THE THREAT TO THE LABOR MOVEMENT
(the governor's commission in New York) in war on the sections of the membership which are not under the influence of the socialist party bureaucracy.
Only agreement on main lines of policy could bring such close organizational cooperation as can be seen in New York and elsewhere with Tammany Hall supporters enlisted side by side with the New Leader, the Daily Forward, the needle trade union officialdom and the socialist party bureaucracy against the majority of the membership.
The socialist party leadership is not only "making love to reaction," as Norman Thomas so delightfully puts it, but has long ago lost its virginity, become promiscuous and appears as a hardened old madam whose role is that of procuring new recruits for the house of prostitution where workers are supposed to lose all shame and which is run under the name of "American trade unionism" by the labor agents of imperialism—the Greens, Wolls, Lewises and other lesser lights.
"Destroying" Trade Unions.
WE have seen how the socialist party bureaucracy has become part of the united front against genuine trade unionism and how parrots the cry of the official union leadership that "trade unionism" must be preserved from the very same sections of the trade union movement which have waged all the militant and successful struggles in 1926.
It is well to inquire here as to what is meant when the accusation is made by labor officialdom that their critics and opponents in the labor movement are trying to "destroy trade unionism."
Do they actually believe that the left wing and the Communist workers are trying to wipe out the trade unions and leave the working class unorganized?
Of course they do not, hut the accusation is made in the above terms with the idea in mind that trade unionists and workers generally will so understand it.
They have in mind, when they make the accusation, that there is a clash of policies in the trade union movement—that a section of the organized working class, either more exploited than supporters of officialdom, more class conscious, or both, tries to guide the unions into the path of POLITICAL struggle based on their economic demands, while the more privileged group of trade union members led by the labor bureaucracy strive to keep the unions DIVORCED FROM POLITICAL ACTION and confine them to the old program of "pure and simple" trade unionism as Daniel De Leon characterized it, or still worse—make them outright efficiency organs of capitalist production. As a matter of fact there is no difference between the two except that the former takes a little longer to render the unions entirely helpless.
William English Walling, the renegade socialist (he will now find plenty of his former colleagues in the same camp) who early saw the
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