Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/25

 lated in the resolution on "Workers' Control" at the first Trade Union Congress, was to "put an end to autocracy in the sphere of economics in the same way as it had been abolished in politics," from which it follows that "Workers' control is not tantamount to the socialisation of the means of production and exchange but a preliminary step towards it."

This cautious approach and estimation of workers' control, the greatest act in the history of the world, arises from the practical estimation of economic possibilities by the trade unions, and the consciousness that socialism cannot be constructed in a week or a month, but is the work of long years and decades. A wedge had been driven into the capitalist system of production: the working class had approached right up to production and its secrets and it was proved that "constitutional monarchy" was impossible and that however complicated a modern factory may be the owner is a useless cog in the mechanism. This is the second logical conclusion which arises from the October Revolution.

The October Revolution converted the working class into the dominant class and the bourgeoisie into the subject class this completely overturned the former relations between the workers and the employers and confronted the trade unions with new problems. Directly after the October Revolution the economic strikes came to an end. The workers formulated their demands and submitted them to the trade unions and, upon the trade unions sanctioning them, these were put into force by the State. If the employer refused to submit, then prisons and other means of compulsion, prepared by the bourgeoisie itself, were brought into use. For the first time in the history of humanity a government intervened in strikes in favour of the workers, imprisoned employers for failing to satisfy the demands of the trade unions and by means of decrees introduced wage rates worked out by the trade unions, and confiscated businesses of obstinate factory owners. The October Revolution did not merely imply a transfer of political power to the proletariat but also the transfer of economic power into the hands of the working class. All former relations were destroyed. The trade unions developing on the basis of capitalist relations and as fighting organs were converted into part of the machinery of the labour government (resolutions of the 9th Congress of the Russian Communist Party), and this compelled the trade unions to reorganise their ranks, to change their tactics and to put forward questions which have never before confronted trade unions of other countries.

These new problems, arising out of the commencing social revolution were formulated by the first All Russia Trade Union Congress which met in the beginning of January, 1918, in Petrograd. In the first place the trade unions had to define: (1) their attitude towards the October revolution, (2) whether the organised proletariat could preserve neutrality in the acute