Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/408

 not. The vast majority of the conscious workers and peasants will approve such an expenditure, knowing from practical life that our backwardness compels us to lose billions, and that we have not yet attained such a high degree of organization, accounting and control which would cause the universal and voluntary participation of these "stars" of the bourgeois intelligentsia in our work.

Of course, there is another side to this question. The corrupting influence of high salaries is beyond dispute—both on the Soviets (the more so, since the rapidity of the Revolution made it possible for a certain number of adventurers and loafers to join the Soviets, together with the incapable and dishonest among certain commissaires, who would not mind becoming "star grafters") and on the mass of workers. But all thinking and honest workers and peasants will agree with us and will admit that we are unable to get rid at once of the evil heritage of Capitalism; that the Soviet Republic can be freed from this "tribute" of fifty or a hundred millions of rubles (a tribute for our own backwardness in the organization of universal accounting and control from the bottom up) only by organization, by increasing discipline among ourselves, by getting rid of all those who "maintain the traditions of Capitalism," that is, of loafers, parasites and grafters. If the conscious workers and peasants will succeed, with the help of Soviet institutions, in organizing and disciplining themselves, and in creating powerful labor discipline in one year, then we will in one year do away with this "tribute" (which may be reduced even sooner) depending on the measure of success attained in creating labor discipline and organization among the workers and peasants. The sooner we ourselves, workers and peasants, shall learn better labor discipline and a higher technique of labor, making use of the bourgeois specialists for this purpose, the sooner we get rid of paying tribute to these specialists.