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this way the professional bureaucracy breaks up the powerful stream of the labour movement into weak streamiets, substitutes partial reformist demands for the general revolutionary purposes of the movement, and on the whole delays the transformation of the struggle of the proletariat into a revolutionary struggle for the annihilation of capitalism.
4. Bearing In mind the rush of the enormous working masses into the labour unions, and also the objective revolutionary character of the economic struggle which these masses are carrying on in spite of the labour bureaucracy, the Communists must join such unions in all countries, in order to make of them conscious organs of the struggle for the suppression of capitalism and for Communism. Every voluntary withdrawal from the industrial movement, every artifical attempt to organise special unions, without being compelled thereto by exceptional acts of violence on the part of the labour bureaucracy, such as expulsion of separate revolutionary local branches of the unions by the opportunist offiCials, represents a great danger to the Communist movement. It threatens to tear away the most advanced, the most conscious workers from the masses, already on their way towards Communism; it threatens to hand over these masses to the opportunist leaders, playing Into the hands of the bourgeoisie … The lukewarmness of the working masses, their
