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PARTISAN REVIEW
ment with one another. Some held that workers' control was a kind
of industrial democracy which would
supplement
political democ–
racy, others that it would
replace
political democracy. Some thought
it meant only a consultation
with
the workers by management, others
that it meant participation by the workers with powers of co-decision
in
management. These differences polarized around the generic views
that workers' control was something exercised
for
the workers by
a political group monopolizing power or, on the other hand, that it
was something exercised
by
the workers themselves, following what–
ever leadership they chose.
In the early days of bolshevism, on the eve of taking power
and shortly thereafter, the Communists stressed in the most emphatic
way the desirability of workers' control in every factory. In the be–
ginning there was hardly any difference between the Communist and
anarcho-syndicalist views of how a socialist society would function.
In countries in which anarcho-syndicalist traditions were strong, Com–
munists actually seized the factories and tried to run them even be–
fore they destroyed the existing political power. Before long, however,
the control of the Communist Party asserted itself so forcibly that
the phrase "workers' control" became a transparent piece of ter–
minological hypocrisy. Lenin himself led the fight against "the
workers' opposition," a group in the Communist Party which took
the earlier agitational and propaganda slogans seriously, as an anar–
cho-syndicalist deviation.
The Yugoslav Communists who speak today of "workers' con–
trol" imply that Stalin revised Lenin's position on this question while
they
are following the Leninist pattern. This is a misleading over–
simplification. It results from confusing decentralization of industry
and planning, which permits greater autonomy to the individual
plant, and which the Yugoslavs
have
carried out, with independent
workers' control in the decentralized plants, a control which the
Yugoslavs only
promise.
And if they follow Lenin, they
will
never
deliver on their promises. For even in the most liberal period of
Russian economic life, Lenin insisted that in the interests of rapid
construction of large-scale industry "it is absolutely essential that all
authority in the factories should be in the hands of the management."
We need not stop to point out that management in the so-called
capitalist countries has much less power over workers than manage-
