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Vol. 73/No. 27      July 20, 2009

 
Openings to build unions
during 1930s depression
(Books of the Month column)
 
Printed below is an excerpt from The Communist League of America: Writings and Speeches, 1932-34 by James P. Cannon, one of the Books of the Month for July. Cannon was a central leader of the Communist Party in the 1920s. He was expelled from the CP in 1928 for supporting Leon Trotsky’s defense of Leninist policies. The Communist League of America was formed by those expelled by the CP that year. Its political work in the early 1930s helped lead to the founding of the Socialist Workers Party several years later. The piece below is from an editorial published in the Militant on Oct. 14, 1933, titled “The AFL, the strike wave, and trade union perspectives.” It points to the improved prospects for workers to bounce back from the demoralizing effects of the first years of the Great Depression. Copyright © 1985 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

The attempt of the [Franklin] Roosevelt administration to “plan” industry on a basis of capitalist private ownership is inevitably doomed to a resounding collapse, and that very probably in the near future. With that, and with the failure also to satisfy the expectations of the workers which were aroused by the ballyhoo campaign of the NRA [National Recovery Administration], will come a tremendous disillusionment of the workers and a rapidly increasing tendency on their part to resort to more aggressive struggles; to rely on their own strength and organization. Trade unionism, which was held out to them in the first stages of the NRA as a device to restrain their independent movement, will become for the workers the medium for its expression on a colossal scale. The workers will turn to trade unionism in real earnest, and they will be bent on making the unions serve as instruments of struggle against the exploiters.

Then, as has already been clearly intimated in the threatening speeches of Roosevelt and [NRA administrator Hugh] Johnson at the [American Federation of Labor] Washington convention, the benevolent mask of the Roosevelt administration will be taken off. The unions they encouraged, and even coddled, as long as they thought they could serve as “harness” will meet open opposition from the government. All the forces at its command, from systematic antiunion and antistrike propaganda to police and military force, will be brought to bear. The unions, insofar as they really fight—and that is the function which the conditions of the times impose upon them—will have to fight for their existence against the government itself.

The capitalist attack against the trade unions as organs of struggle will be carried inside the unions. [AFL president William] Green, [John L.] Lewis, and Company will be called upon to purge the organizations of their militant elements and restore the unions to conservative and respectable docility. The prompt response of these treacherous agents of capital to this demand is assured in advance; their attitude at Washington, in harmony with all their previous conduct, signifies this first of all.

The trade unions, swelling into larger proportions by the influx of new members on one side, will witness wholesale expulsions and splits, engendered by the reactionary bureaucracy on the other. Insurgent workers who insist on striking—the “horses” that “refuse to work in harness”—will meet the condemnation of the labor bureaucracy. Their strikes will be outlawed and denounced as communistic plots. A campaign of red-baiting will be inaugurated against revolutionaries and communists. Where these do not exist they will be invented. Every worker who wants to fight for his rights and wants to make the union fight for them will be branded as a “red.” The next developments of the trade union movement will unfold in a seething tide of labor rebellion—of “outlaw” strikes, clashes with the authorities, fierce internal struggles in the unions, expulsions, and splits.

The fact that already today hundreds of thousands of workers are streaming into the trade unions is in itself a fact of incalculable significance. The workers are on the move. That is what is new; that is what is important in the situation. The trade union is the first and most elementary form of working-class organization, for which no substitute has ever been invented. The workers take their first steps on the path of class development through that door. Hundreds of thousands are taking this step already today, a large percentage of them for the first time. Millions of others will follow them tomorrow. No matter how conservative the unions may be, no matter how reactionary their present leadership, and regardless of what the real purposes of the Roosevelt administration were in giving a certain encouragement and impetus to this trade union revival—in spite of all of this, the movement itself represents an elemental force, a power which properly influenced at the right time by the class-conscious vanguard, can break through all the absolute forms and frustrate all the reactionary schemes.

This movement of the masses into the trade unions can be seriously influenced only from within. From this it follows: Get into the unions. Stay there. Work within.

Before any serious development of a revolutionary organization can be expected in America this penetration of the trade unions must begin in earnest. The militants who undertake this task now, after all the discredit brought to the name of communism by the Stalinists, will labor under a double handicap. The complete and unchallenged supremacy of the reactionaries in the trade union leadership; the weight of the government and of all capitalist propaganda and repressive forces on their side; the popular hostility to communism and the relationship of forces in general—these circumstances alone will constitute huge obstacles at the beginning. Besides that, the new left-wing movement will have to pay for the sins and failures of the old.  
 
 
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