longer hang in the air above the masses, but will become implements in the hands of the masses themselves. This will undoubtedly promote the development of a communistic consciousness, and will favour the growth of a comradely discipline among the workers. At the same time it will help the masses to understand the integral nature of the productive and distributive apparatus in socialist society. Further it is necessary, after enrolling the whole population in the cooperatives, that the leading part in these organisations shall be assigned to the proletarian stratum of the population. In the towns this will be secured through the more active participation of the urban workers in cooperative functions; through securing the election of a communist and proletarian majority upon the administrative bodies; and above all by seeing to it that the cooperatives which are transformed into urban consumers’ communes shall be the workers’ cooperatives and not the cooperatives founded by the petty bourgeois and the civil servants. To the same end it is essential that there should be an intimate association between the cooperatives and the trade unions, that is to say between the respective organs of distribution and production. There is an immense future for such an association. In course of time the function of the State will be reduced to that of a central accountant’s office, and then the living union of productive organisations with distributive organisations will be of overwhelming importance. Finally, it is essential that the communists should participate as a compact group in the construction of this system of cooperative distribution, and that they should secure the dominant role in the work.
In the rural districts it is important that the rich peasants should be excluded from the management of the cooperatives; that the comparatively well-to-do inhabitants of the countryside should not receive any privileges in the matter of distribution; and that the entire apparatus of the rural cooperatives should be controlled by the poor peasants and the class-conscious among the middle peasants.