Page:The Proletarian Revolution in Russia - Lenin, Trotsky and Chicherin - ed. Louis C. Fraina (1918).djvu/416

 emulation. In reality Socialism, by destroying classes and, hence, the enslavement of the masses, for the first time opens up the road for emulation on a really mass scale. And only the Soviet organization, passing from the formal democracy of a bourgeois republic to the actual participation of the toiling masses in management, for the first time allows emulation on a broad basis. It is much easier to organize emulation in the political than in the economic field, but for the success of Socialism the latter is the more important.

Let us take publicity as a means for the organization of emulation. A bourgeois republic establishes this only formally, actually subjecting the press to capital, amusing the "mob" with spicy political trifles, concealing the occurrence, in the factories, commercial transactions, etc., as a "business secrct," protecting "sacred property." The Soviets abolished commercial secrecy and started on a new road, but have done hardly anything to make use of publicity in the interest of economic emulation. We must systematically endeavor,—along with the merciless suppression of the thoroughly false and insolently caluminous bourgeois press,—to create a press which shall not amuse and fool the masses with spicy political trifles, but which will bring to the attention of the masses and help them to study seriously the questions of every-day economics. Every factory; every village is a production and consumption Commune having the right and duty to apply the general Soviet regulations in its own way (not in the sense of violating the regulations, but in the sense of a diversity of forms in carrying them out), to solve in its own way the problem of accounting in production and distribution. Under Capitalism this was the "private affair" of the individual capitalist or land owner. Under the Soviets this is not a private affair, but a most important public concern.

And we have hardly begun the immense and difficult, but also promising and important work of organizing emulation between the Communes, of introducing reports and publicity in the process of the production of bread, clothing, etc., of transforming the dry, dead bureaucratic reports into living things—either repulsive or attractive.

Under the capitalistic system of production the significance of an individual example, say, of some group of producers, was inevitably extremely limited, and it was only a petty bougeois illusion to dream that Capitalism could be "reformed" by the influence of models of virtuous establishments. After political power has