Plan, which in turn brought millions more peasants into new factories. The chaos of the early 1930s led to the imposition of very strict labor laws, removing strikes as a viable weapon for labor until the late 1980s. The stabilization of the planned economy produced the first unmistakably hereditary working class in Russian history, as migration from the countryside slowed significantly and educational policies restricted social mobility. This was also a very docile period in labor relations, with very few strikes or viable protests. One major wave of labor discontent did occur from 1962 to 1964, which helped bring down Nikita Khrushchev when he tried to attack the status quo with price hikes and demands for increased productivity. Workers were guaranteed a job, were rarely fired, and were seldom threatened with demands for greater productivity, while being granted a lifestyle that could be considered comfortable by historical standards. As a popular epigram expressed it, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” This situation changed in the Mikhail Gorbachev era. The massive dislocations that accompanied the shift from a planned to free market economy at first produced massive strikes, followed by sullen quiescence, as those who still had jobs did not feel secure enough to strike. Labor discontent in the 1990s manifested itself primarily in a steady sizable vote for the Communist Party. Political and economic stability in the early twenty-first century led to normalization of labor markets and more consistent payment of wages than after the shock therapy of the early 1990s. See also: FIVE-YEAR PLANS; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; PEASANTRY; SERFDOM; SLAVERY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Chase, William J. (1987). Workers, Society, and the Soviet State: Labor and Life in Moscow, 1918-1929. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Ekonomakis, Evel G. (1998). From Peasant to Petersburger. London: Macmillan Press Ltd. Filtzer, Donald. (1992). Soviet Workers and De-Staliniza-tion: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production Relations, 1953-1964. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Haimson, Leopold. (1964- 1965). “The Problem of Social Stability in Urban Russia, 1905-1914.” Slavic Review 23:619-642, 24:1-22. Johnson, Robert Eugene. (1979). Peasant and Proletarian: The Working Class of Moscow in the Late Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kuromiya, Hiroaki. (1988). Stalin’s Industrial Revolution: Politics and Workers, 1928-1932. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McDaniel, Tim. (1988). Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zelnik, Reginald E. (1968). “The Peasant and the Factory.” In The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia, ed. Wayne S. Vucinich. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Zelnik, Reginald E. (1971). Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia. The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg, 1855 -1870. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
DAVID PRETTY
Labor Books were issued to all officially employed persons in the Soviet Union and were used to keep a written record of the daily work behavior of each worker. These labor books were introduced in the Soviet Union in late 1938. Labor books are of historical interest as one of several drastic changes in labor regulations implemented in the late 1930s in an effort to develop and to sustain labor discipline. Moreover, these regulations, which included the requirement of internal passports, limitations on mobility, and the organized and controlled placement of labor, were significant elements of the general process of labor allocation reducing the influence of market-type forces and incentives and were more generally important as restrictions on the freedom of the population.
Throughout the Soviet era, the mix of mechanisms used for labor allocation changed considerably. Beginning in the 1930s, the system of controls was expanded in many directions. These controls, including the widespread use of forced labor, were a fundamental systemic component of the Soviet economic system. However, during the post-Stalin era, the use of direct controls over labor allocation was reduced and began to be replaced by market- type forces and direct incentive arrangements. These incentives were increasingly used to allocate labor in a variety of dimensions, for example by sector and region of the economy.
The use of labor books in the Soviet Union is an important component of the more general process of replacing market mechanisms with state directed nonmarket mechanisms during the command era. The impact of these controls on labor al814
LABOR THEORY OF VALUE
location and labor productivity in an economy artificially characterized as a full employment economy (an economy with a “job right constraint”) remain controversial in the overall judgement of labor allocation procedures and results during the Soviet era. See also: LABOR
Bergson, Abram. (1964). The Economics of Soviet Planning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gregory, Paul R., and Stuart, Robert C. (2001). Russian and Soviet Economic Performance and Structure, 7th ed. New York: Addison Wesley Longman. Nove, Alec. (1982). An Economic History of the USSR. New York: Penguin Books.
ant rewarded in kind (for example, grain) or in money (rubles). With the magnitude of compulsory deliveries at low fixed prices set by the state, the state wielded significant power by extracting products from the farm. Moreover, even though changes in the frequency and form of payment were made over time, the labor day system was a very crude mechanism of payment, with severe limitations as an incentive system. See also: COLLECTIVE FARM; PEASANTRY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Davies, R. W. (1980). The Soviet Collective Farm, 1929-1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stuart, Robert C. (1972). The Collective Farm in Soviet Agriculture. Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath.
LABOR CAMPS See GULAG.
The labor day (trudoden) was a mechanism for calculating the labor payment of peasants belonging to collective farms. In theory the collective farm was a cooperative form of organization, and thus peasants divided among themselves a residual payment for work rather than a contractual wage. The latter was reserved for the payment of state workers (rabochii) in industrial enterprises and on state farms.
Each daily task on a collective farm was assigned a number of labor days, according to the nature of the task, its duration, difficulty, and so forth. Peasants accumulated labor days, which were recorded in a labor book. Although a peasant might have some sense of the value of a labor day from past experience, the value of a labor day in terms of money or product would not be known until the end of the agricultural season. Valuation would be determined by the following general formula: To calculate the value of a labor day, the compulsory deliveries to the state would be subtracted from the farm output, and the result divided by the total number of labor days.
After the completion of the harvest, the value of each labor day could be known, and each peasLABOR THEORY OF VALUE The labor theory of value may be traced to the writings of John Locke, an English philosopher of the late 1600s. While Locke assumed that all the resources that were found in nature had been provided by God and therefore were common property, he argued that when people took things that had been present in a natural state and reshaped them into products of use for human beings, they mixed their labor with the raw materials, and thus had the right to personal ownership of the resulting products. Indeed, the products that a worker produced became an extension of that worker. Locke employed the labor theory of value to justify private ownership of property, the cornerstone principle of capitalism. He planted the seeds of the ideas that human labor is the unique factor that creates value in commodities, and that the value of any product is approximately determined by the amount of labor that is necessary to produce it.
Karl Marx became familiar with the labor theory of value through his extensive reading of the works of British economists, including Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whose works reflected the pervasive influence of Locke’s ideas and accepted the labor theory of value. Ironically, in Marx’s hands, the Lockean premises became the basis for an radical critique of capitalism and an implicit justification of socialism. In Marx’s theoretical model of a
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