Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/126

 122 where anti-socialism has reached its peak, corruption has also its peak. We see there such a case where a deceased leader of a yellow union left a property of $500,000 which he had "saved up" within the fifteen or twenty years of his leadership. Of course, such money the "leaders" received, not as wages, but from the bourgeoisie as reward for some kind of successful treason to the interests of the working class.

There were many proven cases where a leader of a union—its secretary—at certain moments would break a strike, receiving for it a definite amount of so many thousands of dollars. Some employer would pay money in order to cause a strike against his competitors, etc. In America there is a whole system invented by the bourgeoisie for the corruption of labor leaders and for crushing of the class struggle and diverting it into another channel.

This influence of the bourgeois state, has, in every country, its peculiarities. Each country has its method for the corruption of the working class, and the bourgeoisie of each country uses these methods very successfully for its own interests. But the opportunity itself of having such an influence on the working class, proves that the bourgeoisie has a foothold within the working class, just as we, for instance—the Profintern—have our foothold within the Amsterdam International.

Thus, the power of the bourgeoisie is contained not only in its army, police, courts, but also in its ability to influence and control a section of the working class, and to undermine the labor organizations which should conduct the struggle against it. For, if the world's 50,000,000 mass membership of the trade unions would be a really united army, the bourgeoisie would long ago have been smashed to pieces. The reason why we have not smashed it before now is not only because we have within the working class some elements of bourgeois ideology, but because it has an organized foothold within the working class.

The difficulty of the revolutionary labor movement is in the necessity of dislodging these organized bourgeois footholds from within the working class. Almost all the leaders of the reformists are infected with bourgeois ideology. We have to create new staffs of leaders who will feel themselves representatives of the always-fighting working class. The difficulty of creating such new staffs and instilling into them revolutionary ideas is one of the main causes which is delaying the victory of revolution all over the world.

At last, we will dwell upon the prospects of the world's trade union movement as a whole. The picture of the international trade union movement which is given here, may seem at first glance, somewhat