A Great Beginning—Heroism of the Workers in the Rear “Communist Subbotniks”

Lenin’s work to publicize and popularize “Communist Saturday Voluntary Labor” (Communist Subbotniks) which was initiated by the workers in the rear regions. It was written on June 28,1919 and published as a separate pamphlet by Moscow State Press in July of the same year. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 37 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin .

After the end of the World War I, the Fourteen imperialist countries, such as Britain, the United States, France and Japan, carried out armed intervention into Soviet Russia, and the white army of landlords and capitalists, commanded by Kolchak, Denikin, and Yudenich successively launched attacks on the newborn Soviet power. In order to crush the enemy’s attack, in April 1919, the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party called on people to work in a revolutionary spirit. Many party members and workers on the railway went to the front line to kill the enemy bravely. But then it turned out that, owing to the shortage of labor and low productivity of labor, urgent orders and repairs of locomotives were being held up. In order to support the front line and defeat the enemy, the Communist Party members and sympathizers of the Moscow Kazan Railway Branch initiated and organized the “Communist Saturday Voluntary Labor”, which took one hour out of the rest time, that is, voluntarily extended one hour of their working day, and accumulate these extra hours and put in six extra hours of manual labor on Saturday for the purpose of creating real values of immediate worth. The resulting productivity rate ensures the supply of essential goods at the front line. In order to publicize and promote this heroic deed, Lenin wrote this article.

His main points are as follows:

(1) He highly praised “Communist Saturday Voluntary Labor” as “a great initiative”, and pointed out that its great significance lies in the communist spirit of workers who do extra work without pay, as well as their self-consciousness and self-sacrifice to improve labor productivity, transition to new labor discipline and innovation. The pioneering spirit for building socialism.

(2) Communism is the higher productivity of labour—compared with that existing under capitalism—of voluntary, class-conscious and united workers employing advanced techniques. “Communist subbotniks” are extraordinarily valuable as the actual beginning of communism ; and this is a very rare thing, because we are in a stage when “only the first steps in the transition from capitalism to communism are being taken” and the first steps of a more difficult, significant, profound and decisive change than overthrowing the bourgeoisie.

(3) The dictatorship of the proletariat is not only the violence against the exploiters, but also the realization of a higher type of social labor organization than capitalism. In the final analysis, labor productivity is the most important thing for the victory of new social system, which is maintained by the self-conscious discipline of the working masses. This new discipline did not come down from heaven, nor was it the result of good will. Only the proletariat, trained and tempered by the material conditions of large-scale capitalist production, could have it. Lenin gave the classic definition of “class”: the so-called class refers to such groups. Because of their different positions in a certain social and economic structure, one group can own the labor of the other group.

(4) In order to build and consolidate socialism, the proletariat has two important tasks after the victory of the Revolution: first, to completely suppress the resistance of the bourgeoisie and defeat the exploiters; second, to build a new society, to lead all the exploited working masses and all the strata of the petty bourgeoisie onto a new economic construction road, and to establish new social ties, new labor disciplines and new way of labor organization. This kind of labor organization should connect the latest achievements of science and capitalist technology with the large-scale union of socialist builders. The second task is more important and more difficult than the first, because it requires the most prolonged, most persistent and most difficult mass heroism in plain, everyday work, as well as the replacement of capitalist and petty bourgeois modes of production by socialist mass production. Lenin stressed that “Communist Subbotniks” initiative is a model kind of labor which includes a revolutionary spirit and can greatly improve labor productivity.

He called on all the Communist Party branches to learn from the workers of the Moscow Kazan railway. He predicted that, with the support of the proletarian state power, the shoots of communism will not wither; they will grow and blossom into complete communism. In 20th December 1919, in his “Report on Subbotniks Delivered to the Moscow City Conference of the R.C.P. (B)” and later in April 1920, Lenin further elaborated on the characteristics of Communist labor, pointed out that it could not be widely and universally carried out under socialist conditions, but he still called on the Communist Party and Party members enthusiastically support and promote the Communist Subbotniks, i.e., the voluntary labor on Saturdays.