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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| David Mandel, Labour After Communism (Montreal: Black Rose Books 2004)
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| LABOUR AFTER COMMUNISM distills more than a decade of engagement by its author in the struggles of autoworkers and their unions in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. David Mandel, who teaches political science at the University of Quebec, previously has written on the workers of Petrograd during the 1917 revolution and elsewhere in the Soviet Union during Perestroika. He also is co-founder of the School for Worker Democracy which, according to the blurb on the back of this book, "conducts rank-and-file labour education in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus." In the often depressing, occasionally surprising, but generally fascinating story this book tells, the School figures as a site for interactions among shop-floor activists, and as an actor itself. The book, then, is the fruit of Mandel's involvement with the School and his reflections on the strategies and practices of leaders of the autoworkers' unions in the three countries. It amply demonstrates the advantages and occasionally the disadvantages of the author's personal involvement with his subject. |
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The book opens with a chapter on "The Legacy of the Soviet Period" that is one of the most insightful summaries I have read of labour under Communism. Weaving the emergence of insurgent movements of autoworkers into its account of the Perestroika period, it easily can stand on its own for class assignment and discussion. Among the other eleven chapters, five deal with Russian autoworkers' unions, and three each are devoted to those in Ukraine and Belarus. The "socio-political context" in each country is presented in chapters under that title. They too could be used in labour education and global studies classes as supplements to, or a foil against, the literature that considers "democratization," "civil society," and investment opportunities in isolation from workers and their institutions. The conclusion assesses unions' failures and victories ("exceptional and limited though the latter were") in the light of the interplay of "objective" and "subjective" factors, the desirability but difficulty of pursuing class independence as a strategy, and the importance of promoting dignity among rank-and-file workers. |
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Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, unions in the predominantly Slavic successor states have pursued two basic strategies: "social partnership" and "class independence." The former, identified most closely with the labour federations that are the lineal descendants of the old Soviet trade union structures (and in some cases, personnel), asserts the necessity of maintaining good relations with enterprise management (indeed, retaining the membership and active participation of managers in the union), taking into account the "objective circumstances" of the economy and individual enterprises, and maintaining the union's control over the distribution of social benefits in order to protect workers from the vagaries of the market and retain their loyalty. Unions pursuing the "class independence" strategy of turning up the heat on management instead of the state have been few and far between. They included most famously the break-away Independent Miners Union [NPG], but also other "alternative" trade unions affiliated with Sotsprof [Association of Social(ist) Trade Unions] and the VKT [General Confederation of Workers]. |
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Mandel is an informative, if hardly unbiased, guide to the ins and outs and fluctuating fortunes of both the main autoworkers' unions of the three countries and the only non-ephemeral alternative union in the industry, Edintsvo (Unity), which represents roughly 3,000 workers (or some 3 per cent of the entire workforce) at Togliatti's giant automobile company, VAZ. He scrupulously acknowledges — indeed, he emphasizes —that the situation has been less clear-cut than the simple division between "traditional" and "alternative" unions would suggest. Some affiliates within the "traditional" Russian autoworkers' union (ASMR) engaged in sustained militant action largely to protest against wage arrears, and under the dynamic leadership of its first president, Vladimir Zlenko, the Ukrainian union (ASMU) consistently pursued a policy of opposing layoffs and promoting rank-and-file activism. In Belarus, Zlenko's counterpart, Aleksandr Bukhvostov, was also committed to independent trade-union activism and educating the rank-and-file. As for Edinstvo, it gets high marks for distinguishing itself from ASMR's conciliationist/capitulationist relationship with management, but Mandel admits that only in 1998 did it break from its policy of supporting the Yeltsin regime, that the strike it organized at VAZ in Fall 2000 "failed," and that the union needs to "rekindle the dynamism of earlier years." (148) |
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Inevitably though, the imbalance of informants and the author's own ideological proclivities colour his analysis. The voices of the "social partnership" majority — to say nothing of management —generally are muted, and such individuals invariably come off as cynical, resigned, or just nasty. Communists are labeled "Stalinists" and assumed to be motivated mainly by opportunism. Those with whom the author shares the same outlook (and especially the activists who participated in the School for Worker Democracy) get to tell their stories in their own words, and often are given the benefit of the doubt. The already mentioned Zlenko is a case in point. He "is a committed socialist without nostalgia or illusions about the old system" (175); "never stopped pushing, but had few illusions about the capacity of willingness of most regional and local leaders to change"; (177) "had few illusions about the impact" of amendments to the union's constitution (179); and "had had few illusions about his support," (183) which is a good thing because no sooner had he retired than his successor shifted the orientation of the union's Central Council towards cooperation with management. The book, which Mandel describes as "an honest analysis of the available facts and the determination of their interconnections," (vii) sometimes has the character of a primer for trade union organizers. |
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And yet, the close contacts he has with "hundreds of activists, some of them union officers but many with no elected position" (viii) also constitute a strength of the book. It is through them that the reader is privy to information about the most local and quotidian of affronts to these auto and farm-machine workers' dignity: physical searches at the plant gates, foremen's use of foul language, management's manipulation of the bonus system and housing situation, its failure to replace a lightbulb in a stairwell without the intervention of the president of the firm, and so forth. Thanks to such contacts —the "interviews, reports at seminars, personal communications, and personal observation" (212) that comprise a great deal of the source-base — we learn of the local triumphs too: the liquidation of wage arrears, the saving of a factory from closure, the simple assertion of personal worth derived from participation in collective action. |
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On a larger scale, Labour After Communism is persuasive about where the main thrust of unions' activities should go in these countries — not so much in opposition to respective governments as against the sway of private enterprise and its invocation of "objective constraints." It also, incidentally, provides a useful corrective to the incredibly one-sided coverage of the regime of Aleksandr Lukachenko in Belarus. For, notwithstanding its undeniable political repressiveness, Belarusian workers by most criteria have fared better than their brothers and sisters in Russia and (notwithstanding the Orange Revolution) Ukraine. For all these reasons, the book deserves a wide readership. Indeed, a Russian-language edition would be highly appropriate. Let us hope that it avoids the perverse transposition of dates and other typographical errors with which this edition is afflicted. |
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Lewis Siegelbaum
Michigan State University |
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