Marxists’ Internet Archive: ETOL Home Page: Trotskyist Writers Section: Farrel Dobbs
Source: Socialist Appeal, Vol. IV No. 27, 6 July 1940, p. 2.
Transcription & Mark-up: Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A new high in confusing the political problems of the working class was reached by John L. Lewis in his recent addresses at Philadelphia. He gave the definite impression of a man who is rapidly losing all sense of political balance.
Lewis has on many occasions brought forth telling indictments of capitalist mismanagement of social production. As the chief representative of the CIO, a mass organization whose members are vitally involved in the major industries, he is well equipped with facts. Unemployment, malnutrition, inadequate housing, industrial diseases have remained as a permanent nightmare to a broad section of the mass production workers of the CIO. A gifted orator, Lewis has done a good job of describing some of the worst sides of these evil conditions.
All of this is an excellent and most necessary service to the workers. But an analysis of the conditions of the working class is only a preliminary step to an effective solution of these problems. In sharp contrast to his good performance in describing the bad conditions of the workers, Lewis has amassed an impressive record of misleadership in action on both the economic and the political front.
He has adhered consistently to the old-line trade union policy of horse-trading with the employers. But the big corporations, already enjoying a monopoly in their respective fields, have little to expect from a union except higher labor costs and a resultant reduction in their profits. The CIO unions in the basic industries have failed, therefore, to find “friends” among the big employers. Not content to wait for the benevolence of the employers to solve their problems the workers have pressed for militant trade union action – demands for union contracts, wage increases, reduction in hours, seniority, regulation of production speed and improved working conditions – and they have been ready to win these demands. The employers have fought back all along the line.
The officials of the CIO, with Lewis at the head, failing to get a basis for agreements with the bosses without a head-on fight, sought to stem the tide of strike actions by placing their reliance upon government agencies to force the employers into agreements with the union. This necessitated a pressure campaign on the politicians. Acute problems of unemployment relief, poor housing, protection from industrial disease brought demands from the workers for political action by the CIO.
The choice was between the CIO taking the initiative in the creation of a national labor party or continuing to place reliance in “friendly” politicians of the old-line parties. Lewis and his colleagues chose the latter course, streamlining the old AFL methods by the creation of Labor’s Non-Partisan League which was nothing more than an organization to bring pressure on the Democratic and Republican politicians, although it was palmed off on the workers as an independent working class political organization. It is against this background that the remarks of Lewis at Philadelphia appear in the most significant light.
On June 18, 1940 Lewis told the NAACP at Philadelphia that “Mr. Roosevelt made depression and unemployment a chronic fact in American life.” Chronic depression, unemployment, is a fact. The workers do not have to be convinced of that. It is the making not of Roosevelt alone, but of capitalism as such. Roosevelt has failed to correct these ills because he is committed to a policy of perpetuating them through his role as a protector of their real creator – capitalism. Neither a Roosevelt nor a Willkie nor any other defender of capitalism can give the workers anything but. chronic depression, unemployment, and war.
But in 1936, after the first four years of Roosevelt, John L. Lewis and Labor’s Non-Partisan League considered him the workers’ champion and gave him unconditional support for re-election. And again in the state elections in 1938 Lewis and the LN-PL supported the bulk of the New Deal candidates. This could be excused if Lewis had belatedly made an honest discovery of the real nature of the Roosevelt administration. But he has learned nothing.
“It was a slogan of the 1932 presidential election,” Lewis told the NAACP, “that Herbert Hoover was responsible for that depression. As a- simple matter of justice let me say here and now that the workers of the United States realize that he had nothing to do with it.”
It isn’t the absent-mindedness of Lewis which is at fault here; it is his belief that the workers have such a poor memory that they will swallow this clap-trap. But it is the best which Lewis has to offer.
Referring again to Hoover and the depression, Lewis adds, “It was laid on his doorstep when he came to the White House.” In other words, Hoover didn’t create the depression; he just didn’t overcome it. Therefore, he is a politician in whom the workers can place their trust and, to quote Lewis again, “It is only the self-seeking politicians that blame Mr. Hoover.”
At this hour of the clock, with the world engulfed in a war which will soon involve the American workers, with Roosevelt already fastening a straight-jacket upon the labor movement, with the Republicans promising the bosses that they will finish the job if their candidate is elected, Lewis can do nothing but fumble around like an octogenarian who has lost his glasses. The best he has to offer is a threat to the Republican resolutions committee, in what the CIO News describes as a “straight-from-the-shoulder talk” that “some day the people will tire of being deceived by the major political parties.”
That is right. Some day the workers will. But it will not be because of anything John L. Lewis has done to help them find their way onto the right political road.
Lewis, Hillman and Dubinksy prevented the workers from taking the road of independent political action when they had an excellent chance under the impetus of the growth and struggles of the rising industrial unions in the basic industries. And so far as they are concerned there will be no such action in 1940.
Hillman and Dubinsky are on the Roosevelt band-wagon. Hillman has broken openly with Lewis on the political front. Dubinsky has broken not only politically; he has taken the ILGWU back into the AFL, thus striking a severe blow at the whole CIO movement.
John L. Lewis, who has presumed to be the leader of millions of workers, stands politically bewildered before them in the hour of their greatest crisis. He has neither the courage nor the foresight to lead the workers in independent political struggle through their own party.
On the field of trade union action the real leaders who made the CIO movement what it is today sprang to the front in the periods of struggle against the bosses and then when the fight was over returned into the ranks or remained in minor posts in the unions. They have contributed much more to the building of the CIO than the top leadership which claimed the credit.
These same unsung heroes of the working class will find their way to the front in the political struggles of the days to come. It is in them and not in the John L. Lewises that the workers of the CIO will find the leaders who can guide them to ultimate victory.
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