around when things started to change. The meals were free and no one raised a fuss about his eating here. He'd always sit all alone, and he'd stay at his table after everyone else had left. It seemed like he didn't want to go back out to the street. Maybe he was afraid that a crowd would start chasing him shouting 'There's that capitalist thief—shoot him!' One night when I was here baking he even came into the kitchen and asked if there might be something he could do. You don't know about all that! You don't know that the man who was 'In Restaurants,' the man who supposedly 'fed thousands of people daily,' the Big Boss as he was called—this man didn't know how to boil an egg! Apparently all he knew was how to send checks to the bank. And when the banks closed down he didn't know anything! I myself told him everyone would be happier if he didn't help in the kitchen, that no one minded his eating here. He continued coming every day when the fighting was still going on, but after the army collapsed he never came back."
The militant is visibly annoyed, and finds that these people are extremely evasive. "Frankly," she says, "I'm not at all interested in the former, capitalist organization of this restaurant. I've studied the social relations and class structure of capitalism to the point where I'm sick of it! What I want to know is how this productive enterprise is organized now—who coordinates the activity, who orders the food, who plans the meals. In other words, how is this place run if not by a Workers' Council guided by a Council Committee?"
"Sister," says the woman, "if one of us can't do it then it just doesn't get done."
"That's no answer!" snaps the militant. "I don't understand your motives for being so hostile to my question, for being so evasive. I'm not so stupid as to believe that a restaurant could function for a day without an organization. I happen to know what goes into a loaf of bread! A specific person has to decide how much bread is to be baked so as to know how much flour to order. At the flour mill, in turn, someone is in charge of coordinating the mill's requirements with the agricultural authorities who supply the grain.
149
