Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

CAN THE BOLSHEVIKS RETAIN STATE POWER?107employees, in the same way as the watchdogs of capitalismlike Briand and other bourgeois ministers, by a single decree,transfer railwaymen on strike to the status of stateemployees. We shall need many more state employees of thiskind, and more can be obtained, because capitalism has simplifiedthe work of accounting and control, has reduced it toa comparatively simple system of book-keeping, which anyliterate person can do.The conversion of the bank, syndicate, commercial, etc.,etc., rank-and-file employees into state employees is quitefeasible both technically (thanks to the preliminary workperformed for us by capitalism, including finance capitalism)and politically, provided the Soviets exercise control and supervision.As for the higher officials, of whom there are very few,but who gravitate towards the capitalists, they will haveto be dealt with in the same way as the capitalists, i.e.,“severely”. Like the capitalists, they will offer resistance.This resistance will have to be broken, and if the immortallynaïvePeshekhonov, as early as June 1917, lisped like theinfant that he was in state affairs, that “the resistance ofthe capitalists has been broken”, this childish phrase, thischildish boast, this childish swagger, will be converted bythe proletariat into reality.We can do this, for it is merely a question of breakingthe resistance of an insignificant minority of the population,literally a handful of people, over each of whom the employees’unions, the trade unions, the consumers’ societiesand the Soviets will institute such supervision that everyTit Titych will be surrounded as the French were at Sedan. 56We know these Tit Tityches by name: we only have to consultthe lists of directors, board members, large shareholders,etc. There are several hundred, at most several thousandof them in the whole of Russia, and the proletarian state,with the apparatus of the Soviets, of the employees’ unions,etc., will be able to appoint ten or even a hundred supervisersto each of them, so that instead of “breaking resistance”it may even be possible, by means of workers’ control (overthe capitalists), to make all resistance impossible.The important thing will not be even the confiscationof the capitalists’ property, but country-wide, all-embrac-