Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/36

 32 During the war and previously we had in the trade unions the more conscious part of the proletariat; but right after its end we see how the workers joined the unions in masses. This peculiarity of the post-war period of the trade union movement, we should remember in order to understand our tactics of winning the unions, our opposition to the splits, our desire to win over the organization as a whole, for we consider the trade union organizations not as a union of privileged, individuals, but as an organization which unites if not the majority, at least a great part of the workers of a given industry.

But, alongside this development of the trade union movement, we have in the post-war period also the development of what we may call "the reformist illusions." The development of these illusions is the second peculiarity of the post-war trade union movement. Above, we gave the characteristic of reformism, and we pointed out its special features, but in the post-war period it seems that the reformists had the opportunity to demonstrate the practicability of their ideals and by reforms to show the correctness of their point of view as against the viewpoint of the revolutionary left wing element of the labor movement. How did the development of these reformist illusions appear? What are their peculiar characteristics?

It is known that the end of the war was coincident with revolution in the Central Powers. The revolution in Germany which is officially dated "the 9th of November," has shown that in the moment of the social impact of the revolutionary collision of the class forces, the only organized forces were the working class and the employers. The old military regime, the old structure of Junkers' Germany had fallen apart under the pressure of military defeats. The insurrection started and the strongest organized force was the proletariat; and, as in Germany, the specific gravity of the proletariat was much stronger than in other countries the role of the proletariat in the revolution could be understood.

We can, for instance, bring the following examples of the comparative importance of the German and the Russian proletariats: In Germany with a population of 65,000,000, the sick-benefit societies have insured about 22,000,000 people who are living by wage labor. In Russia, the maximum number of proletarians of all kinds, if we will include also the agricultural proletariat, is only between 8,000,000 and 9,000,000 and that is to a population of 150,000,000. By comparing these figures the specific gravity of the German proletariat will be seen.

Here assumption appears; that in this revolution the German proletariat should have played the leading role. If the Russian proletariat in a peasant country, with a small city population, played such