WHEN THE WORKERS OWN THEIR TOOLS
John Stevens, head of the railroad commission sent to Russia from the United States, has shown the Russian government how to increase its transportation facilities sixty per cent. In a report made public in mid-August Mr. Stevens said that the chief cause of the railroad crisis was bad management. Locomotives traveled 2,800 versts a month when they could be made to travel 5,000 versts. A verst is about three-quarters of a mile. Twice as much freight as was being hauled could be carried, said Mr. Stevens. Freight cars were constantly being sent out only half loaded. Mr. Stevens recommended government dictatorship of all railroads, both publicly and privately owned. That was rather naïve, considering that the government was powerless to control, much less to dictate to, any department of activity in the empire. A little earlier Mr. Nekrassoff, then Minister of Ways and Communications, issued a circular in which he outlined his plan for coping with the railroad crisis. He advised turning the entire railroad system over to the workmen, the engineers, firemen, conductors and machinists. A shriek of protest went up from the engineering profession and a howl of laughter arose from the press of Russia. But the fact of the matter is that the railroads were and are still, for all practical purposes, in the hands of the working people, and so is every other industry in Russia.
One of the great dreams of the socialists and philosophical anarchists is of the day when the worker shall own his tools, as they put it, when all industry shall be owned by the people who operate the machines, and all profits shall be shared by them. It really is a great dream, and will probably be realized in some measure some day. But not now. The human race is not yet educated to such a Utopia. The strongest proof that the capitalistic system is not yet ready to pass is the well-known fact that the secret ambition of almost every human being in every walk of life is to become a capitalist, large or small. This has just been proved on an enormous scale in Russia. The workers have seized the factories, shops, department stores and offices, and in no instance of which I could learn, and I searched diligently, have they used their great opportunity wisely or unselfishly for the common good. They have used it to get all the money possible out of the employers and to render back the minimum of service.
This is what is the matter with the transportation system in Russia. It is the reason why the people of Petrograd, Moscow and other cities will go cold and hungry this winter, one reason why the death rate of children and old people, already appallingly large, will grow more appalling within the next few months; one reason, and a very strong one, why order has not been restored in Russia. High as are the prices of all food and manufactured articles, the working people, as a class, have money enough to pay for them, and not until the merchants’ stocks are completely gone and the weather gets too cold to stand in line long hours in order to buy will the purblind workers realize their situation. Not until then will they realize what their selfishness and cruel folly have done to themselves and the entire working class of the country.
So struck was I by the scarceness of goods in the shops and the soaring prices of almost every article that I went to the Minister of Labor and asked him to tell me something of industrial conditions of the country. I was not entirely ignorant of those conditions. I knew, for example, that Russia is not exclusively an agricultural country, that, on the contrary, her development as a manufacturing country has been going on by leaps and bounds, especially in the last dozen years. Russia has a proletariat and a factory system, although not quite as large proportionately as those of the United States. Her iron industry, her cotton mills, her machine shops are enormous and in normal times they are wonderfully productive. After the suppressed revolution of 1905-06 important reforms in the land laws were enacted, and for the first time the peasants were given their lands in fee simple. That is, they were given an opportunity in certain circumstances to take title to their share in communal lands. This gave them an opportunity to sell if they chose, and a large number of peasant artisans did sell their lands, moved into the cities and became factory workers. Before this time the factory workers had more or less alternated between town and rural life.
The leaders of the Social Democratic party encouraged by every means in their power the selling of lands by peasant owners, because they wanted the workers to move to town, organize in labor unions and become a political power. In their own words, they wanted to create a landless working class, one which, having no stake in property, would the more easily revolt against the government and more heartily support the movement to create a coöperative commonwealth. It was good reasoning up to a certain point. A man with a piece of land thinks twice before he puts that land in danger of being absorbed by his neighbors. He hesitates before he takes a course of action which might turn even a bad government out at least. The bad government protects his title. But the leaders of the Social Democrats left an important human element out of their reasoning. A landless man makes a good revolutionist, it is true, but he does not necessarily make a good coöperator. Nine and three-quarters times in ten he is just as strong for number one as the real estate owner. When he gets a chance to grab power and money he does it, and he divides up just as little as the others let him.
A story is told in Russia which illustrates this trait of character. Some one asked a peasant of Little Russia what he would do if he were made czar. “I’d steal a hundred rubles and run away,” was the prompt reply. In a word, that is virtually what the working people of Russia did as soon as the revolution of February, 1917, made them into individual czars of Russia.
When I called on the Minister of Labor and asked him what was the matter with industry, his face assumed an expression of mingled amusement and despair. “If you really want to know,” he said, in effect, “go and look at some of our factories.”
I was given an official document, elaborately stamped and signed, authorizing me to enter and inspect any factory in Petrograd, and I began, bright and early the next morning, with one of the largest munitions factories in the Viborg district of the city. I showed my pass to the man at the gate, who read it doubtfully, and said he didn’t think it was good. “What right has the Minister of Labor to give you permission to visit this plant?” he inquired. “If anybody had a right to give you such permission, I should think it would be the Minister of War, for only war materials are manufactured here. Anyhow, I don’t think you can get in.”
I asked him mildly if he was sure that he had the power to keep me out, and I suggested that he put the case up to a higher authority, the manager, for instance. He turned to a wall telephone in his little gate house and conversed with some one at the other end of the line. Then he said: “The committee is in session and will see you.”
A long walk through the enormous yard and past many shops brought me to the office building of the plant, and there, in a small room, I found the committee, that is, the group of workmen elected by the entire working force of the factory to manage the industry and to fix all conditions of labor. Every industry in Russia is thus managed. I had a long talk with this committee, but I did not get into the factory. The man would not permit me to get in. They wouldn’t even allow me to see any one connected with the office force. Kindly but firmly they gave me to understand that they were all the power there was in that plant and they could give me all the information I could possibly need. So I sat there for an hour or so, and, through my interpreter, learned how manufacturing is carried on when the workers own their tools.
Because I could carry but few notes out of the country, I am not certain how many delegates per thousand workers make up a committee of management in a Russian factory, but I think each unit of one hundred men elects a representative. Perhaps there are two hundred men to the unit. My memory for numbers is not always reliable. At all events, the committee members, who are usually the intelligent and highly paid workers, do no work except committee work. But they draw their full pay. The employer has no voice in the conduct of his own business. The committee tells him how much he pays his employees, what their hours of work are, when they arrive and when they depart and how much they produce. And the employer pays the committee for its kind words and deeds. I asked the particular committee which thus informed me if this seemed fair to the employer. Mostly the men said they thought it did. One man asked me who in my opinion ought to pay the committee members. I told him I thought the workers might pay at least a part of their salaries, and perhaps also give the employers a casting vote in case of a tie, or something like that. They seemed to find the idea humorous, all except one fine, thoughtful young fellow, who said: “There may be an element of unfairness in some of the present conditions, but time will adjust them. There is no question but that the workers should own the industries, and they will. The working class has never had a square deal and now that they have seized the powers of government, nothing less than confiscation of industries will satisfy them.”
The working class in Russia has had rather less of a square deal than any other in the modern world, it is true. The factory system being comparatively new in Russia, there has not been time for the workers to organize closely, and under the autocracy there was little or no chance to obtain enlightened factory legislation. There was hardly a chance for the Russian workman to attain a very high degree of skill in many industries. He could not, as a rule, learn the finest processes of his trade, because until the war broke out most of those processes were in the hands and under the control of Germany. When I was in Russia in 1906 one of the most striking things to me was the prevalence of German shopkeepers, German managers, German foremen. You hardly ever saw a Russian in command of any industry. I spoke of this to a Russian friend and told him that I should not like to see in my country all the business controlled by foreigners, for these Germans were not even Russian citizens. He shrugged his shoulders and said “Nitchevo,” which means almost anything and is a general expression of indifference or resignation to the inevitable. “We have no heads for that sort of thing, we Russians,” he apologized.
“But what if you should ever go to war with Germany?” I asked. And he, sobered a little, said: “We should have to learn to be business men and skilled mechanics, in that case, and we should have a devil of a time doing it.”
Eight years later, almost to a day, they did go to war with Germany, and they did have a devil of a time adjusting their industries to meet the crisis caused by the exodus of thousands of highly skilled German managers and department heads in hundreds of factories and shops throughout the empire.
One story told me in Moscow is representative, I believe. A very large factory taken over by the government for the fine toolmaking facilities its machines afforded was found to be managed exclusively by German foremen and managers. Not only had they drawn large salaries for years in that factory, but they had insisted on hiring for the last processes and the most highly skilled jobs workmen from Germany. They didn’t want, or rather the German government didn’t want, the Russian people to know how to do skilled work. They wanted to keep Russia in exactly the right condition for permanent commercial exploitation by the fatherland.
I go into this because I think it is only fair to the Russian working class to explain that they have not been allowed to develop the intelligence and skill which the English and American working classes have done. Because of this ignorance the Russians of the working class have in their few months’ debauch of liberty and the control of industry wrecked their country industrially and have brought themselves and their own people to the verge of starvation. They have done to their class approximately what the mutinous soldiers at the front did to the men who wanted to go forward and fight—shot them in the back. I know this, because I have seen it. The next factory I approached the committee let me in.