It is a significant fact that from the middle of the nineteenth century right down to the present day the extreme radical left wing of the Socialist movement in every country has been bitter in its denunciation of those Socialists who assumed the continued existence of the state, rivaling the most extreme individualists in abuse of “the tyranny of the state.” Without a single noteworthy exception the leaders of the radical left wing of the movement have been identified with those revolts against “statism” which have manifested themselves in the agitations for decentralized autonomy. They have been anti-parliamentarians and direct-actionists almost to a man.
By a strange irony of history it has remained for the self-styled Marxian Socialists of Russia, the Bolsheviki, who are so much more Marxist than Marx himself, to give to the criticism we are discussing the authority of history. They have lifted it from the shadowy regions of fantastic speculation to the almost impregnable and unassailable ground of established law and practice. The Code of Labor Laws of Soviet Russia, recently published in this country by the official bureau of the Russian Soviet Government, can henceforth be pointed to by the enemies of social democracy as evidence of the truth of the charge that Socialism aims to reduce mankind to a position of hopeless servitude. Certainly no freedom-loving man or woman would want to exchange life under capitalism, with all its drawbacks and disadvantages, for the despotic, bureaucratic régime clearly indicated in this most remarkable collection of laws.
As we have seen, Lenin and his followers were anti-statists. Once in the saddle they set up a powerful state machine and began to apotheosize the state. Not only did the term “Soviet State” come into quite general use in place of “Soviet Power”; what is still more significant is the special sanctity with which they endowed the state. In this they go as far as Hegel, though they do not use his spiritual terminology. The German philosopher saw the state as “the Divine Will embodied in the human will,” as “Reason manifested,” and as “the Eternal personified.” Upon that conception the Prussian-German ideal of the state was based. That the state must be absolute, its authority unquestioned, is equally the basic conception upon which the Bolshevist régime rests. In no modern nation, not even the Germany of Bismarck and Wilhelm II, has the authority of the state been so comprehensive, so wholly dependent upon force or more completely independent of the popular will. Notwithstanding the revolutionary ferment of the time, so arrogantly confident have the self-constituted rulers become that we find Zinoviev boasting, “Were we to publish a decree ordering the entire population of Petrograd, under fifty years of age, to present themselves on the field of Mars to receive twenty-five birch rods, we are certain that 75 per cent. would obediently form a queue, and the remaining 25 per cent. would bring medical certificates exempting them from the flogging.”
It is interesting to note in the writings of Lenin the Machiavellian manner in which, even before the coup d’état of November, 1917, he began to prepare the minds of his followers for the abandonment of anti-statism. Shortly before that event he published a leaflet entitled, “Shall the Bolsheviki Remain in Power?” In this leaflet he pointed out that the Bolsheviki had preached the destruction of the state only because, and so long as, the state was in the possession of the master class. He asked why they should continue to do this after they themselves had taken the helm. The state, he argued, is the organized rule of a privileged minority class, and the Bolsheviki must use the enemy’s machinery and substitute their minority. Here we have revealed the same vicious and unscrupulous duplicity, the same systematic, studied deception, as in such matters as freedom of speech and press, equal suffrage, and the convocation of the Constituent Assembly—a fundamental principle so long as the party was in revolt, anti-statism was to be abandoned the moment the power to give it effect was secured. Other Socialists had been derided and bitterly denounced by the Bolsheviki for preaching the “bourgeois doctrine” of controlling and using the machinery of the state; nothing but the complete destruction of the state and its machinery would satisfy their revolutionary minds. But with their first approach to power the tune is changed and possession and use of the machinery of the state are held to be desirable and even essential.
For what is this possession of the power and machinery of the state desired? For no constructive purpose of any sort or kind whatever, if we may believe Lenin, but only for destruction and oppression. In his little book, The State and the Revolution, written in September, 1917, he says: “As the state is only a transitional institution which we must use in the revolutionary struggle in order forcibly to crush our opponents, it is a pure absurdity to speak of a Free People’s State. While the proletariat still needs the state, it does not require it in the interests of freedom, but in the interests of crushing its antagonists.” Here, then, is the brutal doctrine of the state as an instrument of coercion and repression which the arch Bolshevist acknowledges; a doctrine differing from that of Treitschke and other Prussians only in its greater brutality. The much-discussed Code of Labor Laws of the Soviet Government, with its elaborate provisions for a permanent conscription of labor upon an essentially military basis, is the logical outcome of the Bolshevist conception of the state.
The statement has been made by many of the apologists of the Bolsheviki that the conscription of labor, which has been so unfavorably commented upon in the western nations, is a temporary measure only, introduced because of the extraordinary conditions prevailing. It has been stated, by Mr. Lincoln Eyre among others, that it was adopted on the suggestion of Mr. Royal C. Keely, an American engineer who was employed by Lenin to make an expert report upon Russia’s economic position and outlook, and whose report, made in January of this year, is known to have been very unfavorable. A brief summary of the essential facts will show (1) that the Bolsheviki had this system in mind from the very first, and (2) that quite early they began to make tentative efforts to introduce it.
When the Bolsheviki appeared at the convocation of the Constituent Assembly and demanded that that body adopt a document which would virtually amount to a complete abdication of its functions, that document contained a clause—Article II, Paragraph 4—which read as follows: “To enforce general compulsory labor, in order to destroy the class of parasites, and to reorganize the economic life.” In April, 1918, Lenin wrote:
The delay in introducing obligatory labor service is another proof that the most urgent problem is precisely the preparatory organization work which, on one hand, should definitely secure our gains, and which, on the other hand, is necessary to prepare the campaign to “surround capital” and to “compel its surrender.” The introduction of obligatory labor service should be started immediately, but it should be introduced gradually and with great caution, testing every step by practical experience, and, of course, introducing first of all obligatory labor service for the rich. The introduction of a labor record-book and a consumption-budget record-book for every bourgeois, including the village bourgeois, would be a long step forward toward a complete “siege” of the enemy and toward the creation of a really universal accounting and control over production and distribution.[67]
[67] The Soviets at Work, p. 19
Some idea of the extent to which the principle of compulsory labor was applied to the bourgeoisie, as suggested by Lenin, can be gathered from the numerous references to the subject in the official Bolshevist press, especially in the late summer and early autumn of 1918. The extracts here cited are entirely typical: as early as April 17, 1918, Izvestia published a report by Larine, one of the People’s Commissaries, on the government of Moscow, in which he said: “A redistribution of manual labor must be made by an organized autonomous government composed of workers; compulsory labor for workmen must be prohibited; it would subject the proletariat to the peasants and on the whole could be of no use, seeing the general stoppage of all labor. Compulsion can be used only for those who have no need to work for their living—members of heretofore ruling classes.” Bednota, an official organ of the Communist Party, on September 20, 1918, published an interesting item from the Government of Smolensk, saying: “We shall soon have a very interesting community: we are bringing together all the landed proprietors of the district, are assigning them one property, supplying them with the necessary inventory, and making them work. Come and see this miracle! It is evident that this community is strictly guarded. The affair seems to promise well.”