The widest possible application of the principle of general labor
service, together with measures for the militarization of labor, can
play a decisive part only in case they are applied on the basis of a
single economic plan covering the whole country and all branches of
productive activity. This plan must be drawn up for a number of years,
for the whole epoch that lies before us. It is naturally broken up
into separate periods or stages, corresponding to the inevitable
stages in the economic rebirth of the country. We shall have to begin
with the most simple and at the same time most fundamental problems.
We have first of all to afford the working class the very possibility
of living--though it be in the most difficult conditions--and thereby
to preserve our industrial centres and save the towns. This is the
point of departure. If we do not wish to melt the town into
agriculture, and transform the whole country into a peasant State, we
must support our transport, even at the minimum level, and secure
bread for the towns, fuel and raw materials for industry, fodder for
the cattle. Without this we shall not make one step forward.
Consequently, the first part of the plan comprises the improvement of
transport, or, in any case, the prevention of its further
deterioration and the preparation of the most necessary supplies of
food, raw materials, and fuel. The whole of the next period will be in
its entirety filled with the concentration and straining of
labor-power to solve these root problems; and only in this way shall
we lay the foundations for all that is to come. It was such a problem,
incidentally, that we put before our labor armies. Whether the first
or the following periods will be measured by months or by years, it is
fruitless at present to guess. This depends on many reasons, beginning
with the international situation and ending with the degree of
single-mindedness and steadfastness of the working class.
The second period is the period of machine-building in the interests
of transport and the storage of raw material and fuel. Here the core
is in the locomotive.
At the present time the repairing of locomotives is carried on in too
haphazard a fashion, swallowing up energies and resources beyond all
measure. We must reorganize the repairing of our rolling-stock, on the
basis of the mass production of spare parts. To-day, when the whole
network of the railways and the factories is in the hands of one
master, the Labor State, we can and must fix single types of
locomotives and trucks for the whole country, standardize their
constituent parts, draw all the necessary factories into the work of
the mass production of spare parts, reduce repairing to the simple
replacing of worn-out parts by new, and thereby make it possible to
build new locomotives on a mass scale out of spare parts.
Now that the sources of fuel and raw material are again open to us, we
must concentrate our exclusive attention on the building of
locomotives.
The third period will be one of machine-building in the interests of
the production of articles of primary necessity.
Finally, the fourth period, reposing on the conquests of the first
three, will allow us to begin the production of articles of personal
or secondary significance on the widest possible scale.
This plan has great significance, not only as a general guide for the
practical work of our economic organs, but also as a line along which
propaganda amongst the laboring masses in connection with our economic
problems is to proceed. Our labor mobilization will not enter into
real life, will not take root, if we do not excite the living interest
of all that is honest, class-conscious, and inspired in the working
class. We must explain to the masses the whole truth as to our
situation and as to our views for the future; we must tell them openly
that our economic plan, with the maximum of exertion on the part of
the workers, will neither to-morrow nor the day after give us a land
flowing with milk and honey: for during the first period our chief
work will consist in preparing the conditions for the production of
the means of production. Only after we have secured, though on the
smallest possible scale, the possibility of rebuilding the means of
transport and production, shall we pass on to the production of
articles for general consumption. In this way the fruit of their
labor, which is the direct object of the workers, in the shape of
articles for personal consumption, will arrive only in the last, the
fourth, stage of our economic plan; and only then shall we have a
serious improvement in our life. The masses, who for a prolonged
period will still bear all the weight of labor and of privation, must
realize to the full the inevitable internal logic of this economic
plan if they are to prove capable of carrying it out.
The sequence of the four economic periods outlined above must not be
understood too absolutely. We do not, of course, propose to bring
completely to a standstill our textile industry: we could not do this
for military considerations alone. But in order that our attention and
our forces should not be distracted under the pressure of requirements
and needs crying to us from all quarters, it is essential to make use
of the economic plan as the fundamental criterion, and separate the
important and the fundamental from the auxiliary and secondary.
Needless to say, under no circumstances are we striving for a narrow
"national" Communism: the raising of the blockade, and the European
revolution all the more, would introduce the most radical alterations
in our economic plan, cutting down the stages of its development and
bringing them together. But we do not know when these events will take
place; and we must act in such a way that we can hold out and become
stronger under the most unfavorable circumstances--that is to say, in
face of the slowest conceivable development of the European and the
world revolution. In case we are able actually to establish trading
relations with the capitalist countries, we shall again be guided by
the economic plan sketched above. We shall exchange part of our raw
material for locomotives or for necessary machines, but under no
circumstances for clothing, boots, or colonial products: our first
item is not articles of consumption, but the implements of transport
and production.
We should be short-sighted sceptics, and the most typical bourgeois
curmudgeons, if we imagined that the rebirth of our economic life will
take the form of a gradual transition from the present economic
collapse to the conditions that preceded that collapse, _i.e._,
that we shall reascend the same steps by which we descended, and only
after a certain, quite prolonged, period will be able to raise our
Socialist economy to the level at which it stood on the eve of the
imperialist war. Such a conception would not only be not consoling,
but absolutely incorrect. Economic collapse, which destroyed and broke
up in its path an incalculable quantity of values, also destroyed a
great deal that was poor and rotten, that was absolutely senseless;
and thereby it cleared the path for a new method of reconstruction,
corresponding to that technical equipment which world economy now
possesses.
If Russian capitalism developed not from stage to stage, but leaping
over a series of stages, and instituted American factories in the
midst of primitive steppes, the more is such a forced march possible
for Socialist economy. After we have conquered our terrible misery,
have accumulated small supplies of raw material and food, and have
improved our transport, we shall be able to leap over a whole series
of intermediate stages, benefiting by the fact that we are not bound
by the chains of private property, and that therefore we are able to
subordinate all undertakings and all the elements of economic life to
a single State plan.
Thus, for example, we shall undoubtedly be able to enter the period of
electrification, in all the chief branches of industry and in the
sphere of personal consumption, without passing through "the age of
steam." The programme of electrification is already drawn up in a
series of logically consequent stages, corresponding to the
fundamental stages of the general economic plan.
A new war may slow down the realization of our economic intentions;
our energy and persistence can and must hasten the process of our
economic rebirth. But, whatever be the rate at which economic events
unfold themselves in the future, it is clear that at the foundation of
all our work--labor mobilization, militarization of labor, Subbotniks,
and other forms of Communist labor voluntarism--there must lie the
_single economic plan_. And the period that is upon us requires from
us the complete concentration of all our energies on the first
elementary problems: food, fuel, raw material, transport. _Not to
allow our attention to be distracted, not to dissipate our forces, not
to waste our energies._ Such is the sole road to salvation.