(A resolution based on Comrade Antzelovich’s report)
Fully supporting the general principal policy of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Government on the questions of provisioning and supplying the population, taking into consideration the extraordinary difficulty of the food situation, caused by the general conditions of the moment and by the weakness of the food supplying apparatus, the Congress resolves to give its best forces to the work of organization of the provisioning work, to continue the work of mobilization and centralization for this purpose of the proletarian forces on an all-Russian scale, and is hereby submitting for the approval of the Council of People’s Commissaries the provisions stated below:
1. The Congress recognizes the War-Provisioning Bureau of the All-Russian Soviet of Vocational Unions, acting in accordance with the instructions adopted by the Soviet, as the central body in charge of mobilization and distribution of the proletarian forces in the field of provisioning.
In order to fulfil its tasks the War-Provisioning Bureau of the All-Russian Soviet of Vocational Unions: (a) mobilizes the labor power, selecting it from among the vocational unions and their organs (the shop committees, etc.); (b) promotes the workers into the positions of members of the colleges, provincial provisioning committees, district provisioning committees, and other provisioning organizations, appointing them to office through the People’s Commissariat for provisioning; (c) sends the workers’ provisioning detachments composed of the best forces into the villages to do the work of organization. The detachments are working under the leadership of members delegated by the War-Provisioning Bureau into the local provisioning bodies, and are to act as auxiliary organizations to those provisioning bodies; (d) it organizes the provisional expeditions with special tasks to aid the provisioning organizations among them in the localities freed from occupation; (e) it organizes the work of labor inspection, working under the control of the War-Provisioning Bureau, both in the field of provisioning and in the allied fields of transportation, etc.; the problems of inspection consist of the renovation, reorganization and the placing of the entire system of provisioning bodies on a proletarian basis; (f) it selects with the aid of the proper vocational unions specialists in different lines of the provisioning work, making them available to fill executive offices; (g) in its work the Central War-Provisioning Bureau is leaning for support on the auxiliary local war-provisioning bureaus of the Soviets of Vocational Unions, uniting the entire activity of the vocational unions for the betterment of the provisioning work.
2. From the point of view of unity of the general system of distribution of necessaries, the Congress deems it necessary to put into practice in full measure the participation of labor cooperation in the matter of distributing the products so that, in the course of time, and labor, all the united system of distribution may be organized after the pattern of a single type of consumers’ communes.
Workers’ cooperative societies must become the chief distributors of products among the workers.
Considering it necessary thus to impose on the workers’ cooperative societies the extremely important task of constructive Socialist work and the work of actually supplying the workers with the necessaries, without which the productivity of labor cannot be increased, the Congress holds that these functions can best be carried out by the workers’ cooperatives on the following conditions: (a) the creation of a united organized basis for the cooperative and vocational associations (factory or mill committees), which is to be carried into practice by means of an agreement between the All-Russian Council of Vocational Unions and the All-Russian Council of Workers’ Cooperative Societies; (b) the All-Russian Councils of Vocational Unions and the Workers’ Cooperative Societies exchange representatives; (c) all members of the vocational unions must join the Workers’ Cooperative Society and every member of the latter must become a member of a vocational union; (d) the common leading body of the workers’ cooperative societies must be the meeting of representatives (conferences) of the shop committees and collective associations, uniting the employees and the laborers not occupied in the mills and factories; (e) the workers’ cooperatives must immediately be induced to participate in the broadest possible manner in the work of organizing all municipal commerce; the control and general direction in the matter remaining in the hands of the provisioning bodies; (f) the existing special productive-distributive organs such as that in charge of transportation of the provisions, waterway transportation of provisions, (canals, rivers, etc.), must be transformed into well organized, open workers’ cooperative societies; (g) the workers’ cooperative societies are to be induced to take up the practical work of organization of these branches of industry whose scale and problems justify such work, and which are engaged in the production of the prime necessities.
3. The furnishing of the proletariat with the products provided for it by the government plans of distribution, must be insured through the appropriation of a special fund for the purpose on the plan adopted for the army. The special department of the Commissariat for Provisioning which is in charge of the planning, calculating, and distributing of the products intended for the workers, must be organized in accordance with an understanding between the All-Russian Council of Vocational Unions and the Council of Workers’ Cooperatives, and it must not form its own technical and economic apparatus.
4. In order to help the methods of proletarian work to permeate more fully the entire system of the provisioning institutions it is necessary to inject into their midst representatives of Vocational Unions and Workers’ Cooperative Societies, particularly representatives of the All-Russian Council of Vocational Unions and the All-Russian Council of Cooperative Societies, into the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat for Provisioning.
In the matter of preparing the products which are subject to monopoly, by government counter-agents (as per decree of January 21st) the central workers’ cooperatives (city) and all centralized workers’ cooperative organizations (regional, provincial and all-Russian) are to be called upon to help, while the matter of preparing the products not subject to monopoly should be entirely given over to the cooperative societies, headed by the Workers’ Cooperative Society, the management to be given over to the Central Buying Committee (Tzentrozakup) and a corresponding portion of the products is to be set aside for the needs of the army.