# Out of Their Own Mouths/Chapter 5

V
SLAVERY AND COMPULSORY LABOR
Working men and their organizations suffer not only from the lack of any form of representative government or freedom of press or assemblage, and not only from the persecutions of the Extraordinary Commission, but also from Soviet legislation aimed directly at Labor.
After a year of syndicalism, factory Soviets and anarchy—during which production was reduced to less than one-seventh of its previous level—the Soviet "Government" in 1919 reversed its industrial policy and began to have recourse to one form after another of labor compulsion or enslavement. Compulsion has never, throughout history, produced the same degree of efficiency as freedom, but some of the most extreme disorder was cured and the Bolshevists gave figures to prove that the output of Russian industry had now "risen," though in a few cases only, to as high as two-thirds of its pre-war level—a level which was very low indeed in comparison to that of more advanced countries.
The first completed plan of labor compulsion was that devised by the "Code of Labor Laws." Some of the principal clauses of this slave code, as it was published in the official organ of the Soviet "Embassy" in America, called Soviet Russia, on February 21, 1920, were as follows:
The assignment of wage earners to work shall be carried out through the Departments of Labor Distribution.
In case of urgent public work the District Department of Labor may, in agreement with the respective professional unions and with the approval of the People's Commissariat of Labor, order the transfer of a whole group of wage earners from the organization where they are employed to another situated in the same or in a different locality, provided a sufficient number of volunteers for such work cannot be found.
The production standards of output adopted by the valuation commission must be approved by the proper Department of Labor jointly with the Council of National Economy.
The Supreme Council of National Economy jointly with the People's Commissariat of Labor may direct a general increase or decrease of the standards of efficiency and output for all wage earners and for all enterprises, establishments and institutions of a given district.
The Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party, the real Soviet Government, which took place a few weeks later (in April, 1920), attempted to give reasons for the new coercion plans. The chief arguments used were these:
The Ninth Congress approves of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party on the mobilization of industrial proletariat, compulsory labour service, militarisation of production and the application of military detachments to economic needs.
In connection with the above, the Congress decrees that the Party organisation should in every way assist the Trade Unions and the Labour Sections in registering ​all skilled workers with a view of employing them in the various branches of the production with the same consistency and strictness as was done, and is being carried out to the present time, with regard to the commanding staff for army needs. …
Every social system, whether based on slavery, feudalism, or capitalism, had its ways and means of labour compulsion and labour education in the interests of the exploiters.
The Soviet system is faced with the task of developing its own methods of labour compulsion to attain an increase of the intensity and wholesomeness of labour; this method is to be based on the socialisation of public economy in the interests of the whole nation.
In addition to the propaganda by which the people are to be influenced and the repressions which are to be applied to all idlers, parasites, and disorganisers who strive to undermine public zeal—the principal method for the increase of production will become the introduction of the system of labour. …
Owing to the fact that a considerable part of the workers, either in search of better food conditions or often for purposes of speculation, voluntarily leave their places of employment or change from place to place, which inevitably harms production and deteriorates the general position of the working class, the Congress considers one of the most important problems of Soviet Government and of the Trade Union organisation to be established is the firm, systematic, and insistent struggle with labour desertion. The way to fight this is to publish a list of desertion fines, the creation of a Labour Detachment of Deserters under fine, and, finally, internment in concentration camps.
A resolution was also adopted which still more clearly defined the nature of the new enslavement and pointed out the "necessity" for using the same punishments for ​labor desertion as those employed in cases of military desertion:
The organisations of the Party must assist in every way the Trade Unions and labour departments in registering skilled workers for the purpose of employing them in productive labour on the same principles and with the same severity as are adopted with regard to officers mobilized for the requirements of the army.
The officers' families, it may be recalled, are held as hostages for their good behavior.
If we wish to get a picture of how this industrial mobilization or militarisation works out in practice we can refer to the report presented to the International Federation of Trade Unions late in 1920 by representatives of the Russian Metal Workers Union.
Militarisation means a complete and absolute subjection of the workmen to the work's management. It embodies a number of stern measures, also restriction of leaves and cruel suppression of strikes.
In order to show to what extent militarisation is carried out in the metal industry we quote below an extract from an article, which appeared in the XIII issue of the journal "Metallist" in August, 1920, and was contributed by a Communist worker, Khronin: "Absolute submission to the director has been introduced at these works (Plow works of Kostroma); neither interference nor contradiction on the part of the workmen are tolerated. The instructions given by the works committee are in accordance with the instructions of the Works' Management. At our works absence without permission of the foreman means suspension of the extra ration. Refusal to work overtime also means suspension of ration. Whereas an obstinate refusal means arrest. ​For being late at work a fine of two weeks' wages is imposed."
When the Bolsheviks came into power they abolished overtime work in all branches of industry. But as the output was decreasing in an alarming way and as many skilled workmen went to the villages the Soviet Government, as far back as the beginning of 1920, reintroduced overtime work. At first it was optional, but in the summer of this year it was announced that overtime is compulsory.
At a secret meeting on the 5th of September, 1920, the representatives of the Petrograd Labour Organizations adopted the following resolution: "Never before has overtime work been practised so widely as now' the worst of it is that more than 80% of the overtime is compulsory and any refusal on the part of the workmen is severely punished."
Overtime work is remunerated as follows: for the first two hours—double pay; for the second two hours—time and a half.
The normal working day is 8 hours and 44 hours per week, but owing to compulsory overtime the Russian metal worker works now 12 hours a day, and 72 hours a week. Sometimes compulsory work is performed on Sundays, which makes 80 hours per week.
The workmen, far from being pleased with these methods, resist them, and as a result a wave of strikes passed all over Soviet Russia in 1920.
There is little known in Europe about these strikes or the measures taken to suppress them, as the Bolshevik Government which controls all papers and journals, does not allow this information to appear in the press. But in official documents we find the following information (Central Committee of Statistics of the Commissariat of Labour).
During the first six months of 1920:
1. Strikes have been called in 77% of the large and middle sized works.
​2. In nationalized undertakings strikes are continuous and 90% of them are called at such factories and works.
As a part of the system of Labor compulsion absolute dictators have been placed over the factories with the power of life and death. Schliapnikoff, Chief Commissar of Labor, printed the following explanation in the Russian Bolshevist press on November 13, 1919:
All those circumstances (a total absence of order and discipline in the factories) put together have compelled us to abolish the Working Men's Councils and to place at the head of the most important concerns special "dictators," with unlimited powers and entitled to dispose of the life and death of the workmen.
The "Code of Labor Laws" was by no means the last experiment in methods of enslavement, Trotzky following this up with the plan for utilizing the thousands of conscripts of the Red Army for purposes of labor,thus going back to the military slavery of ancient Egypt and Peru.
Lenin and Trotzky have freely expended their rhetorical and propaganda talents to justify the new slavery, not as a temporary expedient but as resting upon the permanent principles of Sovietism. In his booklet "The State and the Revolution" (pages 51 and 67) Lenin says:
We want the Socialist revolution with human nature as it is now; human nature itself cannot do without subordination. There must be submission to the armed vanguard of the proletariat.
Until people grow accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social existence without force and ​without subjection there must be suppression, and it is clear that where there is suppression there must also be violence and there cannot be liberty or democracy.
This reasoning on the surface means that no peoples are ready for liberty or democracy, and as there must be some form of dictatorship, why not the dictatorship of Lenin and his Party? But under the surface is also the shrewd calculation, evident throughout the Soviet leader's statements, that the Russian masses, being accustomed to merciless repression and subjection will finally give up hope of self-government and submit to the Soviet's rule if the Bolshevists can remain a few years longer in the saddle.
In his official report to the Soviet Economic Conference in January, 1920, Lenin frankly justified the rule of a minority of the city workers, which he calls the conscious "vanguard," over the majority of the city workers as well as the peasants who constitute 90 per cent of the population—and it is to be an arbitrary personal rule like that of the army. Here is what he said:
In the organization of the army we have passed from the principle of command by committee to the direct command of the chiefs. We must do the same in the organization of Government and industry.
Through committee power and its development we have arrived at autocracy, but it does not give that rapidity to our work which is required by the situation. In the autocracy of the chiefs of Communism and the Communist domination of the people lies the pledge of our success.
This is but the beginning of our work. There will be many drawbacks at first, much will have to be altered, but the basis itself cannot be unsound, as it is the same as that on which our entire Soviet structure is founded (i.e., this is not a temporary military expedient).
As to the workmen, Trotzky said:
All artisans will be sent into the works and transferred from one place to another, according to the indications of the Government. We will have no pity for the peasants; we will make labor armies of them, with military discipline and Communists as their chiefs. These armies will go forth among the peasants to gather corn, meat and fish that the work of the workmen may be assured.
The Soviet scheme of compulsory labor is being applied on such a broad scale and is so boldly presented as a "proletarian" scheme that it constitutes the gravest danger that has confronted labor for centuries. It is undoubtedly destined to become historic. It is therefore well worth while to present at somewhat greater length the extraordinary reasoning by which Trotzky and Lenin seek to defend it. The first full justification was presented by Trotzky to the Communist Party Congress in March, 1920, and was published in the official Soviet organ of Moscow on the 21st. Its most important points are perhaps the following:
At the present time the militarization of labor is all the more needed in that we have now come to the ​mobilization of peasants as the means of solving the problems requiring mass action. We are mobilizing the peasants and forming them into labor detachments which very closely resemble military detachments.
Some of our comrades say, however, that even though in the case of the working power of mobilized peasantry it is necessary to apply militarization, a military apparatus need not be created when the question involves skilled labor and industry because there we have professional (labor) unions performing the function of organizing labor. This opinion, however, is erroneous. …
We have in the most important branches of our industry more than a million workmen on the lists, but not more than eight hundred thousand of them are actually working, and where are the remainder? They have gone to the villages or to other divisions of industry or into speculation. Among soldiers this is called desertion, and, in one form or another, the measures used to compel soldiers to do their duty should be applied in the field of labor.
Under a unified system of economy the masses of workmen should be moved about, ordered and sent from place to place in exactly the same manner as soldiers. This is the foundation of the militarization of labor, and without this we are unable to speak seriously of any organization of industry on a new basis in the conditions of starvation and disorganization existing today.
In the period of transition in the organization of labor compulsion plays a very important part. The statement that free labor, namely, freely employed labor, produces more than labor under compulsion is correct only when applied to feudalistic and bourgeois orders of society.
Later in the year in an article republished by the official Bolshevist organ in America, Soviet Russia, Trotzky explains at length that compulsory labor is the backbone of Soviet communism. According to Trotzky ​Russia is in a period of transition to communist socialism which must last many years. He says:
The transition to socialism means the transition from a rudimentary distribution of labor power (by the play of purchase and sale, by movement of market and labor wages) to a planful distribution of workers through the economic organs of the district, of the province, of the entire country. Such a planful distribution presupposes the subordination of those to be distributed to the economic plan of the state. This is the essence of labor duty, which unquestionably is contained as a fundamental element in the program of the socialist organization of labor.
The carrying out of obligatory labor is inconceivable without an application of the methods of the militarization of labor in greater or less measure.
Why do we speak of a militarization? Of course this is only an analogy. But it is a very pregnant analogy. No other social organization, with the exception of the army, has ever considered itself justified to subordinate citizens to such an extent, to develop them on all sides by the application of its will as the state of the proletarian dictatorship is doing and considers itself justified in doing.
Trotzky asserts that compulsory labor is the very foundation of the Soviet State and that it will have to remain the basis until the coming generation through compulsion, terror, and the Bolshevist press and school monopoly (which Trotzky calls education) has converted the population into communism. This is the view expressed in the "theses" which he presented to the Economic Congress on January 24, 1920. One of these "theses" is the following:
In building up a society upon the remains of a very much confused and disorganized industry, transition to a systematic basis is inconceivable without the application of compulsory measures relating to the backward elements of the peasantry and working class. The means of compulsion at the disposal of the state form its military power. Consequently, the organization of work on a military basis, in some form or other, is an unconditional necessity for every society which is built upon the principle of compulsory labor.
Compulsory measures will be less and less needed as the system of socialization of industry develops, and the conditions of labor become more favorable, and as the educational level of the coming generation is raised.
Noteworthy in this "thesis" is the fact that any element of the working class which the communists may be pleased to designate as "backward" is to be treated the same as the Russian agriculturists or peasants, i.e., the same as the outlawed "bourgeois."
By such arguments Trotzky defends also the introduction of the Taylor system, bonuses, etc.:
"Therefore wages for labor," he continues, "both in the form of money and in that of commodities, must be made to coincide as far as possible with the productivity of the individual laborer. Under capitalism, piece work and agreements for pay, application of the Taylor methods, etc., had the object of increasing the exploitation of the workers by squeezing out a surplus profit. In socialist production, pay for piece work, premiums, have the object of increasing the social production and with it also the general well-being."
Yet one of the slogans by which the Bolshevists tricked labor into that measure of support they needed to get ​themselves into power was precisely the abolition of the bonus system. In November, 1917, Lenin said: "The bonus system is a heritage of the capitalistic regime and we repudiate it." And now we see the bonus system not only restored but established in places where it did not exist before.
Another promise to labor by which the Bolshevists were helped into power was a shorter working day. Now they have made long hours and Sunday work compulsory:
Our workday lasts twelve hours. We are compelled to work in two shifts in the paper department of our factory, and we are forced to work both Saturdays and Sundays. No exception is made with regard to women. Since August 15, overtime work has become compulsory. (Resolution of Petrograd government printing office workers.)
No leave of absence is to be granted to the workers. Failure to do overtime work is punishable, the first time by forfeiture of food allowance, and the second time by court action. Lateness of ten minutes on the job will be fined with loss of a day's pay. (From an order of the Petrograd government printing office, signed by Manager Forst, August, 1920.)
A report at the Russian Trade Union Congress of 1920 declared that the flight to the villages was so great that the proletariat was disappearing, melting away. Surely a rather serious state of affairs under the "dictatorship of the proletariat!" The official representative of the Petrograd labor unions in one of their resolutions declared:
We feel as if we were hard labor convicts, where everything but our feeding has been made subject to iron rules. We have become lost as human beings, and have been turned into slaves. (Resolution of Petrograd workers of September 5, 1920.)
It must not be supposed that the arguments of Lenin differ from those of Trotzky on this fundamental point. The American organ Soviet Russia declares that Soviet Russia is "the property of the producers" and "every worker belongs to Soviet Russia." No more absolute abandonment of individual liberty has ever been seen in print. Soviet Russia then proceeds to justify itself by reproducing the following article from the pen of Lenin, who differs from Trotzky only in the proposition that methods of compulsion will have to be continued not for one but for many generations:
Communist labor, in the strictest sense of the word, is the voluntary labor of future society, performed without pay, not as a definite duty, not in order to obtain the right to a share of production, and not according to rigid rules. It is labor performed freely, bound by no rule, without regard to compensation, and not with an eye to any reward. It is labor performed as a habit, for the common good, and with the realization of its necessity (which will also become a habit), in order to provide for the needs of society.
It is clear to every one that we, and this means our society, must advance very far indeed before labor of this kind can be realized in our social order.
To build up a new labor discipline, to create new forms of social relations, to find new methods of drawing people to work—this is a task of many generations. It is the supreme task. …
​To succeed in great things, we must begin in little things. And even after the "great" thing—the overthrow of the state, whereby capitalism is destroyed and power is transferred to the proletariat—the formation of industrial life on a new basis must start with the little things. Communist Saturdays, industrial armies, compulsory labor—these are various forms of the practical working out of Socialist labor.
A radical American Socialist, Albert Boni (formerly of the publishing firm of Boni and Liveright) who has just returned from several months in Soviet Russia has given us, in the New York Globe, a pro-Soviet newspaper, the following unforgettable picture of the new slavery.
The industrial collapse of Russia brings not merely a problem of technical reorganization, replacement of machinery and supplying raw materials and motive power. The Communist party is facing a situation in which the laboring classes, in whose behalf, supposedly, the Communist party is working, are proving themselves not only unwilling, but unable to endure the hardships and suffering that industrial disorganization has imposed upon them. In the face of impossible living conditions, the workers are abandoning the cities for the country and its more certain existence.
To meet the dearth of man-power, the Russian government decreed that every male over sixteen years of age must labor at such tasks as the state may assign. Labor books, showing that this obligation is being fulfilled, have been issued to all citizens, replacing passports and all other identification papers.
Wherever plans of the central government meet with opposition they have one resort that never fails—military force and the terror imposed by the extraordinary commission. But the peasants are already in a state of too ​great restlessness to permit of forcible measures over wide stretches of territory without great risks of serious consequences. Conscription of labor is going forward very slowly, and only where the Communist forces are gathered in such strength that resistance is rendered impossible.
The Russian laborer is held tied to his shop as closely as any feudal serf was bound to the land of his lord. Transfer of employees from one factory to another is possible only with the consent of the shop directorate. Travel beyond a radius of twenty-five miles is possible only with the consent of the local representatives of the extraordinary commission, which permission is granted only upon the request of the factory executive. Desertion from factories is punishable by reduction of food ration, and, if repeated, by arrest and internment in concentration camps. Some of the most important plants are being operated like military encampments, workers' quarters having been erected upon the grounds. There the employees are held under armed guards and require special passes to enter and to leave.
Military discipline has been introduced in all works. Fines are imposed for workers arriving late, heavy punishments are exacted from those failing to appear unless satisfactory justification of their absence is forthcoming. Factories are again placed under individual control with dictatorial power in directorates' hands over conditions of work. Overtime is demanded as required. Piece work, premiums, the Taylor system, all possible methods are introduced to speed up the exhausted worker. In each factory are representatives of the extraordinary commission reporting all cases of discontent and mischief makers are dealt with severely. Strikes are absolutely forbidden, and any attempts to organize the workers to resist the imposition of new demands are called counter-revolutionary activities for which long-term imprisonment is the lightest possible punishment.