The Practical Manual & The Counter-Manual

In his pamphlet 'State & Revolution' written before October, but not published till 1918, Lenin had called for 'every cook to govern', for workers to plan the socialist society. The militant activists in the factory committees were aware of the need to co-ordinate their activities and centralise. The very day after the October Revolution, representatives from the Central Council of Factory Committees met Lenin and some Trade Union leaders to propose a Provisional All-Russian People's Economic Council. Here was a genuine plan from elements of the real working class vanguard. They suggested that this Council should have as two-thirds of its members, workers' representatives from the factory committees, trade unions and the Soviet's Central Executive Committee, and one-third drawn from the owners and technicians. The Council would have separate divisions corresponding to different parts of the economy, each division to be overseen by control commissions composed only of workers, these forming a control commission over the whole Council. The Council would regulate industry, transport and agriculture, and would be able to take over private firms. This constructive attempt to grapple with the problems of the economy, thought out by those most affected, was turned down flat by Lenin, who had his own "workers' plan" In the form of a draft decree which accepted economic conditions and relations that the factory committees were trying to go beyond. His decree in effect intended the committees to be subordinate to the unions. Lenin also refused to let the committees borrow money: the effect of this is looked at further on. On day one of Bolshevik rule, the workers' own plan was rejected.

Undeterred, the Central Council tried another plan on November 3rd, this time to set up an All-Russian Council for the Regulation of Industry. This plan differed from the earlier one: it excluded the unions, whose leaders had stood with Lenin. The Central Council's leaders saw that the unions were too remote from the workers, that they were unable to counteract the employers' attempts to sabotage factories. Similarly, the plan now left employers out of consideration and tried to ensure that the factory committees could not be integrated into the state. The Central Council was already drawing well away from Lenin's conceptions, and moving rapidly to the realisation that the workers alone had to run industry, Lenin's ideas were standing still: "It was assumed without question that the employers and technical staffs would continue to operate their enterprises under the vigilant eye of 'workers' control'." [24] In late October a Bolshevik trade union spokesman, Lozovsky, said "It is necessary to make an absolutely clear and categorical reservation that the workers in each enterprise should not get the impression that the enterprise belongs to them." [25] However for the workers, the revolution meant that the productive forces of the country were now theirs.

The draft decree on Workers' Control published in November set up an All-Russian Soviet for Workers' Control. However this only had five representatives from the factory committees, who thus became a tiny minority. Workers' control was to be carried out by elected bodies, either factory committees alongside management or general assemblies of all workers: these bodies would have access to the firm's accounts and other information (which a lot of factory committees already had), and their decisions would be binding. There were, though, two enormous 'buts' in the proposals. Firstly, the trade unions centrally could overrule any factory committee decisions, and secondly, in any enterprise "important to the state", the committees were answerable to state bodies for keeping order and doing as instructed. These two things negated any positive aspects of the decree. More detailed instructions to supplement the decree were drawn up by a small committee of three Bolsheviks and two left Social-Revolutionaries : 'every cook to govern' indeed ! Eventually the new government produced its "General Instructions on Workers' Control", which came to be known as the "Counter-Manual". Its overall intention was to turn the factory committees into powerless local union branches. Its standpoint is captured in Article 7: "(...) the right to issue orders relating to the management, running and functioning of enterprises remains in the hands of the owners."

The Central Council of Factory Committees distributed a "Practical Manual for the Implementation of Workers' Control" in late November 1917. This advocated that each factory should have commissions to organise production, to handle the conversion of production from war to peace, to get supplies of fuel and raw materials and so on. Such commissions would in all probability use the knowledge and abilities of technicians and specialists, but these would have no power of decision at all; this was in marked contrast to Lenin's schema. The factory committees should unite upwards: in local, regional and national federations, thus posing a direct challenge to the Bolshevik state. Then the Central Council drew up a Model Statute for factory committees as a direct response to the Bolsheviks' "Counter-Manual" and draft instructions. This envisaged that the committees would be integrated into an economic council system, with People's Economic Councils in every district, city and region. These councils would be elected at conferences of factory committees, and their members would all have to be from a factory committee.

This plan was fully developed and drawn up in December. The local councils would unite the factory committees, transport workers and those in commerce and agriculture. The regional councils would each year elect a Supreme Economic Council. Each People's Economic Council would deal with all the economic activity in its locality. This flood of ideas and plans from the workers in the factories showed that the workers knew that socialism would be empty and meaningless if it was anything other than their own activity. They were trying concretely to tackle the massive problems facing Russia; so too were the Bolsheviks, but from a different class viewpoint. A much modified version of the Economic Councils idea was introduced in such a way as to weaken the factory committees by gradually establishing a centralised top-down control and strangling local initiative.

The majority of factory committees approved of the Central Council's proposals and rejected the Bolshevik All-Russian Council of Workers' Control. Factory committees in the metal industry complained that the 'Counter-Manual' "shackled the hands of the workers" while the 'Practical Manual' "allowed the workers great room for self-activity and made them the practical rulers of the factories." [26] In the period following the October Revolution, greatly increased factory committee activity was necessary to face the employers' tactics of sabotage, closures and refusal to pay wages. Hundreds of firms were taken over by workers who had no alternative if they were to protect their livelihood. The Bolshevik government and the trade unions were against such seizures by workers: incredibly, the Supreme Economic Council threatened to cut off funds to such firms. Many such workplaces were managed by collegial boards of workers, technicians and administrators, all under the watchful eye of the factory committee. By mid-1918, factory committees were involved In the management boards of some three-fifths of all plants, and in areas such as the Urals and the Donetz basin it was more.

The committees were facing enormous difficulties in a period of economic collapse that was not of the workers' making. The committees made any number of constructive efforts to overcome the chaos. The Central Council of Petrograd committees co-ordinated work to organise deliveries of drugs, yarn, machine oil etc to the provinces and Finland. Just before the October Revolution, the first All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees had called for a plan to change wartime production over to peacetime purposes : the Central Council set up demobilisation commissions to do this. Politically, the committees were clarifying their attitudes. A Bolshevik worker, Matvei Zhivkov, who was chairman of the factory committee at the 1886 power station in Petrograd, said: "(...) it is where we are, in the factory committees, that instructions are elaborated which arise from below to envelop all branches of industry; these are the instructions of the workplace, of life, and hence are the only instructions which can have any value. They show what the factory committees are capable of, and, therefore, they should dominate everything which concerns workers' control." [27]

Notes

[24] Carr, p73.

[25] quoted in Carr, p74.

[26] quoted in Sirianni, p101.

[27] quoted in Sirianni, pp 99-100.