Page:Nikolai Bukharin - Programme of the World Revolution (1920).djvu/76

 sense. Equally absurd, from the point of view of the working class, is the system of taxation of foreign capitalists. A third way out is wanted, and this consists in the nationalisation of foreign trade by the proletarian State.

What does this mean? It means that no one who lives upon Russian soil has a right to make business agreements with foreign capitalists. If anyone is caught at it, he should be fined or imprisoned. The whole of the foreign trade is carried on by the Workers' and Peasants' Government. The latter carries out all transactions whenever occasion arises. Supposing American machines are being offered in exchange for certain goods or for a certain amount of money or gold, whilst some Germans offer the same machines at a different price and on different terms. The workers' organisations (Government Soviet organisations) consider whether it is necessary to make the purchase and of whom it should be more advantageous to buy. In accordance with their decision the machines are bought in the place, and upon terms which are the most profitable. Products bought in this manner are distributed to the population without any profits being made out of them, because the transaction is carried out not by capitalists to make money out of the workers, but by the workers themselves. In this manner the domination of capital would be abolished in this department as well. The workers must take the business of foreign trade (as they have done and are doing) into their own hands and organise it so that not a single swindler or speculator or shop-keeper should be able to evade the workers' watchfulness.

It is clearly understood that capitalist smugglers should be dealt with mercilessly. They should be made to forget all their tricks. The management of economic life is at present the business of the working class. It is only by the aid of a further strengthening of this order that the working class can attain its final liberation from the remnants of the accursed capitalist order.

 

The working class and its party, the party of Communist Bolsheviks, are struggling not only for economic freedom but