Bureaucratic bungling had given rise to all kinds of distortions in the Soviet economy. While some sections were very modern, others had been starved of investment, like the Likino bus manufacturing plant in the Urals which was producing the same model as in 1970 with machine tools built 40 years earlier. And yet Gorbachev insisted that the workers must produce quality goods and be penalised if they did not. But with outdated machinery and hamstrung by red tape and mismanagement, it was virtually impossible to comply with the standards laid down. Thus, for many workers, perestroika meant a worsening of wages and conditions. In effect, the bureaucracy, like the Western bosses, was trying to get out of the crisis by putting pressure on the workforce, trying to increase productivity at the cost of the workers’ sweat, muscle and nerves.
Significantly, the only time Gorbachev attempted to deal with ‘theoretical’ questions in his book Perestroika is when he tried to justify wage differentials as being consistent with socialism! Under conditions of poverty, deprivation and backwardness, with a semi-literate working class, and an illiterate peasantry, the Bolsheviks were compelled to concede to the bourgeois specialists salaries far in excess of the Party maximum. But for an advanced country to tolerate such inequalities would have been regarded by Lenin and Trotsky as quite unpardonable. Lenin envisaged that, as the Soviet economy advanced, so the inequalities would gradually be reduced. When the Soviet Union developed into an industrial nation with a highly-educated working class, the existence of differentials of this sort was completely anti-socialist and anti-Marxist. Yet far from disappearing, seven decades after October, inequality was increasing all the time. Far from standing on Lenin’s position of greater and greater equality, and the progressive abolition of differentials, Gorbachev was increasing them.
Like Stalin, Gorbachev attempted to broaden the base of the bureaucracy by creating a special privileged layer of labour aristocrats, on high bonuses linked to productivity. The problem was that the growth of differentials and inequalities within the workforce, setting worker against worker and factory against factory, would only serve to stoke the fires of resentment. It was no accident that Gorbachev, in his speech on the anniversary of the October Revolution, spoke of opposition to his reforms not only from the bureaucracy, but also in “work collectives”. This indicated the growing alarm of the bureaucracy at the spate of strikes which for the first time were widely reported in the Soviet press. For instance, the workers at the Likino bus manufacturing plant went on strike for three days in protest at having a wage cut of Rbs60-70 a month because of non-payment of bonuses. Moving towards socialism would mean a lessening of inequality, not a reinforcement of inequality as Gorbachev was undertaking. Thus, the argument that ‘socialism’ had been achieved in the Soviet Union, when the state had reached such monstrous proportions was a total mockery. Despite this, Gorbachev received the praise of the Stalinist leaders internationally, together with the left reformists, for his ‘socialism with a democratic face’.
Yet the USSR was no longer the weak, impoverished, embattled state of Lenin’s day. As Gorbachev himself had commented, the Soviet Union was now a vast and wealthy country. If the workers were really to take into their hands the running of the state, industry and society, all the bottlenecks produced by the bureaucracy could have been quickly eliminated. Freed from the dead hand of bureaucracy, the planned economy would soar ahead. In the space of one Five-Year Plan, the wealth of society could be enormously increased on the basis of unleashing the initiative and enthusiasm of the masses.
In 1919 when the workers took power in Saxony and Bavaria, Lenin immediately appealed to them to introduce the seven-hour working day so that the workers would have time to run industry and the state. Gorbachev claimed to stand for a return to the ideas of Lenin, but in reality, he was as far away as Stalin from genuine Leninism. If an appeal was made to the Russian workers and peasants to take control of society and industry into their own hands, it would have been possible immediately to move to a reduction of the working day, the prior condition for establishing a genuine regime of workers’ democracy.
This is true even today, although as a result of the ghastly chaos caused by mafia capitalism, it is probable that initially the advance will be slower than what would be warranted by the real possibilities created by the planned economy. But within one or, at most two, Five-Year Plans, with the democratic control and participation of the masses, the whole situation will be transformed. Given the present level of development, it should be possible quite soon to introduce the 32-hour week, followed by a further reduction of hours. Such a measure would transform the situation, not only in Russia, but throughout the world.
The material conditions for beginning a move towards socialism had been built up in Russia over the previous six or seven decades. In fact, the scientific and technical resources necessary to begin the move towards socialism, absent in 1917, were now present. Even on the most conservative estimate, the Soviet economy in the 1980s, under these conditions, could have attained two or three times the then rate of growth, far exceeding even the best results under capitalism. On a sustained basis, within ten years, the Soviet Union could have overtaken the USA not only in absolute terms but in terms of the productivity of labour – the most fundamental index of economic progress. On such a basis, it would really have been possible to begin to move towards socialism, with an unparalleled flowering of art, science and technique.
Gorbachev’s solution was to carry through “all-round democratisation of management, heightening the part played in it by work collectives, strengthening control from below, and ensuring accountability and publicity in the work of economic bodies”. But his declared intentions proved to be pure demagogy as a serious move in such a direction would strike at the very heart of bureaucratic control. He certainly had no intention of going that far. The changes were really only cosmetic, although a certain consultation was allowed with workers in an endeavour to involve them in some decisions, without introducing genuine workers’ control and management. Nevertheless, Gorbachev continued to hammer away in the same demagogic manner:
The elective bodies should be more exacting and strict towards their own apparatus. One cannot overlook the fact that executives who remain in offices for long periods tend to lose their feel for the new, to shut themselves off from the people by institutions they have concocted themselves, and sometimes even hold back the work of elective bodies. It is obviously time to work out a procedure which enables soviets, and all social bodies in general, to evaluate and certify the work of responsible executives of their apparatus after each election making desirable personnel changes.
Ever more active involvement of social organisations in governing the country is needed in our time. When the work of our social organisations is considered from this angle, however, it becomes obvious that many of them are lacking in sufficient initiative. Some of them try to operate above all through their regular staff, in a bureaucratic way, and lean only a little on the masses. In other words, the popular collective, independent nature of social organisations is not being fully realised by far.
Gorbachev even came out in his speech to the 27th Party Congress for the “electivity principle for all team leaders and then gradually to some other categories of managerial personnel – foremen, shift, sector or shop superintendents, and state-farm department managers”. He was stretching things to the limit in order to propel the economy forward, but he was playing with fire. Once you introduce ‘electivity’, as far as the workers were concerned, where would it end?
The fact that he was compelled to raise the question in his January 1987 speech of the election of all the posts in the ‘Communist’ Party was an indication that not much success was achieved in the election of foremen and the rest. The bureaucracy blocked the development of this so-called principle. Gorbachev was attempting to use these ‘reforms’ as a whip against the bureaucracy within the Party itself. The real situation in Soviet society was indicated by the desperate attempt of Gorbachev to use the secret ballot, as Stalin had done, in elections from lower to higher levels of the Communist Party, as a means to break the will of the more reactionary sections of the bureaucracy, who wanted to continue their unhindered looting of the Soviet state.
In a capitalist society, the secret ballot is meant to defend the exploited from the terror of the exploiters. If the bourgeoisie finally adopted such a reform, obviously under pressure from the masses, it was only because it became interested in protecting its state at least partially from the demoralisation introduced by itself. But in a socialist society there can be, it would seem, no terror of the exploiters.
From whom is it necessary to defend the Soviet citizens? The answer is clear: from the bureaucracy. Stalin is frank enough to recognise this. To the question: Why are secret elections necessary? He answered verbatim: ‘Because we intend to give the Soviet people their freedom to vote for those they want to elect.’ Thus, humanity learns from an authoritative source that today the ‘Soviet people’ cannot yet vote for those whom they want to elect. It would be hasty to conclude from this that the new constitution will really tender them this opportunity in the future. (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed, p. 264-5, emphasis in original.)
The bureaucratic system under Gorbachev remained in essence what it had been during the course of the rule of the bureaucracy. The attempt to hold a whip over the bureaucracy was doomed to fail. “It is not a question of sociology, but material interest,” as Trotsky put it. The economy could not develop without the participation and control of the working class. Gorbachev was gambling on maintaining control with some elements of participation and control by the workers. However, there is no such thing as a partial control by the mass of the population. Either the workers get control or control is taken back from them. Partial control could never succeed.