war communism

why was WC implemented

• shortcomings of handing over control of the land to the peasants

• control of factories to the workers’s committees

grain requisitioning WC

• 1918 food supplies dictatorship

• red guards and soldiers forcibly requistion from peasants

nationalisation of industry WC

• brought all industry under state control

• administered by supreme council of national economy (vesenkha)

• workers committees replaced by single managers reporting to central authorities

• old bourgeois managers = “specialists”

• didn’t increase production

banning on private trade WC

• private trade and manufacture banned

• industry not producing enough consumer goods - black market (depended on for survival)

labour discipline WC

• fines for lateness and absenteeism

• internal passports to stop people fleeing to countryside

• piece-work rates brought back, also brought bonuses and work book for rations

rationing WC

• class-based system of rationing

• red army soldiers and labour force given priority

• smaller rations = civil servants + professional people such as doctors

• smallesy rations = middle classes

situation may 1918

• shortage of raw materials = industrial output (consumer goods) shrank

• shortage of goods = soaring price inflation + collapse of rouble

• peasants refuse to supply to cities if there were no goods for which could be exchanged (paper money = worthless)

• workers flee from cities, searching food, leaving factories short of workers

lenin & war communism

• extension of class-warfare

• no different than waging civil war against external enemies

• “internal front”

• squeeze out counter-revolutionaries (left or right)

• wipes out old bourgeois attitudes + lingering power

WC bolshevik support

• hated market system (happy to see its collapse)

• centralised control = socialism

trotsky WC

• trotsky = “militarisation of labour”

• discipline and practices of the army taken into civilian life to build a new socialist state

• end of civil war = units of soldiers drafted into factories + fields to work under military discipline

• WC continued after civil war