Disciplining The Workers

Trade union Bolsheviks begged to differ, and the verbal attacks on the workers started. For Tomsky, "productivity has fallen so low that workers are producing less in value than they get as a wage." Gostiev referred to "economic sabotage, no longer solely by the bourgeoisie, (...) but by the whole nation, the working class." [28] Shlyapnikov, the Commissar of Labour and future leader of the so-called "Workers' Opposition", complained about the workers and the factory committees in March 1918: "In a word, things are in the hands of a crowd that, due to its ignorance and lack of interest in production, is literally putting a brake on all work." [29]In the face of these sorts of comments and the withholding of wages by banks and employers, it's no wonder that many workers felt -- why work when the Bolsheviks keep the old owners in place and defend the profit motive? Despite the accusations, productivity rose steadily in fact from the low point of January 1918. The workers were still aiming to build a new society, and a miserable diet wasn't going to stop them. Given the chaos they operated in, it is hardly surprising if many factory committees put their own interests first and concentrated on trying to resolve their particular problems. Accusations were then made that the committees were 'parochial' and 'particularistic'. The accusers were themselves responsible for these tendencies, as the government would not let the committees obtain credit early on: as a result, committees often had to sell machinery and stock to pay workers and to keep any production going at all.

The decree on nationalisation made on December 14th 1917 was part of the move against self-management. New boards were to take over firms, and the old management and the factory committee would be represented on them. While workers who called for nationalisation, often expropriating the owners before getting 'official' approval, thought they would run the firms, the Bolshevik conception was quite different: indeed, the Bolsheviks were often reluctant nationalisers. Once nationalised though "(...) decisions concerning management and the activity of the industry belong to management. The control commission (of the factory committee) will not take any part in this management, and will not be responsible for its functioning, which remains a managerial matter." [30] In the Urals most firms were taken over by workers and nationalised.

A conference in Petrograd on January 7th 1918 of delegates from 300,000 workers laid out a scheme for a nationalised mining industry. Every mine would elect a managing council of 25-60 members, including representatives of technical and administrative staff: this would set up an executive of 3-15. There would be direct elections to regional bodies leading up to a Central Mining Council. The right of recall by workers who elected a delegate to any council at whatever level was spelt out clearly, and trade union and state bodies were excluded. Again we can see the constructive attempts of workers to develop practical structures that gave them control, as against the government's plans. In their attitude to the technical staffs, workers were not usually hostile, even though the technicians wanted a strong state control to guarantee their position and were against workers' control. Many though were willing to work with the committees, who needed to make use of their abilities.

The trade unions saw as their major task increasing production through more organised and disciplined labour. They were eager to help set piece-rates, norms and bonuses, to raise productivity and impose discipline. In this they were supporting Lenin. In September 1917 he called for "universal labour service" (presumably not so universal as to include himself and other top Bolsheviks); in January 1918 in an unpublished article he wrote that "workers who slack at their work" should be "put in prison". For Lenin only "the declassed petty bourgeois intelligentsia (...) does not understand that the chief difficulty for socialism consists in guaranteeing the discipline of labour (...)" : socialism's 'chief difficulty' thus appears to be the same as capitalism's ! Lenin's solution was the same as capitalism's :

"Piece-rates must be put on the agenda, applied in practice and tried out; we must apply much that is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system (...)'' [31] Lenin, not the workers, decides what is put 'on the agenda', but the workers, not Lenin, will try out the piece-rates.

This attitude was reflected at the 1st All-Russian Trade Union Congress held in January 1918. The factory committees were attacked for not being organised, or disciplined or experienced enough. Members of the Central Council of Factory Committees were not there to argue their case. The Bolshevik Gastev proposed a resolution that was passed almost unanimously which argued for the industrial reconstruction of Russia with foreign capital, for the implementation of Taylorism (piece-rates, time and motion studies etc), for the raising of productivity and discipline, for workers to be moved as required, and for private ownership to remain. This approach was agreed in March at the 4th Conference of Trade Unions.

The Bolsheviks proceeded to Bolshevise the non-Bolshevik trade unions by breaking up meetings, setting up rival unions and appointing officials from above, so that all unions would adopt Gastev's capitalist approach. Protests from workers about the lack of independence from the state of the unions grew in the spring of 1918. The factory committees still tried to be constructive. While answering the slanderous attacks made on them by the unions, the committees proposed unity with the trade unions, so as not to have two workers' organisations in conflict. The proposal had conditions attached: there should be compulsory membership so that all workers would be part of the decision-making process; the factory committees would act as local branches; the summit of the union would be a conference of factory committee delegates, which would then elect an executive to act like the Central Council of Factory Committees.

The Petrograd factory committees had been far in advance of anyone else in thinking of the centralised economy in August 19179 and had come up with plan after plan, all of them practical propositions, for workers to run the economy and move to socialism. Given the way Lenin ignored these attempts, it was a real nerve of him to say to the 3rd Congress of Soviets in January 1918: "In introducing workers' control, we knew that it would take much time before it spread to the whole of Russia, but we wanted to show that we recognise only one road -- changes from below; we wanted the workers themselves, from below, to draw up the new basic economic principles..." In fact Lenin's state capitalism with a decorative bit of workers' control added was behind the workers' struggle. Workers had their own plans and a superior conception of socialism born of necessity: stripped bare of rhetoric, all Lenin had was 'Power to the Party'.

It did not take long for Lenin to state clearly the capitalist content of his socialism. In March 1918, he demanded 'one-man management' on the railways: for him, collective self-management was rudimentary, and had to be superseded by one-man management. In 'The Current Tasks of the Soviet Power', Lenin wrote "Any large-scale machine industry -- and this is precisely the material productive source and basis of socialism -- calls for unconditional and strict unity of the will which directs the simultaneous work of hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people (...) Unqualified submission to a single will is conditionally necessary for the success of the process of labour organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry." [32] Why workers should bother to fight and die for this is not explained,

In 1915 the then Menshevik Larin wrote an article enthusing over the German war-state : "Contemporary Germany has given the world a pattern of the centralised direction of the national economy as a single machine working according to plan." Lenin took up this theme with his observation that socialism had been realised politically in Russia and economically in Germany. By April 1918, Lenin exhorted "Yes, learn from the German ! History proceeds by zigzags and crooked paths. It happens that it is the German who now, side by side with bestial imperialism, embodies the principles of discipline, of organisation, of solid working together, on the basis of the most modern machine industry, of strict accounting and control." That all this labour discipline might have anything to do with the 'bestial imperialism' did not enter Lenin's mind: for him, the only thing wrong with German state capitalism was that it was a bourgeois-imperialist state; add a 'proletarian state' and you have socialism. Capitalist methods of production can only create capitalism, but Lenin thought they could support 'socialism' too. To make his point firmly, Lenin referred admiringly to a Tsar. Russian socialists had to "study the state capitalism of the Germans, (...) adopt it with all possible strength, not to spare dictatorial methods in order to hasten its adoption even more than Peter hastened the adoption of Westernism by barbarous Russia, not shrinking from barbarous weapons to fight barbarism." For the workers this meant more work and harder work, and more organisation (by others).

The 7th Party Congress in March 1918 demanded "the most energetic, unsparingly decisive, draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and discipline of workers and peasants." Milyutin, in a session of Vesenkha (the Supreme Council of National Economy), called for a 'labour service' not of course "the kind of labour service which has been applied in the west, not the kind of service which is thought of here by the masses and which says that all must be put to work, but labour service as a system of labour discipline and as a system of the organisation of labour in the interests of production." Not in the interests of workers, evidently: this all required "iron self-discipline" on the part of workers. Vesenkha had underneath it a network of glavki (chief committees) and tsentry (centres). These were based on the Tsarist war committees for industry, and operated with help from managements. Larin, the admirer of German capitalism, and Milyutin were two of the leaders of Vesenkha, both of them enthusiastic planners. At the end of April, a Vesenkha decree outlawed 'wildcat nationalisations', but this, like an earlier decree in February was widely ignored. The factory committees did not respond to Vesenkha's 'authority': for its part, the Central Council of Factory Committees operated without any official sanction.

Notes

[28] quoted in Ferro (October), p176.

[29] quoted in Sirianni, p106-7.

[30] quoted in Ferro (October), p177.

[31] quoted in Carr, p116.

[32] quoted in Carr, p191. (Carr says this aroused "the most obstinate prejudices" !)