V. I. Lenin

Speech Delivered at the

Third All-Russia Trade Union Congress

April 7, 1920 [1] ( Prolonged , stormy applause. Ovation. ) Comrades, permit me to begin by conveying
greetings from the Council of People’s Commissars to the
Third All-Russia Congress. ( Applause. ) Comrades, Soviet
power is now passing through a phase of outstanding importance,
which in many respects confronts us with the highly complex and
interesting tasks that belong to a period of change. And it is the
specific nature of the period that provides the trade unions with
special tasks and special responsibilities in the work of building
socialism.

That is why I should now like to dwell not so much on certain
decisions of the Party Congress which has just ended (on this
subject you will receive a more detailed report) as on those
changes in the conditions of Soviet policy which link up all the
tasks of socialist construction and the activities of the trade
unions. The chief feature of the present phase is the transition
from war tasks, which have hitherto absorbed all the attention and
effort of the Soviet government, to tasks of peaceful economic
development. And it should be mentioned right away that this is
not the first time that the Soviet government and the Soviet
Republic are passing through such a phase. We are reverting to
this question once more—this is the second time since the
dictatorship of the proletariat was established that history has
brought the work of peaceful construction into the foreground.

The first time was at the beginning of 1918, when, after the
brief but very impetuous offensive of German imperialism, at a
time when the old capitalist army had completely collapsed and
when we had no army of our own and could not create one rapidly,
the German imperialist predators forced the Peace of Brest-Litovsk
upon us. It seemed as if war tasks had receded into the
background, owing to the weakness of the available forces of the
Soviet government. It seemed as if we could proceed to the work of
peaceful construction. I had occasion to make a report to the
All-Russia Central Executive Committee at that time, too. That was
on April 29, 1918, nearly two years ago. The Central Committee
adopted a number of theses based on my report and had them
published. I remind you of this because even at that time the
theses enumerated a number of questions—on labour discipline
and so forth—which are included in the agenda of this
Congress. There is a similarity between that time and the
present. I assure you that our attention is again being
concentrated on the disputes and differences which were aired in
the trade union movement two years ago. It would be a profound
mistake to assert that the decisions of the Ninth Congress of the
Russian Communist Party arose out of the present disputes. Such an
assertion would only tend to distort the true picture of
events. And, therefore, in order to understand the true nature of
the question and to set about its solution in a proper way, it
would be useful to compare and give some thought to conditions as
they were at the beginning of 1918 and as they are today.

At that time, during the brief suspension of the war against
German imperialism, the tasks of peace-time development assumed
prominence. It looked as if we might enjoy a long period of
peaceful constructive work. Civil war had not yet begun. Krasnov
had, with German aid, only just appeared on the Don. There were no
hostilities in the Urals and in the North. The Soviet Republic
included a vast territory—all except what it had been deprived of by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Conditions were such
that we might count upon a long period of peaceful work. And,
under these conditions, the primary question taken up by the
Communist Party and stressed in a number of resolutions
(particularly that of April 29, 1918) was the need for widespread
propaganda of, and greater insistence on, labour discipline.

Dictatorial powers and one-man management are not contradictory
to socialist democracy. This must now be borne in mind, if the
decisions adopted by the recent Party Congress and the general
tasks that confront us are to be understood. And this is not an
answer to questions that have only just arisen; it has its deep
roots in the very conditions of the period in which we live. Let
anyone who doubts this compare the situation with what it was two
years ago, and he will understand that the present phase demands
that all attention be devoted to labour discipline, to the labour
armies, although two years ago there was no mention of labour
armies. Only by comparing the issue as it stands today with the
way it stood then, can we draw a proper conclusion, ignoring minor
details and singling out what is general and fundamental. The
whole attention of the Communist Party and the Soviet government
is centred on peaceful economic development, on problems of the
dictatorship and of one-man management. Not only the experience we
have had in the stubborn civil war of the past two years leads us
to such a solution of these problems.

When we tackled them for the first time in 1918, there was no
civil war and no experience to speak of.

It was, therefore, not only the experience of the Red Army and
of the victorious Civil War, but something more profound,
something bound up with the tasks of the dictatorship of the
working class in general, that has induced us now, as it did two
years ago, to concentrate all our attention on labour discipline
as the crucial factor in the economic development of socialism,
and as the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat as we
understand it. Since capitalism was overthrown, every day of our
revolution has taken us further and further away from the idea
about which the old internationalists, who were thoroughly
petty-bourgeois, made so much ado; they believed that the decision
of a majority in the democratic institutions of bourgeois
parliamentarism—with private property in land, the means of
production and capital still retained—could settle the issue, when as a matter of fact it can be decided only by a bitter
class struggle. The significance of the dictatorship of the
proletariat in actual practice unfolded before us when, after the
conquest of power, we set about putting it into practice and saw
that the struggle between classes had not ceased with this, that
the victory over the capitalists and landowners had not destroyed
these classes, that it had only smashed them, but had not
completely destroyed them; suffice it to mention the international
ties of capital, which are of much longer standing and more solid
than the ties of the working class are as yet.

On an international scale, capital is still stronger, both from
the military and the economic standpoint, than Soviet power and
the Soviet system. That is the fundamental premise from which we
must proceed, and we must never forget it. Forms of the struggle
against capital change—at one time they acquire an open
international character, at another they are centred in one
country. The forms change, but the struggle goes on whether it be
in the military, the economic, or some other sphere of the social
system; and our revolution confirms the basic law of the class
struggle The greater the cohesion achieved by the proletariat in
over throwing the bourgeois classes, the more it learns. The
revolution develops in the course of the struggle itself. And the
struggle does not cease with the overthrow of the capitalists. Only after the defeat of the capitalists has been
consolidated in one country does it acquire practical significance
for the whole world. At the beginning of the October Revolution
the capitalists regarded our revolution as a freak—any queer
thing may happen in those distant parts, they thought.

For the dictatorship of the proletariat to acquire world
significance, it had to be consolidated in practice in some one
country. Only then did the capitalists—not only the Russian
capitalists, who at once rushed to seek the aid of other
capitalists, but the capitalists of all other countries—become convinced that this matter was acquiring
international significance. Only then did the resistance of the
capitalists on a world scale attain the force it did. Only then
did civil war develop in Russia and all the victorious countries
do their utmost to assist the Russian capitalists and landowners
in the Civil War.

The class struggle in Russia had taken full shape by 1900,
whereas the socialist revolution became victorious in 1917. Not
only did the resistance of the overthrown class continue to
develop after its overthrow, but it acquired a new source of
strength in the relations between the proletariat and the
peasantry. This is known to anybody who has made any study of
Marxism, who has based socialism on the international movement of
the working class, as its only scientific foundation. Everyone
knows that Marxism gives the theoretical reason for the abolition
of classes. What does this mean? For the victory of socialism it
is not enough to overthrow the capitalists; the difference between
the proletariat and the peasantry must be abolished. The position
of the peasantry is this—on the one hand, it is a class of
working people, who for decades and centuries were oppressed by
the landowners and capitalists, and it will therefore be a long
time before they can forget that the workers alone liberated them
from this oppression. This question could be discussed for
decades; reams of paper have been filled on the subject, and many
factional groups have taken shape around it. But we now see that
these differences have paled before reality. As working people,
the peasants will not forget for many years to come that it was
the workers alone who liberated them from the landowners. That
cannot be contested; but they remain property-owners in a
commodity-producing economy. Every case of a sale of grain on the
open market, of speculation and profiteering is the restoration of
a commodity-producing economy, and hence of capitalism. By
overthrowing the capitalists we liberated the peasantry, a class
which in old Russia undoubtedly comprised the majority of the
population. The peasants have remained property-owners in their
form of production, and they are continuing to develop new
capitalist relations after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. These
are the basic features of our economic position. Hence the
absurdity of the talk we hear from those who do not understand the
state of affairs. The talk of equality, liberty and democracy
under present conditions is nonsense. We are waging a class
struggle, and our aim is to abolish classes. As long as workers
and peasants remain, socialism has not been achieved. And, in
practice, we find an irreconcilable struggle going on everywhere. We must think about how and under what conditions the
proletariat, wielding so powerful an apparatus of coercion as the
state, can attract the peasant as a working man and overcome his
resistance as a property-owner, or render it harmless.

Here the class struggle is continuing, and this throws new
light on the significance of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It appears before us not only, and not even largely,
as the employment of the coercive means of the state apparatus for
the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters. It is, of
course, right to say that we have done a lot by taking this as the
basis, but we also have another method, in which the proletariat
plays the part of an organiser, of one who has been through the
school of labour and the training and discipline of the capitalist
factory. We must organise economic life on a new and more perfect
basis, counting on and utilising all the achievements of
capitalism. Without this we shall never be able to build socialism
and communism. This is much more difficult than the war tasks: In
many respects the war tasks are easier to accomplish. They can be
accomplished by enthusiasm, energy and self-sacrifice. It was
easier for the peasant to fight his inveterate enemy, the
landowner, and more within his understanding. He did not have to
understand the connection between the power of the workers and the
necessity to put down freedom of trade. It was easier to beat the
Russian whiteguards, the landowners and capitalists, and their
henchmen, the Mensheviks. This victory will cost us more, both in
time and effort.

You cannot win in economic matters in the same way as in a
war. Freedom of trade cannot be defeated by enthusiasm and
self-sacrifice. Here, prolonged work is required; the ground has
to be won inch by inch; the organising forces of the proletariat
are required. Victory may be achieved only it the proletariat
wields its dictatorship as a great, organised and organising
force, a force of moral influence on all the working people,
including the non-proletarian working masses. Now that we have
been successful—and will continue to be equally successful—in carrying out the first and simplest task, the
suppression of the exploiters who directly attempt to sweep away
Soviet power, a second and more complex task arises, which is to
organise the forces of the proletariat, to learn to be good
organisers. Labour must be organised in a new way; new ways of
stimulating people to work and to observe labour discipline must
be devised. Even capitalism took decades to accomplish this. All
too often the worst mistakes are made in this field. Many of our
opponents show a complete failure to understand this question. They said we were utopians when we maintained that power
could be seized. On the other hand, they expect us to complete the
organisation of labour in a few months and to show results that
require several years to produce. That is absurd. Given the
political conditions, power can be retained by the sheer
enthusiasm of the workers, perhaps even in the face of the whole
world. That we have proved. But the creation of new forms of
social discipline requires decades. Even capitalism required many
decades to transform the old system of organisation. From the
theoretical standpoint it is sheer nonsense to expect that we can
reconstruct the organisation of labour in short order, and to
instil this idea into the minds of the, workers and peasants.

And not only is it nonsense, it is extremely harmful, because
it prevents the workers from clearly understanding the difference
between the new tasks and the old. The new task is to organise
industry, and first of all our own forces—and as far as
organisation is concerned, we are weak, weaker than any of the
advanced nations. The ability to do this is developed by
large-scale machine industry, and it has never, in all history,
had any other material basis than the productive labour of
millions employing large-scale machine industry in accordance with
a previously established plan. And here the interests of the
proletariat and the peasantry do not coincide. A difficult period
of struggle begins—a struggle against the peasantry. We
must, however, make it clear to the peasants that they have no
other course; they must either march with the workers, they must
help the proletariat, or again succumb to the rule of the
landowners. There is no middle course; the Mensheviks have a
middle course, but it is a thoroughly rotten one and is failing
everywhere, including Germany. The peasant masses cannot get an
understanding of this by theory or by observing the Second and
Third Internationals. The peasant masses—comprising tens of
millions of people—can get an understanding of this only
from their own experience, from their daily practical life. The
peasants could understand the victory over Kolchak and
Denikin. They were able to compare in practice Kolchak and Denikin
with the dictatorship of the working class which the Mensheviks
and Socialist-Revolutionaries had tried very hard and are still
trying to scare the peasants with. But actually the peasants could
never study theory, and cannot now. The peasant masses see that
the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are all lying; and
they see the struggle we are waging against profiteering. It must
be confessed that the Mensheviks too have made some progress in
propaganda, having learned something from our political
departments in the army. The peasants saw a banner on which was
inscribed, not dictatorship of the proletariat, but Constituent
Assembly, the power of the people; they did not see the word
“dictatorship”, they did not even understand the word. But experience has taught them that Soviet government is
better.

And we are now faced with a second task, that of bringing moral
influence to bear on the peasantry. Coercive methods towards the
peasantry will help us little. It is the economic differentiation
of the peasantry that is involved here. Since the overthrow of the
capitalists, the struggle has drawn the workers close together;
they have been cemented by two years of civil war. The peasantry,
on the other hand, is splitting up more and more. The peasants
cannot forget the landowners and capitalists; they remember
them. Nevertheless, the peasantry of today are disunited; the
interests of one section clash with those of another. The
peasantry are not united. For one thing, not every peasant has
food surpluses. There is no such equality. It is nonsense to say
there is. To divide the peasantry and win over the non-kulak
elements will require a lot of time. It will involve a long
struggle, in which we shall employ all our forces, every means at
our disposal. But force alone cannot ensure victory; moral means
must be employed too. And from this follow all the questions of
dictatorial power and individual authority which to many, or to
some at any rate, it may be safely said, appear to have arisen
only out of our recent disputes. But that is a mistake. Compare
the situation with that of 1918. There were no disputes then.

When, after the peace with Germany, the question arose as to
what should be the basis of power, we Communists replied—it
must he made clear that democracy under the Soviet system does not
contradict dictatorship. This was not to the liking of many
leaders of the old International. Even Kautsky cursed me.

The peasants are half labourers and half property-owners, and
in order to win them over to us there must be unity of will, all
must act in unison on every practical issue. Unity of will must
not be a catchword, a symbol. We demand it in practice. This is
how unity of will was expressed during the war—anybody who
placed his own interests (or the interests of his village or
group) above the common interests, was branded as a self-seeker
and was shot; this was justified by the moral consciousness of the
working class that it must achieve victory. We spoke about these
shootings openly; we said that we made no secret of coercion,
because we realised that we could not emerge from the old society
without resorting to compulsion as far as the backward section of
the proletariat was concerned. That is the way unity of will was
expressed, and it was maintained in practice by punishing every
deserter; in every battle and every campaign it was maintained by
the Communists marching in the forefront and setting an
example. The present task is to try to apply this unity of will to
industry and agriculture. We have a territory stretching thousands
of versts and huge numbers of factories. You must realise,
therefore, that we cannot achieve our purpose by force alone; you
must realise what a colossal task confronts us and what unity of
will means today. It is not only a slogan. It must be given
thought, careful thought. It is a slogan that entails prolonged,
day-to-day effort. Take 1918, when there were no such disputes;
even then I pointed to the necessity for individual authority, to
the need to recognise the dictatorial authority of individuals in
order to carry out the Soviet idea. All talk about equality of
rights is nonsense. We are not waging the class struggle on the
basis of equality of rights, nor can we if the proletariat is to
prevail. Prevail it can, because we have hundreds of thousands of
disciplined people expressing a single will; and it can prevail
over the peasantry, which have been dispersed economically, and
which have no common basis such as welds together the proletariat
in the factories and the cities. The peasants are economically
disunited. They are partly property-owners and partly labourers. Property drags them towards capitalism: “The more
profitably I sell, the better.
If they’re starving, I’ll sell at a higher price.” But, as a working man, the peasant knows that he
suffered oppression at the hands of the landowner, from which he
was liberated by the worker. Here we have a conflict of two souls,
resulting from the economic status of the peasantry. These two
souls must be separated one from the other. And we shall win only
when we pursue a firm policy. All working people will always be
working people to us; but as for the peasant proprietors, we have
to fight them. Not only are they always at each other’s
throats, but they are ignorant into the bargain. The gentlemen at
the League of Nations, thank God, are not ignorant; they are
probably better educated than our Mensheviks and
Socialist-Revolutionaries. But what do we find? Japan glorifies
the League of Nations, yet tries to trip up America, and so
on.

They are all at loggerheads, whereas we are united. And that is
why workers in all countries are joining us. Since we have been
able to defeat such enlightened gentlemen as the directors of
international policy, who have so much experience, so much wealth,
and a hundred guns and battleships for every one of ours, it is
absurd to think that we cannot solve the peasant problem. It is
discipline, loyalty, and united will that will win here. The will
of tens and hundreds of thousands of people can be expressed by
one person. This composite will is achieved in the Soviet way. In
no other country have there been so many congresses of peasants
and workers as in ours. That is the way we develop an enlightened
attitude. What the Soviet Constitution gives us no other state has
been able to give in two hundred years. ( Applause. ) To
take only the number of congresses—no other state has summoned so many in a century of democracy. In this way we arrive
at common decisions and mould a common will.

This is the broad way in which our Soviet Constitution, our
Soviet form of government are to he understood. Its effect is that
the decisions of the Soviet government have power of authority
without parallel in the world, the power of the workers and
peasants. But that is not enough for us. We are materialists, and
you cannot satisfy us with power of authority, so please take the
trouble to put it into effect. And here we find the old bourgeois
instinct gaining the upper hand, and we must frankly admit that
it is stronger than we are. The old petty-bourgeois habit of
conducting enterprises on individual lines and trying to
strengthen freedom of trade is stronger than we are.

The trade unions arose out of capitalism as a means developing
the new class. Class is a concept which is evolved in struggle
and development. There is no wall dividing one class from
another. The workers and peasants are not separated by a Chinese
Wall. How did man learn to form associations? First through the
guild, and then according to different trades. Having become a
class, the proletariat grew so strong that it took over the
whole state machine, proclaimed war on the whole world and
emerged victorious. The guilds and craft unions have now become
backward institutions. Time was when the proletarians, under
capitalism amalgamated along the lines of guild and craft. This
was progressive at that time because the proletariat could not
have amalgamated in any other way. It is absurd to say that the
proletariat could have amalgamated to form a class at once. Such
amalgamation requires decades. Marx, more than anybody, fought
such sectarian and short-sighted views. The class grows under
capitalist conditions, and when the suitable moment for
revolution arrives, it takes state power into its own hands. And
then all the guilds and craft unions become obsolete, they play
a backward role, they are retrograde, not because they are run
by bad people, but because bad people and enemies of communism
find in them fertile soil for their propaganda. We are surrounded by the petty bourgeoisie who are reviving freedom of
trade and capitalism. Karl Marx fought vigorously against the
old utopian socialism and advocated the scientific view, which
shows that the class struggle fosters the growth of the class,
and the class must be helped to mature. Marx also fought the
working class leaders who went astray. In the Federal Council,
in 1872, a vote of censure was passed on Marx for saying that
the British leaders had been bribed by the bourgeoisie. Of
course, Marx did not mean this in the sense that certain people
were traitors. That is nonsense. He spoke about a bloc of a
certain section of the workers with the bourgeoisie. The
bourgeoisie supports this section of the workers directly and
indirectly. That is the way in which it bribes them.

As far as getting its representatives elected to parliament
is concerned, the British bourgeoisie has worked miracles, and
excels all others. Marx and Engels exposed the bourgeoisie over a
period of forty years, from 1852 to 1892, and the bourgeoisie acts
in the same way in all countries. The fact that throughout the
world trade unions have passed from the role of slaves to the role
of builders marks a turning-point. We have existed for two years
and what do we see? We see today that the working class has
suffered most from hunger. In 1918 and 1919 the country’s
industrial workers received only seven poods of bread each,
whereas the peasants of the grain-producing gubernias each had
seventeen poods. Under the tsar the peasant used to get sixteen
poods of bread at the best, whereas under our rule he gets
seventeen poods. There is statistical evidence of this. The
proletariat has been hungry for two years but this hunger has
shown that the worker is capable of sacrificing not only his craft
interests, but even his life. The proletariat was able to stand
famine for two years because it had the moral support of all the
labouring folk, and it bore these sacrifices for the sake of the
victory of the workers’ and peasants’ government. It is true that the division of workers according to trade continues,
and that many of these trades were necessary to the capitalist but
are not necessary to us. And we know that the workers in these
trades are suffering more severely from hunger than others. And it
cannot be otherwise. Capitalism has been smashed, but socialism
has not yet been built; and it will take a long time to
build. Here we come up against all sorts of misunderstandings,
which are not fortuitous, but are the result of the difference in
the historical role of the trade unions as an instrument of craft
amalgamation under capitalism and the trade unions as an
instrument of the class amalgamation of the workers after they
have taken over the state power. The workers are prepared to make
any sacrifice; they create the discipline which compels people to
say and feel, perhaps vaguely, that class interests are higher
than craft interests. Workers who are incapable of making such
sacrifices we regard as self-seekers, and we drive them out of the
proletarian fold.

Such was the fundamental question of labour discipline, of
one-man management in a general sense, as discussed by the Party
Congress. That is the gist of the decisions of the Party Congress,
which you are all familiar with and which will be spoken of in
greater detail in special reports. Their meaning is that the
working class has grown and matured; it has taken over the power
and is fighting the whole bourgeois world; and this struggle is
becoming more and more difficult. It was easier to fight in the
war. What is now required is organisation and moral education. Numerically the proletariat in Russia is at present not
very strong. Its ranks have grown thinner during the war and our
very victories have made it harder for us to govern the
country. Both the trade unionists and the masses of the workers
must realise this. When we talk about dictatorship, it is not the
whim of centralists. The regions we have won have greatly enlarged
the territory of Soviet Russia. We have won Siberia, the Don and
the Kuban areas. There the percentage of proletarians is very
small, smaller than it is here. We must go straight to the worker
and tell him frankly that conditions of work have grown more
complicated. We need more discipline, more individual authority
and more dictatorship. Without that, we cannot even dream of a
bigger victory. We have an organised army of three million
members. The 600,000 Communists, the members of the Party, must
act as its vanguard.

But it must be realised that we have no other army with which
to gain a victory than the 600,000 Communists and the three
million trade union members. The acquisition of territories with a
peasant-kulak population demands a new exertion of proletarian
effort. We are faced with a new ratio of proletarian to
non-proletarian masses, of their social and class interests. Nothing can be done here by force alone, organisation
and moral authority are all that is needed. Hence our absolute
conviction, which was expressed by our Party Congress and which I
deem it my duty to uphold. Our chief slogan is—let us have
more one-man management, let get closer to one-man management, let
us have more labour discipline, let us pull ourselves together and
work with military determination, staunchness and loyalty,
brushing aside all group and craft interests, sacrificing all
private interests. We cannot succeed otherwise. But if we carry
out this decision of the Party, carry it out to a man among the
three million workers, and then among the tens of millions of
peasants, who will feel the moral authority and strength of the
people who have sacrificed themselves for the victory of
socialism, we shall be absolutely and completely invincible. ( Stormy applause. )

Endnotes

[1]
The Third All-Russia Trade Union Congress was held in
Moscow April 6-13, 1920, in the House of Trade Unions. It was
attended by nearly 1,600 delegates, who represented over 4 million
trade union members. The Bolsheviks constituted a majority at the
Congress 1,180 delegates were Bolsheviks and their supporters, 57
were Mensheviks, and 69 represented other parties.

The Congress based its work on the programme of economic development mapped out by the Ninth Party Congress. The
agenda included the following items: report on the activities of
the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions, report on the
activities of the People’s Commissariat of Labour, the tasks
of the trade unions, organisational question, tariff policy, the
supply of goods for workers, the role of the trade unions in the
national economy, the international trade union movement, cultural
and educational activities.

At the second plenary meeting of the Congress on April 7 Lenin delivered a speech in the name of the Council of
People’s Commissars. He was greeted with an ovation and the
audience sang the Internationale. He defined the tasks of
the Soviet Republic in peace time and drew attention to the work
of the trade unions in economic development. After Lenin’s
speech the Congress adopted a decision to issue an appeal to the
workers and to all working people generally calling upon them to
combat economic chaos by their joint efforts, to introduce strict
discipline immediately in all trade union organisations and to
intensify the work of drawing the masses in the building of
communism through the medium of the trade unions and under the
guidance of the Communist Party.

The Third All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions fully approved of the decisions of the Ninth Congress of the
R.C.P.(B.) in the sphere of economic development. The Congress
condemned the Mensheviks who advocated the independence of the
trade unions and attempted to oppose them to the Communist
Party.