Wohlforth Archive | Encyclopedia of Trotskyism | Marxists’ Internet Archive
Written: 1964-1969.
First Published: 1971.
Source: A Bulletin Book for Labor Publications Inc., New York 1971.
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THE SWP & THE RISE OF THE CIO
The Socialist Workers Party was without a doubt the leading party of world Trotskyism from the 1930s until the 1950s. The degeneration of this party has transformed it into the major prop of revisionism internationally playing much the same role as Kautsky did in the latter period of the Second International.
The revisionist role of the SWP did not simply emerge from out of nowhere in the 1950s. Its roots can be found precisely in the most healthy period of its development in the 1930s. The purpose of this article is to trace the roots of the SWP's revisionism as it expressed itself within the greatest strength of the SWP – its trade union work. This will not only help us in understanding the degeneration of this party but also in developing a revolutionary line for trade union work today.
Part of the mystique of the proletarian past of the SWP, which is especially used to fortify the image of Dobbs and Cannon, is the experience of the American Trotskyists as leaders of the Minneapolis general strike of 1934. As a result of the strike, Minneapolis became a union town, the Trotskyists dominated the Central Labor Council using their base in the leadership of Teamsters Local 574 in a mighty drive to organize the over-the-road drivers. Art Preis reports in his book Labor's Giant Step (Pioneer, 1964): ''The Minneapolis union . . . spearheaded a tremendous expansion of unionism throughout a great open-shop area. In August 1938 this organizing drive was climaxed by the winning of the first over-the-road drivers contract, with union wages and conditions including the closed shop, in an eleven-state area ranging from Montana to Ohio and Minnesota to Oklahoma."
The basis for this organizing drive had been laid by the victorious May and July-August 1934 strikes of the Minneapolis drivers. These strikes, nominally called by Teamsters Local 574 of the AFL were not led by the old leadership of that Local but by an organizing committee called the "strike committee of 100" which was under the leadership of a group of younger rank and file members of 574, members of the Trotskyist organization of that time, the Communist League of America. After the initial stages of the struggle, the top leadership of the League including its National Secretary, James P. Cannon, were on the scene in Minneapolis to give leadership to the entire struggle.
The American Trotskyists from the start displayed the qualities of tactical flexibility, organizational finesse and quickness to seize on opportunities for involvement in mass struggle that were the greatest strength of the early Trotskyist movement in America. In his lectures on The History of American Trotskyism (Pioneer Publishers, New York 1944) Cannon says: "This was a strike that began with such a wallop that the whole country heard about it, and about the role of the Trotskyists in its leadership – the jokes about the Trotskyist 'sectarians' began to turn sour."
Cannon's description of the May strike which closed down the entire city, gives something of the flavor of the events:
"The attempt by the bosses and the police to crush the strike by force culminated in the famous 'Battle of the Market.' Several thousand special deputies in addition to the whole police force were mobilized to make one supreme effort to open up a strategic part of the town, the wholesale market, for the operation of trucks. . . . They were going to have fun down there just beating up strikers. One of the special deputies wore his polo hat. . . . He and the whole mob of deputies and cops ran into a mass of determined organized pickets of the union supplemented by sympathetic unionists from other trades and by members of the unemployed organizations. . . . The battle has gone down in Minneapolis history as 'The Battle of the Deputies Run.' There were two casualties and they were both on the other side. That was one of the features of the strike that lifted Minneapolis high in the estimation of the workers everywhere. In strike after strike of those days the same story had been monotonously repeated in the press: Two strikers killed; four strikers shot; twenty strikers arrested, etc. Here was a strike where it wasn't all one-sided. There was a universal burst of applause, from one end of the labor movement to the other, for the militancy and resoluteness of the Minneapolis fighters. They had reversed the trend of things and workers militants everywhere praised their name."
From the point of view of organization, discipline and inventiveness, the strike leaders pioneered in the use of procedures that were later used by the auto workers with proficiency in the great Flint sit-down strikes of 1937 and other struggles – the union commissary, the emergency hospital, the Women's Auxiliary and the "flying squads" of pickets on wheels. But behind the superb organization was a political conception which Cannon describes:
"The policy of the class struggle guided our comrades; they couldn't be deceived and outmaneuvered, as so many strike leaders of the period were, by this mechanism of sabotage and destruction known as the National Labor Board and all its auxiliary setups. They put no reliance whatever in Roosevelt's Labor Board; they weren't fooled by any idea that Roosevelt, the liberal 'friend of labor' President, was going to help the truck drivers in Minneapolis win a few cents more an hour. They weren't deluded even by the fact that there was at that time in Minnesota a Farmer-Labor Governor, presumed to be on the side of the workers. Our people didn't believe in anybody or anything but the policy of the class struggle and the ability of the workers to prevail by their mass strength and solidarity. . . . Therefore they prepared everything from the point of view of class war. They knew that power, not diplomacy, would decide the issue. Bluffs don't work in fundamental things, only in incidental ones. In such things as the conflict of class interests one must be prepared to fight."
The initial period of the Trotskyist leadership of the Minneapolis strikes based on the conception of "the class fight" as outlined above by Cannon represented the highest development of the American Trotskyists as an independent leadership in the trade union movement. The involvement of the SWP in the trade union movement in later years, even when the party had considerable forces in CIO unions, never had the independent leadership characteristic of this early period. In fact, as we shall see, even the work in the Teamsters which grew out of the Minneapolis struggles was characterized by adaptation to "progressive" elements in the late 1930s. But this adaptation had its roots in the theoretical and political weaknesses of Cannon and the Trotskyists which prevented them from translating their power and leadership in the Minnesota class struggle into a political struggle.
Honest class struggle unionism, the leadership of an almost "model" union by itself could not by "force of example", destroy the influence of Stalinism and build a Marxist leadership in the unions in America or anywhere else. What the Communist League of America built on the picket lines and in the streets of Minneapolis was being undermined by the Stalinist Communist Party in the corridors of the Farmer-Labor Party. The Stalinists, who, according to Cannon, had "been driven out of the trade unions" in Minneapolis, had been able to penetrate and in collaboration with the trade union bureaucracy, take over the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party and, as V.R. Dunne pointed out in the 1938 Discussions with Trotsky on the Labor Party, " . . . the Stalinists in controlling the apparatus of the FLP control more than just the apparatus – they make it difficult for us in the unions." Eventually, these difficulties caused not only by the power of Stalinism in Minnesota, but nationally and internationally, meant that Roosevelt and IBT president Daniel Tobin could, with the open collaboration of the Stalinists, destroy the power of the Trotskyists as a force in the Teamsters by railroading 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis Teamsters to prison under the provisions of the notorious Smith Act in 1941.
Not only in Minnesota, but all over the country, the alliance of the labor bureaucracy with Roosevelt and the state via the Democratic Party was decisive for the ruling class in undermining the growing power of the CIO and preventing the development of an independent labor party which could open the road for a workers and farmers government in the U.S. The Stalinists with their policy of the "Popular Front" support to Roosevelt and the Democrats and their vast influence in the CIO played a key role in holding back the labor party development and propping up capitalism.
The fight for a labor party, a struggle against the Stalinist popular front line within the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party – was a fight which had to be linked at every moment with the fight in the unions. This, the SWP failed to do. Dunne and the SWP leadership understood how the Stalinists could "make it difficult for us in the unions," but even after the 1938 discussions with Trotsky, could not fuse the economic and political struggle. Political struggle tended to be seen as an aid to the work in the unions rather than a vital necessity for the struggle of the unions and the working class as a whole.
Related to this separation of the trade union and the political struggle, was a deep strain of anti-intellectual, "know-nothing" pragmatism that pervaded in the Cannonite proletarian section of the SWP. This tendency was strongest in the proletarian stronghold of the SWP – Minneapolis. This tendency was represented in the attitude of a former National Committee member and leader of the SWP in Minneapolis-St. Paul, who personally told us that as far as the Stalinists go, "We don't have to fight them," politically and theoretically. Presumably, they will dry up and wither away by force of our shining example.
This same anti-political, anti-theoretical outlook combined with "proletarian snobbery" – looking down one's nose at "intellectuals," led the SWP to give up the struggle for the students and intellectuals in Minnesota, leaving them in effect to the Stalinists who used them to build a base against the Trotskyists in the unions and in the Farmer-Labor Party.
It is clear that the experiences in Minneapolis and in various AFL and CIO unions before the war were not accompanied by the kind of theoretical development that was needed to raise the leadership of the SWP above the level of American pragmatism and impressionism. To his dying day, Trotsky was concerned about this problem. This is clearly revealed in the stenographic report of the discussion between the SWP leaders and Trotsky held in June 1940, shortly before his death. The discussion reveals the pragmatism of the SWP leadership, the impatience with political struggle and theoretical problems which were often seen as an obstacle to the "concrete work" of the Party. It was this economist separation of the political and theoretical struggle against the Stalinists from the practical trade union work that had characterized the Minneapolis work.
But underlying this economism was a political bloc with the "Rooseveltian Progressives" in the unions who were led by a wing of the bureaucracy in the CIO in opposition to the Stalinist wing. While the "Progressives" representing the militants had been opposing the Stalinists from the left on trade union questions, the Stalinists following the Stalin-Hitler Pact had taken a left, anti-war, anti-Roosevelt stance and were preparing to run Browder for President against Roosevelt. Trotsky proposed a tactic to reach the Stalinist workers and expose the CP leadership: critical support to Browder's candidacy. Cannon was adamantly opposed, feeling that there were bigger fish to catch elsewhere in the CIO, that such a maneuver would be unpopular with the SWP's Progressive allies, that it "would disrupt our work." He saw it not as a question of the SWP attempting to expose and if possible destroy the influence of Stalinism in the class, but of bookkeeping – "What we gained from the Stalinists we would lose otherwise," he said.
Trotsky replied: "How to break the Stalinist party? The support of the Progressives is not stable. It is found at the top of the union rather than as a rank and file current. Now with the war we will have these progressives against us. We need a stronger base in the ranks. There are small Tobins on whom we depend. They depend on the big Tobins. They on Roosevelt. (Not long afterward Tobin and Roosevelt collaborated to put the Trotskyists behind bars – D. F.) . . . It would be fatal to pay too much attention to the impression we can make on the pacifists and our 'progressive' bureaucrat friends. In this case we become the squeezed lemon of the bureaucrats. They use us against the Stalinists but as the war nears call us unpatriotic and expel us. These Stalinist workers can become revolutionary, especially if Moscow changes its line and becomes patriotic."
Cannon attempted in the discussion to pin the opportunistic policy that Trotsky had referred to as the SWP's on the Lovestoneites who he described as "attorneys for the labor fakers, especially in auto." The Lovestone group was the advisor and mentor to UAW President Homer Martin, who with the encouragement of John L. Lewis (who at that time was something of a "Rooseveltian Progressive") was trying to cement a bureaucratic stranglehold over the UAW, and was leaning increasingly on a virulent red-baiting, anti-communist campaign. Martin was opposed by a bloc of the Reutherites and Stalinists. Cannon disowns the policy of the Lovestoneites, saying: "We followed a more careful policy. We tried to exploit the differences between the Martin gang and the Stalinists. For a while we were the left wing of the Martin outfit, but we extricated ourselves at the proper time."
But it seems clear that the SWP was not only the "left wing of the Martin outfit" but had adapted to Martin since he was in opposition to the Stalinists from the left according to B.J. Widdick writing in the 1938 New International, theoretical journal of the SWP. In his articles on the UAW at that time, Widdick who was the SWP's leading trade union reporter saw Martin's role as that of a misguided progressive, not as a dangerous bureaucrat. "Martin," said Widdick, "answered the Stalinist attack with an essentially progressive program, unfortunately applied in a bureaucratic fashion . . . this played directly into the hands of the Stalinists." There is a tendency here to see the Stalinists as the "main enemy" in the labor movement and to begin from that premise rather than from the point of view of building the Trotskyists as an alternative independent leadership.
This is what Trotsky is attacking when he discusses the CIO "Progressives"; "Their existence is a reflex of this new movement (The CIO – D.F.) but it is not a direct reflection of the rank and file. It is an adaptation of the conservative bureaucrats to the situation. There are two competitors, the progressive bureaucrats and the Stalinists. We are a third competitor trying to capture this sentiment. These progressive bureaucrats can lean on us for advisors in the fight against the Stalinists. But the role of an advisor to a progressive bureaucrat doesn't promise much in the long run. Our real role is that of third competitor . . . "
Later in the discussion, Dobbs lauds the SWP's growth of support among the rank and fiIe achieved through the bloc with the "Progressives." Trotsky asks him if we can "get them to go against Roosevelt" and "For whom will they vote?" Dobbs replies: "I don't know. Maybe Roosevelt. For us to turn to the Stalinists will sow real confusion in their minds. It should not be rushed in any case." Trotsky then says: "I believe we have the critical point very clear. We are in a bloc with so called progressives – not only fakers but honest rank and file. Yes they are honest and progressive but from time to time they vote for Roosevelt – once in four years. You propose a trade union policy not a Bolshevik policy. Bolshevik policies begin outside the trade unions. (Our emphasis – D.F.) The worker is an honest trade unionist but far from Bolshevik politics."
Trotsky further points out how the adaptation to the "Progressives" thwarted the independent role of the Party not only in the unions as such but on the level of political action as well: "Last January we discussed a campaign in the unions to have our own trade union presidential candidate. We were to propose to him that we would vote for him if he were nominated. Even Lewis. We were to begin the campaigning for a labor president. But not a thing was done. Nothing appeared. Nothing in the Northwest Organizer. (The paper of the Minneapolis Teamsters edited by Dobbs – D.F.) . . . Why? It signifies an immediate clash with our allies, the machine, the conscious Rooseveltians who would immediately attack, a clash with our own class enemies such as Tobin . . . I discussed . . . two years ago on this same problem . . . but the Northwest Organizer remains unchanged. It is a photograph of our adaptation to the Rooseveltians."
In the light of this discussion we can see that the loss of influence in the unions and the accompanied retreat from a revolutionary Marxist line in the recent period was not simply the result of isolation because of the post-war prosperity. The wiping out of its great base in the Minneapolis labor movement was partly caused by the SWP's inability to develop this base politically and in the process train its own trade union cadres as real Marxists.
While the SWP lost many of its trade union cadres during the war, the Party did go through a period of expansion and very significant growth in the trade union movement during the period of the late-war and post-war upsurge of the working class. We will see however to what extent the SWP learned the lessons of the 1940 discussions with Trotsky. During the war the SWP's trade union policy could be characterized in one word – "caution," as is pointed out in Tim Wohlforth's Struggle for Marxism in the U.S.. Perhaps the SWP could point to an excuse in the early war period when the Stalinist and reformist (Hillman-Murray-Green) bureaucrats were able to by and large keep the workers under the screws of the wartime wage freeze and no-strike pledge with the notable exception of the United Mine Workers. But by 1944 with the growing movement against the .wage freeze and no-strike pledge taking hold especially in the CIO unions, the SWP had little excuse for the policy of "caution" behind which they hid their hesitance to project an independent course in the unions.
Nevertheless the SWP eventually did respond to what Art Preis correctly called "American Labor's Greatest Upsurge." The high point of the strike wave was the 113 day strike of some 225,000 auto workers against General Motors, ending in March 1946. The GM workers won an 18 1/2 cent an hour increase without any "company security" clauses which the UAW leadership conceded to Ford. Preis writes: "In the twelve months following V-J Day more than 5,000,000 workers engaged in strikes. For the number of strikers, their weight in industry and the duration of the struggle, the 1945-46 strike wave in the U.S. surpassed anything of its kind in any capitalist country including the British General Strike of 1926."
On the crest of the upsurge the SWP held its November 1946 convention at which it reported that 1,013 new members had come into the Party since the previous convention. In addition to reports of the union fractions in auto, steel, rubber, railroads and maritime, Dobbs reported to the convention that "almost one half of the Party members belong in the trade unions, primarily in the basic industries. A relatively large number hold posts of various kinds in the unions. Many of the new recruits are prominent trade union militants in the major industrial areas of the U.S. where a total of 41 SWP branches are now functioning . . . "
At the same time Dobbs reported that the SWP was rapidly gaining ground against the Stalinists, "that as our party roots itself more and more deeply in its class it not only gathers strength but cuts the ground from under the feet of Stalinism." Again, we encounter the false theory of the automatic demise of Stalinism resulting from trade union mass work. Dobbs recognized that with the beginning of a "left turn" against "Browderism" the CP was in crisis, but despite his words of optimism, the SWP had not learned from the 1940 discussion with Trotsky. As the CP was preparing the formation of the Wallaceite Progressive Party the SWP missed an opportunity to expose the popular front basis of the Stalinist policy. As Tim Wohlforth points out in his history, "The SWP should have offered as early as 1947 to give critical support to such a campaign (a national CP electoral campaign on a class basis – D.F.) and to withdraw its own candidates if the Stalinists ran on a class line."
In the union movement, the SWP was projecting the "organization of a progressive left wing." This policy stated abstractly could cover a multitude of sins, especially for a party such as the SWP which despite its growth did not feel capable of projecting a really independent struggle to become the third alternative against the "Progressives" and the Stalinists that Trotsky had talked of. In practice the SWP was still playing "trade union caucus" politics. Their policies tended to originate with the internal union situation and to fall into the trap of tailing progressive forces and caucuses such as the Reuther caucus in the UAW and Curran in the NMU – until the witch-hunting of these bureaucrats forced the SWP to attempt to form blocs with Stalinist-led caucuses, as in the UAW.
This process is best illustrated in the SWP's policies in the UAW during and after the war. In 1944 a "rank and file" caucus arose in the UAW to challenge both the Reuther and the Stalinist influenced Addes-Thomas wings of the bureaucracy. The rank and file caucus was led by a number of militant secondary leaders, some of whom were members or supporters of the Shachtmanite Workers Party. "Its program was simple: rescind the no-strike pledge; press for independent political action by labor; elect UAW leaders pledged to these views." (See The UAW and Walter Reuther by Howe and Widdick, Random House, 1949). The SWP also supported this caucus which Preis speaks very highly of. But the SWP did not build anything out of it. Howe and Widdick wrote that "soon the 'Rank and File' caucus disintegrated. Once the war was over its major plank became irrelevant, and most of its people went back to the Reuther camp." While this statement is nothing more than an apology for the capitulation of the Shachtmanites to Reuther, the SWP in fact went along with them, if not into the Reuther "camp", at least into his caucus.
Wohlforth summarized the subsequent history of the SWP's post-war UAW policies in his Struggle for Marxism in the U.S. as follows:
"The party auto fraction had supported the Reuther caucus against the Stalinist-backed Thomas-Addes caucus in the closing days of the war when Reuther favored a more militant trade union policy than did the Stalinists. This relationship with the Reuther group continued into 1946 and early 1947, when it was becoming increasingly apparent that the Reuther formation was becoming more conservative and was engaging in the most virulent forms of red-baiting against the Thomas-Addes caucus. In 1947 there developed serious differences within the party leadership over whether or not to switch support to Thomas-Addes, Swabeck and Dunne (with Cannon's backing, Cochran insisted later) favored continuing support for Reuther, while Cochran and the auto fraction pushed for a turn to Thomas-Addes. Neither side considered a third formation realistic. The auto fraction finally supported Thomas-Addes but at a time when the Stalinists were losing control of the caucus. This support did not lead to any significant contact or work with the Stalinist workers, something Cannon was later to see as a virtue."
While the SWP never whitewashed Reuther the way the Shachtmanites did, there is no doubt that in his report in the May 1946 Fourth International on the 1946 UAW convention, Art Preis is critical of Reuther but within the framework of support. Reuther is only mildly criticized for his leadership of the GM strike and is lauded because his leadership "was a model of resoluteness compared with the conservative and timid Thomas." What is obviously decisive to Preis is that even though Reuther made unprincipled appeals to "questionable and reactionary elements," "the main base of the Reuther caucus consisted of the most progressive militants." What is most revealing is that the SWP was still following a policy of blocs with "progressives." As for the possibility of an independent role for the SWP, all Preis can say is, "There was no movement in the ranks prepared to push a third alternative to the two presented by the main divisions of the convention." The SWP could not go beyond the role of a "critical" cheering section for the election of Reuther as President of the UAW. Preis wrote that Reuther's policies while far from "socialistic" (which Thomas had asserted) "do represent a policy of militancy and a program aimed at resolving the broader and deeper-going issues of the American scene. As one delegate expressed it to this writer, "Reuther wants to do something about inflation and profits and housing. He wants to fight."
Here in a nutshell is expressed all the pragmatic adaptation to progressive bureaucrats of which we have been speaking. Reuther is not seen as a bureaucrat attempting to capture the radical sentiment of the workers and to render it harmless and under the domination of the labor bureaucracy. Instead he is seen as a non-socialist who has a (capitalist?) "program aimed at resolving the broader and deeper-going issues of the American scene." As for implementing the laudable program, the best Preis can say for Reuther is that he and Thomas both made "vague expressions . . . during the course of the convention for a possible 'progressive third party.'"
What is decisive in the SWP's trade union policy is not simply whether or not the party involved itself in caucus formations which were led by revisionist tendencies or sections of the trade union bureaucracy. Marxists function in the unions with the utmost organizational flexibility. It is impossible to abstractly determine what caucuses to enter, when to break with a caucus, when to attempt to form a independent caucus under the leadership of the Party, etc. Trotskyists do not exclude the formation of blocs and collaboration with scoundrels and bureaucrats if these maneuvers can help the Party to develop a leadership in the unions against these very same scoundrels and bureaucrats.
Trotsky had said in the 1940 discussions, ''These bureaucrats are Rooseveltians, militarists. We tried to penetrate the trade unions with their help. This was a correct maneuver, I believe." In the same breath Trotsky says, regarding the Progressives and the Stalinists, "Our real role is that of third competitor." The tactic of relations with caucuses is therefore subordinate to the strategy involved in the building of the revolutionary party as an independent leadership in the trade unions. What is decisive is Trotsky's dictum as he had stated it in the 1940 discussions: "Bolshevik policies begin outside the trade unions." What is decisive is that in the course of flexible maneuvering, there is no adaptation to the bureaucracy or the backwardness of the ranks.
We could see in the work of the SWP in various caucuses of the UAW a tendency to sacrifice their own independent policies – to adapt to the moods of militant workers and the left turns of progressive bureaucrats. This tendency had as its philosophical mentor, American pragmatism, not dialectical materialism. This same pragmatism, an entrapment in parochial "militant trade unionism," was evident in the same period even under conditions where the SWP was able to lead struggles of caucuses organized under its own leadership.
An article by J. Lyons in the March 1947 SWP "Party Builder" provides a good example of how this approach of beginning pragmatically with the given union situation abstracted from the needs of building a Marxist leadership in the class as a whole leads to opportunism. The article describes an SWP-led caucus campaign for election of a slate of officers known as the "Unity" slate in an election for posts of a Steelworkers local in Calumet (Chicago suburb), Illinois. The slate won nine out of the twelve posts and only narrowly lost the Presidency of the Local, running in opposition to a Stalinist backed slate which had been in the leadership of the local. With the rising cost of living being a big issue in the working class at that time, the central demand of the SWP was the cost of living escalator clause. The Stalinists counterposed the demand to hold down prices by continuing the OPA.
The SWP campaign was conducted with admirable organizational expertise, theatrical grandeur and public relations which any politician would envy. Morale, based on the upsurge in the class struggle was high. But it was conceived on a narrow, opportunistic plane. "Our objective," writes Lyons, "was to win the posts: therefore we were extremely careful not to advance points which would frighten and drive away any considerable section of the workers: Had we been in for educational purposes, our objective would have been to mobilize the advanced section of the workers. In this case, we would probably have advanced many far reaching programmatic points at the expense of possibly losing the support of the more backward elements. Since our objective was to win, we could not afford this risk; consequently, we advance those points which would mobilize the widest possible section of workers."
What is revealed is that the SWP's campaign for the Labor Party demand which Cannon had declared should be advanced not just as propaganda, but agitationally as early as 1942, was tossed out the window – in order to win union posts. The Party is transformed from a vanguard into a union election machine. Lyons describes how the campaign workers in discussions with other workers would pick out a particular point in the program which would be attractive to that particular worker. There was something for everyone, apparently. ''Thus, each individual worker was given the impression that the point discussed by the (Unity slate) operator was the main point in the program, and in most instances, that individual was well satisfied with the program."
This adaptation to "trade union policies" as opposed to Bolshevik policies eventually led to a major factional explosion in the SWP in 1952-53. A section of established trade unionists, the core of which was the auto fraction in Flint and Detroit came out in open revolt against the Leninist Party. The leader of this faction was Bert Cochran who had been the leader of the Party's fraction and a protege of Cannon. His base was that of the older conservatized trade unionists who Cannon correctly saw had been corrupted by thirteen years of "prosperity" and material privilege. They were tired and wanted out. Cochran's liquidationist line was clearly tailored for them.
Cannon was aghast at this conservative "infection" that had erupted in the SWP, but he did not understand that these elements together with himself and the Minneapolis trade unionists were the targets of Trotsky's warnings in 1940. The Cochranite trade unionists were never developed by the Party into Party people trained to be revolutionary Marxist leaders of the class. Instead they were militant trade unionists who were caught up in the parochialism of narrow trade union politics. This never bothered Cannon until the "infection" threatened to destroy the SWP as an organization.
While the "orthodox" belief in the Party held by Cannon and the Dobbs wing of the SWP forced them to fight the Cochranites, their lack of understanding of Marxist theory and the dialectical method upon which the Party rests also led them eventually to adopt the very liquidationist politics of Cochran and Pablo which they had opposed in 1953.
With the departure of the Cochranites and the deepening of the prosperity and conservatism of the 1950s, the SWP lost just about all its trade union cadres. In their place the SWP gave lip service to its "proletarian" traditions while increasingly orienting to middle class currents and leaders. The best the SWP could do in relation to the trade union movement in the post-Cochran period was the publication of Labor's Giant Step by Art Preis.
This book is an excellent and invaluable objective account of the CIO and the American labor movement. But in it the role of the SWP as a vanguard party struggling to develop leadership in the class does not come through. Instead it from time to time gives the SWP "merit badges" because on occasion, parts of the Transitional Program which appeared in the pages of the Militant were "adopted," if not fought for, by various sections of the bureaucracy. Although Preis was a leading National Committee member of the SWP, one can read the entire book with only the foggiest notion of the real problems, discussions and activities of the SWP in the CIO. The Militant is only one of a number of honest sources on the history of the CIO in Preis' treatment. One would have to be in "the know" or read the introduction in order to have any idea at all that the Militant was the organ of a Party that was ostensibly struggling in the trade union movement for a Trotskyist leadership of the working class not only in the U.S. but throughout the world.
Today, to the extent that the SWP carries out any trade union work at all, it is done in the spirit of complete capitulation to the bureaucracy, the Black nationalists, or both. In New York's Social Service Employees Union, the SWP spokesmen support the leadership of President Martin Morgenstern, in his efforts to sell Lindsay's "reorganization" to the SSEU ranks. The "reorganization" plan calls for the attrition of 9,000 jobs in the Department of Welfare accompanied by intense speed-up. This is the sequel to Trotsky's warnings in 1940.
In contrast, the Workers League has taken the lead in a struggle in the SSEU against the Morgenstern-Gotbaum bureaucracy of the SSEU and DC 37, soon to be merged. Key to this is our leadership in the struggle against the contract which if not defeated will ratify the City's "reorganization" scheme. This is a fundamental struggle not only for the SSEU but for the entire working class since it poses most sharply the program of the ruling class to solve their crisis at the expense of the working class through attrition, reorganization; containerization, etc. – through unemployment and speed-up.
We have tried to approach this struggle as all union struggles must be approached – beginning from the objective needs of the workers and not from the "mentality" or moods of the workers as the SWP tended to do even in its healthiest period. We have been able to fuse the economic and political struggles by injecting the fight against the Taylor Law and the demand for a Labor Party aggressively into the recent Central Park demonstration against the Rockefeller budget cuts.
In our work in the SSEU and in other unions we fight to unite theory and practice in wrestling with the practical problems of building a Marxist leadership in the unions. This involves a constant struggle against the same tendencies that the SWP succumbed to: opportunistic tailing of "progressive" forces, trade union parochialism, routinism and propagandism, sectarian abstentionism, to name a few.
The Workers League looks back at the trade union policy of the SWP over the years in order to deepen its understanding of the mistakes and limitations of Cannonism, in order to carry out the building of a Marxist leadership against the bureaucracy and its revisionist supporters in the unions. But the class struggle history and traditions of the SWP are in reality our history and traditions which have been spat upon by the present leaders of the SWP.
The Trotskyist movement has advanced far beyond the Cannonite conception of trade union work which paved the way unwittingly for the Cochranite revolt against the Party. Our British comrades in the International Committee of the Fourth International, the Socialist Labour League, have pointed with way with the organization of the All Trades Unions Alliance as the industrial arm of the SLL in the trade union movement. The SLL is patiently, but nevertheless with a necessary sense of urgency, developing a cadre of Marxist leaders in the trade union movement that is challenging the reformist, Stalinist and "left" leaders of the working class. The All Trades Unions Alliance, numbering thousands of trade unionists, is marching forward in full support of the SLL newspaper, the Newsletter, which will be the first Trotskyist daily paper this coming September.
Far from seeing this as something "foreign" and apart from the Workers League, we see the daily Newsletter as a great advance in the development of the indispensable Trotskyist leadership of the world revolution. That is why we bring the campaign into all areas of our activity and especially into our trade union work.
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