Page:Lenin - The Soviets at Work (1919).pdf/22

20 of accounting and control—the fundamental question for a Socialist revolution after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. It will inevitably take some time before the masses begin to feel themselves free after the overthrow of the land owners and the bourgeoisie, and before they comprehend—not from books, but from their own experience through the Soviets—that without thorough state accounting and control of production and distribution the authority of the toilers, and their freedom, cannot last, and a return to the yoke of capitalism is inevitable.

All the habits and traditions of the bourgeoisie, and especially of the petty bourgeoisie, are also opposed to state control, and are for the inviolability of "sacred private property" and of "sacred" private enterprise.

It is especially clear to us now how correct is the Marxian proposition that Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism are bourgeois tendencies, irreconcilable with Socialism, with a proletarian dictatorship and with Communism. The present struggle is for the purpose of instilling into the masses the idea of Soviet state control and accounting, for the realization of this idea, for a break with the accursed past, which accustomed the people to look upon the work of getting food and clothing as a "private" affair and on purchase and sale as something that "concerns only myself." This is a most momentous struggle, of universal historical significance, a struggle of Socialist consciousness against bourgeois-anarchistic "freedom." We have introduced labor control as a law, but it is barely beginning to be realized or even to penetrate the consciousness of the proletarian masses. That unaccountability in production and distribution is fatal for the first steps toward Socialism, that it means corruption, that carelessness in accounting and control is a direct assistance to the German and Russian Kornilovs, who can overthrow the authority of the toilers only in case we do not solve the problem of accounting and control, and who with the aid of the peasant bourgeoisie, the cadets, the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionists of the Right are watching us, waiting £or