just what this danger is and what means will be used to combat it:
International trading, as proposed, is not a serious menace. It will be closely controlled by the Government and can hardly furnish vantage ground for a new capitalism to take root. Nor will the concessions present grave difficulties. The foreign exploiters going in will insist upon and no doubt get ample guarantees of protection, but their projects will be hedged around with legal restrictions isolating them and limiting their baneful political influence. Moreover, and this is the decisive factor, the Communists will arrange matters so that the capitalists must produce their own social antitoxin. That is, as fast as the concessionaries build plants and fill them with workers, the Communists, by organizing the latter industrially and politically, will give them a power sufficient not only to overcome that of the employers involved, but also to lend considerable support to the general proletarian social structure. Hence, we get the interesting result that the more capitalists go into Russia, and the larger they swell the ranks of the working class, the stronger will become the workers' republic. There is little to fear from the concessionaries. Speaking of them recently, Kamenev said: "Capital in Russia will dig its own grave with every extra shovelful of coal and with every bucketful of petroleum that we obtain by its help."
But if international, trade and concessions do not constitute real dangers, the establishment of free trade and its helpmeet, the grain tax, certainly do. They give private individuals the right again to manufacture and deal in social necessities. They will result in a great growth of small-scale production and the strengthening of petty-bourgeois sentiment. They are equivalent to injecting the worst kind of capitalist poison straight into the body of proletarian Russia. But the revolutionary tacticians are sure that the latter is strong enough to withstand the nauseous dose. Everything will be done to prevent contagion, and to make only good come from the vaccination. The luxuriant crop of small producers and dealers, both industrial and agricultural, will be organized into co-operatives, and thus their activities will be kept largely within proletarian bounds. The great basic
