Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - The World's Trade Union Movement (1924).pdf/79

 Rh the growth of the Russian trade union movement the problem of international connections arose before it. And already at the Third All-Russian Conference of Trade Unions, where a majority were Mensheviks, from June 20th to 28th, 1917, a resolution was adopted stating the necessity of renewing international connections.

The Bolsheviks, who brought in their own resolution, spoke of the need of unifying that wing of the trade union movement which does not subordinate the interests of the working class to the interests of the bourgeoisie and which conducts a revolutionary struggle against war and the ruling classes. In this formula, so far very vague, we already find the germ of the idea of future development of the left trade union movement as an international organization.

At the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, which was held from the 3rd to the 9th of January, 1918, where the Bolsheviks had already two-thirds of the votes, in the main resolution on the question of the problems of the trade unions there was a paragraph in which the necessity of reconstruction of the trade union international was stated. What kind of an international and how to organize it?

An answer to this question was not given there. The formulation of our position on these questions, the position of the Russian trade unions, was formed at a later period, at the time when the separate parts of the Amsterdam International participated in the drafting of separate paragraphs of the Versailles Treaty, the Washington Conference, etc. When this position of the Amsterdam International became clear, when it bound its future up to the International Labor Bureau, then the necessity arose of creating some kind of a center for the concentration of the left trade union movement all over the world.

The creation of the Third International greatly aided the formation of the left trade union movement. It is very well known that the Third International at its beginning placed before itself the problem of winning over the trade unions and capturing the laboring masses. This formation of the political international and later on the formulation of its tactics, program, and general line of conduct, called forth in the sphere of the trade union movement also, on one hand the formation of left-wing union organizations, and on the other concentrated into one all that existed in the international trade union movement.

And so the bankruptcy of the old trade union international, the going over of a majority of its leaders to the policy of class collaboration, the formation of the left-wing labor movement through Zimmerwald and Kienthal, and the crystalization of it through the Comintern, the Russian revolution which brought a certain clarification into the labor movement of the world, the further strengthening of the Russian trade union movement on one hand and, on the other, the continuation of the tactics of class collaboration which was the foundation of the newly