Part 40 (1/2)
”'Many in the army have already accomplished their military task but they cannot be demobilized as yet. Now that they have been released from their military duties, they must fight against economic ruin and against hunger; they must work to obtain fuel, peat and other heat-producing products; they must take part in building, in clearing the lines of snow, in repairing roads, building sheds, grinding flour, etc.
”'We have already organized several of these armies and they have been allotted their tasks. One army must obtain foodstuffs for the workmen of the districts in which it was formerly stationed and it also will cut wood, cart it to the railways and repair engines.
Another army will help in the laying down of railway lines for the transport of crude oil. A third labor army will be used in repairing agricultural implements and machines, and, in the spring, will take part in the working of the land....
”'Trade unions must register qualified workmen in the villages.
Only in those localities where trade union methods are inadequate other methods must be introduced, in particular that of compulsion, because labor conscription gives the state the right to tell the qualified workmen who is employed on some unimportant work in his village, ”You are obliged to leave your present employment and go to Sormovo or Kolomna, because there your work is required.”
”'Labor conscription means that the qualified workmen who leave the army must proceed to places where they are required, where their presence is necessary to the economic system of the country. We must feed these workmen and guarantee them the minimum food ration.'”
No doubt these ”qualified workmen” are what we call ”skilled workmen.”
Here we have, in its naked reality, the ”deliverance” from ”wage-slavery” which the crazy Socialists of all schools have so long been preaching to the laboring freemen of America. How would the millions of labor's n.o.blemen in the American Federation of Labor like to see Debs, Hillquit and Victor L. Berger cracking the whip over them after the fas.h.i.+on of Lenine, Trotzky and Zinovieff in Russia?
Notice the ”capitalistic” language of Trotzky: ”_We_”--the tyrannical, exploiting drones in the Kremlin--”must feed these workmen and guarantee them the _minimum_ food ration.” Do not the ”workmen” produce the food?
Then why do they not take it and cut the throats of these drones? Is not this the Socialist doctrine we are taught by our American theorists, who froth at the mouth over the alleged ”wage-slavery” of American workmen who rear intelligent families in comfortable homes and maintain the independence and self-initiative of American freemen?
In the eleventh place, we notice that the workmen of Russia, as a reward for complete slavery under military conscription and courts martial tribunals, are guaranteed nothing but this ”minimum food ration” and a possibility of being able to buy enough additional food out of their wages to postpone starvation. The last-mentioned possibility is described for us by Lincoln Eyre in his cable in the ”New York World” of February 27, 1920, where, it must be remembered, he is speaking of the most-favored workmen, in the big cities. He says:
”n.o.body in Russia relying wholly upon 'Sovietsky' food--food handed out through official agencies--gets enough to eat except soldiers, a small percentage of heavy workers and high Soviet officials. Ordinary factory workers seldom receive as much as 60 per cent of their alimentary requirements through the Government. The remainder they must buy at fantastically high prices from speculators. And though they themselves, in collaboration with central dictators.h.i.+p, fix their own wages, they never earn enough to cover the swift-climbing cost of living. If this is the plight of the workers, that is, of the ruling cla.s.s, the ghastliness of the situation confronting the less favored elements of the population may well be imagined.”
Is it in irony that Eyre speaks of these ”workers” as ”the ruling cla.s.s”? What are the real workmen in Russia but victims of this cruel experiment of tyrannizing Socialist ”intellectuals”?
We remark next, in the twelfth place, that the Soviet system of food distribution, wholly unequal and thus anti-communistic, has resulted in dividing the Russians into eight cla.s.ses, each category having a special card defining its special ration. The account of this is given by Lincoln Eyre in a cable dated March 9, 1920, and published in the ”New York World” of March 10, 1920, from which we take two sentences:
”The commissariat of food control has gradually built up no less than eight distinct cla.s.ses.... Special cards also are provided for children from one, two to five and from five to sixteen. It will be seen that this totals eight distinct varieties of card.”
The affect of these distinctions may be gathered from the following instance given in the article just cited:
”In the month of November there was distributed by the Petrograd Soviet altogether 13,631,480 pounds of bread.... Had all the bread been divided evenly among the whole population, each person would have had about one-half a pound a a day, whereas, in fact, one category got much less than that amount daily and the third category none at all.”
In the thirteenth place, we note that the Russian Socialist tyrants give the workmen, in exchange for their labor, pieces of paper run off from printing presses which seem almost to have solved the problem of perpetual motion. The workmen are wise if they spend this fiat money daily for whatever it will bring in food, for its value will collapse utterly when the dictators.h.i.+p bursts, leaving the country financially prostrate, without credit or means of exchange. This is one of the greatest bunco games ever practiced upon workingmen. Eyre describes it in a cable dated March 3, 1920, and published in the ”New York World” of March 4, 1920, from which we quote:
”In 'the Socialist Federative Republic of Soviets of Russia,' to give the Bolshevik land its official t.i.tle, no mention has been made of finance. The reason for this is simple. There is no finance, in the European or American sense of the word, in present Russia. The Soviet Government pays its own people what it has to pay in paper money, of which it prints unlimited quant.i.ties. Being determined eventually to abolish money altogether in favor of Communistic exchange of products, it is not worried about depreciation in the value of its currency. It possesses about 1,000,000,000 rubles--the exact amount is kept very secret--in gold, with which it intends to pay for goods purchased abroad until it can establish a system of barter with foreign commercial interests. From the capitalistic viewpoint its budgetary expenditures are chaotic, but in Communistic eyes they are both sane and logical.”
Only to minds financially insane or criminally degenerate could such a system seem ”sane and logical.” Their carefully kept store of gold shows that the Bolshevist dictators are not insane but criminal. They understand their game, which is that of bunco-steering to ”exploit”
labor on the largest scale the world has ever seen. Honest paper money is a promise to pay, for value received, in gold, silver or good merchandise. If this form is used by these frauds, it is with the deliberate intention of repudiation, the possibility of payment being also destroyed by the floods of the stuff turned out. If the paper given is not a promise to pay, it is circulated simply through the tyranny of men who by threat of punishment or starvation force workingmen to exchange a day's labor for a bit of food and a piece of paper. In either case the labor exploiters in the Kremlin exact from Russia's workingmen, in exchange for a little food and a wad of paper, a genuine value, the product of hard labor, which these get-rich-quick Wallingfords can turn into gold, or exchange with the world for anything they want. All that Russian workingmen get is semi-starvation and the temporary delusion, conveyed to them in fine speeches, that they are ”in the game,” whereas they are only its dupes.
The worthless character of the paper money, which the workmen nevertheless have to take and spend to keep soul and body together, is shown by the fact that the peasants refuse it. In his cable printed in the ”New York World” of February 27, 1920, Eyre says that ”the peasant twenty miles outside of Moscow ... has more food than he can eat, more clothes than he can wear,” yet ”refuses to sell his products for money except that proportion of them that he is compelled to turn over to the Soviets at a fixed price. In private trading,” Eyre continues, ”he will take in exchange for his foodstuffs only manufactured articles, clothing and other things he needs.” Thus the peasant is fortunate in that he lives on land where he can at least raise enough to eat; whereas the ”proletarian,” in whose behalf the Socialists pretend to have made the Russian revolution, is most of all victimized by it.
The reason why the Bolshevist dictators are now conscripting Russian labor seems evident. These pick-pockets have finished exploiting the Russian aristocracy and ”bourgeoisie,” squeezed them dry, and squandered what they stole. The only game left to them now is to exploit labor to the limit and appropriate the profits.
Two other features of this thimble-rigging arrangement complete the exposure of the most inhuman scheme to exploit labor which the world has seen for centuries. One of these shows us, in the fourteenth place, that the rascals Lenine and Trotzky, are actually inviting ”foreign capital”
to form a partners.h.i.+p with them in their exploitation of Russian labor, under promise to turn over to this outside ”capital” a good share of the ”profits” to be wrung by labor conscription out of the sweat of Russia's brow.
The invitation to ”foreign capital” to join hands with the Bolshevist dictators.h.i.+p, under promise of good profits and guarantees of security was made by both Lenine and Trotzky through interviews granted to Lincoln Eyre. Through courtesy of the ”New York World” we have quoted the propositions of these ”friends” of Russian labor near the close of Chapter XV of this book, as the reader doubtless remembers, and we merely recall the facts here to put them in line with the other features of Bolshevist labor oppression which we have just been considering. Who could have imagined that within a little more than two years after beginning their barbarous Socialist experiment with Russian industries the brazen dictators.h.i.+p would be urging ”foreign capital” to join in a scheme to squeeze both a domestic and a foreign profit out of the toil of Russian workingmen conscripted by Socialist task-masters and held in wage-slavery under fear of death by court martial?
In the fifteenth place, we have the dreadful fact that Russian labor is enslaved by a Socialist autocracy not for the sake of promoting peace but for the sake of promoting war. In our last chapter we quoted the statements of Zinovieff to Lincoln Eyre that the Third Internationale would never give up its purpose to make the whole world Bolshevist. Eyre also found the belief general in Russia that so long as the Socialists retain power, any peace made by them with the outside world will only be a short truce in which to prepare for another war. He says, in his cable printed in the ”New York World” of February 27, 1920: