CAPITAL AND CONSCRIPTION

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 48, 25 August 1931, Page 8

CAPITAL AND CONSCRIPTION

Addressing the Collegium of the Foreign Commissariat at Moscow, M. Stalin is reported as stating:— The economic crisis affects the proletariat throughout the world, therefore it behoves the. Soviet to co-operate with capitalistic countries to maintain pence and to ensure the -welfare of the world's proletariat. A direct and definite instruction lo co-operale with capitalist countries has a surprising sound. Perhaps the explanation may be found' in the speech delivered by Stalin to a conference of Soviet economists in June. That speech was not published until a fortnight after its delivery, and it immediately aroused widespread interest. In it Stalin made frank admission of the Soviet need for capital. New sources of capital must be found, as the old sources were already yielding their utmost. Foreign capitalists had refused long credits or loans. The exhaustion, of financial resources was due partly to the uneconomic management of many enterprises. These "careered merrily along" without calculation, under the impression that the "State Bank would pay anyway," but their care-free progress would now receive an abrupt check. On methods, Stalin was equally direct. He said, that enterprises must boldly "throw away their paper reforms" and "cease the practice of charming away difficulties by highsounding phrases and heroic resolutions which accomplished nothing." The one-man system of management must replace- boards of directors; there must be greater mechanisation of labour, conscription of labour, and payment by results. Progress had been'hampered by cessation of the voluntary flow of peasant labour into industry. "The countryside, therefore, must be constrained to deliver to industry sufficient supplies of labour based on a system of contracts between the economic organisations and the collective farms." He added that conscription of labourers was not the whole task. Labourers must be bound to enterprises to which they were indentured, and "labour flux" combated by a system of differential wages to increase productivity. . . A system of payment according to the workers' needs could not be allowed, and workers must be paid strictly according to the amount and the quality of the work they performed. And ibis is the Russia which is held up for admiration by our buckling! Communists; compelled lo consider! where capital may be found and to adopt conscription of labour and' i:a\mrnl by result?.