submit to any control, they will not reveal their balance-sheets, they will not present their stocks of paper money to be registered by the democratic state.
By nationalising the banks, by making the use of cheques compulsory for the rich, by suppressing secret balance-sheets, by punishing with the confiscation of all their goods all who make false returns of income—by these means a close alliance of the workers and peasants would be able, with the greatest ease, to institute an effective and universal control of the rich; and this control would take back from those who are holding it in their safes the paper money issued by the treasury—to which it would then return.
To do this, we need a revolutionary and democratic dictatorship, directed by the revolutionary proletariat—in other words, democracy must become effectively revolutionary.
But there's the rub. This is not what is desired by our S.R.'s and our mensheviks, who cover themselves with the flag of "revolutionary democracy," meanwhile upholding the reactionary and bureaucratic policy of the bourgeoisie, who, as usual, are now acting on the motto: "After us the deluge!"
In general, we do not even notice how far our thinking is encrusted with anti-democratic habits and the prejudice of the "inviolability" of bourgeois private property. When an engineering firm or a banker publishes data on the income and wages of a worker, on the productivity of his work—this is considered to be something perfectly legal and just. Nobody dreams of considering it as an assault on the "private life" of the worker and as an "act of spying" or of gathering illegal information on the part of the employer. Bourgeois society considers work and the payment of wages to be like an open book in which every bourgeois has the right to look at any time, which he can use as a basis to reveal the "luxury" of the workers, their "laziness," &c. …
But what about reversing control? If associations of officials, employees and servants were invited by the democratic State to verify the income and expenditure of the capitalists, to publish the figures concerning them, to help the government to combat the making of false income returns?
What a clamour of indignation would arise from the breasts of the bourgeoisie, who would howl about "spying " and "illegal
