Labor Discipline and the Decline of the Soviet System
The issue of labor discipline lay at the very heart of the antagonistic relationship between the Soviet elite and its work force. That "discipline" was slack in Soviet factories has long been noted by Western and Soviet commentators alike: high labor turnover; absenteeism, closely tied to heavy drinking on and off the job; and, more importantly, a highly irregular pace of work, with periods of intensive labor (usually involving forced overtime) interspersed with countless opportunities for time wasting, slow work, and a general disregard for production quality.
The historical genesis of this system of work is complex, and beyond the scope of this article, but one factor in particular deserves special stress. In order to consolidate its rule, the emerging Stalinist elite had to break down actual and potential opposition emanating from virtually the entire society: the peasants who resisted forced collectivization, and the industrial workers (largely drawn from that same peasantry), the majority of whom resented and to a certain extent resisted the hardships and pressures of industrialization. This required an atomization of the population, in particular the working class—not perhaps a total destruction of mutual solidarity, but the elimination of its ability to function collectively as a class, and the erosion of its consciousness of itself as a class. At the same time, the bureaucratic, almost cavalier planlessness of the Five Year Plans created a deep labor shortage. For the regime this was to prove a fatal combination: a depoliticized, but alienated and bitter work force which, because labor power was desperately scarce, could neither be induced nor compelled to work efficiently.
The result was that workers became a central—but by no means exclusive—cause of the long-term trend toward chronic inefficiency and economic decline which plagued the Soviet system. Workers, while politically powerless to alter the system, compromised the elite's ability to extract and dispose of the surplus product. They thereby became a prime cause of its instability. Virtually every phase of Soviet history therefore witnessed a concerted struggle by the elite to find ways to improve labor performance. Under Stalin, the emphasis was on naked coercion; to the extent that such measures proved unsuccessful, the economic losses this entailed were compensated by the existence of a massive slave-labor sector.
The failure of the Stalinist strategy produced two major periods of attempted reform, under Khrushchev and Gorbachev, which sought to solve the problems of poor motivation and effort by combining the incentives of political liberalization with the economic sanctions of tighter wage policies and, under Gorbachev, the threat of unemployment. As we now know, these efforts also failed to produce the desired results because the reforms could not go beyond the intrinsic limits of the system. No reform could challenge the basic power relations on which the elite's continued rule rested. Thus the fundamental antagonisms which destabilized production remained unresolved, and the system continued on its path of irreversible decline...
Stalinist industrialization had given rise to a specific labor relationship in which workers were rendered unable to confront the ruling elite or even industrial management as a collective entity in their pursuit of either economic or larger political goals. The bureaucratic and planless nature of the system, however, with its absence of systematic economic regulation, allowed workers to assert negative sanctions directly at the point of production. This was not "resistance," but individualized defensive action by an essentially atomized and depoliticized work force. Workers became a source of the system's long-term tendency toward economic decline, a fact explicitly recognized by both Khrushchev and Gorbachev when providing the rationale for their respective reform programs. Unless workers could be made once again to identify with the system and emerge from their demoralization, no moves toward greater economic efficiency would be possible. Insofar as the elite's privileges depended on such an economic rationalization, its own existence was therefore placed in jeopardy. It is for this reason that the Stalinist system could not be termed a "mode of production." It operated at such a high level of internal contradiction and instability that it could never be more than a historically transient social formation.
Effectively, the political relationships which kept the elite in power produced a network of social relations within production which led to the system's ultimate decline. This is significant. The system deteriorated but it was not overthrown. Stalinism's legacy was to make the reconstitution of the Soviet working class as a class (able to articulate and pursue its own radical needs) a lengthy and very difficult process. Some rudimentary beginnings were observable during perestroika, but they will take a long time to mature, perhaps several generations. In the meantime, the prospects for post-Soviet capitalism are for a stagnant, corruption-driven system, with no dynamic for development. If the alternatives are not quite socialism or barbarism, perhaps they are, at the very best, socialism or chaos.
