This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
Saturday, September 27, 2014
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-Italian Poets
Italian War Poetry
This is a contributed item. Please direct your feedback concerning the contents of this item to the author using the e-mail link below. By all means let them know if you find it interesting. They enjoy hearing from you!
Contributed by Michael E. Hanlon. Mike is Website Editor for the ΓΈ The Great War Society. He has written extensively on the Great War and guided tours of the Western Front.
Annotations and biographical sketches have been contributed by Michael E. Hanlon. The translations are from the PENGUIN BOOK OF WORLD WAR I POETRY edited by Jon Silkin.
GIUSEPPE UNGARETTI, 1888-1970
A literary minimalist, Giuseepe Ungaretti is considered by some critics the greatest Italian poet of the 20th Century. He served an infantryman on the lower Isonzo front with the 3rd Army from 1915 until early 1918. In the spring, he was transferred to the Western Front where Italian forces fought with distinction. In his most famous war poem, RIVERS, he alludes to his birth in Egypt, his youth in Tuscany and his service on both fronts during the Great War. Ungaretti's pure style was achieved by condensation to essentials and is in the tradition of the French Symbolists. His works are collected in the 2 volumes of LIFE OF A MAN portions of which are available in English translation.
VIGIL
A whole night long
crouched close
to one of our men
butchered
with his clenched
mouth
grinning at the full moon
with the congestion
of his hands
thrust right
into my silence
I've written
letters filled with love
I have never been
so
coupled to life
Cima Quattro, 23-Dec-1915
BROTHERS
What regiment d'you belong to
brothers?
Word shaking
in the night
Leaf barely born
In the simmering air
involuntary revolt
of the man present at his
brittleness
Brothers
Mariano, 11-Jul-1916
I AM A CREATURE
Like this stone of
San Michele
as cold
as hard
as thoroughly dried
as refractory
as deprived of spirit
Like this stone
is my weeping that can't
be seen
Living
discounts death
Valloncello di Cima Quattro, 5-Aug-1916
SAN MARTINO DEL CARSO
Of these houses
nothing
but fragments of memory
Of all who
would talk with me not
one remains
But in my heart
no one's cross is missing
My heart is
the most tormented country of all
Valloncello dell' Albergo Isolato, 27-Aug-1916
ITALY
I am a poet, a unanimous
cry, am
a cleat of dreams
a fruit
of innumerable conflicting grafts
ripened in the hothouse
But the same earth bears
your people
as carries me
Italy
In this, the uniform
of your soldier, I rest
as if
it were the cradle
of my father
Cease murdering the dead.
If you hope not to perish, if you
Want sound of them again,
Stop crying out, cease
The crying out of it.
They have a barely heard whispering,
No more than the increase of grass,
Happy where no man passes.
RIVERS
This mutilated tree gives
Me support, left in this pot-hole
It has the bitterness of a circus
Before or after the show.
I watch
The quiet passage of
Clouds over the moon.
This morning I stretched
Myself in an urn of water,
Like a relic, and rested.
The Isonzo scoured
Me like
One of its stones.
I pulled my four
limbs together,
And went, like an acrobat,
Over the water.
Crouched by my clothes
Fouled with war, I inclined
My head, like a Bedouin,
To receive the sun.
This is the Isonzo.
And it is there I
Most see myself
In the universe
A compliant
Thread.
My pain is
When I do not believe
Myself in harmony.
But those hidden
Hands give as they knead me
A rare joy.
I have relived
The stages of my life.
The Serchio: from
Which have drawn, perhaps
For two thousand years
My country people, my father,
My mother.
This is the Nile
That has seen me be born,
And grow
And burn in ignorance on
Extending plains.
This is the Seine; and I mingled
In that muddiness learning each
Part of all myself.
These are my rivers confluent
In the Isonzo.
This is my nostalgia
That in each
One shines through me, now
It is night, and my life seems
A budding
Off of shades.
As
The 100th Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End
All Wars) Continues ...
Some Remembrances-Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky On The Anti-War Movement
From War And The International
The events leading up to World War I from the massive
military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in
Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of
the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats
and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the
international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the
approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. The ability
to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first
portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial
might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th
century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow
exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.
The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the
“cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably
except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be
carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy,
or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as
Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan
tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine
warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and
other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can
hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the
losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the
blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not
clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about
calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went
into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do
anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international
conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement
which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg
in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette
in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs,
were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in
this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations
centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments
began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to
clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times,
most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the
decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are
able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my
lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in
its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A
time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to
subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in
1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the
fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one
hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as
the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.
Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th
anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline
post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in
order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle
against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive
struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the
battlefields.
Friday, September 26, 2014
From
The Labor History Archives -In The 80th Anniversary Year Of The
Great San Francisco, Minneapolis And Toledo General Strikes- Lessons In The
History Of Class Struggle
75 years since the San Francisco general strike
By Marge Holland and Robert Louis 18 September 2009
On May 9, 1934, San Francisco longshoremen went out on strike against West Coast ship owners, igniting a movement of 35,000 maritime workers of the International Longshoremen's Association (ILA) that shut down 2,000 miles of Pacific coastline from Bellingham, Washington, to San Diego, California.
Driven by the determination and militancy of the rank and file, this 83-day struggle defied the employers’ Industrial Association of San Francisco, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s federal mediators, the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) union leadership, and culminated in the San Francisco general strike.
The San Francisco strike combined with two other momentous labor struggles in 1934 to alter the American political landscape—the Toledo Auto-Lite strike led by socialists in the American Workers Party, and the Minneapolis truck drivers strike led by Trotskyists in the Communist League of America. These three strikes—which were, in essence, rebellions not only against business interests but also against the business unionism of the AFL—paved the way for the pivotal victories of Detroit auto workers in sit-down strikes led by socialist-minded workers in 1937 and the formation of the mass industrial unions in the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations.)
Background to the strike
The events on the San Francisco waterfront in 1934 were the culmination of years of struggle by maritime workers against the ship owners and business interests grouped in the Industrial Association, which had been founded in 1921 to spearhead the anti-union, open-shop drive in San Francisco.
For more than 14 years, the longshoremen (or stevedores) on the Pacific Coast had been separated by craft unions and individual port agreements. In San Francisco, a company hiring structure prevailed. For workers, this meant poverty wages, unsafe work and irregular employment.
In 1919, the US erupted in the largest strike wave to that point in its history, with nearly four million workers, or one-fifth of the nation’s labor force, walking off their jobs in the course of the year. One of the most electrifying of these struggles was the Seattle general strike of 1919, which proclaimed its solidarity with the Russian Revolution.
For five days, the city was virtually run by the General Strike Committee. In Seattle and San Francisco, dockworkers refused to handle weapons destined for the pro-capitalist and Czarist White Guard forces trying to crush the new workers state. [1]
San Francisco's dockworkers were then organized in the Riggers and Stevedores Association, a loose affiliate of the ILA. In 1919, longshoremen aimed to secure control over the work of loading and unloading. They struck against speed-up, which, combined with automation, made the pace of work unbearable. The men demanded lighter sling loads, an increase in the size of work gangs from twelve to sixteen men, and a share in company ownership.
The strike failed, as did another ILA-led struggle in 1921. A concerted offensive by the ship owners for the open shop followed. The owners formed a business union, the Waterfront Employers Union (WEA), which drove out the ILA and signed a “closed shop” contract, making itself the only union on the docks. It was officially called the Longshoremen’s Association of San Francisco and the Bay District, but to workers it was known as the “Blue Book” union for the color of its dues book.
After its triumph, the WEA signed a five-year agreement that featured a 10 percent wage cut. Speedup continued, and the notorious “shape up” system of casual on-site hiring was introduced. After 1919, only holders of the blue book could get jobs, and the WEA had the power to replace and blacklist workers. Although attempts were made in the 1920s to revive the ILA, the Blue Book dominated the lives of dockworkers for the next 14 years.[2][3]
In 1929, the AFL expelled the ILA-affiliated Riggers and Stevedores Association, in existence since 1853, and allowed the Blue Book “union” to enter the Labor Council.
Militant workers sought out different forms of organization. Among the veterans of the 1919 and 1921 strikes were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), including the future leader of the San Francisco dockworkers, Harry Bridges. The IWW championed revolutionary industrial unionism in opposition to the corrupt AFL craft unions. After the strike defeats, the IWW was able to attract large numbers of seamen and longshoremen away from the AFL.
In April 1923, IWW workers organized in the Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union (MTW) called a general strike that received significant support among Pacific Coast marine, lumber and oil workers, as well as some construction workers. The principal demand was for the “release of class war prisoners,” coupled with separate economic demands for each industry. The IWW strike ultimately failed under the weight of court injunctions, mass arrests of strikers, and vigilantism by the Ku Klux Klan and the American Legion.[4]
By the early 1930s, two factions of the Communist Party began to carry out work among the longshoremen. The CPUSA had little success in an attempt to form an independent union, called the Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU.) The CPUSA was then in its ultra-left “Third Period.” Its unionization effort exhibited little interest in the actual conditions confronting workers, while it dismissed the AFL unions as “social fascist.”
In 1934, a group of Communistsled by Sam Darcy took control of the CPUSA’s newspaper for longshoremen, the Waterfront Worker, making it a voice for industrial unionism. Bridges came under the influence of the CPUSA at this time, likely becoming a member.
The Great Depression was creating conditions favoring the growth of radicalism and militant struggle. According to a “Special Census of Unemployment” in January 1931, the number of unemployed workers in San Francisco increased from 24,467 in 1930 to 46,045 in 1931—a 47 percent increase in one year. From 1929 to 1930, expenditure for relief aid increased by 29.2 percent. However, by 1934 it had increased by 2,308 percent, and the number of families on relief increased 818 percent over 1929. [5]
More than 50 percent of all longshoremen were on the relief rolls. With irregular work, the vast majority of maritime workers were trying to live on an average subsistence wage of $10 a week. [6]
For longshoremen fortunate enough to have retained their jobs, the central grievance remained the “shape up.” At the crack of dawn, rain or shine, men hoping for work would assemble across from the piers on the Embarcadero and wait for the gang bosses to come out and announce how many men they needed and for how long. Sometimes the men would work a whole day, sometimes a few hours, sometimes as many as 24-36 hours straight.
Employment was intermittent, unpredictable and casual. The men were by turns out of work and forced to work long hours without a break. If they complained or got injured, they were fired. These conditions were compounded by bribery and discrimination. Workers who were known to have supported a union were blacklisted on the docks, while those who did favors or kept the gang bosses supplied with liquor were chosen for the best jobs. This condition was the norm up and down the West Coast.
Dock workers were, practically speaking, part-time, casual labor, with no guarantee of a regular wage. There were no regularly enforced safety standards and many men sustained serious, in some cases fatal, injuries.
The strike
In the second half of 1933, over 95 percent of San Francisco dockworkers joined the AFL’s newly revived ILA Local 38-79. This success was repeated up and down the Pacific Coast. However, ship owners refused to recognize the union or negotiate.
In early March 1934, the ILA, under immense rank-and-file pressure, issued a demand that the shape up be abolished and replaced by a union-controlled hiring hall. If the demand was not accepted within two weeks, the San Francisco longshoremen would strike.
In response, the Blue Book WEA made a vague offer to cooperate with the ILA and open a dispatching hall under unspecified control. When the ILA leaders agreed with this proposal, the membership removed the local president for being “too conservative.” [7]
Frightened over the implications of a shutdown of West Coast shipping in the midst of the Depression, Roosevelt on March 23 succeeded in getting the ILA to agree to a strike postponement, which lasted six weeks. This delay gave the ship owners and their allies time to prepare.
Finally, on May 9, 1934, members of the ILA struck up and down the Pacific Coast. Within days, other maritime workers joined the strike. By the middle of May, some 35,000 waterfront workers were off the job, shutting down or limiting traffic at virtually all West Coast ports.
The workers’ central demand remained the union-controlled hiring hall, coupled with a closed shop and a Pacific Coast-wide bargaining agreement. Workers refused to place these issues in the hands of government arbitration. With their own hiring hall, the dockers felt they could achieve more steady, equal hours of work and significant control over the pace of work, which would mean fewer injuries and deaths.
Workers also demanded a six-hour day, a thirty-hour week, and $1 an hour in wages with overtime at $1.50.
To direct the strike, workers set up a Joint Marine Strike Committee composed of ten maritime unions. Harry Bridges, with the support of the CPUSA, was selected chairman. The strike committee insisted that no one would settle and return to work until the main demands of all the maritime crafts were met.
The employers, backed by federal, state and local officials, responded with a campaign of red-baiting and intimidation. They mobilized hundreds of police and thugs to attack the large picket lines. Hundreds of strikebreakers were housed aboard ships moored in the bay, but their usefulness was limited when truck drivers refused to move cargo.
Truck drivers offered critical assistance to the strikers in spite of the Teamsters Union leadership. When a delegation headed by Bridges endeavored to obtain Teamsters consent for bringing this most powerful union into the Joint Marine Strike Committee, Teamsters President Michael Casey refused to even consider it. [8] [9]
The longshoremen faced the behind-the-scenes resistance of their own union leadership. In mid-May, and again in June, the Roosevelt administration's labor mediator, Edward McGrady, concluded sellout deals with ILA national head Joseph Ryan. Both agreements left the issues of wages and hours dependent on arbitration and excluded the demands for a union-controlled hiring hall and closed shop, and a settlement that included all the crafts on strike. [10]
Ryan traveled to San Francisco from New York in an attempt to negotiate a capitulation to the employers independently of the strike committee and the rank and file. On June 16, Ryan and Casey met with the WEA “Blue Book” in Mayor Angelo Rossi’s office and arrived at an agreement that did not support any of the main demands except union recognition. Casey accepted this settlement and offered to resume the movement of cargo from the docks, telling reporters, “Our men will return to work Monday morning [June 18], regardless of what action is taken by the longshoremen at their Sunday meeting.” [11]
Ryan tried to get some of the ports to settle separately. But when he presented his deal to general meetings in the main ports, it was unanimously repudiated. At the San Francisco ratification meeting there was a loud rejection of the agreement and Ryan was booed off the platform. He left town denouncing the workers, declaring, “The [International] Longshoreman’s Association is dominated by the radical elements and Communists… .” [12]
At the end of June, the employers, with tens of millions of dollars of goods piled up on the piers, decided to open the ports by other means.
Bloody Thursday
Policeman attacks worker during the strike.
On July 5, the employers’ Industrial Association ordered strikebreakers to move cargo-laden trucks and railroad cars from the docks to some of the warehouses. One thousand police armed with tear gas, specially-made vomiting gas, revolvers and riot shotguns protected the strikebreakers. Workers responded by organizing about 2,000 pickets to stop the trucks.
July 1934: Police use tear gas as strikers battle police on the Embarcadero. (Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
In the morning hours mounted police charged the pickets and began indiscriminately clubbing people in the crowds and firing tear gas. Workers fought with stones, bricks and railroad spikes and set up barricades, but were dispersed after one-and-a-half hours of street fighting. Then in the afternoon, 5,000 workers gathered and attempted to stop the railway line. This time police responded with gun fire, and pickets were again driven back after a bloody battle. [13]
Two strikers shot by police. Charles Olson on left survived, Howard Sperry, on the right, died.
Near the corner of Steuart and Mission Streets, a plain clothes policeman with a riot gun got out of a radio car and began shooting toward the crowd. Three men were hit as they tried to evade the danger. Charles Olson eventually recovered, but Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise died on the spot. In all, over 100 people were hospitalized. [16]
The funeral march for Howard S. Sperry and Nicholas Bordoise on July 9 was a powerful expression of grief and outrage. As many as 40,000 people marched in respectful silence from the Ferry Building to Valencia Street, a distance of over two miles. Eight abreast, the working men walked slowly, hats off, to Beethoven’s “Funeral March.” They were joined by women and children and the families of the slain.
The killings, and the solemn dignity of the longshoremen’s mourning, created a wave of sympathy for the strikers. It was this, more than anything, that moved the working people of San Francisco to support a general strike.
Silent funeral march of 40,000 for slain workers Howard Sperry and Nick Bordoise.
Writer Tillie Olsen expressed the feeling in an article appearing in the September-October 1934 edition of Partisan Review. “'I saw the people, I saw the look on their faces,” she wrote. “And it is the look that will be there the days of the revolution. I saw the fists clenched till the knuckles were white, and people standing, staring, saying nothing, letting it clamp into their hearts, hurt them so the scar would be there forever—a swelling that would never let them lull.” [14]
The general strike
After the police brutality of Bloody Thursday, the Joint Marine Strike Committee called for a general strike and scores of Bay Area union members voted their support against the wishes of the AFL leadership. At a mass meeting July 12, “Teamsters sang, ‘We’ll hang [Teamsters President] Michael Casey from a sour apple tree,’ and shouted him down when he argued passionately against a strike.” [15]
Sympathy for the strikers was not limited to San Francisco or the West Coast alone. In New York City there was a call for a mass meeting in support of the San Francisco strikers. In Los Angeles every union in the city came out in support of the maritime workers and assessed their members 25 cents each to assist the strikers. The proprietor of a lunch counter declared, “Any of my help don’t walk out, I’ll kick their behinds out the door. That’s where I stand.” [16]
The labor officials, however, did not share this popular feeling.
On July 6, Labor Council President Vandeleur appointed a Strike Strategy Committee of seven—all right-wing bureaucrats headed by himself. The committee excluded all of the striking maritime unions in an attempt to wrest control of the movement from the rank-and-file-dominated ILA. As a maneuver to provide a democratic cover for its hidden agenda, it also formed a General Strike Committee of 50 that included Bridges, but which had no ultimate decision-making power.
The New York Times recognized the essence of the Strike Strategy Committee, headlining its article the next day, “General Walkout Blocked.” In response, Bridges now openly defended the reactionary AFL heads, saying in the next day’s ILA Strike Bulletin, “The Labor Council is definitely behind the marine strike.”[17]
By agreeing that the longshoremen’s Joint Strike Committee would be excluded from the leadership of the mass strike, Bridges effectively turned its control over to the AFL leadership. Months later, James P. Cannon, the leader and founder of the Trotskyist movement in the United States, noted that the general strike had fallen “into the hands of the reactionary officialdom,” who “transformed it into a weapon against the marine workers and against the ‘Reds,’” and then “deliberately broke the general strike and pulled the marine strike down with it.” [18]
Nonetheless, the labor bureaucrats could not hold back the general strike, resisting it “until the momentum of events threatened to overwhelm them.” [19]
National Guard tanks on the waterfront (Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
The San Francisco Labor Council voted on July 14 to “support” the call for a general strike. From July 16 to July 20, the city was shut down as 130,000 workers—including teamster drivers, streetcar men, construction workers and restaurant employees—walked off the job. Workers virtually controlled the city for two days. Many small businesses closed down in support. The nearby cities of Oakland and Berkeley were also at a standstill.
Meanwhile, 4,500 heavily armed National Guard troops were deployed throughout the city. Big business, the newspapers and government officials condemned the longshoremen as dangerous radicals and advocates of violence. National Recovery Administration (NRA) chief, General Hugh Johnson, declared the strike “a bloody insurrection” and called on “responsible” labor organizations to “run these subversive influences out from its ranks like rats.” [20]
National Guard machine gun nest (Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)
A group of publishers led by William Randolph Hearst laid plans to help break the strike. In unison, the newspapers fulminated against the general strike as a “revolution against constituted authority.” Hearst cabled a story from London “about the crushing of the 1926 general strike in England.” [21]
The Hearst propaganda machine failed to convince the workers. According to author Bruce Nelson, “the growing trend in the ranks was to view red-baiting as another in the arsenal of weapons that the employer used to divide and conquer the workers.” [22]
July 15, 1934: General Strike Headline, The San Francisco News Call Bulletin
Supported by the National Guard, the Industrial Association and city hall mobilized right-wing thugs and police dressed as workers. Dozens of armed gangs raided the headquarters of Communist, IWW and relief organizations, destroying furniture, office equipment and literature, and beating up workers. Three hundred workers were jailed. [23]
The most effective weapon against the city’s workers proved to be the AFL-dominated Strike Strategy Committee, which was working behind the scenes to shut the strike down. On July 18 it voted to end the general strike, calling for all the demands to be submitted to federal arbitration.
The next day the Teamsters, after having been threatened by the city government with mass strike-breaking and firings, voted to return to work, further isolating the longshoremen. On July 31, longshoremen ended their strike, submitting the hiring hall demand to arbitration and returning to work without any of the demands of the seamen and other unions having been met.
Aftermath of the strike
In arbitration, the longshoremen won some of their main demands, gaining union recognition and a coast-wide agreement, a 12-percent wage increase from 85 to 95 cents per hour and overtime at $1.45. The workers also acquired a six-hour day at 30 hours per week, with job security and a regular, equal share of the work. The Blue Book company union and the shape-up were abolished.
The National Labor Boardfederal arbitration committee granted the employers the right to continue work speed-up and mechanization to increase profits and compensate for the wage increase. On the key issue of hiring, longshoremen did not win their demand for a strictly union-controlled hiring hall and a closed shop. The hall was to be controlled by a Labor Relations Committee composed of both sides.
However, the settlement ruled that the dispatcher would be an ILA union member, and hiring would generally be determined by a list of registered longshoremen who had been regularly working for at least one year of the last three before the strike began. Union members had preference for hiring over non-union members. Strikebreakers were to be laid off.
Ultimately, the Roosevelt administration concluded it was better to give longshoremen substantial concessions than risk another confrontation at vital West Coast ports.
Yet the subordination of the general strike to the leadership of the AFL, which was supported by Bridges and the local ILA leadership, limited the strike’s effectiveness. Seamen and other unions in the Joint Strike Committee won little besides union recognition. And the strike left intact the power of the ship owners and West Coast business interests.
Later, in 1937, the dockworkers formally seceded from the AFL and joined the newly formed CIO, taking the name International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). In 1950, during the Red Scare, the CIO executive board expelled the entire ILWU from the labor federation, accusing its leadership, particularly Bridges, of being communist. Bridges always denied he was a Communist Party member, although recent archival research in Russia appears to prove that he was.
Like the Toledo Auto-Lite strike and the Minneapolis truck drivers strike, the West Coast longshoremen’s strike was a crucial experience for the working class. These militant struggles provided an impetus for the formation of the mass industrial unions. All three strikes represented a rebellion by workers, under socialist or radical leadership, against the craft union dominated AFL.
Yet ultimately the mass struggles of 1934 and after—which often took on insurrectionary dimensions—were defused by the trade union bureaucracy, the new CIO leadership included, and delivered politically to the Democratic Party.
As in the 1930s, workers today face the necessity of building new organizations. The existing trade unions are integrated into the structure of corporate management and the state, and work to lower the living standards of the working class in the name of competitiveness. Over the past several decades they have worked to hand back all the gains won by workers since the 1930s.
Workers must, and will, fight back, just as they did in 1934. The central lesson of the struggles of the 1930s is the necessity to articulate the independent political interests of the working class. To do so requires the building of an international mass socialist party with deep roots in the working class. Notes:
1. Joshua Freeman et al., Who Built America?: Working People and the Nation’s Economy, Politics, Culture and Society, Vol. 2, ed. Stephen Brier (New York: Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 258-261.
2. Howard Kimeldorf, Reds or Rackets?: The Making of Radical and Conservative Unions on the Waterfront (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 35-36
3. David F. Selvin, A Terrible Anger: The 1934 Waterfront and General Strikes in San Francisco (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996).
4. Bruce Nelson, Workers on the Waterfront: Seamen, Longshoremen, and Unionism in the 1930s (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 61-62.
5. Huntington, Emily H. Unemployment Relief and the Unemployed in San Francisco Bay Region 1929-1934, Heller Committee for Research in Social Economics, (Berkeley, CA: UC Press, 1939), p. 6.
6. “Longshore Labor Conditions and Port Decasualization in the United States,” Monthly Labor Review, December, 1933, quoted in Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles (New York: Monad Press, 1974), p. 328.
7. Jeremy Brecher, Strike (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1972), pp. 150-151.
8. Samuel Yellen, American Labor Struggles (New York: Monad Press, 1974), p. 333.
9. Paul Eliel, The Waterfront and General Strikes San Francisco, 1934: A Brief History. (San Francisco: Hooper Printing Company, 1934), p. 87.
10. S.F. Examiner, June 17, 1934, quoted in Eliel, p. 24.
11. S.F. Examiner, June 17, 1934, quoted in Eliel, pp. 70, 74.
12. Kevin Starr, Endangered Dreams, The Great Depression in California (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 101.
13. Brecher, p. 153.
14. Tillie Olson, Partisan Review, October 1934.
15. Bernstein, Turbulent Years, p. 280, quoted in Brecher, p. 154.
16. Mike Quin, The Big Strike (Olema, California: Olema Publishing Company, 1949), p. 118.
17. Selvin, p. 156.
18. James P. Cannon, “The Strike Wave and the Left Wing,” New International, Vol.1, No.3 September-October 1934, pp. 67-68.
19. Nelson, p. 149.
20. Sidney Lens, The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sitdowns (New York: Doubleday Anchor Press, 1973), p. 300.
21. Yellen, p. 347.
22. Nelson, pp. 145-146.
23. Art Preis, Labor’s Giant Step (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972), 32.
As The 100th Anniversary Of The Beginning of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars) Starts ... Some Remembrances-Russian Revolutionary Leon Trotsky On The Anti-War Movement From War And The International
The events leading up to World War I from the massive military armament of almost all the capitalist and imperialist parties in Europe and elsewhere in order to stake their claims to their unimpeded share of the world’s resources to the supposedly eternal pledges by the Social-Democrats and other militant leftist formations representing the historic interest of the international working-class to stop those parties in their tracks at the approach of war were decisive for 20th century history. The ability to inflict industrial-sized slaughter and mayhem on a massive scale first portended toward the end of the American Civil War once the Northern industrial might tipped the scales their way almost could not be avoided in the early 20th century once the armaments race got serious, and the technology seemed to grow exponentially with each new turn in the war machine.
The land war, the war carried out by the “grunts,” by the “cannon fodder” of many nations was only the tip of the iceberg and probably except for the increased cannon-power and rapidity of the machine-guns would be carried out by the norms of the last war. However the race for naval supremacy, or the race to take a big kink out of British supremacy, went on unimpeded as Germany tried to break-out into the Atlantic world and even Japan, Jesus, Japan tried to gain a big hold in the Asia seas. The deeply disturbing submarine warfare wreaking havoc on commerce on the seas, the use of armed aircraft and other such technological innovations of war only added to the frenzy. We can hundred years ahead, look back and see where talk of “stabs in the back” by the losers and ultimately an armistice rather than decisive victory on the blood-drenched fields of Europe would lead to more blood-letting but it was not clear, or nobody was talking about it much, or, better, doing much about calling a halt before they began among all those “civilized” nations who went into the abyss in July of 1914. Sadly the list of those who would not do anything, anything concrete, besides paper manifestos issued at international conferences, included the great bulk of the official European labor movement which in theory was committed to stopping the madness.
A few voices, voices like Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Lenin and Trotsky in Russia, some anti-war anarchists like Monette in France and here in America Big Bill Haywood and the stalwart Eugene V. Debs, were raised and one hundred years later those voices have a place of honor in this space. Those voices, many of them in exile, or in the deportations centers, were being clamped down as well as the various imperialist governments began closing their doors to political refugees when they were committed to clapping down on their own anti-war citizens. As we have seen in our own times, most recently in America in the period before the “shock and awe” of the decimation of Iraq in 2002 and early 2003 the government, most governments, are able to build a war frenzy out of whole cloth. At those times, and in my lifetime the period after 9/11 when we tried in vain to stop the Afghan war in its tracks is illustrative, to be a vocal anti-warrior is a dicey business. A time to keep your head down a little, to speak softly and wait for the fever to subside and to be ready to begin the anti-war fight another day. So imagine in 1914 when every nationality in Europe felt its prerogatives threatened how the fevered masses would not listen to the calls against the slaughter. Yes, one hundred years later is not too long to honor those ardent anti-war voices as the mass mobilizations began in the countdown to war.
Over the next period as we lead up to the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I and beyond I will under this headline post various documents, manifestos and cultural expressions from that time in order to give a sense of what the lead up to that war looked like, the struggle against its outbreak before, the forlorn struggle during and the massive struggles in order to create a newer world out of the shambles of the battlefields.
CHAPTER VIII
SOCIALIST OPPORTUNISM
The Communist Manifesto written in 1847, closes with the words: “Workingmen of all countries, unite!” But this battle cry came too early to become a living actuality at once. The historical order of the day just then was the middle class revolution of 1848. And in this revolution the part that fell to the authors of the Manifesto themselves was not that of leaders of an international proletariat, but of fighters on the extreme left of the national Democracy.
The revolution of 1848 did not solve a single one of the national problems; it merely revealed them. The counter-revolution, along with the great industrial development that then took place, broke off the thread of the revolutionary movement. Another century of peace went by until recently the antagonisms that had not been removed by the revolution demanded the intervention of the sword. This time it was not the sword of the revolution, fallen from the hands of the middle class, but the militaristic sword of war drawn from a dynastic scabbard. The wars of 1859, 1864, 1866 and 1870 created a new Italy and a new Germany. The feudal caste fulfilled, in their own way, the heritage of the revolution of 1848. The political bankruptcy of the middle class, which expressed itself in this historic interchange of roles, became a direct stimulus to an independent proletarian movement based on the rapid development of capitalism…
In 1863 Lassalle founded the first political labour union in Germany. [36] In 1864 the First International was formed in London under the guidance of Karl Marx. The closing watchword of the Manifesto was taken up and used in the first circular issued by the International Association of Workingmen. It is most characteristic for the tendencies of the modern labour movement that its first organization had an international character. Nevertheless this organization was an anticipation of the future needs of the movement rather than a real steering instrument in the class struggle. There was still a wide gulf between the ultimate goal of the International, the communist revolution, and its immediate activities, which took the form mainly of international cooperation in the chaotic strike movement of the workers in various countries. Even the founders of the International hoped that the revolutionary march of events would very soon overcome the contradiction between ideology and practice. While the General Council was giving money to aid groups of strikers in England and on the Continent, it was at the same time making classic attempts to harmonize the conduct of the workers in all countries in the field of world politics.
But these endeavours did not as yet have a sufficient material foundation. The activity of the First International coincided with that period of wars which opened the way for capitalist development in Europe and North America. In spite of its doctrinal and educational importance, the attempts of the International to mingle in world politics must all the more clearly have shown the advanced workingmen of all countries their impotence as against the national class state. The Paris Commune, flaring up out of the war, was the culmination of the First International. [37] Just as the Communist Manifesto was the theoretical anticipation of the modern labour movement, and the First International was the practical anticipation of the labour associations of the world, so the Paris Commune was the revolutionary anticipation of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
But only an anticipation, nothing more. And for that very reason it was clear that it is impossible for the proletariat to overthrow the machinery of state and reconstruct society by nothing but revolutionary improvizations. The national states that emerged from the wars created the one real foundation for this historical work, the national foundation. Therefore, the proletariat must go through the school of self-education.
The First International fulfilled its mission of a nursery for the National Socialist Parties. After the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, the International dragged along a moribund exist encefor a few years more and in 1872 was transplanted to America, to which various religious, social and other experiments had often wandered before, to die there.
Then began the period of prodigious capitalist development, on the foundation of the national state. For the labour movement this was the period of the gradual gathering of strength, of the development of organization, and of political possibilism, or opportunism.
In England the stormy period of Chartism [38], that revolutionary awakening of the English proletariat, had completely exhausted itself ten years before the birth of the First International. The repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) and the subsequent industrial prosperity that made England the workshop of the world, the establishment of the ten-hour working day (1847), the increase of emigration from Ireland to America, and the enfranchisement of the workers in the cities (1867), all these circumstances, which considerably improved the lot of the upper strata of the proletariat, led the class movement in England into the peaceful waters of trade unionism and its supplemental liberal labour policies.
The period of possibilism, that is, of the conscious, systematic adaptation to the economic, legal, and state forms of national capitalism, began for the English proletariat, the oldest of the brothers, even before the birth of the International, and twenty years earlier than for the continental proletariat. If nevertheless the big English unions joined the International at first, it was only because it afforded them protection against the importation of strike breakers in wage disputes. [39]
The French labour movement recovered but slowly from the loss of blood in the Commune, on the soil of a retarded industrial growth, and in a nationalistic atmosphere of the most noxious greed for “revenge”. Wavering between an anarchistic “denial” of the state and a vulgar-democratic capitulation to it, the French proletarian movement developed by adaptation to the social and political framework of the bourgeois republic.
As Marx had already foreseen in 1870, the center of gravity of the Socialist movement shifted to Germany.
After the Franco-Prussian War, unified Germany entered upon an era similar to the one England had passed through in the twenty years previous: an era of capitalist prospenty, of democratic franchise, of a higher standard of living for the upper strata of the proletariat.
Theoretically the German labour movement marched under the banner of Marxism. Still in its dependence on the conditions of the period, Marxism became for the German proletariat not the algebraic formula of the revolution that it was at the beginning, but the theoretic method for adaptation to a national-capitalist state crowned with the “Prussian helmet”. Capitalism, which had achieved a temporary equilibrium, continually revolutionized the economic foundation of national life. To preserve the power that had resulted from the Franco-Prussian War, it was necessary to increase the standing army. The middle class had ceded all its political positions to the feudal monarchy, but had intrenched itself all the more energetically in its economic positions under the protection of the militaristic police state. The main currents of the last period, covering forty-five years, are: victorious capitalism, militarism erected on a capitalist foundation, a political reaction resulting from the intergrowth of feudal and capitalist classes – a revolutionizing of the economic life, and a complete abandonment of revolutionary methods and traditions in political life. The entire activity of the German Social Democracy was directed towards the awakening of the backward workers, through a systematic fight for their most immediate needs – the gathering of strength, the increase of membership, the filling of the treasury, the development of the press, the conquest of all the positions that presented themselves, their utilization and expansion. This was the great historical work of the awakening and educating of the “unhistorical” class.
The great centralized trade unions of Germany developed in direct dependence upon the development of national industry, adapting themselves to its successes in the home and the foreign markets, and controlling the prices of raw materials and manufactured products. Localized in political districts to adapt itself to the election laws and stretching feelers in all cities and rural communities, the Social Democracy built up the unique structure of the political organization of the German proletariat with its many-branched bureaucratic hierarchy, its one million dues-paying members, its four million voters, ninety-one daily papers and sixty-five party printing presses. This whole many-sided activity, of immeasurable historical importance, was permeated through and through with the spirit of possibilism.
In forty-five years history did not offer the German proletariat a single opportunity to remove an obstacle by a stormy attack, or to capture any hostile position in a revolutionary advance. As a result of the mutual relation of social forces, it was constrained to avoid obstacles or adapt itself to them. In this, Marxism as a theory was a valuable tool for political guidance, but it could not change the opportunist character of the class movement, which in essence was at that time alike in England, France and Germany. For all the undisputed superiority of the German organization, the tactics of the unions were very much the same in Berlin and London. Their chief achievement was the system of tariff treaties. In the political field the difference was much greater and deeper. While the English proletariat were marching under the banner of Liberalism, the German workers formed an independent party with a Socialist platform. Yet this difference does not go nearly as deep in politics as it does in ideologic forms and the forms of organization.
Through the pressure that English labour exerted on the Liberal Party it achieved certain limited political victories, the extension of suffrage, freedom to unionize, and social legislation. The same was preserved or improved by the German proletariat through its independent party, which it was obliged to form because of the speedy capitulation of German liberalism. And yet this party, while in principle fighting the battle for political power, was compelled in actual practice to adapt itself to the ruling power, to protect the labour movement against the blows of this power, and to achieve a few reforms. In other words: on account of the difference in historical traditions and political conditions, the English proletariat adapted itself to the capitalist state through the medium of the Liberal Party; while the German proletariat was forced to form a party of its own to achieve the very same political ends. And the political struggle of the German proletariat in this entire period had the same opportunist character limited by historical conditions as did that of the English proletariat.
The similarity of these two phenomena so different in their forms comes out most clearly in the final results at the close of the period. The English proletariat in the struggle to meet its daily issues was forced to form an independent party of its own, without, however, breaking with its liberal traditions; and the party of the German proletariat, when the War forced upon it the necessity of a decisive choice, gave an answer in the spirit of the national-liberal traditions of the English labour party.
Marxism, of course, was not merely something accidental or insignificant in the German labour movement Yet there would be no basis for deducing the social-revolutionary character of the party from its official Marxist ideology.
Ideology is an important, but not a decisive factor in politics. Its role is that of waiting on politics. That deep-seated contradiction, which was inherent in the awakening revolutionary class on account of its relation to the feudal-reactionary state, demanded an irreconcilable ideology which would bring the whole movement under the banner of social revolutionary aims. Since historical conditions forced opportunist tactics, the irreconcilability of the proletarian class found expression in the revolutionary formulas of Marxism. Theoretically, Marxism reconciled with perfect success the contradiction between reform and revolution. Yet the process of historical development is something far more involved than theorizing in the realm of pure thought. The fact that the class which was revolutionary in its tendencies was forced for several decades to adapt itself to the monarchical police state, based on the tremendous capitalist development of the country, in the course of which adaptation an organization of a million members was built up and a labour bureaucracy which led the entire movement was educated – this fact does not cease to exist and does not lose its weighty significance because Marxism anticipated the revolutionary character of the future movement. Only the most naive ideology could give the same place to this forecast that it does to the political actualities of the German labour movement.
The German Revisionists were influenced in their conduct by the contradiction between the reform practice of the party and its revolutionary theories. They did not understand that this contradiction is conditioned by temporary, even if long-lasting circumstances and that it can only be overcome by further social development. To them it was a logical contradiction. The mistake of the Revisionists was not that they confirmed the reformist character of the party’s tactics in the past, but that they wanted to perpetuate reformism theoretically and make it the only method of the proletarian class struggle. Thus, the Revisionists failed to take into account the objective tendencies of capitalist development, which by deepening class distinctions must lead to the Social Revolution a the one way to the emancipation of the proletariat. Marxism emerged from this theoretical dispute as the victor all along the line. But Revisionism, although defeated on the field of theory, continued to live, drawing sustenance from the actual conduct and the psychology of the whole movement. The critical refutation of Revisionism as a theory by no means signified its defeat tactically and psychologically. The parliamentarians, the unionists, the comrades continued to live and to work in the atmosphere of general opportunism, of practical specializing and of nationalistic narrowness. Reformism made its impress even upon the mind of August Bebel, the greatest representative of this period.
The spirit of opportunism must have taken a particularly strong hold on the generation that came into the party in the eighties, in the time of Bismarck’s anti-Socialist laws and of oppressive reaction all over Europe. Lacking the apostolic zeal of the generation that was connected with the First International, hindered in its first steps by the power of victorious imperialism, forced to adapt itself to the traps and snares of the anti-Socialist laws, this generation grew up in the spirit of moderation and constitutional distrust of revolution. They are now men of fifty to sixty years old, and they are the very ones who are now at the head of the unions and the political organizations. Reformism is their political psychology, if not also their doctrine. The gradual growing into Socialism – that is the basis of Revisionisin – proved to be the most miserable Utopian dream in face of the facts of capitalist development. But the gradual political growth of the Social Democracy into the mechanism of the national state has turned out to be a tragic actuality – for the entire race.
The Russian Revolution was the first great event to bring a fresh whiff into the stale atmosphere of Europe in the thirty five years since the Paris Commune. The rapid development of the Russian working class and the unexpected strength of their concentrated revolutionary activity made a great impression on the entire civilized world and gave an impetus everywhere to the sharpening of political differences. In England the Russian Revolution hastened the formation of an independent labour party. In Austria, thanks to special circumstances, it led to universal manhood suffrage. In France the echo of the Russian Revolution took the form of Syndicalism, which gave expression, in inadequate practical and theoretical form, to the awakened revolutionary tendencies of the French proletariat. And in Germany the influence of the Russian Revolution showed itself in the strengthening of the young Left wing of the party, in the rapprochement of the leading Centre to it, and in the isolation of Revisionism. The question of the Prussian franchise, this key to the political position of Junkerdom, took on a keener edge. And the party adopted in principle the revolutionary method of the general strike. But all this external shaking up proved inadequate to shove the party on to the road of the political offensive. In accordance with the party tradition, the turn toward radicalism found expression in discussions and the adoption of resolutions. That was as far as it ever went.
Poet's Corner -T.S. Eliot-The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock- In Honor Of Eliot' Birthday
As The 100th
Anniversary Of The First Year Of World War I (Remember The War To End All Wars)
Continues ... Some Remembrances-Poet’s Corner-German Poets
Argonne Forest, at midnight
A sapper's song from the World War, 1915
Argonne Forest, at midnight,
A sapper atands on guard.
A star shines high up in the sky,
bringing greetings from a distant homeland.
And with a spade in his hand,
He waits forward in the sap-trench.
He thinks with longing on his love,
Wondering if he will ever see her again.
The artillery roars like thunder,
While we wait in front of the infantry,
With shells crashing all around.
The Frenchies want to take our position.
Should the enemy threaten us even more,
We Germans fear him no more.
And should he be so strong,
He will not take our position.
The storm breaks! The mortar crashes!
The sapper begins his advance.
Forward to the enemy trenches,
There he pulls the pin on a grenade.
The infantry stand in wait,
Until the hand grenade explodes.
Then forward with the assault against the enemy,
And with a shout, break into their position.
Argonne Forest, Argonne Forest,
Soon thou willt be a quiet cemetary.
In thy cool earth rests
much gallant soldiers' blood.
CIW joins over 300,000 in People’s Climate March in advance of Clinton Global Citizen Award
ceremony…
As we wait for tonight’s Clinton Global Citizen Award ceremony to
get underway, here is a quick dispatch from the streets of New York!
This afternoon, over a dozen CIW members joined people from all over
the globe — New York families, Superstorm Sandy survivors, indigenous groups,
Chinese farmworkers, and everyone in between — in what is being called “the
largest march against climate change in the history of the planet.” Organizers
estimate that a record-breaking 310,000 individuals came out to join the
People’s Climate March, filling the city’s streets from the heights of Central
Park down to lower Manhattan.
The experience spurred this powerful reflection from CIW’s Lupe
Gonzalo:
As farmworkers, we are deeply affected by climate change and
environmental degradation. First, it affects our work — extreme temperatures
and other impacts of climate change have a direct impact on farmworkers.
Second, and most importantly, we are all connected. We all must fight for a
better future, and in order for us to leave a better world for our children, we
must have clean air, clean water, and sustainable energy. It is time the major
corporations contributing to climate change to take responsibility for their
actions
Tapped
When: Thursday, October 2, 2014, 6:45 pm to 9:00 pm
Where: Central Square Library • 45 Pearl
St • Central T • Cambridge
First Thursday Documentary
Films SPECIAL FEATURE - TAPPED
Because of the urgency of the times, we begin our program with a discussion
and short video by Brave New Films. It examines the escalation of war on ISIS
which could lead us into another quagmire and fuel hatred against the U.S. It
illustrates how our tactics have failed so far and questions why we are doing
more of the same failed approach.
TAPPED
"With style, verve and righteous anger, the film
exposes the bottled water industry's role in suckering the public, harming our
health, accelerating climate change, contributing to overall pollution, and
increasing America's dependence on fossil fuels. All the while gouging
consumers with exorbitant and indefensible prices." --Peter
Rothberg, The
Nation
Parking nearby in Municipal garage on Green Street
Sponsored by
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom & The Cambridge
Peace Commission
When: Thursday, October 2, 2014, 6:45 pm to 9:00 pm
