Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/24

 every factory elected a special control commission which would vigilantly watch the management of the employers, and, in the event of the employers declaring that there was no raw material, no money, etc., the workers would check, the correctness of the statement by the books and by reference to the banking accounts. The workers would veto any suspicious operation, and if the employers continued their scheming the workers would compel them to submit to their will by force of arms. In many places the employers fled from their factories and deliberately concealed themselves, hoping by this means to bring industry to a standstill, but, in such cases, the workers took the factories into their own hands and continued working.

This form of attack on capital acquired the definition of "workers' control." On the eve of the revolution the introduction of control was carried out without any plan and was quite spontaneous. For that reason on the morrow after the October revolution the Trade Unions were confronted with the difficult task of introducing a uniform system of labour control and of working out a practical programme of action.

The question was complicated by the severity of the struggle in the factories, and, in several places the tendency was observed for the workers to drive the owners from the factories and take the latter in their own hands. In place of a single owner there was a collective ownership represented by the workers employed in that factory. From the first days of the revolution the trade unions put up a determined resistance against this disintegration o the national industries. "The factories and works," we said, "are the property of the working class as a whole and not the property of the workers of a given factory, and for that reason workers should under no circumstances assume ownership of any factory." Labour control is only a part of State regulation of industry and therefore all local control committees must become the agents for carrying out the general economic plan and uniform economic policy.

Workers' control in the form that it developed directly after the October revolution was not yet the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, but merely a considerable limitation of the rights of the owners over the means of production and exchange. This is evident from the following paragraphs of the decree on workers' control which was drawn up in conjunction with the trade unions and issued on November 27th, 1917.

From this decree, issued directly after the October Revolution, it is evident that the task of control, as it was formu-