John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

There was an immediate reaction from the unions. Trotsky and Lenin, who whole-heartedly supported the proposals at the time, were shouted down at party and union meetings. Only a minority of People’s Commissars–Rykov, Miliutin, Nogin and Tomsky–were opposed. In January 1920 Sovnarcom issued a Decree which laid out general regulations for a universal labour service that would supply all branches of the economy on the basis of a general economic plan. The tenor of the Decree is revealed by an aside to the document, which revealed Sovnarcom now had cause to “regret the destruction of the old police apparatus” because it had “known how to register citizens, not only in towns but also in the country”. 4

On 12th January Lenin and Trotsky attended a meeting of the All-Russian Central Council of Trade Unions (ARCCTU) and urged upon them the general scheme of the militarisation of labour. Of sixty Bolshevik trade union leaders present, only two supported them. The leading Bolshevik trade unionist and Chair of the ARCCTU Mikhail Tomsky argued for the principle of “collective management”, i.e. for a co-partnership role for the trade unions and for their right to make and influence managerial decisions. This was as far as leading Bolsheviks could go in overt criticism of Lenin and Trotsky. It was a clear challenge to their authority from the heart of working-class Bolshevism.

The controversy exploded at the Ninth Russian Communist Party Congress, held from 29th March to 4th April, 1920. The Congress debated Tomsky’s call for “collegial management” in industry instead of the one-man management favoured by Lenin and Trotsky. Tomsky’s proposal argued:

The basic principle in building the organs for regulating and administering industry, the only one capable of guaranteeing the participation of the broad non-party working masses through the trade unions, is the presently existing principle of the collegial administration of industry, beginning with the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council and concluding with the plant administration. 5

The Seventh Congress of Soviets and the Central Trade Union Council had both supported Tomsky’s call for collegial management, i.e. for the input and influence of the organised working class. This meant nothing to Lenin. He rejected the idea of collective workers’ management as “utopian”, “injurious” and “impractical”.

Trotsky went even further than Lenin. He completely rejected the views of the Soviet Congress and the Central Trade Union Council (both of which were dominated by Bolsheviks) and told the Congress:

Elected collegia, composed of the very best representatives of the working class, but not possessing basic technical knowledge, cannot replace one technician who has gone to a special school and who knows how to handle a given job. Collegial management is an entirely natural reaction of a young, revolutionary, recently oppressed class, which rejects the individual commands of yesterday’s masters, bosses, commanders, but this is not the last word on building the state economy of the proletarian class. 6

Neither Lenin nor Trotsky seem to have considered the option of retaining the technician for technical advice only, whilst an elected collegia of workers gained administrative experience.

Trotsky openly mocked the idea of working-class independence. He bluntly told the Ninth Party Congress, “The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers”. He added, “Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps”. He called this “the progressive essence of Taylorism”. 7

In Terrorism and Communism , written at the time, Trotsky explained his reasoning:

The young socialist state requires trade unions not for a struggle for better conditions of labour, but to organise the working class for the ends of production, to educate and discipline […] to exercise their authority hand in hand with the state in order to lead the workers into the framework of a single economic plan.

He rejected the concept of collective management as “a Menshevik idea”. In Diane P. Koenker’s estimation, “Trade Union independence was the keystone of the alternative model of labour relations, which was embraced by the Menshevik Party”. 8Despite themselves, a de facto alliance between Bolshevik trade unionists and the Menshevik party was now established on the issue.

Lenin backed Trotsky to the hilt. He told the Ninth Party Congress,

The elective principle must be replaced by the principle of selection […] The trade unions are going to be placed in gigantic difficulties. It is necessary that they approach this task in the spirit of a struggle against the vestiges of the notorious democratic procedures.

After hearing the arguments of those opposing the militarisation of labour and the removal of union democracy, Lenin responded with pure contempt. “All your words are nothing but verbalism pure and simple; ‘self activity’, the ‘rule of appointees’, etc.! But when does our centralism come in?” 9

Despite challenges from a few trade union leaders, there was never any doubt what a party Congress, most of whose delegates were directly chosen by Stalin’s Secretariat, would decide. At the close the Congress passed a resolution that decreed “no trade union group should directly intervene in industrial management”. It made clear that “Factory Committees should devote themselves to the question of labour discipline, of propaganda and of education of the workers”. 10With this resolution Bolshevik activists who had spent most of 1917 passionately agitating for working-class power at the point of production voted to give it away and to become enforcers for one-man management imposed by the government.

After the Ninth Party Congress Trotsky was put in charge of the Commissariat of Transport (in addition to the War Ministry and Red Army). The railways had all but collapsed in the Civil War. Without them industry would grind to a halt. Trotsky chose to address the problem by re-organising the transport system along military lines. He unilaterally removed the heads of the transport workers’ unions and replaced them with a Central Committee for Transport (Tsektran), a strict military-bureaucratic operation. Under Tsektran’s edicts the railway network began to function to at least minimal efficiency. Tsektran “worked” in the literal sense–in the sense that Mussolini made the trains run on time. But it did great damage to the morale of Russian workers and the reputation of Soviet power. Its existence was a negation and rejection of any kind of workers’ democracy.

With attention focused on Tsektran, few noticed that the Ninth Congress gave the Orgburo, set up the year before, unilateral power to carry out transfers and postings of party members without reference to the Politburo. Although Stalin’s power and influence continued to grow, it was Trotsky who appeared to ordinary party members as the epitome of bureaucratic coercion. In 1920 Trotsky conveyed the impression of a brilliant man drunk with power. At the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions held in April he replied to criticisms that his forced labour policy resembled the slavery of the Pharaohs by candidly admitting it. “Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice […] Compulsory slave labour was in its time a progressive phenomenon”. He concluded that “labour, obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism”. 11

He expanded on the subject in a chapter of his Terrorism and Communism (1920). After an eloquent demolition of bourgeois moralists who criticised the Bolsheviks for “terrorism” whilst overlooking the terrorism of their own states, Trotsky analysed what he called “Problems on the Organisation of Labour”. He lamented that Mensheviks and others “opposed the practical measures of our economic reconstruction” with “bourgeois prejudices and bureaucratic-intellectual scepticism”. 12He openly avowed: