Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/26

 22 ing against reformism even before the war, we fought against the bourgeoisie. But that the bourgeois relations, the bourgeois ideology, the bourgeois literature, the bourgeois church and philosophy, and in general all that was created by the bourgeoisie could so much dominate the working class, this—to be frank—every Bolshevik may say we did not expect.

And for us, the left wing of the labor movement, which had been the left wing before the war and remained as such during the war, was the degree of the collapse entirely unexpected. We underestimated the influence of bourgeois society on the labor movmentmovement [sic]. We did not calculate that organic connection which existed between the labor movement and that society in which the labor movement developed.

However, during the war, concurrently with the maximum influence of the bourgeois society on the working class, began to develop that tendency which is within the working class of antagonism toward bourgeois society.

This tendency which in the first period was very weak and very insignificant in some countries found its reflection only in individual actions, such as Liebknecht in Germany (and he, among other things, did not vote the first time against the war credits, he voted against them the second time), appeared in the trade union movement of France. I happened to participate directly in the creation of the first international nucleus in the Confederation of Labor together with Monatte, Rosmer and the "dead-in-life" Merrheim. That was the first nucleus from which grew the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences. The labor movement from within itself began to develop a new movement, new powers. …

The whole post war period of the labor movement can be understood only when we come up to the war period from the point of view, not only of the changing of leaders, but also the objective forces which lead the workers in the political and spiritual sense; also from the point of view of the growing, new forces within these anti-patriotic groups, which by the end of the war took a definite form and in the post war period brought about the creation of the Communist International and the Red International of Labor Unions.

The trade union movement after the war, as the labor movement in general, could be understood only by a careful study of the labor movement as it existed during the war period, by calculating those contradictory forces within the capitalist state which create the class struggle and create organizations which have on their banners the overthrow of capitalist society.

We have therefore acquainted ourselves in a general way with the basic factors in the development of the trade union movement before and after the war period. It is natural that these basic lines drawn