Page:Nikolai Lenin - On the Road to Insurrection (1926).pdf/86

 connection, the objection that it is impossible to establish Socialism are shameless liars: what we have to do, I repeat, is not establish Socialism in a day, but expose the theft of public money.

The capitalist economy which works "for the war" and is directly or indirectly connected with the war supplies on which the capitalists make hundreds of millions of profit, is protected by the Cadets, just as it is also by the Mensheviks and the S.R.'s who oppose the suppression of business secrecy; who are therefore no more nor less than the accomplices of those who steal the public money.

The war now costs Russia fifty millions a day, and most of this is for military supplies. Of these fifty millions, five millions at least and probably ten and more represent the "legitimate profits" of the capitalists and of the officials with whom the former are more or less directly connected. The big firms and the important banks which finance the transactions in war supplies pocket enormous sums—speculating on the suffering of war, profiting by the death of hundreds of thousands and millions of men, in order to plunder the Treasury.

These scandalous profits on munitions, these "securities" faked by the banks, the names of those who are enriching themselves out of the rise in the cost of living—these are publicly notorious. In "Society" everyone talks about it with a smile on the lips. The bourgeois Press itself, whose principle it is to ignore unpleasant facts and evade "delicate" questions, nevertheless provides us with a certain amount of precise information. Everyone knows these things: yet nothing is done, all is tolerated, and a government which is able only to indulge in fine phrases about "control" and "regulations " still finds support.

If the revolutionary democrats really were revolutionaries and democrats, they would at once have published a law to suppress business secrecy; compel the merchants and war-contractors to hand over their accounts; forbid them to abandon their class of occupation without authority; punish them with confiscation of goods for concealing their profits and deceiving the people; organise the inspection from below, democratically, by the whole people itself, by the associations of clerks, workers, consumers, &c. …

Our S.R.'s and Mensheviks are quite rightly dubbed "frightened democrats"; for in reality they only repeat what all the