distributing financial resources. Above all, there must be a thoroughgoing nationalisation of banking business. Not merely must all the banks taken from the bourgeoisie be converted into State institutions of the proletariat, but all future banking operations must be declared a State monopoly. The State alone can be allowed to found banks.
Furthermore, all the banks must be amalgamated. Superfluous banks must be abolished, and those which it is considered desirable to maintain must become branches of the unified bank of the Soviet Republic.
Instead of the manifold methods of account-keeping and instead of the various kinds of banking operations conducted by the bourgeois banks, in the unified people’s bank there will be a single and simple method of keeping accounts. This will enable the proletarian State to draw up a complete picture showing where and how much the State has paid out, whence and how much it has received.
If, however, the revenue and expenditure of the State are recorded by the unified bank of the republic, what will happen to the bank when the State itself becomes, as it tends more and more to become, the sole administrator of a unified and gigantic apparatus organising the entire economic life of the country?
It is obvious that the bank will then play the part that is played by the counting-house in any economic enterprise. The bank, as such, will gradually disappear. As our party program explains, the bank will become the central counting-house, “the central book-keeping establishment of communist society.”
121. Money and the Dying-out of the monetary System.
Communist society will know nothing of money. Every worker will produce goods for the general welfare. He will not receive any certificate to the effect that he has delivered the product to society; he will receive