Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/25

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this way organs for the annihilation of capitalism.

3. The old labour bureaucracy and the old forms of organization of the labour unions are in every way impeding such a change in the nature of the labour unions. The old labour bureaucracy is even now endeavouring to replace the strike methods, which are ever more and more acquiring the character of revolutionary warfare between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, by the policy of arrangements with the capitalists, the policy of long term contracts, which have lost all sense simply in view of the constant insane rise of prices. At the most tense moments of the struggle the labour bureaucracy sows trouble and confusion among the struggling masses of the workers, impeding the fusion of the struggle of various categories of workmen into one general class struggle. In these attempts it is helped by the old organization of the labour unions according to crafts, which breaks up the workmen of one branch of production into separate professional groups, notwithstanding their being bound together by the process of capitalist exploitation. This old system of organization rests on the force of tradition of the Ideology of the old labour aristocracy, which is now constantly being weakened by the process of suppression of the privilege of separate groups of the proletariat through the general decay of capitalism. In