Leon Trotsky: Speech at the enlarged plenum of Tsektran

December 2, 1920

[My own translation of the Russian text in Sotchinenia, Vol 15, Moscow-Leningrad 1927, compared to the German version. Corrections by English native speakers would be extremely welcome]

Comrades, our conference met at a turning point in the general life of our country, and this turning point, which in general can be characterized as the transition from the war period to the economic period, is reflected in the life of all bodies of Soviet Russia, purely Soviet organizations, party, trade union and all other ... That is why we are now talking about a crisis experienced by various organizations, an internal crisis, which is essentially nothing more than an internal regrouping of elements, people and workers in order to adapt to the new period. Nobody, of course, will demand from me, as a speaker, to undertake a commitment that we will have the new period permanently, firmly and completely. Unfortunately, not all the factors of this new period are in the hands of Tsektran and not even in the hands of Soviet Russia as a whole. A new war may be imposed on us, and then we will have to move on to a new war period, whether we like it or not. But I repeat that those elements of the crisis in which there is nothing threatening for the structure, for work, for the future tasks of Soviet Russia as a whole and all its individual organs are left to us as a legacy of the previous war era. War is a cruel craft and bodies of war are cruel bodies, and their work consists in the merciless depletion of all the vital forces and resources of the country. And when the war draws to a close, the elements of malaise, discontent that the war accumulates, make themselves felt. And this is good, because it testifies to the vitality of the organism itself.

In general, we can say that the main cause of malaise and dissatisfaction is the poverty and destitution that we inherited and which were exacerbated by the very fact of the civil war. The way out, therefore, is to improve the welfare of the country. This common reason is reflected in all organizations of Soviet Russia, but in the field of the trade-union movement there is its own special crisis, which has a special nature, determined by the tasks of the movement and the nature of the trade-union organizations.

We inherited the trade unions from capitalist society as organizations embracing, in German terminology, workers against employers (in German there is an expression for "workers' fraternity," that is, wage workers against capitalists). The task of the trade unions was to improve the position of the wage earning class against the bourgeois class. They had a definite structure, and they were doing the work of conquering power in our country together with the working class. But it is precisely the objective situation that has completely affected the trade unions, and the restructuring of the unions themselves in accordance with the new tasks is an independent task, which we have not fully resolved to this day; and the very place that trade unions should occupy in the general structure of Soviet bodies and apparatuses is far from being determined in practice, although it is fully predetermined theoretically by our program. We are talking about the program of the Communist Party, the leading party in Soviet power. If you take the text of the program – the section on economic issues, then you will read:

"The organizational apparatus of socialized industry must rely primarily on the trade unions. They should more and more get rid of the narrowness of the guild and turn into large production associations, embracing the majority, and gradually all of the working people in a given branch of production" ...

... "The trade unions must come to the actual concentration of the entire management of the entire national economy as a single economic whole in their hands. Thus ensuring an indissoluble link between the central state administration, the national economy and the broad masses of the working people, the trade unions must involve the latter in the widest possible scope of direct work on the management of the economy. The participation of trade unions in the management of the economy and their attraction of the broad masses to this is at the same time the main means of combating the bureaucratization of the economic apparatus of the Soviet power "...

Although the program was written before the experience that we had, a year and a half ago, before that internal struggle, it fully embraces and exhausts the entire question that interests us. The trade unions must concentrate in their hands all the leadership of economic life. They not only assist production, but must organize production and become the sovereign leaders of this organization. The fight against bureaucracy is not a separate isolated task on which individual technicians-specialists in the fight against bureaucracy can specialize (there are, unfortunately, such specialists) – the fight against bureaucracy can be conducted on the basis of the practical organization of production itself with the involvement of the toiling masses themselves in this organizational work. If you take the decisions of the IX Congress of our Party on the trade-union question, then in the principled part they are only confirmation of the party program, in the practical part they outline some stages, some transitional steps regarding how the work of trade unions is coordinated with the economic bodies in the form in which they exist now; for if it is necessary that the trade unions become, more and more, the governing apparatus of the economy, then we must not close our eyes to the fact that this does not exist yet, and the very attempt to mechanically transfer the economy into the hands of each individual trade union would be doomed to ruin. We saw this in the field of railway transport – such an attempt was made through the Vikzhedor – and then the trade union failed and could not cope with the transport task, because, I repeat, it came out of the old era, preserving, on the whole, the old system of organization, old work habits and old selection of workers. The old transport had two floors, like all industry: first the administrative superstructure, the governing one – the crowning of property ownership –, then the middle technical personnel and the lowest mass of workers. The revolution tore off the head of the capitalist owner, it destroyed the administrative and technical apparatus, moreover, it later removed the best elements from the working class itself, layer by layer, and sent them to the fronts of the civil war or to various areas of Soviet work. Thus, all that remained was largely exhausted, deprived of thousands and thousands of old organizers with great experience, whom the revolution had to remove and had the right to remove, otherwise it would not have been a revolution. The revolution could not but destroy the old administrative apparatus and, by necessity, it removed the other top - the top of the ideological revolutionary organization. And the Soviet state could not transfer transport to such a weakened union. In order for a trade union to become a production union, it must involve all participants in production in its environment, for every worker who is needed by transport and the union must participate in the work of organizing transport. By drawing workers of all categories into its ranks, the union gradually takes over the production apparatus. But for this it must gather its forces, and since the old trade unions did not face this task and did not work according to this principle, it is necessary to check the cadre of their leaders, old workers, old leaders; for many of them were quite suitable for the old organizational struggle and work, for leading strikes, for barricade battles, but not all of them in their qualities can be suitable for organizing transport as such. Consequently, a strict examination of the old cadres of the union from a new production angle of view, and not a professional one, and their strict selection at work itself, is one side of the task. The other side is the extraction from all other bodies, and above all from the army at the moment, all workers who were given either by railroad workers or by anyone else – it's all the same, but who showed their organizational qualities at work: these workers need to be extracted, transferred to the framework of the union and help it become a production union. We are approaching those questions that provide food for the backward elements in our own environment for the struggle against the so-called "appointmentism", and this fierce and seemingly principled struggle completely obscures the question of who appoints: is the appointment coming from the class enemy, the capitalist state, or from the workers' state?

To reject the principle of appointment as a practical method of strengthening the transport apparatus and the trade union itself is to confine transport to the guild confinement of those workers we have inherited from the past. This idea is completely false and incapable of opening the way for us to transform the trade union into an production union. If we undertake the new task of transforming the union itself through internal efforts and assistance of the workers' state and the leading communist party, then the first urgent task on this road is to find workers who need to be added in all other areas of work, which the union as such cannot reach, and by whom the work in transport must be strengthened. Hence the appointment, i.e. the redistribution of forces to certain posts. To deny this method and to fight against appointments, opposing it to the method of electability, is to forget the class nature of the state, is to repeat what was appropriate in relation to a state representing another class, for example, in the Kerensky era, but wrong in the era of working class domination itself. For the working class must, if it is dissatisfied with the Soviet power, rebuild it, replace the Soviet power. If it elects it at the annual congresses, it obviously gives it the right standing not only above individual Commissariats, but even above individual production unions. There may, of course, be practical questions as to which appointment was right and which was wrong. These are questions from which we will not escape even in elections, and it is absolutely inevitable. There is one way to do it and that is through on-the-job inspections, appraisal lists for every single employee of any responsibility.

This most pernicious, fundamentally undermining of all prospects for the development of the union, the opposition of elected workers to those appointed by the workers' state, is something against which the Tsektran and all its organs must open a merciless struggle of ideas on the ground, to expose such a policy as a vestige of the old trade-unionist psychology, the old stale shop-room psychology. It is like the old trade-unionists not allowing women into their unions, fighting against apprenticeship, considering their milieu as a self-sufficient world.

Now we see, including in our union, how the most honest and faithful workers, who have proved their merit to the working class in various fields of work, who are entitled to be marked out by the state, who transfers them from one field to another, are being opened up to campaign against as if they were appointed. This is a burp of trade-unionism, and trade-unionism is capable of bringing unions down, undermining the very meaning of the trade union. Old-style trade unions fought for workers' share of the national income, which was created by the workers themselves. Today's trade unions can only fight for an increase in national income, i.e. an increase in productivity, because this is the only way to improve the situation of the working masses. Here we return again to the question of the so-called bureaucracy, which plays a great role in the life of the production organisation.

Comrades, I parenthetically state that I recognize bureaucratism in Soviet organizations as an existing fact, and I am even the inventor of the term "glavkocracy", which has been used quite widely. But the struggle that is being waged against bureaucratism is built 9/10ths on a trade unionist prejudice, on a misunderstanding of the role of trade unions in the workers' state. I have heard from some professionals statements of the kind that the Tsektran may work better in some respects, but we have such a office that if a worker comes, he will get lost in it. This is an attitude of treating the union as a small house-room organization, as it was in a past era, when it led an underground or semi-underground existence, when the union was a field strike headquarters, whereby portability, i.e. the ability to be portable, was the main quality needed for a professional union. If our task is to master production as a whole, to take every worker into account, to introduce attestation lists, to check the work, to reassess the leading workers of the trade union, then obviously the trade union has to be built on new, more correct, scientifically organised foundations. It is quite clear that it must start by restructuring its ruling central apparatus and not be intimidated by the fact that we have a large office. If we have shortcomings, we will correct them. But it is necessary to accustom the worker to a precise, more perfect apparatus – this is a matter of life and death for us, because handicraft, makeshift work flourishes in our various fields, including in the trade union, and a prejudice, an aversion to a more precise organisation is still lurking in the underlying consciousness even among some communist comrades. I consider it a great gain that the Tsektran has set up a correct apparatus in the centre, a correct accounting of all forces and means: this is the most necessary approach to the cause.

That is not what bureaucratism is about. By bureaucratism is understood what I have called a glavkocracy. Glavkocracy contains a lot of negative sides, but glavkocracy is a transitional moment to the construction of a socialist economy. To take into account the metallurgical, textile industry, food, transport, to nationalize, merge and build vertical headquarters, between which there were not enough passages, so that all the products, people, means, ideas would pass from one headquarters to another along the shortest lines, so that the exchange of substances in the economic process would take place with the least expenditure of energy, that is the task. Have we solved it or not? No, we are only solving it. There is a colossal amount of friction. Such an order of management of the economy, that is, a single central apparatus has never been, samples do not exist anywhere and here, in these tensions, in the inconsistency, one must be able to see, understand the transitive form, which must be overcome by further efforts and not stand aside and say "bureaucracy". Finally, the most important issue is material need, poverty. Here we come to the substance of the disagreement within the unions and beyond their doorstep. It is assessed – at first glance it seems unbelievable – as Soviet bureaucracy. If a workshop in a factory or a plant is waiting for two thousand pairs of boots and they don't always get them – and you know that in our misfortune there are more such cases than any other – the workers attack the board, the factory or the Commissar, they attack it, convinced that they retain the right to grumble and show their fists to the factory board and to someone higher up, because they are not getting boots and food. What does the workshop committee or factory committee answer them? It replies that there is a civil war, four fronts, and that everything goes to the Red Army. They listen to this once, twice, and the third time they still demand boots and food. Then the commissar himself says, they were given anyway way, but the bureaucracy does not send them from Moscow. And indeed, the old ones do not get any outfits for three or four months or more. And whoever follows the life of this kind of grassroot organization – and many of you have much more opportunity than I have to follow the life of a factory, a plant, a workshop, a station, a line, etc. – knows this answer, that the bureaucrats who sit in the centre do not give. This is wrong. It is absolutely wrong. The trouble with us is that there are no nails, no shirts, no boots, not enough bread. This is a very simple, basic truth about our poverty and ruin. And we don't hide this fact to anyone. If there are ten thousand pairs of boots in the main office and there are a million demands for these ten thousand, the main office will go around barefoot for a month discussing whom to give first, and even if it decides, it will satisfy one ten-thousandth of the need. The others, knowing that the main office has something, that it distributes something, will accuse it of bureaucracy. Here I draw the attention of comrades in the unions to the danger of such a formulation of the question. Of course, if one were to ask me in any factory or plant concerning bureaucratism, I would say: "You are short of two thousand pairs of boots. If we didn't have bureaucracy you would get probably fifty pairs, but a thousand nine hundred and fifty you still wouldn't get, for they are not there." And the representatives of our and other unions, who are facing the needy hungry masses, forced and obliged to work, can take two paths: the path of trade unionist agitation and the path of industrial agitation. This is where the path of every trade unionist is dissected. When a worker says: I have no boots, you can develop the idea that there is a collective monster sitting there in the centre that has everything but, like a dog in the hay, gives nothing to anyone. To speak in this way before the most backward, dark working masses is to inculcate in them the same attitude to this unknown bureaucratic centre as the workers had (and rightly so) to the capitalist who oppressed them immediately before their eyes, i.e. to conduct in essence a monstrously perverted class struggle against the Soviet power that has no social basis. For some trade unionists, buried in demagogy, under the guise of fighting against the bureaucracy, which does not give, hinders, destroys - these trade unionists, without actually realizing it, are waging a class struggle against the Soviet power. The production trade unionist must tell the worker that his hired labour is a fiction - he is the master of production himself and, therefore, he can increase his share of the product of national production only by increasing the very quantity of the products. Of course, the apparatus of distribution must be improved and all abuses must be combated; but that is only one thousandth of the task. In terms of the quantity of products the main task is to increase the productivity of labour, to increase the national annual income many and many times over. So, one point of view is trade unionist – pitting workers against the Soviet state – which means the collapse of the trade union, the collapse of the party, the collapse of the class. The other point of view is the production point of view: the trade union must master production and increase productivity. And we see that such groupings exist in the trade union bodies.

The trade union, given the current state of society in a workers' state, in the communist economy under construction, can either become an apparatus that carries through all the superstitions and prejudices of the most backward masses, or it can become the most important body that organises these masses in production. Nothing else is given to it. The intermediate state of the production union reduces it to nothing. I consider it a great merit of Tsektran that it took the right course not on trade unionist psychology, but, on the contrary, on the fight against trade unionism and on levelling the entire line of trade unions of railway workers and water workers (water workers in this area had less time than railroad workers). In this last area, it took the right line – the line of the trade union under construction. In the field of water transport, less progress has been achieved, because water transport is a more backward wing of transport, more technically fragmented, administratively less centralized and less adapted for centralization. And it is quite natural if precisely for this reason in water transport there are elements of backwardness, inertia, more trade unionist demagogy than in the field of railway transport.

Our main conclusion is that in no case can we allow attempts to force the more revolutionary and advanced wing of the transport workers' union to adapt to the more backward wing. On the contrary, our task is to align this more backward, more artisanal, more trade-unionist wing along our common production front by transferring more workers from the railroad to the waterways. This is one of the most important tasks of the present time. The fight against bureaucracy in the railway department, where, of course, bureaucracy is plentiful and where a fight against it is necessary, can be waged. (Moreover, comrades, by bureaucracy I do not at all necessarily mean the old bureaucrats: very young members of our union and even members of our party are quite often bureaucrats.) In the old methods of work there were many elements of bureaucracy, from which we must wean our workers who have gone through the old school with its shortcomings, but also with its merits. I had to write recently, and I can at any time confirm and support this in every possible way, that we often suffer not so much from the bad sides of bureaucracy, but mainly from the fact that we have not learned many of its good sides: the proper distribution of labour, proper forms of supply. There is a German, American bureaucracy, which has developed well-known methods for work, which introduced rationalisation, Taylorisation, distribution, forms of responsibility, supply, planning, reporting, etc. Bureaucracy is not an invention of Russian tsarism – bureaucracy is an era in the development of mankind, when mankind is moving from the medieval fog to the bourgeois system and creates well-known management skills and techniques, creates good, more accurate offices with good typewriters (which we now, I hope, will receive from abroad), with correct bookkeeping and office work. If we had assimilated this, then, reading, for example, the lists of our union, we would not have found that in the end we were lying ten times. They say that this is bureaucratic pickiness. But we need to learn these good features of the bureaucracy, if we do not want, I apologise for the expression, become completely "lousy" and loose circulation. Accuracy is the most important lever in human development.

At the same time, I am ready to admit and acknowledge that the methods that Tsektran used (this is the view of Tsektran himself, which was expressed in a number of actions, judgments and organizational measures), are not the only possible and binding for all unions. They grew up in a certain period, in a certain union, as necessary methods. You know that we had to fight internally with the old Tsekprofsozh. It was on the lines, it was a well-known internal struggle, in which the state party intervened and gave support to one of the struggling sides against the other. Was this intervention correct (here I come back to the question of appointment)? Is it correct that a certain impetus was given to a certain trend in the trade union? Is it correct that the state said that it was necessary to remove the head of the union? In that era when the working class was in opposition or in the revolutionary underground, or in the semi-underground, then the communists in the trade unions fought against other parties and removed from their posts Mensheviks, Socialist-Revolutionaries and some non-party people who, although they were non-party, were in fact reactionaries, and were replaced by communists. The union did not meet the revolutionary needs of the working class, and one faction of the workers' union waged a fierce internal struggle against those who lagged behind or contradicted historical development. What were we supposed to do here? The union had to move from the trade union line to the production line. There are elements among the leaders of the union, at the top and bottom, who have not understood that the production criterion is a decisive criterion, and that this is not a matter of the union alone, that the entire working class can be saved from destruction and decay only by rebuilding all its apparatuses from the perspective of the economy. This can be done in two ways. It is possible to create two factions – a faction of production and a faction of trade unionists of the old type and wage a struggle between these two factions, two groups. And I have no doubt that in this open struggle we would have won a complete and decisive victory. But such a struggle between the two groups is a great expenditure of the forces of the working class. In such a situation, the workers' power, which is the political state representation in the workers' state, shortens the period of struggle, intervenes and gives orders. To deny this principle is to deny the workers' state.

The interference of the state and the leading bodies of the party in the internal struggle of the trade unions of construction workers, railway workers and water workers has not only its historical justification, but is also dictated by vital necessity. From the experience of our union, other unions can learn something, and it is not at all necessary that the restructuring was carried out by means of an internal struggle or by way of firm and harsh government intervention. The union can itself, by its own internal efforts, rebuild itself, and there are already examples of this. The unions not only do not give up appointments, but even demand from the leading bodies of the party to revise the composition of their workers from a master's angle, and this gives the necessary results without the surgical intervention of the party or the state.

Thus, the methods used by Tsektran were dictated by the acute situation of transport, the death of which threatened the death of the entire country. Let's not forget that last autumn we thought that by the spring of 1920 the percentage of sick steam locomotives should reach 75, at which percentage the railway traffic would lose all meaning, since the available number of steam locomotives could only serve the railways themselves. Transport paralysis meant the death of the entire economic life of the country. Decisive measures were needed. There were not enough forces to carry out these measures, for the main forces were at the fronts, and the measures were needed exceptionally and urgently. We could not expect that we would convince everyone. This meant meeting the inevitable risk that the transport would stop before we got to the point. That is why we have reached the point where from above we had to show the masses the methods of work with which we must fight for the revival of the country's transport. Such sharp, drastic measures were applied to Tsektran. They caused a well-known opposition, bitterness, and this bitterness has not subsided in some people to this day. With many comrades, we acted abruptly; now with the comrades with whom we argued, we work in complete solidarity and we have no doubt that tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, this bitterness from the internal struggle will disperse as soon as the successes of the joint work show itself more clearly. They have already affected us now, but at the same time, since we are entering an economic era, since we can expect that all trade unions, including our union, will receive a significant number of workers primarily from the army, where we have almost half of the party, – to the extent that we will get the opportunity to develop industrial agitation, political and educational work among the masses. And what is called ordering, appointing from above – all this is in inverse proportion to the development of the masses, with their cultural level, political consciousness and the strength of our apparatus. The stronger we are as a production organization, the less frequent cases of hostility to our orders, and vice versa. The setting is not always such that it is possible to resort to discussion. This is dictated entirely by external conditions. There is not a single sane person who would not understand that as soon as the situation becomes easier, as soon as we breathe a little more freely and we can remove workers from military affairs and transfer them to transport work, then we immediately involve the workers in all branches of transport.

Here we come to the question of workers' democracy, which plays a colossal role in the trade union – more than, say, in the party, and which can be fully resolved only through the trade union. The question of workers' democracy in our country has been and is being raised now: to expand the scope of criticism, discussion, internal polemics, etc. All this, of course, is necessary, but it also depends on the general situation. I said at workers' meetings in Moscow that it is one thing when we stand in front of Perekop: the 30th and 51st divisions did not engage in discussion, did not discuss whether to cross or not to cross Perekop, but it was necessary either to break through or to die ... But if we transfer the 30th and 51st divisions to the rear, no doubt they will criticize very much why this or that was bad, and we must explain to them why this was so, and raise educational work there. The workers' and peasants' army does not represent some kind of militarism. The further, the less we have to apply methods of repression to our army; the further, the more the internal psychological link provides methods of internal pressure. The militarisation of the trade union and the militarisation of transport, which is at the same time internal, ideological militarisation, are dictated by an atmosphere of fear, a natural and salutary fear of the death of the country. Last autumn, winter and spring, we stood in front of a transport Perekop, and we did not conduct discussions, which was expressed in the decree declaring the transport under martial law. Can we say that the danger to transport has passed? In no case. It is not so acute, but we need the same heroic efforts, the same selfless dedication to the cause (in this case, to the cause of transport) that the comrades showed at the Isthmus of Perekop at the most crucial hour.

When we talk about the militarisation of transport, this means that all transport workers must give themselves up to this work, on the success or failure of which depends the life or death of the country. In the same way we are also talking about the spiritual militarisation of workers. How are we going to militarise each worker individually? Internally, through the ideological, spiritual militarisation of each worker individually and, above all, of the leaders of the trade union.

So, does the militarisation contradict workers' democracy? In no case. For this same democracy created the army and it will use its methods and will strengthen it now during a respite, when we are faced with the task of strengthening, reducing the army by almost half in the next period, in order, at the same time, to double its consciousness, its readiness to die for the cause of the working class. ...

Thus, the militarisation of the army is just beginning in the sense of saturating this army with the consciousness of the need to perish for every last, most backward soldier. We are told that this militarisation is contrary to the methods of workers' democracy. Never. It naturally follows from it that we must build our organisations in such a way as to give the masses the result of a workers' organized public opinion, which exert pressure on all strikebreakers who leave our ranks and undermine production. This is what the essence of militarisation is: we will capture every worker in every workshop, and he will reflect on what he can bring to his new tool – where to put the door in the workshop so as not to waste extra steps every day, – for this amounts to millions of working hours. If he thinks about this, then this, comrades, is the most important component of genuine workers' democracy. But the question is that now we need to expand the field of criticism. In a military environment, criticism would be unacceptable. In a peaceful environment, criticism will be broader. After all, we are not liberals, we are the fighting working class. Democracy, as a political democracy, is a bare frame, it must be given economic content. I think this is the most important task of Tsektran. It creates with strict methods and has already created a certain apparatus. It secured the sympathy and cooperation of the vast majority of the old trade union workers. It is not quite true among water workers yet, but tomorrow or the day after tomorrow it will be so. This is our firm hope. But this is only a fraction of the work; it is still an apparatus that must begin to solve a new problem, which has not yet been solved by any of the unions and could not be solved, because it did not stand before them. This is the task of the production organisation of the mass in production and for production. We are just getting started on this task. Here, the responsibility of production agitation and propaganda must be assigned to every specialist and technician who works for the means of communication, so that he devotes a certain part of his time to presenting the next technical questions of transport to the broad masses of the workers in a language accessible to these masses, in close connection with the tasks of today. In the field of transport, there should not be a single knowledgeable worker, specialist and former political worker who would not be involved in the creation of a production democracy – not just a workers' democracy, but a production democracy; we should all become economic officials and organisers, there should be no one who would not be involved in the work. This means that it is necessary to create such an organisation of the toiling masses, when each representative is taken, as they say, at gunpoint and examined what he gave to production in the field of actually improving the material situation of the toiling masses. We can say with full confidence that, despite all our poverty and misery, even now, with the initiative and skill of every worker in our union on the spot, it is possible to improve the position of the workers by one-hundredth, by one-fiftieth, if we treat this with full attention. It is necessary to involve the advanced workers so that they introduce elements of collectivism into the more backward one – into household use, where philistinism still dominates, stupid philistine individualism, where the worker's wife also erases and sews buttons separately, and the husband, who has obtained a separate awl, himself separately in his kennel mending his boots. Even if we start with something as small as comradely repair shops, as collective canteens – not as filthy as ours in most cases – then under the real serious control of some capable culinary inspection, even now, with our poverty in the amount of food, it is possible to achieve both greater cost savings and greater satisfaction of the elementary needs of the working class.

Each group of workers should thus evaluate their representatives: what they did on the spot to improve the situation from local funds, what they gave to increase labour productivity. Only in this way will the workers' union, involving administrative and technical elements from other areas, re-educating within itself and pushing out of the unions a large number of workers and merging the economic apparatus with the union apparatus, will it create workers' democracy. Only in this way will the parallelism of the existence of the organs of the union and the Soviet economic organs disappear. What the union is doing now by creating production departments is a transitional measure. Production departments and the corresponding cells can in no way be perpetuated as bodies of economic administration. These are not self-sufficient organs: these are only tentacles extended from the union to the Soviet economic organs in order to facilitate the process of fusion. In each such cell should sit, respectively, the branch of work, the head; all these issues should be discussed jointly, i.e. such a cell should be involved in the economic apparatus. The most gifted practical workers or specialists from the economic apparatus should be drawn into the union. And thus, the gap between those who received special knowledge and those who are the representatives of the union will disappear. This is the task of Tsektran by its very essence. The struggle that is waged in the trade union has many random elements that must be diverted from. Of course, this brings in passion and personal moments. It must be swept away like rubbish, and we will do it. If we are forced to go with such a slogan of struggle to the masses – we are not afraid to go to them with this – we will explain to the masses what the essence is. The whole point is that we have approached a new era, an era of independent activity of the masses, an economic era, a production era. That is why we say to the working masses: as before, be critical of your leaders, test them, but listen to them, learn the new criterion. Previously, you needed the leaders to be good defenders during the strike. This is necessary now. But this alone is not enough now. They must now be administrators, economic officials, Taylorists, that is, they should increase labour productivity. If they increase the number of boots, the amount of grain, coal, they are the true leaders of the working class. And the banner that we raise over the union of transport workers is the banner of economic revival. The working class will pursue a course not towards the trade unionist, but towards the economic official, towards the creator, towards the one who alone can stand at the head and provide the masses with a way out of economic decay.