# Article One
Source: PSS, Volume 32

Before the All‑Russia Conference of Trade Unions now in session in Petrograd{127}, one question of paramount importance must be brought to the forefront: the question of establishing a nationwide union of rural workers.

All classes in Russia are organizing themselves. Yet the class most exploited, the poorest of all, the most fragmented and oppressed—the class of agricultural wage laborers in Russia—seems to have been all but forgotten. In certain non-Russian border regions, such as the Latvian region, organizations of agricultural wage laborers do exist. But in the vast majority of Great Russian and Ukrainian guberniyas, no class-based organizations of rural proletarians have yet been formed.

The greatest and most unshakable duty of the vanguard of Russia’s proletariat—the trade unions of industrial workers—is to come to the aid of their brethren, the rural workers. The challenges involved in organizing rural workers are immense—and this is abundantly clear; the experience of all capitalist countries bears this out.

All the more reason, then, to seize upon political freedom in Russia with the utmost urgency and energy, and to immediately establish a nationwide union of rural workers. It is precisely the Conference of Trade Unions that can—and must—take this step. It is the more experienced, more advanced, more conscious representatives of the proletariat, gathered here at this conference, who can—and must—issue the call to rural workers, inviting them to join the ranks of the self‑organizing proletariat, to become part of their own trade unions. It is the factory wage laborers who must take the lead, harnessing the scattered cells, groups, and branches of trade unions across Russia, in order to awaken the rural worker to an independent life, to active participation in the struggle to improve his lot, and to the steadfast defense of his class interests.

Many may well think—and indeed, this may even prove to be the prevailing view at present—that precisely now, when the peasantry is organizing itself throughout Russia, proclaiming the abolition of private ownership of land and the “equal” use of land, the formation of a trade union of rural workers is untimely.

On the contrary: it is precisely at such a moment that it becomes especially timely and urgently necessary. For those who stand on a class‑proletarian standpoint, there can be no doubt about the correctness of the principle adopted at the Stockholm Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1906 by the Mensheviks, at the initiative of the Bolsheviks, and which has since been enshrined in the program of the RSDLP. This principle states:

“In all cases and under every conceivable circumstance of democratic agrarian reform, the Party’s task is to strive unswervingly toward the independent class organization of the rural proletariat, to explain to it the irreconcilable antagonism between its own interests and those of the peasant bourgeoisie, to warn it against being deluded by the system of small-scale farming—which, so long as commodity production persists, can never succeed in eradicating the poverty of the masses—and, finally, to point out the necessity of a complete socialist revolution as the sole means of abolishing all poverty and all exploitation.”

There is not a single conscious worker, not a single member of the trade unions, who would not recognize the soundness of these principles. To put them into practice—especially when it comes to the independent class organization of the rural proletariat—is precisely the task of the trade unions.

We hope that precisely in this revolutionary period, when among the working masses in general, and among workers in particular, there is a vibrant desire to assert themselves, to forge their own path, to refuse to allow life to be reshaped without the workers themselves taking independent decisions on matters of labor—precisely at such a time, the trade unions will not confine themselves to narrow shop-floor interests, nor will they forget their weaker brethren, the rural workers; rather, they will come to their aid with full vigor, founding the Union of Rural Workers of Russia.

In our next article, we shall endeavor to outline certain practical steps in this direction.