US workers: different from all the rest?

Subterranean Fire: A history of working class radicalism in the United States

If you count yourself as any sort of socialist you cannot fail to have had at least one steamy love affair with the US working class. Its history has furnished us with some of the most memorable movements and moments in the class struggle.

From the Knights of Labor to the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, from the Factory Occupation at Flint Michigan to the Battle of Seattle, the US workers have shown a repeated willingness to carry the fight to the most powerful capitalist class in the world. They tend to use every weapon to hand and have won on more than one occasion.

Throughout that illustrious history this self-same movement has failed to take the elementary step of creating a mass working class political alternative, a party, even a reformist one, capable of breaking the big business ruling duopoly of the Democrats and the Republicans. Industrial militancy has thus far failed to generate political independence.

Nor has that militancy always been enough to defeat the deep-rooted racism in the US. Trade unions have, at times, been complicit in maintaining the oppression of blacks. Even during the post-war heyday of trade unionism, when levels of membership eventually edged up to a third of the working class, it was the Civil Rights ­movement, not the unions, who led the charge against the US’s vicious apartheid system in the South and racist exclusionism in the North.

Sharon Smith’s book examines this contradiction: breathtaking militancy combined with political backwardness. She asks why this has been the case and whether the answer means the US working class are somehow “different”.

It is an ambitious book, rattling through almost 150 years of history in 320 pages. By and large it fulfils its ambition. Of course some aspects of the working class’ struggles get only a cursory mention. The author has to be selective. But she doesn’t leave out any of the key episodes.

For anyone new to the subject there is more than enough detail about the US movement. Smith tells the story of the Haymarket Martyrs, the Chicago anarchists framed and executed in 1886 by the state. They had led a strike by the Chicago Labor Union for the Eight Hour Day. The strike was successful and the bosses provoked violence at the demonstrations organised by the union. The union’s anarchist leaders were then charged with carrying out bombings they didn’t commit.

It was the Haymarket executions that led to Mayday becoming the international day of workers’ protest. Their case was also a prototype “red scare”, a tactic that the US bosses perfected over the years at great cost to the workers’ movement. Haymarket prefigured the extreme violence that working class activists faced from the bosses and the state every time they tried to organise and defend the working class.

The first major national organisation of the US working class was The Knights of Labor. The Knights laid the basis of industrial unionism in the US during the 1880s and the best activists were to be found in its ranks agitating and leading strikes. It opened its ranks to blacks, women and most immigrants.

But the Knights of Labor was a quirky organisation – and not in a good way. Smith points to its terrible racism towards Chinese workers. Its leader, Terence Powderly, regarded strikes as “relics of barbarism” but his views were often voted down and the Knights took part in strikes. But these errors cost the Knights dearly in terms of being able to make headway amongst the rapidly growing industrial working class.

It was the American Federation of Labor (AFL), based on the craft unions and led by Samuel Gompers, which grew in influence at the expense of the Knights in the 1890s. The AFL, under Gompers, was the antithesis of a militant industrial union. And, despite briefly suffering defeat at the hands of the left, by 1895 Gompers and the right were in complete control of the federation. They fashioned it as a craftist business union, ever ready to strike rotten deals with the bosses in the factories and the Democratic Party in the town halls and Congress.

Gompers didn’t oppose the idea of strikes outright and occasionally sanctioned them. But he always ensured they failed if they looked as though they threatened his class collaborationist strategy and bureaucratic stranglehold.

The AFL leader was racist as well as a business unionist. Blacks were excluded from the AFL and Smith quotes liberally from Gompers’ repeated outbursts about waging a “race war” on the “darkies”.

Gompers also excluded the great mass of the working class from his federation. It was reserved for skilled workers, labour aristocrats. At the first whiff of industrial unionism gaining ground Gompers moved quickly to crush it – Smith recounts his role in isolating the embattled American Rail Union (ARU) in the 1894 Pullman Strike to demonstrate this.

The ARU smelled far too much like an industrial union to Gompers and in Eugene Debs (later the Socialist Party’s most successful Presidential candidate) it had far too radical a leader. Despite the fact that thousands of workers, especially in Chicago, expressed a willingness to come out in solidarity, general strike action when the state attacked the Pullman workers with injunctions and troops, Gompers flatly refused to call out other unions. Gompers declared, “a general strike at this time is inexpedient, unwise, and contrary to the best interests of working people.” He might have added “at this, or any time, as long as I lead the AFL.” His inaction caused an unnecessary defeat on the railways and indicated to the state that the AFL would bend its knee to the law whenever it was invoked against strikers.

Smith demonstrates that while the AFL sustained itself as a major union federation it produced two major counter-movements that ensured that class heroism rather than class subservience became the abiding memories of the US union movement in the first half of the twentieth century.

The first of those movements was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the Wobblies as they came to be known. Founded in 1905 by committed industrial syndicalists like Big Bill Haywood, alongside socialists like Debs and Daniel De Leon and anarchists like Joe Ettor, the IWW espoused the doctrine of class war. Its doors were open to everyone, black, Chinese, Latino. It espoused women’s equality and in Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Lucy Parsons (widow of Albert Parsons one of the Haymarket Martyrs) elevated women cadre into national leaders.

The struggles the IWW led during its colourful history are the stuff of legend. It organised the first ever factory occupation. It brought rodeo workers out on strike. It led the 1912 mass struggle in Lawrence, Massachusetts amongst immigrant textile workers. This strike became famous, not just because of the violence meted out to strikers by company goons, but because the IWW countered that violence by rallying nationwide support for the strike and eventually won a startling victory.

The IWW at various times became a serious contender for national leadership of the US workers’ movement, outwitting, outflanking and out-organising the AFL. But by 1920 it had become a victim of its own political limitations. It collapsed into a rump organisation, ravaged by the effects of the First World War and the repression that came during and after it, but also by its own political inability to cope with the new questions the war posed to the working class.

The IWW’s syndicalism was both a cause of its success in particular battles and its downfall in the general battle between capital and labour. The industrial unionists underestimated the importance of politics to the economic struggle. They did not understand the relationship between the two. But then again, nor did the Socialist Party, which grew alongside the IWW but whose leaders – except for Debs – shifted sharply to the right and interpreted politics in a narrow parliamentary sense. Out of the crisis of both organisations the Communist Party, after protracted birth pangs, was born in the early 1920s in the wake of the Russian Revolution.

Smith charts the positive role the Communist Party played in carrying on the drive to organise the US working class – its opposition to the AFL’s leadership’s collaborationism but its willingness to play a part in building up AFL unions on a militant and industrial basis. The result of its work, together with the work of Trotsky’s followers in the Left Opposition expelled from the US Communist Party, was the role the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO) played in the great battle of the 1930s.

The CIO was initially a coalition of bureaucrats within the AFL but ones who led mainly industrial organisations. They grew impatient of the AFL’s failures to take on members in the burgeoning mass production industries, especially in the auto, rubber and related sectors. The split between the AFL and CIO, in 1935 (although the AFL didn’t finally expel the CIO until 1938 but by then they were two separate federations in effect) was inevitable. And in true US style it was symbolised by a brawl when the miners’ leader, John L Lewis, scrambled over a row of chairs to chin the right wing carpenter’s leader, Bill Hutcheson who had just called him a “bastard” at a session of the AFL congress.

The impact of the CIO was immediate and dramatic. As Smith notes “When the CIO formally opened its doors as a section of the AFL in 1935 industrial workers flooded in. Auto and rubber workers, already at the forefront of the class struggle, quickly affiliated their unions with the CIO.” (p116) While the CIO leaders tried to rein things in, and maintained an alliance, along with the AFL, with Roosevelt’s “New Deal” Democrat administration, its members declared open season on the bosses. In 1936 a wave of factory occupations occurred in the rubber, engineering and car industries. The occupation of the General Motors plant, at Flint Michigan, was the most well-known and militant example of this strike wave. And it was victorious. It humbled the giant corporation and let the world know that the United Auto Workers union was a force to be reckoned with.

This huge step made by the unions in the 1930s had an impact for decades to come in the US. The unions became, at long last, a national force, with a mass membership and the clout to make things happen. Through the post-war decades, right through to the 1970s, the unions grew. They seemed to prosper as well. Though their enhanced status in US society owed more to the favourable circumstances that US imperialism had won for itself in World War Two than to a continuation of the spirit of Flint. The AFL and CIO re-united in 1955 to become the AFL-CIO. And the new organisation was rancid – it was more bureaucratic than ever before.

Constituent organisations were riddled with mob influence and tied to the Democratic Party’s patronage system. Rank and file democracy and militancy was crushed by the union tops. They re-fashioned business unionism for the post-war boom. Smith quotes the AFL-CIO leader, George Meany, from a speech he made to the US bosses: “I never went on strike in my life, never ran a strike in my life, never had anything to do with a picket line . . . I stand for the profit system; I believe in the profit system. I believe it’s a wonderful incentive. I believe in the free enterprise system completely.”

Meany served as AFL-CIO boss from 1955 until 1976. His brand of business unionism shaped the post-war working class movement in the US. In doing so he prepared it for disaster. For when the long boom ended and the US bosses decided that the time for sharing the spoils of world supremacy with the unions were over, the unions’ business strategy left it wide open to attack. And the attacks came thick and fast, especially during the 1980s following the right wing President Reagan’s all-out onslaught – legal and otherwise – on the air traffic controllers’ union, PATCO.

The union organisations that fought the bosses to a standstill in the 1930s became integrated by the bosses in the 1950s and were then dispensed with by those bosses in the 1980s. The result is that the US working class movement has been thrown back decades, with levels of organisation across industry back to those of the early twentieth century. And it is no nearer taking its first step to political independence as Obama canvasses the working class vote than it was when the Knights of Labor staged their early jousts with the employers.

No party it can call its own

Sharon Smith tries to come up with an answer to why this is the case. What she adamantly rejects is the idea that the US workers are in some way qualitatively different to those in the rest of the world. She argues: “There is nothing fundamentally different about the American working class that makes it incapable of acting as a class, or which can explain why workers in the United States have not yet developed an independent political tradition.” (p12)

But she recognises that peculiarities of US development have had a profound impact on the working class and those developments have at various times both hindered and accelerated the tendency of the class to act as a class. First among those differences is racism. Smith is not just talking about the everyday racism that permeates and poisons capitalist society. She is far more specific, focusing on the very real and significant elements of racism that flowed from the legacy of slavery in the country. They led to a form of racism which was far more endemic, far more barbarous and far more divisive than everyday racism.

Its practical results were “Jim Crow” apartheid in the southern states – the legal segregation of blacks from white society and the institution of legal discrimination against them in just about every field of social and political life. These laws were imposed by a regime of terror in many states, carried out either by the authorities or by the lynch mob, usually with the blessing of the authorities.

The impact of such racism was to create a physical divide between workers, not only where Jim Crow laws prevailed in the south but in the north where the systemic racism was simply transplanted following the various migrations of black workers. The black ghetto wasn’t a legal entity in the north but its very existence was the result of the effect of legalised racism that was tolerated as part of the USA’s system until the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s.

As Smith notes: “This extreme level of racism left a permanent stamp on the labor movement. The South remains a non-union stronghold today, largely because the legacy of white supremacy has not yet been destroyed.”

And the legacy was upheld by generations of racist union bureaucrats who were happy to see black and white workers at each other’s throats because it undermined the threat of a united rank and file challenge to their own power in the labour movement.

Racism has set back the US workers’ movement by decades. And Smith is spot on to highlight it as one answer to why the US movement remains so politically backward. In an aside she echoes the Socialist Workers Party line (Smith’s International Socialist Organisation used to be a sister organisation of the British SWP before it was expelled from the IST) that this is all a product of false consciousness since white workers “do not benefit” from racism, ignoring her own evidence of the petty privileges, differential wage levels and unequal access to social benefits between white and blacks that are still a feature of US society.

Her failure to accept a materialist explanation of why white workers continue to be taken in by racism is a serious weakness, but she sounds less convinced of her own argument in this book than many of the SWP tracts that deal with the same issue. And her emphasis on the centrality of racism as a factor suggests that whatever her theoretical shortcomings she recognises that the black question in the US is of primary importance in determining the fate of the entire movement.

A second difference that Smith notes is the legacy of what she does not call – but which we will – “wild west capitalism”: the imposition of capitalist order by the bosses themselves, through their private armies and goons rather than through the state apparatus.

The centralised state – as Marx and Engels noted – did not, in the US, develop out of absolutism and revolutions against it in the way it did in Europe. Even the civil war – fought in the first instance against the notion of “states’ rights” and not against slavery (whatever the history books try to tell you) – failed to fashion the centralised state into the sort of all embracing interventionist force typical of the western European major powers. To be sure, where it did exist it backed the bosses, but those bosses frequently relied on their own private armed forces in their battles with the working class. This led to the industrial magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt commenting, “Law? What do I care for the law? H’aint I got the power.”

Smith gives many examples of the brutality of the US ruling class, not least Reagan’s leg chaining of Patco strikers and (father of Dubya) George Bush’s suppression of the Los Angeles uprising in 1992. But her quote from Mike Davis’ (excellent) Prisoners of the American Dream, sums up her point well: “American labor may never have had to face the carnage of a Paris Commune or a defeated revolution, but it has been bled in countless ‘Pinkerloos’ at the hands of the Pinkertons or the militia.”

The US bosses, faced even with a modest strike by a moderate union, are capable of unleashing a ruthless level of brutality that is only equalled by the actions of some of the globe’s more unsavoury dictators. Violence is a way of doing business with the labour movement and always has been, to a far greater extent than in Britain or France for example. And its impact has been to deter countless workers from risking collective action for fear of their lives and limbs.

And the state has backed the bosses – from its use of troops against miners at Ludlow in 1914, its support for Rockefeller’s private army which was butchering strikers, through the terror against immigrants that culminated in the legal lynching of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in 1953 during the McCarthyite witch-hunt.

Even violence and racism were unable to stop the workers’ movement taking their “giant step” in the 1930s under the banner of the CIO. Indeed anti-racism and well-organised counter-violence were hallmarks of many of the most famous struggles of the 1930s. As early as 1934 Trotskyist-led picket defence teams fought and won the Battle of Deputies Run in Minneapolis during a strike by Teamsters. The deputies who ran were right wing civilians drafted in by the trucking bosses as well as cops.

It was another factor that led to a different outcome for these struggles – the New Deal. Roosevelt re-fashioned the old racist, southern based Democratic Party in the 1930s into a version of what Trotsky called “the popular front” – an alliance of the bosses and workers but with the workers as junior partners. Minor labour reforms, including the right to recognition, proved enough to win the bureaucrats over to Roosevelt. Stalin’s decision to embrace the Popular Front ensured that the rank and file leaders of the US unions, many of whom were Communist Party members, also tied the knot with Roosevelt. This meant there was no resistance to the bureaucrats before or during the war.

The authority of the Communists amongst the rank and file was decisive. They were the organising cadre for the CIO. They were associated with previous militant battles. What they said carried weight. As a result their campaign against militancy in 1937, because it threatened the popular front, was crucial in disarming the working class at a key point in its historical development.

As Smith argues: “Communist Party leaders bent over backwards to make clear that their allegiance was to the New Deal coalition, not to rank and file workers outside their control. The Daily Worker ran a statement by William Weinstone, the party’s Michigan State Secretary, declaring [that wild cat strikes by workers] would be ‘gravely injurious to the cause of co-operative action between labor and middle class groups’.” (p144)

Despite the occasional zig-zag, this political loyalty to the Democrats prevailed up to and beyond the cold war – and by then the Communists’ sudden recognition that the Democrats were not their friends after all was too late. The damage had been done. The most powerful radical organisation in the unions – the Communist Party – played a key role in alliance with the future business union bureaucrats in blocking any independent political development in the US workers’ movement by tying it to the Democratic Party.

The final element of Smith’s answer to why the US working class has not developed any political independence and has suffered gravely as a consequence was the impact of Cold War anti-communism. This was when the state did take over from the bosses’ private armies in order to terrorise the class. It succeeded in this repression because of its timing. It occurred during a period of growing prosperity, the late 1940 and 50s, when class collaboration by the business union leaders seemed to bring the realisation of the American Dream closer to a whole generation of workers. The gains of the workers were never universal, nor were they institutionalised. Health care, for example, was part of a contract with an employer, not a right won from the state.

But the long boom blinded many to this real flaw in the American Dream – axed, like every other benefit and wage increase, when the bosses decided they could no longer afford it. And it led many to accept the gains made as the product of the American way rather than as a result of the preceding decades of union struggle.

The scale of the repression during the Cold War was staggering. McCarthyism tends to be remembered as being a witch-hunt targeted at Hollywood writers and actors. It was far more than that. It was a war against all forms of radicalism – an attempt to wipe it out. And while Hollywood suffered, the main targets were in the factories and working class communities. Driven by the need to weld the US nation together against the USSR, the better to prosecute its quest for domination of the world’s markets and wealth, the US ruling class sanctioned a state orchestrated witch-hunt that was, in the words of the National Industrial Conference Board (a top bosses’ organisation), designed to “rid your plant of agitators who create labor unrest . . . The spies, traitors and misguided fools who promote Communism constitute our number one industrial security problem today.” (p181)

Tragically the purges succeeded and militants were driven from their jobs, homes and communities in droves. The toll on the movement was massive and it left the field free for the bureaucrats to promote a regime of industrial harmony. It maintained the duopoly of the two party system free from any radical challenge. And, despite the rise of a new left during the 1960s and 1970s, its legacy was to dramatically undermine the strength of radicalism in the labour movement.

The practical legacy of this was to become apparent in the way in which the ruling class, during the late 1970s and 1980s, were able to launch attack after attack on the wages and working conditions of the workers. The labour movement went into decline and the rot is only just being stopped. The McCarthy witch-hunts were a sustained and successful means of further retarding the political development of the US workers’ movement.

Taken together Smith’s explanation of the political backwardness of the US working class – racism, repression, New Dealism and the impact of McCarthyism – is a convincing one. However she does not offer a convincing solution. She is hampered by the legacy of the ideas she has inherited from the British SWP.

As we have seen this manifests itself in her wrong belief that racism does not benefit white workers and is simply a question of consciousness. This is a position that cannot begin to develop a class programme capable of defeating racism, but rather that sees it as something that will evaporate in the economic struggle.

It also manifests itself in her perspectives for change in the labour movement. She concludes “Today . . . nothing short of mass struggle will reverse the balance of class forces. The opportunities for such a level of struggle, however, are self evident.” (p319)

Such a conclusion does not do justice to the book that precedes it. She has furnished plenty of evidence that mass struggles – in themselves – were not sufficient to change the fate of US history. Other factors needed to come into play – not least the political outcome of such struggles, outcomes shaped in the interests of the working class by militants capable of seeing what those interests really are. Militant workers grouped together in a revolutionary party that is able to link these every day battles to the struggle against capitalism.

How can this be achieved? What obstacles stand in the way of victory for the mass struggle? And what weapons – political and otherwise – will the US ruling class deploy to maintain their rule? What openings exist within the union movement that the left can use to begin to rebuild fighting organisations? Sharon Smith brushes all these issues under the table with the broad brush of impending mass struggle, some time, sooner or later. Which is a pity because it is a conclusion that does not match the value of so much of what she has written.

Tue 02, December 2008 @ 18:02