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... e workers' revolutionary apprenticeship. The growing number of strikes, their extension and increasing duration pointed towards a possible ' General Strike, that is, to the impending social revolution. Each particular strike was a facsimile in reduced scale of the General Strike, and a preparation for the final insurrection.
The increasing revolutionary will would not be measured by the success or failure of political parties, but by the frequency and vehemence of the strikes. The revolution will have proceeded from action to action in a continuous mixture of spontaneous and organized aspects of the proletariat's struggle for emancipation. Syndicalism and such international offspring as the Guild Socialists in England and the Industrial Workers of the World in the United States were, to some extent, reactions to the increasing bureaucratization of the socialist movement and to its class-collaborationist practices. As marxism was the ideology of the dominant socialist parties, opposition to these organizations and their policies expressed itself as an opposition to marxian theory in its reformist and revisionist versions. The trade unions, too, were attacked for their centralist ic structures and their emphasis upon specific trade interests at the expense of proletarian class needs. But just as the centralism of the marxist ideology did not prevent the emergence of left-wing oppositions within the socialist organizations, so the ideological decentralization of syndicalism could not restrain the emergence of centralist tendencies within the syndicalist movement.
The Guild Socialists sought the conciliation of the two extreme, distancing themselves equally from the localism of French anarcho syndicalism and from the state socialist conceptions of the marxist ideology. The organizations tended to see in their steady growth and everyday activities the most important factors of social change. In the social democratic parties it was the growing membership, the spreading party apparatus, the increasing number of votes in elections and a wider participation in existing political institutions which were thought of as growing into a socialist society. As regards the Industrial Workers of the World, on the other hand, the growth of its own organizations into One Big Union was seen, at the same time, as "forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. " In the first revolution of the 20 th century it was the unorganized mass of workers which determined the character of the revolution and brought into being its own, new form of organization in the spontaneously arising workers and soldiers councils.
The soviet system (4) of the Russian Revolution of 1905 disappeared with the crushing of the revolution, only to return in greater force in the February Revolution of 1917. It was these soviets which inspired the formation similar spontaneous organizations in the German Revolution (5) of 1918 and, to a somewhat lesser extent, the social upheavals in Italy, England, France and Hungary. With the soviet system arose a form of organization which could lead and coordinate the self-activities of the very broad masses for either limited ends or for revolutionary goals, and which could do so independently of, in opposition to, or in collaboration with existing labor organizations. Most importantly, the rise of the council system proved that spontaneous activities need not dissipate in formless mass-exertions but could issue into organizational structures of more than temporary nature. The Russian councils, or soviets, grew out of a series of strikes and from their needs for committees of action and representation to deal with the industries affected as well as with the legal authorities. The strikes, caused by the increasingly intolerable conditions of the working class, were spontaneous in the sense that they were not called by political organizations or trade unions, but were launched by unorganized workers who had no choice but to look upon their workplace as the springboard and center of their organizational efforts.
In the Russia of that time political organizations had as yet no real influence on the mass of workers and the trade unions existed only in embryonic form. In any event, the growth of the socialist organizations and trade unions was to a are extent intensified by the spontaneous strikes and successive uprisings. In essence, of course, the 1905 Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, supported by the liberal middle class, to break Czarist absolutism and to advance Russia via a Constituent Assembly towards the conditions that existed in the more developed capitalist nations. In so far as the striking workers thought in political terms, they largely shared the program of the liberal bourgeoisie.
And so did all existing socialist organizations which accepted the necessity of a bourgeois revolution as a precondition for the formation of a strong labor movement and a future proletarian revolution under more advanced conditions. The soviets were thought of as temporary instruments in the struggle for specific goals of the working class and for a bourgeois democratic society. It was not hoped that they would acquire a permanent character. Beginning in 1906, organizational initiative fell into the hands of the political parties and trade unions. But the experience of 1905 was not lost. The soviets, wrote Trotsky (6) " were the realization of an objective need for an organization which has authority without having tradition, and which can at once embrace hundreds of thousands of workers.
An organization, moreover, which can unify all the revolutionary tendencies within the proletariat, which possesses both initiative and self-control, and, which is the main thing, can be called into existence within 24 hours. " The soviets attracted the most articulate and politically alert workers, and they found support in the socialist organizations and the incipient trade unions. The difference between these traditional organizations and the soviets is explained by this observation by Trotsky, according to whom " the parties were organizations within the proletariat, while the soviets were the organizations of the proletariat. " The Revolution of 1905 invigorated the left-wing opposition in the Socialist parties of the West, but as yet more with respect to the spontaneity of its mass strikes than the organizational form these actions assumed. There were exceptions, however. Anton Pannekoek (7), for example, thought that with the soviets " the passive masses become active and the working class converts itself into an independent organism that achieves its unification...
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