The Bolshevik Bosses

In May 1918, when the All-Russian Congress of Councils of National Economy met in Moscow there were delegates from Vesenkha, its glavki and tsentry, and the trade unions, but not the factory committees. The door was shutting firmly on the workers, as the committees became mere local branches of a top-heavy union bureaucracy. The unions were subordinate to the state, as agreed at the first All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. (One anarchist delegate described the unions as "living corpses"; another said that the factory committees were "cells of the coming socialist social order, the order without political power.") A decree on June 28th 1918 nationalised all major industry, making the state the main employer in Russia; labour was to be a form of service to society, and piece-rates were regarded as normal. [33] As the invasions by Allied Powers and the civil war had only just started, none of what had happened thus far can be blamed on those factors. The application of piece-rates and norms of production meant that workers were driving themselves to ill-health to get a survival wage. Yet at the end of the year, norms were raised throughout industry because the state machine considered wages to be "perniciously high". In January 1919, the norms were raised by 150% in the metal industry.

These developments started to cause dissent within the Bolshevik party, even amongst those who had never worked in their life. 'Kommunist' the journal of the 'Left Communists' contained an attack on Lenin by Osinsky. Among other criticisms, Osinsky argued that Lenin's 'discipline' was exactly like that of the capitalists; that only the workers can emancipate themselves; that Lenin confused productivity improvements with working harder and faster, "Socialism and the socialist organisation of work will either be built by the proletariat itself, or it will not be built at all; but then something else will be erected, namely state capitalism." [34] Lenin replied, as he always did when lost for an answer, with a tirade of abuse and nonsense: for instance, statements that the introduction of capitalist authority and labour discipline were an attack on workers' self-organisation were "a terrible disgrace and imply the complete renunciation of communism in practice and complete desertion to the camp of the petty bourgeoisie."

Workers were able to impose themselves occasionally against the growing monolith of Bolshevik state power. During 1918 state-capitalist combines had been set up in the leather, textile and sugar industries based on co-operation between the state and the old owners. The right-wing industrialist Mescherskii wanted to create a similar 'trust' in the metal industry, with the factories run by the old bourgeois owners. This was alright by Lenin and Trotsky, and officials of the Metalworkers Union supported the project. Workers were however very much against it. A conference of delegates from affected plants demanded an end to the scheme, and immediate nationalisation. As the Bolsheviks were not yet strong enough to crush this sort of thing, the pressure from below put an end to the project.

The civil war undoubtedly strengthened tendencies to central control and planning, involving one-man management and the use of highly-paid technical specialists. Centralisation of itself is not a bad thing: the question is, who's doing the centralising, and to what end? Again, using the talents of technical staffs was essential, but to what end would their abilities be directed? The peasants were angry that the old exploiters were taken on as managers of the Sovkhozy collective farms. The 'specialists' got high salaries, and the managers and directors lived in the luxury of the old landowners' houses: sometimes the old landowner himself was the director. Lenin's message to the peasants was "(...) if you yourselves do not know how to organise agriculture in the new way, we must take the old specialists into our service." While the Lenin of 'State and Revolution' said "Smash the bourgeois state", the Lenin of 'Will the Bolsheviks retain state power ?' said "Use the bourgeois state, take it over." Thus Trotsky drew heavily on the Tsarist officer corps for the Red Army.

When Molotov analysed the personnel of the glavki he found that 57% were definitely non-worker; the other 43% included representatives of the unions, mostly not workers either. He concluded in his report (given in December 1918) that those directing policy were "employers' representatives, technicians and specialists." A 'white' professor reported in autumn 1919 that "the unprepared visitor to these centres and glavki who is personally acquainted with the former commercial and industrial world will be surprised to see the former owners of big leather factories sitting in Glavkozh, big manufacturers in the central textile organisation, etc." [35] The willingness to use the Tsarist state machinery extended to a Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) decree in January 1920 regretting that "the old police apparatus which had known how to register citizens not only in the towns, but in the country" had been destroyed by the revolution.

Despite this destructive act by the revolution, the mobility of labour was still achieved. A spokesman from Narkomtrud (the People's Commissariat of Labour) boasted: "We supplied labour according to plan and consequently without taking account of individual peculiarities or qualifications or of the wish of the worker to engage in this or that kind of work." He could have been talking about any commodity. The governments wages policy was based on incentives and piece-work; wages were in groups of scales, the highest by far being for technical and administrative people. At the 8th Party Congress in March 1919, the new programme declared that "(...) the socialist method of production can be made secure only on the basis of the comradely discipline of the workers." To the unions fell the task of creating this new 'socialist discipline'. Disciplinary courts of labour in 1920 dealt with 945 recorded cases. About half of these cases related to punctuality; others were about not doing Saturday overtime, not obeying orders or union discipline, leaving work and agitating for a shorter working day. The 9th Party Congress in March 1920 not only fully accepted the principle of one-man management, but even came up with four different ways of instituting it.

The utter feebleness of the emerging 'opposition' inside the Bolshevik party was shown by Lutovinov of the "Workers' Opposition" saying they'd carry out one-man management while disagreeing with it. First the party, and a poor last, the workers. By November 1920 only 12% of nationalised industries had any form of collective management. 1783 out of 2051 large enterprises under Vesenkha had one-man management. To overcome absenteeism and 'inefficiency' the government had introduced labour books for workers in Moscow and Petrograd (up till then they had only been issued to the old bourgeoisie for compulsory labour). 'Communist Saturdays' -- that is, working for nothing -- were instituted with Lenin's enthusiastic approval. The massive drive for unpaid overtime, with Subbotniks working Saturday unpaid, and Voskresniks working Sunday unpaid, eventually collapsed. Workers were (quite inexplicably!) not too excited. Lenin did try to set an example: he actually worked a 'Communist Saturday' on May 1st 1920.

Latter-day Bolshevism's other favourite, Trotsky, deserves to say a few words at this point. In January 1919 at a Trade Union Congress, he stressed that "At a time when the Trade Unions regulate wages and conditions of work, when the appointment of the Commissar for Labour also depends on our Congress, no strikes can take place in Soviet Russia. Let us put the dot on this i." Having dotted that i, he proceeded to cross the t in the following year, recognising "the right of the workers' state to send each working man and woman to the place where they are needed for the fulfilment of economic tasks"; and "the right of the state, the workers' state, to punish the working man or woman who refuses to carry out the order of the state, who does not subordinate his will to the will of the working class and to its economic tasks (...)" Stripped of verbiage and rhetoric, Trotsky's message to workers was 'We, the Bolsheviks, are the bosses now; you, the workers -- back to work !' Trotsky's call for a 'militarisation of labour' "in which every worker feels himself a soldier of labour, who cannot dispose of himself freely" was taken up by the party Central Committee, who only debated whether it should take a 'healthy' or a 'bureaucratic' form.

Notes

[33] "Piece-wages (...) the most fruitful source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating." "(...) the form of wages most in harmony with the capitalist mode of production." Capital, Volume 1, Karl Marx, p518, p521.

[34] quoted in Sirianni, p149.

[35] quoted in Carr, p183.