Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/396

 The supreme factor in the control and regulation of economic activity is the Superior Council of National Economy, which unifies and directs industrial and agricultural production, and to which the specific agricultural and industrial councils are subsidiary, all in turn being responsible to the central organ of government, the Council of People's Commissaires. The Council of National Economy regulates the state finances, has authority to confiscate, requisition, sequestrate and syndicate any industrial establishments, the right to reform and re-organize all other existing institutions for the regulation of production, and supervises and directs the work of all economic departments of the Soviets. The Council of National Economy is composed of representatives of the All-Russian Workmen's Council of Control, each commissariat of the Soviet government, and specially selected persons. The Council is divided into several sections, each of which deals with a particular phase of economy: and it must submit all bills and important measures to the Council of People's Commissaires.

In these measures for workers' control of industry temporary requirements are fused with ultimate purposes: the forms are not in any sense final, although latent in the general tendency of the measures. While the representation on the local and district organs of control is industrial, the whole system functions territorially and is not yet wholly and integrally industrial The ultimate form of organization is the unification of all the separate parts of a particular industry in all Russia into one integrated industrial department, having immediate and particular direction of its industry; and the unification of all industrial departments into one central and inclusive industrial administration—as provided in the theory of industrial unionism and the facts of production. This is precisely what should emerge from the present incomplete forms of workers' control, together with the complete expropriation of capital. Proletarian Russia is constructing the industrial state, preparing the conditions for the final abolition of the state and the institution of Engels' "administration of things." Two circumstances determined the temporarily incomplete forms of workers' control of industry: the immediate necessity to resume production and crush the industrial sabotage practised by the bourgeoisie, which had to be done immediately even if functioning through incomplete forms; and the fact that Russia is not as completely industrialized as other nations, consequently much of the material for an integrated industrial administration is missing. But the tendency has been initiated out of which inevitably emerge the higher forms, as the dictatorship of the proletariat completes its task of annihilating the bourgeoisie and increasing the totality of the productive forces. The tendency, moreover, is wholly in accord with the ultimate purposes of communist Socialism.

The nationalization of the banks was a crucial measure. It was, perhaps, the most difficult and adventurous of all the measures introduced by the Soviet state, but inescapable. Monopolistic finance is the heart of Capitalism and Imperialism, and to strike at this heart is to deal a mortal blow at the bourgeoisie. The expropriation of the banks, accordingly, is necessarily one of the first measures of the proletarian revolution. This measure is a most difficult and dangerous one, and latent with infinite complications, since it is the most definite step toward the abolition of