Page:Samuel Gompers - Out of Their Own Mouths (1921).djvu/201

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THE NEW RED LABOR UNION
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tions. The language here chosen is highly significant, as is also the phraseology of the following sentence from the same resolution:

As regards the I. W. W. of America and Australia and the Shop-Steward Committees of England, we have to deal with a genuinely proletarian mass movement which practically adheres to the principles of the Communist Internationale.

In order, however, to show the utter impossibility of any real compromise on the part of Moscow toward any trade unions or any other body having to deal with it—no matter how revolutionary they may be—we may quote the following passages on the trade unions from "the theses and statutes adopted by the Third or Communist Internationale" at their 1920 Congress. We quote from the official publication issued by the office of the Communist Internationale in Moscow:

All voluntary withdrawal from the industrial movement, every artificial attempt to organize special unions, without being compelled thereto by exceptional acts of violence on the part of the trade union bureaucracy, such as expulsion of separate revolutionary local branches of the unions by the opportunist officials, or by their narrow-minded aristocratic policy, which prohibits the unskilled workers from entering into the organization, represents a great danger to the Communist movement. It threatens to hand over the most advanced, the most conscious workers, to the opportunist leaders, playing into the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Placing the object and the essence of labour organizations before them, the Communists ought not to hesitate before a split in such organizations, if a refusal to split