Factory committees in 1918.pdf

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FACTORY COMMITTEES AND THE DICTATORSHIP OF THEPROLETARIAT (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 ofrevolutionary history has undoubtedly been caused by a surfeit ofanswers. This is especially true for the history of the Russianrevolution; this genesis point of our transitional world is rightly usedas a testing-ground for our conception of ourselves as a historicalmovement. The trouble has been that dogma and the most rigid kind

of orthodoxy have governed our approach. It is only the currentpractice and experience of the world movement for socialistrevolution 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 thelight of current knowledge and experience, and so I will take as astarting point my own belief that contemporary experience hasredefined 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 provethat this redefinition has a "global", overall validity. It is a socialism inwhich the direct forms of working people's power at the point ofproduction, distribution and social organisation have much greaterpotential power over historical development than fifty years ago,when neither the objective conditions nor the subjective capabilitieswere 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 itdoes mean is that their history has been hidden and ignored. Thedebate about the role of the factory committees in the Russianrevolution is largely a modern one. It has been initiated by thelibertarian tendencies of the left, and has caught the Marxist left andits allies in positions of frozen orthodoxy.



In any discussion about the ways through which the Russianproletariat exercised its dictatorship in the years immediately after therevolution, it has to be said that the objective conditions impoverishedthat experience. The restricting circumstances did not suddenly beginwith the Civil War; three and a half years of world war had alreadycompletely subordinated the productive life of the country in theinterests of West European imperialism, and the treaty of Brest-Litovsk alone deprived the new workers' state of 32% of its populationand 89% of its home-produced fuel supplies. Production statistics for1920, in ratio to those for 1913. were as follows - workers, 1:4;working hours, 1:8; productive capacity, 1:16.[2] The strike wave ofthe first half of 1920, when 77% of large and medium-sized Sovietfactories experienced strikes (mainly for food), and the eventualpolitical expression of this in the Kronstadt "third revolution",

therefore, took place in circumstances that were quite different evenfrom the extraordinary and chaotic "objective" situation of 1917.

The pioneering research on the factory committees done by writerswith broadly libertarian sympathies (e.g. F. Kaplan: BolshevikIdeology, or the work of R. V. Daniels and Paul Avrich) has been ofcrucial value in opening up an area where the Marxist left has not hadthe 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 bythe Bolsheviks under Lenin. Leninism is thus equated with Stalinism,and we are confronted with the perfect complement to Stalinism'slibelous claim to the Leninist tradition, a libel which is one of the majorobstacles in the fight for a socialist consciousness. It is an argumentthat almost totally ignores the tremendous weight of those "objectiveconditions".

It is entirely legitimate to oppose this argument by pointing out themitigating circumstances of the isolation of the revolution in the Civil

War, or even the pre-October circumstances, but it is certainly notenough. To oppose it with this response alone is to accept implicitlythe a-historical premise of the original argument: that is, that "if" it hadnot been for the Civil War (or, on the other hand, the inherenttotalitarianism of the Bolshevik idea), the Russian proletariat in 1917would have been able, without the aid of a party, without thetechnological 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 twoarguments thus share common ground.

They also share an apocalyptic vision of how democratic socialistdemocracy was in 1917, a mythological view of the soviets. This isnot to deny that socialist democracy did exist then, merely to suggestthat it should be analysed in terms more appropriate to historicalmaterialism than to religious mysticism. It is also part of therevolutionary process to demystify our own history.

A short analysis of the factory committees cannot do this. But it can atleast contribute to the preliminary debate, by making good themissing analysis in the discussion about revolutionary subjectivity -

that is, an analysis of the internal composition of the Russian workingclass, its organs of struggle and organisation, its relation to the party.In all the talk about "objective conditions" it is necessary to point outthat they form a unity, though a contradictory one, with thatsubjectivity; 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 therevolutionary process was at this level. The party convened regionaland then national conferences of what had till then been delegatecommittees isolated in the factories. It was these conferences, not thetown soviets, which discussed the essential practical questions ofworkers' 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 soon. The predominance of the Bolshevik party in these conferenceswas the basis of its predominance in the workers' sections of the

soviets and eventually in the soviets as a whole. In this was anapparent source of conflict: between the political strategy of theBolshevik party in which the factory committees were the rank-and-file to be deployed, and the aims of a working class which sought toextend the forms of its own direct power. Did the party use the factorycommittees for its own ends and, after October, suppress theirpotential 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 possibleat all?

We cannot answer the question either way until we find out, not whatthe aims of the proletariat were (or rather the aims of this or thatsection of it), but what the proletariat actually was. It is commonpractice to quote Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, oftenagainst Trotsky himself: "The soviets lagged behind the factorycommittees, the factory committees lagged behind the masses . . . .The masses showed themselves to be a 'hundred times to the left' ofthe leftest party" (i.e. the Bolsheviks).[3] Yet there is a factor inTrotsky's equation which is regularly overlooked, and that is therelation between the masses and the factory committees. It is a

grotesque mistake to assume that factory committees were theRussian proletariat. If, as the libertarian argument insists, there was anascent bureaucracy in 1917, then the factory committees were partof it. Their members' allegiance was as much to the workers' politicalparties to which they mostly belonged as to their factoryconstituencies. The memoirs of Bolshevik factory committee militantsare full of cheerful acknowledgments that they, like the partyprofessionals and the other parties, were continually taken aback bythe spontaneous thrust of mass revolutionary action, and were

forced, sometimes under the threat of violence at mass factorymeetings, to take their place at the front of demonstrations.[4] Aspolitical militants, they were a bridge between the party leadershipand the masses. As workplace representatives their main functionuntil June was to fight for collective bargaining procedures. Februarywas, after all, a bourgeois revolution; the rate of increase in bothprofits and investments actually rose sharply after that revolution, andonly began to fall, equally sharply, after the July days. Bourgeoisieand proletariat had fought for the same revolution. The unusualfeature of the fight was that even before February, the proletariat was

already challenging the capitalist class for control of the anti-Tsaristrevolution: there is evidence of this in the power-struggle betweenworkers' and employers' representatives on the Wan IndustryCommittees (the wartime production-boosting organs of jointconsultation). Thus the workers often found themselves fighting formore rational methods of capitalist production.



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

Therefore both the political and the factory-level distinctions betweenthe factory committees and their working-class base depended on amore fundamental distinction, that of skill. Dilution (razvodnenie) andde-skilling {dekvalifitsirovanie) were almost as much at issue inPetrograd as they were on Clydeside.[7] The war had produced achange and a cleavage in the proletariat by calling up large numbersof men and replacing them with women, immigrants and minors, thusintroducing the conditions for mass production. For the skilled

workers, dilution was both the zenith of their power and the beginningof the end. They had always had scarcity value, and this increasedduring the war, even as they were being squeezed out at the top tobecome supervisors, trainers, etc., for the new mass producers; theycould exploit this scarcity in "economic" terms (differentials increasedenormously during the war), but now they could also recruit a newand vibrant rank-and-file for their "political" ambitions. However, thebasis of their power was an obsolete, pre-war technology (productionbays, the seven-year apprenticeship); meanwhile peasant immigrantsand women, the new rank-and-file, were being trained in seven

weeks for work on adjacent rows of electric and pneumatic latheswhich destroyed the basis of the skilled turners' power, while givingthe latter an army to organise. It was a general Europeanphenomenon, but the opportunity to fuse these two major forces wastaken 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", meaningpeasant labourers) sitting on the factory committees;[8] the vastmajority of members are turners, fitters and electricians. (It is worthnoting in passing that the leading national figures in shop stewards' orworkers' council movements - Davy Kirkwood on Clydeside, RichardMuller in Berlin, Giovanni Parodi at FIAT Turin and Vlas Chubar' inPetrograd - were all skilled turners, born within a few years of eachother.)

Each thrust of "revolutionary spontaneity" came from the 'newproletariat', in February, July and the "nationalisations from below" ofearly 1918. In February it was the women workers who hadrampaged through the Petrograd factories bringing the rest out on

strike, against the orders of shop-floor representatives of allparties.[9] Yet once this revolution was accomplished, theconferences of factory committees only mention the women workersto refer to their "indiscipline", especially (and significantly) in thefactories where dilution was strongest. The electrical industry was theonly one where the absolute number of women taken on during thewar actually exceeded that of men; a month after the Februaryrevolution, the Central Council of Factory Committees in Petrogradmade 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 regrettedthat their understanding of the situation is weak, and so is theworkers' sense of organisation and proletarian discipline . . . . It hasbeen decided to delegate a comrade from the first reserve regimentto 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 codeword for revolutionary fervour, not for backwardness. Similar attitudeson the part of the factory committees towards peasant immigrantsand youth can be traced.[10]

Some recent writers have brought the discussion about the internalcomposition of the working class as far as this point - notably the



disciples of Mario Tronti, who have studied this period internationallyand in great detail.[11] They have made the point that the significanceof Petrograd was not its position as a westernised outpostsurrounded by a semi-feudal hinterland, but as part of a chain ofmunitions-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 wherethey saw the need for a political revolution going beyond thebourgeois state (i.e. in Petrograd and Turin), they still thought ofproduction and of their role in production in terms of the capitalistmode.

This analysis stands up to empirical scrutiny. Not only the Bolsheviks,

but Gramsci and Ordine Nuovo lamented the indiscipline of the newproletariat whom the "factory councils" had been designed toincorporate; they refer to traditional skilled workers as "the betterelements" 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 raiseproduction under their own management after February. On the otherhand, the new proletariat in Russia had names for the traditionalskilled workers - "the wise guys with their nuts and bolts",

"metalworkers' republics". The shop-floor organisers of the wholeclass mistook this hostility towards themselves, as a section, forbackwardness on the question of the class struggle: at certain keyconjunctures in the revolutionary process, the opposite wasmanifestly the case.

It is, however, to be regretted that having brought the historicalargument into wholly new territory, i.e. the internal composition of theworking class, the writers of this school then leave it there. In themanner of (bourgeois) sociology, they see the class structure of the

proletariat only as a structure, as a series of adjacent layers, one ofwhich plays an all-determining role. They have explored the internalcomposition, but not the internal dialectic. This leads them to dismisswhat Bologna calls "the self-management project" as the outmodedproperty of only one section of the class, moreover a project which isirrelevant 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 froman overall world analysis but from the highly specific conditions ofItaly, 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 tothat of Pannekoek, the Dutch council communists and theirdescendants, 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 projectwhich they both see structurally, as an institution. But in Russia, Italyand elsewhere, the role, functions and membership of shop-floorcouncils and committees could change rapidly and represent

complex, conflicting interests. They were less an institution withstable functions than the symptoms of a process in which the fightagainst the bourgeoisie in the factories was helped, and not onlyhindered, by the interaction between different sections of the workingclass; both sections played "leading", determining roles, but of quitedifferent kinds.

It is a commonplace that internal class antagonisms are sharpest in apre-Revolutionary situation (groups of workers in Ivanovo-

Voznesensk were having gun-battles with each other in 1916). The"antagonisms" between the factory committees and factoryassemblies, or between skilled and "new" workers, are lessantagonistic and more fruitful than might appear from the evidence sofar. (It may be argued that no one in their right mind would everquestion the unity of the working class in the Russian revolution, inthe first place. But taking such positions for granted is the first steptowards the kind of sterility which I have pointed to in the existingarguments; and, outside of certain left-wing milieux, there is no harmin asking questions.).

It would be a mistake to think that the sectional interests of the skilledworkers who formed the factory committees held back therevolutionary process, any more than they created it. Therevolutionary process was carried through by neither one section ofthe workers' movement nor the other, but precisely by the relationsbetween 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 appearsomewhat contradictory in relation to what I have just said. The termdescribes their view of themselves and the view of the other layers; itdoes not accurately describe the influence of both sections on theobjective developments. In February and July the masses in thefactories were "well to the left" of the committees and had sometimesto use violent intimidation to get their delegates to support insurgentaction. Can the latter still be called a vanguard, and why did theyusually remain in place? In the bigger factories, at least, the principleof instant recall of delegates (one of the most important features ofsocialist democracy) does not seem to have operated. The names of

committee officials tend to remain constant throughout 1917 in anyone factory, although the turnover of labour was colossal. The sourcedocuments of individual factory committees are very reticent abouttheir own mode of election or appointment, and where references dooccur there seems to have been some backstairs dealing betweenthe various political parties. In one example, where the SRs held amajority over the Bolsheviks, the July days (which discredited theSRs with the workers en masse) made a redistribution of places onthe factory committee inevitable. Factory militants of the two parties

tried to get a behind-the-scenes agreement between themselves, sothat there would be an increase in the number of committee placesfor the Bolsheviks at the expense of the SRs, reflecting the generalmood. It was only when the latter objected to the precise size of themajority claimed by the Bolsheviks that the issue was put to a vote ata mass meeting.[12]

The working masses, then, accepted the skilled committee layer astheir natural leaders. Socialist democracy reached a ceiling; the falseconsciousness of the proletariat in relation to its own revolutionary

leadership. This is the second reason, apart from the "authoritariannature of the Leninist party", that is deduced by the libertarianargument for the deformation of the Russian revolution, the evidenceis plentiful and has to be faced. Again, facing it and examining it is theonly 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? Theweakness of feudalism in Russia had been the vast size of theterritory which it had to cover with its primitive communicationstechnology. This vastness created a weakness in local administrationwhich was made up for by all kinds of institutions in which peasantsand artisans, lacking any external embodiment of political authorityapart from the priesthood, organised themselves for the purposes oftheir own subjugation to the Tsarist state. This was the meaning ofthe so-called primitive communism of the village commune, and ofthe artel system for artisans and labourers. These forms of self-organisation were inoculated against revolutionary or centrifugaltendencies by the internalisation of order and discipline throughreligion and the suppression of women and children, the severity ofwhich was quite special to Russia. Even by the time of the First World

War the commune system was still in substantial existence: thechornorabochie\n the advanced Petrograd factories were still hired inartel-type gangs which employed and paid themselves.

The collapse of the Tsarist system meant the collapse of the forms ofself-organisation which had underwritten that system. The old formswhich were being lost could not be separated from the new, socialistforms of self-organisation at the base. The factory committeesdeveloped out of "councils of elders" and often carried that name

through the revolutionary experience - the name of the villagecommune's governing body. In some ways this pre-capitalist traditionof self-organisation was fruitful in 1917. The practice of control frombelow did not just affect the factories but the whole of social life. Thebread queues, for example, were in actual fact rationing committees -each one had an elected committee which allotted places in thequeue 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, allcreated "soviets".[13] But this tradition was double-edged: at the very

point where their own direct power took the most advanced andprophetic forms, the masses carried through the ideological ballast ofthe previous society. "Tradition" contributed, but ambiguously.

The essence of the libertarian argument is that the level of productiveforces plays a less determining role in the development of historythan the existence of hierarchy: in the revolutionary process, that



hierarchy takes the form of "authoritarianism" among the leaders (inthis case the Bolshevik party), and "false consciousness" among themasses in submitting to what they consider their natural leaders. Butto put the attack on hierarchy in first place is in fact to reflect theauthoritarian principle which it wants to destroy. There was a wholepolitical movement, the SRs, which was built round the belief that theexisting forms of self-organisation could be developed through acultural revolution into communism, and which similarly ignored thevital role of the level of productive forces. They ignored it to the extentof fighting against the introduction of industry into Russia; at the sametime, they sought to develop a modern communist project directly outof a "primitive communism" which was in fact a perfected form ofinternalised authoritarianism, the backbone of the Tsarist state. It wasa self-defeating project. The post-1917 careers of the factory

committees and their leaders will show exactly how seriously thisquestion must betaken.

We should be grateful to the modern writers who have questioned thehomogeneity of the workers' movement as it is portrayed in the workof more orthodox historians (and this includes the "Trotskyist"movement, though Trotsky's own history does not deserve thisaccusation). The reluctance to analyse revolutionary subjectivity in allits complex internal richness is rooted in an irrational fear that to

probe too closely would reveal no unity at all, that the Russianworkers' movement was always divided into leaders and led withantagonistic interests, that the "enemy" argument might actually betrue. But in fact the libertarian argument, which is implied by all themodern researchers on the factory committees, can be nailed quiteeasily; it is a mundane question of doing the research, and the lessmundane one of seeing the need to do it.

Let us take one very specific example. Brinton's The Bolsheviks andWorkers' Control is not in itself a work of original research, but it

draws on most of the modern writers who have done research in thisarea. He develops an argument concerning the first months of Sovietpower that has been raised by all the modern researchers, but whichfirst appears in a pamphlet written by Kerensky in 1920.[14] Theargument is that Lenin and the Bolshevik leaders suppressed thefactory committees immediately on the seizure of power, becausethey held too much real power. There is, first of all, no doubt about



the fact that the factory committees were the most powerful institutionin Russia by the end of 1917, not only among the working class but inthe whole political life of the country: no one could move withoutthem. There is also no doubt about the fact that this power latersubmerged. Let us deal with the argument, rather than mutter somedismissive phrase about the party leadership being better able tocope with the long-term interests of the class than the class's ownrepresentatives. We have seen how there is a tendency in this kind ofargument to pose a divergence between the interests of the partyleadership and those of the working class, only to reconstruct themonolith as a homogeneous working class devoid of sectionalinterests. In this process the factory committees are collapsed into"the working class", whereas in fact, even if the original premise isaccepted - the divergence between the class and a nascent

bureaucracy - the committees belong to the latter. Brinton notes thatthe legislation on workers' control immediately after October waselaborated in totally different ways by Lenin and by the factorycommittee leaders.[15] His basis for this argument is a documentdrawn up by the Central Council of Petrograd Factory Committees onhow to run the new socialist economy, which was published in part inIzvestia [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 leadersto a debate summoned by the new Soviet government and involvingthe trade unions and government commissioners for the economy. Itlaid down the duties of the factory committees in precise detail -shop-floor duties for individual committees, and for the Central Council therunning of the department of the economy within the new state.

"Control must be understood as a transitional stage towardsorganising the whole economic life of the country according tosocialist principles; it is the first urgent step towards this from below,

and runs parallel with the work at the top, which is the centralorganisation of the national economy."

The étatist project dovetails perfectly here with the anarcho-syndicalist one; there is no irony in saying that workers' control isstate control on the shopfloor - the experience of bureaucratisationlies ahead, not in the past. The result of the debate was that the



factory committees' proposals were more acceptable to Lenin thanthose of either the trade unions or his economic experts, and notsimply for manipulative reasons: they were the only proposals whichwere based on the thoroughgoing destruction of the old stateadministrative apparatus, for reasons which I shall make clear lateron. The "work at the top" which the document refers to is VSNKh (theSupreme Council of the National Economy), which shortly afterwardswas set up on the initiative of the Central Council of FactoryCommittees itself (the evidence is their own),[18] and whicheventually became the organ for bringing local soviets to heel bywithholding credit and subjugating them to centralised state control.Yet this is the document which Brinton refers to as the great exampleof workers' management, of how the factory committees were at oddswith Lenin.

It makes an interesting digression to discover how he could havereached such a conclusion. His knowledge of the document is fifth-hand. It derives from an article by Didier L. Limon (Lénine et lecontrôle ouvrier), written in the late forties and reprinted in

Autogestion (no. 4, Paris, December 1967). This article derives itsknowledge from an article by Anna Pankratova, written in 1923 andtranslated in the same issue of Autogestion (Les comités d'usine enRussia).

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, itis evident that Lozovskii's pamphlet is the "original" secondary sourcefor the rest, since all four writers quote from only one, identicalpassage:

"Workers' control over industry, as an integral part of control over thewhole economic life of the country, should be understood not in the

narrow sense of a simple revision, but on the contrary in the broadsense of an intervention in the employers' decisions concerningcapital, stocks, raw materials and finished articles in the factory;effective supervision over the profitable and expedient execution oforders; the use of energy and labour power; and participation in theorganisation of production itself on a rational basis, etc., etc."



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

Lozovskii continually refers to the document by a title that was not thepublished one: when he quotes from it, he calls it the "PracticalManual for the Execution of Workers' Control". Pankratova takes overthis title from him, and also gets the date wrong: she dates it 6thFebruary 1918 (Lozovskii's pamphlet was written in November 1917).There are obvious "political" reasons for Stalin's rewriter-in-chief ofhistory books to do this, for the new date situates it after the first tradeunion congress and the fusion between unions and factorycommittees, instead of before. This erases from history theantagonism between the two (which forms the very basis ofLozovskii's polemic). Limon in the 1940s takes over the wrong title

and the wrong date, and adds his own embellishment: his quotationfrom the above paragraph ends abruptly at the word "intervention":this cuts out any reference to what is to be intervened in, and givesthe word an apocalyptic significance. At the same time. Limon hasdecided to change the authors of the document too - he refers tothem as "the non-Bolshevik leaders of the all-Russian Council ofFactory Committees".

Brinton thus takes over from Limon an amputated quotation bearing

the wrong date, the wrong title and the wrong authors. Then he getsto work himself. There is a passing reference to Limon's"sophisticated Leninist apologetics" (a facet of which is presumablyLimon's ability to read Russian, which Brinton cannot, in spite of thefact that he quotes the original source in impeccable Russian evenwhen he has obtained things from secondary and tertiary sources).Then, in addition to his inherited mistakes, he decides to re-write thetext:

"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 areform of institutions but in the widest possible sense: that of movinginto fields previously dominated by others. Control should merge intomanagement. [19]

By this time, any resemblance to the original quotation is purelycoincidental. That last sentence is in fact Limon's - it is Limon's



interpretative comment on the text (which he has misread by closingthe quotation at the word "intervention"). Brinton elects to includeLimon'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 emergeswith his particular set of conclusions; given this libertarian attitudetowards verifiable facts, one can see how the pumpkin turned into agolden coach. The "Draft Instructions" are perhaps the firstcontributory 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 orthodoxMarxist left. Writers like these have at least attempted to get aworms'-eye-view of the revolutionary process; from a book like IsaacDeutscher'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 athing as the working class existed, let alone any factory committees.

The factory committee layer, then, was closely associated from thevery beginning with the attempt to build a new, centralised economicapparatus, to raise the level of productive forces; the primacy of thistask was rejected by both the SRs and the tendencies to the left ofBolshevism. Is this to imply that the factory committee leaders hadalready become apparatchiks? If that is the case, then it must be

admitted that they had been so even from February (Vlas Chubar, forexample, had spent the entire February-October period in a roommarked nachalnik zavoda - works manager - in the Petrograd GunFactory as chairman of its factory committee). But this would thendestroy the argument that they were the "real" leaders of the workingclass. In fact, though, the Central Council was elected by a largedelegate conference of factory committees.

Looking at the later careers of the former factory committee leaders, itis certainly possible to talk about a process of bureaucratisation. But

if we trace those careers backwards, we can see that the process isgrounded in a more material condition than "false consciousness" orcareerism. Chubar' was shot in 1938 and elected to the SupremeSoviet in 1937. From 1934, when he was elected to the Politburo, hehad been known as an expert on capital formation in industry andwas critical of the "lack of financial discipline" in carrying out the first5-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 theUkrainian Socialist Republic, where he was one of the chiefexecutants of collectivisation: one of his aides there was MatveiZhivotov, who had been chairman of the factory committee at the"1886" power station in Petrograd in 1917, a member of the bureau ofthe Central Council of Factory Committees and at that time a notablyforthright attacker of "bureaucratic attitudes" among the partyprofessionals. In 1927 Chubar' and Skrypnik, another former memberof the bureau, were among the cheerleaders at the Party CentralCommittee meeting which shouted down Trotsky. From 1920 to 1923Chubar' was head of VSNKh in the Ukraine, in the company ofZhivotov and Artur Kaktyn', a Latvian journalist who had been co-opted on to the bureau of the Central Council of Factory Committeesin 1917. In 1920 Kaktyn' wrote a pamphlet called Edinyi

khozyaistvennyi plan i edinyi khozyaistvennyi tsentr ("The SingleEconomic Plan and the Single Economic Centre"). This pamphlet is apolemic in favour of the ideas of Eugene Varga, who had just startedto publish in Ekonomicheskaya Zhizn' ("Economic Life") the ideaswhich paved the way for the 5-year plans. Kaktyn's pamphlet gives abrief history of the factory committees in passing, and points out howthe 1917 plans of the Central Council of Factory Committees for thecreation of VSNKh were the ideal model for the "single economicplan". This was no false hindsight. The eyes of the factory committee

stratum had been turned in this direction from October. I shall try todemonstrate later the relation of this to the internal dialectic within theproletariat. For the moment, let us note that the question for thisstratum in the late 1920s was industrialisation at all costs; the costsincluded (for example) famine and massacre in the Ukraine, handingout favours to a non-socialist technocracy, and the elimination ofthose like Trotsky who counted these costs. For the former shop-floorleaders of the proletariat which in emancipating itself and liquidatingthe old apparatus had also virtually liquidated itself, the problem washow to create a new proletariat.

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



Shop-floor committees appear under the name of "councils of elders"from 1903 onwards: they exist only fitfully, as negotiating organsduring strikes (trade unions are effectively outlawed). They are afluctuating mixture of highly political militants and managementstooges, united by the fact that they are skilled workers.[20] Skilledmen are at a premium in a country where industrialisation took placein one go and where, less than a generation before, anything up to90% of the skilled workers in the big new factories were WestEuropeans; otherwise, the picture and the timetable correspond towhat is also happening in factories all over Europe.

In the First World War working-class political activity outside thefactory is still suppressed. As in the rest of Europe, political militants

are deliberately called up first, but arc sent back because they are allskilled workers who are now in even shorter supply. At the bosses'request, the Mensheviks and SRs participate in the establishment offactory-level War Industry Committees, which are intended to imitatethe West European forms of joint consultation and to boost munitionsproduction. The leader of the "workers' section" of these committeesis the Menshevik Kuz'ma Gvozdev, an electrician-fitter at the Ericsontelephone factory. The Bolsheviks attack the committees becausethey are against the war, and refuse to participate in elections to

them. But there is a whole new proletariat in the factories whichparticipates enthusiastically in the elections - not necessarily becausethey approve of the war, but because it means that there is someform of representation for them, that they can hold mass meetings,vote, etc. The Bolsheviks are then forced to recognise this new andvery real aspect of the situation, and participate half-heartedly in theelections. But even for the pro-war Mensheviks such as Gvozdev thesituation is ambiguous: they have in fact entered an anti-Tsaristrevolutionary alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie, and it is analliance in which they are already claiming seniority. In early 1916

militarisation of factory management becomes total; the Tsaristgovernment forces the industrial bourgeoisie to disband their"subversive" war industry committees and the workers' sections aresent to prison.[21]

At the turn of 1916-17 the vast new working class is leaderless. Thevanguard of the new elements is the women, whose experience of



the chaos and oppression covers most aspects of social and workinglife - they are the same women who organise the bread queues. Theyare the leaders of the "spontaneous process" of the Februaryrevolution. The very first demonstrations release Gvozdev fromprison: he initiates an Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet,which in turn convenes the Soviet itself (it has thus been created fromthe top down). The source of the revolutionary experience and itspolitical expression are as yet remote from each other.

Factory committees, in the sense of permanent organs of shop-floorrepresentation, spring up first in the dozen or so Petrograd ordnancefactories run directly by the Tsarist state[22] ; management inside thefactory has disappeared, and the workers elect their own, to look afterthe day-to-day running of production. In the other factories,

committees soon spring up to introduce a "modern" system of theeight-hour day and collective bargaining; the rate of private industrialinvestment shoots up, and until June most strikes are avoided at theeleventh 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-optBolshevik representatives to the meeting, who advise that a

conference of all the Petrograd factories should be convened; thistakes place at the beginning of June.[23] The spontaneity ofFebruary, the product of the "new proletariat" above all and"advanced" in a quite different sense, is channelled by the skilledfactory committee workers from its broad social course on to thefactory floor, to the "workers' control" slogan, to the preparation forpolitical control of the Soviet.

This "channelling" activity dams up the patience of workers in thelarger factories, which in June bursts; a rival "revolutionary centre"

temporarily draws away a significant number of factory committeesfrom the centre set up by the conference. It is non-party basically, butincludes some rank-and-file Bolsheviks from the Vyborg factories.This centre is one of the main bodies responsible for the agitationwhich culminates in the July days, which is in turn a "spontaneous"action which goes far beyond the immediate plans of most of thefactory committees, pushed unwillingly to the head of the



demonstrations. The July uprising is defeated, but the momentum ismaintained within the narrower context of the factory committeemovement: they channel the defeated thrust of the masses into amuch more aggressive form of workers' control. It is at precisely thispoint that the balance in the duality of power tips decisively towardsthe working class. The rate of investment falls like a stone from Julyonwards and the bourgeoisie starts to sabotage production; this inturn only increases the power of the factory committees as they takeover responsibility for getting things produced and for ensuringsupplies of fuel and raw materials. The second conference of factorycommittees in early August confirms this. The Kornilov revolt seeks torestore the status quo. Kornilov is not just any general but the manresponsible for militarising the labour force in Petrograd during thewar; his identity is a testimony to the power of the committees. The

Central Council of Petrograd Factory Committees takes a moredirecting role, especially in the formation of the Red Guard. When theBolshevik leaders, or rather Lenin alone, waits for the people to be onthe streets before taking responsibility for the October uprising, it isprecisely these people he is talking about - the hard core of thefactory committee leaders and the militia they had formed. It is not a"spontaneous" movement, but it fulfills the basic demands of what themasses fought for in July.

The October revolution intensifies the crisis of the bourgeoisie in thefactories, to the extent that "workers' control" over sabotage is nolonger effective - the sabotage is now taking the form of abandoningthe enterprises. Throughout the first few months of 1918, Lenin andTrotsky, supported by the former factory committee leaders, try tohold back the economic chaos. They plan nationalisation, which forthem means a pragmatic short-term attempt to bring certainindustries under state control for the purposes of capitaldevelopment, to limit rather than suppress the market and privateproperty (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 assignifying real socialisation; they carry out wildcat "spontaneous"nationalisations which undermine the basis of the negotiations goingon between Lenin and Trotsky and Western representatives forfinancial and technical assistance.[24] The Bolshevik leaders warnagainst this; but the masses carry on socialising enterprises from the



bottom up, in the name of the Soviet government which they aredefying but which they regard as theirs. ("False consciousness"? Or asophisticated grasp of the real situation, of the partial nature of theirown direct power?) Their defiance ensures that the Westernrepresentatives will not be enticed into real negotiations, that thecapitalist countries will invade, that the civil war will start in earnest,that the proletariat will have virtually disappeared by 1920. It is theRussian proletariat itself which has created these "objectiveconditions".

Between October and the middle of 1918 production is alreadycollapsing as a result of the imperialist war. The class struggle isgoing 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 wildcatnationalisations but simultaneously supports the view of Bukharin andthe "left" group that such nationalisations should be given de factorecognition. According to Kaktyn':

"The instructions on active workers' control elaborated by thePetrograd Council of Factory Committees led only to a generalchannelling of the overflowing, wide-ranging process of seizure of thefactories by the workers. Although it proceeded in an anarchic way,

accompanied by a similarly anarchic process of demilitarisation of themunitions industry, the importance of this colossal creative work wasenormous. It brought the solid basis of Soviet power." [25]

Unable to influence this class war, the Bolshevik leaders accusethese workers of having a "petty-bourgeois consciousness", of havinga cottage-industry mentality that looks on the factory as they wouldon a small private business of their own. Historians like Carr andeven Avrich, whom one might expect to be more sympathetic to theworkers' view, take this accusation at face value. In fact there are not

many people on any section of the left who disbelieve the story thatthe Russian workers were backward in this and were "too close to thesoil". It is a mistaken view, which results from studying too much ofthe polemic of the time and not enough about what the proletariatactually was. The women and youth among the "new proletariat"were largely from the families of urban workers who had been calledup,[26] and were certainly not "backward peasants"; on the other





locomotive-building shop and send them to fight the reaction. Thenon-party delegates, led by Oskar Vakkhanen, the sole anarcho-syndicalist delegate, complain that their skills are more urgentlyrequired in production since Russia is without railway engines. Thenon-party delegates have usually supported the Bolsheviks before,but Vakkhanen wins the vote.[28] He is certainly right about therailway engines, but his priorities are questionable. If we know nowthat the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be exercised in thepolitical sphere without also being exercised at the point of production(and this knowledge depends on our consciousness of theconsequences of bureacratisation), then the converse is also true:that the consolidation of a Soviet state whose existence was still indoubt at the time of this first "trade union debate" was theprecondition 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 cellsof the trade unions in January 1918 was not exactly a suppression ofthe former. It came only after the trade unions had accepted the lineof the Central Council of factory committees on economicdevelopment and the role of VSNKh. In this debate the CentralCouncil 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 weretherefore interested in preserving what was left of the existingstructure of national economic management. This was not just a"loyal" reproduction of the Leninist line, it was something of vitalinterest to the factory committees themselves. They united workersnot on the basis of craft but of the branch of production: theytherefore had an interest in a more fundamental reorganisation of thewhole economy, in which they genuinely saw state planning andcentralisation as the indispensable precondition of workers' control on

the spot. The factory committee leaders had emerged in 1917 as partof a highly skilled section of the working class and had actedaccordingly, maintaining and channelling the spontaneous creativityof the class as a whole towards political goals; this was a successfulprocess to which their sectional interests contributed, even wherethere was antagonism between these and the interests of the newproletariat. But now, in positions of power in the state apparatus,



removed from their immediate working-class context, theyrepresented the much more generalised interest of a class which hadto be re-formed along with the economy. And at the same time thesectional interest of the remaining handful of traditional skilledworkers still on the spot, their "craft status", became a much morereactionary interest, tied to the old economic apparatus. This is of theutmost importance in studying the changeover to collegiatemanagement in mid-1919. The former factory committee leadersapproved of the change from management by trade-union/factorycommittee cells to a system of increased participation by state andtechnicians (which already had a de facto existence). This does notmean they had already turned into petty bureaucrats - they foughthard against piecework, for example, which was reintroduced at thesame time. The opposition to collegiate management came from

people like Holzman, the metalworkers' union leader, who claimedthat by introducing it the party was "protecting unskilled workers andlabourers at the expense of 'industrial' groups of the proletariat"[30] ;this indicates that collegiate management was seen as a lowering ofstatus for the skilled workers who had naturally slid into the "workers'management" posts.

Overshadowing the question of what happened to the factorycommittees, however, are those statistics of Milyutin's on the decline

of productive capacity by 1920, which I quoted at the beginning. Thecareers 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 fromprison in 1920 - and sent to work for VSNKh. Vladimir Shatov,politically educated by the Wobblies and therefore closely associatedwith the "new proletariat", an anarcho-syndicalist member of theCentral Council of Factory Committees, the most coherent advocateof "workplace democracy before anything else" at the first trade unioncongress, became Minister responsible for the militarisation of labour

in the Far East - he spent 1920 ordering railwaymen to work fornothing.[31] The former factory committee leaders were working forVSNKh in 1920, bringing the last of the independent local Soviets toorder. The convergence of the Menshevik, Bolshevik and Anarcho-syndicalist careers rested on a more fundamental convergencebetween their ideas on how to run a socialist economy, which in turnwas determined by the productive and technological level available to



them. While the Bolshevik party were the political vanguard, the onlyparty with the revolutionary will and effective programme to create theconditions for raising this level, it was the shop-floor leaders inparticular who seemed to grasp the meaning of this for the future ofsocialism, and worked for "industrialisation at all costs".

The arguments presented here might seem like a justification ofStalinism. On the other hand, they could equally signify a ritual datingof the "degeneration" of the Russian revolution as beginning in 1920,though we really ought to be out of that particular wood by now. Theywould both be false assumptions. Whatever the later results, it wasthe internal dialectic of the Russian workers' movement and thedetonating role of this dialectic within the wider context of the classstruggle that produced our transitional world - from the civil war and

war communism, the introduction of NEP and the ending of therazverstka, to Stalinism itself and the current state of the worldrevolution. The "dictatorship of the proletariat" was indirect, and theindirect forms of workers' power - party and state - only survived atthe expense of the direct forms, of the self-managing organs at thebase. It is the classic instance of bureaucratic degeneration.Thermidor is not a date: it is a tendency inherent in those indirectforms of power, in the creation of any "workers' state" - it is inherentalways and from the beginning. A ritual precise dating of Thermidor is

the business of those who regard the history of the revolution as thehistory of the party, and the analysis of revolutionary subjectivity astaken for granted. The degeneration is not the personal property of aStalin or those who suffer from "false consciousness", it is rooted inour transitional material world.

This is not to assert that the "Leninist party" (of 1917) is somehow toblame for this degeneration. (Even in our present world, in spite of thefact 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 effectiveantibodies against that degeneration.). But among revolutionaryhistorians the mechanical exegesis of the history of the party has ade-dialectising influence on our revolutionary activity today. To referto the tradition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks by upholding the contentof the Bolshevik programme or the Leninist party schematically, asmodels for our activity today, is to deny that tradition. The Leninist



reference is to precisely the opposite, to all those elements which diddistinguish the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks, Anarcho-Syndicalistsetc. - to a creative audacity, to a willingness to jettison old modelsand go along with the revolutionary praxis of working people. Thecollective attempt to carry on this real "tradition" needs also todiscover its own history. (From Critique no.3)

NOTES

1. This article is an extended version of a paper given to the ThirdConference of Radical Soviet & East European Studies, BirminghamUniversity, 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 theJuly days in I. I. Gaza: Putilovets v trekh revolyutsiakh (Moscow1933).

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

6. V. Drobizhev and N. Dumova: V. Ya. Chubar': BiograficheskiiOcherk (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 mostcomprehensive 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 partitoalle origini del movimento consiliare (in Operai e Stato, Milan, 1972).

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

13. Eye-witness accounts by foreign observers are especiallyinformative in this respect; these examples are taken from JohnReed, 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" ( CaliforniaSlavonic 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); JacquesSadoul: 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", inQuellen 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 ofRussia (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 THEPROLETARIAT

Reply by Maurice Brinton

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

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



But elements of a serious critique antedated - and by a considerableperiod - 'May 1968 in France, the Prague events and the Chileanrevolution. Some of those who initiated this critique would moreovershudder to find themselves subsumed under the 'we' that Goodeyrefers 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 Russiansociety was moving and proclaimed a principled opposition, often atthe cost of their lives. It is a tragic fact, for which Leninists of all kinds(Stalinists, Trotskyists, Maoists, and the advocates of various theoriesof 'state capitalism', i.e. International Socialists, Bordigists, 'Marxisthumanists', etc.) must carry their full share of responsibility that weknow less today about the early weeks of the Russian Revolutionthan we do, for instance, about the history of the Paris Commune.

'Unfortunately it is not the workers who write history. It is always "theothers".[1] 'Official' historians seldom have eyes to see or ears tohear the acts and words which express the autonomous activity of theworking class. They think in terms of institutions, congresses,leaders. In the best instances they will vaunt rank and file activity aslong as it coincides with their own conceptions. But they 'will radicallycondemn it or impute the basest of motives to it as soon as it deviatesfrom that line'.[2] They seem to lack the categories of thoughtnecessary to perceive life as it really is. To them an activity which has

no leader or programme, no institutions and no statutes, can only beconceptualised as 'troubles' , 'disorder', 'anarchy'. In the words ofCardan[3] 'the spontaneous activity of the masses belongs, bydefinition, to what history suppresses'.

Goodey is correct when he claims it is 'part of the revolutionaryprocess to demystify our own history' and when he points out that thestruggle for 'direct forms of working peoples' power at the point ofproduction' has been 'hidden and ignored'. (The formulation in thepassive is, however, disingenuous. By whom was it hidden? And why

was it ignored?) But he is profoundly wrong when he attributes thissilence of the 'Marxist left' to such ideological shortcomings as lack of'temerity' or insufficient 'capacity for self-criticism'. A properevaluation of these matters cannot but lead, for anyone with evenmoderate pretensions to intellectual honesty, to a complete breakwith Leninism in all its aspects and to a re-examination of certainbasic Marxist beliefs.



A steady trickle of documentation is now coming to light concerningthe role of the Factory Committees in the Russian Revolution.[4]Goodey sees these committees as 'the most powerful institution inRussia by the end of 1917' and in this he is certainly right. He is alsocorrect in claiming that 'this power later submerged'. What is lackingin his article, however, is a serious attempt to explain what happenedin between, when it happened, why it happened, and to whom ithappened. The 'submergence' of which Goodey speaks was welladvanced, if not virtually completed, by May 1918, i.e. before the CivilWar and the 'Allied' intervention really got under way. The traditionalexplanations of the degeneration of the Russian revolution are justnot good enough.

In my view, Goodey's silence on these essential questions isunavoidable. It flows directly from his honestly declared politicalposition. He sees Party and State as 'indirect forms of workers'power, and explicitly absolves the Leninist Party from any blame inthe degeneration. He claims that 'even in our present world, in spiteof the fact that bureaucratic degeneration is inherent in the "workers'state" and the "workers' party", these are still the necessarycomplement to forms of direct workers' power. He only conceivesthese forms of direct workers' power as 'effective antibodies against

that degeneration'. He nowhere posits them as the necessarilydominant units in the initiation of policy, in other words as the basicnuclei of the new society. With this kind of overall outlook a seriousanalysis of the smashing of the Factory Committees is virtuallyimpossible, for the Bolshevik Party was to play a dominant rote in thistragedy. There is nothing more Utopian than the belief that theRussian working class could have maintained its power through a'workers' party' or a 'workers' state' when it had already lost thatpower at the point of production.

I have elsewhere[5] sought to bring together material from disparatesources and to document as concisely and yet as fully as possible thevarious stages of a process which led, within the short period of fouryears, from the tremendous upsurge of the Factory Committeemovement (a movement which both implicitly and explicitly sought toalter the relations of production) to the establishment of unquestioneddomination by a monolithic and bureaucratic agency (the party) over



all aspects of economic and political life. I argued that as this agencywas not itself based on production, its rule could only epitomise thecontinued limitation of the authority of the workers in the productiveprocess. This necessarily implied the perpetuation of hierarchicalrelations within production itself, and therefore their perpetuationwithin society at large.

It is impossible, within the space available, to recapitulate all theevidence here. The first stage of the process under discussion wasthe subordination of the Factory Committees to the All-RussianCouncil for Workers' Control in which the unions (themselves alreadystrongly under Party influence) were heavily represented. This tookplace very shortly after the coming to power of the SovietGovernment.

The second phase - which almost immediately followed the first - wasthe incorporation of this All-Russian Council for Workers' Control intothe Vesenka (Supreme Economic Council), even more heavilyweighted in favour of the unions, but also comprising direct nomineesof the State (i.e. of the Party). By early 1918 the Bolsheviks wereactively seeking to merge the Committees into the trade unionstructures. 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 maintainthe autonomy of the Committees, against the advice of Ryazanovwho urged the Committees 'to commit suicide by becoming anintegral element of the trade union structure'.[6] During the next twoyears a sustained campaign was waged to curb the power of theunions themselves, for the unions, albeit in a very indirect anddistorted way, could stiff be influenced by the working class. It wasparticularly important for the new bureaucracy to replace this powerby the authority of direct Party nominees. These managers andadministrators, nearly all appointed from above, gradually came to

form the basis of a new ruling class. The important point, as far as there-evaluation of history is concerned, is that each of these steps wasto be resisted, but each fight was to be lost. Each time, the'adversary' appeared in the garb of the new 'proletarian' power. Andeach defeat was to make it more difficult for the working class itselfdirectly to manage production, i.e. fundamentally to alter its status asa subordinate class.



Goodey claims that the 'essence of the libertarian argument is thatthe level of the productive forces plays a less determining role in thedevelopment of history than the existence of hierarchy: in therevolutionary process that hierarchy takes the form of"authoritarianism" among the leaders (in this case the BolshevikParty) and "false consciousness" among the masses in submitting towhat they consider their natural leaders. It is difficult to know fromwhere he can derive such a crudely psychological formulation of thelibertarian case. As far as I know, no libertarian has argued that thelevel of the productive forces is either 'more' or 'less' important thanthe role of ideas and attitudes in influencing historical development.Both are important. What libertarians have stressed (and mostMarxists have signally refused to recognise) is that the conceptions

and attitudes of the dominant Party were as much an objective fact ofhistory - influencing the evolution of events at critical moments - aswere production statistics for electricity or steel.

Goodey claims that the libertarian argument 'can be nailed quiteeasily' and I find it a compliment that he should choose my essay onwhich to practice his skills as a carpenter. He focusses attention onone particular episode I describe in the hope that by challenging itsfactual accuracy he can somehow impugn the credibility of the rest.

He correctly defines the area of the discussion. The argument is thatLenin and Bolshevik leaders suppressed the factory committeesimmediately on the seizure of power, because they held too muchreal power.

Right on! Goodey is also correct in attributing to me the view 'thelegislation on workers' control immediately after October waselaborated in totally different ways by Lenin and by the factorycommittees' 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 bycertain members of the Central Council of Petrograd FactoryCommittees on how the economy should have been run immediatelyafter the October events. I am quite prepared to take up the challengeon this rather narrow basis. According to Goodey (and he devotesthree pages to the matter) my knowledge of the document in questionwas 'fifth hand'. I had inherited from one Didier Limon 'an amputated



quotation, bearing the wrong date, the wrong title, and the wrongauthors'. I had then 'rewritten the text'. Strong stuff. Unfortunately, onevery single point Goodey is wrong.

According to Goodey the fateful history of this document was asfollows. It was originally published in part in Izvestia (December 7,1917) and fully in Narodnoe Khozyaistvo (no. 1, 1918). Lozovski, aBolshevik trade unionist, allegedly altered its title from 'DraftInstructions on Workers Control' to 'Practical Manual for theExecution of Workers Control'. This was done in his book RabochiiKontrol which according to Goodey was written 'in November of1917'. (Goodey does not explain how Lozovski could, in November1917, have been distorting the title of a text that had not yet beenpublished, but this is a minor point.) Then, still according to Goodey's

chronology, Pankratova took up the text in her writings of 1923. Forreasons of her own she dated it February 6, 1918 (i.e. after the FirstTrade Union Congress, which sought to 'fuse from above' the FactoryCommittees and the Unions). Goodey is to be congratulated indetecting this early piece of falsification by one of Stalin's pethistorians. But the relevance of this to what either Limon or I wrotetotally escapes me: neither of us gave the wrong date for the textunder discussion.

According to Goodey, Limon takes over from Pankratova 'the wrongtitle and the wrong date and adds his own embellishments'. Hetruncates a quotation in the text and changes the authorship of theoriginal 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] fromsomeone who had seen the document at first hand, and beforePankratova had even thought of writing about it. I have also seen thisoriginal source. Even Goodey could have had access to it, had he

been less concerned in proving the bad faith of those he disagreeswith politically, and had he chosen to check with Limon. (Limon is,after all, on the Editorial Board of Autogestion, for which paperGoodey is the 'correspondent for Great Britain').

The 'original' source is Chapter 8 Les Soviets d'Usine a I'oeuvre') ofMax Hoschiller's book Le Mirage Sovietique (Payot, Paris, 1921).



Hoschiller was a French revolutionary who spoke Russian well. Theauthenticity of his account is vouched for by no less a figure than

Andre Merrheim[10] who wrote the Preface to Hoschiller's book. Itwas in fact at Merrheim's suggestion that Hoschiller went to Russia.

Now what does Hoschiller say a) as to the authorship, b) as to thetitle, and c) as to the content of the controversial document?Hoschiller makes it clear that in the weeks preceding the revolution itwas the anarchists who were striking the tune ('donnaientle la') in theFactory Committees and that the Bolsheviks could only trail alongafter them Cetaient bien obliges de marcher a leur remorque'). OnDecember 7, 1917, the decree setting up the Vesenkha (SupremeEconomic Council) was promulgated.[11] The Vesenkha comprisedsome members of the All-Russian Council of Workers Control (a very

indirect sop to the Factory Committees), massive representation of allthe new Commissariats and a number of experts, nominated fromabove, in a consultative capacity. According to Hoschiller the leadersof the Factory Committees, dissatisfied with Lenin's concessions('mecontents en depit de toutes les concessions du chef dugouvernement') did not implement the decisions but elaborated theirown decree in the form of a Practical Manual for the Implementationof Workers Control ('elaborerent leur propre decret sous forme d'unManuel 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 thestreets of Petrograd. He has clearly seen the original, which is morethan can be said with any confidence of Lozovski, Pankratova . . . oreven of Goodey.

Goodey then takes issue with Limon's attribution of this text to the'non-Bolshevik leaders of the All-Russian Council of FactoryCommittees'. Is he really suggesting that the Manual was a Partydocument? 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'. Buteven Deutscher is forced to point out that such demands werediametrically opposed to Party policy at the time. 'A few weeks afterthe upheaval the Factory Committees attempted to form their ownnational organisation. . . . The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade



unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet State and todiscipline the Factory Committees. The unions came out firmlyagainst the attempt of the Factory Committees to form a nationalorganisation of their own. They prevented the convocation of aplanned All-Russian Congress of Factory Committees'.[12] It illbehoves various Bolsheviks, after all this, to denounce the factoryCommittees as only having had parochial preoccupations.

Two other facts stress the wide divergence of approach alreadyobvious at this stage between the Leninists and the leaders of theFactory Committees. First the very real difficulties Lenin experiencedin getting wide support for his 'Draft Decrees on Workers Control'.These were originally published in Pravda (on November 3, 1917) butonly ratified by the V.Ts.l.K. (All-Russian Central Executive

Committee of the Soviets) eleven days later after heated oppositionfrom the rank and file of the Factory Committees. Secondly the factthat Izvestiya (December 13, 1917) found it necessary to publish atext (General Instructions on Workers Control in Conformity with theDecree of November 14) which became widely known as theCounter-Manual.

Concerning the substance of the passage under dispute Hoschiller'stext makes it crystal clear that Limon has 'amputated' nothing.

Quoting from the Introduction to the Manual, Hoschiller (p.167) writesthat workers' control 'ne doit pasetre considere dans le sens etroitd'une revision mais dans le sens plus large de "I'ingerance"/ Fullstop. (A full stop put by Hoschiller, not by Limon. And a reasonableplace, I would have thought, at which to end a quotation.) That myown reference to this document included, through the carelessness ofa misplaced unquote, a few words that were Limon's hardlyconstitutes 'rewriting the text' and alters precisely nothing to thesubstance 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 secondarysource of all the rest. No wrong dates inherited from Pankratova. NoLimon changing the authorship of the document. No truncating ofquotations. All these are figments of Goodey's imagination and heshould clearly stop prattling about 'attitudes to verifiable facts'. If thisis really the best your contributor can do to 'nail' the libertarian



argument those who manufacture bandages for sore thumbs are infor a boom.

But let us return to the main argument. Goodey claims that 'if . . .there was a nascent bureaucracy in 1917, then the FactoryCommittees were part of it'. This is totally to misunderstand theconcept of bureaucracy. It attributes to the word a restricted meaning,of little value to those who seek radically to change society. Theclassical Marxist conceptions are here totally inadequate. Abureaucracy is not just 'officialdom' or a 'social stratum enjoyingcertain material privileges' or a 'gendarme, ensuring a certain patternof distribution under conditions of want'. If the concept of self-management is to have any meaning a bureaucracy must be seen asa group seeking to manage from the outside the activities of others. If

that group has a monopoly of decisional authority, its bureaucraticpotential will be vastly enhanced. In this sense if there was a nascentbureaucracy by the end of 1917 in Russia it was certainly not to befound in the Factory Committees. It was to be found in the Party itself.Certain Party attitudes here played a very important role. Trotskyhimself (if we must refer to him) perceptively described all this.

Referring to the Third Party Congress (April 25-May 10,1905) hespoke of 'the young revolutionary bureaucrat already emerging as a

type. (They were) far more intransigent and severe with therevolutionary working men than with themselves, preferring todomineer'.[15] No less a man than Lenin had written that 'a workeragitator who shows any talent should not work in the factory'.[ 16] Is itany wonder that with these conceptions the Party soon lost all contactwith the class? Goodey seeks to prove his point that the FactoryCommittees belong to the nascent bureaucracy by looking at the latercareers of certain Factory Committees' leaders: men such as Chubar,Matvei, Zhivotov and Skrypnik. That non-Bolshevik leaders of theFactory Committees later supported the Bolsheviks is indisputable.

But so what? It is not unknown for individual shop stewards to end upas foremen. Does this really prove anything beyond the capacity ofestablished power, in its various garbs, to recuperate dissent? Doesthe fact that Alexandra Kollontai later became a Stalinist ambassadorinvalidate her earlier writings on the emancipation of women? DoesTrotsky's later Bolshevism invalidate his prophetic warnings of 1904on 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 thepersonnel of the Factory Committees (and not to just a few of theirleaders) a fruitful area might be the history of the various syndicalistgroups, and in particular of the 'Revolutionary Center of FactoryCommittees', a body of anarchist inspiration which competed for-awhile with the All-Russian Council of Factory Committees, withoutever succeeding in supplanting it, so many were the obstacles put inits path. The search will, I suspect, prove disappointing. Systematicpersecution of 'left' dissidents soon became a way of life. Proletarianpartisans of the individual Factory Committees tried to resist and toregroup but their resistance was easily overcome. The search mightalso 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 asearch will reveal - and of this there can be little doubt - is that thesegroups had perceived (as early as 1921, without the privilege ofhindsight, and far more clearly than does Chris Goodey) that the'dictatorship of the proletariat' had been liquidated paripassu with theliquidation 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 labureaucratie'. Socialisme ou Barbarie no. 35 (January-March 1964).This text was subsequently published in English as SolidarityPamphlet 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'nykhsoiuzov, Yanvarya 1918 g (First All-Russian Congress of TradeUnions, 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 thetime 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 theimportant figures of the anti-war movement in France during the FirstWorld War. He was an active participant in the ZimmerwaldConference 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 whichfollowed the publication of Lenin's draft, the trade unions became theunexpected champions of order, discipline and centralised direction

of production; and the revised draft decree finally presented toV.Ts.l.K. on 14/27 November 1917 was the result of a strugglebetween the trade unions and the Factory Committees whichrepeated the struggle at the October Conference. (The First All-Russian Conference of Factory Committees had been held onOctober 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 THEPROLETARIAT ADDITIONAL NOTESFurther reply by Chris Goodey

It has become clear to me, as a result of the various responses to myarticle Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariatwhich appeared in Critique no. 3, that while some of the questionsraised in it and some of the detail of the research have arousedinterest, the theoretical framework of the article is feeble and, where itexists, self-contradictory. The following notes should be read as akind of glossary to clarify some of the terms used in that article. Forthe most part, the definitions have emerged from the detail.

1. "Self-management"Self-management is a process, the management of society by itself. Itis 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 orboth. It is not some pure essence of socialism, always present andpossible in roughly the same form throughout its history. A societycannot manage itself without overcoming the key division betweenmental and manual labour, between managing and executing

"management's" orders. A technological revolution affecting thedivision of labour (e.g. computerisation and cybernetics, which inspite of the constraints of the relations of production are functionallyanti-bureaucratic) radically changes the already-existing project for aself-managed society, and forces the revolutionary movement tomake an "on-line" intervention. Anyone examining 1917 must takeinto 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 puton the agenda because of the new, technologically determinedsituation.

Ernest Mandel, for instance, in a discussion on "Workers' Self-Management"[1] , says that "socialism is Soviets - that is to sayworkers' councils - electrification and television", updating Lenin'sfamous 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 theextent that it acts as a permanent catalyst, entering and transformingevery aspect of social practice and doing so permanently: thisincludes, for the purposes of this article, its retroactive effect onrevolutionary history (apart from a diversity of other aspects, e.g.relations of domination in the party and the workers' organisation, ininterpersonal and sexual relations, etc. )

2. "Internal dialectic"

"Dialectic" is, of course, the last resort of scoundrels. I shall try to givea clearer picture of what lies behind the phrase which I loosely usedin the previous article, the "internal dialectic of the proletariat". Whenrevolutionary historians focus on the proletariat, they tend to seesome kind of "ultimate proletariat", an irreducible entity (and in thissense, an object). There are, of course, different ways of seeing thesame thing. Some see the proletariat either as cannon fodder for apre-determined history which is the field of action of great heroes (aStalin, a Mao or - in the view of some of his followers - a Trotsky) oras some pure sanctuary beyond which all extraneous material -

"workers" parties, the results of recuperation, the capitalist systemitself - is lumped together and cast in the devil's role: these seem tome to be the same concept, a sort of "wave theory" rather than aparticle theory of the masses, which is totalitarian. Others see theimportance of examining the composition of the proletariat or of themasses in general. But even then, they are more than the sum oftheir sectors, and this becomes clear in a revolutionary situation, as I



shall explain.

The crucial - and incorrect - word is "sum". If self-management is nota sum or aggregate of councils but a process, then the proletariat andthe masses in general are a field of sectoral and individualinteractions constituting life itself, a creating and negating cadre ofactivity. If we make the proletariat the focus of our attention during arevolutionary period, what we find is a complex field of tensions andintervals between various (shifting) sectors which are interlocked withthe concrete totality of the period: with the technological(skilled/unskilled), political ("conscious"/"unconscious" ) and sexual-social (men/women/immigrant groups) revolutions. This much isstating the obvious. It is probably meaningless to speak, as I did inthe 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 casualrelation is established for either A or B. The crucial step is to see thatwhat constitutes the "energy" of the revolutionary process (themeasure of its negation of the ruling class) is precisely these intervalsand tensions . If it is the antagonisms amongst the bourgeoisie whichproduce the state, then it is the "antagonisms" (in fact, symptoms ofthe "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 themoment, this brief exposition is simply an attempt to clarify some ofthe vagueness in the earlier article (see Critique no.3. especiallypages 41-43).

3. "Direct and indirect forms of workers' power"It is too easy to oppose the two forms. "Easy", because it takes usback to a pre-1917 world in which there was a simple dividing linebetween 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 keyconfrontations in the Russian and other experiences: the mistake is tocollapse the indirect forms into a lucky dip which also contains thebourgeoisie, capital, trade unions, "recuperation" of all kinds.) On theother hand, it now seems to me (and this is not made clear in theearlier article) the historian cannot salvage very much from theBolsheviks' simple conception of the relation between "direct" and



"indirect" forms of workers' power, between base councils and partyor state, and that the terms themselves conceal rather than expressthe reality.

One of the reasons for this is to be found in what has intervenedhistorically between then and now. Part of this was referred to in thearticle: the fact that in the Russian experience at least, the indirectforms of power stayed alive partly by consuming the direct forms("necessarily" inasmuch as at that period it could not have happenedthe other way round). However there is a further point: the fusionbetween party and state which took place immediately after and as aconsequence of that. There has been fifty years of marxist criticism ofthis fused bureaucratisation. But criticism of the bureaucratic statehas largely been made in the name of a future withering away of the

state or its transformation into a self-regulating mechanism of theensemble of self-managed councils (whether this happens in ze ...demands a transitional period is irrelevant here); it has never beenbased on a desire to return to war communism or the NEP ("Soviets",yes, but in a modern context). But criticism of the party, which hasfused with this state, is pointed in precisely the opposite direction,backwards in time towards a pristine "Leninist" concept (whichLeninist concept is another matter) of the party, a pure essencedecanted from its poisonous association with the bureaucratic state.

It seems to me not only equally one-sided to say (a) that the party is avanguard whose job is to be permanently at the head of therevolutionary forces or (b) that the party/club/group is merely theexpression of the proletariat's own activity, but also inadequate torefer (as Marcel Liebman does - brilliantly and accurately - inLeninism under Lenin) simply to a party-masses dialectic, in whichthe party is sometimes ahead of and sometimes (in revolutionaryperiods) behind the masses: as if all that is needed today is a similarparty. In all three cases one remains locked in 1917. If this dialectic,

which actually occurred between the Bolshevik party and the massesin 1917, is to be preserved, it must be transformed. That, of course, isnot an original comment: what would be original is for it to beachieved, or even for some theoretical guidelines to be worked out. Itcould only be done by jettisoning certain central themes. Amongthese are the notion that there is either a necessary "balance" or aconflict between democracy and centralism, in an age where the



technological preconditions exist to abolish the very distinction; thenotion that the science of socialism stands "outside" the producerswhen science itself has entered and become once and for all aninextricable part of material production; and the assumedhomogeneity of the revolutionary forces, when the "internalcomposition" of the proletariat and the masses is fanning out into acomplex field of movement not simply demanding but imposing theirautonomy. Finally, to bring the argument back to the viewpoint of therevolutionary historian, it involves a change in the historiographicalapproach. The question is not: how can we update the concept of theparty (ending up with a few embellishments on the Leninist theory ofthe vanguard), but: what possible function in the future socialistsociety was the "party" a prototype of?

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

A note on Brinton's replyMaurice Brinton's reply in Critique no. 4 to my earlier piece raisessome important points, but as so often happens in these cases heappears 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 ofa counter-response I would simply ask that interested readers shouldcompare the two articles and see if they too think that Brinton hasignored the main thrust of the argument and attributed to me viewsabout (for example) the influence of the civil war or the recuperationof workers' leaders which I did not express in my article.

Apart from this, there is the question of the use of source materialsand textual accuracy, which I feel needs some further clarification. Ireproached 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 newsource material (something which his way with bibliographicalfootnotes somehow conceals). His response rests on two points. Thefirst is a printer's error in his book. On this I stand corrected. Thesecond is to interpose yet another piece of non-source evidence: MaxHoschiller's book, Le Mirage du Sovietisme . Brinton thus



acknowledges that he quoted Limon who quoted Hoschiller whoquoted the Manual: he evidently obtained it at third hand, rather thanat fifth hand as I had previously stated. Again, I stand corrected, andapologise for not checking the facts. In fact Hoschiller (whose opinionof the "Bolshevik coup d'etat" is that it was a "monstrous lock-out",because it provoked civil war and ruined industry) quotes only a fewpassages from the Manual, in a fairly accurate translation from theRussian (the fate of these in the hands of Limon and Brinton isanother matter). For those who wish to examine the Manual (a crucialdocument in the history of the Russian revolution because of itsinfluence), I will repeat the bibliographical information which I gave: itwas published in full, under its original title of "Draft Instructions onWorkers' 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 thepassage in my own article. It is interesting to note that parts of it -including the essential parts quoted by Brinton and the rest - arereprinted in Natsionalizatsiya promyshlennosti v SSSR2, written bythe official Soviet historian I.GIadkovin 1954 (not a peak year foranarcho-syndicalist tendencies in the bureaucracy, one presumes); itis also interesting that he adds a footnote[3] which might well havecome from Brinton himself, writing with approval of how the Manualwas published separately as a brochure and was "famous throughout

industrial Russia", and what an important part it played in bringingabout the flight of the bourgeoisie.

This is precisely the importance of the Manual: when it and the Lenindecree on workers' control were presented to the employers as anultimatum, they sparked off a chain reaction in which the employersleft and the factories were nationalised from below. As a blueprint forworkers' control it obviously conflicts with the Lenin decree: but thevery act of presenting either of them to the employers as a blueprintfor workers' control in capitalist-owned industry (and this is how both

of them were planned, as the texts themselves and the untruncatedquotation in Hoschiller's book reveals) caused the capitalists to leaveand an entirely new situation, irrelevant to the Manual or Lenin'sdecree, to arise. (From Critique no.5)

NOTES1. In International, vol. 2 no. 3.



2. 'The Nationalisation of Industry in the USSR.

3. Ibid., p. 82.

Documents

Factory committees in 1918.pdf