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.
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