The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons (Classic Reprint)
(Half a million men are employed in the steel industry of ...)
Half a million men are employed in the steel industry of the United States. At a period in which eight hours is rapidly coming to be accepted as the standard length of the working day, the principal mills in this industry are operating on a 12-hour work schedule, and many of their workmen are employed seven days in every week. These half million men have, for the most part, no opportunity to discuss with their employers the conditions of their work. Not only are they denied the right of bargaining collectively over the terms of the labor contract, but if grievances arise in the course of their employment they have no right in any effective manner to take up the matter with their employer and secure an equitable adjustment.1 The right even of petition has been at times denied and, because of the organized strength of the steel companies and the disorganized weakness of the employees, could be denied at any time. The right of workers in this country to organize 1S ee for example Judge Gary stestimony before the Senate Committee investigating the steel strike October i, 1919, pp. 161-162, of committee hearings. He told of a strike which occurred because a grievance remained unadjusted after a committee of the workers had tried to take it up with the management. The president of the company involved was for crushing the strike without knowing what the grievance was or even of the existence of the committee.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)
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(Communist party and its program. The masses of toilers, s...)
Communist party and its program. The masses of toilers, suffering under the burdens of the crisis, are keenly discontented and want to find a way out of their intolerable situation. They are alarmed at the depth, length and general severity of the crisis. They begin to realize that there is something rotten in Denmark, that there are fundamental flaws in the capitalist system. Their growing realization of this is further strengthened as they see the spectacular rise of Socialism in theS oviet Union. The masses are beginning rightly to sense that Communism has an important message for the human race, and they want to know what it is. Capitalism is deeply anxious that the masses do not get this message. Hence, from the outset it has carried on a campaign of falsification of the Russian revolution entirely without parallel in history. There has been a veritable ocean of lies in the capitalist press against the U.S.S.R.
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(Excerpt from Toward Soviet America
Communists as willful...)
Excerpt from Toward Soviet America
Communists as willful enemies and destroyers of the human race. But the masses begin to see through this misrepresentation and they want to know the truth.
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(History of the First International under Marx and Engels,...)
History of the First International under Marx and Engels, the Second International with Engels and Lenin, and the Third International under Lenin and Stalin.
William Z. Foster was a radical American labor organizer and Marxist politician, whose career included serving as General Secretary of the Communist Party USA from 1945 to 1957.
Background
He was born in Taunton, Massachussets, the son of James Foster, an Irish nationalist, and Elizabeth McLaughlin. When Foster was six, the family moved to the slums of Philadelphia, where his father worked as a carriage washer and livery stableman.
Education
While acquiring this education in the harsh realities of American working-class life, Foster began immersing himself in the political and economic movements that responded to those conditions.
In November 1920 he formed the Trade Union Education League (TUEL), another left-wing organization devoted to industrial unionism and working within AFL unions.
Career
The family's poverty forced Foster to leave school at the age of ten and take a job in 1891 as a sculptor's assistant. After three years he quit, and for the next twenty-three years he traveled restlessly across the American industrial landscape, toiling in Philadelphia type foundries, in Pennsylvania fertilizer plants, in Florida lumber camps, on New York trolley cars, on British merchant ships, in northwestern farms, sawmills, and metal mines, and in Chicago rail yards.
While acquiring this education in the harsh realities of American working-class life, Foster began immersing himself in the political and economic movements that responded to those conditions.
Abandoning his youthful attraction to William Jennings Bryan's free silver movement, as well as his father's Irish nationalism and his mother's Catholicism, he joined the Socialist party (SP) in 1901 and began his sixty-year commitment to revolutionary trade unionism and socialism.
Although that commitment was steadfast, his attachment to a particular movement was not. In 1909 Foster and other members of the SP's left wing in the state of Washington split from the party and launched the short-lived Wage Workers party.
But Foster soon shifted from political to trade-union radicalism by joining the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during the Spokane free-speech fight. Foster's membership in the IWW also proved brief.
In 1910 he left the Pacific Northwest and spent thirteen months in Europe studying radical and union movements. Impressed by the French syndicalist tactic of "boring from within" existing unions, he returned to the United States in 1911 and campaigned to persuade the IWW to abandon its independent, "dual unionist" stance and work within the American Federation of Labor (AFL).
With the failure of his efforts, Foster resigned from the IWW in 1912 and began to "bore from within" the AFL by joining the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen. At the same time he founded the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA), with himself as unpaid national secretary, in order to mobilize radical unionists within other AFL craft unions.
The early recruits to this new movement included a number of anarchists. Under the influence of anarchist ideas and comrades, Foster became an anarcho-syndicalist, believing that a revolution would come solely through the economic struggles of unions, strikes, and sabotage.
The SLNA never exceeded 2, 000 members during its two years of operation (1912 - 1914); the Independent Trade Union Educational League, which Foster founded in 1915, proved even less successful.
It was largely an organization of Chicago union militants who believed that trade unions would inevitably turn to "the overthrow of capitalism. " Although Foster would later criticize this policy as "right opportunism, " it was the basis of his most notable successes as a labor leader.
In 1915, Foster, then working in the Swift's car shops in the Chicago stockyards, was elected business agent of the Chicago District Council of the Railway Carmen. In this position he gained both organizing experience and influence in the Chicago labor movement.
In 1917 he was able to win the Chicago Federation of Labor's support for an effort to organize packinghouse workers. As secretary of the Stockyards Labor Council, Foster brilliantly led an organizing campaign that increased union membership tenfold.
As a result the packinghouse workers won the eight-hour day and other benefits through federal arbitration.
Having thus gained the confidence of AFL leaders, Foster in 1918 moved on to the even more ambitious task of organizing the steel industry.
Again he was spectacularly successful; nearly 100, 000 steelworkers had joined the union by the spring of 1919. But the strike of 365, 000 steelworkers that fall proved much less successful.
In the postwar "red scare" atmosphere, Foster's radicalism became a major issue in the strike. Although he repudiated many of his previous radical positions in testimony before the Senate Investigating Committee, the red-baiting proved crucial in the eventual defeat of the strike.
Despite the ultimate failure of the steel organizing drive, Foster's work as leader of the packinghouse and steel campaigns received almost universal praise.
The defeat of the steel strike ended Foster's immediate hopes for transforming the AFL into a revolutionary labor movement and left him at a crossroads. He decided to return to the rail yards to build left-wing unionism as a rank-and-filer.
But, finding himself blacklisted, he was forced to turn to full-time organizing. In November 1920 he formed the Trade Union Education League (TUEL), another left-wing organization devoted to industrial unionism and working within AFL unions. Although the American Communist party, which had been formed in 1919 out of the left wing of the Socialist party, disdained Foster's approach, the Soviet Communists showed much greater interest.
In 1921 the RILU (a Moscowcentered "international" of revolutionary trade unions) invited him to attend its Moscow convention, at which it designated the TUEL as its American affiliate.
Foster, who had been gradually moving away from antipolitical syndicalism, spent three and a half months in Moscow, studying Soviet society and the Communist movement. Pleased by the attention paid to the TUEL and the Russian support for "boring from within" the AFL, and impressed by the results of the Russian Revolution, Foster joined the American Communist party in 1921.
Although he did not join the party until two years after its creation, he devoted the next forty years to the Communist movement and to insuring that he would never again be absent from what he called his "proper place in the ranks of the revolutionary Communist International. "
For the first two years, Foster kept his party membership secret, so that it would not interfere with his trade union work. Initially his organizational talents won significant results; the TUEL gained the support of numerous AFL unions for the principle of industrial unionism.
But by 1924, under attack from the leadership of the AFL and in the atmosphere of Coolidge "prosperity, " the TUEL found itself, as even Foster later conceded, in "relative isolation from the masses. " Just as Foster's trade union efforts were faltering, so were his efforts to win ascendancy within the American Communist party (known as the Workers Party of America from 1922 to 1929).
Although his loose faction of the party--dominated by such Chicago-centered, American-born trade unionists as James P. Cannon, Earl Browder, and himself--often had the support of the majority of party members, they lacked the crucial backing of the Communist International (Comintern).
In 1929, Josef Stalin intervened on behalf of the Foster group, but for Foster the triumph was ambiguous. Criticized by Stalin for too energetically fighting the factional battles of the 1920's, he was gradually pushed aside in favor of the less well-known and seemingly more tractable Earl Browder, who had previously been little more than Foster's "errand boy. "
To add insult to injury, Foster was told to administer the party's new policy of creating independent unions outside the AFL, an approach that he had fought since 1911. Abandoning this longtime opposition to "dual unionism, " Foster became secretary of the new federation--the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL)--formed in 1929 as a center for organizing independent, revolutionary, industrial unions.
To many American radicals he became a legendary and heroic figure--the "embodiment of the American working class, the living confirmation of the historic mission of the proletariat. "
He was the party's presidential candidate in 1924, 1928, and 1932. The last campaign, in which he garnered 102, 785 votes, was his most successful, but personally the most costly. Although run-down from years of overwork, Foster undertook a grueling campaign tour.
In September 1932 he collapsed from a heart attack. Only after three years of recuperation could he again make even a ten-minute speech. When Foster returned to active party life, he found Browder solidly entrenched as party secretary, and himself relegated to the largely honorary post of party chairman.
He continued to give advice, particularly on labor questions, but for the most part he was confined to "literary" activities. His articles appeared almost monthly in the party's theoretical magazine, The Communist, in the late 1930's and early 1940's. An activist, not a writer or theoretician, in both temperament and talent, Foster grew increasingly frustrated over Browder's dominance and his own limited role in party affairs.
Political disagreements reinforced Foster's personal bitterness. While Browder had championed close cooperation with the Roosevelt administration in pursuit of the antifascist "popular front" of the late 1930's and of wartime national unity, Foster remained suspicious and critical of such alliances.
In May 1944, Browder took his coalition policy to the logical extreme of dissolving the Communist party, replacing it with the "nonpartisan" and "educational" Communist Political Association, and declaring, "Capitalism and Socialism have begun to find the way to peaceful coexistence and collaboration in the same world. "
Such visions of class harmony were anathema to the more "fundamentalist" Foster. Despite these sharp disagreements, Foster publicly supported Browder's policy, became a vice-president of the new association, and even presided over the expulsion of a party official who refused to accept the new line.
Foster finally felt vindicated when, in April 1945, French Communist leader Jacques Duclos, with the apparent support of Soviet leaders, published an article attacking Browder for "opportunist illusions. "
Within months the American party repudiated Browder, reestablished the Communist party, and turned over leadership to Foster. Despite continued ill health he led an often vicious purge of all remnants of "Browderism. "
Some of Foster's policies were modified by the more pragmatic Eugene Dennis, the party secretary during the postwar years. Tragically for Foster, he had achieved dominance of the American party only to watch it collapse.
Although his own sectarianism probably encouraged this decline, a more important problem facing the party was cold-war-era repression.
In 1948 the government indicted twelve top party leaders under the Smith Act for advocating the overthrow of the American government by "force and violence. " Following their conviction in October 1949, the government successfully prosecuted secondary party leaders all over the country.
The party, now even more firmly under the leadership of Foster, who had escaped trial and imprisonment because of his heart condition, aided the process of party disintegration by sending thousands of trusted members "underground" to evade further anticipated governmental attacks.
Such actions accorded with Foster's apocalyptic "five minutes to midnight" line, which predicted impending economic depression, domestic fascism, and international war. This crisis, he argued, would propel the American working class to a revolution under Communist party leadership.
But the cataclysmic clash between capitalism and socialism anticipated by Foster never materialized. Instead, postwar prosperity continued, domestic repression gradually diminished, and the cold war began to thaw.
Even more important, at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Nikita Khrushchev revealed the crimes of the Stalin years. In these circumstances the American party met in April 1956 to assess the party's decline over the past decade.
Such reflections, notes historian and former party member Joseph Starobin, "inevitably cast doubt on the competence of Foster as ideologue and leader. " In effect, the report of party secretary Dennis, The Communists Take a New Look, which was approved with only Foster dissenting, repudiated the leadership Foster had given to the party since 1945.
Despite some initial hesitation Foster counterattacked forcefully until a serious stroke sidelined him in October 1957. Earlier that year he had been pushed out of his position as party chairman and made chairman emeritus. But he ultimately won a pyrrhic victory as most of his strongest opponents--centered around Daily Worker editor John Gates--left the party in 1957 and 1958.
Still, one of those who remained in the party complained privately that Foster had "become very rigid and inflexible on tactical and personnel questions and is intensely subjective and bitter. " Thus, in the last four years of his life Foster had the ambiguous status of ignored, but honored, party elder statesmen. Foster died in Moscow, where he had gone for medical treatment, and was honored by a state funeral in Red Square. Both his life and his legacy were riddled with ironies: hostile to intellectuals and insecure over his lack of education, he spent many years as a party theorist; an extremely talented labor organizer, he failed to demonstrate those talents as a leader of his own party; personally rooted in the realities of American working-class life, he increasingly seemed to lose touch with those realities.
It was largely an organization of Chicago union militants who believed that trade unions would inevitably turn to "the overthrow of capitalism. "
Personality
Although Foster had been denied the top leadership post in the party, he remained its best-known and most popular public figure. Tall, slight, partially bald, and with what literary critic Edmund Wilson described as "a small mobile Irish mouth and a plebeian Irish lantern jaw, " Foster was a soft-spoken but effective orator.
Quotes from others about the person
Even his longtime political opponent James P. Cannon admitted that "no one but Foster, with his executive and organizing skill, his craftiness, his patience and his driving energy, could have organized the steelworkers on such a scale and led them in a great strike. "
Connections
He married one of them, Russian-born Esther Abramowitz, on March 23, 1912.