V. I. Lenin

To the First International Conference of

Communist Co-Operators[1]


Written: 2 November, 1922
First Published: Pravda No. 249, November 3, 1922; Published according to the newspaper text
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 33, page 398
Translated: David Skvirsky and George Hanna
Transcription\HTML Markup: David Walters & R. Cymbala
Copyleft: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License


I welcome the very timely convocation of the International Conference of Communist Co-operators and wish you every success in your work.

Like the delegates at the conference, I fully appreciate the complexity and difficulty of the task you have under-taken, that of capturing the machinery of the co-operative movement in order to further the world revolution.

I shall be very glad if the experience we have gained in our work in Russia can be of use to the common cause.


Endnotes

[1] The First International Conference of Communist Co-operators took place in Moscow on November 1-6, 1922. It was attended by rep-resentatives from Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Bul-garia, Denmark, Estonia, the Far Eastern Republic, Finland, France, Georgia. Germany, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, the R.S.F.S.R., Sweden, Switzerland and the Ukraine.

The cardinal question before the conferehce was that of the tactics of Communists in the co-operative movement. The resolution adopted by the conference rejected the principle that co- operatives should be neutral in politics and underlined the need for establishing a close bond between co-operative work end the political and economic tasks of the proletariat, and for carrying on this work in closer co-operation with Communist Parties and revolutionary trade unions. The conference elected Lenin its honorary chairman and sent him greetings. Lenin’s greetings in reply were read on November 2, 1922.