Vol. 78/No. 32      September 15, 2014

Below is an excerpt from Revolutionary Continuity: Birth of the Communist Movement, 1918-1922 by Farrell Dobbs. Dobbs was a principal leader of the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes and subsequent over-the-road union organizing campaign, as well as a central leader of the Socialist Workers Party, serving as the party’s national secretary from 1953 to 1972. The book is the second volume in a two-part series by Dobbs on the history of the development of Marxist leadership in the U.S. Copyright © 1983 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

BY FARRELL DOBBS 
When the United States government entered the First World War in April 1917 it took coercive measures to enforce compliance by the population with its imperialist course. Compulsory military service was imposed. The passage of the Espionage Act amended federal sedition laws to severely restrict civil liberties. This act served as the main legal justification for government attacks on antiwar militants.

Political cops raided the headquarters of trade unions and workers’ political organizations. Homes of workers were invaded as well. Their families were harassed. Records and literature were seized. Arrests, often followed by imprisonment, were made on frame-up charges of obstructing the military draft. The foreign born became a special target, as deportations were used more and more as a weapon of intimidation. Anti-German chauvinism was fostered on a mass scale.

An even more brutal crackdown, including the imposition of martial law, became the order of the day in Washington’s colonial possessions such as Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

Press censorship was instituted, and authorities banned from the mails numerous issues of radical publications. At the same time the government encouraged extralegal suppression of the workers’ movement as part of a general antiradical crusade.

Mobs terrorized opponents of the war — socialists, pacifists, syndicalists, and rebel farmers alike. Businessmen were praised for arming themselves. Racist assaults and lynchings increased. Vigilante gangs ransacked trade union centers, broke strikes in the name of “patriotism,” and in Butte, Montana, lynched a union organizer, Frank Little. Attacks were carried out against agrarian radicals, especially supporters of the Non-Partisan League.

Under such reactionary pressures class-collaborationist currents within the labor movement capitulated, one after another, to the imperialist government. The once-massive peace movement was reduced to a scattering of individuals who maintained a stand as conscientious objectors to military service.

Despite such defections, however, many of the nation’s toilers remained opposed to the war. A competently led organized labor movement could have forged an alliance of the working class and working farmers that would have launched a strong antiwar campaign as part of its class-struggle course. But the workers were handicapped by a general leadership default. They had no independent means of politically asserting themselves in an organized manner. Right-wing and centrist leaders in the labor movement were betraying them, and none of the left-wing tendencies had a program that pointed the way toward an effective defense of the toilers’ interests. …

Then, like a brilliant sunrise, inspiring political light came from the East. On October 25 (November 7), 1917, the Bolshevik revolution triumphed in Russia, offering living proof that, under the leadership of a revolutionary combat party, a workers’ vanguard could lead the exploited toilers to take political power. Once in power, moreover, the Soviet regime’s first proclamation stated that the newly created workers’ and peasants’ republic was removing itself from the international conflict, thus providing a concrete demonstration that the working class could put an end to imperialist wars of conquest. The Russian example gave fresh impetus to struggles against the capitalists, landlords, and imperialist oppressors throughout the world.

In the United States all wings of the radical movement were inspired by the proletarian victory in Russia. The definitive overthrow of tsarism in war-ravaged Russia and the victory of the antiwar workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors were popular well beyond the ranks of proletarian revolutionists. Support for the new Soviet government was expressed by individuals adhering to widely divergent political tendencies, ranging from reformists in the SP [Socialist Party] to the anarcho-syndicalists in the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World]. Pro-Soviet sentiments were also manifested among militants in the AFL. Their immediate sense of class kinship with their Russian brothers and sisters was articulated by Eugene V. Debs, the foremost socialist agitator of the time, who proclaimed himself a Bolshevik. …

In August 1918 Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin addressed a letter to American workers appealing for their support in opposing the imperialist intervention. “At the present time the American revolutionary workers have to play an exceptionally important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism,” he wrote.

Lenin defended the Russian Soviet republic against bourgeois propaganda that was trying to turn workers against the revolution by pointing to the stern defense measures, including executions and abridgement of democratic rights, forced upon the Bolsheviks in order to defeat the counterrevolution in the civil war. Recalling the example of the American War of Independence from British monarchical rule and the U.S. Civil War to abolish slavery and defeat the slave-owning landlord class in the South, Lenin frankly explained to U.S. workers that the basic “truth is that no revolution can be successful unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed.”  
 
 
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