Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/23

 Rh but also about a very great number of anarcho-syndicalists, who suddenly, somehow, began to feel that they had a "fatherland" although anti-patriotism was previously their hobby.

The military ideology of the labor movement brought great changes in the relation of forces. The modern war is not a war of small groups, or small armies. Modern war is a war of masses, a war of nations in the real sense of the word. It is a war of industry against industry. The tactics of the working class in this war, the tactics of its unions, the methods of struggle, play a decisive role in the modern war.

Not without reason did the garrulous Lloyd-George in 1916 say to the Metal Workers, "In this victory on the northern front won by the British Army, you, metal workers, played a great and decisive part." Yes, the influence of industry played a decisive role in the war. The growth of military industry explains the numerical changes of the unions beginning in 1916–1917. But, on the other hand, this growth also explains the lowering of the level of the labor movement, for in the war industry, which was the basis of war and which concentrated all workers not gone to the front, the conditions of work were such that those who participated in it were in fact ideological and political participants in the war.

When we talk about the war between France and England on one side and Germany on the other, we have to talk not only about the war between the two groups of bourgeoisie, but also the war between the socialists and trade unions of these fighting countries. Here, the war was not only in the sense that the workers had been organized into unions and sent to the front and ordered to fire at their comrades with machine guns. The war which began in 1914 started a war also between the trade unions of the Allies and the unions of the Central Powers. It started a polemic and an ideological fight where the representatives of one side—the Allies, tried to prove to the German trade unions, that they were traitors to the principles of international socialism when they were supporting the Kaiser, and Legien, the leader of the German unions, tried to prove that the traitors were the unions of the Allies, because they were supporting the bourgeoisie allied to the Russian Czar.

This war between the leaders of the trade unions is most characteristic of the unions of the whole war period. It is even more characteristic than the conduct of the trade unionists in every country who in the name of "defense of the fatherland" gave up the gains which had cost them many years of bitter struggle against their bourgeoisie. In England, by way of compromise between the cabinet ministers and the trade unions, they did away with the working rules which benefited