State affair, but the bourgeois State held the leading strings. Furthermore, even when certain enterprises remained in private hands, they were often subjected to governmental control. Some enterprises were by special legislation forced to buy their raw materials from certain others, while the latter had to sell to the former in specified quantities and at fixed prices. The State prescribed working methods, specified what materials were to be used, and rationed these materials. Thus, in place of private capitalism, State capitalism came into being.
Under State capitalism, instead of the separate organisations of the bourgeoisie there now flourishes a united organisation, the State organisation. Down to the time of the war there existed in any capitalist country the State organisation of the bourgeoisie, and there also existed separately from the State large numbers of bourgeois organisations, such as syndicates, trusts, societies of entrepreneurs, landowners’ organisations, political parties, journalists’ unions, learned societies, artists’ clubs, the church, societies for the clergy, Boy Scouts and cadet corps (White Guard organisations of youth), private detective bureaux, etc. Under State capitalism all these separate organisations fuse with the bourgeois State; they become, as it were, State departments, and they work in accordance with a general plan, subject to the “high command”; in the mines and factories they do whatever is ordered by the general staff; they write in the newspapers under the orders of the general staff; they preach in the churches whatever will be useful to the robbers of the general staff; their pictures, their books, and their poems, are produced under the orders of the general staff; they invent machinery, weapons, poison gas, etc., to meet the needs of the general staff. In this manner the whole of life is militarised in order to secure for the bourgeoisie the continued receipt of its filthy lucre.
State capitalism signifies an enormous accession of strength to the great bourgeoisie. Just as under the working-class dictatorship, in the workers’ State, the working class is more powerful in proportion as the soviet