I'm historically illiterate so sorry if this is a simple question. I watched a clip of Chomsky saying that Lenin was a right wing deviation of what the popular discourse was at the time. And it seems to me that the way he describes it workers did not actually own the factories and the agriculture. As in, democratically owned. If they weren't owned this way how where the factories, and agrarian cultures managed. He also states that Lenin saw Germany was where the real revolution would begin. Is there any proof to this? Does this mean Lenin saw Russia's farm-centric economy to be a lost cause or what? Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my question. I really, really appreciate it. The Chomsky Lecture
Chomsky's fundamental argument is that Lenin was secretly opposed to the idea of workers' control, and that as a result, Soviet workers had (as he once put it) "no control over anything. They were virtual slaves." However, this is questionable to say the least. For one thing, Lenin certainly did not reject the idea that the workers should be in control; the Trotskyist activist Tony Cliff notes:
Lenin was very quick to give vigorous support to the factory committees. Writing on May 17, he endorsed the slogan of “workers’ control,” declaring that “the workers must demand the immediate establishment of genuine control, to be exercised by the workers themselves.”
Nor was this all talk; for all of its faults, the Soviet Union did give working people some degree of meaningful control, which they did not have in contemporary capitalist societies. Historian Robert Thurston (Miami University at Ohio) states that "at the lower levels of society, in day-to-day affairs and the implementation of policy, [the Soviet system] was participatory." He notes that workers were frequently encouraged to take part in decision making:
The regime regularly urged its people to criticize local conditions and their leaders, at least below a certain exalted level. For example, in March 1937 Stalin emphasized the importance of the party's 'ties to the masses.' To maintain them, it was necessary 'to listen carefully to the voice of the masses, to the voice of rank and file members of the party, to the voice of so-called "little people," to the voice of ordinary folk.'
This was not mere propaganda; while there were obvious limits to criticism, Thurston notes that "such bounds allowed a great deal that was deeply significant to workers, including some aspects of production norms, pay rates and classifications, safety on the job, housing, and treatment by managers." The workers had a voice in various official bodies, and they generally had their demands met:
The Commissariat of Justice also heard and responded to workers' appeals. In August 1935 the Saratov city prosecutor reported that of 118 cases regarding pay recently handled by his office, 90, or 73.6 percent, had been resolved in favor of workers.
Workers also took part in direct oversight of managers:
Workers participated by the hundreds of thousands in special inspectorates, commissions, and brigades which checked the work of managers and institutions. These agencies sometimes wielded significant power.
This becomes all the more notable when one remembers what conditions for workers were like in many capitalist nations around this time:
This occurred at a time when American workers in particular were struggling for basic union recognition, which even when won did not provide much formal influence at the work place.
Political scientist Kazuko Kawamoto (Hitotsubashi University) states that the USSR had "a more democratic face than what is usually imagined, especially among Western people." As they put it:
The Soviet regime was democratic in its own sense of the word... participation through sending letters and attending discussions gave self-government a certain reality and helped to legitimize the Soviet regime. Therefore, listening to the people was an important obligation for the authorities... the government encouraged people to send letters to the authorities and actively used the all-people’s discussions.
All of this must reshape one's conception of the USSR; Thurston makes the following observation:
Far from basing its rule on the negative means of coercion, the Soviet regime in the late 1930's fostered a limited but positive political role for the populace... Earlier concepts of the Soviet state require rethinking: the workers who ousted managers, achieved the imprisonment of their targets, and won reinstatement at factories did so through organizations which constituted part of the state apparatus and wielded state powers.
With all of this in mind, Chomsky's fundamental argument (that Leninism rejected/rejects workers' control, and the Soviet working-class had no control over anything) seems to be highly flawed, to say the very least.
Sources