ABSTRACT
About 40 per cent of the factories in the area of Russia controlled by the Bolsheviks were affected by the system of workers' control. Where the factory representatives did assume control and continue production, the workers proceeded to promote the interests of their own factory with little or no regard to the interests of the community or the state. Under the conditions of the Civil War various conceptions of democratic management of industry, of which workers' control had been merely an extreme manifestation, had to give way in practice to a bureaucratic management, exercised through special officials. It is a commonplace observation that making policy is much easier than executing it. Most organized human groupings, and particularly such large ones as the modern state, have had to evolve methods for coping with this problem. During the period of War Communism a similar line of thought was elaborated by Trotsky to justify the military discipline applied to the industrial workers.
