The factory committees in the Russian revolution

"The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control" is a classical study of the factory committee movement during the Russian revolution. The author, Maurice Brinton, was a member of a small but relatively well known British leftist group, Solidarity. He is also the author of "The irrational in politics", a rather crude attempt to combine Freud, Reich and Marx in one package. I always assumed that Maurice Brinton was a pen name used by the French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (Solidarity translated some of his political writings). Actually, Brinton was another person!

This edition of "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control" was published in the United States by Black & Red, presumably a small anarchist publisher. Despite its political antecedents, the book is extremely interesting and draws on a large amount of sources, including Soviet books and documents. Conventional historians are also cited, including Carr, Daniels, Shapiro and Deutscher.

After the February revolution in 1917, workers at many factories in Russia created "factory committees", which attempted to wrest control of the plants from the owners. The factory committees were independent of the labour unions, and seems to have been somewhat similar to the soviets formed at the same time. The Bolsheviks initially supported the factory committee movement. After the October revolution, however, their attitude gradually cooled. In the Bolshevik scheme of things, the economy should be controlled by the state, i.e. the Supreme Economic Council and its local organs. Brinton describes the process in painstaking detail. Of course, the Bolsheviks also turned Russia into a one party state. The experiment with "workers' control" of production was a short lived one.

The book does contain a few sloppy errors. Thus, the author places the Lenin Levy in 1923 rather than 1924, making Lenin commenting upon the levy, when actually it took place after his death! Overall, however, this seems to be a well documented work about a usually neglected period in Russian history. "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control" also cover topics treated more extensively elsewhere, such as the Left Communists and the Workers' Opposition.

Personally, I consider the factory committees to have been utopian. A modern economy cannot be completely decentralized, nor can it be "centralized" on the basis of radical democracy á la the Paris Commune, which I presume is Brinton's position. The Bolsheviks were political realists when they pinioned the factory committees, and any other regime would surely have done the same. Of course, this has made the factory committees a staple of anarchist, anti-statist mythology. While Solidarity weren't anarchists in the strictest sense of that term, they did come pretty close. Nor is it surprising that "The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control" have been reprinted by anarchist groups.