Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky

Capitalist industry utilizes auxiliary labor-power on a large scale, in the shape of peasants employed on industry for only part of the year. The village, throttled by the grip of landlessness, always threw a certain surplus of labor-power on to the market. The State obliged it to do this by its demand for taxes. The market offered the peasant manufactured goods. To-day, we have none of this. The village has acquired more land; there is not sufficient agricultural machinery; workers are required for the land; industry can at present give practically nothing to the village; and the market no longer has an attractive influence on labor-power.

Yet labor-power is required – required more than at any time before. Not only the worker, but the peasant also, must give to the Soviet State his energy, in order to ensure that laboring Russia, and with it the laboring masses, should not be crushed. The only way to attract the labor-power necessary for our economic problems is to introduce compulsory labor service.

The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. "He who works not, neither shall he eat." And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labor Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic rebirth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor-power – an almost inexhaustible reservoir – and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization.

How are we practically to begin the utilization of labor-power on the basis of compulsory military service?

Hitherto only the War Department has had any experience in the sphere of the registration, mobilization, formation, and transference from one place to another of large masses. These technical methods and principles were inherited by our War Department, to a considerable extent, from the past.

In the economic sphere there is no such heritage; since in that sphere there existed the principle of private property, and labor-power entered each factory separately from the market. It is consequently natural that we should be obliged, at any rate during the first period, to make use of the apparatus of the War Department on a large scale for labor mobilizations.

We have set up special organizations for the application of the principle of compulsory labor service in the centre and in the districts: in the provinces, the counties, and the rural districts, we have already compulsory labor committees at work. They rely for the most part on the central and local organs of the War Department. Our economic centres – the Supreme Economic Council, the People's Commissariat for Agriculture, the People's Commissariat for Ways and Communications, the People's Commissariat for Food – work out estimates of the labor-power they require. The Chief Committee for Compulsory Labor Service receives these estimates, co-ordinates them, brings them into agreement with the local resources of labor-power, gives corresponding directions to its local organs, and through them carries out labor mobilizations. Within the boundaries of regions, provinces, and counties, the local bodies carry out this work independently, with the object of satisfying local economic requirements.

All this organization is at present only in the embryo stage. It is still very imperfect. But the course we have adopted is unquestionably the right one.

If the organization of the new society can be reduced fundamentally to the reorganization of labor, the organization of labor signifies in its turn the correct introduction of general labor service. This problem is in no way met by measures of a purely departmental and administrative character. It touches the very foundations of economic life and the social structure. It finds itself in conflict with the most powerful psychological habits and prejudices. The introduction of compulsory labor service pre-supposes, on the one hand, a colossal work of education, and, on the other, the greatest possible care in the practical method adopted.

The utilization of labor-power must be to the last degree economical. In our labor mobilizations we have to reckon with the economic and social conditions of every region, and with the requirements of the principal occupation of the local population —i. e., of agriculture. We have, if possible, to make use of the previous auxiliary occupations and part-time industries of the local population. We have to see that the transference of mobilized labor-power should take place over the shortest possible distances —i. e., to the nearest sectors of the labor front. We must see that the number of workers mobilized correspond to the breadth of our economic problem. We must see that the workers mobilized be supplied in good time with the necessary implements of production, and with food. We must see that at their head be placed experienced and business-like instructors. We must see that the workers mobilized become convinced on the spot that their labor-power is being made use of cautiously and economically and is not being expended haphazard. Wherever it is possible, direct mobilization must be replaced by the labor task —i. e., by the imposition on the rural district of an obligation to supply, for example, in such a time such a number of cubic sazhens of wood, or to bring up by carting to such a station so many poods of cast-iron, etc. In this sphere, it is essential to study experience as it accumulates with particular care, to allow a great measure of elasticity to the economic apparatus, to show more attention to local interests and social peculiarities of tradition. In a word, we have to complete, ameliorate, perfect, the system, methods, and organs for the mobilization of labor-power. But at the same time it is necessary once for all to make clear to ourselves that the principle itself of compulsory labor service has just so radically and permanently replaced the principle of free hiring as the socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist property.

THE MILITARIZATION OF LABOR

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 mediæval 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. Mediæval 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.