Vladimir Lenin

B ourgeois authors have been using up reams of paper praising competition, private enterprise, and all the
other magnificent virtues and blessings of the capitalists and the
capitalist system. Socialists have been accused of refusing to understand
the importance of these virtues, and of ignoring "human nature". As a
matter of fact, however, capitalism long ago replaced small, independent
commodity production, under which competition could develop enterprise,
energy and bold initiative to any considerable extent, by largeand very large-scale factory production, joint-stock companies, syndicates
and other monopolies. Under such capitalism, competition means the
incredibly brutal suppression of the enterprise, energy and bold initiative
of the mass of the population, of its overwhelming majority, of
ninety-nine out of every hundred toilers; it also means that competition is
replaced by financial fraud, nepotism, servility on the upper rungs of the
social ladder.

Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the
first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really
wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the
majority of working people into a field of labour in which they can display
their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so
abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed and strangled
in thousands and millions.

Now that a socialist government is in power our task is to organise
competition.

The hangers-on and spongers on the bourgeoisie described socialism as a
uniform, routine, monotonous and drab barrack system. The lackeys of the
money-bags, the lickspittles of the exploiters, the bourgeois intellectual
gentlemen used socialism as a bogey to "frighten" the people, who, under
capitalism, were doomed to the penal servitude and the barrack-like
discipline of arduous, monotonous toil, to a life of dire poverty and
semi-starvation. The first step towards the emancipation of the people from
this penal servitude is the confiscation of the landed estates, the
introduction of workers’ control and the nationalisation of the banks. The
next steps will be the nationalisation of the factories, the compulsory
organisation of the whole population in consumers’ societies, which are at
the same time societies for the sale of products, and the state monopoly of
the trade in grain and other necessities.

Only now is the opportunity created for the truly mass display of
enterprise, competition and bold initiative. Every factory from which the
capitalist has been ejected, or in which he has at least been curbed by
genuine workers’ control, every village from which the landowning exploiter
has been smoked out and his land confiscated has only now become a field in
which the working man can reveal his talents, unbend his back a little,
rise to his full height, and feel that he is a human being. For the first
time after centuries of working for others, of forced labour for the
exploiter, it has become possible to work for oneself and moreover
to employ all the achievements of modern technology and culture in one’s
work.

Of course, this greatest change in human history from working under
compulsion to working for oneself cannot take place without friction,
difficulties, conflicts and violence against the inveterate parasites and
their hangers-on. No worker has any illusions on that score. The workers
and poor peasants, hardened by dire want and by many long years of slave
labour for the exploiters, by their countless insults and acts of violence,
realise that it will take time to break the resistance of those
exploiters. The workers and peasants are not in the least infected with the
sentimental illusions of the intellectual gentlemen, of the Novaya Zhizn crowd and other slush, who "shouted" themselves hoarse
"denouncing" the capitalists and "gesticulated" against them, only to burst
into tears and to behave like whipped puppies when it came to
deeds, to putting threats into action, to carrying out in practice
the work of removing the capitalists.

The great change from working under compulsion to working for oneself,
to labour planned and organised on a gigantic, national (and to a certain
extent international, world) scale, also requires—in addition to
"military" measures for the suppression of the exploiters’
resistance—tremendous organisational, organising effort on the
part of the proletariat and the poor peasants. The organisational task is
interwoven to form a single whole with the task of ruthlessly suppressing
by military methods yesterday’s slave-owners (capitalists) and their packs
of lackeys—the bourgeois intellectual gentlemen. Yesterday’s
slave-owners and their "intellectual" stooges say and think, "We have
always been organisers and chiefs. We have commanded, and we want to
continue doing so. We shall refuse to obey the ’common people’, the workers
and peasants. We shall not submit to them. We shall convert knowledge into
a weapon for the defence of the privileges of the money-bags and of the
rule of capital over the people."

That is what the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectuals say, think,
and do. From the point of view of self-interest their behaviour is
comprehensible. The hangers-on and spongers on the feudal landowners, the
priests, the scribes, the bureaucrats as Gogol depicted them, and the
"intellectuals" who hated Belinsky, also found it "hard" to part with
serfdom. But the cause of the exploiters and of their "intellectual"
menials is hopeless. The workers and peasants are beginning to break down
their resistance—unfortunately, not yet firmly, resolutely and
ruthlessly enough— and break it down they will .

"They" think that the "common people", the "common" workers and poor
peasants, will be unable to cope with the great, truly heroic, in the
world-historic sense of the word, organisational tasks which the socialist
revolution has imposed upon the working people. The intellectuals who are
accustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitalist state say in order
to console themselves: "You cannot do without us." But their insolent
assumption has no truth in it; educated men are already making their
appearance on the side of the people, on the side of the working people,
and are helping to break the resistance of the servants of capital. There
are a great many talented organisers among the peasants and the working
class, and they are only just beginning to become aware of themselves, to
awaken, to stretch out towards great, vital, creative work, to tackle with
their own forces the task of building socialist society.

One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to
develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working
and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in
creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old,
absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the
so-called "upper classes", only the rich, and those who have gone through
the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and
directing the organisational development of socialist society.

This is a prejudice fostered by rotten routine, by petrified views,
slavish habits, and still more by the sordid selfishness of the
capitalists, in whose interest it is to administer while plundering and to
plunder while administering. The workers will not forget for a moment that
they need the power of knowledge. The extraordinary striving after
knowledge which the workers reveal, particularly now, shows that mistaken
ideas about this do not and cannot exist among the proletariat. But every
rank-and-file worker and peasant who can read and write, who can
judge people and has practical experience, is capable of
organisational work. Among the "common people", of whom the
bourgeois intellectuals speak with such haughtiness and contempt, there are
many such men and women. This sort of talent among the working
class and the peasants is a rich and still untapped source.

The workers and peasants are still "timid", they have not yet become
accustomed to the idea that they are now the ruling class; they are not yet resolute enough. The revolution could not at one stroke instill these qualities into millions and millions of
people who all their lives had been compelled by want and hunger to work
under the threat of the stick. But the Revolution of October 1917 is
strong, viable and invincible because it awakens these qualities,
breaks down the old impediments, removes the worn-out shackles, and leads
the working people on to the road of the independent creation of a
new life.

Accounting and control--this is the main economic task of every
Soviet of Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasant’ Deputies, of every consumers’
society, of every union or committee of supplies, of every factory
committee or organ of workers’ control in general.

We must fight against the old habit of regarding the measure of labour
and the means of production from the point of view of the slave whose sole
aim is to lighten the burden of labour or to obtain at least some little
bit from the bourgeoisie. The advanced, class-conscious workers
have already started this fight, and they are offering determined
resistance to the newcomers who flocked to the factory world in
particularly large numbers during the war and who now would like to treat
the people’s factory, the factory that has come into the
possession of the people, in the old way, with the sole aim of "snatching
the biggest possible piece of the pie and clearing out". All the
class-conscious, honest and thinking peasants and working people will take
their place in this fight by the side of the advanced workers.

Accounting and control, if carried on by the Soviets of
Workers’, Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies as the supreme state power, or
on the instructions, on the authority, of this power --
widespread, general, universal accounting and control, the accounting and
control of the amount of labour performed and of the distribution of
products—is the essence of socialist transformation, once the
political rule of the proletariat has been established and secured.

The accounting and control essential for the transition to socialism can
be exercised only by the people. Only the voluntary and conscientious
co-operation of the mass of the workers and peasants in accounting
and controlling the rich, the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies,
a co-operation marked by revolutionary enthusiasm, can conquer these
survivals of accursed capitalist society, these dregs of humanity, these
hopelessly decayed and atrophied limbs, this contagion, this plague, this
ulcer that socialism has inherited from capitalism.

Workers and peasants, working and exploited people! The land, the banks
and the factories have now become the property of the entire people! You
yourselves must set to work to take account of and control the
production and distribution of products—this, and this alone is
the road to the victory of socialism, the only guarantee of its victory,
the guarantee of victory over all exploitation, over all poverty and want!
For there is enough bread, iron, timber, wool, cotton and flax in Russia to
satisfy the needs of everyone, if only labour and its products are properly
distributed, if only a business-like, practical control over this
distribution by the entire people is established, provided only we can
defeat the enemies of the people: the rich and their hangers-on, and the
rogues, the idlers and the rowdies, not only in politics, but also
in everyday economic life.

No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemies of socialism, the
enemies of the working people! War to the death against the rich and their
hangers-on, the bourgeois intellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and
the rowdies! All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism,
the offspring of aristocratic and bourgeois society; the society in which a
handful of men robbed and insulted the people; the society in which poverty
and want forced thousands and thousands on to the path of rowdyism,
corruption and roguery, and caused them to lose all human semblance; the
society which inevitably cultivated in the working man the desire to escape
exploitation even by means of deception, to wriggle out of it, to escape,
if only for a moment, from loathsome labour, to procure at least a crust of
bread by any possible means, at any cost, so as not to starve, so as to
subdue the pangs of hunger suffered by himself and by his near ones.

The rich and the rogues are two sides of the same coin, they are the two
principal categories of parasites which capitalism fostered; they
are the principal enemies of socialism. These enemies must be placed under
the special surveillance of the entire people; they must be ruthlessly
punished for the slightest violation of the laws and regulations of
socialist society. Any display of weakness, hesitation or sentimentality in
this respect would be an immense crime against socialism.

In order to render these parasites harmless to socialist society we must
organise the accounting and control of the amount of work done and of
production and distribution by the entire people, by millions and millions
of workers and peasants, participating voluntarily, energetically and with
revolutionary enthusiasm. And in order to organise this accounting and
control, which is fully within the ability of every honest,
intelligent and efficient worker and peasant, we must rouse their
organising talent, the talent that is to be found in their midst; we must
rouse among them—and organise on a national scale -- competition in the sphere of organisational achievement; the
workers and peasants must be brought to see clearly the difference between
the necessary advice of an educated man and the necessary control by the
"common" worker and peasant of the slovenliness that is so usual
among the "educated".

This slovenliness, this carelessness, untidiness, unpunctuality, nervous
haste, the inclination to substitute discussion for action, talk for work,
the inclination to undertake everything under the sun without finishing
anything, are characteristics of the "educated"; and this is not due to the
fact that they are bad by nature, still less is it due to their evil will;
it is due to all their habits of life, the conditions of their work, to
fatigue, to the abnormal separation of mental from manual labor, and so on,
and so forth.

Among the mistakes, shortcomings and defects of our revolution a by no
means unimportant place is occupied by the mistakes, etc., which are due to
these deplorable—but at present inevitable—characteristics of the
intellectuals in our midst, and to the lack of sufficient
supervision by the workers over the organisational work
of the intellectuals.

The workers and peasants are still "timid"; they must get rid of this
timidity, and they certainty will get rid of it. We cannot
dispense with the advice, the instruction of educated people, of
intellectuals and specialists. Every sensible worker and peasant
understands this perfectly well, and the intellectuals in our midst cannot
complain of a lack of attention and comradely respect on the part of the
workers and peasants. Advice and instruction, however, is one thing, and
the organisation of practical accounting and control is another.
Very often the intellectuals give excellent advice and instruction, but
they prove to be ridiculously, absurdly, shamefully "unhandy" and
incapable of carrying out this advice and instruction, of
exercising practical control over the translation of words into
deeds.

In this very respect it is utterly impossible to dispense with the help
and the leading role of the practical organisers from among the
"people", from among the factory workers and working peasants. "It is not
the gods who make pots"—this is the truth that the workers and peasants
should get well drilled into their minds. They must understand that the
whole thing now is practical work; that the historical moment has
arrived when theory is being transformed into practice, vitalised by
practice, corrected by practice, tested by practice; when the words of
Marx, "Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen
programmes", become particularly true—every step in really curbing in
practice, restricting, fully registering the rich and the rogues and
keeping them under control is worth more than a dozen excellent arguments
about socialism. For, "theory, my friend, is grey, but green is the eternal
tree of life".

Competition must be arranged between practical organisers from among the
workers and peasants. Every attempt to establish stereotyped forms and to
impose uniformity from above, as intellectuals are so inclined to do, must
be combated. Stereotyped forms and uniformity imposed from above have
nothing in common with democratic and socialist centralism. The unity of
essentials, of fundamentals, of the substance, is not disturbed but ensured
by variety in details, in specific local features, in methods of
approach , in methods of exercising control, in ways of exterminating and rendering harmless the parasites (the
rich and the rogues, slovenly and hysterical intellectuals, etc.,
etc.).

The Paris Commune gave a great example of how to combine initiative,
independence, freedom of action and vigour from below with voluntary
centralism free from stereotyped forms. Our Soviets are following the same
road. But they are still "timid"; they have not yet got into their stride,
have not yet "bitten into" their new, great, creative task of building the
socialist system. The Soviets must set to work more boldly and display
greater initiative. All "communes"—factories, villages, consumers’
societies, and committees of supplies—must compete with each
other as practical organisers of accounting and control of labour and
distribution of products. The programme of this accounting and control is
simple, clear and intelligible to all—everyone to have bread; everyone
to have sound footwear and good clothing; everyone to have warm dwellings;
everyone to work conscientiously; not a single rogue (including those who
shirk their work) to be allowed to be at liberty, but kept in prison, or
serve his sentence of compulsory labour of the hardest kind; not a single
rich man who violates the laws and regulations of socialism to be allowed
to escape the fate of the rogue, which should, in justice, be the fate of
the rich man. "He who does not work, neither shall he eat"—this is the
practical commandment of socialism. This is how things should be
organised practically. These are the practical successes
our "communes" and our worker and peasant organisers should be proud of.
And this applies particularly to the organisers among the intellectuals
( particularly, because they are too much, far too much in
the habit of being proud of their general instructions and
resolutions).

Thousands of practical forms and methods of accounting and controlling
the rich, the rogues and the idlers must be devised and put to a practical
test by the communes themselves, by small units in town and country.
Variety is a guarantee of effectiveness here, a pledge of success in
achieving the single common aim—to clean the land of Russia of
all vermin, of fleas—the rogues, of bugs—the rich, and so on and so
forth. In one place half a score of rich, a dozen rogues, half a dozen
workers who shirk their work (in the manner of rowdies, the manner in which
many compositors in Petrograd, particularly in the Party printing-shops,
shirk their work) will be put in prison. In another place they will be put
to cleaning latrines. In a third place they will be provided with "yellow
tickets" after they have served their time, so that everyone shall keep an
eye on them, as harmful persons, until they reform. In a fourth
place, one out of every ten idlers will be shot on the spot. In a fifth
place mixed methods may be adopted, and by probational release, for
example, the rich, the bourgeois intellectuals, the rogues and rowdies who
are corrigible will be given an opportunity to reform quickly. The more
variety there will be, the better and richer will be our general
experience, the more certain and rapid will be the success of socialism,
and the easier will it be for practice to devise—for only practice can
devise—the best methods and means of struggle.

In what commune, in what district of a large town, in what factory and
in what village are there no starving people, no unemployed, no idle rich, no despicable lackeys of the
bourgeoisie, saboteurs who call themselves intellectuals? Where has most
been done to raise the productivity of labour, to build good new houses for
the poor, to put the poor in the houses of the rich, to regularly provide a
bottle of milk for every child of every poor family? It is on these points
that competition should develop between the communes, communities,
producer-consumers’ societies and associations, and Soviets of Workers’,
Soldiers’ and Peasants’ Deputies. This is the work in which talented organisers should come to the fore in practice and be
promoted to work in state administration. There is a great deal of talent
among the people. It is merely suppressed. It must be given an opportunity
to display itself. It and it alone, with the support of the
people, can save Russia and save the cause of socialism.

Vl. Ilyin