Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/415

 them, for the success of Socialism is inconceivable without the victory of conscious proletarian discipline against the instinctive petty bourgeois anarchy, this real guarantee of a possible restoration of Kerenskyism and Kornilovism.

The most conscious vanguard of the Russian proletariat has already turned to the problem of strengthening labor discipline. For instance, the central committee of the Metallurgical Union and the Central Council of the Trade Unions have begun work on respective measures and drafts of decrees. This work should be supported and advanced by all means. We should immediately introduce piece work and try it out in practice. We should try every scientific and progressive suggestion of the Taylor system, we should compare earnings with the general total of production or the operation results of railroad and water transportation, and so on.

The Russian is a poor worker in comparison with the advanced nations and this could not be otherwise under the regime of the Czar and other remnants of feudalism. To learn how to work—this problem the Soviet authority should present to the people in all its aspects. The last word of Capitalism in this respect, the Taylor system—as well as all progressive measures of Capitalism—combines the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific achievements in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt all valuable scientific and technical advances in this field. The possibility of Socialism will be determined by our success in combining the Soviet rule and the Soviet organization of management with the latest progressive measures of Capitalism. We must introduce in Russia the study and the teaching of the Taylor system and its systematic trial and adaptation. While working to increase the productivity of labor, we must at the same time take into account the peculiarities of the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism which require, on the one hand, that we lay the foundation for the Socialist organization of emulation, and, on the other, that we use compulsion so that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat may not be weakened by the practice of a too mild proletarian government.

Among the absurdities which the bourgeois is fain to spread about Socialism is the one that Socialists deny significance of