The state, an organ of oppression and robbery of the people, left to us, as a heritage, the greatest hatred and distrust of the people toward everything connected with the state. To overcome this is a very difficult task, which only the Soviets can master, but which requires even from them considerable time and tremendous perseverance. This "heritage" has a particularly painful effect on the question of accounting and control—a fundamental problem for the Socialist revolution after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. It will inevitably take some time before the masses will begin to feel themselves free, after the overthrow of the land owners and the bourgeoisie, and will comprehend—not from books, but from their own, the Soviet, experience—will comprehend and come to feel that without thorough state accounting and control of production and distribution the authority of the toilers, and their freedom, cannot last, and a return to the yoke of Capitalism is inevitable.
All the habits and traditions of the bourgeoisie, and especially, of the petty bourgeoisie, are also opposed to state control, are for the inviolability of "sacred private property" and of "sacred" private enterprise.
It is especially clear to us now how correct is the Marxian proposition that anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois tendencies, irreconcilable with Socialism, with a proletarian dictatorship and with Communism. The struggle to install in the masses the idea of Soviet state control and accounting, for the realization of this idea, for a break with the accursed past, which accustomed the people to look upon the work of getting food and clothing as a "private" affair and on purchase and sale as something that "concerns only myself,"—this is the most momentous struggle, of universal historical significance, a struggle of Socialist consciousness against bourgeois-anarchistic "freedom." We have introduced workers' control as a law, but it is barely beginning to be realized or even penetrating the consciousness of the proletarian masses. That lack of accountability in production and distribution is fatal for the first steps toward Socialism, that it means corruption, that carelessness in accounting and control is a direct assistance to the German and Russian Kornilovs, who can overthrow the authority of the toilers only in case we do not solve the problem of accounting and control, and who with the aid of the peasant bourgeoisie, the Cadets, the Mensheviki and the Right Wing Social-Revolutionists are watching us, waiting for their opportunity,—this is not adequately emphasized in our agitation, and is not given sufficient
