ABSTRACT
WORK AND EMPLOYMENT IN SOVIET IDEOLOGY
In their approach to the labour process, the leaders of the USSR have been influenced in their policy and thinking by Marxist assumptions. For Marx, the maintenance and reproduction of material life is the prime human need. In a well-known passage in The German Ideology, Marx writes: ‘The first historical act is ... the production of material life itself. This is indeed . . .a fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must be accomplished every day and every hour merely in order to sustain human life.’ 1
