Compulsory syndication, that is, compulsory organization into unions, for example, of industrialists, has already been applied in practice by Germany. And there is nothing new here. And here, owing to the fault of the SRs and Mensheviks, we see the most complete stagnation of republican Russia, which these disreputable parties "occupy" with a quadrille, which they dance with the Cadets, or with the Bublikovs, or with Tereshchenko and Kerensky.

Compulsory syndication is, on the one hand, a kind of pushing by the state of capitalist development, everywhere and always leading to the organization of class struggle, to the growth in number, diversity, and importance of unions. But on the other hand, compulsory "unionization" is a necessary preliminary condition for any seriously effective control and any conservation of popular labor.

The German law obliges, for example, leather manufacturers in a given locality or throughout the state to unite in a union, with a representative of the state entering the governing board of this union for purposes of control. Such a law directly, that is, in itself, in no way whatsoever affects property relations, does not take away a single kopeck from any proprietor, and does not yet predetermine whether the control will be exercised in reactionary-bureaucratic or in revolutionary-democratic forms, direction, and spirit.

Such laws could and should be issued by us immediately, without losing a single week of precious time, and leaving it to the social situation itself to determine the more concrete forms of implementing the law, the speed of its implementation, the methods of oversight for its implementation, and so forth. The state needs neither a special apparatus, nor special research, nor any preliminary investigations whatsoever to issue such a law—it needs only the determination to break with certain private interests of capitalists "unaccustomed" to such interference, unwilling to lose the excessive profits ensured, along with uncontrolability, by conducting business in the old way.

No apparatus and no "statistics" (which Chernov wished to substitute for the revolutionary initiative of the peasantry) are needed to issue such a law, because its implementation must be entrusted to the manufacturers or industrialists themselves, to the existing social forces, under the control likewise of existing social (that is, not governmental, not bureaucratic) forces, only necessarily from the so-called "lower estates," that is, from the oppressed, exploited classes, who have always proven themselves immeasurably superior to the exploiters in their capacity for heroism, self-sacrifice, and comradely discipline.

Let us suppose that we have a genuinely revolutionary-democratic government and that it decrees: all manufacturers and industrialists in each branch of production, if they employ, let us say, not fewer than two workers, are obliged immediately to unite in district and provincial unions. Responsibility for the unflinching fulfillment of the law is placed in the first instance upon the manufacturers, directors, members of boards, major shareholders (for these are all the genuine leaders of modern industry, its true masters). They are regarded as deserters from military service and punished as such for evasion of work in the immediate implementation of the law, answering through collective liability, all for one, one for all, with all their property. Then responsibility is placed also upon all employees, likewise obliged to form a single union, and upon all workers with their trade union. The aim of "unionization" is the establishment of the most complete, strictest, and most detailed accounting, and above all the combination of operations in the purchase of raw materials, in the sale of goods, in the conservation of popular resources and forces. This conservation, upon the unification of scattered enterprises into a single syndicate, achieves gigantic proportions, as economic science teaches, as the examples of all syndicates, cartels, and trusts demonstrate. And once again it must be repeated that unionization into a syndicate in itself changes property relations not one iota, takes away not a single kopeck from any proprietor. This circumstance must be strongly emphasized, because the bourgeois press constantly "frightens" small and medium proprietors, as if socialists in general, and Bolsheviks in particular, wish to "expropriate" them: an assertion deliberately false, since socialists even in the event of a complete socialist revolution do not wish to, cannot, and will not expropriate small peasants. And we are speaking all the while only of those immediate and most urgent measures which have already been implemented in Western Europe and which any somewhat consistent democracy ought to implement immediately with us in order to combat the impending and inevitable catastrophe.

Serious difficulties, both technical and cultural, would be encountered by the unionization of the smallest and small proprietors, as a consequence of the extreme fragmentation of their enterprises, technical primitiveness, illiteracy or lack of education of their owners. But precisely these enterprises could be excluded from the law (as already noted in our hypothetical example, above), and their non-unionization, not to mention the delay in their unionization, would create no serious obstacle, because the role of a vast number of small enterprises is negligible in the total sum of production, in their significance for the national economy as a whole, and moreover they are often dependent in one way or another upon large enterprises.

Only large enterprises possess decisive significance, and here the technical and cultural means and forces for "unionization" are present, what is lacking is only the firm, resolute, mercilessly severe initiative with respect to exploiters of revolutionary authority in order that these forces and means be set in motion.

The poorer the country is in technically educated and generally intellectual forces, the more urgent is the necessity to decree compulsory unionization as quickly as possible and as resolutely as possible and to begin its implementation with the largest and major enterprises, because precisely unionization will conserve intellectual forces, will make it possible to utilize them fully and distribute them more correctly. If even Russian peasantry in its remote backwaters, under tsarist government, working against a thousand obstacles created by it, managed after 1905 to make a tremendous advance in the creation of all sorts of unions, then, of course, the unionization of large and medium industry and commerce could be carried out in several months, if not faster, on condition of coercion to this by a genuinely revolutionary-democratic government, relying upon the support, participation, interest, and advantage of the "lower ranks," the democracy, employees, workers—calling them to oversight.