intellectuals who were leading the cooperatives, and refusing to discard the whole cooperative apparatus because of the counter-revolutionary activities of these leaders, the Soviet Power has continually endeavoured to fuse the cooperative distributive apparatus with the whole system of its own distributive organs. It has endeavoured to widen rather than to narrow the scale of cooperative activities. The practical aims of the Soviet Power and of the Communist Party, in this connexion, have been the following.
The normal cooperative of the bourgeois type is a voluntary union of citizens having a definite interest in the society. As a rule the society serves none but its own members; and if it supplies products to the general population, it does so only in so far as this can be effected without harm to the members. We, on the other hand, consider it necessary that the entire population shall be organised in cooperatives, that every member of the community shall belong to a cooperative. Only then will distribution through the cooperatives signify distribution to the whole population.
In a distributive society of cooperators, the work is usually carried on under the administration of all the members of the society. In actual fact, as a rule, quite a small group of the members is responsible for the conduct of affairs, but this depends upon the members themselves. The constitution of the society puts the absolute control in the hands of the general assembly of the members. If all the citizens of the republic are enrolled in the cooperatives, they have full power to control these organisations from below upwards, thus controlling the entire apparatus of distribution in the proletarian State. Should the masses display sufficient independence, they could resolutely and successfully eradicate maladministration and bureaucracy from the work of distribution, and could thus ensure the requisite punctuality and accuracy throughout the State-cooperative organisation. When the consumers themselves participate in the work of distribution, the distributive organs will no