A workerist Soviet leader from 1985 at the head of a workerist tendency—fails

Sam R.

Wotcher,

often we’ve discussed how 1968 marks the death of the Russian revolution as the inevitability of a Brezhnevite tankie decline into the worlds greatest ever disorganised go slow and drink in the job industrial action dooms the Soviet Union to out of date capital plant, out of date labour discipline, and a tendency of the rate of profit to fall.

We have also previously discussed at length how the Soviet Union lacks the ability to produce a Boys from Chicago to fuck the Soviet working class up: the Soviet Union can’t financialise profit offshore as it is national; the Soviet Unions fordist welfare state is organised out of the factory site level not the national state, so you can’t foreclose welfare without foreclosing productive industry; the Soviet Union’s elites relation to value form (profit) is one of considered control of a total system including uprising and drug cultures: the US elite were happy to produce South Central and South Ossetia. The Soviet Union lacks the dynamism to declare bankruptcy on the Fordist labour composition / kondratieff cycle and send jobs to China.

We’ve tried and failed to save the Soviet Union with right liberals like Gorbachev.
We’ve tried and failed to save the Soviet Union with soft tankies who close the train curtain and wait for the train to restart (Brezhnev forever).
We’ve tried and failed to save the Soviet Union with hard tankies who make five, seven, many Chechnyas.

Let’s try and fail to save the Soviet Union with pseudo-workerist nomenklatura.

Imagine, for a moment, Dubcek without Czech Spring. Imagine, Imre Nagy without the revolutionary Hungarian communists (social democrat, Communist, student and young worker). Imagine Gomulka. Imagine Tito. Imagine Mikoyan being more influential.

Now with these imaginings I am postulating two things
1) leaders just ain’t enough: you gotta have a movement. This is standard Marxism, so many people may be unfamiliar with it due to trots and LARPers: men do make history but not in the circumstances of their choosing; and individual mans *don’t* make history social movements of people do
2) that pseudo-workerist nomenklatura failed historically. The nomenklatura in my analysis was the ruling class (you may choose “rulings caste” or “clique with rule) who managed a capitalist (value form) society in the interests generally of controlling working class unrest and maximising productivity over profitability: tractors not rubles. Such a class would have a workerist fraction *if* said fraction obeyed the working class’s interests: Soviet Labourism. Such a caste would have a pseudo-workerist fraction if that fraction appeared publicly to obey working class interests: Soviet actual Labourism. For example when pushed by revolution Dubcek, Nagy and even Mikoyan became workerist. For example without class force Tito, Gomulka and Mikoyan shot strikers.

what would such a faction attempt to do 1983-199x?

How would they fail?

yours,
Sam R.
 

Canuck Wingnut

So: 1983. Soviet leadership is facing declining competitiveness in the global market, rising expectations at home, and generational turnover. If those leaders belong to a workerist faction, what do they try to set things right?

The first and second set of "solutions" probably look a lot like the Brezhnevites: deny that there's a real problem, and get overinvested (emotionally, not necessarily financially) in military entanglements (OTL, Afghanistan). After all, an aging leadership will tend to defend the systems they set into place thanks to normal human defensiveness when ideas we've placed our egos into are challenged- even if those challenges are simply changing circumstances. So admitting to problems is always unpopular. And this is still a Soviet Union defined by the Great Patriotic War- leaders under stress will tend to focus on military problems and solutions not for ideological reasons as much as historical and organizational ones- there are too many senior Red Army men in government for military pursuits to be ignored.

But let's ignore all that as too boring and too close to OTL. What new exciting fuck-ups; sorry, solutions- can I, as a consultant for our hypothetical workerist party, devise?

Comrades, I propose first a Six Sigma program for the Soviet Union. If the problem is that foreigners want to by American-designed products rather than Soviet-designed ones, then clearly the solution is simply designing new products and implementing new production lines to produce them. And if efforts to create entirely new production lines to build dubious copies of western products turns out to produce finished goods more expensive than those goods themselves are (especially as the US turns to outsourcing to find labour cheaper than the Soviet Union can) then clearly the solution is to train Soviet workers to be more efficient than western ones (since if your labour costs are higher, you need to be more efficient than your competitors or your toast. I'm sure efforts to create fordist experts to train the Soviet labourer to outcompete his capitalist competition will only turn up absolutely reliable, intelligent men with effective motivational and educational skills; and certainly won't lead to a bunch of snake-oil salesmen arising to provide "trainings" that are irritating, unhelpful, or both and then argue about who's to blame when production figures don't increase.

I also propose a new Autarky regime for the Union. Like previous Soviet efforts to achieve autarky, the goal is to lessen reliance on foreign trade and hence foreign exchange. Of course, the general problem that the Union cannot be self-sufficient remains. So the real question is which organizations get to spend valuable foreign currency and which are expected to produce it. Being good workerists, we will of course allow factories, mines and other key industries (defined as industries with lots of management jobs for members of the workerist party) access to the foreign currency pool in order to reinvest in their critical work; the military, agricultural, and oil sectors will have their allocations reduced in order to compensate.

Finally, of course, when all else fails we will respond to crises by attempting to bribe disaffected individuals or regions back into compliance.

Glory to the Motherland!
 
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