The Russian Revolution полностью

We are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of that laboring majority. But this, of course, does not mean liquidating the element of compulsion. The element of compulsion does not disappear from historic accounts. No, compulsion plays and will play an important role for a significant period of history.¹²¹

Trotsky spoke especially bluntly on this subject at the Third Congress of Trade Unions in April 1920. Responding to a Menshevik motion calling for the abolition of compulsory labor on the grounds that it was less productive than free labor, Trotsky defended serfdom:

When the Mensheviks in their resolution say that compulsory labor always results in low productivity, then they are captives of bourgeois ideology and reject the very foundations of the socialist economy.… In the era of serfdom it was not so that gendarmes stood over every serf. There were certain economic forms to which the peasant had grown accustomed, which, at the time, he regarded as just, and he only rebelled from time to time.… It is said that compulsory labor is unproductive. This means that the whole socialist economy is doomed to be scrapped, because there is no other way of attaining socialism except through the command allocation of the entire labor force by the economic center, the allocation of that force in accord with the needs of a nationwide economic plan.¹²²

In sum, forced labor was not only indispensable to socialism but actually beneficial: “Forced serf labor did not emerge because of the ill will of the feudal class: it was a progressive phenomenon.”¹²³

The notion that the worker must become a peon of the “socialist” state—that is, on the face of it, a slave of himself, since he was said to be “master” of that state—embedded in the Marxist theory of a centralized, organized economy and its misanthropic view of human nature, was further strengthened by the extremely low opinion which the Bolshevik leaders had of Russia’s workers. Before the Revolution, they had idealized them, but contact with the worker in the flesh quickly put an end to illusions. While Trotsky extolled the virtues of serfdom, Lenin dismissed the Russian “proletariat.” At the Eleventh Party Congress, in March 1922, he said:

Very often, when they say “workers” it is thought that this means the factory proletariat. But it means nothing of the kind. In our country, since the war, the people who went to work in factories and plants were not proletarian at all, but those who did so to hide from the war. And do we now have social and economic conditions which induce true proletarians to go to work in factories and plants? This is not the case. It is correct according to Marx, but Marx wrote not about Russia but about capitalism as a whole, beginning with the fifteenth century. For six hundred years this was correct, and for today’s Russia it is not correct. Those who go into the factories are through and through not proletarians but all kinds of casual elements.¹²⁴

The implications of this astonishing admission were not lost on some Bolsheviks: for Lenin was saying nothing less than that the October Revolution had not been made by or even for the “proletarians.” Shliapnikov alone had the courage to point this out: “Vladimir Ilich said yesterday that the proletariat in the sense in which Marx perceived it does not exist.… Allow me to congratulate you on being the vanguard of a nonexistent class.”¹²⁵

With such a view of human nature in general and Russian labor in particular as Lenin and Trotsky entertained, they could hardly have tolerated free labor and independent trade unions even if other considerations had not spoken against them.

The official reasons for the introduction of compulsory labor were the requirements of economic planning: economic planning, it was argued, not inconsistently, could not be realized unless labor were subject to the same controls as all the other economic resources. The Bolsheviks spoke of the need for compulsory labor obligation as early as April 1917, before coming to power.¹²⁶ Lenin apparently saw no contradiction in saying that whereas the introduction of compulsory labor in capitalist Germany in wartime “inevitably meant military penal servitude [katorga] for the workers,” under Soviet rule the same phenomenon represented “a giant step toward socialism.”¹²⁷