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

HOW TO ORGANISE COMPETITION?407of the exploiters, the bourgeois intellectual gentlemen usedsocialism as a bogey to “frighten” the people, who, undercapitalism, were doomed to the penal servitude and thebarrack-like discipline of arduous, monotonous toil, to alife of dire poverty and semi-starvation. The first steptowards the emancipation of the people from this penal servitudeis the confiscation of the landed estates, the introductionof workers’ control and the nationalisation of the banks.The next steps will be the nationalisation of the factories,the compulsory organisation of the whole population inconsumers’ societies, which are at the same time societiesfor the sale of products, and the state monopoly of the tradein grain and other necessities.Only now is the opportunity created for the truly massdisplay of enterprise, competition and bold initiative.Every factory from which the capitalist has been ejected, orin which he has at least been curbed by genuine workers’control, every village from which the landowning exploiterhas been smoked out and his land confiscated has only nowbecome a field in which the working man can reveal histalents, unbend his back a little, rise to his full height,and feel that he is a human being. For the first time aftercenturies of working for others, of forced labour for theexploiter, it has become possible to work for oneself andmoreover to employ all the achievements of modern technologyand culture in one’s work.Of course, this greatest change in human history fromworking under compulsion to working for oneself cannot takeplace without friction, difficulties, conflicts and violenceagainst the inveterate parasites and their hangers-on. Noworker has any illusions on that score. The workers andpoor peasants, hardened by dire want and by many longyears of slave labour for the exploiters, by their countlessinsults and acts of violence, realise that it will take timeto break the resistance of those exploiters. The workers andpeasants are not in the least infected with the sentimentalillusions of the intellectual gentlemen, of the Novaya Zhizncrowd and other slush, who “shouted” themselves hoarse“denouncing” the capitalists and “gesticulated” againstthem, only to burst into tears and to behave like whippedpuppies when it came to deeds, to putting threats into action,