A book about the planning of labour is bound to be, at some level, a book about compulsion — about who works, at what, and where, and about the force that stands behind the answer. Planning of Manpower in the Soviet Union is unusual among the volumes in this series in saying so out loud on its first page. "Social ownership of the means of production," writes L. Danilov in the third chapter, "excludes exploitation of the labour of others; it stipulates compulsory participation of all able-bodied members of the society in socially useful work." The Introduction is blunter still. Quoting the maxim the young Soviet government "immediately proclaimed" — "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" — it adds a single flat sentence: "This principle has been strictly observed ever since."
Everything that is interesting about this book, and everything it cannot say, lives in the gap between that admission and the picture of untroubled freedom the same pages insist upon.
The volume is a Progress Publishers export title of 1975, and unlike several books in this series the spine date is close to honest. It is a collective work: an Introduction and one chapter by Y. Dubrovsky, the other nine by named specialists in economic and labour planning — K. Aslanyan, L. Berry and G. Perov, Danilov, N. Zabelin, N. Ivanov, V. Bitunov, K. Remizov, M. Chistyakov and, on labour law, A. Pyatakov. These are not apparatus polemicists but planning professionals, and the book reads like the manual it is. Its latest signposts are the 24th Congress of the CPSU (1971) and the Ninth Five-Year Plan (1971–75), which it discusses as current business; its statistics run to 1971 and 1972, drawn from the handbook National Economy of the USSR in 1922–1972. Nothing later intrudes. This is a text of about 1973–74, published in 1975, and it argues from that moment.
It is worth asking who the book was written for, because it tells us. The Introduction explains that "in accordance with the request of the World Labour Organisation" — the International Labour Organisation — "the Soviet Union arranges seminars on this subject for representatives of Asian, African and Latin American countries," and that the authors hope "the developing countries which have decided to build and regulate their own independent economies" can learn from Soviet method. This is a détente-era book of technical assistance, offering the machinery of Gosplan (the State Planning Committee) as a model for newly independent states. That commission shapes everything. The tone is administrative and confident, the audience is assumed to be a foreign planner rather than a hostile critic, and the ideological claims are pitched as the settled findings of a science.
Strip away the organisational detail — the four groups of planning organs, the balances, the indicators — and the argument has a clean shape, and it is a serious one.
Capitalism, the book holds, structurally requires unemployment. "Capitalism without a reserve army of labour would cease to be capitalism," runs the Introduction, invoking Marx's phrase; the capitalist system "is not and cannot be interested in the planned and full employment of society's labour resources." Socialism, having socialised the means of production and abolished the market in labour, removes the mechanism that produces joblessness. Hence Danilov's central contrast: "In the capitalist countries full employment is only possible for certain periods, but in the Soviet Union it is general and constant." Pyatakov dates the achievement exactly — "Unemployment in the USSR was completely eliminated in 1930" — and grounds it in law: Article 118 of the 1936 Constitution guarantees "the right to work, i.e., the right for guaranteed work paid according to its quantity and quality," a right secured precisely "by eliminating the possibility of economic crises."
The right to work has a twin, and the book states it without embarrassment: the duty to work. Article 12 of the same Constitution makes labour "the sacred duty of every citizen," and Danilov names the mechanism in one striking sentence: "This compulsion is combined with the society's duty to provide jobs in the national economy for all able-bodied people." The instrument that reconciles the two is the balance of labour resources — the summary reckoning, drawn up sector by sector and region by region, of how many hands the economy will have and where the plan will place them.
Put fairly, this is the strongest card socialism could play in 1975, and no honest critic should pretend otherwise. A worker in Detroit or Turin who lost his job in the recession of 1974–75 had no guaranteed alternative; a Soviet worker, in principle and largely in practice, did. The elimination of mass open unemployment was real, and it was a thing the capitalist economies of that decade conspicuously could not promise.
The trouble is that the book, having named compulsion once, spends the rest of its length denying that it exists. The Introduction insists that planned employment "entails no restrictions whatever of the freedom of the individual in choosing an occupation," and that "any claims of such 'restrictions' made by bourgeois critics of the socialist system are completely false." Danilov assures the reader that "the migration of workers in the Soviet Union is a matter of voluntary choice on the basis of personal material interests." Pyatakov, cataloguing the legal forms by which manpower is moved about the country, writes that transfer, recruitment and mobilisation campaigns "are all based on the principle of free choice."
A manpower plan that assigns labour, and simultaneously insists labour is never assigned, has committed itself to a set of silences. They are the substance of the book, and they are large.
The first is the internal passport. The book describes the movement of workers between town and country, between republics, and into the "virgin lands," always as voluntary migration — and never once mentions the propiska, the residence permit stamped in the internal passport, without which a Soviet citizen could not lawfully live where he chose. The system is not a marginal detail: it is the actual mechanism by which the state governed the distribution of population that this book claims to plan. More pointedly still, at the very moment the book was being written, collective farmers did not hold internal passports at all — a fact that tied them to the kolkhoz (collective farm) as surely as any older bondage — and were only granted them by a decree of 28 August 1974, phased in over the following years. A book of 1973–75 on the planned distribution of manpower, silent on the single largest reform of the passport regime in a generation, taking place as it wrote, has not simply omitted a fact. It has removed the subject.
The second silence is the criminal law of labour. The book quotes "he who does not work, neither shall he eat" as a benign folk principle, "strictly observed ever since." It does not mention how the principle was enforced. It says nothing of the anti-"parasite" legislation — the RSFSR decree of 4 May 1961 directed against those who avoided socially useful work and lived, in its phrase, a parasitic way of life, which made not holding a state job a punishable status, sanctioned by exile and corrective labour. It says nothing of the wartime and post-war labour code: the decree of 26 June 1940 that criminalised absenteeism and unauthorised quitting of one's job, or the labour-reserve decree of 2 October 1940 that conscripted teenagers into vocational training and directed them to work — the very "labour reserves" whose descendant vocational-school system the book celebrates. Pyatakov's own chapter half-lets the mechanism show: a graduate who "fails to report or refuses to start work without valid reasons... is dismissed for breach of discipline," and one who "decides to quit of his own accord... is obliged to pay back the travelling expenses." This is the assignment of specialists — raspredelenie, the compulsory posting of graduates — described in the language of a guarantee.
The third silence is the largest, and it is historical. The book's Chapter One narrates the history of Soviet planning from the Supreme Council of National Economy of 1917, through GOELRO in 1920 and the First Five-Year Plan of 1928, to the Great Patriotic War, when "planning was completely subordinated to the need for re-organising the economy." In this entire account of how the Soviet economy was built, there is not one word about the labour that built much of it. The historical record is not in serious dispute: a vast forced-labour economy, administered through the camp system, supplied the workforce for the White Sea–Baltic Canal, for mining at Norilsk and the gold of Kolyma, for timber, canals and construction across the 1930s and 1940s. Millions passed through it. A book whose subject is precisely the sources and distribution of Soviet manpower, and whose history reaches back to the years when that system was at its height, cannot mention it. The word "camp" appears in these pages only in "campaign."
And there is a quieter, technical silence that a planner especially should notice. "Full employment... general and constant" was in practice sustained partly by overstaffing — enterprises hoarding labour against the next plan target, padding their rolls, carrying more workers than the work required. The book gestures at the edge of this when it concedes that "the problem of full employment can never be solved completely" and mentions the planned retraining of a "redundant labour force," but it never names disguised unemployment for what it was. Full employment guaranteed by a soft budget and an insatiable demand for bodies is a genuine social good and a genuine economic problem at once; the book keeps only the first half.
The Soviet worker's condition under the plan had been described, decades before this book, by the tradition from which this introduction is written — and described in the exact terms the book converts into propaganda.
In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), written as the 1936 Constitution the book leans on was being promulgated, Trotsky took up the very maxim of the Introduction and gave it its real Soviet form. Describing how expelled Oppositionists were denied work — Stalin, "through Pravda, openly advised the local organs not to give them work," and "in a country where the sole employer is the state, this means death by slow starvation" — he drew the conclusion this book's serene sentence cannot: "The old principle: who does not work shall not eat, has been replaced with a new one: who does not obey shall not eat." That is the answer to "strictly observed ever since." When the state is the only employer, the duty to work and the right to work fuse into a single instrument of control, and the same guarantee that shelters the loyal worker starves the disobedient one.
Trotsky also named the very institution this book erases. Listing the measures by which collectivisation "revived throughout the country the atmosphere of the seemingly so long ended civil war," he included "a restoration of the passport system" — the internal passport, identified in 1936 as an instrument of coercion, and unmentionable in 1975.
The deepest reply, though, is to the book's governing conceit: that the allocation of a nation's labour is a matter of scientific "balances" drawn up by expert commissions. In The Soviet Economy in Danger (1932), Trotsky anatomised exactly this pretension. "If a universal mind existed," he wrote — the omniscient intelligence imagined by Laplace — "such a mind, of course, could a priori draw up a faultless and exhaustive economic plan, beginning with the number of acres of wheat down to the last button for a vest. The bureaucracy often imagines that just such a mind is at its disposal; that is why it so easily frees itself from the control of the market and of Soviet democracy." His alternative was not the market alone but a system of three checks — plan commissions, trade, and "Soviet democracy, as a system for the living regulation by the masses of the structure of the economy" — because "the plan is checked and, to a considerable degree, realized through the market," and by the direct pressure of "the innumerable living participants in the economy." Planning of Manpower is a monument to the universal mind Trotsky described: the balance of labour resources is the plan for the last worker down to the last vest-button, drawn by officials who have "fenced off" the workers whose lives they allocate. Its authors would have been genuinely puzzled by the charge, which is the point. The instrument feels to its wielders like science, precisely because the people it moves have no way to answer back.
None of this makes the book worthless, and the series does not pretend it does. Two of its achievements were real, and the volume documents them in concrete and usable detail.
The first is mass technical training. The chapters on vocational schools, apprenticeship, day-release courses, correspondence and evening study, paid examination leave and the retraining of redundant workers describe a genuine and enormous machine for lifting a peasant society to industrial skill. Paid leave for study, wages retained in full during retraining, free vocational instruction guaranteed in law — these were substantive provisions, and many workers in the capitalist economies of 1975 had nothing comparable. Whatever the coercions surrounding it, the Soviet Union did teach tens of millions of people a trade, and this book shows the apparatus that did it.
The second is the transformation of women's work. The book records, plainly, that the share of women among workers and office employees rose from 24 per cent in 1928 to 39 per cent in 1940 to 51 per cent in 1970, and it links this to the expansion of crèches, kindergartens and canteens that made it possible. That women should carry the "double burden" of paid work and unshared housework is a criticism this tradition has always pressed; but the movement of women into paid, skilled, independent employment on this scale was one of the real social revolutions of the century, and the book credits it accurately.
So the reader is left with a document of a particular and revealing kind: an honest technical description of half a system, written by people who could see the machinery of allocation clearly because they built it, and who could not see — or could not print — the compulsion that made it run. The right to work was real. The reserve army was really abolished. And the price, which Trotsky had named forty years before, was a state that owned every job and therefore held every worker, in a country where the passport that governed where you lived, and the law that punished the man who would not work, were the two things a book on the planning of manpower could not describe.