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

HOW TO ORGANISE COMPETITION?411property of the entire people! You yourselves must set towork to take account of and control the production anddistribution of products—this, and this alone is the roadto the victory of socialism, the only guarantee of its victory,the guarantee of victory over all exploitation, over allpoverty and want! For there is enough bread, iron, timber,wool, cotton and flax in Russia to satisfy the needs ofeveryone, if only labour and its products are properly distributed,if only a business-like, practical control over thisdistribution by the entire people is established, providedonly we can defeat the enemies of the people: the rich andtheir hangers-on, and the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies,not only in politics, but also in everyday economic life.No mercy for these enemies of the people, the enemiesof socialism, the enemies of the working people! War to thedeath against the rich and their hangers-on, the bourgeoisintellectuals; war on the rogues, the idlers and the rowdies!All of them are of the same brood—the spawn of capitalism,the offspring of aristocratic and bourgeois society; thesociety in which a handful of men robbed and insulted thepeople; the society in which poverty and want forced thousandsand thousands on to the path of rowdyism, corruptionand roguery, and caused them to lose all humansemblance; the society which inevitably cultivated in theworking man the desire to escape exploitation even by meansof deception, to wriggle out of it, to escape, if only for amoment, from loathsome labour, to procure at least a crustof bread by any possible means, at any cost, so as not tostarve, so as to subdue the pangs of hunger suffered by himselfand by his near ones.The rich and the rogues are two sides of the same coin,they are the two principal categories of parasites whichcapitalism fostered; they are the principal enemies ofsocialism. These enemies must be placed under the specialsurveillance of the entire people; they must be ruthlesslypunished for the slightest violation of the laws and regulationsof socialist society. Any display of weakness, hesitationor sentimentality in this respect would be an immensecrime against socialism.In order to render these parasites harmless to socialistsociety we must organise the accounting and control of the