§ 64. Self-imposed discipline versus discipline imposed from above

Self-imposed discipline is impossible in an imperialist army. The very nature of such an army forbids the idea. An imperialist army consists of various social groups. The workers and peasants have been forcibly herded into the barracks of the bourgeois army. Should they begin to realize their own interests, far from consciously submitting to the discipline imposed by their epauletted superiors, they would consciously resist this discipline. For this reason, the discipline of bourgeois armies must be maintained by force; for this reason, flogging, tortures of every kind, and mass shootings, are not simply occasional incidents, but the foundations of order, discipline, 'military education'.

On the other hand, in the Red Army, which is formed by the workers and the peasants and which defends their interests, coercive discipline must to an ever greater extent be replaced by the workers' voluntary acceptance of the discipline of the civil war. As the Red Army grows more clearly aware of its own nature, the Red soldiers come to realize that in the last resort they are commanded by the whole working class, through the instrumentality of the workers' State and its military staff. Thus the discipline of the Red Army is the submission of the minority (the soldiers) to the interests of the majority of the workers. Every reasonable order is backed, not by the commanding officer and his arbitrary will, not by the bourgeois minority and its predatory interests, but by the whole Workers' and Peasants' Republic. In the Red Army, therefore, propaganda and agitation, the political education of the rank and file, assume peculiar importance.