Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/55

 tem. The one-man management program, now being gradually introduced, is for efficiency's sake.

Upon this proposition, however, there is not unanimity in the workers' ranks. There is a well-developed minority, called "The Workers' Opposition" and of which Mme. Kollontai is a leader, that flatly opposes any curtailing of the unions' participation in actual industrial management. Preserving the fighting traditions of the movement, this faction look with undisguised suspicion upon the experts of the Supreme Economic Council and believe that to grant them authority will result in their erecting themselves into a privileged class. The advocates of one-man management, besides their efficiency argument, urge that with the workers controlling all the state apparatus they need have no fear of such a caste springing up, especially in view of the fact that the trade union schools are turning out thousands of experts who, along with their industrial education, have absorbed the principles of Communism. They declare that these revolutionary engineers may be depended upon to break any monopoly that the present class, who have not yet overcome their bourgeois training, may attempt to create even as the Communist Commissars in the Red Army broke the monopoly that the ex-czarist officers had on military knowledge.

To decide just exactly what share of industrial management shall rest with the technical organizations and what with the trade unions is one of the big problems of the Russian revolutionary forces. But there is one thing everybody is agreed upon, and that is that the trade unions are destined to play an increasingly important role in the national life, in accordance as the rising intellectual level of their members fits them for greater and greater tasks.