insults, cavils and persecutions by the leaders (who, being opportunists and social-chauvinists, are, in most cases, directly or indirectly connected with the bourgeoisie and the police), and to work by every possible means wherever the masses are to be found. Great sacrifices must be made, the greatest hindrances must be overcome, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, stubbornly, insistently, and patiently, in all those institutions, societies, and associations, however reactionary, where proletarians or semi-proletarians gather together. As for Trade Unions and Co-operatives (this applies, at least sometimes, to the latter), they are just the organizations where the mass is to be found. In Great Britain, according to data given in the Swedish paper, Folkets Dagblad Politiken, of March 10, 1919, the Trade Union membership from the end of 1917 to the end of 1918 rose from 5.5 millions to 6.6 millions—i. e., an increase of 19 per cent. Towards the end of 1919, this number reached 7.5 millions. I have not at hand the corresponding data about France and Germany, but the facts testifying to the rapid growth in membership of the Trade Unions in these countries are quite incontestable and are generally known.
These facts speak most clearly, and are confirmed by thousands of other indications, of the growth of class-consciousness, and of the passion for organization, which exists especially amongst the proletarian masses, in the “rank and file,” amongst the backward elements. Millions of workers in England, France and Germany who were not at all organized heretofore have, for the first time, entered the most elementary, most simple and most easily accessible form of organization—for those still imbued with bourgeois-democratic prejudices—namely, the Trade Unions. And the revolutionary but unwise “Left” Communists stand by, crying “The mass, the mass!” and refuse to work with the Trade Unions; refuse on the pretext of their “conservatism,” and contrive new, spick and span “Workers’ Unions,” guiltless of bourgeois-democratic prejudices, guiltless of craft feeling and narrow professionalism! These Workers’ Unions, they claim, will be (will be!) all-embracing, and for participation in them the only (only!) requirement is “the acceptance of the Soviet system and the
