the best way of planning out economic life as a whole, how should one branch of production be linked up with another, how should production be administered, what is the best and most economical way of allotting the reserves of raw material, how can we best dispose of the available labour power?) How can we secure better work, in so far as this depends upon the workers themselves? (the question of a comradely labour discipline; that of the struggle against slovenliness, slackness, idleness, etc.) Last of all comes the question of applying science to production, the question of the work of skilled experts.
All these questions are of immense importance. We have to solve them practically, to solve them in action. We have to solve them, not in a single factory or for a single factory, but for the whole of a huge country, where the working class and the semi-proletariat are numbered by millions. It is evident that in this matter we must stick to one point of view, must drive the nail home, must increase the productivity of the whole country which is building its economic life upon the new foundation of communist labour.
Our opponents — the social revolutionaries, the mensheviks, the bourgeois, etc. — declare that we are not Marxists at all, that our communism is only a consumers’ communism, a communism of distribution. The bolsheviks, they say, shear the bourgeois, compel the bourgeois to give up their houses; the bolsheviks divide up the articles of consumption; but they do not organise production. The charge is utterly unfounded. The productive forces of society consist of two things: of the material means of production, on the one hand; and of living persons, the workers, on the other. The working class is the basic force of production. If machinery, tools, etc., have been destroyed, this is unfortunate, but the loss is not vital, for experienced workers can, even though at the cost of much labour, reproduce everything that is lacking. Very different is the state of affairs when the living force of production is destroyed, when the workers migrate to the villages, when cold and