Perestroika Time: The Beginning of the Free Labor Movement in the USSR

Abstract

The labor movement in the former Soviet Union was formed under very unusual conditions. Its development was determined by factors of two kinds: first, it was determined by the social relations of the process of formation, following the Western model, of a democratic market society, with a hired labor market as one of its elements. Second, it was determined by the leftovers of state-socialist relations and even more by relations that arose in the course of the crisis and disintegration of state socialism. Through the development of the labor movement in the former USSR and in the majority of the societies that stemmed from it, we see tendencies not common to countries where market and capitalist relations are being formed. There are unique processes, which derive from the circumstance that the market and democracy are arising here not through the usual transition from feudalism to capitalism but through the disintegration of state socialism, from the so far nonexistent post-communist or post-socialist development.1 In this sense, the labor movement here has a bipolar, two-layer nature: two streams join in it. One is the stream which has grown out of the contradictions of the normal market of wage labor. The second is the process due to the contradictions of state socialism and the crisis of disintegration.2 In the long term, the relative importance of the contradictions of the first type (the usual capitalist or post-capitalist contradictions) will obviously overwhelm the influence of the contradictions of state socialism. However, in the late 1980s