The question of raising fixed prices on grain has yet another aspect. This increase means a new chaotic expansion of paper money issuance, a new step forward in the process of intensifying dearness, an intensification of financial disorder and an approach to financial collapse. Everyone acknowledges that the issuance of paper money is the worst form of forced loan, that it worsens the situation most severely precisely for workers, the poorest part of the population, that it is the chief evil of financial distress.

And it is precisely to this measure that the government of Kerensky, supported by the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, resorts!

For a serious struggle against financial disorder and inevitable financial collapse there is no other path than that revolutionary break with the interests of capital and the organization of genuinely democratic control, i.e., "from below," control by workers and the poorest peasants over capitalists – that path of which our entire preceding exposition speaks.

The vast issuance of paper money encourages speculation, allows capitalists to make millions from it and creates tremendous difficulties for the so necessary expansion of production, since the dearness of materials, machines, and so forth intensifies and moves forward by leaps. How to help matters when the wealth acquired through speculation by the rich is concealed?

One can introduce an income tax with progressive and very high rates for large and largest incomes. Our government, following other imperialist governments, introduced it. But it remains to a considerable degree fiction, a dead letter, because, first, the value of money falls faster and faster, and, second, income concealment is all the greater, the more the source of that income is speculation and the more reliably commercial secrecy is guarded.

To make the tax real and not fictional, genuine control is needed, control that remains not merely on paper. But control over capitalists is impossible if it remains bureaucratic, for bureaucracy is itself tied and interwoven with the bourgeoisie by thousands of threads. Therefore, in Western European imperialist states, whether monarchies or republics alike, financial order is achieved only at the price of introducing such "labor conscription" as creates military hard labor or military slavery for workers.

Reactionary-bureaucratic control – that is the only means which imperialist states know, not excluding the democratic republics, France and America, for placing the burdens of war upon the proletariat and the laboring masses.

The fundamental contradiction of our governmental policy consists precisely in this: that one must conduct – so as not to quarrel with the bourgeoisie, not to destroy "coalition" with it – reactionary-bureaucratic control, calling it "revolutionary-democratic," deceiving the people at every step, irritating and embittering the masses who have only just overthrown tsarism.

Meanwhile, it is precisely revolutionary-democratic measures, uniting in alliances precisely the oppressed classes, workers and peasants, precisely the masses – that would make possible the establishment of the most genuine control over the wealthy and the most successful struggle against income concealment.

Efforts are being made to encourage check circulation as a means of combating excessive paper money issuance. For the poor this measure has no significance, for the poor in any case live from day to day, in any case complete their "economic turnover" in a week, returning to the capitalists those meager kopecks which they manage to earn. For the rich, check circulation could have tremendous significance; it would allow the state, especially in connection with such measures as nationalization of banks and the abolition of commercial secrecy, genuinely to control the incomes of capitalists, genuinely to tax them, genuinely to "democratize" (and at the same time bring order to) the financial system.

But the obstacle here is precisely the fear of violating the privileges of the bourgeoisie, breaking the "coalition" with it. For without measures truly revolutionary, without the most serious coercion, capitalists will not submit to any control, will not open their budgets, will not surrender their stock of paper notes "on account" to a democratic state.

Workers and peasants, united in alliances, by nationalizing banks, introducing check circulation as mandatory by law for all wealthy people, abolishing commercial secrecy, establishing confiscation of property for income concealment, and so forth, could with extraordinary ease make control both genuine and universal, control precisely over the wealthy, control precisely of the sort that would return to the treasury the paper money it issues from those who have it, from those who hide it.

For this, there is needed the revolutionary dictatorship of democracy, led by the revolutionary proletariat, i.e., for this democracy must become revolutionary in deed. This is the crux of the matter. This is precisely what our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks do not want, deceiving the people with the banner of "revolutionary democracy" and in deed supporting the reactionary-bureaucratic policy of the bourgeoisie, which, as always, is guided by the rule: "après nous le déluge" – after us the deluge!

We do not even ordinarily notice to what degree deeply ingrained in us are the anti-democratic habits and prejudices concerning the "sanctity" of bourgeois property. When an engineer or banker publishes the incomes and expenditures of a worker, data about his wages and the productivity of his labor, this is considered perfectly lawful and just. No one thinks to see in this an encroachment upon the worker's "private life," "spying or denunciation" by the engineer. The labor and wages of hired workers bourgeois society regards as its open book, into which any bourgeois has the right always to look, always to expose such-and-such "luxury" of the worker, such-and-such supposedly "idleness" of his, and so forth.

Well, and the reverse control? What if unions of employees, clerks, servants were invited by a democratic state to verify the incomes and expenditures of capitalists, to publish data about this, to assist the government in the struggle against income concealment?

What a wild howl the bourgeoisie would raise against "spying," against "denunciation"! When "gentlemen" control servants, capitalists control workers, this is considered in the normal order of things; the private life of the toiling and exploited is not considered inviolable; the bourgeoisie has the right to demand an accounting from every "hired slave," always to make public his incomes and expenditures. But an attempt by the oppressed to control the oppressor, to bring his incomes and expenditures to light, to expose his luxury, even if only during war, when this luxury causes direct starvation and the death of armies at the front – oh no, the bourgeoisie will not permit "spying" and "denunciation"!

The question comes down to the same thing: the rule of the bourgeoisie is irreconcilable with truly revolutionary, truly genuine democracy. In the twentieth century, in a capitalist country one cannot be a revolutionary democrat if one fears to move toward socialism.