Factory committees in 1918 - Chris Goodey

debates Maurice Brinton

Debates between Trotskyists and libertarians about the Russian Revolution rarely break new
ground. But this debate from the 1970s raised many thought-provoking questions that still
await satisfactory answers even today.

FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

(1918) by Chris Goodey (followed by debate with Maurice Brinton)
In a paper of this length there is only room to ask a few questions, which may be just as well,
since the sickness in the study of revolutionary history has undoubtedly been caused by a
surfeit of answers. This is especially true for the history of the Russian revolution; this genesis
point of our transitional world is rightly used as a testing-ground for our conception of
ourselves as a historical movement. The trouble has been that dogma and the most rigid kind
of orthodoxy have governed our approach. It is only the current practice and experience of the
world movement for socialist revolution that is beginning to allow us an overall review of the
battle-stations which we have unthinkingly maintained for a long time.

There is nothing dishonest or dangerous in revising the past in the light of current knowledge
and experience, and so I will take as a starting point my own belief that contemporary
experience has redefined both the socialist struggle and the socialist model as self-managed
socialism, and that the symptoms of this - May '68 in France, the Prague spring, the Chilean
revolution - together prove that this redefinition has a "global", overall validity. It is a
socialism in which the direct forms of working people's power at the point of production,
distribution and social organisation have much greater potential power over historical
development than fifty years ago, when neither the objective conditions nor the subjective
capabilities were so favourable.

But this does not mean that those direct forms of power did not exist then, nor that they
played no part in the revolutionary process; what it does mean is that their history has been
hidden and ignored. The debate about the role of the factory committees in the Russian
revolution is largely a modern one. It has been initiated by the libertarian tendencies of the
left, and has caught the Marxist left and its allies in positions of frozen orthodoxy.

In any discussion about the ways through which the Russian proletariat exercised its
dictatorship in the years immediately after the revolution, it has to be said that the objective
conditions impoverished that experience. The restricting circumstances did not suddenly
begin with the Civil War; three and a half years of world war had already completely
subordinated the productive life of the country in the interests of West European imperialism,
and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk alone deprived the new workers' state of 32% of its population
and 89% of its home-produced fuel supplies. Production statistics for 1920, in ratio to those
for 1913. were as follows - workers, 1:4; working hours, 1:8; productive capacity, 1:16.[2]
The strike wave of the first half of 1920, when 77% of large and medium-sized Soviet
factories experienced strikes (mainly for food), and the eventual political expression of this in
the Kronstadt "third revolution", therefore, took place in circumstances that were quite
different even from the extraordinary and chaotic "objective" situation of 1917.

The pioneering research on the factory committees done by writers with broadly libertarian
sympathies (e.g. F. Kaplan: Bolshevik Ideology, or the work of R. V. Daniels and Paul Avrich)
has been of crucial value in opening up an area where the Marxist left has not had the temerity
to explore (nor the capacity for self-criticism). However, that has remained its only value. The
factory committees represent for them the only "real" dictatorship of the proletariat,
suppressed by the Bolsheviks under Lenin. Leninism is thus equated with Stalinism, and we
are confronted with the perfect complement to Stalinism's libelous claim to the Leninist
tradition, a libel which is one of the major obstacles in the fight for a socialist consciousness.
It is an argument that almost totally ignores the tremendous weight of those "objective
conditions".
It is entirely legitimate to oppose this argument by pointing out the mitigating circumstances
of the isolation of the revolution in the Civil War, or even the pre-October circumstances, but
it is certainly not enough. To oppose it with this response alone is to accept implicitly the a-
historical premise of the original argument: that is, that "if" it had not been for the Civil War
(or, on the other hand, the inherent totalitarianism of the Bolshevik idea), the Russian
proletariat in 1917 would have been able, without the aid of a party, without the technological
preconditions for a real de-proletarisation, to construct a socialism with all the characteristics
of a modern "self-managed" socialism, or even the "direct association of producers" itself.
The two arguments thus share common ground.

They also share an apocalyptic vision of how democratic socialist democracy was in 1917, a
mythological view of the soviets. This is not to deny that socialist democracy did exist then,
merely to suggest that it should be analysed in terms more appropriate to historical
materialism than to religious mysticism. It is also part of the revolutionary process to
demystify our own history.

A short analysis of the factory committees cannot do this. But it can at least contribute to the
preliminary debate, by making good the missing analysis in the discussion about
revolutionary subjectivity - that is, an analysis of the internal composition of the Russian
working class, its organs of struggle and organisation, its relation to the party. In all the talk
about "objective conditions" it is necessary to point out that they form a unity, though a
contradictory one, with that subjectivity; the role of these internal relations of the workers'
movement was crucial in helping to create the "objective conditions" themselves, and in
creating the modern Soviet state.

The factory committees were at the centre of these internal relations. There can be no doubt
that the key Bolshevik intervention in the revolutionary process was at this level. The party
convened regional and then national conferences of what had till then been delegate
committees isolated in the factories. It was these conferences, not the town soviets, which
discussed the essential practical questions of workers' control (over employers' sabotage,
spurious fuel shortages, etc., and extending to the control of supervision and management),
demilitarisation of industry, the formation of the Red Guards, and so on. The predominance of
the Bolshevik party in these conferences was the basis of its predominance in the workers'
sections of the soviets and eventually in the soviets as a whole. In this was an apparent source
of conflict: between the political strategy of the Bolshevik party in which the factory
committees were the rank-and-file to be deployed, and the aims of a working class which
sought to extend the forms of its own direct power. Did the party use the factory committees
for its own ends and, after October, suppress their potential emergence as the real managers of
a socialist economy? Or was it only because the party intervened to make them a nationwide,
conscious movement that the October revolution was made possible at all?

We cannot answer the question either way until we find out, not what the aims of the
proletariat were (or rather the aims of this or that section of it), but what the proletariat
actually was. It is common practice to quote Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution,
often against Trotsky himself: "The soviets lagged behind the factory committees, the factory
committees lagged behind the masses . . . . The masses showed themselves to be a 'hundred
times to the left' of the leftest party" (i.e. the Bolsheviks).[3] Yet there is a factor in Trotsky's
equation which is regularly overlooked, and that is the relation between the masses and the
factory committees. It is a grotesque mistake to assume that factory committees were the
Russian proletariat. If, as the libertarian argument insists, there was a nascent bureaucracy in
1917, then the factory committees were part of it. Their members' allegiance was as much to
the workers' political parties to which they mostly belonged as to their factory constituencies.
The memoirs of Bolshevik factory committee militants are full of cheerful acknowledgments
that they, like the party professionals and the other parties, were continually taken aback by
the spontaneous thrust of mass revolutionary action, and were forced, sometimes under the
threat of violence at mass factory meetings, to take their place at the front of demonstrations.
[4] As political militants, they were a bridge between the party leadership and the masses. As
workplace representatives their main function until June was to fight for collective bargaining
procedures. February was, after all, a bourgeois revolution; the rate of increase in both profits
and investments actually rose sharply after that revolution, and only began to fall, equally
sharply, after the July days. Bourgeoisie and proletariat had fought for the same revolution.
The unusual feature of the fight was that even before February, the proletariat was already
challenging the capitalist class for control of the anti-Tsarist revolution: there is evidence of
this in the power-struggle between workers' and employers' representatives on the Wan
Industry Committees (the wartime production-boosting organs of joint consultation). Thus the
workers often found themselves fighting for more rational methods of capitalist production.

This was especially true in those factories run by Tsarist ministerial departments for the war
effort, the small, labour-intensive ordnance plants. It was in precisely these factories that the
"workers' council" experience after February was fullest. Supervisors, foremen and floor
managers were largely elected by the workers. This was partly due to the fact that the former
management had seen itself as agents of the Tsarist government and therefore went to ground
in February; but it was also partly because the highly skilled ordnance workers thought they
could manage capitalist production, at shop-floor level at least, better than their bosses.[5]
The effective leader of the Central Council of Factory Committees, Vlas Y. Chubar', as well as
many of his fellow council members, came from one of the ordnance factories. Chubar's
training as an apprentice had included English, French and civil engineering.[6]

Therefore both the political and the factory-level distinctions between the factory committees
and their working-class base depended on a more fundamental distinction, that of skill.
Dilution (razvodnenie) and de-skilling {dekvalifitsirovanie) were almost as much at issue in
Petrograd as they were on Clydeside.[7] The war had produced a change and a cleavage in the
proletariat by calling up large numbers of men and replacing them with women, immigrants
and minors, thus introducing the conditions for mass production. For the skilled workers,
dilution was both the zenith of their power and the beginning of the end. They had always had
scarcity value, and this increased during the war, even as they were being squeezed out at the
top to become supervisors, trainers, etc., for the new mass producers; they could exploit this
scarcity in "economic" terms (differentials increased enormously during the war), but now
they could also recruit a new and vibrant rank-and-file for their "political" ambitions.
However, the basis of their power was an obsolete, pre-war technology (production bays, the
seven-year apprenticeship); meanwhile peasant immigrants and women, the new rank-and-
file, were being trained in seven weeks for work on adjacent rows of electric and pneumatic
lathes which destroyed the basis of the skilled turners' power, while giving the latter an army
to organise. It was a general European phenomenon, but the opportunity to fuse these two
major forces was taken at the flood.

The fusion took in some respects a hierarchical, sexist and "racist" (anti-peasant) character.
We find very few of the "new proletariat" (women or chornorabochie - literally "black
workers", meaning peasant labourers) sitting on the factory committees;[8] the vast majority
of members are turners, fitters and electricians. (It is worth noting in passing that the leading
national figures in shop stewards' or workers' council movements - Davy Kirkwood on
Clydeside, Richard Muller in Berlin, Giovanni Parodi at FIAT Turin and Vlas Chubar' in
Petrograd - were all skilled turners, born within a few years of each other.)

Each thrust of "revolutionary spontaneity" came from the 'new proletariat', in February, July
and the "nationalisations from below" of early 1918. In February it was the women workers
who had rampaged through the Petrograd factories bringing the rest out on strike, against the
orders of shop-floor representatives of all parties.[9] Yet once this revolution was
accomplished, the conferences of factory committees only mention the women workers to
refer to their "indiscipline", especially (and significantly) in the factories where dilution was
strongest. The electrical industry was the only one where the absolute number of women
taken on during the war actually exceeded that of men; a month after the February revolution,
the Central Council of Factory Committees in Petrograd made the following statement about
the Svetlana electrical factory, one of the starting points of the revolution:

"It is almost exclusively women who work there. It is to be regretted that their understanding
of the situation is weak, and so is the workers' sense of organisation and proletarian
discipline . . . . It has been decided to delegate a comrade from the first reserve regiment to
the general assembly of women workers."

In a factory where so many of the workers were women that an all-male committee was
impossible, a man had to be specially delegated from outside the factory. "Indiscipline" seems
to have been a code word for revolutionary fervour, not for backwardness. Similar attitudes on
the part of the factory committees towards peasant immigrants and youth can be traced.[10]

Some recent writers have brought the discussion about the internal composition of the
working class as far as this point - notably the disciples of Mario Tronti, who have studied this
period internationally and in great detail.[11] They have made the point that the significance
of Petrograd was not its position as a westernised outpost surrounded by a semi-feudal
hinterland, but as part of a chain of munitions-producing centres stretching through Berlin,
Vienna, Turin, Paris to Glasgow, and across the Atlantic. In each of these centres, they point
out, it was the skilled metal-workers who ran the councils, committees, etc.; their interests
were often sectional, and even where they saw the need for a political revolution going
beyond the bourgeois state (i.e. in Petrograd and Turin), they still thought of production and
of their role in production in terms of the capitalist mode.

This analysis stands up to empirical scrutiny. Not only the Bolsheviks, but Gramsci and
Ordine Nuovo lamented the indiscipline of the new proletariat whom the "factory councils"
had been designed to incorporate; they refer to traditional skilled workers as "the better
elements" in much the same way that Emile Vandervelde, the Belgian Arthur Henderson,
talked about "the moral qualities of the producer" when he saw the Petrograd ordnance
factory committees raise production under their own management after February. On the other
hand, the new proletariat in Russia had names for the traditional skilled workers - "the wise
guys with their nuts and bolts", "metalworkers' republics". The shop-floor organisers of the
whole class mistook this hostility towards themselves, as a section, for backwardness on the
question of the class struggle: at certain key conjunctures in the revolutionary process, the
opposite was manifestly the case.

It is, however, to be regretted that having brought the historical argument into wholly new
territory, i.e. the internal composition of the working class, the writers of this school then
leave it there. In the manner of (bourgeois) sociology, they see the class structure of the
proletariat only as a structure, as a series of adjacent layers, one of which plays an all-
determining role. They have explored the internal composition, but not the internal dialectic.
This leads them to dismiss what Bologna calls "the self-management project" as the outmoded
property of only one section of the class, moreover a project which is irrelevant to the "new
proletariat". It must be pointed out that, again, this "sociological" deficiency in the argument
must be traced forward to the attitudes of the school to current practice, which derive not from
an overall world analysis but from the highly specific conditions of Italy, where the role of a
"new proletariat" in mass production (e.g. peasants from the South in FIAT) is relatively
important.

The work of Bologna and Tronti seems to be diametrically opposite to that of Pannekoek, the
Dutch council communists and their descendants, who are the supreme upholders of the
"councillist" idea. Yet they are really two sides of the ' same coin. The "council fetish" works
against the councils' detractors as well as their supporters. One side dismisses what the other
upholds, namely a council project which they both see structurally, as an institution. But in
Russia, Italy and elsewhere, the role, functions and membership of shop-floor councils and
committees could change rapidly and represent complex, conflicting interests. They were less
an institution with stable functions than the symptoms of a process in which the fight against
the bourgeoisie in the factories was helped, and not only hindered, by the interaction between
different sections of the working class; both sections played "leading", determining roles, but
of quite different kinds.

It is a commonplace that internal class antagonisms are sharpest in a pre-Revolutionary

situation (groups of workers in Ivanovo-Voznesensk were having gun-battles with each other
in 1916). The "antagonisms" between the factory committees and factory assemblies, or
between skilled and "new" workers, are less antagonistic and more fruitful than might appear
from the evidence so far. (It may be argued that no one in their right mind would ever
question the unity of the working class in the Russian revolution, in the first place. But taking
such positions for granted is the first step towards the kind of sterility which I have pointed to
in the existing arguments; and, outside of certain left-wing milieux, there is no harm in asking
questions.).

It would be a mistake to think that the sectional interests of the skilled workers who formed
the factory committees held back the revolutionary process, any more than they created it.
The revolutionary process was carried through by neither one section of the workers'
movement nor the other, but precisely by the relations between them. It was the product of an
interaction between the spontaneous forces of the mass movement and the steadier
"organisational" approach of the vanguard.

The use of the term "vanguard" for one particular section may appear somewhat contradictory
in relation to what I have just said. The term describes their view of themselves and the view
of the other layers; it does not accurately describe the influence of both sections on the
objective developments. In February and July the masses in the factories were "well to the
left" of the committees and had sometimes to use violent intimidation to get their delegates to
support insurgent action. Can the latter still be called a vanguard, and why did they usually
remain in place? In the bigger factories, at least, the principle of instant recall of delegates
(one of the most important features of socialist democracy) does not seem to have operated.
The names of committee officials tend to remain constant throughout 1917 in any one factory,
although the turnover of labour was colossal. The source documents of individual factory
committees are very reticent about their own mode of election or appointment, and where
references do occur there seems to have been some backstairs dealing between the various
political parties. In one example, where the SRs held a majority over the Bolsheviks, the July
days (which discredited the SRs with the workers en masse) made a redistribution of places
on the factory committee inevitable. Factory militants of the two parties tried to get a behind-
the-scenes agreement between themselves, so that there would be an increase in the number of
committee places for the Bolsheviks at the expense of the SRs, reflecting the general mood. It
was only when the latter objected to the precise size of the majority claimed by the
Bolsheviks that the issue was put to a vote at a mass meeting.[12]

The working masses, then, accepted the skilled committee layer as their natural leaders.
Socialist democracy reached a ceiling; the false consciousness of the proletariat in relation to
its own revolutionary leadership. This is the second reason, apart from the "authoritarian
nature of the Leninist party", that is deduced by the libertarian argument for the deformation
of the Russian revolution, the evidence is plentiful and has to be faced. Again, facing it and
examining it is the only way of dealing with it.

What is the precise location of this "false consciousness" in Russian history and its relation to
the movement for workers' control? The weakness of feudalism in Russia had been the vast
size of the territory which it had to cover with its primitive communications technology. This
vastness created a weakness in local administration which was made up for by all kinds of
institutions in which peasants and artisans, lacking any external embodiment of political
authority apart from the priesthood, organised themselves for the purposes of their own
subjugation to the Tsarist state. This was the meaning of the so-called primitive communism
of the village commune, and of the artel system for artisans and labourers. These forms of
self-organisation were inoculated against revolutionary or centrifugal tendencies by the
internalisation of order and discipline through religion and the suppression of women and
children, the severity of which was quite special to Russia. Even by the time of the First
World War the commune system was still in substantial existence: the chornorabochie\n the
advanced Petrograd factories were still hired in artel-type gangs which employed and paid
themselves.

The collapse of the Tsarist system meant the collapse of the forms of self-organisation which
had underwritten that system. The old forms which were being lost could not be separated
from the new, socialist forms of self-organisation at the base. The factory committees
developed out of "councils of elders" and often carried that name through the revolutionary
experience - the name of the village commune's governing body. In some ways this pre-
capitalist tradition of self-organisation was fruitful in 1917. The practice of control from
below did not just affect the factories but the whole of social life. The bread queues, for
example, were in actual fact rationing committees - each one had an elected committee which
allotted places in the queue according to the age, needs and size of family of the women.
Monasteries, old people's homes, tenants, passengers on long train journeys, children in
primary as well as secondary schools, all created "soviets".[13] But this tradition was double-
edged: at the very point where their own direct power took the most advanced and prophetic
forms, the masses carried through the ideological ballast of the previous society. "Tradition"
contributed, but ambiguously.

The essence of the libertarian argument is that the level of productive forces plays a less
determining role in the development of history than the existence of hierarchy: in the
revolutionary process, that hierarchy takes the form of "authoritarianism" among the leaders
(in this case the Bolshevik party), and "false consciousness" among the masses in submitting
to what they consider their natural leaders. But to put the attack on hierarchy in first place is
in fact to reflect the authoritarian principle which it wants to destroy. There was a whole
political movement, the SRs, which was built round the belief that the existing forms of self-
organisation could be developed through a cultural revolution into communism, and which
similarly ignored the vital role of the level of productive forces. They ignored it to the extent
of fighting against the introduction of industry into Russia; at the same time, they sought to
develop a modern communist project directly out of a "primitive communism" which was in
fact a perfected form of internalised authoritarianism, the backbone of the Tsarist state. It was
a self-defeating project. The post-1917 careers of the factory committees and their leaders will
show exactly how seriously this question must betaken.

We should be grateful to the modern writers who have questioned the homogeneity of the
workers' movement as it is portrayed in the work of more orthodox historians (and this
includes the "Trotskyist" movement, though Trotsky's own history does not deserve this
accusation). The reluctance to analyse revolutionary subjectivity in all its complex internal
richness is rooted in an irrational fear that to probe too closely would reveal no unity at all,
that the Russian workers' movement was always divided into leaders and led with antagonistic
interests, that the "enemy" argument might actually be true. But in fact the libertarian
argument, which is implied by all the modern researchers on the factory committees, can be
nailed quite easily; it is a mundane question of doing the research, and the less mundane one
of seeing the need to do it.

Let us take one very specific example. Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control is not
in itself a work of original research, but it draws on most of the modern writers who have
done research in this area. He develops an argument concerning the first months of Soviet
power that has been raised by all the modern researchers, but which first appears in a
pamphlet written by Kerensky in 1920.[14] The argument is that Lenin and the Bolshevik
leaders suppressed the factory committees immediately on the seizure of power, because they
held too much real power. There is, first of all, no doubt about the fact that the factory
committees were the most powerful institution in Russia by the end of 1917, not only among
the working class but in the whole political life of the country: no one could move without
them. There is also no doubt about the fact that this power later submerged. Let us deal with
the argument, rather than mutter some dismissive phrase about the party leadership being
better able to cope with the long-term interests of the class than the class's own
representatives. We have seen how there is a tendency in this kind of argument to pose a
divergence between the interests of the party leadership and those of the working class, only
to reconstruct the monolith as a homogeneous working class devoid of sectional interests. In
this process the factory committees are collapsed into "the working class", whereas in fact,
even if the original premise is accepted - the divergence between the class and a nascent
bureaucracy - the committees belong to the latter. Brinton notes that the legislation on
workers' control immediately after October was elaborated in totally different ways by Lenin
and by the factory committee leaders.[15] His basis for this argument is a document drawn up
by the Central Council of Petrograd Factory Committees on how to run the new socialist
economy, which was published in part in Izvestia [16 ] and fully in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo
[17] under the title of "Draft Instructions on Workers' Control".

This document was the contribution of the factory committee leaders to a debate summoned
by the new Soviet government and involving the trade unions and government commissioners
for the economy. It laid down the duties of the factory committees in precise detail -shop-floor
duties for individual committees, and for the Central Council the running of the department of
the economy within the new state.

"Control must be understood as a transitional stage towards organising the whole economic
life of the country according to socialist principles; it is the first urgent step towards this from
below, and runs parallel with the work at the top, which is the central organisation of the
national economy."

The tatist project dovetails perfectly here with the anarcho-syndicalist one; there is no irony
in saying that workers' control is state control on the shopfloor - the experience of
bureaucratisation lies ahead, not in the past. The result of the debate was that the factory
committees' proposals were more acceptable to Lenin than those of either the trade unions or
his economic experts, and not simply for manipulative reasons: they were the only proposals
which were based on the thoroughgoing destruction of the old state administrative apparatus,
for reasons which I shall make clear later on. The "work at the top" which the document refers
to is VSNKh (the Supreme Council of the National Economy), which shortly afterwards was
set up on the initiative of the Central Council of Factory Committees itself (the evidence is
their own),[18] and which eventually became the organ for bringing local soviets to heel by
withholding credit and subjugating them to centralised state control. Yet this is the document
which Brinton refers to as the great example of workers' management, of how the factory
committees were at odds with Lenin.

It makes an interesting digression to discover how he could have reached such a conclusion.
His knowledge of the document is fifth-hand. It derives from an article by Didier L. Limon
(Lnine et le contrle ouvrier), written in the late forties and reprinted in Autogestion (no. 4,
Paris, December 1967). This article derives its knowledge from an article by Anna
Pankratova, written in 1923 and translated in the same issue of Autogestion (Les comits
d'usine en Russia).

Pankratova got to know of it through a pamphlet, Rabochii Kontrol' ("Workers' Control"),

written by S. A. Lozovskii at the end of 1917. Although Narodnoe Khoayaistvo and the
document are not a rarity, it is evident that Lozovskii's pamphlet is the "original" secondary
source for the rest, since all four writers quote from only one, identical passage:

"Workers' control over industry, as an integral part of control over the whole economic life of
the country, should be understood not in the narrow sense of a simple revision, but on the
contrary in the broad sense of an intervention in the employers' decisions concerning capital,
stocks, raw materials and finished articles in the factory; effective supervision over the
profitable and expedient execution of orders; the use of energy and labour power; and
participation in the organisation of production itself on a rational basis, etc., etc."

Unfortunately the whole reference has got a bit shop-soiled in passing through four pairs of
hands.

Lozovskii continually refers to the document by a title that was not the published one: when
he quotes from it, he calls it the "Practical Manual for the Execution of Workers' Control".
Pankratova takes over this title from him, and also gets the date wrong: she dates it 6th
February 1918 (Lozovskii's pamphlet was written in November 1917). There are obvious
"political" reasons for Stalin's rewriter-in-chief of history books to do this, for the new date
situates it after the first trade union congress and the fusion between unions and factory
committees, instead of before. This erases from history the antagonism between the two
(which forms the very basis of Lozovskii's polemic). Limon in the 1940s takes over the wrong
title and the wrong date, and adds his own embellishment: his quotation from the above
paragraph ends abruptly at the word "intervention": this cuts out any reference to what is to be
intervened in, and gives the word an apocalyptic significance. At the same time. Limon has
decided to change the authors of the document too - he refers to them as "the non-Bolshevik
leaders of the all-Russian Council of Factory Committees".

Brinton thus takes over from Limon an amputated quotation bearing the wrong date, the
wrong title and the wrong authors. Then he gets to work himself. There is a passing reference
to Limon's "sophisticated Leninist apologetics" (a facet of which is presumably Limon's
ability to read Russian, which Brinton cannot, in spite of the fact that he quotes the original
source in impeccable Russian even when he has obtained things from secondary and tertiary
sources). Then, in addition to his inherited mistakes, he decides to re-write the text:

"Workers' control of industry, as a part of workers' control of the totality of economic life,
must not be seen in the narrow sense of a reform of institutions but in the widest possible
sense: that of moving into fields previously dominated by others. Control should merge into
management. [19]

By this time, any resemblance to the original quotation is purely coincidental. That last
sentence is in fact Limon's - it is Limon's interpretative comment on the text (which he has
misread by closing the quotation at the word "intervention"). Brinton elects to include
Limon's gloss inside the quotation marks, as part of the original text.

This seems to me a bit strong. It is no wonder that Brinton emerges with his particular set of
conclusions; given this libertarian attitude towards verifiable facts, one can see how the
pumpkin turned into a golden coach. The "Draft Instructions" are perhaps the first
contributory document to the idea of a centrally planned, state-owned "total" economy: in
Brinton's book they appear as an "anti-Leninist", anti-Stalinist tract. But sarcasm does not sit
too well on the orthodox Marxist left. Writers like these have at least attempted to get a
worms'-eye-view of the revolutionary process; from a book like Isaac Deutscher's The
Prophet Armed or E. H. Carr's history, which in their own ways are immensely valuable, it is
difficult to grasp that such a thing as the working class existed, let alone any factory
committees.

The factory committee layer, then, was closely associated from the very beginning with the
attempt to build a new, centralised economic apparatus, to raise the level of productive forces;
the primacy of this task was rejected by both the SRs and the tendencies to the left of
Bolshevism. Is this to imply that the factory committee leaders had already become
apparatchiks? If that is the case, then it must be admitted that they had been so even from
February (Vlas Chubar, for example, had spent the entire February-October period in a room
marked nachalnik zavoda - works manager - in the Petrograd Gun Factory as chairman of its
factory committee). But this would then destroy the argument that they were the "real" leaders
of the working class. In fact, though, the Central Council was elected by a large delegate
conference of factory committees.

Looking at the later careers of the former factory committee leaders, it is certainly possible to
talk about a process of bureaucratisation. But if we trace those careers backwards, we can see
that the process is grounded in a more material condition than "false consciousness" or
careerism. Chubar' was shot in 1938 and elected to the Supreme Soviet in 1937. From 1934,
when he was elected to the Politburo, he had been known as an expert on capital formation in
industry and was critical of the "lack of financial discipline" in carrying out the first 5-year
plan; he was given the task of correcting these faults in the second. In the decade up to 1934
he had been chairman of the Ukrainian Socialist Republic, where he was one of the chief
executants of collectivisation: one of his aides there was Matvei Zhivotov, who had been
chairman of the factory committee at the "1886" power station in Petrograd in 1917, a
member of the bureau of the Central Council of Factory Committees and at that time a
notably forthright attacker of "bureaucratic attitudes" among the party professionals. In 1927
Chubar' and Skrypnik, another former member of the bureau, were among the cheerleaders at
the Party Central Committee meeting which shouted down Trotsky. From 1920 to 1923
Chubar' was head of VSNKh in the Ukraine, in the company of Zhivotov and Artur Kaktyn', a
Latvian journalist who had been co-opted on to the bureau of the Central Council of Factory
Committees in 1917. In 1920 Kaktyn' wrote a pamphlet called Edinyi khozyaistvennyi plan i
edinyi khozyaistvennyi tsentr ("The Single Economic Plan and the Single Economic Centre").
This pamphlet is a polemic in favour of the ideas of Eugene Varga, who had just started to
publish in Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn' ("Economic Life") the ideas which paved the way for the
5-year plans. Kaktyn's pamphlet gives a brief history of the factory committees in passing,
and points out how the 1917 plans of the Central Council of Factory Committees for the
creation of VSNKh were the ideal model for the "single economic plan". This was no false
hindsight. The eyes of the factory committee stratum had been turned in this direction from
October. I shall try to demonstrate later the relation of this to the internal dialectic within the
proletariat. For the moment, let us note that the question for this stratum in the late 1920s was
industrialisation at all costs; the costs included (for example) famine and massacre in the
Ukraine, handing out favours to a non-socialist technocracy, and the elimination of those like
Trotsky who counted these costs. For the former shop-floor leaders of the proletariat which in
emancipating itself and liquidating the old apparatus had also virtually liquidated itself, the
problem was how to create a new proletariat.

If we now go back and look at a factual account and timetable of how the council process was
formed out of and transformed the objective reality, by means of its own internal class
dialectic, we shall be able to see more clearly how those shop-floor leaders became involved
with the "Stalinist" project, or rather that part of it associated with names such as
Ordzhonikidze.

Shop-floor committees appear under the name of "councils of elders" from 1903 onwards:
they exist only fitfully, as negotiating organs during strikes (trade unions are effectively
outlawed). They are a fluctuating mixture of highly political militants and management
stooges, united by the fact that they are skilled workers.[20] Skilled men are at a premium in a
country where industrialisation took place in one go and where, less than a generation before,
anything up to 90% of the skilled workers in the big new factories were West Europeans;
otherwise, the picture and the timetable correspond to what is also happening in factories all
over Europe.

In the First World War working-class political activity outside the factory is still suppressed.
As in the rest of Europe, political militants are deliberately called up first, but arc sent back
because they are all skilled workers who are now in even shorter supply. At the bosses'
request, the Mensheviks and SRs participate in the establishment of factory-level War
Industry Committees, which are intended to imitate the West European forms of joint
consultation and to boost munitions production. The leader of the "workers' section" of these
committees is the Menshevik Kuz'ma Gvozdev, an electrician-fitter at the Ericson telephone
factory. The Bolsheviks attack the committees because they are against the war, and refuse to
participate in elections to them. But there is a whole new proletariat in the factories which
participates enthusiastically in the elections - not necessarily because they approve of the war,
but because it means that there is some form of representation for them, that they can hold
mass meetings, vote, etc. The Bolsheviks are then forced to recognise this new and very real
aspect of the situation, and participate half-heartedly in the elections. But even for the pro-war
Mensheviks such as Gvozdev the situation is ambiguous: they have in fact entered an anti-
Tsarist revolutionary alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie, and it is an alliance in which
they are already claiming seniority. In early 1916 militarisation of factory management
becomes total; the Tsarist government forces the industrial bourgeoisie to disband their
"subversive" war industry committees and the workers' sections are sent to prison.[21]

At the turn of 1916-17 the vast new working class is leaderless. The vanguard of the new
elements is the women, whose experience of the chaos and oppression covers most aspects of
social and working life - they are the same women who organise the bread queues. They are
the leaders of the "spontaneous process" of the February revolution. The very first
demonstrations release Gvozdev from prison: he initiates an Executive Committee of the
Petrograd Soviet, which in turn convenes the Soviet itself (it has thus been created from the
top down). The source of the revolutionary experience and its political expression are as yet
remote from each other.

Factory committees, in the sense of permanent organs of shop-floor representation, spring up

first in the dozen or so Petrograd ordnance factories run directly by the Tsarist state[22] ;
management inside the factory has disappeared, and the workers elect their own, to look after
the day-to-day running of production. In the other factories, committees soon spring up to
introduce a "modern" system of the eight-hour day and collective bargaining; the rate of
private industrial investment shoots up, and until June most strikes are avoided at the eleventh
hour by negotiations, in which the committees come off best.

In early April the first step towards co-ordination of the committees' activity is taken: there is
a conference of the ordnance factories, i.e. the most "advanced" workers, technically and
politically. They co-opt Bolshevik representatives to the meeting, who advise that a
conference of all the Petrograd factories should be convened; this takes place at the beginning
of June.[23] The spontaneity of February, the product of the "new proletariat" above all and
"advanced" in a quite different sense, is channelled by the skilled factory committee workers
from its broad social course on to the factory floor, to the "workers' control" slogan, to the
preparation for political control of the Soviet.

This "channelling" activity dams up the patience of workers in the larger factories, which in
June bursts; a rival "revolutionary centre" temporarily draws away a significant number of
factory committees from the centre set up by the conference. It is non-party basically, but
includes some rank-and-file Bolsheviks from the Vyborg factories. This centre is one of the
main bodies responsible for the agitation which culminates in the July days, which is in turn a
"spontaneous" action which goes far beyond the immediate plans of most of the factory
committees, pushed unwillingly to the head of the demonstrations. The July uprising is
defeated, but the momentum is maintained within the narrower context of the factory
committee movement: they channel the defeated thrust of the masses into a much more
aggressive form of workers' control. It is at precisely this point that the balance in the duality
of power tips decisively towards the working class. The rate of investment falls like a stone
from July onwards and the bourgeoisie starts to sabotage production; this in turn only
increases the power of the factory committees as they take over responsibility for getting
things produced and for ensuring supplies of fuel and raw materials. The second conference of
factory committees in early August confirms this. The Kornilov revolt seeks to restore the
status quo. Kornilov is not just any general but the man responsible for militarising the labour
force in Petrograd during the war; his identity is a testimony to the power of the committees.
The Central Council of Petrograd Factory Committees takes a more directing role, especially
in the formation of the Red Guard. When the Bolshevik leaders, or rather Lenin alone, waits
for the people to be on the streets before taking responsibility for the October uprising, it is
precisely these people he is talking about - the hard core of the factory committee leaders and
the militia they had formed. It is not a "spontaneous" movement, but it fulfills the basic
demands of what the masses fought for in July.

The October revolution intensifies the crisis of the bourgeoisie in the factories, to the extent
that "workers' control" over sabotage is no longer effective - the sabotage is now taking the
form of abandoning the enterprises. Throughout the first few months of 1918, Lenin and
Trotsky, supported by the former factory committee leaders, try to hold back the economic
chaos. They plan nationalisation, which for them means a pragmatic short-term attempt to
bring certain industries under state control for the purposes of capital development, to limit
rather than suppress the market and private property (as the quotation from the committees'
"Draft Instructions on Workers' Control" suggests), and to hire the skills of the bourgeoisie.
The mass of workers, on the other hand, see nationalisation as signifying real socialisation;
they carry out wildcat "spontaneous" nationalisations which undermine the basis of the
negotiations going on between Lenin and Trotsky and Western representatives for financial
and technical assistance.[24] The Bolshevik leaders warn against this; but the masses carry on
socialising enterprises from the bottom up, in the name of the Soviet government which they
are defying but which they regard as theirs. ("False consciousness"? Or a sophisticated grasp
of the real situation, of the partial nature of their own direct power?) Their defiance ensures
that the Western representatives will not be enticed into real negotiations, that the capitalist
countries will invade, that the civil war will start in earnest, that the proletariat will have
virtually disappeared by 1920. It is the Russian proletariat itself which has created these
"objective conditions".

Between October and the middle of 1918 production is already collapsing as a result of the
imperialist war. The class struggle is going on, but beyond the reach of the Bolshevik
government. VSNKh, which includes the former factory committee leaders, begins to
function. It supports Lenin's attempt to prevent wildcat nationalisations but simultaneously
supports the view of Bukharin and the "left" group that such nationalisations should be given
de facto recognition. According to Kaktyn':

"The instructions on active workers' control elaborated by the Petrograd Council of Factory
Committees led only to a general channelling of the overflowing, wide-ranging process of
seizure of the factories by the workers. Although it proceeded in an anarchic way,
accompanied by a similarly anarchic process of demilitarisation of the munitions industry, the
importance of this colossal creative work was enormous. It brought the solid basis of Soviet
power." [25]

Unable to influence this class war, the Bolshevik leaders accuse these workers of having a
"petty-bourgeois consciousness", of having a cottage-industry mentality that looks on the
factory as they would on a small private business of their own. Historians like Carr and even
Avrich, whom one might expect to be more sympathetic to the workers' view, take this
accusation at face value. In fact there are not many people on any section of the left who
disbelieve the story that the Russian workers were backward in this and were "too close to the
soil". It is a mistaken view, which results from studying too much of the polemic of the time
and not enough about what the proletariat actually was. The women and youth among the
"new proletariat" were largely from the families of urban workers who had been called up,
[26] and were certainly not "backward peasants"; on the other hand the chornorabochie and
peasant heavy labourers had very little influence on factory politics. There were also the in-
betweens, especially the Kustar' artisans from the countryside who had been called up and
then sent to work in the factories because they had some needed skill. These would certainly
have originally been the "petty bourgeoisie" in the countryside, but the evidence is that they
had been proletarianised rapidly and intensely by mass production. Questionnaires sent by the
Tsarist government to factory bosses asking about the effects of the vodka prohibition receive
delighted answers saying that the workers have been transformed into "real industrial
workers" overnight.[27]

So we are talking about a genuine class struggle. The slanders of the Bolshevik leaders are not
examples of an arbitrary "authoritarianism", though. While this new spontaneous action is
going on, the party leadership has its hands full coping with the political and military tasks
posed by the October revolution, looking for a breathing space. At the very moment when the
leadership is struggling to consolidate one situation created by the spontaneous initiative of
the working class, the class itself is already in the process of creating an entirely new
situation. The party leadership, which has only recently come round to the idea of permanent
revolution and has not thought about how to run the economy (its only ideas in 1917 are
Menshevik ones, and it is a recent Menshevik, Yuri Larin, who is belatedly appointed as
economic adviser), wants a dictatorship of the proletariat over a mixed economy. The
proletariat itself wants the bourgeoisie out of the apparatus - but it can only achieve this by
provoking its own liquidation, in a physical sense.

In this situation the factory committees are no longer the pilot group they were in 1917. The
debates at the first trade union congress in January 1918 (which was also the sixth conference
of factory committees) reflect the apparent divergence: the debate is between those who
believe that workplace democracy is the priority, and those who put political and military
tasks first. In the factories, a small fraction of anarcho-syndicalists and a larger number of
nonparty delegates are gaining ground on the Bolsheviks because of their insistence on the
first of these priorities. The Bolshevik faction on the Putilov factory committee, for example,
wants to withdraw the members of the Red Guard there from their skilled jobs in the
locomotive-building shop and send them to fight the reaction. The non-party delegates, led by
Oskar Vakkhanen, the sole anarcho-syndicalist delegate, complain that their skills are more
urgently required in production since Russia is without railway engines. The non-party
delegates have usually supported the Bolsheviks before, but Vakkhanen wins the vote.[28] He
is certainly right about the railway engines, but his priorities are questionable. If we know
now that the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised in the political sphere without
also being exercised at the point of production (and this knowledge depends on our
consciousness of the consequences of bureacratisation), then the converse is also true: that the
consolidation of a Soviet state whose existence was still in doubt at the time of this first "trade
union debate" was the precondition for any kind of "socialism" at all, even if this socialism
could only be built at the expense of direct workers' power.
The official incorporation of the factory committees into factory cells of the trade unions in
January 1918 was not exactly a suppression of the former. It came only after the trade unions
had accepted the line of the Central Council of factory committees on economic development
and the role of VSNKh. In this debate the Central Council had attacked the trade unions
(citing Vikzhel in particular, though the disease apparently extended to Bolshevik-controlled
unions too) for being too interested in their craft status[29] : they were "syndicalists", uniting
workers on the basis of their craft, and were therefore interested in preserving what was left of
the existing structure of national economic management. This was not just a "loyal"
reproduction of the Leninist line, it was something of vital interest to the factory committees
themselves. They united workers not on the basis of craft but of the branch of production:
they therefore had an interest in a more fundamental reorganisation of the whole economy, in
which they genuinely saw state planning and centralisation as the indispensable precondition
of workers' control on the spot. The factory committee leaders had emerged in 1917 as part of
a highly skilled section of the working class and had acted accordingly, maintaining and
channelling the spontaneous creativity of the class as a whole towards political goals; this was
a successful process to which their sectional interests contributed, even where there was
antagonism between these and the interests of the new proletariat. But now, in positions of
power in the state apparatus, removed from their immediate working-class context, they
represented the much more generalised interest of a class which had to be re-formed along
with the economy. And at the same time the sectional interest of the remaining handful of
traditional skilled workers still on the spot, their "craft status", became a much more
reactionary interest, tied to the old economic apparatus. This is of the utmost importance in
studying the changeover to collegiate management in mid-1919. The former factory
committee leaders approved of the change from management by trade-union/factory
committee cells to a system of increased participation by state and technicians (which already
had a de facto existence). This does not mean they had already turned into petty bureaucrats -
they fought hard against piecework, for example, which was reintroduced at the same time.
The opposition to collegiate management came from people like Holzman, the metalworkers'
union leader, who claimed that by introducing it the party was "protecting unskilled workers
and labourers at the expense of 'industrial' groups of the proletariat"[30] ; this indicates that
collegiate management was seen as a lowering of status for the skilled workers who had
naturally slid into the "workers' management" posts.

Overshadowing the question of what happened to the factory committees, however, are those
statistics of Milyutin's on the decline of productive capacity by 1920, which I quoted at the
beginning. The careers of the various shop-floor leaders illustrate the point. Gvozdev, the
arch-patriot, production-boosting munitions worker, bosses' friend, and Minister of Labour
under Kerensky, was released from prison in 1920 - and sent to work for VSNKh. Vladimir
Shatov, politically educated by the Wobblies and therefore closely associated with the "new
proletariat", an anarcho-syndicalist member of the Central Council of Factory Committees,
the most coherent advocate of "workplace democracy before anything else" at the first trade
union congress, became Minister responsible for the militarisation of labour in the Far East -
he spent 1920 ordering railwaymen to work for nothing.[31] The former factory committee
leaders were working for VSNKh in 1920, bringing the last of the independent local Soviets
to order. The convergence of the Menshevik, Bolshevik and Anarcho-syndicalist careers
rested on a more fundamental convergence between their ideas on how to run a socialist
economy, which in turn was determined by the productive and technological level available to
them. While the Bolshevik party were the political vanguard, the only party with the
revolutionary will and effective programme to create the conditions for raising this level, it
was the shop-floor leaders in particular who seemed to grasp the meaning of this for the future
of socialism, and worked for "industrialisation at all costs".

The arguments presented here might seem like a justification of Stalinism. On the other hand,
they could equally signify a ritual dating of the "degeneration" of the Russian revolution as
beginning in 1920, though we really ought to be out of that particular wood by now. They
would both be false assumptions. Whatever the later results, it was the internal dialectic of the
Russian workers' movement and the detonating role of this dialectic within the wider context
of the class struggle that produced our transitional world - from the civil war and war
communism, the introduction of NEP and the ending of the razverstka, to Stalinism itself and
the current state of the world revolution. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was indirect, and
the indirect forms of workers' power - party and state - only survived at the expense of the
direct forms, of the self-managing organs at the base. It is the classic instance of bureaucratic
degeneration. Thermidor is not a date: it is a tendency inherent in those indirect forms of
power, in the creation of any "workers' state" - it is inherent always and from the beginning. A
ritual precise dating of Thermidor is the business of those who regard the history of the
revolution as the history of the party, and the analysis of revolutionary subjectivity as taken
for granted. The degeneration is not the personal property of a Stalin or those who suffer from
"false consciousness", it is rooted in our transitional material world.

This is not to assert that the "Leninist party" (of 1917) is somehow to blame for this
degeneration. (Even in our present world, in spite of the fact that bureaucratic degeneration is
inherent in the "workers' state" and the "workers' party", these are still the necessary
complement to forms of direct workers' power which act as increasingly effective antibodies
against that degeneration.). But among revolutionary historians the mechanical exegesis of the
history of the party has a de-dialectising influence on our revolutionary activity today. To
refer to the tradition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks by upholding the content of the Bolshevik
programme or the Leninist party schematically, as models for our activity today, is to deny
that tradition. The Leninist reference is to precisely the opposite, to all those elements which
did distinguish the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks, Anarcho-Syndicalists etc. - to a creative
audacity, to a willingness to jettison old models and go along with the revolutionary praxis of
working people. The collective attempt to carry on this real "tradition" needs also to discover
its own history. (From Critique no.3)

NOTES

1. This article is an extended version of a paper given to the Third Conference of Radical
Soviet & East European Studies, Birmingham University, 5 May 1973.

2. V. Milyutin, article in Moscow Izvestiya mo. 275 (1920), quoted by K. Leites in Recent
Economic Developments in Russia (Oxford, 1922), p.162.

3. Trotsky: History of the Russian Revolution, p.435.

4. See account of Putilov factory committee's behaviour during the July days in I. I. Gaza:
Putilovets v trekh revolyutsiakh (Moscow 1933).

5. Emile Vandervelde: Three Aspects of the Russian Revolution, p.48-9. (London 1918).

6. V. Drobizhev and N. Dumova: V. Ya. Chubar': Biograficheskii Ocherk (Moscow 1963).

7. M. I. Mitel'man (ed.): Istoria Putilovskovo zavoda, p.484-489 (Moscow, 1961); Trotsky:
op. cit., p.419.

8. Evidence for this can be obtained from the documents and protocols issued by the factory
committees themselves, the most comprehensive selection of which is available in D.
Chugeav: Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii, 4 vols. (Moscow, 1959-61).

9. Article by V. Kayurov in Proletarskaya Revolyutsia no. 1 (1923), p.157-171.

10. Izvestiya of the Petrograd Soviet, 6 (19) April 1917, quoted in Amoscv etc. (ed.):
Oktyabrskaya Revolyutsia i Fabzavkomy, 2 vols, (Moscow 1927), p.19.

11. e.g. Sergio Bologna: Composizione di classe e teoria: del partito alle origini del
movimento consiliare (in Operai e Stato, Milan, 1972).

12. D. Chugaev; Revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie v Rossii vavguste 1917 g, (Moscow 1959) p.244.
[]

13. Eye-witness accounts by foreign observers are especially informative in this respect; these
examples are taken from John Reed, Louise Bryant and Phillips Price.[]

14. A. Kerensky: Soviet Russia in the Autumn of 1919, (London, 1920).

15: M. Brinton: The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control (London, 1970), p.25.

16. Izvestiya, 7 December 1917.

17. Narodnoe Khozyaistvo no. 1, 1918.

18. Article by V. Chubar' in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo no. 11, 1918.

19. M. Brinton: op. cit., p.26.

20. See Benjamin Ward: "Wild Socialism in Russia" ( California Slavonic Studies vol. 3,
Berkeley 1964).

21. Oskar Anweiler: Dic Ratebewegung in Russland (Leiden, 1958), chapter 3, section 1.

22. Amosov: op. cit., vol. 1.

23. Ibid.

24. Milyutin: article in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo (no. 5, 1918); Jacques Sadoul: Notes sur la
Revolution Bolchevique, p.279.

25. Arthur M. Kaktyn': Edinyi khozyaistvennyi plan, etc. ( op. cit. ), p.19

26. S. Kohler: "Die russische Industrie wahrend des Weltkriegs", in Quellen und Studien vol.
1 no. 5 (Berlin, 1921), p.89.
27. Statistical Bureau of the Society of Mill and Factory Owners (Moscow District), quoted in
J. Y. Simpson: The Self-discovery of Russia (London, 1916).

28. I. I. Gaza: op. cit.

29. A. M. Kaktyn': op. cit. p.20.

30. Holzman: "K bor'be za vosstanovlenie narodnovo khozyaistva", quoted in Drobizhev and
Drumova: op. cit., p.27.

31. H. K. Norton: The Far-eastern Republic of Siberia, London 1923.

FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT

Reply by Maurice Brinton

It is a welcome sign of the times that a serious exchange of radical opinion is now under way
concerning the formative period of the Russian state, and Critique is to be congratulated on
having played a part in the initiation of this discussion. How deep the confrontation goes will,
of course, depend on how open the journal remains to those in the revolutionary movement
who do not accept the label of 'marxist', but who feel they may nevertheless have something
of relevance to contribute.

In your last issue, Chris Goodey claims that 'it is only the current practice and experience of
the world movement for socialist revolution that is beginning to allow us an overall view of
the battle-stations which we have unthinkingly maintained for a long time'. In a very general
sense that is, of course, true.

But elements of a serious critique antedated - and by a considerable period - 'May 1968 in
France, the Prague events and the Chilean revolution. Some of those who initiated this
critique would moreover shudder to find themselves subsumed under the 'we' that Goodey
refers to. They did not wait until the late sixties to express their views. As early as 1918 they
had clearly seen the direction in which Russian society was moving and proclaimed a
principled opposition, often at the cost of their lives. It is a tragic fact, for which Leninists of
all kinds (Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and the advocates of various theories of 'state
capitalism', i.e. International Socialists, Bordigists, 'Marxist humanists', etc.) must carry their
full share of responsibility that we know less today about the early weeks of the Russian
Revolution than we do, for instance, about the history of the Paris Commune.

'Unfortunately it is not the workers who write history. It is always "the others".[1] 'Official'
historians seldom have eyes to see or ears to hear the acts and words which express the
autonomous activity of the working class. They think in terms of institutions, congresses,
leaders. In the best instances they will vaunt rank and file activity as long as it coincides with
their own conceptions. But they 'will radically condemn it or impute the basest of motives to
it as soon as it deviates from that line'.[2] They seem to lack the categories of thought
necessary to perceive life as it really is. To them an activity which has no leader or
programme, no institutions and no statutes, can only be conceptualised as 'troubles' ,
'disorder', 'anarchy'. In the words of Cardan[3] 'the spontaneous activity of the masses
belongs, by definition, to what history suppresses'.
Goodey is correct when he claims it is 'part of the revolutionary process to demystify our own
history' and when he points out that the struggle for 'direct forms of working peoples' power at
the point of production' has been 'hidden and ignored'. (The formulation in the passive is,
however, disingenuous. By whom was it hidden? And why was it ignored?) But he is
profoundly wrong when he attributes this silence of the 'Marxist left' to such ideological
shortcomings as lack of 'temerity' or insufficient 'capacity for self-criticism'. A proper
evaluation of these matters cannot but lead, for anyone with even moderate pretensions to
intellectual honesty, to a complete break with Leninism in all its aspects and to a re-
examination of certain basic Marxist beliefs.

A steady trickle of documentation is now coming to light concerning the role of the Factory
Committees in the Russian Revolution.[4] Goodey sees these committees as 'the most
powerful institution in Russia by the end of 1917' and in this he is certainly right. He is also
correct in claiming that 'this power later submerged'. What is lacking in his article, however, is
a serious attempt to explain what happened in between, when it happened, why it happened,
and to whom it happened. The 'submergence' of which Goodey speaks was well advanced, if
not virtually completed, by May 1918, i.e. before the Civil War and the 'Allied' intervention
really got under way. The traditional explanations of the degeneration of the Russian
revolution are just not good enough.

In my view, Goodey's silence on these essential questions is unavoidable. It flows directly

from his honestly declared political position. He sees Party and State as 'indirect forms of
workers' power, and explicitly absolves the Leninist Party from any blame in the
degeneration. He claims that 'even in our present world, in spite of the fact that bureaucratic
degeneration is inherent in the "workers' state" and the "workers' party", these are still the
necessary complement to forms of direct workers' power. He only conceives these forms of
direct workers' power as 'effective antibodies against that degeneration'. He nowhere posits
them as the necessarily dominant units in the initiation of policy, in other words as the basic
nuclei of the new society. With this kind of overall outlook a serious analysis of the smashing
of the Factory Committees is virtually impossible, for the Bolshevik Party was to play a
dominant rote in this tragedy. There is nothing more Utopian than the belief that the Russian
working class could have maintained its power through a 'workers' party' or a 'workers' state'
when it had already lost that power at the point of production.

I have elsewhere[5] sought to bring together material from disparate sources and to document
as concisely and yet as fully as possible the various stages of a process which led, within the
short period of four years, from the tremendous upsurge of the Factory Committee movement
(a movement which both implicitly and explicitly sought to alter the relations of production)
to the establishment of unquestioned domination by a monolithic and bureaucratic agency (the
party) over all aspects of economic and political life. I argued that as this agency was not
itself based on production, its rule could only epitomise the continued limitation of the
authority of the workers in the productive process. This necessarily implied the perpetuation
of hierarchical relations within production itself, and therefore their perpetuation within
society at large.

It is impossible, within the space available, to recapitulate all the evidence here. The first
stage of the process under discussion was the subordination of the Factory Committees to the
All-Russian Council for Workers' Control in which the unions (themselves already strongly
under Party influence) were heavily represented. This took place very shortly after the coming
to power of the Soviet Government.
The second phase - which almost immediately followed the first - was the incorporation of
this All-Russian Council for Workers' Control into the Vesenka (Supreme Economic Council),
even more heavily weighted in favour of the unions, but also comprising direct nominees of
the State (i.e. of the Party). By early 1918 the Bolsheviks were actively seeking to merge the
Committees into the trade union structures. The issue provoked heated discussions at the First
All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (Jan. 7-14, 1918) which saw desperate attempts, led
mainly by anarcho-syndicalists, to maintain the autonomy of the Committees, against the
advice of Ryazanov who urged the Committees 'to commit suicide by becoming an integral
element of the trade union structure'.[6] During the next two years a sustained campaign was
waged to curb the power of the unions themselves, for the unions, albeit in a very indirect and
distorted way, could stiff be influenced by the working class. It was particularly important for
the new bureaucracy to replace this power by the authority of direct Party nominees. These
managers and administrators, nearly all appointed from above, gradually came to form the
basis of a new ruling class. The important point, as far as the re-evaluation of history is
concerned, is that each of these steps was to be resisted, but each fight was to be lost. Each
time, the 'adversary' appeared in the garb of the new 'proletarian' power. And each defeat was
to make it more difficult for the working class itself directly to manage production, i.e.
fundamentally to alter its status as a subordinate class.

Goodey claims that the 'essence of the libertarian argument is that the level of the productive
forces plays a less determining role in the development of history than the existence of
hierarchy: in the revolutionary process that hierarchy takes the form of "authoritarianism"
among the leaders (in this case the Bolshevik Party) and "false consciousness" among the
masses in submitting to what they consider their natural leaders. It is difficult to know from
where he can derive such a crudely psychological formulation of the libertarian case. As far as
I know, no libertarian has argued that the level of the productive forces is either 'more' or 'less'
important than the role of ideas and attitudes in influencing historical development. Both are
important. What libertarians have stressed (and most Marxists have signally refused to
recognise) is that the conceptions and attitudes of the dominant Party were as much an
objective fact of history - influencing the evolution of events at critical moments - as were
production statistics for electricity or steel.

Goodey claims that the libertarian argument 'can be nailed quite easily' and I find it a
compliment that he should choose my essay on which to practice his skills as a carpenter. He
focusses attention on one particular episode I describe in the hope that by challenging its
factual accuracy he can somehow impugn the credibility of the rest. He correctly defines the
area of the discussion. The argument is that Lenin and Bolshevik leaders suppressed the
factory committees immediately on the seizure of power, because they held too much real
power.

Right on! Goodey is also correct in attributing to me the view 'the legislation on workers'
control immediately after October was elaborated in totally different ways by Lenin and by
the factory committees' leaders. Again, right on! There is abundant evidence (summarised in
my text) to substantiate this view. The Achilles' heel of my thesis is allegedly my reference to
a document drawn up by certain members of the Central Council of Petrograd Factory
Committees on how the economy should have been run immediately after the October events.
I am quite prepared to take up the challenge on this rather narrow basis. According to Goodey
(and he devotes three pages to the matter) my knowledge of the document in question was
'fifth hand'. I had inherited from one Didier Limon 'an amputated quotation, bearing the
wrong date, the wrong title, and the wrong authors'. I had then 'rewritten the text'. Strong
stuff. Unfortunately, on every single point Goodey is wrong.

According to Goodey the fateful history of this document was as follows. It was originally
published in part in Izvestia (December 7, 1917) and fully in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo (no. 1,
1918). Lozovski, a Bolshevik trade unionist, allegedly altered its title from 'Draft Instructions
on Workers Control' to 'Practical Manual for the Execution of Workers Control'. This was
done in his book Rabochii Kontrol which according to Goodey was written 'in November of
1917'. (Goodey does not explain how Lozovski could, in November 1917, have been
distorting the title of a text that had not yet been published, but this is a minor point.) Then,
still according to Goodey's chronology, Pankratova took up the text in her writings of 1923.
For reasons of her own she dated it February 6, 1918 (i.e. after the First Trade Union
Congress, which sought to 'fuse from above' the Factory Committees and the Unions).
Goodey is to be congratulated in detecting this early piece of falsification by one of Stalin's
pet historians. But the relevance of this to what either Limon or I wrote totally escapes me:
neither of us gave the wrong date for the text under discussion.

According to Goodey, Limon takes over from Pankratova 'the wrong title and the wrong date
and adds his own embellishments'. He truncates a quotation in the text and changes the
authorship of the original document, attributing it to the 'non-Bolshevik leaders of the All-
Russian Council of Factory Committees'. On all these scores, Goodey is wrong. Limon did
not get his facts via Pankratova. The 'secret' can now be let out of the bag. Limon got his
facts[9] from someone who had seen the document at first hand, and before Pankratova had
even thought of writing about it. I have also seen this original source. Even Goodey could
have had access to it, had he been less concerned in proving the bad faith of those he
disagrees with politically, and had he chosen to check with Limon. (Limon is, after all, on the
Editorial Board of Autogestion, for which paper Goodey is the 'correspondent for Great
Britain').

The 'original' source is Chapter 8 Les Soviets d'Usine a I'oeuvre') of Max Hoschiller's book
Le Mirage Sovietique (Payot, Paris, 1921). Hoschiller was a French revolutionary who spoke
Russian well. The authenticity of his account is vouched for by no less a figure than Andre
Merrheim[10] who wrote the Preface to Hoschiller's book. It was in fact at Merrheim's
suggestion that Hoschiller went to Russia.

Now what does Hoschiller say a) as to the authorship, b) as to the title, and c) as to the content
of the controversial document? Hoschiller makes it clear that in the weeks preceding the
revolution it was the anarchists who were striking the tune ('donnaientle la') in the Factory
Committees and that the Bolsheviks could only trail along after them Cetaient bien obliges de
marcher a leur remorque'). On December 7, 1917, the decree setting up the Vesenkha
(Supreme Economic Council) was promulgated.[11] The Vesenkha comprised some members
of the All-Russian Council of Workers Control (a very indirect sop to the Factory
Committees), massive representation of all the new Commissariats and a number of experts,
nominated from above, in a consultative capacity. According to Hoschiller the leaders of the
Factory Committees, dissatisfied with Lenin's concessions ('mecontents en depit de toutes les
concessions du chef du gouvernement') did not implement the decisions but elaborated their
own decree in the form of a Practical Manual for the Implementation of Workers Control
('elaborerent leur propre decret sous forme d'un Manuel Pratique pour I' Execution du
Controle ouvrier'). Hoschiller describes how jealously he had kept the eight great in-folio
sheets, printed in double columns, that had been widely distributed in the streets of Petrograd.
He has clearly seen the original, which is more than can be said with any confidence of
Lozovski, Pankratova . . . or even of Goodey.

Goodey then takes issue with Limon's attribution of this text to the 'non-Bolshevik leaders of
the All-Russian Council of Factory Committees'. Is he really suggesting that the Manual was
a Party document? Reference to the Hoschiller text shows that it was no such thing. One
particular prescription of the Manual epitomises this point. The Manual spoke of 'Regional
Federations of Factory Committees' and of the need for a 'National Union of Factory
Committees'. But even Deutscher is forced to point out that such demands were diametrically
opposed to Party policy at the time. 'A few weeks after the upheaval the Factory Committees
attempted to form their own national organisation. . . . The Bolsheviks now called upon the
trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet State and to discipline the
Factory Committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the Factory
Committees to form a national organisation of their own. They prevented the convocation of a
planned All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees'.[12] It ill behoves various Bolsheviks,
after all this, to denounce the factory Committees as only having had parochial
preoccupations.

Two other facts stress the wide divergence of approach already obvious at this stage between
the Leninists and the leaders of the Factory Committees. First the very real difficulties Lenin
experienced in getting wide support for his 'Draft Decrees on Workers Control'. These were
originally published in Pravda (on November 3, 1917) but only ratified by the V.Ts.l.K. (All-
Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets) eleven days later after heated opposition
from the rank and file of the Factory Committees. Secondly the fact that Izvestiya (December
13, 1917) found it necessary to publish a text (General Instructions on Workers Control in
Conformity with the Decree of November 14) which became widely known as the Counter-
Manual.

Concerning the substance of the passage under dispute Hoschiller's text makes it crystal clear
that Limon has 'amputated' nothing. Quoting from the Introduction to the Manual, Hoschiller
(p.167) writes that workers' control 'ne doit pasetre considere dans le sens etroit d'une revision
mais dans le sens plus large de "I'ingerance"/ Full stop. (A full stop put by Hoschiller, not by
Limon. And a reasonable place, I would have thought, at which to end a quotation.) That my
own reference to this document included, through the carelessness of a misplaced unquote, a
few words that were Limon's hardly constitutes 'rewriting the text' and alters precisely nothing
to the substance of the matter.

So there you have it. No plot. No 'fifth hand knowledge' of a 'shop-soiled' quotation. No
Lozovski as the 'evident' original secondary source of all the rest. No wrong dates inherited
from Pankratova. No Limon changing the authorship of the document. No truncating of
quotations. All these are figments of Goodey's imagination and he should clearly stop
prattling about 'attitudes to verifiable facts'. If this is really the best your contributor can do to
'nail' the libertarian argument those who manufacture bandages for sore thumbs are in for a
boom.

But let us return to the main argument. Goodey claims that 'if . . . there was a nascent
bureaucracy in 1917, then the Factory Committees were part of it'. This is totally to
misunderstand the concept of bureaucracy. It attributes to the word a restricted meaning, of
little value to those who seek radically to change society. The classical Marxist conceptions
are here totally inadequate. A bureaucracy is not just 'officialdom' or a 'social stratum enjoying
certain material privileges' or a 'gendarme, ensuring a certain pattern of distribution under
conditions of want'. If the concept of self-management is to have any meaning a bureaucracy
must be seen as a group seeking to manage from the outside the activities of others. If that
group has a monopoly of decisional authority, its bureaucratic potential will be vastly
enhanced. In this sense if there was a nascent bureaucracy by the end of 1917 in Russia it was
certainly not to be found in the Factory Committees. It was to be found in the Party itself.
Certain Party attitudes here played a very important role. Trotsky himself (if we must refer to
him) perceptively described all this.

Referring to the Third Party Congress (April 25-May 10,1905) he spoke of 'the young
revolutionary bureaucrat already emerging as a type. (They were) far more intransigent and
severe with the revolutionary working men than with themselves, preferring to domineer'.[15]
No less a man than Lenin had written that 'a worker agitator who shows any talent should not
work in the factory'.[ 16] Is it any wonder that with these conceptions the Party soon lost all
contact with the class? Goodey seeks to prove his point that the Factory Committees belong to
the nascent bureaucracy by looking at the later careers of certain Factory Committees' leaders:
men such as Chubar, Matvei, Zhivotov and Skrypnik. That non-Bolshevik leaders of the
Factory Committees later supported the Bolsheviks is indisputable. But so what? It is not
unknown for individual shop stewards to end up as foremen. Does this really prove anything
beyond the capacity of established power, in its various garbs, to recuperate dissent? Does the
fact that Alexandra Kollontai later became a Stalinist ambassador invalidate her earlier
writings on the emancipation of women? Does Trotsky's later Bolshevism invalidate his
prophetic warnings of 1904 on the subject of the Party substituting itself for the working
class? (See Our Political Tasks. )

If Goodey is really interested in the history of what happened to the personnel of the Factory
Committees (and not to just a few of their leaders) a fruitful area might be the history of the
various syndicalist groups, and in particular of the 'Revolutionary Center of Factory
Committees', a body of anarchist inspiration which competed for-a while with the All-Russian
Council of Factory Committees, without ever succeeding in supplanting it, so many were the
obstacles put in its path. The search will, I suspect, prove disappointing. Systematic
persecution of 'left' dissidents soon became a way of life. Proletarian partisans of the
individual Factory Committees tried to resist and to regroup but their resistance was easily
overcome. The search might also encompass the fate of groupings of Bolshevik origin, such
as Miasnikov's Workers' Group (an offspring from the Workers' Opposition) and of
Bogdanov's Workers' Truth. One fact such a search will reveal - and of this there can be little
doubt - is that these groups had perceived (as early as 1921, without the privilege of hindsight,
and far more clearly than does Chris Goodey) that the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' had been
liquidated paripassu with the liquidation of the Factory Committees. (from Critique no.4)

Maurice Brinton is author of 'The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control: 1917-1921' (Solidarity,
1970)

NOTES

1. P. Cardan. 'Le role de I'ideologie bolchevik dans la naissance de la bureaucratie'.

Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 35 (January-March 1964). This text was subsequently published
in English as Solidarity Pamphlet no. 24 From Bolshevism to the Bureaucracy.
2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Carr's The Bolshevik Revolution : 1917-1923 (Macmillan, 1952), Daniels' The Conscience
of the Revolution (Harvard University Press, 1960), Avrich's The Russian Anarchists
(Princeton University Press, 1967) and Kaplan's Bolshevik Ideology (Owen, 1969) provide an
excellent starting point for anyone interested in this discussion.

5. M. Brinton 'The Bolsheviks and Workers Control : 1917-1921' (Solidarity, 1970).

6. Ryazanov, D. B. in Pervyi vserossiiskii s'ezd professional'nykh soiuzov, Yanvarya 1918 g

(First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, 7-14 January 1918, Moscow, 1918), p.235.

7. D. Limon, 'Lenine et le Controle Ouvrier' (Autogestion no. 4, Paris, 1967).

8. Pankratova's article on 'The Factory Committees in Russia at the time of the Revolution
(1917-1918)' was published in the previously mentioned issue of Autogestion.

9. D. Limon. Personal communication.

10. Merrheim, one-time secretary of the French Metalworkers' Federation and co-author of
the Charter of Amiens, was one of the important figures of the anti-war movement in France
during the First World War. He was an active participant in the Zimmerwald Conference of
anti-war socialists.

11. Sobraniye uzakonenii 1917-1918, no. 4, art. 58.

12. I. Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions (Royal Institute for International Affairs, London, 1950)
p.17.

13. According to Carr (The Bolshevik Revolution, Vol. I I , p.73, Pelican edition 1966) 'in the
controversy behind the scenes which followed the publication of Lenin's draft, the trade
unions became the unexpected champions of order, discipline and centralised direction of
production; and the revised draft decree finally presented to V.Ts.l.K. on 14/27 November
1917 was the result of a struggle between the trade unions and the Factory Committees which
repeated the struggle at the October Conference. (The First All-Russian Conference of Factory
Committees had been held on October 17-22, 1917. - M.B.)

14. M. Brinton, op. cit., p.62.

15. L. Trotsky. Stalin. Hollis and Carter, London, 1947. p.61.

16. Lenin. Sochineniya, IV, 44.

17. M. Dobb. Soviet Economic Development since 1917. New York, 1948 pp.89-90.
FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT
ADDITIONAL NOTES
Further reply by Chris Goodey

It has become clear to me, as a result of the various responses to my article Factory
Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat which appeared in Critique no. 3, that
while some of the questions raised in it and some of the detail of the research have aroused
interest, the theoretical framework of the article is feeble and, where it exists, self-
contradictory. The following notes should be read as a kind of glossary to clarify some of the
terms used in that article. For the most part, the definitions have emerged from the detail.

1. "Self-management"
Self-management is a process, the management of society by itself. It is not a "structure" or
"model" of the socialist system.

On the one hand, therefore, it is not simply an aggregate of workers' and people's councils, at
either the economic or the political level or both. It is not some pure essence of socialism,
always present and possible in roughly the same form throughout its history. A society cannot
manage itself without overcoming the key division between mental and manual labour,
between managing and executing "management's" orders. A technological revolution affecting
the division of labour (e.g. computerisation and cybernetics, which in spite of the constraints
of the relations of production are functionally anti-bureaucratic) radically changes the already-
existing project for a self-managed society, and forces the revolutionary movement to make
an "on-line" intervention. Anyone examining 1917 must take into consideration the fact that
they are commuting across a transformation in science and technology.

On the other hand, self-management is not the icing on top of a cake, something irrelevant to
discussion about earlier periods and only put on the agenda because of the new,
technologically determined situation.

Ernest Mandel, for instance, in a discussion on "Workers' Self-Management"[1] , says that

"socialism is Soviets - that is to say workers' councils - electrification and television",
updating Lenin's famous formula in a way which for me is equally schematic as the "pure"
concept of self-management. As an "interpretation" or model (structure) of democratic
political or economic planning, self-management is an abstraction and it would be better not
to use the term. It can only be used to define what we mean by socialism to the extent that it
acts as a permanent catalyst, entering and transforming every aspect of social practice and
doing so permanently: this includes, for the purposes of this article, its retroactive effect on
revolutionary history (apart from a diversity of other aspects, e.g. relations of domination in
the party and the workers' organisation, in interpersonal and sexual relations, etc. )

2. "Internal dialectic"
"Dialectic" is, of course, the last resort of scoundrels. I shall try to give a clearer picture of
what lies behind the phrase which I loosely used in the previous article, the "internal dialectic
of the proletariat". When revolutionary historians focus on the proletariat, they tend to see
some kind of "ultimate proletariat", an irreducible entity (and in this sense, an object). There
are, of course, different ways of seeing the same thing. Some see the proletariat either as
cannon fodder for a pre-determined history which is the field of action of great heroes (a
Stalin, a Mao or - in the view of some of his followers - a Trotsky) or as some pure sanctuary
beyond which all extraneous material - "workers" parties, the results of recuperation, the
capitalist system itself - is lumped together and cast in the devil's role: these seem to me to be
the same concept, a sort of "wave theory" rather than a particle theory of the masses, which is
totalitarian. Others see the importance of examining the composition of the proletariat or of
the masses in general. But even then, they are more than the sum of their sectors, and this
becomes clear in a revolutionary situation, as I shall explain.

The crucial - and incorrect - word is "sum". If self-management is not a sum or aggregate of
councils but a process, then the proletariat and the masses in general are a field of sectoral and
individual interactions constituting life itself, a creating and negating cadre of activity. If we
make the proletariat the focus of our attention during a revolutionary period, what we find is a
complex field of tensions and intervals between various (shifting) sectors which are
interlocked with the concrete totality of the period: with the technological (skilled/unskilled),
political ("conscious"/"unconscious" ) and sexual-social (men/women/immigrant groups)
revolutions. This much is stating the obvious. It is probably meaningless to speak, as I did in
the original article, of "interactions" between the various sectors. As Karl Korsch has pointed
out, even Hegel noticed long ago that in an "interacting" relation, where A causes B which
causes A, no casual relation is established for either A or B. The crucial step is to see that
what constitutes the "energy" of the revolutionary process (the measure of its negation of
the ruling class) is precisely these intervals and tensions . If it is the antagonisms amongst
the bourgeoisie which produce the state, then it is the "antagonisms" (in fact, symptoms of the
"field" which I have described) amongst the proletariat which "produce" the overthrow of the
bourgeoisie and its state. This raises all kinds of questions which there is no room for here.
For the moment, this brief exposition is simply an attempt to clarify some of the vagueness in
the earlier article (see Critique no.3. especially pages 41-43).

3. "Direct and indirect forms of workers' power"

It is too easy to oppose the two forms. "Easy", because it takes us back to a pre-1917 world in
which there was a simple dividing line between friends and enemies, away from the
complexities of our real, transitional world. (This is not to deny that they have opposed each
other in actual fact, indeed this has been one of the key confrontations in the Russian and
other experiences: the mistake is to collapse the indirect forms into a lucky dip which also
contains the bourgeoisie, capital, trade unions, "recuperation" of all kinds.) On the other hand,
it now seems to me (and this is not made clear in the earlier article) the historian cannot
salvage very much from the Bolsheviks' simple conception of the relation between "direct"
and "indirect" forms of workers' power, between base councils and party or state, and that the
terms themselves conceal rather than express the reality.

One of the reasons for this is to be found in what has intervened historically between then and
now. Part of this was referred to in the article: the fact that in the Russian experience at least,
the indirect forms of power stayed alive partly by consuming the direct forms ("necessarily"
inasmuch as at that period it could not have happened the other way round). However there is
a further point: the fusion between party and state which took place immediately after and as a
consequence of that. There has been fifty years of marxist criticism of this fused
bureaucratisation. But criticism of the bureaucratic state has largely been made in the name of
a future withering away of the state or its transformation into a self-regulating mechanism of
the ensemble of self-managed councils (whether this happens in ze ... demands a transitional
period is irrelevant here); it has never been based on a desire to return to war communism or
the NEP ("Soviets", yes, but in a modern context). But criticism of the party, which has fused
with this state, is pointed in precisely the opposite direction, backwards in time towards a
pristine "Leninist" concept (which Leninist concept is another matter) of the party, a pure
essence decanted from its poisonous association with the bureaucratic state.

It seems to me not only equally one-sided to say (a) that the party is a vanguard whose job is
to be permanently at the head of the revolutionary forces or (b) that the party/club/group is
merely the expression of the proletariat's own activity, but also inadequate to refer (as Marcel
Liebman does - brilliantly and accurately - in Leninism under Lenin) simply to a party-
masses dialectic, in which the party is sometimes ahead of and sometimes (in revolutionary
periods) behind the masses: as if all that is needed today is a similar party. In all three cases
one remains locked in 1917. If this dialectic, which actually occurred between the Bolshevik
party and the masses in 1917, is to be preserved, it must be transformed. That, of course, is
not an original comment: what would be original is for it to be achieved, or even for some
theoretical guidelines to be worked out. It could only be done by jettisoning certain central
themes. Among these are the notion that there is either a necessary "balance" or a conflict
between democracy and centralism, in an age where the technological preconditions exist to
abolish the very distinction; the notion that the science of socialism stands "outside" the
producers when science itself has entered and become once and for all an inextricable part of
material production; and the assumed homogeneity of the revolutionary forces, when the
"internal composition" of the proletariat and the masses is fanning out into a complex field of
movement not simply demanding but imposing their autonomy. Finally, to bring the argument
back to the viewpoint of the revolutionary historian, it involves a change in the
historiographical approach. The question is not: how can we update the concept of the party
(ending up with a few embellishments on the Leninist theory of the vanguard), but: what
possible function in the future socialist society was the "party" a prototype of?

The relation between "direct" and "indirect" forms of workers' power is a question that may
have to be put in quite different terms, with the distinction removed. But a precondition of this
is to sort out the mess which the fusion between party and state has bequeathed to us.

A note on Brinton's reply

Maurice Brinton's reply in Critique no. 4 to my earlier piece raises some important points,
but as so often happens in these cases he appears to be replying to an article which I did not
write. I do not think it will be interesting or useful to repeat myself, and therefore in lieu of a
counter-response I would simply ask that interested readers should compare the two articles
and see if they too think that Brinton has ignored the main thrust of the argument and
attributed to me views about (for example) the influence of the civil war or the recuperation of
workers' leaders which I did not express in my article.

Apart from this, there is the question of the use of source materials and textual accuracy,
which I feel needs some further clarification. I reproached Brinton, on the issue of the
Practical Manual for the Execution of Workers' Control, for claiming to present a whole
set of "new facts" about the Russian revolution while using hardly any new source material
(something which his way with bibliographical footnotes somehow conceals). His response
rests on two points. The first is a printer's error in his book. On this I stand corrected. The
second is to interpose yet another piece of non-source evidence: Max Hoschiller's book, Le
Mirage du Sovietisme . Brinton thus acknowledges that he quoted Limon who quoted
Hoschiller who quoted the Manual: he evidently obtained it at third hand, rather than at fifth
hand as I had previously stated. Again, I stand corrected, and apologise for not checking the
facts. In fact Hoschiller (whose opinion of the "Bolshevik coup d'etat" is that it was a
"monstrous lock-out", because it provoked civil war and ruined industry) quotes only a few
passages from the Manual, in a fairly accurate translation from the Russian (the fate of these
in the hands of Limon and Brinton is another matter). For those who wish to examine the
Manual (a crucial document in the history of the Russian revolution because of its influence),
I will repeat the bibliographical information which I gave: it was published in full, under its
original title of "Draft Instructions on Workers' Control" in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo no. 1,
1918 (i.e. the text, written in November 1917, was reproduced in this journal), which is
available in Western Libraries and from which I translated the passage in my own article. It is
interesting to note that parts of it - including the essential parts quoted by Brinton and the rest
- are reprinted in Natsionalizatsiya promyshlennosti v SSSR2, written by the official Soviet
historian I.GIadkovin 1954 (not a peak year for anarcho-syndicalist tendencies in the
bureaucracy, one presumes); it is also interesting that he adds a footnote[3] which might well
have come from Brinton himself, writing with approval of how the Manual was published
separately as a brochure and was "famous throughout industrial Russia", and what an
important part it played in bringing about the flight of the bourgeoisie.

This is precisely the importance of the Manual: when it and the Lenin decree on workers'
control were presented to the employers as an ultimatum, they sparked off a chain reaction in
which the employers left and the factories were nationalised from below. As a blueprint for
workers' control it obviously conflicts with the Lenin decree: but the very act of presenting
either of them to the employers as a blueprint for workers' control in capitalist-owned
industry (and this is how both of them were planned, as the texts themselves and the
untruncated quotation in Hoschiller's book reveals) caused the capitalists to leave and an
entirely new situation, irrelevant to the Manual or Lenin's decree, to arise. (From Critique
no.5)

NOTES
1. In International, vol. 2 no. 3.

2. 'The Nationalisation of Industry in the USSR.

3. Ibid., p. 82.