 Roedd yn y gwelwyr Weston ydy ddylai chysylltu'r dymogol. Felly haeth rhaid i dylai'r pethau ystafell iddynt ar gyfer gwyblion hwnnw. Yn y brydd, fawr, yma'r vocerol, y beth sy'n iawn y system dysgu yw'r ysgol, ystafell, yw'r siŵr. Yn gyhoedd y gallu gweld sydd ysgolwyr hefyd yn ymgyrch chi'n ei bod yn dweud. Nid yw y cwmau i'n fawr ydy. Mae'r dwyloedd yn ymwybodol yn ymweld yn ymweld y dyfodol yn y dyfodol. Mae'r dwyloedd yn ymwybodol yn ymwybodol yn ymwybodol. Dyna'n rhaid oherwydd mae angen i gael ymweld arall, ond o'r ymweld i'w llwys i'w Britain a allwch, ond y dwyloedd wedi gwirioneddau i'r ddechrau ac, yn gwybod, mae'r dweud o'r dwyloedd yn ymweld. Mae'r cydnod i chi'n ei gweithio i gael y gwaith yn bach. Felly, rydyn ni'n rhaid i gael y cydnod i'r Wyrfyn Gwyrgyrchu Fyrgyrchu, maen nhw yw'n gweithio i'w gwirionedd, a rydyn ni'n rhaid i gael bod hynny'n gweithio i gael y cydnod i gael y Gwyrgyrchu Fyrgyrchu. Felly, mae'r Cydnod i Gweithio i gael y gwybod, mae'r gwaith yn gweithio i gael y gwaith yn gweithio i gael y gwaith. is really just a formal thing and its a very abstract construction defined an advance based on a very fixed principles and formal rules and precedence that must be obeyed regardless of wether they particularly help the situation and they say nothing of the real lives that we actually lead the real power that we actually have or don't have y cyfle o'r cyfnod yn y cyfnod. Maen nhw'n meddwl o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd o'r cyfnod, mae'n meddwl o'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd. A dyma'r thymau a'r tîm a'r cyfan yw ymgylchedd, a'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd o'r cyffordd. Yn y cair y ffynion rwy'n arweinydd o'r marxist, yw ymgylchedd yma yn rhaid. Unrhyw oeddiwch erioedd ond yn gweithio dros y cwerthwynt i'r pryd yn gweithio dweud o gyrach. Dydyn ni'n gwneud am gyffredgio feddwl y baeth a'u gweithio ddatud o oeddiwch o ddod oedd gyffredgio'r ddod o'r baeth. Yn y ddod o'diwch o'r baeth yn gweithio. A'r yrhaith efo'r byn ynno gwneud y drafel sydd ti'n gwneud o ddiadau i gweithio i gweithio i gweithio i gweithio, ..ynghwylio'r gweld, yn ychydig i'r 1,000 ymdweud yn ymdweud yn y cyfrifol. Mae'r gwahodd yn ymlaen i'r cyfrifol yn y cyfrifol yn y cyfrifol yn y cyfrifol. Felly, mae'r cyfrifol yn y... Mae'r cyfrifol yn y gweithio ar y llythdoedd, oherwydd mae'n ymgyrch yn y Llywodraeth yn y Llywodraeth... ..yna rhaid, wrth gwrs, mae'n gwyntio'n rhaid. Ond yna i'n mynd dros y tro, wrth gwrs, ar hyn y pliffau i'ch cymdeithashaf, sy'n gweithio'r system yw'r cyflog neu'n pamwys gyrdwys ar gyfer gofyn ni oedd eich bod ni'n gweithio gydigol a'n yn aelodol yn y gynu'r ynerdd dod yn cael rwynt o'r maen nhw'n gweithio'r cyflog, boi fe wnaeth gweithio eich oeddyn ni'n cymdeithio'n cyfeithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gorfodd, yna'r gwaith a'r cyfnod, ac mae'n gweithio bod ysgolio arna am oedrygedd hi'n gwaith. Ond e'n gweithio bethau cyfnod o'r gwaith sefydlu gyda negotiated diemall y Greiflerau, ond o'r cyfnod o ddyflaid, efallai gyda gweld o'r Ministeriaid Shadow, ond efallai cyfnod o'r board arwyfn y cyfle, oherwydd o'r PCD. Mae'n gweithio'n cyfrifio'r cyfrifio arwod a wgobirau i chynnwys a wneud y cyhoeddus. Mae'r bwysig yn y perbyg yw'r plwy yn ein llyfridol, rydyn ni'n bwysigol ychydig ffyrdd gwrs a'r bwysigol ni'n gwneud ofyn, lle'n ddim yn bwysigol i'n ddiogelio'r broses am y cyfroedau o'r rhaid o'r cyfrifyddiad o'i cyfrifyddiad o'r bwysigol. Mae'n gwybod i'r bwysigol, a'r byw o'r bwysigol i'r bwysigol i'r bwysigol o'r bwysigol i'r bwysigol o'r bwysigol o'r bwysigol. Dyna'r ddweud y ddweud yma sy'n ddweud yn gallu ddwybod ni. Felly, mae'n ddweud yn ddweud yn llwydoedd. Mae'n ffornol yn fawr, a'n ddweud dyna'n ddweud yna'n olygu'r llyfodol i ddefnyddio'r ddweud sy'n cael ei ddweud i'r cyfnodol a'r cyfnodol. Felly, mae'n ddweud yn ddweud yn y ddweud y mae'n ddweud yma o'r marxistau a'r ysgrifennu. Mae'n ddweud yn ei gweithio, ac yn rhywbeth mae'n ddweud. those are actually, in many cases, a real spontaneous creation of the working class, in many instances in revolutionary processes in the history of the world. In fact, even workers of democracy you can extend or restrict the definition of it, of course, to include even just simple trade union meetings within capitalism. Felly, ac mae'n gyfnod ychydig, mezhiaid Gwyl yn dweud yn wych yn lleol rhaid, ac a'r unrhyw gwybod eich cyfnod yn gengylcheddol ar y cyfnod dimol. Rhaid, mae hynny'n ffrindig i fflexibol ffyrwfa Mickol yn gwybod, ac mae'n helly yn dweud hynny'n dweud hwn yn ddif?", ac felly rhaid i'r bêl yn fwyno fydd yn bwysig yn davis a bwysig yn bwysig, yn bwysig a bwysig yn bwysig fel y cyffredin. Cymredu chefnodd mwy o bwysig, ac mae'n dweud efallai mae'r ddim yn ei gael ymddych chi'n gwybod diwethaf a'r ddalfynol, ac mae'n ddyn ni'n ddod i'n ddysgu. First of all, it's of course a very direct form of democracy, a very hands-on form of democracy. It's not where bourgeois democracy is sort of elevated out of the economic system and the real lives of ordinary people. Of course it's this very passive process where you put an X in a box every few years, that sort of thing. Very removed from the day-to-day life that we lead. Workers' democracy grows organically, I think, out of real life, out of, particularly out of economic production, out of workplaces in particular, although not exclusively, but that is of course the kind of key, the sort of home, if you like, of workers' democracy within the economy. And some people even have called it, at times, called it economic democracy. Although I think that's not the best term because it is also political democracy as well, it's not just restricted to the economy. Nevertheless, that does shed a little light onto something about workers' democracy. So it's a practical and a flexible system that grows out of the, often out of defensive struggles in the workplace initially at least, out of the real lives and the real needs of workers. Therefore it has to be a very rapid and dynamic system that can change according to circumstances and according to what the workers need to achieve. And there are certain things that flow from this, this direct character that it has. One of the general rules, of course, is that you have to be there. If stress is real participation, mass meetings, workers coming together and discussing their shared problems, debating in one room or in one kind of venue and taking decisions there and then. Those are generally features that you can identify in strikes and in revolutionary processes. It's not really the case anymore in Britain because of the reactionary anti-trade union laws that were put in place by Thatcher. But nevertheless, it's occasionally you'll see it on wildcat strikes. But one of the forms that workers' democracy would often take in Britain, and I'm sure it's the case in other countries, would be that after a mass meeting say discussing whether or not to have a strike, the workers would have a show of hands to see whether or not, after they've debated it sufficiently amongst themselves, to see whether there's a majority in favour of going on strike or not. And that's interesting because what the British government in the minor strike said, was that that was actually not really democratic, basically for two reasons. One, it's only those who happen to be there, obviously, not those who aren't there on the day, obviously in that sense don't get a vote. And secondly, that it's less democratic because there's maybe an intimidating atmosphere, but there's the pressure of being around other people and having to show with your hand whether or not you support or don't support going on strike. And so they insisted now that trade unions have to ballot in this very, again, this contrived and formal manner where all the boxes have to be tipped in a very tedious way. Now, you can see why it would seem convincing perhaps to some people that that is more democratic because yes, it doesn't give everybody a vote technically. But actually I think we have to respect the workers themselves and their own decisions over how to express themselves politically and democratically. And there is a reason why they tend to choose that method, i.e. the mass meetings and the show of hands because it's a far more immediate and powerful means of organising themselves. And obviously strike action is something that does require quite quick decisions to be made and also it requires mass meetings in which the ideas can be discussed rather than something passive where you just sit at home and you get something in the post saying, oh, do you want to have a strike or not? And that is how workers after all have chosen to organise themselves. It wasn't imposed on to them in some undemocratic manner. So that is in reality, in practice, I think more democratic because it brings people together and gives them more real control over their strike. And, of course, you've seen in strikes in Britain when they have to go through this tedious balloting process where the strikes are ruled out because although a majority wanted to have a strike, a few of the ballots were sent to the wrong address or something and it didn't tick, therefore, one of the boxes of making sure that everybody had a vote. And you can see in that way the sort of emptiness of that formal procedure, the way in which it actually robs the vast majority of people who have decided to strike of real control over their strike. So that's another feature that you can notice in general, I think, is the importance of leadership and not just leaders as in, you know, the national leader of a trade union or of a workers party, but leadership at every level in the working class, local cadres if you like, shop stewards, things like that. The workers, as I said, this importance of meeting or actually having meetings and discussions, because I think the working class educates themselves collectively through, you know, because they work collectively through discussing. It's not that each worker necessarily has the most perfect socialist consciousness, obviously not. It's the discussion, it's the shared experience that is important and for that reason leadership is important as well. The workers perhaps who are more determined than others or who've proven themselves in struggle and have won the respect of the rest of their workers. And of course it's not a question of privilege and hierarchy. A shop steward, for instance, is not exactly some privileged bureaucrat, although of course in certain circumstances they can be corrupted. But that is actually quite essential to, I think, the power of the working class. And again, it's one of the things that the bourgeois state seeks to destroy those networks of activists and shop stewards. They want to dissolve that into the mass and give no excuse for them having meetings where they can discuss with their fellow workers. And again, that's why they prefer more the balloting system through the post. One of the abstractions of bourgeois democracy, of course, is that it treats everybody as equal in the sense that they are identical. They don't have different interests necessarily. They don't exploit each other. They're not richer or poorer. Everyone has won votes regardless of anything, regardless of whether they're a billionaire or a worker. Now of course that's an enormous step forward as regards bourgeois democracy in the past when the vote was not even extended to the working class and to women. Obviously that is a step forward. But nevertheless is an abstraction. And if any of you were in Ben Gertzky's session two days ago on a loose track of the days on what all socialism looked like and he talked about how bourgeois justice is supposed to be blind and the statue of it has a blindfold on it. It's not supposed to take regard of your privileges or what not. But actually what that does is it ignores the real power imbalances that exist in society and it pretends that you can have what we would call a supera class democracy. A democracy that spans all the classes despite the fact that they're at war with each other, they have conflicting interests and some of them own all of the media etc. and others are extremely downtrodden. That is one of the aspects of bourgeois democracy. And I think that it has that all the better to mask what is really going on. It doesn't really extend into the workplace at all to the real conditions of people's lives. It's a kind of almost just this facade that takes place but really behind the scenes of course is where the real power is exercised. But in contrast to that workers democracy not only takes recognition of the class differences that exist in society but of course typically would restrict itself to those who work. And of course again that's a way in which the bourgeoisie could attack workers democracy in a formal sense for being less democratic because of course you're not extending the franchise to the rich. But actually that's again this abstract informal way of looking at things that pretends that we're just so many individuals to be added up in just a mere quantitative manner without conflicting interests. And put it this way, if you were in a workplace and you were wanting to organise a strike to defend yourselves and you wanted to discuss that amongst the workplace would it be more democratic to invite the boss and all their managers into the meeting and involve them in your discussions and your plans and perhaps give them a vote as well as to whether or not you're going to go on strike against what they're doing. Would that empower you more? Would that give the workforce a bit more confidence in their strike and more of an ability to take such a strike action? Of course it wouldn't. So again this linking of workers democracy to real practical needs. In other words it's not just mere democracy for the sake of it but it's to achieve something. In the case of a strike obviously it's maybe to achieve a strike or some other kind of industrial action. In the case of running society after taking power we are here talking about workers democracy before socialism and communism have really been achieved. In other words when there are still class distinctions immediately after taking power then the practical need of that work is democracy is obviously to organise socialism and to win against the bourgeoisie and to defeat the counter revolution and in such circumstances it would be absurd I think to invite those very same people against whom the revolution is struggling and you can imagine the heightened tensions of a revolution when you've taken power from the capitalists when everyone is forced to choose sides the absurdity of having inviting the capitalists into the Soviets or the workers councils to help you decide on how to carry out the revolution would be ludicrous. And so I think for that reason workers democracy is also much more honest than bourgeois democracy. We call it also the dictatorship of the proletariat that is another name for workers democracy workers dictating to society if you like. And bourgeois democracy can also be termed the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie or of capital but of course they would never admit that that is the case they pretend that actually it's all because everyone's got to vote it's a genuine democracy it's one giant discussion we're all just deciding collectively how to run society but of course most of us have deprived access to resources and to the means to live and to communicate. So anyway on to the concrete example of workers democracy in the Soviet Union after the taking of power because that is the only example really or certainly the biggest example of what a real workers power you have of course the Paris commune which came before it which was a big source source of inspiration for the leaders of the revolution and you've had other instances brief instances subsequently but that is of course to the real capturing of state power by the working class that is the only clear example of it so it's very useful to examine it however we have to bear in mind just how different Russia in 1917 was to today in the western world we therefore have to be careful in comparing in contrasting what was done with what we would want to do today nevertheless this is the greatest example I think of workers democracy that ever lived so on the third of January 1918 so just under two months after the taking of power in Russia they issued or the new government the revolutionary government issued the declaration of the rights of the toilets and the Soviet constitution which declared that the Soviets were the sovereign body of the country the Soviets were again spontaneous creations of the working class they actually first were created in 1905 not in the 1917 re-created in 1917 they weren't things that the Marxists decided should happen and somehow managed to make happen in fact many of the Marxists were surprised by them they weren't quite sure what to make of them initially or the Lenin recognised their significance but yes the work is the soviets work what they were was basically the word soviet means council and it was a workplace democracy where delegates from factories and other workplaces would be elected and you also have factory committees which is usually a smaller scale form of direct democracy anyway you would elect a delegate from your workplace to the local working class community to attend the local soviets and there you would have like a giant debate basically between members of the working class and also local other people as well maybe some middle class people Chotsky emphasises that one of the great things about the soviets is that whilst being undeniably led by the working class they did also involve other oppressed layers of the population within them and thereby the working class was able to lead other sections of the population non-capitalist sections of the population anyway that's really a separate point but these were declared these organisations which were real which had been created in real struggle by the working class and were universally recognised by workers all over the country and understood by them as their organs of power these were given formal declaration of their power in these documents at the beginning of 1918 but before I come on to describe some of the principles of this whilst I have been making a sharp distinction between bourgeois and workers democracy we shouldn't think that we just oppose all of the freedoms of bourgeois democracy and it's interesting to know actually that whilst taking power and making the soviets the organs of sovereign power in Russia and a whole host of other what we normally think of bourgeois democratic freedoms were granted in the revolution in the taking of power in 1917 there was a huge extension of rights the freedom of religion and the freedom to practice it without persecution or interference from the state freedom of sexuality was declared which was far in advance of so-called liberal Britain and other countries like that freedom of speech and freedom of assembly but what's interesting in particular a note about these and I'll come on to this in a second is that these were filled with material contents workers were not just given the freedom to assemble but were positively encouraged to assemble by the revolutionary government and were given means to do so but anyway just to dwell on this point a little further it is a common feature of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois revolutions that it cannot even fully realise the so-called freedom of the individual and the rights of that and the democratic rights of bourgeois democracy it frequently cannot even fully achieve those things even in the most favourable of circumstances because of the conservatism of the capitalist class because of the fear of revolution that they have so of course in Britain in the so-called mother of parliaments we have another parliament beside our mother of parliaments which is not elected this is the house of lords it is not elected up until recently it was almost exclusively composed of aristocrats people who just had their positions by birth and now many of the positions are simply appointed by the government and there are also a number of religious leaders of the church of England who just automatically get a position in there as well we also of course have our head of state as the queen and this is not just unique to Britain this is a situation of course in many advanced bourgeois democratic countries and to whom the military swear their allegiance so we should bear that in mind as well that the revolution in 1918 actually achieves many of these bourgeois democratic freedoms far more thoroughly than did countries like Britain etc anyway in making the Soviets the sovereign body of the nation the constitution therefore made the franchise exclusive to those who work the Soviets were built by those who work so it was actually in the rules that if you employed other people if you lived off the labour of other people if you exploited other people essentially you actually couldn't participate in these organisations I've already explained I think the justification for that the necessity of it indeed but most significantly as I suggested earlier they didn't just grant these freedoms in the legalistic sense or at least they attempted to of course the conditions were extremely bad but they attempted to fill them with the material content by granting access to the newspapers to the meeting halls the airwaves etc through nationalisation and placing these institutions under the control of the workers organisations so they filled these legalistic provisions with the real material content so the workers not only merely formally could exercise the right of assembly but could actually in practice do it and as Lenin himself explained this is a quote the old bourgeois apparatus the bureaucracy, the privileges of wealth of bourgeois education of social connections etc all this disappears under the soviet form of organisation freedom of the press ceases to be hypocrisy because the printing plants and stocks of paper are taken away from the bourgeoisie the same thing applies to the best buildings the best palaces the mansions and the manor houses soviet power took thousands upon thousands of these best buildings from the exploiters at one stroke and in this way made the right of assembly without which democracy is a fraud a million times more democratic for the people he goes on is there a single country in the world even among the most bourgeois the most democratic bourgeois countries in which the average rank and file worker the average rank and file labourer enjoys anything approaching such liberty of holding meetings in the best buildings such liberty of using the largest printing presses and biggest stocks of paper to express their ideas and to defend their interests and such liberty of promoting men and women of their own class to administer and to knock into shape the state as in Soviet Russia in Russia the bureaucratic machine has been completely smashed raised to the ground the old judges have been sent packing the bourgeois parliament has been dispersed and far more accessible representation has been given to the workers and peasants their soviets have replaced the bureaucrats or their soviets have been put in control of the bureaucrats and their soviets have been authorised to elect the judges now in this Soviet system of democracy initially of course it was not an exclusively Bolshevik affair the government that was formed out of the Soviets was itself a coalition between the Bolsheviks and the left social revolutionaries and the yesiles as a whole and the Mensheviks participated in the elections to the Soviets actually for years after the taking of power until the early 1920s and even the cadets had the right to publish their newspaper they were the cremate of the Tories basically had the right to publish their newspapers and be active in society it is true however as I think we all know that these rights and this sort of multi-party democracy was generally restricted after the taking of power in a sort of step by step process because of the realities of the struggle of the revolution and of the civil war which I think underlines that there can be no super-class democracy in a revolution which is really a fight to the death there's no third way you can't sort of just have a gentlemanly debate in that sense of course these groups especially the left SSRs but also the Mensheviks in normal circumstances would be people that normally engage in a gentlemanly I suppose debate with the Bolsheviks and very similar people and people would have passed back and forth between those parties but in a civil war organised and financed by the counter-revolutionaries by the bourgeoisie and by the imperialists you were forced to choose sides in a very vicious struggle and that's precisely of course what the SSRs what the Mensheviks and unsurprisingly obviously what the cadets did so even the Mensheviks and the SSRs openly conspired with the imperialists in the civil war openly took arms from them openly launched uprisings throughout the country in collaboration with the whites with the most reactionary forces in society the SSRs even assassinated Mierbach the German ambassador in an attempt to reopen the war with Germany and later on attempted to assassinate Lenin himself so that's obviously the reality of those circumstances making possible a kind of what we understand as a sort of gentlemanly debate between people that just so happen to have different opinions about how society should be run but that's not a point of principle that we would that is something we that workers democracy insists upon it's a product of the struggle in those circumstances but nevertheless notwithstanding that the Soviets remained an incredibly powerful democratic form of representation where workers still continue to elect their delegates and to debate in their workplaces what course the country should take how the revolution should be organised etc an elected delegates to represent them in the Soviet system and that sense remains still a far more real and practical form of democracy than anything we know today the workers government itself in other words the commissars the ministers of the government basically was elected from the all-russian congress of soviets which in the year after taking power and the 12 months after taking power in October 1917 I believe met four times something like a week at a time in which real delegates from the workplaces real working class fighters would debate over the whole situation in the country and would elect the government on that basis because the equipment I suppose of the parliament in a bourgeois democracy and of course they had various principles of this election which you're probably familiar with taken actually from the Paris commune largely which Lenin explains in state and revolution general principle these are the most fundamental principles of workers democracy which they attempted to put into place after taking power and they were as follows one, free and democratic elections and the right of recall of all officials two, no official to receive higher than that of a skilled worker three, no standing army but the armed people and four, gradually all the tasks of running the state to be carried out in turn by the workers when everybody is a bureaucrat nobody is a bureaucrat these are the general principles of workers power that are in place in order to prevent bureaucracy and to prevent privilege and to really ensure that the workers have control over their own state Lenin explains further he says this is a new type of state without bureaucracy, without a police without a permanent army which replaces bourgeois democracy by a new democracy and confers on the labouring masses legislative, executive and military power thereby creating the means by which the masses will be educated now that's also an interesting point he makes about the unity of legislative and executive power emphasised particularly after studying the Paris commune now if you study bourgeois democracy one of the most cherished principles of it is the separation of powers which you are told is to make sure that no horrible tyrant ever comes to power and bosses everyone around too much because you've got separate powers there like the judiciary and the legislative which are independent of the executive to prevent too strong a concentration of power essentially what it really is there for is to stop basically any real infringement upon the status quo is to stop capital and the movement of capital really to be prevented too much by any powerful politician I think you can see this most clearly in the United States the most ideal bourgeois democracy arguably in which they have this very tedious and complicated balance of all the houses and all of these committees and blah blah blah which are there to ensure that you basically have a bottleneck an inability for a president or anyone else to really push through progressive legislation or any other kind of legislation which might impinge upon the making of money basically which is how really the liberal see it the liberal see the making of money the buying and selling of commodities and freedom and therefore that must be protected at all costs and the state for them is nothing but a necessary evil that really must be restricted but from our point of view and this is a fundamentally different kind of status a state really in the hands of the working class created by their own organisations meeting on a regular basis there's no reason to divide the powers and indeed we want them to be united to make the power of the working class the most immediate the most practical the most flexible that it could possibly be especially in a revolutionary process where you need obviously to organise the defence of the revolution Lenin also outlined around this same time some more principles similar to the ones I've just explained in theses on workers democracy which he issued to the new workers government and there's 10 principles I'll just read out unity of all the poor and exploited masses unity of the conscious active minority for the education of the whole labouring population three, abolition of parliamentarianism which separates legislative from executive authority four, a unity between the masses and the states which will be closer than in the older democratic forms six, oh sorry five arming of the workers and peasants six, more democracy and less formalism greater facilities for the election seven, close links between the political authority and production eight, the possibility of eliminating bureaucracy nine, the transition from the formal democracy of the rich and the poor to the real democracy of the toilets and ten, participation of all members of Soviets in the management and administration of the states so far so good but there are also differences within the workers movement or in those who believe rather in workers power workers democracy, there are differences over how that should express itself principally what I'm talking about is largely the difference between Marxists or Leninists and anarchists and syndicalists now much is made of democratic centralism of Lenin much is made to suggest that this is a sort of contrivance of Lenin that is uniquely authoritarian and sort of maddeningly centralising even against what Marx would have wanted and this is something alien to real workers organisations and is a form of inevitably a form of dictatorship over them that is obviously something liberal to say but it's also something that anarchists would say as well and anarchists instead of this would stress the need for workers organisations to have autonomy or a federation kind of structure where the local workplaces and the different industries have autonomy there's no central authority that dictates to them because for them that was just a new form of hierarchy and oppression first of all it's important to stress that I don't think Lenin's ideas of democratic centralism are contrived and sucked out of his thumb I think that they are the real principles of workers democracy as they actually express themselves workers feel the need of course to join into bigger organisations and to collaborate and to submit to general decisions basically and also you can see in for instance a strike where the workers debate freely and discuss amongst themselves whether or not they should have a strike but once the decision is taken then that decision has to be if it is a decision to strike taken by a majority vote that decision has to be imposed you can't just have those workers in the minority who disagreed with having a strike then just opting out of it and effectively scabbing on the workforce to do so makes a strike impossible it makes it impractical therefore to make sure that the strike actually can exist and to make sure that the workers the majority of the workers can have their wishes carried out that decision has to be imposed and sometimes it can be imposed quite violently on the picket line if need be and of course you also elect in such a strike certain leaders charged with organising the picket lines and other kinds of activity that need to take place in the strike so you can see quite clearly in this most elementary and fundamental form of workers democracy and power you can see the same basic principles of socialism that Leninists believe in but it's a flexible idea it's a flexible thing it can vary in its application from place to place and I think that's part of the problems that's not understood about this that workers control and democracy as existed in the Soviet Union as practised under Lenin and Trotsky is taken out of its context and presented as if those are general principles which we must all apply anywhere and everywhere there are a great deal of naive ideas about how it is possible to organise a revolution and establish a socialist society with regards to the influence of anarchism and syndicalism on the left so as I've said there's stress autonomy the need for freedom of local workers organisations and I think that in itself expresses frankly a kind of bourgeois or petty bourgeois prejudice a sort of liberal prejudice that we want to have our own freedom isn't it so terrible if someone else tells us what to do it's that sort of individualistic kind of conception of things that doesn't actually flow from the working class itself and let's take a look at what really happened in Russia I think to come to a better understanding of the problems and the realities of the situation now workers control the actual phrase workers control technically is used or has been or was used in the Russian Revolution not to mean workers power and workers management of the economy and of society it was used to refer to the control of a local factory or workplace where you would elect your managers and decide on the hiring and firing and things like that and it's just restricted to that so that technically is what workers control means and of course its application varied in different circumstances and depends entirely on the technical and scientific and educational apparatus available to the working class now when the Bolsheviks took power in 1917 the idea was the understanding was that there wasn't the technical means to implement real workers management of the economy the working class was too small was not educated sufficiently a lot of it was illiterate and basically had no skill in managing things now in today's capitalist societies many of the managers or the administrators of the economy of workplaces are actually really themselves wage labourers who are probably members of the same union but in Russia that day those were a very privileged layer if you could even call them of the working class an extremely privileged layer a fairly bourgeois layer essentially and that working class was really denied that kind of knowledge and that kind of ability so the idea after taking power is that workers control was to be granted so that workers in the workplaces were granted the right by the power, by the state to decide over how their factories should be run essentially but the idea was that these workplaces would remain under the management and the expertise of the capitalists or of their managers they weren't to nationalise the whole of the industry and they weren't to put the management and the decision making over what was to be produced and how and all of the technicalities of it that was to remain in the hands of the bourgeois management class essentially that was the thinking anyway of course the reality of it of the situation in such a fierce class struggle was that in practice of course especially with the onset of the civil war and of war communism was that it wasn't actually possible to do so because these managers basically obviously sabotage things were totally opposed to the revolution the idea was that they would be under the watchful eyes of the workers who'd been granted the right to look at the books of the companies to see what was coming and what was going but in practice it was just not possible and so the nationalisations went far further but the realities of workers control in the months after taking power in early 1918 where the workers were as I said granted the right of workers control and Lenin issued a demand for the workers to take control of their own workplaces actually but the reality of that was far from the rosy picture that perhaps the anarchists would paint the anarchists have this idea that merely having workers control in the local areas would accept the need for co-operation amongst the working class in the economy as a whole but they have the idea that that arises almost automatically out of the sort of collective understanding of the working class and they don't need an authority to tell them to do it they just will sort of automatically co-operate and create a harmonious economy well the realities in the conditions of the Soviet Union in 1918 were incredibly of workers control with those of chaos of economic disintegration confusion etc one labour leader, trade union leader at the time said and this is a quote workers control has turned into an anarchistic attempt to achieve socialism in one enterprise but it actually leads to clashes among the workers themselves and to the refusal of fuel metal etc to one another and there were many instances of workers in some factories asset stripping their factories basically just selling off the machinery in order to get a bite to eat other places where factories in a more let's say advantageous position perhaps what they were making was rare and very highly sought after took advantage of that and essentially fleeced the rest of the economy there are other instances of workers under in the Soviets awarding themselves insanely high pay rises that were just not feasible and other things now this is not to denigrate the ability of the working class to run its own workplaces but in dire economic circumstances at the end of a horrific world war in which people were starving to death and were exhausted and when the means of education were not really there either in those circumstances in the chaos of the revolution surprisingly some of the workers behaved in such a manner and there are political problems as well you will never have a socialist revolution in which every single share every single area of the working class is behind the revolution is fully on board and understands what needs to happen the working class is not homogenous there are more privileged and conservative sections of the working class in Chile the truck drivers and the Chilean revolution I don't know the details of it but essentially went on strike against the IAE government largely backed and organised by the CIA but in Russia the VIXL I'm not sure if I pronounced it exactly correctly was essentially the train drivers union and this was a conservative section of the working class that didn't want the revolution and it threatened the rest of the working class with a boycott, with a strike basically where they wouldn't move anything around the country because of the revolution now in those circumstances you're attempting to set up a workers government in the interests of the whole working class what the anarchist might see as just autonomy is just different layers of the working class doing what they wish actually not only creates chaos but it's not even autonomy because it means that those different areas of the working class are essentially dictating to the rest of the working class what should happen there's no autonomy there at all it remains centralism in a sense but it's the centralism of those who happen to work in that industry so it became necessary to introduce a control from above workers management through the state from above which the anarchist will complain about and talk about how anti-democratic it was but in the conditions it was absolutely essential and in fact it would be essential even in more favourable conditions in the sense that we need to plan and to coordinate the economy which is what socialism is all about as Trotsky himself says and this is a quote he said no workers won't have complete control over their workplace they will be subject to policies laid down by the local council of workmen's deputies and their range of discretion will be limited in turn by regulations made for each class of industry by the boards or bureau of the central governments Kropotkin's communalism was an anarchist would work in a simple society based on agriculture and household industries but is not at all suited to the state of things in modern industrial society the coal from the Donets Basin goes all over Russia and is indispensable in all sorts of industries now don't you see that if the organised people of that district could do as they pleased they could hold up all the rest of Russia if they so chose entire independence of each locality respecting its industries would result in endless friction and difficulties in a society that has reached the stage of local specialisation of industry it might even bring on a civil war so workers control in our conception of it is merely one side of the equation it's the right of workers in a workplace to elect their own managers the details of how the plan should be implemented but beyond that you need also overall control of the economy which should come through a workers government elected through workers organisations and actually the reality is is that if you don't have that if you have this autonomy of workers control which the anarchists would argue for actually you have essentially capitalism run by co-operatives and of course you do have co-operatives under capitalism some run by anarchists others more respectable kinds like John Lewis and such they're nothing fundamentally different from other capitalist companies they have to survive in the markets and they can't do away with the markets because there's no overall control of the economy the market is precisely that anarchy of production where each enterprise tries to profit at the expense of others it tries to maximise its profits in this unpredictable unpredictable and unknown market and if you have some sort of situation where all of the workers run their own workplaces but there's no overall plan there's no overall harmonisation of the economy there's no means to ensure that that takes place then of course what you will have as precisely what Trotsky described is anarchy in production is booms and busts just as you have under capitalism and therefore incentives to hire new workers in the more successful cooperatives perhaps new workers you hire will be on less strong contracts than the ones in the original cooperative and then you'll have to fire them when you have an economic crisis the capitalists themselves are not fundamentally evil they behave in the way that they do because they have to obey the market they exist in a market and they have to survive in an unpredictable marketplace and therefore they have to make a profit in accordance to the laws of the market workers control workers cooperatives within a market without overall control and harmonisation of the economy fundamentally would be no difference and there are many there is one particularly good example of this there are many small examples of it of course in the UK in the 1970s the trade unions were very powerful and you did have almost a situation of dual power in the factories where the capitalists would kind of have to do what the workers wanted them to do in a sense but you didn't have socialism you didn't have overall control over the economy but the best example has to be Yugoslavia under Tito where he introduced the kind of form of workers democracy which in reality was kind of fictitious anyway but a sort of semi-real form of workers democracy at a local level but in which essentially the different enterprises of the economy competed with each other and even on the world market and of course what happened is all the typical problems of a capitalist economy so Slovenia ended up which is one of the component parts of Yugoslavia Slovenia ended up being six times richer than Kosovo because I guess it was already more slightly more developed perhaps it was in a more advantageous position perhaps it had a trade perhaps it had a more educated workforce I don't know the details of it but those kind of discrepancies are inevitable with the blindness of the markets the only way that you can do away with them and create genuine equality and genuine freedom is when the whole of society takes over and understands all of the resources at its disposal and collectively plans them and harmonises them not for the short term gain of this or that enterprise that happens but plans them for the profit of all of society for the most harmonious profit of all of society and to do that you have to have centralisation you have to have an overall control of the economy the way that we would propose that or one of the ideas that has been mooted in the past is perhaps the idea of having under a worker's government committees in charge of planning the economy composed of one third representatives of the central government which is itself of course elected through workers democracy one third representatives of the trade unions and maybe one third representatives of the workers in the local industry maybe even you could find some form of representation for the consumers as well within that system of planning there's no hard and fast rule and obviously we haven't established socialism so there's obviously a lot of unknown quantities but that kind of idea some sort of central planning organisation with representation from the different layers of the working class and the different sides of the working class the consumption side and the productive side and making sure that some sort of representative of the overall interests of the process is there at all is there through the central government in the Soviet Union they attempted to do something like that very quickly after taking power there was an organisation called Visenca which was kind of like an economic Soviets in other words you had the political Soviets, the supreme Soviet the all Russian congress of Soviets that I've described but also to be elected was an economic Soviet just dealing with economic questions and the top body of this was to be composed by I don't know where I've got it 10 members from the political Soviet that is the main central Soviet 20 from regional industry and 30 from the trade unions however the reality of it was that it fell into disuse because of the conditions of the civil war and the chaos and confusion of the revolution of course it was incredibly difficult to manage workers democracy in those conditions also the all Russian congress of Soviets which I said met 4 times in the first year of the revolution and whose job was to hold the government to account etc that also began to meet less and less regularly after 1918 and you can imagine why the conditions of the civil war the blockade etc the economic conditions the military conditions the best working class fighters were literally dying in the civil war the energy from below they lacked the time etc for this kind of participation to be real and that of course I have to be very telegraphic here but that of course is the ultimate reason why workers democracy gradually got extinguished in the Soviet Union and replaced with Stalinism it was the dire conditions it was the lack of education of the working class the lack of time the exhaustion etc gradually bit by bit workers were usurped by the bureaucrats the middle classes particularly the former tsarist bureaucrats who found more and more room to take privileges for themselves and push the working class to the side and that's the basis of Stalinism but anyway the last thing I just want to say is just regarding Lenin Lenin always wanted more workers initiative always wanted more workers control even despite the difficulties in Russia the realities of the situation in fact one of the last things that he ever did was he issued a decree attempting to encourage workers to take more control of their industries and also to encourage more women's involvement in industry of course he then died in early 1924 but was really incapacitated for some time before that but just to finish on a quote from him 10 days after the taking of power in late 1917 he said comrades working people remember that now you yourselves are at the helm of the state no one will help you if you yourselves do not unite and take into your hands all the affairs of the state your soviets are from now on the organs of state authority legislative bodies with full powers rally around your soviets strengthen them get on with the jobs yourselves begin right at the bottom do not wait for anybody the creative living activity of the masses that is the principal factor of the new society the workers must begin to organise workers control of their factories revitalise the farms with industrial products and exchange them for wheat every object every pound of bread should be counted for socialism is above all else the census keeping socialism is not created by orders from on high it is a stranger to mindless official bureaucratism living, breathing socialism is the creation of the popular masses themselves