through the crisis, and that if the Trades Unions were for
such academic reasons to insist on their complete
independence instead of in every possible way collaborating
with the Government, they would be not only increasing the
difficulties of the revolution in its economic crisis, but
actually hastening that change which the Mensheviks,
though they regard it as inevitable, cannot be supposed to
desire. This Menshevik opposition is strongest in the
Ukraine. Its strength may be judged from the figures of the
Congress in Moscow this spring when, of 1,300 delegates,
over 1,000 were Communists or sympathizers with them; 63
were Mensheviks and 200 were non-party, the bulk of whom,
I fancy, on this point would agree with the Mensheviks.


But apart from opposition to the "stratification" of the
Trades Unions, there is a cleavage cutting across the
Communist Party itself and uniting in opinion, though not in
voting, the Mensheviks and a section of their Communist
opponents. This cleavage is over the question of "workers'
control." Most of those who, before the revolution, looked
forward to the "workers' control", thought of it as meaning
that the actual workers in a given factory would themselves
control that factory, just as a board of directors controls a
factory under the ordinary capitalist system. The
Communists, I think, even today admit the ultimate
desirability of this, but insist that the important question is
not who shall give the orders, but in whose interest the
orders shall be given. I have nowhere found this matter