Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/414

 of increasing the productivity of labor requires at least several years (especially after a most distressing and destructive war). The decisive character of this work is determined by purely objective circumstances.

To increase the productivity of labor we must first of all secure the material basis of large industry: the development of the production of fuel, iron, machinery and of the chemical industry. The Russian Soviet Republic is in such an advantageous position that it possesses, even after the Brest-Litovsk peace, colossal stores of ore (in the Ural); of fuel, in Western Siberia (hard coal); in Caucasia and in the Southeast (petroleum); in central Russia (pasture); vast resources of lumber, water-power and raw material for the chemical industry (Karabugas) and so on. The exploitation of these natural resources by the latest technical methods will furnish a basis for an unprecedented development of production.

Higher productivity of labor depends, firstly, on the improvement of the educational and cultural condition of the masses of the population. This improvement is now taking place with unusual swiftness, but is not perceived by those who are blinded by the bourgeois routine and are unable to comprehend what a longing for light and initiative is now pervading the masses of the people, thanks to the Soviet organizations. Secondly, economic improvement depends on higher discipline of the toilers, on higher skill, efficiency and intensity of labor and its better organization.

In this respect our situation is especially bad and even hopeless,—if we should take the word of those who are frightened by the bourgeoisie or who are paid to serve it. These people do not understand that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a revolution in which the adherents of the old regime would not wail about disorganization, anarchy, etc. It is natural that among the masses who have just overthrown an incredibly barbarous oppression, there is a profound and widespread unrest and ferment, that the development of a new basis of labor discipline is a very long- process; that before the land owners and the bourgeoisie had been overcome, such a development could not even begin.

But, without being influenced by this despair, often pretended, which is spread by the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectuals (who have given up hope of retaining their old privileges), we should by no means conceal any manifest evils. On the contrary, we will expose them and improve the Soviet methods of combating