Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
From The New International, Vol. XVII No. 4, July–August 1951, pp. 207–221.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
All the important social and political problems facing the classes in the United States will be determined for the entire next period by the development of the war economy.
The war economy is here to stay, in the United States above all countries. This is due to the unique position the United States occupies in the world today. Russia, while also forced by her regime to maintain a permanent war economy, is nevertheless able to supplement her military strength, and thereby compensate for its comparative inadequacy, by powerful political instruments in the form of popular mass movements organized everywhere and led by Stalinist parties and devoted to her defense. The United States has no such popular movements at its disposal in any other country, nor even governments so completely in its service as Russia has in her satellite governments; and in the conflict between the two big imperialist camps, it must therefore depend, more than any other regime, upon overwhelming military force and that force alone. Other capitalist countries, while incapable of playing the decisive international role of the United States or Russia, are capable of using their political positions for the purpose of maneuvering, in their own interests, between the two big powers, and in some cases they are even forced to engage in such maneuvers.
The United States, however, is not in a political position to force the other capitalist countries into line with its policies by maneuvering, or threatening to maneuver, against them in alliance with Russia. The preservation of its international interests compels it to depend more and more upon alliances with these countries. It can offer them security from undermining by Stalinism at home or in their colonies and Stalinist conquest from without, and therewith win them as more or less willing allies in the world conflict, only by a display, again, of overwhelming military power. The purely economic assistance which the exceptional industrial and financial power of the U.S. has enabled it to provide the collapsing capitalist world, has not been and could not be an adequate substitute for the military power which the U.S. must force upon other countries and, in largest measure, must supply directly.
The third consideration that dictates the maintenance and extension of the war economy in the United States is the realization that has grown since the Second World War and is now a rooted conviction, not only that capitalism, in particular its only remaining vigorous representative, the United States, cannot live peacefully side by side by Stalinism, but that capitalism can defeat Stalinism on a Russian, and therefore world scale, by military means, by war, and by no other means.
The immensity of the task confronting American capitalism is only partly indicated by the immensity of the proposed national budget, the largest by far in the peacetime history of the country. For all the alarm felt over the budget by sections of the bourgeoisie, the ruling classes and their two political parties are fundamentally united on it. They see no alternative to it and offer none. Not even the most “isolationist” Congressional group, on one side, or the most “economy-minded” Congressional group, on the other, has proposed any modifications in the budget that would reduce the total figure to a substantial degree. Moreover, a 1951–52 budget of some seventy billion dollars affords only a preliminary glimpse of the war economy as it will and must develop. It is quite conceivable that in the period of preparations for the outbreak of the war, there may be stages of comparative lull in the intensity of the conflict between the two big war camps. But there is no ground for the belief that there will be any real relaxation of the armaments race for more than a fleeting moment, and even that is possible only under the most favorable and exceptional circumstances. American imperialism is and must be embarked upon a serious, extensive, long-range preparation for war. The national budgets will show this more and not less emphatically in the coming years.
This is necessarily so because the United States has the task of mobilizing and equipping the entire capitalist world for war with Russia. In this respect, the situation is radically different from the one obtaining before and during the Second World War.
In the period of the Second World War, the military forces of German imperialism could be held in check, at least to the point of preventing their decisive victory, by the armed forces of its enemies on the European continent, primarily by the already engaged British armies and by the mobilized and later actually engaged Russian armies. The United States did not require a big peace-time army. It could mobilize after the war began and even then not until after the Pearl Harbor event. Its economic might was sufficient to help hold the German armies at bay; its armed forces were needed only to inflict the decisive defeat upon Germany and Japan. For the Third World War, it is already clear that the armed forces at the disposal of Russia cannot even be slowed down, let alone defeated, except by a United States which is armed to the teeth in advance of the actual outbreak of military warfare; and not only that but by a United States which in addition has allies who are similarly armed and equipped. The rest of the capitalist world is, however, either reluctant or economically or politically incapable of achieving such armaments preparations by itself. The primary and main effort to arm, equip and defend the capitalist world, in order to defend itself, therewith falls upon the United States.
Merely to supplement the already fully developed war economy and armies of its allies in the Second World War required a tremendous economic effort on the part of the United States. The preparations for the Third World War require a much greater effort. Among its allies in the coming war, the United States today finds no large armies, in contrast to the huge armies of the British and the Russians with which it was allied in the Second World War. Upon the war economy of the United States for the coming period, therefore, rests the problem of creating a vast U.S. armed force and, to a very large extent, also the problem of creating, expanding and maintaining a large army in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and a dozen smaller countries. Even this does not present the entire picture of the problem of American imperialism. Its allies in the Third World War are not at all as reliable politically, and therefore militarily, as were its allies in the Second World War. This fact is already recognized, with grave feelings of disturbance, by wide sections of the American bourgeoisie.
In the Second World War, the anti- German alliance was strongly buttressed and cemented by popular movements, especially in the countries occupied by Germany and Japan. In the present pre-war period, the anti- Stalinist alliance which the U.S. is seeking to unite is rendered precarious by the outright resistance of the people in the American-allied countries, or at least, their uncertainty or indifference. For this reason, American capitalism finds itself compelled to make its war plans in terms of a much larger contribution of military manpower to the armed forces of its alliance in the Third World War than in the Second World War. This great difference in proportion is already indicated by the alignment in the Korean war. In other words, all the signs point to a far greater American armed force in the Third World War than the twelve or more million mobilized in the Second World War. The American people are being called upon to pay the heaviest blood sacrifices in their history to keep capitalism alive and around their necks.
Finally, the United States entered the Second World War with vast reserves of unemployed manpower from which to draw for its military and war-production armies. With all the prospects that the Third World War will require a much larger production effort and a much larger armed force than before, the U.S. enters decisively into the war economy with very small manpower reserves. Although war production and the mobilization of an army have only begun, there is virtually no army of unemployed today to draw upon. In some branches of industry there is even a shortage of labor power. Since some of the women who were drawn into industry in the period of 1940–45 have remained in industry, that particular source of labor power is certainly no larger now than it was for the Second World War and very likely not even as large. Hence, the more men drawn off into the armed forces and the more extensive the schedules for war production, the more acute will become the problem of labor power.
This problem can be solved in three ways. One is by importing labor to the United States – from Europe and Latin America. At most, this means could take care of only the tiniest fraction of the problem. Another is by increased restriction upon the production of consumer goods, not so much for want of raw materials as for want of labor power. Still another is by increasing and intensifying the exploitation of the labor power that is available, both in the form of the longer workday and of speedup in the process of production. The last two are the only serious means at the disposal of the government – of the government, since it must of necessity become increasingly the organizer and director of the entire economy – for solving the interdependent problems of a large armed force and a large war-labor force.
All this implies ever deeper undercutting of the standard of living of the working class and a strengthening of the foundations of what the bourgeoisie itself calls the barracks state, and increased centralization of economic and political power in the hands of the capitalist government at the expense of the economic and political positions of the working class.
The permanent war economy in the United States means a persistent drive to lengthen the workday of the working class. It means persistent efforts to deprive the working class, either by legislation or by “mutual consent,” of its right to strike in order to “guarantee uninterrupted production” – that is, production on terms fixed for workers who are deprived of their right and ability to affect them by open, organized, independent action of their own. It means permanent inflation whose effects fall primarily, mainly and increasingly upon the shoulders of the working class. The only means employed by the government to combat or control inflation produce consequences which differ in no important respects from the inflation itself. Inflation, to the working class, means that it can satisfy its consumer wants less and less, even if it has a nominally high income. The “anti-inflation” measures of the bourgeoisie boil down essentially to draining off or otherwise reducing the real income of the working class and reducing the amount of available consumer goods so as to concentrate more upon producing the means of destruction. In both cases, the standard of living of the working class is lowered, while monopolistic profits not only remain intact, as the last war showed, but reach fabulous new heights.
During the initial period of expansion of the war economy there may be brief periods of improvement in the standard of living of the working class due to full employment, overtime pay, and the vast inventories of durable consumer goods remaining from the pre-Korea production. But these momentary trends will not significantly modify the overwhelming tendency of the war economy to depress the living standard of the American worker.
The permanent war economy means ever greater control and direction of the working class, and therefore ever greater police power in the hands of the state to enforce this control and direction. This tendency, present in every modern war period, is enormously strengthened and accelerated in the preparation and conduct of atomic bomb warfare. The atomic bomb is an exceptionally barbarous abomination not only from the humanitarian standpoint. Its use introduces a radical change in the social consequences of warfare, which its promoters and apologists gladly gloss over. The closer we come to the outbreak of the atomic war, the greater will be the restlessness, fear and even panic of the population, particularly those sections inhabiting the large industrial centers which are presumed to be the more immediate and easiest targets. It must therefore be expected that, sooner or later, the government will take the most extraordinary and rigorous measures for forced residence of workers, in one set of cases, and for forced shifting of workers to other residences, in the other set of cases.
The immensity of the arbitrary police powers which the state will arrogate to itself in order to apply these measures, cannot be exaggerated and must exceed anything known in the history of the country. To believe that these police powers will be employed with any other considerations than the prosecution of the war to the bitter end, which always means primarily at the expense of the social interests and positions of the working class, is a gross illusion. Atomic bomb warfare and the preparations for it mean an extension and speeding-up of the militarization of public and private life in this country on an unprecedented scale and to an unprecedented degree.
Coupled with this trend is another which is specific to the nature of the Third World War and of which all the preliminary signs are already visible. The rival of American imperialism has at its disposal in the United States a mass movement (more or less) which is connected with and seeks to base itself upon the working class, a condition unknown in the First or Second World Wars. It is inconceivable that the state will in the future, any more than it has in the past or is in the present, combat the Stalinists in this country by any other measures, in the main, than police measures. The police powers in the hands of the state for this purpose not only grow more and more arbitrary and extensive, but are applied, in the name of “national security” to all free-thinking, non conformist, militant, radical, socialist and even liberal movements and individuals. There can be no question about the fact that, as the outbreak of war nears, let alone when the war is on, the red-baiting and witch-hunting drive of the ruling classes will be intensified, openly and cynically and under all sorts of hypocritical “patriotic” disguises.
From every significant angle, therefore, the threat of war and the war itself represents a danger to democracy and to the working class and socialist movements which depend upon it and seek to realize it in full. The main task of these movements, in the United States and elsewhere, becomes the uncompromising struggle against the unfolding of the reactionary trends evoked and stimulated by the war, the defense of all democratic rights and of the economic and political positions of the workers, and the intransigent upholding of the complete independence of the labor movement which is the indispensable condition for this defense.
The development of the permanent war economy is automatically also the development of state power over the economy. In turn, it is the development of the trend toward the fusion of the state machinery with the most reliable and direct representatives of capitalist industry and finance. The Truman regime has already staffed virtually all the commanding positions in the multitude of bureaus and committees for organizing and directing the economy with outstanding capitalists and bankers, as if to give spectacular demonstration of this trend. Since these bureaus and committees acquire more and more power over the functioning of all economic life, the labor movement is necessarily obliged to enter into more and more direct relations with them and less and less with the employers whose representation is taken over by the state.
Two related consequences follow. The struggle for the economic standards of the working class is increasingly directed against the government-representing-capitalists (or capitalists-representing-government!) and therefore the economic struggle perforce becomes more directly and obviously a political struggle for the working class. Secondly, the struggle for the economic standards of the working class must increasingly become, or take the form of, a fight between the labor movement and the Truman government over the conduct of the war preparations and more directly over who will bear the main burden of the permanent war economy.
That these are the forms that labor’s struggle will take and that the struggles will not abate, is already indicated by numerous signs. The stupendous profits of monopoly industries appear in sharp contrast to the worker who sees a decline in his own living standards, with an even greater decline in prospect. The inequities of the Truman taxation schedule are felt by every worker and his family. The failure to control the cost of consumer goods, at the same time that efforts are made to freeze wages, is likewise felt by every worker and his family. The loading up of all the important government war boards with outstanding representations of capital who seek to include “labor representation” for decorative purposes or as captives, has a significance which escapes few workers. The widespread unpopularity of the prelude to the Third World. War, that is, the war in Korea, only intensified the antagonism of the working class.
Finally, the fact that the United States is not yet engaged in a full-scale war makes it more difficult for the “patriotic” demagogues to persuade labor to “curb” itself and “sacrifice” its interests. In such a situation, the gap between the labor movement and the Truman administration is widened. The sentiments of the workers make it both possible and necessary for the official union leadership to make such a sensational, even if partial and temporary, a break with “its” Administration as occurred in the withdrawal of all labor representation from the War Stabilization Board. Even if this conflict is patched up, its outbreak would be sufficient in itself to show that other such conflicts are inevitable. What is more important is the fact that such conflicts can easily produce deeper and wider breaks between the labor movement and the Truman Administration. The reasons for this are: the labor movement feels the tremendous power in its hands, and it has been neither cowed nor bridled against the use of its power; even the labor officialdom shows that it seeks more important positions and powers, which the support of the strong labor movement enables it to obtain; and the development of the permanent war economy under conditions of the bourgeois fight against inflation continually narrows down the possibilities for easily-granted economic concessions to the working class.
The struggle of labor against the war economy and the war-economy state is thoroughly progressive in that it gives an impulsion to the shift of the labor movement from the limited confines of economic struggle to the broader field of political struggle and in that it likewise gives an impulsion to the long overdue unification of the divided labor movements. That these manifest themselves today at the top, in the spheres of the leadership, only shows that the organic and irrepressible tendencies are asserting themselves, for the present, in a distorted form but are asserting themselves nevertheless. Signs of the unification of the labor movement, which would vastly enhance its self-confidence and combativity, are visible in many parts of the country and not least significantly in the formation by the CIO, AFL, IAM and the Railroad Brotherhoods of the United Labor Policy Committee authorized to speak and act before the government with the backing of virtually all the unions. Signs of the shift to political action are visible in the persistence of the Political Action Committee and Leagues for Political Education of the various unions. All these movements represent attempts, however limited, ambiguous or deformed, to free the working class from control by bourgeois political machines without leaving the framework of the bourgeois political parties, to wrest concessions from the existing political parties by organized political action of labor.
That these attempts, bureaucratically conceived and controlled, are fruitless and demoralizing to the working class, precisely because they remain within the framework of the bourgeois political parties, has been demonstrated time and again. The fact that labor officials find it necessary to make what are thus far purely verbal threats to form a “third party,” is an involuntary acknowledgment of the futility of the present political course of the labor movement. What has been likewise demonstrated, particularly in the last national election, is that there is a widespread and deep-going political dissatisfaction in the country, which has only been strengthened by domestic and international events since last November. The downright criminality of the political policy of the official labor movement is underscored by the outcome of the 1950 national election. In almost all localities where there was a “protest vote,” it took the form of a blind striking-out against the given administration, or even for conservative demagogues against demagogues denominated as “liberals.”
Broadly speaking, the people appeared to swing “to the right” primarily in the absence of an independent political movement offering a clear-cut, aggressive and progressive alternative to the two parties of capitalism, that is, a political party such as only the labor movement can found and build up. This blind rebellion against the political status quo is likewise represented by the great popular support aroused for Hooverism in the “Great Debate” over foreign policy, which represents essentially a successful exploitation of the healthy anti-war sentiments of the people by reactionary politicians for reactionary ends – successful precisely because and to the extent that the labor movement has not put forward an independent and progressive foreign policy of its own but has allowed itself to be used as a mere echo of the reactionary and justly unpopular foreign policy of the Truman Administration.
Just when the labor movement will succeed in breaking the paralyzing bonds of capitalist politics and in forming its own independent party, cannot be established. Neither can it be established that it will form such a party along a road known and prescribed in advance and along no other. The most important task of the labor movement, which overshadows and determines all other tasks, remains the formation of an Independent Labor Party. Consequently, the main and most important task of the socialist movement remains the unremitting advocacy and work for the formation of a Labor Party by the unions. The war danger only gives added urgency to the performance of the task which means the declaration of political independence by the American working class.
While it is probable that the actual founding of a Labor Party in the future will be undertaken either upon the initiative or the leadership, that is, the control, of the labor leadership, it is not upon that section of the labor movement that the ISL rests its confidence and attention. The main basis of socialist activity in the labor movement continues to be the militants and leaders of the rank and file. It is these latter who are the best assurance that the Labor Party will be formed sooner rather than later, that it will from the very beginning be more rather than less democratic, that its development will be more swiftly progressive than it could possibly be under the exclusive control of the conservative or compromising officialdom. It is these militants who have always inspired and organized the progressive groups within the labor unions. Such groups were an outstanding phenomenon during the Second World War. It may be expected that, as the country – and its labor movement – are pulled closer to the Third World War, the official union leadership, generally speaking, will again fail to fight aggressively for the interests and demands of the rank and file and will even sacrifice them in the name of that “national unity” so cynically and hypocritically proclaimed by the blood-profiteers and their political representatives.
Under such circumstances, the formation of progressive rank-and-file union groups may likewise be expected. Socialist militants will at all times help in the formation of such groups, encourage and defend them, and seek to popularize the program of the ISL and win recruits to it from among these militants, without whom, as the Second World War experience of our organization demonstrated, the effectiveness of the socialist movement is drastically reduced, and with whom it is exceptionally strengthened. The great importance of such rank-and-file progressive groups is further underlined by the fact that, again as shown in the experience of the last war period, while they may start on the basis of purely economic demands or inner- union questions, they almost invariably become the vanguard of the movement for independent working- class organization and action in the political field.
The advocacy of an Independent Labor Party remains unequivocally the principal political slogan, the axis of all the political work of the ISL, which reiterates its pledge to give unconditional support to such a party and its candidates even before it has adopted a socialist program and leadership. However, the ISL is aware of the possibility that the labor movement may well pass through one or more transitional stages between its present allegiance to bourgeois political parties and the formation of a political party of its own. The ISL takes no dogmatic position on the question of these transitional stages. On the contrary, at every stage which represents to any degree a breach between the labor movement and the bourgeois parties, or which offers the possibility of sharpening the inherent conflict between the political interests of the working class and those of the bourgeois parties, the ISL will welcome, encourage and stimulate the forward step, no matter how hesitant, partial or even confused it may be at first. Even in those cases where the forward step appears initially in the form of a conflict between the interests and aspirations of the labor officialdom, on the one side, and those of the bourgeois political machines, on the other, the ISL will seek to intervene in order to explain to the workers the deeper and truer meaning of the conflict, to widen it, and by supporting the representatives of the labor movement against those of the bourgeois political parties, help to advance the class consciousness and self-reliance of the workers toward the formation of their own independent party.
The fact that the basic conflict between the classes takes the form, at certain stages, of a rivalry between bureaucracies, indicates that the conflict is still at a primitive stage but does not alter the fact of the conflict. Such for example was the motivation of the ISL in urging its friends to enroll in the Liberal Party in New York to educate and work for independent working class politics despite all the shortcomings of that party and despite the fact that it is not at all a Labor Party but a party bureaucratically based upon a narrow section of the union movement which has taken only the first step toward independent political action by its organizational separation from the bourgeoisie. It was with the aim of moving this party toward independence that the ISL called for an independent candidate for mayor on the Liberal Party ticket.
A similar policy would be indicated wherever the labor movement or sections of it moved toward the formation of local independent political parties even if these were not at the outset constituted as labor parties, fully independent and democratic in structure and policy; or wherever the labor movement ran its own candidates in the elections independent of the two old parties. The ISL proposes that such independent candidates enter the field and would support them against their capitalist opponents viewing such steps as the first hesitant moves toward a general separation of labor from the capitalist parties. In all such situations it is the action of the working class for independence with which the ISL is concerned, it is the movement for a complete break with bourgeois parties and the establishment of a Labor Party upon which the ISL concentrates its attention.
Where the unions or the labor bureaucrats do not move toward a break from the bourgeois parties (in particular, the Democratic Party) they continue to function within these parties in coalition with one wing of the bourgeois machines against another and in no sense “independently.” The labor bureaucracy, at present, collaborates inside the Democratic Party with its liberal wing and at some point jockeys for greater recognition and fuller “representation” as its price for continued collaboration. In the same way, the labor bureaucracy participates in all government agencies and in the war boards while at the same time it demands a greater voice and more representation in its councils. Thus, even in the course of class collaboration, the antagonisms between the labor bureaucracy on the one hand and the bourgeois state and bourgeois parties on the other remain as a striking symptom of those class conflicts which will finally lead to a rupture between labor and the capitalist class.
Whenever these antagonisms burst out into the open, the ISL, in the interests of an effective program for the labor movement, takes the opportunity to call for an end of the self-defeating policy of class collaboration and the initiation of a program for militant working class independence. During the Wage Stabilization Crisis, for example, the ISL hailed the resignation of labor delegates from the War Boards, argued against their return, and called for the continuation and extension of the move into a break with the Truman Administration and the “Fair Deal” Democrats. Similarly, in the case of any conflict inside the Democratic Party where the discontent of the labor leaders or of the workers is evidenced, the ISL calls not for greater “representation” of labor within it but for a break from it.
Where the unions are in fact forced into a serious conflict with their Democratic allies, the real tendency that develops is not at all toward primary fights in the Democratic Party or toward demands for greater representation within it but toward a break from it and toward the search for new political forms. So it was in 1947–8 in preparation for the 1948 elections, when the UAW, voicing the mood of the wide sections of the union movement, called for the formation of a new progressive party. So it was during the recent wage crisis, when leading labor officials again voiced their threat of forming a new party. So it was at the 1951 UAW convention where no one proposed a fight to elect labor candidates in Democratic primaries but where the delegates applauded open attacks on the Truman Administration and the “liberal” Democrats, and voted in large numbers for the defeated minority resolution for the formation of an independent labor party.
Where the unions do participate in primary fights, they merely continue their old policy of alliance with a wing of the Democratic Party. The convention rejects the proposal that the ISL or its friends advocate or support labor’s contesting in the primaries of the bourgeois parties and rejects support to candidates running on the ticket of the bourgeois parties.
If the main task of the labor movement is the formation of its political party, the task of developing its own political program is indispensable not only once such a party is formed but also for the purpose of leading to its formation. In this most crucial present situation in the country, the importance of a democratic political program of its own to be put forward by the labor movement, for both domestic and international problems, is impossible to overstate.
The ISL sets itself the goal of urging and popularizing such a program. It declares that the program that it, as the socialist wing of the labor movement, puts forward for adoption by the labor movement, is not the rounded program for the socialist reorganization of society, but yet is a program consistent with the fight to preserve and extend democracy and to protect the working class and its interests from the reactionary consequences of the permanent war economy and the war itself. It does not look forward to the adoption of such a program by any capitalist government, not even the most “liberal,” and characterizes any such hope or expectation as a deception or self-deception.
The political position, and what is more important, the political action of the contending classes in the United States, is, as elsewhere, determined basically by their antagonistic social positions, and not by temporary relationships, the personnel of their political spokesmen, or other superficial considerations. The more critical the situation of capitalist society becomes, the more irksome and intolerable become the rights and institutions of democracy which are available to the people in the defense of their interests. Capitalism is not identical with democracy; it is merely compatible with it (and even then only in its bourgeois form) at certain stages of development, and less and less compatible the more acute the difficulties of the capitalist economy and state become.
Not democracy but private ownership and profit are the basis of capitalism and therefore of the capitalist class. But while democracy is not indispensable to capitalism, it is absolutely indispensable to the working class. It cannot even exist, much less advance, as an organized class, without democratic rights. An authentic labor movement, even the most conservative, cannot be conceived of without the right to organize, which directly involves such fundamental rights of democracy as freedom of speech, press and assembly. The labor movement, given a backward working class or a conservative officialdom or both, may allow the ruling class to restrict these rights, or may carry on only an incompletely effective fight to maintain and extend them, at a time when it still adheres to policies of class collaboration which in the long run only facilitate the undermining of all democratic rights. But it cannot allow these rights to be abolished without assuring by that very act its own abolition.
What is a luxury to the most liberal representatives of the capitalist class, is a vital necessity to the most conservative as well as to the most progressive movement of the working class. Hence, the complete reliance that socialism places in the labor movement as the natural fortress and champion of democracy. From these basic considerations, the ISL, in presenting a program for the labor movement, reiterates its irreconcilable political opposition and complete non-confidence in any capitalist government that exists or may be established in the United States, and declares emphatically that the program which meets the elementary needs of the people can be carried out only by a workers’ government in this country. In turn, only a workers’ government which repudiates all responsibility for the imperialist tradition and reactionary policies of the past can expect to win that sympathy and solidarity of the peoples of the entire world which a capitalist government can never hope to obtain but which are vital to the security and peace of the people of this land and all others.
The first and most important point in a democratic foreign policy of labor is the principle of the Right of Self-Determination for all peoples. This principle is a mighty two-edged sword which the labor movement can wield not only against capitalist reaction at home and abroad, but also against Stalinist imperialism. Even the most “democratic” warmongers and imperialists in this country wink at the gross violations of this truly democratic principle when the violations are committed in the interests of the American war camp. Labor cannot become the champion of the democratic nation and of democracy in general without cutting through the general political cynicism that prevails on this question, and coming forth as the militant champion of this elementary right, enjoyed by the United States but which its government denies or helps deny to other peoples and nations. Every people has the right to decide its own national destiny, without internal intervention by the United States (or any other power) and without having a “friendly” protectorate established over it “for its own good.” The violations of this right have actually imperiled the true national – not imperialist, but true national – interests of the United States by bringing closer the danger of devastating war, and consequently imperil the interests of the American working class. The honest championing of this basic democratic right all over the world, and not merely lip- service to it, demands that the American labor movement call for withdrawal of all troops of occupation, American included, and American political domination and control, which deprive countries like Germany and Japan of their national sovereignty. It demands a halt to any and all American aid and support to imperialist regimes in the colonial countries, like the French regime in Indo-China. It demands an end to the shameless military alliances with arch-reactionary regimes like that of Franco in Spain and Chiang Kai-shek in Formosa, alliances that make a mockery even of the pretense of a fight to preserve democracy.
The labor movement, eschewing all national narrow-mindedness, indifference and selfishness, must proclaim that it is as much concerned with the improvement of the economic conditions of the retarded and undeveloped countries of the world as it is with the advancement of its own economic position. It is a task and duty of the labor movement to elaborate and adopt a plan for generous and large-scale contributions to the modernization and construction of the backward countries of the world of the kind advocated by President Reuther of the UAW, but with this all-important difference: such a plan can be put into effect with fruitful and progressive consequences only by an American workers’ government, which alone can dispel the entirely justified skepticism, suspiciousness and outright hostility with which any “Point Four” program put forward by American imperialism is regarded by the bitterly-experienced peoples of the backward sections of the world.
The attitude of the peoples is strengthened by the fact that all talk of American economic assistance to these sections is unaccompanied by any proposal for those radical but indispensable social changes required, especially in the backward countries, before industrial and financial aid from abroad can mean anything more than exploitation from the outside and the enrichment of the corrupt, parasitical and anachronistic ruling classes at home. The socialist criticism of such plans as put forward by Reuther is not directed against their goal, but against the illusory idea that it can be executed in a democratic non-imperialist way by an American capitalist government. It is only an American workers’ government that can gain that confidence and fraternal support of the peoples of the backward and undeveloped countries which are essential to the democratic success of such a plan.
A democratic domestic program is likewise of vital importance to the labor movement. First and foremost comes the need for an unbending stand by the organized labor movement against any and all curbs upon freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press and assembly, freedom to organize and strike, and full academic freedom in all educational institutions. This stand must include unambiguous opposition to all attempts to deprive the Stalinists of their democratic rights. The labor movement itself has most successfully and effectively defeated its Stalinist enemy when it employed fully democratic methods in the fight against it, that is, allowing it full freedom of expression and at the same time allowing a full democratic decision against it by the voting membership. The same method must be defended in the country as a whole.
It is the red-baiting, labor-hating reaction that urges and needs arbitrary police measures for its fight against Stalinism, for it is incapable of fighting it democratically. The labor movement has no need of such measures and must reject them wherever they are put forward. Without full democratic rights, the labor movement cannot live and breathe and fight.
There is no civil war in the United States and a violation of the democratic rights of any section of the people can only serve to undermine the rights of the labor movement as a whole. In this connection, it is important to emphasize the need of the keenest vigilance in maintaining democratic rights within those unions where they are threatened by officialdoms grown conservative and a persistent fight to institute these rights in the unions which have long been deprived of them. It is a mockery of democracy for union officials to proclaim the need of saving it throughout the world while stifling it in their own organizations.
Basic and indispensable to union democracy is complete control over the officialdom by the membership, unrestricted right of the expression of criticisms and differences of opinion, the right of every members to run for union office without any political restriction, freedom to establish groups or caucuses within unions, right to publish organs of opinion within unions, and equal access of all members to the discussion and correspondence sections of official union periodicals. The tendency toward the limitation or even suppressing of these rights, usually under the hypocritical guise of fighting the Stalinists, has been on the rise in the unions. It is a socialist and working-class duty to resist this tendency wherever it is manifested.
The championing of democracy demands of the labor movement, in alliance with the entire Negro population, a more uncompromising fight than ever the abolish all forms and traces of the hideous institutions of Jim Crow, the very existence of which belie the pious claims of the imperialist democrats. The ruling classes in the past years have found themselves compelled to make many concessions to the American Negro people. These concessions have been wrested by the militant demands of the Negro people themselves, by the support they have received from the trade unions which have organized more Negro workers than ever before. Not the least consideration in granting these concessions has been the attempt to modify the effectiveness of the international propaganda campaign conducted by the Stalinists (but not by them alone), and to mollify the burning resentment toward Jim Crow felt among the colonial peoples all over the world who despise the doctrines of “white superiority.” But these concessions, valuable and welcome though they are to the Negro people, have not yet destroyed or come near destroying the foundations of the Jim Crow system under which the vast majority of the Negroes live in this country. Discrimination, in a hundred fields of social life, is still the rule for the Negro people.
The tremendous enthusiasm displayed by the bourgeois press for the extremely modest concessions granted up to now, are calculated only to present the great shame of the American imperialist democracy in the most rosy light and to smother with words a continuation of the struggle for the real abolition of the Jim Crow monstrosity. The Negro people and the labor movement must take up and persist in the drive for the abolition of all discrimination against Negroes, in all its forms and disguises, for complete economic, political and social equality between Negro and white citizens, for that equal treatment in industry, agriculture, politics, education, housing, medical and health facilities, in the armed forces and everywhere else, which the great bulk of the American Negroes do not yet enjoy. That is a task of the labor movement, and it cannot fight for it consistently, let alone achieve it, without first rooting out all forms of discrimination against Negroes which still prevail so widely in its own midst.
To protect the working people from suffering most heavily from the consequences of the permanent war economy and the war danger, the labor movement must make its own a program for shifting the economic burdens where they belong.
First of all comes the need for ever-increasing workers control of production. The unions must safeguard themselves against all attempts by the employers or government to use the war situation for super-profiteering and as a pretext for undermining them and the best union militants by assuring to themselves the right to control hiring and firing. This is required also as a specific protection of the labor movement in a period of atomic bomb warfare, so that it may have the maximum assurances that the integrity of unions and the security of its most active members will not be menaced by the arbitrary powers to “freeze” or “shift” labor which the government, so openly staffed with the men of big capital, will seek to take and exert. The workers can only safeguard themselves against the shameless blood profiteering that was seen during the Second World War, and against the equally shameless attempts to freeze wages in the face of such profiteering, by demanding that the capitalists open their books to union committees. Control over hiring and firing, access to all economic information: these are the minimum rights in industry the workers need for their own protection in the war economy.
The labor movement, which should seek to establish a workers’ government and pursue a political program, at home and abroad, of its own, should not take any responsibility for the war-making or war policy of the present government. It should not allow itself to be committed to a crippling “no strike pledge” of any kind. It should not allow its representatives to be on any kind of “Defense” or “War Labor Boards” whose task is, basically, to harness labor to the war machine, or to serve them, as was the case in the last war, as part captive and part hostage. By thus taking responsibility for a course which it is not allowed to determine, labor helps to saddle itself as the docile bearer of the war burden. But this does not mean that it can fail to fight unremittingly for its rights in industry, and not leave the defense of its interests either to a government board or to the employer himself. Such a fight, to achieve and assure the most desirable objective, cannot but culminate in the demand for workers’ control of production.
The permanent war economy threatens and will increasingly threaten the living standards of the workers. To counteract this threat, the labor movement cannot but demand that the economic burdens of the war and the war preparations be borne by the wealthy classes and not by the working classes. The Independent Socialist League urges the labor movement to call for: the immediate nationalization of all war industry under workers’ control; a genuine shift of the tax burden to the shoulders of the rich who gained so much from the last war and expect to gain so much from the next; if there is a levy on the bodies and lives of the people, then there must be a government levy on capital to help cover the backbreaking costs of the war preparations; a 100 per cent tax on all super profits made out of war production; a roll-back of prices on consumer goods to the 1950 level and the most rigid control on all price ceiling; repeal of the Taft-Hartley law; a national housing program; national health insurance and expanded social services; expanded educational facilities; a rolling back of rent rates to the 1948 level, when federal ceilings were first lifted.
With these points as the basis for a labor program on domestic and international policy, the labor movement can seize the favorable opportunities that are presenting themselves to win the support of the whole working class and of the most important sections of the middle classes who want peace, security and democracy. The members and the press of the Independent Socialist League are pledged to an incessant campaign to win over larger numbers in the labor movement to this program. No socialist is doing his duty if he fails to become an active part of one of the popular organizations in the country – the trade unions and their political committees, as well as such organizations as the ADA, the Liberal Party, the NAACP and the like – where in he is able to put forward the program of the Independent Socialist movement and to win adherents and support for it.
At the same time, the ISL reaffirms the declaration of its last convention concerning its character and tasks as a revolutionary socialist propaganda organization. The ISL has the specific task of educating and training a movement of workers and students in the fundamental principles and program of internationalist socialism and socialist democracy. It has the specific task of disseminating and defending the theoretical and political positions which it alone has developed, summed up in the popular formula of “Neither Washington nor Moscow, but the Third Camp of Socialism and Democracy.”
Above all, it has the task of expounding its position on the interrelation between capitalism and Stalinism which distinguish it, and it alone, from both of these forms of contemporary social decay and from the apologists and defenders of both, that is, from the official labor leadership and its Social-Democratic echo, on one side, and the Stalinist spokesmen and their “Fourth Internationalist” echo, on the other. The Independent Socialist League proudly re-dedicates itself to the performance of this task, never before more urgently necessary than today, as the task most essential to the reconstruction and triumph of the world movement for socialist freedom.
July 1951
Main NI Index | Main Newspaper Index
Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Last updated on 22 November 2018