Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/412

 thought or sufficient exposition by the advanced workers and peasants. And as long as workers' control has not become a fact, as long as the advanced workers have not carried out a successful and merciless campaign against those who violate this control or who are careless with regard to control,—until then we cannot advance from the first step (from workers' control) to the second step toward Socialism, that is, to the regulation of production by the workers.

A Socialist state can come into existence only as a system of production and consumption Communes, which keep conscientious accounts of their production and consumption, economize labor, and steadily increase productivity, thus making it possible to lower the work-day to seven, six or even fewer hours. Anything less than rigorous, universal, thorough accounting and control of grain and of the production of grain, and later of all other necessary products, wilt not do. We have inherited from Capitalism mass organizations, which facilitate the transition to mass accounting and control of distribution—the consumers' cooperatives. They are developed in Russia less than in the advanced countries, but they comprise more than 10,000,000 members. The decree on consumers' associations which was recently issued is extremely significant, showing clearly the peculiarity of the position and of the problem of the Socialist Soviet Republic at this time.

The decree is an agreement with the bourgeois cooperatives and with the workmen's cooperatives adhering to the bourgeois standpoint. The agreement or compromise consists, first, in the fact that representatives of these institutions not only participated in the deliberations on this decree, but practically obtained a deciding control, for parts of the decree which met determined opposition from these institutions were rejected. Secondly and essentially, the compromise consists in the rejection by the Soviet authority of the principle of voluntary admission to the cooperatives (the only consistent principle from the proletarian standpoint) uniting the whole population of a given locality in a single cooperative. The defection from this, the only Socialist principle, which is in accord with the problem of abolishing classes, allows the existence of "workmen's class cooperatives" (which, in this case, call themselves "class" cooperatives only because they submit to the class interests of the bourgeoisie). Lastly, the proposition of the Soviet government to completely exclude the bourgeoisie from the administration of the cooperatives was also considerably weakened,