In this way the trade (industrial or productive) unions effect the closest association between the central organs of State administration, economic life, and the broad masses of the workers.
The first, the most important, function of the industrial (productive) unions is to an ever-increasing degree to ensure that the masses shall participate in the control of economic life. Taking the factory committees as their foundation, and uniting practically all the workers, the industrial (productive) unions must induce more and ever more workers to interest themselves in the organisation of production. Direct practical experience of administrative work is here especially valuable (for example, on the factory committees, in the workers’ factory administrations, in the economic councils, the “chiefs,” etc.). Of great value, likewise, is a special work of enlightenment undertaken by the unions (courses of instruction, etc.).
This introduction of the masses to participation in constructive work is also the best way of counteracting the tendency to bureaucracy in the economic apparatus of the Soviet Power. In places where there are very few workers but a great number of “soviet employees,” bureaucracy is apt to assume formidable proportions. Routinism, red tape, bad manners, slackness, sabotage — there is too much of all these in the economic organisations. We know only one way of getting rid of such abuses, and it is by lifting the lower grades of workers to a higher level. For thus only can be ensured a genuine, popular control of the activities of all our economic institutions.