The task of communists is to win the trade unions to the cause of socialist revolution, transforming them into organizing and training centers able to draw large numbers of workers into the struggle against capitalism. To accomplish this task, the present stranglehold of the labor aristocracy over the organized trade union movement must be smashed and the labor lieutenants of capital driven from the ranks of the working class movement.
In the difficult battles to revolutionize the trade unions, it may sometimes be necessary to make tactical alliances with certain labor leaders. But it is never permissible for communists within such an alliance to abandon independent communist agitation and propaganda, to rely on these leaders, or to liquidate the tasks of building and consolidating revolutionary organization in the form of party cells and networks. The experience of the Communist Party in the ’30s, which at the time was the vanguard party of the working class, brings out clearly these fundamental lessons.
In the late ’20s and ’30s, the then revolutionary Communist Party led the whole working class movement in the U.S. in achieving its greatest advances in history. The Party took the lead in the drive to build the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and challenged the labor aristocracy for leadership of the trade unions. But at the end of the ’30s, the revisionist forces in the Party’s leadership, headed by Earl Browder, sabotaged this work, leading the Party and the workers into an unprincipled alliance with the labor misleaders and suppressing the independent work of the Party. As a result, the great advances were turned into setbacks.
To deepen the struggle against revisionism today, the lessons from the ’30s must be summed up and applied. What was correct and what erroneous in the CP’s trade union work?
The Party developed its program for work in the trade unions in the course of the struggle against dual unionism and syndicalism. During the first decades of the century, under the leadership of organizations like the Syndicalist League of North America and the International Workers of the World (IWW), revolutionaries concentrated on organizing unions independent of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and refused to affiliate or wage a struggle within this federation against the leadership. Their erroneous policy was to draw the more revolutionary-minded and advanced workers away from the AFL and other established unions, which left an open field for the misleaders to maintain their sway over the main body of organized labor. At the same time, this dual unionist approach led to the isolation of the revolutionary forces within the working class.
Communists such as William Z. Foster, who earlier had been a founding member of the Syndicalist League, learned through their own experiences the dangers of “left” sectarianism, a deviation clearly criticized by Lenin in the early days of the Third International.
The Communist Party, founded in 1919, waged a largely successful struggle to break with dual unionism. Party members were directed to work inside the AFL unions and to fight to transform the character of those unions.
During the ’20s, the CP placed emphasis on building the Party in industry, carrying on a special campaign from 1925 to 1929 to root itself in the large plants and mills across the country. The CP developed its factory networks and an expanded system of shop organizations and shop newspapers in the course of union drives, strikes and in the day-to-day work in the plants. Concentrated efforts were aimed at consolidating the more advanced fighters from among the workers and building the backbone of a rank-and-file movement through the Trade Union Educational League, later the Trade Union Unity League.
From this strong base in major industry, the CP led the battle against the most powerful of the monopoly capitalists. This strong base of support was also essential in the fight to defeat the endless efforts of the labor aristocrats to isolate the communists through red-baiting, expulsions and, in cooperation with the companies, firings and arrests.
To transform the character of the trade unions, the CP put as the cornerstone of its program the fight for multinational unity based on a consistent battle against Jim Crow unionism.
The CP’s fight against discrimination was reflected in the drive to extend unionization to the millions of unskilled workers and to make the unions a fighting force for the interests of the unemployed.
In all the key CIO drives, it was communists who organized the workers, planned strike strategy and mobilized support in workers’ communities. Even CIO misleaders like John L. Lewis and Phillip Murray, who had been part of the old guard officialdom of the AFL until 1935, were forced to acknowledge that communists were indispensable to CIO campaigns.
This period of the building of the CIO was one of great upsurge in the mass movement, which greatly increased the dangers of rightism, of getting swept up by these mass struggles, overestimating the consciousness of the masses and underestimating the decisive importance of independent communist work.
In the course of the CIO drives, serious errors were made under the growing influence of Browder, then CP general secretary. Browder cultivated and then consolidated the rightist errors which had begun to emerge when the party turned to mass agitation in the late ’20s and early ’30s. The downplaying of communist aims and independence served as fertile ground for Browder’s revisionism. Browder opposed communist work on the basis that it would “antagonize” the CIO bureaucrats. To advance his treacherous objectives, Browder spread illusions about the CIO misleaders, praising them as well as Roosevelt new-dealers as saviors and heroes of working people.
As a result of Browderism, party recruitment was halted; the party suspended publication of shop papers, silenced all criticism of the CIO misleaders, cut back independent propaganda and agitation, ended independent work in union elections and didn’t even struggle for leadership positions in the steel union it had done the work to build. Browder called these measures “concessions” to show the “spirit of cooperation” of the Party.
The CIO leadership had opposed the AFL craft-union line and leadership with the opportunist aim of building a separate center for the trade union movement, equally wedded to the capitalist system, but under their control. The big capitalists, realizing that unions were a fact of life, began to rely more and more on reformists to keep the unions under class-collaborationist leadership, to go along with their anti-labor violence, police and thugs. The CIO industrial unions clearly created more favorable conditions to carry out class struggle, but even greater vigilance and struggle were needed against reformism and narrow trade unionism. These ideologies were to chain the struggles of the workers within the bounds of capitalism for some time to come.
The revisionist line on trade union work peddled by Browder has emerged today, typified in the revisionist Communist Party but also present within the ranks of the Marxist-Leninist organizations. For example, communists, including the October League, made rightist mistakes in the Arnold Miller reform campaign in the United Mine Workers Union. Rightism took the form of downplaying the importance of communist independence and initiative.
While it is absolutely correct and important for communists to work in the broad movements which have developed and will develop against the old-line union misleadership like Boyle and Abel, it is essential that this work be based on communist independence and initiative as well as on a consistent fight against the political and organizational influences of reformism and revisionism. It means a protracted struggle to win communist leadership in the course of sharp class struggle.
The right opportunist line of relying on one sector of the labor aristocracy against another while abandoning communist aims and independent work leads the working class into the arms of its enemies. This is what the Browder betrayal did in the late 1930s, and in this betrayal lie the roots of the present weakened workers’ movement and the consolidated position of the labor aristocracy.
To reverse the consequences of this betrayal, the most urgent task for communists is to build a new vanguard party, rooted in the major industries and unions, which will revolutionize the trade unions.
(To be continued)