First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions, Resolution. January 23, 1918

Original Source: Pervyi vserossiiskii s"ezd professional'nykh profsoiuzov (Moscow, 1918), pp. 119-20.

1. The political victory of the workers and poorer peasants over the imperialists and their petty-bourgeois agents in Russia brings us at the same time a victory over capitalistic ways of production and the beginning of the international socialist revolution. The Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies have become government organs, the policy of the government of the workers and peasants has become the policy of socialist reconstruction of society.

2. The November Revolution, which transferred the power from the hands of the bourgeoisie into the hands of the working class and the poorer peasantry, gave rise to entirely new conditions for the activities of all workers' organizations without exception, including the trade unions.

3. Revolutionary socialists have never considered trade unions as mere instruments of the proletariat's economic struggle for bettering the conditions of the working classes within the capitalist order.. Revolutionary socialists have always looked upon trade unions as organizations called upon to fight side by side with all the other revolutionary organizations of the working class for the dictatorship of the proletariat and the realization of socialism. So much greater is the part which the trade unions are called upon to play now when the class struggle has brought the Russian proletariat face to face with the socialist revolution, with the actual realization of a number of the most important socialist projects.

4. The idea of trade-union "neutrality" has always been and remains a bourgeois idea. There is no neutrality and there can be none in the great historic strife between revolutionary socialism and its adversaries. Behind professed neutrality there is almost always concealed the support of bourgeois politics and treason to the interests of the working class. This is proved by the conflict of the two leading tendencies in the European trade-union movement during three and a half years of the World War. The "neutralists" of yesterday everywhere became defensists and servants of imperialism; true socialists should have renounced once and for all the idea of trade-union "neutrality."

5. Still less is it possible to have a "neutral" trade-union movement in Russia, a country which is living through a great revolution and is throwing off the bourgeois yoke. The questions of the Constituent Assembly, the nationalization of banks, the suppression of the bourgeois press, the annulment of loans, the fight against counter-revolution--all these questions touch in the most direct way the interests of the working class, and thereby the interests of the trade-union movement. In all these questions the trade unions must support fully and loyally the policy of the socialist Soviet Government directed by the Soviet of People's Commissars.

6. The center of gravity In the work of the trade unions must, at present, be shifted to the field of economic organization. Trade unions, being class organizations of the proletariat, must take upon themselves the task of organizing production and restoring the shattered productive forces of the country. They should aim to participate most emphatically in the work of all the centers regulating production, to organize workers' control and the registration and distribution of workers, to organize exchange between villages and cities, to participate most actively in the demobilization of industry, to fight against sabotage, to enforce the duty of universal labor, etc. Particular attention should be given to the centralization of the trade-union movement on an All-Russian scale and to the organization of powerful unions of agricultural workers.

7. In their mature state, after they have gone through the process of the socialist revolution which is now taking place, trade unions will become instruments of state authority and as such will work in coordination with other instruments of the socialist state for the realization of new principles in the organization of economic life.

8. To achieve this end and to effect the amalgamation of all economic organizations of the working classes (particularly the factory shop committees), there should be the closest possible co-operation and an uninterrupted organizational connection between trade unions and the political organizations of the proletariat and, in the first instance, with the Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.

9. The Congress is convinced that as a result of the process already taking place the trade unions will inevitably become instruments of the socialist state and that the membership in them of all persons employed in a given industry will be enforced by the government.

The Russian trade-union movement will not be able to fulfill its great tasks unless it establishes the closest contact with the international trade union movement. The Congress considers it to be its duty to assist in every possible way the rebirth of the international trade-union movement, and thinks that it would be in order to call a general international trade-union congress as well as a number of international trade-union conferences of separate branches of industry.

As a first step in this direction the Congress resolves to call an International Conference of Trade Unions to meet in Petrograd on February 15.

Source: James Bunyan and H.H. Fisher, ed., Bolshevik Revolution, 1917-1918; Documents and Materials (Stanford: Stanford University Press; H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 639-641.