formed, marking time for the most part, while it endeavored to bring about unity of program among all the left-wing elements.
It was at this time that the full effects of the Russian revolution upon the American labor movement generally began to show themselves. Under the leadership of the Communist International and later also of the Red International of Labor Unions, the revolutionists of America were freeing themselves from the peculiarly American dogma of dual unionism which had rendered their efforts sterile for a generation. The result was the coming together in a great campaign of left-wing organization and the clarification of program, in the Trade Union Educational League. From the mass trade unions came hundreds of militants hitherto unattached to any revolutionary body on account of the old dual union notions. From the I. W. W. came a group of workers who embodied all the fine traditions of the best revolutionary days of that organization. From the Communist groups that split away from the Socialist Party and were later unified in the Workers Party of America, came the full current of American revolutionary experience and ideology. In the Trade Union Educational League all these elements, comprising every healthy American left-wing tendency, were fused together into the first effective left-wing trade union movement in this country, the American section of the Red International of Labor Unions.
The Red International in America
In the brief years of its work the Trade Union Educational League has wrought a profound clarification in the entire labor movement. Starting out with a great campaign from coast to coast and in every labor union, for amalgamation and a labor party—slogans expressing the two deepest and most fundamental needs of the American labor movement—the T. U. E. L. has reached the minds of hundreds of thousands of trade unionists and influenced the decisions of at least 2,000,000. From the broad slogans that stir the masses, it has intensively developed the issue of revolutionary unionism until today it represents the organized struggle within the unions against every phase of capitalistic influence and bourgeois ideology. While it battles for the formation of an all-embracing farmer-labor party, to express the broad political struggle of the toiling masses at the present moment of development, it is at the same time rallying the smaller groups of conscious revolutionary workers to the more bitter and intense struggle against the subtler forms of class collaboration. It is no accident that the T. U. E. L. is at once a leading factor throughout the labor movement in the struggle for a labor party, in which millions are enlisted, and at the Same time is organizing the resistance to the nefarious "B. & O." class collaboration scheme of the railroad union bureaucrats, to the poisonous effects of which the workers are only beginning to be aroused.
Of course the tremendous progress made by the Trade Union Educational League, in establishing the left-wing as a power in the trade
