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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The Communist Party and the Autoworkers’ Union
Roger Keeran
International Publishers £7.95
The Big Strike
Mike Quin
International Publishers £7.50
Black Workers in the Deep South
Hosea Hudson
International Publishers £4.95
In 1931 the American Communist Party had 9,300 members. The situation they faced was bleak. Mass unemployment had destroyed many working class communities and whole sections of American industry remained virtually non-unionised. Those trying to organise came up against company unions or language barriers that appeared almost insurmountable (42 different languages were spoken in one factory in Flint). They also faced witch hunts from the union leaders and victimisation from their jobs. Many were beaten up or murdered by company agents and racism was never far from the surface.
The CP wanted to head the drive to unionise American industry and create a serious revolutionary party in the heart of world capitalism. In many ways it was successful. It led many big strikes and membership rose to 75,000 by 1938. These three books show the bravery and ingenuity of some of those involved and their attempts to overcome the problems that faced them.
The Communist Party and the Autoworkers’ Union is the best of the three. The auto industry was one of the few growth industries of the depression. By 1930, 640,474 people were employed in the industry. It was argued by many at the time that because of the ruthless nature of the employers and the fact that a large proportion of the workforce was made up of immigrants, that it was impossible to unionise.
The CP dismissed this idea. With company spies always present it was often impossible to hold meetings inside the car plants. The CP would go to the community halls of foreign workers and hold recruitment drives. They also produced papers and leaflets in dozens of different languages and even spoke at black church meetings. They also found imaginative ways of distributing their material. One worker described finding his first CP leaflet in a toilet paper holder. He went on to become a key union activist.
By the time of the mid-1930s big ‘sit down’ strikes, the CP had a thousand members inside the auto industry. It also sold 60,000 copies of the rank and file auto workers’ paper in Detroit alone.
The central plank of the CP’s strategy for building unions was ‘militant strike action’ led by the rank and file. Management used the large reserve of unemployed workers to break strikes. The workers replied with ‘sit down’ strikes. Rather than walk out on strike, they would occupy the factory, stopping management removing expensive machinery and stopping the use of scab labour. In 1934 a wave of sit down strikes forced management in plant after plant to recognise the United Autoworkers Union and improve both working conditions and pay. The chapter on The Sit Down Strike is inspirational and essential reading.
The second book – The Big Strike – is an account of the general strike led by dock workers of San Francisco in 1934. It, along with the general strikes in Toledo and Minneapolis (read Farrell Dobbs’ Teamster Rebellion for a brilliant account of that strike), ushered in a new era of militancy for the American working class.
Quin provides a vivid account of how a strike for union recognition and better pay and conditions in the docks spread to nearly every other group of workers in San Francisco and every other dock along the west coast. San Francisco was the hub of the strike. Massive battles between pickets and police took place and two pickets were killed. Over 40,000 attended the funeral parade of the two murdered strikers, one of whom was a CP member. In a final attempt to break the strike the National Guard was sent in. The dockers held firm and won a total victory.
From the grand heights of sit down and general strikes, Hosea Hudson’s personal account of a black worker in the American South may seem tame. But it is one of the few accounts of a black Communist organising in the South. If the Ku Klux Klan got hold of a black CP member it meant certain death, members often attended their branch meetings armed with shotguns.
Hudson attempted with great success to organise both black and white workers and unemployed to stand and fight together. He played a prominent role in unionising agricultural and industrial workers. He was also involved in the campaign to free the Scottsboro Boys (nine black youth wrongly accused of raping two white women), and voter registration for blacks. He was finally forced to leave the South when Birmingham’s police commissioner, ‘Bull’ Connor, used the police and the Klan to track him down. Some 25 years later Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement would run into ‘Bull’, but then fortunes would be reversed.
All the authors give an uncritical view of the American CP, which followed every twist and turn of Stalin’s foreign policy. They also accepted the turn towards the Popular Front (the formation of cross class alliances) and a separate state in America for black people. These turns weakened the organisation, particularly during the Second World War when it turned its back on the best militants and used the slogan, ‘Everything for victory’, opposing strikes because they damaged the war effort. But don’t let that put you off reading these books.
The militant tactics employed by the CP re-emerged in the new struggles of the late 1950s and 1960s in America. The sit down strike was introduced by black militants in the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). The voter registration drives were used on a scale that the CP could never have matched by King and his supporters.
These books are not new, but have so far been difficult to obtain. However Bookmarks does have a limited number for sale so get them while you can. They are a goldmine for socialists today.
(Available from Bookmarks 081 801 6145)
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