The Proletarian Ethic and Soviet Industrialization

Conventional comparisons of national industrialization strategies place a strong emphasis on the cultural development of a modern ethic of work performance as an important component of effectively attaining industrial growth. In the case of Czarist and Soviet Russia, most studies maintain that Russian workers are exceptional inasmuch as they have always lacked a modern work ethic and therefore remain necessarily less productive than the more ethically disciplined work forces of Europe, Japan, and North America. However, such studies fail to deal with the problems of Soviet industrialization and distort the actual historical processes of Western capitalist industrialization. This analysis argues that a modern work ethic has developed within the Soviet workplace since 1917. it maintains that the social origins of this cultural code of disciplined labor are to be found, in large part, in the cultural values and group practices of the radical Russian intelligentsia before 1914, a group that provided the concrete class bases of the Bolshevik reconstitution of Marxism as a culture-transforming ideology for industrializing Russia.