This book explores the impact of the 1917 Revolution on factory life
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- purposes (as when the bourgeoisie used it with the aim of promoting private accumulation) or
- Notes INTRODUCTION T. Skocpol
- Excellent accounts of the general developments of the Russian Revolution are available in the following works: J.L.H. Keep
- (London, Routledge, 1980). The July Days are examined in A. Rabinowitch
- (New York, Scribners, 1967) and A. Rabinowitch
- (Columbia University, Ph.D., 1962); R.J. Devlin
- (London, New Left Books, ; R. Hyman
- V.I. Lenin, ‘What is to be done’
- issue 1 (Petrograd, 1920), p. 10. Estimates vary from 2.3 million to 2.7 million. A.G. Rashin
- A.G. Rashin
- A more detailed statistical discussion of the demographic structure of St Petersburg can be found in: S.A. Smith
- (Petrograd, 1916), p.8.
- vol.i, pp.403-5.
Conclusion The labour movements of Western Europe were dominated by skilled artisans for most of the nineteenth century. Trades, such as tailors, shoemakers, cabinet-makers, carpenters and the building trades, spearheaded the radical and labour movements.1 In contrast, the factory proletariat, which consisted to a large extent of women and children, was, with certain exceptions, badly organised and political- ly quiescent.2 Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did trade unionism begin to expand beyond the ranks of an elite of artisans and skilled factory craftsmen. The evolution of the Petrograd labour movement was far more telescoped that its counterparts in the countries of Western Europe. Although the number of strikes and informal labour organisations grew rapidly during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was not until the 1905 Revolution that a formal labour movement was inaugurated. Although artisans played an important part in creating trade unions and socialist organisations,3 by 1917 the labour movement of the Russian capital was based predominantly on workers in factory industry, workers employed in huge enterprises which were among the most modern in the world. Whilst this working class corresponded in some respects to the Marxian model of the modern working class, since it was employed in large-scale machine industry, in other respects, it was not yet a fully-developed proletariat. Within its ranks, urbanised, hereditary proletarians were still outnumbered by newcomers to industry, who retained strong ties to the countryside. The labour movement which was re-established in Petrograd after the February Revolution, therefore, had a hybrid character. Based on the modern factory rather than the artisanal workshop, it embraced a gamut of types of workers from the traditional artisan, to the skilled worker of the modern assembly plant, to the peasant migrant worker, so familiar in the Third World today. The factory workforce of Petrograd was highly differentiated by degree of proletarianisation, by skill and wage-level, by gender, age and education. Each of these variables had its own effectivity within the struggles of the working class in 1917, and, in particular circumstances, could become ‘overdetermined’, as for instance, in the conflict between male and female workers over redundancies, or the conflict between skilled and unskilled workers during the metal-union contract negotiations. Nevertheless, one can crudely generalise, and say that within the workforce in 1917 there were two broad groups of workers: the first, consisting of proletarianised, skilled, literate, male workers, who comprised around 40% of the total factory workforce; the second, consisting of workers new to industry - mainly rural migrants, women and youth. The first group - sometimes called by contemporaries ‘cadre’ workers — should not, as a whole, be considered a ‘labour aristocracy’, for although there were aristocratic strata within it — the best-paid type-setters in the print trade, the starshie in the armaments factories or the glass-blowers of the glass industry — the majority of skilled men, whilst earning higher wages and being culturally distinct from the new workers, lacked the strong craft traditions on which the power of the ‘labour aristocracy’ in nineteenth-century Britain had been based. Moreover, their skills were not the all-round skills of the artisanal workshop, but the more specialised skills of the modern factory. The widespread introduction of the new technology of mass production during the First World War facilitated the big increase in numbers of the second group of new workers. The expansion of mass production in the metal and chemical industries allowed the rapid absorption of new workers into semi- skilled and unskilled jobs. The working-class women, the peasant youths and the urban petit-bourgeois who poured into the factories of the capital had little prior experience of wage-work in modern industry, but it did not take long to train them to operate automatic machinery or tend assembly lines. They quickly adapted to the fevered tempo of work in the war industries and to the discipline of the piece-rate system. The young, in particular, were soon at home in the factory and the city. Nevertheless, in 1917 the new workers were still culturally distinct from the ‘cadre’ workers, who tended to regard them as the ‘backward masses’. The existence of two broad social groups within the workforce was by no means a new phenomenon brought about by the war. As far back as the 1880s, contemporaries had noted the phenomenon and had speculated on the revolutionary propensities of each group. Kropotkin, one of the fathers of Russian anarchism, predicted that it would be the spontaneous militancy of the fabrichnie, the down- trodden peasants and women of the textile mills, which would spark off the social revolution.4 In contrast, Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, envisaged that the zavodskie, or skilled workers of the metal plants, would provide the basis of the revolutionary movement, because of their greater proletarianisation, literacy and leisure time.5 The experience of 1917 suggests that the two groups played different, but largely complementary roles in the revolution- ary process. Those who built the labour movement were the ‘cadre’ workers, especially metalworkers, for they had more time and money at their disposal, were at home in the factory, were more literate, had experience of informal shop-floor organisation and a degree of job-control, and were thus better placed to participate in labour and political activities. The new workers, on the other hand, were often more turbulent than the ‘cadre’ workers because they combined the manifold discontents of the low-paid worker with the grievances of the poor peasants and the specific oppressions of women and youth. Their militancy, however, was often of an explosive, sectional and volatile kind, and tended to threaten the attempts of the factory committee and trade-union leaders to build sustained, formal organisations. The labour leaders were not unsympathetic to the plight of the new workers, but they sought to direct their militancy into organised channels. They had some success in this, for women and peasant workers began in 1917 to engage in organised pursuit of their goals and to join trade unions. Young workers in particular, displayed a remarkable propensity for self-organisation. In this sense, working-class unity became a reality after February, in spite of profound divisions within the factory workforce. Yet contradictions of interest - between skilled and unskilled, men and women, young and old — remained: contradictions which labour leaders were reluctant to recognise. For while they aspired to bring the inexperienced and badly-off groups of workers into the orbit of the labour movement, they were unwilling to make special provision for the particular needs of the unskilled, the peasant migrants, working women or of youths. As a result, the participation of the latter in labour organisations and in revolutionary politics more generally, remained fairly tenuous. As the economy collapsed in early 1918, contradictions of interest between different groups of workers came to the fore, with the result that the unity of the previous year began to fall apart. The tsarist factory was, in certain respects, a microcosm of the wider society. The structure of authority, the conditions of work, the low wages placed workers in a semi-servile position, and they welcomed the February Revolution as emancipation from this ‘serfdom’. Workers saw the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty as the signal to create a democratic, or ‘constitutional’ factory order: firstly, by expelling the most unpopular administrators and, secondly, by establishing representative institutions to promote their interests as wage-earners within both the factory and society at large. In a very short time, workers won the eight-hour day and big wage-increases to compensate for wartime inflation. The Petrograd employers’ associa- tion, having long resisted a more liberal industrial-relations policy, quickly reconciled itself to the ‘constitutional’ order in the factories, and conceded the greater part of the workers’ demands. The factory committees were the greatest gain made by workers as a result of the February Revolution. They had their roots in the tradition of the starosty, and perhaps, too, in the informal job control of skilled workers, which was increasingly threatened by rationalisation and de-skilling. The committees were strongest in the state sector, where skilled workers of a defencist persuasion temporarily took over the running of their enterprises, in order to ensure that production for the war effort was not put in jeopardy. It was out of this experience that the ideas of workers’ control of production and collegial management were born. In the private sector the factory committees at first had largely trade-union functions, for it took some time for the unions to re-establish themselves, but everywhere the committees took on a wide range of tasks within and without the workplace. They asserted their right to monitor hiring and firing, to supervise the general running of the factory, and they intervened in areas as diverse as food-supply, education and law and order. Because state power was relatively ineffective, the committees became a central part of that ‘counter-state’ which was built up by workers between February and October, and in whose name the Bolsheviks seized power.6 The trade unions took some time to get off the ground, especially in the metal industry, where the factory committees were strongest. Throughout 1917 the unions were less influential than the commit- tees, for the latter were more popular, more democratic and more powerful than the unions. It would be wrong, however, to minimise the importance of the unions, for they grew at a remarkable rate, becoming genuine mass organisations, and playing a crucial part in the revolutionary process. Craft unionism proved relatively weak in Petrograd, guild traditions never having been as strongly rooted in Russia as in Western Europe. The ‘modern’ character of the factory workforce seemed to call for industrial unionism, and the socialists who led the union movement found this more politically appealing than craft unionism. Although the reformist socialists were a powerful influence in the unions at a national level, in Petrograd the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks were fairly evenly balanced, with the influence of the former growing rapidly. Given their large size and the inhospitable conditions in which they began to operate, the unions proved themselves surprisingly effective as organisations representing the interests of workers as a whole. It was only after October, when the unions became subject to the Bolshevik government, that bureaucra- tisation developed on a significant scale. Accelerating inflation rapidly undermined the wage-gains which workers had made in the spring, largely by means of small-scale, localised struggles. The unions sought to restore the real wages of workers by negotiating city-wide contracts covering all workers in each branch of industry. The contracts aimed to improve the position of the low-paid, in part by diminishing wage-differentials, and so many low-paid workers joined the unions in the summer of 1917. Negotiations of the contracts were often protracted, however, and as the position of the low-paid grew progressively worse, they turned increasingly to unofficial direct action in an effort to defend them- selves against rocketing inflation. This brought some sections of the rank-and-file into conflict with union leaders - conflict which was exacerbated when the compromises made between union negotiators and the employers became known. There was considerable opposi- tion to the final terms of the metal contract, for example, because ferocious inflation had eaten away the value of the wage increases by the time the contract was signed. Given the intractability of the economic crisis, it was probably an achievement for the unions to have succeeded in implementing the contracts at all. The contracts, by rationalising the pay structure, by setting-up rates commissions and, above all, by linking wages to productivity, prefigured aspects of Bolshevik labour-policy after 1917. And within the metal union a ‘productivist’ current, which celebrated efficiency, planning and the ‘culture of production’, adumbrated the movement for the ‘scientific organisation of labour’ which was to develop in the 1920s. The deepening crisis of the economy provides the backdrop to the political radicalisation of Petrograd workers. The inability, or- perceived unwillingness, of the Kerensky government to protect the gains made by workers after the February Revolution, led to growing disillusionment with the moderate socialists who supported the government. Workers now began to look to their own organisations for protection. It was the movement for workers’ control of produc- tion which translated growing economic discontent into sympathy for the Bolshevik party. Workers’ control had its roots in the democra- tisation of factory life, but the main impulse behind the movement sprang from the efforts of the factory committees to maintain production and to defend jobs — at a time when massive redundancies and the collapse of the war industries loomed on the horizon. Initially, the scope of workers’ control was fairly modest: it aimed to supervise the activities of management in order to ensure that it did not ‘sabotage’ production or endanger workers’ jobs. As economic disorder and class conflict grew, however, the factory committees broadened the scope of control. No longer did they confine themselves to procuring fuel and raw materials and to inspecting the process of production, they increasingly intervened in every sphere of manage- ment decision-making, demanding the right to attend board meetings and access to financial accounts and order-books. Although the movement aimed to limit the power of management, it cannot be considered a ‘syndicalist’ movement, for the determination of the committees to combat ‘sabotage’ was motivated more by practical than ideological considerations. Within Petrograd, anarchist and syndicalist influence was limited, and conceptions of workers’ control were not articulated in syndicalist terms at either factory level or on the CCFC.7 Whilst the committees rejected Menshevik and SR calls for state control of the economy, they endorsed Bolshevik perspectives for centralised coordination of the economy by a proletarian state power. There were, however, differences of emphasis between the leaders of the factory committees, the majority of whom were Bolsheviks, and the official party spokesmen. Committee activists appear to have had more faith in the capacity of grass-roots control to restore order in the economy than did some party leaders. Moreover they linked the battle to combat economic disorder to the struggle to limit the prerogatives of the employers and, consequently, placed much greater emphasis than did most party leaders on the necessity of transforming authority-relations at enterprise level, as part of the transition to socialism. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the Bolsheviks cynically manipulated the factory committees for their own ends. The radicalisation of the movement for workers’ control gave the party enormous opportunity to win wide support for its policies, but it did not control the movement: it responded to it, trying to steer it in the direction it believed was proper. It was the organised working class, not the Bolshevik party, which was the great power in society — more powerful than even the capitalist class, as its success in resisting redundancies suggests. The collapse of the system of war capitalism, however, in early 1918 destroyed the strength of the working class, and it was only at that point that the Bolsheviks were in a position to achieve a monopoly of power. The advent to power of the Bolsheviks in October raised the hopes and aspirations of workers in a similar way to the February Revolution, yet it made little difference to their working lives, for the economic situation continued to get worse. Initially, Lenin supported a radical interpretation of the Decree on Workers’ Control, although he did not envisage a rapid transition to a socialist economy. Gradually, however, he became convinced that workers’ control could not cope with the deep structural crisis of the economy, and he came to side with the trade-union critics of the factory committees. The Bolsheviks on the CCFC favoured a speedy transition to socialism, and they were the most vocal section of the party pressing for a system of central economic planning and state ownership of industry. Under such a system, the factory-committee Bolsheviks envisaged that workers’ control would be transmuted into workers’ management of individual enterprises. At factory level, many com- mittee activists saw the Decree on Workers’ Control as opening the way to workers’ self-management, but in practice most of the control-commissions set up by the Decree confined themselves to circumscribing drastically the power of management, whilst not displacing it altogether. In the circumstances, this policy did not prove workable. Most employers resisted the more ambitious style of workers’ control, and preferred to close down their factories rather than to submit to it. As a result, in a few instances, the control- commissions were forced to take over the actual running of the factories in a vain effort to save jobs. Such takeovers — although occurring in only a minority of Petrograd factories - were crucial in pushing the government in the direction of full-scale nationalisation. ‘Nationalisations from below’, together with escalating chaos in industry, persuaded the government finally to nationalise the whole of industry in June 1918. This proved, however, not to be the realisation of self-management, as the factory-committee activists had expected, but the first step in a process which culminated in the full restoration of one-man management. There is some indication that prior to October the factory committees were beginning to accept the idea of a merger with the trade unions, but after October conflict between the two organisa- tions flared up, as both tried to compete in the business of regulating the economy. The factory committees were accused by the unions of being selfish, parochial organisations, unsuited to the broad tasks of restoring order to the economy. Instances of such parochialism were in fact few in Petrograd, but there were just enough examples of committees refusing to share precious stocks of fuel and raw materials (at the Metal, Triangle and Copper-Rolling works)8 to make the trade-union charges stick. There is no real evidence that the committees were exacerbating the chaos in the economy, as the unions claimed, but nor were they managing to cope with it, as they claimed they could. As the factories closed down, and as hundreds of thousands of workers fled from Petrograd, centralism and firm discipline became the order of the day. Only the unions seemed capable of achieving these things. Consequently, the government decided that the factory committees must be absorbed into the apparatus of the trade unions. By the spring of 1918, Lenin was haunted by the fact that the economic infrastructure of socialism did not exist in Russia. The political superstructure was there, in the shape of a soviet govern- ment, but not the material base. This existed only in the West - above all, in Germany. This led him to observe that: ‘History has taken such a peculiar course that it has given birth to two unconnected halves of socialism, existing side by side like two future chickens in a single shell of international imperialism. In 1918 Germany has become the most striking embodiment of the material realisation of the economic, productive and socio-economic conditions for socialism on the one hand, and Russia, the embodiment of the political conditions on the other.’9 The Treaty of Brest Litovsk signalled the fact that revolution would not break out immediately in Germany. Every effort, therefore, had to be made to build up the productive forces in Russia. As Lenin argued: The task of the day is to restore the productive forces destroyed by the war and by bourgeois rule; to heal the wounds inflicted by the war and by the defeat in the war, by profiteering and the attempts of the bourgeoisie to restore the overthrown rule of the exploiters; to achieve economic revival; to provide reliable protection of elementary order. It may sound paradoxical, but, in fact, considering the objective conditions mentioned, it is absolutely certain that at the present moment the Soviet system can secure Russia’s transition to socialism only if these very elementary, extremely elementary problems of maintaining public life are practically solved.10 This meant, first and foremost, raising the productivity of labour: ‘the Russian worker is a bad worker in comparison with the advanced nations ... To learn to work is the task that the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope.’11 In turn, this meant the restoration of ‘iron discipline’ in the workplace, the revival of piece-rates, productivity deals and, above all, one-man management. Implicit within the movement for workers’ control was a belief that capitalist methods cannot be used for socialist ends. In their battle to democratise the factory, in their emphasis on the importance of collective initiatives by the direct producers in transforming the work-situation, the factory committees had become aware — in a partial and groping way, to be sure - that factories are not merely sites of production, but also of reproduction — the reproduction of a certain structure of social relations based on the division between those who give orders and those who take them, between those who direct and those who execute. The leaders of the factory committees never developed these insights into a systematic strategy for socialism, alternative to that of Lenin and the majority of the Bolshevik leadership; yet inscribed within their practice was a distinctive vision of socialism, central to which was workplace democracy. Lenin believed that socialism could be built only on the basis of large-scale industry as developed by capitalism, with its specific types of productivity and social organisation of labour. Thus for him, capitalist methods of labour-discipline or one-man management were not necessarily incompatible with socialism. Indeed, he went so far as to consider them to be inherently progressive, failing to recognise that such methods undermined workers’ initiatives at the point of production. This was because Lenin believed that the transition to socialism was guaranteed, ultimately, not by the self-activity of workers, but by the ‘proletarian’ character of the state power. Maurice Brinton, the libertarian critic of Bolshevism, has exposed the inadequacy of his conception: None of them [i.e. the Bolshevik leaders] saw the proletarian nature of the Russian regime as primarily and crucially dependent on the exercise of workers’ power at the point of production (i.e. on workers’ management of production). It should have been obvious to them as Marxists that if the working class did not hold economic power, its ‘political’ power would at best be insecure and would in fact soon degenerate. The Bolshevik leaders saw the capitalist organisation of production as something which, in itself, was socially neutral. It could be used indifferently for bad purposes (as when the bourgeoisie used it with the aim of promoting private accumulation) or good ones (as when the ‘workers” state used it ‘for the benefit of many’).12 This critique is absolutely on target. There is no doubt that Lenin did conceive proletarian power in terms of the central state and lacked a conception of localising such power at the point of production.13 A more far-reaching critique of Bolshevik strategy at this time has been developed by writers of Maoist persuasion - principally, the French economist Charles Bettelheim. He argues that the Bolsheviks were wrong to believe that the possibility of socialist advance is, in any sense, determined by the level of productive forces. He follows Mao Zedong in arguing that the transformation of relations of production clears the way for the development of productive forces rather than vice versa.14 He contends that because the Bolsheviks - with the heroic exception of Lenin, whom he unwarrantedly excludes from his strictures — erroneously believed that the level of productive forces dictates the possibilities of socialist advance, they therefore subordinated the transformation of capitalist social relations to the drive to increase industrial output. The consequent absence of a strategy for transforming work-relations meant that output increased within a framework of capitalist rather than socialist relations of production. The capitalist division of labour and the ideological and political relations which are an effect of this division, were thus constantly reproduced, paving the way, Bettelheim avers, for the ultimate restoration of a ‘state bourgeoisie’. There is much in Bettelheim’s stimulating critique with which one can agree. The Bolshevik strategy of transition did indeed centre on building the ‘economic base’ (‘socialism equals electrification plus soviet power’), with little attention being paid to transforming social relations. But in denying that the level of productive forces exercises any constraint on the possibilities of socialist advance, Bettelheim is guilty of the grossest voluntarism. The implication of his argument is that the subsequent development of the Soviet state was the consequence of a simple theoretical error (‘economism’). Whilst he mentions the intractable economic and social circumstances in which the Bolsheviks found themselves, these objective constraints do not really function as part of his explanation of the degeneration of the revolution. A satisfactory examination of the theoretical relationship of forces of production to relations of production, would take us into rarefied spheres well outside the scope of this work. Marx centrally assumed that the creation of socialist relations of production was possible only on the basis of a certain level of productive forces, but his treatment of this question is problematical, because his concept of the ‘productive forces’ at times smacks of technological determinism. This led the Second International to interpret the question in a way that was unambiguously technological-determinist. Theoreticians such as K. Kautsky conceived the ‘productive forces’ as technology and the ever-growing scale of production. They argued that these, being social in character, would come into ever-increasing conflict with the constricting mode of appropriation based on private ownership. Finally, the productive forces would burst the fetters of private ownership, but would provide the material base for a socialist reorganisation of society, once a socialist government came to power. It is possible, however, to find in Marx’s writings, a broader conception of ‘productive forces’, which does not reduce them to technology or productive capacity. This conceives productive forces as all those capacities and resources which are harnessed to producing use-values. These forces, which can never be divorced from the social forms in which they are embodied, include not merely types of industrial and agricultural production, but modes of social cooperation, the application of knowledge and cultural forms.15 Above all, Marx sees the principal ‘productive force’ as being the working class itself.16 In the light of this broader conception, it becomes clearer why Marx considered that a developed level of productive forces was necessary to the construction of socialism; for only a high level of productive forces could make possible the big reduction in necessary labour time which would enable the whole people to participate in self-government and civilisation. Without an adequate level of productive forces, ‘want is merely made general and, with destitution, the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business is necessarily reproduced’.17 Socialism, in other words, would cease to be the entry into freedom, and become a struggle for survival instead. With this in mind, it is possible to understand the cruel dilemma in which the Bolsheviks found themselves in 1918. They were intent on creating democratic socialism, but their priority had to be the reconstruction of the productive forces, especially, the revival of labour-discipline. In the short term, the limited use of forms of compulsion, in particular, the application of capitalist methods of labour-discipline and labour-intensification, was probably unavoid- able. Yet most of the Bolshevik leadership seemed unaware of the dangers posed to the goal of democratic socialism by the long-term use of methods which undermined workers’ self-activity in produc- tion. This was largely a consequence of the ideological problematic within which they thought through the problems of socialist construc- tion. This problematic - still, in large part, that which had been inherited from the Second International - construed the productive forces in a narrow, technicist fashion and conceived the types of productivity and social organisation of labour engendered by capital- ist society as being inherently progressive. Moreover within this problematic the absence of a notion of workers’ self-activity in the realm of production as being a constituent element of socialist transition was especially glaring. If the Bolsheviks had been more critical of this Second International problematic, it is possible that they would have been more alive to the dangers of using coercive methods to restore the battered productive forces, except as an emergency measure. Whether such an awareness could have pre- vented the degeneration of the democratic socialist revolution in the long term, however, as Bettelheim suggests - given the persistence of war, economic isolation and cultural backwardness - seems doubtful. The depressing experience of socialist societies to date suggests that the imperatives of economic and social development in under- developed societies necessitate types of compulsion which ultimately conflict with the creation of free social relations. In other words, even if the Bolshevik government had been more percipient concerning the dangers to democratic socialism posed by the methods which it was forced to adopt, it seems probable that objective circumstances would ultimately have conspired to drain socialism of its democratic content. As it was, blind to the risks that it was running, the government was very quickly forced along a path which in October 1917 it had never dreamed of traversing. Already by 1921, the Bolsheviks no longer represented a socialism of liberty, but one of scarcity, in which the needs of individual and human liberation were firmly subordinate to the exigencies of economic development. Notes INTRODUCTION
NOTES TO CHAPTER I
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