I want to talk about labor unions, specifically, why I think labor union consciousness is anathema to communism.
The logic is really simple. Say you allow labor unions to organize independently under market socialism (SWCC or whatever). Labor Union A accrues members and bargaining power and starts demanding higher wages. Given that unions are likely to be concentrated in urban areas, this further widens the gap between urban and rural outcomes. Now Labor Union A is threatening to shut down an entire project unless its demands are met. Labor Union B does the same thing in another sector. Before long, you have these fractious groups whose interests have become increasingly divergent from the broader goals of socialist development because their primary concern is enriching their own members.
How can you presume to lead a nation toward communism if you're constantly capitulating to the narrow demands of individual workers' unions and their already relatively privileged members compared to the rural population? It's not "un-Marxist" to prevent independent labor unions from forming. Quite the contrary: from this standpoint, allowing autonomous unions to develop competing centers of political and economic power risks ultimately subordinating long-term socialist development to sectional interests.
this post is so awesome
In this assumed model labor unions are themselves the representatives for firms, rather than the industrial unions that we are all much more familiar with in however partial of a form, and they have no mediation with each other or with their consumers at all. I’m not sure how we’ve gotten to this imaginary system with a free market of individual union firms given that it would take more effort to accomplish this in most countries than it would to just socialize industrial monopolies, govern their overall operations through assemblies, reduce managers from obnoxious pocket watching micromanagement to an oversight position like conductors, and electing union delegates to advocate for the interests of particular firms or sectors to other firms or sectors within the socialized monopoly and to those delegates advocating for other industries.
This is a completely imaginary scenario of course, but so is the risk of a trade union free market that needs to be prevented (by who?) for the sake of national development (with goals set by who and for who?). To me that preventative measure sounds more like another, much more real problem, which is bureaucratic harassment of workers and the disempowerment of all individuals in the face of the state, which claims to equally and neutrally represent all classes except for the enemies of national development. At this point the socialism being imagined doesn’t sound like it would motivate many workers or peasants to act.
If anything this sort of system provoked mass working class and peasant resistance in the early years of the Soviet Union, from the Greens to Kronstadt. And even if you think those were just foreign agents, Lenin himself admitted that they stemmed from real problems and advocated not only for the NEP but for concessions to the trade unionists in order to keep the organs of the class and the “class state” allied with each other. I would recommend reading what he had to say during the trade union dispute of 1921, especially against Trotsky’s call for the destruction of all independent trade unions in the name of the kind of development you describe. For more historical context, read Moshe Lewin’s book Lenin’s Last Struggle.
The actual problem that developed within the Soviet trade unions over time is they only represented the interests of the union representatives and their contractual relations with the public bureaucrats. That was little different than the problem of American unions like the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which agreed to the no-strike pledge during WWII in exchange for union recognition and full employment while its rank-and-file resisted the peace treaty with corporate management and organized wildcat strikes over the control of the production process throughout the 1940s. That period of rank-and-file revolt against work and over the nature or course of development seems much more promising to me than an imaginary developmentalist state cracking down on unions so that they don’t get in the way of the accumulation of national capital
I don't see what's wrong necessarily with the developmentalist state cracking down on the accumulation of “national capital”—a loaded term, admittedly. In practice, we're talking about the factories, infrastructure, processing capacity, and industries needed to actually produce wealth and abundance. That productive capacity has to exist before there's anything meaningful to redistribute. But sure, I'll read your recommendations. Although Moshe Lewin being a Labor Zionist and Israeli nationalist has me starting with a rather quirked eyebrow.
The form that the construction, operation, and management of the infrastructure takes is where the question of politics and class struggle comes in even under conditions of public ownership. Especially when a new assembly line setup requires a work pace that the workers are not accustomed to and the bureaucratic planners are setting quotas higher than anything they’ve ever been demanded to achieve before. In the Soviet Union these are both sources of widespread tension and resistance by workers and urbanized peasants. Some historians (like Sheila Fitzpatrick) have even found that most of the mass participation in the Great Purges was motivated by a desire to take revenge on the managers who had used harassment and punishments to force workers into fulfilling overly high quotas in these abnormally strenuous conditions.
Lewin became a Zionist for basically the same reason he had been a Sovietist, this was pretty common for the postwar generation of Israeli settlers (David Ben-Gurion was an explicit admirer of Lenin and Stalin until the ‘50s). The problems with his work on the Soviet Union are for the most part the same as the problems with any nationalist, which is where a historian critical of nationalism like Ronald Grigor Suny can be brought in but then that’s 500+ total pages of reading recommendation for an off handed reference that’s meant to direct to a relevant context
You see, I agree that public ownership doesn't make class conflict disappear. But then what's the practical alternative? If workers and planners inevitably have conflicting interests over things like quotas and working conditions, how do you actually resolve that contradiction while still pushing rapid development? At some point, doesn't a developmental state need some mechanism to prioritize long-term productive development over immediate workplace interests?
As I see it, creating highly favorable conditions for workers, meeting the demands of survival under a hostile world system, and achieving developmental goals in a timely and adequate fashion can create mutually contradictory demands. These are problems Lenin grappled with, of course, but he never lived to oversee their solutions to completion; he died only a few years into the process.
Why rapid development? The question also remains open of, what kind of development? In the late Soviet Union, both of these issues contributed to, on the refusal side, widespread work absenteeism and slacking, and on the affirmative side, revived grassroots council campaigns, a green movement against the ecological destruction of unsustainable petroindustrial heavy development, and of course the now infamous demand for a greater variety of light industry consumer products.
Socialism that’s only better conditions, competition with other states, and achieving development goals could describe anything from the U.S. New Deal to Francois Spain. The latter even had public ownership of railways, aviation, communications, energy, and manufacturing. What made the Russian Revolution and revolutions like it distinct was the mass revolution driven by everyday workers’ desire to control the production process, peasants’ desire for freedom from serfdom or indenture, and colonized people for self-determination. All of these bring up not only problems of a single development process in completing itself but the question of what development is, for whom it is, what it should be, and how it is attempting to develop its goal
In the case of SWCC, the goal has demonstrably included lifting hundreds of millions of Chinese people out of poverty. You can debate what constitutes “poverty,” who gets to define it, and how poverty alleviation should be measured, but the material transformation itself is undeniable. At the same time, China’s development has contributed to a restructuring of global power relations, creating space for competing socialist and emancipatory movements that might otherwise be more vulnerable to immediate pressure from the American financial, political, and military apparatus.
These objectives ultimately reinforce one another: poverty reduction, industrialization, technological development, greater strategic autonomy, and a more plural distribution of global power all create greater room for socialist projects to survive, experiment, and develop. The argument, then, is that rapid development is being prioritized partly because it is effectively an arms race with the imperialist world over productive capacity and strategic autonomy. The state has to expand the material limits of what is possible before it can meaningfully redistribute or transform them.
You can argue over whether this strategy will actually produce socialism (I argue that in some ways it already has), or whether its contradictions will ultimately lead somewhere else. But “develop first, transform later” is at least a material strategy for creating the conditions under which transformation becomes possible, rather than simply assuming those conditions into existence.
Meanwhile, a narrower project focused primarily on improving workers’ living conditions might, at best, produce a self-contained workers’ paradise that, by failing to prioritize rapid development and strategic autonomy, leaves itself vulnerable to being crushed and resubordinated into the existing world system. Revolutionary Burkina Faso was, in many ways, an example of this.
“creating space for competing socialist and emancipatory movements” “greater room for socialist projects to survive, experiment, and develop” ok but the thing is that hasnt happened… multipolarity hasnt led to a renaissance of socialist movements worldwide, and “emancipatory movements” in the sense of resistance to US imperialism are dominated by non-socialist forces.
also “develop first, transform later” is bifurcating the issue, development along capitalist lines creates certain productive relations, its not simply a question of ownership. how do you ‘transform’ a funko pop factory? what about an international supply chain? its not as simple as a change in hands.
