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V. I. Lenin
The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government
"It required precisely the October victory of the working people
over the exploiters, it required a whole historical period in which
the working people themselves could first of all discuss the new
conditions of life and the new tasks, in order to make possible the
durable transition to superior forms of labour discipline, to the
conscious appreciation of the necessity for the dictatorship of the
proletariat, to unquestioning obedience to the orders of individual
representatives of the Soviet government during the work.
This transition has now begun."
The third stage is now beginning. We must consolidate what we
ourselves have won, what we ourselves have decreed, made law,
discussed, planned—consolidate all this in stable forms of everyday
labour discipline. This is the most difficult, but the most
gratifying task, because only its fulfilment will give us a
socialist system. We must learn to combine the "public meeting"
democracy of the working people—turbulent, surging, overflowing its
banks like a spring flood—with iron discipline while at work, with
unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet
leader, while at work.
We have not yet learned to do this.
We shall learn it."
"Secondly, a condition for economic revival is the raising of the
working people's discipline, their skill, the effectiveness, the
intensity of labour and its better organisation………………………………The more
class-conscious vanguard of the Russian proletariat (the new ruling,
capitalist, class) has already set itself the task of raising labour
discipline. For example, both the Central Committee of the
Metalworkers' Union and the Central Council of Trade Unions have
begun to draft the necessary measures and decrees.
This work must be supported and pushed ahead with all speed. We must
raise the question of piece-work and apply and test it in practice;
we must raise the question of applying much of what is scientific
and progressive in the Taylor system; we must make wages correspond
to the total amount of goods turned out, or to the amount of work
done by the railways, the water transport system, etc., etc.
The Russian is a bad worker compared with people in advanced
countries. It could not be otherwise under the tsarist regime and in
view of the persistence of the hangover from serfdom. The task that
the Soviet government must set the people in all its scope is—learn
to work.
The Taylor system, the last word of capitalism in this respect, like
all capitalist progress, is a combination of the refined brutality
of bourgeois exploitation and a number of the greatest scientific
achievements in the field of analysing mechanical motions during
work, the elimination of superfluous and awkward motions, the
elaboration of correct methods of work, the introduction of the best
system of accounting and control, etc.
The Soviet Republic must at all costs adopt all that is valuable in
the achievements of science and technology in this field. The
possibility of building socialism depends exactly upon our success
in combining the Soviet power and the Soviet organisation of
administration with the up-to-date achievements of capitalism. We
must organise in Russia the study and teaching of the Taylor system
and systematically try it out and adapt it to our own ends.
At the same time, in working to raise the productivity of labour, we
must take into account the specific features of the transition
period from capitalism to socialism, which, on the one hand, require
that the foundations be laid of the socialist organisation of
competition, and, on the other hand, require the use of compulsion,
so that the slogan of the dictatorship of the proletariat shall not
be desecrated by the practice of a lily-livered proletarian
government."
http://marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/x03.htm
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Karl Marx.
Capital Volume One, Chapter
Twenty-One: Piece-Wages
" Let us now consider a little more closely the characteristic
peculiarities of piece-wages. ( ed.Lenins `question of
piece-work')
The quality of the labour is here controlled by the work itself,
which must be of average perfection if the piece-price is to be paid
in full. Piece-wages become, from this point of view, the most
fruitful source of reductions of wages and capitalistic cheating.
They furnish to the capitalist an exact measure for the intensity of
labour.
Only the working-time which is embodied in a quantum of commodities
determined beforehand, and experimentally fixed, counts as socially
necessary working-time, and is paid as such. In the larger workshops
of the London tailors, therefore, a certain piece of work, a
waistcoat, e.g., is called an hour, or half an hour, the hour at 6d.
By practice it is known how much is the average product of one hour.
With new fashions, repairs, &c., a contest arises between master
and
labourer as to whether a particular piece of work is one hour, and
so on, until here also experience decides. Similarly in the London
furniture workshops, &c. If the labourer does not possess the
average capacity, if he cannot in consequence supply a certain
minimum of work per day, he is dismissed.
Since the quality and intensity of the work are here controlled by
the form of wage itself, superintendence of labour becomes in great
part superfluous. Piece-wages therefore lay the foundation of the
modern "domestic labour," described above, as well as of a
hierarchically organized system of exploitation and oppression. The
latter has two fundamental forms.
On the one hand, piece-wages facilitate the interposition of
parasites between the capitalist and the wage-labourer, the "sub-
letting of labour." The gain of these middlemen comes entirely from
the difference between the labour-price which the capitalist pays,
and the part of that price which they actually allow to reach the
labourer. In England this system is characteristically called
the "sweating system." On the other hand, piece-wage allows the
capitalist to make a contract for so much per piece with the head
labourer-in manufactures with the chief of some group, in mines with
the extractor of the coal, in the factory with the actual machine-
worker — at a price for which the head labourer himself undertakes
the enlisting and payment of his assistant work people. The
exploitation of the labourer by capital is here effected through the
exploitation of the labourer by the labourer.
Given piece-wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the
labourer to strain his labour-power as intensely as possible; this
enables the capitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of
intensity of labour. It is moreover now the personal interest of the
labourer to lengthen the working-day, since with it his daily or
weekly wages rise. This gradually brings on a reaction like that
already described in time-wages, without reckoning that the
prolongation of the working-day, even if the piece wage remains
constant, includes of necessity a fall in the price of the labour."
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