The title of G. Chernikov's book makes a promise in two halves, and it is worth pausing on the join between them. The Crisis of Capitalism and the Condition of the Working People proposes to move from a diagnosis of the Western economy to an account of what that economy does to the people who live inside it. The first half is the stronger. Chernikov is an economist of the Soviet academic establishment, writing out of the world that the Institute of World Economics and International Relations and the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement had built, and when he stays close to the statistical record of the capitalist slump of the mid-1970s he is often precise, sometimes genuinely useful, and easy to check. The second half is where the book turns into what it was commissioned to be: a demonstration, by contrast, of the superiority of the system he served. The contrast is the argument, and the contrast is where the book fails, because to make it work Chernikov has to describe one half of the world in the vocabulary of crisis and leave the other half in permanent daylight.
Begin with the date, because the catalogue can mislead. The spine reads 1980, and both the Russian original and the English translation carry a Progress copyright of that year. Here, unusually for this series, the spine is close to honest. The book's evidence runs hard through 1977, reaches into 1978 — steel output, OECD growth forecasts, the "order books of capitalist shipyards ... the thinnest for the past ten years" — and ventures a forecast that the growth curve of the major powers "will creep slowly upward in 1979 and possibly in 1980." This is a book written at the very end of the 1970s and published as the decade closed: a late-Brezhnev text in a late-Brezhnev jacket, with none of the dating problems that afflict other titles in this catalogue. What it says, it says about the world of 1979, and it should be read as a document of that exact moment.
What was it for? Not, in the first instance, for a London bookshop browser curious about Marxism. The book is addressed, throughout, over the heads of that reader to the Communist parties of the West. Its worked examples are drawn from the 22nd Congress of the French Communist Party, from the Bonn congress of the German Communist Party, from the Italian and Belgian party press; its authorities are the 25th Congress of the CPSU and the pages of World Marxist Review. Its closing chapters are a détente-era brief — "Peace, Detente, and Co-operation of All Countries," "Co-operation with Socialist Countries — a Dictate of the Times" — arguing that the Western parties should press for trade with the East and an easing of Cold War tension. This is export literature for the Eurocommunist years: ammunition for the mass Communist parties of France and Italy to make the case that the crisis of the 1970s vindicated them, and that a "democratic way out of the crisis" led, by stages, toward socialism. Chernikov is writing not to convert the West but to arm its Communists, and the book carries the assumptions of that commission on every page.
The doctrine it exists to serve should be stated exactly, because Chernikov states it exactly himself. The organising category is the "general crisis of capitalism" — not this or that recession, but a single terminal process. "The general crisis of capitalism," he writes, "which began during World War I (1914–1918) and the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, consists in the dying of capitalism and its replacement by a new, socialist mode of production." That process is said to unfold in stages: a first stage from 1917, a second after the Second World War with the emergence of a bloc of socialist states, a third from the mid-1950s. The slump of the 1970s is fitted into this frame as evidence of the third stage deepening — "a further undermining of the capitalist system's foundations." The frame is doctrine, not finding. It is asserted as a law of history, and everything the book then documents is arranged as an instance of it. Capitalism has been dying, on this account, for sixty-three years, and the fact that it has spent those decades visibly transforming itself — a difficulty a more curious analyst might dwell on — is folded in as merely another symptom of the death.
Alongside the general-crisis schema runs its human counterpart, the thesis of the deteriorating condition of the working people. Chernikov is careful, and to his credit more careful than many, not to claim that Western workers are simply starving; he concedes that the gains won by Western workers have "to some extent retarded the tendency toward an absolute deterioration of the working people's material position." But the tendency is held to be real and to be reasserting itself, and by the end of his wage analysis he concludes that the crisis meant "an absolute worsening of the position of the greater part of the working class of capitalist countries." Immiseration, absolute and relative, is the mechanism by which the general crisis is supposed to be felt in the household.
Now the part that must be said plainly, because a reader told that the whole book is worthless learns nothing from it. When Chernikov documents the distress of Western workers in the mid-1970s slump, much of what he assembles is real and can be cited. His unemployment chapter is the strongest section of the book. The figure he gives — registered unemployment in the developed capitalist countries rising from 6.6 million in 1965 to 17.1 million by December 1975, drawn from national statistics and the International Labour Organisation — is in the right order and honestly sourced. His anatomy of Western unemployment insurance is better than most Soviet accounts of the West and repays reading: he is right that coverage was full of holes (more than a fifth of the United States labour force outside the system; larger shares in Italy and France), that benefit typically replaced only a fraction of prior earnings, and that it ran out after a fixed period "whether or not the unemployed person has managed to find a new job." His pages on migrant labour — the eleven-to-thirteen million foreign workers of Western Europe, hired in the boom and expelled in the slump, a reserve the employers used for "letting 'steam' out of the labour market" — describe a real and ugly mechanism. And he is honest, in a way that strengthens rather than weakens his case, about the limits of official statistics: retail-price baskets "so selected as to hide the true picture," wage indices that leave out miners, migrants, women and the unemployed. A reader who wants a contemporary Marxist account of the 1974–75 recession as it looked from Moscow, with its citations to the ILO, the OECD and the UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics, will find one here, and the sourcing is generally good enough to follow up. The scholarship, where it is scholarship, deserves that acknowledgement.
The trouble is not the documentation. It is the frame, and above all the asymmetry the frame requires. This is a book about the condition of the working people, and it has only one working people. Run the vocabulary of the book against itself and the pattern is unmistakable. "Crisis" tolls through the contents page like a bell — the overproduction crisis, the monetary crisis, the energy crisis, the ecological crisis, the crisis of state monopoly control, the ideological and political crisis — and every one of them is Western. "Shortage" appears only as an energy shortage in the capitalist market; "deficit" only as the budget and trade deficits of the United States and France; "stagnation" only as the fate of Western real wages. Not once is any of these words allowed to touch the country Chernikov is writing from. The Soviet Union of 1979 — a country then entering the era its own later economists would call the zastoi, the stagnation; a country of chronic consumer shortage, of queues, of the second economy — appears in this book solely as the daylight against which the Western night is measured. Poland, where the decisive events of the book's own publication year were about to unfold, is not mentioned at all.
The conclusion states the counter-image without embarrassment. "A planned socialist economy, by its very nature, excludes economic crises and other upsets." "Unemployment has been completely banished from the Soviet Union and other socialist countries." "The incomes of workers, peasants, and all working people are rising and prices kept stable." The "exploitation of man by man has been abolished as a result of historic transformations, and an end has been put to social inequality." The move is not incidental; it is the book's engine. Every deprivation catalogued in the West is convertible, by a turn of the page, into a Soviet achievement. When Chernikov reaches the plight of the Western unemployed, he does not merely describe it — he answers it, quoting the Soviet Constitution's guarantee that citizens have "the right to work (that is, to guaranteed employment and pay in accordance with the quantity and quality of their work)," and holding up "the countries of the socialist community, where the right to work is guaranteed by their constitutions" as the standard the West fails to meet.
This is where the book must be measured against the tradition it exists to refute, and where its silences become findings. The classic answer to exactly this operation was written more than forty years before Chernikov's book, by a man who knew the Soviet worker's condition from the inside and had every ideological reason to flatter it and refused. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed (1936) is the standing counter-text, and it speaks directly to each of Chernikov's claims. Against the boast that exploitation of man by man had been abolished and inequality ended, Trotsky's chapter on "The Growth of Inequality" found that "Soviet society is already divided into a secure and privileged minority, and a majority getting along in want" — the privileged half-million and the pyramid of officials beneath them, set over a working class from whom they were, in his word, deeply alienated. Against the picture of a working class that "works for itself," Trotsky described a factory regime in which "the workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory," in which the worker "in the bureaucracy ... sees the manager, in the state, the employer."
And against the very contrast Chernikov builds his book upon — the humane socialist workplace set beside the exploitative capitalist one — Trotsky supplied the sentence that ought to be printed opposite Chernikov's conclusion. Describing the piecework and speed-up regime of the Stakhanov years, he observed that in the Soviet Union "the classic methods of exploitation, such as piecework payment, are applied in such naked and crude forms as would not be permitted even by reformist trade unions in bourgeois countries." That is not a Cold War slander imported from the West; it is the judgement of a founder of the Soviet state, made in 1936, and it inverts Chernikov's entire scheme. The book's decisive absence is the Soviet worker's own organisation. Chernikov's chapter on the class struggle is full of Western trade unions striking, marching, defending their members — the French CGT, the West German unions, the eight million who answered the call for a general strike in Italy in November 1977. In the socialist half of his world there are no strikes and no independent unions, and the reason is not that the workers were content; it is that the right Chernikov most conspicuously omits from his catalogue of socialist guarantees is the right of a worker to combine against the state that employs him. He quotes the Constitution's right to work. He is silent on the right to withhold it.
That silence had a history the book does not tell. The Soviet workplace Chernikov offers as the humane alternative to Western wage-labour had itself been the site of a struggle between workers and their own official unions — a struggle Trotsky watched at first hand during the Stakhanov drive of the mid-1930s, when the speed-up campaign set the productivity of the exceptional worker against the wage of the average one. Reporting the resistance it provoked, Trotsky noted the astonishing alignment it exposed: in this conflict "the workers are on one side, the trade unions on the other." That is the precise inversion of Chernikov's picture. In his West, the unions defend the workers against the employer; in the actual Soviet Union of the record, the union stood with the state against the worker, which is why the Polish workers of 1980 had to build a union outside the official structure rather than reform the one they had. And Chernikov's own method — reading a constitution aloud as proof of a social reality — is the one Trotsky had already turned against the Stalin Constitution of 1936, warning that a fundamental law drafted by the ruling stratum is a self-portrait, not a guarantee: "the lie with which, as a mirror of the ruling stratum, the new constitution is imbued." Chernikov quotes the 1977 Constitution's right to work exactly as the 1936 text had been quoted in its day, as a fact accomplished. Trotsky's caution — that the article guaranteeing the citizen's property would in practice protect "the bureaucrat's automobile ... more effectively than the peasant's wagon" — was a warning about the distance between the paper right and the administered life. Chernikov reprints the paper right and calls the distance closed.
The event supplied the commentary the text could not. The Crisis of Capitalism and the Condition of the Working People carries a 1980 copyright. In August 1980 — the book's own year of publication — the workers of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk struck, an Inter-Factory Strike Committee spread the stoppage across the Baltic coast, and on 31 August the Polish government signed the Gdańsk Agreement conceding the right to form independent, self-governing trade unions. Solidarność, the first free trade union in the Soviet bloc, was born of precisely the grievances Chernikov's book declared abolished: rising prices in a system where prices were supposedly "kept stable," a shortage economy in a bloc where shortage was a Western disease, and a working class demanding an organisation of its own against the state that claimed to embody it. No introduction needs to strain the point. A book that asks after the condition of the working people, and can find that question worth posing only west of the Elbe, was answered within months of its appearance by ten million working people inside the system it defends, who had concluded that their condition was a question too.
There is one sentence in Chernikov's conclusion that reads, in retrospect, like an unwitting confession. "Anti-communists," he writes, "try, in their attacks on socialism, to prove that economic and social progress are allegedly achieved under socialism without development of democracy, and even at the price of a limitation of political freedoms." He raises the charge in order to dismiss it as slander — and then Gdańsk demonstrated that the "anti-communists" and the Polish workers were describing the same thing. "Genuine democracy," Chernikov insists a few lines later, "is unthinkable without socialism." The workers of the Baltic coast, building the freest institution their country had seen since the war precisely against the state that called itself socialist, were not persuaded.
The wider claim — the "general crisis," capitalism in its terminal stage — belongs to a prophecy that the anti-Stalinist left had been examining critically for decades before Chernikov restated it. The Fourth International never doubted that capitalism was crisis-ridden; its founders had lived through 1929. What it doubted was the official schema's central move: the conversion of a real analysis of capitalist contradiction into a calendar of inevitable, stage-by-stage collapse, timed to the achievements of the Soviet state and immune to disproof. Chernikov's own book contains the material for the objection. He records, honestly, that the scientific-technical revolution had "even limited the scale of the recession during the steepest fall in production," that Western capitalism kept renewing its fixed capital and restructuring its industries — and then files this dynamism, without apparent unease, under the heading of death. A system that has been dying since 1914 while transforming the productive forces of half the planet is a system whose obituary needs rewriting, or at least dating. The "general crisis" was not a finding about capitalism; it was a fixed point of Soviet doctrine, and its function was less to explain the West than to certify the East. That is why Chernikov can end a book about economic crisis with the announcement that socialism, "by its very nature, excludes economic crises and other upsets" — a sentence that the following decade in Poland, and then across the bloc, would treat as an experiment and refute.
What, then, is this book for a reader today? It is a well-sourced Soviet account of a real slump, and its first half can be mined — with the ordinary caution owed to any partisan source — for the ILO and OECD data, the anatomy of unemployment insurance, the mechanics of the migrant-labour reserve, that Chernikov assembled with real diligence. It is also a near-perfect specimen of the operation this series exists to document: the reservation of the entire vocabulary of crisis, shortage, stagnation and exploitation for one half of the world, in a book whose own subject was the condition of the working people, written in the last full year before the working people of Poland made that reservation impossible to sustain. Read the unemployment chapter for its figures. Read the conclusion beside The Revolution Betrayed, and beside the date on the spine, for everything the figures were arranged to prove.