nationalisation of the banks, by the merging, that is, of all the banks into a single State Bank. Whosoever has fifteen roubles in the Savings Bank retains his fifteen roubles after the nationalisation of the banks; and whosoever has fifteen millions keeps his fifteen millions also, in the form of shares, bonds, Bills of Exchange, warrants, notes, &c.
What then is the use of nationalising the banks?
To make control possible. In fact real control of private banks and their operations (even if business secrecy is abolished) is impracticable, for it is absolutely impossible to verify the mechanism of the extremely complex, subtle and artificial procedure employed in the preparation of balance-sheets, in the founding of fictitious enterprises and branch banks and in the use of men of straw, &c. … Only the merging of all banks in one—in no way modifying property relationships by this step and taking away from no one, we repeat, the tiniest portion of his property—makes effective control possible—on condition, of course, that all the other measures indicated above are put into force.
It is only by means of the nationalisation of the banks that the State will be able to find out whence come the millions and the milliards, where they go to and which way they pass. And only the control of the banks, on which the whole of capitalist circulation is pivoted, will allow us to realise, in fact and not in words merely, the control of the whole of economic life, of the production and distribution of the most important products, and so to organise "the regularisation of economic life" which otherwise will remain a mere ministerial phrase, only useful to dupe the people. Only the control of banking operations, conditioned as it is by their being concentrated in a single State Bank, will enable us, by using it to prevent any concealment of income and with the help of easily applied supplementary measures, to make effective the collection of the income-tax which at the present time, thanks to the possibility of concealing income, is no more than a fiction.
It would be enough to decree the nationalisation of the banks; the directors and officials themselves would be responsible for carrying it out. The State needs no special machinery, no special preparatory measures; nationalisation can be realised by decree, "at one stroke." The economic possibility of this measure has been created just by capitalism, which has put property into the form of
