The introduction of compulsory labor service is unthinkable without
the application, to a greater or less degree, of the methods of
militarization of labor. This term at once brings us into the region
of the greatest possible superstitions and outcries from the
opposition.
To understand what militarization of labor in the Workers' State
means, and what its methods are, one has to make clear to oneself in
what way the army itself was militarized--for, as we all know, in its
first days the army did not at all possess the necessary "military"
qualities. During these two years we mobilized for the Red Army nearly
as many soldiers as there are members in our trade unions. But the
members of the trade unions are workers, while in the army the workers
constitute about 15 per cent., the remainder being a peasant mass.
And, none the less, we can have no doubt that the true builder and
"militarizer" of the Red Army has been the foremost worker, pushed
forward by the party and the trade union organization. Whenever the
situation at the front was difficult, whenever the recently-mobilized
peasant mass did not display sufficient stability, we turned on the
one hand to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and on the
other to the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions. From both these
sources the foremost workers were sent to the front, and there built
the Red Army after their own likeness and image--educating, hardening,
and militarizing the peasant mass.
This fact must be kept in mind to-day with all possible clearness
because it throws the best possible light on the meaning of
militarization in the workers' and peasants' State. The militarization
of labor has more than once been put forward as a watchword and
realized in separate branches of economic life in the bourgeois
countries, both in the West and in Russia under Tsarism. But our
militarization is distinguished from those experiments by its aims and
methods, just as much as the class-conscious proletariat organized for
emancipation is distinguished from the class-conscious bourgeoisie
organized for exploitation.
From the confusion, semi-unconscious and semi-deliberate, of two
different historical forms of militarization--the proletarian or
Socialist and the bourgeois--there spring the greater part of the
prejudices, mistakes, protests, and outcries on this subject. It is on
such a confusion of meanings that the whole position of the
Mensheviks, our Russian Kautskies, is founded, as it was expressed in
their theoretical resolution moved at the present Congress of Trade
Unions.
The Mensheviks attacked not only the militarization of labor, but
general labor service also. They reject these methods as "compulsory."
They preach that general labor service means a low productivity of
labor, while militarization means senseless scattering of labor-power.
"Compulsory labor always is unproductive labor,"--such is the exact
phrase in the Menshevik resolution. This affirmation brings us right
up to the very essence of the question. For, as we see, the question
is not at all whether it is wise or unwise to proclaim this or that
factory militarized, or whether it is helpful or otherwise to give the
military revolutionary tribunal powers to punish corrupt workers who
steal materials and instruments, so precious to us, or who sabotage
their work. No, the Mensheviks have gone much further into the
question. Affirming that compulsory labor is _always_ unproductive,
they thereby attempt to cut the ground from under the feet of our
economic reconstruction in the present transitional epoch. For it is
beyond question that to step from bourgeois anarchy to Socialist
economy without a revolutionary dictatorship, and without compulsory
forms of economic organization, is impossible.
In the first paragraph of the Menshevik resolution we are told that we
are living in the period of transition from the capitalist method of
production to the Socialist. What does this mean? And, first of all,
whence does this come? Since what time has this been admitted by our
Kautskians? They accused us--and this formed the foundation of our
differences--of Socialist Utopianism; they declared--and this
constituted the essence of their political teaching--that there can be
no talk about the transition to Socialism in our epoch, and that our
revolution is a bourgeois revolution, and that we Communists are only
destroying capitalist economy, and that we are not leading the country
forward but are throwing it back. This was the root difference--the
most profound, the most irreconcilable--from which all the others
followed. Now the Mensheviks tell us incidentally, in the introductory
paragraph of their resolution, as something that does not require
proof, that we are in the period of transition from capitalism to
Socialism. And this quite unexpected admission, which, one might
think, is extremely like a complete capitulation, is made the more
lightly and carelessly that, as the whole resolution shows, it imposes
no revolutionary obligations on the Mensheviks. They remain entirely
captive to the bourgeois ideology. After recognizing that we are on
the road to Socialism, the Mensheviks with all the greater ferocity
attack those methods without which, in the harsh and difficult
conditions of the present day, the transition to Socialism cannot be
accomplished.
Compulsory labor, we are told, is always unproductive. We ask what
does compulsory labor mean here, that is, to what kind of labor is it
opposed? Obviously, to free labor. What are we to understand, in that
case, by free labor? That phrase was formulated by the progressive
philosophers of the bourgeoisie, in the struggle against unfree,
_i.e._, against the serf labor of peasants, and against the
standardized and regulated labor of the craft guilds. Free labor meant
labor which might be "freely" bought in the market; freedom was
reduced to a legal fiction, on the basis of freely-hired slavery. We
know of no other form of free labor in history. Let the very few
representatives of the Mensheviks at this Congress explain to us what
they mean by free, non-compulsory labor, if not the market of
labor-power.
History has known slave labor. History has known serf labor. History
has known the regulated labor of the mediaeval craft guilds. Throughout
the world there now prevails hired labor, which the yellow journalists
of all countries oppose, as the highest possible form of liberty, to
Soviet "slavery." We, on the other hand, oppose capitalist slavery by
socially-regulated labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory
for the whole people and consequently compulsory for each worker in
the country. Without this we cannot even dream of a transition to
Socialism. The element of material, physical, compulsion may be
greater or less; that depends on many conditions--on the degree of
wealth or poverty of the country, on the heritage of the past, on the
general level of culture, on the condition of transport, on the
administrative apparatus, etc., etc. But obligation, and,
consequently, compulsion, are essential conditions in order to bind
down the bourgeois anarchy, to secure socialization of the means of
production and labor, and to reconstruct economic life on the basis of
a single plan.
For the Liberal, freedom in the long run means the market. Can or
cannot the capitalist buy labor-power at a moderate price--that is for
him the sole measure of the freedom of labor. That measure is false,
not only in relation to the future but also in connection with the
past.
It would be absurd to imagine that, during the time of bondage-right,
work was carried entirely under the stick of physical compulsion, as
if an overseer stood with a whip behind the back of every peasant.
Mediaeval forms of economic life grew up out of definite conditions of
production, and created definite forms of social life, with which the
peasant grew accustomed, and which he at certain periods considered
just, or at any rate unalterable. Whenever he, under the influence of
a change in material conditions, displayed hostility, the State
descended upon him with its material force, thereby displaying the
compulsory character of the organization of labor.
The foundations of the militarization of labor are those forms of
State compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy
by the Socialist will for ever remain an empty sound. Why do we speak
of _militarization_? Of course, this is only an analogy--but an
analogy very rich in content. No social organization except the army
has ever considered itself justified in subordinating citizens to
itself in such a measure, and to control them by its will on all sides
to such a degree, as the State of the proletarian dictatorship
considers itself justified in doing, and does. Only the army--just
because in its way it used to decide questions of the life or death of
nations, States, and ruling classes--was endowed with powers of
demanding from each and all complete submission to its problems, aims,
regulations, and orders. And it achieved this to the greater degree,
the more the problems of military organization coincided with the
requirements of social development.
The question of the life or death of Soviet Russia is at present being
settled on the labor front; our economic, and together with them our
professional and productive organizations, have the right to demand
from their members all that devotion, discipline, and executive
thoroughness, which hitherto only the army required.
On the other hand, the relation of the capitalist to the worker, is
not at all founded merely on the "free" contract, but includes the
very powerful elements of State regulation and material compulsion.
The competition of capitalist with capitalist imparted a certain very
limited reality to the fiction of freedom of labor; but this
competition, reduced to a minimum by trusts and syndicates, we have
finally eliminated by destroying private property in the means of
production. The transition to Socialism, verbally acknowledged by the
Mensheviks, means the transition from anarchical distribution of
labor-power--by means of the game of buying and selling, the movement
of market prices and wages--to systematic distribution of the workers
by the economic organizations of the county, the province, and the
whole country. Such a form of planned distribution pre-supposes the
subordination of those distributed to the economic plan of the State.
And this is the essence of _compulsory labor service_, which
inevitably enters into the programme of the Socialist organization of
labor, as its fundamental element.
If organized economic life is unthinkable without compulsory labor
service, the latter is not to be realized without the abolition of
fiction of the freedom of labor, and without the substitution for it
of the obligatory principle, which is supplemented by real compulsion.
That free labor is more productive than compulsory labor is quite true
when it refers to the period of transition from feudal society to
bourgeois society. But one needs to be a Liberal or--at the present
day--a Kautskian, to make that truth permanent, and to transfer its
application to the period of transition from the bourgeois to the
Socialist order. If it were true that compulsory labor is unproductive
always and under every condition, as the Menshevik resolution says,
all our constructive work would be doomed to failure. For we can have
no way to Socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the
economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized
distribution of labor-power in harmony with the general State plan.
The Labor State considers itself empowered to send every worker to the
place where his work is necessary. And not one serious Socialist will
begin to deny to the Labor State the right to lay its hand upon the
worker who refuses to execute his labor duty. But the whole point is
that the Menshevik path of transition to "Socialism" is a milky way,
without the bread monopoly, without the abolition of the market,
without the revolutionary dictatorship, and without the militarization
of labor.
Without general labor service, without the right to order and demand
fulfilment of orders, the trade unions will be transformed into a mere
form without a reality; for the young Socialist State requires trade
unions, not for a struggle for better conditions of labor--that is the
task of the social and State organizations as a whole--but to organize
the working class for the ends of production, to educate, discipline,
distribute, group, retain certain categories and certain workers at
their posts for fixed periods--in a word, hand in hand with the State
to exercise their authority in order to lead the workers into the
framework of a single economic plan. To defend, under such conditions,
the "freedom" of labor means to defend fruitless, helpless, absolutely
unregulated searches for better conditions, unsystematic, chaotic
changes from factory to factory, in a hungry country, in conditions of
terrible disorganization of the transport and food apparatus.... What
except the complete collapse of the working-class and complete
economic anarchy could be the result of the stupid attempt to
reconcile bourgeois freedom of labor with proletarian socialization of
the means of production?
Consequently, comrades, militarization of labor, in the root sense
indicated by me, is not the invention of individual politicians or an
invention of our War Department, but represents the inevitable method
of organization and disciplining of labor-power during the period of
transition from capitalism to Socialism. And if the compulsory
distribution of labor-power, its brief or prolonged retention at
particular industries and factories, its regulation within the
framework of the general State economic plan--if these forms of
compulsion lead always and everywhere, as the Menshevik resolution
states, to the lowering of productivity, then you can erect a monument
over the grave of Socialism. For we cannot build Socialism on
decreased production. Every social organization is in its foundation
an organization of labor, and if our new organization of labor leads
to a lowering of its productivity, it thereby most fatally leads to
the destruction of the Socialist society we are building, whichever
way we twist and turn, whatever measures of salvation we invent.
That is why I stated at the very beginning that the Menshevik argument
against militarization leads us to the root question of general labor
service and its influence on the productivity of labor. It is true
that compulsory labor is always unproductive? We have to reply that
that is the most pitiful and worthless Liberal prejudice. The whole
question is: who applies the principle of compulsion, over whom, and
for what purpose? What State, what class, in what conditions, by what
methods? Even the serf organization was in certain conditions a step
forward, and led to the increase in the productivity of labor.
Production has grown extremely under capitalism, that is, in the epoch
of the free buying and selling of labor-power on the market. But free
labor, together with the whole of capitalism, entered the stage of
imperialism and blew itself up in the imperialist war. The whole
economic life of the world entered a period of bloody anarchy,
monstrous perturbations, the impoverishment, dying out, and
destruction of masses of the people. Can we, under such conditions,
talk about the productivity of free labor, when the fruits of that
labor are destroyed ten times more quickly than they are created? The
imperialistic war, and that which followed it, displayed the
impossibility of society existing any longer on the foundation of free
labor. Or perhaps someone possesses the secret of how to separate free
labor from the delirium tremens of imperialism, that is, of turning
back the clock of social development half a century or a century?
If it were to turn out that the planned, and consequently compulsory,
organization of labor which is arising to replace imperialism led to
the lowering of economic life, it would mean the destruction of all
our culture, and a retrograde movement of humanity back to barbarism
and savagery.
Happily, not only for Soviet Russia but for the whole of humanity, the
philosophy of the low productivity of compulsory labor--"everywhere
and under all conditions"--is only a belated echo of ancient Liberal
melodies. The productivity of labor is the total productive meaning of
the most complex combination of social conditions, and is not in the
least measured or pre-determined by the legal form of labor.
The whole of human history is the history of the organization and
education of collective man for labor, with the object of attaining a
higher level of productivity. Man, as I have already permitted myself
to point out, is lazy; that is, he instinctively strives to receive
the largest possible quantity of products for the least possible
expenditure of energy. Without such a striving, there would have been
no economic development. The growth of civilization is measured by the
productivity of human labor, and each new form of social relations
must pass through a test on such lines.
"Free," that is, freely-hired labor, did not appear all at once upon
the world, with all the attributes of productivity. It acquired a high
level of productivity only gradually, as a result of a prolonged
application of methods of labor organization and labor education. Into
that education there entered the most varying methods and practices,
which in addition changed from one epoch to another. First of all the
bourgeoisie drove the peasant from the village to the high road with
its club, having preliminarily robbed him of his land, and when he
would not work in the factory it branded his forehead with red-hot
irons, hung him, sent him to the gallows; and in the long run it
taught the tramp who had been shaken out of his village to stand at
the lathe in the factory. At this stage, as we see, "free" labor is
little different as yet from convict labor, both in its material
conditions and in its legal aspect.
At different times the bourgeoisie combined the red-hot irons of
repression in different proportions with methods of moral influence,
and, first of all, the teaching of the priest. As early as the
sixteenth century, it reformed the old religion of Catholicism, which
defended the feudal order, and adapted for itself a new religion in
the form of the Reformation, which combined the free soul with free
trade and free labor. It found for itself new priests, who became the
spiritual shop-assistants, pious counter-jumpers of the bourgeoisie.
The school, the press, the market-place, and parliament were adapted
by the bourgeoisie for the moral fashioning of the working-class.
Different forms of wages--day-wages, piece wages, contract and
collective bargaining--all these are merely changing methods in the
hands of the bourgeoisie for the labor mobilization of the
proletariat. To this there are added all sorts of forms for
encouraging labor and exciting ambition. Finally, the bourgeoisie
learned how to gain possession even of the trade unions--_i.e._,
the organizations of the working class itself; and it made use of them
on a large scale, particularly in Great Britain, to discipline the
workers. It domesticated the leaders, and with their help inoculated
the workers with the fiction of the necessity for peaceful organic
labor, for a faultless attitude to their duties, and for a strict
execution of the laws of the bourgeois State. The crown of all this
work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific
organization of the process of production are combined with the most
concentrated methods of the system of sweating.
From all that has been said above, it is clear that the productivity
of freely-hired labor is not something that appeared all at once,
perfected, presented by history on a salver. No, it was the result of
a long and stubborn policy of repression, education, organization, and
encouragement, applied by the bourgeoisie in its relations with the
working class. Step by step it learned to squeeze out of the workers
ever more and more of the products of labor; and one of the most
powerful weapons in its hand turned out to be the proclamation of free
hiring as the sole free, normal, healthy, productive, and saving form
of labor.
A legal form of labor which would of its own virtue guarantee its
productivity has not been known in history, and cannot be known. The
legal superstructure of labor corresponds to the relations and current
ideas of the epoch. The productivity of labor is developed, on the
basis of the development of technical forces, by labor education, by
the gradual adaptation of the workers to the changed methods of
production and the new form of social relations.
The creation of Socialist society means the organization of the
workers on new foundations, their adaptation to those foundations, and
their labor re-education, with the one unchanging end of the increase
in the productivity of labor. The working class, under the leadership
of its vanguard, must itself re-educate itself on the foundations of
Socialism. Whoever has not understood this is ignorant of the A B C of
Socialist construction.
What methods have we, then, for the re-education of the workers?
Infinitely wider than the bourgeoisie has--and, in addition, honest,
direct, open methods, infected neither by hypocrisy nor by lies. The
bourgeoisie had to have recourse to deception, representing its labor
as free, when in reality it was not merely socially-imposed, but
actually slave labor. For it was the labor of the majority in the
interests of the minority. We, on the other hand, organize labor in
the interests of the workers themselves, and therefore we can have no
motives for hiding or masking the socially compulsory character of our
labor organization. We need the fairy stories neither of the priests,
nor of the Liberals, nor of the Kautskians. We say directly and openly
to the masses that they can save, rebuild, and bring to a flourishing
condition a Socialist country only by means of hard work,
unquestioning discipline and exactness in execution on the part of
every worker.
The chief of our resources is moral influence--propaganda not only in
word but in deed. General labor service has an obligatory character;
but this does not mean at all that it represents violence done to the
working class. If compulsory labor came up against the opposition of
the majority of the workers it would turn out a broken reed, and with
it the whole of the Soviet order. The militarization of labor, when
the workers are opposed to it, is the State slavery of Arakcheyev. The
militarization of labor by the will of the workers themselves is the
Socialist dictatorship. That compulsory labor service and the
militarization of labor do not force the will of the workers, as
"free" labor used to do, is best shown by the flourishing,
unprecedented in the history of humanity, of labor voluntarism in the
form of "Subbotniks" (Communist Saturdays). Such a phenomenon there
never was before, anywhere or at any time. By their own voluntary
labor, freely given--once a week and oftener--the workers clearly
demonstrate not only their readiness to bear the yoke of "compulsory"
labor but their eagerness to give the State besides that a certain
quantity of additional labor. The "Subbotniks" are not only a splendid
demonstration of Communist solidarity, but also the best possible
guarantee for the successful introduction of general labor service.
Such truly Communist tendencies must be shown up in their true light,
extended, and developed with the help of propaganda.
The chief spiritual weapon of the bourgeoisie is religion; ours is the
open explanation to the masses of the exact position of things, the
extension of scientific and technical knowledge, and the initiation of
the masses into the general economic plan of the State, on the basis
of which there must be brought to bear all the labor-power at the
disposal of the Soviet regime.
Political economy provided us with the principal substance of our
agitation in the period we have just left: the capitalist social order
was a riddle, and we explained that riddle to the masses. To-day,
social riddles are explained to the masses by the very mechanism of
the Soviet order, which draws the masses into all branches of
administration. Political economy will more and more pass into the
realms of history. There move forward into the foreground the sciences
which study nature and the methods of subordinating it to man.
The trade unions must organize scientific and technical educational
work on the widest possible scale, so that every worker in his own
branch of industry should find the impulses for theoretical work of
the brain, while the latter should again return him to labor,
perfecting it and making him more productive. The press as a whole
must fall into line with the economic problems of the country--not in
that sense alone in which this is being done at present--_i.e._,
not in the sense of a mere general agitation in favor of a revival of
labor--but in the sense of the discussion and the weighing of concrete
economic problems and plans, ways and means of their solution, and,
most important of all, the testing and criticism of results already
achieved. The newspapers must from day to day follow the production of
the most important factories and other enterprises, registering their
successes and failures encouraging some and pillorying others....
Russian capitalism, in consequence of its lateness, its lack of
independence, and its resulting parasitic features, has had much less
time than European capitalism technically to educate the laboring
masses, to train and discipline them for production. That problem is
now in its entirety imposed upon the industrial organizations of the
proletariat. A good engineer, a good mechanic, and a good carpenter,
must have in the Soviet Republic the same publicity and fame as
hitherto was enjoyed by prominent agitators, revolutionary fighters,
and, in the most recent period, the most courageous and capable
commanders and commissaries. Greater and lesser leaders of technical
development must occupy the central position in the public eye. Bad
workers must be made ashamed of doing their work badly.
We still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of wages.
The further we go, the more will its importance become simply to
guarantee to all members of society all the necessaries of life; and
thereby it will cease to be a system of wages. But at present we are
not sufficiently rich for this. Our main problem is to raise the
quantity of products turned out, and to this problem all the remainder
must be subordinated. In the present difficult period the system of
wages is for us, first and foremost, not a method for guaranteeing the
personal existence of any separate worker, but a method of estimating
what that individual worker brings by his labor to the Labor Republic.
Consequently, wages, in the form both of money and of goods, must be
brought into the closest possible touch with the productivity of
individual labor. Under capitalism, the system of piece-work and of
grading, the application of the Taylor system, etc., have as their
object to increase the exploitation of the workers by the
squeezing-out of surplus value. Under Socialist production,
piece-work, bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the
volume of social product, and consequently to raise the general
well-being. Those workers who do more for the general interest than
others receive the right to a greater quantity of the social product
than the lazy, the careless, and the disorganizers.
Finally, when it rewards some, the Labor State cannot but punish
others--those who are clearly infringing labor solidarity, undermining
the common work, and seriously impairing the Socialist renaissance of
the country. Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a
necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship.
All the measures enumerated above--and together with them a number of
others--must assist the development of rivalry in the sphere of
production. Without this we shall never rise above the average, which
is a very unsatisfactory level. At the bottom of rivalry lies the
vital instinct--the struggle for existence--which in the bourgeois
order assumes the character of competition. Rivalry will not disappear
even in the developed Socialist society; but with the growing
guarantee of the necessary requirements of life rivalry will acquire
an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express
itself in a striving to perform the greatest possible service for
one's village, county, town, or the whole of society, and to receive
in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or, finally, just internal
satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But in the
difficult period of transition, in conditions of the extreme shortage
of material goods, and the as yet insufficiently developed state of
social solidarity, rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or less
degree bound up with a striving to guarantee for oneself one's own
requirements.
This, comrades, is the sum of resources at the disposal of the Labor
State in order to raise the productivity of labor. As we see, there is
no ready-made solution here. We shall find it written in no book. For
there could not be such a book. We are now only beginning, together
with you, to write that book in the sweat and the blood of the
workers. We say: working men and women, you have crossed to the path
of regulated labor. Only along that road will you build the Socialist
society. Before you there lies a problem which no one will settle for
you: the problem of increasing production on new social foundations.
Unless you solve that problem, you will perish. If you solve it, you
will raise humanity by a whole head.