Industrial courts are courts composed of elected representatives from workers and employers (factory owners in industry) and which hear cases and disputes that arise so frequently from conditions of hire, from the determination of wages for ordinary and overtime work, from the settlement of workers not according to regulations, from compensation for damaged materials, from the improper imposition of fines, and so forth and so forth. In the majority of Western European states such courts exist; in Russia—they do not. And we intend to examine what advantages they bring to workers and why the establishment of industrial courts is desirable in addition to ordinary courts, in which a single judge, appointed by the government or chosen by the propertied classes, sits in judgment without any elected representatives from employers or from workers.

The first advantage of an industrial court consists in that it is far more accessible to workers. To lodge a complaint in an ordinary court, one must write a petition (for this one often has to turn to a lawyer), one must pay court fees, one must wait long periods, one must appear in court, interrupting one's work and calling witnesses away from theirs, one must then wait until the case, upon appeal by dissatisfied litigants, passes to a higher court, where the case is decided all over again. It is no wonder that workers are so reluctant to resort to ordinary courts! Industrial courts, by contrast, consist of employers and workers elected as judges. To lodge a complaint verbally to one's own elected comrade is by no means difficult for a worker. Sessions of industrial courts are usually appointed on holidays or at such times when workers are free and do not have to interrupt their occupations. Cases in industrial courts proceed far more quickly.

The second advantage of industrial courts for workers consists in that the judges in them understand factory and mill affairs far better, that moreover the judges are not outside officials but local people acquainted with the conditions of workers' lives and with the conditions of local production, and furthermore half the judges are workers who will always treat a worker justly and will not regard him as a drunkard, an impudent fellow, and an ignoramus (as bureaucratic judges mostly do, judges drawn from the bourgeois class, from the class of propertied people, and who almost always maintain connections with bourgeois society, with factory owners, directors, engineers, while being separated from workers by a veritable Great Wall of China). Bureaucratic judges are concerned above all with ensuring that a case goes smoothly on paper: so long as everything is in order in the paperwork, the bureaucrat cares nothing further—he seeks only to receive his salary and to curry favor with his superiors. This is why there is always such a disgraceful amount of red tape, litigation, and pettifogging trickery in bureaucratic courts: if something is written incorrectly on a form, if one fails to enter something in the record when one ought—the case is lost, even though it was a just case. When elected representatives from factory owners and from workers sit as judges, they have absolutely no need to increase the red tape: they serve not for salary, they are not dependent on parasitic bureaucrats. They are concerned not with obtaining a better position, but with settling disputes that prevent factory owners from conducting their production uninterrupted, that prevent workers from continuing their work calmly and from fearing harassment and unjust insults from their employers. And furthermore, in order to judge disputes between employers and workers, one must know factory life well, from one's own experience. The bureaucratic judge glances at a worker's passbook, reads a regulation—and wants to listen to nothing more: the regulation has been violated, he says, so answer for it, and I know nothing more about the matter. But elected judges from among employers and workers do not look at papers alone, but at how things actually are in life. Sometimes, after all, a regulation remains perfectly intact on paper while reality turns out quite differently. A bureaucratic judge often, even if he wanted to, even if he were examining a case with full attention, cannot understand what the essence of the matter is, because he does not know the customs, does not know the methods of determining piece rates, does not know the ways masters often squeeze workers without violating regulations or piece rates (for example, by reassigning them to different work, giving them different materials, etc.). Elected judges, who themselves work or themselves conduct factory affairs, immediately understand all such questions; they easily grasp what a worker actually wants; they are concerned not merely with compliance with regulations, but with settling everything so that workers cannot be oppressed by means of circumventing the regulations, so that there can be no occasion for deception or arbitrary treatment. Just recently there was a report in the newspapers that hat-making workers were almost condemned, on complaint of the employer, for theft—they were using scraps of hats; it was fortunate that honest lawyers were found who collected evidence and proved that such is simply the custom in this trade and that the workers not only were not thieves but had not even violated any regulation. But an ordinary simple worker, earning the very lowest wage, can almost never manage to reach a good lawyer, and therefore, as every worker knows, bureaucratic judges very often hand down the most cruel and senselessly cruel verdicts in workers' cases. From bureaucratic judges one can never expect complete justice: we have already said that these judges belong to the bourgeois class and are prejudiced in advance to believe everything a factory owner says and to disbelieve the words of a worker. The judge looks at the law: a contract of personal hire (one person hires himself out for pay to do something for another or to serve him). And it is all the same to him whether an engineer, a doctor, a factory director hires himself out to the factory owner or whether an unskilled laborer does; the judge thinks (owing to his bureaucratic soul and his bourgeois obtuseness) that an unskilled laborer ought to know his rights just as well and be able to stipulate everything required in the contract, just as well as a director, a doctor, an engineer. But in an industrial court, judges are composed (half of them) of elected representatives from workers, who understand very well that a young or novice worker often feels himself on a factory floor and in an office as if in a dark forest and has not the slightest idea that he is entering into a "free contract" and can "foresee" in it all the conditions desirable for him. Let us take, for example, such a case: a worker wants to complain about unjust rejection of his work or about fines. There is no point in thinking about complaining about this to a bureaucratic judge or a bureaucratic factory inspector. The bureaucrat will keep repeating one thing: the law grants the factory owner the right to fine workers and to reject poor work, and it is the factory owner's business, he says, to determine when work is poor, when a worker has erred. This is why workers so rarely resort to courts with such complaints: they endure abuse, they endure it, and end up in a strike when their patience is exhausted. If elected representatives from workers sat among the judges, then it would be incomparably easier for workers to achieve justice and protection in such cases and in all the smallest factory disputes and insults. After all, to a rich bureaucratic judge such trifles seem not worth attention (some hot water for tea, or cleaning a machine one more time, or something similar), but for a worker these are not trifles at all; only the workers themselves can judge what a mass of oppressions, insults, and humiliations are sometimes occasioned by the smallest and at first glance trivial, harmless regulations and procedures in factories.

The third advantage of industrial courts for workers is that workers learn through them and by means of them to familiarize themselves with laws. Ordinarily workers (in the mass) do not know the laws and cannot know them, although nonetheless bureaucrats and bureaucratic judges exact penalties from them for ignorance of the laws. If a worker, when a bureaucrat points out a law to him, says that he did not know of such a law, then the bureaucrat (and the judge) either laughs or curses: "no one has the right to plead ignorance of the law"—that is what the basic Russian law says. Every bureaucrat and judge therefore presumes that every worker knows the laws. But such a presupposition is a bourgeois lie, a lie concocted by propertied people and capitalists against the propertyless—such a lie as the presupposition that a worker enters into a "free contract" with the employer. In reality, a worker, who from childhood is taken into a factory, barely literate (and very many cannot even learn to read!), has no time to learn laws and no one to learn them from, and perhaps has no need to, because if laws are applied by bureaucrats from the bourgeoisie without asking him, they will bring little benefit to the worker! The bourgeois classes, who accuse workers of ignorance of laws, have themselves done absolutely nothing to facilitate workers' acquisition of such knowledge, and therefore those actually responsible for workers' ignorance of laws are not so much the workers themselves as their exploiters (= robbers), who own all the property, live off others' labor, and alone wish to enjoy education and science. No school and no books can or will give workers knowledge of laws, because only very few workers from the mass of millions of laborers crushed by capital can read books, few use schools for the same reason, and even those who go to school mostly learn only to read, write, and count; and this is not enough to make sense of such a complex and difficult field as Russian laws. Workers can familiarize themselves with laws only when they themselves must apply these laws and hear and see the courts apply these laws. Workers, for example, could better know the laws if they were appointed as jurors (with factory owners being obliged to pay them their previous wage even for the days they spend in court), but in bourgeois society it is arranged so that only people from the propertied class can be jurors (and also peasants, trained in "public service," that is, in reality service in lower police positions); the propertyless, the proletariat, are required only to submit to the judgment of others, and do not have the right to judge themselves! When industrial courts are established, workers themselves choose their comrades as judges in them, and these elections are repeated at fixed intervals; thus, those elected from among workers themselves apply the laws and gain the opportunity to familiarize themselves with them in practice—that is, not only to read the laws printed in a book (this far from means familiarizing oneself with laws), but also actually to convince themselves of which cases and in what manner particular laws are applied and what influence they exert on workers. And besides the elected judges, other workers also become far more easily acquainted with laws with the establishment of industrial courts, because a worker can always easily speak with judges from among his comrades and obtain from them the necessary information. Since the industrial court is more accessible to workers than the court of bureaucrats, workers visit it incomparably more often, listen to the hearing of cases in which their relatives and acquaintances are involved, and thus become acquainted with the laws. And it is critically important for a worker not only from books but from life itself to become acquainted with the laws, in order to understand in whose interests these laws are composed, in whose interests those who apply the laws act. Having become acquainted with the laws, every worker will clearly see that this is in the interests of the propertied class, of property owners, capitalists, the bourgeoisie, and that the working class will never achieve for itself any solid and fundamental improvement in its lot so long as it itself does not achieve the right to elect its representatives to participate in the composition of laws and in the supervision of their execution.

Furthermore (fourthly), a good feature of industrial courts is that they accustom workers to take independent participation in public, state affairs (because the court is a state institution, and the activity of the court is one part of state activity), they accustom workers to choose more rational, honest, and firmly devoted comrades for such positions, positions in which the activity of these workers is visible to the entire working class, positions in which representatives of workers can present the needs and demands of all workers. The interest of the capitalist class, the interest of all the bourgeoisie, consists in keeping workers ignorant and divided, in removing those workers who are more intelligent than others and who use their intelligence and knowledge not in order to become traitors to the workers' cause, currying favor before masters, employers, and police, but use them to help other workers acquire greater knowledge and learn to stand together for the workers' cause. But in order for such advanced workers, who are so necessary for the workers' cause, to be known by all workers and trusted by them, it is very important that all see the activity of such a worker, that all know whether he can express the actual needs and desires of workers and stand up for them. Now if workers could choose such people as judges, then the best people among workers would be known to all, trusted more, and the workers' cause would gain enormous benefit from this. Look at our landowners, industrialists, and merchants: they are not satisfied with the fact that each of them can go to the governor or minister and present his requests to them; they also strive to have elected representatives of theirs sit in the courts (courts with class representatives) and participate directly in administration (for example, leaders of the nobility elected by the nobility, guardians of schools, etc.; members of factory councils elected by merchants, members of stock exchange and fair committees, etc.). The working class in Russia, meanwhile, remains entirely without rights: it is regarded as a pack animal, which must work for others and be silent, not daring to state its needs and desires. If workers continuously elected their comrades to industrial courts, they would obtain at least some possibility of participating in public affairs and expressing not merely the opinions of individual workers—Peter, Sidor, or Ivan—but expressing the opinions and demands of all workers. And workers would not then regard courts with such distrust as they regard the courts of bureaucrats: they would see that there are their comrades there who will stand up for them.

Then (fifthly), the advantage of industrial courts for workers consists in that these courts would provoke greater publicity of factory affairs and of all incidents of factory life. Now we see that both factory owners and the government strive with all their might to conceal from the eyes of society what happens in the factory world: strikes are forbidden to be printed about, reports of factory inspectors on the condition of workers have also stopped being printed, every abuse is sought to be concealed and the matter settled quickly "behind closed doors," in a bureaucratic manner, any workers' gatherings are persecuted. It is no wonder that the mass of workers often knows very little about what is happening at other factories or even at other departments of the same factory. Industrial courts, which workers could frequent, in which cases were conducted in time free for workers and openly, that is, in the presence of the working public, would bring much benefit to workers in that they would contribute to the publicity of every abuse, would facilitate for workers the struggle against various factory evils, would accustom workers to think about the arrangements not only of their own factory but of arrangements at all factories, about the condition of all workers.

Finally, one must not pass over in silence one more advantage of industrial courts: they accustom factory owners, directors, and foremen to proper treatment of workers, as of equal citizens, not as of serfs. Every worker knows how often factory owners and foremen allow themselves outrageously crude treatment of workers, cursing, and the like. It is difficult for a worker to complain about this, and giving a retort succeeds only where all workers are already sufficiently developed and can support a comrade. Factory owners and foremen say that our workers are very ignorant and crude—that is why one must treat them roughly. In our working class, there are indeed still many traces of serfdom, little education, and much crudeness—this cannot be denied. But who is responsible for this more than anyone? Responsible are precisely the factory owners, foremen, bureaucrats, who conduct themselves toward workers as nobles conducted themselves toward serfs, who do not wish to recognize in a worker an equal human being. Workers present a polite request or question—and encounter rudeness, cursing, threats from all sides. Is it not obvious that if factory owners accuse workers of rudeness in doing so, they are blaming the well for the sickness of the sick? Industrial courts would quickly teach our exploiters to refrain from rude treatment: in court there would be judges—workers alongside factory owners—who would together discuss cases and cast votes. Factory-owner judges would have to see worker judges as their equals, not as hired hands. Before the court there would be litigants and witnesses both from among factory owners and from among workers: factory owners would become accustomed to conducting proper negotiations with workers. This is very important for workers, because at present such negotiations rarely succeed: the factory owner refuses even to consider the possibility that workers choose their own deputies, and workers have only one path left for conversation: a strike, and this is a difficult path and often a very painful one. Then, if workers were among the judges, workers could freely resort to court with complaints of rude treatment. Worker judges would always take their side, and a factory owner's or foreman's summons to court for rudeness would dissuade them from holding themselves with impudence and haughtiness.

Thus, industrial courts, composed of elected representatives from employers and workers in equal numbers, have very great significance for workers and bring them much benefit: they are far more accessible to workers than ordinary courts, there is less red tape and bureaucracy in them, the judges understand the conditions of factory life and judge more justly, they acquaint workers with the laws, they accustom workers to the election of their representatives and to participation in state affairs, they expand the publicity of factory life and the workers' movement, they accustom factory owners to proper treatment of workers and to proper negotiations with workers as with equal people. It is therefore no wonder that workers in all European countries demand the establishment of industrial courts, demand that these courts exist not only for factory and mill workers (the Germans and French already have such courts), but also for workers employed in their homes by capitalists (for handicraft workers) and for rural workers. No bureaucrats appointed by the government (neither judges nor factory inspectors) can ever replace such institutions in which workers themselves participate: after all that we have said above, there is no need to clarify this. Every worker, moreover, from his own experience knows what to expect from bureaucrats; every worker will clearly understand that if he is told that bureaucrats are not at all worse able to care for workers than representatives elected from among the workers themselves, this will be a lie and a deception. Such deception is very advantageous to the government, which wishes to keep workers ignorant, without rights, and voiceless slaves of capitalists, and that is why one can so often hear these false assurances from bureaucrats or from writers defending factory owners and the government.

The necessity and benefit for workers of industrial courts are so evident that even Russian bureaucrats acknowledged them long ago. True, this was so long ago that many have forgotten about it! This was when our peasants were freed from serf dependence (in 1861, more than 38 years ago). Around that same time the Russian government decided also to replace with new laws the old laws concerning craftsmen and factory workers: it was far too clear by then that with the freeing of peasants one could not leave the old laws concerning workers unchanged; when those old laws were being formulated, many of the workers were serfs. And so the government appointed a commission of several bureaucrats, entrusting them with studying the German and French (and other countries') laws concerning factory workers and drafting a plan for changes to Russian laws concerning craftsmen and factory workers. The commission was composed of very important personages. Yet they set about the work and printed five whole books in which they set out the foreign laws and proposed a new law for Russia. According to the law proposed by this commission, industrial courts were to be introduced with elected judges from factory owners and from workers in equal numbers. This draft was printed in 1865, that is, 34 years ago. Well, and what did the government do with this draft law?—a worker will ask. Why did the government, which itself entrusted these bureaucrats with developing a draft of necessary changes, not introduce industrial courts in Russia?

Our government dealt with this commission's draft the way it always deals with all projects that are somewhat good for the people and for workers. The government rewarded the bureaucrats with salary for labor in service to the tsar and fatherland; it hung orders around the bureaucrats' necks, gave them higher ranks and more lucrative positions. But the draft they had composed was quietly filed away "under the cloth," as they say in chancelleries. So this draft has remained filed away to this very day. The government has ceased even to think about giving workers the right to elect their own worker comrades to industrial courts.

But one cannot say that the government has not remembered workers since then. True, it remembered them not of its own good will, but exclusively under pressure from threatening workers' unrest and strikes, yet it did remember. It issued laws forbidding child labor in factories, forbidding night work for women in certain industries, shortening the working day, appointing factory inspectors. However craftily constructed these laws may be, however many loopholes they leave for factory owners to violate and circumvent the laws, they nonetheless bring some benefit. So, why did the government prefer not to introduce industrial courts, although such a law had already been fully worked out, and instead introduce new laws and new bureaucrats—factory inspectors? The reason is perfectly clear, and it is very important for workers fully to understand this reason, because from this example one can understand all the politics of the Russian government toward the working class.

The government appointed new bureaucrats instead of industrial courts because industrial courts would have raised workers' consciousness, increased their awareness of their rights, of their human and civic dignity, accustomed them to thinking independently about state affairs and the interests of the entire working class, accustomed them to electing their more developed comrades to the position of representatives of workers, and thus would have undermined, at least in part, the domination of bureaucrats alone. And this is precisely what our government fears more than anything. It is even prepared to give workers some alms—(of course, small alms and arranged so that with one hand, before everyone's eyes, they solemnly give and call themselves benefactors, while with the other hand they secretly take back little by little! On the example of the factory law of June 2, 1897, workers already know this trick!)—prepared to give alms, only so as to leave inviolate bureaucratic autocracy and not allow workers' consciousness to awaken, not allow their independence to develop. The government easily avoids this terrible danger for it by appointing new bureaucrats: bureaucrats are its obedient servants. For bureaucrats (for example, factory inspectors) it is nothing to forbid printing their reports, nothing to forbid telling workers about their rights and the abuses of employers, nothing to transform them into factory overseers, commanding them to report to the police about every discontent and unrest of workers.

Therefore, so long as the present political order remains in Russia—that is, the lack of rights of the people, the arbitrariness of bureaucrats and police not accountable to the people—so long workers cannot hope for the establishment of industrial courts beneficial to them. The government understands very well that industrial courts would very quickly cause workers to move on to more fundamental demands. In electing their representatives to industrial courts, workers would soon see that this is not enough, since the landowners and factory owners, who exploit workers, send their representatives to very many state institutions, far more elevated ones; workers would inevitably demand popular representation. In seeking publicity for factory affairs and workers' needs in courts, workers would soon see that this is not enough, because publicity in our time can be given only by newspapers and popular assemblies, and workers would demand freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press. That is why the government buried the draft of introducing industrial courts in Russia!

On the other hand, let us suppose for a moment that the government, deliberately wishing to deceive workers, introduced industrial courts right now, preserving the present political order unchanged. Would it be of any benefit to workers? It would be of no benefit whatever: workers would not even themselves elect their most conscious, honest, and devoted comrades to these courts, because they know that for any open and honest word in Russia one can be seized on the simple order of the police, thrown, without trial or investigation, into prison or exiled to Siberia!

Consequently, the demand for industrial courts with elected representatives from workers constitutes only one small part of a broader and more fundamental demand: the demand for political rights for the people, that is, the right to participate in the governance of the state and to speak openly about the people's needs not only in newspapers but also in popular assemblies.

Written in late 1899

First printed in 1924 in the journal "Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya" No. 8–9

Printed from the manuscript copied in the hand of N. K. Krupskaya