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Updated: May 5, 2025
Called by the Provisional Government, it comprised representatives of the Soviets, of parties, of organizations of the army, peasant organizations, co-operatives, zemstvos, agricultural committees, etc. Its object was to solve the question of power until the meeting of the Constituent Assembly.
Its action was from the first political as well as economic. While consumers' co-operatives, such as the "Vooruit" of Ghent, were founded in several large towns, Socialist clubs entertained a continuous agitation for electoral franchise, their aim being to use Parliament to obtain the sweeping social reforms inscribed on their programme.
Together with the peasants, workmen and Socialist parties and numerous democratic organizations prepared themselves for the defense of the Constituent Assembly: The Union of Postal Employees, a part of the Union of Railway Workers, the Bank Employees, the City Employees, the food distributors' organizations, the teachers' associations, the zemstvos, the co-operatives.
The Bolshevik government had to accept the despised co-operatives, and even compromise Bolshevist principles as the price of securing their services: A Socialist state can come into existence only as a net of production and consumption communes, which keep conscientious accounts of their production and consumption, economize labor, steadily increasing its productivity and thus making it possible to lower the workday to seven, six, or even less hours.
We find the same readiness to compromise and to follow the line of least resistance in dealing with the co-operatives. From 1906 onward there had been an enormous growth of co-operatives in Russia. They were of various kinds and animated by varied degrees of social consciousness.
On March 2nd, I went to an election meeting of workers and officials of the Moscow Co-operatives. It was beastly cold in the hall of the University where the meeting was held, and my nose froze as well as my feet. Speakers were announced from the Communists, Internationalists, Mensheviks, and Right Social Revolutionaries. The last-named did not arrive.
And yet, withal, there was room for hope, the soul of progress was not dead. In various directions there was a hopeful and promising growth. First among these hopeful and promising facts was the marvelous growth of the Consumers' Co-operatives.
Anything less than rigorous, universal, thorough accounting and control of grain and of the production of grain, and later also of all other necessary products, will not do. We have inherited from capitalism mass organizations which can facilitate the transition to mass accounting and control of distribution the consumers' co-operatives.
GOLDEN RULES OF LIFE. All the air and the exercise in the universe, and the most generous and liberal table, but poorly suffice to maintain human stamina if we neglect other co-operatives namely the obedience to the laws of abstinence, and those of ordinary gratification. We rise with a headache, and we set about puzzling ourselves to know the cause.
They did not differ materially from the co-operatives of England, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, or Germany except in the one important particular that they relied upon bourgeois Intellectuals for leadership and direction to a greater extent than do the co-operatives in the countries named. They were admirably fitted to be the nuclei of a socialized system of distribution.
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