There is occurring everywhere, systematically, relentlessly, a sabotage of all control, supervision and accounting, of all attempts to establish them on the part of the state. And one would need incredible naiveté not to understand – one would need outright hypocrisy to pretend not to understand – whence this sabotage originates, by what means it is produced. For this sabotage by bankers and capitalists, this undermining by them of all control, supervision, accounting, is adapted to the state forms of a democratic republic, adapted to the existence of "revolutionary-democratic" institutions. The gentlemen capitalists have brilliantly assimilated that truth which all adherents of scientific socialism recognize in words, but which the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries hastened to forget immediately after their friends occupied the posts of ministers, deputy ministers, and the like. This is precisely the truth that the economic essence of capitalist exploitation is not in the slightest affected by the replacement of monarchical forms of rule with republican-democratic ones, and that, consequently, conversely: one need only alter the form of struggle for the inviolability and sanctity of capitalist profit in order to defend it under a democratic republic just as successfully as it was defended under an autocratic monarchy.

The contemporary, newest, republican-democratic sabotage of all control, accounting, supervision consists in this: that capitalists verbally "ardently" recognize the "principle" of control and its necessity (as do all Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, needless to say), but only insist upon "gradual," systematic, "state-regulated" introduction of this control. In practice, however, these fair-sounding little words mask the undermining of control, its transformation into nothing, into a fiction, a game of control, delays in every practical and seriously-intended measure, the creation of extraordinarily complex, cumbersome, bureaucratically-lifeless control institutions which are thoroughly dependent on the capitalists and do absolutely nothing and cannot do anything.

In order not to make bare assertions, let us refer to witnesses from among the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries – that is, precisely those people who held a majority in the Soviets during the first half of the revolution, who participated in the "coalition government," and who are therefore politically responsible before the Russian workers and peasants for their connivance with the capitalists, for the latter's sabotage of all control.

In the official organ of the highest of the so-called "plenipotentiary" (and do not laugh!) bodies of "revolutionary" democracy, in *Izvestiia of the CEC* (that is, the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers', Soldiers' and Peasants' Deputies), in No. 164 of September 7, 1917, there was published a resolution of a special institution created by those same Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and remaining in their hands on matters of control. This special institution is the "Economic Department" of the Central Executive Committee. In its resolution it is officially acknowledged, as a fact, the "complete inactivity of the central organs of regulation of economic life formed under the government."

Is it not true – could one imagine more eloquent testimony to the collapse of Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary policy, signed by the very hands of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries themselves?

Even under tsarism the necessity of regulating economic life was recognized, and certain institutions were created for this purpose. But under tsarism economic collapse grew and grew, reaching monstrous proportions. The task of a republican, revolutionary government was immediately acknowledged to be the adoption of serious, decisive measures to eliminate this collapse. When a "coalition" government was formed, with the participation of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, a solemn, nationwide declaration of it from May 6 gave a promise and undertaking to establish state control and regulation. And both Tseretelli and Chernov, as well as all the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionary leaders, swore oaths that they were not only responsible for the government, but that the "plenipotentiary organs of revolutionary democracy" in their hands were in fact monitoring the government's work and verifying it.

Four months passed after May 6 – four long months during which Russia laid hundreds of thousands of soldiers in a senseless, imperialist "offensive," when collapse and catastrophe approached by seven-league strides, when the summer season afforded an exceptional opportunity to accomplish much in the sphere of river transport, and of agriculture, and of reconnaissance in mining, and so forth – and after four months the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are forced to officially acknowledge the "complete inactivity" of the control institutions formed under the government!!

And these Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, with the serious bearing of statesmen, are now babbling (we are writing these lines precisely on the eve of the Democratic Conference of September 12{76}) about how the matter can be helped by replacing the coalition with the Kadets with a coalition with commercial and industrial Kit Kityches, Ryabushinskys, Bublikovs, Tereshchenkos and Co.!

The question arises: how is one to explain this astonishing blindness of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries? Should they be considered political infants who, in their extreme lack of sense and naiveté, know not what they do, and err in all good conscience? Or does the abundance of occupied posts – minister, deputy minister, governor-general, commissar and the like – have the property of producing a special, "political" blindness?