In historical context (especially without technological verification of where goods are ending up, counterrevolutionary presence and so on) I totally see why Lenin felt all this was necessary, extraordinarily strict criteria and all.

I hope when we see a socialist revival in Europe, we are able to leverage less personally invested measures such as those proposed in Stafford Beer’s work. Hopefully we can efficiently measure inputs and outputs to the economic and state machinery and use that as cause for inspection rather than making it a day to day business, and in general make things robust to differences in ideology. Use technology to enhance the efficiency of bureaucracy rather than introducing potential conflicts of interest by combining worker organisations with the state/party.

But these things may be easier said than done.