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embarrassing competitors. Immediately after the seizure of power, the
spontaneous and irresistible tendency toward the socialization of
production was, at first, channeled through workers' control. A decree of
November 14, 1917, legalized the participation of workers in the
management of enterprises and the fixing of prices; it abolished trade
secrets, and compelled the employers to publish their correspondence
and their accounts. According to Victor Serge, "the leaders of the
Revolution did not intend to go beyond this." In April 1918 they "still
intended . . . to set up mixed companies with shares, in which the Soviet
State and Russian and foreign capital would all participate." "The
initiative for measures of expropriation came from the masses and not
from authority."
As early as October 20, 1917, at the first Congress of Factory Councils, a
motion inspired by anarchism was presented. It proposed "control over
production, and that control commissions should not be simply
investigative bodies, but . . . from this moment on cells of the future
preparing to transfer production to the hands of the workers." "In the
very early days of the October Revolution," Anna Pankratova(22)
reported, "anarchist tendencies were the more easily and successfully
manifested, because the capitalists put up the liveliest resistance to the
enforcement of the decree on workers' control and actually refused
workers' participation in production."
Workers' control in effect soon showed itself to be a half measure,
halting and inefficient. The employers sabotaged it, concealed their
stocks, removed tools, challenged or locked out the workers; sometimes
they used the factory committees as simple agents or aides to
management; they even thought it profitable to try to have their firms
nationalized. The workers responded to these maneuvers by seizing the
factories and running them for their own benefit. "We ourselves will not
send the owners away," the workers said in their resolutions, "but we
will take charge of production if they will not insure that the factories
function." Anna Pankratova adds that, in this first period of "chaotic" and
"primitive" socialization, the factory councils "frequently took over the
management of factories whose owners had been dismissed or had fled."
Workers' control soon had to give place to socialization. Lenin literally
did violence to his more timorous lieutenants by throwing them into the
"crucible of living popular creativity," by obliging them to speak in
authentic libertarian language. The basis of revolutionary reconstruction
was to be workers' self-management. It alone could arouse in the masses
such revolutionary enthusiasm that the impossible would become
possible. When the last manual worker, any unemployed person, any
cook, could see the factories, the land, the administration in the hands of
associations of workers, of employees, of officials, of peasants; rationing
in the hands of democratic committees, etc.; all created spontaneously by
the people - "when the poor see and feel that, there will be no force able
to defeat the social revolution." The future seemed to be opening up for a
republic of the type of the Commune of 1871, a republic of soviets.
According to Voline's account, "in order to catch the imagination of the
masses, gain their confidence and their sympathy, the Bolshevik Party
announced . . . slogans which had up tin then been characteristic . . . of
anarchism." All power to the soviets was a slogan which the masses
intuitively understood in the libertarian sense. Peter Archinoff reported
that "the workers interpreted the idea of soviet power as that of their own
right to dispose of themselves socially and economically." At the Third
Congress of Soviets, at the beginning of 1918, Lenin declared:
"Anarchist ideas have now taken on living form." Soon after, at the
Seventh Party Congress, March ~8, he proposed for adoption theses
which dealt among other things with the socialization of production
administered by workers' organizations (trade unions, factory
committees, etc.); the abolition of officials in charge of manual trades, of
the police and the army; the equality of salaries and remuneration; the
participation of all members of the soviets in management and
administration of the State; the complete elimination by stages of the
said State and of the use of money. At the Trade-Union Congress (spring
1918), Lenin described the factories as "self-governing communes of
producers and consumers." The anarcho-syndicalist Maximoff goes so
far as to maintain that "the Bolsheviks had not only abandoned the
theory of the gradual withering away of the State, but Marxist ideology
in general. They had become some kind of anarchists."
AN AUTHORITARIAN REVOLUTION
This audacious alignment with the instinct of the masses and their
revolutionary temper may have succeeded in giving the Bolsheviks
command over the revolution, but had nothing to do with their traditional
ideology or their real intentions. They had been authoritarians for a long
time, and were imbued with ideas of the State, of dictatorship, of : ':__': ,
of a ruling party, of management of the economy from above, of all
things which were in flagrant contradiction with a really libertarian
conception of soviet democracy.
State and Revolution was written on the eve of the October insurrection
and mirrors the ambivalence of Lenin's thoughts. Some pages might have
been written by a libertarian and, as we have seen above(23), some credit
at least is given to the anarchists. However, this call for a revolution
from below runs parallel to a statement of the case for a revolution from
above. Concepts of a hierarchical, centralized state system are not half
concealed afterthoughts but, on the contrary, are frankly expressed: the
State will survive the conquest of power by the proletariat and will
wither away only after a transitional period. How long is this purgatory
to last? This is not concealed; we are told rather with relief than with
regret that the process will be "slow," and "of long duration." Under the
guise of soviet power, the revolution will bring forth the "proletarian
State," or "dictatorship of the proletariat"; the writer even lets slip the
expression "bourgeois State without the bourgeoisie," just when he is
revealing his inmost thoughts. This omnivorous State surely intends to
take everything over.
Lenin took a lesson from contemporary German state capitalism, the
Kriegswirtschaft (war economy). Another of his models was the
organization of modern large-scale industry by capitalism, with its "iron
discipline." He was particularly entranced by a state monopoly such as
the posts and telegraphs and exclaimed: "What an admirably perfected
mechanism! The whole of economic life organized like the postal [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]