The Labor Laws of Soviet Russia/Editorial

(An Editorial in Soviet Russia, April 3, 1920)

COMPULSORY in certain labor appears to be considered circles outside of Soviet Russia as a most deplorable invasion of the rights of the individual. Aside from the fact that in all countries economic necessity drives men very effectively to seek such forms of wage-slavery as may be accessible to them regardless of whether they are to their taste or not—it is surprising that anyone with any pretence to even liberal tendencies should feel in any way shocked at this inevitable development in the new society. Even very moderate thinkers, such as Edward Bellamy and William James, had thought of compulsory labor as a reasonable curefor the chaos in which some men were working themselves to death and others loafing away their time in fruitless, even dangerous idleness and dissipation.

What will the furious commentators on Soviet Russia's Labor Laws (concerning which we have an article in this issue of Soviet Russia) have to say when they read this unmistakable statement in Bellamy's "Looking Backward" (1887), a reply to a question as to whether labor service in the new commonwealth is obligatory for all?

"It is rather a matter of course than of compulsion," replied Dr. Leete. "It is regarded as so absolutely natural and reasonable that the idea of its being compulsory has ceased to be thought of. He would be thought to be an incredibly contemptible person who should need compulsion in such a case. Nevertheless, to speak of service being compulsory would be a weak way to state its absolute inevitableness. Our entire social order is so wholly based upon and deducted from it that if it were conceivable that a man could escape it, he would be left with no possible way to provide for his existence. He would have excluded himself from the world, cut himself off from his kind, in a word, committed suicide."

And can it be that liberals have entirely forgotten one of William James' most brilliant and convincing essays, "The Moral Equivalent of War," published in February, 1910, as a pamphlet of the American Association for International Conciliation?