Polemic on General Line of International ... - From Marx to Mao

speculators engaged in the re-sale of agricultural produce.They “bring to Moscow tons of citrus fruit, apples and vegetablesand re-sell them at speculative prices”. “These profitgrabbersare provided with every facility, with market inns,store-rooms and other services at their disposal”. 1 In theKrasnodar Territory, a speculator set up her own agency and“employed twelve salesmen and two stevedores”. She transported“thousands of hogs, hundreds of quintals of grain andhundreds of tons of fruit” from the rural areas to the DonBasin and moved “great quantities of stolen slag bricks, wholewagons of glass” and other building materials from the city tothe villages. She reaped huge profits out of such re-sale. 2Others specialize as brokers and middlemen. They havewide contacts and through them one can get any thing inreturn for a bribe. There was a broker in Leningrad who“though he is not the Minister of Trade, controls all thestocks”, and “though he holds no post on the railway, disposesof wagons”. He could obtain “things the stocks of which arestrictly controlled, from outside the stocks”. “All the storehousesin Leningrad are at his service.” For delivering goods,he received huge “bonuses” — 700,000 roubles from one timbercombine in 1960 alone. In Leningrad, there is “a wholegroup” of such brokers. 3These private entrepreneurs and speculators are engagedin the most naked capitalist exploitation. Isn’t it clear thatthey belong to the bourgeoisie, the class antagonistic to theproletariat?Actually the Soviet press itself calls these people “Sovietcapitalists”, “new-born entrepreneurs”, “private entrepreneurs”,“newly-emerged kulaks”, “speculators”, “exploiters”,etc. Aren’t the revisionist Khrushchov clique contradictingthemselves when they assert that antagonistic classes donot exist in the Soviet Union?1Ekonomicheskaya Gazeta, No. 27, 1963.2Literaturnaya Gazeta, July 27 and August 17, 1963.3Sovietskaya Rossiya, January 27, 1961.435