s not on the possible opposition
of the Trades Unions, but on their help for realizing its most difficult
measures, and for undermining and overwhelming any opposition which
those measures may encounter. The Trades Unions in Russia, instead of
being an organization outside the State protecting the interests of
a class against the governing class, have become a part of the State
organization. Since, during the present period of the revolution the
backbone of the State organization is the Communist Party, the
Trade Unions have come to be practically an extension of the party
organization. This, of course, would be indignantly denied both by
Trade Unionists and Communists. Still, in the preface to the All-Russian
Trades Union Reports for 1919, Glebov, one of the best-known Trade Union
leaders whom I remember in the spring of last year objecting to the use
of bourgeois specialists in their proper places, admits as much in the
following muddleheaded statement:--

"The base of the proletarian dictatorship is the Communist Party, which
in general directs all the political and economic work of the State,
leaning, first of all, on the Soviets as on the more revolutionary form
of dictatorship of the proletariat, and secondly on the Trades Unions,
as organizations which economically unite the proletariat of factory and
workshop as the vanguard of the revolution, and as organizations of the
new socialistic construction of the State. Thus the Trade Unions must
be considered as a base of the Soviet State, as an organic form
complementary to the other forms of the Proletariat Dictatorship." These
two elaborate sentences constitute an admission of what I have just
said.

Trades Unionists of other countries must regard the fate of their
Russian colleagues with horror or with satisfaction, according to their
views of events in Russia taken as a whole. If they do not believe
that there has been a social revolution in Russia, they must regard
the present position of the Russian Trades Unions as the reward of a
complete defeat of Trade Unionism, in which a Capitalist government has
been able to lay violent hands on the organization which was protecting
the workers against it. If, on the other hand, they believe that there
has been a social revolution, so that the class organized in Trades
Unions is now, identical with the governing, class (of employers, etc.)
against which the unions once struggled, then they must regard the
present p