Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/27

 (23) industry. In this sphere the Russian proletariat had to cut a new path, for history knows no example of the organisation of national economy being approached from the point of view of society as a whole and not in the interests of individuals or groups of exploiters. The First Congress understood perfectly well that the economic problem could not be solved at a single blow and it definitely indicated the road which the trade unions should follow. The Congress emphasised the fact that "workers' control is inseparably connected with the general system of regulation of national economy, that it is the basis of State regulation, that the unions must carry out the idea of centralised workers' control and the merging of the small controlling units into larger organs which correspond to the modern methods of production as well as to the actual structure of labour organisations." In the resolution on the regulation of industry the Congress advocated the syndication and the trustification of the most important branches of industry like coal, petroleum, iron, chemicals and also transport, as a preparatory stage to the nationalisation of industry. The regulation of national economy in the interests of the whole country can only be carried out under the guidance of a class whom history has chosen for this responsible task, i.e., the proletariat. The part to be played by the trade unions in this great work of the reconstruction of society consists not only in the defence of the interests of the working class but in preparing it for the role of industrial organisers during the transition from private monopoly to State monopoly, from the latter to nationalisation and from that last to socialism.

In defining the role and the functions of the trade unions in the organisation of production it was, necessary to pay very serious attention to the factory committees and their role in the general system of our economic organisation. The factory committees arose in Russia in the first days of the February revolution and were the first organisations created in the struggle of the workers against their employers. These organisations embraced all the workers in a given factory, whether they were members of the union or not, and from their very rise, played a double role. On the one hand they served as a support to the Soviet of Workers' Delegates, carrying out the Soviet's political instructions in the factories and, on the other hand, they settled conflicts and conducted strikes, etc., thus taking the place of the trade union in the first period of the revolution and, later, becoming the nuclei of the Russian Trade Union movement.

The factory committees chiefly performed the functions of political and economic control and, at the time of the October Revolution, had to bear the responsibility for the great organising and administrative work. For that reason in the first period of the October Revolution the question of the factory committees became very acute. Among certain sections of the factory committees the opinion began to grow that the trade unions had outlived their time and that they could be supplanted by the factory committees. In several towns like Petrograd, Odessa, Samara, Kiev, etc., central councils of factory