In a series of letters to Marty Glaberman and the Facing Reality Publishing Committee from the early 1960s, C. L. R. James refers several times to the urgent task of producing an English-language version of the hitherto untranslated Russian-language text, Октябрьская революция и фабзавкомы (The October Revolution and the Factory Committees, 1927). Writing from London – James had been deported from the United States in 1953 – in the aftermath of the breakup of the Correspondence Publishing Committee after a painful split, the Factory Committees text looms large in James’s attempt to guide what remained of that organization. James minces no words, describing the Factory Committees as “the proletarian counterpart (the modern historical symbol of our problems today, the practical concrete problems of the working class) [to what Marx’s] Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts represented in theory.”1

According to James, the Petrograd factory committees represent an untimely episode of worker self-activity – “too much even for Lenin and the Bolsheviks.”2 Even so, he argues, it was in part this attempt by thousands of working people to take direct control of their lives that both made the Bolshevik revolution possible and also forecast in practice the obsolescence of the Marxist vanguard party, which was at that time on full display. Translating the Factory Committees, which James saw as a practical document of “the socialism that exists in the population . . . the desire to overturn and get rid of the tremendous burdens by which capitalism is crushing the people,”3 was for him one concrete way that a small Marxist group could support the workers’ movement from which they were meant to learn.

It was these and other remarks from James that first drew our attention to The October Revolution and the Factory Committees, a massive text that details how thousands of Petrograd factory workers took over direct control and management of the factories in which they worked in the months between the 1917 February and October revolutions in Russia.4 Since James’s passing, historical scholarship has emerged on the document, much of which bears out James’s conclusions about a text he never could read himself. In fact, it was James’s reference to the Factory Committees text in the central chapter of Facing Reality (1958), “What To Do and How To Do It,” that prompted a young member of the group, Kathy Bishop, to propose its translation in 1962. However, the translation, apparently undertaken and set to comprise the second bulletin issue of Speak Out in mid-1964, never materialized. The excerpts we offer below are the first published English translation.

In their foreword to the Factory Committees, the eight Petrograd workers who compiled and authored the book remember their factory committees as revealing the “revolutionary creativity” (революционное творчество) of the working class in Russia.5 The revolutionaries in factory committees, it seems, understood the historical significance of their experience in 1917: the invention of unprecedented forms of worker self-organization that directly linked production and politics, cutting across “the economic” and “the political” as reified domains of social life.

As Factory Committees reminds us, trade unions and factory committees emerged along very different lines in the wake of the repression that followed the 1905 revolution. The trade union model, promoted by social democrats – particularly the Mensheviks – was based on shop and profession, primarily organizing skilled segments of the workforce until after the 1917 Revolution.6 In contrast, factory committees emerged as a distinctively Russian revolutionary form: not professional but production based, uniting all workers in a given enterprise through a general assembly. Their ambition extended beyond collective bargaining to the broader struggle for workers’ control over production itself.