mobilization of peasants as the means of solving the problems requiring mass action. We are mobilizing the peasants and forming them into labor detachments which very closely resemble military detachments.
Some of our comrades say, however, that even though in the case of the working power of mobilized peasantry it is necessary to apply militarization, a military apparatus need not be created when the question involves skilled labor and industry because there we have professional (labor) unions performing the function of organizing labor. This opinion, however, is erroneous. …
We have in the most important branches of our industry more than a million workmen on the lists, but not more than eight hundred thousand of them are actually working, and where are the remainder? They have gone to the villages or to other divisions of industry or into speculation. Among soldiers this is called desertion, and, in one form or another, the measures used to compel soldiers to do their duty should be applied in the field of labor.
Under a unified system of economy the masses of workmen should be moved about, ordered and sent from place to place in exactly the same manner as soldiers. This is the foundation of the militarization of labor, and without this we are unable to speak seriously of any organization of industry on a new basis in the conditions of starvation and disorganization existing today.
In the period of transition in the organization of labor compulsion plays a very important part. The statement that free labor, namely, freely employed labor, produces more than labor under compulsion is correct only when applied to feudalistic and bourgeois orders of society.
Later in the year in an article republished by the official Bolshevist organ in America, Soviet Russia, Trotzky explains at length that compulsory labor is the backbone of Soviet communism. According to Trotzky
