Leninism and Workers Control
By Joseph Seymour
Workers Vanguard no 162, 17 June 1977
The following article is based on a talk by Joseph Seymour at a
West Coast Spartacus Youth League educational in mid-March 1977
There is probably no question in contemporary left-wing politics
where greater confusion, both substantive and terminological, reigns than over
"workers control." Of the several forms of confusion, the most dangerous is a
stagist conception of workers control as the link between day-to-day
trade-union militancy and revolutionary dual power, as the necessary, first
step toward the seizure of state power. Workers control is not a demand
which communist trade unionists agitate for and seek to implement every day in
every way. It is only appropriate to a qualitatively different, higher level of
class struggle.
Workers control—dual power at the point of production—is
an aspect, usually secondary, of a generalized revolutionary crisis. With one
exception—Italy in 1969—workers control has emerged only after,
not before, the government was overthrown and the repressive state
apparatus was in disarray: Russia 1917, Germany 1918, Spain 1936, Portugal
1974-75. And in Italy’s "Hot Autumn" in 1969, workers control was a
subordinate aspect of a mass strike wave centered on economic demands.
There are four characteristic kinds of confusion. The most
important is an attempt to exploit terminological ambiguity in the service of a
reformist programmatic conception. This is the trade unionization of workers
control. In the conventional sense, trade unions normally exercise some control
over the conditions of production, job standards and the like. Trotsky, who was
very precise in his programmatic formulations, always speaks of "workers
control of production" or "of industry" to distinguish this concept from the
kind of control that trade unions normally exercise.
In a recent article, "Nuclear Power and the Workers Movement"
(WV No. 146, 25 February), we demanded "trade-union control of safety
conditions in all industrial situations." This is not a call for
generalized dual power at the industrial level. Rather it is a strong
trade-union demand. Many unions in many countries have forced management to
adhere to a thick rulebook specifying safety standards. This is not "workers
control of production." Of course, it is in the interests of reformists and
centrists to blur the distinction between this type of trade-union control of
working conditions and generalized dual power at the point of production
signaling a revolutionary situation.
A second source of confusion is more purely terminological.
"Control" is a word which exists in many Indo-European languages with similar
but not identical meanings. In European languages other than English, "to
control" means to check or monitor the actions of another. For example, the
functionary who checks tickets on French trains is called the controleur de
ballets. However, in English the term "control" means to administer or
direct. While in other languages "workers control" is distinct from and weaker
than "workers management," in English the two are usually identified. Thus
English-speaking Trotskyists sometimes confuse these two qualitatively
different concepts. For example, Felix Morrow in his Revolution and
Counterrevolution in Spain uses "workers control" to describe what was
actually workers management of nominally nationalized enterprises.
A third area of confusion centers on workers management, which is
neither identical with nor necessarily occurs under the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Our program is not workers management, but rather the management
or administration by a workers government of a centrally directed and planned
economy.
It is possible for generalized workers management or, more
precisely, self-management to exist as another, distinct form of dual power.
Workers control is dual power within the production unit; management is still
trying to reassert its traditional authority. In Italy 1969 there were pitched
battles of Fiat workers against Fiat foremen and company goons—that’s
what we mean by workers control or dual power. Workers management, by contrast,
occurs when the bourgeois management abandons the productive units to the
workers, while the latter are not subject to economic administration by the
state. It is obvious that such an extraordinary situation can occur only when a
proletarian state power has not yet consolidated its rule (Bolshevik Russia in
late 1917-early 1918) or in a civil war under a weak bourgeois "popular front"
government (Spain 1936-37). Workers management is then a situation of dual
power between the productive units and the government, which may be
either proletarian or bourgeois. The government’s monopoly over the
mechanisms of finance is invariably the Achilles heel of workers
management.
A fourth point of confusion concerns "workers control" as an
institution under a democratically governed workers state with a centralized
planned economy. The terminological identity of this concept with "workers
control" in a revolutionary, dual-power situation is codified in the
Transitional Program and reflects the political language of the Russian
experience. That the same term refers to two fundamentally different
programmatic concepts is inherently confusing and ideally should be avoided.
However, it would be ineffectual scholasticism for us to invent and use
different terms.
Nevertheless, comrades must understand the difference. Workers
control under socialist economic planning is an authoritative consultative
voice at the point of production. It is absolutely not counterposed or
antagonistic to the managerial hierarchy of the workers government. The notion
that "workers control" has the selfsame character during a revolutionary
offensive against capitalism and in a workers state is an economist or
syndicalist deviation.
Workers control is not a demand made upon the employer or state;
it is a condition of struggle. Workers control cannot be incorporated
into a trade-union contract or otherwise institutionalized. By its very nature
workers control posits open-ended struggle between workers and management.
Comrade Douglas’ document captures well the difference between strong
trade unionism and workers control. Putting assembly-line speed in the contract
is a strong trade-union demand; workers control means determining line speed
against management’s will. A union hiring hall is a strong trade-union
demand; workers control is forcing management to hire more people than it wants
to employ. These are real and significant differences.
Because workers control cannot be institutionalized, it is wrong
to call for workers control in a particular firm or industry as a programmatic
norm. In a revolutionary, situation, of course, certain firms and industries
are in the vanguard of workers control struggles--the Putilov metalworks in St.
Petersburg in 1917, Fiat in Turin in 1969, the Lisnave shipyards in Lisbon in
1974-75. However, a call to action on a particular firm in a revolutionary
period is different from a programmatic norm.
Pabloite Revisionism
The leading exponents of reformist and stagist conceptions of
workers control are the European Pabloites. In Britain the best-known left-wing
advocates of workers control are two freelancing independent Pabloites, Ken
Coates and Tony Topham of the Institute for Workers’ Control. The very
name reveals a reformist conception. Think of the Institute for Revolutionary
Dual Power in Industry! The purely social-democratic nature of the
Coates/Topham project is spelled out openly:
"The aims of the Institute for Workers’ Control
shall be ... to assist in the formation of Workers’ Control groups
dedicated to the development of democratic consciousness, to the winning of
support for Workers’ Control in all existing organizations of Labour, to
the challenging of undemocratic actions wherever they may occur, and the
extension of democratic control over industry and the economy
itself..."
—Bulletin of the Institute for Workers’
Control, Vol. 1, No. 1 (no date)
A far more sophisticated exponent of a reformist, stagist position
on workers control than the "industrial democrat" Coates is Ernest Mandel.
Labeling workers’ control an "anti-capitalist structural reform," he
presents it as an institutionalized aspect of trade-union bargaining:
"Workers’ control is the affirmation by the workers
of a refusal to let the management dispose freely of the means of production
and labour power.... It is a refusal to enter discussions with the management
or the government as a whole on the division of the national income, so long as
the workers have not acquired the ability to reveal the way the capitalists
cook up the books when they talk of prices and profits."
—"Lessons of
May," New Left Review, November-December 1968
Mandel simply trivializes workers control as an appendage to every
kind of social struggle normally occurring in capitalist society:
"The struggle for workers’ control--with which the
strategy of anti-capitalist structural reforms, the struggle for a transitional
programme, is largely identified—must... keep close to the preoccupations
of the masses, must constantly arise from the everyday reality
experienced by the workers, their wives, the students and revolutionary
intellectuals." [our emphasis]
—Ibid.
The anti-revolutionary nature of Mandel’s position is clear
when he attempts to inject workers control into the French May 1968 general
strike. I read the following passage several times because I didn’t
understand it. This is because it’s inherently confused and confusing,
grafting a reformist, stagist concept of workers control onto a revolutionary
dual power situation:
"The general strike of May 1968 ... offers us an
excellent example of the key importance of this problem. Ten million workers
were out on strike. They occupied their factories. If they were moved by the
desire to do away with many of the social injustices heaped up by the Gaullist
regime in the ten years of its existence, they were obviously aiming beyond
simple wage scale demands."
It is significant that Mandel does not see the strikers as having
a revolutionary anti-capitalist impulse, merely wanting to eliminate "many"
(sic) of the social injustices associated with the Gaullist regime. He goes
on:
"But if the workers did not feel like being satisfied
with immediate demands, they also did not have any exact idea of what they did
want. Had they been educated in the preceding years and months in the spirit
[sic] of workers’ control, they would have known what to do: elect a
committee in every plant that would begin by opening the company books;
calculate for themselves the various companies’ real manufacturing costs
and rates of profit; establish a right of veto on hiring and firing and on any
changes in the organization of the work."
—"The Debate on Workers’
Control," International Socialist Review, May-June 1969
But for there to be "workers control of production" there must
be production. A functioning workers control committee during a general
strike would be scabbing! Workers control and a general strike are two mutually
exclusive economic-military tactics, which usually arise in very different
situations. As we shall see, workers control is usually an attempt to
maintain production in the face of employer sabotage, the disruption of
war or severe economic crisis.
The call for workers control during the French May events would
not merely have been wrong and confusionist, but dangerous and liquidationist.
Under those conditions, the French ruling class would have promised
considerable concessions toward workers control--open books, union veto on
firing, the right to beat up foremen and all kinds of good things—if only
the workers ended the general strike and defused the political crisis.
Mandel himself drew out the liquidationist consequences of his
call for workers control during the French May-June 1968 events in an article
published at that time:
"It is here that the strategy of ‘anticapitalist structural
reforms,’ transition demands, assumes all its validity. The
masses cannot seize power in the factories and neighborhoods; that calls
for a new and centralized revolutionary leadership that does not as yet exist.
But the fact that the masses are not yet in a position to seize power does not
at all imply the impossiblity of winning, right now, demands over and above
wage increases.
"The workers hold the factories and nerve centers of the
nation.... They must immediately establish a de facto power that the bosses and
the state cannot cancel out once ‘calm’ has been restored....
"This de facto power consists in democratically elected
committees which establish workers control overall production....
"These committees should decide which enterprises would begin
operating again, and to what end—that is, exclusively to fill the
needs of the working population. They should have veto power over every
investment project." [our emphasis]
—"From the Bankruptcy of
Neocapitalism to the Struggle for the Socialist Revolution," in Revolt in
France (1968)
The French 1968 general strike is a perfect example of when a
stagest concept of workers control is dangerous. Workers control would have
meant a lowering of the level of class struggle. It would have been
equivalent to abandoning a major battle on the verge of victory and retreating
into guerrilla war. The correct revolutionary demand for the French May events
was the unification and centralization of the strike committees as embryonic
soviets, bypassing a distinct period of workers control.
Trotsky on Germany 1931
Trotsky’s 1931 article, "Workers’ Control of
Production," is absolutely unambiguous that workers control is not a reform,
but a manifestation of dual power in a revolutionary situation:
"Control can be imposed only by force upon the
bourgeoisie, by a proletariat on the road to the moment of taking power from
them, and then also ownership of the means of production. Thus the regime of
workers’ control, a provisional, transitional regime by its very essence,
can correspond only to the period of the convulsing of the bourgeois state, the
proletarian offensive, and the falling back of the bourgeoisie, that is, to a
period of the proletarian revolution in the fullest sense of the
word."
However, taken out of historic context and read superficially,
Trotsky’s article could be interpreted as positing workers control as a
necessary or normal early stage of a revolutionary crisis.
Amid Trotsky’s voluminous writings on revolutionary strategy
and tactics, there is only one substantive article on workers
control—concerning Germany in 1931. Why did Trotsky bring to the fore the
demand for workers control at that particular place and time? Why did he
consider factory committees rather than soviets as the most likely form of dual
power? Why did he regard workers control rather than a mass strike wave or
street fighting as the probable initial form of confrontation with bourgeois
authority?
First, the economic conditions militated against the strike
tactic. Given a sharp and worsening depression, the tasks of the workers were
to prevent plant closures, lockouts and increased unemployment.
Apart from economic conjunctural considerations, Trotsky’s
position on workers control was governed by the relations of the Communist
Party (CP), which he considered bureaucratic centrist with a potential for
revolutionary renewal, to the Social Democrats on the one hand and to the Nazis
on the other. In most circumstances the strength of the workers movement
against the employers is roughly in line with its strength against the state.
Try having a work action in Brazil, Iran or South Korea. However, in Germany
1931 the power of the workers in the shops was far greater than in the streets.
The Communists alone, a minority of the proletariat, could not overcome the
Nazi stormtroopers; the CP’s sectarianism and the Social Democrats’
legalism prevented united military action against the fascists. However, the
Nazi writ did not run into the factories so that in military terms resistance
to workers control was far less than to other forms of a proletarian
offensive.
The German Social Democrats associated soviets with Communist rule
and would have opposed them as a united-front form. The "Third Period"
Stalinists refused to work in the Social Democratic-dominated trade unions. The
factory committees were the only existing common organizations of Social
Democratic and Communist workers. Thus Trotsky saw in the factory committees
and workers control the path of least resistance for a united proletarian
offensive. His advocacy of workers control was not a universal tactical schema,
but a concrete form for a united front of a deeply divided workers movement
against the growing fascist threat. If one abstracts Trotsky’s position
from the concrete conjuncture and political alignment in Germany 1931, one is
liable to project a false tactical schema involving the fetishization of
workers control.
The Bolsheviks and Workers Control
The Bolshevik Revolution and Spanish civil war witnessed the most
profound workers control struggles and the only experiences of widespread
workers self-management. Therefore the assimilation of these two historic
experiences is essential to understand our programmatic positions on the
question.
Unlike the Russian revolution of 1905, 1917 was not marked by mass
strikes. The workers knew that the war had severely damaged and dislocated the
Russian economy, industry was on the verge of collapse due to breakdowns and
shortages, and the urban population was threatened by famine. Workers control
arose primarily to counter capitalist neglect and sabotage, rather than to
extract economic concessions. Lenin’s strong support for workers control
in this period was motivated by a conservative economic purpose. In a major
article, significantly entitled "The Impending Catastrophe and How To Fight It"
(September 1917), he states:
"Control, supervision and accounting are the prime
prerequisites for combatting catastrophe and famine. This is indisputable and
universally recognised. And it is just what is not being done from fear
of encroaching on the supremacy of the landowners and capitalists, on their
immense, fantastic and scandalous profits...." [emphasis in
original]
Shortly after coming to power, the Bolshevik government issued two
decrees (14 November and 13 December) designed to institutionalize the dual
power already existing within Russian factories. The second decree details the
powers of the control commissions:
"The control commission of each enterprise is to establish the
amount of materials, fuel, equipment, workers and technicians, etc., required
for production, the actual stock in hand and labor available; to estimate the
prospects of carrying on or closing down; to maintain labor discipline; to
check whether buying and selling conform to state regulations; to watch over
productivity, and assist in ascertaining production costs, etc.
"Decisions of the control commission designed to secure the
conditions for its operation are binding on the owner." [our
emphasis]
It also stipulates that direct management remains in the
owners’ hands and that the control commission has no right to expropriate
the enterprises on its own:
"The owner retains his managerial rights over the
administration and operation of the enterprise. The control commission does not
take part in the administration of the enterprise and is not responsible for
its operation.... The control commission may, through its higher authorities,
raise the question of sequestration of an enterprise or any other compulsory
measure with the economic state organs, but it has no right itself to seize and
administer an enterprise."—reproduced in Margaret Dewar, Labour Policy
in the USSR 1917-1928 (1956)
Why did Lenin put forth a policy he later described as a
"contradictory and incomplete measure"? Lenin’s position on workers
control is incomprehensible unless one realizes that he was opposed to the
nationalization of industry in the short term. He defended this policy as late
as spring 1918 against left communist opponents (Bukharin, Radek, Ossinsky).
The Bolshevik government did not have available the technical/managerial
apparatus capable of administering a socialized, planned economy. Lenin
believed that through a combination of concessions and pressure Russia’s
capitalists could be made to serve the new Soviet state. Workers control
commissions were projected as the lowest level of state economic
administration. Secondly, Lenin considered workers control a school to train a
proletarian managerial cadre, who could take over the administration of a
socialized economy in a gradual, orderly and efficient way.
The Bolshevik attempt to institutionalize workers control broke
down almost immediately. Capitalists hostile to soviet power abandoned their
factories for counterrevolutionary intrigue. Workers, in turn hostile and
distrustful toward their employers, drove them out and took over the factories.
Frequently instructions from the Supreme Council of the National Economy
(VSNKh) not to expropriate an enterprise were met with the response that
it has already been done. In the months following the October Revolution,
workers control gave way to workers self-management imposed from below.
The instructions of VSNKh to the individual factory committees
concerning production and distribution were frequently disregarded. The factory
committees sought to maximize enterprise income through unbridled competition
for supplies and markets. A Bolshevik leader of the Metal Workers Union,
writing in late 1917, described the situation as follows:
"Another proprietor came, who was equally an
individualist and anti-social as the former one, and the name of the new
proprietor was the control committee. In the Donetz area, the metal works and
mines refused to supply each other with coal and iron on credit, selling the
iron to the peasants without regard for the needs of the
State."
—quoted in Maurice Dobb, Soviet Economic Development Since
1917 (1948)
Another Bolshevik trade unionist in November 1917 summarizes the
situation thus:
"Workers control by itself is an anarchistic attempt to
achieve socialism in one enterprise, and actually leads to clashes among the
workers themselves and to the refusal of fuel, metal, etc. to one
another."
—quoted in Paul Avrich, The Russian Revolution and Factory
Committees (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1961)
These quotes are somewhat onesided. The recourse of the factory
committees to unrestrained atomized competition did not primarily express
either parochial self-centeredness or anarcho-syndicalist prejudices, though
both were present. Rather the economic situation reflected the new Bolshevik
government’s lack of authority and organization amid the anarchic turmoil
of revolution. The workers in the mass supported Lenin’s government to one
degree or another, but questioned its viability and permanence. It was
understandable for individual factory committees to refuse to sell on credit to
a government they believed would not be around long enough to pay.
The disastrous effect of workers self-management and the
exigencies of the looming civil war convinced most workers of the need for
centralized economic direction. The institution of "war communism" met with
general support and little resistance.
The onset of full-scale civil war in mid-1918 led to wholesale
nationalization and the subordination of the factory committees to centralized
economic direction. However, the main reason that Lenin had earlier opposed
general nationalization remained. The Bolshevik government did not have an
apparatus capable of administering a nationalized, centralized industry. So it
turned to the one politically loyal organization which had a hierarchy
conforming to the industrial structure—the trade unions. The economy under
"war communism" was administered by the trade unions, not by a separate state
body. Industrial management by the trade unions, traditional workers
organizations, had the further advantage of allaying syndicalist prejudices
against the new soviet state power.
The threat of white terror strengthened the loyalty of the workers
to Bolshevik rule and generated a spirit of self-sacrifice. Economic
administration by the unions worked fairly well. A policy originally undertaken
as a practical expedient was accepted as a programmatic norm for a workers
state. The new Bolshevik program adopted at the Eighth Party Congress in March
1919 stipulated the trade unions would be the basic organ of economic
administration. Point 5 of the section entitled "In the sphere of economics"
states:
"The organizing apparatus of socialized industry must
first of all rest upon the trade unions. The latter must free themselves from
the narrow guild outlook and transform themselves into large productive
combinations comprising the majority, and gradually all the workers of a given
branch of production."
—Robert H. McNeal, ed., Decisions and
Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1974)
This programmatic statement would cause much trouble a few years
later.
The overwhelming economic exigencies of the civil war suppressed
any differences within the Bolshevik party over the optimal organization of a
workers state, of the relations between the government administration, the
trade unions and other workers organizations. Such differences exploded with
the end of the civil war in early 1921 amid a mass reaction against the severe
austerity and commandism of "war communism."
The Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 saw the semi-syndicalist
Workers Opposition advocate the administration of the economy by autonomous
trade unions. Trotsky, short-sightedly concerned with rehabilitating
the economy as speedily as possible, advocated the total statification of the
unions, liquidating them as autonomous, internally democratic bodies. Lenin,
whose views prevailed, occupied a middle position. He insisted on the direct
administration of the economy of the state. He also supported autonomous trade
unions to represent the interests of specific groups of workers
vis-à-vis the government administration hierarchy, which was capable of
bureaucratic abuses as well as errors.
Only with the institution of the New Economic Policy in 1921 did
the Bolshevik government acquire its own distinct organs of economic
administration. This freed the unions to defend the consumerist interests of
specific groups of workers. The Labor Code of 1922 stipulated that wages and
working conditions be determined by collective bargaining between the unions
and state employers.
The early 1920’s also saw the introduction of a new form of
workers control as an authoritative consultative voice designed to increase
productivity. Production conferences of the entire work force elected standing
control commissions to oversee that their recommendations were carried out. The
Stalini’st political counterrevolution eroded and eventually suppressed
the control commissions, as it did the trade unions and all other independent
proletarian bodies.
The Trotskyist Left Opposition in its 1927 "Platform" calls
attention to the atrophying of workers control and the growing indifference of
the workers toward productivity:
"The production conferences are gradually being reduced
to nothing. The majority of the practical proposals adopted by the workers are
never carried out. Among many of these workers a distaste for these production
conferences is nourished by the fact that the improvements which they do
succeed in introducing often result in a reduction of the number of
workers."
The "Platform of the Joint Opposition" called for strengthening
the control commissions:
"The functions of the control commissions of the
production councils must be extended to include supervising the execution of
their decisions and investigating their success in protecting the workers’
interests."
The 1938 Transitional Program incorporated workers control
in the consultative sense as a programmatic norm in a workers state, an
integral part of proletarian democracy and rational economic planning.
Workers Management in the Spanish Civil War
While workers management in the Bolshevik revolution was a
short-lived, anarchic episode, workers management was a central element in the
Spanish revolution and civil war. Following the defeated military coup of July
1936 most of Spain’s capitalists either fled or were driven out into the
areas controlled by Franco’s army. Workers management became widespread
throughout Spain and dominant in Catalonia (which then accounted for 70 percent
of Spanish industry) where the labor movement was dominated by the
anarcho-syndicalists through their trade-union federation, the
Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). Workers management was
legalized by the Collectivization Decree of October 1936.
The anarchist masses did not look upon workers management as a
temporary situation or expedient caused by the civil war, but as the
realization of their ideal program. They believed the libertarian millennium
had arrived. Despite this very different political attitude, the initial
experience of workers management in Spain resembled that of Russia in
1917-18. The anarchist-managed collectives acted like competing producer
cooperatives. In those collectives which inherited ample material and financial
reserves, which had new equipment and enjoyed favorable market demand, the
workers’ incomes were relatively high. In those collectives without these
advantages, the workers suffered accordingly. The situation is well described
by Gaston Leval, a French anarchist and prominent CNT militant at the time:
"Too often in Barcelona and Valencia, workers in each
undertaking took over the factory, the works, or the workshop, the machines,
raw materials, and taking advantage of the continuation of the money system and
normal capitalist commercial relations, organised production on their own
account, selling for their own benefit the produce of their labour....
"There was not, therefore, true socialisation, but a
workers’ neo-capitalism, a self-management straddling capitalism and
socialism, which we maintain would not have occured had the Revolution been
able to extend itself fully under the direction of our
Svndicates."
—Collectives in the Spanish Revolution
(1975)
The anarcho-syndicalist cadre, like Leval, were dismayed that the
"libertarian" collectives reproduced the irrationality and inegalitarianism of
the capitalist market, a situation which also impeded the war against Franco.
The CNT hierarchy more-or-less successfully countered the anarchic parochialism
of the collectives and imposed some centralized economic direction. In general,
the anarcho-syndicalist workers regarded the enterprises as belonging to the
CNT as a whole, not to the individual collectives. Through the CNT, the Spanish
workers achieved miracles of economic organization. In Catalonia, which had no
metal-working industry, the CNT collectives built a munitions industry from the
ground up. The Spanish proletariat displayed outstanding labor discipline,
self-sacrifice and ingenuity. This is one of the factors that caused Trotsky,
in arguing for the unique significance of the Bolshevik Party, to state that in
their mass consciousness the Spanish proletariat stood higher, not lower, than
the Russian workers of 1917-18.
The CNT attempted, with mixed success, to combine the individual
enterprises into vertically-integrated industrial syndicates (e.g., textiles,
wood products). However, all the CNT collectives—individual factories,
multi-enterprise industrial syndicates (like the light textile syndicate in
Alcoy), transport and utilities—had to relate to the rest of the economy
through capitalist commercial methods.
Were the CNT collectives economically viable? Those collectives
which had a relatively self-contained production process, supplied a localized
market, enjoyed a monopolistic position and a large, regular cash flow were
generally "profitable." The pride of the CNT industrial collectives was the
Barcelona tramways syndicate, a localized monopoly supplying an essential
service for immediate cash payment. But those collectives which were part of a
long chain of production, imported raw materials, sold on long-term credits or
to the government (e.g., the munitions industry) were not economically viable
without state support and cooperation. Such collectives were critically
dependent upon state credit and, therefore, on parties hostile to workers
management and the anarcho-syndicalist masses. One justification the anarchist
leaders advanced for entering the central Popular Front government was to
secure state finance for the CNT collectives.
The collectives were naturally the most resolute defenders of
workers management. Despite the attitudes of the workers and given the absence
of a planned, socialized economy, the collectives had an organic tendency to
become competing producer cooperatives.
The CNT bureaucracy administered the collectives partly in the
interests of what it considered economic rationality and partly to carry out
the bidding of its Popular Front partners. The CNT did on behalf of the
bourgeois Popular Front government what the Russian trade unions did on behalf
of the Bolshevik government; it disciplined the anarchic, localist tendencies
of the collectives in the interests of the government’s economic
objectives.
The "expanded economic plenum" of the CNT in January 1938 adopted
a series of measures resembling "war communism." These measures, of course,
grossly violated anarcho-syndicalist principles. An inspectorate was created to
"put forward the expected norms which will effectively orientate the different
industrial units with a view to improving their economy and administration..."
(quoted in Vernon Richards, Lessons of the Spanish Revolution [1972]).
These inspectors had the right to sanction the elected factory committees. The
plenum also empowered managers to dismiss workers for lateness, absence and
failure to meet work norms, as well as those labeled "troublemakers" who
"create dissensions between the workers and the managers or the trade union
representatives."
The Popular Front government, with the Stalinists in the vanguard,
recognized in the factory committees and workers management a locus of
independent proletarian power capable of challenging its authority. Therefore
the basic policy of the Popular Front was to liquidate workers management and
statify the CNT collectives. The CNT was too powerful to achieve this end by
direct administrative/military action, so the government resorted to economic
sabotage. Capital equipment was requisitioned from the collectives on the
pretext that they were needed for the war effort. Leval recounts an incident
where the War Ministry, requisitioned two modern milling machines from the
Barcelona tramways syndicate. Later it was discovered the ministry had a secret
cache of some 40 comparable machines.
The primary method by which the Popular Front sabotaged workers
management was through its control of finances. The government literally
starved the workers in the CNT collectives. Leval describes how this was done:
"And when, in Catalonia, the Communist leader Comorera
became Minister of Finance after the May Days, the means of struggle he adopted
were original. It was clear that it was quite impossible to destroy the
outstanding influence of the Syndicates of the C.N.T. To attempt to do so would
have paralysed production overnight. So, Comorera had recourse to two
complementary procedures; on the one hand he deprived the factories of raw
materials or deliveries did not arrive on time, thus resulting in production
delays which were knowingly criticised; on the other hand they paid for
deliveries of cloth, clothing, arms, etc., with a delay which affected the
workers’ own budgets. As the wages were distributed under the supervision
of the Syndicates, it was against the delegates of the C.N.T. and against the
organism of which they were the representatives that the discontent of one
section of the workers was directed."
—Collectives in the Spanish
Revolution
The turning point of the Spanish revolution, the "May Days" in
Barcelona, was precipitated by a military attack by the Popular Front
government on workers management. The CNT collective which ran the telephone
system was especially irritating to the Popular Front because it enabled the
anarchist workers to listen in on communications between the central ministries
in Valencia and their Catalan counterparts. On 3 May 1937 the Stalinist
commissar of public order in Catalonia, Rodriguez Sala, attempted an armed
assault on the Telefónica building. The infuriated response of the
Barcelona workers--a massive general strike including the erection of street
barricades--was on the verge of sweeping away the government forces when the
anarchist ministers, Garcia Oliver and Federica Montseny, intervened to arrange
a truce. This gave the central government time to send 6,000 Civil Guards to
occupy Barcelona.
In the rightist reaction which followed, the POUM leader
Andrés Nin and anarchist Camillo Berneri were assassinated among others,
the left-centrist POUM was suppressed and the anarchists were expelled from the
government (although they remained loyal to the Popular Front). The "May Days"
broke the back of the vanguard of the proletariat; the liquidation of the
revolutionary dual power established in July 1936, including workers
management, followed apace.
The Trotskyist position toward workers management in the Spanish
revolution is governed by the fact that it constituted a form of proletarian
dual power in relation to an essentially bourgeois government. While
criticizing and opposing anarcho-syndicalist doctrine, we would be the most
resolute defenders of workers management in practice, far more so than the
treacherous CNT bureaucracy. While maintaining and stepping up production for
the war of the Republic against Franco, a Trotskyist leadership would have
refused and resisted the Stalinist-inspired state requisitions of capital
equipment on the pretext of furthering the war effort. Trotskyists would have
demanded the ouster of official representatives of the Popular Front government
from all bodies administering the collectives. Above all, the Trotskyists would
also have explained that genuine socialization of production required the
overthrow of the Popular Front (no less than the defeat of Franco’s army)
and the establishment of a planned economy administered by a workers
government.
The contrasting experiences of Russia 1917-21 and Spain 1936-39
indicate that our attitude toward workers control and management depends above
all on the class nature of the state power, and secondarily on the development
of the revolution from a proletarian offensive against capitalist rule to the
consolidation of a workers government administering a centralized, planned
economy. |