V. I.

Lenin

Factorycourts is the name given to courts consisting of elected
representatives of workers and employers (factory owners in the case of
industry) that examine cases and disputes arising in connection with the
terms of hire, with the fixing of rates of pay for ordinary work and
overtime, with the discharge of workers in violation of rules, with
payments for damage to material, with unfair imposition of fines, etc.,
etc. Courts of this kind exist in the majority of the West-European
countries, but not in Russia, and we propose to examine what advantages
they bring the workers and why the institution of factory courts is
desirable in addition to the ordinary courts, where cases are heard by a
sole judge appointed by the government or elected by the propertied
classes, with no elected representatives of the employers and the workers.

Thefirst advantage of the factory court is that it is much more
accessible to the workers. To present a petition to an ordinary court, one
has to submit it in writing (which often requires the employment of a
solicitor); stamp duty has to be paid; there are long waiting periods; the
plaintiff has to appear in court, which takes him and the witnesses away
from their work; then comes a further period of waiting until the case
goes to a higher court to be retried after an appeal by dissatisfied
litigants. Is it any wonder that workers do not willingly resort to the
ordinary courts? Factory courts, on the contrary, consist of employers and
workers elected as judges. It is not at all difficult for a worker to make
a verbal complaint to one of his fellow workers whom he has himself
elected. Sessions of factory courts are usually held on holidays or, in general, at times when the workers are free and do
not have to interrupt their work. Cases are handled much more
expeditiously by factory courts.

Thesecond advantage that the workers gain from factory courts is that the
judges have a far better understanding of factory affairs and,
furthermore, are not outside officials but local people who have a
knowledge of the workers’ living conditions and local industrial
conditions; half of them are workers, who will always be just to a worker
and will not regard him as a drunkard, an insolent and ignorant fellow (as
he is regarded by the majority of official judges, who come from the
bourgeois class, the class of property owners, and who almost always
retain their connections with bourgeois society, with the factory owners,
directors, and engineers, but are separated from the workers as by a
Chinese Wall). Official judges are mostly concerned that matters should go
smoothly on paper; as long as things look all right on paper, the
government official does not worry about anything else—he is merely
concerned with receiving his salary and pleasing those in higher
authority. This accounts for the disgusting amount of red tape, protracted
litigation, and pettifoggery—something has been incorrectly
recorded, something did not get properly entered in the court record, and
the case is lost, however just it may have been. When the judges are
elected from among the employers and from among the workers, they have no
need to pile up red tape, because they are not working for a salary and
are not dependent on parasitic government officials. They are not
concerned with getting a still better post, but with settling disputes
that prevent the factory owners from continuing production uninterruptedly
and workers from continuing their work in peace and with less fear of
chicaneries and unjust vexations on the part of the employers. Furthermore, one has to know factory life well and from
personal experience in order to be able to settle disputes between
employers and workers. The official judge glances at the worker’s
pay-book, reads the rules, and refuses to listen to anything
else—you have broken the rules, he says, so you bear the
responsibility, and the rest does not concern me. But judges elected from
among the employers and from among the workers do not merely look at
papers

but at what happens in real life. It sometimes happens that a rule remains
unchanged on paper, while in practice things proceed differently. Very
often the official judge, even if he wants to, even if he examines cases
with the greatest attention, cannot understand the point at issue, because
he does not know the customs, he does not know the methods of fixing
rates, he does not know the methods by which a master often cheats the
worker without infringing the rules and the rates (as by transferring the
worker to another job, by giving him different material, etc.). Elected
judges who themselves work or who manage factory affairs have an immediate
understanding of such issues, they can easily understand what exactly the
worker wants, they are not concerned merely with observing the rules but
with ensuring that the worker cannot be cheated by the bypassing of the
rules, with ensuring that there can be no pretexts for deception and
arbitrariness. There was a recent report in the newspapers that hat-makers
had almost been convicted of theft, on a complaint from the employers, for
making use of the waste trimmings from hats. Fortunately honest barristers
were found who gathered information to prove that this was the custom in
the industry and that the workers, far from being thieves, had not
violated a single regulation. The ordinary, simple worker who earns very
small wages can hardly ever get to a good barrister, and for this reason,
as every worker knows, official judges often pass cruel, senselessly
cruel, sentences in cases affecting workers. Absolute justice is never to
be expected from official judges: we have said above that these judges
belong to the bourgeois class and are prejudiced in advance to give
credence to whatever the factory owner says and to disbelieve the words of
the worker. The judge consults the law:

a master and servant contract (one man hires himself out for wages to do
something for another or to serve him). As far as he is concerned, it is
all the same whether an engineer, a doctor, a factory director, or an
unskilled labourer hires himself out to the factory owner; the judge
thinks (by the dictates of his bureaucratic soul and his bourgeois
stupidity) that the unskilled labourer should know his rights and be able,
as well as a director, engineer, or doctor, to make stipulations in his
contract for everything needed.

But the judges in a factory court (half of the panel) are elected from
among the workers, who know very well that a new worker, or a young
worker, often feels in the factory or in the office as though he were in a
dark forest and has not even the ghost of an idea that he is concluding a
“free contract” and that he can “foresee” terms in that contract that are to his advantage. Let us take the following
instance:

a worker wants to register a complaint against unjust rejection of work or
against fines. It is useless for him even to think of complaining to a
judge or to a factory inspector, both of whom are government officials. An
official will keep insisting on one thing: the law gives the
factory owner the right to fine workers and to reject bad work, so that it
is for the factory owner to decide whether the work is bad and whether
blame rests with the worker. That is why workers so rarely seek recourse to
the courts: they put up with abuses, put up with them until finally they
strike when their cup of patience runs over. With judges elected from
their midst, the workers would find it incomparably easier to secure
equity and protection in such cases and in regard to all petty factory
disputes and insults. The wealthy official judge does not regard such
petty matters as worthy of his attention (like having hot water for tea,
or an extra cleaning of a machine, or similar items); but to the worker
these things are by no means petty. Only the workers themselves can judge
what a huge amount of gross ill-treatment, of insults, and of humiliation
can be caused by what at first sight appear trifling, innocuous,
inoffensive rules and regulations in the factory.

Thethird advantage workers stand to gain from factory courts is that in
and through them workers learn to know the laws. As a rule the workers (in
their mass) do not know and cannot get to know the laws, although
government officials and official judges often punish them for not knowing
the laws. When an official confronts a worker with the law and the worker
pleads ignorance of its very existence, the official (or the judge) either
laughs at him or rebukes him with the statement: “Ignorance of the
law is no excuse,” as basic Russian legislation puts it. Any official and
judge, therefore, assumes that every worker knows the laws. But
this assumption is a bourgeois lie, a lie invented by propertied people and by capitalists against the propertyless, the same sort of lie
as the assumption that a worker concludes a “free contract”
with the master. In actual fact, the worker who starts in at the factory
at a tender age, when he has learned no more than to read and write (and
very, very many have not even been able to learn to read and write!), has
never had time to learn anything about laws, has had nobody to learn from,
and, no doubt, has had no reason to learn—because if bourgeois
officials apply the laws without asking him, the laws will not be of much
benefit to the worker! The bourgeois classes that accuse the workers of
ignorance of the laws have done absolutely nothing to help them acquire
the knowledge, so that it is not so much the workers themselves who are
to blame for their ignorance of the law as their exploiters (=those who
plunder them), who own all the property, live by the labour of others and
want to he the only ones to take advantage of education and
knowledge. There is no school and there are no hooks that will give the
workers a knowledge of the laws, because only very few workers can read
books—very, very few among the millions of working people oppressed
by capital. For the same reason there are very few who attend school, and
even those who have had some schooling can, in most cases, only read,
write, and count; this is too little for the understanding of a branch of
knowledge as complicated and difficult as are the Russian laws. The
workers will gain a knowledge of the laws only when they have to apply
them themselves and hear and see justice done according to those
laws. Workers could learn to know the laws better if, for instance, they
were appointed to juries (with the factory owners required to pay them
their regular wages for the days spent in court); but bourgeois society is
so constructed that only people from the propertied classes may serve as
jurymen (and also peasants who have been schooled in “social
service,” i. e., in the lower ranks of the police); the propertyless, the
proletarians, must submit to a court that is not theirs, while they
themselves have no right to judge! When factory courts are set up, the
workers elect their own comrades as judges and the elections take place at
regular intervals; in this way those elected from among the workers
acquaint themselves with the laws by applying them in practice, that is, they not only read the laws as they are written in a book (for
that does not by any means ensure a knowledge of the laws), but see for
themselves in practice what particular laws are applicable to what cases
and what their effect on the workers is. It is much easier for other
workers, apart from the elected judges, to acquaint themselves with the
laws through factory courts, because it is easy for a worker to speak to a
judge elected from among his mates and obtain from him any necessary
information Workers will visit a factory court more often than a court
conducted by civil servants, because it is more accessible; they will
listen to cases in which their relatives and friends are participating and
in this way acquaint themselves with the laws. For a working man to
understand in whose interests the laws are drawn up and in whose interests
those who apply them act, it is important that he should become acquainted
with the laws in practice and not merely from books. Once the worker is acquainted
with the laws he will see quite clearly that the interests are those of
the propertied class, the men of property, the capitalists, the
bourgeoisie and that the working class will never win a sound and radical
improvement n its conditions, so long as it does not win the right to
elect its representatives to participate in the formulation of laws and in
supervision over their fulfilment.

Furthermore(fourthly), a good aspect of factory courts is that they teach
the workers to take an independent part in public, state affairs (because
the court is a state institution and the activity of the court is a part
of state activity), they teach the workers to elect the most intelligent
and honest of their comrades, those who firmly support the workers’ cause,
to post where their activities can be seen by the whole working class,
where workers’ representatives can declare the needs and demands of all
the workers. It is to the interest of the capitalist class, of the entire
bourgeoisie, to keep the workers ignorant and isolated, to remove as
quickly as possible those among them who are more intelligent and who
make use of their intellect and knowledge, not to become traitors to their
class and to fawn on the foremen, masters, and police, but to help other
workers acquire greater knowledge and to learn to stand up jointly for the
working-class cause. But in order that such advanced representatives, of whom that cause has great need, should come to be known by all workers
and win their trust, it is important that all should witness their
activities, that all should know whether they are capable of expressing
and upholding the real needs and desires of the workers. If the workers
could elect such people as judges, the best of them would be known to
all, they would gain wider trust, and the proletarian cause would win by
it greatly. If we look at our landowners, industrialists, and merchants,
we see that they are not content with the fact that each of them is able
to go to a governor or to a minister and present his requests; they also
make sure of having their representatives in the courts (the courts with
representatives from the social-estates) and that these participate
directly in the administration (e.g., Marshals of the

Nobility, [2] school inspectors, etc., are elected by the
nobility; members of factory affairs boards, [3] of stock-exchange and fair committees are elected by
the merchants, etc.). The working class in Russia is without any
rights at all; workers are regarded as draught animals that have to
toil for others and hold their tongues, that never dare to state
their needs and desires. If the workers were to elect their comrades
to factory courts constantly, they would have at least some
possibility of participating in public affairs and of stating, not
only the opinions of individual workers—of Pyotr, Sidor, or Ivan—but also of stating the opinions and demands of all the workers. In that case
the workers would not be so mistrustful of the courts as they are of those
conducted by government officials; they would see their comrades there,
those who would intercede for them.

Further(fifthly), the factory courts are of benefit to the workers
because they would give greater publicity to factory affairs and to all
incidents in factory life. We see today that the factory owners and the
government are doing every thing in their power to conceal what is
happening in the factory world from the general public; it is forbidden to
publish anything about strikes, the reports of factory inspectors on the
condition of the workers are no longer being printed, an effort is being
made to have all abuses passed in silence and get matters settled as
quickly as possible “in camera,” by government officials,
and all workers’ meetings are prohibited. It is not surprising that the mass of the workers
frequently has very little knowledge of what is going on in other
factories or even in other departments of the same factory. Factory
courts, to which workers could frequently appeal, which would be held in
public, i.e., in the presence of a working—class public, in
non-working hours, would benefit the workers by helping to make known all
abuses and would thus facilitate their struggle against various factory
outrages and accustom them to think, not only of the regime at their own
factory, but of the regime at all factories, of the conditions of all workers. [1]

Finally,there is one other benefit accruing from factory courts that must
be mentioned: they get factory owners, directors, and foremen into the
habit of treating workers decently, of treating them as equal citizens and
not as slaves. Every worker knows that factory owners and foremen all too
often permit themselves to treat workers in a disgracefully insulting
manner, to rail at them, etc. It is difficult for a worker to complain
against this attitude; it can be rebuffed only when the workers are
sufficiently developed and are able to give support to their comrade. The
factory owners and foremen say that our workers are very ignorant and
coarse, for which reason they have to be treated roughly. There are still
many survivals, actually, of serfdom among our workers, there is little
education and much uncouthness—this cannot be denied. But who is
mostly to blame for this? It is precisely the factory owners, foremen, and
government officials who are to blame, they, whose attitude to the workers
is that of feudal lords towards serfs, they, who do not want to consider the worker as an equal. If workers make
a request or ask a question civilly, they are everywhere met with
rudeness, with oaths and threats. Is it not obvious that when factory
owners blame the workers for their rudeness under these circumstances they
are placing the blame on the wrong shoulders? Factory courts would
speedily wean our exploiters of their insulting manner: there would be
worker judges in the court side by side with the factory owners, and they
would discuss cases and vote together. The factory-owner judges would have
to regard the worker judges as their equals and not as their hired
servants. The contestants and witnesses in court would come from the
factory owners and the workers, and the former would get their training
in addressing workers civilly. This is very important to the workers, in
view of the fact that at present discussions of this sort are extremely
rare:

the factory owner refuses to recognise delegates elected by the workers,
so that the latter have only one way open to them—to strike, a
difficult and often a very burdensome way. Further, if there were also
workers among the judges, workers would be able to appeal freely to the
court against rough treatment. Worker judges would always be on their
side, and if a factory owner or a master were summoned to court for
insulting behaviour, he would lose all desire to display his arrogance and
insolence.

Factorycourts consisting of representatives of masters and workers in
equal numbers, therefore, would have great significance for the workers
and would bring them many benefits. They would be more accessible to the
workers than the ordinary courts, there would be less pettifoggery and red
tape, the judges would have a better knowledge of the factory conditions,
and would judge more fairly; they would acquaint the workers with the
laws, they would teach the workers to elect their representatives and to
participate in state affairs, they would give greater publicity to factory
life and to the working-class movement, and they would accustom the
factory owners to treat the workers decently, to have polite dealings with
them as equals with equals. It is no matter for wonder, therefore, that
the workers in all European countries demand the establishment of factory
courts, that they demand that these courts should be set up, not only for factory workers (which the Germans and the French
already have), but also for workers engaged in home-work for capitalists
(for handicraftsmen), as well as for agricultural labourers. No officials
appointed by the government ( no judges and no factory inspectors )
can ever replace institutions in which the workers themselves participate : after what has been said above, this requires
no further explanation. Every worker, furthermore, knows from his own
experience what he has to expect from government officials; if he is told
that government officials can he concerned with the workers’ welfare
equally with people elected from among the workers themselves, he knows
it to be a lie and a deception. Deception of this sort is of great
advantage to the government that wants the workers to remain the ignorant,
rightless, and inarticulate slaves of the capitalists, and for this reason
one often hears these lying assertions from government officials or from
writers who defend the interests of the factory owners and the government.

Theneed for factory courts and the benefits they could bring the workers
are so obvious that they were long ago recognised even by Russian government officials. True, it was so long ago that many have
forgotten it! It was at the time when our peasants were liberated from
serf dependence (in 1861, over 38 years ago). About that time the Russian
Government decided also to replace the laws governing artisans and factory
workers with new ones; it was all too obvious then that the old laws for
workers could not remain when the peasants had been liberated, since many
of the workers had been serfs when the old laws were drawn up. And so the
government appointed a commission of several officials to study the
factory laws of France and Germany (and of other countries) and to draft a
bill to change the Russian laws for artisans and factory workers. The
commission included some very important people. Nevertheless, they got
down to the task and printed five tomes in which they outlined foreign
laws and proposed a new law for Russia. This new law, proposed by the
commission, was to institute factory courts with the judges elected from among the factory owners and the workers in equal numbers . The
draft was print ed in 1865, that is, thirty-four years ago. But what, the worker will ask, happened to this draft law? Why did not the government,
which had itself instructed the officials to draft a law on the necessary
changes, introduce factory courts in Russia?.

Ourgovernment dealt with the commission’s draft in the same manner in
which it deals with any draft laws that are in any way of benefit to the
people and to the workers. The officials were rewarded for their labours
for the good of the tsar and the fatherland; they were given decorations
to hang from ribbons round their necks and accorded higher ranks and more
lucrative posts. And the draft law they had prepared was quietly
“pigeon-holed,” as they say in offices. And so this draft law is
still stacked away in its pigeon-hole. The government has even stopped
thinking of according the workers the right to elect comrades from their
midst to factory courts.

Itcannot, however, be said that the government has not once thought about
the workers since that time. True, it has not thought of them of its own
free will, but only when forced to do so by menacing workers’ unrest and
strikes; nevertheless, it has thought of them. It has published laws
prohibiting child labour in factories, prohibiting night-work for women in
certain industries, reducing the working day, and appointing factory
inspectors. Despite all the pettifoggery employed in drafting them,
despite the numerous loopholes left open for the factory owners to violate
and get round them, these laws have still been of some benefit. Why, then,
does the government prefer introducing new laws and new
officials—factory inspectors—instead of introducing factory
courts, provided for by a law that has been fully elaborated? The reason
for this is very obvious and the workers must fully understand it, for
this example will make clear the entire policy of the Russian Government
with respect to the working class.

Thegovernment has appointed new officials instead of factory courts,
because factory courts would raise the level of the workers’
class-consciousness; make them more conscious of their rights, of their
human and civic dignity; teach them to think independently about state
affairs and about the interests of the entire working class; teach them to
elect their more developed comrades to represent them, and in this way undermine, if only in part, the undivided authority
assumed by government officials. This is what the government fears more
than anything else. It is even prepared to dispense a few hand-outs to the
workers (only mites, of course, and only with one hand that does the
giving ceremonially in full view of the public, so that it may pose as a
benefactor, while taking them away slyly and gradually with the other
hand! The workers now know this trick, having had a sample of it in the
factory law of June 2, 18971)—it is prepared to dole out crumbs as
long as the autocratic power of the bureaucracy is left untouched and
there is no awakening of the workers’ class-consciousness, no development
of their independence. The government can easily avoid this terrible
danger by appointing new officials, since officials are the humble
servants of the government. It is no trouble to forbid officials (factory
inspectors, for instance) to publish their reports, it is no trouble to
forbid them to talk to the workers regarding their rights and regarding
the abuses of the masters, it is no trouble to turn them into factory
police sergeants and to order them to report to the police all
dissatisfaction and unrest on the part of the workers.

Therefore,so long as the present political system remains in
Russia—i.e., denial of rights to the people, lawless actions on the
part of government officials and the police, who are not answerable to the
people—the workers cannot expect the introduction of factory courts
which can be of benefit to them. The government understands full well that
factory courts would very speedily cause the workers to go over to more
radical demands. Having elected their representatives to the factory
courts, the workers would soon realise the insufficiency of this step,
because the factory owners and landlords who exploit them send their
representatives to very many state institutions at a much higher level;
the workers would certainly demand a general all-people’s
representation. Having once secured court publicity for factory affairs
and the workers’ needs, they would soon see that this is not enough,
because in our day real publicity can be obtained only through newspapers
and popular meetings, so that the workers would demand freedom of
assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press.

This is why the government has buried the draft law to introduce factory courts in Russia !

Onthe other hand, let us assume for a moment that the government were
deliberately, with deception of the workers in mind, to introduce factory
courts today and to retain the present political system intact. Would this
be of any benefit to the workers? It would bring them no benefits at all:
the workers would not even elect to these courts the most class-conscious
and most loyal of their comrades, those who are most devoted to the cause
of the working class, knowing that in Russia for every straightforward and
honest word a man may be seized simply by order of the police and thrown
into prison or transported to Siberia without trial!

Itfollows, therefore, that the demand for factory courts with judges
elected from among the workers is only one small part of a wider and more
radical demand: the demand for political rights for the people, i.e., the
right to participate in the administration of the state and the right to
make known the needs of the people openly, not only in the press, but also
at popular meetings.

---
Notes:
[1]
It must, of course, be remembered that factory courts can be only one of
the ways and means of publicity, and not even the chief means. The life in
factories, the conditions of the workers and their struggle can be brought
to public knowledge in a real and comprehensive manner only by a free
working-class press and by free meetings of the people to discuss all
state affairs. Similarly, workers’ representation at factory courts is
only one of the means of representation and is far from being the chief
means. The real representation of the workers’ needs and interests is
possible only through a national representative assembly (a parliament)
that would promulgate laws and supervise their execution. Below we shall
deal with the question as to whether factory courts are possible under the
conditions now obtaining in Russia.
— Lenin

[2]
Marshal of the Nobility —in tsarist Russia, the elected
representative of the nobility of a gubernia or uyezd. The Marshal of the
Nobility was in charge of all the affairs o the nobility; he occupied an
influential position in the administration and took the chair at meetings
of the Zemstvo.

[3]
Factory affairs boards —bodies supervising factory affairs
in tsarist Russia. As a rule, the boards consisted of the provincial
governor, the public prosecutor, the chief of the police administration,
the factory inspector, and two factory owners.