committees, and the activities of shop stewards. In a few industries—e.g., the American ready-made clothing trades since about 1918-joint control applies, not merely to the shaping of labour conditions, but goes on to seek the welfare of the industry by adopting scientific management, seeking to increase output and reduce cost of production, and establishing provisions for unemployment pay as a first charge on the industry. In such cases the unions still discharge their prime function-the protection of their members; but they no longer hold the doctrine that the success of the industry is no concern of theirs.

More ambitious interpretations of industrial democracy are found in the schemes put forward since the Armistice for the control of industries which had passed under government administration during the war. In Germany the constitution provided that the economic councils should have considerable power over both public and private industries. In Italy in 1920 the railroad workers secured the right to elect five members of the administrative board. In Great Britain miners and railwaymen urged that the mines and railroads should be nationalized and placed in the hands of bodies containing representatives of the employees and the general public. In the United States the railway unions put forth, and the Federation of Labour approved, a comprehensive scheme for the public ownership and democratic control of the railways. This scheme, which is known as the Plumb Plan, after its author, Mr. Glenn E. Plumb, counsel for the railroad brotherhoods, is a skilful attempt to provide a "here and now' proposal and to avoid that shadowy conception of the state which is the weak spot in pure guild socialist theory. Briefly, the Plumb Plan is as follows: (1) The railroads are to be bought by the federal government, payment being made in bonds. (2) The management is to be vested in a railroad commission, containing in equal parts representatives of the rank and file of workers, the managerial section, and the general public. The commission would control the general administration of the system, and be aided by district and local bodies similarly constituted. (3) Exploitation of the public is to be avoided partly by giving the public one-third of the votes on the managing body, but far more by keeping in the hands of the Interstate Commerce Commission the fixing of maximum freights and fares and any other powers necessary to secure adequate, efficient, and safe service, along with the supervision of plans for extensions. (4) Subject to this control, the railway commission is to be free to run the railways as it thinks best. As an incentive to effort, half the net surplus is to be distributed among all the employees. The other half is to be devoted to wiping off the capital cost and providing for new capital expenditure. The Plumb Plan was put forward when the American government was considering whether it should retain control of the railroads or hand them back to public enterprise. It decided to hand them back, as did the British government. But the Plan still lives, and like similar projects in other lands is now a recognized part of the objective of organized labour.

One other project influenced by guild socialist ideas is worthy of mention. After the Armistice houses were very scarce and building prices high. In order to get dwellings built quickly and at as low a price as possible, the building employees of Manchester formed themselves into a guild and offered to erect as many houses as were required at a cost covering little more than labour and supervision. Similar proposals were made in London and elsewhere, and details concerning capital and guarantees were

worked out. Whether the plan will succeed in getting houses built quickly and cheaply remains to be seen; if it does, it will give a fillip to the idea of workers' ownership and control and a new lease of life to what is really productive co-operation. (See Chapter XXVII.)

Bolshevism. The Russian experiments in government since the revolutions of 1917 are the most ambitious attempts yet made to establish workers' control in industry and politics. The first revolution was primarily an ordinary political transfer from autocratic to democratic government; but behind it was a strong socialistic surge, which expressed itself in the formation of councils (soviets) of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies. These soviets took control of large slices of political and economie life, and the Bolshevik triumph of November, 1917, was followed by an attempt to build them into an elaborate constitution as organs of government in the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic.

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The fundamental task" of the revolution was "the abolition of exploitation of men by men, the entire elimination of the division of society into classes, the suppression of exploiters, the establishment of a socialist society, and the victory of socialism in all lands." This was to be done by stripping the bourgeoisie and its satellites of every shred of political and economic power, and by erecting a purely proletarian society. The political dictatorship was easily established. Rural and urban soviets were set up to Ideal with local affairs. From them delegates were sent to provincial, county, or regional congresses, while the urban soviets and provincial congresses sent representatives to the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the supreme power in the land. This body was to meet twice a year, in order to review past and future policy, and elect a smaller body; the Central Executive Committee. From this committee the executive heads-the People's Commissars—were chosen and held ministerial office, subject to the control of the Committee.

There are three important features of this constitution. (1) The central bodies are composed of delegates from urban or provincial bodies, not of directly-elected representatives of the citizens as a whole. (2) The bourgeoisie is completely disfranchised. Persons who employ labour in order to make a profit, persons who receive an income from property, private merchants and middlemen generally, monks and clergy, all are deprived of a vote. Only labourers and employees, soldiers and sailors, peasants who employ no labour, and the womenfolk of these persons are allowed to vote or eligible for election. This excludes all peasants but the poorest. (3) The composition of the soviets is so arranged as to give preponderance of power to the town workers. In the urban soviet an employee may vote in four different capacities: the factory in which he works is entitled to choose deputies; his union chooses some more; the ward in which he resides has its delegates, and, finally, his political party is entitled to representation. Election is by show of hands at meetings; soviets decide their own rules of procedure at elections, and enjoy the right to recall any unsatisfactory delegate.

The political victory of the proletariat was easily won. The economic problem was not so simple. In the first flush of revolt it was easy to declare factories, banks, land, etc., national property. It was easy for the employees to evict the managers and technicians, to talk of workers' control, to elect managers and committees, and to turn a workshop into a talking shop. But this destruction of capitalism soon looked dangerously like the

destruction of production-such production as still survived after three years of war and blockade. The administrative and technical staffs had gone, sometimes sabotaging the plant before they left, and there was no one capable of taking their place. The old discipline had melted away in the factory as in the trenches, and the atmosphere of war-weariness and revolutionary exultation did not brace men to impose a new discipline based on a sense of public duty. Blockade, war, starvation, disease, the depreciation of industrial equipment, and the collapse of railroad transport all added to the confusion.

The plans drawn up to reorganize industry started out with the intention of establishing direct workers' control; but they were changed and modified frequently in the light of experience or under the pressure of dire need. Some of them never got off the paper on which they were written. Without going into a whirl of intricate obscure detail, we can indicate the chief features of Bolshevik economic organization.

(1) All persons over 16 and under 50 years were subject to compulsory labour, and could be sent from place to place like a private soldier. Industrial conscription was enforced, strikes were illegal, and in 1920 the red army was transformed into a labour army, which undertook productive or reconstructive tasks under military rule in the intervals between one campaign and the next.

(2) The nationalization of industries was at first sporadic, and the plants passed into the hands of local soviets or workers' committees. In 1918 the government began to systematize further expropriations and to organize control of a national scale. The area of nationalization was steadily expanded, until by the middle of 1920 about 5,000 enterprises, including banks, mines, oil fields, locomotive, machinery, electrical, textile, and other works had passed out of private hands. Here and there a few firms, chiefly small ones, were left alone, but the number gradually diminished, and by 1920 about nine-tenths of the industrial equipment of the country was state property.

(3) It soon became evident that economic control must be centralized, just as political power had been in the Council of Commissars. At first the local soviets or workers' committees took matters entirely in their own hands; they assumed a narrow outlook, thought only of the requirements of their cwn workers, produced no surplus for the wider market, and had difficulty in getting their fuel and raw material. The non-manual workers had usually been evicted or allowed to leave. Therefore the first step necessary was to get these people back, pending the time when the proletariat should have trained its own technicians and administrators. This was done by offering them high salaries in some cases twenty times as high as that which Lenin received—and by insisting that they should have adequate representation and power on all committees dealing with economic affairs. These expedients were fairly successful; the technicians and administrators were soon back at work, and their power gradually increased almost to its pre-revolutionary size.

The second step was towards centralization and simplification of control. In March, 1918, the workers' committees were deposed in favour of an elaborate system of committees representing workers, technicians, managers, the central government, and political, scientific, co-operative, trade union, and peasant organizations. This arrangement seems to have been cumbersome and unworkable, and so power was next concentrated in the hands of the

trade unions and the Supreme Council of National Economy. The trade unions changed their name to "professional alliance" and their structure to industrial unionism. Each industry had its union, embracing all grades of workers, from the office boy to the managers. Membership was in theory compulsory, though this point was not pressed. Since all workers in a factory were in the same union, the local union committee and the workshop committee were the same thing. The thirty unions were closely federated in the All-Russian Council of Professional Alliances, which at its annual convention elected a Central Executive Committee. In structure, therefore, Russian unionism resembles that advocated by national guildsmen.

This Central Executive Committee (C.E.C.) is the economic head f Russian industry. The Supreme Council of National Economy is the political head. It has its local and regional councils throughout the country. It controls general economic policy, co-ordinates the activities of the various state departments, authorizes further confiscations, and generally handles production, distribution, and finance. Its members are chosen by cabinet, after consultation with the C.E.C. It divides its domain into some sixty sections, over each of which it places a small committee, selected after a preliminary agreement with the C.E.C. In 1920, 36 per cent. of the members of these sectional committees were described as workers, 34 per cent. as technicians or engineers, 22 per cent. as clerical workers. Most of the sectional committees have gathered the factories under their control together into trusts, and in 1920 2,500 works were grouped into 180 trusts. Each trust has its committee, composed of workers and specialists, who are appointed by the section controlling the industry after agreement with the union for the industry. Finally, each factory is supposed to have a committee of management, in addition to its workers' committee (the local union executive). The management committee of the factory has suffered many changes since 1917. At first the workers had control; then came representation of the technicians, of the C.E.C., and of the Supreme Council. By 1919 the workers' committee had lost most of its old power, and management was in the hands of a group of three men, chosen in equal parts by the workers in the factory, the C.E.C., and the Supreme Council. By 1920 even this arrangement was being discarded, as will be shown in a moment.

In all this scheme for control the central union organization was given large powers, especially of nominating, approving or opposing persons for managerial posts. It also claimed the right to pick the heads of the Commissariat of Labour, to draw up wages lists, which were then presented to the Commissar of Labour for ratification or rejection, to conduct factory inspection, and generally to control the regulation of industrial conditions by the state. If we remember that in addition to all these powers each factory and local union has its delegates in the soviet, it is evident that enormous power is apparently in the hands of the labour organizations. The unions are, in fact, organs of the state power" and the basis of the structure which directs economic life. This is not syndicalism, for the political head has too great power; early in 1920 the left wing of the Social Revolutionary Party at its conference demanded the complete transfer of industrial control to the All-Russian Council of Professional Alliances-a demand for syndicalism which was condemned by one Bolshevik Commissar as a "big backward step.'' It is not pure guild socialism, for the unions have to let the political head share control at every turn. Still, insofar as he attempts to

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secure a balance of power between the state and the unions the Bolshevik is at least first cousin to the national guildsman.

In actual practice the balance has been unstable, and the political head has more and more superseded the economic since 1919. This is due partly to the external pressure of the blockade and hostile armies, which compelled the soviet government to be more dictatorial than ever in its marshalling of men and resources. Production was the first consideration, and any institution or method of control which failed to "deliver the goods'' must be discarded. At the same time, internal factors had their influence. The central government was a party government; the dictatorship of the proletariat was a dictatorship of the Bolshevik party, a party numerically small but active and determined to stick to power. Hence there was a strong temptation to depress or bring under strong control any possible rival authority—e.g., the co-operative societies and unions, and to fill positions with faithful supporters, who would acquiesce in any action of the central authority. Finally, it was recognized that management by committee had failed in the majority of industries. It is doubtful whether any other system would have been either acceptable or successful in view of the revolutionary temperament, and the lack of fuel, equipment, food, and transport. But in the minds of the leading Bolsheviks hard necessity compelled an abandonment of the faith in collective management and a recognition that the capitalist without could be fought only by adopting many of the methods of the enemy.

We see this change of front in the virtual abandonment of election of army officers early in 1918. This step was justified by Trotsky on the ground that so long as officers were chosen by a bourgeois government the rank and file must strive for the election method; it was a move in the political struggle rather than a method of appointing officers. The position was changed when the working-class, through its own government, appointed its own officers. In April, 1918, Lenin preached the need for “iron discipline during work, with absolute submission to the will of one person, the soviet director, during work"; he urged the study of scientific management, the trial and adaptation of the Taylor system, and the re-employment of "bourgeois specialists" at high salaries. Nearly two years later he fearlessly attacked collective management at the All-Russian Congress of the Council of National Economy. While admitting that representative committees were necessary in the revolutionary stage, "the transition to practical work calls for individual management as the system which more than any other assures the best use of human abilities.' "Collective management at the best causes an enormous waste of effort and hampers the speed and accountability of work required by the conditions of a centralized large industry." In theory, each member of any committee had some specific task assigned to him, for the execution of which he bore individual responsibility; "but every one of us who has practical experience knows that only in one out of a hundred cases is this followed in practice." "We must commence building our state from all sides on the basis of the methods of large machine industry,' " and this demands the abandonment of that ideal of workers' direct control which had seemed to be the foundation-stone of Bolshevik economic policy.

When Lenin made this frank confession, the change for which he pleaded was already well under way. In 1919 one-man management replaced committee control in many important works, and the policy of appointing

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