Dictatorship vs. Democracy (Terrorism and Communism): a reply to Karl Kantsky
Kant · en
In my report I attempted to explain that the adaptation of the workers
on new social foundations to new forms of labor, and the attainment of
a higher level of productivity of labor, are possible only by means of
the simultaneous application of various methods--economic interest,
legal compulsion, the influence of an internally co-ordinated economic
organization, the power of repression, and, first and last, moral
influence, agitation, propaganda, and the general raising of the
cultural level.
Only by the combination of all these methods can we attain a high
level of Socialist economy.
If even under capitalism economic interest is inevitably combined with
legal compulsion, behind which stands the material force of the State,
in the Soviet State--that is, the State of transition to Socialism--we
can draw no water-tight compartment at all between economic and legal
compulsion. All our most important industries are in the hands of the
State. When we say to the turner Ivanov, "You are bound at once to
work at the Sormovo factory; if you refuse, you will not receive your
ration," what are we to call it? Economic pressure or legal
compulsion? He cannot go to another factory, for all factories are in
the hands of the State, which will not allow such a change.
Consequently, economic pressure melts here into the pressure of State
compulsion. Abramovich apparently would like us, as regulators of the
distribution of labor-power, to make use only of such means as the
raising of wages, bonuses, etc., in order to attract the necessary
workers to our most important factories. Apparently that comprises all
his thoughts on the subject. But if we put the question in this way,
every serious worker in the trade union movement will understand it is
pure utopia. We cannot hope for a free influx of labor-power from the
market, for to achieve this the State would need to have in its hands
sufficiently extensive "reserves of manoeuvre," in the form of food,
housing, and transport, _i.e._, precisely those conditions which
we have yet only to create. Without systematically-organized
transference of labor-power on a mass scale, according to the demands
of the economic organization, we shall achieve nothing. Here the
moment of compulsion arises before us in all its force of economic
necessity. I read you a telegram from Ekaterinburg dealing with the
work of the First Labor Army. It says that there have passed through
the Ural Committee for Labor Service over 4,000 workers. Whence have
they appeared? Mainly from the former Third Army. They were not
allowed to go to their homes, but were sent where they were required.
From the army they were handed over to the Committee for Labor
Service, which distributed them according to their categories and sent
them to the factories. This, from the Liberal point of view, is
"violence" to the freedom of the individual. Yet an overwhelming
majority of the workers went willingly to the labor front, as hitherto