If, in the first period of the Soviet revolution, the principal
accusation of the bourgeois world was directed against our savagery
and blood-thirstiness, later, when that argument, from frequent use,
had become blunted, and had lost its force, we were made responsible
chiefly for the economic disorganization of the country. In harmony
with his present mission, Kautsky methodically translates into the
language of pseudo-Marxism all the bourgeois charges against the
Soviet Government of destroying the industrial life of Russia. The
Bolsheviks began socialization without a plan. They socialized what
was not ready for socialization. The Russian working class,
altogether, is not yet prepared for the administration of industry;
and so on, and so on.
Repeating and combining these accusations, Kautsky, with dull
obstinacy, hides the real cause for our economic disorganization: the
imperialist slaughter, the civil war, and the blockade.
Soviet Russia, from the first months of its existence, found itself
deprived of coal, oil, metal, and cotton. First the Austro-German and
then the Entente imperialisms, with the assistance of the Russian
White Guards, tore away from Soviet Russia the Donetz coal and
metal-working region, the oil districts of the Caucasus, Turkestan
with its cotton, Ural with its richest deposits of metals, Siberia
with its bread and meat. The Donetz area had usually supplied our
industry with 94 per cent. of its coal and 74 per cent. of its crude
ore. The Ural supplied the remaining 20 per cent. of the ore and 4 per
cent. of the coal. Both these regions, during the civil war, were cut
off from us. We were deprived of half a milliard poods of coal
imported from abroad. Simultaneously, we were left without oil: the
oilfields, one and all, passed into the hands of our enemies. One
needs to have a truly brazen forehead to speak, in face of these
facts, of the destructive influence of "premature," "barbarous," etc.,
socialization. An industry which is completely deprived of fuel and
raw materials--whether that industry belongs to a capitalist trust or
to the Labor State, whether its factories be socialized or not--its
chimneys will not smoke in either case without coal or oil. Something
might be learned about this, say, in Austria; and for that matter
in Germany itself. A weaving factory administered according to the
best Kautskian methods--if we admit that anything at all can be
administered by Kautskian methods, except one's own inkstand--will not
produce prints if it is not supplied with cotton. And we were
simultaneously deprived both of Turkestan and American cotton. In
addition, as has been pointed out, we had no fuel.
Of course, the blockade and the civil war came as the result of the
proletarian revolution in Russia. But it does not at all follow from
this that the terrible devastation caused by the Anglo-American-French
blockade and the robber campaigns of Kolchak and Denikin have to be
put down to the discredit of the Soviet methods of economic
organization.
The imperialist war that preceded the revolution, with its
all-devouring material and technical demands, imposed a much greater
strain on our young industry than on the industry of more powerful
capitalist countries. Our transport suffered particularly severely.
The exploitation of the railways increased considerably; the wear and
tear correspondingly; while repairs were reduced to a strict minimum.
The inevitable hour of Nemesis was brought nearer by the fuel crisis.
Our almost simultaneous loss of the Donetz coal, foreign coal, and the
oil of the Caucasus, obliged us in the sphere of transport to have
recourse to wood. And, as the supplies of wood fuel were not in the
least calculated with a view to this, we had to stoke our boilers with
recently stored raw wood, which has an extremely destructive effect on
the mechanism of locomotives that are already worn out. We see, in
consequence, that the chief reasons for the collapse of transport
preceded November, 1917. But even those reasons which are directly or
indirectly bound up with the November Revolution fall under the
heading of political consequences of the revolution; and in no
circumstances do they affect Socialist economic methods.
The influence of political disturbances in the economic sphere was not
limited only to questions of transport and fuel. If world industry,
during the last decade, was more and more becoming a single organism,
the more directly does this apply to national industry. On the other
hand, the war and the revolution were mechanically breaking up and
tearing asunder Russian industry in every direction. The industrial
ruin of Poland, the Baltic fringe, and later of Petrograd, began under
Tsarism and continued under Kerensky, embracing ever new and newer
regions. Endless evacuations simultaneous with the destruction of
industry, of necessity meant the destruction of transport also. During
the civil war, with its changing fronts, evacuations assumed a more
feverish and consequently a still more destructive character. Each
side temporarily or permanently evacuated this or that industrial
centre, and took all possible steps to ensure that the most important
industrial enterprises could not be utilized by the enemy: all
valuable machines were carried off, or at any rate their most delicate
parts, together with the technical and best workers. The evacuation
was followed by a re-evacuation, which not infrequently completed the
destruction both of the property transferred and of the railways. Some
most important industrial areas--especially in the Ukraine and in the
Urals--changed hands several times.
To this it must be added that, at the time when the destruction of
technical equipment was being accomplished on an unprecedented scale,
the supply of machines from abroad, which hitherto played a decisive
part in our industry, had completely ceased.
But not only did the dead elements of production--buildings, machines,
rails, fuel, and raw material--suffer terrible losses under the
combined blows of the war and the revolution. Not less, if not more,
did the chief factor of industry, its living creative force--the
proletariat--suffer. The proletariat was consolidating the November
revolution, building and defending the apparatus of Soviet power, and
carrying on a ceaseless struggle with the White Guards. The skilled
workers are, as a rule, at the same time the most advanced. The civil
war tore away many tens of thousands of the best workers for a long
time from productive labor, swallowing up many thousands of them for
ever. The Socialist revolution placed the chief burden of its
sacrifices upon the proletarian vanguard, and consequently on
industry.
All the attention of the Soviet State has been directed, for the two
and a half years of its existence, to the problem of military defence.
The best forces and its principal resources were given to the front.
In any case, the class struggle inflicts blows upon industry. That
accusation, long before Kautsky, was levelled at it by all the
philosophers of the social harmony. During simple economic strikes the
workers consume, and do not produce. Still more powerful, therefore,
are the blows inflicted upon economic life by the class struggle in
its severest form--in the form of armed conflicts. But it is quite
clear that the civil war cannot be classified under the heading of
Socialist economic methods.
The reasons enumerated above are more than sufficient to explain the
difficult economic situation of Soviet Russia. There is no fuel, there
is no metal, there is no cotton, transport is destroyed, technical
equipment is in disorder, living labor-power is scattered over the
face of the country, and a high percentage of it has been lost to the
front--is there any need to seek supplementary reasons in the economic
Utopianism of the Bolsheviks in order to explain the fall of our
industry? On the contrary, each of the reasons quoted alone is
sufficient to evoke the question: how is it possible at all that,
under such conditions, factories and workshops should continue to
function?
And yet they do continue principally in the shape of war industry,
which is at present living at the expense of the rest. The Soviet
Government was obliged to re-create it, just like the army, out of
fragments. War industry, set up again under these conditions of
unprecedented difficulty, has fulfilled and is fulfilling its duty:
the Red Army is clothed, shod, equipped with its rifle, its machine
gun, its cannon, its bullet, its shell, its aeroplane, and all else
that it requires.
As soon as the dawn of peace made its appearance--after the
destruction of Kolchak, Yudenich, and Denikin--we placed before
ourselves the problem of economic organization in the fullest possible
way. And already, in the course of three or four months of intensive
work in this sphere, it has become clear beyond all possibility of
doubt that, thanks to its most intimate connection with the popular
masses, the elasticity of its apparatus, and its own revolutionary
initiative, the Soviet Government disposes of such resources and
methods for economic reconstruction as no other government ever had or
has to-day.
True, before us there arose quite new questions and new difficulties
in the sphere of the organization of labor. Socialist theory had no
answers to these questions, and could not have them. We had to find
the solution in practice, and test it in practice. Kautskianism is a
whole epoch behind the gigantic economic problems being solved at
present by the Soviet Government. In the form of Menshevism, it
constantly throws obstacles in our way, opposing the practical
measures of our economic reconstruction by bourgeois prejudices and
bureaucratic-intellectual scepticism.
To introduce the reader to the very essence of the questions of the
organization of labor, as they stand at present before us, we quote
below the report of the author of this book at the Third All-Russian
Congress of Trade Unions. With the object of the fullest possible
elucidation of the question, the text of the speech is supplemented by
considerable extracts from the author's reports at the All-Russian
Congress of Economic Councils and at the Ninth Congress of the
Communist Party.