CULTURAL AND EDUCATIONAL WORK OF THE VOCATIONAL UNIONS
AND VOCATIONAL TRAINING
(Resolution based on Tzyperovich’s and Kossior’s reports)
1. The Socialist revolution has put before the proletariat a series of the most important problems in the field of reconstruction. Simultaneously and in connection with the revolutionization of the economic relations, the working class, as the standard-bearer of Socialism, must get down to the work of creating a proletarian culture, instead of that of the bourgeoisie, in order to prepare the masses for the complete realization of the Socialist Commonwealth.
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat, enabling the working class to fully utilize all the cultural acquisitions of mankind, is already now putting forward a new creative form of the cultural movement, in the shape of proletarian cultural organizations.
3. Vocational unions, as working class organizations, notwithstanding all their weakness and the isolation of the proletarian cultural organizations from the masses of the working class must organically enter into their work, concentrating within them all their activity for the general work along questions of science and art and endeavoring with a view to making it sound, to subject their activity to the influence and guidance of the industrially organized laboring masses.
4. The Vocational Unions are also facing as an immediate problem the utilization on as large a scale as possible of those facilities which have been created by the Commissariat of Public Education in the matter of compulsory, and free education, of education for people above school age, for technical training, etc.
The vocational unions must have their representatives in the Commissariats of Public Education, who are to shed light on the needs of the trade union movement and demand that these needs be satisfied immediately.
5. At the same time, the vocational unions are to continue their cultural and educational activity, creating educational institutions and organizations which would answer the immediate problems of the vocational movement.
6. The building up of clubs, especially for the districts and provinces, is desirable. The type of a vocational-political club is preferable, if possible of a large size.
7. It is necessary at present to build libraries in the districts. But for the central trade-industrial unions special libraries are to a certain extent superfluous (outside of special publications, guides, etc.) They can easily and with much greater success be replaced by public and municipal libraries, to which the trade-industrial unions should turn their attention, by sending to the same the representatives of their cultural-educational departments, as delegates.