Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Russian Revolution (1921).pdf/90

 from their raw material supplies and ruined them, and which brought about wholesale destruction of mines, mills, and factories by the retreating counter-revolutionary armies; (c) the deadly sabotage practiced by the counter-revolutionaries in Soviet Russia, which poisoned industry at its heart; (d) the fatal loss of skilled labor by the defection of the industrial experts, the death of thousands of the best mechanics in the revolutionary struggles and the unavoidable removal of many thousands more from industry to fill positions in the new Soviet Government institutions; (e) the great loss in efficiency caused by the revolutionary change in labor discipline from the old basis of capitalistic slave driving to the new system of industrial self-control by the workers; (f) the food shortage, which, originating to a great extent from the industrial breakdown, reacted to make that breakdown still worse by forcing the workers down to such an inadequate diet that their productive power has been seriously impaired.

Taken altogether these factors, and many others of lesser importance, have resulted in a general industrial crisis so intense and disastrous as to constitute probably the very greatest economic problem that any nation has ever been confronted with. The fate of the revolution depends upon its outcome. If it is solved and the industries are got to working again, then the revolution will be safe and the Russian people will march rapidly forward to the development of the greatest civilization the world has ever known. But if the industrial crisis is not solved, sooner or later the revolution will go down with a crash and the whole nation will be plunged into the deepest chasms of reaction. That is what is at stake in the breakdown of Russian industry.