bourgeois law" which compels one to calculate, with the pitilessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than another, whether one is not getting less paid than another, this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no means for any exact calculation by society of the quantity of product to be distributed to each of its members; each will take freely "according to his needs."
From the capitalist point of view it is easy to declare such a social order a "pure Utopia" and to sneer at the Socialists for promising each the right to receive from society, without any control of the labor of the individual citizen, any quantity of truffles, automobiles, pianos, etc. Even now, most bourgeois "savants" deliver themselves of such sneers that thereby they only display at once their ignorance and their material interests in defending capitalism. Ignorance—for it has never entered the head of any Socialist "to promise" that the highest phase of Communism will actually arrive, while the anticipation of the great Socialists that it will arrive, assumes neither the present productive powers of labor, nor the present unthinking "man in the street," capable of spoiling, without reflection, the stores of social wealth and of demanding the impossible. As long as the "highest" phase of Communism has not arrived, the Socialists demand the strictest control, by Society and by the State, of the quantity of labor and the quantity of consumption; only this control must start with the expropriation of the capitalists, with the control of the workers over capitalists, and must be carried out, not by a government of bureaucrats, but by a government of the armed workers.
The interested defense of capitalism by the capitalist ideologists (and their hangers-on like Tseretelli, Tchernoff and company), consists just in that they substitute their disputes and discussions about the far future for the essential, imperative questions of the day; the expropriation of the capitalists, the conversion of all citizens into workers and employees of one huge "syndicate"—the whole State—and the complete subordination of the whole of the work of this syndicate to a really democratic State—to the State consisting of the Councils of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies. In reality, when a learned professor, and in his train, some philistine, and in his wake, Messrs. Tseretelli and Tchernoff talk of unreasonable Utopia, of the demagogic promises of the Bolsheviks, of the impossibility of "bringing in" Socialism, it is the highest stage or phase of Communism which they have in mind, and which no one has not only not promised, but also never
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