The Bolshevik leader outlines an approach on how to mobilize working people around demands suited to their immediate needs and level of consciousness, but pointing toward the conquest of power by the working class and its allies and the elimination of the root cause of their oppression—capitalism. The excerpt below is from the introduction to the book by Joseph Hansen, a leader of the Socialist Workers Party in the United States until his death in 1979. Copyright © 1973 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
 

The resolutions and decisions of the First Congress of the Profintern reflect the considerable discussion that took place there on the tasks of Communists in the union movement. In an introduction which he wrote for a compilation of the documents immediately after the congress, A. Lozovsky, the international secretary of the organization, said the following about one of the subjects:

…the congress paid great attention to the problem of workers’ control. Workers’ control, at a given stage of development of the social struggle, is a thoroughly practical slogan for workers of all countries. In this respect a great deal of experience has been accumulated of late. It is of course very evident that Russia in this respect has the greatest experience and it is not surprising that the Russian experience…was made the basis of the resolution on the question. The congress did not satisfy itself with merely putting the question to the front, but gave a concrete form to it, drew the workers’ attention as to how workers’ control has to be shaped, the methods of approaching it, and gave a practical program in this matter. We can consider the resolution on this subject exhaustive.

If not entirely “exhaustive,” the resolution (“On the Question of Tactics”) did include considerable detail. It has a very modern ring. Some of the sentences and even paragraphs sound like rough drafts of points included by Trotsky in the Transitional Program 17 years later.

A few quotations will illustrate this:

The basis for enlarging our influence must lie within the economic struggle. Questions of wages, of securing relief for the war victims, social insurance, unemployment, women and child labor, sanitary conditions in industrial establishments, high prices, the housing question, etc., taxation, mobilization, colonial schemes, financial combinations—all these must be utilized as daily material for organization and militant socialist education….

While conducting the fight for the improvement of the conditions of labor, raising the standard of life of the masses, and establishing workers’ control over industry, we should always keep in mind that it is impossible to solve all these problems within the frame of the capitalist system….

The resolution projects various stages in the development of workers’ control. The most elementary stage is merely the realization gained by the workers through experiences such as war, unemployment, the chaos of capitalist society, the arbitrariness of the bosses, etc., that they must begin to exert their own control in the plants.
 

This primitive stage of workers’ control reveals itself in sporadic attempts of the workers of each concern to supervise the work, the supply, and conditions of the machinery of production, to determine whether the closing of the factory, or the curtailing of production are really based upon necessity and are not a result of mischievous intention of the owner….

Workers’ control “in its fullest expression” must include financial as well as technical supervision.

Only the full application of financial control reveals to the workers the fundamental basis of the capitalist system. In the process of financial control the workers learn in practice the dependence of their factory upon the banks and national and international financial trusts. The disclosure of the commercial, industrial, and particularly financial secrets gives the proletariat an exact picture of the prime source of the overwhelming sabotage on the part of the bourgeoisie….

The struggle for financial control leads the working class to the immediate and decisive clash with the bourgeoisie whose political power is to a certain extent based on financial power. At this stage, control inevitably takes an evident political aspect and requires political leadership. Meanwhile the increasingly frequent cases of seizure of factories, and at the same time impossibility of managing them without disposing of the financial apparatus, clearly puts before the workers the timely problem of getting hold of the financial system and, through it, of the whole industry. [This leads to a struggle for power and social revolution.]…the Red unions must pay special attention to the practice of workers’ control, which is the best preliminary school for the proletariat striving to take power in its own hands.  
 
 
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