Now Socialism is oozing through all the pores of contemporary capitalism; Socialism rises directly and practically from each great step in advance within capitalism.
What is general compulsory labour?
It is a step in advance on the basis of actual monopolist capitalism; a step towards the regularisation of the whole of economic life in a general scheme; a step towards the preservation of national work, insanely wasted by capitalism.
In Germany the junkers (the great landowners) and the capitalists established general compulsory labour and then this obligation became inevitably a military prison for the workers.
But take the same institution and consider the application it would have in a state of revolutionary democracy. The general obligation to work, established, regulated and directed by the Soviets of workers', peasants', and soldiers' deputies, is not Socialism yet, but it is already no longer capitalism. It is an immense step towards Socialism; a step after which—under a rule of true democracy—it would be impossible, without using unprecedented violence against the masses, to force a retreat to capitalism.
12.—The Struggle against Disorganisation and War
The question of the measures to take against the approaching catastrophe leads us to the discussion of another extremely important question: that of the relations between home and foreign policy or, in other words, between the imperialist war of conquest and the revolutionary, proletarian war, between the criminal war of plunder and the just democratic war.
All the measures that we have described would considerably strengthen, as we have already shown, the capacity for defence or, in other words, the military power of the country. On the other hand, it is impossible really to carry them out without changing the war of conquest into a just war, without making of the war carried on by the capitalists in their own interests a war carried on by the proletariat in the interests of all workers and of all exploited peoples.
The nationalisation of banks and trusts, accompanied by the suppression of business secrecy and by the establishment of workers' control over the capitalists, would not only lead to tremendous economy of the labour, strength and reserve of the population, but also to a great improvement in the conditions of the working masses,
