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business
a lot more difficult than they expected.
The weakness of the anarchist explanation is that the factory committees were in trouble before the Bolsheviks turned against them. Initially the factory committees had been very successful. By bringing stockpiled resources into play they were able to keep the factories running for several weeks and workers set to the task with a will. Essentially this was living on capital. Justifiable as a stopgap the workers believed that with a socialist government the problems of raw material shortages and the like would ease.18 The shortages did not. The factory committees soon found themselves with the thankless task of running a factory in the midst of economic collapse while incurring the resentment of their fellow workers for unpopular decisions.19
An alternative view is that the workers essentially mismanaged things, so forcing the Bolsheviks to intervene. The Bolsheviks were initially supportive of workers control with Lenin himself widening the scope of the workers control decree.20 But the example's of worker's 'mismanagement' often do not bear close examination.21 And even if Tony Cliff (of the SWP) is right in saying that things were pretty chaotic with different factories competing for scarce resources22 that does not prove that factory control wasn't the most efficient way of running things under the circumstances. Unless of course you share with Cliff and the Bolsheviks a dogmatic belief that central planning is always more efficient.
Many factories were forced to close but the reason was usually neither Bolshevik repression or workers mismanagement but the economic crisis. But this does not let the Bolsheviks off the hook. The workers expected that the Bolshevik seizure would ensure that the resources of the state would be channelled to the benefit of the workers.23 Instead the demobilization of industry cut the market for many engineering firms that had been producing arms for the army. Obviously war production with the coming of peace was totally wasteful. However there was a great need for industrial products such as agricultural tools and machinery. The Bolsheviks could have replaced the military orders with orders for products that could have been supplied to the grain requisition parties to give to the peasants. The factory committees could have attempted this themselves and sent there own parties into the countryside to trade industrial goods for food (as indeed some factories did) but in doing so they would be acting quite illegally by breaking the government grain monopoly24.
Of course the Bolsheviks were at the time facing a strike amongst bank employees and civil servants and were incapable of giving any support. But this strike was a direct result of the Bolsheviks policy of confrontation and besides it is unlikely that the Bolsheviks would have provided support if they had been able. Once they got their act together they began to use the state against the factory committees25. The factory committees lost their independence and their powers. The Supreme Economic Council, established by the Soviet government, now demonstrated how to really mismanage the economy. [next page]