Written: June 2, 1918
Published:
First published in 1959 in Lenin Miscellany XXXVI.
Printed from the manuscript.
Source:
Lenin
Collected Works,
2nd English Edition,
Progress Publishers,
1971,
Moscow,
Volume 42,
page 96.2.
Translated: Bernard Isaacs
Transcription\Markup:
D. Walters
Copyleft:
V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marxists.org)
© 2003
Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the
terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
Communism requires and presupposes the greatest possible centralisation of large-scale production throughout the country. The all-Russia centre, therefore, should definitely be given the right of direct control over all the enterprises of the given branch of industry. The regional centres define their functions depending on local conditions of life, etc., in accordance with the general production directions and decisions of the centre.
To deprive the all-Russia centre o. the right of direct control over all the enterprises of the given industry throughout the country, as follows from the commission’s draft, would be regional anarcho-syndicalism, and not communism.
{1} The draft “Regulations for the Management of the Nationalised Enterprises” drawn up by the Supreme Economic Council were discussed on May 28 and 30, 1918, at a meeting of the Organisation of Production Section of the First All-Russia Congress of Economic Councils. After a lengthy discussion, the section, under pressure from the “Left” Communists, adopted the Regulations, which ran counter to the policy of the Party and the Government. On learning of the speeches of the, “Left” Communists on the question of management of the nationalised enterprises (see Collected Works, Vol. 50, Fifth Russian edition, p. 84) and reading the Regulations drafted by the section, Lenin proposed that they be examined at the Conciliation Board specially set up on June 2 and at which the C.P.C. was represented by V. I. Lenin and the S.E.C. by A. I. Rykov and G. D. Veinberg. The Conciliation Board revised the Regulations on the basis of Lenin’s comments published here. Despite the “Left” Communists, the congress, by a majority, adopted the draft of the Conciliation Board.
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