p The press reports many instances of the heroism of the Red Army men. In the fight against the Kolchakites, Denikinites and other forces of the landlords and capitalists, the workers and peasants very often display miracles of bravery and endurance, defending the gains of the socialist revolution. The overcoming of the guerrilla spirit, weariness and indiscipline is a slow and difficult process, but it is making headway in spite of everything. The heroism of the toiling masses who are voluntarily making sacrifices for the cause of the victory of socialism-this is the foundation of the new, comradely discipline in the Red Army, the foundation on which it is regenerating, gaining strength and growing.

p The heroism of the workers in the rear is no less worthy of attention. In this connection, the communist subbotniks  [60•*  organised by the workers on their own initiative are of enormous significance. Evidently, this is only a beginning, but it is a beginning of unusually great importance. It is the beginning of a revolution that is more difficult, more material, more radical and more decisive than the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for it is a victory over their own 61 conservatism, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits that accursed capitalism left as a heritage to the worker and peasant. Only when this victory is consolidated will the new social discipline, socialist discipline, be created; then and only then will a reversion to capitalism become impossible, will communism become really invincible....

p ... The communist organisation of social labour, the first step towards which is socialism,,rests, and will do so more and more as time goes on, on the free and conscious discipline of the toilers themselves who have thrown off the yoke both of the landlords and capitalists. ...

p ... In order to achieve victory, in order to build and consolidate socialism, the proletariat must .fulfil a twofold or dual task: first, it must, by its supreme heroism in the revolutionary struggle against capital, win over the entire mass of the toilers and exploited; it must win them over, organise them and lead them in the struggle to overthrow the bourgeoisie and utterly suppress its resistance. Second, it must lead the whole mass of the toilers and exploited, as well as all the petty-bourgeois strata, into the road of new economic construction, into the road to the creation of new social ties, a new labour discipline, a new organisation of labour, which will combine the last word in science and capitalist technology with the mass association of classconscious workers creating large-scale socialist production.

p The second task is more difficult than the first, for it cannot possibly be fulfilled by single acts of heroic fervour; it requires the most prolonged, most persistent and most difficult mass heroism in prosaic, everyday work. . . .

p The "communist subbotniks" are so important because they were initiated by workers who were by no means placed in exceptionally good conditions, by workers of various specialities, and some with no speciality at all, just unskilled labourers, who are living under ordinary, i.e., exceedingly hard, conditions... .

p ... And yet these starving workers, surrounded by the malicious counter-revolutionary agitation of the bourgeoisie, the Menshevjks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries,  [62•*  are organising "communist subbotniks", working overtime without any pay, and achieving an enormous increase in productivity of labour in spite of the fact that they are weary, - tormented, and exhausted from malnutrition. Is this not supreme heroism? Is this not the beginning of a change of momentous significance?

p In the last analysis, productivity of labour is the most important, the principal thing for the victory of the new social system. ...

p ... If in starving Moscow, in the summer of 1919, the starving workers who had gone through four trying years of imperialist war and another year and a half of still more trying civil war could start this great work, how will it develop later when we triumph in the civil war and win peace?

p Communism is the higher productivity of labour- compared with that existing under capitalism-of voluntary, class-conscious and united workers employing advanced 63 technique. 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" (as our Party programme quite rightly says).

p Communism begins when the rank-and-file workers begin to display a self-sacrificing concern that is undaunted by arduous toil for increasing productivity of labour, for husbanding every pood of grain, coal, iron and other products, which do not accrue to the workers personally or to their “close” kith and kin, but to their “distant” kith and kin, i.e., to society as a whole, to tens and hundreds of millions of people united first in one socialist state, and then in a Union of Soviet Republics. .. .

p ... Fewer pompous phrases, more plain, everyday work, concern for the pood of grain and the pood of coal! More concern for supplying this pood of grain and pood of coal needed by the hungry workers and ragged and barefooted peasants, not by means of huckstering, not in a capitalist manner, but by means of the conscious, voluntary, boundlessly heroic labour of plain working men like the unskilled labourers and workers of the Moscow-Kazan Railway....

p ... Take the position of women. Not a single democratic party in the world, not even in the most advanced bourgeois republic, has done in tens of years a hundredth part of what we did in the very first year we were in power. We literally did not leave a single stone standing of the despicable laws which placed women in a position of inequality, or which restricted divorce and surrounded it 64 with disgusting formalities, or which denied recognition to illegitimate children and enforced a search for their fathers, etc.-laws, numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism be it said, are to be found in all civilised countries. We have a thousand times the right to be proud of what we have done in this sphere. But the more thoroughly we have cleared the ground of the lumber of the old, bourgeois, laws and institutions, the clearer it is to us that we have only cleared the ground to build on, but are not yet building.

p Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery, and wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when a mass struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding the power of the state) against this petty domestic economy, or rather when its wholesale transformation into largescale socialist economy begins.

Do we in practice pay sufficient attention to this question, which, theoretically, is indisputable for every Communist? Of course not. Are we sufficiently solicitous about the young shoots of communism which already exist in this sphere? Again we must say emphatically. No! Public dining rooms, creches, kindergartens-here we have examples of these shoots, here we have the simple, everyday means, involving nothing pompous, grandiloquent or ceremonial, which can in actual fact emancipate women, which can in actual fact lessen and abolish their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life....