Counter-Revolution before the Proletarian Court
(This Pravda editorial is related to "The Industrial Party Trial " November 25 – December 7, 1930, Published in The Communist January 1931, E.A)
Pravda
THE trial of the counter-revolutionists and saboteurs discloses before the proletarians all over the world the counter-revolutionary work of the agents of French imperialism for the re-establishment of the capitalist system in the U. S. S. R. Ramzin and his band, under the leadership of the former Russian manufacturers, of the Torgprom, and the French General Staff, in their mad class hatred of the only proletarian state in the world, did not hesitate at using any means in order to destroy Socialist construction in our country and to establish a land-owner and capitalist yoke over the workers and peasants.
Feeling and realizing the complete hopelessness of a counter revolutionary change through internal forces, these "patriots of the fatherland" have turned into spies for French imperialism with the hope that through intervention they would be able to overthrow the Soviet power.
In his testimony Ramzin confirmed the fact that dominant among the members of the "Industrial" Party was a belief in the "sanctity and superiority of private initiative and in the necessity of a capitalist system as the only basis upon which it is possible to successfully develop the productive forces of the country."
This false concern of the class enemy about the development of the productive forces hides behind it a whole program of capitalist restoration. The productive forces of the Soviet Union, being based on Socialist productive relations, are developing with such a stormy tempo as has never been known before in the history of humanity. It is precisely on the basis of a rapid Socialist growth of productive forces that we have made gigantic progress in the sphere of improving the standard of living of the workers and the toilers of our country.
But the enemies are anxious for a rapid capitalist development of productive forces based upon severe exploitation of the working class and of the poor and middle peasantry. Ramzin wants to return the enterprises to the former owners so that they shall "after the counter-rewlutionary uyrising not only receive back their capital value but, possibly, a big increase." These wreckers, the lackeys of
French imperialism, who plotted to return the factories, mills, and mines to the capitalists, and the land to the land-owners, were preparing the way for working class impoverishment and hunger, and for the land-owners' capitalist whip. The saboteurs decided upon paying the land-owners for the land and compensating, in the form of money, those manufacturers whose enterprises are not in a working condition or have been completely reconstructed. "The trustification of enterprises," Ramzin pointed out at the trial, "would allow, first, compensation to the former owners for their enterprises, and second ( due to the fact that the value of all the Soviet enterprises has considerably increased since they were expropriated), quite substantial reserves, to remain for the needs of the state and also for the compensation of the land-owners."
It is quite clear that the compensation of the land-owners and capitalists in addition to a large growth of capitalist value, meant oppression and enslavement for the poor peasantry, for the proletariat, and the broad masses of toilers. Compensation to the landowners and capitalists calculated by the class enemies who have been eliminated by the October Revolution meant a return to conditions of Czarist Russia. In the name of returning the land, factories, and mills to themselves, the capitalist plunderers have designed to doom 150,000,000 to misery and starvation, and to turn our country into a colony of world imperialism.
These mercenary bourgeois scoundrels expected to carry out the program for the re-establishment of capitalism by most ruthless exploitation. They try to turn back the wheel of history, to liquidate all the greatest accomplishments of October. The payment of billions to the "insulted" capitalists and land-owners meant the establishment of a twelve-fourteen hour day, o sharp decrease in wages, and unemployment for millions of workers, because capitalist accumulation is unavoidably accompanied by the poverty and degradation of the masses.
The class enemy, in order to establish himself at the helm of power, and to squeeze surplus value from the workers of the Soviet Union, adopted the method of active sabotage, and tried to utilize its positions in the Plan and Economy organs to decrease the tempo of Socialist construction, to divert the energy of the masses to less effective building, and to purposely and wilfully prolong the time for construction, in order to undermine the Five-Year Plan of Socialist construction and to worsen the economic conditions in the Soviet Union. The saboteurs have done everything possible in order to disorganize the supply for the proletarian centers and to choke the workers with the bony hand of hunger.
In their criminal work they have had the financial help, of the Torg,prom and the French General Sta.ff. World imperialism, which is choking itself in the midst of a grave economic crisis that is maturing in a series of countries into a political crisis, is trying to solve its contradictions at the expense of the Soviet Union. It cannot look calmly on at the rapid growth of Socialism in our country. Successful Socialist construction, the rapid growth of collectives, the rapid improvement in the standard of living of the workers in our country, the introduction of the seven-hour day-is dynamite which is blowing up capitalism.
World imperialism operates under the formula "Now or Never," but the toilers of the Soviet Union are on the look-out. The success of the establishment of collectives, the carrying out of the policy of eliminating the kulaks as a class on the basis of complete collectivization, the tremendous building of tractor factories ( at the end of the Five-Year Plan the annual production of tractors will be 170,000) and other industrial giants, the electrification of the country, general compulsory education, and the building of strong and devoted proletarian cadres of specialists-mean the transformation of the U. S. S. R. into an impregnable fortress. The Soviet Union is already becoming such an impregnable fortress, basing itself on the mighty power of the tens of thousands of workers of our country and on the sympathy and support of millions of workers throughout the world.
At one pole there is a rapid growth of the well-being of the workers, the complete liquidation of the cursed legacy of capitalism -unemployment-, the growth of the number of workers, the shortest worki.ng day in the world, the raising of the yield of the collectives above that of the individual farm by thirty to forty per cent, the raising of the standard of living of the proletariat and the basic mass of peasantry, and the liquidation of illiteracy of ten million people for the year of 1930; at the other pole-in the camp of capitalism, intensification of labor, a ten- and twelve-hour day, perpetual unemployment, over twenty-five million unemployed, not counting those who work part time, drastic fall in real wages ( in the United States, eighteen per cent; England, in the coal industry, nineteen per cent; in Germany, twelve per cent), a general growth of the revolutionary movement, and uprisings in the colonies capitalism has something to think about.
The aggressiveness of world imperialism, its mad preparations for war against the Soviet Union, is an attempt to turn back the wheel of history, an attempt to drown in a sea of blood the World October. Against the mobilization of the counter-revolutionary forces, against the actual sabotage and the attempts of intervention, the proletariat of the Soviet Union and of the capitalist countries will answer with a counter-mobilization of their forces. The working class and toiling masses of our country are now as never before united around the Leninist Party, ready to defend October. The brother Parties that are at the front posts of defense of the .first proletarian state are mobilizing their forces against intervention, for the turning of the new imperialist war, the war against the Soviets, into civil war. The time is coming of which Marx wrote: "The hour has struck for the destruction of capitalist private ownership; the expropriators are being expropriated." The world counter-revolution and its first gendarme--French imperialism and its vassals ( Poland, Roumania, etc.) are coming before the court of the international working class.
Pravda
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