Page:Nikolai Lenin - On the Road to Insurrection (1926).pdf/72

 obstruction of all control, inspection and registration, is adapted to the forms of the democratic republic, to the existence of "revolutionary democratic" institutions. The capitalist gentlemen have learnt perfectly this oft-repeated lesson which the partisans of scientific Socialism verbally acknowledge, but which the Mensheviks and S.R.'s have been eager to forget since their friends were installed in the ministerial and secretarial armchairs—this truth, that the economic essence of capitalist exploitation is quite unaffected by the substitution of democratic republican forms for monarchical forms; and that to protect capitalist profits with as much success in a democratic republic as under the autocratic regime, it is only necessary to modify the methods of struggle.

The latest method, the present republican democratic method of sabotaging all control, registration and inspection, is for the capitalists (this goes without saying), and the Mensheviks and S.R.'s, to recognise verbally, without protest, the "principle " and the necessity for control, but to demand its "gradual" application. It is with these seemingly plausible pretexts that the capitalists veil their real activity, which is to make control miscarry, to transform it into a fiction by the creation of a mass of complicated and bureaucratic machinery, dependent upon them, doing nothing and incapable of doing anything.

To make it clear that these are not just airy assertions, we will base our case on the evidence of the Mensheviks and S.R.'s; that is, of the people who have had the majority in the Soviets during the first half-year of the Revolution, who have participated in the "coalition government," and are therefore politically responsible before the workers and peasants for the benevolent neutrality they have observed towards the capitalists, who were occupied in making abortive every attempt at control.

The official organ of the most important of the "plenipotentiary" (don't smile!) organs of the "revolutionary" democracy, the Isvestia of the C.E.C. (that is, of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Worker, Soldier and Peasant delegates), published in No. 164, on September 7, a decree of a special institution for dealing with questions of control, an institution created by the Mensheviks and S.R.'s, and entirely in their hands. In this decree, this institution, which is the "Economic Section" of the C.E.C., officially acknowledges the