policy" which, among other things, allowed local peasant markets, where the workers had traditionally bought their food but which the Bolsheviks had suppressed, to operate again.

But there was a price --the suppression of the few remaining vestiges of independent trade unionism that had managed to survive the first years of the Bolshevik dictatorship. The unions became incorporated into the state; in fact, ceased to be unions, becoming instead organs of the state similar to the Labour Front Hitler later set up in Germany. This, let it be noted, was done under Lenin and Trotsky and was not a product of a later "Stalinism". The Menshevik leaders were forced into exile. The "Workers' Opposition" --and all other "factions"-- within the Bolshevik Party was banned, so establishing the principle of "monolithic unity" of which the next victim was to be one of its main architects . . . Trotsky.

From a socialist point of view the Bolsheviks had got themselves into an impossible position. Having seized power as a minority in a country where socialism was not possible for all sorts of reasons (economic backwardness, isolation from the rest of the world, lack of a majority will for socialism), they had no alternative but to do the only thing that was possible: to continue to develop capitalism.

The Bolsheviks found themselves in the position of having to preside over --and, in fact, to organise-- the accumulation of capital. But, as capital is accumulated out of surplus value and surplus value is obtained by exploiting wage-labour, this inevitably brought them into conflict with the workers who, equally inevitably, sought to limit their exploitation. The Bolsheviks justified opposing and suppressing these workers' struggles on the ground that they (the Bolsheviks) represented the longer-term interests of the workers. But did they?

Certainly, they claimed to be acting to further the cause of socialism, but Marx when formulating his materialist conception of history had already pointed out that you shouldn't judge a historical movement by what it said --and genuinely thought- it was doing but on what, objectively, it did. And objectively what the Bolsheviks did was to develop capitalism in Russia in the form of what Lenin himself in his more honest moments called state capitalism.

Adam Buick