To some extent, indeed, we worked along these lines. But the goods were unfortunately confiscated too late, when the greater part of them had already been converted into money, which had been hidden by the owners. The whole apparatus of large-scale distribution was seized by the Soviet Power, and began to work on its behalf with the aid of the employees’ trade unions. Only the heads of the businesses were discarded, for these had now become purely parasitic elements. Formerly it had been necessary to buy goods, to hunt them out, to make bargains. But now that the proletarian State had itself become the chief producer of goods in its nationalised workshops, it would have been absurd for the State to sell these goods to itself, and thus to maintain traders at its own expense. Furthermore, middlemen are superfluous as between the peasants and the State, and as between the State and the consumers — as soon as a State monopoly in grain has been established. Middlemen can offer no inducements which will encourage the peasants to hand the grain over to the State. The peasants have no occasion to seek buyers for the grain, for there are no buyers.
In so far, therefore, as the proletarian Power has taken over the production of a number of important articles, and in so far as it effects a notable proportion of production by the work of its own instruments, it needs its own apparatus of distribution. There is no place here for private trade.
But what is to happen in the case of petty private trade which serves for the distribution of the produce of small-scale independent home industry? The Soviet Power has not yet taken possession of this branch of production. It has not yet succeeded in becoming the monopolist buyer of the produce of home industry. What is to happen in the case of the petty traders who are distributing such produce among the population (of course, at fancy prices) — articles which the agents of the Soviet Power are unable to provide at fixed prices?