Source: The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 48, 29 November 1948, p. 2.
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conclusion of a speech by a visitor advertised as a “Marxist scholar" and “one-time follower of Leon Trotsky,” the delegates at the AFL convention in Cincinnati, according to the enthusiastic report in the capitalist press, “stood up and applauded for several minutes.”
No, the top bureaucracy of the AFL is not going Marxist. In fact the applause was one more proof, if any were needed, that these house servants of America’s 60 richest families have not yet developed the capacity to think.
The speaker was Max Eastman, renegade from the Marxist movement and bitter opponent of Leon Trotsky’s views. The warmongering speech delivered against the Soviet Union by this intellectual wreck would have brought a gathering of the National Association of Manufacturers or the Daughters of the American Revolution to their feet cheering with no less enthusiasm than it did the AFL claque.
Eastman pretended to be a “critic” of the State Department and its foreign policy. Marshall isn’t getting tough enough, Eastman feels. The war drive isn’t being pushed fast enough. If that’s “criticism,” then Charley McCarthy is a model independent thinker.
This spokesman of the State Department did not forget, naturally, to praise capitalism. In a brilliant and strikingly original metaphor that went straight to the hearts of the high-paid AFL bureaucrats, Eastman called capitalism a “goose” that really lays “golden eggs.” “Don’t kill the goose,” he pleaded.
That’s advice which William Green and his fellow chair-warmers are certain to follow – with undying gratitude to Max Eastman for calling it to their attention.
Eastman covered his war-mongering with an appeal to the widespread anti-Stalinist sentiment that exists in the labor movement, demanding an end to the Stalin regime. That objective is a highly desirable one, as the Trotskyists have maintained since Stalin came to power. But we oppose farming out the job to the imperialists, who aim at converting; the Russian people into colonial slaves.
Eastman’s brand of anti-Stalinism might be dismissed as just another instance of the casuistry to be expected in the propagandists of American Big Business were it not for the fact that it can disorient some people.
The demands of the AFL bureaucrats for democracy in the Soviet Union are scarcely convincing in view of the dictatorial regimes they maintain in the unions. Stalin puts in practice on a governmental scale what the Tobins apply on a union scale. But a Max Eastman holds no czardom in the labor movement. His anti-Stalinism thus may appear more genuine than that of the AFL dictators.
In addition, the AFL bureaucracy is known to take its views on foreign policy without question from the State Department. In the early days of the Soviet Union when the Russian workers established a government truly representative of the people, the AFL bureaucrats, in slavish conformity with State Department views, opposed recognition of the young workers’ republic.
After the Stalin gang destroyed democracy in the Soviet Union, the State Department decided to recognize this counter-revolutionary regime. Official policy was to Whitewash Stalin. Under State Department inspiration Hollywood turned out Mission to Moscow, presenting Stalin’s version of the infamous Moscow Frame-up Trials, and the publishers of a truthful biography of Stalin written by Leon Trotsky decided not to release it to the public.
No protest was uttered by the AFL bureaucrats during this period. They went along with the State Department.
Then after 1945, when the strategists of American Big Business began preparations for World War III and the State Department began implementing its new “get tough” line toward the Soviet Union, the AFL bureaucrats again followed the official lead like sheep.
Anything they might say against the Soviet Union is therefore taken as nothing original. Everybody knows they didn’t think it up.
Here is where a renegade like Max Eastman earns his keep. He did support the Soviet Union in the early days. He did stand up against the capitalist system at one time. Consequently, what he says can carry weight. Workers who never heard of Max Eastman before wonder why he changed. And giving him the rostrum at the AFL convention places a kind of union label on his utterances, no matter how profoundly anti-union they are at bottom.
Small wonder the bureaucrats stood up and applauded. The munition makers too, no doubt, stood up and applauded when they heard how well their message had been delivered at the AFL convention.
Last updated on: 29 March 2023