Abstract
It was argued in Chapter 1 that one could not designate state-socialist societies as ‘transitional social formations’ on the grounds that they exhibited certain features which approximated to an ideal state of affairs. Rather than adhere to such a teleological definition of socialism, which would imply that a socialist society was tending in a certain direction, the argument implied that a society could be considered socialist if it could be demonstrated that class relations had been seriously weakened or were non-existent. The purpose of this chapter is to investigate whether (and if so, to what extent) class relations are operative in the Soviet Union. It will be remembered that it was argued that if class relations were weak or non-existent, the relatively open access to the means of production would mean that the differential forms of access of various agents would be subject to constant challenge by other agents, and would thus be an object of struggle and negotiation. One could add now that such struggles might well be subject to adjudication by certain legal or political agencies. Such a situation would not preclude differentiation of economic agents; indeed, this is inevitable in any division of labour, and would include a differentiated occupational structure for individuals, but such differentiation would not entail a fairly systematic enhancement or restriction of agents’ capacity for action deriving from differential access to the means of production.
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Notes
See, for example, the identification by both Goldthorpe and Halsey (in their famous Oxford mobility study publications) of the ‘class structure’ of occupational positions with the ‘class structure’ of family units, which is criticised by B. Hindess, ‘The Politics of Social Mobility’, Economy and Society, vol. 10, no. 2, May 1981.
D. Lane, The End of Inequality?, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1971, p.38.
D. Lane and F. O’Dell, The Soviet Industrial Worker: Social Class, Education and Control, Martin Robertson, London, 1978, p.3.
D. Lane, Politics and Society in the USSR, 2nd edn, Martin Robertson, London, 1978, p.418.
see Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR: Second Period 1923–1930, Harvester Press, Brighton, 1978, ‘Foreword’
Amvrosov, Sotsial’naya Struktura Sovetskogo Obshchestva, Politizdat, Moscow, 1975.
J.F. Hough, ‘Policy-making and the Worker’, in A. Kahan and B. Ruble (eds), Industrial Labor in the USSR, Permagon, New York, 1979, pp. 367–96.
This is certainly similar to the situation in capitalist countries: see, for example, M. Guilbert, Les Fonctions des Femmes dans l’Industrie, Mouton, Paris, 1966.
A. Heitlinger, Women and State Socialism: Sex Inequality in the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Macmillan, London, 1979
See Z. Medvedev, ‘Russia Learns to Live without American Grain’, New Scientist, 8 January 1981, pp.58–61.
For another source indicating the extent of technical innovation in Soviet agriculture (without, however, throwing any light on the situation in collective farms), see G.B. Carter, ‘Is Biotechnology Feeding the Russians?’, New Scientist, 23 April 1981, pp. 216–18.
A. McAuley, Economic Welfare in the Soviet Union, Allen & Unwin, London, 1979.
L. Rzhanitsyna, Soviet Family Budgets, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977, pp. 162–72.
L.G. Churchward, The Soviet Intelligentsia: An Essay on the Social Structure and Roles of Soviet Intellectuals during the 1960s, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1973, p.6.
N. Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State: A Study of Soviet Managers and Technicians 1928–1935, Macmillan, London, 1979, p.7.
M. Hirszowicz, The Bureaucratic Leviathan: A Study in the Sociology of Communism, Martin Robertson, London, 1980, ch. 5 ‘Intelligentsia versus Bureaucracy — The Revival of a Myth’.
For example, M. Kaser, Health Care in the Soviet Union, Croom Helm, London, 1976, on the health service, as well as
V. George and N. Manning, Socialism, Social Welfare and the Soviet Union, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980, discussed in Chapter 5, or Hirszowicz, The Bureaucratic Leviathan, ch. 4 ‘The Limitations of Rationality in a Planning Society’.
M. Matthews, ‘Top Incomes in the USSR’, in Economic Aspects of Life in the USSR, NATO Directorate of Economic Affairs, Brussels, 1975, pp. 131–4.
See note 30 with respect to the work of Grossman, ‘The Soviet Government’s Role in Allocating Industrial Labor’; the difficulties of manpower planning in the 1950s and 1960s are discussed in G. Littlejohn, ‘Education and Social Mobility in the USSR’, unpublished dissertation, 1968. The main difficulties discussed were those of forecasting changes in the occupational structure five years ahead (in the case of entrants to tertiary education) and of successfully placing specialised secondary and tertiary graduates in ‘appropriate’ jobs.
For critiques of such views, see A. Hussain, ‘The Economy and the Educational System in Capitalist Societies’, Economy and Society, vol. 5, no. 4. November 1976; also
J. Demaine, Contemporary Theories in the Sociology of Education, Macmillan, London, 1981;
as well as R.J.V. Waton, ‘A Sociological Study of Education in Sweden and Britain’, unpublished M.Phil, thesis, University of Bradford, 1980.
E. Hopper (ed.), Readings in the Theory of Educational Systems, Heinemann, London, 1971.
R.H. Turner, ‘Modes of Social Ascent through Education: Sponsored and Contest Mobility’, in A.H. Halsey et al. (eds), Education, Economy and Society, Free Press, New York, 1961. B.R. Clarke’s article on ‘The Cooling Out Function in Higher Education’ also appears in this volume. this volume.
They thus explicitly disagree with H. Ticktin, ‘The Contradictions of Soviet Society and Professor Bettelheim’, Critique, no. 6, Spring 1976, and with
M. Holubenko, ‘The Soviet Working Class’, Critique, no. 4, Spring 1975.
It could be the case that the policy of income equalisation is being partly undermined by growing wage inequalities due to the payment of bonuses: see A. McAuley, ‘Wage Differentials in the USSR: Policy and Performance’, paper presented to the Second World Congress of Soviet and East European Studies, Garmisch, 1980.
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© 1984 Gary Littlejohn
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Littlejohn, G. (1984). The Analysis of the Class Structure of the Soviet Union. In: A Sociology of the Soviet Union. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17358-7_7
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