Socialists Played a Defining Role in Initiating and Leading the Strikes

 
And finally, this new wave of rank-and-file fierce militancy did not emerge “spontaneously.” In the three cases, it was initiated by Socialists and Communists, it had a political leadership that emerged and operated from the ranks, and with heavy reliance on mass action and democratic methods of organizing. The Communist Party led the SF strike, and the trotskyist Communist League of America (predecessor of the SWP) led the Minneapolis one, and the American Workers Party, a socialist led the Toledo Strike – yet A.J. Muste AWP member and auto worker union leader would join with the Trotskyist Communist League in December of 1934. IBT (Teamsters) President, Daniel Tobin denounced, like AFL Green did, the strike leaders as “socialists and communists,” but many communists did not back down. On the contrary, SWP members developed within the union a strike newspaper called The Organizer that reached a circulation of 10,000 at its peak, and allowed them to put forward a political leadership for the strike. Palmer, recounts that many teamster militants were won to the SWP in the process of the strike as they realized that “We couldn’t have done it without a disciplined revolutionary party.”^[6]
 
We believe that Cannon was right when he asserted that what explained the greatness of these three 1934 strikes was “the presence of this nucleus [of socialists militants] in the mass movement” which was and continues to be “the most important of all prerequisites for the development of a militant labor movement.” “When [revolutionary socialists] enter the labor movement and apply their ideas intelligently they are invincible. The labor movement grows as a result of this fusion and their influence grows with it.”^[7]
 
Yet, being a socialist in a generic term was not enough, and the difference between democratic revolutionary socialism on the one hand, and top-down bureaucratic socialism was palpable in the kinds of political experiences that unfolded. The key difference between the two is that Trotskyists were better prepared to resist first the hostile opposition and later the attempt to take-over and co-opt the struggles from the national AFL leadership and the Progressives and Democratic Party forces. This is because on the one hand, Trotsky was already developing an understanding of the problem of bureaucratic degeneration in working class organizations and the importance of preserving rank-and-file democracy. But also because the CP was still influenced by the sectarian and ultra-Left orientations of Stalin which announced in the beginning of 1928 the inauguration of a “Third Period” where any form of opposition to the evolving bureaucratic formation in Soviet Russia will be “plainly fascist.” This led to the isolation of communists from many sectors of rank-and-file activism, and the development of dual unionism since 1929 under Stalin’s order, that is to say to abandon the oppositional intervention in the AFL and develop “revolutionary” unions with a communist program under the banner of the Trade Union Unity League. CP members in the ILA were able to intervene in the strike process and play a leadership role precisely because they abandoned locally the dual unionism orientation of the national CP leadership and went into the organized ranks of mass unions. If more local CP chapters had done the same, we would have probably seen more strikes of the kind in the same years.
 
Those revolutionary socialists learned how to act inside the labor unions in a democratic way, by providing real leadership, and avoiding the twin pitfalls of being either passive spectators, that is to say pessimists who are convinced of the uselessness of unions or mass action, or of arrogant sectarians who from the outside tell workers what to do. Instead, they organized with the workers, learned with and from them the best paths of struggle, brought to them a socialist understanding of exploitation and the current crisis, that expanded beyond their local situation, and provided a national and international strategy for political emancipation.
 
 
 

Bibliography:

• For excellent histories of the 1934 general strike in San Francisco, read Mike Quinn’s The Big Strike and David Selvin’s A Terrible Anger.
• Also see Art Preis’ Labor’s Giant Step. Irving Bernstein’s The Turbulent Years, now out of print, but soon to be reissued by Haymarket Books, offers a detailed retelling of the strike as well.
• Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States offers an invaluable survey of the U.S. labor movement, with a section on 1934 and its importance for future labor struggles.
• The Labor Wars: From the Molly Maguires to the Sit-Downs by Sidney Lens provides a history and analysis of the U.S.’s most significant labor struggles, including the 1934 strike in San Francisco.
• Strike! – Jeremy Brecher
• Joe Burns, Reviving the Strike

Notes and References

^[1] Sharon Smith, “1930s: The Turning Point for U.S. Labor”, International Socialist Review 25, 2002.
http://www.isreview.org/issues/25/The_1930s.shtml
^[2] Sidney Lens, Labor Wars.
^[3] http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2016/09/03/Unions-set-to-celebrate.html
^[4] Todd Chretien, “The Battle for the Docks”, 2009. https://socialistworker.org/2009/09/21/battle-for-the-docks
^[5]  https://socialistworker.org/2009/09/21/battle-for-the-docks
 
^[6] Brian D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters – The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934, p. 73.
^[7] “Learn From Minneapolis!”, The Militant, 26 May 1934.