376 THE CLASS STRUGGLE WORK, DISCIPLINE, AND ORDER 377 place hunters, intriguers, former failures and derelicts, who under the old regime of yesterday were without employment.
When suddenly necessity arose for the employment of tens of thousands of new specialized workers, it is no wonder that many parasites succeeded in getting into the pores of the new regime.
It must be added that many of the comrades working in various offices and institutions have shown themselves to be still far from capable of organic, creative, intensive work. At very step we observe such comrades, particularly from the ranks of the October Bolsheviki, in the government bureaus working four to five hours and not very intensively at that at a time when our whole situation at present demands of us the hardest work that is in us, not out of fear but out of conscientiousness.
Many even honest persons with weak wills easily give themselves up to the suggestion that now in the weakened condition of the country, when everything is rather loose and out of joint, it doesn pay to develop a whole lot of energy, since in the general economy of national life it won count anywayso why, says each one to himself, shall alone slave away in all this chaos? And right here, Comrades, there arises for the representatives of our party which has convened its city conference in this hall, for you, these representatives, an entirely new task. If we were first in the revolutionary battles, just as before we had been first in underground activity, and afterwards in the open struggle stormed the position of the class that was our enemy, we must now in all the places which we are holding. do not forget that we are now the ruling class we must develop a maximum of consciensciousness, devotion to duty, creative joy, in a word all those qualities which characterize the class of real builders. And it is necessary for us within our party to establish a new ethics, or more correctly, such an ethics as will appear to be the development of our ethics of yesterday.
If yesterday he was regarded with the greatest esteem who had self sacrificingly committed himself to living in unlawful habitations, cutting himself off from every personal interest and feeling, who at any moment was ready to lay down his life, today, too, the same fundamental characteristics of the Russian revolutionary of which we have been proud must find a new application in all positions, no matter how prosaic they may outwardly appear. Everywhere the leading executors of all the functions, all the tasks and all the needs of the Socialistic Soviet Republic should rise up and put into the execution of these duties all their self sacrifice, all their enthusiasm.
Through the agency of our Communist Party we must form in every factory a model cell, as it were, which should be the working conscience of the factory. It is necessary that this call maintaining the standpoint of the general interest of the people follow and observe the life of that factory and convince the workers of the necessity of fulfilling at all times and in all stations the most elementary duties toward our Soviet land. The responsibility for its fate after all rests with all its weight upon us, we must stand up for it, and we alone, as the ruling class, the ruling party particularly now, since the Left Social Revolutionary group has left us and since with the Communist Party lies the direct and full responsibility for everything that happens in the state life, and through the state life in the economic life of the land.
It is necessary that this new sentiment should be cultivated, through the Party and through our industrial federations, in every large shop and factory that this new consciousness of working duty and working honor should be adopted and fostered, that, with this consciousness to depend upon, workingcourts should be established, so that the worker who is indifferent to his duties or appropriates wilfully or wastes material, or the worker who does not devote all his working time to workso that such a worker may be brought to trial, so that the names of all such offenders against socialistic solidarity may be printed in the Soviet publications as the names of renegades. This communistic ethics, Comrades, it is our duty to preach at once, to support, to develop, and to establish. That is the noblest task of our Party in all the fields of its activity.
Look at the railroads. Hitherto in regard to the railroad system we have accused one another, we have attacked the former government, the old administrations, the Central Committee of the Railroad Union. And we were in the right. And we became the conquerors, and the power and the administration came our way. The railroads are in our hands, but this, Comrades, is not the whole thing, not even half, perhaps not more than a tenth. Now it remains to transform the apparatus of the railroads into the mechanism of a clock and this at the present time is one of the most important political tasks of our Party. You see, this is the essential thing and the keynote to the situation. If in former times the political task consisted in agitation, in propaganda, in open street fighting behind the barricades, in the conquest of power, in elections, now it is the organization of the railroad system, the creation of workers discipline in it, of the fullest responsibility of each individual for his position all this constitutes the political task of our party.