Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Newsreel Footage Of The 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite Strike
Commentary
This year marks the 75th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.
*****
Guest Commentary
Toledo Auto-Lite Strike
Below is a speech given by Ted Selander on June 3, 1984 at an anniversary celebration of the 1934 Toledo Auto-Lite strike. Selander was a participant in the historic strike, the leadership of which shortly afterwards joined the Trotskyist movement. This article is reprinted from the March 1986 issue of Socialist Action newspaper. An expanded version appeared in the July 1984 issues.
Brothers and sisters, the key to an understanding of the magnificent Auto-Lite strike in 1934 is that it was a strike won on the picket line by a community uprising. I repeat: on the picket line by a community uprising.
Toledo was in the grip of a tremendous popular upsurge of anger at the greedy bosses who have to give their wage slaves a few cents more in their pay.
This was 1934 B.T. – B.T. meaning before television. As a matter of fact, it was before all the social gains when we fought for and won in the ‘30s – before unemployment pay, before food stamps, before social security, before the CIO, and before Medicare, etc.
After four years of depression, the Toledo workers were in an angry mood because of the bank failures, the idle factories, the over-stocked granaries, and the 15 million unemployed. For four years we had poverty in the midst of plenty. Even the establishment was losing confidence in themselves and their system.
Rank and file muzzled
I don’t think (as James P. Cannon once pointed out) there was any real difference between the Toledo Auto-Lite strikers and the workers involved in many of the lost strikes in the United States at that time. In practically every strike, the rank and file always displayed courage. The difference was in the leadership and their strategy and tactics. In nearly every strike the militancy of the rank and file was muzzled, many times snuffed out from the top.
The leaders are tricked by the courts, the labor boards, the mediators, the government, and the media to shift the fight from the picket line to the court and conference room. But all the while, the company keeps hiring scabs to take the strikers’ jobs.
In the Auto-Lite strike, the company was hiring scabs by the hundreds and claimed they now had 1800 workers. We understood what was happening. We knew that the strike was dying and doomed. Only some bold, dramatic action could revive it, and even then it would have to be followed up with plenty of action and support to give the company an all-out fight. And nothing short of an all-out fight would do.
As you probably know, we wrote a public letter to Judge Stuart telling him that we were going to violate his anti-labor injunction and call for mass picketing. By mass picketing we didn’t mean a few hundred, we meant thousands. Could we get thousands down to that picket line? Well, that was the $64 question.
We had spent the previous year organizing what some qualified observer said was the largest and most militant unemployed organization in the country – the Lucas County Unemployed League. We had held meetings and spoke in every section of the city and in the townships; organized countless marches, demonstrations, sit-ins; stopped evictions; won cash relief with a relief strike; and had held many, many other actions.
Because of this vast experience, we felt sure that we knew the temper of the Toledo workers. We felt we had a good chance to be the fuse that could ignite a spirit of solidarity with the Auto-Lite strikers to get union recognition and perhaps even win the first union contract in the auto plants of Toledo.
Workers violate injunction
On the first day that we violated the injunction, our mass picket line consisted of four individuals. That’s right – just four. We were arrested, jailed, convicted and let out on bail and warned not to return to the picket line. But we told the judge that we were going back. And we did – picking up some 50 pickets on the way.
After that, there were a series of arrests, each one with a greater amount of pickets – first 46, then 108, and in between many smaller numbers. Every time we went back from the courts and jail, the picket lines kept growing steadily until on May 23 there were 10,000 reported on the street in front of the plant.
Now when you have a mass picket line of thousands, it enables you to counter the company’s offensive moves. For example, they brought out a high-pressure hose and turned a stream of water on us. But it didn’t take very long for a couple of hundred pickets to take the hose away and turn the water on them.
Many times the police and deputies brutally clubbed the pickets; but before they could shove them into a patrol wagon enough pickets rushed in and grabbed the pickets away and often gave the cops a taste of their own clubs.
You know that every good union has two educational committees: one to arrange lectures of all kinds and the other to educate scabs who won’t attend classes.
Half the employees at the Auto-Lite were women who were among the very best strikers we had. A couple of days after the National Guard came in, the women grabbed a scab, took him into an alley, and stripped every bit of clothing off of him except his tie and shoes. Then they marched him, naked as a jaybird, up and down the downtown streets.
Next day the papers carried a large picture of him on the front page, but they had their artist broaden and lengthen the tie to hid the family jewels. You can bet that picture discouraged a lot of scabs, but it got a big round of applause from the unionists in Ohio.
Strikers fight National Guard
The Auto-Lite strikers battled first the police, then the company guards and deputies, and finally the National Guard. The first day the Guard came in they fired without warning at the unarmed strikers, killing two and wounding 25.
After those murders, the enraged strikers fought the guard for six days and nights – returning again and again to face tear gas and vomit gas, bayonet charges, and even rifle fire.
During the lulls in the battle, we stood on boxes educating the guardsmen about the issues in the strike and how they were being used against the workers. By the way, the casualties were not all one-sided. The hospitals were patching up not only strikers but police, deputies, and the National Guardsmen.
On June 4, the company surrendered and signed on the dotted line a union contract giving the strikers priority on jobs, a 5-percent wage increase, and other concessions; agreed to withdraw all court charges and to pay all court costs. The logjam in Toledo had finally been broken, and 19 auto plants were organized before the year ended. The road was cleared to make Toledo a union town.
As a participant in the Auto-Lite strike of 1934, I appreciate this opportunity to join with you in this 50th anniversary celebration. It is a credit to all of you who organized this anniversary to keep alive the memory of labor’s untapped strength as demonstrated in the Auto-Lite strike and all the other battles which prove that in unions we are strong.
Below is the letter that the Auto-Lite strikers sent to Judge R.R. Stuart to inform him of their intention to violate his injunctions against picketing.
May 5, 1934
His Honor Judge Stuart
County Court House
Toledo, Ohio
Honorable Judge Stuart:
On Monday morning May 7, at the Auto-Lite plant, the Lucas County Unemployed League, in protest of the injunction issued by your court, will deliberately and specifically violate the injunction enjoining us from sympathetically picketing peacefully in support of the striking Auto Workers Federal Union.
We sincerely believe that this court intervention, preventing us from picketing, is an abrogation of our democratic rights, contrary to our constitutional liberties and contravenes the spirit and the letter of Section 7a of the NRA.
Further, we believe that the spirit and intent of this arbitrary injunction is another specific example of an organized movement to curtail the rights of all workers to organize, strike and picket effectively.
Therefore, with full knowledge of the principles involved and the possible consequences, we openly and publicly violate an injunction which, in our opinion, is a suppressive and oppressive act against all workers.
Sincerely yours,
Lucas County Unemployed League
Anti-Injunction Committee
Sam Pollock, Sec'y
Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
*Labor's Untold Story-John L. Lewis And The Limits Of Trade Union (Sometimes)Militancy
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for "labor leader" and United Mineworkers Union President John L. Lewis. His career exemplifies the contradictions of the labor movement in America, as well as the perfidious role of the labor bureaucracy. If that story sounds familiar, well, it is from the likes of old Brother Lewis that they got their "skills".
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story-The Strange Tale Of The 19th Century People Party's Leader Tom Watson
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for late 19th century populist leader Tom Watson and his checkered (to say the least)career.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story- Honor The 75th Anniversary Of The Great San Francisco General Strike
Click On Title To Link To YouTube's Film Clip Of Newsreel Footage Of the San Francisco General Strike. This Is A Repost Of A June 2009 Entry On This Important Action That Made San Francisco For Long Time One Of The Great Labor Centers Of America.
Commentary
This year marks the 75th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.
********************
The following is presented for informational purposes only. The political and factual points are those of the authors. I will present other material on these actions at a later date.
San Francisco and the General Strike
By Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold
What really happened in San Francisco's general strike? What were the issues? What do they mean to labor, employers, the community? What of the vigilantes and their violent anti-Red campaign? Two Californians here give the story down to date
Survey Graphic, September, 1934 (Vol. 23, No. 9), p. 405.
SIXTY-FIVE thousand trade unionists during four July days staged on the shores of San Francisco Bay the second and most widespread general strike in United States history. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth they carried out an extended maneuver which surprised, bewildered, gratified, or terrified and maddened the average citizen. To most Americans there is something reign about a general strike, and a bit ominous—like the "dole," storm-troopers, socialists, communists, fascists, and a lot of other things that used to seem farther away than they do now. But to many on the Pacific Coast, experience has made the general strike at least real, however differently they may interpret it—as a splendid demonstration of the strength and "solidarity of labor," a victory for the "real leaders of labor," a "sell-out" by labor "fakirs," a "strikers' Dictatorship," or an "insurrection."
The San Francisco general strike of 1934 was in no sense a "sport." It is but the latest of a long line of conflicts between employers and employed in that area, many of them, like the general strike, centering about the waterfront, and focusing on the degree of control over employment to be exercised by employers or by union. For power flows from job control. Beginning in the late eighties, the shipowners' association established a hiring-hall as a device for breaking union power. The sailors struck, proposed joint control, were refused, and then beaten. In 1934 the longshoremen demanded substitution of union-control for employer-control of hiring halls. The employers proposed joint control, here refused, and the issue finally went to arbitration. The general strike was but a climax to the 1934 phase of this perennial struggle for power.
Waterfronts the world over provide dramatic examples of the local accumulation—characteristic of many industries-of over-supplies of under-employed workers. We lack neither knowledge nor example of how to "decasualize" this waterfront labor. Indeed, Seattle employers have taken the lead among American ports in achieving regularization, and the other ports of the Pacific Coast, except San Francisco, have more or less followed suit. But in San Francisco the "good employer," while maintaining his individual labor relations on a fairly advanced plane, allowed general employment practices in his industry to lag behind those long recognized by experts in industrial relations as intelligent and beneficial. The philosophy of the agent who for years has managed waterfront labor there is suggested by his characterization of marine workers as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and by his statement some years ago that "Really, what we are trying to do is to put the spirit of Jesus Christ in these men," a profession promptly balanced with: "Of course, you've got to put the fear of God in them, too." Under this regime, the well-known abuses of an overcrowded labor market flourished: under-employment, low earnings for many, long and fruitless waits at the docks, petty graft as the price of jobs. These were the conditions, against a background of protracted unemployment and insecurity, of anxious hope stimulated by the rights of collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act, of a left-ward surge toward more aggressive labor activity both within and without the trade unions, from which the waterfront strike, and ultimately the general strike, developed.
THE first rumble of impending conflict on the waterfront was heard in October 1933 when 400 longshoremen struck against the Matson Navigation Company, claiming discriminatory discharge of members of the newly formed International Longshoremen's Association (ILA.) The company refused to recognize the ILA, but after mediation, reinstated the men. This act sounded the death-knell of a curious organization, the "Blue Book" union, or Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco. Fourteen years earlier the Blue Book union had arisen during a strike from a schism within the ILA; organized by the gang bosses as a right-wing dual union, the employers promptly accorded it recognition and a "union shop" agreement which consigned the original ILA to a lingering death. Strangely, the Blue Book union later was welcomed into the San Francisco Labor Council in 1929 as a "transformed" company union, but ejection followed in 1931 when it was ascertained that the "transformation" was not complete. It lingered on, then in its turn went down to defeat before the rising ILA of 1933 and 1934.
By March 1934 the longshoremen were ready for aggressive action. Slack employment, instead of deterring action, only made more acute the grievance voiced by the numerous unemployed and underemployed unionists that favored gangs received too large a share of the work. Both sides were in a fighting mood, the men following militant leaders, the employers confident of victory, and willing to put up with the possible loss of two or three million dollars as not an exorbitant price for crushing the new union. Negotiations proceeded, both sides yielding a bit, but neither conceding enough to avert a strike. The men asked an increase of wages from 85 cents to $1 an hour, and $1.50 an hour for overtime, a coastwide agreement, and union control of the hiring-hall. The last demand was crucial and the issue was clearly joined: the men called it the foundation of their union; the employers declared that it meant union dictation—an infringement on the "right to select employee," and discrimination against competent and faithful non-unionists. Curiously but significantly, the ILA now was seeking a "union shop," which it had protested the preceding October when employers gave force to their "union shop" agreement with the Blue Book union and discharged some ILA men. The employers, similarly, were now resisting a "union shop," when previously they had only too eagerly granted one. How much depends on the kind of union!
Negotiation for a shift in power is peculiarly difficult. Dissatisfied, the men called a strike for March 23, halted it upon request of President Roosevelt, but mediation failing, called it again for May 9. The fight was on in San Francisco and in other ports of the Pacific Coast. Along the three and one-half miles of San Francisco's Embarcadero the corrugated steel doors remained shut. Gates, topped with barbed wire, were closed and boarded. Pickets strolled up and down, passing knots of police, accosting and warning those who looked as though they might take jobs.
THE companies advertised for strike-breakers, and recruited several hundred. These were given steady work at the same hourly rates which the strikers refused, plus $1.50 a day, which was in excess of the cost of board and lodging aboard two ships fitted out for the purpose. Some people inquire incredulously how any man can break strike. Perhaps the answer is not difficult: apart from the few who do it for principle or for love of adventure, they act under the spur of necessity. Many a striker and strikebreaker had this in common: each, with his family, was on relief. Said a college premedical student who worked as a strikebreaker: "I'd rather have salt on my torn body, but God, I have to be a doctor!" His earnings of $150 enable him to return to college. Union pickets sought to deter the strikebreakers with the threats and physical violence often characteristic of American strikes. By July 9, 266 injured persons had been reported by the police; of these 63 percent were strikebreakers and 10 percent were police.
The strike spread first on the side of labor. Partly in sympathy with the longshoremen, but principally to resume actively its long-clouded leadership of the men of its crafts, the International Seamen's Union struck on May 16. The unions of licensed officers followed, May 19 and 21. Meanwhile the truck drivers (under the anachronistic name of the Teamsters' Union) decided that after May 13 they would no longer haul from the docks "hot cargo," i.e., cargo unloaded by strikebreakers. They continued to haul freight from the warehouses, however, if the employers could move it that far. This the employers did by way of the state owned Belt Line Railroad, which operates from the piers to the warehouses. Strikebreakers loaded the cars on the piers, warehousemen unloaded them. To stop this traffic, the longshoremen proceeded to organize the warehousemen into a union to refuse to handle "hot cargo." On June 14 the Teamsters' Union refused to haul "hot freight" anywhere The tactics were effective. The railroads, connected with the piers by the Belt Line over which freight moved to the hinterland and along the coast, gained heavily at the expense of the shipowners, but freight movement from the waterfront to the city was at a standstill. The docks choked with cargo, vessels could not unload, more merchant ships lay at anchor in the Bay than at any time since '49 when sailors deserted en masse to join the rush to the gold fields.
THE widening base of support on the side of labor was countered on the side of capital. On May 20 the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce rallied to the support of the waterfront employers, declaring, "It is now my duty to warn every business man in this community, that the welfare of business and industry and of the entire public is at stake in the outcome of this crisis." Three weeks later, the Industrial Association, organized in 1921 during a crisis in the building trades, standing for the open shop under the name of the American Plan, and representing the leading industrial, financial, and business interests of the city (including the shipowners) accepted the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to "open the port." A corporation was formed; it acquired trucks, a warehouse, the fastest speed boat on the Bay, assembled men to drive trucks and work longshore, and took contracts to move freight. With the announcement that, "We are, therefore, commencing operations to restore the streets of San Francisco to its citizens, confident that the Police Department will afford full protection for the full use thereof by unarmed drivers," the Industrial Association began to haul cargo July 3. The strikebreaking drivers were evidently of the adventurous type; in the words of an Association official, "We've got a fine bunch of boys to drive those trucks. They are falling all over themselves to get the jobs."
The movement of cargo from waterfront to warehouse was little more than a gesture, for effective picketing still prevented movement beyond. But everybody—longshoremen and teamsters, shipowners and Industrial Association, public authorities and the public—accepted it as a test of power. The mayor promised the Industrial Association "adequate police protection during these operations which, of course, is their right" and asked "the people of San Francisco to absent themselves from the vicinity wherein the movement of merchandise is to be conducted." But neither spectators nor pickets would remain away. Cargo moved from waterfront to warehouse, some trucks were dumped and burned, missiles were thrown, clubs wielded, and officers and men injured. On July 5, "lines of battle, as clear cut as any formed on the Western Front, were drawn along San Francisco's waterfront."
The pickets faced the police; this is significant. String pickets usually confront first the strikebreakers or guards hired by the employers. Indeed, in times past San Francisco employers have even boldly proclaimed their readiness directly to meet force with force. In an earlier longshore strike a noted shipowner said: "As long as we continue hauling our men to the receiving hospital . . . we are never going to get anywhere, and I propose, that tomorrow morning, starting in when they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital, we send two of theirs." But in the strike of 1934 different tactics were employed: "We didn't do as in the old days when we went out and got a lot of ugly-faced toughs." Instead, the maintenance of physical order was left to the police, so that when pickets were beaten it was the police who did it rather than hired thugs. The gain in public sympathy to the employers from such an alignment is obvious. Financially, it also offers advantages to them; as the San Francisco employers pointed out to those in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles:
The item of guards, cost and boarding, amounting to about $100,000 [in San Pedro], is one which we think should be borne by the city. Here [in San Francisco] the police in ample numbers are supplied without cost, and the only guards employed are those needed on the housing ships. Each company has extra guards or watchmen, the cost being borne by the individual line.
On July 5, then, hundreds of police and some thousands of pickets faced each other. The trucks of the Industrial Association began to move. The pickets were forced back, back, in an extended maneuver covering many blocks. Thousands of commuters from the East Bay jammed the viaduct and the sidewalks; clerks crowded to the windows of office buildings. As police drove strikers and sightseers up Rincon Hill, the pickets hurled bricks, and the police, at the cry of "Let 'em have it," threw tear-gas grenades. Here and there clubbing occurred as men and police clashed. Before the ILA hall fighting was more vicious. Inspectors of police, surrounded by angry strikers seeking to overturn their car, fired. Two men were killed. Police, horses, strikers, and spectators were wounded.
THE men called it "bloody Thursday," and spoke of the "battle of Rincon Hill." They staged a funeral parade down Market Street that contrasted strangely in its awesome quiet and simplicity with the gay banners above, hung in welcome to the convention of Knights Templar. At street intersections the police stepped aside, and like other spectators bared their heads. The funeral made a stirring emotional appeal to the strikers; the public was curious and impressed.
The Governor declared a state of riot. Strike leaders had refused to allow "hot cargo" to move over the State Belt Line "without molestation," so he accepted "the defi of the strikers," and ordered out the National Guard to preserve order and "protect state property." Under the guns of the troops, "hot freight" continued to move from waterfront to warehouse. If the troops allowed traffic to move, their presence aided the employers; if they did not, they would have aided the men by establishing completely effective picketing. We are accustomed to follow the first practice. (The Governor of Minnesota, however, has introduced a notable exception to American procedure by permitting movement only of trucks engaged in essential services or those whose Owners have reached an agreement with the men approved by federal officials.) So the strikers were out-maneuvered, until to the on-looker the waterfront conflict was made to appear a battle of employee striking not against their employers but against the police and beyond them against the public itself. A less obvious effect was to suggest to the strikers that the government was not impartial, but against them. Communists were not slow to point this out to the men, ignoring, of course, government feeding of needy strikers' families and other helpful services.
TROOPS occupied the waterfront-sentries with steel helmets and gleaming bayonets, machine-gun nests, and motorized roving patrols. Admission to the occupied area was by pass. Guards moved about in the ferry building and forbade commuters to loiter on the viaduct. A pier watchman who obeyed too slowly the sentry's command to halt was bayoneted in the groin; a 19-year-old strikebreaker who inadvertently came within the 50-foot deadline in his speedboat, and an amateur photographer taking movies of guardsmen were shot.
Conceding the futility of trying to stand up against the militia, the strikers' leaders sought other weapons to checkmate the waterfront employers who were now actively aided by the highest financial and industrial leaders of the city. To the strikers, confident and more impassioned than ever, the situation seemed clear: the employers had finally used their last resource—their own strength first, then the police, the Industrial Association, and the militia; now the men must win reinforcements for the final test of power.
From the waterfront through the ranks of organized labor and to the public went the appeal for support of a general strike. it was urged as the:
first and only possible defense-step against the aggression of anti-union employers under the banner of the San Francisco Industrial Association....
When the Industrial Association entered the waterfront controversy, as a third party, as a strikebreaking agency supported by guns and police clubs, labor trouble in the San Francisco Bay Region ceased to be just a dispute between certain labor unions and certain employers over questions relating to their specific industries.
It took on the direct and obvious form of organized warfare on the part of employers federated in the Industrial Association against all labor organizations and the principle of collective bargaining—progressive, unified, massed attack which unless repelled was certain to engulf and eventually destroy more and more labor groups.
Realizatin of this fact has caused the strikes of workers, affiliated in AFofL organizations in industries which at a glance seem to have slight unity of interest with the waterfront unions originally involved in the disturbance. But the campaign of the Industrial Association, with its anti-labor program and leadership, is in reality an attack on all labor organizations, all members of organized labor who seek to retain their legal rights of unified activities.
The right of labor to such organization and collective bargaining has been fought by certain groups of employers ever since America became an industrial nation. It is a right which received a powerful stimulus from President Roosevelt and the New Deal; a right affirmed in clear words in the National Industrial Recovery Act; under which the NRA operates.
It is a right legally granted labor which has been denied in San Francisco.
The sympathy of a large section of the general public was swinging to the side of labor. Even professional and business men said, "I hope they beat the Industrial Association," and "I'm for the longshoremen." The overwhelming show of force was too much, and American spirit was moved to side with the under dog. Besides, the verbatim publication of hearings before the National Longshoremen's Board now gave the public its first opportunity to read and compare adequate statements by all parties to the dispute.
One of the significant aspects of the entire situation was e relation between aggressive strike leaders of the longshoremen, and the more conservative leaders of unions throughout the city. In the ILA, the conservative leaders had already been repudiated one by one. The conservative local president had been deposed; thereafter he sought to weaken the strike by organizing a new union, and announcing that conservative longshoremen were ready to return to work, and that more would do so except for insufficient slice protection and the spell cast over them by communist leadership. And when the international president, Joseph P. Ryan, came out from the East and, together with Pacific Coast union executives, negotiated an agreement with the employers, the members denied the authority of officials to take a binding agreement without referendum, and voted it down. Under Harry Bridges, sincere, militant man of the ranks, whose eleven years on San Francisco's waterfront have not effaced his nasal-cockney Australian accent, a Joint Marine Strike Committee was organized to take over negotiations. The employers called the rejection of the "Ryan agreement" a "repudiation," but clearly the men never had been bound by it, for Ryan negotiated it with neither authority nor sufficient knowledge of the temper the men and their local leaders.
As the cry for a general strike sounded, the gulf between the aroused members of the ILA and the Teamsters, on the one hand and the conservative leaders of the San Francisco labor movement and their followers on the other, became increasingly apparent. Indeed, the course of the general strike itself was determined by this conflict. On July 6, the day after troops occupied the waterfront, the Labor Council appointed a strike strategy committee of seven to "investigate." But if the business agents at the Labor Temple were calm and cautious, the rank and file of a number of unions were eager for action. "Bloody Thursday" and the ensuing funeral had dramatized the struggle to all labor. The Teamsters voted 1220 to 271 for a complete walkout in San Francisco; said Michael Casey, their "responsible," conservative officer:
I warned them that it was strictly against the rules of the brotherhood and that they will undoubtedly lose all strike benefits . . . but nothing on earth could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men, I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out.
Union after union voted to strike or (about half of them) to abide by the decision of the General Strike Committee formed by appointment of President Vandeleur of the Labor Council as the labor directorate of the strike. In vain their leaders urged arbitration and warned against a general strike. "All right, boys, I'm with you," said one, and later he told a friend, "It was an avalanche. I saw it coming, so I ran ahead before it crushed me."
The employers agreed now to arbitrate all issues with the longshoremen, and to bargain (but not to arbitrate) with elected representatives of the seafaring crafts. The longshoremen remained adamant; they would not arbitrate "control of the hiring-hall," and they would not settle unless the seafaring crafts were guaranteed a satisfactory settlement. And now the men were marching out. On July 12 the truck drivers ceased work; gasoline trucks could make no deliveries and taxis were driven back to their garages. Butchers, ship boilermakers, machinists, welders, and laundry workers followed. The building-trades, cleaners, cooks and waiters, barbers, auto mechanics, cleaners and dyers, streetcar men, and many others waited only the call of the General Strike Committee. In the East Bay similar stands were taken by excited unionists.
The National Longshoremen's Board worked furiously for a settlement. The striking teamsters allowed only emergency trucks to operate in the city. Fire trucks, police cars, hospital services, scavengers were unmolested; other essential-service trucks required union permits. A ring of teamsters' pickets began to turn back food trucks bound for the Bay cities. Still people were asking: "Is there going to be a general strike?" Vandeleur as head of the General Strike Committee replied: "Do you fellows have to see a haystack before you can see which way the straws are blowing?"
Grocery stores were jammed. As the contagion spread, more and more people rushed to the stores to stock up. In the more affluent districts vegetables soon were "picked over" and gaps appeared on grocers' shelves. Canned goods sold rapidly, but stocks were large. With meat no longer obtainable, an inspired advertisement announced "X-brand tuna, an ideal meat substitute . . . can be served in countless ways." In the poorer districts trade was brisk, but slower than elsewhere; there were no funds for large purchases. The Knights Templar terminated their convention and left the city while teamsters would still haul their baggage.
By Saturday night, July 14, a general strike seemed inevitable. Said Michael Casey: "Logic has all gone out of the window! This thing is being ruled now by passion and hatred." But now the leaders were well ahead of the prodding followers, and they guided the action. The general strike was timed for 8 o'clock Monday morning in San Francisco, and Tuesday in the East Bay. But the militant unionists were not in control. Harry Bridges was defeated for the vice-presidency of the meeting formed by delegates from every union in San Francisco, and he was smothered as the only maritime representative on the appointed General Strike Committee of twenty-five.
Monday morning no streetcars ran. The streets were filled with pedestrians. Autos were left at home to conserve gasoline. A holiday mood was in the air. Two thousand more soldiers entered the city; armored tanks appeared on the waterfront. There was practically no violence. Long lines of people waited their turn for meals before nineteen restaurants officially opened by the strike committee.
But already the strike, which was general but never complete, was being checked. From within, the strike leaders decided the first day that the municipal carmen should return. The next day food trucks were given free passage by the pickets. More restaurants were opened by union permit, then all restaurants. Soon the embargo on gasoline trucks was lifted, and finally on July 19, the general strike was called off at the close of its fourth day. The General Strike Committee urged arbitration of all issues by all unions and employers party to the original dispute, and the National Longshoremen's Board announced a closely similar position.
FROM without, press and public officials were declaring the general strike a labor "dictatorship" and "insurrection," a strike against the public. "Strike bred in Moscow AFL avers," "Citizens open food, gas sales in spite of unions; Bridges admits defeat of plot to starve city into surrender," declared the headlines. Said Mayor Rossi "In the presence of a general strike nothing can be accomplished. That strike must be ended." Oil trucks were operated under armed guard; union "permits" were indignantly refused, by interests which, only a few years earlier had supported the Industrial Association's "permit" system which compelled the "open shop" in the building trades. But now they said, "Are we going to recognize another government or our own?" Guardsmen stripped the permit signs from cars which entered the occupied zone, and some, over-zealous, even took union badges from the strikers. "Imagine permits!" said an oil man, "I see red every time I see one those signs. What a fizzle! What have they gained? Nothing but the hatred of the public. I like what General Johnson said; nothing but civil war, insurrection... general strike!" The sympathy of the public was turning away from the strikers as their inconvenience grew. "They were trying to set up another city government of their own. They found that our sympathy was gone when we couldn't get our carrots," said a professional man. "The longshoremen should have endured almost anything rather than let people go hungry and cause anything like a general strike"; "Working people can't be trusted," said middle-class housewives. Many rank and file unionists, too, like a Key Route conductor were
glad that it ended the way it did. It might have been worse. If it had lasted longer the company would have ordered us back to work and then we would have been called "scabs" or we'd have lost a year's pension rights. A general strike? That's socialistic. The AFofL don't believe in that. We had nothing to do with the making of it, yet we were brought into it. We lost three days' wages and are paying for it yet.
Such men, and those who genuinely doubted the tactical wisdom of a general strike of indefinite duration, were the support of the conservative leaders
The Mayor "officially" announced the end of the general strike, saying, "I congratulate the real leaders of organized labor on their decision. San Francisco has stamped out without bargains or compromise any attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt."
The maritime strike went on to its conclusion. The fate of the longshoremen's strike hung on the teamsters whose position was strategic. What would they do? Delay, refusal to admit Bridges to the Teamsters' Hall, then the vote. The teamsters would go back to work "unconditionally." The last prop was pulled, and the longshoremen reluctantly, if overwhelmingly, voted to return to work. The strike was over.
The newspapers brought pressure on the employers to arbitrate with all crafts. They accepted, and the role of the national government as mediator at last became that of arbitrator.
To the employers, forestalling a victorious general strike meant victory for themselves. In 1893 San Francisco employers after a series of crushing victories over labor had exulted:
The Manufacturers' and Employers' Association can look with complacency upon its work during the last two years. One after another the unions have been taught a salutary lesson until out of the horde of unions only one or two are left of any strength. This association has taken hold of the shipowners' struggle and it is only a question of time when the Sailors' Union will have gone the way of the rest. It is of most vital importance that this good work should go on. Trade unionism among workmen is like tares in the field of wheat. The word and the act should be placed among the things prohibited by law.
One of the leading capitalists of San Francisco, according to a quotation appearing in a New York paper, evidently thought in 1934 very much in the terms of the victory of '93:
This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. It's costing us money, certainly. We have lost millions on the waterfront in the last few months. But it's a good investment, a marvelous investment. It's solving the labor problem for years to come, perhaps forever.
Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the 'men have been driven back to their jobs, we won't have to worry about them any more. They'll have learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we'll never have another general strike but I don't think we'll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during this generation. Labor is licked.
IN order to mobilize support for the employers, it was declared early in the strike that the longshoremen were "led by a radical and communistic group . . . whose objective is to create civil disturbance, not only in the waterfront trades, but in all other trades." As the strike proceeded, and especially when the general strike was declared, the press and public officials broke into a torrential attack upon "reds" and "subversive influences" among the strikers. Even the conservative Ryan, whose agreement was upset by Bridges and his followers, supported the employers in the charge that "the Communist Party, led by Harry Bridges, is in control of the San Francisco situation," although a local committee of conservative labor leaders denied that Bridges and his committeemen were "reds." The Communists, indeed, were active in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere; they followed a twofold policy: to "bore from within" the conservative trade unions; to form a "dual" union, the Marine Workers' Industrial Union. The first tactic met with considerable success, the second with comparatively little. They advertised widely their asserted influence in San Francisco. Whether Bridges is or is not a Communist is extremely difficult to prove; certainly neither the maritime strike nor the general strike were basically "communist strikes." The central issue of the longshoremen's strike was an old one; the position of the parties was not greatly different than in numerous earlier conflicts stretching back a half century. In 1893 the agent of the employers called the striking Sailors' Union of Andrew Furuseth an "anarchistic society." In 1934 the presence of Communists on the scene, and such influence as they exerted on men and on tactics, were seized upon to defeat aggressive, but essentially orthodox unions and unionists.
NOT only was this accomplished, but creating an hysteria the like of which California had not witnessed since the war, employers and industrial leaders, the press, and officials fostered thereby an attack against "reds" which has spread over the Bay region and beyond. Labor was importuned to "run subversive influences from its ranks like rats," and some union laborers did physically attack Communists, although not in most of the cases where it was attributed to them. Police and vigilantes raided communist "lairs," and arrested "reds," characterized by the approving press as "alley spawn." Vigilante committees were rapidly organized; business men, professors, and other staid citizens armed with pick handles and other weapons patrolled cities of the East Bay while more halls were raided and bricks with warnings attached were thrown through windows of homes. A protecting picket line was thrown around fashionable Piedmont; a librarian was ordered by resolution to submit for destruction a list of books "praising the virtues and advantages of Communism." A student editor urged that "student vigilantes must quell student radicals," opening his editorial with Voltaire's famous statement: "I may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it." The tactical theory of the vigilantes was explained by a member: "If you shoot the reds, then they become heroes, but they don't like it so well if you work them over with pick handles."
The farmers of California have been organizing vigilante groups and prodding officials to action for months. In the wake of the general strike came the opportunity to arrest communist leaders of farm strikes on charges of vagrancy and criminal syndicalism under cover of hysteria, for the criminal syndicalism laws work most effectively when fear is abroad. A warning scaffold appeared in rural Hayward where fruit pickers had struck in sympathy with the longshoremen.
The most significant aspect of the general strike, perhaps, is the fact that officials, business men, and other conservative citizens have been so effectively agitated, that they are convinced of the immediate necessity, and of the suitability of storm-troop tactics to "save America," and "democratic government, including civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and trial by jury." Few audible voices have been raised in protest-the victims first, of course, then a judge, and later a couple of editors;—for the harvests seem less prone to interruption, industries less exposed to "demoralization" when strike leaders are in jail.
Commentary
This year marks the 75th Anniversary of three great labor struggles that ended in victory in heart of the Great Depression(the 1930s version of what we, at least partially, confront today); the great General Strike in San Francisco that was led by the dockers and sailor unions and brought victory on the key issue of the union hiring hall (since then greatly emasculated); the great Minneapolis Teamster strikes that led to the unionization of truck drivers and allied workers in that labor-hating town and later to the organizing of over-the-road drivers that created one of the strongest (if corrupt) unions in North America; and, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike whose key component was leadership by the unemployed workers. Does all of this sound familiar? Yes and no. Yes, to labor militants who, looking to a way out of the impasse of the condition of today's quiescent labor movement, have studied these labor actions. No, to the vast majority of workers who are either not organized or are clueless about their history. In either case, though, these actions provide a thread to how we must struggle in the future. Although 75 years seems like a long time ago the issues posed then have not gone away. Far from it. Study this labor history now to be ready to struggle when we get our openings.
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The following is presented for informational purposes only. The political and factual points are those of the authors. I will present other material on these actions at a later date.
San Francisco and the General Strike
By Paul S. Taylor and Norman Leon Gold
What really happened in San Francisco's general strike? What were the issues? What do they mean to labor, employers, the community? What of the vigilantes and their violent anti-Red campaign? Two Californians here give the story down to date
Survey Graphic, September, 1934 (Vol. 23, No. 9), p. 405.
SIXTY-FIVE thousand trade unionists during four July days staged on the shores of San Francisco Bay the second and most widespread general strike in United States history. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth they carried out an extended maneuver which surprised, bewildered, gratified, or terrified and maddened the average citizen. To most Americans there is something reign about a general strike, and a bit ominous—like the "dole," storm-troopers, socialists, communists, fascists, and a lot of other things that used to seem farther away than they do now. But to many on the Pacific Coast, experience has made the general strike at least real, however differently they may interpret it—as a splendid demonstration of the strength and "solidarity of labor," a victory for the "real leaders of labor," a "sell-out" by labor "fakirs," a "strikers' Dictatorship," or an "insurrection."
The San Francisco general strike of 1934 was in no sense a "sport." It is but the latest of a long line of conflicts between employers and employed in that area, many of them, like the general strike, centering about the waterfront, and focusing on the degree of control over employment to be exercised by employers or by union. For power flows from job control. Beginning in the late eighties, the shipowners' association established a hiring-hall as a device for breaking union power. The sailors struck, proposed joint control, were refused, and then beaten. In 1934 the longshoremen demanded substitution of union-control for employer-control of hiring halls. The employers proposed joint control, here refused, and the issue finally went to arbitration. The general strike was but a climax to the 1934 phase of this perennial struggle for power.
Waterfronts the world over provide dramatic examples of the local accumulation—characteristic of many industries-of over-supplies of under-employed workers. We lack neither knowledge nor example of how to "decasualize" this waterfront labor. Indeed, Seattle employers have taken the lead among American ports in achieving regularization, and the other ports of the Pacific Coast, except San Francisco, have more or less followed suit. But in San Francisco the "good employer," while maintaining his individual labor relations on a fairly advanced plane, allowed general employment practices in his industry to lag behind those long recognized by experts in industrial relations as intelligent and beneficial. The philosophy of the agent who for years has managed waterfront labor there is suggested by his characterization of marine workers as "hewers of wood and drawers of water," and by his statement some years ago that "Really, what we are trying to do is to put the spirit of Jesus Christ in these men," a profession promptly balanced with: "Of course, you've got to put the fear of God in them, too." Under this regime, the well-known abuses of an overcrowded labor market flourished: under-employment, low earnings for many, long and fruitless waits at the docks, petty graft as the price of jobs. These were the conditions, against a background of protracted unemployment and insecurity, of anxious hope stimulated by the rights of collective bargaining under the National Industrial Recovery Act, of a left-ward surge toward more aggressive labor activity both within and without the trade unions, from which the waterfront strike, and ultimately the general strike, developed.
THE first rumble of impending conflict on the waterfront was heard in October 1933 when 400 longshoremen struck against the Matson Navigation Company, claiming discriminatory discharge of members of the newly formed International Longshoremen's Association (ILA.) The company refused to recognize the ILA, but after mediation, reinstated the men. This act sounded the death-knell of a curious organization, the "Blue Book" union, or Longshoremen's Association of San Francisco. Fourteen years earlier the Blue Book union had arisen during a strike from a schism within the ILA; organized by the gang bosses as a right-wing dual union, the employers promptly accorded it recognition and a "union shop" agreement which consigned the original ILA to a lingering death. Strangely, the Blue Book union later was welcomed into the San Francisco Labor Council in 1929 as a "transformed" company union, but ejection followed in 1931 when it was ascertained that the "transformation" was not complete. It lingered on, then in its turn went down to defeat before the rising ILA of 1933 and 1934.
By March 1934 the longshoremen were ready for aggressive action. Slack employment, instead of deterring action, only made more acute the grievance voiced by the numerous unemployed and underemployed unionists that favored gangs received too large a share of the work. Both sides were in a fighting mood, the men following militant leaders, the employers confident of victory, and willing to put up with the possible loss of two or three million dollars as not an exorbitant price for crushing the new union. Negotiations proceeded, both sides yielding a bit, but neither conceding enough to avert a strike. The men asked an increase of wages from 85 cents to $1 an hour, and $1.50 an hour for overtime, a coastwide agreement, and union control of the hiring-hall. The last demand was crucial and the issue was clearly joined: the men called it the foundation of their union; the employers declared that it meant union dictation—an infringement on the "right to select employee," and discrimination against competent and faithful non-unionists. Curiously but significantly, the ILA now was seeking a "union shop," which it had protested the preceding October when employers gave force to their "union shop" agreement with the Blue Book union and discharged some ILA men. The employers, similarly, were now resisting a "union shop," when previously they had only too eagerly granted one. How much depends on the kind of union!
Negotiation for a shift in power is peculiarly difficult. Dissatisfied, the men called a strike for March 23, halted it upon request of President Roosevelt, but mediation failing, called it again for May 9. The fight was on in San Francisco and in other ports of the Pacific Coast. Along the three and one-half miles of San Francisco's Embarcadero the corrugated steel doors remained shut. Gates, topped with barbed wire, were closed and boarded. Pickets strolled up and down, passing knots of police, accosting and warning those who looked as though they might take jobs.
THE companies advertised for strike-breakers, and recruited several hundred. These were given steady work at the same hourly rates which the strikers refused, plus $1.50 a day, which was in excess of the cost of board and lodging aboard two ships fitted out for the purpose. Some people inquire incredulously how any man can break strike. Perhaps the answer is not difficult: apart from the few who do it for principle or for love of adventure, they act under the spur of necessity. Many a striker and strikebreaker had this in common: each, with his family, was on relief. Said a college premedical student who worked as a strikebreaker: "I'd rather have salt on my torn body, but God, I have to be a doctor!" His earnings of $150 enable him to return to college. Union pickets sought to deter the strikebreakers with the threats and physical violence often characteristic of American strikes. By July 9, 266 injured persons had been reported by the police; of these 63 percent were strikebreakers and 10 percent were police.
The strike spread first on the side of labor. Partly in sympathy with the longshoremen, but principally to resume actively its long-clouded leadership of the men of its crafts, the International Seamen's Union struck on May 16. The unions of licensed officers followed, May 19 and 21. Meanwhile the truck drivers (under the anachronistic name of the Teamsters' Union) decided that after May 13 they would no longer haul from the docks "hot cargo," i.e., cargo unloaded by strikebreakers. They continued to haul freight from the warehouses, however, if the employers could move it that far. This the employers did by way of the state owned Belt Line Railroad, which operates from the piers to the warehouses. Strikebreakers loaded the cars on the piers, warehousemen unloaded them. To stop this traffic, the longshoremen proceeded to organize the warehousemen into a union to refuse to handle "hot cargo." On June 14 the Teamsters' Union refused to haul "hot freight" anywhere The tactics were effective. The railroads, connected with the piers by the Belt Line over which freight moved to the hinterland and along the coast, gained heavily at the expense of the shipowners, but freight movement from the waterfront to the city was at a standstill. The docks choked with cargo, vessels could not unload, more merchant ships lay at anchor in the Bay than at any time since '49 when sailors deserted en masse to join the rush to the gold fields.
THE widening base of support on the side of labor was countered on the side of capital. On May 20 the president of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce rallied to the support of the waterfront employers, declaring, "It is now my duty to warn every business man in this community, that the welfare of business and industry and of the entire public is at stake in the outcome of this crisis." Three weeks later, the Industrial Association, organized in 1921 during a crisis in the building trades, standing for the open shop under the name of the American Plan, and representing the leading industrial, financial, and business interests of the city (including the shipowners) accepted the invitation of the Chamber of Commerce to "open the port." A corporation was formed; it acquired trucks, a warehouse, the fastest speed boat on the Bay, assembled men to drive trucks and work longshore, and took contracts to move freight. With the announcement that, "We are, therefore, commencing operations to restore the streets of San Francisco to its citizens, confident that the Police Department will afford full protection for the full use thereof by unarmed drivers," the Industrial Association began to haul cargo July 3. The strikebreaking drivers were evidently of the adventurous type; in the words of an Association official, "We've got a fine bunch of boys to drive those trucks. They are falling all over themselves to get the jobs."
The movement of cargo from waterfront to warehouse was little more than a gesture, for effective picketing still prevented movement beyond. But everybody—longshoremen and teamsters, shipowners and Industrial Association, public authorities and the public—accepted it as a test of power. The mayor promised the Industrial Association "adequate police protection during these operations which, of course, is their right" and asked "the people of San Francisco to absent themselves from the vicinity wherein the movement of merchandise is to be conducted." But neither spectators nor pickets would remain away. Cargo moved from waterfront to warehouse, some trucks were dumped and burned, missiles were thrown, clubs wielded, and officers and men injured. On July 5, "lines of battle, as clear cut as any formed on the Western Front, were drawn along San Francisco's waterfront."
The pickets faced the police; this is significant. String pickets usually confront first the strikebreakers or guards hired by the employers. Indeed, in times past San Francisco employers have even boldly proclaimed their readiness directly to meet force with force. In an earlier longshore strike a noted shipowner said: "As long as we continue hauling our men to the receiving hospital . . . we are never going to get anywhere, and I propose, that tomorrow morning, starting in when they compel us to send one ambulance to the receiving hospital, we send two of theirs." But in the strike of 1934 different tactics were employed: "We didn't do as in the old days when we went out and got a lot of ugly-faced toughs." Instead, the maintenance of physical order was left to the police, so that when pickets were beaten it was the police who did it rather than hired thugs. The gain in public sympathy to the employers from such an alignment is obvious. Financially, it also offers advantages to them; as the San Francisco employers pointed out to those in San Pedro, the port of Los Angeles:
The item of guards, cost and boarding, amounting to about $100,000 [in San Pedro], is one which we think should be borne by the city. Here [in San Francisco] the police in ample numbers are supplied without cost, and the only guards employed are those needed on the housing ships. Each company has extra guards or watchmen, the cost being borne by the individual line.
On July 5, then, hundreds of police and some thousands of pickets faced each other. The trucks of the Industrial Association began to move. The pickets were forced back, back, in an extended maneuver covering many blocks. Thousands of commuters from the East Bay jammed the viaduct and the sidewalks; clerks crowded to the windows of office buildings. As police drove strikers and sightseers up Rincon Hill, the pickets hurled bricks, and the police, at the cry of "Let 'em have it," threw tear-gas grenades. Here and there clubbing occurred as men and police clashed. Before the ILA hall fighting was more vicious. Inspectors of police, surrounded by angry strikers seeking to overturn their car, fired. Two men were killed. Police, horses, strikers, and spectators were wounded.
THE men called it "bloody Thursday," and spoke of the "battle of Rincon Hill." They staged a funeral parade down Market Street that contrasted strangely in its awesome quiet and simplicity with the gay banners above, hung in welcome to the convention of Knights Templar. At street intersections the police stepped aside, and like other spectators bared their heads. The funeral made a stirring emotional appeal to the strikers; the public was curious and impressed.
The Governor declared a state of riot. Strike leaders had refused to allow "hot cargo" to move over the State Belt Line "without molestation," so he accepted "the defi of the strikers," and ordered out the National Guard to preserve order and "protect state property." Under the guns of the troops, "hot freight" continued to move from waterfront to warehouse. If the troops allowed traffic to move, their presence aided the employers; if they did not, they would have aided the men by establishing completely effective picketing. We are accustomed to follow the first practice. (The Governor of Minnesota, however, has introduced a notable exception to American procedure by permitting movement only of trucks engaged in essential services or those whose Owners have reached an agreement with the men approved by federal officials.) So the strikers were out-maneuvered, until to the on-looker the waterfront conflict was made to appear a battle of employee striking not against their employers but against the police and beyond them against the public itself. A less obvious effect was to suggest to the strikers that the government was not impartial, but against them. Communists were not slow to point this out to the men, ignoring, of course, government feeding of needy strikers' families and other helpful services.
TROOPS occupied the waterfront-sentries with steel helmets and gleaming bayonets, machine-gun nests, and motorized roving patrols. Admission to the occupied area was by pass. Guards moved about in the ferry building and forbade commuters to loiter on the viaduct. A pier watchman who obeyed too slowly the sentry's command to halt was bayoneted in the groin; a 19-year-old strikebreaker who inadvertently came within the 50-foot deadline in his speedboat, and an amateur photographer taking movies of guardsmen were shot.
Conceding the futility of trying to stand up against the militia, the strikers' leaders sought other weapons to checkmate the waterfront employers who were now actively aided by the highest financial and industrial leaders of the city. To the strikers, confident and more impassioned than ever, the situation seemed clear: the employers had finally used their last resource—their own strength first, then the police, the Industrial Association, and the militia; now the men must win reinforcements for the final test of power.
From the waterfront through the ranks of organized labor and to the public went the appeal for support of a general strike. it was urged as the:
first and only possible defense-step against the aggression of anti-union employers under the banner of the San Francisco Industrial Association....
When the Industrial Association entered the waterfront controversy, as a third party, as a strikebreaking agency supported by guns and police clubs, labor trouble in the San Francisco Bay Region ceased to be just a dispute between certain labor unions and certain employers over questions relating to their specific industries.
It took on the direct and obvious form of organized warfare on the part of employers federated in the Industrial Association against all labor organizations and the principle of collective bargaining—progressive, unified, massed attack which unless repelled was certain to engulf and eventually destroy more and more labor groups.
Realizatin of this fact has caused the strikes of workers, affiliated in AFofL organizations in industries which at a glance seem to have slight unity of interest with the waterfront unions originally involved in the disturbance. But the campaign of the Industrial Association, with its anti-labor program and leadership, is in reality an attack on all labor organizations, all members of organized labor who seek to retain their legal rights of unified activities.
The right of labor to such organization and collective bargaining has been fought by certain groups of employers ever since America became an industrial nation. It is a right which received a powerful stimulus from President Roosevelt and the New Deal; a right affirmed in clear words in the National Industrial Recovery Act; under which the NRA operates.
It is a right legally granted labor which has been denied in San Francisco.
The sympathy of a large section of the general public was swinging to the side of labor. Even professional and business men said, "I hope they beat the Industrial Association," and "I'm for the longshoremen." The overwhelming show of force was too much, and American spirit was moved to side with the under dog. Besides, the verbatim publication of hearings before the National Longshoremen's Board now gave the public its first opportunity to read and compare adequate statements by all parties to the dispute.
One of the significant aspects of the entire situation was e relation between aggressive strike leaders of the longshoremen, and the more conservative leaders of unions throughout the city. In the ILA, the conservative leaders had already been repudiated one by one. The conservative local president had been deposed; thereafter he sought to weaken the strike by organizing a new union, and announcing that conservative longshoremen were ready to return to work, and that more would do so except for insufficient slice protection and the spell cast over them by communist leadership. And when the international president, Joseph P. Ryan, came out from the East and, together with Pacific Coast union executives, negotiated an agreement with the employers, the members denied the authority of officials to take a binding agreement without referendum, and voted it down. Under Harry Bridges, sincere, militant man of the ranks, whose eleven years on San Francisco's waterfront have not effaced his nasal-cockney Australian accent, a Joint Marine Strike Committee was organized to take over negotiations. The employers called the rejection of the "Ryan agreement" a "repudiation," but clearly the men never had been bound by it, for Ryan negotiated it with neither authority nor sufficient knowledge of the temper the men and their local leaders.
As the cry for a general strike sounded, the gulf between the aroused members of the ILA and the Teamsters, on the one hand and the conservative leaders of the San Francisco labor movement and their followers on the other, became increasingly apparent. Indeed, the course of the general strike itself was determined by this conflict. On July 6, the day after troops occupied the waterfront, the Labor Council appointed a strike strategy committee of seven to "investigate." But if the business agents at the Labor Temple were calm and cautious, the rank and file of a number of unions were eager for action. "Bloody Thursday" and the ensuing funeral had dramatized the struggle to all labor. The Teamsters voted 1220 to 271 for a complete walkout in San Francisco; said Michael Casey, their "responsible," conservative officer:
I warned them that it was strictly against the rules of the brotherhood and that they will undoubtedly lose all strike benefits . . . but nothing on earth could have prevented that vote. In all my thirty years of leading these men, I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out.
Union after union voted to strike or (about half of them) to abide by the decision of the General Strike Committee formed by appointment of President Vandeleur of the Labor Council as the labor directorate of the strike. In vain their leaders urged arbitration and warned against a general strike. "All right, boys, I'm with you," said one, and later he told a friend, "It was an avalanche. I saw it coming, so I ran ahead before it crushed me."
The employers agreed now to arbitrate all issues with the longshoremen, and to bargain (but not to arbitrate) with elected representatives of the seafaring crafts. The longshoremen remained adamant; they would not arbitrate "control of the hiring-hall," and they would not settle unless the seafaring crafts were guaranteed a satisfactory settlement. And now the men were marching out. On July 12 the truck drivers ceased work; gasoline trucks could make no deliveries and taxis were driven back to their garages. Butchers, ship boilermakers, machinists, welders, and laundry workers followed. The building-trades, cleaners, cooks and waiters, barbers, auto mechanics, cleaners and dyers, streetcar men, and many others waited only the call of the General Strike Committee. In the East Bay similar stands were taken by excited unionists.
The National Longshoremen's Board worked furiously for a settlement. The striking teamsters allowed only emergency trucks to operate in the city. Fire trucks, police cars, hospital services, scavengers were unmolested; other essential-service trucks required union permits. A ring of teamsters' pickets began to turn back food trucks bound for the Bay cities. Still people were asking: "Is there going to be a general strike?" Vandeleur as head of the General Strike Committee replied: "Do you fellows have to see a haystack before you can see which way the straws are blowing?"
Grocery stores were jammed. As the contagion spread, more and more people rushed to the stores to stock up. In the more affluent districts vegetables soon were "picked over" and gaps appeared on grocers' shelves. Canned goods sold rapidly, but stocks were large. With meat no longer obtainable, an inspired advertisement announced "X-brand tuna, an ideal meat substitute . . . can be served in countless ways." In the poorer districts trade was brisk, but slower than elsewhere; there were no funds for large purchases. The Knights Templar terminated their convention and left the city while teamsters would still haul their baggage.
By Saturday night, July 14, a general strike seemed inevitable. Said Michael Casey: "Logic has all gone out of the window! This thing is being ruled now by passion and hatred." But now the leaders were well ahead of the prodding followers, and they guided the action. The general strike was timed for 8 o'clock Monday morning in San Francisco, and Tuesday in the East Bay. But the militant unionists were not in control. Harry Bridges was defeated for the vice-presidency of the meeting formed by delegates from every union in San Francisco, and he was smothered as the only maritime representative on the appointed General Strike Committee of twenty-five.
Monday morning no streetcars ran. The streets were filled with pedestrians. Autos were left at home to conserve gasoline. A holiday mood was in the air. Two thousand more soldiers entered the city; armored tanks appeared on the waterfront. There was practically no violence. Long lines of people waited their turn for meals before nineteen restaurants officially opened by the strike committee.
But already the strike, which was general but never complete, was being checked. From within, the strike leaders decided the first day that the municipal carmen should return. The next day food trucks were given free passage by the pickets. More restaurants were opened by union permit, then all restaurants. Soon the embargo on gasoline trucks was lifted, and finally on July 19, the general strike was called off at the close of its fourth day. The General Strike Committee urged arbitration of all issues by all unions and employers party to the original dispute, and the National Longshoremen's Board announced a closely similar position.
FROM without, press and public officials were declaring the general strike a labor "dictatorship" and "insurrection," a strike against the public. "Strike bred in Moscow AFL avers," "Citizens open food, gas sales in spite of unions; Bridges admits defeat of plot to starve city into surrender," declared the headlines. Said Mayor Rossi "In the presence of a general strike nothing can be accomplished. That strike must be ended." Oil trucks were operated under armed guard; union "permits" were indignantly refused, by interests which, only a few years earlier had supported the Industrial Association's "permit" system which compelled the "open shop" in the building trades. But now they said, "Are we going to recognize another government or our own?" Guardsmen stripped the permit signs from cars which entered the occupied zone, and some, over-zealous, even took union badges from the strikers. "Imagine permits!" said an oil man, "I see red every time I see one those signs. What a fizzle! What have they gained? Nothing but the hatred of the public. I like what General Johnson said; nothing but civil war, insurrection... general strike!" The sympathy of the public was turning away from the strikers as their inconvenience grew. "They were trying to set up another city government of their own. They found that our sympathy was gone when we couldn't get our carrots," said a professional man. "The longshoremen should have endured almost anything rather than let people go hungry and cause anything like a general strike"; "Working people can't be trusted," said middle-class housewives. Many rank and file unionists, too, like a Key Route conductor were
glad that it ended the way it did. It might have been worse. If it had lasted longer the company would have ordered us back to work and then we would have been called "scabs" or we'd have lost a year's pension rights. A general strike? That's socialistic. The AFofL don't believe in that. We had nothing to do with the making of it, yet we were brought into it. We lost three days' wages and are paying for it yet.
Such men, and those who genuinely doubted the tactical wisdom of a general strike of indefinite duration, were the support of the conservative leaders
The Mayor "officially" announced the end of the general strike, saying, "I congratulate the real leaders of organized labor on their decision. San Francisco has stamped out without bargains or compromise any attempt to import into its life the very real danger of revolt."
The maritime strike went on to its conclusion. The fate of the longshoremen's strike hung on the teamsters whose position was strategic. What would they do? Delay, refusal to admit Bridges to the Teamsters' Hall, then the vote. The teamsters would go back to work "unconditionally." The last prop was pulled, and the longshoremen reluctantly, if overwhelmingly, voted to return to work. The strike was over.
The newspapers brought pressure on the employers to arbitrate with all crafts. They accepted, and the role of the national government as mediator at last became that of arbitrator.
To the employers, forestalling a victorious general strike meant victory for themselves. In 1893 San Francisco employers after a series of crushing victories over labor had exulted:
The Manufacturers' and Employers' Association can look with complacency upon its work during the last two years. One after another the unions have been taught a salutary lesson until out of the horde of unions only one or two are left of any strength. This association has taken hold of the shipowners' struggle and it is only a question of time when the Sailors' Union will have gone the way of the rest. It is of most vital importance that this good work should go on. Trade unionism among workmen is like tares in the field of wheat. The word and the act should be placed among the things prohibited by law.
One of the leading capitalists of San Francisco, according to a quotation appearing in a New York paper, evidently thought in 1934 very much in the terms of the victory of '93:
This strike is the best thing that ever happened to San Francisco. It's costing us money, certainly. We have lost millions on the waterfront in the last few months. But it's a good investment, a marvelous investment. It's solving the labor problem for years to come, perhaps forever.
Mark my words. When this nonsense is out of the way and the 'men have been driven back to their jobs, we won't have to worry about them any more. They'll have learned their lesson. Not only do I believe we'll never have another general strike but I don't think we'll have a strike of any kind in San Francisco during this generation. Labor is licked.
IN order to mobilize support for the employers, it was declared early in the strike that the longshoremen were "led by a radical and communistic group . . . whose objective is to create civil disturbance, not only in the waterfront trades, but in all other trades." As the strike proceeded, and especially when the general strike was declared, the press and public officials broke into a torrential attack upon "reds" and "subversive influences" among the strikers. Even the conservative Ryan, whose agreement was upset by Bridges and his followers, supported the employers in the charge that "the Communist Party, led by Harry Bridges, is in control of the San Francisco situation," although a local committee of conservative labor leaders denied that Bridges and his committeemen were "reds." The Communists, indeed, were active in San Francisco, as they are elsewhere; they followed a twofold policy: to "bore from within" the conservative trade unions; to form a "dual" union, the Marine Workers' Industrial Union. The first tactic met with considerable success, the second with comparatively little. They advertised widely their asserted influence in San Francisco. Whether Bridges is or is not a Communist is extremely difficult to prove; certainly neither the maritime strike nor the general strike were basically "communist strikes." The central issue of the longshoremen's strike was an old one; the position of the parties was not greatly different than in numerous earlier conflicts stretching back a half century. In 1893 the agent of the employers called the striking Sailors' Union of Andrew Furuseth an "anarchistic society." In 1934 the presence of Communists on the scene, and such influence as they exerted on men and on tactics, were seized upon to defeat aggressive, but essentially orthodox unions and unionists.
NOT only was this accomplished, but creating an hysteria the like of which California had not witnessed since the war, employers and industrial leaders, the press, and officials fostered thereby an attack against "reds" which has spread over the Bay region and beyond. Labor was importuned to "run subversive influences from its ranks like rats," and some union laborers did physically attack Communists, although not in most of the cases where it was attributed to them. Police and vigilantes raided communist "lairs," and arrested "reds," characterized by the approving press as "alley spawn." Vigilante committees were rapidly organized; business men, professors, and other staid citizens armed with pick handles and other weapons patrolled cities of the East Bay while more halls were raided and bricks with warnings attached were thrown through windows of homes. A protecting picket line was thrown around fashionable Piedmont; a librarian was ordered by resolution to submit for destruction a list of books "praising the virtues and advantages of Communism." A student editor urged that "student vigilantes must quell student radicals," opening his editorial with Voltaire's famous statement: "I may disapprove of what you say but will defend to the death your right to say it." The tactical theory of the vigilantes was explained by a member: "If you shoot the reds, then they become heroes, but they don't like it so well if you work them over with pick handles."
The farmers of California have been organizing vigilante groups and prodding officials to action for months. In the wake of the general strike came the opportunity to arrest communist leaders of farm strikes on charges of vagrancy and criminal syndicalism under cover of hysteria, for the criminal syndicalism laws work most effectively when fear is abroad. A warning scaffold appeared in rural Hayward where fruit pickers had struck in sympathy with the longshoremen.
The most significant aspect of the general strike, perhaps, is the fact that officials, business men, and other conservative citizens have been so effectively agitated, that they are convinced of the immediate necessity, and of the suitability of storm-troop tactics to "save America," and "democratic government, including civil liberties such as freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly and trial by jury." Few audible voices have been raised in protest-the victims first, of course, then a judge, and later a couple of editors;—for the harvests seem less prone to interruption, industries less exposed to "demoralization" when strike leaders are in jail.
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
*Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History-The Struggle For Women's Suffrage And The Trade Unions In 19th Century America
Click On Title To Link To Timeline For Women's Rights In America. As noted below this is just a sketch for now. There is much more to do in connecting women with the early trade union movement and the struggle for the vote.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Tuesday, September 08, 2009
***Labor's Untold Story-The Futility Of Individual Anarchist Action- Alexander Berkman And The Homestead Strike Of 1892
Click on title to link to the Alexander Berkman Archives.
Markin comment:
For those not familiar with this heroic, if foolhardy, anarchist and long time companion of the anarchist lecturer Emma Goldman (whose biography has been reviewed in this space)he attempted to murder one Henry Frick, capitalist, and evil genius of the now famous and, for labor, unsuccessful Homestead Steel strike of 1892. That defeat, by the way, left the steel industry unorganized for the next forty or so years. Take that as a lesson as well as the futility of heroic , or otherwise, individual actions to turn the tide of history. Mass action is the key. So, let's get organized.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Markin comment:
For those not familiar with this heroic, if foolhardy, anarchist and long time companion of the anarchist lecturer Emma Goldman (whose biography has been reviewed in this space)he attempted to murder one Henry Frick, capitalist, and evil genius of the now famous and, for labor, unsuccessful Homestead Steel strike of 1892. That defeat, by the way, left the steel industry unorganized for the next forty or so years. Take that as a lesson as well as the futility of heroic , or otherwise, individual actions to turn the tide of history. Mass action is the key. So, let's get organized.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History-The National Labor Reform Party And The Struggle Against Capitalist Parties In 19th Cetury America
Click On Title TO Link To Wikipedia Entry For The National Labor Union, The Precursor Of The National Labor Reform Party.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story- Honor The Memory Of 19th Century Labor Organizer Ignatius Donnelly
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Ignatius Donnelly.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Monday, September 07, 2009
*Labor Day Scorecard- 2009-RIP
Click on title to link to UE site for information about one of the few highlights of the last year in labor- the Republic Window workers sit-in staged in order to get what they were owed from a company going out of business.
Markin comment:
Keep that sit-in idea in mind for the future. Otherwise, given the severe depression-like economic situation, including massive lay-offs in all branches of industry the labor situation over the last year has made that RIP in this entry's headline is more than a little too real. The class struggle continues but, hell, we are, and have, taken it on the chin for far too long. We must preserve the working class, at least long enough to struggle for a society that will get rid of classes, in the face of these economic efforts to turn it to dust. That said- follow Joe Hill's advice. "Don't Mourn, Organize!".
The only other newsworthy labor struggle, although it now seems in the far distant past, was the hard fought Boeing strike in the late Fall of 2008. Some information on that struggle is posted below.
Commentary
October 20, 2008
Here is a little update (as of October 10) on the situation with the Boeing strikers from "Workers Vanguard". With the presidential campaign sucking all of the air out of the political universe this important strike is getting short shrift by the major media. I also have listened to a more recent interview with striking workers whose spirits are still high and who fully expect to continue on the lines until Christmas or later, if they have to. The call for a total shutdown of Boeing, creation of one company-wide union and more acts of solidarity on the lines by other unions are called for now. Again, Victory to the Boeing Strikers!
****
IAM Boeing Strikers Hold Firm
OCTOBER 6—Against the backdrop of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, the monthlong strike by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) against Boeing has rippled across the globe. Already the aerospace giant has missed delivery of more than 30 commercial aircraft, forcing airlines internationally to postpone the launch of new service. Many of its thousands of parts suppliers, some as far away as Japan, have slowed or stopped production. With Boeing the nation’s largest exporter, the effects of the strike could be felt well beyond the aerospace industry.
This strike, like any labor battle, is a confrontation between the capitalist bosses and the working class. Having raked in $4 billion in the last year alone, Boeing hopes to further jack up its massive profits by forcing a giveback contract on the union with no restrictions on the bosses’ ability to outsource work. Boeing is targeting new-hires, threatening to eliminate their pensions and retiree medical benefits altogether, and similarly wants to cut off survivor benefits. Its wage proposal is grossly inadequate, with more than 4,000 IAM members currently earning less than $30,000 a year because of a tiered wage structure.
But the Machinists remain firmly resolved to stay out and are in a position to win. The aircraft manufacturer had been scurrying to build planes in the face of volatile oil prices, slowing economies and a shakeout among the companies that finance aviation sales. The strike at Boeing points the way toward unleashing the social power of the working class at a time when the economic crisis, including the bipartisan federal bailout of Wall Street, threatens working people with yet another big hit in the pocketbook.
A victorious IAM Boeing strike could reverberate throughout the labor movement. Recognizing the Machinists’ struggle as their own, members of other unions have joined the picket lines, with union pilots at Alaska Airlines refusing to fly a new 737 from Boeing Field to Sea-Tac airport. In marked contrast to the bureaucrats’ plans to keep pickets small, a number of IAM members are putting in extra duty on the picket lines. However, other workers at Boeing are going into the plants. As a result, Boeing has sent out ten planes to customers during the strike, and engineers have continued to prepare the 787 Dreamliner for ground tests. Workers Vanguard supporters were told by Machinists on Seattle-area picket lines that the engineers, whose union is in contract negotiations with Boeing, and Teamsters are “required” by contract to work. The unions should carry out joint negotiations and strike action as a first step to forming one industrial union. “No-strike” contract clauses are examples of earlier sellouts by the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which swears off hard class struggle, substituting for it the lie of a partnership between labor and capital. All Boeing workers would be in a stronger position if they followed the union principle: picket lines mean don’t cross!
Many striking workers expressed concerns about outsourcing and job security. The response of the IAM tops has been to try to pit workers here against those overseas through protectionist campaigns to keep “our jobs” in the U.S., which fuel bigotry toward foreign, especially Asian, and immigrant workers. This chauvinist poison also is the stock in trade of the capitalist Democratic Party. As a norm, the capitalists will move to exploit cheaper labor where it is available. What is necessary is a head-on struggle against the bosses. This includes forging a fighting alliance of Boeing workers internationally and launching a serious drive to organize Boeing’s non-union suppliers in the U.S. To unlock labor’s power, there must be a political struggle within the unions for a class-struggle leadership to replace the bureaucrats who chain workers to the Democratic Party. Victory to the IAM Boeing strike!
******
Markin Commentary-On The Ending Of The Boeing Strike
News has come in that the IBM machinists who have been strike against Boeing for the past several weeks have ratified their new contract. Let’s face it, the way we should look at any labor contract settlement short of workers state power is as an armed truce. Whether the contract can be called a victory, a standoff or a defeat depends on the specific circumstances surrounding the contract. From initial appearances this contract looks like at least a standoff, if not a small victory especially on the question of outsourcing. In today’s dismay labor market and with the general economy in a tailspin this is to the good. A favorable combination of Boeing’s backlog of orders for its new line of airplanes, its huge profits and the union rank and file’s willingness to go on strike for an extended period to get a decent contract helped. That willingness to struggle on the union’s part is the key lesson we militants can take away from these proceedings. Of course, as always with any labor contract we come back to that question of the armed truce mentioned above. That will determine the ultimate value of this deal. Forward.
Markin comment:
Keep that sit-in idea in mind for the future. Otherwise, given the severe depression-like economic situation, including massive lay-offs in all branches of industry the labor situation over the last year has made that RIP in this entry's headline is more than a little too real. The class struggle continues but, hell, we are, and have, taken it on the chin for far too long. We must preserve the working class, at least long enough to struggle for a society that will get rid of classes, in the face of these economic efforts to turn it to dust. That said- follow Joe Hill's advice. "Don't Mourn, Organize!".
The only other newsworthy labor struggle, although it now seems in the far distant past, was the hard fought Boeing strike in the late Fall of 2008. Some information on that struggle is posted below.
Commentary
October 20, 2008
Here is a little update (as of October 10) on the situation with the Boeing strikers from "Workers Vanguard". With the presidential campaign sucking all of the air out of the political universe this important strike is getting short shrift by the major media. I also have listened to a more recent interview with striking workers whose spirits are still high and who fully expect to continue on the lines until Christmas or later, if they have to. The call for a total shutdown of Boeing, creation of one company-wide union and more acts of solidarity on the lines by other unions are called for now. Again, Victory to the Boeing Strikers!
****
IAM Boeing Strikers Hold Firm
OCTOBER 6—Against the backdrop of the financial meltdown on Wall Street, the monthlong strike by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM) against Boeing has rippled across the globe. Already the aerospace giant has missed delivery of more than 30 commercial aircraft, forcing airlines internationally to postpone the launch of new service. Many of its thousands of parts suppliers, some as far away as Japan, have slowed or stopped production. With Boeing the nation’s largest exporter, the effects of the strike could be felt well beyond the aerospace industry.
This strike, like any labor battle, is a confrontation between the capitalist bosses and the working class. Having raked in $4 billion in the last year alone, Boeing hopes to further jack up its massive profits by forcing a giveback contract on the union with no restrictions on the bosses’ ability to outsource work. Boeing is targeting new-hires, threatening to eliminate their pensions and retiree medical benefits altogether, and similarly wants to cut off survivor benefits. Its wage proposal is grossly inadequate, with more than 4,000 IAM members currently earning less than $30,000 a year because of a tiered wage structure.
But the Machinists remain firmly resolved to stay out and are in a position to win. The aircraft manufacturer had been scurrying to build planes in the face of volatile oil prices, slowing economies and a shakeout among the companies that finance aviation sales. The strike at Boeing points the way toward unleashing the social power of the working class at a time when the economic crisis, including the bipartisan federal bailout of Wall Street, threatens working people with yet another big hit in the pocketbook.
A victorious IAM Boeing strike could reverberate throughout the labor movement. Recognizing the Machinists’ struggle as their own, members of other unions have joined the picket lines, with union pilots at Alaska Airlines refusing to fly a new 737 from Boeing Field to Sea-Tac airport. In marked contrast to the bureaucrats’ plans to keep pickets small, a number of IAM members are putting in extra duty on the picket lines. However, other workers at Boeing are going into the plants. As a result, Boeing has sent out ten planes to customers during the strike, and engineers have continued to prepare the 787 Dreamliner for ground tests. Workers Vanguard supporters were told by Machinists on Seattle-area picket lines that the engineers, whose union is in contract negotiations with Boeing, and Teamsters are “required” by contract to work. The unions should carry out joint negotiations and strike action as a first step to forming one industrial union. “No-strike” contract clauses are examples of earlier sellouts by the pro-capitalist union bureaucracy, which swears off hard class struggle, substituting for it the lie of a partnership between labor and capital. All Boeing workers would be in a stronger position if they followed the union principle: picket lines mean don’t cross!
Many striking workers expressed concerns about outsourcing and job security. The response of the IAM tops has been to try to pit workers here against those overseas through protectionist campaigns to keep “our jobs” in the U.S., which fuel bigotry toward foreign, especially Asian, and immigrant workers. This chauvinist poison also is the stock in trade of the capitalist Democratic Party. As a norm, the capitalists will move to exploit cheaper labor where it is available. What is necessary is a head-on struggle against the bosses. This includes forging a fighting alliance of Boeing workers internationally and launching a serious drive to organize Boeing’s non-union suppliers in the U.S. To unlock labor’s power, there must be a political struggle within the unions for a class-struggle leadership to replace the bureaucrats who chain workers to the Democratic Party. Victory to the IAM Boeing strike!
******
Markin Commentary-On The Ending Of The Boeing Strike
News has come in that the IBM machinists who have been strike against Boeing for the past several weeks have ratified their new contract. Let’s face it, the way we should look at any labor contract settlement short of workers state power is as an armed truce. Whether the contract can be called a victory, a standoff or a defeat depends on the specific circumstances surrounding the contract. From initial appearances this contract looks like at least a standoff, if not a small victory especially on the question of outsourcing. In today’s dismay labor market and with the general economy in a tailspin this is to the good. A favorable combination of Boeing’s backlog of orders for its new line of airplanes, its huge profits and the union rank and file’s willingness to go on strike for an extended period to get a decent contract helped. That willingness to struggle on the union’s part is the key lesson we militants can take away from these proceedings. Of course, as always with any labor contract we come back to that question of the armed truce mentioned above. That will determine the ultimate value of this deal. Forward.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
***Untold Story-The Other Side Of The Class War- Allen Pinkerton And His Anti-Labor Detective Agency.
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for the Pinkerton Detective Agency, at one time a notorious anti-labor private police force for the capitalists, in addition to their public police. Hey, we have to know our friends, but also keep an eye on our enemies who spend over a billion dollars a year to keep unions out of their work places. Right?
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story-The Fight For An Independent Labor Party- The Farmer/Labor/LaFollette Debacle Of 1924
Click on title to link to a 1954 letter to historian Theodore Draper by early American Communist Party leader James P. Cannon (subsequently an American Trotskyist leader)on the communist maneuvering ( I am being kind here) on the labor party question in the mid-1920's.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Saturday, September 05, 2009
*Labor's Untold Story- The Lessons Of The United Electrical Workers Strikes In The 1930's
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for some information on the United Electrical Workers union (UE)in the 1930s when it formed a core of the Congress Of Industrial Unions (CIO). I am not happy with the entry but I will, as noted below, expand on this one in the future. Enough to say that the Republic window workers who had a sit-in at their factory in Chicago last winter were organized by UE.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story-Remember Ben Gold And The Heroic New York Furrier's Union Struggle Of 1926
Click on title to link to Wikipedia's entry for Ben Gold and the New York Furrier's Union strike of 1926.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Slight Rumblings In The Empire- The First Stirrings Of Opposition To Obama' Afghan War Policy-The Streets Are Not For Dreaming Now
Click on title to link to National Public Radio's report on September 3, 2009about the growing opposition to Obama's Afghan war policy, Kevin Whitelaw's "Unease Grows Over Obama's Afghanistan Plans". Well,boys and girls, the time for Obamian illusions is over. It is time to settle up. The streets are not for dreaming now. Get the poster boards, the old bed sheets, magic markers, paint and cell phones ready. "Obama-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan ((And Iraq And Pakistan Too!)"
Every once in a while (more frequently than I would like) old Pete Seeger's song about his World War II adventures that served as a parable for President Lyndon Johnson and his constant Vietnam escalations, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy" just seems appropriate. This is one of those occasions. Just switch "Big Poppy" for "Big Muddy" and you will have it just about right.
"Waist Deep In The Big Muddy"-Pete Seeger
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Every once in a while (more frequently than I would like) old Pete Seeger's song about his World War II adventures that served as a parable for President Lyndon Johnson and his constant Vietnam escalations, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy" just seems appropriate. This is one of those occasions. Just switch "Big Poppy" for "Big Muddy" and you will have it just about right.
"Waist Deep In The Big Muddy"-Pete Seeger
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Friday, September 04, 2009
*Labor's Untold Story-The Class War In The Kentucky Coal Fields- Bloody Harlan
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip on "Bloody Harlan". There will be much more on this subject. The Kentucky coal country and its history are personal in these quarters.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*It 's McChrystal Clear- U.S. Afghan Troop Escalation Coming- From Knee-Deep To Waist-Deep In "The Big Poppy"
Click on title to link to National Public Radio's report on September 1, 2009 of the musings of Afghan top commander, General Stanley McChrystal, about (another) future troop escalation in Afghanistan. Well,boys and girls, the time for Obamian illusions is over. It is time to settle up. The streets are not for dreaming now. Get the poster boards, the old bed sheets, magic markers, paint and cell phones ready. "Obama-Immediate Unconditional Withdrawal Of All U.S./Allied Troops From Afghanistan ((Iraq And Pakistan Too!)"
Every once in a while (more frequently than I would like) old Pete Seeger's song about his World War II adventures that served as a parable for President Lyndon Johnson and his constant Vietnam escalations, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy" just seems appropriate. This is one of those occasions. Just switch "Big Poppy" for "Big Muddy" and you will have it just about right.
"Waist Deep In The Big Muddy"-Pete Seeger
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
Every once in a while (more frequently than I would like) old Pete Seeger's song about his World War II adventures that served as a parable for President Lyndon Johnson and his constant Vietnam escalations, "Waist Deep In The Big Muddy" just seems appropriate. This is one of those occasions. Just switch "Big Poppy" for "Big Muddy" and you will have it just about right.
"Waist Deep In The Big Muddy"-Pete Seeger
It was back in nineteen forty-two,
I was a member of a good platoon.
We were on maneuvers in-a Loozianna,
One night by the light of the moon.
The captain told us to ford a river,
That's how it all begun.
We were -- knee deep in the Big Muddy,
But the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, are you sure,
This is the best way back to the base?"
"Sergeant, go on! I forded this river
'Bout a mile above this place.
It'll be a little soggy but just keep slogging.
We'll soon be on dry ground."
We were -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
The Sergeant said, "Sir, with all this equipment
No man will be able to swim."
"Sergeant, don't be a Nervous Nellie,"
The Captain said to him.
"All we need is a little determination;
Men, follow me, I'll lead on."
We were -- neck deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool said to push on.
All at once, the moon clouded over,
We heard a gurgling cry.
A few seconds later, the captain's helmet
Was all that floated by.
The Sergeant said, "Turn around men!
I'm in charge from now on."
And we just made it out of the Big Muddy
With the captain dead and gone.
We stripped and dived and found his body
Stuck in the old quicksand.
I guess he didn't know that the water was deeper
Than the place he'd once before been.
Another stream had joined the Big Muddy
'Bout a half mile from where we'd gone.
We were lucky to escape from the Big Muddy
When the big fool said to push on.
Well, I'm not going to point any moral;
I'll leave that for yourself
Maybe you're still walking, you're still talking
You'd like to keep your health.
But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We're -- waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.
Waist deep! Neck deep! Soon even a
Tall man'll be over his head, we're
Waist deep in the Big Muddy!
And the big fool says to push on!
*Labor's Untold Story-The Class War In The Kentucky Coal Fields- Bloody Harlan's Heroic Aunt Molly Jackson
Click on title to link to Aunt Molly Jackson's site. There will be much more on this subject. The Kentucky coal country and its history are personal in these quarters.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Labor's Untold Story-The Class War In The Kentucky Coal Fields- Bloody Harlan In Song
Click on title to link to YouTube's film clip of the song "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive". There will be much more on this subject. The Kentucky coal country and its history are personal in these quarters.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
Thursday, September 03, 2009
*Labor's Untold Story- The Memorial In Honor Of The Haymarket Martyrs
*Labor's Untold Story- The Memorial In Honor Of The Haymarket Martyrs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdMfMt8tLPo
eight hour day, haymarket martyrs, albert parsons, lucy parsons, communism, COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, communist manifesto, DEATH PENALTY, leon trotsky,
Click on title to link to Youtube's film clip of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdMfMt8tLPo
eight hour day, haymarket martyrs, albert parsons, lucy parsons, communism, COMMUNIST INTERNATIONAL, communist manifesto, DEATH PENALTY, leon trotsky,
Click on title to link to Youtube's film clip of the Haymarket Martyrs Memorial.
Every Month Is Labor History Month
This Commentary is part of a series under the following general title: Labor’s Untold Story- Reclaiming Our Labor History In Order To Fight Another Day-And Win!
As a first run through, and in some cases until I can get enough other sources in order to make a decent presentation, I will start with short entries on each topic that I will eventually go into greater detail about. Or, better yet, take my suggested topic and run with it yourself.
*Once Again, On The United Front Tactic - Guest Commentary -The View Of The International Communist League's Joseph Seymour
Click on title to link to the pertinent documents of the Third Congress of the Communist International referred to the Joseph Seymour article below.
Markin comment: This Seymour article is extremely interesting one from a couple of points for those of us here in America who face point blank the question of the arduous task creating socialist propaganda, agitation and party-building. I will do a separate, more extensive commentary shortly. For now though a couple of points are important.
One is that informative distinction (and not just for historical purposes, although that is also helpful) Seymour makes between propaganda, agitation and party-building, one that I, personally, have not always sharply drawn. On that continuum I think that Seymour is right that are tasks today, and in the short term future, have to be directed toward creating cadre. To use his term- explain many complex ideas to the few. Secondly, the trend of American labor action have tended to be explosive and haphazard so that if one projected the creation of a workers party as having to go through some reformist stage first that might be a wrong way to look at it. In any case that task is of a propaganda sort today.
The other point, reading between the lines of the Seymour article at the last couple of paragraphs it is apparent that there is, or was, some confusion about the united front tactic within the International Communist League, or at least the Spartacist League. More later on the united front question, especially its relationship to party-building. I will confess that I am concerned that if we stress teaching complex ideas, whether I think that is the right road or not, to a few in this political environment that we may miss some opportunities.
Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
The United Front Tactic: Its Use and Abuse
By Joseph Seymour
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a presentation by Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour to the 13th National Conference of the SL/U.S. held this summer.
The tactic of the united front, as it was originally developed and expounded at the Third Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in June-July 1921, was intended for mass parties, in particular the nascent Communist Parties in Germany and France. It was aimed at winning over a section of the working-class base of mass reformist organizations led by the Social Democrats and, in France, the right-wing syndicalists. The united-front tactic was not considered applicable for relatively small Communist Parties, such as those in Britain and the United States.
Therefore, it’s important to understand that our use of the united front is an adaptation of the tactic as it was originally conceived and implemented. This adaptation necessarily involves many differences, some obvious, others not so obvious. Thus the characteristic form of the original united front was a military action: a strike, a mass demonstration against government policies (sometimes involving a one-day general strike), defensive actions against the fascists. In contrast, the characteristic form of our united-front activities is a pre-planned political protest. Moreover, often these protests are based on demands that cannot possibly be achieved by the small left-wing propaganda groups participating in them, for example, a campus-based protest against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such activities are really a form of agitation, not a united-front action at all in the original sense of the term.
In this presentation I’m going to focus on the united-front tactic as it was originally developed and expounded by Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the early Comintern. However, a useful approach in considering the applicability of the united front for a revolutionary Marxist propaganda group like ourselves was indicated six centuries earlier by the young English feudal warrior Henry Percy, otherwise known as Hotspur. As recounted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Hotspur was discussing the united-front tactic with his ally, the old Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower. Glendower declaimed: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which Hotspur replied: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” If the spirits don’t come when we call them from the reformist swamp, we don’t have a united front.
Agitation and Propaganda
I think one source of confusion in our discussions on the united front has been terminological imprecision resulting in a lack of mutual understanding. That is, we use the same terms, but we mean different things by them. A key term in this regard is “agitation.” The classic Marxist definition of agitation was provided by the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, who differentiated it from propaganda in this way. Propaganda is the explanation of many complex ideas to the few. Agitation is the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many. However, in our tendency agitation is often conflated with a call to action. The difference between propaganda and agitation in this case is viewed and presented not in terms of explaining complex versus basic ideas, but rather in terms of the immediate realizability of the latter.
The original Comintern documents on the united front linked agitation with propaganda while clearly differentiating both from involvement in struggle. Thus the July 1921 document “On Tactics” stated:
“From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously stated that its task is not to establish small Communist sects aiming to influence the working masses purely through agitation and propaganda, but to participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and in the course of the struggle create large, revolutionary, mass Communist parties.”
—Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (1980)
Or again in the same document: “The Communist Parties can only develop through struggle. Even the smallest Parties should not limit themselves to propaganda and agitation.”
I’ll try to expound this concept in terms of our own organization by a hypothetical example. Let’s say that a number of undocumented Latino immigrants working in hotels and restaurants in San Francisco are seized by federal agents and deported. Some of these immigrant workers are members of the hotel and restaurant workers union. A WV article focusing on this incident concludes with the position that as a general policy the labor movement must oppose deportations and support full citizenship rights for all immigrants. That’s agitation. Let’s continue and say that we have some supporters in the San Francisco hotel and restaurant workers union. They judge that many workers in the union are sufficiently incensed by the deportations that they’re willing to engage in a protest action. So our supporters put up a motion at a union meeting for a one-day protest strike opposing deportations and for immigrant rights. That’s a call to action. We should consistently use the term agitation in its original Plekhanovite sense, clearly differentiating it from propaganda on the one side and from calls to action on the other.
The United Front at the Third Congress
The Third Congress of the Communist International, held in mid 1921, recognized and addressed the temporary restabilization of the bourgeois order in Europe following the revolutionary turbulence of the immediate post-World War I period. In particular, revolutions in Germany and Hungary and an incipient revolution in Italy had been defeated by the forces of bourgeois reaction, abetted, especially in Germany, by the Social Democratic leaders. In 1998, comrade Reuben Samuels gave an educational on the Third Congress in which he summarized the conditions confronting it:
“The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries.”
—“The First Four Congresses of the Communist International,” Marxist Studies for Cadre Education, No. 9 (2003)
One way of looking at the policies developed and adopted at the Third Congress, centrally the united-front tactic, is that they represented a more advanced stage of party building—they sought to gain the support of a less politically advanced layer of the working class. The main theme of the Comintern documents on tactics at this time was that a majority of the organized working class could not be won to the Communist movement simply through propaganda and agitation, that is, on the basis of ideas. For that, the Communist Parties have to demonstrate in practice leadership of day-to-day economic and political struggles, often of a defensive character, for partial demands.
However, a corollary of this position is that a minority of the working class, in fact a numerically significant minority—the most politically advanced elements—can be won over by propaganda and agitation to communism, in particular, through polemical attacks on the reformists and centrists. By 1921, the Communist Parties in Germany and France and some other European countries—Czechoslovakia, for example—had succeeded in attracting the main body of such politically advanced workers. They were now faced with a different task, one of gaining the support of a section of the workers who still adhered to the reformist parties and affiliated trade unions.
These workers pretty much knew what the Communists were about in terms of doctrine, policies and practices. The problem was not lack of familiarity on their part. Rather, these workers rejected what the Communists stood for. In large measure, they subscribed to bourgeois-democratic ideology, centrally the identification of democracy with a parliamentary-type government elected through universal and equal suffrage. In many cases, they viewed the Communists as irresponsible hotheads who would lead the workers following them into adventurist actions that would be smashed by the forces of the state and right-wing paramilitary groups.
However, some of these workers were willing to collaborate with the Communists on the basis—but only on the basis—of mutually agreed upon terms. The December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” describes the mindset of such workers:
“Considerable sections of workers belonging to the old social-democratic parties are even now unwilling to accept the attacks of the social democrats and the centrists on the Communist vanguard. They are even beginning to demand an agreement with the Communists, but at the same time they have not outgrown their belief in the reformists and large numbers of them still support the parties of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals. They do not formulate their plans and aspirations all that clearly, but in general the new mood of these masses comes down to a wish to set up a united front and make the parties and unions of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals fight alongside the Communists against the capitalist attack.”
The Amsterdam International was the trade-union grouping affiliated with the Second International.
There are two basic conditions for the united-front tactic to be effective. One, its aims have to involve issues, such as resistance to wage cuts, that reformist-minded workers would struggle for independently of the offer of collaboration by the Communists. Two, the Communist Party has to have sufficient social and political weight to substantially affect the outcome of such struggles. As Trotsky explained in his March 1922 piece, “On the United Front”:
“Wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organized, political force, but not the decisive magnitude; wherever the party embraces organizationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organized proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.”
—The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Volume 2
He contrasted such parties to those that were qualitatively smaller: “In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organizational significance.” Later in this presentation I’ll discuss the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for those parties, particularly in Britain and the United States, that in Trotsky’s words were still a numerically insignificant minority.
The united-front tactic was intended as a two-edged sword. If the reformist leaders agreed to a united-front action, the Communists would be able to demonstrate in practice that they were the most effective and militant leaders of elemental working-class struggles. In doing so they would gain a more sympathetic hearing from reformist-minded workers for their broader program and goals. If the reformist leaders rejected the offer of a united front, then the Communists could say to the workers who followed them: “See, out of hostility to Communism, your leaders are depriving you of a strong and willing ally in your own struggles against the capitalists and their state apparatus.” As Trotsky put it: “It is necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was not due to our formalistic irreconcilability but to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists.”
The January 1922 Comintern appeal, “For the United Proletarian Front!” argues:
“No worker, whether communist or social-democrat or syndicalist, or even a member of the Christian or liberal trade unions, wants his wages further reduced. None wants to work longer hours, cold and hungry. And therefore all must unite in a common front against the employers’ offensive.”
—The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents (Vol. 1, 1919-1922), selected and edited by Jane Degras (1956)
To understand the central importance of elemental wage struggles in motivating and implementing the united-front tactic, one has to recognize that in Germany, France and a number of other European countries at this time the trade-union movement was divided along political lines. Most of our sections are in countries—the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia—where there are unitary trade unions encompassing workers of all political persuasions. But we also have sections in countries—France, South Africa, Mexico—where there are competing union federations affiliated with different political parties.
The United Front in France and Germany
Our policies toward the political organizations of the working class are significantly different than toward the economic organizations of the working class. A political party consists of a voluntary selection of individual activists based on a comprehensive program for organizing or reorganizing society. We seek to create a politically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard party. The course of doing so often involves splitting reformist and centrist parties. Thus the French Communist Party was created in 1920 by splitting a left-wing majority from the reformist Socialist Party. Similarly, the German Communist Party was transformed in the same year from a relatively small organization, with about 80,000 members, into a mass party by splitting a left-wing majority from the centrist Independent Social Democratic Party.
However, we advocate and, when appropriate, seek to build industrial unions and factory committees encompassing all workers employed therein, regardless of their political views and affiliations. We aim to gain the political support of the majority of union members in order to replace the incumbent reformist or (in the U.S.) liberal labor bureaucrats, while preserving these organizations intact. But the incumbent bureaucrats will not necessarily play by those rules of the game, especially when they are losing it. That’s what happened in France in 1921.
In the pre-World War I era, the main trade-union organization in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was a bastion of left-wing or revolutionary syndicalism. The CGT was proudly and willfully independent of the Socialist Party and to no small degree hostile to it. Syndicalist militants viewed that party, with good reason, as a predominantly petty-bourgeois organization permeated by parliamentarist careerism and intellectual dilettantism. However, in the last few years before the war the political distance between the CGT and Socialist Party was appreciably narrowed when a new, more right-wing leadership around Léon Jouhaux took over the former. With the outbreak of the war, Jouhaux and other CGT leaders joined with Socialist Party leaders in a so-called “sacred union” of national defense. Jouhaux himself became a government official.
After the war, the CGT polarized between an avowedly reformist right wing around Jouhaux and an amorphous left wing consisting of pro-Bolshevik militants, old-line syndicalists and anarchists. Faced with the increasing prospect of losing out to the forces of the left, the Jouhaux group split the organization in late 1921. The right-wing union federation, which retained the old name, had about 250,000 members. The left-wing organization, called the CGT-Unitaire (CGTU), led by an unstable bloc of fledgling Communists, syndicalists and anarchists, claimed 350,000 members. So to be effective, workers struggles over wages, conditions and layoffs had to involve united action between the Communists and their left-wing allies in the CGTU and the reformists in the CGT.
The situation in Germany was more complicated because the political division between the Communists and reformists was intermeshed with different forms of working-class economic organization. The Social Democrats retained control over the main trade-union organization, the Allgemeine Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB). This was literally a union of trades, based on occupations, not on industrial or other economic units. For example, the machinists union consisted of machinists in different factories while not including non-machinists in these factories. While the Communist Party sought to work in the ADGB, the Social Democratic officialdom was able to use bureaucratic methods to prevent the Communists from wielding authority in the unions, corresponding to their influence in the ranks.
However, the revolutionary turbulence of late 1918-1919 gave rise to another form of mass working-class organization, factory councils. These embraced all workers in the enterprise and were more representative of the ranks than the unions. Council representatives had to be wage-earning workers in that enterprise, thus barring paid union functionaries. By late 1922, the Communist Party had gained sufficient authority to organize a national congress of several thousand factory councils. Thus the united-front tactic often involved calls for united action between the Communist-led factory councils and the Social Democratic-dominated unions.
A good example, albeit in the negative sense, of how the united-front tactic played out on the ground involved a railway workers strike in early 1922. The German railways were state-owned. As part of a fiscal austerity program, the government announced that 20,000 railway workers would be laid off. This provoked a strike by an independent railway union, that is, one not affiliated with the ADGB. The government, headed by the Social Democratic president Friedrich Ebert, declared the strike illegal. In response, the Communist Party issued an appeal for all workers organizations to defend the right to strike and mobilized its own forces in support of the railway workers. When the Social Democratic Party and ADGB leaders refused to support the strike, the railway union executive ordered its members back to work. However, the Communists’ policies and activities increased their political authority among a strategically important section of the working class while discrediting the Social Democrats.
The United Front and the Post-Soviet Period
It’s obvious that the use of the united-front tactic in elemental, day-to-day struggles of labor against capital by the early European Communist Parties is not relevant for us today, nor will it be tomorrow. However, there are other important differences that are much less obvious. One such difference is the role of freedom of criticism or, more precisely, of criticism. In his 1922 piece Trotsky identified freedom of criticism as a negative condition of the united front, that is, something the Communists would not stop doing:
“We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labor movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us.”
Remember, we are considering mass Communist Parties that had the capability to make their criticisms of the reformist organizations known to the latter’s members and supporters. The German Communist Party in the early ’20s had dozens of daily newspapers, read by hundreds of thousands of workers, including a fraction of the members and supporters of the Social Democracy. The German, French and other European Communist Parties had parliamentary deputies and members of local government councils. They had trade-union officials and representatives on factory committees. In practically every factory in Germany, France and some other countries—such as Italy and Czechoslovakia—Communist workers were continually arguing politics with social-democratic, syndicalist or anarchist co-workers. There was no lack of political engagement and debate between the Communists and other tendencies in the workers movement.
The SL/U.S. faces a very different situation vis-Ã -vis our somewhat larger reformist opponents—the social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Stalinoid Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Maoist-Stalinist Revolutionary Communist Party. The leaders and cadre of these organizations do not want to engage in political combat with us and do not feel any need to do so. Quite the contrary. They seek to cordon off their newer, younger members and contacts from “the Sparts.” The ISO, for example, bar us from their public talks. In response, there’s been a tendency to use the united-front tactic to get around the unwillingness of our reformist opponents to engage us in political debate. We can argue about the effectiveness of the tactic for this purpose.
But what is not arguable is that this was not the original purpose of the united-front tactic. Its aim was not to create an additional arena of debate with the reformists over doctrine and program but to engage them at an altogether different level. Thus the December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” stated: “The Communist Parties of the world, having secured complete organizational freedom to extend their ideological influence among the working masses, are now trying at every opportunity to achieve the broadest and fullest possible unity of these masses in practical activity.” [emphasis in original]
I’m going to conclude by discussing the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for the smaller Communist Parties in Britain and the United States, for which the united front was not applicable, that is, they lacked sufficient weight to initiate and organize mass working-class actions. At the same time, these were not propaganda groups either. In the early 1920s, the British and American CPs encompassed thousands of experienced worker militants and had in their top ranks some widely known and respected workers’ leaders, such as Tom Mann in Britain and William Z. Foster in the U.S.
In the case of both the British and American parties, Lenin played a central role in working out the appropriate tactics. The basic axis of the united-front tactic is the offer by the Communists of joint struggle with the reformist organizations, including their current leaderships. In Britain, this was expressed through critical electoral support to the Labour Party and also the offer by the Communists to join the Labour Party. As such, the Communists would act openly as an organized faction on the basis of a revolutionary program. At the same time, as members of the Labour Party, Communists would help to build it, for example through winning over more politically backward workers who still supported the Liberals and Tories.
In the U.S., the only mass working-class organizations were (and still are) the trade unions. Hence the Communist demand that the unions form a political party opposed to the Democrats and Republicans in which the Communists would participate. I’m not going to address whether many, perhaps most, American Communists misunderstood the tactic as calling for and being willing to build a new reformist party similar to the British Labour Party. That question is not germane to the purpose of this presentation. What is germane is an understanding that the advocacy of a trade-union-based party was the American analogue of the united-front tactic.
During the early 1970s we had an extensive internal discussion on the labor party question. The substance and conclusions of the discussion were synthesized in a presentation, “A Talk on the Labor Party Question,” in 1972 by comrade Jim Robertson, that was republished in the Spartacist pamphlet On the United Front (January 1996). He explained:
“In the last debate in New York, I spent all my time on the decisions of the Third and Fourth Congresses. I’m going to evade that this time and simply point out that the Labor Party slogan is the current American version of the issue of the united front. It’s posed in the absence of a massive political expression of reformism or Stalinism in the United States; rather, with the organization of industrial unions with a deeply committed pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, it is toward them that the issue of proletarian unity and the process of communist triumph in struggle is centered on the Labor Party question.”
Jim also emphasized that actual motion toward such a labor party, or even substantial sentiment in favor of it, would only be generated by a qualitatively higher level of working-class struggle than existed at the time or even during the big strikes that built the mass industrial unions in the 1930s. Absent such a convulsive upsurge in working-class struggle, our advocacy of a union-based party in opposition to the Democrats is a subordinate aspect of our more fundamental propaganda for the dictatorship of the proletariat (expressed using the term “workers government”).
This approach to the labor party question has, I think, a general relevance for the SL/U.S. in the current period. There’s been a lot of talk about whether or not we have a perspective. I think we do have a perspective but not in the way the term has been used. Our perspective should be to produce more and better propaganda in the Plekhanovite sense of explaining many complex ideas to the few. Let’s stop with the get-rich-quick schemes already. When, in the future, opportunities for organizational breakthroughs arise, we’ll all know it. Doubtless, these will involve both objective problems and internal differences, possibly fights, but that’s not what has been happening in our tendency since the fall of the Soviet Union.
What has happened, I think, is a deepgoing subjective drive to achieve organizational breakthroughs in order to demonstrate (mainly to ourselves) that we are not historically irrelevant, since everyone else in the world thinks we are historically irrelevant. We are historically relevant but we don’t have to and cannot now demonstrate that through substantial organizational breakthroughs or some other kind of external success. That’s just objective reality
Markin comment: This Seymour article is extremely interesting one from a couple of points for those of us here in America who face point blank the question of the arduous task creating socialist propaganda, agitation and party-building. I will do a separate, more extensive commentary shortly. For now though a couple of points are important.
One is that informative distinction (and not just for historical purposes, although that is also helpful) Seymour makes between propaganda, agitation and party-building, one that I, personally, have not always sharply drawn. On that continuum I think that Seymour is right that are tasks today, and in the short term future, have to be directed toward creating cadre. To use his term- explain many complex ideas to the few. Secondly, the trend of American labor action have tended to be explosive and haphazard so that if one projected the creation of a workers party as having to go through some reformist stage first that might be a wrong way to look at it. In any case that task is of a propaganda sort today.
The other point, reading between the lines of the Seymour article at the last couple of paragraphs it is apparent that there is, or was, some confusion about the united front tactic within the International Communist League, or at least the Spartacist League. More later on the united front question, especially its relationship to party-building. I will confess that I am concerned that if we stress teaching complex ideas, whether I think that is the right road or not, to a few in this political environment that we may miss some opportunities.
Workers Vanguard No. 941
28 August 2009
The United Front Tactic: Its Use and Abuse
By Joseph Seymour
(Young Spartacus pages)
We print below a presentation by Spartacist League/U.S. Central Committee member Joseph Seymour to the 13th National Conference of the SL/U.S. held this summer.
The tactic of the united front, as it was originally developed and expounded at the Third Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in June-July 1921, was intended for mass parties, in particular the nascent Communist Parties in Germany and France. It was aimed at winning over a section of the working-class base of mass reformist organizations led by the Social Democrats and, in France, the right-wing syndicalists. The united-front tactic was not considered applicable for relatively small Communist Parties, such as those in Britain and the United States.
Therefore, it’s important to understand that our use of the united front is an adaptation of the tactic as it was originally conceived and implemented. This adaptation necessarily involves many differences, some obvious, others not so obvious. Thus the characteristic form of the original united front was a military action: a strike, a mass demonstration against government policies (sometimes involving a one-day general strike), defensive actions against the fascists. In contrast, the characteristic form of our united-front activities is a pre-planned political protest. Moreover, often these protests are based on demands that cannot possibly be achieved by the small left-wing propaganda groups participating in them, for example, a campus-based protest against the U.S. occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such activities are really a form of agitation, not a united-front action at all in the original sense of the term.
In this presentation I’m going to focus on the united-front tactic as it was originally developed and expounded by Lenin, Trotsky and the other leaders of the early Comintern. However, a useful approach in considering the applicability of the united front for a revolutionary Marxist propaganda group like ourselves was indicated six centuries earlier by the young English feudal warrior Henry Percy, otherwise known as Hotspur. As recounted in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1, Hotspur was discussing the united-front tactic with his ally, the old Welsh chieftain Owen Glendower. Glendower declaimed: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” To which Hotspur replied: “Why, so can I, or so can any man; but will they come when you do call for them?” If the spirits don’t come when we call them from the reformist swamp, we don’t have a united front.
Agitation and Propaganda
I think one source of confusion in our discussions on the united front has been terminological imprecision resulting in a lack of mutual understanding. That is, we use the same terms, but we mean different things by them. A key term in this regard is “agitation.” The classic Marxist definition of agitation was provided by the early Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, who differentiated it from propaganda in this way. Propaganda is the explanation of many complex ideas to the few. Agitation is the explanation of a few basic ideas to the many. However, in our tendency agitation is often conflated with a call to action. The difference between propaganda and agitation in this case is viewed and presented not in terms of explaining complex versus basic ideas, but rather in terms of the immediate realizability of the latter.
The original Comintern documents on the united front linked agitation with propaganda while clearly differentiating both from involvement in struggle. Thus the July 1921 document “On Tactics” stated:
“From the day of its foundation the Communist International has clearly and unambiguously stated that its task is not to establish small Communist sects aiming to influence the working masses purely through agitation and propaganda, but to participate directly in the struggle of the working masses, establish Communist leadership of the struggle, and in the course of the struggle create large, revolutionary, mass Communist parties.”
—Theses, Resolutions and Manifestos of the First Four Congresses of the Third International (1980)
Or again in the same document: “The Communist Parties can only develop through struggle. Even the smallest Parties should not limit themselves to propaganda and agitation.”
I’ll try to expound this concept in terms of our own organization by a hypothetical example. Let’s say that a number of undocumented Latino immigrants working in hotels and restaurants in San Francisco are seized by federal agents and deported. Some of these immigrant workers are members of the hotel and restaurant workers union. A WV article focusing on this incident concludes with the position that as a general policy the labor movement must oppose deportations and support full citizenship rights for all immigrants. That’s agitation. Let’s continue and say that we have some supporters in the San Francisco hotel and restaurant workers union. They judge that many workers in the union are sufficiently incensed by the deportations that they’re willing to engage in a protest action. So our supporters put up a motion at a union meeting for a one-day protest strike opposing deportations and for immigrant rights. That’s a call to action. We should consistently use the term agitation in its original Plekhanovite sense, clearly differentiating it from propaganda on the one side and from calls to action on the other.
The United Front at the Third Congress
The Third Congress of the Communist International, held in mid 1921, recognized and addressed the temporary restabilization of the bourgeois order in Europe following the revolutionary turbulence of the immediate post-World War I period. In particular, revolutions in Germany and Hungary and an incipient revolution in Italy had been defeated by the forces of bourgeois reaction, abetted, especially in Germany, by the Social Democratic leaders. In 1998, comrade Reuben Samuels gave an educational on the Third Congress in which he summarized the conditions confronting it:
“The defeats of this period demonstrated both the immaturity of the newly formed communist parties and the ability of the Social Democracy—despite its role in WWI mobilizing the proletariat for the imperialist slaughter, and despite its vanguard role in the imperialist expeditions against the Soviet Union—to maintain its base among the organized working class in the advanced industrial countries.”
—“The First Four Congresses of the Communist International,” Marxist Studies for Cadre Education, No. 9 (2003)
One way of looking at the policies developed and adopted at the Third Congress, centrally the united-front tactic, is that they represented a more advanced stage of party building—they sought to gain the support of a less politically advanced layer of the working class. The main theme of the Comintern documents on tactics at this time was that a majority of the organized working class could not be won to the Communist movement simply through propaganda and agitation, that is, on the basis of ideas. For that, the Communist Parties have to demonstrate in practice leadership of day-to-day economic and political struggles, often of a defensive character, for partial demands.
However, a corollary of this position is that a minority of the working class, in fact a numerically significant minority—the most politically advanced elements—can be won over by propaganda and agitation to communism, in particular, through polemical attacks on the reformists and centrists. By 1921, the Communist Parties in Germany and France and some other European countries—Czechoslovakia, for example—had succeeded in attracting the main body of such politically advanced workers. They were now faced with a different task, one of gaining the support of a section of the workers who still adhered to the reformist parties and affiliated trade unions.
These workers pretty much knew what the Communists were about in terms of doctrine, policies and practices. The problem was not lack of familiarity on their part. Rather, these workers rejected what the Communists stood for. In large measure, they subscribed to bourgeois-democratic ideology, centrally the identification of democracy with a parliamentary-type government elected through universal and equal suffrage. In many cases, they viewed the Communists as irresponsible hotheads who would lead the workers following them into adventurist actions that would be smashed by the forces of the state and right-wing paramilitary groups.
However, some of these workers were willing to collaborate with the Communists on the basis—but only on the basis—of mutually agreed upon terms. The December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” describes the mindset of such workers:
“Considerable sections of workers belonging to the old social-democratic parties are even now unwilling to accept the attacks of the social democrats and the centrists on the Communist vanguard. They are even beginning to demand an agreement with the Communists, but at the same time they have not outgrown their belief in the reformists and large numbers of them still support the parties of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals. They do not formulate their plans and aspirations all that clearly, but in general the new mood of these masses comes down to a wish to set up a united front and make the parties and unions of the Second and the Amsterdam Internationals fight alongside the Communists against the capitalist attack.”
The Amsterdam International was the trade-union grouping affiliated with the Second International.
There are two basic conditions for the united-front tactic to be effective. One, its aims have to involve issues, such as resistance to wage cuts, that reformist-minded workers would struggle for independently of the offer of collaboration by the Communists. Two, the Communist Party has to have sufficient social and political weight to substantially affect the outcome of such struggles. As Trotsky explained in his March 1922 piece, “On the United Front”:
“Wherever the Communist Party already constitutes a big, organized, political force, but not the decisive magnitude; wherever the party embraces organizationally, let us say, one-fourth, one-third, or even a larger proportion of the organized proletarian vanguard, it is confronted with the question of the united front in all its acuteness.”
—The First 5 Years of the Communist International, Volume 2
He contrasted such parties to those that were qualitatively smaller: “In cases where the Communist Party still remains an organization of a numerically insignificant minority, the question of its conduct on the mass-struggle front does not assume a decisive practical and organizational significance.” Later in this presentation I’ll discuss the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for those parties, particularly in Britain and the United States, that in Trotsky’s words were still a numerically insignificant minority.
The united-front tactic was intended as a two-edged sword. If the reformist leaders agreed to a united-front action, the Communists would be able to demonstrate in practice that they were the most effective and militant leaders of elemental working-class struggles. In doing so they would gain a more sympathetic hearing from reformist-minded workers for their broader program and goals. If the reformist leaders rejected the offer of a united front, then the Communists could say to the workers who followed them: “See, out of hostility to Communism, your leaders are depriving you of a strong and willing ally in your own struggles against the capitalists and their state apparatus.” As Trotsky put it: “It is necessary that the struggling masses should always be given the opportunity of convincing themselves that the non-achievement of unity in action was not due to our formalistic irreconcilability but to the lack of real will to struggle on the part of the reformists.”
The January 1922 Comintern appeal, “For the United Proletarian Front!” argues:
“No worker, whether communist or social-democrat or syndicalist, or even a member of the Christian or liberal trade unions, wants his wages further reduced. None wants to work longer hours, cold and hungry. And therefore all must unite in a common front against the employers’ offensive.”
—The Communist International, 1919-1943: Documents (Vol. 1, 1919-1922), selected and edited by Jane Degras (1956)
To understand the central importance of elemental wage struggles in motivating and implementing the united-front tactic, one has to recognize that in Germany, France and a number of other European countries at this time the trade-union movement was divided along political lines. Most of our sections are in countries—the U.S., Canada, Britain, Germany, Australia—where there are unitary trade unions encompassing workers of all political persuasions. But we also have sections in countries—France, South Africa, Mexico—where there are competing union federations affiliated with different political parties.
The United Front in France and Germany
Our policies toward the political organizations of the working class are significantly different than toward the economic organizations of the working class. A political party consists of a voluntary selection of individual activists based on a comprehensive program for organizing or reorganizing society. We seek to create a politically homogeneous revolutionary vanguard party. The course of doing so often involves splitting reformist and centrist parties. Thus the French Communist Party was created in 1920 by splitting a left-wing majority from the reformist Socialist Party. Similarly, the German Communist Party was transformed in the same year from a relatively small organization, with about 80,000 members, into a mass party by splitting a left-wing majority from the centrist Independent Social Democratic Party.
However, we advocate and, when appropriate, seek to build industrial unions and factory committees encompassing all workers employed therein, regardless of their political views and affiliations. We aim to gain the political support of the majority of union members in order to replace the incumbent reformist or (in the U.S.) liberal labor bureaucrats, while preserving these organizations intact. But the incumbent bureaucrats will not necessarily play by those rules of the game, especially when they are losing it. That’s what happened in France in 1921.
In the pre-World War I era, the main trade-union organization in France, the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), was a bastion of left-wing or revolutionary syndicalism. The CGT was proudly and willfully independent of the Socialist Party and to no small degree hostile to it. Syndicalist militants viewed that party, with good reason, as a predominantly petty-bourgeois organization permeated by parliamentarist careerism and intellectual dilettantism. However, in the last few years before the war the political distance between the CGT and Socialist Party was appreciably narrowed when a new, more right-wing leadership around Léon Jouhaux took over the former. With the outbreak of the war, Jouhaux and other CGT leaders joined with Socialist Party leaders in a so-called “sacred union” of national defense. Jouhaux himself became a government official.
After the war, the CGT polarized between an avowedly reformist right wing around Jouhaux and an amorphous left wing consisting of pro-Bolshevik militants, old-line syndicalists and anarchists. Faced with the increasing prospect of losing out to the forces of the left, the Jouhaux group split the organization in late 1921. The right-wing union federation, which retained the old name, had about 250,000 members. The left-wing organization, called the CGT-Unitaire (CGTU), led by an unstable bloc of fledgling Communists, syndicalists and anarchists, claimed 350,000 members. So to be effective, workers struggles over wages, conditions and layoffs had to involve united action between the Communists and their left-wing allies in the CGTU and the reformists in the CGT.
The situation in Germany was more complicated because the political division between the Communists and reformists was intermeshed with different forms of working-class economic organization. The Social Democrats retained control over the main trade-union organization, the Allgemeine Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund (ADGB). This was literally a union of trades, based on occupations, not on industrial or other economic units. For example, the machinists union consisted of machinists in different factories while not including non-machinists in these factories. While the Communist Party sought to work in the ADGB, the Social Democratic officialdom was able to use bureaucratic methods to prevent the Communists from wielding authority in the unions, corresponding to their influence in the ranks.
However, the revolutionary turbulence of late 1918-1919 gave rise to another form of mass working-class organization, factory councils. These embraced all workers in the enterprise and were more representative of the ranks than the unions. Council representatives had to be wage-earning workers in that enterprise, thus barring paid union functionaries. By late 1922, the Communist Party had gained sufficient authority to organize a national congress of several thousand factory councils. Thus the united-front tactic often involved calls for united action between the Communist-led factory councils and the Social Democratic-dominated unions.
A good example, albeit in the negative sense, of how the united-front tactic played out on the ground involved a railway workers strike in early 1922. The German railways were state-owned. As part of a fiscal austerity program, the government announced that 20,000 railway workers would be laid off. This provoked a strike by an independent railway union, that is, one not affiliated with the ADGB. The government, headed by the Social Democratic president Friedrich Ebert, declared the strike illegal. In response, the Communist Party issued an appeal for all workers organizations to defend the right to strike and mobilized its own forces in support of the railway workers. When the Social Democratic Party and ADGB leaders refused to support the strike, the railway union executive ordered its members back to work. However, the Communists’ policies and activities increased their political authority among a strategically important section of the working class while discrediting the Social Democrats.
The United Front and the Post-Soviet Period
It’s obvious that the use of the united-front tactic in elemental, day-to-day struggles of labor against capital by the early European Communist Parties is not relevant for us today, nor will it be tomorrow. However, there are other important differences that are much less obvious. One such difference is the role of freedom of criticism or, more precisely, of criticism. In his 1922 piece Trotsky identified freedom of criticism as a negative condition of the united front, that is, something the Communists would not stop doing:
“We broke with the reformists and centrists in order to obtain complete freedom in criticizing perfidy, betrayal, indecision and the half-way spirit in the labor movement. For this reason any sort of organizational agreement which restricts our freedom of criticism and agitation is absolutely unacceptable to us.”
Remember, we are considering mass Communist Parties that had the capability to make their criticisms of the reformist organizations known to the latter’s members and supporters. The German Communist Party in the early ’20s had dozens of daily newspapers, read by hundreds of thousands of workers, including a fraction of the members and supporters of the Social Democracy. The German, French and other European Communist Parties had parliamentary deputies and members of local government councils. They had trade-union officials and representatives on factory committees. In practically every factory in Germany, France and some other countries—such as Italy and Czechoslovakia—Communist workers were continually arguing politics with social-democratic, syndicalist or anarchist co-workers. There was no lack of political engagement and debate between the Communists and other tendencies in the workers movement.
The SL/U.S. faces a very different situation vis-Ã -vis our somewhat larger reformist opponents—the social-democratic International Socialist Organization (ISO), the Stalinoid Workers World Party and Party for Socialism and Liberation, and the Maoist-Stalinist Revolutionary Communist Party. The leaders and cadre of these organizations do not want to engage in political combat with us and do not feel any need to do so. Quite the contrary. They seek to cordon off their newer, younger members and contacts from “the Sparts.” The ISO, for example, bar us from their public talks. In response, there’s been a tendency to use the united-front tactic to get around the unwillingness of our reformist opponents to engage us in political debate. We can argue about the effectiveness of the tactic for this purpose.
But what is not arguable is that this was not the original purpose of the united-front tactic. Its aim was not to create an additional arena of debate with the reformists over doctrine and program but to engage them at an altogether different level. Thus the December 1921 “Theses on the United Front” stated: “The Communist Parties of the world, having secured complete organizational freedom to extend their ideological influence among the working masses, are now trying at every opportunity to achieve the broadest and fullest possible unity of these masses in practical activity.” [emphasis in original]
I’m going to conclude by discussing the tactics worked out by the Comintern leadership for the smaller Communist Parties in Britain and the United States, for which the united front was not applicable, that is, they lacked sufficient weight to initiate and organize mass working-class actions. At the same time, these were not propaganda groups either. In the early 1920s, the British and American CPs encompassed thousands of experienced worker militants and had in their top ranks some widely known and respected workers’ leaders, such as Tom Mann in Britain and William Z. Foster in the U.S.
In the case of both the British and American parties, Lenin played a central role in working out the appropriate tactics. The basic axis of the united-front tactic is the offer by the Communists of joint struggle with the reformist organizations, including their current leaderships. In Britain, this was expressed through critical electoral support to the Labour Party and also the offer by the Communists to join the Labour Party. As such, the Communists would act openly as an organized faction on the basis of a revolutionary program. At the same time, as members of the Labour Party, Communists would help to build it, for example through winning over more politically backward workers who still supported the Liberals and Tories.
In the U.S., the only mass working-class organizations were (and still are) the trade unions. Hence the Communist demand that the unions form a political party opposed to the Democrats and Republicans in which the Communists would participate. I’m not going to address whether many, perhaps most, American Communists misunderstood the tactic as calling for and being willing to build a new reformist party similar to the British Labour Party. That question is not germane to the purpose of this presentation. What is germane is an understanding that the advocacy of a trade-union-based party was the American analogue of the united-front tactic.
During the early 1970s we had an extensive internal discussion on the labor party question. The substance and conclusions of the discussion were synthesized in a presentation, “A Talk on the Labor Party Question,” in 1972 by comrade Jim Robertson, that was republished in the Spartacist pamphlet On the United Front (January 1996). He explained:
“In the last debate in New York, I spent all my time on the decisions of the Third and Fourth Congresses. I’m going to evade that this time and simply point out that the Labor Party slogan is the current American version of the issue of the united front. It’s posed in the absence of a massive political expression of reformism or Stalinism in the United States; rather, with the organization of industrial unions with a deeply committed pro-capitalist trade-union bureaucracy, it is toward them that the issue of proletarian unity and the process of communist triumph in struggle is centered on the Labor Party question.”
Jim also emphasized that actual motion toward such a labor party, or even substantial sentiment in favor of it, would only be generated by a qualitatively higher level of working-class struggle than existed at the time or even during the big strikes that built the mass industrial unions in the 1930s. Absent such a convulsive upsurge in working-class struggle, our advocacy of a union-based party in opposition to the Democrats is a subordinate aspect of our more fundamental propaganda for the dictatorship of the proletariat (expressed using the term “workers government”).
This approach to the labor party question has, I think, a general relevance for the SL/U.S. in the current period. There’s been a lot of talk about whether or not we have a perspective. I think we do have a perspective but not in the way the term has been used. Our perspective should be to produce more and better propaganda in the Plekhanovite sense of explaining many complex ideas to the few. Let’s stop with the get-rich-quick schemes already. When, in the future, opportunities for organizational breakthroughs arise, we’ll all know it. Doubtless, these will involve both objective problems and internal differences, possibly fights, but that’s not what has been happening in our tendency since the fall of the Soviet Union.
What has happened, I think, is a deepgoing subjective drive to achieve organizational breakthroughs in order to demonstrate (mainly to ourselves) that we are not historically irrelevant, since everyone else in the world thinks we are historically irrelevant. We are historically relevant but we don’t have to and cannot now demonstrate that through substantial organizational breakthroughs or some other kind of external success. That’s just objective reality
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