The State, which for centuries has been an organ of oppression and robbery of the people, has bequeathed to us the greatest hatred and mistrust of the masses toward everything governmental. To overcome this is an extremely difficult task, one only within the capacity of Soviet power, but one that demands from it prolonged time and enormous persistence. On the question of accounting and control – this fundamental question for the socialist revolution on the very day after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie – such an "inheritance" manifests itself with particular acuteness. An inevitable period must necessarily pass before the masses, who for the first time have felt themselves free after the overthrow of the landlords and bourgeoisie, will understand – not from books, but from their own, Soviet, experience – will understand and feel through their own experience that without comprehensive, state accounting and control of production and distribution of products, the power of the toiling masses, the freedom of the toiling masses cannot be maintained; return under the yoke of capitalism is inevitable.

All the habits and traditions of the bourgeoisie in general, and of the petty bourgeoisie in particular, also work against state control and for the inviolability of "sacred private property," the "sacred" private enterprise. We now see with particular clarity how correct is the Marxist position that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois currents, what an irreconcilable contradiction they stand in to socialism, to the proletarian dictatorship, to communism. The struggle for implanting in the masses the idea of Soviet – state control and accounting, for putting this idea into practice, for breaking with the accursed past that has accustomed us to regard the production of bread and clothing as a "private" affair, regard buying and selling as a transaction that "concerns only me" – this struggle is the greatest, possessing worldwide-historical significance, the struggle of socialist consciousness against bourgeois-anarchical spontaneity.

Workers' control has been introduced among us as a law, but into practice and even into the consciousness of the broad masses of the proletariat it is only just beginning to penetrate. The fact that irresponsibility and lack of control in the matter of production and distribution of products is the ruin of the beginnings of socialism, is embezzlement (for all property belongs to the state treasury, and the state treasury is none other than Soviet power, the power of the majority of toiling people), that carelessness in accounting and control is direct aid to the German and Russian Kornilovs, who can overthrow the power of the toiling masses only on the condition that we do not overcome the task of accounting and control, and who, with the aid of the entire peasant bourgeoisie, with the aid of the Cadets, Mensheviks, and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries "lie in wait" for us, awaiting our moment – about this we speak insufficiently in our agitation, about this the advanced workers and peasants think and speak insufficiently. And so long as workers' control has not become a fact, so long as the advanced workers have not set up and carried through a victorious and merciless campaign against those who violate this control or are careless about control, so long we cannot take the second step toward socialism from the first step (workers' control), that is, we cannot move on to workers' regulation of production.

A socialist state can arise only as a network of productive-consumer communes that conscientiously account for their production and consumption, economize labor, raise its productivity unswervingly and thereby achieve the possibility of reducing the working day to seven, to six hours per day and even less. Without setting up the strictest universal, all-encompassing accounting and control of bread and the production of bread (and then of all other necessary products), one cannot do without it. Capitalism has bequeathed to us mass organizations capable of facilitating the transition to mass accounting and control of the distribution of products – consumer societies. In Russia they are developed more weakly than in the advanced countries, but nevertheless have encompassed more than ten million members. The decree on consumer societies{67} issued recently represents an extraordinarily significant phenomenon, which clearly shows the peculiarity of the position and tasks of the Soviet socialist republic at the present moment.

The decree represents a compromise with bourgeois cooperatives and with workers' cooperatives that remain on a bourgeois point of view. The compromise or agreement consists, first of all, in the fact that representatives of the aforementioned institutions not only participated in the discussion of the decree, but actually obtained the right of decisive vote, inasmuch as those parts of the decree that met with decisive opposition from these institutions were rejected. Second, in essence, the compromise consists in Soviet power's renunciation of the principle of free admission to the cooperative (the only consistently proletarian principle), as well as of the unification of the entire population of a given locality in a single cooperative. In deviation from this uniquely socialist principle, corresponding to the task of abolishing classes, the right was granted to "workers' class cooperatives" to remain (which are called "class" only in this case because they serve the class interests of the bourgeoisie). Finally, Soviet power's proposal to exclude the bourgeoisie entirely from the managements of cooperatives was also considerably weakened, and the prohibition on entering the managements was extended only to owners of trading and industrial enterprises of a private-capitalist character.

If the proletariat, acting through Soviet power, had succeeded in setting up accounting and control on a nationwide scale, or at least the foundations of such control, there would have been no need for such compromises. Through the food departments of the Soviets, through supply organs under the Soviets, we would have united the population into a single cooperative, proletarianly led, without the assistance of bourgeois cooperatives, without concessions to that purely bourgeois principle which causes the workers' cooperative to remain workers' alongside the bourgeois instead of entirely subordinating itself to this bourgeois cooperative, merging both, taking all the management for itself, taking into its own hands the supervision of the consumption of the rich.

By entering into such an agreement with bourgeois cooperatives, Soviet power has concretely defined its tactical tasks and its peculiar methods of action for this given period of development, namely: leading bourgeois elements, utilizing them, making certain limited concessions to them, we create the conditions for such forward movement which will be slower than we initially assumed, but at the same time more solid, with more reliable assurance of the base and lines of communication, with better strengthening of the positions being conquered. The Soviets can (and must) now measure their successes in the work of socialist construction, among other things, by an extraordinarily clear, simple, practical measure: in exactly how many communes (communes or villages, city districts, etc.) and to what extent does the development of cooperatives approach the point of encompassing the entire population.