Everywhere the organized working class aspires to attain that industrial democracy which is the counterpart of political democracy.  Syndicalism, with all its vagaries, its crude reversal to outworn ideas and methods, is, nevertheless, fundamentally an expression of that yearning.  It is the same passion that lies back of the Shop Stewards’ movement in England, and that inspires the much more patiently and carefully developed theories and plans of the advocates of “Guild Socialism.”  Motived by the same desire, our American labor-unions are demanding, and steadily gaining, an increasing share in the actual direction of industry.  Joint control by boards composed of representatives of employers, employees, and the general public is, to an ever-increasing extent, determining the conditions of employment, wage standards, work standards, hours of labor, choice and conduct of foremen, and many other matters of vital importance to the wage-earners.  That we are still a long way from anything like industrial democracy is all too painfully true and obvious, but it is equally obvious that we are struggling toward the goal, and that there is a serious purpose and intention to realize the ideal.

Impelled by the inexorable logic of its own existence as a dictatorship, the Bolshevik government has had to set itself against any and every manifestation of democracy in industry with the same relentless force as it opposed democracy in government.  True, owing to the fact that, following the line of industrial evolution, the trade-union movement was not strongly enough developed to even attempt any organization for the expression of industrial democracy comparable to the Constituent Assembly.  It is equally true, however, that had such an organization existed the necessity to suppress it, as the political organization was suppressed, would have proceeded inevitably and irresistibly from the creation of a dictatorship. There cannot be, in any country, as co-existent forces, political dictatorship and industrial democracy. It is also true that such democratic agencies as there were existing the Bolsheviki neglected.

That the Bolsheviki did not establish industrial democracy in its fullest sense is not to be charged to their discredit.  Had Bolshevism never appeared, and had the Constituent Assembly been permitted to function unmolested and free, it would have taken many years to realize anything like a well-rounded industrial democracy, for which a highly developed industrial system is absolutely essential.  The leaders of the Bolshevik movement recognized from the first that the time had not yet arrived for even attempting to set up a Socialist commonwealth based on the social ownership and democratic control of industry.  Lenine frankly declared that “Socialism cannot now prevail in Russia,"[64] and Trotzky said, a month after the coup d’etat:  “We are not ready yet to take over all industry....  For the present, we expect of the earnings of a factory to pay the owner 5 or 6 per cent. yearly on his actual investment.  What we aim at now is control rather than ownership."[65] He did not tell Professor Ross, who records this statement, on what grounds the owner of the property thus controlled by the Soviet government, and who thus becomes a partner of the government, is to be excluded from the exercise of the franchise.  But let that pass.