PRINCIPLES 0 AND PRACTICE that this knowledge must be acquired by the workers ·before the revolution· if the latter is to accomplish its purposes. That is why the shop and factory committee, dealt with in the previous chapter, are so important and will play such a decisive role in the revolutionary re-construction. . For a new society is not born suddenly, any more than a child is. New social life gestates in the body of the old just as new individual life does in the mother's womb. Time and certain processes are required to develop it till it becomes a complete organism capable of functioning. When that stage has been reached birth takes place in agony and pain, socially as in9ividually. Revolution, to use a trite but expressive saying, is the midwife of the new social being. 'That is true in the most literal sense. Capitalism is the parent of the new society; the shop and factory committee, the union of class-conscious labour and revolutionary aims, is the germ of the new life.. In that shop committee and ,uriion the worker must acquire thl~nowledge of how to manage his affairs : in the process he will grow to the ·perception that social life is a matter of proper organisation, of united effort, of solidarity. He. will come to understand that it is not -the bossing and ruling of men but free association and harmonious working together which accomplish things; that it is not government and laws which produce and create, make the wheat grow and the wheels turn, but concord and co-operation. Experience will teach him to substitute the management of things in place of the government of men. · In the daily life and struggles of his shop-committee the worker must learn how to conduct the revolution: Shop and factory' committees, organised locally, by district, region, and State, and federated nationally, will be the bodies best suited to carry on revolutionary production. Local and State labour councils, federated nationally, will be the form of organisation most a<lapted tcimanage distribution by means of the people's co-operatives.. · · These committees, elected by_ the workers on the job, connect their shop and factory with other shops and .factories of the same industry. The Joint Council of an entire industry links that industry with other industries, and thus is formed a federation of labour councils for the entire country. C?·Operative associations are the mediums of exchange between the countr.y and city. The farmers, organised locally and federated regionally and nationally, supply the needs of the cities by means of the co-ooeratives and receive through the latter in exchange the products of the city industries. 79 B1blloteca G no Bianco
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