Russia is in a period of transition to communist socialism which must last many years. He says:
The transition to socialism means the transition from a rudimentary distribution of labor power (by the play of purchase and sale, by movement of market and labor wages) to a planful distribution of workers through the economic organs of the district, of the province, of the entire country. Such a planful distribution presupposes the subordination of those to be distributed to the economic plan of the state. This is the essence of labor duty, which unquestionably is contained as a fundamental element in the program of the socialist organization of labor.
The carrying out of obligatory labor is inconceivable without an application of the methods of the militarization of labor in greater or less measure.
Why do we speak of a militarization? Of course this is only an analogy. But it is a very pregnant analogy. No other social organization, with the exception of the army, has ever considered itself justified to subordinate citizens to such an extent, to develop them on all sides by the application of its will as the state of the proletarian dictatorship is doing and considers itself justified in doing.
Trotzky asserts that compulsory labor is the very foundation of the Soviet State and that it will have to remain the basis until the coming generation through compulsion, terror, and the Bolshevist press and school monopoly (which Trotzky calls education) has converted the population into communism. This is the view expressed in the "theses" which he presented to the Economic Congress on January 24, 1920. One of these "theses" is the following:
