Thus the foundation of the factory cell must definitely be the workshop of dept. cell. The general factory cell can work well only when it has strong support points in the workshops and separate departments.
The most important task of the shop cell is to concentrate the non-Party active workers in the shop compactly around itself. To organize the shop, the dept.--this is the task of the shop cell, so that every shop of a factory may act as an organized force. How can this be done? It can be done only provided the shop cell works on the foundation of the defense of the everyday interests of the working class, that every Communist in every shop organizes the mass of the workers of that shop around every question of everyday struggle of the working class. For example, there is a foreman in the shop who behaves very roughly to the workers. The cell must organize the whole mass of the workers around the demand that this foreman should be dismissed. The cell should create a committee of action, organize elections of shop stewards who should be delegate-representatives of all the workers in the shop, in order to effect the driving out of the foreman. Active Communists among these shop stewards should form the leading core, but non-Party workers who are respected by the mass of the workers, should also be drawn in, including even individual Social-Democratic workers who have declared their readiness to fight for the removal of this foreman, in spite of all orders and threats from their leaders. If the shop cell succeeds in creating such a directing center around concrete tasks affecting the interests of all the workers of the factory, then we can say that this shop cell has worked well: it has become the revolutionary leader of the workers of a given shop. A cell which is every day closely bound up with the working masses on questions of the defense of their closest interests and which enjoys the full confidence of the workers in the cause of the defense of their interest, will retain that confidence in the future, in more responsible actions and at most responsible moments of the struggle for power.
The question of the creation of such support points for revolutionary class struggle in the shops and also on a general factory scale is the most important question in the work of our factory cells. In the first place the question of the so-called revolutionary shop stewards is bound up with this. This slogan was issued by the Communist Party of Germany in 1929. At present it is extremely real for all capitalist countries. Revolutionary shop stewards--that means those workers elected by the revolutionary section of the workers of the factory at their workshop of general factory meetings, who are the organizers of the united front from below in the struggle for the defense of the closest interests of the workers of the given factory against the attacks of the employers and against the leaders of the Social Democratic and reformist trade unions.