ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the quasi-corporatist labour relations in the USSR. Soviet Taylorism necessitated the absorption of unions into the apparatus of state from the very beginning. The unions’ role became one of assessing the value of workers as applied to production processes. However, Taylorism in the USSR never fully developed, and unions became important in implementing paternalistic workfarism and welfarism. This chapter then analyses so-called “transition” in socialist countries to marketized capitalism and in China's case to a so-called “socialist market economy”. Path dependency from the socialist period led in the same direction – quasi-corporatism, with co-option by the ruling elite of federated unions and so-called tripartite structures, with China diverging somewhat in its search for a legalist solution to labour unrest. In conclusion, the demise of legacy labour representation leaves open the question of the “traditional” unions’ continuing role in authoritarian states that lack the welfare state histories of their Western European counterparts.

Keywords: Unions under socialism; state-controlled unionism; Russia; China

INTRODUCTION

While the meaning of “actually existing socialism” in terms of typologizing the political economy of communist and socialist countries (state capitalism, bureaucratic collectivism, etc.) is beyond the scope of the chapter, the first section discusses in some depth the substantive character of “quasi-corporatist” (Pravda 1983) labour-enterprise-state relations in these countries in the period roughly between Stalinism in the USSR in the 1930s to the transition of China towards some form of hybrid market socialism in the 1990s and beyond. The point of this section is to argue that such corporatist dependency left an indelible mark on labour subjectivity and relations, organizational forms and resources of unionism. This focus also allows reflection on the degree to which the high socialist period (1945– 89) offers points of similarity between Eastern Bloc countries and social democratic ones. While China, Vietnam, Eastern Europe and the USSR – the places with the most wide-ranging extant academic literature – were all different, their common dependency upon the party-state nexus shaped the existential terrain in profound ways. This comprised, among other things, the distance between union leadership and activism, a hidebound conservative ideology, and, relatedly, a paternalist, quasi-welfarist sense of role and identity.