Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/103

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THE REIGN OF TERROR
77

2. In nationalized undertakings strikes are continuous and 90% of them are called at such factories and works.

As a part of the system of Labor compulsion absolute dictators have been placed over the factories with the power of life and death. Schliapnikoff, Chief Commissar of Labor, printed the following explanation in the Russian Bolshevist press on November 13, 1919:

All those circumstances (a total absence of order and discipline in the factories) put together have compelled us to abolish the Working Men's Councils and to place at the head of the most important concerns special "dictators," with unlimited powers and entitled to dispose of the life and death of the workmen.

The "Code of Labor Laws" was by no means the last experiment in methods of enslavement, Trotzky following this up with the plan for utilizing the thousands of conscripts of the Red Army for purposes of labor,thus going back to the military slavery of ancient Egypt and Peru.

Lenin and Trotzky have freely expended their rhetorical and propaganda talents to justify the new slavery, not as a temporary expedient but as resting upon the permanent principles of Sovietism. In his booklet "The State and the Revolution" (pages 51 and 67) Lenin says:

We want the Socialist revolution with human nature as it is now; human nature itself cannot do without subordination. There must be submission to the armed vanguard of the proletariat.

Until people grow accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social existence without force and