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A Labor Party
From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 41, 1 October 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
IT IS possible generally to foresee, with workable accuracy, what the next few years hold in store for the American people.
The 1929–40 depression – temporarily lifted through the artificial stimulants of the Second World War – will be resumed, with devastating social and political implications.
Capitalism in the U.S., developing for over a hundred years under the most favorable conditions for the system – an immense territory without an inner tariff barrier, a continent richer than most in natural resources, an inexhaustible labor market through immigration, the absence of a European-type militarism until recent years – even this U.S. capitalism has been periodically shaken by crises, beginning with the first one in 1819, the next significant one in 1837, and thereafter one every nine or ten years, up to the First World War.
Then came the post-war crisis of 1921, then a boom period of prosperity (a period, however, in which one fifth of the industrial plant and equipment was idle) and then the crisis of 1929, the sharpest and most appalling in the history of capitalism.
That crisis began in agricultural areas such as the Balkans and Latin America, swept with growing fury across the earth and finally rolled up on the shore of this country in November with an impact that gradually numbed trade and production, doomed tens of millions of workers to unemployment, shattered the morale of the capitalist class, and called into being the New Deal government of Roosevelt in 1933 to save the system and buy off the growing mass sentiment for revolutionary change.
From 1933 to 1940 the New Deal administration vainly strove to restore the functioning of capitalism in this nation. Leaning on the theories of capitalist economists, the government sought to spend the nation into a state of prosperity. Relief or WPA jobs were given to millions – not to all who needed them, but to millions. The economic system gradually and slightly lifted by 1937, and then again in 1938 fell flat on its back. In 1939, when the Second World War broke out in Europe, there were still more than 10 million unemployed here.
Roosevelt’s policies failed to rescue the economy, as had Hoover’s before him. But the war which Roosevelt and world imperialism brought on temporarily revived the patient. Capitalism came back with a bang once the war really got going. But it is an artificial recovery.
Since the end of the war it has been a feast-and-famine economy – a feast for the rich, whose profits reached an all-time high of approximately $20 billion in 1947, but a famine for the masses, who in the first two years after the war were deeper in debt than they ever had been in history.
The post-war “prosperity” was built on a number of factors, chief of which were the following: huge military expenditures, record installment buying, unprecedented volume of investments in new plants and equipment, extremely large expenditures by business for inventories of goods, vast increase in foreign trade between the United States and the European nations ruined by the war, and pent-up consumer purchasing power from the years of war scarcities.
Most of these factors exhausted themselves by the spring of 1948. It is only a question of time until the American economy once more hits the skids. When the new depression comes, American capitalism will confront it in a much worse position than in 1929.
A national debt of at least $250 billion will be hanging overhead at the very start of the depression. The economy is even more monopolized than in 1929. Military commitments are huge. The rest of the world is insolvent. There is growing unrest in the colonial world. At home the workers are better organized in unions, a little wiser, a little harder to control by the old methods.
After seeing big business spend hundreds of billions of dollars for destruction in the war, the unemployed (who will number tens of millions) will be in no mood to accept a miserly one billion dollars a year in relief, as Roosevelt and Congress tossed them in the last depression.
In such a depression, it is more than probable that labor, fighting desperately to gain a bare living for the people and to maintain and protect its economic organizations, will be forced to supplant the present conservative union leadership – professional, narrow-minded, selfish, brutal, jealous, bribed and corrupted by big business.
We believe that labor will build its own political party, based upon the unions, controlled by the unions, with a leadership responsible to the unions and removable by the unions. We believe that this labor party will attract to it, through its program and policies, the majority of farmers and middle-class people, both of which groups will be ruined by the vast depression.
We believe that this labor party will be forced by each new turn of the screw to adopt increasingly radical demands which will go beyond capitalism, that labor will finally see that the solution of mankind’s economic and social problems lies not within the capitalist system at all but beyond it, in a socialist order.
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Last updated: 6 October 2018