By Art Preis
Pioneer Publishers 1964, Pathfinder Press 1972
Reviewed by Steven Halpern
Growing up and experiencing the so-called educational system and news media in this country means that we are routinely barraged a number of ideas. These ideas include the argument that we live in a democracy where everyone has equal rights. In fact, teachers in the schools routinely ask students to stand up every day, place their hands on their hearts, and pledge allegiance to a flag they claim represents, “liberty and justice for all.”
As we become adults, we begin to see serious problems with these ideas. Why do some people have tens of billions of dollars, while others don’t have enough food to eat or a place to live?
Karl Marx believed that the very core of what capitalism is consists of the basic contradiction between the employer and the employee. Because this is the core of what capitalism is, the educational system, the media, the government, and certainly all corporations are all driven to rationalize this basic division of humanity.
There are many political activists who have organized to protest against police brutality, racist discrimination, the destruction of the environment, horrendous working conditions, and war. I believe that Marx would argue that the root cause of all these problems comes from fundamental contradiction between employers and employees.
Today, Bernie Sanders argues that we need an “Economic Bill of Rights.” Sanders also argues that this is nothing new in the following statement: “Over eighty years ago, Franklyn Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families.”
Thinking about that statement, we might ask the question: If Roosevelt made “transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families,” why are there tens of millions of people in this country who don’t have enough food to eat? We can see part of the answer to that question in Art Preis’s book Labor’s Giant Step.
This book is a history of the labor union federation called the Congress of Industrial Organizations known as the CIO. Preis was a reporter for The Militant newspaper and was a witness to many of the events that shaped the building of the CIO.
The emergence of capitalism and the CIO
We might consider that the capitalist system came about because a class of capitalists overturned feudal property relations. In feudalism serfs farmed the land. They sustained themselves with a portion of the crops produced on the land of the lord. The lord received the bulk of the produce. The serf usually didn’t even have permission to leave the manor during his or her lifetimes.
Then, there were the craft guilds. We see this today in Japan where there are small shops that produce specialty items of wood, ceramics, metals, or textiles. These craft guilds have limited production and were primarily concerned with selling their wares to the royal families.
Today, craft workers in Japan might drive to their shops in automobiles and have cell phones in their pockets. Those automobiles and cell phones are produced because of the combined efforts of thousands of relatively skilled and unskilled workers. When we see the difference between the craft worker and the industrial worker, we also see an emerging difference between feudalism and capitalism.
With capitalism the working class emerges. Masses of workers toil in large factories where huge amounts of commodities are produced on a regular basis. This is a completely different atmosphere from the relatively small craft guilds. However, as with feudalism, the needs of humanity are not the priority. In the capitalist system, the drive to maximize profits becomes the top priority.
The first labor federation in the United States was the American Federation of Labor. This federation worked to promote unions of the relatively skilled craft workers. A basic problem of the AFL was that it ignored the masses of relatively unskilled production workers.
From the years, 1877 to the year 1934 there were many titanic strikes in this country. Most of those strikes ended in defeats for the workers. Then, in the year 1934, there were three strikes that signified a watershed in the history of the labor movement in this country. These were the San Francisco longshore strike, the Toledo-Auto Light strike, and the teamsters strike in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
John L. Lewis was the President of the Mine Workers Union. Lewis viewed those strikes and understood that there were the beginnings of a mass movement to organize workers. Workers were responding to conditions of mass unemployment, starvation wages, extremely dangerous working conditions, and employers who viewed workers as their personal slaves.
Responding to this new reality, Lewis worked with other union leaders to form the Congress of Industrial Unions or the CIO. Because industrial workers composed the heart of the working class at that time, the CIO, even with all its many limitations, became a “giant step” in the history of the labor movement.
One of the transforming battles of the labor movement was the 1937 sit-down strike against General Motors. Preis called this strike the “Gettysburg” of the CIO. In this strike the workers stopped working and sat down at their jobs and refused to leave. The General Motors corporation work with the government in a determined effort to dislodge the workers from the factory. Those efforts failed and the union won a decisive victory.
Another of the big battles in the development of the CIO was the 1941 strike against the Ford Motor Company. Ford pioneered the assembly line that transformed the skilled work of building cars into the furious work of doing the same task all day long.
In order to get workers to do this horrendous work, Ford recruited Black workers and gave them the worst jobs. At that time, there was a “Great Migration” where Black workers moved to industrialized areas like Detroit, in order to escape the slave-like conditions in the states where Jim Crow segregation was the law. So, if the United Auto Workers Union of the CIO was to organize these workers, the union needed to take a stand against racist discrimination.
As a result, Black and white workers stopped work, sat down in the plant, and refused to leave. Their supporters found way of supplying the sit-down strikers with the supplies they needed. The government and the company made another attempt to dislodge the workers from the plant, but failed again in their efforts. This is how the UAW won union recognition from the Ford Company.
This history shows how President Roosevelt was no friend of labor. Roosevelt did sign the Wagner Act that allowed for collective bargaining between unions and corporations. Workers won this right on their own with the strikes of the 1930s and 40s. While the right to strike is seen as a fundamental right all over the world, Roosevelt mobilized about 40,000 National Guard troops to break strikes. He also threatened to draft any worker into the armed forces who went on strike during World War II.
President Roosevelt also supported legislation for unemployment insurance and social security. We might consider that these payments came from deductions made in taxes on workers salaries. Those payments would be considerably less than similar payments in other developed nations. At that time, unemployment and social security payments ran from two to ten dollars per week.
We also should not forget that President Roosevelt sent 110,000 Japanese into concentration camps in this country in full violation of the Constitution. Roosevelt also had the support of the Jim Crow politicians who routinely denied Black people of citizenship rights in this country.
The trade union bureaucracy
A basic problem of the labor movement at this time was the politics of union officials Phillip Murray, Sidney Hillman, and William Greene. These officials felt that the best that workers could do would be to get a relatively good contract from employers. They all had faith in the politics of President Franklyn Delano Roosevelt.
Roosevelt invited these officials to meetings at the White House. Roosevelt offered them a cup of coffee, and thanked them for attending the meeting. That is about all Roosevelt would ever give to these officials. However, Roosevelt was effective in convincing these same leaders to accept wage freezes while corporations gouged out super-profits. He also put a considerable amount of pressure on these officials to refrain from calling strikes.
The Communist Party of this country has a slightly different history. In its early years, Communist Party members and supporters were in the leadership of several important strikes. Harry Bridges was the central leader of the 1934 maritime strike on the West Coast. Because of this record, there was a time when there might have been about one million supporters of the Communist Party.
Initially the Communist Party opposed the United States participation in the Second World War. That stance followed the politics of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, who was always opposed to imperialist wars.
However, the Communist Party had been corrupted by the politics of Joseph Stalin who murdered most of the leaders of the Russian Revolution. So, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Party reversed their political orientation and became ardent supporters of President Roosevelt’s war drive. This meant that Communist Party members supported the wage freeze imposed on workers.
The Communist Party also supported the felony charges against 18 members of the Socialist Workers Party for their opposition to U.S. participation in the Second World War. The government argued that these SWP members were in violation of the Smith Act, a law that flagrantly violated the free speech Amendment to the Constitution. Years later, members of the Communist Party were also charged with violating the Smith Act. At that time, the SWP supported the clear frame-up of those Communist Party members.
A basic problem to this approach, was the inflationary prices during the war. This meant that the wages of workers effectively declined to the point where working families had difficulty feeding their families.
At that time, all the work in all the basic industries was extremely dangerous. There were about two to three thousand deaths in the mines every year. That number did not include the hundreds of thousands of miners who would eventually die of the dreaded disease of black lung from inhaling coal dust.
During those years, the Roosevelt Administration was in a pro-war frenzy. They put enormous pressure on the miners not to strike. However, for the miners, the threat of being drafted into the military was no more a threat to their lives than going into the mines. John L. Lewis understood this, and argued that “you can’t mine coal with bayonets.” The miners won considerable concessions because of their strike against corporations and the threats from the government.
The same government that threatened the mine workers union, awarded lucrative defense contracts to the industrial corporations, where they gouged out super-profits. In other words, Roosevelt wasn’t just going to war against Germany and Japan, he also went to war against the working class in this country.
After the war, Harry S. Truman became the President. 1946 marked the beginning of a strike wage in this country. Truman, like Roosevelt did everything in his power to compromise the interests of labor.
However, workers were tired of the wage freeze and the war. They were willing to engage in a tenacious struggle to win better wages and working conditions. Walter Reuther initially supported the post-World War II strike wave. At that time, the Communist Party continued to support the government and opposed strike actions. Although the Communist Party had considerable influence in the labor movement at that time, they became an obstacle to advancing the rights of workers. Under these conditions Walter Reuther became President of the United Auto Workers Union. The UAW was one of the unions in the CIO.
Then, there was a seemingly obvious contradiction in the labor movement. The number of strikes in this country mushroomed. However, union officials continued to support the government in trying to accept deals that thwarted the goals of these strikes.
The government adopted the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act. This law allowed for effective government control of union activities, and was a direct attack on the very existence of unions. After the union officials gave ardent support to capitalist politicians during the war, this was their ultimate reward.
Although President Truman didn’t formally support Taft-Hartley, he enacted many of its provisions. Truman also ordered the fire-bombing of about 67 Japanese cities at a time when the Japanese government was open for peace negotiations. Then, he ordered the use of atomic bombs to hasten the end of the war before the Soviet Union’s Red Army was prepared to battle the Japanese.
President Truman also used his influence to postpone a 1953 steelworkers strike in the midst of the war against Korea. That war cost the lives of about four million people from Korea and China. Most of the buildings in North Korea were destroyed.
For all these reasons, Art Preis consistently argued that the labor movement urgently needed to break from their support of the Democratic Party and promote a Labor Party. The long record of the Democratic Party has been consistent in its vicious opposition to the interests of labor. A labor party would have the potential of working to use the government to force real concessions for workers. This strategy has had limited success in Europe.
My experience
I happened to be a member of the United Auto Workers Union for fourteen years. I also worked in a non-union auto-manufacturing shop for seven years. I can testify to the fact that while the conditions I experienced were horrendous, those conditions were considerably better than the conditions autoworkers faced in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. None of my coworkers had to struggle to feed their families. I can also testify that the conditions in the union shop where I worked were significantly better than in the nonunion shop.
My generation of autoworkers had different challenges. My union President once said to me that in the old days, the union worked to shut the factory down to force concessions from the company. He argued that in the present environment, the union was working to keep the factory open. In fact, after many jobs were eliminated through automation, the factory finally closed and eliminated about 2,500 jobs.
Today most of the factories in this country are located in either the Southeast or the Midwest. While the Northeast of this country was once a center for manufacturing, today most of those factories have closed. While the city of Detroit, Michigan was once another center for manufacturing, many areas of that city now resemble a ghost town.
In the past, capitalists worked to cut their costs by going to war against unions. Today, while they continue to be at war with unions, they have also moved their factories to nations where wages are between one and ten dollars per day.
Today there are at least three massive ports in China that transport commodities all over the world. Automated cranes lift containers and place them on supertankers twenty-four hours a day and seven days per week.
However, while China has become the center of manufacturing in the world and millions of jobs left this country, something else has unfolded. The economy of the United States has become centered on service industries. Today, Amazon and Walmart are the largest employers. While I’m writing this blog, Amazon workers are voting for union recognition in the Bessemer, Alabama facility.
While millions of manufacturing jobs left this country, tens of millions of people have moved into suburban homes, with perhaps two cars in the garage, and children who have college education. This reality reflects the fact that in the 1970s a typical college education could be purchased at $200 per semester. Today, that same education costs about $10,000 per semester.
So, for about fifty years between 1970 and 2020, there were very few successful strikes by labor. Many people felt that they could improve their lives with a college education. However, with the pandemic of 2020, masses of people began to understand that the future of the capitalist system in this country will be extremely precarious.
Young people in this country and around the world demonstrated in the streets this past summer against racist murders by the police. There appears to be a sense in the air that young people are demanding profound change.
Because of this new atmosphere, I believe that Art Preis’s book Labor’s Giant Step will give those who are now demanding change an insight into the kind of politics that we will need. Corporations and their government are incapable of resolving the enormous problems we face today. Preis ultimately argued that we need a political movement that organizes to establish a political party and a government that will make the needs of workers its top priority.
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