‘A Worker in a Workers’ State’ is Miklos Haraszti’s analysis of working conditions and management practices on the shop floor in Hungary today. It is also an account of the author’s personal experiences in the Red Star tractor factory on the outskirts of Budapest where he worked as a millwright for six months. The merit of the book is that it vividly portrays the attitudes and consciousness of workers at the factory and the effect on these workers of the Hungarian bureaucracy’s current piece-work strategy on the shop floor.
The drive to reintroduce and strengthen the piecework system in the Hungarian factories was an integral component of the bureaucracy’s ‘New Economic Mechanism’. Alongside greater managerial autonomy and the introduction of market criteria to decide prices and production norms, it was designed to force the Hungarian workers to pay for the crisis of economic stagnation facing the bureaucracy in the late 1960s with increased work-loads and deteriorating working conditions.
‘Piece-Rates’, as the book was originally titled, is presented by the publishers in the trappings of a sociological study of the workshop in Hungary. For instance, it carries an introduction by Heinrich Boll who describes the book as containing ‘… various elements, some of which have so far been absent from the literature of work. It is first of all a detailed sociographic account of the techniques and terminology of work in a metal factory and of the relation of these techniques, terms and categories to that sacred something for which all workers have to work: their pay, their living.’
Never-the-less the book is more political in content and more specific in its conclusions than the term ‘sociology’ implies and it is largely devoid of the academic mumbo-jumbo that is the pillar of this subject. This is not to say that Haraszti’s argument is the epitome of political clarity. For instance, although one of the main implications of the book is that a major capitalist institution, if not capitalism itself, has been introduced in Hungary, there is not the slightest hint as to why this has occurred.
Haraszti’s history entitles him to a special place in the Eastern European ‘dissident’ movement and the English edition carries useful and copious notes on the author’s life history. He is a socialist who has observed the machination of the Hungarian bureaucracy in general and personally. Yet he has used periods of enforced curtailment of his liberties to examine and experience at first hand the condition of the Hungarian working class and the regime of Hungarian factory life. His indictment of Hungarian ‘Socialism’ proceeds from his observations of the situation of the working class in the Hungarian bureaucracy’s ‘Workers State’.
Haraszti shows how the two-machine and piece-work system are used to progressively reduce wages and at the same time increase productivity. He describes the state of frenzied exhaustion in which workers labour under this system, and the extremely dangerous conditions which workers are prepared to impose on themselves in order to earn a living wage. He uncovers the way in which the ‘official’ bureaucracy at shop floor level rests on a layer of skilled and craft conscious workers and how these are gradually incorporated into the state apparatus. He demonstrates the absolute cynicism of the use of force at the Red Star factory. Here is how Haraszti is introduced to the piece-rate system by a fellow miller on the neighbouring pair of machines:
‘I can see they’ve shown you what to do, but as for making money, well, they haven’t told you a thing about that. If you want to do that too, you’ve got to learn the score. If you don’t, with the money you’ll be making you won’t even have enough to go out begging for the air you breathe. Believe me, they don’t give a damn about what happens to you.’
This miller attempts to dispel any illusions Haraszti may have in the technical and scientific dressing which surrounds the piece-rate on the work sheets. The scene continues:
‘Then brushing aside the jumble of mysterious letters and figures with a sweep of his hand he says, “None of that need bother you. Here are your holy words… That’s the piece-rate. That is the only thing we look at… But if that lot up there want to slash the piece-rate — otherwise called readjusting the norm — they have only to give the order, and down it comes by such and such per cent. They just sit there with the rate-fixers, add, multiply, divide and rub out, and at the end of all this, the piece-rate has dropped. But on paper it looks fine.”‘
Haraszti ignores these warnings and tries to work to the technical instructions in order to analyse what the piece rates really mean for the worker. He discovers, for instance, that the time per piece is 3.3 minutes — he takes ‘about four minutes a piece and that does not include the time needed to set up the run’; ie that the time per piece can make it appear that if a worker works hard and diligently for the complete working day then a living wage could be earned. But if the quality and safety instructions are heeded then it would not be worth-while the worker bothering to work. The result? The millers abandon all quality and safety regulations in order to make enough pieces to earn a decent wage.
Noting Haraszti’s experiment, his neighbour smiles: ‘What are you trying to prove with these chemical calculation? You’ll never earn more like that. While you did your sums, I made at least 10 Forints. And I knew the result before you started: you’re broke.’
Haraszti soon finds that the setters who are supposed to be there to help smooth production problems such as a machine fault can never be found when they are needed. This results in further losses in earnings for the millers. The neighbouring miller explains the situation sagely: ‘Look, they’re just not here to make life easy for you. The bosses know perfectly well that the setters simply waste your time… They’re all friends of the bosses; that’s why they’re setters. They are on the way up… Now you just tell me where in your opinion, the older setter has been spending all his time these past two months? He was chairman of the local magistrate’s court. On full pay, plus all the usual extras, of course. It’s the same with the others. The younger one, who only became a setter last year, will be a trade union representative or Party secretary by next year, you’ll see. The works manager was also a setter in his time. In a word, they’re all in it together.’
The merciless pressure to keep working at break neck speed, ignoring all safety regulations and technical instructions, in order to ‘loot’ the norm (workers call this ‘looting’) and earn a decent wage furnishes Haraszti with some horrendous stories of mutilation of workers. He describes the hair raising method an old miller uses to grind the teeth on cog wheels and asks: ‘Is it safe to work with so few clamps? Does he have time to check that they are fastened tightly enough or that the piece isn’t going to smash into the revolving head? He (the old miller) never asks questions like this. If he worked to the rules… his job would be metamorphosed into “bad” work, and he would have lost his “living”. We were made tragically aware of the way L (the old worker) worked. There was an accident involving another miller who put L’s pieces through their next operation. This worker also took a chance of the pivot to place the pieces around. The milling head tore off the fingers from his right hand. The stretcher on which they carried him out passed right in front of old L’s machine.’
‘The foreman sent for the millers and gave us a little talk in his office.’ The foreman emphasises: ‘We must learn from what has just happened. You are grown men, I know, but you shouldn’t be ashamed to learn. Has anyone got any questions? Now, please sign the minutes of this ad hoc meeting.’ The foreman draws their attention to the importance of keeping to the technical regulations, and the workers register their agreement. And the result of this warning? ‘We went back to the section, and everyone continued exactly as before — including old L.’
These appalling shop floor conditions, the workers’ apparent toleration of them, and the severe atomisation of the Hungarian working class under the massive dead weight of the bureaucracy and their piece-work system has left Haraszti with scars of deep pessimism about the ability of workers to fight back — to permanently rid themselves of the shackles of the bureaucracy.
Another failing of the book is the lack of a framework to surround its detailed descriptions and its implied conclusion. If there are any doubts as to these implications they are dispelled in Haraszti’s court statement at his trial. He says: ‘The prosecution is seeking the condemnation of the attitude which wants to expose reality, the belief that our society contains conflicts, the belief that it is the duty and the interest of socialism to bring these conflicts to light… Acceptance of this view would not eliminate conflict. On the contrary, it would delay their solution. In the present case, this means that the retention of piece-work, this institution created by capitalism, may serve the interests of certain social groups, but not those of the majority. If the courts were to accept the point of view of the prosecution, it would be defending the interests of a very clearly definable sociological group.’
But his argument throughout the book fails either to reinforce this point or to seriously explore the political implications of this vital observation. He remains unclear as to whether it is the wages system in general, or the piecework system in particular which categorises the system as ‘not socialist’. His belief that the piecework system represents the interests of ‘a very clearly definable sociological group’ does not lead him to develop any analysis of the bureaucratic state or of the relationship of the working class to political power.
The reader is left unclear as to what would happen if the piecework system was replaced by the old hourly-rate, or at the very least to wonder how Haraszti characterised the political system before the introduction of the piece-rates. No reason is given for the introduction of piecework by the bureaucracy, apart from retelling its excuse that ‘payment by results was the ideal form for socialist wages…’ as ”it was… the embodiment of the principle, “from each according to his capacity, to each according to his work”.’
He believes the piecework system has duped and confused the Hungarian working class to such an extent that it has been immobilised and only a reform re-instating an hourly rate would allow the possibility of a growth of class consciousness. In this way Haraszti focuses his perspective for change, not on the Hungarian working class but on a specific section of the Hungarian bureaucracy — in fact that section of the bureaucracy least enamoured of the New Economic Mechanism, most desirous of a return to the centralised command economy, has always been equally complicit in the Stalinist system which drowned the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 in blood, which systematically deprives the Hungarian workers of political power. There can be no perspective for the emancipation of the Hungarian working class built on expectations of change initiated by this faction of the bureaucracy.
Within Haraszti’s model the working class is duped and atomised by the management and bureaucracy. While able to observe the exploitation and alienation of Hungarian workers, he has no concept of overcoming their backwardness and atomisation.
Unlike many ‘dissidents’ in East Europe, Haraszti’s critique of the Stalinist system starts with the position of the working class and the hollow claims of the bureaucracy. However he shares with so many dissidents a deep pessimism in the possibilities of working class action. Such fatalism fails to recognise that it is only the power of the organised workers — as in Hungary in 1956, and in Poland in 1970 and 1976 — that can confront the bureaucracy head-on to install a genuine workers’ state. Instead, it falsely looks to sections of the bureaucratic apparatus (in the case of Haraszti) to initiate change in the interests of the working class.
Despite all these criticisms, ‘A Worker in a Worker’s State’ will prove a valuable book for any interested in the condition of the working class in Hungary and also the politics of one section of the Eastern European ‘dissident’ movement.
