Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/23

 right of the proletariat in its fight against the exploiters. To strike against the workers' revolution is an act of hostility against the working class and is therefore a crime against Russian and international socialism. The strikes of the bourgeoisie and the backward sections of the workers against the proletariat and its authority will never be permitted by the trade unions. This was the first lesson of the October revolution.

As for the strike wave roused by the October revolution itself and directed against the bourgeoisie as a means of destroying the bourgeois apparatus, immediately the victory of the workers became apparent the leading organs of the trade unions called upon the workers to set the factories and works going immediately. In its manifesto of the 28th October, the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions declared that "strikes and demonstrations of workers in Petrograd only do harm to the working class," and proposed "that all economic and political strikes immediately cease and that everybody commence work and carry it on in complete order." The same happened in other towns and particularly in Moscow, where the Council of Trade Unions on October 28th called upon the workers to strike and to armed battle; but on November 4th, as soon as the struggle ended, it proposed to the workers immediately to end the strike called out by the active participation of the workers in the armed conflict, and to return to the factories and commence work.

The October revolution was victorious under the battle-cries of "peace," "land" and "workers' control," The demand for peace and land we can understand, but what is this "workers' control," which was one of the most popular demands on the eve of the October revolution? The idea of workers' control arose in the first days of the February revolution. It aimed at subjecting the whole private, commercial, industrial and financial apparatus to the control and influence of the labour organisations. It meant that the factory committees and the responsible union would keep under observation the state of the factories, the supply of raw material and the financial side of the businesses, and would control the quantity of materials that came in and went out of the factories. This was the first attempt in history to limit the independent authority of the employer in his undertaking.

The idea of workers' control arose directly out of the struggle of the workers with the bourgeoisie as a weapon against the deliberate attempts to bring the factories to a standstill and disorganise production for the purpose of defeating the proletariat by starvation, and thus retard the revolution. In practice, workers' control meant that the factory committee in