As we discussed in the last section, anarchists consider the usual association of state ownership with socialism to be false. We argue that it is just another form of the wages system, of capitalism, albeit with the state replacing the capitalist. As such, state ownership, for anarchists, is simply state capitalism. Instead we urge socialisation based on workers' self-management of production. Libertarian Marxists concur.

Some mainstream Marxists, however, say they seek to combine state ownership with "workers' control." This can be seen from Trotsky, for example, who argued in 1938 for "workers' control . . . the penetration of the workers' eye into all open and concealed springs of capitalist economy . . . workers' control becomes a school for planned economy. On the basis of the experience of control, the proletariat will prepare itself for direct management of nationalised industry when the hour for that eventuality strikes." Modern day Leninists are often heard voicing support for what anarchists consider an oxymoron, namely "nationalisation under worker' control." This, it will be argued, proves that nationalisation (state control) is not "state capitalism" as we argued in the last section, rather "control is the first step along the road to the socialist guidance of economy." [The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, p. 73 and p. 74]

Anarchists are not convinced. This is because of two reasons. Firstly, because by "workers' control" anarchists and Leninists mean two radically different things. Secondly, when in power Trotsky advocated radically different ideas. Based on these reasons, anarchists view Leninist calls for "workers' control" simply as a means of gaining popular support, calls which will be ignored once the real aim, party power, has been achieved: it is an example of Trotsky's comment that "[s]logans as well as organisational forms should be subordinated to the indices of the movement." [Op. Cit., p. 72] In other words, rather than express a commitment to the ideas of worker's control of production, mainstream Marxist use of the term "workers' control" is simply an opportunistic technique aiming at securing support for the party's seizure of power and once this is achieved it will be cast aside in favour of the first part of the demands, namely state ownership and so control. In making this claim anarchists feel they have more than enough evidence, evidence which many members of Leninist parties simply know nothing about.

We will look first at the question of terminology. Anarchists traditionally used the term "workers' control" to mean workers' full and direct control over their workplaces, and their work. However, after the Russian Revolution a certain ambiguity arose in using that term. This is because specific demands which were raised during that revolution were translated into English as "workers' control" when, in fact, the Russian meaning of the word (kontrolia) was far closer to "supervision" or "steering." Thus the term "workers' control" is used to describe two radically different concepts.

This can be seen from Trotsky when he argued that the workers should "demand resumption, as public utilities, of work in private businesses closed as a result of the crisis. Workers' control in such case would be replaced by direct workers' management." [Op. Cit., p. 73] Why workers' employed in open capitalist firms were not considered suitable for "direct workers' management" is not explained, but the fact remains Trotsky clearly differentiated between management and control. For him, "workers' control" meant "workers supervision" over the capitalist who retained power. In other words, a system of "dual power" at the point of production (and, like all forms of dual power, essentially and inevitably unstable).

This vision of "workers' control" as simply supervision of the capitalist managers can be found in Lenin. Rather than seeing "workers' control" as workers managing production directly, he always saw it in terms of workers' "controlling" those who did. It simply meant "the country-wide, all-embracing, omnipresent, most precise and most conscientious accounting of the production and distribution of goods." He clarified what he meant, arguing for "country-wide, all-embracing workers' control over the capitalists" who would still manage production. Significantly, he considered that "as much as nine-tenths of the socialist apparatus" required for this "country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods" would be achieved by nationalising the "big banks," which "are the 'state apparatus' which we need to bring about socialism" (indeed, this was considered "something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society"). Over time, this system would move towards full socialism. [Selected Works, vol. 2, pp. 364-5, p. 366 and p. 365]

Thus, what Leninists mean by "workers' control" is radically different than what anarchists traditionally meant by that term (indeed, it was radically different from the workers' definition, as can be seen from a resolution of the Bolshevik dominated First Trade Union Congress which complained that "the workers misunderstand and falsely interpret workers' control." [quoted by M. Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, p. 32]). It is for this reason that from the 1960s English speaking anarchists and other libertarian socialists have been explicit and have used the term "workers' self-management" rather than "workers' control" to describe their aims. Mainstream Marxists, however have continued to use the latter slogan, undoubtedly, as we note in section H.3.5, to gain members from the confusion in meanings.

Secondly, there is the example of the Russian Revolution itself. Indeed, Trotsky is simply repeating the slogans used by the Bolsheviks in 1917. As historian S.A. Smith correctly summarises, the "factory committees launched the slogan of workers' control of production quite independently of the Bolshevik party. It was not until May that the party began to take it up." However, Lenin used "the term ['workers' control'] in a very different sense from that of the factory committees." In fact Lenin's "proposals . . . [were] thoroughly statist and centralist in character, whereas the practice of the factory committees was essentially local and autonomous." [Red Petrograd, p. 154]

This is not all, this "workers' control" was always placed in a statist context and it would be exercised not by workers' organisations but rather by state capitalist institutions. In May 1917, Lenin was arguing for the "establishment of state control over all banks, and their amalgamation into a single central bank; also control over the insurance agencies and big capitalist syndicates." He reiterated this framework later that year, arguing that "the new means of control have been created not by us, but by capitalism in its military-imperialist stage" and so "the proletariat takes its weapons from capitalism and does not 'invent' or 'create them out of nothing.'" [Op. Cit., p. 112, p. 367 and p. 599] The factory committees were added to this "state capitalist" system but they played only a very minor role in it. Indeed, this system of state control was designed to limit the power of the factory committees:

"One of the first decrees issues by the Bolshevik Government was the Decree on Workers' Control of 27 November 1917. By this decree workers' control was institutionalised . . . Workers' control implied the persistence of private ownership of the means of production, though with a 'diminished' right of disposal. The organs of workers' control, the factory committees, were not supposed to evolve into workers' management organs after the nationalisation of the factories. The hierarchical structure of factory work was not questioned by Lenin . . . To the Bolshevik leadership the transfer of power to the working class meant power to its leadership, i.e. to the party. Central control was the main goal of the Bolshevik leadership. The hasty creation of the VSNKh (the Supreme Council of the National Economy) on 1 December 1917, with precise tasks in the economic field, was a significant indication of fact that decentralised management was not among the projects of the party, and that the Bolsheviks intended to counterpose central direction of the economy to the possible evolution of workers' control toward self-management." [Silvana Malle, The Economic Organisation of War Communism, 1918-1921, p. 47]

Once in power, the Bolsheviks soon turned away from even this limited vision of workers' control and in favour of "one-man management." Lenin raised this idea in late April 1918 and it involved granting state appointed "individual executives dictatorial powers (or 'unlimited' powers)." Large-scale industry required "thousands subordinating their will to the will of one," and so the revolution "demands" that "the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labour." Lenin's "superior forms of labour discipline" were simply hyper-developed capitalist forms. The role of workers in production was the same, but with a novel twist, namely "unquestioning obedience to the orders of individual representatives of the Soviet government during the work." This support for wage slavery was combined with support for capitalist management techniques. "We must raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice," argued Lenin, "we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond to the total amount of goods turned out." [Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 610, p. 611, p. 612 and pp. 602-3]

This vision had already been applied in practice, with the "first decree on the management of nationalised enterprises in March 1918" which had "established two directors at the head of each enterprise . . . Both directors were appointed by the central administrators." An "economic and administrative council" was also created in the workplace, but this "did not reflect a syndicalist concept of management." Rather it included represents of the employees, employers, engineers, trade unions, the local soviets, co-operatives, the local economic councils and peasants. This composition "weakened the impact of the factory workers on decision-making . . . The workers' control organs [the factory committees] remained in a subordinate position with respect to the council." Once the Civil War broke out in May 1918, this process was accelerated. By 1920, most workplaces were under one-man management and the Communist Party at its Ninth Congress had "promoted one-man management as the most suitable form of management." [Silvana Malle, Op. Cit., p. 111, p. 112, p. 141 and p. 128] In other words, the manner in which Lenin organised industry had handed it over entirely into the hands of the bureaucracy.

Trotsky, as to be expected, did not disagree with all this. In fact, quite the reverse. He wholeheartedly defended the imposing of "one-man management" in his justly infamous book Terrorism and Communism. As he put it, "our Party Congress . . . expressed itself in favour of the principle of one-man management in the administration of industry . . . It would be the greatest possible mistake, however, to consider this decision as a blow to the independence of the working class. The independence of the workers is determined and measured not by whether three workers or one are placed at the head of a factory." As such, it "would consequently be a most crying error to confuse the question as to the supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers at the head of factories. The dictatorship of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the collective will of the workers, and not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered." [Terrorism and Communism, p. 162] The term "collective will of the workers" is simply a euphemism for the Party which Trotsky had admitted had "substituted" its dictatorship for that of the Soviets (indeed, "there is nothing accidental" in this "'substitution' of the power of the party for the power of the working class" and "in reality there is no substitution at all." The "dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party." [Op. Cit., p. 109]). The unions "should discipline the workers and teach them to place the interests of production above their own needs and demands." He even argued that "the only solution to economic difficulties from the point of view of both principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labour power . . . and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilisation and utilisation." [Op. Cit., p. 143 and p. 135]

Trotsky did not consider this a result of the Civil War. Again, the opposite was the case: "I consider if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner and much less painfully." [Op. Cit., pp. 162-3]

Significantly, discussing developments in Russia since the N.E.P, Trotsky argued that it was "necessary for each state-owned factory, with its technical director and with its commercial director, to be subjected not only to control from the top — by the state organs — but also from below, by the market which will remain the regulator of the state economy for a long time to come." Workers' control, as can be seen, was not even mentioned, nor considered as an essential aspect of control "from below." As Trotsky also stated that "[u]nder socialism economic life will be directed in a centralised manner," our discussion of the state capitalist nature of mainstream Marxism we presented in the last section is confirmed. [The First Five Years of the Communist International, vol. 2, p. 237 and p. 229]

The contrast between what Trotsky did when he was in power and what he argued for after he had been expelled is obvious. Indeed, the arguments of 1938 and 1920 are in direct contradiction to each other. Needless to say, Leninists and Trotskyists today are fonder of quoting Trotsky and Lenin when they did not have state power rather than when they did. Rather than compare what they said to what they did, they simply repeat ambiguous slogans which meant radically different things to Lenin and Trotsky than to the workers' who thrust them into power. For obvious reasons, we feel. Given the opportunity for latter day Leninists to exercise power, we wonder if a similar process would occur again? Who would be willing to take that chance?

As such, the claim that Marxists stand for "workers' control" can be refuted on two counts. Firstly, by that term they simply mean workers' supervision of those who do have real power in production (either the capitalists or state appointed managers). It does not mean workers' self-management of production. Secondly, when they had the chance they did not implement it. In fact, they imposed capitalist style hierarchical management and did not consider this as anything to be worried about. And as this policy was advocated before the start of the Civil War, it cannot be said to have been forced upon them by necessity. As such, any claim that mainstream Marxism considers "workers' control" as an essential feature of its politics is simply nonsense.

For a comprehensive discussion of "workers' control" during the Russian Revolution Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control cannot be bettered.

The roots of this confusion can be found in Marx and Engels. In the struggle between authentic socialism (i.e. workers' self-management) and state capitalism (i.e. state ownership) there are elements of the correct solution to be found in their ideas. This is their support for co-operatives. For example, Marx praised the efforts made within the Paris Commune to create co-operatives, so "transforming the means of production, land and capital . . . into mere instruments of free and associated labour." He argued that "[i]f co-operative production is not to remain a shame and a snare; if it is to supersede the Capitalist system; if united co-operative societies are to regulate national production upon a common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of Capitalist production — what else . . . would it be but Communism, 'possible' Communism?" [Op. Cit., pp. 290-1] Engels, continuing this theme, argued for "the transfer — initially on lease — of large estates to autonomous co-operatives under state management and effected in such a way that the State retains ownership of the land." He stated that neither he nor Marx "ever doubted that, in the course of transition to a wholly communist economy, widespread use would have to be made of co-operative management as an intermediate stage. Only it will mean so organising things that society, i.e. initially the State, retains ownership of the means of production and thus prevents the particular interests of the co-operatives from taking precedence over those of society as a whole." [Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 47, p. 389]

However, Engels comments simply bring home the impossibilities of trying to reconcile state ownership and workers' self-management. While the advocacy of co-operatives is a positive step forward from the statist arguments of the Communist Manifesto, Engels squeezes these libertarian forms of organising production into typically statist structures. How "autonomous co-operatives" can co-exist with (and under!) "state management" and "ownership" is not explained, plus the fatal confusion of socialisation with nationalisation.

In addition, the differences between the comments of Marx and Engels are obvious. While Marx talks of "united co-operative societies," Engels talks of "the State." The former implies a free federation of co-operatives, the latter a centralised structure which the co-operatives are squeezed into and under. The former is socialism, the latter is state capitalist. From Engels argument, it is obvious that the stress is on state ownership and management rather than self-management. This confusion became a source of tragedy during the Russian Revolution when the workers, like their comrades during the Commune, started to form a federation of factory committees while the Bolsheviks squeezed these bodies into a system of state control which was designed to marginalise them (see the appendix on "What happened during the Russian Revolution?" for full details).

Moreover, the aims of the Paris workers were at odds with the vision of the Communist Manifesto and in line with anarchism. Proudhon, for example, had argued in 1848 against state ownership and for "democratically organised workers' associations" which would be "models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies" which would make up "the democratic social Republic." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 62] In his Principle of Federation he called this idea an "agro-industrial federation." Thus the idea of co-operative production is a clear expression of what Proudhon explicitly called "industrial democracy," a "reorganisation of industry, under the jurisdiction of all those who compose it." [quoted by K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, p. 225] Bakunin and later anarchists simply developed these ideas to their logical conclusion (see section I.3 for example).

Marx, to his credit, supported these libertarian visions when applied in practice by the Paris workers during the Commune and promptly revised his ideas. This fact has been obscured somewhat by Engels historical revisionism in this matter. He argued, for example, that the "economic measures" of the Commune were driven not by "principles" but by "simple, practical needs." This meant that "the confiscation of shut-down factories and workshops and handing them over to workers' associations" were "not at all in accordance with the spirit of Proudhonism but certainly in accordance with the spirit of German scientific socialism." [Marx, Engels, Lenin, Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 92] This distortion of Proudhon's ideas is also present in Engels' 1891 introduction to Marx's "The Civil War in France." He painted a picture of Proudhon being opposed to association (except for large-scale industry). He stresses that "to combine all these associations in one great union" was "the direct opposite of the Proudhon doctrine" and so "the Commune was the grave of the Proudhon doctrine." [Marx-Engels Selected Works, p. 256]

However, as noted, this is nonsense. The forming of workers' associations was a key aspect of Proudhon's ideas and so the Communards were obviously acting in his spirit. Given that the Communist Manifesto stressed state ownership and failed to mention co-operatives at all, the claim that the Commune acted in its spirit seems a tad optimistic. Particularly since Marx had commented in 1866 that in France the workers ("particularly those of Paris"!) "are strongly attached, without knowing it [!], to the old rubbish" and that the "Parisian gentlemen had their heads full of the emptiest Proudhonist phrases." [Marx, Engels and Lenin, Op. Cit., p. 46 and p. 45]

What did this "old rubbish" consist of? Well, in 1869 the delegate of the Parisian Construction Workers' Trade Union argued that "[a]ssociation of the different corporations [labour unions/associations] on the basis of town or country . . . leads to the commune of the future . . . Government is replaced by the assembled councils of the trade bodies, and by a committee of their respective delegates." In addition, "a local grouping which allows the workers in the same area to liase on a day to day basis" and "a linking up of the various localities, fields, regions, etc." (i.e. international trade or industrial union federations) would ensure that "labour organises for present and future by doing away with wage slavery." This "mode of organisation leads to the labour representation of the future." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 184]

To state the obvious, this had clear links with both Proudhon's ideas and what the Commune did in practice. Rather than being the "grave" of Proudhon's ideas on workers' associations, the Commune saw their birth, i.e. their application. Rather than the Parisian workers becoming Marxists "without knowing it," Marx had become a follower of Proudhon! Thus the idea of socialism being based on a federation of workers' associations was not buried with the Paris Commune. It was integrated into all forms of social anarchism (including communist-anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism) and recreated every time there is a social revolution.

In ending when must note that anarchists are well aware that individual workplaces could pursue aims at odds with the rest of society (to use Engels expression, their "particular interests"). This is often termed "localism." Anarchists, however, argue that the mainstream Marxist solution is worse than the problem. By placing self-managed workplaces under state control (or ownership) they become subject to even worse "particular interests," namely those of the state bureaucracy who will use their power to further their own interests. In contrast, anarchists advocate federations of self-managed workplaces to solve this problem (see section I.3 for more).

In summary, the problem of "localism" and any other problems faced by a social revolution will be solved in the interests of the working class only if working class people solve them themselves. For this to happen it requires working class people to manage their own affairs directly and that implies self-managed organising from the bottom up (i.e. anarchism) rather than delegating power to a minority at the top, to a "revolutionary" party or state. This applies economically, socially and politically. As Bakunin argued, the "revolution should not only be made for the people's sake; it should also be made by the people." [No Gods, No Masters, vol. 1, p. 141]