The ABC’s of Communism Bolshevism 2011

Jason W. Smith, Ph.D.

 

Chapter 24: Capitalism Unleashed: 1878 – 1920

The Revolution had unchained capitalism; the civil war had removed its fetters. Now, the time had come for Capitalism to be truly unleashed. It was at Appomattox, Virginia, that history was served so well (as it had been 80 years earlier at Yorktown.)

The (1) entire previously non-capitalist, (and in fact anti-capitalist) economy of the South had been abolished. The Southern States now joined the capitalist economic system. (2) Capital itself now could concern itself with just one thing – expansion – super expansion – super fast. In other words, the productive potential of capitalism, after a century of struggle, was finally unleashed. Now, it would show what it could do when the political circumstances were finally perfect.

Yet the great political victory for humanity represented by Lincoln, the Republicans, and the working class/farmer victory over the slavocrats in the Civil War, could not change the laws of operation of the Capitalist System. The “boom and bust” cycle would continue (to the present day) and nothing could be done about that. (In fact we are in another bust right now.) It would be another 68 years before US citizens would be able to force Capital to accept compromises capitalists had hitherto refused (with the election of FDR in 1932). Along the way, however, North American labor struck out on its own, as a true class with its own interests, and became increasingly politically sophisticated. The most advanced elements of the US union movement would accept Marxism and proceed to experiment with various forms of overthrowing capitalism altogether.

Innovation in High Gear

One after another the technological barriers confronted by industry were overcome during the post-Civil War period. The demand for wrought iron was constant and growing. What was needed was a cheaper process to make larger quantities. Several processes were invented beginning with the Bessemer process (patented in 1856 but not perfected until 1879) for blowing cold air through molten iron thus producing not simply cheaper and more plentiful wrought iron but a new form of the metal we now call mild steel. This was the beginning of the steel age and with it all of the technical problems associated with the earlier more highly carburized forms of iron became a thing of the past.

You will recall from our discussion of the Capitalist Stage (Chapter 12) that the key problem with iron was the carbon content. The cold air of the Bessemer process provided the oxygen for the carbon to combine with, raising the temperature in the “converters” rapidly and leaving behind a properly carburized iron (wrought iron or mild steel). Once the converters were lined with dolomite limestone (magnesium carbonate) the phosphorous present in so many ores was removed simultaneously (to be ejected with the slag) and virtually any ore in the world could be employed to produce wrought iron and mild steel (the Thomas process). This latter modification of Bessemer’s cold blown air process allowed both phosphoric and non-phosphoric ores to be utilized.  By 1879 all the worlds iron ores were now at the service of the industry.

Iron and Steel became cheaper simultaneously because of the Siemens-Martin process where the discharged hot gases from the furnaces were recycled as fuel for the process eliminating the need to spend as much fuel as had been used to maintain the high temperatures in the furnaces. In fact, the savings in glass blowing ran between 70 and 80%. Furthermore, the Siemens-Thomas process took 12 hours as opposed to 30 minutes with straight forward Bessemer mild steel. This was an advantage because it allowed workers to control the composition of the steel in the Siemens-Thomas system and thus to satisfy special needs of different clients in terms of hardness and ductility.

Alloyed steels for special purposes had begun to appear in 1868. Tungsten and then magnesium were used as the alloys which would keep this new iron from softening during working (accelerated temperatures) so that by 1887 virtually all tasks could be accomplished by alloyed steel for which earlier forms of wrought iron were unfit.

Reverse rolling of rail iron while hot became the chief process by which railroad rails and other industrial products were made. These advances occurred first in England and were quickly copied in the US.

It would take time for all the rails needed in the US and Canada to be produced of tougher iron than that easily available during the Civil War so American trains grew larger and longer with more wheels to spread the weight over the light rails. Between 1868 and 1871 George Westinghouse invented and perfected the air brake for these huge and heavy trains.

The internal combustion engine fueled by coal-gas had been invented in France in 1860. Twelve years later (1872) the first liquid fuel internal combustion engine was invented in Boston. – And electricity was advancing by leaps and bounds so that by 1872 it was widely understood that electricity generators worked just as well as motors. One such electrical motor was demonstrated in Vienna the following year.

The Labor Movement in 1866 and the struggle for the eight hour day

Capital was organizing in every way with the end of the Civil War and in response the most advanced leaders of the US labor movement (William Sylvis, William Harding, and Jonathan Fincher – chiefs of the International Molders Union, Coach Makers International Union, Machinists and Blacksmith’s Union, respectively) met in Philadelphia during February of the following year (1866). Their objective being the formation of a unified Congress of national labor unions and all other unions too.

Accordingly, in August 1866, 60,000 workers were represented by the 59 delegations in attendance at the founding American Workers Congress, in Baltimore. Simultaneously in Europe the International Workingmen’s Association held a Congress in Vienna. The resulting proclamations were nearly identical, demonstrating the theoretical sophistication that had been achieved by workers on both continents. From these congresses grew the demand for the eight hour day.

Review and Recap

Labor from the Communist Manifesto and European Revolutions of 1848 – 1852 to the First International, and the split with Anarchism and Revisionism

The International and the Working Men’s Party, 1876

Acknowledging that the Anarchist problem in Europe was so great that it was best to start all over again, at least in America, the First International dissolved itself in Philadelphia in July, 1876. Karl Marx had sent the Executive Council of the First International to the United States precisely to prevent its corruption by anarchism (the European equivalent to the various utopian and other crack-pot schemes so prevalent in the USA.) Accordingly, all 19 sections of the First International in the United States came together during that summer of 1876 to bury the first “form” of international working class action following the correct principles of the historical materialist theory as outlined by Marx and Engels. Then, declaring it time to reorganize, the Americans proceeded to create the Working Men’s Party of the United States.

The Depression of 1873

Rapid advances in technology reviewed above, required the purchase and installation of much new factory equipment in all key industries. Competition among the capitalists required that they adopt the new machinery. Rather than looking to their own pocketbooks to pay the cost, the capitalists looked to the wallets of the working class. Wage cuts, longer hours, and massive unemployment were the result for workers still employed and those sent to the street, respectively.

This depression turned out to be quite possibly worse than any of its predecessors if for no other reason than North American workers were now a true proletariat without other means of support (as for example many had had when they could return to their farms.) It led to the great national strike movement of 1877.

The First Soviet Was Formed in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1877

You will recall the Russian word for “council” is “soviet” and the first workers council to take power into its own hands was formed as a result of the massive national U.S. strike movement in the summer of 1877. The national strike wave had begun in Pennsylvania and Maryland and spread quickly to Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky.

The capitalists counter-attacked with federal troops firing on unarmed workers, men, women and children in Baltimore. However, even when they broke the strike in Maryland all they had really done was to help spread the strike to New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri and California!

One reason for the success of the workers was the massive support they received from farmers, small business people, professionals, and miners. Everyone, it seemed, hated the railroads and the other big capitalist enterprises. The railroads had been engendering mass resistance, ranging from the fight led by Jesse James in Missouri all the way to a variety of buccaneers in California, because of their blatant disregard of people impacted by their greedy expansion. The railroads got huge grants of land adjacent to their tracks as part of the licensing of those days and they used their power to “condemn” via eminent domain, just about any land they wished to claim. See the movie American Outlaws for a vivid depiction of that struggle. The movie Bandidas gives a flavor for what these railroad company gangsters, and their banks, did in Mexico.

The tide began to turn against the capitalists when troops refused to fire on the strikers in Pittsburgh in late July 1876. State power, by definition (army and police), had begun to waver. In New York, at Buffalo, troops again refused to fire on strikers and sympathy for the strikers was widely reported by all observers throughout the State. Should the “state” switch allegiance, then workers would have their first chance at building a new society where the state was loyal to them. The “cap press” (i.e., capitalist press) was panic stricken and hysterical. For example, on the 25th of July (1877) the New York Times ran a headline “The City in Possession of Communists”, referring to what was happening in St. Louis. Indeed the communists were active. The newly formed Workingmen’s Party of the United States had jumped into the fight and provided continuous guidance and support to all strikers and unions involved.

On July 22nd, 1877, workers began a massive strike action – a general strike – in St. Louis and East St. Louis and formed an Executive Committee (of the United Workingmen of St. Louis) and took over all City functions as the new City Council. Ten days later Pinkertons, Federal troops, and others attacked and destroyed the worker’s would-be Paris Commune (1870-71) (the direct inspiration for their actions). But the lesson had been learned by all concerned and that genie could not be easily crammed back into its bottle.

Samuel Gompers: Prince of the Pie-cards (1881)

Perhaps no one single leader of American and Canadian workers had had a better exposure to Marxism than Samuel Gompers. The part of the Marxist position (and for example the program of the Workingmen’s Party) Gompers internalized best was the part that emphasized concentrating on the NOW needs of workers as opposed to the pie-in-the-sky crackpot plans of so many of the non-Marxists.

In November of 1881 Gompers became chief of the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, which became in 1886 the American Federation of Labor (AFL). However, before all this was over Gompers would become a champion anti-Bolshevik of the US labor movement.

Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party (1890)

De Leon took from Marxism the part he understood best and that was the part that made independent working class economic and political activity the core of Labor’s Program for North America. De Leon, a former university professor, and now leader of the Socialist Labor Party, took the SLP along a highly ultra-left sectarian path that resulted in innumerable negatives as far as building a broad national united front was concerned.

Spindletop at Beaumont Texas

The Invention of Rotary Drilling

It would have been obvious to a properly educated scientist that there would be oil everywhere and anywhere in the world where you had (a) trapping geological formations and (b) oil and gas generating formations in conjunction. – And, there were many geologists turning their attention to the fact that the Pennsylvania monopoly on oil was no longer a reality. First it had been Ohio and Indiana that joined the ranks of oil producing States and internationally the Russians were producing nearly as much as the North Americans. In addition there were proven and producing oil wells in Indonesia and apparently adjacent parts of Indochina. Romania had been producing oil for decades. So, it was not as surprising as one might have thought to find oil in the west of the United States and Texas in the last decade of the 1800’s. Texas was about as far west as most eastern Americans knew about..

To make a long story short the greatest oil strike so far in US history occurred on a salt dome hill outside the town of Beaumont in the State of Texas, on January 10, 1902. It was a classic blow-out of drillpipe (as would later be common place in movies) and gushed initially at 75,000 barrels a day! It was also the first successful well drilled by “rotary drilling” as opposed to one or another version of “cable drilling.” The development of rotary drilling would prove to be far more important in the long run than the strike at Spindletop but for the moment it was this new and incredibly large successful oilfield venture which held the world’s attention.

Many men and women, many new companies, and many countries would find their destinies entwined over the next several decades as a result of what had happened at Spindletop. Most important among these for our purposes were the formation of two new permanent competitors to the Standard Trust (Texaco and Gulf) and the emergence of the families which owned them as members of the US oligarchy within the US ruling class.

Texaco

Texaco was the brand name of the Texas Oil Company’s gasoline and was the 1906 creation of Joseph Cullinan and Howard Hughes Sr. Both of these men had extensive experience in oil infrastructure ranging from engineering and pipeline construction to drilling and drill-bit manufacture, respectively. Hughes Sr. invented the tri-cone drilling bit which became the industry standard and made him one of the wealthiest men in the country. It also provided the funds for the adventures of his son, the famous Howard Hughes (Jr.), in movies and aviation. But for the moment (the first decade of the 20th century) these two were able take advantage of the ongoing war between New York and Chicago finance capital to secure as permanent a base of monetary support as was possible in those days.

Armed with plenty of cash they proceeded to buy and develop leases around Beaumont Texas and the Glen Pool in Oklahoma. Constructing their own pipelines and having a permanent buyer in the form of the British Navy these two confronted Standard with a permanent domestic competitor which Standard could not destroy, buy out or shut down.

Gulf

In 1907 the finance capital Mellon family succeeded in becoming the next permanent domestic challenger to the Rockefeller’s when they created the Gulf Oil Corporation.  Gulf was never a serious challenge to Standard even after the 1911 dissolution of the Trust into the new (previously constituent parts of the Standard Trust) companies. But as US imperialism entered its post-World War I phase the US demanded its part of the world-wide settlement among the victors, and gained access for the first time to Arabian oil at Bahrain Island off the Saudi coast. There Gulf would become a major player.

Electricity

The rapid arrival of electric lighting doomed the kerosene industry and for a moment it seemed as if the oil business was about to head south. Kerosene was at least half of the end product inventory and by 1885 there were over a quarter of a million light bulbs in use which meant a quarter of a million kerosene lamps were headed for the junk yard or at best the second hand rural market. In 1902 there were 18 million electric light bulbs in operation in the US alone and that meant 18 million kerosene lamps ceased to be lit.

The story was the same in London and Berlin (called Elektropolis in the popular press for the brilliance and uniformity of its massive electric lighting system.)

The Internal Combustion Engine

Everything changed with the advent of the automobile and the airplane. No longer was kerosene the most important consideration. It was the previously nearly valueless gasoline fraction of the crude oil which was now in demand. In fact, demand was not the word for it. There was an insatiable requirement for gasoline in every industrialized capitalist country and in those just entering the capitalist stage as in Latin America.

In the US automobile production jumped from a few thousand to nearly a million on the road in the first decade! All these cars had to have gasoline. – And in that first decade of the 20th century (1903) Standard agents supplied the gasoline and lubricating oil for the Wright Brother’s first airplane flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

So, as electricity did away with the market for kerosene the planes and automobiles were building a market for the gasoline fraction. The latter would provide massive capital accumulation for oilmen replacing the primitive capital accumulation kerosene had provided.

Gasoline Comes of Age with the Invention of Thermal Cracking

In 1909 an American scientist, employed by John D. Rockefeller, named William Burton, acting on his own, without authorization, knowledge or support from Rockefeller and his henchmen conducted a series of experiments which put oil under high temperatures and pressures! Burton found that his fancy still, cooking crude oil to 650 degrees Fahrenheit in pressure-cooker conditions would produce a gasoline fraction running to 45% of the total. This “thermal cracking” of the long carbon chained molecules of crude oil into short gasoline length molecules made gasoline available to use in all of the new internal combustion engines that demanded it, in sufficient quantities, for the first time.

US Labor 1912 – 1918

Before and During the Capitalist World War (1914-1918)

Imperialism as a phase of the Capitalist Stage began shortly before 1850. In the succeeding half century the major imperialist countries (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Russia, USA, and Japan) divided the rest of the world amongst themselves as colonies. Super profits began to come back to European capitalists from these imperialists adventures as the 20th century unfolded. The entire world labor movement was aware during the first decade of the 1900’s that the capitalists were leading the world to war on a global scale. Throughout Europe and America all kinds of protests against this policy were underway and all kinds of resolutions swearing opposition to the inevitable imperialist war were passed.

Nevertheless the capitalists started the world war in 1914 and it continued for two and a half years until finally in the spring of 1917 Russian workers revolted against the war altogether and the Russian Revolution began. The capitalists would keep the war going for another year and a half, but throughout the capitalist world workers began to see a new path forward. So, for example, in the USA, by War’s end at the close of 1918, chaos within the working class movement began to give way to a period where clarity could be imposed on the international working class movement by the Russian Bolshevik leaders – now the leaders of the workers of the world.

However, the capitalists were still very much in command of the countries in which they had state power. In many of them the capitalists solidified that control with a new political philosophy called fascism. Fascism began in Hungary in 1919 during the civil war of Admiral Horthy against the Red Government of Bela Kun. It was named “fascist” in 1922, by the Italian clown (and former right wing socialist) Benito Mussolini. Its chief diagnostic was in one way or another to raise to the level of legality, the most violent arbitrary capitalist rule over a mass of slave like workers.

The Soviet Republic (after 1924 the Soviet Union) was embargoed by the capitalist world exactly as Cuba has been embargoed by the Gringo regime for half a century. Confronted with this hostility the Bolsheviks launched a massive international business program supplemented by an even more massive international industrial espionage network of gigantic proportions. So, as the capitalist world entered yet another of its innumerable depressions – this time the worst depression ever began in 1929 and lasted until the end of World War II in 1945 – the Soviet Union was beginning the most rapid modernization possible of the industrial base that would have been capitalist industry in any other country but was now publicly owned.

This was the context within which the North American labor movement emerged as a decisive factor in the global struggle for socialism and against fascism and imperialism of any kind (including that of the democratic [parliamentary] imperialist powers of the English-speaking world.) You want to keep this in mind as you become familiar with our own labor history and be prepared to go back and study what was happening in Europe (as for example in Chapters 12-16 below.)

Eugene Debs and North American Social Democracy (1898)

Of all early US and Canadian Socialists perhaps Eugene Debs is the man most remembered today. Debs corrected the ultra-left sectarianism of Daniel De Leon and his Socialist Labor Party and forged an alliance with the AF of L. A new Socialist Party was created out of anti-De Leon SLP elements and the U.S. Social Democratic Party in 1900.

Debs Leads the Fight against World War I

Debs remains famous because he led the North American Socialists who solidified with V.I. Lenin and his demand that the imperialist world war (WW I) be called for what it was. This is to say a world-wide war of capitalists against Labor. Against workers in the capitalist countries and against working people in colonial countries.

Debs was eventually, imprisoned in the USA, in 1918, for his opposition to the world war but nothing could reverse the fact Debs had received three quarter of a million votes during the Presidential election of 1912 and in 1916 the Socialist candidate for President got nearly 600,000 votes. All of this despite the Left appealing phony slogan of the Democratic Party to “Keep Us out of War”.

North Americans Suddenly Cognizant

President Woodrow Wilson said it belatedly best when he said in St. Louis on the 5th of September, 1919 “Is there any man here or woman – let me say is there any child – who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?...This was a commercial and industrial war.”

You will recall in our discussion at the beginning of Chapter 13 (The Stage of Stalinist Socialism) the real reasons for the World War just concluded were two fold:  (1) the desire of capitalists in control of the principal capitalist countries of USA, Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Russia and their clients in the lesser states of Europe to kill as many supernumerary workers as possible. They were no longer needed in the age of imperialism (machinery had long since been sent to the cheap labor colonial world) and their women and children would be available in case of any need for additional domestic labor power. – And, (2) each of the capitalist ruling classes in the imperialist countries believed that seizing their rival’s colonial possession of cheap labor power was worth the risk. Especially when the 1913 profits coming back from these overseas factories and their sub-subsistence level wages were as stupendous as they were. The negatives in case of defeat were minimal and worth risking as far as the capitalist oligarchies in charge of the imperialist countries were concerned.

What about North American labor and its preparation for the World War?

The US Left All Over the Place

I - The Socialist Party

For the entire decade prior to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and throughout the war, North American intellectuals in the socialist movement made all kinds of correct assessments as to what was going on, what had happened, and so forth. But when it came to doing something about it – namely sending cadre into the armed forces to organize sedition and subversion and to prepare to mutiny, shoot their officers and turn their units to the service of the proletarian revolution the gringo socialist leaders failed. (Something which should be our first order of business today.) Consequently, when the gringo capitalists gave the order to enter the World War, there was nothing to stop them.

If US Socialists were not ready to seize power, then were they able to put up any other kind of effective resistance to the capitalist war policy? The answer is yes and no.

The war was terribly unpopular with the Party’s membership but by 1918 it had become popular with the Party’s highest leadership – many of whom were important elected leaders, especially in the labor states. This despite the fact that nearly all the Socialist leaders and members enthusiastically supported the October Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

However, as often as not this support came for bad reasons. Specifically an ignorance of Marxist basics – any socialist leader should have known, because it is elementary Marxism, that the state is owned by capitalists in all capitalist countries and that any war is a war of theirs for profit for them, and to murder millions of trouble-making workers. Instead we see pure silliness coming out of so-called Socialist leaders. For example, when the October Revolution replaced the capitalist regime in Russia many of these so-called socialists naively greeted the arrival of Lenin as meaning the US would support the turn toward real democracy in Russia so that US socialist opposition to the world war was no longer necessary!

The 1917 Socialist Party St. Louis convention had passed an emergency resolution opposing the war and that became the center for further socialist party dissolution as pressure from the Government against them picked up. However, clearly, a Party whose leaders were often this illiterate politically and historically ignorant, failing to understand even the most basic parts of Marxism, left them in an extremely vulnerable position not to mention leaving them isolated from not only the mass of workers but most especially from the mass of those who could be most permanently organized. That is, the industrial proletariat.

In short, no one was more “all over the place” than US Socialist Party thinkers and adherents... Members, leaders, writers, editors, opinion makers of all sorts among Socialists, were first against the war and later maybe for it, depending on who they were, when and where.

Nevertheless this did not stop the capitalists from launching an all out war against them as well as the IWW in 1917. Of course the real reason for the attack was to silence the most effective leaders of the US labor movement. Backing the attack was every reactionary force in the US civil, governmental and state life. No amount of conciliation could call that off.

The AFL would soon confront its own conflict between pie-card leaders and militant members as the cap attack was pressed against labor everywhere in the years after the World War concluded. No one was stronger in their anti-communism and pro-capitalist activity than the AFL national leadership and, of course, the prince of the pie-cards Samuel Gompers.

Talk is Cheap – in the Crunch American Socialists Fail

The Left US Socialist strategy of relying on mass demonstrations and protest petitions to stop the inevitable world war was ludicrous to begin with. But in retrospect it also highlights the core weakness in our country’s working class preparation to combat the world war itself in that it demonstrates the extreme naiveté of the leaders as well as the membership of the Socialist Party (and the rest of the Left as well).

Workers have to organize militarily and prepare for class combat in the streets, mountains, inland waters and deserts of the USA if they are to be taken seriously when it comes to liquidating the political power of the ruling class of trillionaire oligarchs and billionaire scumbags. Nothing short of this will do the job and a Party that fails to make armed insurrection the de facto central strategy in its fight for power must inevitably fail. In other words, protest petitions and mass demonstrations are fine to demonstrate to the participants and the watching masses what it is we want and demand. But all of this is still just cheerleading – the team still has to play the game and win!

Something would have to be done by the gringos in their own country. Just as something had to be done by the workers in every capitalist country. The labor parties throughout the world had betrayed their workers and of course the workers of the world as well. Only in Russia had Marxists done the right thing. – And then only some of them – i.e., the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Therefore, only in Russia would revolution succeed in that fateful year of 1917.

Lenin would get to the North Americans, setting them straight, and then the rest of the world too, as soon as he could. For the moment (1917 – 1918) he had his hands full fighting the armed class struggle in the newly created Soviet Republic. When he did turn his attention to the rest of the world in January 1919 he kicked off the Third International to teach these intellectuals and their working class followers how to do it.

Looking around at the class of 1918

The World War ended officially on the 11th of November, 1918. One full year after the successful Bolshevik seizure of power (November 7th 1917). – And the consequences in gross summary were stunning: 10 million dead soldiers and 20 million more wounded, maimed, crippled; 13 million dead civilians and ten million more homeless refugees and five million homeless orphans.

Capitalism had exacted an awful cost on the peoples of Europe and Asia. – And the only reason it had ended in 1918 was that workers in Germany had taken matters into their own hands and were revolting and setting up their own “soviets” in German industrial centers and in the German Army and Navy. All of this so frightened the German oligarchy that the Kaiser fled the country and the War was over!

The first real call by a “state-power-holding government” for such direct action by workers to end the world war – meaning armed insurrection – against the capitalist governments participating in the World War – came in April of 1917 from the Petrograd City Soviet (Petrograd City Council). It was directed explicitly to the workers of North America and Europe among all the nations of the Earth. 

Menshevik-like US Socialist Party leaders reacted in horror to the idea workers should take direct action and end the war by taking everything in hand themselves. Confronted with the possibility of revolution at home the cowards and fakirs of US social democracy did what their caste had done world wide and that was to attempt to fool workers into supporting their respective capitalist regimes. However, the rank and file Bolshevik-like Socialist Party members in the USA were demanding that their Party do what the Russians were calling for. As were rank and file socialists in Great Britain, France and Italy,

On April 6, 1917, President Wilson got the declaration of War from Congress he had asked for and the gringo regime was off and running on its newest imperialist adventure – the first against a European capitalist imperialist regime since it went after Spain in 1898 and seized her global empire. But when it was all said and done the US Socialist Party, after much fire and brimstone and an emergency national convention, did nothing!

Fighting a more militant resistance to the US entering the war, the IWW did more but not nearly enough. In fact, the International Workers of the World, and their various unions, did as much as they could.  But they suffered from their own inherent weaknesses as we shall see.

The Left All Over the Place II

The Industrial Workers of the World (1905)

Worker’s fights across the US from New England to California and everywhere in between had become increasingly militant. Out of the great struggles preceding 1905 came the Industrial Workers of the World; a union that acted as a Party, having the objective of establishing Socialism in the USA and Canada. Its mass base was initially in a few Eastern manufacturing centers, Mid-West working class communities and the working class mining and lumber unions of the Northwest USA and adjacent Canada. After 1912 the IWW rapidly spread too many of the most important mining centers of both countries and then into many of their cities too. Its program: one big society as one big industrial union.

Fatal Weakness

However, the IWW’s history had been tortured and complex. (1) Its membership was never very large and (2) always demographically unstable. (3) Its greatest internal and inherent problem was its failure to be clear about where it was going in a realistic way. In the end it was this third problem area which would be their undoing.

The idea of setting up a kind of syndicalist heaven on Earth, somewhere here in the USA, had about as much chance of success as the Mormon hope to build a permanent heaven on Earth in Utah. The IWW had to be able to settle-in for a decades-long struggle, and all that that implies for a temporarily submissive way of life under capitalism. Because that is the way life would have to continue for the foreseeable future, and was not the bright future the majority of its unionized members were willing to fight and die for. This settling-in for a submissive way of life – albeit temporary – the IWW leaders could never do. That is they could never separate their long term socialist goals from the immediate struggle needs and demands of its members – “immediate” meaning how, in the meantime, workers were to live their daily lives over the coming period, which after all could last a few years or many decades. This was the Achilles Heal of the ultra-left in the entire international working class movement.

It stands in direct contrast to the Achilles Heal of the right wing socialists which was their unwillingness to understand that capitalism had to go as soon as possible and that meant preparation for an inevitable armed struggle. This was something the right wing socialists were unwilling to do precisely because their interest in socialism was limited to their achieving the role of petty bourgeois foremen for the international capitalist class.

During the three years from 1905 to 1908 the IWW had witnessed several of its key constituents departing over reasons of ideology. With the departure of the Socialist Party, the Socialist Labor Party and the Western Federation of Labor, the Party was reduced to two groups centered out of Chicago and Detroit. However, this industrial leadership was still able to perform some rather spectacular strikes in the years preceding the World War and consequently was in a pre-revolutionary position – albeit weak and incipient it was at least a beginning.

A beginning where the IWW leaders could have begun to organize effective armed strikes as resistance to the federal government’s war policy. Preparing thereby to go over to the military offensive when the time came. However, despite a lot of a backwoods scuffling with 50,000 troops of the US Army in the Northwestern States in the event, the IWW did not go over to military preparation. The reason for this failure was not that workers in these industries were stupid and did not know how to prepare for armed conflict. The reason the IWW failed was ideological. Its leaders did not believe in conquering the capitalist police and military power first before establishing workers control. They foolishly thought this could come about purely and solely through industrial action organizing workers in shops and factories to take power directly over the means of production in this way. This is what is called Syndicalism.

This is particularly troublesome in that the IWW had been at war, literally, throughout the first decade of its existence. It was always involved in some kind of localized armed struggle somewhere. The IWW leaders should have seen the necessity of turning local conflicts into broader regional ones; then on struggling to win key armed victories in the major cities closest to its hinterland bases in Idaho, Montana, Washington, (Alberta and British Columbia too), Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona not to mention in the big states of Washington, Oregon and California. They should have seen the obvious military road forward.

However, despite all the talk about “One Big Union” and “workers running everything” the truth became apparent. Namely, only a few people in the world could see the task at hand and most of them in the early 20th century were Russian, and all of them under the leadership of just one man, V. I. Lenin.

What is it that must be done?

Organize the working class and associated classes to seize power by force of arms! It’s that simple.

We had the experience but not the leadership. Don’t get me wrong. We had men and women with the balls to do the job and the ability. But first of all we didn’t really know what it was we were going to create. Lenin showed us with the emergence of Council (Soviet) power in the Russian Empire but that was during and after this 1905-1917 period. With that model, tough leaders could proceed to do the job but apparently not before. At least that is the way our history unfolded (and we must adhere to the principle that history is always unfolding as it should.)

Let’s take a look at the experience. Why? You should learn right now that experience no matter how romantic and educational means little if you don’t have the right theoretical worldview in order to understand said experience. In other words, they had all this experience you are about to review in summary yet they could not take things to the next step strategically - which would have been to plan for an inevitable class war and thus plan to launch, when the time came, an armed seizure of power in some, many or even all of the States and/or in Washington DC. In the meantime, to build the prosperity and well being of their members. All of this will be reflected in the increasingly high standards of physical health and mental preparation demonstrated by the next generation of communists. For it is that coming generation which will conduct the inevitable class war for state power.

That is what the Left Marxists and the IWW should have done to get on the road to revolution.

What Is Syndicalism?

You have seen how Anarchism missed the boat altogether in failing to understand Karl Marx’s discovery that the “state” is simply an instrument of class suppression (army and police). Whatever class exercises its dictatorship over the class society in question uses that state to control the mass of slaves, serfs or workers (slavery, feudalism, capitalism, respectively, as the three stages of class-state society comprising the Servitude Epoch between Primitive Communism and Modern Communism. Preceded and succeeded by transitional stages.) This scientific discovery has certain undeniable consequences. Marxists and now the Leninists also considered the defeat of the ruling classes and their state as a necessary precondition to the establishment of socialism.

The anarchists wanted only local seemingly spontaneous bodies to go about governing with no enforcement mechanism other than the armed mass of the people as a whole. There were many unionists who saw a broader front had to be created to organize for working class state power than what the anarchists could assemble from their illiterate farmer base and the resulting anarchist industrial proletariat. These men and women believed workers could seize society by first seizing the shops and factories in which they worked and would then proceed to create the new society.

Syndicalists were very similar to the anarchists in many ways but most importantly in this inability to understand the nature of the state and class rule in any class society. In Europe (especially in England and France) these syndicalists had what they considered to be considerable success in building their base for eventual working class takeover of society.

William Z. Foster traveled to Europe while still an active member of the IWW and came back after a year or so convinced that American revolutionaries had to get inside the AFL and by winning over a militant minority, especially in certain specific unions, go about the reform and rehabilitation of that huge organization.

The IWW Fails Because of its Anti-Communism

In the fall of 1920 the underground Communist Party USA told the IWW leadership that its membership in the First International and any working relationship in the USA between the two would require the IWW to stop teaching workers “…that the revolution can be achieved by industrial organization of the shops and factories and the direct seizure of industry, without first overwhelming the capitalist state (military and police – ed) and establishing the Proletarian Dictatorship of the Soviets.” (See Foner 8:234). To make a long story short the ultra left leadership ended up refusing any relationship with the Third International whatsoever. This marks the beginning of the end of the IWW.

After its anti-communist turn the IWW did occasionally have success in dramatic strike and free speech actions across the country now and then. But for practical purposes the IWW was dead and the continuity between it and the coming generation of revolutionaries would consist of the movement to the Communist Party of persons such as William Z. Foster and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (who I met, for example, 42 years later, in January of 1962, at her office in the National Office of the CPUSA in New York City.)

The Communists willingness to participate in the capitalist electoral system (along with joining the fight against the class enemy on every other front in the class war) was the most immediate and obvious given reason by the IWW ultra-left leaders. The real reason was their long commitment to the idea of industrial organization of workers to take ownership of those factories directly and without participation in the capitalist parliaments or without reliance on their own state apparatus. By 1920 it was clear to the ideologically narrow ultra left IWW leaders in Chicago and Detroit that the Russian Bolsheviks had turned their revolution into an anarchist’s bad dream and a syndicalist’s nightmare, in that the Bolshevik state apparatus was not only successful but an idealized version of a state apparatus commanded by Marxists. In other words to construct their socialism the Bolsheviks had adopted the capitalist mechanism of using state power.

There was certainly nothing new about the Marxist approach in this regard except for the Bolsheviks having made it practical in the way in which they applied proletarian police power to back up proletarian military power on the land and sea. The American syndicalists (and Anarchists like Emma Goldman) should not have expected anything else. After all this is what everyone had been arguing about since the days of the First International and the Marxist and Russian Bolshevik interpretation were well known to just about everyone on the Left.

Class War in Gringolandia before and during the First World War

The IWW was a Party of professional revolutionaries bent on destroying private property in general and capitalism in particular as soon as possible. Unfortunately all this good work by IWW revolutionaries had no domestic program to occupy its leaders and members over the coming years. What were they to do in the near term, in the event the IWW should fail in its initial attempt(s) to establish its own form of government?

In practice this meant that a small number of IWW organizers – 287 – could organize, lead and keep on strike some 30,000 textile workers in the great strike of 1912 at Lawrence, Massachusetts. This was a great victory for the IWW. Its strikers got wage increases to 25%. This was also the year when the IWW reached a stable membership high of some 18 to 19,000 dues paying card carrying members.

However, over all, the strength of the IWW was being frittered away in the failure of its leadership to come up with a live-for-now program structurally equivalent to the domestic peace program of Gompers and his gang of traitors in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). For example, in the real world the newly empowered Lawrence workers now had to get used to the idea of continuing the way of life they knew, but without themselves as the masters of their universe, even though this put them at odds with the IWW’s highest leadership. The latter wanted to keep them in a state of perpetual conflict with the Bosses. That was not and is not an acceptable living condition for workers in the interim period. Why? Because people don’t want to live as if they were in a maximum security prison forever on the alert for the next outbreak of violence. Workers, with newly and hard won higher wages and benefits, were more than ready to get on with civil life, as long as their minimal civil rights were respected. But, their leaders were emotional and accordingly not so well prepared. What the IWW and its leaders should have done was to adopt an AFL like public posture while preparing for direct action (through Sports Clubs and the like) at a later date when it would become possible as well as necessary.

In the meantime the membership base of the IWW in the most important sector of the economy for Marxist workers – industrial manufacturing – was dwindling to next to nothing. This as a result of the failure of the IWW to come up with a temporary live-for-now program. Disguising this inherent fatal weakness was the sudden 1917 influx of members and their dues and initiation fee money from the agricultural, lumber and mining camps of the Mid-West and South and Far West. (In fact the IWW was so broke at its annual 1916 convention – its leader Vincent St. John, declined to run for Secretary-Treasurer for fear of having to preside over the financial dissolution of the Union he had fought so hard to build.) Yet by the end of summer, 1917, a New York Times hatchet job on the IWW had its treasury swollen to well over $175,000 dollars. As well, it had at its disposal some 32,000 new members recruited by organizers going gang-busters.

But this was all in the West and Mid-West (as well among black and white timber workers in the Southern states). The most oppressed masses, largely minorities, flocked into the IWW in their struggle to eat and live from day to day. But what the IWW had to have for the long-term was a mass base of workers participating in the capitalist way of life with sufficient reforms having been gained to make life bearable for another generation or two. Agricultural and lumber camps do not provide that kind of setting. Mining camps could provide that kind of setting as they matured into real towns with a permanent cadre of workers and their families – if they were allowed to do so. So far, and at that time, the miners and their families were constantly under armed attack by Pinkertons, vigilantes hired by the owners, US and State troops not to mention the local yokel cops.

Bisbee

 Not long after Ben Wade made Bisbee, Arizona, famous by burning it to the ground (see the movie 3:10 to Yuma) the IWW made Bisbee a permanent milestone in the armed struggle between miners and capitalists. In the end every federal and state cop and every kind of mercenary from Pinkertons to local vigilantes were used to kill and/or seize every union leader and union member in Bisbee and deport them to a locale farthest enough away to make their return difficult. It was made impossible by the use of these same forces, policing the roads and rails, to prevent the return of the still living deported miners.

Summary

If the IWW had used their temporary surge in membership strength and the money it generated to continue a campaign of building Eastern city industrial bases then things could have gone well for them. But they did not.

Thus, as the first post-war year for the North Americans began (1919), the US Left would have to redefine itself.

The Bolshevik Revolution Super-charges US Labor

Only one capitalist country had a more active and politically knowledgeable working class movement than the USA in 1917. Only in Russia were workers more sophisticated educationally. Under Czarism there had been a great deal of secret reading and debate as most political and trade union activities were illegal in the day to day life of proletarians.

As we have seen this sophistication had been reflected in the maturation of the labor movement itself where a Menshevik-like American Federation of Labor took the strongest anti-communist and pro-capitalist positions, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The Left of labor, which had become the Industrial Workers of the World, and virtually all of the Socialist Party, quickly identified with Lenin and the Bolsheviks as 1917 ended with revolution in Russia. In this sense the Americans had in their own way come to their own Menshevik-Bolshevik split within the SP in 1919.

The effect on American and Canadian labor of Lenin’s seizure of power in October (November 7-9, 1917 on the US calendar) was spectacular. All of a sudden the previously nearly fantastic ideas about forming a new society, and a new world, were not just pipe-dreams, but were reality! Nowhere would labor move faster than in North America, in accepting the consequences implied by the success of Bolshevism in Russia.

Present at the Bolshevik seizure in Petrograd was Oregonian socialist John Reed (see the movie Reds for a dramatic depiction of these events) who would author a world famous book entitled Ten Days That Shook the World! As 1918 and then 1919 unfolded the true impact of what had happened in the Czarist Empire began to sink-in among American and Canadian Marxists (and socialists of all persuasions for that matter.)

Left Wing Socialists Regroup

All over the world traitors and renegades on the Left had joined the capitalists in their world war. Now, the Soviet Republic’s embattled leader V. I. Lenin was drawing a dividing line between authentic socialists and the capitalist agents on the Left. It came in the form of his Call for delegates to the founding convention of the Third or Communist International held in the spring of 1919 in Moscow.

At the second Comintern Congress in 1920 the US was represented by two delegations and the Comintern had to sort out which was to be its representative Party in the USA. The movie Reds shows us one version; that of John Reed and his attempt to influence the Comintern’s Executive Committee.

However, the important thing was not what was happening among the Comintern intellectuals in Moscow. But what was going on ‘on-the-ground’ in Gringolandia.     Gompers had thrown the official US labor movement behind the Wilson warmongers but workers on the ground were conducting their own fights. These continued and were stepped up by Left militants, especially in the IWW, throughout the war years and led to many conflicts between the 50, 000 man force the US Army sent to the Northwest forests, and the strikers. Eventually the soldiers began to become disaffected with their bosses and sympathetic to the strikers.

This was the Achilles Heal of the capitalists in their attempt to turn the war into an excuse to break up unions wherever they could. That is, their soldiers were subject to being subverted onto the side of workers and as that sentiment spread in the Army, the Generals in Washington wanted their troops withdrawn before they became totally disaffected.

The Gringo System for Controlling the US Working Class

Gompers Creates Gringo Equivalent to European Fascism

You will recall from Chapters 12 and 13 that capitalism in Europe generated a labor aristocracy (meaning craft unionized workers capable of paying union dues on a regular, long term, basis). The leaders of this caste of workers had the resources and the need to fight the capitalists on their own and for their own limited (hours, wages, and working conditions) objectives. Along the way this caste and its leaders became acquainted with the laws of development of the capitalist system from reading Capital Volume One (1867). They knew if they increased the amount of production dedicated to these limited objectives (e.g., wages) they could count on their members to vote as they were told in union affairs. Of course, they had to fight a class war to get these concessions because capitalists always live in a dream world and fight like Merchants of Venice to grab and squeeze every coin from the workers pocket right now without regard to the long term picture. This initially led to alliances between these labor pie-cards and theoretical socialists of the Marxist variety who were trying to build a new and better world.

Eventually, this kind of marriage of convenience between the Socialist Left and Right would have to dissolve. In Russia it dissolved early on (1903), in the division of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into two wings (Bolshevik vs. Menshevik; revolutionary versus reformist-revisionist). In the USA the Socialist Left and Right divided into separate political parties in 1919, but unlike Russia (where all unions were outlawed from the get go) the most powerful base of the right wing SP was not in the SP but in the reformist-revisionist Marxists of the Samuel Gompers persuasion in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Likewise the most important base of the Socialist Left was in the unions created by the Socialist Party and by the IWW.

The difference was that for the most part Gompers was going after men and women who worked in factories with long term prospects. The Left organizers were going after men and women in agricultural, lumber and mining camps who were inherently unstable in terms of demographic commitment.

Furthermore, Gompers was a real world person. He believed the ideas of the Left Marxists to be not much different from the silly and unrealistic programs of the earlier social reformers of the Utopian variety. He had no commitment to any of these schemes because his view of the world told him people would not change. Certainly they would not change sufficiently or to the degree necessary to put these various “new society” plans into effect. So, in the long run, Gompers simply rewarded his followers with steady union wage and benefit jobs.

Throughout his life Gompers was against supplementing labor gains through “political action” such as might be offered by a steady advance in utopian plans for social legislation, on the grounds that Marx had proven the state to be always at the service of the employers and one could not expect much from a capitalist state apparatus including its government and political parties.

Gompers deserves the credit for forcing the US capitalists to accept him, his philosophy and his Union (and associated unions such as the railroad brotherhoods). After all he engineered a, until then rather unique, system of the rich ruling the poor, where he made the top capitalist ruling families institutionalize this new kind of Capitalist system. In short, as much as we dislike Gompers and his entire ilk, we do not want to denigrate his intelligence nor his competence. No one else in any other capitalist country had generated a Government hand-in-glove with Labor system. Even in Great Britain, under Lloyd George, their capitalist Government had simply given in to labor when it threatened the regime with strikes during the World War. In the USA Labor under Gompers actively supported the capitalist regime and demanded a respectable place in the oligarchy of governmental rulers for the AFL.

In 1918 only Gompers had created a new system featuring the top capitalist ruling families sitting jointly with the AFL and its allies (e.g., Railroad Brotherhoods) as the basis of their post World War I system for forcing US labor to collaborate with their ongoing capitalist system. That was no mean accomplishment. – And, he did it while maintaining Labor should stay away from the existing political parties (and all political action other than to punish and reward individual politicians for their support or lack thereof.) In the rest of the European capitalist world the same kind of collaborative cabal was coming into existence under a new rubric: fascism!

It happened this way.

Right Wing Socialists Attack

Before and during the World War the Right Wing Socialists who controlled the AFL worked unceasingly to help the capitalists and their governments in Washington (and their State governments) destroy the IWW. This course, on the part of the AFL under Samuel Gompers, was accentuated by the success we have just reviewed of the IWW in organizing the Far West. When IWW membership rolls started cutting into the AFL’s membership in a big way in the lumber states of Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana, not to mention California, and the mining state of Arizona, Gompers pulled out all the stops and asked the Justice Department to launch an all out war against the IWW for “patriotic” reasons.

In the USA the AFL had been openly maneuvered into supporting the coming capitalist world war by Samuel Gompers. You will recall Gompers had been one of the early labor leaders with a good knowledge of the economic side of Marxism. Yet, he used this knowledge to help his class (or caste) of petty bourgeois labor pie-cards gain and keep control over larger and larger sections of the organized working class of the USA. Where Gompers was strong (as opposed to the IWW) was precisely where the IWW was weakest – namely the IWW’s inability to develop a live-for-now program in precisely those capitalist towns and cities where workers could anticipate several decades of life under capitalism. In other words, workers would have only successive minor gains in their welfare to look forward too. Opposed to this policy vacuum, was the AFL’s plan (piss poor though it was.)

The AFL strategy, (despite all the well known evils of labor aristocracy-dominated craft and guild unionism,) did fit workers and their families into the capitalist social order any which way it could  (e.g., achieving continuing social reforms albeit under capitalist rule; providing social assistance of various kinds and so forth.)

However, Gompers dictatorship over the AFL did not mean the majority of US union organizers and members supported the coming imperialist war. It was precisely because the overwhelming majority of class conscious Town and City workers were against this coming war that Gompers and gang were desperately trying to mislead the labor movement.

Gompers was not just leading the 3 million AFL and Railroad union members toward war he was a member of the President Wilson’s Council of National Defense where he sat on its Advisory Council with the big capitalist bosses. Their job was to construct the civil base of support for the coming war. Gompers specific job was to organize the subordination of the organized labor movement to the war program once it began. Consequently, every anti-war petition Gompers got from the member AFL unions (and others) he promptly shit-canned. He went much further in initiated strong suppression decisions for union goons and lists of suspected radicals along with their addresses and whatever information his men had been able to gather for federal cops to use in coming raids on Socialists of all stripes – not just the IWW – meaning all the anti-war elements in the country.

Gompers had initiated the call for this national institution of repression in December 1915, and had been rewarded with membership in the August Body called the National Defense Council in October 1916 and within a couple of months Gompers was formally appointed the head of its Labor Commission. In February, 1917, Gompers reported to the Executive Council of the AFL in his capacity as head of the Labor commission for the capitalist gang of Woodrow Wilson rather than in his capacity as union leader.

In his capacity as head of the counter-revolutionary movement within US labor Gompers pledged to organize a series of Labor Conferences to Support the War, once it was announced. The most important of these was held in Washington in March of 1917. The meeting produced unanimity in support of Gompers “American Labor’s Position in Peace or in War.” This was a total sell-out of US workers to US capitalists organized, as usual, by right wing “respectable” socialists like Samuel Gompers, in that these Rightists were throwing their support behind the coming imperialist war (which began less than one month later in April, 1917, for the USA.)

16 Months of Government Unions – 1917 - 1918

On the eve of the World War in 1914 US workers still worked 7 days a week 12 hours a day for about $15.00 a week. About 30% of workers were unemployed in the major cities.

On the eve of US entrance into the World War in 1917 there were some 2 million 800,000 unionized workers in the building, clothing, machinery, metal, shipbuilding and transportation industries. These were industries composed of workers in communities raising families and living permanently from day to day selling their labor power. Within eighteen months an additional 800,000 workers joined their ranks. These were virtually all AFL unions.

While the Government unleashed the Army, Navy and a multitude of Pinkerton wannabees onto the agricultural, lumber and mining camps of the far west destroying the IWW in the process, the AFL leaders had sold out the international working class movement and were being richly rewarded in the process.

Furthermore, workers with and without unions were witnessing a rapid rise in wages and this would have the effect of making the members of the AFL unions grateful and loyal to their hierarchy – in other words, this rapid success in remuneration for many workers resulted in making these unions permanent. Even though workers were confronted with rapidly escalating prices there is nothing like a substantially bigger paycheck at the end of the week.

In July, 1917, the Wilson Administration established the War Industries Board to act as the clearinghouse of war industry production needs. Eventually it would take its place as a principal component of the War Labor Administration. These were critical to a reorganization of the US economy which de facto was underway with the US entrance into the World War. For example in the sixteen months of war the US got involved in, the Government had to move to take over the economy in critical sectors. These included takeover of the US telephone and telegraph system, the railroads, and the shipbuilding industry.

Furthermore a generalized attack against all the gains Labor had made before the war got underway. In every case it was framed as patriotic justification for cutting workers paychecks and repealing social legislative gains of the previous decade. Employers demanded the repeal of labor legislation and six states enacted a legal provision suspending labor laws (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Kansas, Vermont and New Hampshire.) Strong labor states like New York defeated these proposals but the trend was clear. Everywhere they could, capitalists would use “patriotism” against labor.

What really institutionalized things was the decision to set up the War Labor Board in April of 1918. Serious students should study the sixteen month record of the WLB in detail, which is beyond the scope of this Handbook. What I would like you to take away from these introductory comments is recognition that the US rulers under Wilson had decided to take advantage of Gompers more-than-willingness to be corrupted, by performing “scab” sort of services to the US rulers.

This is very interesting because it shows a certain sophistication existing among the US rulers and their political class that certainly did not exist in most of the country and its bourgeoisie. The WLB gave many assurances to the protection of unionized workers rights and other workers too. Even though these did not generally have much effect they were canonized one might say in the ideology of the US ruler’s administration of the nation. Hours, wages and working conditions were supposed to be fair; women were to receive equal pay, and so forth. Overall results for labor were good. For example, half of North American workers had the 48 hour week at War’s end compared to some ten percent in 1914. The Railroad Brotherhoods saw their members average wage increase from $828 in 1914 to $1,820 in 1920.

By the end of the war in 1918, the steel industry had been forced to institute the eight hour day. But as soon as the war ended in November the steel capitalists went back to the twelve hour day. This was symptomatic of the overall condition of labor after the War.

Even so, when it is all said and done the AFL emerged in a much better position than it had gone into the imperialist war and in a way that would make it a permanent partner of capital in the long-term exploitation of US workers. Dialectically, this improved legality for the AFL would provide the basis upon which Left organizers from the soon to be created Communist Party (unified) USA, would build.

The AFL is “Labor’s Spokesman” at War’s End

Gompers had provided the AFL with a program for winning the war and for postwar reconstruction that followed his own narrow and anti-Left ideology. In doing so he assumed the mantle of “Labor’s Spokesman.”

“No important measure vitally affecting Labor is now taken.” declared the New Republic, “without consultation with the leaders of the American Federation of Labor, and in the most important government boards the wage earners are represented.” When the Nation criticized the government’s choice of Samuel Gompers to travel throughout Europe to assess labor conditions there, Solicitor General Howard Lamar informed Oswald Garrison Villard, the Nation’s editor that Gompers “has rendered inestimable service to this government in holding labor in line,” and that “while this war is on we are not going to allow any newspapers in this country to attack him.” The AFL leadership had been fully absorbed into the war apparatus. “ (Foner, Vol. 7:345, 1987) - And, that pretty much says it all.

The Gringo Capitalists invent Cost Plus Contracting

Perhaps no more important development occurred in this time than the invention of the idea that capitalists should be paid on the basis of a capped percentage guaranteed profit against the costs of production. Costs guaranteed paid by the US Government. One million in costs plus a guaranteed percentage of these costs as profits – say 17%. The more you spend the more you get paid! That is still how US war contracting works.