<--Previous  Up  Next-->

to accept this regime, that is to sell ourselves willingly into bondage. Who can agree to do this?

Now let us consider the Bolshevik regime in the economic sphere. The situation of the toilers of the USSR is no less deplorable from the economic standpoint than from the political. The proletariat is denied the right to strike. The factory and shop committees are destroyed, the industrial unions became mere tools of the State. Consequently, the proletariat loses all possibility of defending its economic needs. The State Industrial Unions and organs of management of State industry control labor compensation, forms of productions, regulation of conditions of labor, and settle collective bargaining, ignoring the opinions of the workers, strikers are State offenders and the dissatisfied are under suspicion. Therefore, they lose their jobs, and are exiled to parts unknown. The wages are based on the piece-work plan. Labor compensation is dived into many categories which create a series of groups in the proletariat differing one from another according to the annual income. This creates dissension and lack of unity in the proletariat.

The majority of the workers are shackled to their factories, and have no right to leave their place of work at their own free will. The eight-hour day is non-existent in many shock-industries, because of repeated use of over-time work. Labor compensation continually lags behind the rising prices of the products of first necessity. The introduction of the five-day week deprived the workers of a "Sunday" in common, the day of rest, when thy could meet and discuss the affairs of the country and their own personal affairs. Labor protection was taken away from the workers and given to the Commissariat of Labor. The management of the mills and factories by the workers was destroyed long ago. The collegium and elective industrial management was destroyed and its place was taken by autocratic management.

The worker's control over industry is non-existent. The peasants are forced into the Collective Farms (Kolkhozi) and are compelled to remain there. The same farms supply the city with workers which are taken in herds by collective contract through the bureaucracy of the Kolkhozi. Co-operatives become supplementary additions of the trading organs of the State. The State has the trade monopoly and exploits the peasants by buying their products at a low price and selling them city products at a high price. The land is state property. The peasant land committees are destroyed.

Agriculture and industry are organized on the bourgeois principle of the profit-system, i.e. on the exploitation and appropriation by the state surplus value which is swallowed by the bureaucracy. Industry organized on the capitalist principle makes us of all the capitalist principles of exploitations; Fordization, Taylorization, etc. The proletariat and peasantry respond to this with passive resistance. As a result, industry moves at a snail's pace.