The anarchist writer Bob Black’s influential essay “The Abolition of Work” (1985) argued that work itself is as much a source of exploitation, domination and hierarchy as the capitalist system or the state, and in a libertarian society would become voluntary “productive play”. Black argued that for most people (with the exception of a lucky few whose work corresponds to their vocation and talent) work consists of getting up in the morning at a time they would rather not, travelling in unpleasant conditions to a place they do not wish to be, spending most of their day doing something they do not enjoy in the company, and under the control of, people they have not chosen to be with. This usually involves little to no creativity or control of the work process. Marx had proposed the concept of alienated labour based on the lack of genuine consent in the work contract with the employer. Black claimed that all non-voluntary work was alienated.
In The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (2011), Kathi Weeks added a feminist perspective to Refusal of Work by suggesting that whilst feminist campaigners had, rightly, fought for equal pay and the recognition of women’s unpaid work as a form of labour, they had thereby “depolitisised” work itself. In Weeks’ view feminism had unconsciously accepted a patriarchal concept of work as a moral duty and acknowledged that the employment relationship is how income is and should be distributed. David Graeber, the author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) also questioned the value of work as conventionally defined. His popular blog on “Bullshit Jobs” has disinterred Keynes’ belief that with technological advancement there is no need to work more than 15 hours a week, with free-time devoted to enjoyment and self-improvement.
Weeks and Graeber explicitly challenge that work, or compulsory labour of any kind, should define one’s identity and self-worth, or that refusal to engage in it should lead to social stigma or poverty. In the 1980s André Gorz laid out a conception of a “post-work” society. In Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason he claimed there was no longer any connection between increased productivity and the satisfaction of society’s needs. Computerised mass production made long hours superfluous. In a sane society people would work less for the same reward. But capitalism is not a sane society. Trade unions should recognise this and cease to be capitalism’s mirror image. In Gorz’s view, “Trade unionism cannot continue to exist as a movement with a future unless it expands its mission beyond the defence of the particular interests of waged workers”.32 The reduction in the amount of labour required should not mean furious and doomed attempts to preserve the handloom or the coalmine, but new strategies to shorten paid work hours while maintaining equitable distribution of rewards.
This kind of thinking cannot remain the province of bohemians and anarchists. The mainstream left needs to develop concrete proposals for a post-work society and for better measures of “growth” than the GDP, indeed to redefine the very concept of growth. The Refusal of Work philosophy is useful and necessary as a statement of intent. Clearly we do not live in a utopia where work is productive play. Nor will the mists simply part one day to reveal it. The task for the left now is to create transitional spaces, structures and policies, such as workers’ cooperatives run on egalitarian lines, a shorter working week with no loss of pay, remuneration for housework, non-hierarchical trade unions for freelance workers and a universal basic income for all.
Most of these solutions to the problem of compulsory work were not available in 1920 to a semi-industrialised country shattered by war. Soviet Russia’s “debate” on work was whether to labour under the supervision and discipline of trade unions and fellow workers, or buckle under to the robotic dictats of Taylorism. Lenin claimed that a Taylorist regime overseen by a proletarian state would not replicate that of the US, that it would take the positive and reject the negative. But as one of the main critics of Taylorism in the Soviet Union in the 1920s pointed out, the system invariably meant “not the optimum use of labour, but the maximum use”.33 “Taylorist socialism” was a misnomer. In reality it meant turning workers into an army of labour, and an inevitable confrontation with the trade unions.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Trotsky and Martov
The relationship between Sovnarcom and the trade unions was fractious from the start, despite Bolsheviks securing leading positions in most of the major unions between February and October 1917. Whether they were Bolshevik, Menshevik or SR, trade union leaders reached their positions through different routes and with different skill-sets than party leaders. Keep’s study of the revolutionary tumult of 1917-18 devotes more time than usual to the role of the unions, and found that “in this early period of Soviet history trade union officials were as a rule drawn directly from the working class milieu; they knew industrial conditions at first hand; and they owed their election to their personal qualities as activists and organisers, rather than their record for ideological rectitude”.1
As such they reflected the desires of the Russian working class in a way that party activists did not. This, and the importance of the unions at the point of production, gave them an influence on the Bolshevik government that no other non-governmental body could match. Even after the Vikzhel’s failed attempt to form a post-October coalition government, it still assumed de facto management of the railway network. Sovnarcom’s Commissar for Transport, Andrei Bubnov, had little choice but to work in uneasy alliance with it.
This dual-power could not last. Bolshevik militants in the Moscow and Petrograd branches of the union began to agitate against the Vikzhel, and the schism came to a head at the union’s congress on 20th December, 1917. The congress, which ran from 20th December until 6th January, saw in miniature the process whereby the Bolsheviks had taken over the government–direct, sometimes physical action and a disregard for accepted democratic procedures. Bolshevik activists from Moscow and Petrograd formed a caucus, which they claimed represented over one million “railway proletarians”. On the basis of their claim to be the largest faction, they asserted that they alone had the right to elect the congress’s Presidium. This proposal was defeated by 216 votes to 192. After the congress, the majority voted in favour of the right of the Constituent Assembly to continue to exist, and the Bolshevik faction walked out and set up a new Executive. In the next few months, supporters of the Vikzhel were purged from local branches.
The same events played out in the Postal Workers Union and in the Union of Employees and Workers in Inland Waterways, who also opposed the establishment of a one-party state and threatened strike action against Sovnarcom. The Postal Workers Union’s congress in late November passed a resolution by 52 votes to 8 to support the Constituent Assembly and take strike action should it be dissolved.
The government offered postal workers special bonuses and pay increases in order to defuse the situation, but as soon as the Assembly was dissolved and Sovnarcom’s power more firmly established it increased the political pressure. The “industrial” unions, such as the metalworkers and engineers, were initially supportive of Sovnarcom and the Bolsheviks, taking active stands against the Constituent Assembly and attacking Mensheviks and SRs within their unions. Although these pro-Bolshevik unions were heavily dominated by their militant Petrograd vanguards, there is no reason to doubt their commitment to genuine Soviet power.