cial and industrial circles. Coalition demands that the power of the capitalist be left untouched; that they be left unpunished; that they be allowed to restrict production and to blame the workers for it, to increase the disorganisation and so pave the way for a new Kornilovist insurrection.
6.—The Suppresssion of Business Secrecy
Without the abolition of business secrecy, control of production and distribution is either a meaningless phrase which the Cadets use to dupe the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks, and the latter to dupe the working classes; or it is something that can only be carried out by reactionary and bureaucratic means. Although this is evident to any unprejudiced man, although the Pravda has insistently demanded the suppression of business secrecy (and has itself been suppressed, largely because of this, by the Kerensky Government that is always eager to please the capitalists) our republican government has not thought—no more than have the "organs of the revolutionary democracy"—of this primary means of control.
Here in fact is the key to all control. Here is the most sensitive spot of the Capital that plunders the people and sabotages production. Precisely for that reason the S.R.'s and the Mensheviks are afraid to touch it.
The usual argument of the capitalist, repeated thoughtlessly by the petite bourgeoisie, is that capitalist economy absolutely forbids the abolition of business secrecy, because private property in the means of production and the capitalist's individual relation to the market demand that business ledgers be "inviolable" and, consequently, that banking operations be kept secret.
Persons who use these and similar arguments have let themselves be deceived and in turn they deceive the people: for they refuse to see two cardinal and notorious facts in the economic life of to-day. The first is the existence of big capitalism; that is, the organisation sui generis of banks and trusts and huge factories, &c. … The second is the war.
It is just big capitalism of to-day that deprives business secrecy of the right to exist; that makes business secrecy nothing but hypocrisy—a means of concealing the financial combinations and the monstrous profits of big capital. Big-capitalist economy is, by
