Lukashenko and His Belarus Serfdom

[erupt]

http://www.ajc.com/ap/ap/labor/belarusian-ruler-introduces-forced-employment/nTNPX/

Apparently it's some sort of forced labor. Thoughts?

[hetz]

It's not exactly forced labor, it's more like a "work obligation", someting states proclaim during wartime. It's also similar to practices in Soviet kolkhozes, you generally couldn't leave them without permission from the responsible authority.

Lukashenko will soon learn that he can't "control" a market economy by decrees.
This will only harm his regime in the long run.

[erupt]

Yeah, in reference to Lukashanko, I don't know what the hell he's thinking. He's just asking for some sort of sanctions or something along those lines.

[Victoria Shmakova]

I hear too many of these horror stories out of Belarus. This article is obviously taking something out of context.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Serfdom sums it up quite well in a single word.:thumbdown:

[l'Enfermé]

It's not exactly forced labor, it's more like a "work obligation", someting states proclaim during wartime. It's also similar to practices in Soviet kolkhozes, you generally couldn't leave them without permission from the responsible authority.

Lukashenko will soon learn that he can't "control" a market economy by decrees.
This will only harm his regime in the long run.
Labour in the Soviet Union was closer to forced-labour rather than wage-labour, though, I think.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Forced labor is serfdom. Whether the master is Tsar or Comrade Great Leader is inconsequential.

[hetz]

Forced labor is serfdom.
No it's not. The term serf (or serfdom) has a very specific meaning.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Forced labor is industrial "serfdom". Industrial "serfdom" is akin to historical serfdom. Since the comparison is apt, the use of the term is appropriate.

[hetz]

A serf is tied to his lord for life, except for some very rare cases.
Forced labor exists either as a part of some extraordinary work-obligation or as a part of some punishment.

[GoddessCleoLover]

Industrial serfdom is a colloquial expression, but it conveys the reality that Belorussian workers are being compelled to labor by the state. The state of Belarus seems to be serving as the functional equivalent of the "Lord of the Manor". Has the state of Belarus indicated that this work-obligation will be discontinued by a date certain?

[commieathighnoon]

Labour in the Soviet Union was closer to forced-labour rather than wage-labour, though, I think.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/does-idea-soviet-t176207/index.html?p=2536871

Prove it.

Once and again, wage-labor in the USSR had a peculiar character, which is more like the distorted margins experienced by the archetypal moments and geographic-accumulative 'heart' of its history [1]. One can't take the US in peacetime in 1950 in 1925 in its industrial cutting-edge and compare it as an ideal type to the USSR. Your distinction between "wage-labor" and "forced-labor" as posed is essentially devoid of content, idealistic, and ignores the relevant literature. [2]

[1] For example, akin to wage-labor as experienced in Victorian and pre-Victorian England, with the continuing legal force of the Master and Servant Acts (a prole could be held to be criminally liable in court for terminating contract with employer unilaterally) and in the general context of the virtual criminalization of poverty or unemployment by means of vagrancy legislation and the punitive workhouse or debtors' prison (also subject to labor), in many ways similar to the parasitism law of the USSR as a practical object. Similarly one can see the forms of wage-labor both archaic/subsumed (gang-based "sharecropping") and immediate (urban labor) in the Jim Crow-era South by black Americans, under the threat of imprisonment and mass convict-lease labor on a similar material basis, if arising under very different historical conditions and under very different ideological composition.

Next, there is the forms of wage-labor known as the "company town," particularly in mining and other labor-colony-like sites of production in Western history. The final and most important example would probably be the conditions of wage-labor encountered under the total-war mobilized economy of the major industrialized bourgeois states during the World Wars, where employees were subject to full employment, forced savings and consumer good shortages (partially deferred by the short duration, better implementation, and the compliance of the working-class with bourgeois schemes like war bonds), and a suppression of formal union and party based forms of struggle. Nonetheless, they retained recourse to the spontaneous wildcat strike, passive shopfloor forms of resistance, and periodic rebellions--all of which are observable in the history of the West at war. The wildcats in defiance of the "no-strike pledge" in the US are well-attested, as is the mutiny-riot of the black conscript workers forced to load explosives in unsafe conditions at Port Chicago following a massive explosion. The incorporation of unions and 'official' worker representation into structures of mobilization and co-optation for greater productivity, competitive breakdown of shopfloor solidarity, and supervision all bear strong resemblance to Soviet forms of shopfloor control.

[2] Consult Jairus Banaji, Theory as history, for a critique of the free contract. Consult Fernandez 1997 for a critique of Ticktin's conception of capitalist money, and my existing (and un-answered) critique above.