File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0105, message 41


Date: Tue, 29 May 2001 21:11:51 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu>
Subject: Re: AUT: back to crisis theory


On Wed, 30 May 2001, Cercle social wrote:

> I found this idea interesting :
> 
> <As far as I am concerned the widespread, indeed pervasive <refusal of work
> <was at the heart of the crisis of state capitalism in the East. <The
> <withdrawal of industrial efficiency, as Veblen would say, <undermined
> <Soviet productivity not only in agriculture but in most <industries.
> <Stalinists could force workers to build factories, they <couldn't force
> <them to write good software. As time went by the most important <refusal of
> <work was the refusal to provide the state with creativity and <innovation.
> 
> 
> But is there some references on this or can Harry develop this vision a
> little more ? 

A great deal has been written about how the Russian people responded to
the counterrevolution engineered by the Bolsheviks after 1917. Most of
them were peasants and they used all kinds of passive resistance --that
can be interpreted in terms of their refusal of labor and the fruits of
that labor-- to the "primitive socialist accummulation" of capital as
Preobrazenski called it. The soviet regime built the gulag labor camps in
response to this widespread refusal and its systematic police
state crushing of all overt autonomous worker (including peasant) 
resistance forced it underground. An example of the flight from work was a
problem that plagued the Soviet state for decades: the hard to control
flight from the countryside (where exploitation was worse) to the cities
(where possibilities of survival with less work were greater) --a flight
led by all accounts by young women who had the worst jobs and lowest pay.
A substantial literature was produced by western economists demonstrating
how much lower productivity was in the East but because their
preoccupation was cold war ideology they tended to attribute that lower
productivity to the inefficiencies of the planning state, of planning
itself. However, as a close read of the criticl liteature on labor
"incentives" reveals, policy makers were constantly preoccupied with
getting workers to work. This was a preoccuption that began with Lenin and
continued thereafter. The policies of the Soviet state throughout the
post-WWII period demonstrates over and over the preoccupation with the
refusal of work, right up to the end of the Soviet system. In the later
decades the refusal was so bad labor truancy police were rounding up
people in restaurants and bars during the day seeking those who were not
at their work. On the job the situation was just as bad. Once Gorbachev
initiated glasnost and magazines like Oganyuk began publishing letters
from the people the flood of stories about sabotage on the job
proliferated. My favorite was one about the state discovering something
like 30,000 pairs of shoes with the heel nailed on the toe, completely
unusable. As as far as that goes, anyone who spent any time in the Soviet
Union outside of official tours and communist party orchestrated
encounters found it easy to observe and hear about how little work soviet
workers managed to do. The well known comment "they pretend to pay us and
we pretend to work" was based on real resistance; like many jokes it was
rooted in reality. And the logic of the refusal is obvious: why work hard
for a regime of capital accumulation that minimizes the production of
consumer goods and other things workers need and want. Bukharin made this
point about the peasantry in the industrialization debates but it was
everywhere applicable.

In the domain of unwaged labor, the refusal of procreation by women denied
the state its desired growth in labor force, and like the same phenonmenon
in the West, forced it to rely on alternatives such as drafting students
during harvest of importing immigrant labor. 

H.

> 
> Thanx
> 
> Nicolas (from Cercle social, France)
> 
> 
>      --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
> 

............................................................................
Snail-mail:
Harry Cleaver
Department of Economics
University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas 78712-1173  USA

Phone Numbers: 
(hm)  (512) 442-5036
(off) (512) 475-8535   
Fax:(512) 471-3510

E-mail: 
hmcleave-AT-eco.utexas.edu
PGP Public Key: http://certserver.pgp.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=hmcleave

Cleaver homepage: 
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/index2.html

Chiapas95 homepage:
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/chiapas95.html

Accion Zapatista homepage:
http://www.utexas.edu/students/nave/
............................................................................



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