This was a naïve assessment and a short-sighted strategy. The workers and soldiers who had overthrown Tsarism and formed the Soviets–which now existed in all of Russia’s cities and many rural areas–no longer felt any deference to liberals or waited for them to introduce democracy over their heads. This was forcefully demonstrated in a wave of factory occupations and the emergence of Factory Committees that sought to introduce a form of Workers’ Control in industry. In the first week of March, after the owners had disappeared or fled, Factory Committees spontaneously appeared in many cities. They were particularly strong in the state-owned metallurgical works run by the Artillery and Naval Departments. By April they existed in every large plant in Moscow and Petrograd. All major railway stations were overseen by a Workers’ Committee. In Baku every plant had a Factory Committee.
Inevitably they were run in different ways, but as a general rule they answered to a General Assembly–a mass gathering of factory hands and white-collar workers. It was to the Assembly that the elected committees reported. At least 50% of workers in the factory had to participate in the election for it to be valid.25 The Committee formed at the radio-telegraph Factory in Petrograd laid down rules for a minimum wage, the length of the working day, medical care at work, sick pay, a mutual fund, discipline procedures, food provision and hiring and firing of employees. Some committees went further and began to consider issues around production itself. In March and April, the owners returned to find their managerial prerogatives, and their claim to ownership itself, fundamentally challenged.
The Factory Committees were the most significant and innovatory bodies to emerge from the February Revolution. As early as 2nd March the Petrograd 1st Electricity Works elected a 24-person council to run the Works (even at this stage it included ten Bolsheviks, indicating that despite the hesitations of its leaders, the party’s militants were more attuned to developments on the shop floor). On 7th March the Petrograd Soviet issued the instruction: “For the control of factory and shop administration, for the proper organisation of work, factory and shop committees should be formed at once. They should see to it that the forces of labour are not wasted and look after working conditions in the plant”.26 Although the impetus for this was practical–the workers needed to keep the plants going to ensure that machinery did not break down–Carmen Sirianni’s comprehensive examination of workers’ control and Soviet democracy in the period 1917-21 found that “the idea rapidly took root that workers control was the school for a system of self-management that would arise from the socialist revolution”.27
Such was the unstoppable pressure of the new Factory Committees that on 10th March an agreement was signed between the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet and the Petrograd Manufacturers Association in which the employers conceded the eight-hour day and formally recognised the Factory Committees as partners in negotiation.28 The concession of the eight-hour day in a number of Petrograd businesses could not be contained. Workers in other factories and businesses simply took it for themselves and referred any complaints to the Soviet. Similar rank-and-file pressure led to the employers’ reluctant concession of a national minimum wage. On 24th April, the Factory Committee of the Putilov Works declared: “While the workers of the particular enterprises educate themselves in self-management, they prepare themselves for the moment when private ownership of the factories will be abolished and the means of production will be transferred into the hands of the working class”.29
The Putilov was not alone. A resolution passed by workers at the Old Parvianan metal and machine factory in Petrograd on 13th April, signed by its Chairman S. Ustinov, proclaimed that the workers of the factory, having assembled at a mass meeting of 2,500 men, had resolved:
1) To demand the removal of the Provisional Government, which has served only as a brake on the revolutionary cause, and to put power into the hands of the Soviet and Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.
2) The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, resting as it does on the revolutionary proletariat, must put an end to this war, which has benefited only the capitalists and landowners and has sapped the strength of the revolutionary people.
3) To demand from the Provisional Government the immediate publication of the secret military accords concluded between the old government and its allies.
4) To organise a Red Guard and arm the entire people.
There followed other demands about requisition of the bourgeois newspapers’ printing presses and the immediate seizure of landed estates.30 The Parvianan was more than usually assertive and political, probably reflecting the influence of Bolshevik militants within the factory, but in the context of April 1917 their demands were not exceptional.
This was the social ferment that the hastily assembled system of “Dual Power” was meant to contain–a combustible situation in which the Soviet held the power but not the responsibility, and the Provisional Government held the responsibility but not the power. It was an unstable compound that could not last very long.
CHAPTER SIX
Coalition Governments
The popular revolution of February 1917, like that of 1905, took Lenin entirely by surprise. Until early 1917 he had devoted the war years to two projects: the attempted creation of an internationalist revolutionary anti-war movement that resulted in the Zimmerwald Left, and an explanation of why that movement was required in an era of monopoly capitalism. Lenin’s great work of these years, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), is a necessary adjunct to What Is To Be Done? in that it seeks to explain how the working class of a highly developed capitalism had been diverted from the revolutionary activity Marx claimed was an inevitable by-product of that development. It drew heavily on the English liberal J.A. Hobson’s Imperialism (1902), as well as Marxist analysis from the German Social Democrat Rudolf Hilferding and fellow Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin.
Hilferding’s Finance Capital (1910) analysed for the first time the transformation of classical laissez faire capitalism into the monopoly capitalism of the early 20th century, a transformation based on an unprecedented concentration of industrial capital. The core of Hilferding’s analysis was the concept of “finance capital”, i.e. bank capital that now functioned as a significant owner of industry in its own right. Arising out of this fusion of bank and industrial capital, Hilferding described what he termed “organised capitalism” or capitalism in which financial risk had been removed through the use of trusts, cartels and protective tariffs. This led to economic stagnation and attempts to overcome it. In this analysis, imperialism was the inevitable result of finance capital seeking profits overseas from new markets, by means of which it concentrated its ownership but expanded its production. Hilferding’s work quickly became “the reference point for all left-wing debates about the future of capitalism for a century”.1
In Imperialism and World Economy (published a few months before Lenin’s work and from which Lenin lifted much of his own analysis), Bukharin openly addressed the uncomfortable fact that, as his biographer Stephen F. Cohen put it, “latter day capitalism was distressingly unlike the classical free enterprise system analysed in Capital”.2 Bukharin agreed that the finance capital described by Hilferding would develop into imperialism, but he rejected Hilferding’s suggestion that capitalism might thereby avoid catastrophic implosion. Instead he called imperialism an “historic category” of modern capitalism bound to appear in its terminal stages. In much the same way, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their highly influential Empire (2001), advanced a theory of imperialism for the postmodern era.