The “taken” factories were not utopian havens. They had little capital. The technology left to them was usually second-rate. Their relationship with the public sector was unclear. Many occupied factories, such as Brukman and Zanon, asked for nationalisation under workers’ control, a formulation the government rejected on the same grounds that the post-October Bolshevik government would reject it, i.e. lack of central government control.
The occupied factories worked with their customers to generate capital by customers providing supplies to the factory, which then paid for the industrial processing. In return they produced cheaper products. Whilst not ideal, this allowed the cooperatives to survive. As they did so they began to create new work environments, bolstered by egalitarian income systems. Marina Kabat’s study of the taken factories found “Not long ago, these workers occupied an isolated place in production, and had no chance to transmit their opinions, not even about their own specific jobs. Now they collectively decide about all aspects of production”.28
Similar experiments in workers’ self-management occurred, and are still occurring, in Venezuela as part of its “Bolivarian Revolution”. After an employers’ lock-out in 2002–part of an illegal US-supported attempt to remove President Hugo Chavez–workers took over factories to keep them running. This led the government to legislate for “co-management” and to fund and support workers’ cooperatives. The programme was more than an ad hoc response to crisis. It was an integral part of Chavez’s programme to create a “communal state” and a “social economy” composed of self-governing institutions such as social enterprises, communal councils, and eventually communal cities. As Gregory Wilpert records in the most comprehensive study of the Chavez government’s policies, “The role of the social economy and of endogenous development thus came to occupy centrestage in the construction of an alternative to capitalism”.29
Also known as the “Solidaristic Economy”, the social economy promoted workers’ self-management in a wide variety of cooperatives, micro-enterprises or publicly controlled factories, under a supportive economic architecture established by the government. In 2004 the foundations for a fundamentally different kind of economy began to be laid with the creation of the Ministry for Popular Economy. The ministry provided training, credit and logistical support to help this sector grow, so that by 2005 there were over 100,000 cooperative enterprises in Venezuela, industrial co-management and worker-managed factories, including Venezuela’s main electricity company, and specially created Social Production Enterprises that re-invest profits back into the community. Social “missions” funded by the government from its oil revenue sought to eradicate poverty, illiteracy and ill health amongst the poor of the urban barrios. Mission About Face assisted the unemployed to start co-operatives and integrate them into the government’s wider economic programme.
As a result, by 2007 around 8,000 people had been trained in building the Solidaristic Economy and 10,000 new cooperatives had been founded. In the same year, the government extended the economic programme to the building of 200 “Socialist Production Companies” (ESPs), staffed by and accountable to local democratic bodies. Their ultimate aim is to create non-market systems for the exchange of commodities. Although now subject to sustained right-wing attack, the ESPs and other elements of the Solidaristic Economy are an imaginative attempt to do more than simply talk about socialist transition whilst leaving it to the magical transformation of a future day, and instead to legislate and enable it to happen.
Argentinean and Venezuelan socialists drew lessons from Russia in 1917. On 2nd April, at an Exploratory Conference of Factory Committees of Petrograd War Industries, the delegates issued a proclamation, which read:
From the Factory Committee should emanate all instructions concerning internal factory organisation (i.e. instructions concerning such matters as hours of work, hiring and firing, holidays, etc.). The whole administrative personnel (management at all levels and technicians) is taken with the consent of the Factory Committee which has to notify the workers of its decisions at mass meetings of the whole factory or through shop committees.
From 30th May to 5th June, at the First Conference of Petrograd Factory Committees, different concepts of workers’ control were debated. The conference represented 367 committees and 337,464 workers, about 80% of the workers of Petrograd. The final resolution of the conference, supported by 336 out of 421 delegates, proclaimed that Factory Committees were “fighting organisations, elected on the basis of the widest democracy and with a collective leadership”. It called for “the organisation of thorough control by labour over production and distribution” and for “a proletarian majority in all institutions having executive power”. The conference also called for a universal labour law, the creation of a workers’ militia, an immediate end to the war and the transfer of all political power to the Soviets.30
Skobelev, the Menshevik Minister of Labour, who attended and addressed the conference, repeated the standard social-democratic view. He told delegates,
Upon the individual class, especially the working class, lies the responsibility of helping the state in its organisational work […] The Committees would best serve the workers’ cause by becoming subordinate units in a state-wide network of trade unions.
Skobelev at least made clear where he differed from the Factory Committees. Lenin hid his differences behind militant rhetoric. Ostensibly supporting workers’ control, he told the conference, “The majority of workers should enter all responsible institutions and the administration should render an account of its actions to the most authoritative workers’ organisations”. Nobody stopped to ask what kind of “administration” would exist separately from the Factory Committees, or if “the most authoritative workers’ organisations” might be appendages of a political party with a monopoly of power.
The First Conference created a Central Council of Factory Committees for Petrograd. This consisted of nineteen Bolsheviks, two Mensheviks, two SRs, one anarcho-syndicalist and one Inter-Districter (a group of radical socialists who stood between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks). The heavy preponderance of Bolsheviks indicates that since February they had successfully reoriented their approach to the Factory Committees so that workers now perceived them as the most inclined to support their aspirations (although in Siranni’s estimation the Bolsheviks remained “ideologically inconsistent” about workers’ control).
The Central Council’s role was to enable fuel, machinery, raw materials and access to markets for the factories, ensure that workers had the financial and technical assistance required to fulfill their plans, and liaise with peasant committees outside Petrograd. It was the Council that channeled aid from the robust Putilov and Treugolnik Factory Committees to keep the endangered Brenner plant open, whilst both Soviet and government sat by. By June, similar Councils covered at least 25 cities and districts. Plans were afoot to set up an All-Russia Central Council of Factory Committees, which would coordinate national production within a federated democratic structure.
Perhaps the most politicised and energised group of workers were those of the Kronstadt naval base on Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland. During the revolutionary events of 1905 and February 1917, Kronstadt’s Anchor Square, large enough to hold 25,000 people, functioned as an assembly point and debating chamber for the sailors. It was the base for what Manuel Castells calls “a free community in a symbolic place”, something which ultimately becomes “a political space, a space for sovereign assemblies to meet and to recover their rights of representation, which have been captured in political institutions predominately tailored for the convenience of the dominant interests and values”.31 The Kronstadt Soviet’s general meetings, held nearly every day between February and October 1917, were less like the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party and much more like the General Assemblies of the polyglot anti-capitalist activists of Occupy Wall Street, so much so that Anchor Square and its vibrant democratic debating forum became known as a “free university” for the untutored worker-peasants of the Baltic Fleet.