Lech vs. Leonid: Striking Out at the Kremlin

...But the official responses-a flurry of studies and an anti-alcoholism PR campaign-have met with little success...

...Thus Lenin, in "How to Organize Competition": Not a single rogue (including those who shirk their work) [is] to be at liberty, all are to be kept in prison or put to compulsory labor of the hardest kind...

...There has, of course, been no official declaration that we now accept Russia's interpretation of the Yalta agreement.* Indeed, during the halcyon days of the Carter administration's human rights offensive, it was not uncommon to single out Soviet bloc nations for special attention...

...According to the ADA, Polish workers succeeded despite "threats, intimidation, harassment, and terror tactics...

...Workers are still required to carry a work book, a passport-like document in which is inscribed the owner's entire employment history, including disciplinary action or police difficulties...

...And, as well, a convenient philosophical foundation for subsequent Stalinist refinements, such as the 1940 decree making it a criminal offense for a worker to leave his job, a "wartime emergency" rule which somehow survived until 1956, three years after the dictator's death...

...lists themselves will eventually be hanged...

...Lenin also imposed the piece rate, excoriated by Marx and employed in but a handful of Western industries, throughout the Soviet economy...

...some will argue...

...Here we are reminded that it was during the most liberal period of the Khrushchev thaw, a time when Solzhen-itsyn was given official sanction to publish revelations about the Gulag, that upwards of 300 unarmed workers were massacred in the industrial city of Novocherkassk during a strike over a wage reduction and major increases in food prices...

...today the piece rate remains the principal method of wage determination for most workers...

...Similarly, there are no show trials for strike leaders or for those associated with the various independent trade unions which have sprung up in the past few years...

...Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labor Code...

...To add to the irony, the Soviet worker is also subject to some of the most disagreeable symptoms of capitalist "exploitation...

...More recently, the Soviets have bundled a number of worker dissidents off to institutions for the criminally insane, and it is generally believed that worker dissidents are treated more harshly than those seeking changes in the artistic or intellectual spheres...

...businessmen who see labor as an obstacle to profitable deals with the East...

...and liberals whose efforts to transform the Democratic Party's global perspective to an overtly McGovernite position have been stymied by the AFL-CIO's opposition...

...During the early days of the Polish strikes, a high Carter State Department official was upbraided by a trade union official for the administration's equivocation on Poland and general unwillingness to engage the Soviets in a war of ideas...

...The same author, in State and Revolution: for when all have learned to manage . . . then the escape from this national accounting and control will inevitably become so increasingly difficult, such a rare exception, and will probably be accompanied by such swift and severe punishment . . . that soon the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of everyday social life in common will have become a habit...

...With normal channels of protest foreclosed, Soviet workers must look to passive, indirect outlets for frustrations generated by their isolation and atomiza-tion, and compounded by the cynicism pervasive in Soviet society...

...Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is Willy Brandt, the leader of the Socialist International...

...There was the subsequent consolidation of the workers' movement with the establishment of Solidarity, the independent labor federation, led by Lech Walesa, a better known and certainly more popular figure than the bureaucrats who run the party and state...

...Yet the kind of straightforward support that one might have hoped for from Western liberals and leftists has simply not materialized...

...The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor power-an almost inexhaustible reservoir-and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization...

...This brings us to the recent events in Poland...

...It was, of course, universally acknowledged that the Soviets had failed to create anything resembling a "workers' paradise," in their own country or in the satellites...

...All the elements are there: unarmed workers confronting the awesome power of a police state...

...But even if a clear connection between the American broadcasts and the Hungarian Revolution could be made, does it follow that the only alternatives today are passivity on the one hand and irresponsibility on the other...

...And no one can claim, as has been done, shamefully, in the case of Afghanistan, that we are dealing with backward, feudalistic elements...

...In this view, American trade will stimulate a process of economic liberalization, which in turn will bring about a relaxation in the controls currently imposed on the labor force...

...For challenging these comfortable assumptions, the Polish workers have earned this establishment's resentment, and not its respect...

...Not that there hasn't been sympathy for the workers...

...Such contempt and derision, however, were seen as reflecting a kind of hard-hat cynicism common to industrial workers everywhere, rather than a desire to upset the existing order of things...

...The direct link between Communist ideology as set down by its most respected founders and the totalitarian police state that subsequently evolved has seldom been made more explicit than in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky on the organization of labor...

...to do so, he declared, would appear to all the world like a self-interested defense of our multinational corporations...

...In the Soviet bloc, however, a strike is an inherently political act, even though the striking workers have no overtly political motives...

...others seek thoroughgoing democratic reforms...

...At is a matter of historical record that Communism, wherever it has been imposed, has wiped out all vestiges of free trade unionsim...

...Along with drill bits and computers, the West also exports entire systems of industrial organization, complete in every respect except for the absence of democratic trade unions, a fact that is not lost oh those Western businessmen who have been de'-tente's most resolute supporters...

...In a fourth place one out of every two idlers will be shot on the spot...

...For the first time since the Soviets fastened their grip on Eastern Europe, a satellite government was compelled to acknowledge that one of Communism's sacred institutions, the official trade union movement, was despised by those it presumed to serve...

...There have, after all, been expressions of Western concern about the fate of Klebanov (not to mention an embarrassing inquiry by the International Labor Organization), but no prying foreigners have asked questions about the disappearance of the organizer of the 1972 Kiev Hydroelectric plant strike...

...If-anything, the leadership of Solidarity andits supporters from KOR are of the Left-liberals, social democrats, non-Communist Marxists...

...or that the uniqueness of Polish culture and politics make Poland the only fertile territory for opposition movements in the entire Soviet bloc...

...Flora Lewis, Wicker's colleague on the New York Times oped page, reprimanded American trade unionists for having launched a campaign to assist the Polish workers...

...Why this reluctance to support a political development which presents dramatic proof of the superiority of Western democratic values and at the same time presents the Soviets with a serious and probably long-term headache...

...Yet it is well to remember that before 1980 three of the most important crises in the postwar Communist world were touched off by rebellious industrial workers: Poland in 1956 and 1970 (in both instances the government leadership had to be replaced) and East Germany in 1953...

...The Soviet worker has thus experienced the convergence phenomenon for some time...

...This is because strikes represent either a challenge to the system of labor regimentation-which for Communist societies is the glue holding the entire structure together-or a protest against the inefficiencies and unfairness built into the economy...

...In a number .of instances, a do-nothing course has been urged by commentators who have been otherwise engaged in lecturing the Reagan administration on the vital importance of maintaining a firm commitment to human rights in Latin America and elsewhere in the Third World...

...Nor did the Carter administration particularly distinguish itself...

...It is estimated that Soviet workers spend between one-quarter and one-half of their food budget on vodka, and drunkenness has become the leading cause of absenteeism and poor job performance...

...No sooner had the Polish workers laid down their tools than Tom Wicker, having concluded that a Soviet invasion was inevitable, declared that the main lesson Poland taught us was the importance of ratifying SALT II in order to prevent future Polands from escalating into superpower conflict...

...It must also be measured against vodka's contribution to social peace: An alcoholic worker is a docile worker, quite unlikely to spend his spare hours theorizing about human rights or drawing up petitions for the International Labor Organization...

...attitudes must be the first order of business for the Reagan administration...

...Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character...

...Then there were the unprecedented concessions required to end the general strike: free trade unions, the right to strike, easing of censorship, the release of political prisoners, curtailment of privileges for party big-shots and the security forces...

...Here a special source of bitterness is the lack of opportunity and mobility for the working class, a reality which contrasts sharply with the official propaganda about the workers as the leaders of society...

...Trade unions have been made into the appendage of governments or political parties in various non-Communist societies, but workers have not generally been subjected to the elaborate system of repression and control which is the distinctive feature of Communist labor policy...

...In another place they will be put-to cleaning latrines...

...Until the Polish upheavals of the past summer, few Western observers took seriously the idea that the working class might trigger major reform within the Soviet bloc...

...In fact, Soviet workers are well aware that neither they nor, more importantly, their children will ever play anything resembling a leadership role-upward mobility having been pretty much reserved for the offspring of the educated and technical stratum...

...But aside from wagging an occasional finger at the Russians or Czechs, very little was said or done regarding the Soviet domination of the Eastern bloc...

...For those who were unpersuaded by the convergence theory, or by its complement -the notion of a moral symmetry between the Communist and democratic worlds- the major obstacle facing restive workers remained the special ruthlessness which Communist regimes reserve for the anonymous men and women who dare to challenge the official system of workplace repression...

...A major obstacle is the regime's ambivalence about the role of drink...

...how would we feel, she asked, if the Soviets shipped money to striking farm workers here...

...Although the Sonnen-feldt doctrine was sharply criticized when it surfaced in 1976, its underlying principle that we have a vested interest in promoting a normal, "organic" relationship between the Soviet Union and the satellites appears to have won considerable acceptance among our foreign policy elite...

...And you cannot make the management of the economy more democratic without bringing with it more political democracy...

...The fatuousness of this observation aside, the fact remains that precisely the opposite is true: To the degree that we fail to make a vigorous public case for our democratic ideals, we will be perceived as concerned only with making the world safe for corporate profits...

...As a consequence of these attitudes, the United States has pretty much conceded the ideological terrain on the issue of global workers' rights, an especially dismaying development since, on this question above all others, the Soviet Union is thoroughly and embarrassingly vulnerable...

...So what...

...Lenin had no regrets about his government's repression of the class which had presumably brought the Bolsheviks to power...

...He who works not, neither shall he eat...

...In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen workers who shirk their work . . . will be put in prison...

...Meanwhile, lower-ranking officials groused about how the workers were "going too far" by putting forth demands beyond traditional workplace concerns, reflecting, no doubt, the prevailing administration attitude that there is nothing to be gained from a show of firmness in negotiations with the Communists...

...With Carter, the psychological barriers were practically insurmountable...

...More recently, discontented workers have joined together, sometimes in collaboration with dissident intellectuals, to form independent labor organizations in the Soviet Union and several of its satellites...

...If it were not for Western aid the regime would be forced to introduce democratic measures in agriculture and other areas of the economy," Plyushch argues...

...A habitual problem for all Communist societies is the pricing and availability of food...

...If American workers have such little respect for democratic values, why should things be different for their Russian or Polish counterparts...

...trade unionists demanding bread and roses...

...But the decision to subordinate trade unions to the Communist Party was not alone responsible for the system of workplace terror which evolved under Stalin and was later reproduced by Communist governments in Eastern Europe, Cuba, and, more recently, Cambodia and Vietnam...

...the same issue has also provoked a number of violent clashes between workers and the military in the Soviet Union...

...but the Communists obviously do, which is why literally millions of police agents, management officials, and, not least, "trade union" leaders have been assigned the task of indoctrinating, controlling, and, if necessary, punishing the workforce...

...We may not consider workers a likely source of liberal ferment...

...Nobody believes in Communism anyway, and certainly workers are not about to welcome their own enslavement...

...In a third place they will be provided with "yellow tickets" after they have served their time, so that all the people shall have these pernicious people under their surveillance until they reform...

...Nor, in fact, is the totalitarian subjugation of the working class a Stalinist aberration...

...In the democratic world unions generally restrict bargaining demands to issues like pay, vacations, and pensions, while pursuing broader social goals through the political process...

...Prison-camp labor also figured prominently in Stalin's industrial experiments, and even now inhabitants of the Gulag play an important role in the Soviet economy, assembling everything from auto parts and electrical appliances to souvenirs for the summer Olympics...

...Worker alienation is reflected in epidemic rates of absenteeism and job-site thievery, but the main outlet for worker frustration is alcohol...

...There are those who propose that the United States should help the Soviets to overcome their economic problems through a step-up of trade and the transfer of high technology...

...No one would deny that deploying tanks and troops to enforce labor discipline, or snatching workers from assembly lines and packing them off to mental hospitals for "drug therapy," are more effective than lockouts or injunctions in handling worker unrest...

...In the earliest stages of the Bolshevik government the "trade union question" was the focus of a long and bitter debate whose resolution sealed the fate of Communism's lingering democratic impulses...

...It can hardly even be said that an East European policy existed during the Carter administration (or during the Nixon or Ford administrations, for that matter), a-fact which apparently suited the American foreign affairs establishment just fine, judging by the almost total lack of attention given the issue by its preferred journals...

...Emphasis added) And Trotsky, in Terrorism and Communism: The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the communist quite unquestionable...

...On the surface, Poland would seem an issue which should appeal to a broad and ideologically diverse constituency in the West, especially to liberals and the non-authoritarian Left...

...Finally and especially galling to the Soviets is the alliance between the workers and the intellectual dissidents from the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), a coalition forged in spite of the regime's desperate efforts to depict dissidents as alien, anti-worker elitists...

...But the willingness to employ such extreme measures suggests a conclusion very different from the one drawn by most Western experts about the potential impact of a workers' movement...

...Faced with the most inspirational and strategically significant gain for human rights since that concept was made a "cornerstone" of American policy, the administration treated the Polish events as little more than a nuisance...

...a workers' movement seeking egalitarian reforms through nonviolent means...

...And there is no better way to begin encouraging the emerging workers' movement than to heed the plea of Leonid Plyushch: "The capitalist West should stop selling the Soviets the rope with which the Soviet people are now being hanged, and with which the capitalists themselves will eventually be hanged...

...Given the imagination, energy, manpower, and money expended to prevent the working class from taking its revolutionary mission seriously, the wonder is that the workers have found the courage and resourcefulness to attempt even the most limited protest...

...force and compulsion, he believed, were fundamental to Communist doctrine, and not, as his apologists would have it, temporary measures made necessary by Russia's postwar economic crisis...

...Among major institutions, the single exception to this sorry record has been the American labor movement, whose generous support of the Polish workers is but the most recent and highly publicized reflection of its consistent support for liberation forces behind the Iron Curtain...

...The toll which vodka exacts from the productivity rate must, after all, be measured against the substantial profits derived from the state vodka monopoly...

...The official replied that America could never compete effectively with Russia...

...He has, for example, suggested that because Soviet hegemony over Poland was decided at Yalta, there is really nothing we can do on behalf of the workers except hope that the Soviets and Poles will resolve their "internal problems" internally...

...Nevertheless a number of strikes are known to have occurred in the post-Stalin period, and for every strike report reaching the West there are many others about which we know nothing...

...This, ultimately, has proved the most efficient way of disposing of restive workers...

...Others, especially strike "ringleaders" with no record of dissident activity and therefore no contacts with human rights organizations or trade unions in the West, simply vanish into thin air...

...Satisfying the workers would really require a full-scale economic reorganization, including the introduction of market forces and a substantial diminution of the political control of the economy, something which the Kremlin is not about to do...

...In gratitude, labor has been granted pariah status by an influential and ideologically broad coalition: conservatives who have never accepted labor's right to represent American workers, much less defend the rights of workers abroad...

...And it was never doubted that the tattered slogans about the proletariat playing the "leading role" in Communist society were regarded with anything but contempt and derision by the proletariat itself...

...It was, of course, food policies which ignited the strikes in Poland...

...As our popular culture often reminds us, American workers are known to share such sentiments, and it was not so long ago that blue-collar workers here were pronounced an intolerant, even reactionary, force fully capable of supporting any authoritarian government which provided full employment for white males and repression for everyone else...

...It was Lenin himself who, in a moment of rare creative insight, coined the phrase "progressive Taylorism" to give a more humane veneer to industrial-management techniques which were bitterly opposed by unions in the West...

...Clearly it does not, nor is it likely that the Carter officials really believed that it did...

...Many, especially those who had persuaded themselves that life in the Soviet Union was not so very different from life over here, never entertained the possibility that a workers' opposition could escalate into a regime-threatening force...

...Even today the Soviets remain fascinated with Western management techniques...

...All, however, recognize the fraudulence of the official "trade unions" and appreciate the relationship between genuine trade union rights and broader human rights...

...There is a more plausible reason for the Carter administration's refusal to consider seriously how we might help Poland's democratic forces: the ambivalence many Westerners feel towards the destabilization of the Soviet empire...

...But contrary to the expectations of the theory's most renowned proponents, the result has been a peculiar combination of the worst features of both systems...

...But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle...

...Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic re-birth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible...

...Workers must also avoid running afoul of the KGB agents who function as "personnel managers" at large, enterprises with the assignment of weeding out "malcontents" and " troublemakers...

...Vodka, then, also has a place in Lenin's system of "national accounting and control...

...And as all must eat, all are obliged to work...

...For the Americans for Democratic Action, the major issue raised by Poland was not how the United States should respond in the event of a Soviet invasion or a renewed crackdown by the Kania government, but rather the repression of American workers...

...We can dismiss the dubious claim that it was our propaganda that egged the Hungarians on to a doomed rebellion in 1956 and that we must therefore avoid repetition of those "mistakes" now...

...Of course, one can attach all sorts of caveats and qualifications to the achievements of the workers' movement, asserting, for example, that in the short run fulfillment of the workers' demands will make economic conditions more difficult (although in the long run they may force the regime to adopt long-overdue economic reforms...

...But as dissident intellectual Leonid Plyushch has pointed out, it is the Kremlin's hope that Western technology will enable Russia to resolve its economic crisis without having to introduce liberalizations in the economic and social spheres...

...Although prisoners are no longer mobilized in compulsory labor brigades to build massive hydroelectric projects or sent to near-certain death digging gold in the Kolyma, Soviet labor policy today is distinguished largely by how little it has changed from earlier times...

...Stalin simply inherited an existing system which had been built and given ideological legitimacy by other Bolshevik leaders, most notably Lenin and Trotsky...

...of that inexpensive commodity there has been an abundance...

...Another consideration is the likelihood of growing worker unrest in Eastern Europe over the next decade as the built-in inefficiencies of Soviet-style command economies combine with fuel and resource shortages to produce a major economic crisis...

...Under Brandt's leadership, the Si has established a special committee to monitor alleged acts of American aggres-, sion against El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other Latin American countries...

...For obvious reasons, worker dissatisfaction is a touchy subject in the Communist world, and its leadership will go to extraordinary lengths to conceal the facts from the foreign press...

...Their objectives vary-some limit themselves to traditional trade union concerns...

...Some, like Vladimir Klebanov, a mineworker who was the principal figure behind the Association of Free Trade Unions, have been sentenced to indefinite terms in mental institutions and given doses of powerful drugs which can cause irreparable brain damage...

...Be that as it may, the summer revolution must still be considered one of the most significant setbacks for Communist totalitarianism in the postwar era and a profoundly humiliating experience for the Soviet leadership...

...Again for the first time, a Communist government was forced to grant to a non-party opposition the status of equal partner in negotiations over national policy...

...But the expressions of sympathy have frequently been accompanied by reservations, phrases of caution, and counsels of prudence differing little in substance from the arguments for a "shrinking America" we've grown accustomed to hearing from the foreign policy establishment...

...Here then we have it: discipline, compulsion, regimentation, terror-organizing principles for workplace life in the cheerless society of the future...

...Given the principles underlying Soviet economy and society, the equation of strikes with industrial sabotage makes perfect sense...

...while American workers "are still discriminated against, subjected to terror tactics by repressive employers, and penalized for striking...

...As for the dissidents' claims that the official, government-controlled "trade unions" in the Eastern bloc are despised by the workers for their unwillingness to represent proletarian interests, we had an answer in the eminent convergence doctrine (as enunciated by John Kenneth Galbraith) which assured us that Soviet labor organizations functioned "much the same" as unions in the democratic West and thus enjoyed the same general acceptance among the rank-and-file as our unions do...

...But it is not the masses that the Soviets are attempting to convert, but rather the elites, especially in the Third World, and it is social control, and not social justice, which these elites find tempting...

...If the United States is to encourage the democratic impulse among the working classes of the Soviet bloc, a change of past U.S...

...Although strikes are not specifically outlawed in the Soviet labor codes, in practice they are regarded as criminal acts, and the strikers themselves are dealt with as industrial "saboteurs...

...The severity of the problem can be gauged by the fact that it is openly discussed in the Soviet press...

...They are still subject to "anti-parasite" laws making unemployment a crime (a particularly effective way to punish or humiliate dissidents...

...Concerning a bona fide workers' revolution in his own backyard, however, Brandt has been far less enthusiastic...

...Secretary of State Muskie was dispatched to dissuade the AFL-CIO from setting up its Polish workers' aid fund, and when the unions declined to cooperate, he sent a message to the Russians offering apologies for the conduct of our unions...