Vol. 72/No. 17      April 28, 2008

BY GEORGE NOVACK  
The narrow outlook of the AFL had much in common with the instrumentalist theories of John Dewey, the highest form of pragmatism. Gompersism and Deweyism were kindred products of the same period in America’s social evolution. The principal methods of instrumentalism corresponded on the top level of theory to the everyday practices and outlook of the craft union officials. To be sure, the two sprang from different social strata and did not march closely together. The one stemmed directly from the needs and views of liberal middle class intellectuals; the other came from the habits and interests of the union bureaucracy and the craft aristocracy. Although the former was more volatile and less hidebound than the latter, they converged in the nationally enclosed, opportunist, piecemeal nature of their common ideology… .

The two movements were alike not only in their methods of thought but in their underlying aims. Both sought to effect improvements for the lower classes step by step within the settled framework of capitalist institutions. This program of gradual reform necessarily involved accommodation to the political and social bases of capitalism and a deference to its governing bodies… .

The scorn for broad generalizations in historical and social questions was most conspicuous in the Gompers section of the labor movement. But it was an inescapable phenomenon of that entire era. Its prevalence, though in different forms, at the opposite end of the labor movement testified to its deep roots in the objective conditions of American life. Eugene Debs, the revolutionary socialist who was Gompers’s lifelong left-wing opponent, exemplified in his own way the low theoretical level characteristic of that time. Debs made his way from trade unionism to socialism under the blows he received through personal participation in the union organizing campaigns and class battles of the 1890s. He learned the real nature of capitalist chicanery and cruelty not so much from books as in the school of hard knocks. In this respect, as in so many others, Debs was genuinely representative of the native laboring masses.

He became a thoroughgoing socialist and a left-wing one. But, through no fault of his own, he never grew to be a Marxist leader of the highest stature. As a self-educated worker-leader in the provincial America of his day, he could not acquire the theoretical equipment, training, and insight vested in the outstanding figures of the great German and Russian schools of revolutionary socialism who stood at the crossroads of world history in their time. As Debs’s best biographer, Ray Ginger, notes: “In his entire life, he never made an important decision on the basis of theoretical study. The facts of his own life kicked him into every step; often he required more than one kick.”

This weakness handicapped Debs at many points in his career: in the internal party controversies of the prewar socialist movement, at the time of Wilson’s intervention into the First World War, and finally in the developments following the Russian revolution, which required a profound theoretical readjustment in the outlook of all socialists. Debs shared this inadequacy with most of his generation, regardless of their special tendency or affiliation. Similar deficiencies in theory and program were stamped upon the militant ranks of migratory labor and the proletarian fighters of the IWW; they were to prove a decisive factor in the disintegration of this movement after the First World War and the Russian revolution.

Engels, who closely followed the main events in the labor movement here during the last part of the nineteenth century, often emphasized these contradictory aspects of the American character: its strength in practical affairs coupled with its feebleness in theory. “Theoretical ignorance is the attribute of all young peoples,” he wrote his friend Friedrich Sorge in the United States, “but so is the speed of development in practice. Just as in England, so all abstractions count for nothing in America until they have been brought forward by factual necessity.”

Engels expected that the harsh necessities of the class struggle and the resultant schooling of experience would in time stimulate the American workers’ vanguard to gain a clearer, more comprehensive insight into their historical destiny and enable them to overcome their traditional empiricism. Since his death in 1895, our labor movement has taken giant strides forward. But it must be said that for all the advances made in its understanding, these have not kept pace with its organizational gains, and even less with its needs. The union movement is still, in Engels’s words, “practically ahead of the whole world and theoretically still in its swaddling clothes.”  
 
 
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