Workers’ Control in Europe: A Comparative Sociological Analysis
Carmen Sirianni
As David Montgomery has noted, workers’ control of production has represented a long historical struggle, a “chronic battle in industrial life which assumed a variety of forms.”1 From the beginning of industrial society, workers have devised a great variety of strategies—formal and informal, deliberate and spontaneous—to set their own pace and style of work, to define their own intragroup relations, and to resist the routine of the clock and the discipline of the boss. As much as the working classes have been transformed by the dynamics and rhythms of capital accumulation, they have resisted the very same driving forces of accumulation and redefined them.
During the First World War and the immediate postwar period, this perennial struggle took on new forms. For the first time the efforts of skilled workers to control their own jobs were transformed into mass struggles to wrest control of the production process as a whole from capitalist management and to lodge it in formal organs that were democratically constituted by the workers themselves. Those skilled workers who had previously been in the forefront of job control struggles began to develop organizational forms that promised to transcend the boundaries of craft and to include the mass of less skilled workers in the general project of democratic management. For the first time truly mass struggles were waged to give specific institutional form to the socialist project of reappropriating the means of production and transforming the relations of production. The historic struggles for labor dignity received innovative institutional expression, and important aspects of the class division of labor were challenged.
It was during this period that “workers’ control over production” became a significant part of the vocabulary of the socialist left. Even though certain rudimentary conceptions of workers’ control could be found in the socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist writings of the previous half-century, it was not until the struggle over the control of production became a mass phenomenon during World War I that socialist theory was impelled to take serious recognition of the questions being raised—questions that went to the very heart of orthodox Leninist as well as Social Democratic conceptions about the nature of the revolutionary process and the socialist society that stood as its proximate goal. Nor was the impact of these movements limited to the socialist left. As Steve Fraser has noted, “workers’ control” and “industrial democracy” represented complex metaphors whose meaning varied according to the social grammar and specific context of which they were a part.2 The outcomes of these movements, no less than the specific industrial sectors and working-class traditions within which they emerged, engendered various interpretations, theories, and models of worker participation and control, which have subsequently been implemented in capitalist and socialist countries alike.
This essay makes a preliminary attempt to understand these movements—their emergence, development, and outcomes, their internal dynamics, and their relationship to the larger totality of social forces that simultaneously created and circumscribed their possibilities. The countries chosen for systematic comparison—Russia, Germany, Italy, Britain, and France—represent a broad enough range of experiences in the area of workers’ control to permit us to draw certain tentative conclusions. On the one end we have the Russian case, in which limited control over the owners developed in stages into actual workers’ self-management in many sectors of the economy. In France, on the other end, rank-and-file oppositional movements around such goals were very limited, although the ideals of democratizing industry had considerable resonance within established labor organizations.
While this study is not directly a test of sociological theory, it does draw very considerably on a resource mobilization approach to social movements.3 In contrast to much previous literature, which stressed deprivations and beliefs,4 resource mobilization theory focuses primarily on capacities and constraints. While it does not ignore ideologies and felt deprivations, it tends to make weaker assumptions about their role and seeks to situate them within contexts defined by organized structures. This essay is informed by such an orientation, without excluding the possibility of a much richer analysis of felt deprivations, cultural traditions, or ideological orientations. It does, however, focus on broad political and economic structures; the conditions for the mobilization of resources for struggle; preexisting and emerging organizational forms and networks and the degree and density of these; cooperation, competition, and canalization by and among organizations in the struggle for scarce resources (including legitimacy) and the rational calculation of risks and rewards; and the relation of constituency types and organizational forms. Of central concern throughout are the specifically political factors, such as the various roles of the state, political elites outside the state, the forms and degrees of state crisis, and the constraints and forms of leverage within the international state system. The latter, along with international economic factors, are of essential relevance to the study of movements in a period of war and postwar reconstruction and realignment. Finally, the temporal articulations of movement and organizational development are particularly important in the study of phenomena with both broad continuities and abrupt critical junctures such as characterized this period of total war.
Wartime Contradictions and Protest Potential
The industrial working classes in Europe experienced a noticeable decline in their overall living and working conditions during the war, a decline that contrasted sharply with the trend of the previous decades. Galloping inflation significantly reduced the real wages of most workers, though increased employment opportunities for women and children compensated for this among certain families. Only a very thin stratum of the most highly skilled workers in the war industries were able to achieve gains that kept pace with the constant rise in prices. General working conditions deteriorated as hours were lengthened and protective legislation (where it existed) was often suspended or ignored. Discipline at the workplace intensified severely, especially for those draft-age males covered by the various forms of labor mobilization and special exemption. Labor mobility was itself curtailed, though never completely or effectively. Shortages of food, housing, fuel, and other necessities became increasingly severe as the war dragged on. Such shortages not only increased the absolute burden of the working classes, for whom the incidence of undernourishment and sickness rose considerably (Britain seems to have been the exception here), they also starkly revealed the differential capacities of the various classes, especially wherever the black market served as a supplement to official rationing policies. As Jürgen Kocka has noted of the German wartime experience, nothing more raised the level of class tensions than the manifest inequality in the supply of necessities, at a time when the working classes were being called upon to make incredible sacrifices for the “nation” as a whole. Under such conditions, rumors that the crown princess bathed in milk while workers’ children went without were powerful instigators of class conflict. Awareness of the immense profits that were being made on the war also contributed to the increasing sense of unequal sacrifice and unequal reward and directly fed the antiwar sentiments that continued to grow as the initial patriotic enthusiasm wore off and the war came to be seen as both endless and senseless. Daily life became increasingly more disrupted and brutalized, as families were broken up, children with working mothers were inadequately cared for, and community life was dislocated by the massive population shifts away from the fronts and towards the centers of war production.
While the war dramatically reversed prewar trends toward a general betterment of conditions, it simultaneously led to an increase in expectations in regard to the role of the working classes in the national polity and also created labor market conditions favorable to working class protest. The nationalism used to mobilize the workers behind the state and the ruling powers was a two-edged sword that cut in the direction of increased popular participation and social reform as well as labor integration. Indeed, labor’s cooperation in the war effort had been achieved only with explicit or implicit promises of reform, some of which were not to be postponed even until the war’s end. And the war-induced labor shortage provided the leverage—particularly in war-related industries—for workers to press their demands in the face of the two major restrictive conditions: state repression (including dispatch to the front) and trade union opposition or lack of support. The threat that wildcat strikes posed to the war efforts of the respective governments, as well as to the inflated wartime profits of the owners, was responsible for the relatively high proportion of settlements favorable to the workers.5
The war proved to be the great accelerator of trends toward more rationalized production (including chronometry, price-rates and bonuses, and serial production). Taylor’s ideas had already spread to Europe before the war but had met with only very selective application by industrialists, as well as resistance by some of the workers affected. But the peculiar suitability of such methods to bulk repetition production required especially in munitions, the direct and indirect state support in the form of guaranteed markets and profits and preference for uniform standards, and the sudden and severe shortage of skilled labor as a result of the call-ups provided the impetus for a real “takeoff” in this regard. The metal and machine industries in all the countries under consideration were most directly affected, but so also were selected other industries (chemical, optical) at least partially. Those industries producing for the war not only experienced a huge growth in their workforces but a disproportionate increase in the number of semi- and unskilled workers, mainly women, peasants, youth, and, in some cases, foreigners and prisoners of war. For many of these new recruits, work in the war industries represented increased opportunities, wages, and even skills.
The introduction and extension of rationalized production methods and scientific managerial techniques, however, represented a direct threat to the power and position of the mass of more highly skilled workers—those to whom the limited opportunities for advancement (into the supervisory hierarchy, or the tool rooms, for instance) created by the new methods did not extend. The relative monopoly on productive knowledge and technique that the skilled workers possessed had allowed them a certain degree of informal control over such factors as the process of production, the pace of work, the amount of output, and the training of new workers. Sometimes this informal control became formalized in union work rules, imposed unilaterally on the owners and not the subject of contract bargaining. The extent of such job control, however, varied considerably from industry to industry, and country to country. Even in the British engineering works most directly affected by the war, the dilution of skill had progressed considerably in the previous decades under the impact of new machinery. A long craft tradition and strong craft union muscle had been relatively effective in maintaining the old rates for diluted work, but the objective basis for such a response was being rapidly undermined by wartime transformations—transformations that received added ideological and political impetus from the presence of a foreign threat. In the war industries elsewhere on the continent, craft control had never been as strong as in Britain, and there was even less possibility of actually resisting the introduction of new methods. The expansion of the number of dilutees during the war tended to strengthen the hand of management vis-à-vis the skilled workers on questions of discipline and exacerbated the latter’s fears of being expendable and hence subject to duty at the front. But most conflicts seem to have centered on wages—the wages of the skilled relative to those of the less skilled and the hoards of new recruits, and the establishment of acceptable piece rates for those who had been shifted off hourly scales. The numerical rates of piece and hourly wages were a constant issue of contention under conditions of steep inflation (which continued into the immediate postwar years in Germany, Italy, and France). The actual process of establishing the rates seems to have remained as much of an issue as it had been, for instance, when chronometry had first been introduced in the Renault factories in 1912 and the workers had insisted that their own delegates participate in its application (the famous grève du chronométrage). And to a certain extent, piece work itself was a focus of struggle. A prominent slogan of the Free Trade Unions in Hamburg, for instance, captured the widespread feeling: Akkord ist Mord—piecework is murder.6
Organizational Forms: Old and New
The sacrifices imposed by the war on the working classes and the heightening of perceived inequalities and class tensions generated an increasing potential for mass protest and opposition. The organizational articulation of this potential for protest depended in the first instance on the behavior of the trade unions. The limitations in the unions’ ability to adequately defend workers’ interests had both political and structural causes, though these were interrelated. In those countries with legal and well-established (though unevenly developed) trade unions—Britain, Germany, Italy, and France—the political limitations were roughly similar. The major union federations had renounced class struggle tactics that might be disruptive to the war effort for the duration of that conflict. Their decisions had been conditioned by (1) pressure from above, i.e., the very real possibility of state repression of their organizations; (2) pressure from below (with the partial exception of Italy), i.e., pressure from the masses of workers themselves, whose own nationalistic feelings often ran very deep and whose antimilitarism was extremely vulnerable in the absence of an effective internationalist strategy for preventing the outbreak of war;7 (3) the reformist politics of most trade union leaders, which had evolved in the prewar period of organizational growth and economic improvement for the working classes; and (4) the possibilities of significant concessions in exchange for official participation and collaboration in the war effort (i.e., on various war boards, arbitration commissions, and in relief work). In other words, the unions had not abandoned all aims of their own. In Germany, for instance, the unions not only achieved much greater recognition by the state, but also curbs on company unions, favorable statutes on wages and job mobility in the Auxiliary Service Law, and general treatment encouraging the growth in membership, despite restrictions on overt organizing. All four countries shared in this trade union growth in the second part of the war. But to maintain favorable government treatment and the possibilities of further growth and reform at the war’s end, all the major union federations—the General Labor Union Federation (Allgemeine Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) (ADGB) in Germany, the General Confederation of Labor (Confédération Générale du Travail) (CGT) in France, the General Confederation of Labor (Confederazione Generale del Lavoro) (CGL) in Italy, and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) in Britain—renounced militant tactics like the strike, including the refusal of strike funds and, in some cases, reporting striking workers to the military authorities.8
The unions were also unresponsive to rank-and-file protest because of certain structural characteristics. In the prewar years unions had evolved into relatively stable, bureaucratic, and centralized organizations based primarily on craft association with geographical membership jurisdictions. Such organizations were seen as the only real alternative to the high degree of instability (in terms of membership and concrete gains) that characterized the low-dues, antibureaucratic, anticentralist, and class warfare practices of the syndicalist form of organization—a form of organization that presented a significant challenge to the CGL in Italy (in the form of the Italian Syndical Union [Unione Sindacale Italiana] [USI]) and had characterized many of the unions in the French CGT itself before the latter began to adopt more bureaucratic forms of organization in response to the increasing centralization of capital and the demands of the workers themselves for more stable and secure achievements.9 Craft associations formed the core of the major union federations in these countries, with the exception of the CGT in France, which had made considerable progress towards industrial forms of organization by the time of the war and further progress during it. But even in France the actual organization of the unskilled and semiskilled workers proved extremely difficult before the war’s end. In Germany, Italy, and Britain a multiplicity of craft associations in any given workplace was the rule, and the craft unions exercised hegemony in the labor movement as a whole and even in many unions with a significant number of unskilled workers.
Given the collaborationist, centralized, bureaucratic, and craft character of the trade unions, the rising protest over general economic and political issues and the conflict generated around changes in the production process in the war industries (particularly metals) warranted alternative forms of organization. These would have to be able to respond to the immediate problems arising in the workplace, rather than mediating these problems through sections based in geographical units outside the factory. They would have to be able to respond quickly to the ever-changing structure of wage rates, rather than through cumbersome bureaucratic processes. And they would have to cut across craft distinctions that production process changes were making increasingly outmoded and dangerously divisive. The pattern of organizational formation, however, varied considerably.
Britain In Britain, the country with the most profound craft tradition and the most persistent and rigid craft structure in industry and in the trade unions, the response of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, the major union federation affected, to the dilution crisis was a highly conservative one. The ASE essentially sought to maintain its prewar policy of “following the machine,” or accepting new types of work necessitated by the introduction of new machinery on the condition that jobs traditionally done by craftsmen should continue to be paid at the standard rate, that dilution be confined to war work, and that old practices be restored at the war’s end. Such a policy, James Hinton has shown, “made no allowance at all for the technological dynamism of the industry.”10 It was a strategy based more and more on bluff as the objective skill basis rapidly declined, and it largely ignored the organization of the less skilled and the pursuance of an all-grades strategy. The national agreements between the government and the unions, however, helped open the way to local negotiation as well as conflict. The shop stewards’ movement—a movement based on the direct representation of the skilled engineering workers and tending toward the creation of an all-grades organization rooted in the workshop—thus arose to fill the gap that most ASE locals could or would not. Because the ASE craft structure was so rigid, the stewards in most places existed outside the union organizations and often in direct antagonism to them. Their organizations became the basis for strikes not only around workplace issues but also around the war, the draft (i.e., of specially exempted skilled munitions workers), and food and housing shortages.
Germany The pattern in Germany and Italy was somewhat different. Many local sections of the German Metalworkers’ Union (Deutsche Metallarbeiter Verband) (DMV), the major union in the metal works producing for the war, had evolved considerably towards an all-grades organization. Craft control had never been very strong to begin with, and craft organization was further weakened by the massive influx of previously unorganized and often unskilled recruits who began streaming into the union in the last half of the war. A new mass base was in the process of formation that had little tradition of trade union discipline and stable organizational work. But the normal channels of protest and leadership challenge within the unions were blocked for the duration of the war. There thus arose a new stratum of rank-and-file organizers to fill the leadership gap. As Peter von Oertzen has argued, in the larger factories and cities (especially Berlin) a stratum of trade union functionaries could develop and rise to responsible and influential positions without following the career path of permanently appointed secretaries, i.e., without getting quickly coopted into the union bureaucracy, as was usually the case in the smaller factories and cities. The revolutionary Obleute or shop stewards thus arose from within and drew upon the resources of the various metal workers’ locals that had moved considerably towards an all-grades organization. Though invariably led by the more highly skilled turners and fitters, the organizations they constructed would become the basis in 1919 for a revolutionary factory committee movement involving broad masses, both skilled and unskilled.11
Italy The factory committee movement that arose in Italy at the war’s end was centered largely in Turin, the major Italian industrial city producing for the war. As in Germany, the dominant metal union federation, Federazione Italiana Operai Matallurgici (FIOM), was formally structured along the lines of craft sections, with a fairly high degree of sectional consciousness among founders, coppersmiths, and so on. But, also as in Germany, the actual extent of craft control was not very great—not nearly so far-reaching as in Britain before the war. And this was especially true of Turin, a city whose recent breakneck development as an industrial center was based on a more extensive use of the latest production methods. There was thus very little hope of preventing or reversing the trend toward increased rationalization of production. But the issues raised by rationalization required an all-grades approach and a shop-based organization that could not be provided directly by the union. In the interstices of the union organizations there thus developed internal commissions (commissioni interne). These were usually elected on the shopfloor by all union members irrespective of craft distinctions (though they were sometimes appointed from above) and functioned essentially as grievance committees overseeing the application of wage agreements. Their functions were at first quite limited and their official existence tenuous, for the union was very suspicious of the increase in local initiative that they represented.
But there was considerable pressure from below for their official recognition, and rather than risk a breakaway movement or the loss of locals to the syndicalists, the union moved toward the end of 1918 to incorporate them into its structure. The February 1919 national FIOM agreement recognized the internal commissions as organs competent to negotiate directly with management on all collective and individual grievances arising out of the application of the agreement. Some in the union hierarchy seem to have honestly viewed the commissions as preparatory organs for workers’ self-management, but prior to the revolution that few saw on the immediate agenda, they were to function to help raise productivity, ensure the smooth application of new methods, and maintain overall industrial peace. Indeed, FIOM had come around to the monopolies’ program for industrial reconstruction and development, which was predicated on the unions’ trade-off of all claims to control the labor process and discipline, and of the right to strike for the duration of the contract. In return for a free hand for increased rationalization, the owners conceded the eight-hour day and substantial pay increases. (A similar agreement in 1911 had been disrupted by rejection by the rank and file and syndicalist-led strikes whose defeat resulted in the loss of all concessions. FIOM leaders were determined not to let this happen again.) Thus, the 1919 agreement also established a cumbersome apparatus for the mediation of conflicts in order to avoid spontaneous strikes, and rather stringent penalties for the failure to pursue grievances through the proper channels.
Under the immediate postwar conditions, however, it was unlikely that the internal commissions would remain within this reformed trade union framework. Inflation rates requiring quick adjustments continue to focus wage disputes and negotiation at the local level. Piece rates remained a persistent problem, as many workers viewed them as simply a tool of capital for rationalizing production, speeding up work, lowering pay, and dividing the workers against one another. Disciplinary measures, which all had hoped would be relaxed after the end of hostilities, actually intensified in certain ways. And the eight-hour agreement was undermined by frequent mandatory overtime. Indeed, it was the introduction of daylight savings time—so reminiscent of the harsh wartime measures for raising production—that precipitated the momentous April 1920 strike (’lo sciopero delle lancette’) over the powers of the internal commissions. The continual influx of unskilled factory recruits and the enormous growth of trade union membership itself increased pressure for industrial unions, and the internal commissions quite naturally became a basis for this. When FIOM leaders were absent from Turin for an extended period in the late summer of 1919—they were leading strikes in Liguria, Emilia, and Lombardy—more radical conceptions of internal commissions as permanent factory council organs with extensive powers spread rapidly and began to present a major challenge to the economism and reformism of the traditional union leadership. The ground was prepared for the historic confrontation over workers’ control in Italy.12
France In Britain the shop stewards’ movement arose for the most part outside the framework of the unions largely because of their rigid craft structure, and in Germany and Italy the movements grew more from within the unions because of the greater congruency between the quasi-industrialized unions and the demands for all-grades representation at the shopfloor level by the Obleute and the commissioni interne. In France by contrast, a system of workshop delegates to handle questions of wage adjustments, manner of payment and working conditions developed primarily at the suggestion of the unions themselves after the passing of legislation regulating wages and mandating arbitration in January 1917. (Some did develop as a result of the spontaneous action of the workers, however.) The even greater degree of structural congruence between such a system of delegates and the rather extensively developed industrial organization of the French unions, particularly in metals (whence the proposal had originated), at least partially explains this difference. The Socialist Minister of Armaments, Albert Thomas, accepted the unions’ suggestion, and against the original opposition of many important firms, workshop delegates were subsequently established. The union proposals went considerably beyond the scheme that was eventually put into effect, however. Aside from more inclusive criteria of eligibility for voting and office holding, the unions had insisted on broad functions covering all aspects of corporate order and workers’ dignity and on the constitution of the delegates as a collective factory body under the overall authority of the union. The latter point represented the unions’ fear that isolated delegates—the system that was finally approved officially (and later strengthened under the new minister) in order to palliate the owners—would come under the undue influence of the management and would thus undercut the solidarity and effectiveness of the union. Indeed, the latter seems to have been common, as the delegates functioned more to conciliate than to control, to make work more productive in line with the new methods rather than to change it. But fears of the delegates being used as a base of more radical opposition also no doubt played a part in the unions’ proposals.
The institution of workshop delegates never became mandatory, however, and their development remained very uneven. They were most numerous in the metal firms producing for the war, and particularly in large and medium-sized companies. Most important firms in the Paris area had workshop delegates, although they existed over a wide range of cities. Aside from continued owner resistance in many areas, the diffusion of the institution was limited by a significant degree of worker opposition and apathy due to the innocuousness and conciliationist nature of the delegates’ functions. Some local unions opposed them after the initial union schemes had been rejected, and this hostility increased after the war’s end. As a result, only a small percentage of those created during the war continued into the postwar years, although a few dozen firms instituted new delegations in 1919.
In contrast to Britain, Germany, and Italy, there seems to have been much less tension between the workshop delegates and the unions. The overly conciliatory behavior of some delegates led to accusations by union militants that they had been bought off by the owners. Many delegates, however, violated the official restrictions against linking the affairs of their particular workshops with those of others, and the internal affairs of the factory with the syndical organization outside. They often presented collective reports to the syndicate, and many delegates were “loyal” union members themselves. In such cases the delegates served as a kind of workplace cell of the union. Some delegations, however, did constitute themselves as a kind of factory council independent of the unions and hostile to their moderate policies. The Russian Revolution and the Russian factory councils served them as a model, although their actual knowledge of the latter was quite limited. These delegations became the basis for radical strike action against the war and related political and economic grievances, though on the whole such action seems to have occurred outside both the union and the workshop delegate structures. It is unclear whether such radical delegates ever secured greater effective control over the production process itself. In any case, such radical factory councils remained fairly limited, partly as a result of effective repression by the state. They never became the basis for a more revolutionary movement (as in Germany, Italy, and, to a much lesser extent, Britain), even though rather intense revolutionary sentiments among significant sectors of the working class, especially in the Parisian metal industries, carried over into the postwar years and even though the mass strikes of 1919 witnessed some explicit demands for the nationalization and reorganization of production by the producers themselves.13
Two factors seem to account, at least partially, for the lack of development of a worker council movement with revolutionary goals. The first is the aforementioned structural congruence between the largely industrialized French unions and the institution of workshop delegates. This congruence largely undercut any struggle for recognition of the delegates as a means for creating an all-grades organization of workers. In Britain especially, but also in the only partially industrialized metal unions in Germany and Italy, the stewards’ movements drew a good deal of their impetus from the need for all-grades representation. The struggle for recognition provided a common basis around which more radical demands and conceptions could be articulated. Two major British munitions centers, Coventry and Birmingham, highlight the distinction. In contrast with stewards in Glasgow and Sheffield, the shop stewards in these centers proved fairly easy to officialize and incorporate into reformed trade union structures in such a way as to isolate the revolutionaries. In both cases this was made possible by the much greater presence of the industrially organized Workers’ Union, itself a result of the greater progress of dilution before the war. The wartime dilution crisis was thus not only less acute, but union structures capable of housing the stewards were available, thereby depriving the more revolutionary elements of leadership and a mass base in the struggle for recognition itself.14 In France this pattern seems to have been the general rule.
The second factor was that the CGT itself, despite its opposition to the mass strikes in 1919 and to a strategy for immediate revolution, had a much more vigorous postwar reform program than the union federations in Germany, Italy, or Britain. From the start this program included demands for nationalization of the monopolies, which would be managed by representatives of both producers and consumers. Likewise, the national economic council, which the CGT called for and attempted to institute in direct opposition to the government’s plans, contained representatives from the unions, consumer cooperatives, technicians, and civil servants.15 This program bore the marks of the CGT’s revolutionary syndicalist heritage, and it undoubtedly helped undercut more radical demands for workers’ control. Indeed, it might be said that the CGT’s far-reaching proposals preemptively achieved what the German and Italian unions’ proposed reforms were able to accomplish only after the rise of more revolutionary council movements.
Russia The development of a movement for workers’ control in Russia took a very different path from that in other countries. As in the other warring countries, struggles around wages, piece rates, increased discipline and hours, inflation, time studies, shortages, political issues including the war itself, and the increased leverage of the working class resulting from the severe labor shortages had led to workers’ representation in the War Industries Committees (the elections for which were factory based), and some revival of the previously very paternalistic though potentially militant factory elder system.16 But the economic and political crises engendered by the war were much more severe in Russia than in the other warring countries, and the organizational heritage was quite different.
On the eve of the February Revolution trade union organization in Russia was extremely weak. This was primarily the result of decades of tsarist repression, interrupted by a brief period of full legalization after the 1905 revolution and very sporadic and selective toleration thereafter. During the war only a few small unions in Moscow and the provinces maintained a semilegal existence. After full legalization again in March 1917, the unions experienced rapid, though somewhat loose and disorderly, growth. Most had little continuity with the preexisting legal or semilegal organs. Besides, their activity was at first disrupted by an intense struggle over job categories. As Marc Ferro has noted, their structures were often so complex as to represent a “veritable tower of Babel,”17 and it was only later in the year that they began to iron out their jurisdictional conflicts and move towards more industrial forms of organization. Though the unions rather quickly enlisted a large proportion of the work force in industry, mining, and transport, they remained more bureaucratic shells than structures with organic links to the rank and file. Their weakness at the time of the February Revolution, their largely bureaucratic growth thereafter, and the persistence of craft distinctions in the crucial early months of 1917 all represented structural impediments to their ability to lead the struggles at the base—struggles that often demanded a rapid response and an all-grades strategy.
These structural impediments were exacerbated in the early months by the political outlook of the leadership of most unions. The Mensheviks, who had remained more intact during the war than their radical Bolshevik rivals as a result of the less severe police repression against them and their legal participation and leadership in the War Industries Committees, dominated most union hierarchies at first. Because they viewed the February Revolution as a bourgeois revolution ushering in a prolonged period of capitalist development and liberal democracy, they were opposed to any action by workers that fundamentally encroached on capitalist control of the production process. Regulation of production, where it was necessary, was to be exercised by the state representing all democratic classes. Because of their view that in the absence of a bilateral, negotiated, non-annexationist peace, the workers’ movement must continue to support the Allied cause, the Mensheviks favored the limitation and restraint of workers’ demands if these would further disrupt the economy and undermine the war effort.18
Thus, aside from the occupation and management of those factories temporarily deserted by their managerial staffs in the wake of the February Revolution, factory committees were formed spontaneously by the workers in the plant to fill the void left by trade unions. The rapidity and intensity of response, however, was determined by workers’ prior mobilization, particularly in the factory-based forms of representation.19 And although pragmatic concerns were foremost, the committees became the arena for asserting and defending the profound sense of dignity of workers against managerial abuse, including the protection of women from sexual harassment. The evolving urban working-class culture of pride and power received direct organizational expression in the factory committees.20 The eight-hour day struggle in March was waged primarily by the committees, and the latter took up a whole range of questions that had traditionally been the preserve of the unions, such as wages, working conditions, and job security. Many strikes were called by the committees without the unions’ approval and often without even their knowledge. The motivation behind the committees’ actions was primarily defensive and pragmatic at first, even while their intervention and control (e.g., of company books, over the administrative staff) was often quite active, indeed belligerent. They looked toward improving labor’s position within normalized, if reformed, capitalist relations of production, not toward transforming those relations fundamentally. Propaganda along the lines of the latter strategy began to have an effect only later in the year, as the economy spiraled downward and capitalist sabotage seemed to warrant the assumption of managerial functions by the workers themselves. The committees had the advantage over the unions of being able to take direct and immediate action unimpaired by distant and bureaucratic central offices, and with the highly unstable conditions beginning in June, marked by skyrocketing inflation and increasing layoffs and lockouts, this became more and more necessary. Control over hiring and firing, the supervision of administrative personnel, the organization of fuel and raw materials supplies, and even (though to a much lesser extent) the expropriation and management of the factories themselves became increasingly common as the year wore on. The October revolution would accelerate these trends even further. But that it occurred at all was due in no small measure to the fact that the Russian industrial scene had lacked strong and stable trade unions with a tradition of union discipline and collective bargaining that might have inspired a minimal degree of mutual trust between labor and capital. Under conditions of war-induced economic disintegration such unions had little chance of developing. The factory committees, which developed to a certain extent as surrogate unions, were too close to the rebellious and demanding rank and file and too unencumbered by craft distinctions and bureaucratic procedures to play the role of mediator between the two hostile classes. The attempts to incorporate them into the trade union structures showed only limited success in 1917.21
Crisis and Continuity: States and Movements in the Aftermath of War
The development and fate of the various movements for workers’ control can only be understood in the context of the respective national and international state systems. In all the countries under consideration, it was the state that undertook the task of mobilizing national economic resources, financing industrial reorganization, and providing the rationalization projects with national-popular legitimation. Its actual or threatened repression, besides securing the coercive basis for the latter, set the limits for trade union activity and extraunion protest even as it intervened (often against business) to secure concessions for labor (and hence the consensual basis for that legitimation) in order to prevent the disruption of the war effort. State propaganda efforts had the unintended consequence of raising expectations concerning the role of labor in the polity even as its mobilization activities resulted in a decline in the general living and working conditions of most workers. And, finally, the relative degree and form of state crisis, along with the balance of international political and economic power as perceived and mediated by the elites of the most established political and economic organizations, profoundly shaped the final contours and outcomes of the various movements for workers’ control. Relative ability to wage total warfare was the proximate determinant of political crisis, though this in turn reflects long-term structural characteristics of the respective state systems and national economies. These crises manifested themselves at the level of representation, administration, and legitimacy, but it was ultimately at the level of repressive force that the immediate crises were resolved. Their resolutions simultaneously determined and were determined by the relative balance of organized forces within the workers’ movements themselves. These crisis resolutions established the limits of contestation and defined the relative costs and opportunities of alternative working-class strategies even as they were themselves partly determined by the organizational and ideological legacies that exerted their relative historical strength within the workers’ movements.
Britain and France Serious political crises failed to materialize in either Britain or France after the armistice. Victory seemed to vindicate nationalistic rationales and legitimate political systems. Despite considerable discontent among certain sectors of the working classes, militant protest remained localized and contained by skillful combinations of concession and effective repression. Neither country was faced with a mass peasant movement threatening to link up with urban discontent, as in Russia and Italy. The repressive apparatuses, despite certain internal strains, remained intact and isolated from civilian protest. The armies were demobilized in relatively orderly fashion. And parliamentary majorities were firmly secured against the forces of socialism and revolution. This general bourgeois political stability even further delimited the already scant possibilities for an independent mass-based workers’ control movement in France by reinforcing the reformist tendencies in the trade unions. In Britain, the lack of political space in which to extend the skilled engineers’ demands for workers’ control provided the general context for the strengthening of the unions, the isolation of the revolutionaries, and the restoration of craft structures and practices.22
That the struggle of the British engineers around the question of dilution was able to transcend to some significant degree the traditional exclusiveness of craft prerogatives was partially due to the influence of revolutionary Marxist and syndicalist ideas on the leaders of the stewards’ movement. The DeLeonite Socialist Labour Party in particular worked to undermine the craftsmen’s hope for the restoration of craft structures and craft privileges at the war’s end by arguing that dilution was both inevitable and progressive. If dilution could not be prevented, then an all-grades organization was necessary. The move for unified organization also received impetus from the various syndicalist and industrial unionist movements and ideologies, as well as from the more intellectual and gradualist Guild Socialists around G. D. H. Cole. These various movements had been in the ascendancy in the immediate prewar period. Groups of active revolutionaries had formed in the centers where the shop stewards developed most strongly during the war. The influence of the different ideologies varied from place to place, but all developed important critiques of state socialism and stressed the need for workers’ control over industry. Even the Guild Socialists had an important impact on the militant stewards’ movement on the Clyde. Of course, these various ideologies were not the major impetus behind the movement as a whole. They helped to give that movement coherence and “to transform this narrow demand [for craft control] into a wider movement for workers’ control.”23 As James Hinton has argued, the various ideas on workers’ control helped provide the language, the ideological mediation that could bridge the gap between craft and revolutionary consciousness. But it was the actual struggles over job control by highly skilled craftsmen that provided the fertile soil and the popular base for these revolutionary ideas.24
The shop stewards’ movement, however, failed to develop a fully coherent ideology or an effective organization. Its conceptions of workers’ control remained, for the most part, excessively vague, especially concerning the higher levels of coordination. This was in marked contrast to the miners and railwaymen, who developed more elaborate conceptions of national coordination but tended to ignore the details of local control. If stewards’ ideas on control were inadequate, their conception of how to achieve a socialism based on such control was even more so. Following the ideas of James Connolly and the Guild Socialists, the stewards believed that they could gradually extend workers’ control in the various workplaces up to the point at which the capitalists would no longer have any function. An industrial republic would be constructed within the shell of the old political state, which would then crumble of itself. The struggle for political power need not be organized on its own terrain, for political power would automatically follow from the progressive conquest of control in the workplace. The program of the stewards thus remained largely confined to workshop and trade union questions and ignored the broader political problems with which the mass of the workers and other popular strata were concerned. Complementing this attitude toward political power was a distinct disdain for leadership and organization. In response to the bureaucratic politics of traditional socialism, many stewards came to see leadership itself as reactionary. They never developed any real national organization or elected a responsible leadership capable of taking action at decisive moments. The movement was thus condemned to rebellious isolation: the militant actions in different centers were each defeated in turn, and the movement as a whole failed to build links to other opposition groups. Their hostility to all forms of bureaucracy led the stewards to largely ignore even union politics, and thus they never had any real impact within the structures of their own unions. Though ideology acted as a brake on the development of organizational capacities, the conditions of organizing during the war, namely severe state repression and union antagonism, also hindered effective action.25
The limits of the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement were set by the basic stability of the British state and the resiliency of the trade unions. Lacking the political space in which to extend their demands for workers’ control, the skilled engineers reverted to their old exclusiveness. The partial transcendence of exclusiveness—reflected in demands for all-grades organization and in periodic solidarity (especially in the May 1917 to January 1918 period) with the less skilled on questions of wages, food, and the war—had always been tenuous, especially among the rank and file engineers. In the immediate postwar years the “ambiguous inheritance”26 of the craft tradition resolved itself rather decisively away from the pole of incipient revolutionary workers’ control based on the democratic representation of all workers and toward traditional craft exclusiveness. In the absence of a general political crisis and more vigorous pressure from less skilled and female workers (who remained organizationally weak and preoccupied with questions of pay, recognition, and numbers in their organizational struggles), the potentially expansive reinterpretation of craft control became increasingly confined to those skilled engineers who by now had developed an independent commitment to revolutionary Marxism. And with the success of the Bolsheviks and the rapid decline of their own movement, even many revolutionary stewards began to despair of workers’ control as either a strategy for change or the organizational basis for a socialist economy.
The ASE, for its part, succeeded in reintroducing the old craft structures in many places, though it was itself radicalized to a certain extent by postwar unrest. Amalgamation with other craft societies never questioned the underlying principles of craft organization. Immediately after the armistice the unions in engineering and shipbuilding solidified their hold on the majority of their members by negotiating a reduction of the working week from 54 to 47 hours, with a corresponding increase in pay. Only on the Clyde was this resisted in the name of the 40-hour week, but protest there remained localized and basically unthreatening, despite the contrary appearance created by government overreaction. During the war timely concessions helped undercut the shop stewards’ movement in some places (e.g., the Tyne, where militance was so great as to force early concessions), while in other areas (Coventry, Birmingham) government proposals for official recognition of stewards exercising very limited functions as part of the trade union structure successfully contained militant demands for control and isolated the revolutionaries. The 1919 Shop Stewards’ Agreement generalized this pattern. This, along with the decline in the high levels of employment that had been one of the major sources of strength of the independent shop stewards’ movement in the first place, finally destroyed it as a mass-based phenomenon. The unions had survived the challenge of workers’ control and had even resisted the pressure for all-grades organization. Now even the most radical stewards turned their attention to working within them.27
Italy The severe postwar political crisis in Italy was the context for the development of a factory council movement with revolutionary goals, a movement that made a spectacular if rather ineffective challenge to the capitalist industrial order in 1920. In Italy (in contrast to Britain and France) incredibly severe social strains produced by the war had led to intense popular discontent and polarization in both urban and rural areas, and this reflected itself at the parliamentary level. Universal male suffrage had been won in 1911, and for the first time since unification the liberals lost their absolute majority. It was the mass parties—the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and the new Catholic Popular Party (Partito Popolare Italiano—PPI)—that showed the most dramatic increases. The insecure position of the bourgeois forces in parliament and the uncertain reliability of the armed forces after a victory markedly resembling defeat encouraged mass workers’ and peasants’ movements, including the movement for workers’ control.28 The political crisis, however, never reached the point of dual power (as it had in Germany and Russia), and hence the workers’ control movement proceeded without the protection and encouragement of political and military organs favorable to its general goals. As a result, the degree of actual control over production remained very limited (especially compared with Russia), and the scope of the movement was limited to areas where class formation took highly exceptional forms and where particular grievances were most intense (compared with both Russia and Germany).
The most articulate theorization of the revolutionary role of the emergent factory councils was put forth by the group of young Turinese socialists around Antonio Gramsci. In May 1919 they set up the weekly L’Ordine Nuovo to assist in the creation of a new working-class culture. Such a project was necessary, they felt, if the workers were to become conscious of themselves not as mere passive objects of history or cogs in the capitalist industrial machine but as producers and creators of history, as the new ruling class that would abolish all classes in the struggle for its own liberation. This Hegelian emphasis on the transformation of culture and consciousness took a decisive step beyond Crocean idealism once the Ordine Nuovo group rooted it in the struggle to transform the relations of production in the workplace itself. The internal commissions, it was argued, were an expression in practice of the irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor, and at the same time represented in nuce the striving of the major productive force of capitalism—the working class itself—to reappropriate its powers of control in a conscious fashion. L’Ordine Nuovo set as its task the transformation of these still very limited commissions into full-fledged factory committees as autonomous organs of the entire working class. The trade unions were seen as organs suited to the struggle for more favorable terms for the sale of labor power as a commodity, but not to the abolition of the commodity form itself. Industrial legality, for which the trade unions had struggled and which they had begun to attain in increasing measure, was a great achievement for the defense of the workers’ interests within capitalism, but one hardly suited to the movement of revolutionary offense against capital. Because of the unions’ divisions by trade and because of their need to discipline the workers and enforce their side of the collective bargain, they had to distance themselves from the rank and file. They became bureaucratic organs rather than organs of proletarian democracy striving to institute full working class control over all aspects of production. The latter could be achieved only by factory committees, which built upon the solidarity incarnate in the production process itself and which were the very antithesis of industrial legality because they refused to trade off control for better wages and conditions. It was the factory councils that would be the material and organizational basis for the creation of a new consciousness, that would prepare the workers technically and spiritually to run society without the bourgeoisie. “All power to the workshop committees,” the ordinovisti demanded. These were to be the basis of the new proletarian state. And many anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists, despite their rejection of any form of state and their more persistent warnings of the reformist pitfalls of the councils in a non-revolutionary situation, gave energetic support to councilist ideas and organization.29
It was the activity of these socialists and anarchists, nourished by the spontaneous struggle occurring on the shop floor around questions of control over discipline, piece rates, and the new production methods, that spread the revolutionary conception of the councils like wildfire throughout Turin in the fall of 1919. The ordinovisti, in alliance with Bordiga’s “abstentionists,” gained control of the local PSI, and even the Turin FIOM section and Chamber of Labor approved fairly radical conceptions of the councils and their relation to the trade unions (all workers and not just union members were to elect factory delegates, for instance). In November and December the election of Workshop Commissars (as council members were called) spread among the chemical and tire workers, coachbuilders, auto body workers, and even technicians in the metal plants, and in early 1920 among others as well. Although the ordinovisti played a crucial role in these developments, their ideas were never fully accepted by the movement, as Martin Clark and Giuseppe Maione have demonstrated. The workers themselves rejected the productivist criteria that Gramsci and others put forth, criteria that stressed the maintenance of discipline and order, and the workers’ acceptance of all technical innovations designed to increase production, even before the workers had attained power. Likewise, many of the workers and even some of Gramsci’s close collaborators rejected his conception of the relation between the unions and the committees, which opposed close organizational links directed at revitalizing the unions and reorganizing them on industrial lines. The unions, Gramsci felt, must exercise a certain degree of discipline over the councils and prevent them from acting capriciously in a situation not ripe for direct attack; and the committees, in turn, must help democratize and industrialize the unions. However, this reciprocal process should occur voluntarily, through the overlap in membership, not through hierarchical organizational links. This was a highly unrealistic conception in any but the most unstable situations. And to many workers, especially outside Turin, the syndicalist interpretation of the councils, which stressed their role in (often uncoordinated) factory occupations and sabotage, became prominent, despite the efforts of the ordinovisti to prevent this.30
The organizational and ideological limitations of the councilists manifested themselves very clearly in the two major confrontations of 1920. In April, the owners, supported by a massive deployment of troops, declared a lockout in response to the increasing tendency of workers and their factory councils to by-pass the arbitration machinery set up the previous year. The council leadership and their ordinovisti supporters helped organize a massive strike of some 500,000 workers in Turin and the surrounding province. But national support was not forthcoming from the PSI or the CGL. The councilists never had control of the situation, and local negotiations themselves quickly passed to D’Aragona, reformist secretary-general of the CGL. The settlement was a shattering defeat for the councils. The internal commissions were stripped of most of their newly claimed powers, and the provisions of the old FIOM agreement were reaffirmed. The workers were extremely embittered, not least by the deficiencies of council leadership. Gramsci and L’Ordine Nuovo were thoroughly discredited locally as well as nationally, and the movement that revived around other questions was never in their hands again. Indeed, it was Gramsci’s former collaborator Tasca who now led the PSI Maximalist effort in Turin to unify the factory councils and trade unions, while utilizing the former to democratize and industrialize the latter. Control functions were not to be abandoned, but neither were specific demands made in this regard. Tasca’s scheme, similar to that proposed in Milan by Schiavello, was approved in the Turin Chamber of Labor, though little was done to actually implement it. The scheme was opposed by only a handful of anarcho-syndicalist delegates, and it was they, not the former ordinovisti, who now led the struggle to revive the councils and to push the revolutionary movement forward both in Turin and elsewhere.
It was only the movement over wages led by FIOM against employer intransigence that brought about the major confrontation that the anarcho-syndicalists had been seeking all along. FIOM’s tactic of a slowdown provoked lockouts in the metal industry nationwide, and a half-million metal workers responded by occupying their factories. In the process factory councils were revived to manage the various aspects of the occupation, not the least of which was maintaining production. And in Turin, where again factory councils were most vigorous due to the struggles over the previous year and the peculiar nature of Turinese industrial development and class structure,31 an entire local economic network was soon established, managed by the workers and cooperating technicians and clerks. Overall coordination, however, was in the hands of FIOM and the Chamber of Labor. The CGL itself now pressed for workers’ control (through the union) and the restoration of the pre-April powers of the internal commissions. But its National Council rejected the idea of a revolutionary political solution put forward (probably not seriously) by the PSI Directorate, which was unwilling to act without the support of the trade union leaders. As Terracini, a former ordinovisto and founding member of the Italian Communist Party, was to say at the Third Comintern Congress in 1921, “when the comrades who led the CGL submitted their resignations [in response to the PSI’s proposal for a national movement to seize power], the party leadership could neither replace them nor hope to replace them. It was Dugoni, D’Aragona, Buozzi, who led the CGL; they were at all times representative of the mass.”32
Though it underestimated the revolutionary impulses that guided a certain proportion of the workers, particularly in Turin, Terracini’s statement underlines a basic fact of this period, namely, that the unions had weathered the onslaught of the factory councils and had maintained the leadership and allegiance of the majority of organized workers. Their structures and policies had been severely strained by the massive influx of new members after the war (representing a ninefold growth in two years), but they effectively resisted the factory council challenge. The relatively youthful workplace-based leadership of the council movement that had emerged over the past few years proved incapable of dislodging the veteran union functionaries from overall control, even as their activity helped democratize and industrialize some union structures themselves. To the great mass of organized workers, especially those not as directly affected by the employers’ drive for increased rationalization and productivity, the traditional union leadership seemed capable of renewing the generally favorable trend that had been interrupted by the war. The negative example of Russia and the constellation of international forces further reinforced the unions’ reformist tendencies. Trade union leaders, including Colombino of FIOM and D’Aragona himself, had been in Russia with PSI chief Serrati just that summer and were quite shocked at the harsh dictatorship and economic devastation that they witnessed. A revolution in Italy at this time, they felt, given the minority support for socialism even among the industrial workers and the inevitable blockade by other capitalist powers, would lead to conditions similar to those in Russia.33 The overwhelming vote to return to work on September 24, though by no means an unambiguous proof of what the workers would have been willing to do two weeks earlier, testifies to the hold of the unions. Only in Turin was the vote even close. And the metal workers were the vanguard of the Italian revolutionary movement. Towards the end of the strike most workers were concerned primarily with getting paid for the time they had worked during the occupation. This, along with the reestablishment of the old functions of the internal commissions and promise of limited trade union control in industry, finally brought them back to work. The issue of control over production had not died, but neither had it decisively broken out of the framework of trade union legality. The momentum of workers’ control stopped short of the revolutionary tasks set for it by its theorists. And as the ordinovisti had been discredited by the April strike, so now were the syndicalists, whose “favorite weapon—factory seizure—had been shown up as ineffective.”34
Unobtrusive though it may have been throughout this conflict, the power of the Italian state stood firmly behind the normalization of capital/labor relations. This fact must not be forgotten. It certainly entered crucially into PSI and CGL decisions not to extend the movement into a national revolutionary seizure of power. A hastily armed workers’ movement, still isolated from the rural classes, may have been able to defend the occupied factories, and even destroy them if provoked, as Prime Minister Giolitti warned the more militant employers. But it would hardly have been a match for an army that was still intact and extremely hostile to the antiwar socialist movement, as were the vast numbers of ex-combatants.35
Given this constellation of political and ideological forces at the end of the war, it is unlikely that even a more insurrectionary-minded party would have been able to tip the balance in favor of armed revolution. The anticapitalist posturing of the Giolitti government may have encouraged the workers and their unions to vigorously press their claims for higher wages and to have recourse to quite militant tactics when they were met with intransigent refusal. But the repressive apparatus was not immediately threatened, and the “old fox” Giolitti was able to skillfully force concessions from the owners. His triumph was ambiguous, since the government’s apparent anticapitalism and its unwillingness to immediately suppress mass unrest gave further impetus to the fascist movement. But his strategy had halted the revolution and had contained the factory councils within sufferable limits. The recession that followed the September occupation, and increasing fascist and employer attacks, would soon destroy even the remnants of the movement for workers’ control in Italy.
Germany The political crisis that had been developing in Germany in the later months of the war reached revolutionary proportions once it was clear that defeat was at hand. Thoroughly alienated from the Kaiserreich, its prosecution of the war and its meager attempts at political reform, the troops began to mutiny in early November. Workers all over the country moved decisively to take over local power once it was clear that the old repressive apparatus was crumbling. The workers and soldiers established councils (Räte) with the function of controlling the old authorities, maintaining food supplies and public order, and supervising demobilization. And military power was in the hands of the soldiers’ councils. This relation of forces did not last long; but it was crucial to the extension of control in the workplace in November and December 1918, since the councils gave official recognition and encouragement to the creation of factory committees that occurred in several important industrial regions. The workplace electoral base of most workers’ councils no doubt facilitated this support. The Berlin councils’ executive committee recognized the independence of the committees from the unions, and full co-determination rights for the committees in all matters affecting workers and white-collar employees (who were to be represented jointly). Even where the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils did not lend support to the extensive forms of control over the activities of the owners that were introduced by the more radical factory committees, they did not move directly against such committees either.36
Dual political power, however, was not resolved in a manner favorable to the extension of workers’ control over production. Though the councils possessed revolutionary legitimacy in the eyes of workers, soldiers, and even certain sectors of the middle class and peasantry, they did not move to consolidate real administrative and military power. The relatively few exceptions to this in the early weeks were unsuccessful. Most councils saw themselves as interim organs for control and democratization, not as permanent substitutes for a democratic parliament as the highest state organ. The soldiers, councils, in particular, held a very moderate conception of their role. And demobilization undermined their power and prepared the way for the reconstitution of a new state military apparatus around an old officer corps that had not decomposed as a result of protracted mutinies and defeats (as happened in Russia). The First National Council Congress in December by an overwhelming majority approved of the early election of a National Assembly elected by universal suffrage, though it also registered itself in favor of thorough democratization of administrative and military organs and the initiation of orderly socialization measures.37
That the councils did not try to consolidate power in their own hands reflected both the lack of a practical and theoretical councilist heritage in the workers’ movement and the dominance of the SPD. Under the peculiar conditions of social isolation, lack of access to the levers of political power under the constitutional monarchy and the Prussian three-class voting system, and a significant degree of toleration that permitted promising trade union gains and constant electoral advance, the German workers’ movement had developed over the previous decades as a highly class-conscious movement with a strong subculture of its own, an avowedly revolutionary ideology, and a political and economic practice that was largely reformist and bureaucratic. The close links of the party to and dependence on the trade unions was the most important factor in the last regard, though the necessity to build an efficient organization to wage massive electoral campaigns and to appeal to middle-class voters on issues of political reform, the strong nationalism of its own constituency, and the deterministic brand of its own Marxian theoretical synthesis, also played significant roles in this as well. The wartime experience of collaboration with the government and with the bourgeois parties, and the achievement of definite political reforms and even greater promises just before the war’s end, reinforced these tendencies. By November 1918 the party leaders were firmly convinced that socialist progress could be orderly, peaceful, and parliamentary, and that socialist democracy was consistent with no other way. And without the support of the SPD and the unions, the newly formed council structures could not maintain themselves on a national scale.38
An SPD heritage that had revealed profound, though weakened, sources of strength among the workers even during the sacrifices of war was now brought to bear on an immediate postwar situation fraught with severe, though perhaps overestimated, dangers: Entente opposition to radical political and economic measures, critical food shortages, immediate and long-term reparations, demobilization and reconversion of industry, secessionist movements, and opposition to the workers’ movement by the vast majority of other strata. Under these conditions the moderate socialist leaders were largely able to maintain their hold on the working class, especially in the early months. Political and economic caution made much more sense to a working class with far more to lose than its chains, and the powerful negative image of Russian dictatorship and economic chaos continually reminded German workers of this. If military defeat produced the temporary crippling of the state apparatus in November 1918, it also circumscribed the possibilities for radical political and economic measures that did not threaten to wipe out the very real gains of the past and the immediate present. The SPD, mediating these concerns, lent its support to the establishment of a parliamentary democracy that would unite the nation, negotiate a peace, restore order in the economy, and forestall foreign intervention.39
The other organized political forces in the workers’ movement were in no position in the early months to dislodge the SPD from its dominant role. The Communist Party (KPD) was extremely weak, had little presence in the daily work of the councils or the trade unions and tended to draw its support from the more marginal elements in the working class. The Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) was able to achieve a leading position in only a handful of cities, and its national weakness was reflected in its 2.5 percent tally in the National Assembly elections. It was not only very loosely organized but was divided over major questions of power, councils, and parliament. The radicals, who were in the ascendancy throughout 1919, stood for a councilist dictatorship and immediate socialization but had little more than a vague program and no convincing strategy for achieving democratic socialism under the immediate postwar circumstances. The moderates, though committed to the councils as instruments of democratization, were much more cautious about preempting a universally elected parliament altogether. They wished to delay its convocation and present it with a series of radically democratic and socialist faits accomplis, but they shared SPD fears of a minority proletarian dictatorship. The burgeoning opposition bore within itself both the organizational and ideological weakness of its relatively recent emergence under wartime constraints and of the left’s prewar incoherence, as well as the democratic parliamentarist heritage of the broader workers’ movement itself.40
The hold that the SPD had in the workers’ movement in the early weeks after November, however, began to loosen considerably as it became clear that its commitments for democratizing the state administration and military and initiating the cautious socialization approved at the First Council Congress were less than serious. From January to April 1919 a new phase of radical mass protest occurred. Despite the differences in emphasis in the three major areas of intense activity and confrontation (Berlin, the Ruhr, and Central Germany) and the variety even within these, the goals were basically the same: socialization based on extensive control by the workers at the point of production. Economic demands (wages, hours) and political demands (disarming of the Freikorps) played a significant part in the mass strikes that occurred, but so did a radical protest against the conditions of factory absolutism. The workers demanded respect and dignity and resisted authoritarian discipline even in those areas in which the old paternalistic traditions were strongest. Spurred on by the decisions of the First Council Congress on socialization, numerous council congresses in the various regions developed a series of demands that would begin the process of socialization by anchoring the factory councils in the workplace and in the constitution. Factory councils were elected and district and regional councils were formed out of them. In some places mines and factories were directly seized, but these were exceptions and were opposed by the regional organs. The councils wanted a firm commitment from the government on socialization and wanted the factory councils to be given extensive rights of co-determination in the meantime. But the power of the owners would be directly and immediately curtailed as well, for the higher council organs, composed solely of workers’ representatives, claimed overall authority over industry and power to intervene in disputes between the temporarily retained owners and the councils in the factory. Socialization was seen as a process, but one that would be guided by the workers’ immediate appropriation of overall economic control.41
The mass movement for workers’ control and socialization in the winter and spring of 1919 failed for several reasons. One of these was certainly the continued deficiencies in leadership and ideology. The KPD’s influence was limited to a few places, and its attitude toward the factory councils remained basically instrumental. Its putschist tendencies, however, were held in check wherever the mass movement was strong and fairly unified. The German workers’ movement had no strong anarcho-syndicalist tradition upon which it might draw, and where anarcho-syndicalist groups and unions did develop some limited regional strength in this period (e.g., in the Ruhr and Central Germany), they remained antagonistic to overall coordination. The lack of such coordination proved to be one of the main weaknesses, for none of the major strikes in this period was linked up with the others, and each was defeated in turn. Though the USPD dominated the movement, it was itself divided and unable to provide general direction and coordination. Its radically federalist and decentralist philosophy and structure, shared by virtually all radical left groups in the period as part of their rebellion against the bureaucratism of the SPD and the trade unions, certainly contributed to this. The growth of the USPD in 1919 was tremendous, but, as one group of scholars has noted, it remained more an expression of the spontaneous mass movement than a political party in the real sense of the word.42
The mass movement on the shopfloor was unable to generate an indigenous leadership to unify its activities soon enough to prevent defeat. In November, when political power was still in flux and when the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils could still have attempted to seize the initiative, there existed no mass movement with a clearly articulated ideology and vigorous leadership to press for the rapid extension of workers’ control as the real basis for the socialization that was being demanded in the higher council organs. The revolutionary leadership was too recently formed and theoretically undeveloped to be able to lead the struggle both on the shopfloor around questions of control and in the political council organs around basic questions of program and power. Leadership and ideology developed further in the course of the mass struggles themselves, though these remained either unclear or inadequate on many important questions (the relation of the unions to the factory councils, of universal suffrage and democracy to councilist dictatorship, on party pluralism and competition, and on actual institutional levels and mechanisms for participation and control). But the development of a leadership with even a minimally coherent ideology articulating the felt needs of the mass movement and with the media to communicate it came too late. The effect of council thinking on the mass of workers was thus very irregular, even in the areas of most intense struggle. Not only was the council leadership unable to coordinate the movement to produce the maximum effect, it was unable to adequately educate the movement to ensure against its derailing by skillful yet meager concessions and vague promises by the government and the SPD. In November the coherent leadership on questions of workers’ control and socialization had been lacking; at the height of the mass movement in early 1919 it was only beginning to take shape.43
Skilled workers provided leadership in the council movement and the mass strikes of early 1919. Extensive erosion of craft control and significant progress towards all-grades organization in metals, plus the greater opportunities apparently opened up by political crisis, provided the basis for the translation of craft control conceptions into a democratic and universalistic ideology of liberated labor that promised to provide the institutionalized framework for participation of the less skilled workers as well in the inevitably contradictory and conflictual process of overcoming the unnecessary hierarchies in production. There is little evidence for that interpretation that attributes the defeat of the socialist revolution in Germany primarily to the sectoral interests of skilled workers threatened by rationalization and striving to simply eliminate the owners so as to place themselves at the top of a retained hierarchical organization of production.44 There existed no deterministic relation between skill or position in the division of labor, on the one hand, and politics or workplace practice, on the other. Skilled workers formulated demands with a good deal of appeal to the less skilled. And the latter at times displayed considerable enthusiasm for workers’ control over production.45 Local variations were extremely complex. Nor is it possible to reduce the problems of fundamental political transformation to that of skill composition within the working class or its leading political organs. Less skilled workers were often more reformist in their political and economic demands than skilled. And the eventual “cooptation” of the latter was neither easy nor complete, as the huge demonstrations and mass desertion from the SPD inthe wake of the factory council bill and the continued use of the councils as a base of radical opposition were to show.
The major reasons for the failure of the movement in the spring of 1919, however, were that the reconstituted state apparatus proved too strong for a movement confined to a few geographical areas, however important, and the old trade unions, however strained, proved capable of resisting the onslaught of the factory councils. The Freikorps had little trouble containing and suppressing the uncoordinated strikes, feeble putsch attempts, and isolated council governments that lasted into May. The factory council leaders continued their activity, attempting by peaceful means to construct a council system within a hostile political environment that could no longer be challenged directly. But in July the SPD broke up the Berlin Council’s General Assembly and its executive organ (Vollzugsrat). The radical councils (a majority in Berlin) were unable to maintain themselves as independent organs, however. In view of the impending moderate law on factory committees, the government declared their elections illegal and occupied their bureau.
That the movement was contained and then largely destroyed in its original sense was in no small part due to the fact that the trade unions were able to maintain themselves basically intact. Most unions, as previously noted, had developed into highly centralized, bureaucratic organs dominated by craft sections even where they embraced significant numbers of semi- and unskilled workers. Their reformist outlook had been further cemented during the period of the Burgfrieden, even though most of the gains were the result of government and military pressure rather than more tolerant attitudes of industry. The unions, believing that revolution and rapid socialization were out of the question and that any economic disorganization would destroy their organizations, looked toward the postwar period as one of harmonious collaboration between organized labor and capital (known officially as the Arbeitsgemeinschaft). Leading industrialists, for their part, had come to recognize by the war’s end that the unions could be useful in limiting radicalism, maintaining labor discipline, and undoing the extensive system of government controls. Without a postwar reconstruction policy of its own, the trade union leadership agreed to follow the lead of capital in exchange for a series of very real gains: the eight-hour day (if implemented in other countries as well), full recognition of collective bargaining, industry-wide contracts, uniform wages and conditions, labor exchanges, and the end of employer support for yellow unions. These concessions helped promote the phenomenal growth of the unions to an extent entirely unimaginable before the war and in industries that had completely resisted unionization. In return, labor mediation on the basis of parity and trade union collaboration in the formulation of economic and social policy were to be institutionalized within the Arbeitsgemeinschaft.46
By the end of 1919 over eight million workers were organized into trade unions in Germany, compared with less than two million before the war. This massive growth shook the unions from top to bottom but did not fundamentally transform them. The old craft structures and leadership maintained themselves despite the huge influx of semi- and unskilled workers, and their hostility toward the factory councils was often very strong. They were not willing to risk their very existence and the concrete gains won over the last few years in premature and quixotic attempts to establish socialism. And, in any case, they saw the existence of unions as still necessary under socialism and hence saw the factory committees’ attempts to displace them—which was a tendency in practice though not in the theory or policy of the council leaders—as highly dangerous. The unions were willing to permit worker representation on the shopfloor, but only with very restricted functions and only if strictly subordinated to the union hierarchy.
Large numbers of the trade union rank and file, however, were quite enthusiastic about council ideas. Those unions that were already more industrially-structured before the war (metals, mines, and rails) were more open to councilism and its stress on factory organization. Many saw the councils as a way of transforming the unions along industrial lines. Also, those unions with the most expansive membership (also metals and mines),47 whose new recruits had little tradition of union discipline and stable organizational work, were more open to the councils, as were those who had not been previously organized at all (the new chemical industry, state workers, and clerks). In the mines and state factories and offices an especially oppressive patriarchal/authoritarian tradition existed which the council structure directly challenged, and in the state plants the demand for councils was itself partly a natural spin-off of political democratization. The large-city and large-factory union organizations had a particularly difficult time resisting demands for councils, but even the smaller craft bastions were not immune to council ideas. At the June 1919 ADGB Congress the opposition had perhaps a third of the votes, and this support increased over the summer as many SPD workers became increasingly disillusioned and embittered over party and union policy, especially vis-à-vis the spring strikes that had been resisted by the unions and denied strike funds. But the opposition was able to win control of only one union, albeit the largest and most important—the metalworkers’ union (DMV). This victory, however, came only in October 1919 after the movement as a whole had already reached its climax. The old structures had resisted the attack. The ADGB had even increased its centralized powers. It had helped capital weather the stormiest days of the revolution and had helped normalize labor relations at least in these crucial months. The inflationary policy that permitted such a happy coalition between large industry and organized labor immediately after the war, as during it, would later tear at the very fabric of German society. But in the 1918—19 context, which produced some very significant gains for organized labor, the militant but disorganized factory council leadership proved incapable of decisively undermining the authority of the traditional leaders of German labor—the trade union officials and functionaries. Until the crisis in 1923 it was the unions, not the councils, that were in the forefront of labor’s struggles and the foundation of its united front.48
The mass strikes of the spring of 1919, it should be recalled, were ended not only through effective and often ruthless repression but through a skillful policy of concessions and promises of reform. The idea of factory councils was incorporated into the Weimar Constitution, and much council activity occurred in the latter part of the year around the final draft of the bill that was to be presented to the National Assembly. A combination of pressures by owners, unions, and the SPD, however, whittled down the bill to such an extent as to make the councils virtually powerless. Blue- and white-collar workers were to have separate councils, and delegates were to be elected at fixed intervals only, with no power of recall. The councils were strictly subordinate to the unions, and access to the owners’ accounts was limited to periodic official reports. They were not to have control over hiring and firing or to interfere in production in any manner. Some participation on questions of wages and conditions was granted, but in cases of conflict the councils had no real power. At the higher levels, labor representatives were to sit with those of the owners, since the stated purpose of reform was cooperation in the interests of raising production. As Eberhard Kolb has expressed it, the factory council bill approved by the Assembly in January 1920 was a first-class state funeral for the economic council system.49 For forty-two workers who took part in the large demonstration outside the Assembly, that metaphor became reality. The autonomous factory council movement was dead, though militant activity was to occur periodically through the legalized but disempowered councils. As many as 100,000 workers left the SPD for the USPD as a result of the bill, but SPD and trade union conceptions were approved at the first official National Factory Council Congress in August of that year. As Charles Maier has so neatly put it, “The councils could thus hold either old union beer or new revolutionary liquor. Bourgeois leaders were prepared to drain a glass if the workers agreed to a weaker potion.”50
Russia Repeated military defeats and severe home front deprivations had thoroughly delegitimated the tsarist regime among the masses of workers, peasants, soldiers, and even large sections of the urban bourgeoisie and middle classes. And once the garrison in Petrograd came to the support of the huge strikes and demonstrations in February 1917, the fate of that regime was sealed. Lacking any real tradition of parliamentary democracy, workers and soldiers (and later peasants as well) established their own organs of political power in line with the revolutionary tradition of 1905. And despite their lack of officialization by the hastily constituted Provisional Government of liberal democrats and the dominant moderate socialist leadership that lent it support, the soviets remained the only truly legitimate political organs in the eyes of the popular strata. Continued participation in the war and the economic disintegration that ensued as a result only further enhanced their legitimative and administrative capacities relative to the legal government. The military apparatus itself continued to disintegrate under the dual onslaught of defeat and internal democratization. The troops in the rear, fearing service at the front, stood behind the soviets, and in place of the old police apparatus that had been shattered along with the court in February, local citizen militias arose to keep civic order. Workers’ Red Guards, often the most influential elements in these, gave the factory committees direct protection to extend their powers in the workplace. By October the politico-military conditions existed for resolving dual power both in the factory and in the state apparatus. In no other country were the political, military, and economic crises so severe as to permit the decisive shift of forces in the popular movements themselves. Under these conditions the Bolshevik Party was able to achieve mass support, forge popular coalitions among workers, peasants, and soldiers, and establish the necessary degree of legitimacy for a revolution in the name of the soviets. Though far from being strictly disciplined and organizationally coherent, it was relatively well organized and decisively led, especially in contrast to the other important left-wing groups. The seizure and maintenance of power could hardly have been achieved otherwise.51
The Party also played a significant role in propagating workers’ control. Although it certainly had not initiated the idea, the activity of many Bolshevik factory militants was quite important in the early spread of the committees. And after Lenin had officially come out for workers’ control in May, the Party’s role in the movement became even more pronounced. Leading Bolshevik factory committee militants took the initiative to call the first citywide Petrograd conference in late May, and these workers played the most prominent role in the Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees that the conference elected. The Central Council, in turn, took an active part in spreading the committees nationwide.
The coordination of the movement, of course, was absolutely essential if individual committees were not to suffer the defeat that comes from isolation and if they were to serve as the cells of a unified system of economic self-management after the problem of state power had been resolved. With the aid of Bolshevik militants—whose activity was often as much an expression of the rank-and-file workers’ movement as it was of Party organization per se, though the two were hardly dichotomous—the factory committee movement achieved a very noteworthy degree of coordination. There were innumerable instances of local solidarity that pointed beyond the corporativism embedded in continued competitive capitalist relations. Thus, despite the often strong factory identification of workers, for instance, as “Treugolniki” or “Putilovtsy,” both the Treugolnik and Putilov factory committees, in collaboration with the Central Council, provided money and material to keep the Brenner plant from closing down. By October, municipal coordinating organs existed in the great majority of industrial centers and were complemented by several provincial and industrial branch organs as well. The Central Council in Petrograd functioned as a de facto national center until an all-Russian conference could be convened. After October, efforts at coordination intensified everywhere, and areas previously without such councils quickly developed them. The Petrograd Central Council was the most energetic and effective economic organ in the capital in the crucial weeks after the revolution, arranging for the procurement and transfer of fuel and raw materials among the committees on the basis of democratically agreed-upon criteria, instituting a system of industrial information and registration, disseminating technical advice, and aiding in the process of demobilization and, later, partial evacuation. Its activity, if not matched everywhere, was by no means an exception.
The committee movement was hardly without its contradictions in this regard, however. There were more than a few instances of parochial and competitive behavior among the committees, and even where municipal councils existed, they were not always effective in arranging for cooperation. Coordination at the provincial and regional levels was even less adequate, and the first (and only) national conference of committees was convened only a few days before the revolution. Political and military exigencies seem to have prevented the regular election of the national council that had been planned. Coherent proposals on how the economy as a whole could be coordinated on the foundation of workers’ democratic control developed quickly, considering the recent origins of the movement in February and March, but not quickly enough, in view of the rapid development of the revolution, the economic urgencies of the post-October period, and the enormity of the task itself. The movement was never mobilized nationally around a coherent and detailed program of economic democracy and socialist construction, though there was great support for a system of control built from the bottom up and much resistance to statist conceptions of economic reconstruction.52
The evidence, however, does not point to the conclusion that particularism and economic fragmentation were inherent traits of the movement for workers’ control that would necessarily lead to its undoing.53 We can neither ignore or belittle the very impressive degree of coordination and solidarity achieved in the short and turbulent months between the February and October revolutions, nor the enormous amount of attention given to these issues by committee militants. As October approached, the committees were coordinating their activities at an accelerated pace, on an ever-broadening scale, and with increasing ideological coherence. What is important methodologically, however, is that we not impute tendencies inherent to the movement, as if that movement were not shaped by a complex set of institutional and organizational interrelationships within Russian society and the revolutionary process itself. The committees were, for the most part, hastily improvised in the wake of the February Revolution for pragmatic and defensive purposes. The weakness of the trade unions and their general hostility to workers’ control deprived the committee movement of a preexisting organizational base from which to effect coordination. Although the committees generally recognized the need for close cooperation with the unions in principle, this was frequently disrupted in practice, and the continual organizational competition led to the dissipation of scarce resources, including potential organizational resources for coordinating economic activity. It is significant, for instance, that in the one region (the Urals) that did develop a relatively efficient and democratic system of workers’ self-management after October, the unions seem to have cooperated with the committees for common goals—nationalization, control from the bottom up—even though the unions as organizations were excluded from the council system.
The committees were able to draw upon the preexisting networks and resources of the Bolshevik Party, and this undoubtedly aided the coordination of the movement. The great majority of factory committee centers were initiated by local Bolshevik militants, many of whom were in contact with factory committee leaders in Petrograd or local party committees in the more important industrial centers. But the Bolshevik Party was itself relatively disorganized at the intercity, provincial, and national levels. And Party leaders directed relatively few organizational resources to the development of the Central Council of Factory Committees into an effective economic center. The Council seems to have been used more for strategic political purposes than to have been the recipient of Party resources for its own pressing tasks of coordination. As a result, the workers’ movement faced October without a coherent democratic strategy for economic reconstruction. As regrettable as such decisions may be in hindsight, we cannot overlook the fact that they occurred within the context of political struggle where time was a very scarce factor, power uncertain, and the Party’s own resources incredibly strained. Virtually all Party committees and workers’ organizations chronically complained about the shortage of competent and effective activists, not to mention material resources. The Bolsheviks were better organized than their major competitors for popular urban support. But their costs of mobilization were nonetheless considerable, relative to all the tasks they were confronted with and the competing claims on those resources. And some of the organizational conflicts within the Party overlapped with trade union/factory committee coordination and crisscrossed other lines of conflict. Where Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries (Sr’s) predominated in local soviets or in the factory committees themselves, they often resisted the formation of separate coordinating councils for the committees.
Interwoven with these various organizational and political divisions was the fact that communication and transportation networks, always insufficient in this country of such vast size and geographically dispersed industrial centers, were increasingly disintegrating under the strains of the war, revolution, political animosity among workers, and, as William Rosenberg has shown, occupational divisions as well.54 Under such conditions it became more and more difficult to convene delegates from scattered locales or for delegates elected to coordinating centers to maintain close contacts with their constituents. The dynamic between fragmentation and bureaucratization was henceforth in motion. Where industry was more geographically concentrated, as in Petrograd, committees could be more successful in rapidly developing coordination with their own resources. The smaller, more dispersed and variegated character of Moscow industry contributed to coordination difficulties. And in addition to these factors, a basic aspect of the revolutionary process cannot be forgotten, namely, that as long as political power remained in the hands of the Provisional Government and its Ministries and production continued under the incentive of private profit, the costs of coordination through independent factory committee centers could be as real as the benefits were uncertain. Short-term sacrifices, especially under the economic conditions of 1917, which provided such small margin for the misdirection of material and human resources, were so much more difficult to rationalize as long as the long-term payoffs were so unsure. Until these issues of political and economic power were resolved, there would remain a powerful impetus for committees and general assemblies to simply protect their own factories’ economic interests and for individuals and occupational groups to do the same. That there was so much effort at coordination in 1917 testifies to both the contradictory demands of economic survival and an emerging consciousness of the requirements of reconstruction on new foundations. As Georges Haupt has argued, “it is the dynamic of mass mobilization in a period of social tension that renders the workers’ movement, or more precisely the workers in motion, more susceptible to ideological considerations.”55
However unfavorable were the organizational and political preconditions for factory committee coordination and coherent institutional formation, the role of ideology as a relatively autonomous historical determinant cannot be overlooked. As Theda Skocpol has argued, ideologies do not “provide the key to the nature of revolutionary outcomes.”56 But it is impossible to understand revolutionary outcomes simply by an analysis of the forms of political and structural crises and the organizational capacities available for their resolution, since ideological formations and the modes of their implantation in active historical subjects can determine in significant ways both the nature of crisis and the utilization of potential organizational and administrative resources. In the Russian Revolution, Bolshevik ideology both reacted and contributed to crises and selectively influenced immediate choices in a way that had short-run consequences as well as cumulative effects on urban and rural social development. Capacities for administration and organization were not pregiven, independent of the ideological orientations of the Bolshevik leadership and cadre. Those orientations, to be sure, reflected the conditions of struggle under tsardom, namely, the necessity for conspiratorial activity, relative isolation from mass work, and the lack of prominence of control struggles in comparison to wages, hours, and basic union organization. But Bolshevik ideological confusion and ambiguity in relation to workers’ control, on the one hand, and the emerging Leninist commitment to a conception of “state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat,” on the other, impeded coherent activity and coordination in the committee movement before October. After October they directly contributed to the economic fragmentation and disorganization that became the major rationale for bureaucratic centralization. The dual power in the heart of the factory inherent in Lenin’s formula was, under the conditions of struggle of 1917, bound to produce innumerable conflicts, hinder the struggle against the sabotage of the owners and technicians, and undermine the factory committees’ attempts at instituting new forms of worker self-discipline. Industry was further disorganized when the regime initially failed to recognize the right of committees to borrow money and failed to ensure that the banks would not financially undermine the committees’ attempts to continue production. Whereas the Central Council of Factory Committees came up with a plan for overall economic coordination on the day after the seizure of power, Lenin rejected this as not immediately relevant, and the government floundered through precious weeks without an adequate economic center. The most effective one that existed at that point—the Central Council itself—did not receive official authorization, thus making its attempts to impose sacrifices on some committees in the interests of others that much less effective. When official regulating organs were finally constituted, their competencies were never clearly delineated and conflict among them was constant. The factory committees, struggling to retain their work forces under the very difficult circumstances of the initial transition, were thus faced with a set of highly bureaucratic, confused, and conflicting organs with little connection to the workplace, little legitimacy among the workers, and not much effectiveness to compensate for these deficiencies. Is it any wonder that such labyrinthine statist policies reinforced tendencies to particularism on the part of workers’ collectives? Party leaders could not understand this, although Central Council leaders vigorously argued for overall economic institutions that would possess both the transparency that derives from clarity of functions and the legitimacy that derives from democratic accountability.57
The administrative capacities represented by both local committees and their coordinating organs were not utilized or developed to the extent that they might have been, even if, under the circumstances, this would have inevitably fallen considerably short of their own aspirations. But the ideological factors involved in this reflect a more basic aspect of the Russian Revolution that strikingly parallels both the Italian and German cases, namely, that even in situations of severe crisis where authority relations in production were directly challenged, the relative historical weight of trade union and party organizations made itself overwhelmingly felt in the resulting outcomes. Despite the active and very radical base of support in the committees and their increasing organizational capacities, especially relative to other organizations in regard to managing production, the Bolshevik Party—with the levers of state power in its hands—shifted its previously ambivalent support decisively toward the trade unions. Within a few months, factory committee activists were compelled to struggle on the organizational terrain of the unions rather than vice versa, though not without exerting a distinctive influence of their own. Political divisions within the Party and the need for Right Bolshevik, Left Sr, and Menshevik support partly determined this response. Yet equally important, it seems, was the fact that even though prerevolutionary organizational networks were relatively attenuate and the new committee activists threw their support to the Party much earlier than did union leaders, the historical linkages between Party and union leaders proved most important. In the crucial discussions on the forms of economic reorganization, union leaders had much greater access to the Party hierarchy and provided the dominant definition of the economic situation. Lenin’s own emerging ideology of “state capitalism under the dictatorship of the proletariat” had a definite affinity with that of many union leaders, but the organizational heritage of tsarism provided a distinct bias in the actual “production of knowledge” relevant for strategies of economic reconstruction.
In terms of social composition, factory committees were almost universally constituted by skilled male workers. In some cases delegates were even sent from outside the plant to guide the activity of workers’ assemblies composed predominantly of so-called less “conscious” and less “disciplined” female workers. Patriarchal cultural patterns were quite pronounced. Women continued to be responsible for housework, childcare, and waiting on rationing lines, which made participation on committees much more difficult. (To what extent the nurseries and communal kitchens organized by factory committees and especially raion soviets helped reverse this pattern is unclear, though the committees did struggle against sexual harassment and the raion soviets intervened in family disputes to prevent wife abuse.) The general reasons for the dominance of the skilled in the committees are fairly clear. Within the working class only they had the requisite degree of technical and administrative skill necessary to control production. They were usually the most literate workers and also the most disciplined. Their general cultural horizons were broader, and they did not view their stay in the factories and the cities as merely temporary. They had the best sense of how production as a whole actually ran, and they had the greatest confidence in their own ability to manage it, if not without the technical experts, then certainly in conjunction with them.58 It was also these workers who had the longest tradition of organizational work in the parties and the unions. Although they sometimes lagged behind the more politically explosive elements among the urban working-class women, youth, and recently proletarianized peasants that had swarmed into the factories during the war, the skilled workers dominated the organs exercising the functions of workers’ control.
Despite the privileged position of skilled male workers relative to others within the industrial division of labor and within Russian political and cultural life, there is no evidence that they tried to formalize this privilege, or that they were able, to any significant degree, to informally use their positions of power in the factory committees to further their own corporate and sectoral interests against the less skilled. The informal jockeying behind the scenes for representation on the committees probably derived more from the traditions of party politicking in the workers’ movement and the lesser degree of participation by the unskilled in the daily affairs of the assemblies and committees. The criteria used in the constitution of the formal organs of power were consistently universalistic and democratic: election by all, short terms of office, public meetings, availability of relevant information, instant recall. This was a distinct tendency in all the council movements under consideration. The predominance of skilled workers in the committees was not primarily the result of narrow corporativism or manipulation. The skilled were elected to the councils because the less skilled workers themselves put a high premium on advanced knowledge and skill when it came to running the factories. And there were numerous instances in which general assemblies with large unskilled and female participation asserted themselves against their elected delegates and rectified substantive positions and formal procedures.
It cannot be denied, of course, that skilled male workers often viewed themselves as superior not only to unskilled women but to the recently proletarianized male chernorabochie, who were often described as backward looking and superstitious, passive and fatalistic, crude and ignorant, and prone to drunkenness and wife beating. In fact, the evolving sense of urban worker dignity was defined very much against these perceived peasant-worker traits. The culture of superiority of skilled workers was thus not completely negative, especially in the context of diffuse egalitarian ideological influences from Marxists, populists, and anarchists alike. Internationalism among skilled veteran proletarians was very high, ethnic antagonisms minimal, and egalitarian and democratic political beliefs profound. Craft traditions were particularly weak as a result of the lack of a strong tradition of artisan guilds, late industrialization, and the political foreclosing of the craft union option under the tsar, among other factors. Industrial forms of union organization relatively quickly came to prevail over craft forms in 1917 with little resistance and a great deal of leadership from the skilled.59 And the latter faced a mobilized mass of less skilled and less privileged workers who were militantly demanding their own share in political power and social rewards. They pressed these demands in the streets, in the neighborhood soviets, and in the factories. Indeed, the egalitarian elements in the behavior and thinking of the more privileged workers were no doubt encouraged by the constant pressure from the masses below them. There was much conflict between various categories of workers, and the unskilled often resented the skilled in the committees who enforced discipline and decided on layoffs when these became necessary. But although there was real potential for conflict over the question of wages, for instance, especially in a situation in which everybody’s livelihood was threatened by inflation, lockouts, and the like, this conflict does not seem to have become overly intense. Some groups of skilled workers used the committees to foster their own claims, but the committee movement as a whole (in conjunction with the unions and soviets) seems to have been effective in narrowing the differentials. This no doubt resulted from the fact that the less skilled were able to effectively express their demands (which were predominantly around wages and job security) through the elected workers’ organs, even if they did not enter those organs in large numbers themselves, although skilled workers also often vigorously supported a lessening of differentials.60
The position of the skilled Russian workers was an ambivalent one. Under conditions of political mobilization, of expansive political and social alternatives, of independent pressure from below, and of extensive egalitarian ideological influence, the skilled workers became a leading force—technically, administratively, organizationally, ideologically, and culturally—in the struggle for the liberation of all workers. Their initiative helped create and sustain an organizational framework within which the different sectors of the working class might fruitfully interact in the inevitably contradictory struggle to break down the relevant differentials in skill, knowledge, and effective power over the production process. But as the alternative of workers’ self-management was closed off after October, as a top-heavy system of economic administration was created by the Bolsheviks and the trade unions, and as the mass of workers were demobilized in the workplace, many of these same factory committee militants began to narrow their horizon—though often not without a considerable degree of struggle both outside and within the new economic organs. Gradually they became entrenched in authoritarian factory management staffs or absorbed into bureaucratic state agencies. Their privilege, instead of being progressively undermined through democratic control and participation of the working class as a whole, was reproduced and reinforced on other levels.61
Despite whatever possibilities the factory committees might have had under more coherently democratic leadership, we cannot overlook the fact that some of the very conditions that helped bring about the October Revolution and the rapid extension of workers’ control simultaneously circumscribed the subsequent development of an economic system based on workers’ control over production. The extreme industrial disorganization and the disruption of exchange with the countryside not only fostered destructive centrifugal tendencies but led to a significant disintegration of the urban proletarian base itself. The severe undernourishment of those workers who remained in the factory sapped the vitality of the working class and undercut the very energetic attempts by the factory committees to create new forms of industrial self-discipline.62 This would have been no easy task, even under more favorable conditions, for a working class with such a large proportion of recently proletarianized elements. The fragility of a state apparatus so radically removed from the life of civil society and so estranged from the forces of popular democracy made the seizure of power relatively easy, but it simultaneously necessitated a large transfer of politically reliable and administratively competent workers from the workplace to the new state organs and the Red Army—many of the latter never to return from the front. The already meager proletarian base for a system of political and economic democracy built upon active soviets and factory committees was thus even further weakened. The added economic devastation and deskilling of the working class that resulted from nearly three years of civil war made the extensive use of Taylorist and scientific management methods that much more attractive to a state leadership faced with the necessity of rapidly rebuilding industry, increasing productivity, and reintegrating Russia into the world market. The overall result of this was to further undercut the possibilities of workers’ control.63 The specific forms of “degeneration” of the democratic workers’ organs spawned by the two revolutions may not have been predetermined, and alternative policies may have kept alive possibilities for their renewed development under more favorable conditions, but the immediate realization of their radically democratic content was severely circumscribed by some of the very conditions that allowed them to develop so far in the first place.
Conclusion
While it is impossible to briefly summarize the foregoing analysis or to draw attention to all of the distinctive contributions of the other essays in this volume, let me highlight several central concerns that have emerged in the study of labor insurgency and workers’ control in this period, namely, temporal articulation, spatial (geographic/national) dimension, and movement composition and organization.
The development of movements for workers’ control must be viewed in terms of the disjunctive articulation of several distinct time frames. Both the autonomist tendencies and the relative organizational weakness of councilist movements can be partly explained by their emergence during a period of relatively sudden wartime and postwar crisis that had followed upon a period of economic expansion generally conducive to cautious labor reformism and bureaucratic craft-structured organization. The preceding period of “organized capitalism” represented one of heretofore unknown prosperity, the end of chronic mass unemployment, and unprecedented growth in the rights and organizations of labor. To be sure, even before the war both the industrial and political dimensions of the dominant labor strategy revealed their limits, as inflation undermined gains, the unorganized waged fierce strikes, and revolutionary industrial unionism demonstrated a limited but noteworthy capacity for growth. Nonetheless, this period contrasted starkly with the Great or Long Depression of 1873–96, which had been characterized by high levels of unemployment, violent fluctuations in the labor market, and conditions generally unfavorable to trade union growth and consolidation. It was the contrast of these two periods, and the difficult transition from one to the other, that had deeply imprinted itself in the collective memory of many of the older workers, particularly those who had risen to responsible leadership positions in labor organizations, and set them apart from many of the younger workers. Karl Mannheim’s conception (borrowed from Pinder) of the noncontemporaneity of contemporaries had a very definite organizational translation here.64 The heritage of moderation in union officialdom was reinforced by the kinds of concessions that were or appeared realistically achievable during the war and immediate postwar period. The factory committees, on the other hand, had for the most part emerged relatively suddenly in the heat of local factory struggles during the war. As a result, they often lacked the organizational and agitational experience tested through years of struggle and constructive activity. Their factory constituencies were often quite unstable during the period of their ascendancy, thus disrupting the informal networks and solidary group relations that were often crucial to sustained activity. As a result of their recent emergence, they drew at best on quasi-coherent ideological conceptions of the means of their struggle and the institutional goals towards which they were striving, and this often reinforced organizational deficiencies. Finally, the factory committees were constantly constrained by state repression during the war, which limited their abilities to organize above the plant level. Under these conditions, factory committee movements had extreme difficulty providing the kind of broader organization and coordination necessary to make an effective challenge during the relatively short periods of political crisis when this was most possible. In short, the outcomes of worker control struggles reflect the complex articulation of several distinct time frames of struggle, whose contours were defined by broad socioeconomic and political factors and whose practical and organizational manifestations were often in conflict.
In view of these developments, the radical councilist perspectives developed by Antonio Gramsci and Anton Pannekoek appear seriously lacking. Both postulated a progressive autonomization of function and organization for the factory councils, though Gramsci at least believed that voluntary organizational cooperation with the unions was both necessary and possible.65 But the resilience of the unions in the face of serious organizational strain was as noteworthy as the weakness of council structures that tended toward autonomy. The unions never really lost their dominant role, and the factory committees played more a part in revitalizing them than they did in displacing them. In fact, the distinct tendency that finally prevailed everywhere was that which favored the (re)incorporation of the committees into the unions. This was the case in Glasgow and Sheffield, where craft structures had been very strong and autonomism among shop stewards pronounced. Even in the limit case of Russia, where the unions had been very weak before the February revolution, where their loose and top-heavy growth thereafter gave great scope to autonomist factory committee development, and where the extreme severity of political and economic crisis facilitated shopfloor workers’ control, the tendency toward integration of committees and unions prevailed, primarily on the terms of the latter. In Germany and Italy, where autonomism was less pronounced in practice and where the strengths of the movements for workers’ control partly derived from the mobilization of preexisting union resources, (re)integration prevailed despite serious organizational strain within the unions. And the labor movement with the most continuous and profound ideological tradition of workers’ control, namely France, was the very one that defined control least in terms of autonomous shopfloor action. Factory council organizations labored under what Arthur Stinchcombe has called the “liability of newness,” which is particularly severe for new forms or organization.66 They competed on unfavorable terms against the older, more powerful trade unions for scarce organizational resources and legitimacy, and on a terrain where collective bargaining had hardly outlived its usefulness in the eyes of the vast majority of workers or proved itself incapable of accomodating to issues of control. Under these conditions the radical separation of functions and structures in the Gramscian schema, or the even more total bifurcation in Pannekoek’s, could hardly be expected to sustain itself for any period of time. Further advances in workers’ control could only have been achieved with the support if not organizational preeminence of the trade unions. And if the limits of the councilist perspective are evident even for the period in which it emerged, they should be even more apparent today. This was a period marked by the strains of prolonged total warfare, of a relatively young union movement not nearly so organizationally established or buttressed by participation in state apparatuses as it is today. It was a period marked by a massive and sudden influx of new recruits into the old organizations, and one in which the specific struggles of highly skilled workers against accelerated wartime rationalization were most intense. The combination of such conditions facilitating autonomism are not likely to be repeated. Shopfloor struggles for control since the Second World War have largely remained within trade union frameworks or have been reintegrated into them after brief periods of autonomism. Even in Third World countries such as Chile and Peru this has been the case.67 The movements of the First World War period reflected the growing pains of industrial unionism, magnified by the crisis of the war, more than they represented a viable alternative to trade unionism as such.
The international dimensions of workers’ control in this period are also of utmost significance. Not only did movements develop on a broad scale across national boundaries in response to similar structural changes and specifically war-induced conditions, but Taylorism and its variants helped to alter the international conditions under which national labor movements could struggle to improve the position of workers. Once Taylorist methods had become so much more diffused during the war, labor movements were in a position where they could no longer hope to completely resist them and also achieve gains on other important fronts. The industry and currencies of the warring European countries had lost considerable ground to the United States, whose leading industries continued to set the pace for rationalized production. The pressure transmitted through the world market on corresponding European national industries was internalized by the unions, since resistance to such processes could only weaken the position of national labor in the absence of an effective international strategy against them. In a sense, the underlying premise was very similar to one often expressed in the debates of the Second International parties regarding the tactics to be used to prevent war—namely, that the stronger workers’ movement, the one actually able to obstruct its government’s military mobilization through militant mass actions, would suffer the most at the hands of those countries whose labor movements were less effective in this regard. The leaders of FIOM in Italy clearly recognized this dilemma as did German union leaders, for whom hyperinflation and war indemnities made rationalization of German industry appear that much more necessary. The economic devastation of the civil war and the “de-skilling” of the Russian working class as a result of death, migration to the countryside and to commercial occupations, and absorption into the new state apparatuses, generated strong pressures on Soviet leaders to adopt the latest production techniques. The international vulnerability of the revolutionary state had to be reduced and a rapid reintegration into the world market effected, since the proximate possibilities for indigenous technological development were very slim. Accomodation with Taylorism was a necessity, even if revolutionary state power may have provided objective possibilities for experimentation (workers’ participation and education, job rotation, industrial democracy on the RAIC model). The ASE in Britain represented only a partial and temporary exception here, and one not without its own costs.68
The French case is most instructive in this regard. Leaders of the CGT in France, vigorous opponents of Taylorism in the prewar period, came to regard it as rational and necessary if the position of French industry in the world market was to be enhanced sufficiently enough to secure the increase in wages and the decrease of the working day to eight hours that were both central concerns of the French working class. Their ambitious reform program, which included extensive union participation in economic management, was specifically linked to the need for increased rationalization.69 As Gary Cross has shown, this represented not passive accommodation, but an active strategy based on a critical reflection on past failures, a realistic recognition of the changing nature of the French working class, and a creative redefinition of workers’ control that included broader possibilities for coalition politics (workers, consumers, and technical experts).70 Basic aspects of craft control were sacrificed in this new conception, to be sure. But given the constraints of the world market, and the centrality—even among many skilled workers—of nonworkplace interests in material security and culture (the latter symbolized by the eight-hour day demand), the interest in craft control could no longer have been effectively represented by labor’s organizations, nor could Taylorism have been effectively resisted. In the long-term struggle against Taylorism and rationalization throughout the industrial world, many if not most skilled workers were concerned more about wages, relative status and earnings, and forms of payment and calculation, than with integral skills and craftlike work. Rationalization for the less skilled often brought advances in terms of earnings, hours, physical strain, regularity of employment, and for some, genuine upgrading. The promise of the eight-hour day must be seen in terms of the value placed on culture, community, and family life—even if the terrain of leisure time would not remain an uncontested one. To interpret working-class struggles in this period primarily in terms of the fight against Taylorism would thus represent its own peculiar form of productivism. In the context of world market constraints, national options, credible strategies, and the relative priorities and varieties of actual or perceived working-class benefits, it becomes impossible to view the mass struggles for workers’ control simply against the backdrop of “Frederick Taylor as Serpent”71 or the trade unions as Satan’s lieutenants.
The relations among various groups of workers were complex and shifting. Skilled workers predominated in worker control struggles as a result of their relative deprivations brought about by the impact of wartime rationalization, technical and administrative skills relevant to controlling production, organizational and cultural skills, and preexisting linkages to trade union and party networks. Women workers, who were predominantly semi- and unskilled, suffered multiple disadvantages in terms of participation in control struggles as a result of deeply embedded patriarchal patterns. Responsibility for home and child care, including long rationing lines during the war, made participation much more difficult and tended to preclude the formation of workplace recreational cultures and institutions that have often been the basis for sociability, solidarity, and protest. Communities, neighborhoods, and marketplaces, rather than workplaces, tended to be more central focal points for struggle.72 And, in general, unskilled workers tended to be more instrumental in their attitudes towards work, and their demands centered not on control, but on wages, conditions, and treatment by supervisors. These divisions were neither wiped away by the mass movements for democratic control nor did they remain unaffected by them. Rather, in a complex and contradictory fashion, these movements drew upon and in certain ways reproduced inequalities that were challenged by the very forms of democratic representation developed in the struggle against managerial control. Gramsci’s belief that solidarity was incarnate in the production process itself inadequately represented the divisions that existed. It reflected more the peculiar conditions of Turin as well as the limits of his own critique of the capitalist division of labor. He did not view as problematic large gradations in expertise but considered them functionally necessary and hence the basis for a form of solidarity rooted in the mutual recognition of indispensability. Nor, however, did there exist a deterministic and narrow relation between position in the division of labor and politics or workplace practice. The dynamic of struggle was not deterministically set by the privileges of skill or the interdependencies of productive functions but by a range of other political, organizational, and ideological factors that interacted with these. Such factors included the previous extent of rationalization, the strength of craft organization, the degree of mobilization of the less skilled workers, cultural and ideological formations in the working-class movements, the extent to which alternative forms of production and power appeared possible as solutions to crisis, and the forms of council democracy themselves. The consciousness of skilled workers was not narrowly fixed by corporativist interests but displayed a multivalent dynamism. Likewise, less skilled workers at times became quite receptive to workers’ control. The differences between groups could be bridged in various ways, including those that did not rely solely on rational calculation of mutual benefit but appealed to solidarity and principle.73 In all these council movements, however, the form of democratic participation played a relatively autonomous role. Despite the fact that all the movements drew upon (and hence in some ways reinforced) the inequalities of existing divisions of labor, democratic and universalistic forms tended to foster an egalitarian dynamic of their own.
Notes
This is a revised version of an article that first appeared in Theory and Society 9 (1980), 29–88.
1. David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America (New York, 1979), 10.
2. Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the ‘New Economic Policy,’” in this volume.
3. See, for instance, Mayer Zald and John McCarthy, eds., The Dynamics of Social Movements (Cambridge, 1979); Zald and McCarthy, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977), 1212–1241; Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, 1978); Anthony Oberschall, Social Conflict and Social Movements (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1973); Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure (New York, 1976); and Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions in France, Russia and China (New York, 1979).
4. For example, Ted Gurr, Why Men Rebel (Princeton, 1970); Neil Smelser, Theory of Collective Behavior (New York, 1963); Ralph Turner and L. Killian, Collective Behavior, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972). Unlike some, however, these authors do not completely neglect structural and political factors.
5. On general wartime conditions for the working classes in Germany, see Jürgen Kocka, Klassengesellschaft im Krieg 1914–1918 (Göttingen, 1973); Gerald Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor in Germany 1914–1918 (Princeton, 1966); Robert Armeson, Total Warfare and Compulsory Labor (The Hague, 1964); Reinhard Rürup, Eberhard Kolb, and Gerald Feldman, “Die Massenbewegungen der Arbeiterschaft in Deutschland am Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges (1917–1920),” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, 13 Jahrgang, Heft 1 (August, 1972), 87 ff.; for France, William Oulaid and Charles Picquenard, Salaires et tarifs (Paris, 1928); Roger Picard, Le mouvement syndical durant la guerre (Paris, 1927); Marjorie Ruth Clark, A History of the French Labor Movement (1910–1928) (Berkeley, 1930), 51 ff.; Val Lorwin, The French Labor Movement (Cambridge, 1966); 51 ff.; Max Gallo, “Quelques aspects de la mentalité et du comportement ouvriers dans les usines de guerre, 1914–1918,” Le mouvement social, 56 (July–September, 1966), 3–33; for Italy, Martin Clark, Antonio Gramsci and the Revolution that Failed (New Haven, 1977), 5, 21 ff.; Gwyn Williams, Proletarian Order (London, 1975), 55 ff.; Luigi Einaudi, La Condotta Economica e Gli Effetti Sociali della Guerra Italiana (Bari, 1933), especially 99 f. and chapter 3; Giuseppe Prato, Il Piemonte e gli Effetti della Guerra sulla sua Vita Economica e Sociale (Bari, 1925), chapters 3 and 5; for Britain, Arthur Marwick, The Deluge (London, 1965); James Hinton, The First Shop Stewards’ Movement (London, 1973), 33 ff.; Marion Kozak, “Women Munition Workers During the First World War with Special Reference to Engineering,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hull, 1976; for Russia, S. O. Zagorsky, State Control of Industry in Russia during the War (New Haven, 1928), 51 ff., passim; John Keep, The Russian Revolution (New York, 1976), 42 ff., 16 ff. See Stanislaw Andrezejewski, Military Organization and Society (London, 1954), 28 ff., for an early statement of the hypothesis that increased popular participation in the war effort is conducive to democratization and the narrowing of class differences; see also Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974); Marc Ferro, The Great War, 1914–1918, trans. Nicole Stone (London, 1973), 170 ff.
6. Peter von Oertzen, Betriebsräte in der Novemberrevolution (Düsseldorf, 1963), 273–274; Richard Comfort, Revolutionary Hamburg (Stanford, 1966), 94–95; Feldman, 205; Kocka, 12ff., 27–28; Heidrun Homburg, “Anfänge des Taylorsystems in Deutschland vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Gesellschaft und Geschichte 4, no. 2 (1978), 170–194; Hinton, 56 ff.; Lyndall Urwick, The Development of Scientific Management in Britain (London, 1938); Kozak; Eric Hobsbawm, “Custom, Wages and Work-load in Nineteenth Century Industry,” in Peter Stearns and Daniel Walkowitz, eds., Workers in the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, 1974), 246 ff.; Clark, Antonio Gramsci, 26–27, passim; Aimée Moutet, “Les origines du système de Taylor en France. Le point de vue patronal (1907–1914),” Le mouvement social 93 (Oct.–Dec. 1975), 15–49; James Laux, In First Gear: The French Automobile Industry to 1914 (Montreal, 1976), chapter 13; Patrick Fridenson, Histoire des usines Renault (Paris, 1972), 70 ff., 89 ff.; Oualid and Picquenard, 91 ff., 348 ff.; Picard, Le mouvement syndical, 109 ff.; Robert Wohl, French Communism in the Making, 1914–1924 (Stanford, 1966), 119–120; Bertrand Abherve, “Les origines de la grève des métallurgistes parisiens, juin 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (Oct.–Dec. 1975), 75 ff.; Peter Stearns, Lives of Labor (New York, 1975), Part II; Chris Goodey, “Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1918),” Critique 3 (Autumn 1974), 31; Paul Devinat, Scientific Management in Europe (Geneva, 1927).
7. On this whole problem, see especially Georges Haupt, Socialism and the Great War (Oxford, 1972). Also, Wohl, 54, for the vivid testimony of Merrheim, head of the CGT’s Metal Federation, in this regard.
8. The CGL, under the banner of “neither adherence nor sabotage,” remained officially opposed to the war, however. See Daniel Horowitz, The Italian Labor Movement (Cambridge, 1963), 128–129.
9. See Peter Stearns, Revolutionary Syndicalism and French Labor (New Brunswick, 1971). Both the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in North America and the National Confederation of Labor (Confederatión Nacional del Trabajo) (CNT) in Spain were plagued by similar problems, and both developed reformist/bureaucratic tendencies as a result of mass pressure.
10. Hinton, 68, 58 ff., passim; also Branko Pribićević, The Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control (Oxford, 1959), 30–31, 35, passim.
11. Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, 271 ff., passim; Fritz Opel, Der Deutsche Metallarbeiter-Verband Während des Ersten Weltkrieges und der Revolution (Hannover, 1958); Comfort, 94–95; David Morgan, The Socialist Left and the German Revolution (Ithaca, 1975), 55–56.
12. Clark, Antonio Gramsci, 36 ff., 80 ff.; Giuseppe Maione, Il Biennio Rosso (Bologna, 1975), 7 ff.; Mario Abrate, La Lotta Sindacale nella Industrializzazione in Italia, 1906–1926 (Turin, 1966), chapter 8; Horowitz, 58 ff., 70 ff., 128–129.
13. Picard, Le mouvement syndical, 116 ff.; Picard, Le contrôle sur la gestion des enterprises (Paris, 1922), passim; Oualid and Picquenard, 420 ff.; Gallo, 22 ff.; Nicholas Papayanis, “Masses révolutionnaires et directions reformistes: les tensions au cours des grèves des métallurgistes français en 1919,” Le mouvement social 93 (Oct.–Dec. 1975); Abherve.
14. Hinton, chapter 8.
15. Clark, French Labor Movement, 66 ff., 80 ff.; Lorwin, 52 ff.; Picard, Le contrôle ouvrier, 24, 84 ff.
16. Zagorsky, 86 ff.; Keep, 42 ff.; Oscar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Workers, Peasants and Soldiers Councils 1905–1920, trans Ruth Hein (New York, 1974), 97 ff.; Paul Avrich, “Russian Factory Committees in 1917,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 11 (1963), 165.
17. Marc Ferro, La Révolution de 1917, vol. 2 (Paris, 1976), 275. On the Russian unions, see also Isaac Deutscher, Soviet Trade Unions (London, 1950); Uwe Brügmann, Die russischen Gewerkschaften in Revolution and Bürgerkrieg (Frankfurt am Main, 1972); Keep, 96 ff.; Diane Koenker, “Moscow Workers in 1917,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1976, chapters 6 and 7.
18. Brügmann, 59 ff.; Frederick Kaplan, Bolshevik Ideology and the Ethics of Soviet Labor (New York, 1968), 54 ff., 61 ff.; Leopold Haimson, ed., The Mensheviks, trans, Gertrude Vakar (Chicago, 1974).
19. On this general feature of mobilization see Tilly, p. 141.
20. See Haimson, “The Russian Workers’ Movement on the Eve of the First World War,” paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, New York, December 1971, 34 ff.; Avrich, 172; Anne Bobroff, “The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905–1920,” Soviet Studies 26, no. 4 (1974), 554; Mark David Mandel, “The Development of Revolutionary Consciousness Among the Industrial Workers of Petrograd Between February 1917 and July 1918,” Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1978, 188 ff., 492.
21. On the rise and development of the committees in 1917, see Carmen Sirianni, Workers’ Control and Socialist Democracy: The Soviet Experience in Comparative Perspective (London, 1982), chapters 2 and 3; Brügmann; Avrich; Richard Lorenz, Anfänge der bolschewistischen Industriepolitik (Köln, 1965); Benjamin Ward, “Wild Socialism in Russia: The Origins” California Slavic Studies 3 (1964), 127–148; Kaplan; Falk Döring, Organizationsprobleme der russischen Wirtschaft in Revolution und Bürgerkrieg (1918–1920) (Hannover, 1970); William Rosenberg, “Workers’ Control on the Railroads and Some Suggestions Concerning Social Aspects of Labor Politics in the Russian Revolution,” The Journal of Modern History 49, no. 2 (June 1977), reprint D1181-D1219; Robert Devlin, “Petrograd Workers and Workers’ Factory Committees in 1917: An Aspect of the Social History of the Russian Revolution,” Ph.D. dissertation; SUNY–Binghamton, 1976; Marc Ferro, The Russian Revolution of February 1917, trans. J. L. Richards (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1972), 112 ff., 271 ff., passim; Ferro, La Révolution de 1917, vol. 2, chap. 6. The latter’s contention that the factory committees had voluntarily decided to subordinate themselves to the unions is, however, mistaken.
22. Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (Princeton, 1975), 91 ff.; Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–1921 (London, 1969), 187 ff.; Wohl, 114 ff.; Papayanis.
23. Pribićević, 164.
24. Hinton; Pribićević, 163–64; compare Jean Monds, “Workers’ Control and the Historians: A New Economism,” New Left Review 97 (May–June 1976), 81–100; see Hinton’s response in the same issue.
25. Kendall, chapter 8; Hinton, passim; Pribićević, passim.
26. Hinton, 56. Iain McLean questions the representativeness of the leading stewards in the Workers’ Committees in “Popular Protest and Public Order: Red Clydeside, 1915–1919,” in R. Quinalt and J. Stevenson, eds., Popular Protest and Public Order (New York, 1974), 221.
27. McLean; Hinton, chapter 8, passim; Pribićević, 37 ff., 102 ff.; Kozak, passim. Joint labor-management Whitley committees were established in response to rising worker protest during the war. But, despite the use of similar vocabularies, they were unable to perform the function of channelling labor demands in areas that were previously well organized, and their peak inclusion of 3.5 million workers lasted for only a short period of time. See Harvie Ramsay, “Cycles of Control: Worker Participation in Sociological and Historical Perspective,” Sociology 11 (1977), 481–506.
28. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, chapters 1 and 2; Clark, Antonio Gramsci, 4–5; Paolo Spriano, The Occupation of the Factories, trans. Gwyn Williams (London, 1975), 80; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York, 1971), section 1.3; Adrian Lyttelton, “Revolution and Counter-Revoluttion in Italy, 1918–1992,” in Charles Bertrand, ed., Revolutionary Situations in Europe, 1917–1922 (Montreal, 1977), 63 ff.
29. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings 1910–1920, ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. John Matthews (New York, 1977); Clark, Antonio Gramsci; Williams, Proletarian Order; Carl Boggs, Gramsci’s Marxism (London, 1976); Alastair Davidson, Antonio Gramsci: Towards an Intellectual Biography (London, 1977); Maione; Pier Carlo Masini, “Anarchistes et communistes dans le mouvement des conseils à Turin—première après-guerre rouge 1919–1920,” Autogestion 26–27 (March–June 1974), 37–38, 43 ff.
30. See particularly Clark, Antonio Gramsci, 69 ff. and chapter 4; Maione, chapter 1, passim; Gramsci, Political Writings.
31. Due to its late development, firms there tended to be more technologically advanced, larger, and more concentrated. One industry (automobiles) dominated the city, and one company in particular (FIAT) stood above all the rest. The city possessed a very small middle class and virtually no artisan strata to distract from the basic polarity between owners and workers. There was a high proportion of skilled workers yet with much less of a craft tradition and corporativist consciousness than elsewhere. See Giuliano Procacci, “La classe operaia italiana agli inizi del secolo XX,” Studi Storici 3, no. 1 (Jan.–March 1962), especially the first section; Abrate 22 ff.; John Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism (Stanford, 1967), 19 ff.
32. Quoted in Spriano, 91, also 84; and Davidson, 147; Clark, Antonio Gramsci, chapters 5 to 9; Maione, chapters 2 and 3; Williams, Proletarian Order, chapters 8 to 10; Tasca in Gramsci, Political Writings, 239 ff. Maione, 11 notes that the original resistance of Fiat workers to the FIOM contract that most other workers felt favorable toward was due in part to corporativist motivations. These workers felt that their own better contract terms had been sacrificed for the benefit of the national contract.
33. Albert Lindemann, The “Red Years” (Berkeley, 1974), 164, 181,203.
34. Clark, Antonio Gramsci, 179.
35. Spriano, 152, n. 49, also p. 80 and 132 ff.; compare Williams, Proletarian Order, 256 ff.; Davidson, p. 148; Lyttelton.
36. Eberhard Kolb, Die Arbeiterräte in der deutschen Innenpolitik 1918–1919 (Düsseldorf, 1962), 71 ff.; Ulrich Kluge, Soldatenräte und Revolution (Göttingen, 1975); Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, 80 ff., 134–135.
37. Kolb, Arbeiterräte; Kolb, “Rätewirklichkeit und Räte-Ideologie in der deutschen Revolution von 1918/19,” in Eberhard Kolb, ed., Vom Kaiserreich zur Weimarer Republik, (Köln, 1972), 170 ff.; Rürup, Kolb, and Feldman; Hans Schieck, “Die Behandlung der Sozialisierungsfrage in den Monaten nach dem Staatsumsturz,” in Kolb, Vom Kaiserreich, 150 ff.; Henry Egon Freidlander, “Conflict of Revolutionary Authority; Provisional Government vs. Berlin Soviet, November-December 1918,” International Review of Social History 7 (1962), 163–75. For some local studies, see Reinhard Rürup, ed. Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte in rheinisch-westfälischen Industriegebiet (Wuppertal, 1975).
38. Guenther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany (Totowa, N.J., 1963); Carl Schorske, German Social Democracy, 1905–1917 (Cambridge, Mass., 1955); Robert Michels, Political Parties, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York, 1962); Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor; Ashok Desai, Real Wages in Germany (Oxford, England, 1968). As Rürup argues on the basis of the studies in Arbeiter- und Soldatenräte, the councils may have represented a realistic third way between Bolshevik-style dictatorship and the Ebert-Noske repression that was to follow. But the SPD and the unions would have had to lend decisive political and organizational support.
39. Schieck; Helga Grebing, “Konservative Republik oder soziale Demokratie?” in Kolb, Vom Kaisserreich, 388–403; von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, 247 ff., 67; Kolb, “Rätewirklichkeit,” 181–182; Rürup, Kolb, and Feldman; Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (New York, 1967), 90 ff., 253 ff.
40. Kolb, Arbeiterräte; von Oertzen, Betriebsräte; Gerhard Bassler, “The Communist Movement in the German Revolution, 1918–1919: A Problem of Historical Typology?” Central European History 6 (1973), 248 ff.; Morgan; Hartfrid Krause, USPD (Frankfurt am Main, 1975).
41. Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, chapter 5; von Oertzen, Die Probleme der wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung und der Mitbestimmung in der Revolution von 1918, unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Metallindustrie (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), Part II (these two have since been combined in the 1976 edition of Betriebsräte).
42. Rürup, Kolb and Feldman, 100. See also Morgan; Bassler; von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, chapter 8. It must remain questionable to what extent such a diffuse opposition, emerging during a relatively brief period of intense conflict and under considerable state constraints, could have developed a more coherent and effective organization even if the ideological barriers to this were less extreme.
43. Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte; Rürup, Kolb and Feldman, 85; Morgan 245 ff.; Karl Korsch, Schriften zur Sozialisierung (Frankfurt am Main, 1969). The latter wrote in the council journal, Der Arbeiterrat, though he was not strictly a council theorist associated with the mass movement.
44. Sergio Bologna, ‘Class Composition and the Theory of the Party at the Origin of the Workers’ Councils Movement,” Telos 13 (Fall 1972), 4–27. This is a full translation from the original Operai e Stato, by Bolgona et al. (Milan, 1972), and has been translated into German as well. More recently Karl Heinz Roth has tried to develop this argument, but with a new stress on the unskilled workers as historical subjects, in Die “andere” Arbeiterbewegung (Munich, 1974). Despite the rigidly evolutionistic character of the general schema and the often careless and superficial documentation of specific arguments, this thesis has been frequently repeated.
45. See von Oertzen; Erhard Lucas, Zwei Formen von Radikalismus in der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt am Main, 1976); Comfort, 96 ff.; Bassler, 258 ff.; and the essays of Peterson and Nolan in this volume.
46. Gerald Feldman, “German Big Business between War and Revolution: The Origins of the Stinnes-Legien Agreement,” in Entstehung und Wandel der modernen Gesellschaft, ed. Gerhard Ritter, (Berlin, 1970), 312–341; Feldman, Army, Industry, and Labor, 436 ff., 521 ff.; Schieck, 138 ff.; von Oertzen, Betreibsräte, 181 ff.; Comfort, 85 ff.
47. In the expansive textile unions there was a high degree of radicalism but less councilism due, according to von Oertzen (Betriebsräte, p. 277), to the large unskilled, especially female component (which created personnel difficulties for co-determination), and the small and medium-sized plant structure.
48. Von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, chapters 11 and 12, 189 ff.; passim; Rürup, Kolb and Feldman, 90 ff., 101 ff.; Comfort, 28, 37, 88 ff., 96 ff.; Lucas, 148; Morgan, pp. 129–130, 249–250, 270, 342; Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 61. Where the hold of the old unions was weaker, the Obleute often formed the basis of new revolutionary industrial unions. See Peterson, in this volume.
49. Kolb, “Rätewirklichkeit,” 165–166.
50. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe, 148, 160 ff.; von Oertzen, Betriebsräte, 153 ff., 256; Morgan, 233–234, 269, 312; Comfort, 98 ff.
51. Of the numerous general treatments of political developments in Russia in 1917, see especially Ferro; Anweiler; Keep; Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to Power (New York, 1976).
52. On the extent of coordination and the general problems associated with it, see especially Sirianni, Workers’ Control; M. L. Itkin, “Tsentri Fabrichnozavodskikh Komitetov Rossii v 1917 g.,” Voprosy istorii 2 (1974), 21–36; Döring, especially parts 1 and 2; Brügmann, chapter 12.
53. This conclusion is shared by various historians, though to different degrees. John Keep (p. 158), for instance, concludes that “‘workers’ control’ was bound to create anarchy.” Paul Aurich speaks of “the elemental drive of the Russian masses towards a chaotic utopia,” in “The Bolshevik Revolution and Workers’ Control in Russian Industry,” Slavic Review 27 (1963), 63; see also Jean-Marie Chauvier, “Contrôle ouvrier at ‘Autogestion Sauvage’ en Russie (1917–1921),” Revue des pays de l’est 14, no. 1 (1973), 82.
54. William Rosenberg, “The Democratization of Russia’s Railroads in 1917,” in this volume. As Steve Smith has argued, however, the strength of shop and craft identities in the Russian labor movement should not be exaggerated. Nor, I would argue, did the Bolsheviks consistently use the factory and shop committees to encourage particularistic interests, and quite often did just the opposite. See Steve Smith, “Craft Consciousness, Class Consciousness: Petrograd 1917,” History Workshop Journal 11 (Spring 1981), 33–56.
55. Haupt, 231.
56. Skocpol, 168, my emphasis.
57. The relationship of movement, leadership and theory is a central theme of Sirianni, Workers’ Control.
58. It should be noted that although the committees exercised vigorous control over the technical and administrative personnel, to the point of dismissing those who proved overly recalcitrant, no general purges were undertaken.
59. Reginald Zelnik, “Russian Bebels: An Introduction to the Memoirs of Semen Kanatchikov and Matvei Fisher,” The Russian Review 35, no. 3 (July 1976), 262–263; and Smith. Perhaps the strength of occupational parochialism on the rails, which Rosenberg emphasizes, was due to the complex coordination problems, the deep political divisions among different categories of workers, and the fact that the Central Line Committees were dominated by very highly skilled engineers and technical personnel. As Steve Smith points out, factory committee organization generally held “shopist” tendencies in check.
60. Keep, 71 ff., 258; Goodey, 30 ff.; Ferro, vol. 1, 114–116; Ward, 139 ff.; Koenker, part I; Heather Hogan, “The Putilovtsy: A Case Study of Workers’ Attitudes during the Russian Revolution of 1917,” unpublished paper, August 1974, University of Michigan; and especially Mark David Mandel.
61. It is this ambivalence and resistance which Goodey, in his very provocative article, fails to recognize.
62. Brügmann, 151 ff.; L. B. Genkin, “Rozhdeniye Sotsialisticheskoy Distsiplini Truda (konets 1917-leto 1918),” Istoriia SSSR 1 (Jan.–Feb. 1965), 3–27; A. Lomov, Die Produktivität der Arbeit in Sowjet Russland (Berlin, 1919).
63. See Franciska Baumgarten, Arbeitswissenschaft und Psychotechnik in Russland (Munich; 1924); Kendall Bailes, “Alexei Gastev and the Soviet Controversy over Taylorism, 1918–1924,” Soviet Studies 29, no. 3 (July 1977), 373–394; Anthony Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1917–1930 (Stanford, 1968).
64. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge, ed. Paul Kecskemeti (London, 1952), 283.
65. In Pannekoek’s postwar critique the unions no longer have any positive function and are viewed as “organs of domination of monopolist capital over the working class.” The factory councils are completely different in both structure and function. See Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers Councils, trans. Malachy Carroll (St. Louis, 1978); Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Cambridge, Mass., 1970).
66. Arthur Stinchcombe, “Social Structure and Organizations,” in James March, ed., Handbook of Organizations (Chicago, 1965), 148 ff.; see also Zald and McCarthy, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements,” 1233–1234.
67. See, for instance, G. David Garson, ed., Workers’ Self-Management in Industry: The West European Experience (New York, 1977); Eric Batstone, Ian Boraston, and Stephen Frenkel, Shop Stewards in Action (Oxford, 1977); Evelyn Huber Stephens, The Politics of Workers Participation: The Peruvian Approach in Comparative Perspective (New York, 1980); Juan Espinosa and Andrew Zimbalist, Economic Democracy: Workers’ Participation in Chilean Industry, 1970–1973 (New York, 1978).
68. Steve Fraser, in this volume; Roth, Arbeiterbewegung, 56 ff.; Devinat, passim; Charles Maier, “Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European ideologies and the vision of industrial productivity in the 1920s,” The Journal of Contemporary History 5, no. 2 (1970), 48.
69. Moutet, 39 ff.; Abherve, 79; Wohl, 120.
70. Gary Cross, in this volume.
71. The phrase is borrowed from Jean Monds, 85.
72. John Sharpless and John Rury, “The Political Economy of Women’s Work, 1900–1920,” Social Science History, no. 3 (1980); Temma Kaplan, “Women’s Networks and Social Change in Twentieth Century Petrograd, Turin and Barcelona,” paper presented at Center for European Studies, Harvard University, March 1981.
73. The latter is reemphasized in Bruce Fireman and William Gamson, “Utilitarian Logic in the Resource Mobilization Perspective,” in Zald and McCarthy. Skilled workers’ acceptance of narrower wage differentials was often expressed in terms of principle, ideology, and solidarity with those whose conditions were worse off.