V. I.

Lenin

Yes,we are undoubtedly passing through an era of reforms, strange as
these words may sound when applied to present-day Russia. There is
stagnation in all spheres of home policy, except where these are linked up
with the fight against the internal enemy, and despite this—or, to
be more exact, precisely because of this—constant and unceasing
efforts are being made to institute reforms, attempts at reforms in the
sphere of the most critical and most salient social and political
relations. The proletariat, which is awakening to class-conscious life,
came forward fairly long ago as the real, the main, as the only
irreconcilable foe of our autocratic police regime. However, an enemy such
as the foremost social class cannot be fought with force alone, even with
the most ruthless, best organised, and most thorough-going force. Such an
enemy makes itself reckoned with and compels concessions, which, though
they are always insincere, always half-hearted, often spurious and
illusory, and usually hedged round with more or less subtly hidden traps,
are nevertheless concessions, reforms that mark a whole era. Of course,
these are not the reforms that denote a down-grade in political
development, when a crisis has passed, the storm has abated, and those who
have been left masters of the situation proceed to give effect to their
own programme, or (as also happens) the programme taken over from their
opponents. No, these are the reforms of an up-grade, when ever greater
masses are being drawn into struggle, when the crisis is still in the
offing, when every clash, in which hundreds of victims are carried off the
field of battle, produces thousands of new fighters who are even grimmer,
bolder, and better trained.

Suchreforms are always foretokens and precursors of revolution. The
recent measures partly effected and partly only projected by the tsarist
government are indubitably of this nature, viz., the Bill on workers’
mutual aid societies (this Bill has not been made public by the government
and is known only from reports in the liberal bourgeois
Osvobozhdeniye ), the laws on compensation for injured workers and
on factory stewards. It is on this latter law that we now propose to dwell
in greater detail.

Thegist of the new law is that, under certain circumstances, the workers
may have the right to representation in their relations with the
employers, the right to certain rudiments of organisation. These rights
are circumscribed by an incredible number of police regulations,
restrictions, and qualifications. And indeed, it is first of all necessary
to take into consideration that, according to the new law, the right of
the workers to representation depends on the consent and initiative of the
factory management and on the permission of the Boards for Factory and
Mining Affairs. The right to representation may be accorded the
workers by the factory owners, but they are in no way bound to do so under
this law, besides which the Factory Board may refuse to permit
representation, even if requested by the employer, on any grounds or even
on no grounds whatever. Hence, from the very outset, the right of the
workers to representation has been completely, unconditionally,
and conclusively left to the discretion of the employers and the police . If it appears advantageous and desirable to the employers and
the police, they may set up workers’ representative bodies (on a very
restricted basis)—that is the substance of the reform. I would add
parenthetically that the law makes no mention whatever of workers’
representation at government factories: at privately owned factories the
workers’ representatives may turn out to be new agents, new
factory watchmen controlled by the police; at government factories there
is always a sufficient number of agents and watchmen! The police do not
ask for a reform in this field—hence, reform is not necessary here.

Further,workers’ representation itself has been given an ugly twist. The
workers are to be disunited, divided into categories ; the regulations
governing the division into categories are subject to approval by the governor , as are
all regulations in general that have any bearing on the
organisation of representative bodies under the new law. The
manufacturers and the police can and of course will arrange the
categories in such a way as to hinder workers solidarity and unity in
every way possible, rouse and in flame discord not only among the
various crafts and shops but also among workers of different
nationalities, sex, age groups, degrees of skill, wage levels, etc.,
etc. Workers’ representation can be and is useful to the workers
exclusively in their uniting in a single body, for their unity,
organisation and solidarity are the only source of strength to the
downtrodden, oppressed wage-slaves of our civilisation, ground down as
they are by toil. The tsarist autocracy wants to give the workers
representation of such a kind and on such terms as to disunite them in every way possible and thus make them
powerless.

Thepolice-established categories will have to elect candidates
for the post of steward on the basis of detailed police rules, the number
of candidates to be designated by the police. The factory management will
endorse one of the candidates at its own discretion, while the governor
always has the right to remove any steward who “does not meet the
requirements of his office,” as the law puts it.

Thiswhole police scheme is not so very subtle! The “office”
of a steward obviously consists in being useful to the police, in being
acceptable to them. The law says nothing about this, for such conditions
are not spoken of; they are engineered. And it is more than
simple to engineer this, once the governor, who is the head of the local
police, is given the unrestricted right to remove an undesirable
steward. Once again: would it not be more correct to call such a factory
steward a factory watchman? The police can decide on the election of a
very large number of candidates, of whom only one will be endorsed; for
example, each category of say 50 to 100 people will be told to vote for 5
or 10 candidates. Will it not be possible in some cases to turn the list
of elected candidates into a list of people to be kept under special
surveillance or even subject to arrest? Formerly such lists were drawn up
only by spies; but now will they not perhaps sometimes be drawn
up by the workers themselves? To the police there is nothing dangerous or even inconvenient
in a list of candidates, since it is always the worst of them that will be
endorsed, or no one at all, and new elections will be ordered.

Inits effort to have the factory stewards meet the requirements of their
police “office,” the new law (like the majority of the Russian laws)
has even overdone things. Candidates must not he under 25 years of
age. The original Bill proposed a minimum age of 21; higher government
circles deemed it more cautious and statesmanlike to raise it by four
years so as to eliminate in advance “the most unruly elements of the
industrial population,” which, “according to information in
possession of the Department of Police, are within the 17-20 age
group” (from the explanatory motives of the Ministry of Finance,
published in abridged form in Vestnik Finonsov , and in full in
Osvohozhdeniye ). But that is not all. The factory management and
the police may, in each particular instance, i.e., for each separate
establishment, demand, firstly, a higher minimum age and, secondly, a
certain length of service of the particular worker in the factory. It is,
for example, possible that they may demand a minimum age of 40 and a
service record of not less than 15 years as a condition for the right to
be elected as candidate for the post of steward! There is one thing,
however, to which the authors of this law, who so zealously safeguarded
the interests of the police, did not apparently give sufficient thought:
under such conditions will workers be at all eager to accept this
“post” of steward? After all, the steward will be placed
almost as much at the arbitrary disposal of the police as a mere village
constable. The steward may be turned into an ordinary messenger boy,
conveying the orders and explanations of the factory management to the
workers. The steward will undoubtedly be required to render sheer spying
services and to give accounts of the meetings of the workers’ categories
which are called by him and for the orderly conduct of which he is
responsible. And yet, while providing for rules about stewards being
released from work to perform their duties, the law maintains a modest
silence as to whether the stewards ·are to receive remuneration,
and if so from whom. Do the authors of this law really think that stewards who have been released from work will not demand pay
from the factory for this “free” time? Would they really serve
as stewards, at the will of the manufacturers and governors, out of sheer
love for these true friends of the working people?

Thedesire to turn stewards into factory watchmen is particularly evident
also in Clause 3 of the new law: stewards are recognised as being
representatives empowered to speak for the workers’ categories only on
matters concerning fulfilment of the terms of hire. When it comes
to changing the terms of hire the stewards have no right even to hint at this! Fine workers’ “representatives”
indeed. And how absurd this ruling is, even from the standpoint of the
authors of the law, who wanted to make it easier “to ascertain the
true desires and needs of the workers” “particularly at a time
when discontent and unrest have already arisen.” In nine cases out of ten,
unrest is the result of this very demand to change the terms of
hire, and to bar the stewards from taking a hand in this matter is
tantamount to reducing their role to practically nil. The authors of the
law have become entangled in one of the countless contradictions of the
autocracy, for to accord the workers’ representatives (their genuine
representatives, and not representatives by permission of the police) the
right to demand changes in the terms of hire would mean granting them
freedom of speech and inviolability of the person.

Ingeneral there can be no question of regarding the factory stewards as
genuine representatives of the workers. Representatives must be elected
only by the workers, with out any endorsement by the police. A
representative must be removed as soon as the workers who elected him pass
a vote of non-confidence in him. A representative must render an account
to a meeting of the workers whenever they demand this of him. According to
our law, however, the steward alone is authorised to convene the
workers of the category which has elected him, and, besides, this must be
done when and where the factory management wants it. In other words, the
steward is not obliged to call the workers together, and the management
does not have to provide the time and the place. It would perhaps be more
expedient not to talk about workers’ representation at all than to annoy the workers with this mere pretence of representation.

Workers’meetings inspire the autocracy with such fear (and a justified
fear) that it categorically bans joint meetings of the various
categories. “For the discussion of matters concerning several
categories,” the new law decrees, “the stewards of these categories
alone shall meet.” For the capitalists, and for the police government
which protects them, it would indeed be extremely advantageous to set up
numerically small categories of foremen, office employees, and highly paid
workers, to set up numerically large categories of unskilled workers and
ordinary workers—and then to permit meetings only of the stewards of
different categories. But this means reckoning without the real master :

the class-conscious proletariat is the master of its own fate and it will
spurn these miserable police partitions in which they would segregate
it. The workers will meet together to discuss their own affairs and will
organise secret meetings of their own, genuine, Social-Democratic
stewards, despite all bans.

Butif this miserable reform to such a degree infects the embryo of
workers’ representation with a spirit of police espionage, would it not be
better for the class-conscious workers to have nothing whatever to do with
the election of factory stewards or the meetings of the
“categories”? We believe that it would not. Refusal to take an
active part in present-day political life, however disgusting it may be,
is the tactic of anarchists, not of Social-Democrats. We shall and must be
able to promote a widespread struggle of the workers against every
loathsome trap in the new law, against every spying manoeuvre made with
the help of the new law—and this fight will rouse the most back ward workers, and will develop the political consciousness of all who take part
in the Russian workers-police-gendarme spy “representation.” The
Zubatov meetings corrupted workers’ minds far more and much more directly
than their minds will be corrupted by stewards who kowtow to the
authorities, and yet we sent to those meetings class-conscious workers who
themselves learned and taught others, and yet this entire Zubatov epic
ended in a miserable fiasco, after working to the advantage of
Social-Democracy far more than to that of the autocracy: the Odessa events [2]
have left no shadow of doubt on that score.

Theautocracy is beginning to talk about workers’ meetings. Let us take
advantage of this for the widest propaganda and agitation in support of
the Social-Democratic demands for the full freedom of meetings and
assembly. The autocracy is beginning to talk of elections; let us take
advantage of this to acquaint the working masses with the meaning of
elections, with all systems of elections, with all the tricks of the
police during elections. And let the workers know this not only from books
and talks, but from practice. from the example of the Russian,
police-controlled elections, and by participating in these elections, [1] the class-conscious workers will teach ever greater masses to carry on
election agitation. conduct meetings, defend their demands both at
meetings and before the stewards, and organise a constant watch over the
activities of the stewards. The autocracy is talking about workers’
representation. Let us take advantage of this to spread correct ideas
about genuine representation. Only a free workers’ union , with
members in many factories and many cities, can represent the
workers. Factory representation, bodies representing the workers at each
factory separately, can not satisfy the workers even in the West, even in the free states. The leaders
of the Social-Democratic Labour Party, in Germany for example, have
frequently protested against factory representation. And this can be
readily understood, for the yoke of capital is too heavy, and the right to
dismiss workers—the sacred right of capitalist free contract—will always render the representative body of the
workers in each individual factory powerless. Only a workers’ union which
organises the workers of many factories and many localities will do away
with dependence of the workers’ representatives on the individual factory
owner. Only a workers’ union will provide all the means of struggle that
can at all possibly exist under capitalism. But free-workers’ unions are
out of the question unless we have political liberty , inviolability of the person, freedom of assembly and meetings, and the right freely to elect deputies to a national
assembly.

Withoutpolitical liberty all forms of workers’ representation will remain
a miserable fraud, and the proletariat will remain in prison as hitherto,
without light, with out air, and without the elbow-room it needs for the
struggle to attain its complete emancipation. In this prison the
government is now cutting a tiny aperture instead of a window, and in such
a manner that this aperture is of more use to the gendarmes and spies who
guard the prisoners than it is to the prisoners themselves. And this is
the reform that the butchers of the Russian people want to pass off as a
benefaction of the tsarist government! But the Russian working class will
use this aperture to build up fresh energy for battle; it will raze to the
ground the walls of the accursed all-Russian prison and win for itself
free class representation in a bourgeois-democratic state.

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Notes:
[1]
Naturally, organised workers should in no case be elected to the post of
steward; suitable people from among the unorganised masses should be put
forward as candidates.
— Lenin

[2]
Lenin is referring to the strike of Odessa workers in July 1902. Despite
the efforts of the local Zubatov organisation to deflect the workers from
the revolutionary struggle, the strike assumed a markedly political
character. Mass political strikes in 1903 embraced almost the whole of
South Russia (Kiev, Ekaterinoslav, Nikolayev, Elizavetgrad, and other
towns).

Lenin’s Iskra gave detailed accounts of the Odessa events in
No. 45, August 1. 1903.