Workers’ Councils in the Prague Spring
With the demise of the Prague Spring, the world was deprived of what would have been a valuable experiment. Away from the headlines, and separate from the struggles within the party’s Politburo and Central Committee, working people were taking control of their workplace — not to grab it for themselves but rather to put themselves in the role of industrial decision-makers on behalf of their enterprises and of Czechoslovak society as a whole.
Drawing upon the brief Czechoslovak experience with “works’ councils” following World War II, the self-management system of Yugoslavia (then nearly two decades in operation), and the debates among Czechoslovak economists seeking paths to reform — but going beyond all of these initiatives — Czech and Slovak workers began implementing workers’ control in factories, wrote statutes and organized a national conference of councils at which one-sixth of the country’s workers were represented. They were not able to do so for long, however, because the experiment was brought to a halt as an orthodox régime was imposed once the Soviet Union had re-established control over the Czechoslovak Communist Party.
Unlike Yugoslav self-management, however, this was a grassroots initiative from below. Trade unions often took the lead on organizing, with approximately two-thirds of the more than 200 councils that sprang into existence organized by unions. Local Communist Party branches organized most of the other councils.
Neither unions nor party cells were looking to put themselves out of business. Unions were to continue in the proposed system that was developing, becoming independent organizations that would look out for the interests of working people even as, collectively, they would manage their enterprises. The party’s popularity sharply rose over the course of 1968, as exemplified in the May Day parades in which huge crowds enthusiastically participated, celebrating a new course.
Economic bottlenecks that had developed by the early 1960s, which led to an abortive reform program; an expanding bloc of reformers within the party; and continuing ferment over censorship under the heavy hand of the party — culturally inappropriate for Czechoslovakia — had opened the doors for the seating of Alexander Dubček as party first secretary and created the space for the countrywide movement that came to be known as the Prague Spring.
Memories of an early experiment remain alive
“Works councils” were established in Czechoslovakia in 1945, and given official status in October of that year simultaneously with a decree issued by Eduard Beneš nationalizing most of the country’s industrial capacity. Beneš was a social democrat who headed a four-party government coalition known as the National Front. The Communist Party was the leading vote-getter in the coalition, with about 40 percent. Works councils were vigorous voices for nationalization, and groups of workers from disparate industries, including miners, energy workers and bank employees, demanded nationalizations, sometimes backing those sentiments with strikes (Vitak 1971: 247-248). A mixed economy of nationalized large industry and private and cooperative medium and small enterprises, with a mix of planning and market, was the goal (Kyn 1975: 107).
Works councils were established in enterprises remaining in private hands as well as those nationalized. The councils were originally called on by union leaders to “control” production and the management of enterprises but had their powers curtailed by the Beneš decree legalizing them. Works councils were now to supervise management, to have the right of co-decision in hiring and firing, and to be consulted about production plans, but the responsibility for the enterprise was to remain with management (Kovanda 1977: 258-260, 266). As part of this system, one-third of the members of the boards that managed enterprises were selected by employees.
In early 1948, hundreds of thousands marched through the streets of Prague, demanding that the Communists take sole power, and when non-Communist ministers resigned from the government in an attempt to force new elections, Beneš instead accepted their resignations and appointed a Communist-dominated lineup of ministers. Beneš resigned as president months later, with Communist leader Klement Gottwald assuming the presidency.
There were no significant changes in the first months of Communist Party rule, according to Dubček, then a low-level party official in a small town. The “most immediate results were the enactment of the national health insurance system” and land reform (Dubček 1993: 75). An independent “Czechoslovak road to socialism” was envisioned, but that independent road would soon be blocked by the pressures of the Cold War.
Despite the support of works’ councils for the Communist assumption of power, they were disbanded in 1949 as the Soviet system of “one-man management” (as it was called) was implemented under heavy pressure from Moscow. Similarly, trade unions were subsumed under Communist Party control. The Soviet system of heavy stress on producer goods, such as iron and steel, was instituted, despite its inappropriateness. That model developed in a country that had been largely agricultural and needed to rapidly industrialize; it had evolved in chaotic fashion during a long struggle for survival against a hostile capitalist world in one country (the Soviet Union) that cannot be extricated from the specific absolutist cultural heritage of that country’s dominant nation (Russia). In contrast, Czechoslovakia had no need, or desire, for a system designed to force an agricultural, undeveloped society on a path of rapid industrialization. It already was industrialized, and possessed a diverse economy with a healthy consumer-products industry.
Democratic control from the shop floor was ended, but promotion of workers from the shop floor to management and technical positions became a priority; about 100,000 workers made this leap during the early 1950s (Vitak 1971: 250).
Reforms in the late 1950s that granted some independence to enterprises resulted in temporary economic growth, but in 1960 and 1961, the economy slowed and the reforms were reversed. Nonetheless, economic problems continued, with growth falling far below the goals of the latest five-year plan (Kusin 1971: 88), culminating in conditions for more thorough-going reforms to arise by the mid-1960s. Economic, political and cultural bottlenecks were worsening, and in response a series of commissions were set up to propose reforms. Although economic problems had opened the space for reform, it was widely believed by the reform-minded that economic and political reform must go hand-in-hand; the former would not be possible without the latter.
The memory of the works councils of the 1940s, the desire for fuller participation in society and an end to political monopoly remained, and thus public participation grew rapidly and widely when the opportunity arose in 1968. Far from the cliché of a Central European communist party as a Stalinist monolith, that opportunity grew from the work of reformers within the party. Internal party reformers such as Alexander Dubček, political reformers working in academies such as Zdeněk Mlynář (who headed a commission studying political and legal issues), and economic reformers such as Ota Šik were not lone wolves boring from within. Rather, they operated in networks of like-minded people who worked sometimes quietly and sometimes openly as part of commissions. The mid-1960s return to responsible posts of reformers purged in the 1950s, such as Josef Smrkovský and František Kriegel, bolstered those ranks.
Šik led a group of economists who worked out plans for more extensive economic reforms during 1963 and 1964, which were approved by the Communist Party Central Committee in January 1965. A commission of political scientists and lawyers created a study on “the development of the political system in a socialist society,” and another, comprised of members of the Academy of Sciences, studied the effects of scientific and technological developments on the socialist system. The simultaneous studies and the contact among the members helped crystallize conditions for reform (Pelikán 1976: 16). Pressures for reforms from below also increased, most notably in the resolutions passed by the Fourth Writers Union Congress in June 1967 that strongly criticized party policies (Navrátil 2006: 8-12) and an October 1967 street demonstration in Prague by students that generated a huge police response and further student activism culminating in the government admitting that police had applied “unduly harsh measures” (Golan 1971: 263-265; Pelikán 1976: 16-17).
The basics of the program passed in 1965 included the virtual elimination of obligatory quotas and the flexible competitive pricing and decentralization of investment decisions. The plan foresaw a prolonged transition period, making it easy for its opponents to allow only small parts of it to be implemented (Kyn 1975: 109-110). And thus, economists believed, more thorough-going reforms were needed, and these would only be possible with political reforms. That connection was stressed by Šik (Golan 1971: 220). In turn, Šik stressed in a speech at the 1965 party congress that endorsed the reforms that they were intended to strengthen socialism. He said:
This is not at all a return to capitalist enterprise; this is a historically far higher level of management, social management, in which socialist planning is combined with the use of market relations in an unprecedented way; this is a broad social regulation of conditions which can best permit the development of initiative on the part of individuals and socialist enterprise teams and in which common interests are pursued as the result of mutual influence of the interests of producers and consumers within a planned framework (Kusin 1971: 91).
Much of the 1950s economic growth had been the product of increasing production of producer goods and of developing industry in Slovakia, which had been kept undeveloped during its long Hungarian occupation and remained underdeveloped in comparison to the Czech Lands during the interwar republic. The limits of this growth in capacity had been reached, exposing the bottlenecks of Soviet-style over-centralization. The emphasis on heavy-industry producer products, such as steel and iron, and productivity measured solely in terms of the volume of output, all formulated according to a plan imposed from above, led to waste. The centralized plans imposed on Czechoslovak industry called for specific quantities of products to be produced; the plan did not measure for quality, so inferior products could be produced without a penalty, but these could wind up on the scrap heap.
Another bottleneck triggered by tightly centralized planning was that directors would be penalized for not meeting their factory’s quota under the plan, so directors had an incentive to ask for more raw materials than were necessary, to provide a cushion in the case of future shortages. Thus, sufficient raw materials weren’t always available or sent to where they were more immediately needed, and the emphasis on quantity resulted in raw materials that were not always of sufficient quality, hurting the quality of finished products.
In short, reformers sought a way to loosen central control, to allow enterprises to have more scope for decision-making while retaining central planning as a controlling guide rather than as a rigid numerical target. An enterprise in the Czechoslovak socialist sense was the same as a corporation in a capitalist country; a large enterprise could be comprised of several factories in multiple locations, in the manner of a capitalist corporation. A director of an enterprise is the equivalent of a chief executive officer in a capitalist corporation, and directors had assumed considerable power in Soviet-style economies under the principal of “one-man management.”
Space for reforms opens
An additional factor, one that helped tip the balance against the orthodox Antonin Novotný remaining in the Communist Party’s highest office, First Secretary, were tensions between Czechs and Slovaks. The two closely related nations had widely differing histories of development.
The Czech Lands (Bohemia and Moravia, constituting the present-day Czech Republic) had been part of the Austrian-controlled portion of the pre-World War I Austro-Hungarian Empire and although Czechs were politically suppressed, without representation or say in the affairs of the empire, their area became Austria’s industrial heartland by the end of the nineteenth century, and thus a middle class developed, along with requisite educational opportunities. By contrast, Slovakia (the area constituting the present-day country of that name) was severely repressed by Hungary, which denied even the existence of the Slovak nation. For decades until the fall of the empire at the end of World War I, schools in Slovakia were closed, the Slovak language was banned and Slovaks were little more than serfs on the estates of Hungarian feudal lords. The deficit of education meant that, at the founding of Czechoslovakia, there were almost no Slovaks able to assume important positions.
Between the world wars, little progress was made on tackling these inequalities, which included the fact that there was little industry in Slovakia, a further handicap in an industrializing country. Much had been done to close the gap between the two nations after the Communist takeover, but tensions had never entirely disappeared. A series of gaffes made by Novotný, a Czech, on an August 1967 visit to an important Slovak cultural center reinforced negative perceptions of him on the part of Slovaks and hardened attitudes (Shawcross 1990: 104-105; Dubček 1993: 114-115). These ethnic irritants should not be exaggerated, but Novotný’s persistent insensitivity toward Slovakia caused widespread opposition to him to build among Slovak communists of all political tendencies, which added to opposition coming from reformers across the party leadership and increasing irritation with Novotný’s inability to work collegially (Dolack 2016: 430-438).
Novotný hoped that a visit by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev near the end of 1968 would save him, but following a series of talks with Czechoslovak party leaders, Brezhnev concluded that Novotný was “incapable of cooperating” and “does not know … how to handle people,” and also noted Novotný’s lack of finesse in dealing with Slovaks (Navrátil 2006: 20-25). Brezhnev made no show of support for Novotný; nonetheless, his neutrality was fatal to the latter’s chances of remaining Czechoslovak first secretary because Novotný’s support on his Politburo and Central Committee was dwindling. Novotný relinquished his post of party first secretary (while remaining as president and retaining his seat on the Politburo) when it became apparent that the Central Committee would vote to remove him to break a tie in the Politburo.
Alexander Dubček quickly became the consensus candidate to replace Novotný in January 1968. Four Central Committee members were promoted to the Politburo, widening support for a reform program.
Censorship was ended, sparking popular demands for the removal of orthodox leaders who remained on the Politburo, such as Novotný. Wholesale changes to the Politburo came in April, the same month as the party’s Action Program was unveiled. Although intentionally short on specifics, the Action Program, the product of the commissions that had been meeting the past few years, provided a framework for a new type of society. The program’s text directly acknowledged mistakes, “deformations” and “dogmatic approaches” that were responsible for Czechoslovakia’s impasse. Importantly, the Action Program stressed that socialism must mean democracy:
Socialism cannot mean only liberation of the working people from the domination of exploiting class relations, but must provide for a greater degree of self-fulfillment than any bourgeois democracy. The working people, who are no longer ordered about by a class of exploiters, can no longer be dictated to by any arbitrary interpretation from a position of power as to what information they may or may not be given, which of their opinions can or cannot be expressed publicly, where public opinion may play a role and where it may not (Dubček 1993: 303).
Democratization was to be extended to the economy:
Decision-making about the plan and the economic policy of the state must be both a process of mutual confrontation and harmonization of different interests — i.e., the interests of enterprises, consumers, employees, different social groups of the populations, nations, etc. — and a process of a suitable combination of the long-term development of the economy and its immediate prosperity. Effective measures protecting the consumer against the abuse of the monopoly position and economic power of production and trading enterprises must be considered as a necessary part of the economic activity of the state. The drafting of the national economic plan and the national economic policy must be subject to the democratic control of the [national parliament] and specialized control of scientific institutions (Dubček 1993: 317).
The Action Program also confirmed Czechoslovakia’s place in the Warsaw Pact and its foreign policy — reformers were convinced that socialist reforms could only be safeguarded within the Soviet bloc and there was no legitimate opinion that favored a return to capitalism.
Internally, political space for reform widened with April’s changes to the Politburo, when six members were removed, including Novotný and four of his supporters, with several reformers of various views, but also a couple of reform skeptics with ambiguous stances, added, nonetheless giving the party’s top body a reformist cast. Preparations were then begun to convene early the party’s Fourteenth Congress, originally scheduled for 1970 but now brought forward to September 1968. Delegates to the congress were to be freely elected, the result of which would be to effect a clean sweep of orthodox party leaders.
Such a result was expected by all shades of opinion. This would further open the space for reforms to go forward without bureaucratic interference — the Central Committee still contained many people opposed to any reforms, those who had wanted to oust Novotný but go no further, and others who supported only tepid changes well short of what the public, rank-and-file Communists and the more strongly minded reformers among the party leadership sought. Although the Central Committee was in practice a lower body than the much smaller Politburo, the Politburo was technically answerable to it and thus wholesale reforms could not be effected without a majority backing it on the Central Committee.
Growing demands for worker participation
The 1960s reforms that had been put forth, and implemented in much watered-down fashion, had dealt with macro-economic concerns. One of the reform commissions, separate from the economic commission, concluded that workers should have a role in the management of their enterprises. In order to lessen the control of party and state bureaucracies, it was proposed that enterprise managements be responsible to workers’ councils. Three broad trends of opinion emerged within this commission, with most opinion gravitating toward the medium proposal — the councils would have the power to hire and dismiss the director, to oversee management and to set financial policy, such as distribution of profits. Councils would be comprised of one-third those elected by workers from their own ranks, one-third outside experts and one-third from the state bureaucracy (Kovanda 1976: 39-41).
Ota Šik, a leading reformer among economists who was named a deputy prime minister in April 1968, advocated enterprise independence from government ministries and a central economic authority that would set overall economic policy, with responsibilities for long-range planning and major investments, and be tasked with protecting consumer interests. These would be accompanied by some measure of management participation on the part of workers, conceived as a method for gradually removing incompetent politically connected managers appointed by the state. This participation would be through councils, although Šik, too, wanted workers to elect only one-third of them. By May, however, Šik said publicly that workers should elect a majority of the councils (Kovanda 1976: 45-46; Golan 1973: 23-24, 44-45).
The proposals of Czechoslovak economists had commonalities with the early incarnations of workers’ councils in Yugoslavia’s self-management system. The first conception of those, from the 1950 legislation establishing them until wholesale reforms that expanded the councils’ scope in the mid-1960s, established councils entirely elected by enterprise workers. Yugoslav councils had responsibility for broad policy decisions, codifying enterprise statutes, determining the distribution of net revenues (wages, investment, collective consumption and reserves) and electing a management board. The management board was co-responsible for the running of the enterprise with the director, although it was the director who had legal responsibility for enterprise behavior. Wages were determined by councils and management boards, but were required to be within parameters set by the government (Estrin 2010: 57-61, 249; Szymanski 1984: 174-176, 182-184; Musić 2011: 176-180).
The proposals by Czechoslovak economists were seen as inadequate by the workers themselves and their representatives; organizers would quickly go beyond them. Despite the forcing out of Novotný, the holdovers from the leadership of the national trade union federation (known as the ROH) in March, spurred resolutions demanding their removal by local union branches and party cells; grassroots agitation had continued to grow. New unions and strikes protesting incompetent enterprise management became more numerous. In April, workers’ committees for the defense of the freedom of the press were created in Ostrava. Workers from the Ostrava Nitrogen Factory issued this proclamation:
In the rapid development of political life in Czechoslovakia towards democracy a decisive role was played by stoppage of the censorship. … We believe that in the contemporary situation it is of utmost importance to create workers’ committees for the defense of the freedom of the press as a basic civil right. … These committees for the defense of the freedom of the press would, in case of necessity, initiate in a decisive way such actions which would clearly demonstrate that suppression of freedom in Czechoslovakia was always done against the will of the working class (Hruby 1980: 104-105).
Several other factories in Ostrava quickly followed suit, then in other cities to the point that these committees may have numbered in the hundreds by June. In conjunction with these developments, employees increasingly asserted their rights to have a say in management, free of party interference, and began expressing interest in workers’ councils. Local party leaders strongly in favor of reforms were frequently invited to speak in Brno’s factories (Hruby 1980: 106). (Ostrava and Brno were among Czechoslovakia’s biggest cities and most important industrial centers.)
Acknowledging the upsurge in grassroots organizing, the Communist Party Central Committee issued a resolution on June 1 admitting that the economic-democracy component of the Action Program had been taken up “only slowly, partially and with doubts and hesitation” (Fišera 1978: 10-12).
The first workers’ councils began appearing that month, initially in two of the country’s biggest enterprises, ČKD Prague and Škoda Plzeň (Fišera 1978: 11). The trade-union daily newspaper, Práce, advocated for the broadest possible powers for workers. After the Novotný-era leadership of the ROH national trade union federation was forced out in March, unions took up this call, supplementing words with strikes that in at least two cases forced the resignation of a director (Kovanda 1976: 41-42; Golan 1973: 54). Workers at ČKD Prague put forth a proposal under which the entire council would be elected by employees, there would be a strong role for workers’ assemblies, self-management bodies would be set up in the individual factories of enterprises and there would be term limits on council members to prevent the emergence of “professional council members” (Kovanda 1976: 45). (Workers’ assemblies were meetings of the entire workforce that would elect councils and make strategic decisions.)
On June 6, the government issued its “provisional guidelines” for enterprise democracy, which endorsed councils nominating directors and being consulted on internal practices but did not allow councils the final word in economic decisions nor did it envision any workers’ assemblies (Fišera 1978: 11). This was an implicit endorsement of the latest plan of reform by Šik, whose views had moved toward more worker participation although what he advocated was much less than what council advocates sought (Kovanda 1976: 45-46).
The trade unions countered with their own proposals in July, which fell between government and grassroots ideas. These proposals were recommendations; issuing obligatory rules was not done because a period of trial-and-error was seen as necessary. It was recommended that employees elect a majority of the council, that councils have final say in hiring and dismissing directors, setting directors’ salaries and in determining the continuation, merger or splitting of the enterprise. Councils would have “wide consultative powers” in planning, employee salaries and bonuses, and accounting issues, but final decision would go to the director (Kosta 1977: 65-66).
Common to all these plans was the desire to prevent the chaos of individual factories or enterprises making decisions in isolation from each other.
External disapproval leads to invasion
Reaction from the Soviet Union and its other Central European satellites was sharply negative; reformers now in power knew they had a difficult road to tread as disapproval within the bloc was already building. A series of talks and summit meetings with bloc members, simultaneous with the outpouring of popular support internally for the new course, did not surmount those external disapprovals (Dolack 2016: 430-438), culminating in the Soviet Politburo’s decision to invade in August.
By no means was opposition to Czechoslovakia’s new course confined to Moscow. By April, Czechoslovak newspapers were banned in East Germany and Ukraine, and protesting students in Poland raised slogans praising Alexander Dubček, much to the annoyance of Polish leader Władysław Gomułka (Valenta 1981: 23-24). Gomułka was advocating “intervention” by the Warsaw Pact (the Soviet bloc’s equivalent of NATO) by April, and that same month, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko passed on to bloc leaders lurid KBG propaganda masquerading as intelligence reports claiming plots to overthrow the Czechoslovak party (Navrátil 2006: 96-97, 103-104), a pattern that continued unabated until the invasion.
Although the prospect of increased worker participation, a direct threat to the long-sacrosanct Soviet concept of “one-man management,” was one factor in Soviet bloc displeasure, the more immediate “threats” were the end of media censorship and imminent wholesale changes in the Czechoslovak party leadership, which would reduce the ability of Soviet leaders to interfere in Czechoslovak affairs. A prominent episode that drew Soviet wrath was the publication of the “Two Thousand Words” manifesto in the Writers Union newspaper and three daily newspapers.
The manifesto didn’t go much further than the Action Program, except for a call to defend the country from outside forces if necessary. It called on ordinary citizens to take more control in their workplaces, using all legal methods, strikes included, to force out officials who obstructed reform (Navrátil 2006: 179). Soviet leaders reacted very harshly to the publication of the manifesto, which the reform Communists knew would happen as soon as they read it. From a tactical standpoint, they believed the “Two Thousand Words” was an unhelpful development because it would be sure to harden viewpoints, an added difficulty at an increasingly sensitive time. Josef Smrkovský, a leading party voice for reform and chair of the national parliament, would later say he understood that the signatories were well-intentioned, but that the publication was a bad move tactically, because of “the pretext it provided for the massive attacks on our cause” (Smrkovský 1984: 400).
A dogmatic opponent of reforms, Vasil Bil’ak, who replaced Dubček as head of the Slovak branch of the party after Dubček’s promotion to first secretary, had begun secretly meeting with a member of the Soviet Politburo, Petro Shelest, the party boss for Ukraine and a close ally of Leonid Brezhnev. Bil’ak urged intervention and Shelest asked Bil’ak to produce a letter requesting that. He did so in August, secretly handing Shelest a letter requesting an invasion signed by him and four others (Kramer 1998: 237-238; Kramer 1992: 16).
The Czechoslovak Politburo had been meeting the night of the invasion, August 20, and the reformers, deciding to remain at their posts, were arrested and forcibly taken to Soviet territory. After three days of captivity — days in which Czechs and Slovaks mounted strong resistance — they were brought to the Kremlin to begin talks that ultimately concluded with the dictated agreement known as the Moscow Protocol (Dolack 2016: 475-480).
Czechoslovak negotiators were forced to agree to several concessions, including nullifying the results of the Fourteenth Congress, reimposing censorship, and banning all non-communist social groups, plus an unwritten understanding that several outspoken reformers whom Brezhnev particularly disliked would be removed (Navrátil 2006: 477-480). They signed, for the most basic of reasons — they believed they had no choice (Smrkovský 1984: 422-425). Dubček said his responsibility was too great to refuse: “I had a clear and undeniable personal responsibility for the lives of thousands of people at home, who would have almost certainly taken my refusal to sign the ‘agreement’ as encouragement to active resistance. I did not believe I had the right to allow that, for it would lead to a bloodbath” (Dubček 1993: 209). Dubček also believed that there was enough ambiguity in the agreement to allow him to salvage some of the reforms.
The Fourteenth Congress
The specific timing of the invasion was likely to prevent the seating of the Fourteenth Congress. Two days after the invasion, those delegates who could reach Prague met clandestinely in a factory. Importantly, the congress was guarded by members of the Workers’ Militia, an armed group of dedicated Communists. The Czechoslovak party leaders who secretly asked the Soviet Union to invade believed that the militia would back the invasion. (These leaders were sure to have failed to be re-elected as they well understood.)
The congress was to have opened on September 9, but was convened early on the initiative of the Prague city party committee, a particularly strong hotbed of reformism. The congress was assigned two main tasks — to elect a new Central Committee and to discuss two working papers sketching the tasks of rebuilding socialist society, putting it on a democratic footing, redefining the role of the Communist Party, and creating new social, political, cultural and economic structures.
A May poll had found party members overwhelmingly in favor of the Action Program, 73 percent to nine percent, and the country’s four largest cities — Prague, Bratislava, Brno and Ostrava — were hotbeds of party progressives (Skilling 1976: 502, 505). They seated a congress in which the majority had not previously been a delegate to a congress; so new was the makeup that only 25 percent of the outgoing Central Committee members were elected delegates with the un-nominated majority thus removed from the CC (Skilling 1976: 511, 515). An estimated 90 percent of the congressional delegates were reformers (Valenta 1981: 42, 172).
The two presented working papers did not include specific proposals; rather the papers discussed the many areas where improvements were needed and the bases for making those improvements. The congress was to provide a starting point for the preparation of a more detailed program to be prepared by large working groups, submitted to extensive public discussion and eventually brought for approval to the future Fifteenth Congress. Delegates also discussed the legalization of independent parties and open elections to a revitalized parliament that would include representation in multiple ways (geography, cultural institutions, professions and others), guarantees of civic freedoms, and building a base for a new economic policy and managerial system (Andras 1970: 4-8).
New management systems were to include workers’ councils and possibly other forms of self-management, and economic models would no longer be limited to state ownership; there also would be collectives and other forms (Andras 1970: 8-9). In line with these proposals, a congressional working paper stated:
The whole purpose of socialism as a socio-political system is to mediate and guarantee those rights and freedoms, which in their totality form the actual content of a workers’ state; this requires that use be made of representative democracy (in particular of parliament) and that direct and indirect democracy be linked, with a view to strengthening self-administration in every sphere of social life, in places of work as well as in areas of residence, where it can help overcome the shortcomings of representative democracy, where the conditions have been created for the free self-determination of man and widening of his real participation in decision-making. (Fišera 1978: 32).
The congress was not able to substantially discuss these working papers; the one-day session instead mostly worked on electing a new Central Committee. It also voted to re-elect Dubcek as first secretary. Because most Slovaks were unable to attend due to transport disruptions, there would be further consultation.
The results of the congress would be swiftly annulled under pressure from Moscow, and the freedom of maneuver for the party was now limited. Counter-intuitively, the movement for workers’ councils accelerated after the invasion.
Council movement grows in first months after invasion
Hundreds of thousands of troops poured into Czechoslovakia, occupying radio, television, newspaper and party offices. What the invading forces didn’t do — perhaps the thought didn’t occur to commanders — was to occupy factories. Moscow would have its hands full attempting to gain control over the party during the next several months, and its ability to again control Czechoslovakia would depend on that. All else could wait, even with Czechs and Slovaks out in the streets, listening to clandestine broadcasts, arguing with the soldiers and refusing to cooperate in ways such as pulling down street signs. Factories, too, became centers of resistance, both through protest actions and through the creation of many more workers’ councils.
Workers expressed hostility toward visiting Soviet delegations, sometimes refusing to continue production destined for export to the Soviet Union, and backed journalists who continued to defy censors by writing articles in factory magazines that criticized the Soviet Union. Employees at a Slovak shoe factory threatened to go on strike if Vasil Bil’ak visited their plant, and workers together with the trade union protested his presence at another factory (Hruby 1980: 121-123). His secret meetings weren’t known at the time, but Bil’ak made no secret of his hostility to the reforms (and was one of those to be pushed out of office by the Fourteenth Congress).
Only 19 councils were in existence at the time of the invasion, but another 260 were planned to be created between October 1 and the end of 1968 (Kovanda 1976: 48). Councils continued to be created in the first days of 1969, and the government continued to prepare to introduce national legislation that would codify the councils (although, ultimately, the bill would never be voted upon). A national conference of workers’ councils and preparatory committees was held in the important industrial city of Plzeň on January 9 and 10, 1969. One-sixth of the country’s workers were represented, with 190 councils and preparatory committees from across the country participating. The meeting was organized by eight councils, a branch of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, a parliamentary committee and the ROH trade union federation (Fišera 1978: 50, 54).
The meeting concluded with the unanimous passage of a six-point resolution, including “the right to self-management as an inalienable right of the socialist producer” and that polices should be advanced to “guarantee that what is profitable for the state is equally profitable for the enterprise.” The resolution declared:
We are convinced that workers’ councils can help to humanize both the work and relationships within the enterprise, and give to each producer a proper feeling that he is not just an employee, a mere working element in the production process, but also the organizer and joint creator of this process. This is why we wish to re-emphasize here and now that the councils must always preserve their democratic character and their vital links with their electors, thus preventing a special caste of ‘professional self-management executives’ from forming” (Fišera 1978: 70-71).
A permanent group of consultants was selected to coordinate future activities (Hruby 1980: 125).
The trade unions were firmly on board. In fact, unions took the lead in forming councils, convening about two-thirds of them. Local Communist Party branches formed many of the remaining ones (Vitak 1971: 256). One of the first speakers at the national conference of workers’ councils, an engineer who was the chair of his trade union local in Plzeň, said a division of tasks was a natural development:
For us, the establishment of workers’ councils implies that we will be able to achieve a status of relative independence for the enterprise, that the decision-making power will be separated from executive powers, that the trade unions will have a free hand to carry out their own specific policies, that progress is made towards a solution of the problem of the producers’ relationship to their production, i.e., we are beginning to solve the problem of alienation (Fišera 1978: 55).
There would be separate roles for councils and unions. All personnel (except for the director) would sit as a whole as a workers’ assembly, which would elect the workers’ council. Workers would thus be managers of their enterprises, the ownership of which would formally remain with the state although government and party would cease running them. At the same time, workers would be individual employees. In this half of the duality, they would be represented by trade unions that would now be independent and no longer appendages of the state. To put it more concretely, in the conception of the trade unions in their July 1968 proposals, their role would be “the regulation of wage and salary conditions of employees” and “to take care of the social situation of the workers in the enterprises” (Kosta 1977: 67).
A subtle contradiction arises for a worker in a collectively controlled enterprise because such a worker is simultaneously employee and manager, a duality that is particularly noticeable for state-owned enterprises. That enterprise status would not change; workers were to manage enterprises, not own them. Unions, freed of state control, would represent workers as individuals in disputes with the collective or with higher administrative bodies at the same time that all would participate in workers’ assemblies. Thus, each half of the duality would be represented through separate institutions, although union officials expected to be consulted when appropriate before council decisions were made.
One important consensus was that workers’ councils should exist at the enterprise level, rather than councils for each separate factory. The reason for that was to keep management coherent and production unified — the intention was to manage the entire economy for the benefit of society as a whole, not to simply benefit the workers in a given enterprise.
Two months later, in March, the Seventh Czechoslovak All Trade Union Congress met in Prague with 1,668 representatives present. This meeting, too, ended with a refusal to be subordinate to the Communist Party (Hruby 1980: 124). The general mood was summarized by Listy, a cultural weekly, which published these lines on February 20, 1969:
If the workers are deciding to take into their own hands the production, they do it because they do not want to be merely a part of the production process, but its creators. … It is a concrete form of a revolution opening a way to pluralism of a completely different kind than we can, for the present imagine. … As the Soviets in February 1917, the workers’ councils again arise spontaneously. … It as if once more we could open the first pages of a revolutionary reader and after all the disappointments and despairs once more could endeavor after freedom in this world” (Hruby 1980: 126)
A question bound up with the formation of workers’ councils was that of answerability. To whom would directors be responsible? They had been appointed by, and answerable to, the national government, which was subordinate to the party. Now directors would be answerable to the workers of their enterprise. In a study of the councils published in 1971, Robert Vitak summarized the problem this way:
Insofar as the state relinquished the role of direct and exclusive owner its place could be taken in a nationalized concern either by management (the technocratic or managerial concept) or by a workers council (the democratic concept). Whereas before 1968 the reform could not go beyond the technocratic measure of giving more power to managements, the Action Program came out in favor of the democratic alternative. …
If, however, the enterprises were to operate as self-governing units would this mean breaking up state ownership into group ownership? Would, in fact, the enterprises be handed over to enterprise ownership? This, in the opinion of many people, would mean relinquishing one of the advantages of socialism, that is, the concentration of the entire production process in public hands. Though finding much of interest in the Yugoslav system, Czechoslovak economists never set out to copy their model. In general, with differences of emphasis, the argument on this subject ran as follows: Social ownership is never, even under the most rigid centralism, an undifferentiated whole, it can only be expressed through its parts. The reform would encourage elements of group ownership that would help to overcome the situation where property belonged ‘to everyone and to no one,’ but the economy should not be split into separate units of enterprise ownership. Overall social ownership would operate through the groups to the benefit of the group and of society as a whole. (Vitak 1971: 255).
The means of production would remain in state hands but managed by workers through councils and coordinating bodies. An engineer and council activist, Rudolf Slánský Jr. (son of the party leader executed in the 1950s purges), put the council movement in the context of the question of enterprise ownership. In a February 1969 commentary in Práce, the trade union daily, he wrote:
The management of our nation’s economy is one of the crucial problems. The basic economic principal on which the bureaucratic-centralist management mechanism rests is the direct exercise of the ownership functions of nationalized industry. The state, or more precisely various central organs of the state, assume this task. It is almost unnecessary to remind the reader of one of the principal lessons of Marxism, namely he who has property has power. ... The only possible method of transforming the bureaucratic-administrative model of our socialist society into a democratic model is to abolish the monopoly of the state administration over the exercise of ownership functions, and to decentralize it towards those whose interest lies in the functioning of the socialist enterprise, i.e. the collectives of enterprise workers. (Fišera 1978: 109).
Addressing bureaucrats who objected to a lessening of central control, Slánský wrote:
[T]hese people like to confuse certain concepts. They say, for example, that this law would mean transforming social property as a whole into group property, even though it is clearly not a question of property, but rather one of knowing who is exercising property rights in the name of the whole society, whether it is the state apparatus or the socialist producers directly, i.e. the enterprise collectives. (Fišera 1978: 110).
Also to be resolved was the question of the form of planning. The economic reforms of the mid-1960s, which began to be phased in at the start of 1966, did envision the plan as a guide, rather than a rigid production target. For the first two years, however, planning remained in force, with quotas handed down to enterprises that were treated as binding, due to not only habit but because the government ministries that oversaw the plan remained in place. Mandatory quotas fixed by a plan were abolished for 1968, with enterprises expected to prepare their own plans, using information contained in the “economic guidelines” that replaced detailed annual plans (Kyn 1975: 118-119).
Another aspect of the reform that went into effect that year was that price bands were negotiated between enterprises and a central price office. Once an agreement was reached, the enterprise could change prices only within the agreed-upon band. This was to have controlled most prices, with the ratio of fully free prices rising in comparison to controlled prices in 1969 (Kyn 1975: 124-125). This was reversed in 1969, with prices frozen by government fiat due to the chaos inserted into the economy by the invasion. But fewer prices were set free than economists wanted — political leaders have less scope to ignore the inflationary effects of freeing prices, and the popular response to that, than do economists.
Soviet pressure brings an end to reforms
A series of political crises, peppered by popular actions that failed to sustain broader support, culminated with Alexander Dubček’s ouster as first secretary in April 1969, and his replacement by the opportunist Gustáv Husák, who fulfilled his personal ambitions for political power by abandoning his prior support for the reforms and becoming the willing instrument of a return of an orthodox régime and an accompanying wave of purges. The Dubček-led government, increasingly boxed in, began discouraging the creation of new councils as 1968 turned into 1969. Moscow continued to demand that reformers be removed from party leadership positions and replaced by familiar orthodox personnel more to their liking, with the continued stationing of Red Army troops in the country implicitly reminding all of the force behind those demands.
A government plan was introduced into parliament in January 1969 that would attempt to codify the role of councils but never passed. The plan was a much watered-down version of what council advocates had pushed. It specified three types of enterprises — social, public and shareholder. About 90 percent of enterprises would be “social” and have councils in which employees elected most of the seats. In state enterprises (those representing sensitive areas such as communications, finance and transport), workers, management and the state would each select one-third of the council (Golan 1973: 29, 45).
In all cases, councils would have less powers than they already had obtained, and they would be renamed as “enterprise councils” from “workers councils.” The popular response was negative. A front-page commentary in Práce called the bill a minimum starting point in need of improvement and the March national trade union congress issued a statement criticizing the bill in numerous ways, ending with a plea that the government negotiate with the unions (Fišera 1978: 113-120). There would never be any such negotiations.
At the same time, support for the government was wavering. Students in Prague staged a four-day strike in support of the reforms, urging the government to hold firm and pledging further resistance. The students reached agreements with the metalworkers’ union and the teachers’ and academic workers’ union. The unions endorsed the demands of the students, which centered on implementation of the Action Program, and the students endorsed the unions’ demands for an end to government interference in the national trade union federation and for development of workers’ councils (Tomalek 1969: 13-20; Fišera 1978: 104-106).
Despite these and other efforts, Josef Smrkovský, the head of parliament and a key leader of the reform movement, was pushed out of office at the start of 1969, followed by Dubček in April. With Husák now the first secretary, the floodgates were open. Reformers began to be expelled from the party en masse. Weeks after Husák grabbed the top office of first secretary, the creation of new workers’ councils was forbidden. Those already in existence wouldn’t be for long. Faced with government hostility, the Škoda Plzeň council, one of the first two formed, voted to disband in November. By the next year, councils were formally banned although they had ceased to function.
Under the gathering momentum that a wave of purges inevitably gathers, and with all political opposition silenced, 500,000 were expelled from the party - one-third of the membership. Supporters of the reform were not simply stripped of their party membership; they were also forced out of their jobs as professors, doctors, lawyers and many other professions, and made to take jobs as manual laborers. The Husák régime evidently saw this as an added punishment, but it only weakened the country’s infrastructure. Near the end of 1969, a wave of purges hit several unions, including the militant metalworkers. In May 1970, the entire executive body and most other leaders of the trade union council were removed from office; the chairman was sacked despite condemning himself for his previous reformist sympathies (Hajek and Niznansky 1970: 1-3).
Consolidation of the régime could be considered to have been completed in May 1971, when the “official” Fourteenth Congress of the party was held, as if the earlier one had never happened. In his keynote speech, Husák reiterated his attacks on the 1968 economic reforms, but, consistent with his claims that he was not returning the country to pre-1968 days, he concentrated most of his fire on Antonín Novotný, for a wide variety of failings, although he failed to mention Novotný’s repressive measures (Hajek and Niznansky 1971: 1-4).
Husák’s measures, however, had already gone far beyond anything experienced under Novotný and did not stop despite his feeling confident enough to hold the party congress after a long delay. Toward the end of 1971, and into early 1972, a wave of arrests began. With them, the first political trials ensued. The régime attempted to pin false corruption charges on the defendants and sometimes wouldn’t publish the names of those on trial because the public would see the obvious political nature of the trials (Pelikán 1976: 61-68). Just as in the Soviet Union, which the Czechoslovak orthodox Communists again were mimicking, socialist opposition was feared more than any other source of opposition, and this was reflected in the fact that those arrested were public reform figures from 1968, members of the socialist opposition active at this time, or part of both groups.
Conclusion
The return to stale orthodoxy and rigid ideology was all the more tragic in that Czechs and Slovaks had shown political maturity in not only working out systems of workers’ control but in seating their councils. Council members had been elected on the basis of their qualifications. Manual laborers likely formed a majority of the employee-voters, yet 70 percent of those elected were technical staff or middle management. By contrast, workers generally voted for candidates like themselves for union offices. The percentage of council members with higher education was higher than that of enterprise directors (Kovanda 1976: 51). Confirming the popularity of economic democracy, a study of 95 enterprises found that 83 percent of those eligible had voted (Vitak 1971: 258). At the height of the movement, a report in Práce, the trade union newspaper, estimated about 300 councils were in existence (Kovanda 1976: 49).
Because these workers’ councils were organized on a grassroots basis, with workers themselves taking the lead, had they been allowed to develop they would have been on a much firmer footing than councils in Yugoslavia. Yugoslav self-management, although a sincere attempt by that country’s League of Communists to put the economy on a democratic foundation, was a top-down affair. There, workers were content to allow managers to make decisions, reserving the right to veto decisions they did not like rather than putting forth their own proposals. Yugoslav self-management was also hampered by too much de-centralization, with each of the country’s six republics and two autonomous provinces organizing their own autarchic plans with little regard for duplication in neighboring regions, and councils were eventually introduced not only at the enterprise or even factory level, but within each unit of an enterprise.
Thus there was little national unity. On top of those problems, Yugoslavia became deeply entangled in Western capitalist markets, finding itself deep in foreign debt it could not pay back and eventually forced to impose austerity on orders of the International Monetary Fund, effectively ending self-management. In the Czechoslovak concept, not only would workers have much more scope of management duties than did the limited Yugoslav variety, but national unity was a motivation from the start. Disparities between the Czech Lands and Slovakia would have had to have been worked out — would enterprises be on their own or would extra aid have gone to Slovak enterprises? — but the unity of the two nations in a single economy was not questioned. The movement toward Slovak independence and Czech acquiescence to that, although not necessarily ever backed by a popular majority in either nation, did not arise until after the restoration of capitalism.
The composition of Czechoslovak workers’ councils might have posed its own set of questions. The high number of technicians with experience who were elected to councils was a reaction to often amateurish management; directors had more frequently been given their positions through political loyalty rather than through any qualifications. Because council members were seated for lengthy periods of four years, some observers feared that technicians could separate themselves from the blue-collar majority that constituted many shop floors or manipulate decision-making to their benefit. Other observers believed this issue would sort itself out, that the high number of technicians was a temporary phenomenon and over time councils would more closely resemble their constituencies (Kovanda 1976: 52).
The issue of worker-to-councilor ratios arose because of the nature of Czechoslovak industry — industrial consolidation into large enterprises was common. Council members could represent hundreds of fellow employees. Properly representing co-workers at such ratios might be difficult. One solution might have been to increase the sizes of councils; another might be to have separate councils for individual factories within an enterprise. The latter solution, however, might introduce new problems due to the potential that multiple councils might weaken coordination. (Kosta 1977: 68). That problem would later occur in Yugoslavia; moreover, opposition to such de-centralization was strong among Czechoslovak council activists.
An important factor that can’t be under-estimated is that the means of production were not in private hands. The state already owned the factories and infrastructure; the politically engaged workers of 1968 did not set out to assume ownership, but rather believed that what was needed was to radically democratize the management and direction of the country’s enterprises.
It is vastly easier to wrest control of the means of production when there is no need to engage in a struggle for ownership in contrast to a capitalist economy, where the entire might of the state — through legal codes, armed force and a panoply of institutions — enforces private ownership for private profit. By contrast, in a country where the ruling party claims to rule in the name of elevating working people to power, it takes merely a modest step rather than a leap to envision a truly democratic economy and act on it. Tragically, the concept of “socialism” within the Soviet leadership had fossilized into a simplistic belief that any alternative to tight party control was tantamount to a restoration of capitalism. Two decades later it would be orthodox communists, clinging to the same beliefs, that would open the bloc to capitalism — mirroring their neoliberal counterparts in the West, they believed the only possible economic models were Soviet-style over-centralization or Chicago School-style privatization.
A successful system of workers’ control within a democratized economy would have been an example for people around the world. Fifty years later, the destruction of Czechoslovakia’s experiment in workers’ control remains an immense loss.
References
Andras, Charles 1970. “Pelikán’s Book: Key Documents in Recent Czechoslovak History,” Radio Free Europe research, February 3, 1970, posted on the Open Society Archives web site, http://catalog.osaarchivum.org (electronic record accessed January 12, 2018)
Dolack, Pete 2016. It’s Not Over: Learning From the Socialist Experiment. Winchester, England: Zero Books
Dubček, Alexander 1993. Hope Dies Last: The Autobiography of the Leader of the Prague Spring. New York: Kodanska America
Estrin, Saul 2010. Self-management: economic theory and Yugoslav practice. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press
Fišera, Vladimir 1978. Workers’ Councils in Czechoslovakia: Documents and Essays 1968-69. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Golan, Galia 1971. The Czechoslovak Reform Movement: Communism in Crisis 1962-1968. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press
Golan, Galia 1973. Reform Rule in Czechoslovakia: The Dubček Era 1968-1969. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press
Hajek, H., and L. Niznansky 1970. “Massive Purges in Czech Trade Unions,” Radio Free Europe research, May 25, 1970, posted on the Open Society Archives web site (electronic record accessed January 12, 2018)
Hajek, H., and L. Niznansky 1971. “Congress Opens: Gustáv Husák’s Report,” Radio Free Europe research, May 27, 1971, posted on the Open Society Archives web site (electronic record accessed January 12, 2018)
Hruby, Peter 1980. Fools and Heroes: The Changing Role of Communist Intellectuals in Czechoslovakia. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press
Kosta, Jiři 1977. “Workers’ Councils in the Prague Spring of 1968” in The Economics of Co-Determination, David F. Heathfield (ed.): 61-79. London: MacMillan Press
Kramer, Mark 1992. “A Letter to Brezhnev: The Czech Hardliners’ ‘Request’ for Soviet Intervention, August 1968,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 2: 16
Kramer, Mark 1998. “Ukraine and the Soviet-Czechoslovak Crisis of 1968 (Part 1): New Evidence from the Diary of Petro Shelest,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 10: 234-247
Kovanda, Karel 1976. “Czechoslovak Workers’ Councils (1968-1969),” Telos, No. 28: 36-54
Kovanda, Karel 1977. “Works Councils in Czechoslovakia 1945-47,” Soviet Studies, Vol. 29(2): 255-269
Kusin, Vladimir 1971. The Intellectual Origins of the Prague Spring: The Development of Reformist Ideas in Czechoslovakia 1956-1967. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press
Kyn, Oldřich 1975. “Czechoslovakia: Economic Reforms of 1960s” in The New Economic Systems of Eastern Europe, Hans-Hermann Hohmann, Michael Kaser and Karl C. Thalheim (eds.): 105-154. London: C. Hurst & Co.
Musić, Goran 2011. “Workers’ Self-Management as State Paradigm” in Ours to Master and to Own, Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini (eds.): 172-190. Chicago: Haymarket Books
Navrátil, Jaromír (chief ed.) 2006. The Prague Spring ’68. Budapest: Central European University
Pelikán, Jiří 1976. Socialist Opposition in Eastern Europe: The Czechoslovak example. New York: St. Martin’s Press
Shawcross, William 1990. Dubcek. New York: Simon & Schuster/Touchstone
Smrkovský, Josef 1984. “How They Crushed the Prague Spring of 1968” in The Stalinist Legacy: Its Import on 20th-Century Politics, Tariq Ali (ed.): 385-434. Middlesex, England: Penguin
Skilling, H. Gordon 1976. Czechoslovakia’s Interrupted Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press
Szymanski, Albert 1984. Class Struggle in Socialist Poland: With Comparisons to Yugoslavia. New York: Praeger
Tomalek, Pavel 1969. “Report from Prague: The student action,” New Left Review, No. 53 I: 13–20
Valenta, Jiri 1981. Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968: Anatomy of a Decision. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Vitak, Robert 1971. “Workers Control: The Czechoslovak Experience,” Socialist Register, Vol. 8: 245-264