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industrial workers to organise, little by little, the whole mass of the proletariat, including the unskilled workers, and to include them in the constructive work of the State. The policy of industrialism, which at first sight appears to be radical, is, in practice, only the opportunist policy of the leaders of the working-class aristocracy. When all is said and done, this policy will be the same as that of the social-traitors.
State Trade Unions.
The All-Russian Trade Unions Congress, in January, 1918, declared its conviction that the process which is taking place in the Trade Unions will lead to their transformation into Departments of the Socialist State, and, at the same time, Trade Union membership will be a State obligation for all the workers who belong to the same branch of industry." (Par. 9 of the resolution.)
This conviction of the All-Russian Congress is based on facts. The Industrial Unions are gradually assuming the attributes of State Departments. They really work as a veritable Department of the State when they mobilise all their members, when they concentrate workers in a given town, when they transfer the workers from one part of Russia to another, when they give their vote on a question of wages, when they exercise, by means of their representatives, a decisive influence on the activity of the Supreme National Economic Council.
And just because this transformation of Industrial Unions into State Departments takes place gradually, and quite normally, there is no present necessity of forcing this process, there is no need to proclaim from one minute to another the transformation of Industrial Unions into State Departments.
