Thus, union organizations hardly existed before 1917, though labor-union sentiment was strong. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, workers' committees sprang spontaneously into being at factories, taking them over as the previous owners fled (Ruble 9-10). But it was not out of these committees, but out of the Bolshevik Party itself, that the Soviet labor program emerged.
Lenin and his fellows and followers were faced with two contradictory problems: to move the organization of labor and the overall social order in the direction that their ideology indicated, and to develop the industrial (and military-political) power of the Soviet Union as a state surrounded by actively or potentially hostile capitalist states.
The Soviet form of labor union, as it has existed through most of the period from 1917 to 1989, reflected the inherent tensions between these goals. To a typical American labor leader, the Soviet labor unions had a disturbing similarity to tame "company unions" (Ruble 10-11). They served as mutual-benefit associations for the workers at a given enterprise, and even with some effectiveness as a grievance mechanism. But they were entirely toothless in the face of "management," most of all in their inability to call strikes, an action forbidden by Soviet labor law.
The essence of the problem was perhaps summed up best in the 1981 Warren Beatty movie, Reds. Actor Jack Nicholson, playing the playwright Eugene O'Neill, criticizes the radical American unionists, saying, how are you going to get the American worker to fight for the dignity of the working class when his fondest hope is to make enough money that he doesn't have to work anymore?
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