The basic functions of Soviet trade unions include: 1) taking part in drafting, discussing and examining the production plan of the enterprise; 2) participating in drafting new systems of wages and fixing wage scales, 3) establishing obligatory safety rules and norms; 4) participating in drafting legislation on labour conditions; 5) promoting active forms of worker participation in solving production problems; 6) encouraging workers’ initiative in the introduction of new techniques, inventions and rationalization of production; 7) managing much of the social insurance and welfare programmes including funeral allocations, help with childcare, free legal aid, subsidies for special diets, places in sanatoriums, sickness benefits, retraining expenses and housing; 8) organizing cultural, recreational and sports activities including tourism (the unions own and manage resorts for their members), music events, dances, artistic programmes, films, educational programmes, lectures, etc.; 9) organising meetings of workers in the enterprise at which management must report and be scrutinized 10) approving or rejecting the dismissal of workers 11) discussing the correct use of work time and personnel, and methods for increasing labor discipline and productivity; 12) establishing collective agreements with management on production quotas, methods of production, allocation of workers, etc.; and 13) checking up on management’s compliance with the collective agreements and labour laws.
The Soviet view of trade unions is that they should perform this dual role of directly representing the interests of production workers and advancing the quality and quantity of production for the benefit of the working class as a whole. If in fact the Soviet Union is a socialist society, there is no antagonistic relationship between the interests of the state and management and the one hand and the workers on the other. Therefore both goals can be realized at the same time. Thus an evaluation of the union’s role in advancing the interests of production hinges on one’s evaluation of whether there exists in the Soviet Union an exploiting class that derives a disproportionate benefit from increases in production at the expense of the working class as a whole.
As international and domestic pressure decreased, more and more decision-making and influence was extended to workers in their workplaces. Ernst Mandel (a Trotskyist who was generally opposed to the USSR) said that 40-50% of workers said that they actively and regularly participate in organizations in the factory where they work, and this number generally increased over the course of the USSR. studies in yugoslavia found that only around 50% of workers were interested in decision-making in their places of work, so this number shouldn’t be seen as too low.
more formal systems of workers control don’t result in a more democratic factory life. in Yugoslavia when it was in its least-centralized state (after the reforms of 1965), 87% of the proposals were initiated by those with advanced technical education and only 5% were initiated by blue-collar workers. the highly educated people utterly dominated factory life. 98% of the proposals from highly educated people were accepted without modification. only 8% of people agreed that workers councils played a leading role in the direction of the factory.
Compare this to the USSR, where 13-24% of managers and specialists, 32-45% of skilled machinists, 32-67% of skilled manual workers, and 67% of unskilled workers said that they felt that they had no influence over their work collectives. While there was certainly room for improvement, the Yugoslav experience tells us that official worker council control tells us very little about actual dynamics.
Except for the illegal second economy, which bloomed under the revisionist leadership of Khrushchev and his successors, there wasn’t an exploiting class. The difference in wages and benefits that the highest echelons of the Soviet bureaucracy and unskilled workers was about the same as the differences in wages and benefits between skilled workers and unskilled workers in capitalist countries.
The bourgeoisie doesn’t directly manage a country, it gives that job to a power elite that it controls. For much of the Soviet Union’s history, the producing classes had class control of the Soviet Union. While we can discuss the desirability of a power elite, the existence of a power elite does not negate socialism.
well remember that in yugoslavia it was obvious that the party dictatorship had ultimate say. also participation in yugoslavia was largely limited in practice to electing professional managers. the firms themselves were also part of a structured market, such that workers were isolated in each firm and expected to compete against each other and face "market discipline" of a certain sort, which undermines the participatory cooperative nature. i don't know if this tells us anything in particular about what a deeply participatory planned economy would look like.
the argument of hoxhaists, for example, is that a socialist economy is administrative, and that organization of the economy has to avoid a circulation of commodities.
Crow posted:
Its so weird to see people litter in the street, I'm like, these people still exist? Weirdos
theyre leaving cans around for homeless peopel to collect duh, the market works
most of the hoxhaist stuff ive read talks about the proletariat losing the CPSU as a way of controlling the state as evidence of capitalist restoration, not circulation of commodities.
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/nov1960.htm
A lot is said about peaceful coexistence, some even go so far as to assert such absurdities as that People's China and Albania are allegedly opposed to peaceful coexistence. Obviously, such harmful and erroneous views should be rejected once and for all. There can be no socialist state, there can be no communist who is opposed to peaceful coexistence, who is a warmonger. Great Lenin was the first to put forward the principle of peaceful coexistence among states of different social orders as an objective necessity as long as socialist and capitalist states exist side by side in the world. Standing loyal to this great principle of Lenin's, our Party of Labor has always held and still holds that the policy of peaceful coexistence responds to the vital interests of all the peoples, responds to the purpose of the further consolidation of the positions of socialism, therefore, this principle of Lenin's is the basis of the entire foreign policy of our people's State.
Peaceful coexistence between two opposing systems does not imply, as the modern revisionists claim, that we should give up the class struggle. On the contrary, the class struggle must continue; the political and ideological struggle against imperialism, against bourgeois and revisionist ideology, should become ever more intense. In our persistent struggle to establish Leninist peaceful coexistence while making no concessions of principle to imperialism, we should further promote the class struggle in capitalist countries as well as the national-liberation movement of the people of colonial and dependent countries.
(...)
They say that we are in favor of war and against coexistence. Comrade Kozlov has even put to us, Albanians, these alternatives: either coexistence, as he conceives it, or an atomic bomb from the imperialists, which will turn Albania into a heap of ashes and leave no Albanian alive. Until now, no representative of U.S. imperialism has made such an atomic threat against the Albanian people. But here it is and from a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and to whom? To a small heroic country, to a people who have fought, through centuries, against savage and innumerable enemies and who have never bent the knee, to a small country and to a people who have fought with unprecedented heroism against the Hitlerites and Italian fascists, to a people who are bound like flesh to bone to the glorious Soviet Union, to a party which abides loyally, consistently and to the last by Marxism-Leninism and by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. But comrade Frol Koslov, you have made a mistake in the address, you cannot frighten us into yielding to your wrongly calculated wishes and we never confound the glorious Party of Lenin with you who behave so badly, with such shamelessness, towards the Albanian people and towards the Party of Labor of Albania. The Party of Labor of Albania will strive for and support all the correct and peaceful proposals of the Soviet Union and other countries of the socialist camp as well as of the other peace-loving countries.
Edited by prikryl ()