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Title: Lenin and Workers’ Control
Author: Tom Brown
Date: 1960s
Language: en
Topics: Lenin, workers’ control, Russian revolution
Source: Retrieved on 4th October 2021 from http://libcom.org/history/lenin-workers-control-tom-brown
Notes: A pamphlet by Tom Brown of the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (an early predecessor to today’s Solidarity Federation) on Lenin and his contempt for workers’ self-organisation. Published in the 1960s, it has been transcribed here with one copy’s typos and stylistic inconsistencies kept intact.

Tom Brown

Lenin and Workers’ Control

The pursuit of power

A POLITICIAN who has one single overpowering aim and pursues it

relentlessly, even wading in blood, has, if circumstances are

favourable, a chance of success. He is not usually good at longsight or

broadsight, but on a single aim he makes fluffy liberals his victims.

The same is true of tycoons.

Lenin and the Bolshevik party had that single purpose, to gain and keep

absolute power; all other things were means to that end, or were forced

on them by the pursuit of it. This is true of collectivism and

nationalisation. I shall quote a great deal from Mr. M. H. Dobb, M.A.,

because of his long service to the Communist Party, his position as

lecturer in economics at Cambridge University and the respect given him

by the CP. Dobb wrote two books which will help us – Russian Economic

Development Since the Revolution, in the early twenties, and, in 1948,

Soviet Economic Development Since 1917. The latter, a most interesting

book, is published by Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.

“The leitmotif running through the speeches and writings of Lenin in

1917 was the overshadowing importance of the class which held the actual

reins of power. For him this issue was paramount.” S.E.D.S. 1917, p.82.

We know, of course, that when a Bolshevik uses the term “working class,”

he means in this context “the Party,” which alone has the right to speak

for the “working class.”

Soon after the March revolution the peasants began to seize the estates

of the big landowners. Dobb speaks of numerous cases of what the police

called “agrarian lawlessness,” mostly the taking of timber from estate

woodlands and estate labourers’ strikes in April, although we know that

seizures of land had already started. The Provisional Government

received reports of such happenings from 174 districts, mainly the

Central Region and the Middle Volga.

On May 3, 1917, came the Government decree to establish land committees.

Less than two weeks later a peasant congress at Kazan resolved to

confiscate all estate land and a local landowner reported that “local

administrative authorities are unable to restrain the local land

committees” (see p.75). Early in July, Prince Lvov, head of the

Provisional Government, resigned, mainly because he accused his

government of a tendency “’to justify the disastrous seizures of

property that are taking place throughout Russia ... instead of

combating aggressive tendencies’.” (ibid, p.76).

“In industry a parallel form of direct action was taking place in the

summer and autumn .... In the summer reports began to multiply of

arrests of engineers by workers, acting in the name of local Soviets,

and of the forcible expulsion from factories of unpopular foremen. On

June 1 a national resolution of the executive committee of the Soviets

advised all industrial workers to ‘create councils at the enterprises,

the control embracing not only the course of the work at the enterprise

itself, but the entire financial side of the enterprise’.” (ibid,

pp.76–77).

Deposed by the workers

Dobb goes on to relate what were then well-known facts of further direct

action in mine and factory. In June at Kronstadt dock committees were

insisting on inspecting the books and accounts of the management and

preventing illicit removal of materials. In the cable works the owner

was deposed by the workers, after being accused of trying to close the

works and sell out to a foreign bank.

In July, 1917, a conference of Ukrainian factory committees decided to

remove directors who “refuse within five days to satisfy workers’

demands.” From Kharkov the Government received complaints by factory

owners that the management of one of the city’s largest factories and

the director of the locomotive workers had been kept under arrest by the

workers for 24 hours.

In Petrograd, in autumn, some factories were to be closed by the owners.

The workers at once prevented the transfer of machine and materials from

the works. At Nikolaev on the Black Sea the workers at a shipyard sent

delegates to places supplying the yard with raw materials to ensure

supplies. In Moscow a meeting of leather workers’ delegates decided to

proceed at once to prepare the sequestration of the industry.

In October, on month before the Bolsheviks took power, the coal miners,

after a series of strikes, took control of the mines. “Atuman Kaledin

(later to be a leading figure in the Civil War) wired the Minister of

War: ‘At the moment the entire power has been seized by various

self-appointed organisations which recognise no other authority than

their own.’” (ibid, p.78).

In large and small factories of many kinds the workers were taking

complete control, while the peasants were sweeping away the landowners

and their managers.

In the take-over of industry the soviets played little part, most of the

action being taken by the factory workers on the spot, sometimes backed

by delegate meetings of factory workers of the district.

It is well to recall what was a soviet. In the revolution of 1905 and

again in 1917, the workers and peasants quickly formed makeshift

councils. In the towns they were formed first of all by delegates from

factories and other places of work, later were added delegates from the

professions and even from groups of shopkeepers. Political parties then

were allowed to affiliate. These councils were called soviets. But by

the last-mentioned type of affiliation the way was open to any

unscrupulous politician to invent groups and gain more votes, also

political theory tended to hog the discussion. But in the case of the

factory mass meeting and committee this hardly arose, so that the

workshop became the centre of revolutionary action and construction in

the towns.

Two kinds of soviet

In the country the soviet was usually overwhelmingly peasant, concerned

with getting the land under the control of the tillers and attending to

local social needs. Most political parties had no interest in the

peasants’ aims, certainly not the Bolsheviks. Those who were with the

peasants in this takeover were the Anarchists and Syndicalists,

particularly in the Ukraine, and, in the great majority of cases, the

peasants’ own party, the Left Social Revolutionaries. Soldiers and

sailors also formed soviets.

The real soviets had nothing in common with the present so-called

“soviets,” nor were they initiated by the Bolsheviks. Until a month

before they took power, the latter did not have a majority on any

significant soviet. “In the course of the preceding month (October) the

Bolsheviks had secured a majority in the Soviets of Petersburg and

Moscow and of one or two other cities” (ibid, p.79). The peasant soviets

were all for the Left S.R.’s.

The Anarchists and the Left S.R.’s and the peasants, with or without

anyone’s encouragement, were sweeping to victory in their battle for

“the land to the tillers.” Nothing could stop them. Nothing except

satanic treachery. That was coming.

The kiss of death

LATE in 1917 the Russian provisional government was confused, weak and

ready to fall. Peasants, wage workers, soldiers and sailors, growing

stronger in their soviets, were moving in half awakening to take over

the direction of the country. Lenin saw his opportunity.

The peasants were winning their battle for the land, so the Bolsheviks

suddenly switched their land policy and, in the face of a successful

revolution, cried with the Anarchists and Social Revolutionaries, “The

land to the peasants!” Lenin wrote his State and Revolution, which

looked like an approach to Anarchism and a rebuff to Marxists, and an

alliance with the Left Social Revolutionaries was made.

On November 7 the rising against the Kerensky Government was made in

Petrograd, the attack on the Winter Palace being led by a Russian

Anarchist, Bill Shatov, returned home from America. The sailors of

Kronstadt, “the flower of the ‘October Revolution’,” were given pride of

place in the battle. Success followed in Moscow. Under Lenin a new

government was formed, some seats being given to the Left S.R.’s and to

smaller groups, such as Maxim Gorki’s Novaya Zhizn. However, the

Bolsheviks held the posts of physical power, they were the commissars

who controlled the army, the police and the jails; the S.R.’s and Gorki

got the portfolios of education and such. Revolutionaries in Russia then

seemed to trust one another a great deal. Certainly the non-Bolsheviks

never intended a one-party dictatorship. They were soon to learn, as

others are still learning, that an alliance with the Communists is the

kiss of death.

On November 18 the Peasant Congress met in the Duma. The Bolsheviks had

tried hard to gain a majority, but could command only 20 per cent. of

the delegates, the Left S.R.’s having a big majority and beloved Maria

Spiridonova in the chair. The delegates expressed the self-confidence of

the delegates in their handling of the land question.

Isvestia of November 10, 1918, published Lenin’s Land Decree, seemingly

giving to the peasants the land they already possessed, but in fact

limiting the land they might take. “It was the intention of the

Bolsheviks, however, that a considerable portion of the estate land

should not be subject to distribution, but be retained as model State

farms; and the annexe to the decree referred explicitly to ‘Territories

where cultivation is of a high order: gardens, plantations, nurseries

for plants and trees, orchards, etc.’ as ‘not subject to division’, but

as reserved for ‘the exclusive use of the State or district as model

institutions’; and similarly ‘studs, State and private cattle-breeding

establishments, poultry farms’.” M.H. Dobb, Soviet Economic Development

since 1917.

Dobb goes on to say that peasant pressure curtailed the plan, for

example only between two and three million acres of sugar beet estates

were left to the State, instead of 10 to 12 million. The land possessed

by the peasants increased from 70 per cent. of all cultivated area to 96

per cent. In the Ukraine the increase was from 56 to 96 per cent. and

the land workers were in almost complete control of agricultural

production.

‘Decree of Workers’ Control’

Lenin at the same time tried to stop the take-over of industry, his

“Decree on Workers’ Control” came on November 14, 1917. Here we must be

careful, the decree was not written in English and translation of

political terms is often faulty and influenced by the political

consciousness of the translator. The Russian words used in the decree do

not mean the same thing that is meant by “Workers’ Control” in the

English-speaking world. Dobb comes halfway to admitting this, “In fact

the very word that is usually rendered into English as ‘control’ has in

Soviet usage a meaning that goes at least halfway towards what in

England would be referred to as ‘supervision’ and might at any rate be

not inappropriately rendered as ‘steering’.” (Ibid.). The works

committees were intended to be something that we would now recognise as

ancestors of the Joint Production Committees organised by the British

Communist Party and the Engineering Employers’ Federation in the late

war.

Bolshevism somehow acquired the reputation of being “Socialism, but in a

hurry.” Dobb denies that it was so and, ascribing the myth to such

writers as R.W. Postgate (Bolshevik Theory) and Norman Angell, goes on

to say, “But the placing of Socialism on the immediate agenda was

explicitly disclaimed. Clause 8 of the April Theses clearly affirmed:

‘Not the “introduction of Socialism” as an immediate task, but to bring

immediately social production and distribution of goods under the

control of the Soviet’.” (Ibid, p.68). That is, State control. With a

fatalism worthy of Marxist determinism, Lenin’s party was moving, not to

collectivism, but to the extension and intensification of the Czarist

centralised State. It was the workers who were driving towards

collectivism.

“The ‘amalgamation of all banks into a single national bank, control

over which should be exercised by the Soviet’, and national control of

syndicates and cartels were called for, but only as ‘measures which do

not in any way imply the “introduction of socialism” and which have been

frequently undertaken during the war by a number of bourgeois States’,

which are ‘entirely feasible economically’.” (Ibid, p.68).

“Later, writing on the eve of the November revolution on The Threatening

Catastrophe and How to Avert it, he spoke of the nationalisation of the

oil industry and of the coal industry as necessary ‘to increase the

production of fuel’ and to combat ‘the stopping of production by the

industrialists’; the complete syndication of industry under State

control – a measure which ‘has already been put into practice in

Germany’ and does not directly, in itself, infringe upon the relations

of private property to any degree.” (Ibid, p.69, also Lenin, Collected

Works, XXI, book 1).

“Compulsory syndication under the control of the State, this is what

Capitalism has prepared the way for and what the Junker State has put

into effect in Germany; this is what will be completely realised in

Russia by the Soviets.” Lenin, Will the Bolsheviks Maintain State Power?

(pp. 52–53).

“But no sweeping measures of confiscation or nationalisation were

immediately proposed. Rather was it a controlled or directed capitalism,

steered by such measures of economic control as had come to be the

common stock-in-trade of belligerent governments that was contemplated.”

Dobbs, S.E.D.S. 1917, p.83).

Lenin spoke of the State power adapting itself to the existing

conditions “as gradually as possible and breaking with as little of the

old as possible.” Lenin, Selected Works, Vol. IX (p.284).

Two opposed principles

DOBB quotes an oft-repeated story by Lenin (taken from M. Farbman, After

Lenin): “When workers’ delegations came to me with complaints against

the factory owners,” Lenin once said, “I always said to them: ‘You want

your factory nationalised. Well and good. We have the decree ready and

can sign it in a moment. But tell me, can you take the organisation into

your own hands? Do you know how and what you produce? And do you know

the relations between your product and the Russian and international

market?’ And inevitably it transpired that they knew nothing.”

There is no scrap of evidence to support Lenin’s fable, but there is

abundant evidence, including that of Dobb, to the contrary: “Many

factory committees were beyond the legal powers awarded to them in the

Decree on Workers’ Control, and eventually took the administration of

factories into their own hands. This was a continuation of the

spontaneous movement of direct action on the part of peasants and

factory workers, which had gathered momentum under the Provisional

Government.” (ibid, p.88). “In the spring of 1918 a syndicalist tendency

had become widespread among factory committees; the notion that

factories should be run directly by the workers in them, and for the

benefit of those workers.” (ibid, p.89).

“Against this illegal nationalisation on the initiative of factory

committees and local Soviets” the Bolshevik Government took action

(p.90), but the movement went on as though the workers of Russia had

never heard Lenin’s fable, the “know nothing” workers seemed very

confident.

Local initiative

In December, 1917, Sovnarcom, the Cabinet, instituted Vesenka, Supreme

Economic Council, to supervise control of industry from the centre.

Vesenka and the Cabinet, on April 27, 1917, again ordered an end to

industrial confiscation. “But the instructions continued to be

disobeyed: and efforts made by Vesenka in the direction of

centralisation met with considerable resistance. The case of a group of

factories in the Urals which the central authorities had decided to

leave in private hands was not untypical. The local factory committee,

declaring that the attitude of the owners was provocative, announced

their intention of taking over the factory.” The State-controlled

“Central Council of Trade Unions” sent a delegation from Moscow to

prevent the seizure and backed it with a telegram forbidding such action

against the owners.

To this telegram the only reply was a laconic report announcing the date

on which the factory had been taken over on the authority of the local

Soviet. Of individual firms that had been nationalised prior to June,

1918, only 100 were nationalised by decree of the centre, while 400 had

been nationalised on the initiative of local organisations. When the

starch and molasses factory, Zhivilov, was nationalised by the

Government, the factory committee refused to hand over to the

administrator whom Vesenka had sent to take charge; and when the

District Economic Council of the Northern Region instituted a system of

government inspectors to bring the metal works of Petrograd under its

control, serious conflicts ensued between the inspectors and the factory

committees (see also British Labour Delegation Report, 1920, p.96). In

the railway shops there actually appeared an organisation

grandiloquently terming itself the “Alliance of Workers’

Representatives,” which agitated against centralised control in the

interests of “the autonomy of the workers’ committees’.” (Dobb, pp.90,

91).

It will be noted that Dobb equates collectivism and workers’ control

with nationalisation, that is State ownership and centralised State

control. A strange attempt to reconcile two obviously opposed

principles.

The Left S.R.’s were continually protesting against Bolshevik attempts

to turn the popular tide of collectivism and develop capitalism under a

“Junker State” type economy. Against such protests Lenin wrote his

pamphlet The Principal Tasks of our Day, calling “State capitalism” a

“gigantic step forward” and talking of a future society in which

“elements of both Capitalism and Socialism,” would exist together

(partly republished in Selected Works, vol. IX, 156–7).

Concessions to capitalism

Dobb speaks of some moves in that direction, thus: “For certain

enterprises, particularly where foreign capital was involved, proposals

were canvassed for the creation of ‘mixed companies’ in which State and

private capitalists should participate jointly.” And – “some abortive

negotiations took place in March (1918) between the Soviet Government

and a group of capitalists headed by the wealthy Moscow merchant

Meshchersky for the formation of a mixed company in which foreign

capital should participate, to control a certain group of enterprises in

the metal industry ... and a similar proposal came from a company known

as the Stakhaev Company.”

“In the early summer a commission instituted to frame conditions on

which concessions might be given to foreign capital was considering

certain proposals made by a Norwegian firm and a Russo-Dutch syndicate

for railway extensions in Siberia and the Donetz Region.”

“In the circumstances of the time very little was to become of these

projects, although they were later to be revived on a limited scale

after the civil war in the early period of the New Economic policy.”

Dobb, S.E.D.S. 1917, p.85.

Bolsheviks Russia looked like being a very unhealthy and uncertain

country in which to live. The enterprises were not adventurous enough to

risk wealth and life in a famine and bureaucrat ridden land. The great

plans for capitalist expansion soon came to nought, foreign capital

shied away and those merchants who had the wealth to do so left the

country – except those who found jobs in the bureaucracy. The wage

workers and peasants were left; on them fell the sabre cuts of

dictatorship.

The managers take over

WAR WAS DRIVING all governments to greater State control of the economy.

This was especially true of such a totalitarian state as the Bolsheviks

were creating, but Dobb speaks of other causes. The reason “for the

accelerated transition to general nationalisation in the second half of

the year (1918) was twofold. In the first place, many factory committees

went beyond the legal powers awarded them in the Decree on Workers’

Control and eventually took the administration of factories into their

own hands”. (Dobb, p. 88). Of course a political dictatorship could not

allow industrial democracy to exist; the latter had to head the

execution list.

The other cause of the Decree of General Nationalisation, which applied

to tall companies with more than a million roubles of capital in mining,

metals, textiles, glass, leather, cement, timber and electrical trades,

was quite different. “It might have seemed as if the government had

suddenly capitulated to the Left. The immediate reason for the decree,

however was a rather special one, which gave it an emergency character.

There were considerable fears in Moscow at this time that the Germans,

having already occupied the important industrial regions of the Ukraine,

might proceed, here and in other regions as well, to protect important

industrial concerns from future nationalisation by transferring them to

German firms”. (Dobb, p. 95).

Dobb goes on to describe in some detail the actions of the Germans,

through Count Mirbach, to protect this future “German property”, and the

counter-moves of the Russians, but whether from this or other causes,

the turn was to greater nationalisation. But would the greater State

control find an easier solution to Russia’s economic problem?

The problem, the breaking down of much of industry, transport and

farming, could be solved by starting at the bottom, in the localities,

and co-ordinating the economic units from there outwards. This the

workers and peasants were doing. In June, 1920, a delegation of British

trade union and Labour Party leaders, with the addition of Bertrand

Russell, was invited to Russia. From speeches made by its members on

their return, they seemed to be enthusiastic about the methods used by

the workers in industrial collectives under workers’ control, to

overcome crises.

Everyone in a factory would spend a day in the forest, taking their own

sleds, axes and saw, and cut timber to keep the boilers and engines

going. Some factories, with the aid of peasants’ carts, went to coal

mines to collect fuel for their plant. Foundries organised scrap iron

drives to feed their furnaces. Relations between factory and factory,

for mutual support and exchange, were created. Economic relations

between factory and peasants, exchanging manufactures for food and raw

materials, were extensive.

The ‘know-nothing’ workers

Workers’ control in industry was allied to peasant farming and to

artisan production, a strong economic trigon which the Bolsheviks

destroyed, then tried to revive under NEP.

Many and ingenious were the devices of those whom Lenin despised as

“know nothing” workers, to overcome shortages. One which took the fancy

of some members of the British delegation was the building of a local

Soviet House, a community building, without iron fittings. The house was

built of timber, notched, and all windows, doors and floors held, as

there were no nails, by square pegs driven into round holes; the door

hinges were of leather.

And how did the centralised control of Barrister Lenin shape up to the

job? Divisions of the Supreme Economic Council, called Glavki, had been

created by Lenin and these bodies were to guide and control industry.

According to Dobb (ibid, p. 112), confusion – based on wrong and useless

information – reigned throughout these divisions. An example: “A

committee of investigation set up in June, 1920, reported that many

Glavki not only ‘do not know what good and in what amounts are kept in

the warehouses under their control, but are actually ignorant even of

the number of such warehouses’”. (Dobb, ibid, p. 112).

In agriculture this control was even more disastrous, causing several

famines and war against the peasants which is still going on. Stalin’s

enforcement of his collective farms in 1929 resulted (according to Dobb,

p. 246) in a reduction of cattle by nearly a third by 1931 (more later);

sheep and goats by half; horses by a quarter (later by half). Some

figures are much higher than Dobb’s. who seems to quote Stalinist

statistics of that time. The wastage of arable area during this fatal

centralisation of farming was enormous. Stalin himself, in an attempt to

shift the blame on to his appointed deputies, wrote an essay, “Many are

made dizzy by success”, Labour Monthly (Communist), June, 1930.

Even in 1962, 1963 and 1964, Russia has bought many million tons of

grain from the U.S. and Canada (a less fertile land than Russia) and

Khrushchev’s central planning of “the new lands” has proved disastrous.

Peasants under Czarism did much better when allowed to settle

themselves.

From the beginning of Lenin’s regime the workers were put under pressure

at their jobs that made the old regime seem like organised benevolence.

Individual managers were appointed from above and piecework, hated by

workers throughout the world, was enforced. This was denounced as a

“relic of capitalist exploitation” by Riazanov, a recently resigned

Bolshevik, and by Gorki’s group, as well as the workers’ representatives

(see Dobb, p. 91).

The managers were backed up by such armed force that they had never

enjoyed under the Czar. The factory committees were abolished. The

unions, by force and fraud, were brought under first Communist Party,

then State control and the same fate befell the co-operatives.

Stakhanovites, petted persons, produce false “norms” of work, 8 or 10

times the normal, which the workers were forced to emulate and which cut

their piece rates. Pollitt, leader of the British CP, on his return from

Moscow in 1929, boasted that he had seen, as a typical example, one man

doing the work of three. Bad as it was under the Czar, the new devils,

as in the parable, were even worse than the old.

To those Leninists who now shout “Workers’ Control” and to the

Trotskyists, too, we say look at the work of Lenin and Trotsky in power.

To the Stalinists and the present followers of Khrushchev, who also

falsely cry “Workers’ Control”, we recall the continuation of Lenin’s

evil work by the latter-day totalitarians.

There have been only two sources of Workers’ Control of Industry and

Farming, the Syndicalist movement of the world and the spontaneous

reaching of the workers towards a better life.

We are still cursed by a 19^(th) Century idea that all change, even a

change of tyrants, is necessarily good. There is an old Russian proverb,

which is the equivalent of the English, “Better the devil you know than

the devil you don’t know.” Bitter XX Century experience should have

taught us its truth.

Franco’s rule is even worse than that of the Spanish monarchy;

Dollfuss’s was more cruel than that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Kaiserism in Germany aroused the wrath of decent people, but shrank into

insignificance beside the crimes of Nazism.

The counter-revolution

The Russian people did not want to change one vile tyranny for another,

much less did they wish for a worse oppression. Under Czarism there had

been some small area of expression. Despite repression there were

strikes of workers and demonstrations. Russian writers produced a

splendid literature, including many workers of revolt (H.G. Wells said

that a list of the world’s best 12 writers would be all Russian).

The aims of the Russian Revolution of March, 1917, were, for the

workers, control of their work and equality; for the peasants, the land

to the tillers; to all the exploited, liberty of person, assembly,

organisation and speech. All semblance of these were destroyed by Lenin.

The seizure of power by the Bolsheviks was not a revolution, but the

counter-revolution. It is not unusual for the counter-revolution to

masquerade as the revolution; that is its only chance of success.

But Lenin’s men were not satisfied when they had butchered or jailed the

Socialists, Social-Revolutionaries, Liberals, Anarchists and

Syndicalists. Next they turned upon themselves. Most of the Central

Committee died at their comrades’ hands. Throughout Russia and even

beyond, untold hundreds of thousands of Communists were murdered by

their fellow party members.

The revolution does not devour its own children; the counter-revolution

does that.