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”.10 With 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”.12 He openly avowed:
The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of necessary labour-power–an almost inexhaustible reservoir–and to introduce strict order into its registration, mobilisation and utilisation.
Trotsky dismissed the “fiction of the freedom of labour” and concluded, “The crown of all this work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific organisation of the process of production are combined with the most concentrated methods of the system of sweating”.13
Trotsky thus advocated a militarised industrial regime combined with the most concentrated methods of sweated labour that science could devise. Of this grand scheme, unencumbered by democratic checks or trade union counter-power, Maurice Brinton concluded, “Trotsky’s philosophy of labour came to underline Stalin’s practical labour policy in the Thirties”.14 After Stalin’s death a well-thumbed copy of Terrorism and Communism, annotated with scribblings of approval, was found among his private papers. The philosophy of labour that Trotsky laid out here was not just a suggested route to rapid industrialisation. It was the preferred route to and the foundation of the Soviet Union’s future model of industrialisation.
Significantly, the “Workers’ Opposition” movement was born from the trade unions. Its prime mover and organiser was the Bolshevik union leader and ex-People’s Commissar of Labour Alexander Shliapnikov. He began his political career as an apprentice mechanic in St Petersburg where he was sacked and blacklisted in 1901 for union activities. In 1903 he joined the Bolsheviks and was one of their most important activists, writing articles for Bolshevik journals on trade union and industrial policy. During the war he was one of the main links between the Bolshevik cc abroad and its cadres within Russia. In 1917 he was one of the Bolsheviks’ delegates on the Petrograd Soviet Executive. He supported Kamenev and Zinoviev’s attempts to prevent the October Insurrection because, like them, he felt it would lead to political isolation and economic disaster. After October he ran the Commissariat of Labour for a year until he resigned the post to fight in the Civil War.
Shliapnikov had an intuitive understanding of the Russian working class that Lenin and Trotsky sorely lacked. He knew full well that the Bolshevik Revolution had disappointed many on the factory floor. After Trotsky’s proposals to militarise labour, disappointment turned to anger. The Workers’ Opposition reflected that anger. As well as Shliapnikov, it was led by leaders of the Metalworkers’ Union Mikhail Vladimirov and Sergei Medvedev, Chairman of the Miners’ Union Aleksei Kiselyov, Artillery Industry union leader Alexander Tolokonstev, Chairman of the Textile Workers Union Ivan Kutuzov, and Kirill Orlov, a senior member of the Council of Military Industry and a veteran of the battleship Potemkin. The Workers’ Opposition argued for more influence and control by trade unions in the direction of industry. This meant a reassertion of workplace and industrial democracy, with the senior levels of the factories, Soviets and party cells all directly elected by the workers and replaceable by them.
The Workers’ Opposition was an expression of authentic socialist democracy, but they were still dissenters within Bolshevism. They were thus constrained from developing their critique to its logical conclusion, namely that it was the entire basis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that led to abuse of power and the death of the Soviets. Martov, though, was not. In October 1920 he was invited to address the Congress of the German USPD in Halle, Germany. This was no ordinary Congress. After the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in January 1919 the German left realigned itself to adapt to the new reality of a German republic presided over by a right-wing SPD. Kautsky and Hilferding’s Socialisation Commission had gone nowhere and its leaders resigned in protest. The only left parties who might have carried out its recommendations–the USPD and the KPD–were not in power.