The cited figures demonstrate serious successes of Soviet power in food affairs—successes achieved under unprecedented and extraordinary difficulties. But the clearest figures, the most indisputable facts are disputed or hushed up when the matter concerns the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie, capitalists, speculators, and kulaks.

Precise investigations into the nutrition of urban workers have proven that the worker receives only half (approximately) of his food products from the state, from the Komprod, while obtaining the other half on the "free," "open" market—that is, from speculators. In this process, for the first half the worker pays one-tenth of all his food expenditures, while for the second half he pays nine-tenths.

Speculators fleece the starving worker nine times over.

Speculators rob him with unprecedented ruthlessness. And we all know what an unprecedented orgy of profiteering, thievery, crime, hunger and suffering for the mass of workers, and enrichment of a few scoundrels is bound up with the notorious "freedom of grain trade."

Yet nevertheless there are defenders of free trade to be found!

Our worker-peasant government, the entire Soviet republic, all our nascent socialist society finds itself in a state of the most severe, desperate, ferocious, deadly struggle against capitalism, against speculation, against free trade in grain. This is the deepest, the most fundamental, the most everyday, the most mass struggle of capitalism against socialism. The fate of our entire revolution depends on this struggle. And people who call themselves "socialists"—social democrats, Mensheviks, "Socialist-Revolutionaries"—aid capitalism in this struggle against socialism! The best of these people, those most hostile to Kolchak, Denikin, and capitalists, constantly take the side of capitalism on the question of Soviet power's food policy, demanding concessions in favor of the "private commercial apparatus," "individual enterprise," and so forth and so on.

In essence, if one examines carefully, if one thinks seriously about what the struggle against Soviet power is really about, then one arrives at this conclusion: the opponents of Soviet power divide into two large groups. Both defend capitalism against socialism. One does so brutally and with the crudest self-interest; these are the landowners, capitalists, kulaks, Denikins, Kolchaks, the Black Hundreds, the Cadets. The other group defends capitalism "ideologically"—that is, disinterestedly or without direct personal profit, from prejudice, from fear of the new; these are the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. They are the last "ideological" defenders of capitalism. And therefore it is by no means accidental that Kolchaks and Denikins, Russian and all foreign capitalists march under the cover of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, beneath their banner, beneath their flag, repeating their slogans and phrases about "freedom" in general, about "democracy" in general, about "private" (commercial, capitalist) enterprise, and so forth and so on.

Smart capitalists understand that the "ideological" position of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries serves them, their class, "their" capitalism, while the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, like all petty-bourgeois socialists everywhere and always, do not understand this. They fear a struggle to the death against free trade in grain; they desire concessions to it, recognition of it even in part, "peace" and agreement with it.