The Threat to the Labor Movement/Section 29
"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 trend of the official trade union policy and has become the semi-official spokesman of A. F. of L. officialdom, says in his book, "American Labor and American Democracy," favorably reviewed in all the official labor sheets:
The American labor movement always has been and doubtless will remain, fundamentally economic in character.
We have seen the pronouncements of President Green of the A. F. of L. and other official spokesmen relative to the role of trade unions as production organs in close connection with management and we have likewise seen that the New York Times and other mouthpieces of capitalism share the same opinion.
All of these forces are united against the section of the organized workers and of the unorganized, as in Passaic, who are "disturbing" the "peaceful" development of American imperialism.
The dogma that strikes are unnecessary and "wasteful" has been put forward and an attempt clearly is made, as in the New York needle trades, to show that workers, by accepting the principle of slightly higher pay for much more work, can better their conditions substantially WITHOUT strikes.
The struggle in the labor movement now between right and left is a struggle for the right to strike. But it is something more than that—it is also a new kind of a struggle, a struggle for the abolition of trade unions as weapons of the working class which is being conducted INSIDE of the union by agents of the capitalists. The left wing workers fight to STAY in the unions and forge them into real weapons of all the workers.