Revolution in the Workplace: Bolshevik Labor Strategy from the Underground to October

What role did the Bolsheviks play in the trade unions? The reader who bases their understanding of this question on Lenin’s What Is To Be Done, or the helpful pamphlet “Lenin And The Trade Union Movement” by the Bolshevik union leader Solomon Lozovsky, would be soundly armed with an understanding of the Bolshevik’s theoretical interventions into the workers movement. But these sources are not enough to satisfy the curiosity of the action-minded trade union socialists of today: they know that, while theory is valuable, talk is cheap. They want to know about ‘the work.’

The history of revolutionary organizing across more than three decades reveals that Lenin and his comrades did indeed get their hands dirty. From training organic worker-leaders, to building up trade union networks through house calls and structure tests, to leading strike action and winning leadership of worker organizations, the Bolsheviks were intimately involved with the same types of every-day work familiar to union activists today. It was on the back of this activity that they seized power, building a revolution from the workplace up.

The Russian Rank and File Strategy

For the socialist trade unionists of today, involvement in the trade union movement often means implementing some version of the “rank and file strategy.” The starting point of this approach is the idea that the socialist movement is largely composed of college educated intellectuals, and, in order to bridge the gap to the broader working class, socialists should take jobs in unions to integrate themselves into the workers movement.

The perspective of socialists today is not so different to that of early Russian revolutionaries. The Nardoniks, a movement of left populists, was largely composed of university students and recent graduates. But believing that socialist revolution would be won by the people themselves, they sought to embed themselves among the ‘rank and file’ of the Russian population, the majority of whom were rural peasants. As the members of the early Narodnik group Circle of Tschaikovsky saw it in 1872, their job was to “Go To The People,” to spread among the peasantry ideas of the need for revolution.

But first, they needed to train up a larger number of agitators. They built out their ranks with fellow student agitators, and also set about organizing circles of workers in 1872 and 1873. Overcoming the class divide, they made connections with the urban workers, sometimes by posing as laborers or by taking jobs among the people. By 1874 the Circle of Tschaikovsky had organized several hundred students and workers into circles spread out across several major cities.

And so in the “Mad Summer of 1874,” these forces left the cities, heading out into the countryside to fulfill their mission. The populists donned peasant garb and headed out as tramps in an attempt to educate and agitate across the countryside. The movement spread out from the major cities to the secondary cities and towns of the empire, with rumors of the movement energizing new waves of youth to take to the countryside, not unlike a children’s crusade. All told, some 2,000 to 4,000 students and workers participated in the Narodnik campaign. It was an agricultural rank and file strategy.

As it turned out, many of the highly religious peasantry chafed against the privileged’ students Bohemian ways. Some peasants were sympathetic, but before much organizing could get underway, the Narodniks were quickly rounded up by the Tsar’s police. By the fall some 1,600 had been arrested by Tsarist police, with 193 charged in a mass trial in 1877. Although most of those tried were eventually acquitted, while waiting for years in jail some 45 of them died by suicide or succumbed to mental illness. Outside of the prison walls, the circles they had painstakingly built were mostly, but not entirely, uprooted and dispersed.

Just the year after the trial of the 193, a new initiative was started up- this time at the initiative of some of the populist workers themselves. The Northern Union of Russian Workers was founded in 1878 by populist workers S Khalturin, a carpenter, and V Obnorsky, a fitter. Obnorsky had lived abroad and come into contact with the Marxist Social Democratic parties and the First International, and the group adopted a program calling for both economic and political demands. The ‘union’ brought together circles in St. Petersburg and in neighboring cities, gathering especially the more highly-skilled metalworkers. Its membership reached as high as 200, with about as many sympathizers in addition. The union established a central treasury to manage a growing strike fund, with funds especially marked for the families of exiled strike leaders. In 1878 and through 1879 it participated to some degree in a wave of labor unrest before its leaders were largely arrested and its operations severely curtailed. So the Going To The People campaign had not kicked off a peasant revolution, but it had laid the seeds of the early workers movement.

In the wake of the early defeats, the Narodnik movement became divided between those who wanted to continue the orientation to the rank and file masses, and those who sought a shortcut in terrorism. Most of the college-educated Narodniks chose the path of terrorism, although the majority of the working class members kept the orientation to mass work. Those who stayed true to the rank and file approach were more and more won over to Marxism and a focus on the industrial proletariat which was growing across Russia.

For the next two decades, this work among the rank and file largely took the form of the ‘kruzki,’ or the educational worker ‘circle.’ Until 1895 the workers movement was primarily maintained through these circles, underground cells which mainly focused on worker education. Often meeting in back rooms or apartments, these circles met to discuss topics of interest to the workers. The circles had a layered existence. A bridge to the circles were the public night or sunday schools, often sponsored by factory owners and run by the intelligentsia. Circles would establish contacts in these schools, perhaps among a friendly teacher, and use them to contact new recruits into the underground formations. Plekhanov helped lead these circles from the Narodnik days, and described of the workers who participated at the time,

After working at the factory 10-11 hours a day, and returning home only in the evening, he would sit at his books until 1 o’clock at night … I was struck by the variety and abundance of the theoretical questions which concerned him … Political economy, chemistry, social questions, and the theory of Darwin all occupied his attention … It would have taken decades for him to assuage his intellectual thirst.¹

While many participants were grounded in the need to use education as a vehicle for broader political work, some workers saw personal education and development as a solution to their problems in itself. For others, the purpose of developing the education circles was explicitly revolutionary, but thought through only in a linear manner, rather than as a bridge to some other forms of organization and struggle. As S.I. Mitskevich, a participant in an early circle, recalled

We had long conversations on the future of the workers’ movement. How abstractly we still conceived the future forms of the workers’ movement… gradually the number of workers studying Marx will increase; they will draw still more numbers into the circles studying Marx; with time all Russia will be covered with such kruzhki and then we will form a workers’ socialist party. What tasks this party was to perform and how it should conduct its struggle remained unclear.²

If the circles were limited by their emphasis on pure education, they nonetheless constantly engaged and developed new layers of working class socialists in cities and towns across the Russian empire. Not by taking jobs in the factories, but by offering education and coaching to the workers who already worked in them, the college-educated members of the socialist movement painstakingly seeded and cultivated a layer of working class organic intellectuals.

Many of these organizers, including Plekhanov, were jailed or forced to flee abroad for their efforts. But they took up the translation of Marxist works into Russian and organizing the movement from abroad, smuggling revolutionary works over the border to be passed from circle to circle. And if the circles were cut down by the Tsarist police every few years, they just as surely re-formed and redoubled there efforts. And so the workers movement slowly grew in the waning decades of the 19^th century Russian empire.

The St. Petersburg League of Struggle

When Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg in 1893, the worker circles had recently been reorganized under the general, if not absolute, leadership of some local social democratic students. Under the leadership of the student Radenko, the social democrats emphasized the need for strict underground methods to avoid police capture.

Krupskaya recalls meeting Lenin for the first time in February of 1894, several months after he had arrived in St. Petersburg, at a conference disguised as a pancake party. Krupskaya was one of four women teaching at the factory-sponsored night school, and who were among the leaders of the local Social Democratic circle which oversaw the worker groups. These women leaders helped to screen workers that took their sanctioned classes and feed them into the underground circles. At the meeting, Lenin mocked the idea that the working class could be liberated through education alone, pushing for more assertive action. He was soon set up with his own circle of workers to educate and mentor.³

By 1895 Lenin had won over around 20 worker circles to a more assertive approach: the circles transformed from schools of general worker education into training camps for agitators. The entire operation was run by a core team of 22 persons. These members were divided into three regions with bureaus of 4 to 5 persons, encompassing all the persons except for Lenin, who was to lead literary work, and Radchenko and his wife, who were to lead the conspiratorial work. Each bureau maintained contacts with workers circles in its district, and all told in its beginning the League oversaw some fifteen factory committees and managed around 100 to 150 contacts.

By spurring the existing circles into action, and through them distributing agitational material among the factory workers of St. Petersburg, the League helped to instigate a series of strikes. In the Autumn of 1895, the League consulted with textile workers from the ever-problematic Thornton Factory. When the factory owners cut their pay, the workers struck; the League itself produced propaganda around the strike, publishing two leaflets. One of these, ultimately released a day after the strike ended, featured Lenin writing in the voice of a factory worker and drew lessons for the rest of the city’s working class. Several more strikes followed in the last months of 1895, including a strike at the Putilov metalworks, organized by a League member Zinovev who worked in the boiler room. But before the end of the year, Lenin and many of his comrades were arrested. Lenin would be held in jail for more than a year before being sent into Siberian exile. Nonetheless, the rumor of the League and of its underground operation with cells in every factory continued to grow, as the prepared alternative leadership stepped in to continue the efforts. Finally, in May of 1896, a massive strike of more than 30,000 textile workers from across multiple factories erupted. Strike leadership issued their demands to the League, and the next day they were published across the city.

Although by May 22nd, the strike began to unwind, the movement would never be the same. Spurred by the League and mobilized through the underground circles, tens of thousands of workers had taken action, a democratic consensus around clear demands had been established despite Tsarist repression, and unity was built across factories and industries. Decades of work in the underground was simultaneously validated and surpassed, as the working class of St. Petersburg transformed its own view of what was possible and necessary by taking the course of mass action.

Lenin The Labor Journalist

If the members of the kruhzki had mastered a knowledge of Marx and Engels, that did not mean that they had mastered a knowledge of mills and engines, the wage scales in the textile factories, or the day to day issues in each and every workplace in the empire. Making a concrete intervention into the lives of the workers required the development of labor studies. As Krupskaya recalls, Lenin placed an emphasis on collecting information about concrete working conditions so articles could be grounded in lived experience;

I remember, for instance, how the material about the Thornton Mills was collected. I was to call out my pupil Krolikov, who worked at the mills as a sorter (he had been deported from St. Petersburg once), and collect all the information from him according to the plan outlined by Vladimir Ilyich. Krolikov arrived in a posh fur coat which he had borrowed from somebody, and brought a bookful of notes which he supplemented verbally. His information was very valuable. Vladimir Ilyich fairly pounced on it. Afterwards A. A. Yabkubova and I, with shawls over our heads to make us look like mill workers, went to the Thornton hostel, where we visited both the single and married quarters. Conditions there were appalling. It was only from information gathered in this way that Vladimir Ilyich wrote his correspondence and leaflets.⁵

By meeting with workers, and sending intellectuals undercover, thorough information was collected by the League from its early days, which could then be reflected back to the workers.

Lenin is famous for many forms of written interventions: he penned fierce polemics, strategic writings on revolution, and heady theoretical works. But from 1895 to 1917 he also consistently wrote on the specific questions facing workers in the factories, turning his talents to a form of ‘labor journalism.’

While the more political of these writings are better known, he also wrote a large number of ‘apolitical’ articles. His contributions investigated the minutiae of proposed regulations, exposed the horrid working conditions of this or that factory, guided workers on the use of the Tsarist legal system, analyzed statistics on strikes or the labor market, or otherwise dealt with the concrete questions faced by organizing workers, labor economists, and employment lawyers alike.

Fighting Economism

For more than half a decade, the Russian workers movement was caught in the well-known dispute between the ‘economism’ and ‘politicalism.’ Economism is the tendency which called on the workers to limit themselves to fights for economic reforms in the workplace, and not to raise political demands. This tendency had a profound impact on the workers movement in Russia.

Although Plekhanov noted the tendency of Economism as early as 1883,⁵ the mass impetus to the workers movement sparked by the strikes of 1895 and 1896, paired with the simultaneous mass arrest of the League’s leadership, gave Economism a new significance in the workers movement. A new generation of Economistic activists called for the workers movement to take up only economic demands, and to abandon the conspiratorial form of organizing for open, democratic leadership methods. Lenin waged a ruthless fight against the lowering of the workers movement, already under revolutionary leadership, to a mere fight for economic reforms. Writing from Siberian exhile, Lenin reminded the growing movement that

The conviction that the class struggle must necessarily combine the political and the economic struggle into one integral whole has entered into the flesh and blood of international Social-Democracy.⁶

His polemics on the subject culminated in his famous work What Is To Be Done?

The organizational form of the fight against Economism was the re-consolidation of the movement around Iskra, the anti-economist newspaper published abroad. Just as the League had united the circles of St. Petersburg, Iskra united workers across the entire empire, by placing its editorial board outside the reach of the Russian Tsarist police.

Through Iskra, Lenin grew his organizational structure into an international operation, with cross-border couriers to smuggle in the latest issues, roving propagandists to roam the country and win the allegiance of new circles, and local activists to extend the networks reach into factories and working class neighborhoods. In this way, the original approach which paired revolutionary intention with mass work among the rank-and-file was re-established.

Systematic methods: Leninism-Mcaleveyism

The Bolshevik orientation to the labor movement meant taking up systematic work. In his 1902 “Letter To A Comrade On Our Organizational Tasks,” Lenin laid out a method of systematic organizing from the underground into the factories.⁷

In terms of team-building, Lenin centered the importance of establishing core organizing committees, advising that “We must try to get on the committee revolutionary workers who have the greatest contacts and the best ‘reputation’ among the mass of the workers.” This is in parallel with the McAlevey logic that workers are already ‘organized’ and the most effective way to build majority support is by winning over pre-existing leaders with strong reputations and the respect of their coworkers. As Lenin continues, “the committee should, therefore, include, as far as possible, all the principal leaders of the working-class movement from among the workers themselves.”

Lenin’s focus on the tactic of literature distribution as a means of establishing a comprehensive organizing structure is also in parallel to the structures of distributed outreach developed in the McAlevey model. As Lenin wrote,

[The distribution of literature] is an extremely important task, for if we secure regular contact between a special district group of distributors and all the factories in that district, as well as the largest possible number of workers’ homes in that district, it will be of enormous value, both for demonstrations and for an uprising. Arranging for and organizing the speedy and proper delivery of literature, leaflets, proclamations, etc., training a network of agents for this purpose, means performing the greater part of the work of preparing for future demonstrations or an uprising…. If no newspapers are available, leaflets may and should be distributed, but the distributive machine must in no case be allowed to remain idle. This machine should be brought to such a degree of perfection as to make it possible to inform and mobilize, so to speak, the whole working-class population of St. Petersburg over night.

Here we see that the distribution of literature is not only an end in its own right, but also a means of building comprehensive links with the workers which can be built up steadily during times of moderate activity, and then tapped quickly during peak periods of unrest. And we can imagine that establishing distribution directly into workers’ homes paralleled the tried-and-true union tactic of ‘house calls,’ which enable the building of deeper relationships through 1-on-1 conversations. Lenin’s comment about the danger of the ‘machine’ remaining ‘idle’ emphasises the point that the system exists not only for the purpose of distributing literature, but of building a network which must be constantly fed and maintained.

His methods of identifying and tapping organic leaders, building representative committees, and building organizing structures in order to secure majority support are not dissimilar to the late Jane McAlevey’s organizing theory in her work No Shortcuts.

The 1905 Dress rehearsal

As the movement continued to grow and expand, the Tsarist government increasingly sought means to co-opt the workers movement. To this end, in 1904 the governor of St. Petersburg allowed for a local Orthodox Priest, Father Gapon, to organize a state-sponsored worker assembly.

The explicit goal of the body was to contain the energy of the working class and forestall the influence of the revolutionaries. At first, the activities of the group were limited to promoting basic literacy and music events. But similar to how William Z. Foster later called for Communists to organize even within company unions, or how socialists today organize within unions run by reactionary bureaucrats, the Marxists of the day entered into the formation and pushed it to the left. After a year of skillful organizing, the organization took on a political and economic program. As 1904 turned to January 1905, a strike at the Putilov plant involving Gapon’s assembly spread to include over 130,000 workers across the capital. This mass uprising was quickly met with state violence: on what came to be known as Bloody Sunday, hundreds of workers were massacred as they attempted to deliver their demands to the Winter Palace. Soon general strikes were launched in cities across the country and peasant unrest spreading throughout the country.

The social democrat union organizers working in Gapon’s legal formation had forced a confrontation with the Tsarist regime, further alienating it from ever-greater expanses of the population. Social democrat students organized the student strikes to pair up with the workers movement. At the start of the fall semester, socialist students took control of their campuses and hosted night school classes for workers. Within weeks, tens of thousands of workers were meeting nightly on the campuses in mass meetings, and dozens of unions were formed in campus classrooms.

Through the combination of these efforts, the industrial strike wave of the previous winter was renewed, with a strike of Moscow printers quickly growing to include railroad workers. The wave crested in the form of a general strike. A council of union representatives, or soviet, was formed on the campus of the Technical Institute to coordinate the strike. And although the socialists had not planned for the importance of the new formation, they quickly adapted the soviet as an organizational structure and drove its work forward.

The general strike forced concessions from the government, which for the first time conceded the rights of freedom of assembly, the right to form associations, and the need to hold elections to a constituent assembly. The general strike claimed victory and workers returned to work, but the Tsar soon launched a counter-offensive, arresting the Soviet leaders, which in turned sparked new strikes and an armed insurrection. Although the rising was defeated, the workers for the first time had both won concessions which allowed for increased organizing, and also took the path of revolution.

Between Revolutions

In the years between the revolutions of 1905 and February 1917, the Bolshevik movement deepened its involvement with, and integration into, the workers movement.

The reforms won during 1905 created a varied and shifting environment, as the government went back and forth between allowing for liberal reforms and clamping down on dissent in counter-revolutionary fury. The Bolshevik wing of the socialist movement continued to affirm the possibility of exploiting the legal institutions created by the Tsar for the purpose of cooptation. But the Bolsheviks also emphasized the need to use the formations in service to the revolutionary cause, and organizationally this meant maintaining the underground party.

The dispute over this question eventually led to the full separation of the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions into distinct parties. The Mensheviks, with their emphasis on legal organizations, gained a foothold in the insurance societies and remaining legal unions, especially of state workers and other more privileged sections of the working class. In contrast, the Bolsheviks focused on maintaining the underground factory committees. Although at first the Mensheviks appeared to have the upper hand in influencing the official workers movement, when the Tsar further reduced the scope of legal organizations, the Bolsheviks were better able to maintain activity.

In the long years of counter-revolution which followed the failed Revolution of 1905, the workers movement returned to the old form of an underground conspiratorial center- organizing worker circles at the factory level. The membership of the party, which had reached some 40,000 in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, dwindled in the face of state repression to only a few thousand. Nevertheless, the party survived: drawing upon their well-practiced conspiratorial organizing methods, the Bolsheviks cultivated a membership that, even at its nadir, remained exponentially larger than it had been ten years earlier. As the repression waned, the Bolsheviks were well-positioned to re-emerge and re-establish themselves. In May of 1912, Lenin’s organization launched Pravda, the first daily workers’ newspaper.⁸ By 1914 the paper grew to include submissions from some 2000 worker groups spread across the empire. As worker upsurge grew, suppression unions were re-formed. The Bolsheviks consistent presence allowed them to quickly win leadership of these formations among the less privileged layers of workers. In the re-established metal workers union, the center-piece of the organized workers movement, they won an overwhelming majority as against their Menshevik rivals.

The Bolsheviks at this time also brought the strength of the workers’ movement to bear in the parliamentary elections, and simultaneously used their public electeds in the Duma to the benefit of the unions. The Duma representatives used their immunity to speak to worker meetings, and their offices to help coordinate the clandestine networks of contacts spread throughout the factories of Russia.

The February Uprising

Even before the start of the First World War, the resurgent workers movement was once again headed for a clash with the Tsarist regime. The war’s outbreak, coupled as it was with an initial patriotic fervor, temporarily delayed this clash; however, as the imperialist conflict stagnated, the latent contradictions between the working class and Tsarist state assumed an unprecedented volatility.

In Petrograd, Russia’s largest industrial producer at the time, the cost of living increased to 14.4 times that of pre-war levels; in 1917 alone, prices increased by a factor of 2.3. The whole of the working class had watched as the reforms won in 1905 were reversed. Consequently, industrial activity was increasingly conducted illegally. While three legal unions existed in Petrograd in January of 1917 (printers, pharmacy, and shop assistants), 11 underground illegal unions were operating through the hard work of labor militants.

The early patriotism precipitated by the war’s onset had stymied labor action in non-Bolshevik factories; however, as food shortages worsened and prices continued to increase, the conditions were ripe for the overthrow of the failing ruling class. It was this environment in which a protest by women textile workers on International Working Women’s Day over the cost of food and frustration with the Tsarist regime developed into a general strike as metalworkers and others joined the action. In the whirlwind of action which followed these strikes, the masses took up arms, the soviets reformed, huge portions of soldiers mutinied, and the Tsar was finally deposed by his own armed “subjects.” Although the initial actions were not planned, the role played by organized revolutionaries, in leading other unions out on strike, reforming the soviets, and organizing popular demonstrations, was crucial to the success of the movement. The organization of years had been carried out in days.

Even after the abdication of the Tsar, the confrontation between workers and their employers persisted. Lacking a suitable resolution, workers continued to escalate their strikes across 1917. In April, the total number of strikers sat at around 35,000; by June, this tally had increased to 175,000. Ultimately, the number of strikers would eclipse 1.2 million that October.9

On the organized labor front, the number of unions was likewise dramatically expanding.. As early as March organizing drives in Petrograd founded 30 unions, what had existed before the February revolution. Many of the militants that had been involved in the underground since the upsurges in 1905 and 1912 were instrumental in organizing these new organizations and they had distinct factional splits within leadership. By March 15th the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions (PCTU) was formed with an executive committee of 4 Bolsheviks, 4 Mensheviks, and 1 syndicalist. According to Smith in Red Petrograd, the Bolsheviks emerged in leadership in Petrograd unions, with either majority control or the ability to coalition with the left Menshevik Internationalist faction for a majority while Mesheviks held leadership strongly in Moscow unions and unions with predominantly skilled workers.

The Bolsheviks operated in multiple spheres within unions to gain influence and build the labor movement. In the Vyborg district, which saw some of the highest rates of striking in the period, a core of Bolshevik skilled workers interacted with the newer and unskilled sections of the working class which resulted in the greater militancy and led factories such as Aivaz, Baranovskii, Vulcan, Nobel, New Lessner, Phoenix and Puzyrev to fall under Bolshevik influence. The Bolsheviks held full leadership in the metal workers, textile workers, food workers, and woodturners unions, with party members Alexander Shylapninov as chair of the metal workers union and I.F. Zhonerovich as chair of the woodturners union.

In addition to the Bolshevik party press agitating for the labor movement and advertising union meetings, Bolshevik led unions came out with their own publications: “The Metallist”, Zerno Pravdy, and Tkach for the metal workers union, the food workers union, and the textile union respectively. These publications offered the Bolshevik-led unions a means for mass communication. They likewise served as mechanisms for politicizing labor organizing, acting as a literary complement to the internal work undertaken by Bolsheviks in union meetings and on the shop floor. In addition to providing important news and updates within the labor movement, many of these journals took directly revolutionary political lines; as early as May 1917 700 flour workers passed a resolution calling for “all power to the soviets.” As the year went on, more factories came to sympathize with the Bolsheviks, with many openly affiliating with the party

The Bolshevik’s also promoted novel analyses and programmes for the internal politics and structuring of unions themselves, strongly emphasizing the centralization of unions and organizing on the industrial level. While craft unionism was a much smaller movement in Russia than in other parts of the world, Shylapinov wrote articles criticizing the practice in ‘the Metallist’- citing a situation in the Gruntal Workshop where eight welders formed a union, left the factory demanding wages without consulting other workers, and got the rest of the unprepared workforce laid off in their efforts. Additionally, the woodturners union, while heavily Bolshevik influenced, refused to join in efforts with metal workers within the same factories. Despite PCTU asking the union only to strike where the majority of the factory were woodturners, rank and file rejected the proposition and went on strike anyway. However, by this point in the year other workers were fully politicized and refused to work in solidarity with the woodturners (the October Revolution interceded the strike and it was called off by Oct 28).

When in centralized bodies such as the PCTU the Bolsheviks pushed for political as well as organizational interventions. Outlined in Red Petrograd, over the 30 sessions of the PCTU over 1917 they discussed 29 matters of a political nature, 26 concerning organizational construction, and 14 concerning economic struggles. In many ways, the Bolsheviks’ work in the factory committees complemented their work in unions. Brinton in The Bolsheviks and Workers Control describes how Bolshevik-controlled factory committees would compete for power when the workers were represented by Menshevik led unions. By June, the Bolsheviks helped organize the Petrograd Central Council of Factory Committees (CCFC) which held a large majority of 19 Bolsheviks compared to 2 Mensheviks, and a few representatives of other factions. By October the body employed 80 people and held commissions in communications and personnel, economic, finance, literary and editorial, agitation, and conflict.

Factory Committees: The Seeds of Workers Self Management

As they already had on so many other issues, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks took different stances on the war and therefore influenced the labor movement in different ways. While the Mensheviks took a ‘defensist’ position and supported Russia’s efforts in WWI, the Bolsheviks agitated (illegally) the line of ‘revolutionary defeatism.’ Rather than lend even critical support to the conflict, Bolsheviks instead sought to stop the international war in order to create a civil war in Russia against the ruling class and bourgeois. Due to this major political difference, workers who took part in strikes, whether economic and political, often gravitated towards the Bolsheviks, especially when faced with the brutal tsarist oppression which was often unleashed on militant workers.

Ironically, the Menshevik’s counter-revolutionary defensist line would birth an organizational form that proved instrumental to the subsequent revolutions in 1917. Beginning in the state factories with skilled workers, influenced by the Menshevik line, pro-war factory committees were formed in order to keep production high enough for the war effort despite the mismanagement of the Russian bourgeoisie. However, this form of committee expanded around the country and became, as 1917 progressed, a means to ensure workers were fed, a tool to assert the workers will on the management of the factory, and often blending into the functions or actually becoming a union for workers to struggle through. Despite the Mensheviks early involvement, factory committees took on a life of their own and eventually became powerful base for revolutionary-minded Bolsheviks.

In many ways, the factory committees became a home for a spontaneous movement of the working class seeking workers’ democratic control over management and society. Unlike the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks did support the spontaneous movement in 1917 as a whole and found success in the committees while spreading their political programme to the class. In May of 1917 in “Materials Relating to the Revision of the Party Program,” Lenin proposed an amendment to the party program to include that references to a widespread “demand for state and public control of the production and distribution of all staple products” which “induce the Party to demand nationalisation of the banks.”

While the Bolsheviks supported the movement as a whole, their specific strategy went against the existent prevailing attitude of the committees. Rather than argue for direct worker management at the Bfactory level, they supported the idea of workers managing factories on a national level (a workers state) and attempted to use the committees to further the revolution. Unlike union boards, which consisted on long time trusted labor militants and were therefore slightly more balanced between political factions, factory committees were directly elected and consisted of a Bolshevik majority. The party used these committees to contest factories under Menshevik led unions, organized to consolidate these committees first in citywide and then nationwide meetings, and used their power to challenge the state.

By May 30th the first full conference of the Petrograd Factory Committees met in the Tauride palace. The Bolsheviks already held majority and encouraged militancy on the committees, especially around political demands. This directness was captured by one of their worker delegates, Nemtsov, who declared: “Working of the factories is now exclusively in the hands of higher management. We must introduce the principle of election.”¹⁰

By August the provisional government was openly attempting to dissolve the factory committees, pitting more workers against the Mensheviks. At the eve of the October revolution on October 17th, the committees finally organized the first All Russian Conference of Factory Committees where the Bolesheviks held 86 out of 137 delegates. By this point the factory committees were seen by the party as vehicles for seizing factories and beginning the insurrection- within 8 days of the conference the provisional government was overthrown.

A Revolution Through the workplace

By October, the Bolsheviks had won a strong majority in most of the unions and factory committees and in the Soviets of the two capital cities, and in the municipal elections. The latter saw the Bolsheviks earn overwhelming vote totals in the working class districts.

This longstanding and proactive orientation towards the labor movement proved decisive. When the time arose to launch the October rising, the Soviet Revolutionary Military Committee turned not only to the soldiers, but also to the workers to carry it out. Many workers took part under arms. In St. Petersburg alone, the Red Guards militia were 20,000 strong, mostly drawn from metalworkers and dockworkers. Carrying out the overthrow of the government meant taking control of the very workplaces which the Bolsheviks had been organizing within for years. The printing workers took control of the print shops, and ran the printers for the Soviet government. The telegraph workers took over the central exchange. The rail workers took control of the trains and rail lines, and refused to transport troops under government orders.

The working class, through its central body, took control over its own workplaces in order to carry out the revolution. Workers at the arsenals organized the distribution of arms, and dockyard workers took control of valuable supplies for the revolutionary cause.

Having seized power through both force of arms and workplace action, the new worker government further secured worker supremacy on the shop floor. On November 14, the Soviet government released a decree announcing the establishment of workers control over all commercial, industrial, and agricultural enterprises which hire employees. The decree mandated that all work be brought under the supervision of factory or shop committees or similar democratic bodies of workers.

This measure, signed by Lenin, required owners to turn over their books and functional control of the entire empire’s national industries to the management of the Russian working class. This was the culmination of the interrelated struggle for worker control: in their seizure of the government through class struggle, they consequently also secured full power over their workplaces.

However, this control was hardly secure so long as the civil war raged on.. The Bolsheviks would continue to rely on workers organized at the point of production to expand and defend the revolution. In the immediate post-revolutionary period, the unions contributed greatly to the civil war effort: they sent scores of fighters, helped secure control of crucial wartime industries, and participated in managing the growing Soviet national economy.

Bolshevik Labor Strategy In DSA

For more than three decades the Russian revolutionaries organized in the workers movement in a fight for control over both the workplace and society. The strategies employed by the Bolsheviks uniquely featured an inside-outside strategy in regards to the labor movement with consistent labor focused literary work while maintaining a presence with patient rank and file long term organizing. However, the politicization of labor struggle was used to unify these strategies into a coherent organizing method, often focusing efforts to centralize and nationalize organizations, to equip and spur the working class to power.

While all of these strategies are present in the labor movement today, there is no cohesive, policicizing effort to combine these strategies leaving the socialist presence in the labor movement much less uniform and visible to the broad working class. However, the socialist movement today has made serious strides in uniting its cause with that of the workers movement.

A conscious and open fight against economism within DSA has only just begun in 2025, and already it has made strong progress with the near-passage of the Partyist Labor Strategy at the 2025 convention. But far more organizing is needed before DSA masters the dual tasks of building the workers movement and leading it in a revolutionary direction.

The greatest defense for adherents to Economism is the false claim that they hold a monopoly over the pragmatic efforts of the workers movement. We see from the historical record that the opposite is true; long before Lenin launched his attacks against Economism, he was active in building the workers movement through doing ‘the work.’

The Bolshevik emphasis on politicizing labor struggles was not a sectarian “ultra” maneuver meant to demonstrate the party’s radicalism, but served as a means to drive labor militancy during periods of patriotism and complacency, to gain dedicated long term factory organizers who stayed in the struggle over the years despite the consistent government crack downs on labor organizations, and eventually managed to sway entire factories through their consistent political support for the working class to take power.

In leading circles of workers in education, conducting careful and incisive labor journalism, organizing the mass distribution of leaflets, advising workers in strike action and labor law, overseeing a growing machine of communication which reached into every factory and neighborhood, and growing his publications into an underground mass-media which could counter the narrative of the Tsarist regime, Lenin and his Bolshevik comrades paid their dues in the building of the workers’ movement. Their efforts earned them the right to critique Economism for its attempt to limit the movement to pure bread and butter demands. Workers and agents inside factories would organize, distribute literature, and provide inside information to writers on the conditions of factories. Whenever possible, from the centralization of reading groups into the League of Struggle at the turn of the century to the centralization of factory committees and unions into first city-wide and then nation-wide organizations shows a consistent struggle against parochialism, economism, and craft unionism towards the organized universalization of the struggle.

In We Are The Union, Eric Blanc lays out research showing that current worker leaders and labor organizers are inspired to take the many hours of unpaid organizing and risks primarily from four different factors: other labor struggles, Black Lives Matter, the movement following Bernie Sanders, and LGBTQ+ activism. While the largest factor for these organizers was seeing other workers participate in active class struggle, during periods of low labor militancy asserting the primacy of political factors becomes essential in sustaining and developing the movement. “Sowing the seeds of labor militancy by steadfastly politicizing and training worker leaders is what built the Russian labor movement: from reading groups at the turn of the century to the general strikes of 1917, concerted organizing drove the revolutionary process forward.”

For DSA activists who look to the Russian Revolution today, we offer the Bolsheviks work as a guide. We can “go among the people,” but even more so, we can systematically recruit organic leaders from across the major industries. We can write about high politics, but also we can master the language of labor journalism, writing in the fluency of wages and working conditions. We can help lead organizing drives and strike actions which kick off struggles so broad we lose control of them. We can build for majority support within the unions, and contest and win leadership of them. And we can run workers for public office, and use electoral campaigns to highlight and forward worker struggles.

We can organize for a revolution, from the workplace to the White House.

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Cover Image: Workers attend a political meeting at the Putilov Factory, July 1920.

Works Cited:

1. G.V. Plekhanov, The Russian worker in the revolutionary movement, Sochineniia, vol.3, p.131.
2. S.I. Mitskevich, Revoliutsionnaia Moskva, Moscow 1940, p.144.
3. Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin” St Petersburg 1893-1898, www.marxists.org/archive/krupskaya/works/rol/rol01.htm
4. Ibid.
5. Plekhanov, Socialism and the Political Struggle, 1883, www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/1883/struggle/chap1.htm
6. Lenin, A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats, 1899, /www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/sep/protest.htm#bkV04E061
7. Lenin, A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organisational Tasks, 1902, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/sep/00.htm
8. Lenin, The Results of Six Months’ Work, 1912, www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/jul/14.htm
9. Smith, Red Petrograd, 1983, https://archive.org/details/redpetrogradrevo0000smit
10. Brinton, The Boleshiviks and Workers’ Control, 1970, https://www.marxists.org/archive/brinton/1970/workers-control/
11. Lenin, Materials related to the Revision of the Party Program, 1917, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/reviprog/index.htm
12. Sovnarkom, Decree on Workers’ Control, 1917, www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/revolution/documents/1917/11/14.htm