their opportunity—this is not adequately emphasized in our agitation, and is not given sufficient thought and is not sufficiently discussed by the advanced workers and peasants. And as long as labor control has not become a fact, as long as the advanced workers have not carried out a successful and merciless campaign against those who violate this control or who are careless with regard to control—we cannot move from the first step (from labor control) to the second step toward Socialism; i. e., to the regulation of production by the workers.
A Socialist state can come into existence only as a net of production and consumption communes, which keep conscientious accounts of their production and consumption, economize labor, at the same time steadily increasing its productivity and thus making it possible to lower the workday to seven, six or even less hours. Anything less than rigorous, universal, thorough accounting and control of grain and of the production of grain, and later also of all other necessary products, will not do. We have inherited from capitalism mass organizations which can facilitate the transition to mass accounting and control of distribution—the consumers' cooperatives. They are developed in Russia less than in the more advanced countries, but they comprise more than 10,000,000 members. The decree on consumers' associations which was recently issued is extremely significant, showing clearly the peculiarity of the position and of the problem of the Socialist Soviet Republic at the present time.
The decree is an agreement with the bourgeois co-operatives and with the workmen's co-operatives adhering to the bourgeois standpoint. It is noteworthy, in the first place, that representatives of these institutions not only participated in the deliberations on this decree, but had practically a determining voice, for parts of the decree which met determined opposition from these institutions were rejected. Secondly and essentially, the compromise consists in the rejection by the Soviet authority of the principles of free admission to the co-operatives (the only consistent prin-
