ABSTRACT
The Trade Union movement thus makes in practice its compromise between the rival notions of its purpose. As against the idea of Trade Unionism must be set another, which exists especially among skilled workers following a definite craft and among professional and other non-manual workers who enjoy some superiority of status or income. There are, however, certain large groups of workers who, driven imperatively to organise by the conditions under which they work, are prevented from creating craft unions of the familiar monopolistic type. Most prominent among these groups are the miners, among whom the skilled and the unskilled cannot easily be marked off into distinct classes, so as to enable the skilled men to build up monopolistic combinations apart from the main body. The class-conscious revolutionary may say that it does not matter much what wages and conditions are granted under capitalism, and that Trade Union policy should always be governed by the necessity of advancing the social revolution.
