Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/29



As industry became nationalised and chief committees for managing the nationalised factories were established we passed over from workers' control to workers' management and faith this transition, the functions of the factory committees in the sphere of control of production ceased because the union as a whole and not separate sections of it took part in the administration. As a result of 2½ years' development of the trade union movement, the Third Trade Union Congress, summing up the experience of the dual functions of the factory committee resolved that "the factory committee must definitely be fixed as the local nucleus of the trade union with analogous trade union functions in so far as it concerns the responsibility it has to bear towards the higher organs of the union and completely abstain from interfering ,in the work of administering the factory; in order to abolish parallelism in administrative and trade union organs in the, factory all industrial committees, in connection with the factory committees are to be dissolved."

This resolution, establishing the factory management board as the sole authority in the factory, finally subordinated the factory committee to the union and, in this manner, rounded off a complete period of development of the Russian trade union movement which commenced with the factory committees being independent of the unions, went through a process of administration of the factories by the factory committees, participation of the factory committee in the management—and consequently their subordination to the councils of national economy; and finally binding the factory committee to the union and converting it into a purely trade union organ.

The First All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions, laying down the general line of revolutionary policy and the necessity for the closest co-operation and inseparable connection with the Soviets of Workers' Delegates, came up against one of the most difficult questions in the theory and practice of the trade union movement, i.e., the role of trade unions in the period of proletarian dictatorship. What Is the dictatorship of the proletariat? It is a definite labour system of government, having for its object to destroy the bourgeois capitalist relations and the state machinery created by them, to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to prepare the conditions and foundations for socialist construction. Between capitalism and socialism there is a distinct historical period during which the oppressed class, taking advantage of the new government machinery which it has created, forcibly establishes new social industrial relations, and, to the extent that these new relations are strengthened, the State power of the transition period gradually dies out; for socialist society is a non-class society and where there are no classes there is no State. Consequently, to the extent that we depart from capitalism and approach to socialism the state as such will disappear and, as Engels wrote, it will be placed in the museum of history. The state will remain a mere apparatus for the registration of distribution and production, serving the economic needs of socialist society.