Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/18

 14 of the strike. Organizing strikes as often as possible, they even created a special terminology—"revolutionary exercises," figuring that every strike is a good thing. They claim that a strike is always for the benefit of the working class and it drags in a certain amount of workers into the movement and sharpens the social relations and the struggle between the classes. A careful and long preparation, the study of the objective conditions of strikes, the realistic calculation of the relation of forces and the calculation of the role of the masses and the relation between the masses and the militant minority, all this has been entirely ignored by the anarcho-syndicalists and considered as of no importance at all.

They imagined the social revolution as beginning suddenly, without the necessary organizational, political and other historical surroundings. At last they present the idea of sabotage, or what we call the "economic terror," as a means of compulsion against employers. They have been out-spoken against large, strong trade union treasuries, looking at it from the point of view that the trade unions are, as a matter of fact, like plain people, the one that has much money is not very active in the struggle; and therefore, the trade union that has much money in its treasury, will be afraid of losing it and will not be as militant and ready for strikes as necessary. This is, in short, the characterization of anarcho-syndicalism within the trade union movement of the world, and which is especially characteristic of the Latin countries, France, Spain, Portugal, Argentina, Mexico, etc. In Italy, notwithstanding the fact that it is a Latin country, the trade union movement took another form.

Finally, we have the third movement, the social-democratic trade union movement, the most representative of which has been the German and Austrian trade unions. What are the characteristics of this type of trade union organization? It has to a certain degree been between trade unionism and anarcho-syndicalism. In theory, the social-democratic trade union movement arose from the necessity of creating a new social order. Therefore, it has been different than the pure trade unionism in that it had as its aims the problem of creating a new society, or the destruction—under certain conditions—of capitalism. It was socialistic in the sense that it had socialistic ideas. But we would be greatly mistaken if we would mix the socialist ideas, or in other words the socialist theory and resolutions about socialism, with the everyday practice—with the preparation of the coming of socialism.

The characteristic of the pre-war social-democratic trade union movement was the thought of the possibility of arriving at the new society by gradual transition, separate victories and separate changes of society. In this way, the overthrow of capitalism was not the aim of these