authoritarian and statist apparatus which would act from above and set about
wiping out everything that stood in its way with an iron hand.
This is indeed what happened. The factory committees were merged with the
Bolshevik controlled Trade Union movement. In a decree in March 1918
workers’ control was supposed to return to the conception of monitoring and
inspection rather than management, in nationalised enterprises, worker’s
control is exercised by submitting all declarations or decisions of the
Factory or shop committee.. to the Economic Administrative Council for
approval….Not more than half the members of the administrative council
should be workers or employees. Also in March 1918, Lenin began to campaign
in favour of one-man management of industry. In 1919, 10.8% of enterprises
were under one-man management, by December 1920, 2,183 out of 2,483
factories were no longer under collective management.
Control of the Economy
So within a few short months of October, the Bolsheviks had taken control of
the economy out of the hands of the working class and into the hands of the
Bolshevik party. This was before the civil war, at a time when the workers
had showen themselves capable of making a revolution but according to the
Bolsheviks, incapable of running the economy. The basis of the Bolshevik
attack on the factory committees was simple, the Bolsheviks wanted the
factories to be owned and managed by the state, whereas the factory
committees wanted the factories to be owned and managed by the workers. One
Bolshevik described the factory committee’s attitude: We found a process
which recalled the anarchist dreams of autonomous productive communes.
Partly they did this to remove the threat of any opposition to Bolshevik
rule, but partly, these decisions were a result of the Bolshevik political
perspective. These policy decisions were not imposed on them by external
objective factors such as the civil war. With or without the civil war their
strategic decisions would have been the same, because they arise out of the
Leninist conception of what socialism is and what workers control means.
Their understanding of what socialism means is very different from the
anarchist definition. At the root of this difference is the importance given
to the relations of production. In other words the importance of the
relationship between those who produce the wealth and those who manage its
production. In all class societies, the producer is subordinate and separate
from those who manage production. The workplace is divided into the boss and
the workers. The abolition of the division in society between ‘order-givers’
and ‘order-takers’ is integral to the Anarchist idea of socialism, but is
unimportant to the Leninist.
The phrase workers control of the means of production is often used.
Unfortunately it represents different things to different tendencies. To the
anarchist it means that workers must have complete control over every aspect
of production. There must be workplace democracy. They must have the power
to make decisions affecting them and their factory, including hours worked,
amount of goods manufactured, who to exchange with. As Maurice Brinton,
author of The Bolsheviks and Workers Control explains:
Workers management of production – implying as it does the total domination
of the producer over the productive process – is not for us a marginal
matter. It is the core of our politics. It is the only means whereby
authoritarian (order-giving, order-taking) relations in production can be
transcended, and a free, communist or anarchist, society introduced. We also
hold that the means of production may change hands (passing for instance
from private hands into those of a bureaucracy, collectively owning them)
without this revolutionising the relations of production. Under such
circumstances – and whatever the formal status of property – the society is
still a class society, for production is still managed by an agency other
than the producers themselves(20)
In contrast, the Leninist idea of socialism has more to do with the
nationalisation of industry or State Capitalism than the creation of a
society in which workers have control over their own labour power.
In Can the Bolsheviks retain State Power? Lenin outlined his conception of
‘workers control’:
When we say workers control, always associating that slogan to the
dictatorship of the proletariat, and always putting it after the latter, we
thereby make plain what state we have in mind.. if it is a proletarian state
we are referring to (i.e. dictatorship of the proletariat) then workers
control can become a national, all-embracing, omnipresent, extremely precise
and extremely scrupulous accounting (emphasis in the original) of the
production and distribution of goods. By ‘accounting’ Lenin meant the power
to oversee the books, to check the implementation of decisions made by
others, rather than fundamental decision making.
The Bolsheviks saw only the necessity for creating the objective conditions
for socialism. That is, without a certain level of wealth in society, it is
impossible to introduce all those things that socialism requires; free
healthcare, housing, education and the right to work. Lenin said Socialism
is merely the next step forward from state capitalist monopoly. Or, in other
words, socialism is merely state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve
the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be
capitalist monopoly (21) or also State capitalism is a complete material
preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder
of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no
gaps(22).
The introduction of Taylorism and one man management in the factories in
1918 and 1919 displays a fixation with efficiency and productivity at the
expense of workers’ rights. They didn’t see that without control over your
own working life, you remain a cog in someone else’s wheel. Workers’
democracy at the point of production is as important as material wellbeing
is to the creation of a socialist society.
However, there is yet another problem with the Bolshevik vision of a planned
economy. The Bolsheviks thought centralising the economy under state control
would bring to an end the chaos of capitalistic economies. Unfortunately
they didn’t consider that centralisation without free exchange of
information leads to its own disasters. The bureaucratic mistakes of Stalin
and Mao are legendary. Under Mao, the sparrows of China were brought to the
brink of extinction to prevent them from eating the crops. Unfortunately
this led to an explosion in the insect population (previously the sparrows
ate the insects so keeping the numbers down) and resultant destruction of
the harvest. In Russia huge unusable nuts and bolts were manufactured so
quotas could be met. Industrial democracy did not exist. Plans were imposed
on the population. It was not possible to question or criticise. Any
opposition to the state was counter revolutionary, no matter how stupid or
blind the state decisions were. Only with workers democracy can there be
free exchange of ideas and information. Planning an economy in ignorance is
like playing football blind, difficult if not impossible to do successfully.
In short, it was bad politics, perhaps motivated by wishful thinking, that
led the Bolsheviks to believe that holding the reins of state power could
possibly be a short cut to socialism.
5. Learning the lessons of history
What unites all Leninist traditions (Stalinism, Maoism, Trotskyism) against
the anarchists is their defence of the Bolsheviks in the period 1917-1921.
It is this Bolshevik blueprint which they seek to recreate. The reasons
variously given for the collapse of the revolution are the backwardness of
Russia (either industrially or socially), the Civil War and the isolation of
Russia. What Leninists argue is that the fault didn’t lie with the politics
of the Bolsheviks or with the policies they implemented but rather with
conditions that were beyond their control. Even those who were critical of
the Bolsheviks suppression of democracy, such as Victor Serge and the
Workers Opposition group, ultimately defended the Bolsheviks’ position.
Their argument is that without the measures the Bolsheviks took, the
revolution would have fallen to a White reaction and a return to the
monarchy.
Our argument is that no matter what the objective factors were or will be,
the Bolshevik route always and inevitably leads to the death of the
revolution. More than this, defeat by revolutionaries is much worse than
defeat by the Whites, for it brings the entire revolutionary project into
disrepute. For seventy years socialism could easily be equated with prison
camps and dictatorship. The Soviet Union became the threat of a bad example.
Socialists found themselves defending the indefensible. Countless
revolutions were squandered and lost to Leninism and its heir, Stalinism.
Freedom and utopia
In the following passage Engels outlines how revolution will lead to
mankind’s freedom;
Proletarian Revolution – [is the] solution of the contradictions [of
capitalism]. The proletariat seizes the public power, and by means of this
transforms the socialised means of production, slipping from the hands of
the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act the proletariat frees the
means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne
and gives their socialist character complete freedom to work itself out.
Socialised production upon a predetermined plan becomes henceforth possible.
The development of production makes the existence of different classes in
society henceforth an anachronism. In proportion anarchy [chaos] in social
production vanishes, the political authority of the state dies out. Man, at
last the master of his own form of organisation, becomes at the same time
lord over nature, his own master – free.(23)
In power, the Bolsheviks followed this program. They centralised production,
removing from it ‘the character of capital’, yet the existence of different
classes did not die out. Bolshevik party officials got better rations,
accommodation and privileges. In time they were able to transfer their
privileges to their offspring, acting just as the ruling class in the West.
Chaos in social production didn’t vanish, chaos in Stalin’s time led to
famine. The political authority of the state did not die out and the soviet
people were not free.
The ‘character of capital’ is not the only force underpinning the structure
in society. Power relations also have a part to play, and contrary to
Engel’s assumptions, power does not only come from ownership of capital. The
members of the central committee may not have owned the deeds to the
factories per se but they were in charge.
Freedom isn’t just a goal, a noble end to be achieved but rather a necessary
part of the process of creating socialism. Anarchists are often accused of
being ‘utopian’. Beliefs are utopian if subjective ideas are not grounded in
objective reality. Anarchists hold that part of the subjective conditions
required before socialism can exist is the existence of free exchange of
ideas and democracy. To believe that revolution is possible without freedom,
to believe those in power can, through their best and genuine intentions,
impose socialism from above, as the Bolsheviks did, is indeed utopian. As
Sam Faber puts it in Before Stalinism:
determinism’s characteristic and systemic failure is to understand that what
the masses of people do and think politically is as much part of the process
determining the outcome of history as are the objective obstacles that most
definitely limit peoples’ choices(24)
The received wisdom is that there was no alternative open to the Bolsheviks.
The Bolsheviks could have followed a more democratic route, but they chose
not to. They were in the minority and their goal was to have absolute power.
Their failure to understand that socialism and democracy are part of the
same process destroyed the prospect for socialism in the Soviet Union. Next
time there are revolutionary upheavals in society, it is to be hoped that
the revolutionary potential of the working class will not be so squandered.
Leaving the last word to Alexander Berkman;
No revolution has yet tried the true way of liberty. None has had sufficient
faith in it. Force and suppression, persecutionn, revenge, and terror have
characterised all revolutions in the past and have thereby defeated their
original aims. The time has come to try new methods, new ways. The social
revolution is to achieve the emancipation of man through liberty, but if we
have no faith in the latter, revolution becomes a denial and betrayal of
itself.(25)
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