Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/397

 Capitalism, and financial administration is highly technical in scope. By means of the nationalization of the banks, finance becomes exclusively a means for the development of industry, and not dominantly a means of exploitation as under the bourgeois regime. The control of finance, moreover, is an irresistible instrument for the complete annihilation of the economic and social relations of Capitalism, the complete achievement of which means the end of finance and money in their expression as relations of private property.

Together with these general and fundamental measures, more temporary measures were introduced, such as unemployment insurance, obligatory labor (directed particularly at the bourgeois classes), and systematic and intensive labor legislation, to improve the workers' conditions at the expense of the bourgeoisie and complete the expropriation of capital. Labor legislation, introduced during the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism and on the basis of the proletarian state, becomes a means for the expropriation of capital, not a means to strengthen the domination of capital.

Through all the reconstruction activity of the Soviet Republic runs the thread of developing a sense of discipline and responsibility in the masses. There was the tremendous industrial and social disorganization; the conscious efforts of the bourgeois hirelings to create confusion and disorder; the intoxicating effect among the workers of the newly-won freedom; and the psychology of irresponsibility in the workers inherited from the old regime. All these factors necessarily produced a certain amount of license. An intense struggle had to be waged against the ideology implanted in the minds of the workers by the bourgeois order. It is not sufficient that the administrative norms of the new order shall be introduced; there must develop a new Ideology, the ideology of self-mastery and social discipline, of responsibility to one's self and to one's associates, of administrative competency and management among the workers,—the ideology of the joy of work, since one now works for himself, and not for a master. The development of this ideology was a task stressed by the Soviet officials; and it is a task, international complications aside, upon the success of which depends the immediate success of the proletarian revolution and the Socialist Republic in Russia.

The proletarian revolution in Russia initiates the epoch of the international Social Revolution. Not alone in the tactics and policy used in the conquest of power by the proletariat are the Bolsheviki the masters of the revolution, the symbol of the emerging revolutionary Socialism of the international proletariat; in their measures and tendency of action after the conquest of power, the Bolsheviki are teaching the international proletariat how to use power after its acquisition, developing the administrative norms of the oncoming Socialist Republic.

Part Seven consists wholly of a long article by Lenin appearing in Pravda early in May, 1918. It has already appeared in an English pamphlet, The Soviets at Work, issued by The Rand School of Social Science. But it is not clearly understandable without the other material that precedes it in this book.

L. C. F.