[Marxism] An analysis of the DP convention that works better

[Louis Proyect]

Marvin wrote:
>Unions, women, blacks, immigrants, gays, environmentalists, the antiwar and
>other reform movements have petitioned, demonstrated and engaged in other
>forms of direct action primarily to exert pressure on Congress to realize
>their demands through legislation. While there is much debate about the
>means of struggle and the laws which issue from it, they're part of the same
>process and aren't counterposed to each other.

There is a very subtle confusion here that I want to bring to 
comrades' attention. Marvin refers to unions, etc. as "reform 
movements". Historically, the trade union movement has gone through 
stages. In the beginning, industrial unionism was quite radical as 
the IWW and the early CIO would demonstrate. In fact, the early trade 
union movement did not need the Wagner Act to make gains. Sit-down 
strikes, etc. were enough to wrest concessions from the bosses.

The purpose of the Wagner Act was to help *institutionalize* the 
trade union movement and bring it within the framework of the 
capitalist state. Not long after the CIO became "legal", it began to 
function as an arm of the New Deal along with the CPUSA. Everything 
was subordinated to the New Deal, including support for WWII. FDR and 
the teamster bureaucracy worked together to prosecute the Trotskyists 
under the Smith Act. Silencing the radicals was seen as a prelude to 
establishing the class peace necessary at home in order to push for 
imperialist war abroad. During WWII, many CIO unions under CPUSA 
leadership backed a no-strike pledge. When the civil rights movement 
announced a March on Washington against racism, the CPUSA denounced 
this as virtually a traitorous act.

After WWII, the CP was purged from the trade union movement and the 
AFL-CIO became a bulwark of the Cold War as Meany and others placed 
operatives in restive 3rd world countries to help build unions in the 
AFL-CIO mold.

In fact, there is very little understanding in Marvin's posts about 
the role of trade unions in the period of what Trotsky called 
imperialist decay. It seems to reflect the kind of sunny outlook you 
find on the websites or promotional material sent out by these 
compromised bureaucratic institutions on days just like today, Labor Day.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/xx/tu.htm

In the trade union movement throughout the world there is to be 
observed in the last period a swing to the right and the suppression 
of internal democracy. In England, the Minority Movement in the trade 
unions has been crushed (not without the assistance of Moscow); the 
leaders of the trade union movement are today, especially in the 
field of foreign policy, the obedient agents of the Conservative 
party. In France there was no room for an independent existence for 
Stalinist trade unions; they united with the so-called 
anarcho-syndicalist trade unions under the leadership of Jouhaux and 
as a result of this unification there was a general shift of the 
trade union movement not to the left but to the right. The leadership 
of the CGT is the most direct and open agency of French imperialist capitalism.

In the United States the trade union movement has passed through the 
most stormy history in recent years. The rise of the CIO is 
incontrovertible evidence of the revolutionary tendencies within the 
working masses. Indicative and noteworthy in the highest degree, 
however, is the fact that the new "leftist" trade union organization 
was no sooner founded than it fell into the steel embrace of the 
imperialist state. The struggle among the tops between the old 
federation and the new is reducible in large measure to the struggle 
for the sympathy and support of Roosevelt and his cabinet.

No less graphic, although in a different sense, is the picture of the 
development or the degeneration of the trade union movement in Spain. 
In the socialist trade unions all those leading elements which to any 
degree represented the independence of the trade union movement were 
pushed out. As regards the anarcho-syndicalist unions, they were 
transformed into the instrument of the bourgeois republicans; the 
anarcho-syndicalist leaders became conservative bourgeois ministers. 
The fact that this metamorphosis took place in conditions of civil 
war does not weaken its significance. War is the continuation of the 
self-same policies. It speeds up processes, exposes their basic 
features, destroys all that is rotten, false, equivocal and lays bare 
all that is essential. The shift of the trade unions to the right was 
due to the sharpening of class and international contradictions. The 
leaders of the trade union movement sensed or understood, or were 
given to understand, that now was no time to play the game of 
opposition. Every oppositional movement within the trade union 
movement, especially among the tops, threatens to provoke a stormy 
movement of the masses and to create difficulties for national 
imperialism. Hence flows the swing of the trade unions to the right, 
and the suppression of workers' democracy within the unions. The 
basic feature, the swing towards the totalitarian regime, passes 
through the labor movement of the whole world.

We should also recall Holland, where the reformist and the trade 
union movement was not only a reliable prop of imperialist 
capitalism, but where the so-called anarcho-syndicalist organization 
also was actually under the control of the imperialist government. 
The secretary of this organization, Sneevliet, in spite of his 
Platonic sympathies for the Fourth International was as deputy in the 
Dutch Parliament most concerned lest the wrath of the government 
descend upon his trade union organization.

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