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Talk given to Workers Solidarity Public meeting
Dublin September 1994
There are some who would say there is no point in discussing the
Russian revolution today. It happened nearly 80 years ago, the
world has moved on, capitalism has changed, and the situation
in Russia in 1917 is simply too different, too far in the past to
have lessons for us today. I would disagree, if for no other reason
than that the Russian revolution was one of *the* defining
moments for the left. Most groups on the left, whether consciously
or not, have antecedents in the Russia of 1917, and all of us can
find inspiration in the speed with which the working class
pressed forward, and in the scale of the changes that occurred
- or at least some of them.
This talk will concentrate on just one part - though an important
part- of that change ; the question of workers control - the
relations between the factory committees, the trade unions, and
the various parties, and what workers control meant (if anything)
for each of them. Also, to narrow the focus even further, I will
deal mainly with the changes in this area only up to the outbreak
of the civil war. Though Russia was far from calm up to that
point, the civil war brought in even more complications, and
besides, as we shall see, the question had largely been resolved by
then.
The factory committees appeared in Petrograd and Moscow around
February/March of 1917, and quickly spread. Elected directly by
the workers in each enterprise, they appear initially to have
formed in a response to threatened closures, and to press for the
8-hour day, though the scope of their demands would son extend.
On March 10th, the Petrograd Manufacturer's Association agreed
to this demand in their enterprises, and recognised the committees
- other employers were soon forced to grant the 8-hour day, though
recognition of the committees was to take longer.
On April 2nd, the first exploratory conference of factory committees
was held in Petrograd, made up of workers from the war industries.
They declared that the responsibility of the factory committee
included all areas of internal factory organisation (hours, wages,
hiring and firing, and so on), that the whole administrative
personnel (including management) could only be taken on with the
consent of the committee, and that the committee controlled
managerial activity in the administrative, economic and technical
fields. Though, three weeks later, the government partially
recognised the committees, their declarations were not exactly
welcomed, and a campaign of vilification was launched in the
press which was to last up to the revolution.
On May 29th, the Kharkov Conference of Factory Committees
decided that "the Factory Committees must take over production,
protect it, develop it. They must ... decree all internal factory
regulations, and determine solutions to all conflicts"
The Conference of Petrograd Committees, held over the following
week, resolved that the objectives of the committees were the
"creation of new conditions of work", "the organisation of thorough
control by labour over production and distribution", and called for
a "proletarian majority in all institutions having executive power".
Over the next few weeks, the movement grew, in some cases ousting
the management and taking over their plants.
At the Second conference of Petrograd Factory Committees in August,
a financially independent Soviet of Factory Committees was set up,
though many local committees had mixed feelings about it, and
were reluctant to free their members for work there, partly because
of the Bolshevik predominance, and partly because they felt it had
been set up from above. Also at this conference, it was decided that
the decrees of the factory committees were binding on the factory
administration, that the committees were to meet regularly during
working hours (paid for by the employer), had the right of hiring
and firing over all administrative staff, and were to have their own
press, to inform the workers of their resolutions.
These resolutions, of course, formed a platform, rather than
indication of their real power, and at that time the committees on
the railways were coming under attack from the provisional
government. Kukel, vice-minister for the Navy, proposed the
proclamation of martial law on the railways, and the dissolution
of the committees. The committee movement continued to grow,
though, with a wave of strikes from Moscow to the Donbas
following in its wake.
At this point its worth saying a few words about the attitudes
towards the factory committees in other quarters.
The anarchists, naturally enough, supported the Factory
committees, and allied with the Bolsheviks to stop them from
being absorbed by the trade unions. Golos Truda, the journal of
the Union of Anarcho-Syndicalists, called for the workers to
take into their own hands "all the raw materials and all the
instruments indispensable to your labour". At the All Russian
Conference of Factory Committees, an anarchist speaker said
that"the factory committees were cells of the future...They,
not the state, should now administer"
The Mensheviks, and the Menshevik-dominated trade unions,
were as hostile as the anarchists were supportive. At the 1st
conference of Petrograd Committees, the Menshevik minister
Skobelev said that "the regulation and control of industry was
a task for the state", and that "The committees would best
serve the workers' cause by becoming subordinate units in a
statewide network of trade unions". This was a line they were
to continue to follow, saying at a trade union conference in
Petrograd that the committees should be elected from lists
drawn up by the unions. In late August, Skobelev drew up
circulars forbidding meetings of the factory committees during
working hours, and saying that the committees did not have
the right to hire and fire (though, interestingly, he said that
they had the right to *control* over hiring and firing).
Finally, the Bolsheviks. Though the Bolsheviks called for
workers control, they were not very specific about what exactly
this meant, or how it was to be achieved, and they were active
in both the trade unions and the factory committees. Though
they defended the autonomy of the committees from the trade
unions, this was to a large extent due to their greater strength
in the committees, and there seemed to be no agreed policy
concerning which was to be primary. Lenin, when asked at the
party's conference in April if workers control was to
enterprise-centred or state-centred, replied that the question
had not yet been settled, and that 'living practice' would
provide the answer.
Examining the work of Lenin, however, we can find the signs
of things to come. In his address to the Conference of Petrograd
factory committees in June, he said that workers control meant
that "the administration should render an account of its
actions to the most authoritative workers' organisations", the
clear implication being that the workers themselves weren't
the administration. In "Can the Bolsheviks retain State power",
he says "If it is a proletarian state we are referring to then
workers' control can become a national, all-embracing, extremely
precise and extremely scrupulous *accounting* of the production
and distribution of goods." Finally, in "State and Revolution",
he says that "it is quite possible, after the overthrow of the
capitalists and bureaucrats, to proceed immediately, overnight,
to replace them in the *control* over production and distribution,
in the work of *keeping account* of labour and products, by the
armed workers, by the whole of the armed population."
AFTER OCTOBER
The months after the revolution were to see this policy being
put into place, and 'living practice' did indeed show where
workers control was to be based. Lenin's draft decree on
workers control said that "the decisions of the elected
delegates of the workers and employees were legally binding
upon the owners of enterprises", but that they could be
annulled by trade unions and congresses. Also, the committees
were to be answerable to the state in all enterprises of state
importance. The full decree subordinated the committees to
the Russian Council of Workers Control - on which the
All-Russian Council of Factory Committees would have only
5 out of 21 seats.
In December, the Supreme Economic Council - Vesenka - was
set up to direct the economy, subordinating all other agencies.
Under the Vesenka would be regional councils -Sovnarkhozy -
which could set up more local offices, incorporating the
factory committees where these had set up. At the First
All-Russian Council of Trade Unions, and again at the First
All-Russian Congress of Textile Workers (both in January), it
was declared that workers control was "the instrument by
which the universal economic plan must be put into effect
locally", and that the Factory Committees were just the lowest
cells of the union, "whose obligation consists of putting into
effect, in a given enterprise, all the decrees of the union."
March saw a decree from Vesenka saying that "in nationalised
enterprises workers control is exercised by submitting all
declarations and decisions of the factory or shop committee, or
of the control commission, to the Economic Administrative
Council for approval... Not more than half the members of the
Administrative Council should be workers or employees". Also
in March, control of the railways was centralised, placed under
the control of the Commisariat, which was granted "dictatorial"
powers. The same decree stressed the need for "iron labour
discipline" and "individual management".
In April, the first issue of 'Kommunist', a left Bolshevik journal,
was produced. It criticised the introduction of piece rates and
the lengthening of the working day, and warned of bureaucratic
centralisation, the loss of independence for local soviets, and
"in practice, the rejection of the type of state-commune
administered from below". The Leningrad party conference, at
the urging of Lenin, demanded that the adherents of Kommunist
cease their separate organisational existence.
Also in April, Lenin's article on "The Immediate Tasks of the
Soviet Government" was published in Isvestiya. As well as
calling for the introduction of Taylorism, he said that "The
irrefutable experience of history has shown that...the
dictatorship of individual persons was very often the vehicle,
the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes"
and "Today the Revolution demands, in the interests of
socialism, that the masses unquestioningly obey the single
will of the leaders of the labour process."
REASONS
While there is no doubt that production in Russia was in
disarray after the revolution, and that there was a great need
for co-ordination of supply, the approach the Bolsheviks took
to this problem is instructive. Rather than supporting the
efforts of the factory committees to federate, which they had
taken steps towards, even before the revolution, they almost
immediately set about subordinating the committees to other
bodies - first the trade unions, then Council of Workers Control,
and then the Vesenka. Less than a year before, the had fought
to keep the committees independent from the unions, now
workers power was to come from even more distant organs.
There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, as was
indicated earlier, the Bolshevik definition of workers control
was very different from the common interpretation. As Lenin
defined it, control meant supervision, accounting. The workers
had control over a factory if they had access to its accounts, and
were informed about all decisions taken by management. On the
other hand, most workers thought of control as management,
and didn't hesitate to take over the running of factories where
they could, and reserved for themselves the right to hire and fire.
The difference is most apparent when we compare two pamphlets
on workers control issued in December 1917. The Central Council
of the Petrograd Factory Committees issued a 'Practical manual
for the implementation of Workers Control" which quite
explicitly moves beyond stock-taking, and into *real* control of
production, calling on each committee to set up control commissions
for the various aspects of production (including the supply of raw
materials and fuel), which commissions were entitled to invite
the attendance of technicians in a consultative capacity. Shortly
afterwards, Isvestiya published the 'General Instructions on
Workers Control in Conformity with the Decree of November'.
This manual also talks of commissions, but says that the only role
they should play in management is making sure that the central
governments directives are followed through. The factory
committees are expressly forbidden from taking over enterprises,
though they may raise the matter with the government. Plus, of
course, the commissions were to be the executive organ of the local
trade union, their activities made to conform with the decisions
of the latter.
If not the factory committees, who was to have the final say in
the running of the factories? The tendency from the very beginning
was to centralise all production decisions into the organs of the
state. Decisions, rather than rising from the factory committees
would be handed down from central government, in the shape of
Vesenka, and ultimately, Sovnarkom. Here the Bolsheviks were
following the Mensheviks, when they said in 1917 that "the
regulation and control of industry was a task for the state" - the
factory committees were to be (at best) the local administration and
accountants of the state.
To understand this change, we have to look at Lenin's concept of
socialism. In "Can the Bolsheviks retain State power?", he says
that a state bank is nine tenths of socialism, and that general
state book-keeping, general state accounting would be the skeleton
of a socialist society. This points to a conception of socialism that
is primarily economic, that criticises capitalism as much for its
chaos and waste as anything else. Apparently, one of the most
important characteristics of a socialist state is its efficiency.
This would explain the need for a state-run, top-down regulation
of production. The factory committees were on their way to
co-ordinating production, and sorting out their supply problems,
but such a set-up does not really allow centralised, uniform
economy, of the type Lenin thought was essential.
Of course, the Bolsheviks thought there was more to socialism
than that. As well as being planned, the economy was to be run,
to coin a phrase, "by the proletariat, of the proletariat, and for
the proletariat". The proletariat was to take the place of the
bourgeoisie at every level of the administration. The fundamental
difference between Russian state capitalism, and any western
state capitalism was the class background of the rulers and
administrators. (This emphasis on class could also be seen in the
legal system, where often the most important thing was the class
of the accused).
The difficulty with this is that ignores the fundamental question
of how the workers would actually govern, or, in this case, how
production would be organised. The factory committees were
under the direct control of the workers, and an economic system
that build on this base could have stayed under their control.
When they were overruled and ignored by the government, it was
the voice of the workers that was being overruled, the workers
that were being ignored. Yes, the government was made up of
workers, but the situation was not so much the dictatorship of the
proletariat, as the dictatorship of some proletarians.
CONCLUSION
While the events outlined in this talk were occurring,
revolutionary Russia was going through many changes. The
dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, the signing of the treaty
of Brest-Litovsk, the beginnings of the repression of other
left-wing parties, the setting-up of the Cheka, changes which
seem to overshadow the demise of the factory committees, and
the rise of the centrally-planned economy. But the direct control
of workers over the conditions of their work, through the
management of their workplaces is surely a key issue for any
revolutionary, and the stance of the Bolsheviks on the Bolsheviks
on this issue is echoed in many other areas. As anarchists, we say
that workers control must mean real control, over all aspects of
their lives, and that the only way to ensure that this control
remains in their hands is through building from the bottom up,
working through the organs which are closest to the workers, and
organising those systems which can be controlled from below. The
state is none of these, and seizing state power means ruling out any
real democracy, leading to a dictatorship, however benign, not of
the class, but of a minority.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Workers Solidarity Movement can be contacted at
PO Box 1528, Dublin 8, Ireland
or by anonymous e-mail to an64739@anon.penet.fi
Some of our material is available via the Spunk press electronic archive
by FTP to etext.archive.umich.edu or 141.211.164.18
or by gopher ("gopher etext.archive.umich.edu")
or WWW at http://www.cwi.nl/cwi/people/Jack.Jansen/spunk/Spunk_Home.html
in the directory /pub/Politics/Spunk/texts/groups/WSM