properly thrashed out, though feeling upon it is extremely
strong. Everybody whom I asked about it began at once to
address me as if I were a public meeting, so that I found
it extremely difficult to get from either side a statement not
free from electioneering bias. I think, however, that it
may be fairly said that all but a few lunatics have abandoned
the ideas of 1917, which resulted in the workmen in a
factory deposing any technical expert or manager whose
orders were in the least irksome to them. These ideas and
the miseries and unfairness they caused, the stoppages of
work, the managers sewn up in sacks, ducked in ponds and
trundled in wheelbarrows, have taken their places as
curiosities of history. The change in these ideas has been
gradual. The first step was the recognition that the State as a
whole was interested in the efficiency of each factory, and,
therefore, that the workmen of each factory had no right to
arrange things with no thought except for themselves. The
Committee idea was still strong, and the difficulty was got
over by assuring that the technical staff should be
represented on the Committee, and that the casting vote
between workers and technical experts or managers should
belong to the central economic organ of the State. The next
stage was when the management of a workshop was given a
so called "collegiate" character, the workmen appointing
representatives to share the responsibility of the "bourgeois
specialist." The bitter controversy now going on
concerns the seemingly inevitable transition to a later stage in
which, for all practical purposes, the bourgeois specialist will
be responsible solely to the State. Many Communists,
including some of the best known, while recognizing the