Forced labour and the relation to the USSR's economy

[Rooster]

I'm trying to understand how the economy of the USSR functioned. I don't really care if it was state-capitalism of anything, I'm more interested in how it functioned. So I was thinking about the forced labour factor. I tried to bring it up in the Stalin thread but got no response.

I was wondering how much did the forced labour system of the gulags contribute towards the economy of the USSR. How many people were toiling under it and did Khrushchev's easing up on prisoners affect the economic system (assuming it forced labour had an impact at all)? How deeply engrained was forced labour within the system?

[BIG BROTHER]

That's a good question.

My hunch on it is that this was more of a punishment than an actual economic need. I doubt slave labor under such hard conditions can be very productive.

[Rooster]

From my understanding of slavery, you had to take care of your slaves to maximise their usefulness. But if you're using forced labour as punishment and you have an unlimited supply of people, then caring about their welfare becomes less and less important. So I don't think productivity would be affected that much.

[Sixiang]

I don't know anything about the USSR's forced labor, but in response to the unproductiveness of slavery, with African slaves in America, they lived under horrible living conditions. Not much thought was given to their well being. They lived in small shacks with 20 other people in them, wallowing in filth and disease. They wore the rejected clothes of their masters, tattered and worn out shoes with holes in them, and usually had only one outfit to their name for a period of up to several years. They were beaten, whipped, cut, and burned for insubordination. They were forced to reproduce. They ate the discarded crumbs off the tables of their masters. Aside form allowing them to have religious practices and sing during work, they weren't allowed any real culture or life.

The southern states' economies flourished immensely from slavery. The cotton industry brought in a lot of money for the white land-owners.

I'm not saying that the same applies for all forced labor practices, but my point is that forced labor can produce a lot. Obviously there is the element of punishment. I can't imagine prisoners breaking rocks all day is very productive.

[gorillafuck]

From my understanding of slavery, you had to take care of your slaves to maximise their usefulness.
No, that's not true at all.

[Rooster]

I'm finding it hard to articulate myself here.

An example of forced labour that I can think of can be found within the American penal system. I believe that all helmets for the US army, for example, are made in prisons which allows those commodities to be produced at a low cost. You do not have provide a living wage for these inmates for their work as it is a form of punishment. If you were to start a factory up then you do have to provide some sort of subsistence wage. I do not know a great deal about the average working conditions of a soviet citizen at this time but I at least think that they would at least have a subsistence wage from the state for their work, some choice in some matters and the ability not to worry about having your teeth kicked in by your task master.


No, that's not true at all.

I apologise for the general slackness of my communication. I meant that it wasn't cost effective to just purchase a slave and then destroy their ability to produce in a very short time. I did not mean that they took good care of them.

[gorillafuck]

I apologise for the general slackness of my communication. I meant that it wasn't cost effective to just purchase a slave and then destroy their ability to produce in a very short time. I did not mean that they took good care of them.
Yeah, but it was cost effective to give them next to nothing.

[Rooster]

Yeah, but it was cost effective to give them next to nothing.

Does that not mean that forced labour is cost effective? Did it have an impact on the soviet economy?

[Kléber]

Quite a few Soviet infrastructure projects, most notably the great canals built in the 1930's, were constructed by unpaid convict labor. Convicts were also forced to mine rare metals for export while working in unsafe conditions. Malnourishment and abuse were staples of Soviet convict life following the reactionary "reforms" spearheaded by Naftaly Frenkel, a bourgeois smuggler who became Stalin's chief overseer.

Most Soviet convict laborers were petty criminals but there was a significant minority of communist activists who were imprisoned for their opposition to the Stalin clique. One of them was Lovett Fort-Whiteman, an expat African-American labor leader living in Russia, sentenced to the gulag for saying he supported Trotsky. He was either murdered by guards or worked to death in the Kolyma gold mines.

[chegitz guevara]

Magnitogorsk was built with a combination of convict and volunteer settler labor.

[khad]

One statistic I found. In 1939 and 1940 the soviet penal system produced 2.6 billion rubles' worth of economic product. The annual gdp of the ussr at the time stood at between 380 billion rubles.

2.6 / 380x2 = 0.34%


Yeah, but it was cost effective to give them next to nothing.

What they got was dependent on what everyone else got. More than half the deaths in the prisons were logged between 1941-1944. You couldn't justify prioritizing them when the rest of the country was starving and dying. Postwar death rates were dramatically reduced.

[Robocommie]

From my understanding of slavery, you had to take care of your slaves to maximise their usefulness.

In the late Middle Ages, Venetian sugar plantations in the Mediterranean used African slave labor bought from Arab merchants. Because they didn't want to waste any arable land that could be used for growing sugar cane on growing cereals to feed the slaves, they basically fed them nothing. They would just bring in new slaves, constantly, to replace the ones they lost.