460 THE CLASS STRUGGLE RECONSTRUCTION IN RUSSIA 461 measures.
in any sense final, although latent in the general tendency of the While the representation on the local and district organs of control is industrial, the whole system functions territorially and is not yet wholly and integrally industrial. The ultimate form of organization is the unification of all the separate parts of a particular industry in all Russia into one integrated industrial department, having immediate and particular direction of its industry; and the unification of all industrial departments into one central and inclusive industrial administration as provided in the theory of industrial unionisms and the facts of production. This is precisely what should emerge from the present incomplete forms of workers control, together with the complete expropriation of capital. Proletarian Russia is constructing the industrial state, preparing the conditions for the final abolition of the state and the institution of Engels administration of things. Two circumstances determined the temporarily incomplete forms of workers control of industry: the immediate necessity to resume production and crush the industrial sabotage practised by the bourgeoisie, which had to be done immediately even if functioning through incomplete forms; and the fact that Russia is not as completely industrialized as other nations, consequently much of the material for an integrated industrial administration is missing. But the tendency has been initiated out of which inevitably emerge the higher forms, as the dictatorship of the proletariat completes its task of annihilating the bourgeoisie and increasing the totality of the productive forces. The tendency, moreover, is wholly in accord with the ultimate purposes of communist Socialism.
The nationalization of the banks was a crucial measure. It was, perhaps, the most difficult and adventurous of all the measures introduced by the Soviet state, but inescapable. Monopolistic finance is the heart of Capitalism and Imperialism, and to strike at this heart is to deal a mortal blow at the bourgeoisie.
The expropriation of the banks, accordingly, is necessarily one of the first measures of the proletarian revolution. This measure is a most difficult and dangerous one, and latent with infinite complications, since it is the most definite step toward the abolition of Capitalism, and financial administration is highly technical in scope. By means of the nationalization of the banks, finance becomes exclusively a means for the development of industry, and not dominantly a means of exploitation as under the bourgeois regime. The control of finance, moreover, is an irresistible instrument for the complete annihilation of the economic and so cial relations of Capitalism, the complete achievement of which means the end of finance and money in their expression as relations of private property.
Together with these general and fundamental measures, more temporary measures were introduced, such as unemployment insurance, obligatory labor (directed particularly at the bourgeois classes. and systematic and intensive labor legislation, to improve the workers conditions at the expense of the bourgeoisie and complete the expropriation of capital. Labor legislation, introduced during the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism and on the basis of the proletarian state, becomes a means for the expropriation of capital, not a means to strengthen the domination of capital.
Through all the reconstruction activity of the Soviet Republic runs the thread of developing a sense of discipline and responsibility in the masses. There was the tremendous industrial and social disorganization; the conscious efforts of the bourgeois hirelings to create confusion and disorder; the intoxicating effect among the workers of the newly won freedom; and the psychology of irresponsibility in the workers inherited from the old regime. All these factors necessarily produced a certain amount of license. An intense struggle had to be waged against the ideology implanted in the minds of the workers by the bourgeois order. It is not sufficient that the administrative norms of the new order shall be introduced; there must develop a new ideology, the ideology of self mastery and social discipline, of responsibility to one self and to one associates, of administrative competency and management among the workers, the ideology of the joy of work, since one now works for himself, and not for a master. The development of this ideology was a task stressed