Writings of William Z Foster: A Collection of Essays From one of the Founders of the American Communist Party

By Lenny Flank

Writings from William Z Foster, the former Wobbly and union organizer who helped found the American Communist Party,and whose organization played a leading role in forming the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) during the 1930's.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lenny Flank
• Release date: Nov 21, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452388199

Lenny Flank

Longtime social activist, labor organizer, environmental organizer, antiwar.

Book preview

Writings of William Z Foster

Edited and with Introduction by Lenny Flank

© Copyright 2009 by Lenny Flank

All rights reserved

Smashwords ebook edition.

Red and Black Publishers, PO Box 7542, St Petersburg, Florida, 33734

http://www.RedandBlackPublishers.com

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Editor’s Preface

The Principles and Program of the Trade Union Educational League

Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement

Russia in 1924

The New Political Bases for a Labor Party in the United States

The Industrial Union Bloc in the American Federation of Labor

The Renaissance of the American Trade Union Movement

Lenin and Stalin as Mass Leaders

Editor’s Preface

William Foster was born in Massachusetts in February 1881. His family moved shortly afterwards to Philadelphia, where he left school at ten years old to work a series of factory jobs. By 1901, he had worked in Pennsylvania, Florida, New York, Oregon, and Washington.

At the age of 20, Foster joined the Socialist Party in Spokane, Washington, but his politics were far more radical than the Socialists, and he was expelled in 1909 as a left-wing factionist. He then joined the IWW (the Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies) during one of its Free Speech Fights in Washington. As a Wobbly, Foster wrote several pamphlets and served as the IWW’s representative in the 1911 international labor conference in Budapest. Foster soon differed with the IWW on tactical questions, however—the IWW viewed the American Federation of Labor (AFL) as weak and reformist, and wanted to build an alternative revolutionary labor union, while Foster thought it better to bore within the AFL unions and turn them radical from the inside. His arguments against dual unionism led him to split with the IWW in 1911; he left and formed his own organization, the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA).

Before the SLNA collapsed in 1914, Foster met two members who would always remain politically close to him, an accountant named Earl Browder, and another former Wobbly named James P Cannon.

Foster became an organizer for the Chicago branch of the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen, then worked as a staff organizer for the AFL. Unlike most other Leftists, Foster did not oppose the First World War, and even sold war bonds in 1918. His primary interest was in organizing the large mass of unskilled workers in Chicago’s sprawling meatpacking and steel industries.

The very first large labor union in the US, the Knights of Labor, had already attempted to organize the meatpacking industry in the 1870’s, and both the AFL and IWW had made similar failed efforts more recently. But Foster recognized that the First World War presented a unique opportunity. Labor shortages caused by the war would make it more difficult for the companies to find scabs and strikebreakers. The Federal government needed huge amounts of meat to feed its troops, and would be willing to see concessions made rather than interrupt production with a strike.

Foster decided to make his move in 1917. Within the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), the local AFL union council, he formed a Stockyards Labor Council that united all the various craft unions that would be affected into a single industrial-based organization, and called a strike. As expected, the Wilson Administration stepped in quickly, pressuring the companies to make concessions and agree to arbitration, and threatening to seize the meat-packing plants as a wartime measure to keep production going, if necessary. As a result, meatpacking workers won an eight-hour day, a large pay increase, and overtime pay, and membership in the Amalgamated Meat Cutter’s Union soared.

The arbitration award had not forced the company to recognize the Union, however; in addition, internal strife soon weakened the organization, as the Amalgamated Meat Cutters craft union claimed all the new members for itself and repudiated the unity of the Stockyards Labor Council. When the war ended, the companies fired all the union supporters and, after a failed strike attempt in 1922, Foster’s effort to organize the meatpacking industry came to an end.

Foster faced similar problems with his other major project—the effort to unionize the steel industry. The Chicago Federation of Labor, at Foster’s urging, drew up a plan for a unified organizing body which would bring together all the various craft unions under the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Tin and Steel Workers, and sent delegates to the national AFL to ask for support. When the AFL leadership proved to be unenthusiastic about the idea, Foster and the CFL decided to go it alone, focusing their efforts on the steel plants near Gary, Indiana, and in the Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh. In 1919, the strike began. It quickly spread to Ohio, West Virginia and elsewhere, and within weeks over half of the American steel industry was idled.

But with the end of the War, the situation had now changed. The steel companies flatly refused to negotiate or recognize the union, and the Federal government now once again supported the companies. In this era of the Palmer Raids, the Red Scare and the IWW trials, Foster’s previous association with the IWW was trumpeted by the companies. In Gary, Indiana, General Leonard Wood imposed martial law, while in Pennsylvania, strikers were beaten and arrested. Fourteen unarmed strikers were killed. The national AFL, led by Samuel Gompers, refused to provide financial support, and as strike funds ran out, Foster called off the strike in January 1920, and resigned his organizer post with the Chicago Federation of Labor. It was a crushing defeat, for the labor movement as well as for Foster.

One of Foster’s fiercest critics during the steel strike was the newly-formed Communist Party.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Lenin and the Bolsheviks enjoyed widespread support in the American labor and socialist movements. While a few American leftists challenged the dictatorial centralized leadership of the Russian Communists, most viewed the Soviet government as a true workers’ democracy. As a result, the American socialist movement was split, as a new faction, led by John Reed and Louis C Fraina, wanted to give up the Socialist Party’s reliance on peaceful electoral methods, emulate instead the example of Lenin’s Communist Party, and organize for immediate Revolution in the US. By 1919, most of the Socialist Party membership were Bolshevik supporters, and a referendum proposing that the Socialist Party affiliate with the Communist International (Comintern), the international organization formed by the Leninists to support the Russian Revolution, passed with over 90% of the vote. The Socialist Party’s moderate leadership responded by expelling nearly two-thirds of the Party’s membership and called an emergency party convention in Chicago.

The expelled members, led by John Reed, crashed the convention and demanded to be reinstated as members. The party leadership called the police to escort them out, and the entire left-wing faction then left, met together in an empty hall nearby, and formed the Communist Labor Party. At the same time, a group led by Louis Fraina refused to attend the Socialist Party convention, and instead formed their own Communist Party of America. Later, in 1921, the two parties, under orders from the Comintern, joined together to form the Communist Party USA.

Many of the more militant union organizers quickly joined the new Communist Party, and as a result, the Party kept a close eye on the biggest fight in the labor arena at the time, the 1919 steel strike. Convinced that the Revolution was imminent in America, the Communists called for workers to turn the steel strike into a national general strike to seize power. The American Federation of Labor were castigated as reformists and sellouts; Foster was lampooned in Communist Party publications as E.Z. Foster for his presumed willingness to cave in to the AFL’s timidity.

After the defeat of the 1919 steel strike, however, the Communists took a new look at its organizer, William Z Foster. In 1920, several old friends of Foster’s who were now members of the Communist Party, including Earl Browder and a number of former Wobblies, met with him and formed a new organization, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), with the aim of agitating within the existing AFL unions for militant industrial unionism. Foster was invited to Moscow to attend the conference of the Profintern, the international organization of Communist-supported trade unions, where he was appointed to be the Profintern representative in the US. Foster joined the Communist Party when he returned to the US, and the Trade Union Education League was later accepted as a Profintern affiliate.

In 1923, the Chicago Federation of Labor, now directed by John Fitzpatrick, called for a convention to establish a left-wing Farmer-Labor Party that would contest local elections. The Communist Party in turn directed Foster and his TUEL to gain influence within the new group, and Foster dutifully packed the Farmer-Labor convention with Communist Party supporters, leading Fitzpatrick and the CFL to abandon the group. The Farmer-Labor Party collapsed.

The Communist Party’s machinations not only led to a permanent split between Foster and his friend Fitzpatrick—it produced a backlash within the AFL against all of the Communists. Wherever TUEL formed a caucus within an existing AFL union, they were expelled.

The debacle led to faction fights within the Communist Party, and Foster, with the help of James P Cannon, was able to control the Party’s leadership. In 1925, however, the Russians at Comintern sent their own observers to the Communist Party USA’s convention, and removed Foster from leadership, replacing him with his rival Charles Ruthenberg. Years of factional fighting began, as rival Stalinist groups fought with each other as well as purging suspected Trotskyites.

The Communist Party, meanwhile, was also steadily losing its influence within the labor movement. After a failed strike in 1925, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union drove out all its Communist members. The Communists also backed a failed attempt by insurgent candidate John Brophy to wrest control of the United Mine Workers of America from John L Lewis, which led to retaliation and expulsion. And the AFL leadership continued to remove Communists wherever it found them.

The biggest blow came in 1928, when the Comintern ordered that its international affiliates stop supporting existing trade unions and form their own rival revolutionary unions instead. It was the very dual union policy that Foster had disagreed with since his IWW days but, bowing to Moscow’s wishes, Foster disbanded TUEL, and set up a Trade Union Unity League to organize Communist-led labor unions in opposition to the existing AFL unions. The effort failed miserably.

As a result of all the chaos, Communist Party membership fell by almost three-fourths. By 1932, there were only some 5000 members in the Communist Party—and over one-fourth of those were FBI informants.

The American labor movement, meanwhile, was being revitalized by two factors—Franklin D Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

One of FDR’s primary tasks in combating the Great Depression was the maintenance of labor peace and the avoidance of disruptive strikes. Realizing that the cause of most strikes was the company’s refusal to recognize a union, the New Deal introduced a package of laws that established the legality of labor unions and put machinery in place through which unions could gain legal recognition, making the company legally obligated to bargain with it. The result was a huge surge in union organizing during the 30’s. And prominent among these efforts was the CIO.

In November 1935, United Mine Workers President John L Lewis called together a number of other AFL unions, including the Oil Workers, the ILGW, and the United textile Workers, to form a caucus within the AFL, called the Committee of Industrial Organization, that would attempt to organize the basic industries along industrial lines. The CIO’s first success was in the electrical industry, where the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), successfully fought a strike at the General Electric plant in Schenectady, New York. Within a year, UE had over 600,000 members in 1300 different plants.

The next move planned by the CIO was an organizing campaign in the steel industry, where Foster had failed almost 20 years before. Just as the Steel Workers Organizing Committee began its work, however, an unplanned war broke out in Michigan, where the United Auto Workers carried out a daring sit-down strike that occupied the General Motors body parts plant, shut down GM’s entire production, and held it for 44 days before forcing the company to recognize and bargain with the Union. Buoyed by the UAW’s success, the CIO was able to obtain recognition for the United Steel Workers from the US Steel Company simply by threatening the same disruption and loss of production.

In 1938, the CIO renamed itself the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and left the AFL, forming its own rival union confederation.

Many of the CIO’s organizers were Communist Party members, and the flagging CP-USA saw the union movement as a way to revitalize itself. At this point, however, the subordination of the Communist Party to Stalin’s foreign policy goals took center stage, and it was disastrous.

By 1935, the Soviet Union began to be alarmed by Hitler’s Germany, and directed its affiliates to carry out a Popular Front policy, in which Communist Parties would work together with other parties to oppose fascism. As part of this directive, the Comintern also gave up its opposition to existing labor unions (which allowed Communist Party members to become organizers for the CIO).

In 1939, however, Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler, and Comintern policy changed overnight. Now, affiliated Communist Parties were directed to focus their efforts on preventing war and opposing military efforts against the fascists.

In June 1941, however, the Nazis invaded Russia, and the Comintern policy flip-flopped yet again. Now, Communist Parties everywhere were called upon to help defend the Socialist Motherland. Communist-led labor unions made no strike pledges so war production would not be hampered—the CP-USA went so far as to oppose the March on Washington being organized by A. Philip Randolph to demand equal treatment on the job for African-Americans.

At the end of the war, the Communist Party USA, now led by Earl Browder, attempted to gain some independence from Moscow. In response, Browder was ousted in 1945 in a Comintern-organized coup, and was replaced with the most loyal Stalin-supporter they could find—William Z Foster. Foster dutifully supported the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and actively purged the CP of Trotskyites.

In 1949, the Federal government filed charges of subversion against Foster, Eugene Dennis, and several other CP leaders. Foster, although indicted and charged, was not put on trial due to his frail health. The others were convicted and sentenced to jail. As a result, much of the Party membership went underground to avoid prosecution, which only left it with dwindling numbers and isolated from any real political action. The final blow came when the CIO expelled all of its left-leaning unions and purged its ranks of Communists, requiring all its members to sign pledges that they were not members of the CP. In 1955, the CIO rejoined with the AFL to form the AFL-CIO.

In 1957, William Z Foster retired as head of the Communist Party and handed over control to his protege, a steel worker named Gus Hall. Under Hall’s leadership, the CP-USA, now shrunken to a tiny remnant and riddled with FBI informants, would remain a pliant tool of Moscow until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989.

William Z Foster died in September 1961, during a trip to the USSR. He was given a state funeral, and his ashes were interred in the Kremlin Wall.

The Principles and Program of the Trade Union Educational League

Published in The Labor Herald [Chicago], March 1922.

The Situation.

In every country but one an advanced state of capitalism has produced a highly developed trade union movement. The single exception is the United States. Here we have a very elaborate industrial system and the world’s most militant and powerful capitalist class, but, paradoxically enough, a trade union movement which, for general weakness and backwardness, has few if any equals in the predominantly industrial countries.

No matter what vital phase of our trade union movement we consider we must admit, if we are honest, that the workers in other lands are ahead of us. In the important matter of numerical strength, for instance, we make a wretched showing. At present, considering the ravages made in our ranks by the employers, it is doubtful if we have as many as 4 million trade unionists in this country, or about 1 unionist to each 27 of the general population. England, by contrast, has approximately 7.5 million trade unionists, or about 1 in each 6 of her 44 million people. Germany shows with over 12 million trade unionists, or about 1 in each 4-1/2 of her 55 million population. In other words, the English trade union movement is proportionately about 4 times as strong numerically as