bureaucratically and not democratically by bribing State officials (the general rule in America and Germany), by keeping up the private character of the banks for the single purpose of maintaining the secrecy of their operations, so as to take millions upon millions of "surplus-value" from the State and guarantee the possibility of shady financial combinations.
America as well as Germany "regularises" its economic life in such a way as to make life a military prison for the workers (in part for the peasants), and a paradise for the bankers and capitalists. Their "regularisation" consists in leading the workers to hard labour and to … famine, and in guaranteeing to the capitalists (secretly, reactionarily and bureaucratically) profits even more gigantic than they made before the war.
Such a kind of "regularisation" is also perfectly possible in republican-imperialist Russia: moreover it is practised here at this very moment, not only by the Miliukovs and the Chingarevs, but by Kerensky himself, with the help of Terestchenko, Nekrassov, Bernatsky, Prokopovitch[1] and Co., who defend, by their reactionary bureaucratic and bourgeois conduct, the "inviolability" of the banks and their sacred right to make the most monstrous profits. Let us speak the plain truth: in republican Russia there are people who want to "regularise" economic life by reactionary and bureaucratic methods, but who are prevented sometimes by the "Soviets " which have not succeeded in wiping out the first Kornilov but will spare no effort to smash another Kornilov.
That is the truth. And this simple and bitter truth is more useful for the education of the people than the lies with which it is deceived about "our great revolutionary democracy."
The nationalisation of the banks would facilitate considerably the nationalisation of insurance; that is to say, the merging of all insurance companies into a single one which would centralise their operations and would be controlled by the State. Here again, if the democratic-revolutionary State were to decree the fusion and order the directors, officials and big shareholders to proceed without delay, on their own personal responsibility, to carry it out, the congresses of officials would accomplish it at once and without the
- ↑ Chingarev—Minister of Finance in the first coalition ministry, after Terestchenko: Bernatsky—Minister of Finance, and Prokopovitch—Minister for Food Supplies, in Kerensky's last ministry.
