Comrade Lenin{27} takes the floor to respond to the inquiry presented by the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries. He reminds them that in the first days of the upheaval, the Bolsheviks offered representatives of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries to enter the new government, but cooperation with the Bolsheviks was rejected by the Left Socialist-Revolutionary faction itself, which was unwilling to share responsibility with their neighbors to the left during these difficult, critical days.

The new power could not conduct its activities in consideration of all the obstacles that might stand in its path through strict adherence to all formalities. The moment was too serious and did not permit delay. It was impossible to waste time smoothing over the rough edges which, while lending only an external finish, changed nothing in the substance of the new measures. After all, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets itself, casting aside all formal difficulties, adopted two laws of world significance in a single plenary session. Let these laws suffer from formal defects from the perspective of bourgeois society, but then again power rests in the hands of the Soviets, which can introduce the necessary corrections. The criminal inaction of the Kerensky government brought the country and the revolution to the brink of ruin; delay is truly akin to death, and in issuing laws that meet the aspirations and hopes of broad popular masses, the new power sets landmarks on the path of development of new forms of life. The Soviets on the ground, in accordance with local and temporal conditions, can modify, expand, and supplement those fundamental principles which are being established by the government. The living creativity of the masses—that is the fundamental factor of the new social order. Let the workers take up the creation of workers' control in their factories and mills; let them supply manufactured goods to the countryside and exchange them for grain. Not a single product, not a single pound of bread should remain outside accounting, for socialism is first and foremost accounting. Socialism is not created by decrees from above. Its spirit is alien to bureaucratic-administrative automatism; socialism that is living, creative, is the creation of the masses themselves.