Everyone agrees that the workers' commissions were an entirely new form of organization, which had no exact precedent in the history of the working-class movement in Europe. But the consensus goes no further than this, and there is little agreement about what the workers' commissions were, or about when or how they began. These basic historical questions remain unsettled partly because there has been a failure to recognize what one rare publication called the ‘diverse modes of their emergence’ (Frères:1969) in different regions of the country, and a corresponding failure to search for what these different styles had in common. This story will take up this search progressively in the different contexts of the commissions' syndical practices of collective bargaining and strikes (Chapter 7), and of their relations with the Communist Party (Chapter 11), with the Vertical Syndicate (Chapter 12), and with their own members and between themselves in this chapter.