Page:Grigory Zinoviev - The Communist Party and Industrial Unionism.djvu/3



To arrive at a clear understanding of the proper relationship of the Communist Party and the workers' industrial organisations, one must first examine the purpose and structure of industrial organisation.

According to Webb, the aim "is to maintain and increase the standard of wages." Brentano and Sombart say that the object is "to subsidise the members in time of strike, and to safeguard their interests by increasing their wages."

The Bolshevik Party has never given it adhesion to these phrases. It has never approved the formula generally accepted by the Second International. This was defined by a well-known Austrian militant industrialist, Adolf Braun, as the organisation of the workers "in permanent craft or Trade Unions of wage earners, with the object of securing ameliorations of working conditions within the limits of the capitalist system, and to fight within those limits to prevent conditions growing worse."

In its controversy with the Mensheviki in 1913, the Bolshevik Party laid down that