The Russian Revolution полностью

The fate of the Russian labor movement, in its anarcho-syndicalist as well as trade union form, was largely settled at the First Congress of Trade Unions, held in Petrograd in January 1918.¹⁴⁴ Here, socialist intellectuals, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks alike, criticized the anarcho-syndicalist tendencies of industrial workers and rejected demands for workers’ control as detrimental to productivity and inimical to socialism. Despite heated arguments in favor of workers’ control, the congress, dominated by Bolsheviks, who on this issue had the backing of the Mensheviks and SRs, adopted a resolution shifting the means of exercising workers’ control over production from Factory Committees to the trade unions. Factory Committees now lost many of the powers granted them in November, including that of interfering with financial matters. “Control over production,” the resolution stated, “does not mean the transfer of the enterprise into the hands of workers.”

When the congress turned its attention to trade unions, the Mensheviks parted ways with the Bolsheviks. Since they enjoyed strong support among some of the largest national unions, the Mensheviks favored independent trade unionism. The Bolsheviks maintained that trade unions should serve as instruments of the state, its agents in “organizing production” and “rehabilitating the country’s shattered economic forces.” Among their tasks was “enforcing the universal obligation to work.” “The congress is convinced,” the Bolshevik resolution read, “that trade unions will inevitably become transformed into organs of the socialist state”:

The entire process of the full fusion of the trade unions with the organs of state authority (the so-called process of ogosudarstvlenie) must occur as the completely inevitable result of their joint, closest, and harmonized activity and the training by trade unions of the broad worker masses for the task of administering the state apparatus and all the organs in charge of the economy.¹⁴⁵

This was very much in line with a tradition of Russian history by virtue of which the state, sooner or later, coopted and subordinated to itself all institutions originally formed, sometimes on its own initiative, as independent, self-governing bodies.

Once it had been decreed that individual Factory Committees were subject to the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control, that this council, in turn, had to account to the trade unions and their congresses, and that the proper function of trade unions was to serve as “organs of the socialist state,” the fate of Factory Committees was sealed. The history of workers’ control institutions following the First Congress of Trade Unions is one of relentless decline: they shrank, wilted, and died, one by one. The abortive movement in the spring of 1918 to create a nationwide network of workers’ plenipotentiaries was the last gasp of the movement. By 1919, they were only a memory.

As concerns trade unions, they increased their scope if not their authority as the Civil War neared its climax and the government came to rely on them to enforce labor discipline. The party increasingly assumed the right to appoint trade union officials, removing elected officials of whom it did not approve.¹⁴⁶ In 1919 and 1920, state and party resolutions still paid lip service to the principle that trade unions helped run the nation’s economy. But in reality by then their main task was to serve as transmitters of government directives. This is how Trotsky defined the role of trade unions in April 1920:

In the socialist state under construction, trade unions are needed not to struggle for better working conditions—this is the task of the social and political organization as a whole—but to organize the working class for the purpose of production: to educate, discipline, allocate, collect, attach individual categories and individual workers to their jobs for a set period: in a word, hand in hand with the government in an authoritative manner to bring workers into the framework of a single economic plan.¹⁴⁷

The trade unions proved a harder nut to crack than the ephemeral Factory Committees: after the Civil War, in 1920–21, an explosion would occur in Bolshevik ranks over the practice of replacing elected union officials with appointed party bureaucrats. This issue would cause a great deal of internal friction and give Lenin the pretext for outlawing the formation of factions in the Communist Party.

Once it had been established that the function of trade unions was not to defend the interests of their members, but to serve the state, it was logical for membership in them to be made mandatory. Compulsory enrollment was not decreed but introduced gradually in one trade after another, until, at the end of 1918, three-quarters of the working force was subject to compulsory unionization.¹⁴⁸ The larger their membership, the more impotent the trade unions became.