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XI

THE NEW RED LABOR UNION INTER-
NATIONALE

Operating solely in the field of politics, propaganda, and insurrection the Communist Internationale was not a perfect instrument for the purposes of the Soviets. The Communist, or Third Internationale, from its foundation in March, 1919, had directed its operations mainly, not against the bourgeoisie, but against what it calls "bourgeois" labor as represented in the Second or Socialist Internationale. But it soon discovered that the most formidable labor enemies of Bolshevism are not the political Socialists of the Right or of the Center (the orthodox Marxist followers of Kautsky, Longuet, etc.) but the labor unions of the world, from the American Federation of Labor to the British and German unions and even the syndicalistic French Confederation.

At the Congress of the Communist Internationale at Moscow in the summer of 1920, Lenin issued the following declaration of war against organized labor, thinly veiled as a war against leaders:

 

Our main enemy is title opportunism in the upper ranks of the labor movement. This is not a Socialist or proletarian, but a bourgeois movement. That these leaders of the labor movement are defending the bourgeoisie better than the bourgeoisie itself, and that without their assistance the bourgeoisie could not maintain

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