#workers' control

[redthreadfilms]

Five Factories (Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler, 2006)

Five Factories documents attempts at instituting workers’ control in five enterprises in Venezuela: an alluminium smelter, paper factory, tomato sauce processor, a cocoa processor, and a pipe valve factory.

These factories had been left in a state of industrial decay by their previous owners, and in the case of Inveval and Invepal, had been shut down by their bosses in an act of industrial sabotage during the 2002-2003 oil lockout. After the April 2002 coup attempt, the lockout was the next phase of the ruling class’ attempt to oust Chavez. The executives of the state oil company PDVSA locked out their workers, as did many other sections of the opposition supporting business community. The country’s GDP dropped by 40% over this period. This lockout was defeated by workers taking over large parts of Venezuela’s industrial structure, and the sacking of PDVSA’s management and research departments. 

These experiments in workers’ control are a fruit of this process of resistance. The state provided financial support for workers to reopen these factories as workers’ cooperatives and attempted to link them to the communal council projects that were occuring locally. However, the film reveals severe weaknesses in this approach which are not discussed by the participants. For one thing, it is obvious that the machinery used in these industries is severely outdated and run down as a result of chronic underinvestment and mismanagement under previous owners. Furthermore, there is an overemphasis on the process of management, ensuring that the enterprise is as democratic as possible, and an underemphasis with what workers intend to do with this new found power. Despite being worker-controlled enterprises, the emphasis is still often on production for the international market and for profit (although now some of this profit will be distributed to the communal councils), rather than accoridng to a plan centred around the needs of the country, and worker control initiatives were often argued for in terms of increasing productivity and reducing strikes in these enterprises without additional investment.

For competing discussions from a Marxist perspective of the experience and significance of the ALCASA co-management, I recommend having a read of Dario Azzellini and Thomas Purcell’s articles in Crisis and Contradiction.

[books-and-barricades]

Whatever the case may be, it is not through the state that socialism can be realized, as this would exclude the self-determination of the class, which is the essence of socialism. State rule perpetuates the divorce of the workers from the means of production, on which their dependence and exploitation rests, and thus also perpetuates social class relations.

Paul Mattick, Marxism: Last Refuge of the Bourgeoisie? (1983)

[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)

[books-and-barricades]

The first stage of this process [whereby the Party established unquestioned domination over all aspects of economic and political life] was the subordination of the Factory Committees to the All-Russian Council for Workers' Control in which the unions (themselves already strongly under Party influence) were heavily represented. The second phase – which almost immediately followed the first – was the incorporation of this All-Russian Council for Workers' Control into the Vesenka [aka: the Supreme Economic Council], even more heavily weighted in favour of the unions, but also comprising direct nominees of the State (i.e. of the Party). The Vesenka was momentarily allowed to retain a 'left' communist leadership. A little later these 'lefts' were to be removed. A sustained campaign was then launched to curb the power of the unions which, albeit in a very indirect and distorted way, could still be influenced by the working class. It was particularly important to curb such power as the unions still held in relation to production – and to replace it by the authority of direct Party nominees. These managers and administrators, nearly all appointed from above, gradually came to form the basis of the new bureaucracy. Each of these steps was to be resisted, but each fight was to be lost. Each time the adversary appeared in the garb of the new 'proletarian' power. And each defeat was to make it more difficult for the working class itself directly to manage production, i.e. fundamentally to alter the relations of production. Until these relations of production had been altered the revolution could not really be considered to have achieved its socialist objective, whatever the pronouncements of its leaders. This is the real lesson of the Russian Revolution.

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

[books-and-barricades]

March [1920]

Second All-Russian Congress of Food Industry Workers

(under syndicalist influence) meets in Moscow. Censures Bolshevik regime for inaugurating "unlimited and uncontrolled dominion over the proletariat and peasantry, frightful centralism carried to the point of absurdity . . . destroying in the country all that is alive, spontaneous and free''. ''The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat is in reality the dictatorship over the proletariat by the Party and even by individual persons".

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

[books-and-barricades]

January 25 [1921]

Pravda publishes the Workers' Opposition's 'Theses on the Trade Unions'. Alexandra Kollontai publishes 'The Workers' Opposition' which develops the same ideas at a more theoretical level.

For all the political storm unleashed by the Workers' Opposition there is little reliable documentation about this tendency. What information there is comes mainly from Leninist sources. The virulence of the attacks against the Workers' Opposition suggests it enjoyed considerable support among rank and file of factory workers and that this caused the Party leadership serious alarm. Shlyapnikov, (the first Commissar of Labour), Lutovinov and Medvedev, the leaders of the metalworkers were its most prominent spokesmen.

"Geographically it seems to have been concentrated in the South Eastern parts of European Russia: the Donets Basin. the Don and Kuban regions and the Samara province on the Volga. In Samara the Workers' Opposition was actually in control of the Party organisation in 1921. Before the Party shake-up in the Ukraine, in late 1920, the oppositionists had won a sympathetic majority in the republic as a whole. Other points of strength were in the Moscow province, where the Workers' Opposition polled about a quarter of the Party votes and in the Metal workers union throughout the country". When Tomsky was to abandon the trade unionists and rejoin Lenin's camp later in 1921, he was to 'explain' the appeal of the Workers' Opposition in terms of the metalworkers' ideology of industrialism and syndicalism. It should be remembered that these same metalworkers had formed the backbone of the Factory Committees in 1917.

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

[books-and-barricades]

[books-and-barricades]

The dictatorship of the proletariat, as Marx understood it, means working people (as an entire class, not just party members or officials) having direct democratic control (i.e., management, power, rule, etc.) over their lives for their collective self-emancipation – nothing more, nothing less.