Page:Lenin - The Soviets at Work (1919).pdf/27

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SOVIET GOVERNMENT
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crees. This work should be supported and advanced by all means. We should immediately introduce piece work and try it out in practice. We should tryout every scientific and progressive suggestion of the Taylor system; we should compare the earnings with the general total of production or the exploitation results of railroad and water transportation and so on.

The Russian is a poor worker in comparison with the workers of 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 comprehensiveness. The last word of capitalism in this respect, the Taylor system—as well as all progressive measures of capitalism—combine the refined cruelty of bourgeois exploitation and a number of most valuable scientific attainments in the analysis of mechanical motions during work, in dismissing superfluous and useless motions, in determining the most correct methods of the work, the best systems of accounting and control, etc. The Soviet Republic must adopt 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 one hand, that we lay the foundation for the Socialist organization of emulation, and, on the other hand, require the use of compulsion so that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat should not be weakened by the practice of a too mild proletarian government.

Socialism and Emulation

Among the absurd falsehoods which the bourgeois likes to spread about Socialism, is the one that Socialists deny