Of all the volumes in this catalogue, Workers in Society: Polemical Essays is the one whose author had the least excuse. Timur Timofeyev was not a journalist filling a commission or a philosopher straying into politics. He directed the Institute of the International Working-Class Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences — the body the Soviet state had created precisely to study the world's workers — and he sat as a deputy chairman of the editorial commission behind the six-volume International Working-Class Movement, the official Soviet history of the subject, also republished in this series. If anyone in Moscow was equipped to see a workers' movement coming, it was the man who ran the institute named after it. This book is his own account, in his own voice, of what the working class is, what it has become under socialism, and how its enemies misrepresent it. It went into English in the single year that answered it.
Date the text before arguing with it. The English translation carries 1981, and the printing codes confirm the year; but the book behind the translation is a book of 1979–80. Its statistics stop in 1977 and 1978 — Soviet wages "from 1960 to 1977," pension rolls "in 1977," the working class at "approximately 66–67 per cent" of the employed population in that year. Its supreme political authority is the 25th Congress of the CPSU of 1976, quoted as the last word; the 26th Congress met in February 1981 and this book does not know it happened. Its recurring lodestar is the 1976 Conference of the Communist and Workers' Parties of Europe in East Berlin. The one hard sign of a later hand is a single clause noting that Zbigniew Brzezinski was National Security Adviser "from January 1977 to January 1981" — a translator's or reviser's touch on a text whose substance was fixed before Reagan took office and before the Polish summer. So this is a late-Brezhnev book, composed at the high-water mark of "developed socialism" — the doctrine that the Soviet bloc had left the improvised, transitional phase behind and settled into a mature and lasting order — and issued for export just as that confidence was about to be tested to destruction.
What was it for? Not, on the evidence, for a sympathetic Western bookshop reader. The subtitle is honest: these are polemical essays, and the polemic runs against named living opponents. Timofeyev's targets are the Western Marxists and ex-Communists who, in the crisis of Eurocommunism — the moment when the Italian, Spanish and French Communist parties were loudly asserting their independence from Moscow — were questioning whether the industrial working class was still the agent of revolution at all: Fernando Claudín, Roger Garaudy, the sociologist André Gorz, and the "Trotskyite ideologists (E. Mandel)." The book is an in-house weapon for the world Communist movement, meant to arm cadres against the argument that the proletariat had been dissolved by the "scientific and technological revolution" into a shapeless mass of employees. It is the Institute's contribution to holding the line on the one doctrine the CPSU could not concede: that the working class, and no other force, remains "the leading revolutionary and creative force" of the age.
Give the book its due on that ground, because much of it is competent and some of it is sharp. Timofeyev's running quarrel with the Western sociology of "post-industrial" society is not foolish. When he catches the U.S. Department of Labor's own bicentennial history conceding, through its Secretary of Labor, that "in America there was no working class as a clearly defined social group," and then quietly reprinting the 1905 preamble of the Industrial Workers of the World — that "the working class and the class of employers had nothing in common" — he has caught official America trying to talk a class out of existence while its own documents record that class declaring war. His insistence that the growth of white-collar and technical labour enlarges the working class rather than abolishing it, that the engineer converted into a salaried employee is closer to the worker than to the owner, is a serious position with Marx behind it, and he argues it with real material. On the terrain he chose — the theory of the working class in the capitalist West — this is a book that knows its opponents and lands blows.
The book's spine, though, is not its Western polemic. It is a claim about the East, stated with a confidence that makes it the clearest single statement of the doctrine anywhere in this series. The working class, exploited and propertyless under capitalism, is transformed by the October Revolution into the ruling class of a new kind of state — and then into something more than ruling. Timofeyev writes of "the transformation of the proletariat, formerly an object of exploitation and oppression, into a new social class" — "the socialist working class which is now the real master of its country." That is the hinge of the whole book. Under capitalism the worker is an object; under socialism he is the master. The dictatorship of the proletariat, he explains, "is nothing else but the rule of the working majority over the overthrown exploiting minority"; and once the exploiters are gone and their return foreclosed, even that becomes unnecessary, so that "the Soviet state ceased to be an organ of the dictatorship of the proletariat and turned into the state of the whole people." The class that seized power has so completely won that it no longer needs to rule as a class: it has become the nation.
Two further propositions complete the picture. First, the socialist working class governs through participation, and the chief instrument of that participation is the union: "the trade unions which embrace practically the entire working class, the working intelligentsia and large contingents of agricultural workers." Note the verb — embrace. The union is universal, all-encompassing, a body that takes in the whole class rather than one the class builds for itself. Second, the old wound of class society, the split between those who work with their hands and those who work with their heads, is healing: "the scientific and technological revolution brings the working class even closer to the engineering and technical intelligentsia." (The intelligentsia, in Soviet usage, means the educated professional stratum — engineers, teachers, scientists, managers.) Worker and specialist are converging, the book says, into an ever more homogeneous socialist people, welded by a shared Marxist-Leninist outlook. Here the doctrine turns against Timofeyev's Western enemies from the other side: where Gorz and Mandel are accused of trying to "drive a wedge between the working intelligentsia and other sections of the contemporary proletariat," Soviet socialism is presented as the place where no wedge can enter, because the interests of hand and brain have fused.
It is a coherent and, on its own terms, an attractive story: the wretched of one century made the sovereigns of the next. Everything in the book that concerns the West is arranged to make it shine. And it contains, at its centre, a silence so exactly shaped to the year of publication that no critic could have designed a better one.
Read the two halves of this book side by side and the doctrine comes apart in the reader's hands.
When Timofeyev writes about the working class in the capitalist countries, its life is combat and self-organisation. He fills chapter after chapter with strikes — the strike battles of the 1970s in the United States, Britain, France and Italy, "protest 'days' and 'weeks,'" wildcat stoppages, factory occupations, ten-million-strong trade-union federations forcing governments to bargain. An entire section of the final chapter is devoted to "The Situation of the Proletariat in the USA and Its Struggle." For the Western worker, the proof of vitality is precisely the capacity to withhold labour, to organise against the employer, to build unions that fight. The strike is the signature of a class that is alive.
Turn to the socialist countries and every one of these things disappears — not because Timofeyev reports their absence but because his frame cannot contain them. There are no strikes in his GDR, no stoppages in his Poland, no independent unions anywhere in the bloc, because the class that would call them is defined as the master already in possession. The "leading role" of the socialist working class is measured instead in participation: seats held, posts occupied, the all-embracing union that "embraces" everyone and confronts no one. The one weapon that certifies a living class in Manchester or Detroit — the withdrawal of labour against those set over it — is not merely absent in Leipzig or Gdańsk but unthinkable, because against whom would the master strike? The book grants the Western worker the right to fight for a voice and awards the Eastern worker the voice as a fact accomplished, without the fight, and therefore without the means to test whether the voice is real.
And then it names the country. The working class, Timofeyev writes, "constitutes the absolute majority of the gainfully employed population" in "Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary, Poland and the USSR." Poland appears in his book as a statistic — a mass of worker-citizens, the leading class of a socialist state by his own definition. It appears as nothing else. Search this text for the union that ten million of those Polish workers were about to build and there is nothing: the word "solidarity" recurs constantly, always as an abstract virtue — "proletarian solidarity," the "solidarity of the working people" — never the shipyard union of that name.
For while Timofeyev's book was being set into English, the class he had crowned was demonstrating, in the plainest possible terms, that it did not feel like the master of anything. In August 1980, at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk, Polish workers struck, occupied their yards, and on 31 August forced their government to concede the one thing the doctrine says a socialist working class cannot need: the right to form a trade union independent of the party. Within a year Solidarność had close to ten million members — more than the British Trades Union Congress whose strength Timofeyev admired — and it asserted, inside a state that called itself the workers' own, exactly the independence he had reserved for workers under capitalism. On 13 December 1981 the government answered with martial law and interned the union's leaders. The "real master of its country" was placed under curfew by the party that claimed to embody it, in the very year Timofeyev's book announced the mastery as complete.
This is the point at which a doctrine stops being merely wrong and becomes self-refuting, and it is worth being exact about why. The failure is not that events overtook a book — books are overtaken all the time, and no one blames a 1980 text for not foreseeing 1985. The failure is structural. Timofeyev's categories were built so that the event could not be perceived even as it happened. If the socialist worker is already the master, a mass movement of socialist workers demanding what masters do not lack cannot be reported as what it was — a class asserting an interest of its own against a stratum that had appropriated its state. It can only be reclassified: as error, as backwardness, as the work of enemies. Which is, in the end, precisely how martial law described it. The book did not merely miss Solidarność; its central doctrine required that Solidarność be impossible, and when the impossible arrived, the doctrine's only recourse was the truncheon.
This finding is not this volume's alone, and the reader should not take it on one book's evidence. Its closest sibling in this catalogue, L. B. Moskvin's The Working Class and Its Allies (1980), went to press in the same window with the same blind spot — celebrating Western wildcat strikes and independent unionism while measuring the socialist worker's "leading role" purely in worker-deputies and elective posts — and met the same Polish refutation. So did the multinational committee volume Socialism as a Social System (1981), coordinated, as it happens, by the theoretical institute of the Polish party itself, which proclaimed "the moral and political unity of the people" in the year its own working class rose against it. Three books, three teams, one doctrine, one refutation. That the pattern replicates across independent authors is what makes it a property of the doctrine rather than a quirk of one writer. Timofeyev's contribution is only to have stated the doctrine's central claim — the worker as master — in its barest and most falsifiable form, and to have done so from the desk of the man whose whole professional charge was to watch the working class of the world.
None of this needed hindsight. The categories that make sense of Gdańsk had been set down forty-five years earlier by a writer this book damns by name — for Timofeyev's roll of enemies runs from the "Trotskyite ideologists (E. Mandel)" back to the source, the "revisionists from the left" who "falsify the proletariat's socio-political role." The source is Leon Trotsky, and the answering book is The Revolution Betrayed (1936), the standard against which every Soviet account of Soviet society in this series must be read, because it took the same object and reached the opposite conclusion by refusing the same evasions.
Trotsky's argument begins where Timofeyev's refuses to look: with the gap between the worker and the state that is supposedly his own. Against the official claim — quoted by Trotsky from Pravda — that the Soviet worker "is not a wage slave" but "a free workman," Trotsky set the factory as it actually ran. "The transfer of the factories to the state changed the situation of the worker only juridically," he wrote. "The workers lost all influence whatever upon the management of the factory." And the conclusion that a Polish shipyard would underline in 1980: "In the bureaucracy he sees the manager, in the state, the employer. Free labor is incompatible with the existence of a bureaucratic state." Where Timofeyev's worker is the master of his country, Trotsky's worker has "expropriated the proletariat politically" done to him — the bureaucracy, he wrote, "has expropriated the proletariat politically in order by methods of its own to defend the social conquests." The identical worker, the identical state; master in one account, dispossessed in the other. Only one of the two readings had to answer to Gdańsk.
On the two institutions Timofeyev leans on hardest, Trotsky is more precise still. The all-embracing union — the one Timofeyev said would "embrace practically the entire working class" — is, in The Revolution Betrayed, an instrument turned inside out. Dissecting the 1936 "Stalin" Constitution — which first announced that antagonistic classes were abolished and society welded into one — Trotsky read its guarantee that citizens might "group themselves" in unions and the rest, alongside its reservation of real power to the party, and gave the verdict this whole tradition of books earns: such organisations are "subordinate branches of the bureaucratic firm." A union that embraces everyone and can refuse the state nothing is not the class in possession of a weapon; it is the state in possession of the class. That is why, when Polish workers wanted a union that could actually say no, they had to build one outside the party — and why the party's reply was internment.
And beneath both institutions lies the condition the doctrine of the "master" is built to deny: not a sovereign class but a scattered one. Trotsky's word for it was atomization. The new constitution, he wrote, returned from workplace-based soviet democracy to a bourgeois ballot cast by "an atomized population"; and the regime that rose above that population, "resting upon a police and officers' corps, and allowing of no control whatever," he named "a politically atomized society." An atomized class is the exact opposite of a ruling one — a mass of individuals with no independent organ through which to act together, each facing the state alone. Solidarność was, before it was anything else, the sudden de-atomization of ten million people: the moment the "master" discovered it possessed nothing that a master needs, and set about building it. Trotsky had named both the condition and, by implication, the cure, four decades before the shipyard proved him right.
There is a test that separates this tradition from Timofeyev's more cleanly than any tally of citations, and it is worth stating because it is the fairest test available. Ask of any political vocabulary: can its central accusation ever be turned on the speaker's own side? Trotsky's charge — that a bureaucracy had appropriated the workers' state and expropriated the workers politically — names a stratum, a mechanism and an act, all of which could be shown false and which history was invited to test; and the Fourth International applied the same category of degeneration to its own sections when it judged they had earned it. Timofeyev's doctrine is built so that the reverse charge can never be levelled: if the socialist worker is by definition the master, then the party cannot be in conflict with him, because they have been defined as one flesh. When the conflict came anyway, the doctrine could metabolise it only by declaring the workers enemies. A theory that can defend itself against the facts only by reclassifying the facts as hostile has stopped describing the world and started supplying an alibi for those who rule it.
A reader told that a book is worthless learns nothing, and it would be false to say it of this one. Two things in Workers in Society hold up, and the series is the more credible for saying so plainly.
The first is the empirical record of the Western class struggle of the 1970s. Timofeyev was, whatever else, a diligent director of a well-resourced institute, and his chapters on the developed capitalist countries are dense with usable material: the strike waves of the decade country by country, the changing shape of the workforce as technical and white-collar labour grew, the sociology of the "new middle strata," the running argument over whether the working class was expanding or dissolving. Stripped of its framing, the survey of the workers' and trade-union movement of the capitalist world in that decade is a serviceable compilation, assembled by someone who read the Western literature closely in order to fight it and reported a good deal of it accurately in passing.
The second is the polemic against the liquidation of class as an analytical category — the argument that "post-industrial" society had abolished the proletariat. Here Timofeyev's target was real and his aim often true. Against the sociologists who declared the working class a nineteenth-century relic, he insisted that the salaried engineer and the office worker were being drawn into the condition of wage labour, not out of it — that capitalism "increasingly deprives the intellectual of his independent position, converts him into a hired worker," in Lenin's phrase, which he quotes to the point. A reader who wants to see the strongest Soviet case that the working class remained the central fact of capitalist society, made against the fashionable Western claim that it had evaporated, will find it stated here with some force. The irony — and it is the book's, not the reader's — is that this genuine insight about the West was precisely the insight its author could not extend to the East. He could see that the Western intelligentsia was being proletarianised into a working class with interests of its own to defend. He could not see that the Eastern working class had interests of its own to defend against the stratum set over it, because his doctrine had already declared that stratum to be the working class. The same sharp eye that would not let a Western sociologist dissolve the proletariat into "employees" let a Soviet bureaucracy dissolve the proletariat into "the whole people."
That is finally the use of this book. It is the most authoritative single statement in English of what the working class meant to the state that ruled a third of the world's Communists — written not by a hack but by the head of the institute charged with the subject, at the doctrine's most confident hour, and issued in the exact year the class it crowned rose to say it was no master at all. Read it for the doctrine, stated more nakedly here than anywhere; read it for the honest Western reporting folded inside the polemic; and read The Revolution Betrayed alongside it, and Gdańsk in the margin. A book about the workers in society, published in 1981, that could not see the largest workers' movement in the history of the society it praised, is not merely mistaken. It is the finest available demonstration of what its own doctrine was built to hide.