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A Labor Party
From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 40, 4 October 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The people see many unions demanding higher wages without a thought for higher prices, without a thought of demanding of the corporations that they not raise prices. The people have learned to expect no consideration from the corporations and monopolies. They expected more from the unions.
The people can see, as can most union members, that it is stupid to seek wage raises without also demanding that prices not be increased. The people know that corporation profits almost reached the $20 billion mark in 1947, that industry has been gouging the nation without mercy through high prices, that industry could well afford wage increases without price increases; yet it sees the unions ask only for higher wages, a demand which (if granted) is soon wiped out by price rises, to everyone’s hurt.
The people are as sick of the Democratic-Republican sham battle as you are. But they see no other claimant to leadership.
Instead they see Philip Murray and William Green and A.L. Whitney proclaiming that Truman is a liberal, a friend of the people, a cohtinuator of the New Deal (as though that were good), when everyone with half an eye can see that Truman is an incompetent and bewildered little man who is the helpless tool of big business, and that Truman’s policies, both at home and abroad, are designed only to increase the profits of America’s Sixty Families.
If labor continues on its present course, there is the danger that the people will not give a damn if Congress takes another swat at labor, and another swat, until the unions are seriously weakened. Think again!
The whole drive of the national economy, of foreign policy and world affairs, the whole direction of old- party politics, spells increasing reaction in the United States, new repressions against labor, further weakening of the unions.
Either labor will break away from its cowardly political past and build its own labor party, begin to assume leadership and responsibility for the broad masses of the people – or labor leaves itself open to be hamstrung.
Here is a prediction that will come true as sure as night follows day. If the labor bureaucrats get away with their present policy of holding onto the coat tails of the old parties in the 1948 elections, the 81st Congress will pass new repressive laws against the union movement. It makes no difference who is elected to any office – Republican or Democrat, “friends of labor” and liberal promise-makers or reactionaries – this will be the outcome.
Until the day when labor’s ranks force the leadership to break with company-union politics, labor’s position will grow steadily worse – new legal weapons will be forged against us – new reactionary forms of taxation will be applied to us – militarization of the nation will increase – the First Atomic War will come closer – Washington’s foreign policy will continue to be used against the interests of the masses on every continent – and American labor will steadily lose friends.
There is something else happening too. Let’s take a look at one state, for example.
The St. Paul Union Advocate in Minnesota complains that a check has revealed that as many as 30 per cent of the membership of some unions are not qualified to vote by reason of failure to register. Why hasn’t this 30 per cent registered? Because they see that their own leadership has driven them into the blind alley of company-union politics. Because they sense that labor has no stake in the success or failure of any capitalist political candidate. Because they believe that the present political course of the union leadership is hopeless.
All the pleadings and threats and fines that the leadership applies can’t force the ranks to play the game of political company-unionism. They’ll vote in their own way – by staying away from the polls and from a ballot that offers them only a choice of bad and almost-as-bad. They are right. The union leadership is wrong.
The same union paper, in a later issue, discussed its current campaign to defeat one of the former “friend of labor,” Senator Joe Ball. Says the Union Advocate:
“There isn’t a member outside of organized labor who gives two hoots in Hades what Joseph H. Ball would like to do to the basic liberties of every union man or woman in the nation. There isn’t one farmer in a thousand who is offended at Ball’s riding herd on labor. As a matter of fact, most farmers think he did a mighty smart amount of good by his efforts to crucify the trade- union movement on a cross of his own personal hatreds. Nor is the small, so-called independent businessman incensed over tho fact that Ball is popularly associated with the crusade against trade unionism.”
Assuming that the Union Advocate knows what it is talking about, this is a horrible indictment of the political policies which organized labor has been following.
If it is true that today in Minnesota no one outside of organized labor, or not one farmer in a thousand, gives a damn about the fate of the union movement, the blame can be placed on the capitalist-minded leaders of the unions.
Fifteen years ago, Minnesota labor had hundreds of thousands of friends outside the union movement. It is a verifiable fact that in the heyday of the Farmer-Labor movement, from 1930 to 1936, when the movement was furthest to the left, when Governor Floyd Olson was proclaiming “I am not a liberal, I am a radical,” the farmers went down the line with the unions at the polls.
In those days, the union ranks were on the march and shoved aside the objections of conservative officials, and built an independent labor party and gave it a radical program – and the farmers and “little people” of the towns and cities loved it.
Then Governor Benson and the Stalinists, from one side, and the leading state AFL officials from their side, tore the Farmer-Labor Party to shreds, drove it into a merger with the Democrats, and in place of independent labor politics hired a press agent who writes nice advertisements to be placed in papers like the Chicago Journal of Commerce, to tell businessmen that labor in Minnesota is housebroken and docile and won’t some capitalists come to that state and exploit its workers and its resources.
And now the conservative union leaders complain that labor hasn’t any friends in Minnesota today, and that the union ranks aren’t interested in registering and voting. This situation in Minnesota, once the stamping ground of a vital farmer-labor movement, reflects what has taken place in the other forty-seven states also.
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