Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/15

Rh Examining that part of the unions which, before the war, unit about three-fourths of all organized workers on a class basis, we can point out in general three political groupings which had been formed during a long historical period. On one side was trade unionism—taking here trade unionism as a certain ideological and political movement—then anarcho-syndicalism and third, social-democratic trade unions. These are the three different clear political divisions into which the class trade union movement was divided. Let us take up the characteristics of these movements.

What do we understand in the trade union literature and politics under trade unionism? This name, which was adopted from the Anglo-Saxon countries, became during the long period of development of the English and American trade union movement not only an external formula or symbol for a certain trade union in a certain country, but it represented also a certain ideological and political content of the trade union movement. Under trade unionism we understand such a form of the labor and trade union movement which has for its purpose only the narrow economic problems of bettering conditions of labor, higher wages, etc.

Trade unionism is a theory which has grown out of the practical Anglo-Saxon labor movement, which in fact does not have in its program, in theory or in practice, the overthrowal of capitalism, but only the betterment of conditions within the capitalist system.

So the main characterization of trade unionism (also a characterization of reformism, which is understood widely outside the borders of Anglo-Saxon countries) is the struggle within the frame of the capitalist system and the conception of that system as a permanent one within the frame of which we have to struggle and better the conditions of the working class. Most of the practical and theoretical workers of the Anglo-Saxon labor movement openly construed the problems of the trade union only in the sense of bettering the conditions of the working class under capitalism and even. put up the theory of the existence of three main factors, Labor, Capital, and Society (public).

What the trade union leaders understood by the "public" somewhat reminds us in Russia of our term "the third element." There was such a third element in the zemstvo (councils of the rural citizenry), the intelligenzia, which was objectively counted as revolutionary but which played a somewhat separate role between the two main struggling classes. Under "public" they understood that part of the bourgeoisie which under the pressure of the working class came to the conclusion