Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/413

 and only owners of capitalistic commercial and industrial enterprises are excluded from the administration.

If the proletariat, acting through the Soviets, would successfully establish accounting and control on a national scale, there would be no need for such compromises. Through the Food Departments of the Soviets, through their organs of supply, we would unite the population in one cooperative directed by the proletariat, without assistance from bourgeois cooperatives, without concessions to the purely bourgeois principle which compels the labor cooperatives to remain side by side with the bourgeois cooperatives instead of wholly subjecting these bourgeois cooperatives and uniting both.

Entering into such an agreement with the bourgeois cooperatives, the Soviet authority has concretely defined its tactical problems and characteristic methods of action for the present stage of development,—by directing the bourgeois elements, using them, making certain individual concessions to them, we are creating conditions for a forward movement which will be slower than we at first supposed, but at the same time more steadfast, with a more solidly protected base and line of communications, and with better fortification of the conquered positions. The Soviets can (and should) now measure their successes in the work of Socialist reconstruction, among others, by very simple and practical tests; in exactly what number of communities (communes, or villages, blocks, etc.) and to what extent does the development of the cooperatives approach the state when they will comprise the whole population?

In every Socialist revolution,—after the proletariat has solved the problem of conquest of power, and to the extent to which the problem of expropriating the expropriators and suppressing their resistance is in the main and fundamentally solved,—it becomes necessary to turn first of all to the fundamental problem of the creation of a social system, higher than Capitalism, namely: to raise the productivity of labor and, in connection with this (and for this), its higher organization. Our Soviet power is in just such a position, now that, thanks to its victories over the exploiters from Kerensky to Kornilov, it has become possible for it to approach this problem directly and to take hold of it. And here it becomes at once clear that, if it is possible to seize the central state power in a few days, if it is possible to suppress the military resistance and the sabotage of the expoiters even in the remote corners of a large country in several weeks, a final solution of the problem