Soviet Labour And The Ethic Of Communism

Full Employment And The Labour Process In The Ussr

David Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000312539
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book seeks to discover the extent to which the claim—the provision of regular paid labour and a permanent occupation for all who are able to work—is true and whether there are any features of society in distinction from capitalism which lead to the provision of full employment.

1 Soviet Marxism and the Ending of Mass Unemployment

Work and Employment in Soviet Ideology

In their approach to the labour process, the leaders of the USSR have been influenced in their policy and thinking by Marxist assumptions. For Marx, the maintenance and reproduction of material life is the prime human need. In a well-known passage in The German Ideology, Marx writes: 'The first historical act is . . . the production of material life itself. This is indeed. . . a fundamental condition of all hist ory, which today, as thousands of years ago, must be accomplished every day and every hour merely in order to sustain human life.'¹

In Marxist thought it is labour that creates value, i.e. it is the labour power that is embodied in a good or service that gives it social value. The labour theory of value is the linch-pin holding together work, production and output. Use-values are produced by conscious or purposeful human activity: such activity may be defined as work. The notion of work not only connotes physical or mental activity but also social relationships which are formed in the process of working. Work has two social aspects. First, it fulfils a social need on the part of the worker—it uses mankind's creative power. Expending such effort is man's 'life-activity'.² What distinguishes the human race from other species is the ability to transform nature to a world of its own making. The second aspect of such activity is that the goods and services produced are consumed. Material and spiritual human needs are met through the consumption of goods and services. Production and consumption are both aspects of the fulfilment of needs in the Marxist conception of human beings.

In Marxist theory, the kind of activity or work that characterizes a society (and the requisite structure of needs) is dependent on a given mode of production. The labour process in pre-capitalist societies was linked to the direct satisfaction of needs; the typical peasant laboured to fulfil his or her material and spiritual wants, and to pay taxes. Employment and unemployment are concepts which only have meaning in a society which has a market for labour. In peasant societies the division of labour activity into employment and unemployment does not occur. There is no wage labour. There is no sharp demarcation between work and leisure. The social relations engendered by work fo cus on fa mily activity. If the harvest fails, the peasant starves, but he or she is not unemployed. If the family increases in size, all take part in tilling the soil, reaping the harvest and consuming the produce: all are absorbed in the social relationships of the domestic economy. If there are too many mouths to fe ed, some go hungry, but they are not unemployed. The growth of the division of labour, of paid labour and the employment of workers, gives rise to a dif fe rent constellation of needs: production and consumption are dif fe rentiated. In the expansion of labour activity through a market system men and women need jobs or employment, they become wage labour.

While human activity and work fulfil human needs, the Marxist notion of class structure modifies the ways that work is organized and labour is performed. Work as fulfilment of human needs, it is argued by many Marxists, is vitia ted, even precluded by the capitalist class structure. The division of societies into classes gives rise to a dominant and an exploited class. The significa nce of this division is that the dominant class, as such, does not participate in labour activity, though the dominant class and its agents shape the social relatio nships in which work takes place. While the consumption needs of members of the dominant class are met, they do not make any contribution to fulfill ing human needs. Class relations also have their impact on the activity and labour of the exploited class. Exploitation means that the workers' exchange with nature is not an expression of their will but is determined by the domination of the ruling class. The social relations in which paid work takes place are based on exploitation and involve conflict. Under capitalism, much (not all) work is instrumental, it is organized by the capitalist class for the realization of exchange-values and for the extraction of surplus though in the process use-value is produced.³ Under such conditions the fulfilment of the workers' needs, it is argued, is made impossible. The worker becomes alienated.

Alienation or Fulfilment in Employment?

In the late 1960s and 1970s in western countries, alienation was the primary focus of concern of Marxist s. Alienation is one of the most ambiguous words used in the social sciences. One may distinguish between three meanings of the term. First, alienation is used in a very general sense to describe a lack of correspondence between people (as individuals or groups) and society; it depicts a state of malaise in social relationships involving feelings of isolation, powerlessness, self-estrangement and normlessness. Secondly, Marxist writers particularly have focused on control of the product of labour. As ownership of the means of production is vested with the capitalist class, the worker's product is alien to him and, in a societal perspective, there arises a disjunction between production (for profit) and human needs. This approach sees the primary source of alienation (both at work and in society) to lie in ownership relationships. Thirdly, many writers (Marxist and non-Marxist) have found the essence of alienation to lie in the modem process of production; for this school, the nature of and context in which work is performed are alienative.

The thrust of most recent western scholarship has been on the third approach and has been inspired by Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Such writers have emphasized the fact that large-scale mass-production process manufacture leads to the fragmentation of production and to the extreme division of labour. The repetitiveness of jobs in mass production, the deskilling of manual and non-manual work, and the increasing domination of management over workers have led Marxists to deny that such employment fulfils human needs. Such critics are agreed that rather than developing a person's potential powers, 'capitalist labor consumes these powers without replenishing them, bums them up as if they were a fuel, and leaves the individual worker that much poorer. The qualities that mark him as a human being become progressively diminished.'⁴ Writers such as Braverman⁵ emphasize the deskilling process involved with the advance of capitalism. An individual becomes 'a living appendage of the machine'.⁶

It would be mistaken, however, to regard work, even under capitalism, as alien to people's needs. Needs are relative to the development of society and are socially defined. Under conditions of modern capitalism, wage labour is a means to meet the necessities of life: it is an instrumentality to fulfil the prime needs of reproduction (food, shelter). It is also valued in itself. To be gainfully occupied or employed is a mark of social recognition of one's contribution to society. The dominant class legitimates itself by claiming to contribute to wealth-creation—profit is a reward for risk-taking, and even Royalty performs the ceremonial aspect of government and is claimed to contribute to the 'tensionmanagement function' of society. For Marxists, a distinction here is between the parasitical class which lives off labour and the productive class which creates value.

This line of reasoning, which posits employment as a major dynamic of modern society, has been questioned in recent years. Writers such as Claus Offe⁷ have argued that in advanced western societies, work and employment no longer have such an important role. Following sociologi sts such as Dahrendorf and Bell, Offe argues that labour and wage dependency no longer play a major role as the focus of collective concern.⁸ In their stead, as organizing principles, Offe suggests concepts such as 'way of life', post-industrial society, and the home.⁹ Socialist writers, such as Gorz and Willis, have also opposed the oppressive ideology of work under capitalism and called for the positive use of free time.¹⁰

In the 1980s, the advent of high levels of unemployment in the West has led to a different emphasis on work and employment. The stress on the 'alienative' character of work current in the 1960s has been put to one side and replaced by a concern for the 'right to work'. There has developed a recognition of the severe deprivation which ensues if work is denied to a person and has eclipsed the writings of Bell and Offe and led to a reappraisal of employment. Contemporary writers analyse work in four dimensions: for the individual—the provision of income, the 'social recognition' of the worth of the employed person and his or her social status: an activity to occupy and structure the day; an environment in which social conviviality outside the family may be enjoyed; finally, work results in the provision of goods and services which other people may enjoy.¹¹ The moral and social values engendered by capitalism make work—and especially an occupation and employment—a human need. Unemployment is not only a potential cost to the economy in that labour is underutilized, but it is a cost to the unemployed individual and to society. Employment is the main means by which national income is distributed. The burden of unemployment is socially differentiated, the poorest groups with no or little capital bear the brunt of the costs and politically it may be socially divisive and destabilizing.

What is true about the critique of Dahrendorf, Bell and Offe is that, as incomes and consumption pass certain thresholds, the marginal utility of money falls. The 'motivation' effect of additional money has declined for social groups who have sought satisfaction outside the work role. Just where these consumption thresholds are located is a controversial matter and it seems likely that middle-class strata (earning, say,more than double the average wage) will have lower motivation for extra income than lower income groups. Financial incentives also vary between societies, being greater in market-type societies such as the USA and lower in welfare states such as pre-Thatcherite Britain. The system of pecuniary rewards is dominant in the contemporary United States, here retirement in old age may be considered as the postponed gratification of the earned efforts of labour. In welfare states, such as the USSR, security in old age and automatic pensions give rise to a need for greater satisfaction in work. However, the psychological effect of a decrease in income, as with unemployment, gives rise to dissatisfaction for all social groups in all societies.¹² In a nutshell, rises in money income do not make all people more satisfied but reductions in money income invariably lead to increases in frustration and dissatisfaction.

Work under Socialism

Marxists in socialist states have always adopted a positive attitude towards the need for people to work. With regard to labour, the ideology of Soviet Marxism may be called the 'Protestant ethic of socialism'.¹³ Lenin's analysis of work recognizes its primacy for the building of socialist society. For Lenin, work was not only the fulfilment of man's 'species being' but was bound up with the development of productive forces. Capitalism (and its form of labour) was progressive compared with fe udal society. Lenin stressed the economic and social advance of wage labour over serfdom. As he put it in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 'Compared with the labour of the dependent or bonded peasant, the labour of the hired worker is a progressive phenomenon in all the branches of the economy.'¹⁴

Unlike advanced capitalist countries, where wage labour was taken for granted, the Soviet state set about creating conditions for the growth of a class of wage-labourers. In The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power, Lenin considered that a major task of the Soviet government was 'to teach the people how to work'.¹⁵ Large-scale factory production, then characteristic of capitalism, was regarded as being capable of fulfill ing a higher level of human needs than artisan labour. The most advanced forms of labour organization had to be copied from the West. For Lenin, Taylorism (or scientific management) was 'the last word of capitalism' and 'its greatest scientific achievements [lie] in the field of analysing mechanical motions during work, in the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, in the working out of correct methods of work, and in the introduction of the best system of accounting and control, etc'.¹⁶ Taylorism has affinities with Leninism in that it su...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Labour Process
• 1. Soviet Marxism and the Ending of Mass Unemployment
• 2. A Full-Employment Economy?
• 3. Planned and Market Labour Mobility
• 4. Types of Involuntary Unemployment
• 5. Labour Productivity
• 6. The Process of Redundancy, Displacement or 'Freeing' of the Work Force in Conditions of Labour Shortage
• 7. Distinguishing Features of the Soviet Labour Market
• 8. The Brigade System and the Work Process
• 9. Full Employment and Labour Shortage: The Directions of Change
• Index