Today we commemorate the beginning of the Russian occupation of
Czechoslovakia in 1968, by presenting what the rulers of the Kremlintried to suppress with a violent invasion. - The space for activities
available to workers at the enterprise level after the "communists" came
to power (February 1948) became in Czechoslovakia the starting point of
a social and political movement that sought to participate in
decision-making in enterprises. This process cannot be understood in
terms of formal power relations. ---- Only when we also add informal
relationships do we get a full picture of the situation. In all types of
state socialism (GDR, Hungary, etc.) they were so important that they
are considered a "form of socialization" and the "real" reality of
"communist" systems.
When it is common to talk about participation in the management of state
socialism, the repressive principle of this establishment is ignored.
Therefore, researchers have long understood even state socialist
enterprises, together with their organized structures and workers'
interests, only as an institution that was completely subordinated to
the "planned economy" of the ruling system. "Workers and managers were
closely tied to the system of political management in all aspects of
economic and working life." 2
After the end of the Second World War, the political development in
Czechoslovakia during the radicalization of the workers, the rapid rise
of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (KSC) and the general turn to
the left overcame the traditional forms of activities from the interwar
republic. The works council movement, emerging from the underground,
raised the demand for broad democratization in production with different
decision-making rights for works councils. It was connected with the
goal of overthrowing the "capitalist class" and support from the
Communist Party, which, however, did not consider workers to be the
guarantor of social justice in the new republic. It did everything to
subjugate the workers' councils in an effort to gain power hegemony. In
connection with the only trade union, which was established in the
spring of 1945 according to the Soviet model, it initiated the creation
of local groups of a unified trade union in enterprises and committees
for production, which were supposed to adequately direct the political
enthusiasm of the works councils and use it in the campaign for
increased production. Together with the decree on the nationalization of
industry from October 1945, Presidential Decree No. 104 on works
councils and works councils was issued and significantly narrowed their
efforts to participate in the management of enterprises: the councils
were subordinated to a unified trade union organization, which was
authorized to draw up a list of election candidates for works councils .
In reality, almost nothing has changed in the control of the works
councils over the industrial sector: without the consent of the
councils, "not even a mouse can slip into the factories", complained the
Minister of Industry in 1947. The racing councils were indeed aware of
their strong stable position. Three years after the KSC took power, the
Pilsen Shkoda race council announced: "The factory belongs to all of
us." The miners said: "The mine belongs to us." The essence of the
conflict over the issue of production control was the former "dual
government" of the race council and trade union groups. It is therefore
necessary to describe at least briefly the basic conditions in which
this conflict developed until 1968.
The official goal of all communist parties in Eastern and Central Europe
was to build a society where everyone would be equal materially. In
this, the Communist Party agreed with the extreme egalitarianism of the
workers, which was programmatically formulated by the works councils. In
practice, they postponed this goal due to differences caused by
production results, but did not abandon it. In other words, the
Communist Party hesitated between the two principles. And it must be
said that this hesitation was not limited to the constantly emphasized
wage policy. Coupled with the process of leveling in the 1950s (a
concession to the most disadvantaged groups of workers) was the party's
policy on industrial management, where formal power structures in
enterprises were expected to be reduced in favor of the growth of
informal trade union power. This cannot be read from normative sources,
such as laws, decrees, regulations and decisions of the Central Board of
Directors, which have always supported the principle of unlimited
directorship, but it is clear in the practical turn regarding the
principle of a single boss in the company. In Litvínov, North Bohemia,
in the summer of 1949, two thousand workers went on strike against the
early release of their director from prison (the local authorities ended
the strike by re-imprisoning him). The fact that people did not pay
attention to the instructions of the plant manager was common in
factories. Faced with a fundamental social reorganization of industrial
management, the unions called for patience (competent leaders "do not
fall from the socialist sky"), and the Communist Party linked this
social transformation with the development of a scenario of constant
threat: company leaders should not be sure that they would remain
untouchable during the following political purges. The race councils
took advantage of this unstable situation and forced the management
staff of the companies to make concessions. From 1949, works councils
became irreplaceable in the matter of obtaining material and resources,
and in 1951 it was common in enterprises under the trade union council
of Prague that "works councils took over the function of enterprise
management". The most important area of informal accumulation of power,
which the union leadership described as "organized disorder" and
"undermining of democratic centralism", the works councils (and from
1959 the works committees of the basic organizations of the ROH, which
continued the policies of the works councils) secured far-reaching
control over the organization of work. This was the equivalent of
control over the standardization of working hours and remuneration
methods, which the committees used extensively to implement egalitarian
ideas about wages. In times of "revolutionary tension" of the Communist
Party, such informal structures could also take on a formal form. When
in 1958 the party disciplined and partially also socially declassified
the management of enterprises with the help of "political class
inspection", a year later the trade union committees received the right
to participate in management, which went far beyond the hitherto usual
framework of forms of participation in increasing production. According
to the law of July 9, 1959, management was legally allowed to introduce
measures concerning wages and labor standards only with the approval of
the industrial union committees. Within a few years, the "proletarian
turn", regarding participation in management,ended again, and the party
announced through the State Wages Commission that the 1959 management
share rules had "weakened the authority" of business management and
needed to be changed.
The party changed course after the founding years of Czechoslovak state
socialism, 1948-1953, which were characterized by the extreme
determination of the power apparatus to use force and social
reorganization of workers in industry on an unprecedented scale -
extreme instability, unrest throughout the country, resistance and
strike movements that it did not even stop the regime's repressive
measures. Politically unprofitable violence began to prove
unsustainable, especially where the working class was concerned, from
whose ranks most of the victims of political persecution came.
Since 1954, the KSC has gradually renounced decision-making in
industrial conflicts, i.e. primarily in negotiations on the regulation
of strikes. At the same time, state security, which was supposed to
investigate the "background" of mass strikes and uncover the
"masterminds", was also gradually disappearing from the scenario of
industrial conflicts. An unintended consequence of this process was the
transformation of the works council or the works trade union committee
into a single instance intended to resolve conflicts (without being
established by any legal norms at the same time). In March 1960, one of
the race committees (in Slatinany in East Bohemia) for the first time
led negotiations in connection with the strike, and the KSC only got
involved because the party's race cell provided the race committee with
company management materials.
Even before 1953, the works councils in large enterprises succeeded in
bringing under the control of the works disciplinary commissions and in
the future to gain powers in the awarding of sanctions in production.
Further attempts by the Communist Party to regain influence in these
lost spheres were not successful. The 1961 law establishing "people's
courts" in enterprises, with the help of which the party and the only
official unions tried to secure control over local decision-making in
production, was simply boycotted at the plants.
Without support in the network of informal business structures, it would
be impossible to resist the apparatus power. Such a network could ensure
safe conduct and relative protection from repression in the event of
conflict. When, in the summer of 1953, the Shkoda employees, who went on
strike against the monetary reform on June 1st, were "accounted for",
the race council managed to turn the criminal case into a farce. Race
trade unions justified similar consolidation of positions and expansion
of their competences by pointing out that "all power comes from the
people". Added to this was a strong anti-centralist mood, which was
always present in production. In the first place, however, the expansion
of positions strengthened the ambitions of works councils and union
committees to cooperate, and this effort was formulated in a syndicalist
spirit as eliminating the "difference" between managers and subordinates
in production. Trade unions have successfully embarked on this path of
informally differentiating the traditional division of labor in the
company and taking over the powers of the workplace administration.
"Trade union officials in enterprises understand economic problems well,
some speak like scientific economists," wrote a member of the Central
Council of Trade Unions in 1956 after an inspection trip to Moravia.
However, the leadership of the Communist Party did not like such
"anarcho-syndicalist" tendencies at all.
In May 1968, when the influence of the movement for general reforms in
Czechoslovakia had already grown considerably, the Politburo of the
Communist Party stated that the workers "basically did not hit" the
party's reform course, even though a few weeks earlier the same body had
announced that the workers committed to the party assumed that comrades
from the central the committee have to eat what they made themselves.
The main political line of the reform movement met with a positive
response in the broad layers of the workers. As an example, the letter
of the competition committee of the Prague compressor production plant
to the Central Council of Trade Unions dated March 15, 1968. The
competition committee expressed its "unequivocal" support for the
conclusions of the plenary session of the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Czech Republic of January 5, 1968, which removed
Antonín Novotný from the position of First Secretary of the Central
Committee of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic and elected
Alexander Dubcek as his successor. "We welcome the process of renewal
that is taking place in our society," the letter continued, "and we are
confident that the current broad discussion throughout society will not
only lead to an uncompromising, clear and concrete exposure of all those
responsible for the grievous mistakes of the past... , but also to the
fact that prerequisites will be created for the unlimited political,
economic and cultural development of our society, in which there will no
longer be contradictions between theory and practice, in which words and
actions will no longer diverge from each other and everyone's life will
be filled with true socialist democracy."
The fundamental contribution of the workers to the political development
of 1968 came exclusively from the trade union labor committees. Two
examples for all. The first open demand for the liquidation of the
nomenclature (i.e. cadre-political regulation of the filling of all
important functions and posts in the state and party apparatus) came in
March 1968 at a meeting of 670 representatives of the race committees of
the Shkoda plant in Pilsen: they demanded "democratic elections" at all
levels of the unified trade union. The labor committees took the
initiative to establish Workers' Committees to defend the freedom of the
press and contributed to their creation. These workers' committees,
after the abolition of censorship (in March 1968), became pressure
groups in many large industrial enterprises in favor of the enactment of
freedom of the press. The level of the press, on the other hand, was one
of the topics of the reform course that the workers critically reflected
upon. In some regions, in May 1968, it could be heard in businesses that
the reform movement was lagging behind mainly because of "writers and
editors". The increasing importance of the media in the reform movement,
which the reformists themselves distanced themselves from, and the
reluctance of a substantial part of the workers to see intellectuals as
"those who speak for them", eventually led to a popular labor demand for
the establishment of a "workers' newspaper".
The social conflict between the workers and the reform movement became
more and more clear. It has already been written several times what
social-political measures the Communist Party took to stop the social
consequences expected in connection with the economic reform, started in
1965, and the transition to a "socialist market economy". Let us at
least mention the conflict surrounding the growth of wage differences,
which at the same time made it possible to open up the most important
socio-political questions.
The determined egalitarianism of workers in wage and social policy in
general was based on the idea of a socio-ethical arrangement, based on a
collective demand for equality. It was about eliminating inequality,
which "has always been perpetrated above all on the socially weakest
workers", as it was said in the joint resolution of the race committee
and the trade union race group of the Brno Armory of July 12, 1945.
The experimental phase of economic reform, which began in the mid-1960s,
however, was directed against the egalitarian wage policy, and the
redistribution of profit in enterprises at that time, despite the
resistance of the workers, obviously favored the management components.
At the annual conference of industrial union committees in 1967, there
was a "great wave" of protest against the favoritism of corporate
management. Neither the State Commission for Wages and its concept of
increasing differences in wages received support, nor the leadership of
the trade unions responsible for the consumer industry, whose plans in
the wage area were often not even discussed in the enterprises.
Workers' protests were not limited to the lowest paid categories.
Skilled workers, for example the violinists from Malshov in South
Bohemia, anticipated the later egalitarian thinking of the working class
when, in 1966, they characterized the incipient wage differentiation as
"acting against the workers as such".
The fight against "leveling" was certainly one of the main themes of the
reform movement. The KSC action program of April 5, 1968 gave typical
reasons: egalitarian tendencies or leveling are a decisive obstacle to
economic development and production growth. "Leveling" encourages
"slackers" and "slackers" at the expense of "diligent" workers, the
low-skilled at the expense of the highly-skilled. After all, these
arguments have not stopped being repeated to this day.
However, lower income inequality in Eastern European countries did not
mean low productivity at all. Czechoslovakia, with its relatively low
level of income inequality, occupied one of the first places in terms of
labor productivity within the RVHP. The second part of the Action
Program clearly shows what was actually about during the onset of the
income egalitarian policy. According to them, the workers themselves did
not like the slogan "Socialism means a lot of work", which had ruled the
programs of all representatives of socialism since the Russian
Revolution. They expected the socialist republic to abolish task wages.
Against the continuous struggle to increase industrial production, they
built their escape strategies, which were for the most part - as in the
coal industry for example - based on old structures of solidarity and
served to protect old and sick colleagues. Therefore, the campaign to
increase the rate of industrial growth has always been aimed at the
destruction of traditional internal workers' structures, as can be
clearly seen in connection with "socialist labor" initiatives (striking,
Stakhanovism, "socialist competition"). Socialist competition is growing
- the race party cell in Pilsen Shkoda triumphantly announced in the
spring of 1958, when it succeeded in breaking the relations between
workers, based on "social prejudices" and "solidarity".
As shown by the turn of the "liberalized" CPC to the production
committees, the party was not going to do anything other than bring the
race committees to their knees as carriers of the egalitarian idea of
socialism. Since there was no discrimination against skilled labor in
the work process, after the celebration of individual performance, the
Action Program of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic only
remained a silent intention to control workers by dividing them
according to the quality of work performance. Almost at the same time,
Italian workers (at that time at Fiat in Turin) faced a similar plan,
who demanded an egalitarian salary policy.
If we have to summarize everything, the demands of the industrial
workers in 1968 related to formally guaranteeing the still largely
informal strong positions they had achieved thanks to the basic trade
union organizations in the enterprises. These demands were
anti-centralist, anti-authoritarian, anti-bureaucratic and syndicalist
in nature. Under the pressure of trade union committees, a single trade
union was first dissolved - it disintegrated into a number of individual
unions demanding autonomy. All important decisions of the higher trade
union bodies now had to be submitted to the basic trade union
organizations first. In the same way, the competences of the labor
committees were to be expanded: by introducing the right of veto against
all higher trade union bodies (including the Central Council), a clear
redistribution of funds from the trade union budget in favor of the
labor committees and the right to call strikes independently. The Prague
company Avia demanded the right of veto for the race committees in cases
where the company director's decision violated the "rights of workers".
Syndicalist tendencies manifested themselves in demands for direct
democracy: all "unnecessary intermediate stages" in the organizational
structure of unions were to be eliminated and replaced by direct
relations between "central governing bodies and grassroots organizations."
The Communist Party of the Czech Republic was also subjected to harsh
criticism, from which the trade union committees requested that it
refrain from "direct interference in the internal affairs of trade union
organizations and the economy" in the future. In the leadership of the
party in 1968, the tendency to influence economic reform prevailed,
although in internal discussions there was sometimes talk of creating
"real power of the working class". The idea of "democratic bodies" of
the type of workers' councils, which were first addressed in the Action
Program of the Communist Party of the Czech Republic, was based on the
consideration that labor collectives must participate in the management
of enterprises, when, as a result of the increasing autonomy of
enterprises, they have already approached the risk of reforms. The party
program claimed that this would in no way affect the "immediate
authority and legal power" of business bosses.
The creation of elites at the enterprise level, which the party
leadership stimulated while rejecting all objections to "managerial
socialism", 72 was effective in its own way. Management cadres in
industry began to relegate workers' councils, which in the eyes of the
Communist Party were a means of enterprise autonomy, production
efficiency, increased material interest and growing requirements for
workers' qualifications, to the role of mere consultative bodies of
company management. Also because of this, the call of party leaders to
create workers' councils on June 1, 1968 did not have a great response.
The democratic elections of councils by the entire collective, the
appointment and dismissal of the management of the company and the
responsibility of the management for "total work results" were not a
proposal that went beyond the already existing real positions of workers
in the given area. The workers took into account their decision-making
positions and responded with the activity of works councils: the
Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences, for example,
discovered that the workers' councils established in Pardubice - in
complete opposition to the "theoretical understanding" of the party, the
state and the economy - served to strengthen the organizational
potential of further wage demands.
Source:
Peter Heumos, Arbeitermacht im Staatssozialismus. Das Beispiel
Tschechoslowakei 1968, in Angelika Ebbinghaus (ed.), Die letzte Chance?
1968 in Osteuropa , Hamburg 2008, pp. 51-60. Abbreviated.
It was published (with a rich note-taking apparatus) in the anarchist
review Existence No. 2/2018 on the topic "Year 1968" .
https://www.afed.cz/text/8232/sila-pracujicich-za-statniho-socialismu
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