But neither the bridges mended and the wood cut by the labor armies, nor the improvement in transport, are any final proof of the success of industrial conscription.Industrial conscription in the proper sense of the words is impossible until a Government knows what it has to conscript.A beginning was made early this year by the introduction of labor books, showing what work people were doing and where, and serving as a kind of industrial passports.But in April this year these had not yet become general in Moscow although the less unwieldy population of Petrograd was already supplied with them.It will be long even if it is possible at all, before any considerable proportion of the people not living in these two cities are registered in this way.A more useful step was taken at the end of August, in a general census throughout Russia.There has been no Russian census since 1897.There was to have been another about the time the war began.It was postponed for obvious reasons.If theCommunists carry through the census with even moderate success (they will of course have to meet every kind of evasion), they will at least get some of the information without which industrial conscription on a national scale must be little more than a farce.The census should show them where the skilled workers are.Industrial conscription should enable them to collect them and put them at their own skilled work.Then if, besides transplanting them, they are able to feed them, it will be possible to judge of the success or failure of a scheme which in most countries would bring a Government toppling to the ground.
"In most countries"; yes, but then the economic crisis has gone further in Russia than in most countries.There is talk of introducing industrial conscription (one year's service) in Germany, where things have not gone nearly so far.And perhaps industrial conscription, like Communism itself, becomes a thing of desperate hope only in a country actually face to face with ruin.I remember saying to Trotsky, when talking of possible opposition, that I, as an Englishman, with the tendencies to practical anarchism belonging to my race,should certainly object most strongly if I were mobilized and set to work in a particular factory, and might even want to work in some other factory just for the sake of not doing what I was forced to do.Trotsky replied: "You would now.But you would not if you had been through a revolution, and seen your country in such a state that only the united, concentrated effort of everybody could possibly reestablish it.That is the position here.Everybody knows the position and that there is no other way."