daily bread. The form of trade-union press that would suit the conditions of our illegal works and that is already called for at the present time is the Trade-Union Pamphlet. In these pamphlets, legal[1] and illegal material should be collected and organised, on conditions of labour in a given trade, on the various conditions prevailing in the various parts of Russia, on the principal demands advanced by the workers in a given trade, about the defects of the laws in relation to that trade, of the outstanding cases of workers' economic struggle in this trade, about the rudiments, the present state and the requirements of their trade-union organisations, etc. Such pamphlets would, in the first place, relieve our Social-Democratic press of a mass of trade details that interest only the workers employed in the given trade; secondly, they would record the results of our experience in the trade-union struggle, would preserve the material collected—which is now literally lost in a mass of leaflets and fragmentary correspondence—and would generalise this material. Thirdly, they could serve as material for the guidance of agitators, because conditions of labour change relatively slowly, the principal demands of the workers in a given trade hardly ever change (see for example the demands advanced by the weavers in the Moscow district in 1885 and in the St. Petersburg district in 1896), and a compilation of these demands and needs might serve
- ↑ Legal material is particularly important in this connection, but we have lagged behind very much in our ability systematically to collect and utilise it. It would not he an exaggeration to say that legal material alone would provide sufficient material for a trade-union pamphlet, whereas illegal material alone would not be sufficient. In collecting illegal material from workers, questions like those dealt with in the publications of Rabochaya Mysl, we waste a lot of the efforts of revolutionists (whose place in this work, could very easily he taken by legal workers), and yet we never obtain good material because a worker who knows only a single department of a large factory, who knows the economic results but not the general conditions and standards of his work, cannot acquire the knowledge that is possessed by the office staff of a factory, by inspectors, doctors, etc., and which is scattered in petty newspaper correspondence, and in special, industrial, medical, Zemstvo and other publications.
I very distinctly remember my "first experiment," which I am not going to repeat. I spent many weeks "examining" a workingman, who came to visit me, about the conditions prevailing in the enormous factory at which he was employed. True, after great effort, I managed to obtain material for a description (of just one single factory!), but at the end of each interview the workingman would wipe the sweat from his brow, and say to me smilingly: "I would rather work overtime than reply to your questions!"
The more energetically we carry on our revolutionary struggle, the more the government will be compelled to legalise a part of the "trade-union" work, and by that will relieve us of part of our burden.
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