(4) The obligation for all industrialists, merchants and employers to group themselves into trusts.
(5) Encouragement or enforcement of the organisation of the population in consumers' societies, under the control of the State.
Let us now see what would be the result of each of these measures, given that they are carried out in a really revolutionary and democratic way.
4.—The Nationalisation of the Banks
Everyone knows that the banks are the chief nerve centres of the whole present economic system, under the capitalist regime. To talk about the "regulation of economic life" and to leave out the nationalisation of the banks is either to display the crassest ignorance or to deceive the credulous public with big words and marvellous promises which one has absolutely no intention of keeping.
It is absurd to control and regulate the supply and distribution of cereals or of all products generally, without controlling and regulating the operations of the banks. It is to go hunting for a few doubtful kopeks while neglecting the millions of roubles close at hand. The banks at the present time are so closely connected with commerce (in cereals as in every product) and industry that without taking possession of the banks it is impossible for anything serious, "revolutionary," "democratic," to be done at all.
But is not this seizure of the banks by the State perhaps an extremely difficult and complicated operation? This is what the capitalists and their defenders try in their own interest to make the public believe, so as to frighten it.
In reality the nationalisation of the banks would not take a farthing from anyone, and it presents no technical or moral difficulties whatever; it is prevented only for base motives of personal interest, by a handful of plutocrats gorged with lucre. If the nationalisation of the banks is so often confounded with the confiscation of private property, the fault is with the bourgeois Press whose interest it is that the public should be deceived.
The ownership of the capital with which the banks operate and which is concentrated in these institutions is certified by printed or written slips called shares, bonds, Bills of Exchange, receipts, etc. … Not one of these slips is suppressed or altered by the
