Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/117

 Rh pulsion. In the present form of Proletarian Dictatorship, the Soviet State is the lever of the economic coup d'etat. There is, therefore, no question of opposing the organs of the Soviet Government.

Politics may be said to be the most concentrated expression of the generalisation and completion of economics. Therefore, any antagonism of the economic organisation of the working-class known as the Trade Unions towards its political organisation—i.e., the Soviets—is an absurdity and is deviating from Marxism towards bourgeois ideas and particularly towards bourgeois Trade Union prejudices. This kind of antagonism is still more harmful and absurd during the epoch of Proletarian Dictatorship when all the struggle of the proletariat and the whole of its political and economical activity should more than ever be concentrated, united and directed by one single will and bound by an iron unity.

The Trade Unions and the Communist Party.

Under such a regulation it was natural that even the hollow shells of "trade unions" should almost cease to exist, and it seems that an accusation to this effect was actually made by Trotzky at a meeting reported in