5. In order to create a solid basis in the matter of supplying farm products and with a view to intensifying agriculture and other types of farming it is necessary to call upon the workers’ cooperative societies to properly utilize and organize the large Soviet agricultural establishments and other farming undertakings.
6. For the successful solution of its tasks in the domain of Socialist construction work it is necessary to bring about the closest organizational union and coordination of activity of the vocational unions and workers’ cooperative societies in the matter of raising the class consciousness of that proletariat and, for this purpose, the joint organization of workers’ homes, clubs, institutes for practitioners, and so on.
THE QUESTION OF ORGANIZATION
(Resolution based an M. Tomsky’s report)
1.
GENERAL PRINCIPLES
1. Adapting its organizations to the conditions of the economic struggle in capitalist society, the working class in the interests of economy and concentration of its divided forces, gradually passed over from the close narrow guild organizations to the broader vocational and, finally, in the course of struggle against capitalism, building its forces on the principle of more efficient centralization of power for the realization of its war aims (class war aims), it came to form organizations embracing all the workers of a given branch of industry (production) into one union.
The industrial union is one union having the follow-lowing basic characteristics: (a) the union rallies all the workers and other employees engaged in a given branch of production, regardless of his functions; (b) the treasury is centralized; (c) the business of the union is transacted on the basis of democratic centralization; (d) the wage scales and conditions of labor are determined by one central body for all the categories of labor; (e) a uniform principle of construction from top to bottom; (f) the sections are playing the part of technical and auxiliary organs; (g) the interests of the industrially organized workers and other employees of a given industry are represented before the outside world by one central body.
2. The industrial union comprises only the permanent workers and employees of a given industry who are directly engaged in the process of production or serve to aid the same. All auxiliary branches serving not production but the producers and all the temporary and casual help remain members of their industrial union.
3. This principle of construction of our unions recognized by the third Conference of the Vocational Unions, and by the first All-Russian Congress of Vocational Unions, presupposing the union of all the workers of a given industry into one organization (union), can be consistently carried into practice only by means of uniting all the workers and employees (“higher” and “lower”) into one union, which became possible of realization only after the political and economic prejudices separating the laborer from the other employees and from the technical personnel have been done away with.
4. Even if the first Congress of Vocational Unions considered it impracticable to unite into one union all the higher employees and laborers,—at the present moment, after a year of proletarian dictatorship during which a good deal of the antagonism between the different categories of laborers and other employees has been spent, when it has been proved from experience that one union in its turn leads to the eradication of all antagonism in the midst of the workers—it must now be recognized as desirable and necessary to unite into one union all persons who are wage workers engaged in one establishment, one industry or one institution.