Page:Theses Presented to the Second World Congress of the Communist International (1920).pdf/35

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Communists must practically subordinate the shop committees and the industrial unions to the Communist Party, and thus create a proletarian mass organ, a basis for a powerfuly centralised party of the proletariat, embracing all the organisations of the proletarian struggle, leading them all to one aim, to the victory of the working class, to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

III.

1. The labour unions tried to form international unions even in time of peace, because during strikes the capitalists used to invite workers from other countries, as strike-breakers. But the International of the labour unions had only a secondary importance before the war. It made one union support another when needful, it organized social statistics, but it did nothing for the organization of a joint struggle, because the labour unions, under the leadership of opportunists, strove to avoid all revolutionary collisions on an international scale. The opportunist leaders of the labour unions, who each in his own country during the war was the flunkey of his bourgeoisie, are now striving to revive the International of labour unions, attempting to make it the weapon against a direct struggle between world capital and the world proletariat. Under the direction of Legien, Jouhaux, Gompers, they are creating a Labour Bureau of the League of