Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/34



Thus the influence of the independents fell from year to year and it is necessary to point out that at the second congress 37 delegates voted for their resolutions and at the Third Congress only 31. This means that the few non-party representatives deserted them while the Congress proceeded. The powerful party that in the first period of the revolution had a majority in the Soviets and Trade Unions was reduced to nothing. The organised proletariat of Russia marched past the anti-socialist theories and practice of "independence."

One of the most important points in the theory of independence was the relations of the unions to the controlling organs of national economy. The question was: should the trade unions participate in the organisation of industry? To this the independents replied that it was necessary to participate but to refuse all responsibility, that the functions of the unions in entering these organs was chiefly to protect labour. As we have seen, however, the Russian trade union movement, from the first days of the October Revolution, took quite a different road. It not only did not avoid responsibility but sought it, taking upon itself the responsibility for the organisation of all the controlling and administrative organs of industry. As soon as the decree on workers' control was issued, the trade unions, on the basis of representation of the All-Russian Industrial Unions, created a National Council of Workers' Control, whose business it was to unite all the work of organisation and control in the localities, but, from the very beginning the unions and the organs which they created arrived at the necessity of creating wider organisations in which control would only form a part of the work, and the National Council of Workers' Control thus became converted into a supreme Council of National Economy which daily widened the sphere of its activities. The Supreme Council of National Economy was created by the Trade Unions together with the Soviet authorities and its separate branches as well as the newly created organs, arising because of the machinery becoming more and more complicated, are being constructed on the basis of representation of trade unions.

The Supreme Council of National Economy is composed of dozens of central organs which manage the nationalised industry, and there is not one of them which has been set up without an agreement between the Executive of the Supreme Council of National Economy and the Executive of the respective trade union being arrived at.