another has illustrated the natural and inevitable development
of Trades Unions inside a revolutionary State
which, like most if not all revolutionary States, is attacked
simultaneously by hostile armies from without and by
economic paralysis from within. The excited and
lighthearted Trades Unionists of three years ago, who
believed that the mere decreeing of "workers' control" would
bring all difficulties automatically to an end, are now
unrecognizable. We have seen illusion after illusion scraped
from them by the pumice-stone of experience, while the
appalling state of the industries which they now largely
control, and the ruin of the country in which they attained
that control, have forced them to alter their immediate aims
to meet immediate dangers, and have accelerated the process
of adaptation made inevitable by their victory.


The process of adaptation has had the natural result of
producing new internal cleavages. Change after change in
their programme and theory of the Russian Trades Unionists
has been due to the pressure of life itself, to the urgency of
struggling against the worsening of conditions already almost
unbearable. It is perfectly natural that those Unions which
hold back from adaptation and resent the changes are
precisely those which, like that of the printers, are not
intimately concerned in any productive process, are
consequently outside the central struggle, and, while feeling
the discomforts of change, do not feel its need.