The Labour Movement, Shop Committees and the
Third International.
I.
1. The labour unions, created by the working class during the period of the peaceful development of capitalism, were organizations of the workers for the struggle for the increase of the price of labour at the labour market, and the improvement of labour conditions. The revolutionary Marxists endeavoured by their influence to unite them with the political party of the proletariat, the Social Democracy, for a joint struggle for Socialism. For the same reasons that the international Social Democracy, with a few exceptions, proved to be not an instrument of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat for the overthrow of capitalism, but an organisation which held back the proletariat from revolution in the interests of the bourgeoisie, the labour unions proved to be in most cases, during the war, a part of the military apparatus of the bourgeoisie, helping the latter to pump out of the working
