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Tony Cliff

Russia: A Marxist analysis

Chapter XIV:
Crisis on the labour front
(Part 2)

Effect of inequality and slowness of social mobility on work incentives

Frustration is fed by a consciousness of the gulf that exists between what a person has and what he feels he is entitled to have when he compares his lot-however much it may be improving-with that of others in the same society. While the very poor and utterly oppressed may be so miserable as to submit to their fate, slow improvement may raise their appetites and hopes so high that inequality becomes unbearable.

The effects of inequality on work discipline depend not only on the change in workers’ standards as well as in their appetites, their standards relative to those of the nor in ruling class, but even more on the ease or otherwise of social mobility out of the working class.

In Stalin’s time the escalator of social advance moved very quickly indeed. Millions of peasants improved their economic and social position by becoming industrial workers. Millions of unskilled industrial workers became skilled; and hundreds of thousands, or even millions, rose into the different layers of the heterogeneous bureaucracy. However, once the rate of increase in the size of the working class slowed down and the bureaucracy became more stabilised and more intent on protecting its position from invasion from below, the social escalator ground very nearly to a bait. There was less room at the top.

It is worth while, even at the risk of some digression, to show (1) that under Khrushchev the privileged bureaucracy is as privileged as ever, and (2) that the road upwards-mainly through higher education-has been narrower than under Stalin.

A British steel missionto the USSR in April 1956 reported: “Without allowing for tax, a manager in the United Kingdom would require a salary of £4,200 a year to be as well off as the Russian manager in relation to the average earnings of a worker in each of the countries. If account is taken of the progressive taxation in the United Kingdom the corresponding money income needed to give the same disparity in net earnings as in Russia would be a salary of £12,000 a year.” [47]

In Britain a typical head of an organisation employing 1,000 people earns about £7,000; the head of a firm of 20,000 would earn about £14,000. [48]

An economist who compared Soviet factory directors with their American colleagues said:

It seems reasonable to think of directors of plants with a total labour force of 500-1500 employees as receiving something in the order of five to six times the earnings of the average worker. To see this in American terms, the average wage earned by an American worker employed all year in manufacturing in 1957 was $4,300. An American plant director would have to earn $22,000 a year in order to attain the same position relative to the average American worker as the Russian director holds compared with the Russian worker. One small-scale 1957 study of American firms showed that, in actual fact, the top policy-making executive in firms of under 1,000 employees earned an annual average of $28,000 in salary and bonus.

Moreover, we have not considered the tax angles. The top income tax rate in the Soviet Union is only 13 per cent. Take a Russian director with three children: his tax will be about 12 per cent of his income. Our American manager earning $22,000 a year, also with three children, would pay some 17 to 19 per cent in tax. [49]

Another observer compared the incomes of scientists in Russia, Britain and the United States:

The value of the Soviet scientist to the community is expressed also in his salary. While an unskilled labourer earns 600 roubles per month, a young physicist fresh from the University has 2,000. With a research degree, his income rises to 3,000, and with a lectureship to 4,000. A reader earns 5.000 and a professor 6,000, to which an extra 3,000 are added if be is elected to corresponding membership of the Academy, or 6,000 for full members.

Since the more outstanding physicists will often hold two professorships simultaneously, their income can easily rise to 15,000 roubles per month, while the very top bracket may have as much as 20,000 to 30,000. This is a lot, considering that a small motor-car costs 12,000 to 15.000. Comparing the ratios between unskilled labour and a good, but not the best, physicist’s salary we get: for the United States 1: 5, for Britain 1:7, and for the Soviet Union 1:25. [50]

In the army the annual pay of a private is 360 rubles, of a captain 18,000 rubles, a major 24,000, a colonel 36,000 and a general 60,000. All the privileges of rank continue to be there-the batman, the special officers’ clubs, even special booking offices at railway stations with army queues carefully graded according to rank.

While a Deputy to the Supreme Soviet earns 1,200 rubles a year, usually for a four-day sitting, a charwoman earns only 45 kopeks an hour [51] or 14.80 rubles per 4 days. It is true the domestic servant’s work is now being highly appreciated. We are told, “In a Sverdlovsk school, children declaim a poem about a domestic servant whom nobody thanked for her work before the Revolution, but now she is thanked and people are kind to her.” [52]

The decline in social mobility is clear from changes introduced in educational policy since Stalin’s death.

Chapter 14 Index

The education ladder

In 1949 seven years’ schooling became compulsory, but large numbers slipped through the net. In 1958 Khrushchev stated that only 80 per cent of those who entered the first grade actually succeeded in completing the seventh during recent years. [53] Of these, 70 per cent continued their education to the 8th grade. By 1956, 35 per cent of the corresponding age group completed 10-years’ schooling. For the sake of comparison, in capitalist Britain there is 10 years’ education for all!

Beyond the 8th grade, and especially on the path to the universities, the hurdles become more numerous. The discrepancy between the number of graduates from the 10th year and admission to higher education has been increasing rapidly over the last decade or so, as can be seen from the following table [54]

In other words, while in 1949 the number of admissions to higher education was almost equal to the number of 10-year graduates, in 1958 the ratio was one to six.

According to Khrushchev, nearly 3 million pupils between 1953 and 1957 who were qualified and desirous of entering higher education, failed to gain admission. [55]

Such a situation cannot fail to have a detrimental effect on pupils’ attitude to study. A typical reply of a girl who was reprimanded for not making satisfactory progress at school was: “What does it matter? I’ll have to go into a factory anyhow.” Another said much the same thing. “I know I’m going into a factory, so what’s the use of all this education.” [56]

One can obtain the clearest picture of the educational pyramid by comparing the number of pupils at different levels. Thus at the end of 1958 there were 19.0 million pupils in grades 1 to 4; 6.2 million in grades 5 to 7; 3.5 million in grades 8 to 10: 1.4 million graduated from the 10th grade; 0.24 million were admitted to higher education institutes. [57]

Access to higher education became even more difficult when the Government retreated in December 1958 from its declared aim of 10 years’ compulsory education. This had originally been mooted at the 19th Congress of the CPSU (1952), and the 20th Congress (1956) reiterated the aim. Khrushchev, in his report to the Congress, stated that this would be fully implemented by the end of 1960. [58]

December 1958 saw a retreat to eight years’ schooling, after which most youths, now 15 or 16, were to start working in factories, mines, on construction sites, etc. Further schooling was to be on a part time basis only, through evening classes, correspondence courses, etc. The minority, who showed greater talent, were to have a complete secondary course of 3 years (grades 9 to 11) in what is called “general polytechnical schools with production training”. These grades were to be more selective than were grades 8 to 10 hitherto. Exceptionally gifted pupils (and those with father’s pull?) would be allowed to proceed directly to higher education without prior employment. [59]

In 1938, 42.3 per cent of all students in higher institutions were children of the intelligentsia. [60] Since then no statistics of the social composition of the student body have been published, but the percentage of students from “good” homes has in all probability increased. Evidence for this comes from Khrushchev himself who revealed that in institutes of higher education in Moscow, only 30-40 per cent. of students were descendants of workers and collective farmers. [61] This is not any different than in United States universities, where the proportion of students whose fathers are workers was estimated to be 31 per cent. [62]

One economist pointed out that the chances of children of white-collar employees rising to managerial positions were 8.3 times greater than those of children of other fathers in the United States in 1952. The corresponding figure for Russia in 1936 was 6.4. [63] Since then the figure has risen. “Occupational mobility seems much the same in the Soviet Union as in the United States. The same social groups dominate the paths of advancement.” [64] “... social stability is strong in both societies, although probably somewhat stronger in the United States. But along with the actual social stability which we have noted, both societies share a common myth: the myth of social mobility.” [65] [I]

Management of industry has become specialised to such a degree that promotion from the shop floor is no longer as likely as it was at the time of the industrial revolution. The worker with strong elbows to push with may become a charge hand or a foreman, but he is most unlikely to become a manager. Managers are now recruited almost exclusively from amongst those who have had a higher education.

With inequality between the classes increasing, and the road to the elite is closing up, the disappointments, frustrations and resentments among workers inevitably increase. This must cause the workers not to bother to make an effort for production.

Chapter 14 Index

Workers sabotage “socialist emulation”

If strikes were legal in Russia, workers’ resistance to management and the state could have been measured by the number, character and duration of strikes. But as only a tiny fraction of the iceberg shows above the sea of official secrecy, we have to deduce the position indirectly.

One of the clearest expressions of workers’ resistance is the failure of the Stakhanovite movement and all the campaigns of socialist emulation. When the First All-Union Congress was held in December 1929 there were reported to be about 900,000 “competitors and shock workers”. On 1 November 1930, 58.1 per cent of all industrial workers were said to be taking part in competition; by May 1931, the figure was up to 71.3 per cent. [67] A new spurt in socialist emulation came with the launching of the Stakhanovite movement in 1935. The movement was named after the Donbas miner, Aleksei Stakhanov. It consisted in creating special favourable conditions under which one worker could achieve the greatest possible output: this was then used as an excuse to raise production norms. By 1949 the proportion of workers taking part in “socialist emulation” rose to “more than 90 per cent”. [68]

However, these figures represented paper successes. The overwhelming majority of workers only simulated effort while they did their best to withdraw from production.

From the Donbas, the area from which Stakhanov miraculously excavated 102 tons of coal in a six-hour shift, we have the following figures regarding average excavation per miner per month: 1940, 26.1; 1950, 22.7; 1955, 25.8. [69] Thus the Donbas miner in 1955 dug in a month what Stakhanov dug in 1935 in 1½ hours! How do workers manage to make nonsense of “socialist emulation”? For notwithstanding central Government Planning and large numbers of time and motion agents the workers manage to keep the output norm very low. So long as the man with the stopwatch is there, the workers “prove” that they can achieve no more than this low output. But the moment he has gone, and after the norm has been fixed, they step up their productivity considerably, far surpass the norm and get high bonuses. The low level of the established norms is clear from a statement made in 1955 that “the fulfilment of the norms of output reaches 160-180 per cent in the engineering industry, more than 140 per cent in the chemical industry and 135 per cent in metallurgy. [70] From the V.I. Lenin Nevsky Machine-Building Plant it was reported:

The deliberately low experimental norms were fulfilled 172 per cent on the average in 1955, and almost 200 per cent during July and August. This created an atmosphere of complacency in the shops, and interfered with rallying the mass of the workers to eliminate losses in work time. The fact that norms were considerably exceeded was no indication of high labour productivity. In the iron foundry, for instance, norms in July were fulfilled 205 per cent, but output per man was only 94 per cent of that planned. [71]

Similarly the Kharkov Stanko Stroi Works fulfilled its output norms in 1955 by 190 per cent, but failed to fulfil even 90 per cent of the plan regarding labour productivity. In the first half of 1955 the Minsk Automobile Works fulfilled output norms by 179 per cent, but for the whole year labour productivity was only 0.6 per cent above the Plan. [72]

The proportion of workers who fail to fulfil the norm is extremely small. Thus, for instance, in March 1954, only 1.77 per cent of the workers in the Kuznetsk Metallurgical Combine failed to fulfil the norm: and 1.35 per cent in the Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Combine. [73]

On this theme, Khrushchev said to the 20th Congress:

Considerable over-fulfilment of such deliberately low output norms creates the illusion that all is well, and tends to divert workers, foremen and engineers from effective efforts to raise productivity. The present practice is to make output norms correspond in effect to a definite wage level and not to the technical and efficiency level already achieved. [74]

In July 1955, Bulganin, then Premier, pointed out at a Central Committee meeting:

Average wages in industry have more than doubled compared with the pre-war period, while basic rates have been raised only very slightly, with the result that the share of the basic rate in wages has dropped sharply. In order to narrow the gap between actual wages and the basic rates norms of output are lowered. This gives rise to an abnormal situation – in many cases it is not the degree of norm fulfilment, based on production and technical possibilities, that determines the scale of wages, but, – on the contrary, norms are made to “fit in” with wages. This essentially consumers’ approach to the question of norms is a serious obstacle to the growth of labour productivity. [75]

Workers’ pressure also counteracts the authorities’ desire to encourage rivalry by increasing the differentials between different categories of workers. As Khrushchev said in the above-quoted speech: “It must be pointed out that there is a great deal of disorder and confusion in the system of wages and rate-fixing. Ministries and other bodies, and the trade unions, have not taken up these matters in the way they should. They have neglected them. Cases of wage levelling are not uncommon.” [76]

One of the ways in which levelling expresses itself is the artificial upgrading of a worker of lower skill to a grade higher than his skill warrants. (Grades of skill range from 1, the lowest, to 8). Bulganin in the report quoted above stated the fact: “Many workers, especially time workers, are given a higher rating than the nature of the work warrants, while the lower ratings are hardly ever applied.” [77] An example was given to support this statement: “Machine-building enterprises very often classify cleaners of premises, i.e., people without any qualifications, as grade 3 or even grade 4 workers. There are branches of industry in which there is not a single worker belonging to grade 1 or grade 2.” [78] Another example: “... a wage scale does not even exist for 1st and 2nd category repair workers in car garages: the scale begins only with the 3rd and 4th category.” [79] It is actually very common for the lower categories to be non-existent in factories. The following figures were given in 1953 for the proportion of workers in the first three categories in two ball-bearing factories [80]:

Thus, in this way too, the workers frustrate the authorities’ aim to divide them.

Management goes through the motions of obeying orders from above, but is forced to bow to workers’ pressure from below in order not to lose its labour force, and to encourage it to work.

There is inherent in the bureaucratic mismanagement itself a loophole which is very commonly used by the workers to manipulate the bonus scheme in order to keep production down. This is the proliferation of wage rates:

In Britain “studies of time study procedures” have shown them to be much less accurate and consistent than is often claimed. One experiment, for example, was designed to measure the consistency shown by time study engineers in timing three tasks.

Care was taken to avoid contriving tasks or conditions simply to prove that experienced practitioners could be inconsistent. The study showed a range of 12 per cent in variation of assessments of paired elements by the same observer; a range of 52 per cent in variation of assessments by different observers who had received similar training; and a range of 76 per cent in variation of assessment by observers with different training. The variation in the final figures reached by observers in general had a range of 84 per cent. These variations are very much higher than the five per cent usually allowed for error in time study calculations. [81]

In Russia inaccuracies are even greater.

The effects of inaccurate measurements combine to produce tight and loose rates, fantastic proliferation of norms and differences in rates between different localities, factories, and inside each factory. First, about the proliferation of wage rates:

... in Ordzhonikidze Machine-Tool Works in Moscow, there are over 180,000 piece wage rates, as a result of which more than 60,000 primary documents on wages are made out every week. In order to work out the wage of one woman tool cutter in a tool shop of the Neva factory earning up to 500 roubles a month, 700 documents have to be filled in. [82]

Again, one manual giving the piece rate tables for six operations in the processing of metals (casting, stamping, etc.) comprises 10,000 pages, while the number of individual output norms in the building industry has reached 150,000. [83]

With proliferation of norms, completely arbitrary differences in norms appear between different factories. “Disorganisation in norm fixing for labour shows itself in the fact that for the same work, with the same equipment, different norms have been fixed in different factories. Thus, for instance, for turning out the body of a flange angle valve, the time allowed at the Leningrad Molotov works was 48 minutes in 1953, while at the Metal Construction Factory it was 4 hours. [84]

Similarly, for bricklaying, three Soviet ministries – the Ministries for the Metallurgical Industry, Construction and Trade – set standards of output of 700, 880, and 1,350 units per day respectively. [85] A milling machine operator earned twice as much for the same job at a Kharkov factory as he did in Barnaul and Minsk. [86]

It is very common for an operation or a job to be divided into so many small units of output that the computation of wages on the basis of the standard norm becomes excessively time-consuming and impractical. In the construction industry, for instance, work is atomised in such small details that there are standard rates for each cutting of a board (1.3 kopeks) and for each time a fitter bends a piece of metal (0.31 kopeks). [87] Standard rates, sometimes up to a few hundred, are expressed in fractions of a kopek and must be enumerated on the job order which is given to each worker or group of workers by the foreman. Due to the obvious cumbersomeness of this system there is a tendency to avoid the use of fractional rates. Instead, time clerks compute wage rates “by pulling them out of the air”. [88]

With an innumerable number of piece-rates, no consistent tie-in between them, “good” rates and “bad” rates, it is not to be wondered at that the workers find the system irritating; and knowing the scarcity of labour, they simply manipulate the piece rates. Sabotage of production is the answer of workers who feel that they are not a willing part of the industrial’ organisation, an answer to management whose central logic is that of cutting costs. The pressure towards levelling pay packets in the plant is the answer of workers to the authorities’ aim of atomising the workers’ communities.

It is obvious why Russian workers find the main weapon at hand to fight the authorities, central planners and management alike in the slowdown. Slowdown, cutting down, the norm, is the main weapon in the hand of workers when strike action is illegal. It is of the greatest advantage to workers, in that the authorities cannot in each particular case prove the degree. or even the fact of slowdown. The objects of slowdown were determined by a sociologist with Western industrial experience thus: “(1) to obtain high piece-work rates; (2) while the rates remain the same, to prevent intensification of the rhythm of work: (3) to show bad feeling towards the individual environment, both management and staff, the reasons for which are more or less clearly felt.” [89]

The more conformist and bureaucratic the trade unions, the more workers, even where strikes are legal, tend to resort to go-slows. The phoney nature of Soviet “trade unions” is well known, which results in the complete estrangement of the workers from them and their having little influence over the behaviour of the members. Hence the “socialist emulation” obligations undertaken by the unions on behalf of their members are worth no more than the paper they are written on. For the workers they just don’t exist.

Chapter 14 Index

Post-1956 reforms in the wage system

As industry changed technically. Stakhanovism, with its emphasis on individual pace-making and record-breaking became more and more untenable. “The record makers became heroes of the day. while the working masses remained on the former level ... We know that even hundreds of records with overfulfilment of norms by 200-300 per cent will not give the country even an insignificant part of what an overall 1 per cent increase in labour productivity would give if attained daily be millions of workers.” [90] The new technology demands better general, all-round application of new working processes. So a new category of “leading workers” was introduced, the novatory (innovators). For a year or two the term novatorstvo (innovation) coexisted with Stakhanovism and then replaced it entirely. Since 1953 there have been no references to Stakhanovism in the Soviet press.

This new form of “socialist emulation” consists in mobilising all the workers to overfulfil norms, even if only by a small percentage.

The new emphasis on the need to raise the general willingness of workers to work, together with the retreat from crude compulsion, made it necessary to reform the whole wages structure, and in 1955 a special State Committee on Labour and Wages was created to do this. The first reform was in the wages of construction workers. Wage rates for the entire construction industry, whatever Ministry it applied to, were unified and standards of output simplified. All types of construction work were now classified according to a single scale consisting of seven wage groups, the rate in the highest being 2.8 times the rate in the lowest.

Area coefficients were also introduced. In the first wage area 1, in the second, 1.1, in the third, 1.2, and in the fourth 1.4. Special coefficients were fixed for Sakhalin and Kamchatka, 2.0, and for the Kurile Islands 2.5. The system of progressive output was also simplified. Wages were to be increased by 50 per cent for exceeding the norm by up to 20 per cent, and by 100 per cent in the case of higher output. General standardisation of output norms was introduced, and job classification simplified and standardised. [91]

The revision of the wage system in the engineering industry came up against difficulties, including workers’ opposition. Before proceeding with a general revision of wages and norms, the State Committee on Labour and Wages decided to conduct experiments in fourteen major machine plants. The results were to provide a pattern for the whole country. [92] In October 1956, according to some persistent reports an attempt to raise the work norms in one of the experimental factories (the Kaganovich ballbearing plant in Moscow) provoked a sit-down strike. However, after a couple of years of experimentation, a wages structure was at last fixed for engineering. Its basic principle, adopted later by the rest of the economy, was, as in construction, greater uniformity and simplicity, regional differentials have been levelled out, the bonus system has been simplified, and basic rates (for both piece and time workers) have been raised to a larger share of total earnings. At the same time, differentials have been widened for skilled jobs, on the whole reaching more or less the same magnitude as those prevailing in 1946, as can be seen from the following table [93]:

The prevailing differentials in Russia are incomparably larger than those in the West. Thus the percentage by which the skilled wage exceeded the unskilled in 1952 was: in Italy, 25 per cent; France, 23 per cent; United States, 37 per cent. [94] In Britain the difference between the wage of a machinist or a lathe operator and a labourer was estimated in 1955 to be only 15-25 per cent. [95] As against this, the differential in Russia ranges from 1:2 in the clothing industry to as much as 1:3.2 in mining, the average being around 1:2.8. Add to this the fact that the regulations give skilled men better chances of earning bonuses, and the differentials must in practice be even larger than the above scales indicate.

The aim of the reconstruction of the wage system under Khrushchev has been to rationalise and better coordinate the exploitation of the workers, to make it less erratic and more systematic. Hence the clearer demarcation of grades and jobs. However, notwithstanding the efforts of the authorities to standardise wage structures so as to close loopholes to workers’ manipulation of the norm system, workers’ sabotage goes on.

An aspect of this is labour turnover.

Chapter 14 Index

Labour turnover

Frequent job-changing is another weapon associated with go-slow and cutting of production quotas.

Even prior to the decree of 25 April 1956, which allowed workers to change their jobs after giving a fortnight’s notice, labour turnover took place on a large scale. Thus, according to Bulganin, 2.8 million workers (out of some 12 million) left their jobs in Union and Union Republican industrial enterprises (excluding the timber industry) in 1954, and 1.45 million left building sites; 90 per cent of building workers have been in the trade continuously for less than 5 years, and 60 per cent for less than 2 years. [96]

Since the 1956 decree the situation has further deteriorated.

For the first time in a quarter century, Soviet authorities have raised the curtain a little on the question of labour turnover, with an article published in April 1961 [97] dealing with labour turnover in twenty Economic Councils. It states that in three out of the twenty the number of workers changing jobs in 1960 was approximately 36 per cent of the average number of workers employed, and in one it was 60 per cent. On the basis of accepted Soviet practice in presenting such data, it would be reasonable to assume that the range is between 36 and 60 per cent.

The duration of unemployment was on average 31 days. With respect to the output losses entailed for industry under the jurisdiction of the Economic Councils, the author of the article estimated these at 18,600 million roubles in 1958 and over 20,000 roubles in 1959.

A labour turnover of nearly 40 per cent a year! -what better expression of workers’ resentment of the industrial environment! [98]

Thieving by workers

One of the clearest expressions of workers’ feelings that the industrial organisation to which they belong is not theirs, is their indulgence in thieving from work. By the nature of things there are no statistics to cover this facet of workers’ life, although the fact is well known to anyone who has been in industry. A study of four firms in the United States estimates theft to have cost 15 per cent of output. [99] There are no relevant figures for Russian industry, but some information can be gleaned from the number of guards and watchmen found necessary to protect “socialist property” from the people. These numbered 2,030,000 in 1959. [100] This is more than thirty times greater than the number of guards and watchmen in Britain!

Chapter 14 Index

A changing working class

The capitalist mode of production, and especially its bureaucratic state capitalist species, is endowed with tremendous dynamism, changing itself and everything it touches.

Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form was ... the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguishes the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned. and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (The Communist Manifesto)

Above everything else capitalism changes the working class radically, in a revolutionary way.

Barely thirty years ago it was possible to mobilise ignorant peasants and thrust them into the primitive factories of the First Five-Year Plan. The path of breakneck industrial advance was littered with the wrecks of thousands of machines rendered unusable by peasants’ ineptitude (not to speak of the wrecked lives of millions). Almost anyone can wield a hammer. At that tune the Soviet leaders could agree with the father of Taylorism when he said that stupidity is not an impediment for being an industrial worker. “One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation”, Frederick W. Taylor wrote, “is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles an ox than any other type.” Or with P.F. Drucker who, a generation later, quoted “as a fairly representative view” a statement by an American industrialist to the effect that no one with intelligence above a moron should be allowed to work on an assembly line. [101]

But as the processes of production become more complex, the illiterate worker who behaves like an automaton can no longer deal with the situation. A third stage comes in which there is a growing demand for workers with mental alertness, general intelligence and broad technical knowledge – an all-round man.

Marx was quite prophetic when he wrote: “Modern industry compels society, under penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of a man, by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production. and to whom the different social functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.”

The transformation of industry and the working class make it more and more necessary to reorganise production as “production by freely associated men ... consciously regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.” (Marx).

A central worry for the Russian leaders today is how to develop the productivity of the worker. Never has the attitude of the workers to their work meant more to society.

By the effort to convert the worker into a cog of the bureaucrat’s productive machine, they kill in him what they most need, productivity and creative ability. Rationalised and accentuated exploitation creates a terrible impediment to rise in the productivity of labour.

The more skilled and integrated the working class the more will it not only resist alienation and exploitation, but also show an increasing contempt for its exploiters and oppressors. The workers have lost respect for the bureaucracy as technical administrators.

No ruling class can continue for long to maintain itself in face of popular contempt.

Next Chapter:
Liberalisation: relaxation of terror

Chapter 14 Index

Footnote

I. The Russian press gives clear expression to the social abyss existing between the white-collar workers, students, etc. on the one hand, and the manual workers on the other. As an example, here is a letter published in the Komsomol paper written by a girl to her friend regarding the fate of a friendship:

... his friendship meant a lot to me. I thought (he) was an architecture student who was spending his holidays down here ...

And then our friendship went to pieces. It all happened so suddenly. We were strolling along and talking. Suddenly Tolya stopped outside the House of Culture, pointed to an ornamented plaster work cornice and asked me whether I liked it ...

“It’s nothing special, just an ordinary cornice.” And then I thought I’d better say something to cover up my absent-mindedness, and so I added: “It’s nice, very nice.”

“You know, Galina,” he said, “... I made that cornice ...”

So I asked him: “Do you mean to say you’re just an ordinary plasterer?”

I suddenly imagined what he’d look like in overalls all splashed with plaster. I had another good look at Tolya, and he seemed quite different now. He was wearing a new, navy blue suit, but I kept seeing him in overalls full of white splashes.

“And I thought you were an architecture student,” I blurted out.

And you should have heard how offended he was.

“And what’s wrong with being a plasterer?” he said.

I told him that that wasn’t what I’d meant, but I just didn’t seem to be able to make up for what I’d said. We went on in silence; neither of us could think of anything to say. Right at the entrance to the stadium he suddenly turned round and quickly walked off without saying goodbye or anything. [66]

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Notes

47. The Russian Iron and Steel Industry, A Report prepared by a British Steel Mission to the USSR, April 1956, London.

48. The Observer, 17 February 1963.

49. D. Granick, The Red Executive, London 1960, p.42.

50. K. Mendelssohn, F.R.S., Reader in Physics, Oxford University, Russia Pays Her Physicists Well, The Observer, August 18 1957.

51. Sovetskie Profsoyuzy, No.8, 1961, p.43.

52. G.Z.F. Bereday: Class Tensions in Soviet Education, in The Politics of Soviet Education, edited by Z.F. Bereday and J. Tennar, London 1960, p.68.

53. Pravda, 21 September 1958.

54. National Economy of USSR 1956, pp.244, 251; Cultural Construction in USSR, Russian, Moscow 1956, pp.122, 156-7, 203; USSR in Figures, Russian, Moscow 1958, p.349; Pravda, 27 January 1958; Pravda, 14 July 1959.

55. Pravda, 19 April 1958.

56. Izvestia. 7 June 1958.

57. Pravda, 14 July, 1959.

58. Pravda, 15 February 1956.

59. Pravda, 25 December 1958.

60. Cultural Construct ion in USSR, Russian, Moscow 1940, p.114.

61. Pravda, 21 September 1958.

62. D. Wolfe, Educational Opportunity, Measured Intelligence and Social Background, in Education, Economy and Society, edited by A.H. Halsley, J. Floud, and C.A. Anderson, New York 1961, p.232.

63. D. Graniëk, The Red Executives, op. cit., p.51.

64. ibid., p.56.

65. ibid., p.57.

66. Reprinted in D. L. Meek, Soviet Youth, London 1957, pp.178-9.

67. S. Gersbberg, The Communist Party’s Leadership of the Innovators’ Movement in Industry, Russian, Moscow 1956, pp.28-9.

68. Trud, 20 April 1949.

69. Voprosy Ekonomiki, No.10, 1957, p.79.

70. N. Maslova, Some Questions of the Organisation of Wages in Industry, Voprosy Ekonomiki, No.8, 1955.

71. Trud, 21 November 1956.

72. Sovetskaia Belorussiia, 1 September 1956.

73. N. Maslova, op. cit.

74. Pravda, 6 February 1956.

75. N.A. Bulganin, Tasks of the Further Development of Industry, Technical Progress and Better Organisation of Production, Moscow 1955, p.45.

76. Pravda, 6 February,1956.

77. Bulganin, op. cit., p.45.

78. V. Malyev, Material Interests and Labour Productivity, Moscow Radio, 5 June 1956.

79. Ye. Kapustin, Distribution According to Labour – An Economic Law of Socialism, Voprosy Ekonomiki, No.6, 1954.

80. Sovetskie Profsoyuzy, No.2, 1953, p.68.

81. T. Lupton, Money for Effort, London 1961, p.18.

82. F. Savenkov, Improving the Administrative Apparatus of Industry, Voprosy Ekonomiki, No.1, 1957.

83. Kommunist, No.2, 1955, and No.8, 1956.

84. Maslova, op. cit.

85. D. Sneper, The New System of Wages for Building Workers, Sovetskie Profsoyuzy, November 1955.

86. Novy Mir, No.7, 1955, pp.10-11.

87. Trud, 10 April 1951.

88. ibid.

89. G. Friedmann, Industrial Society, New York 1955, p.281.

90. Stroitelnaya Gazeta, 12 February 1958.

91. Sneper, op. cit.

92. A. Volkov. Our Tasks in the New Year, Sotsialisticheskii Trud, January 1957.

93. M. Yanowitch, Trends in Soviet Occupational Wage Differentials, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January 1960.

94. J.T. Dunlop and M. Rothbaum, International Comparisons of Wage Structures, International Labour Review, Geneva, April 1955.

95. The Economist, 4 June, 1955.

96. V. Koltsov in Voprosy Ekonomiki, No.8, 1955, p.64.

97. I. Kaplan in Trud i Zarabotnaya Plata, No.4, 1961, pp.33-39.

98. For an elaboration of the problem see A. Kahan, Labour Turnover in the Soviet Union, Monthly Labor Review, Washington, January 1962.

99. M. Dalton, Men Who Manage, New York 1959, Ch.7.

100. Vestnik Statistiki, No.12, 1960, p.49.

101. P.F. Drucker, Big Business, London 1947, p.155.

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