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

404HOW TO ORGANISE COMPETITION?Bourgeois authors have been using up reams of paperpraising competition, private enterprise, and all the othermagnificent virtues and blessings of the capitalists and thecapitalist system. Socialists have been accused of refusingto understand the importance of these virtues, and ofignoring “human nature”. As a matter of fact, however,capitalism long ago replaced small, independent commodityproduction, under which competition could develop enterprise,energy and bold initiative to any considerable extent,by large- and very large-scale factory production, jointstockcompanies, syndicates and other monopolies. Undersuch capitalism, competition means the incredibly brutalsuppression of the enterprise, energy and bold initiativeof the mass of the population, of its overwhelming majority,of ninety-nine out of every hundred toilers; it also meansthat competition is replaced by financial fraud, nepotism,servility on the upper rungs of the social ladder.Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on thecontrary, for the first time creates the opportunity foremploying it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, foractually drawing the majority of working people into afield of labour in which they can display their abilities,develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundantamong the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed andstrangled in thousands and millions.Now that a socialist government is in power our task isto organise competition.The hangers-on and spongers on the bourgeoisie describedsocialism as a uniform, routine, monotonous and drab barracksystem. The lackeys of the money-bags, the lickspittles