Page:Trade Unions in Soviet Russia - I.L.P. (1920).djvu/74



As in the years of Tsarism, so in the months of Kerensky and during the past years of the Soviet Government the Metal workers' union invariably and uninterruptedly associated its work with the general revolutionary struggle of the working class. Although formally independent of the Party, the Union in fact submitted itself to the directions of the left wing of the Social-Democrats—i.e., the Bolshevik Party, and subsequently the Communist Party. During the reign of the Tsar and right up to the beginning of the war, the Petrograd Metal Workers' Union carried on an inseparably connected economic and political struggle. Every economic strike was converted into a blow against the existing political system. The masses of the members of the union were brought up in a spirit of revolutionary social democracy.

After the February Revolution the Petrograd and Moscow unions, and subsequently the provisional Central Committee from the first days of its existence, took up a revolutionary position. The cry "all power to the Soviets" was the more easily acceptable to the union from the fact that the direct acquaintance with the life in the factory, the lockouts of factory workers, the rise in the cost of living after every increase in wages, all showed that the struggle for the improvement of the economic conditions of life of the proletariat must be conducted as a struggle for the conquest of the means of production. For that reason, when the sixth conference of the Bolshevik Party gathered in Petrograd at the period of the Korniloff offensive, the metal workers' union was the first to welcome it. For the same reason the Moscow metal workers' union called an extremely well-organised one-day general strike of protest on the 25th of August, 1917 (new style), when the State convention of all the bourgeois and compromising socialist parties opened in Moscow. During the October Revolution the metal workers' union took a most energetic part and handed over its machinery for the purpose of assisting the establishment of the Soviet Government.

At its inaugural conference in January, 1918, the union formulated its fundamental tasks under the new social system. The Conference decided to subordinate all the work of the Union to the task of strengthening the Soviet system and organising national economic and social life. This two-fold task remains up to the present moment the fundamental task of the union, and the subsequent conferences which have taken place since then have endeavoured to seek means of developing this work.