#factory committees

[books-and-barricades]

During this period [around August-September, 1917] there were a number of important strikes (tannery and textile workers in Moscow, engineering workers in Petrograd, petrol workers in Baku, miners in the Donbas). 'There was a common feature to these struggles: the employers were prepared to make concessions through increased wages but categorically refused to recognise any rights to the Factory Committees. The workers in struggle ... were prepared to fight to the bitter end not so much on the question of wage increases as on the question of the recognition of their factory organisations'. * So much for the workers 'only being capable of trade union consciousness'.

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control: The State and Counter-Revolution (1970)

[workerscontrol]

Maurice Brinton -- The Bolsheviks and Worker's Control, 1917-192

[workerscontrol]

Maurice Brinton -- The Bolsheviks and Worker's Control, 1917-192

[workerscontrol]

Maurice Brinton -- The Bolsheviks and Worker's Control, 1917-1921

[russia-libertaire]

Bureaucratisation of the Soviets

'The soviets of 1917 differed from those of 1905 in a number of ways. Most important was that they now had something to defend: the political settlement which had followed the departure of the old regime. They were local authorities and part of the postrevolutionary "establishment." This responsibility put pressure on the leaders of the soviets to work with the Provisional Government to keep public life going till the war was ended and a Constituent Assembly could decide Russia's future. As a result, executive committees tended to develop into a new kind of bureaucracy, ever more remote from the soviets' plenary meetings, where the mood was tumultuous and unruly. ... Gradually, then, workers began to sense once more that their aspirations were being ignored. They began to transfer the focus of their political energy downward, from the town soviets to the elected factory committees which handled affairs at the workplace in individual enterprises and kept up pressure on employers, soviets, and government.'

Russia and the Russians, by Geoffrey Hosking