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Maritime
Frederick J. Lang
Maritime: A Historical Sketch
and a Workers’ Program
I – IMPERIALISM AND THE MARITIME INDUSTRY
Written: 1943.
First Published: March 1943.
Second Edition: October 1945.
Source: Published for the Socialist Workers Party by Pioneer Publishers.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Sean Robertson for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Copyleft: Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (marxists.org) 2015.
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Every seaman today finds that settling a beef is not the same thing as it was back in job-action days. The skipper doesn’t know where the ship is going, and wouldn’t tell if he did. The company agent cannot decide a dispute offhand: it must go to Washington. For the union patrol man to get the dope about overtime pay due a crew means weeks or months of letters to the Maritime Commission. Everywhere, in everything, the seaman is faced with government. He begins to feel that everything is all fouled up.
This did not happen overnight. War is the immediate and primary cause. But long before war was declared, there was a deliberate and skilful government policy in this direction. It’s bigger than any everyday beef. Militancy and common sense on an immediate problem are no longer enough. For the sailor to comprehend today’s problems is necessary to see them in their full scope. To understand why the government is now clamping down on seamen and their unions, we must first realize the exceptional place of the maritime industry in the nation’s life, we must examine the nature of government itself, and we must analyze just how we have got into the present difficult and dangerous position.
That is the purpose of this pamphlet: to show seamen how and why they have been caught in the net of government regimentation way ahead of other industrial workers, and to show the only way out of that net.
The first step is to understand the nature of the problem.
Nature of the Maritime Industry
Maritime is a peculiar industry, occupying a unique place in the industrial life of a nation. All industrial nations maintained their own merchant marine. The merchant fleets of the leading world powers, added together, are far more than what is necessary to transport the commerce of the world under peace-time conditions. The ships of any single one of the great powers would be almost sufficient to handle the entire burden of world overseas trade if this were scientifically organized. But that is not possible under the anarchy of capitalist competition.
The entire structure of capitalist economy, particularly in its imperialist state of development, depends upon foreign trade and foreign markets. Competition among the highly industrialized countries – United States, Germany, England, Japan, France, and Italy – for control of the world markets, has forced each of these countries to give special consideration to its own maritime industry. They cannot permit any one country to establish a monopoly in this important service, on which the industrial life at home depends. In order to sell the manufactured product abroad, it safe transport to foreign markets must be guaranteed. The maintenance of an uneconomical merchant fleet is part of the price every imperialist country pays for the guarantee. The other part of the cost goes for the maintenance of a large navy.
When rivalry among the competing imperialist nations become so acute that it reaches the “shooting war” stage, the merchant marine then becomes even more important as an indispensable cog in the “national effort.” The war, whether confined to the economic arena or finding military expression, is a contest to determine which of the imperialisms is going to rule the world market. And just as the economic warfare among them rages at the marketplace as well as at the home base, so in their military operations, they seek to occupy and hold marketplaces abroad while they bomb enemy industries at home. The merchant fleet in time of open fighting is absolutely indispensable for carrying troops and war materials to the far-flung battle fronts; as now to India, China, Russia, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific Islands.
Imperialism Forces Government Control
Government in all the great imperialist nations exercises more control over its maritime industry than over any other part of the industrial machine. Because there has never been enough overseas traffic to use all the ships that were built in the great yards at Sparrows Point and Bremen, on the Clydeside and at Le Havre, in Kobe and Genoa, private ship operators could not profitably compete with one another. The industry in every country operates at a loss. It is able to attract private capital only when profits are guaranteed by government protection which prohibits foreign competition in domestic trade and by government money which subsidizes ships in foreign runs.
The basic problems which all governments of the robber nations face in building and maintaining a merchant service are only one facet of the much broader problem of their foreign-trade rivalry and market-grabbing. Although the American government was late in recognizing this peculiarity of maritime industry, it finally developed a program in full conformity with the fact. That program was embodied in the Merchant Marine Act of 1936. This act was tacit recognition that:
1) U.S. imperialism cannot compete for its share of the world’s markets without its own merchant fleet.
2) The merchant fleet must be built and operated at government expense.
3) War is a continuation by military means of economic struggle and is fought on the same world-wide arena.
The Merchant Marine Act of 1936 was a measure preparing for the present imperialist war. It specifically states that the merchant marine is to be used as a war-time auxiliary to the U.S. Navy. The fleet that was being built when war broke out was designed by Navy architects and is especially built so as to be quickly convertible to tend and supply the Navy’s warships and to transport troops.
The government program for maritime was not executed with the same boldness that characterized the main ideas behind it. It is one thing to draw up a plan of action, something else to put it into effect. The new shipbuilding program was hampered from the beginning by the hypocritical pretence that this vast project was a “private enterprise” that government was only helping out with subsidies, i.e., by furnishing the capital for both building and operating the ships. No one was deceived by the pretense that it was really a privately owned and operated merchant marine – least of all the Roosevelt administration. But the principle of private ownership had to be respected. The problem of manning the new ships was carefully considered in the government plan. What was emphasized was a “disciplined personnel”. This meant the regimentation of seamen, the destruction of trade-union independence. But the organized seamen were too strong in 1936 for the immediate realization of this point in the government program.
Machinery was set up for effecting the full-blown program in the easiest and quickest possible manner. The Maritime Commission was the agency entrusted with this job. It got the shipbuilding schedule lined up. And at the same time it began an attack on the unions, so as to have ready at hand a “loyal and disciplined personnel” when the new ships slid down the ways.
Nature of Government
The story of U.S. government intervention in the maritime industry clearly demonstrates that this government is – and, as we shall illustrate in Sections II and III, has always been – the executive committee of the American capitalist class. This government – more precisely, the President and his Cabinet – sits like a board of directors for the entire industrial plant of the nation.
This board of directors has to find answers, to all the big national and international problems that plague U.S. economic and social life, for the benefit of the capitalist class. This does not mean that there are not temporary differences of opinion between antagonistic sectors of that ruling class. The two bass parties, the Republicans and Democrats, have alternated in office, arguing over tariffs and other secondary differences of opinion within the ruling class. But the important thing is that even though these rival sectors of that class may propose different answers to problems which affect them immediately, the government always gives the answer at which the time appears to the dominant section of the ruling class to be in the best interests of the class as a whole. On major issues, such as the need of preserving private ownership of the means of production, of controlling labor, and of undertaking imperialist expansion, all sectors see pretty much eye-to-eye. With the development of American industry and the growing need for foreign markets, American capitalism as a whole began to turn outward, to challenge its imperialist rivals in all the marketplaces of the world.
Government and the Maritime Industry
Prior to 1917 the government regarded maritime not as a special industry but simply as one among many – one that also needed protection against foreign competition until it grew strong enough to stand on its own feet. And in the early period the government limited itself to applying that principle, which is the basis for a protective tariff, in a modified form, to the maritime industry. World War I proved that this was not enough, that a merchant fleet is an absolute essential in the great game of imperialist rivalry – and especially under war-time conditions.
American capitalism emerged from that 1914–18 war in a much more favorable position that it had held at the outbreak. It had become the greatest creditor nation in the world. The dollar had financed the war and every nation of the world owed America money. The American industrial plant had produce enough war material to supply half the world through four years of slaughter. Thus was produced the paradox that led ultimately to the 1929 U.S. and the 1929-31 European crashes. On the one hand, that mammoth new U.S. industrial plant had to be kept going if American capitalism was to extract profits from its exploitation. On the other hand, to avoid monetary catastrophe, the debtor nations had to pay in consumers’ goods, which competed with the products of U.S. industry. The Republicans who from 1920 to 1932 with a directing committee for U.S. imperialism, coasted along, partly at the expense of war-torn Europe, partly by means of a gradual credit expansion for the sale of U.S.-made consumers’ goods internally, never attempting any basic solution to a set of contradictions full of economic dynamite.
During the post-war “prosperity” era they had built a huge tariff wall around this nation. The debtor countries had been unable to pay off their war debts because the American government’s high tariff had kept exports above imports; instead of debts to America being whittled down, they were increased. If other countries cannot pay for goods received from America in the form of other goods imported into this country, they have to pay in gold bullion (that was back in the days when the gold standard was something sacred). But America had a large share of the world’s gold already, and to demand more of the other nations meant the collapse of the gold standard (this is what finally happened). There was only one other means whereby the debtor nations could pay off, however small the payment: by services. Shipping is a major service to world economy.
Thus, while buttressing its industrial machine behind an insurmountable tariff wall, the leading committee of American capitalism sacrificed its high-seas merchant service to greedy short-sightedness which dictated payment – at least something – on the war debt.
Although the government is the executive committee of the ruling class – and whatever political administration is elected to power always represents the will of the dominant section of the class at the time of election – this does not mean that this board of directors is able to satisfy all the requirements of all sections of the capitalist class at once.
The economic decline that began on a world scale in 1929 proved particularly painful to those industrialists who produce consumers’ goods – clothing, furniture, tobacco, etc., and which depend directly on the purchasing power of the masses. These light industrialists wanted a “New Deal” – a deal which would increase the mass purchasing power immediately. They took the lead in instituting a shake-up of the top committee.
The economic decline that began on a world scale in 1929 proved that some serious mistakes had been made somewhere along the line. The American boss began a shake-up in the top committee, prompted by the growing discontent of the masses of people.
Roosevelt came to power in 1932 with a whole set of emergency measures. He showed far more imagination and had a better understanding of the problems that harass U.S. imperialism than any of his predecessors. He lowered the tariff wall and oiled the industrial machine with public funds.
With a weather eye to the gathering war clouds, Roosevelt turned the attention of government to the imperative necessity of a modern fleet. The merchant marine modernization program of 1936 was the conscious effort of full-grown U.S. imperialism to meet one of its most overdue needs. It had no intention of being caught short as it had been in World War I when an emergency fleet had to be built after the outbreak of open hostilities.
The U.S. merchant fleet in 1935 ranked below that of any of the leading imperialist nations. It was largely the remnant of the emergency fleet built by the government during the First World War. Title to it had been given to private operators. Whatever small fees had been charged by the government for the legal title were more than offset by government money poured into the industry in the form of mail subsidies, without which the merchant fleet would have ceased operation entirely. In actual fact this merchant fleet, though ostensibly a private enterprise, had been built and was operated at the expense of the U.S. Treasury. The new expansion called for no change in this respect. It did, however, envisage a more careful control by the government over the industry. The idea of control was to be applied throughout, from top to bottom. But it’s most noticeable effects had been at the bottom. The base of all industrial life is the working man whose labor alone builds and runs industry. There is where government now applies its most restrictive and rigid control.
Government and the Maritime Unions
Maritime labor had joined the great wave of revolt that swept across America in the years 1934–38. The longshoremen’s and seamen’s strike on the Pacific in 1934 established one of the strongest sections of the American labor movement. Seamen extended their organizational gains and by 1938 the vast majority of seamen were in either the AFL or CIO on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts as well as the Pacific.
This development of strong independent unions alarmed the government. Long-established domesticated unions are pliable instruments and usually lend themselves to government pressure. They often become important instruments for government regimentation of labor as has been notably demonstrated in Great Britain. But the militant new unions that were forged in the heat of the great strike struggles of 1934 and 1936-37 were not tame enough for ready acceptance of the government’s 1936 merchant marine programme.
With U.S. entry into World War II the government still had not realized its program. It had made a fair start. But events overtook it. Under the pressure of war-time conditions tactical improvisation is were introduced to speed up the work. The entire industry was requisitioned and brought under direct government control.
Control of the labor supply is the main emphasis of the government’s war-time tactics. It talks of “requisitioning” labor, just as it has requisitioned the merchant fleet. But it cannot ignore the unions. Some sections of the ruling class have become impatient and favor a frontal attack, an open drive to smash all union opposition to the repressive measures against seamen. Occasionally such drives are tentatively launched by the government. They have not been carried through. The government is cautious: it realises that this is not the best method at this time for the American boss to use in his war on the home front. He doesn’t risk so much by proceeding more cautiously for the present.
The key fact of the present situation is that the leaderships of the seamen’s unions are united on the basic question from which all tactical actions flow: that is, all sections have declared complete support of the imperialist war.
The fact that trade unions exist independent of direct government control is a threat to the imperialist aims of U.S. capital. No one understands this better than American capital’s present board of directors – the Roosevelt administration. They seek to utilize the trade-union officialdom. One pincer of their dual solution to the problem is carefully to control the unions by bringing the officialdom into the government apparatus. The unions then become semi-official government agencies through which the program of the government is applied.
Under government pressure being unions are being transformed from independent working-class organizations defending the immediate economic interests of the sailors into dependent instruments politically integrated into the state structure, at the service of finance capital. (No merely negative “anti-political” tactic can stop this historical process. It was completed in England during World War I. It is now taking shape in this country in the crucible of the Second World War.)
Before the solution we offer to this, noting problem can be clearly understood, there is necessary a thorough understanding of its constituent components: the role of the government as shown in its policy toward shipowners and toward maritime labor; the crisis of the divergent policies of maritime-union leaderships; and the full implications of the government’s tendency to integrate the once independent unions into the state apparatus. But to understand the present stage in each of these matters, it will first be necessary to see how we have reached it, that is, to retrace our steps a little and sketch in its broad general outlines the history of maritime. We shall fast see that the role of the government toward shipowners at the present juncture is nothing novel or exceptional, but only the logical end-product of a long consistently worked-out process. For convenience in handling this complex material, it is subdivided into the government’s attitude to the shipowners, and it attitude to maritime labor. But it must never be forgotten that they are only two faces of the same coin. Later their intimate interrelation will become apparent.
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