Kevin Murphy: Class struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory: Review

Source material is arranged to show how revolutions are the confluence of social crises and years of painstaking preparatory work of focused propaganda, agitation and intervention by organised groups of revolutionaries. Thus the period is rich in lessons for how to organise, not as a blueprint on how to act now, but as an example how Russian revolutionaries connected particular localised conditions and grievances to the national and international class struggle.

Finally, it shows that the revolution’s descent into barbaric dictatorship, the negation of all the revolution stood for, was not a smooth process proceeding inevitably from its outset (the “continuity thesis”, p2) but one actively contested by the organised working class who were defeated through a combination of exhaustion, economic ruin and ruthless political suppression.

Murphy uses archive material from one strategic metal factory the Guzhon, later renamed the Hammer and Sickle, in Moscow. In pre and post revolutionary Russian the factory served as much more than simply a place for making hammers and sickles. In fact the “Soviet factory acted as the community-organising centre for food and housing distribution, as well as the workers’ leisure activities.” And therefore, it represents in microcosm the developments in Russian and then Soviet society itself.

The Guzhon metal factory was the largest in Russia, making more than a million roubles profit a year and enjoying massive expansion in orders, up to 40% during the war. It was also wracked by strikes, political and economic, occupations and lock-outs, leading Lenin to rebuff the bosses’ claim to have imposed class peace, writing in March 1913, “You are wrong you gentlemen who own the factories! Even in the economic sense, to say nothing of the political, the workers’ gains are terrifying!”

The early part of the book traces the fluctuations in shop floor activism and the components of the workforce. It indicates how membership of political organisations varied. The Bolsheviks were at first quite weak in the factory with many workers following the Zubatov secret police union which, in order to retain its credibility with the workforce, was forced to fight and was later supplanted by both Bolshevik and Socialist Revolutionary (SR) delegates. This section also graphically illustrates how revolutionaries brought in political issues around the rampant sexism of the shop floor where young women workers were often raped by supervisors and subject to harassment and abuse by fellow workers.

A turning point in the political organisation of the factory, and indeed the class struggle nationally, was the Lena massacre of 1912 where hundreds of striking gold miners were shot dead on the orders of the Tsar.

Between this incident and the end of 1916 Guzhon workers struck 19 times. Of these eight strikes were overtly political. (p35) As political strikes became more frequent the tactic of occupation was used. “We were Italian strikers!” wrote one participant of the eight day strike in September-October 1916. The workers elected delegates to negotiate with the owners and refused to leave the factory (p34).

In the heady days of February 1917, 3500 metal workers walked out after lunch with workers running “from shop to shop shouting down with the Tsar… and then everyone like an avalanche, advanced through the main gate towards the city centre” (workers’ account, cited p44). The “noisy growing crowd” surged over the bridge, joining more demonstrators, shouting “Hooray!” After one worker was shot another Guzhon metal worker “threw the police officer into the Iauza river”. Another account describes how “the head of the gendarmes and his assistant were thrown from the bridge into the Iauza. The remaining police seeing that they were powerless, fled.”

Throughout 1917 workers’ demands became more inclusive of previously marginalised parts of the workforce and direct action was used to implement the 8-hour day and other agreements. In June management complained of workers using the “most violent measures against management… dragging them out in wheelbarrows and other insults.” (p49) Political and cultural discussions flourished with demands for a “permanent workers’ committee . . . general factory meetings, lectures and other cultural-educational events” (factory committee strike demands June 1917, p50).

Following the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 the factory committee and local soviet proceeded to introduce workers’ control especially as a response the economic chaos during the civil war. The following years saw a high degree of worker participation in debates and actions with 800 out of 1100 workers attending a meeting in 1918 on the “critical flour situation” and to organise aid for families of deceased workers. (p68) Workers constantly used their right to recall workplace delegates and in 1919 the SRs successfully won the factory committee election. A 1918 general meeting donated 1,000 roubles to an Anarchist newspaper, indicating at least elements of a vibrant workers’ democracy.

This continued into the early years of the New Economic Policy (NEP) where two-thirds of delegates were non (Communist) party members. (p91) The workers were still confident and organised as late as 1926 when workers berated party officials reminding them that “Reports should be connected to real life” and to remember the “words of Lenin” and expel officials who do not pull their weight on the shop-floor. (p92)

During 1926 considerable aid was raised in the factory for the British general strike with workers making political points against the incipient party bureaucracy under Stalin. They complained that the party speaker “talked beautifully and splendidly about these . . . vermin traitor . . . English leaders while our ragamuffin Soviet leaders, who are worried about workers there, but do not have the same worries about our Soviet workers” or “Can you tell us how it is on one hand you put anarchists in jail, while at the same time our union conducts protests against the execution of [American anarchists] Sacco and Vanzetti?” (p85)

The painstaking work of research carried out by Murphy is invaluable. Of course any researcher is selective but it lends far greater weight to his political analysis of the triumph of Stalinism as a defeat forced on a vibrant working class revolutionary movement. At times, perhaps as an inevitable side effect of being published as an academic monograph, Murphy’s connecting prose between vignettes is somewhat dry but the vividness of the workers’ accounts more than makes up for this – if anything I could have coped with more quotations from the marvellous transcripts.

Another weakness, perhaps again due to its academic nature, is failure to sufficiently address how and why the revolution was defeated. However, there are lots of clues such as the exhaustion of civil war and the lack of a political and organisational expression of opposition. To quote a police account from 1913 “to have any organised events, appropriate agitation is necessary . . . [requiring] some kind of underground party organisation.” (p23)

Whilst the partial suppression of workers’ democracy during the civil war – the banning of factions and proscribing of political parties is not referred to (and this is an omission) it is clear that these mistakes were not just confined to the Bolsheviks but enjoyed some support amongst some sections of organised workers. Murphy’s account also effectively demonstrates how the later suppression of workers’ opposition and Trotskyism in the late twenties was a break from the earlier revolutionary traditions.

Any militant today wanting to uncover our class’s revolutionary heritage, to read first hand accounts from participants, to try to creatively apply the formulas to today’s very different world, but one still structured by mass misery and elite privilege, would do well to read this book. It provides real insight into a world and a revolution which is either ignored or traduced today.

Sat 02, August 2008 @ 13:20