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<h2>G. Zinoviev, N. Bukharin, B. Smeral & O. Kuusinen</h2>
<h1><small>The Englarged Executive Committee<br>
on the Norwegian Party</small></h1>
<h3>(14 July 1922)</h3>
<hr class="infotop">
<p class="info"><strong>Source:</strong> <strong><em>International Press Correspondence</em></strong>, <a href="../../../../../history/international/comintern/inprecor/1922/v02n058-jul-14-1922-Inprecor.pdf" target="new">Vol. 2 No. 58</a>, 14 July 1922, p. 437.<br>
<strong>On-line Publication:</strong> Zinoviev Internet Archive, May 2020.<br>
<strong>Transcription/Mark-up:</strong> <a href="../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Marxists’ Internet Archive</strong>.</p>
<hr class="infobot">
<p class="fst">The Enlarged Executive of the Comintern has examined the situation of the Norwegian Workers’ Party and adopted the following resolution:</p>
<p class="fst">1. In its efforts to begin Parliamentary activity according to its actual needs, the Norwegian Workers’ Party has been led to give conditional support to the Liberal Government. This policy led to such occurrences as the journey of Comrade Lian, a member of the Party Executive, as Government expert to the Genoa Conference, the acceptance of a provisory Compulsory Arbitration Bill, and the support of the Government in a few other cases.</p>
<p>These phenomena can scarcely be distinguished from the old reformist policy. They have indeed been motivated with regard to certain working class interests; yet in the end they have led to the abandonment of other more important working class interests. The Norwegian comrades responsible for this policy, no doubt have tried to bear in mind the interests of the revolutionary class struggle, but the mistakes made in its application, have contradicted these interests. The Enlarged Executive has with great satisfaction taken cognizance of the assurance that the Norwegian Party has from its own experience and conviction recognized the necessity of a revision of its former Parliamentary policy. The Enlarged Executive expresses the hope that this will be done in the shortest possible time.</p>
<p class="fst">2. The case of Lian is to be judged in connection with the above-related facts concerning the former policy of the Norwegian Workers’ Party. It is clearly stated that his journey to Genoa raised no protest within the party. Therefore the whole Party was in accordance with this step. In the opinion of the Enlarged Executive Committee this step was a mistake and injurious. But in view of the circumstance that Comrade Lian cannot be alone held responsible, the Enlarged Executive annuls its former decision that Lian be personally disciplined and therewith considers this personal case as liquidated.</p>
<p class="fst">3. The acceptance of the Compulsory Arbitration Law in the Norwegian Parliament was a mistake. It had not the effect, as the Norwegian comrades thought, of strengthening the fighting position of the Party against the capitalist class; it rather produced differences of opinion within the Party’s ranks. In view of the great difficulties in the present situation of the Norwegian working class movement, it must be understood that the Enlarged Executive appreciates the efforts of the responsible Norwegian comrades who have protected the workers from premature, too severe fighting by legal measures. An irresponsible “ Leftism”, which attempts to weaken the fighting strength of the workers’ organizations by daily participation in thoughtless struggles and therefore opposes all legal measures protecting working conditions cannot count upon any support from the Communist International. But defense of the workers’ freedom to struggle against the legal restrictions of the bourgeois State is quite another thing; this defense is the duty of the Communists and in this connection the Compulsory Arbitration Law is unthinkable. Experience hitherto with compulsory arbitration has shown that it is futile to hope that the advantages of protection through this law would be greater for the workers than the disadvantage in shackling their freedom of action. The Norwegian comrades have now also gained this experience and come to this opinion. This is now generally recognized on the part of the former defenders of the bill, and none of them have recommended an extension of this provisory measure. In consequence of this the Enlarged Executive sees no more reason for dealing with this case.</p>
<p class="fst">4. The support of a bourgeois government contradicts the tactics of the proletarian united front, because on the one hand it arouses mistrust of the Communist Party in the revolutionary workers and on the other hand it strengthens the confidence of the remaining working class in the bourgeoisie and thus is not likely to assist the gathering of the working class into a united anti-bourgeois front. The tactics of the united front is in Norway, as everywhere, a fight against all bourgeois parties and against all capitalist circles. In this class struggle there must be gathered the broadest masses of the proletariat and for this reason we must bring the Social Democrats of the Second and 2½ Internationals as well as the Syndicalists together with us in the fight for joint slogans and for the most important interests of the working class.</p>
<p>There are in Norway no doubt great prospects for success for the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat through this tactic; of course, not in the sense that the conscious Right Socialists and Syndicalists would change themselves to real revolutionary class fighters. We need not labor under such an illusion. On the contrary, sooner or later, many of their leaders are sure to unmask themselves in the proletarian united front as deserters, traitors or cowards. But the great majority of their adherents can be won as true and worthy comrades of the proletarian revolution through our earnest demand for the common fight. On the other hand, the ruling position of our Norwegian brother party in the workers’ movement in its country gives more guarantee than in any other country that its application of the tactic of the united front will neither endanger the independence of the Communist Party nor its role as the leader of the revolution.</p>
<p>In spite of this, there have appeared in Norway, as in a few other countries, “left radical” fears and confused opposition to the tactic of the united front. The opposition sees in the official addressing of the proposals of our party to the Social Democratic Party or to the Syndicalist organizations, an unchaste “organic contact”. But that need not be the case. If important interests of the proletariat require the common action of all workers’ organizations, the successful execution of the tactic of the united front demands of the Communist Party, the political courage to turn to rival workers’ organization to confer with their leading organs or representatives, at times even to form a bloc, to enter into an alliance for the carrying out of a joint action, without prejudicing in the least the organic or political independence of the Party. Pursuing this further, our Party should be ready under certain conditions to form even a Government Bloc with the representatives of the workers’ parties and other workers’ organizations, to participate in a Workers Government and then from this half-way step in the further development of the revolutionary class struggle to lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Through a courageous carrying out of this tactic, thoroughly conscious of its aim, our Party has, without abandoning its steady revolutionary leadership or moderating its criticism of the non-revolutionary leaders, the best opportunity of thoroughly unmasking their inconstancy and treachery and to deprive them of the leadership of the workers. A Communist opposition that through its confused Left Wing fears, disavows the real tactics of revolutionary Marxism and shakes the confidence of the workers in such party leadership, does the proletariat an unpardonable misservice in the successful fighting of the class struggle.</p>
<p class="fst">5. The Enlarged Executive Committee binds all Norwegian Communists to work for immediate adherence to the R.T.U.I. at the approaching Trade Union Congress.</p>
<p class="fst">6. The Enlarged Executive Committee expects that the decision already made on the altering of the names of the central organs and several other papers of the Norwegian Workers’ Party will be carried out without delay.</p>
<p class="c"><b>The Executive Committee of the Communist International</b><br>
<i>G. Zinoviev. N. Bukharin, B. Smeral. O. Kuusinen,</i> Secretary</p>
<br>
<p class="link"><a href="../../../index.htm">Zinoviev Archive</a> | <a href="../../../../index.htm">Marxist Writers’ Archive</a></p>
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<p class="updat">Last updated: 5 May 2020</p>
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MIA > Archive > Zinoviev
G. Zinoviev, N. Bukharin, B. Smeral & O. Kuusinen
The Englarged Executive Committee
on the Norwegian Party
(14 July 1922)
Source: International Press Correspondence, Vol. 2 No. 58, 14 July 1922, p. 437.
On-line Publication: Zinoviev Internet Archive, May 2020.
Transcription/Mark-up: Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
The Enlarged Executive of the Comintern has examined the situation of the Norwegian Workers’ Party and adopted the following resolution:
1. In its efforts to begin Parliamentary activity according to its actual needs, the Norwegian Workers’ Party has been led to give conditional support to the Liberal Government. This policy led to such occurrences as the journey of Comrade Lian, a member of the Party Executive, as Government expert to the Genoa Conference, the acceptance of a provisory Compulsory Arbitration Bill, and the support of the Government in a few other cases.
These phenomena can scarcely be distinguished from the old reformist policy. They have indeed been motivated with regard to certain working class interests; yet in the end they have led to the abandonment of other more important working class interests. The Norwegian comrades responsible for this policy, no doubt have tried to bear in mind the interests of the revolutionary class struggle, but the mistakes made in its application, have contradicted these interests. The Enlarged Executive has with great satisfaction taken cognizance of the assurance that the Norwegian Party has from its own experience and conviction recognized the necessity of a revision of its former Parliamentary policy. The Enlarged Executive expresses the hope that this will be done in the shortest possible time.
2. The case of Lian is to be judged in connection with the above-related facts concerning the former policy of the Norwegian Workers’ Party. It is clearly stated that his journey to Genoa raised no protest within the party. Therefore the whole Party was in accordance with this step. In the opinion of the Enlarged Executive Committee this step was a mistake and injurious. But in view of the circumstance that Comrade Lian cannot be alone held responsible, the Enlarged Executive annuls its former decision that Lian be personally disciplined and therewith considers this personal case as liquidated.
3. The acceptance of the Compulsory Arbitration Law in the Norwegian Parliament was a mistake. It had not the effect, as the Norwegian comrades thought, of strengthening the fighting position of the Party against the capitalist class; it rather produced differences of opinion within the Party’s ranks. In view of the great difficulties in the present situation of the Norwegian working class movement, it must be understood that the Enlarged Executive appreciates the efforts of the responsible Norwegian comrades who have protected the workers from premature, too severe fighting by legal measures. An irresponsible “ Leftism”, which attempts to weaken the fighting strength of the workers’ organizations by daily participation in thoughtless struggles and therefore opposes all legal measures protecting working conditions cannot count upon any support from the Communist International. But defense of the workers’ freedom to struggle against the legal restrictions of the bourgeois State is quite another thing; this defense is the duty of the Communists and in this connection the Compulsory Arbitration Law is unthinkable. Experience hitherto with compulsory arbitration has shown that it is futile to hope that the advantages of protection through this law would be greater for the workers than the disadvantage in shackling their freedom of action. The Norwegian comrades have now also gained this experience and come to this opinion. This is now generally recognized on the part of the former defenders of the bill, and none of them have recommended an extension of this provisory measure. In consequence of this the Enlarged Executive sees no more reason for dealing with this case.
4. The support of a bourgeois government contradicts the tactics of the proletarian united front, because on the one hand it arouses mistrust of the Communist Party in the revolutionary workers and on the other hand it strengthens the confidence of the remaining working class in the bourgeoisie and thus is not likely to assist the gathering of the working class into a united anti-bourgeois front. The tactics of the united front is in Norway, as everywhere, a fight against all bourgeois parties and against all capitalist circles. In this class struggle there must be gathered the broadest masses of the proletariat and for this reason we must bring the Social Democrats of the Second and 2½ Internationals as well as the Syndicalists together with us in the fight for joint slogans and for the most important interests of the working class.
There are in Norway no doubt great prospects for success for the revolutionary class struggle of the proletariat through this tactic; of course, not in the sense that the conscious Right Socialists and Syndicalists would change themselves to real revolutionary class fighters. We need not labor under such an illusion. On the contrary, sooner or later, many of their leaders are sure to unmask themselves in the proletarian united front as deserters, traitors or cowards. But the great majority of their adherents can be won as true and worthy comrades of the proletarian revolution through our earnest demand for the common fight. On the other hand, the ruling position of our Norwegian brother party in the workers’ movement in its country gives more guarantee than in any other country that its application of the tactic of the united front will neither endanger the independence of the Communist Party nor its role as the leader of the revolution.
In spite of this, there have appeared in Norway, as in a few other countries, “left radical” fears and confused opposition to the tactic of the united front. The opposition sees in the official addressing of the proposals of our party to the Social Democratic Party or to the Syndicalist organizations, an unchaste “organic contact”. But that need not be the case. If important interests of the proletariat require the common action of all workers’ organizations, the successful execution of the tactic of the united front demands of the Communist Party, the political courage to turn to rival workers’ organization to confer with their leading organs or representatives, at times even to form a bloc, to enter into an alliance for the carrying out of a joint action, without prejudicing in the least the organic or political independence of the Party. Pursuing this further, our Party should be ready under certain conditions to form even a Government Bloc with the representatives of the workers’ parties and other workers’ organizations, to participate in a Workers Government and then from this half-way step in the further development of the revolutionary class struggle to lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat. Through a courageous carrying out of this tactic, thoroughly conscious of its aim, our Party has, without abandoning its steady revolutionary leadership or moderating its criticism of the non-revolutionary leaders, the best opportunity of thoroughly unmasking their inconstancy and treachery and to deprive them of the leadership of the workers. A Communist opposition that through its confused Left Wing fears, disavows the real tactics of revolutionary Marxism and shakes the confidence of the workers in such party leadership, does the proletariat an unpardonable misservice in the successful fighting of the class struggle.
5. The Enlarged Executive Committee binds all Norwegian Communists to work for immediate adherence to the R.T.U.I. at the approaching Trade Union Congress.
6. The Enlarged Executive Committee expects that the decision already made on the altering of the names of the central organs and several other papers of the Norwegian Workers’ Party will be carried out without delay.
The Executive Committee of the Communist International
G. Zinoviev. N. Bukharin, B. Smeral. O. Kuusinen, Secretary
Zinoviev Archive | Marxist Writers’ Archive
Last updated: 5 May 2020
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./articles/Žižek-Slavoj/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.subject.philosophy.works.ot.zizek1 | <body>
<h1>Repeating Lenin</h1>
<h5>Slavoj Zizek </h5>
<h3>Lenin’s Choice </h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source:</span> <a href="http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm">lacan.com</a>;<br>
<span class="info">Mark-up:</span> Styled and linked to Zizek's sources by <a href="http://home.mira.net/~andy/seminars/22022002.htm">Andy Blunden</a>.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/index.htm">Lenin</a> is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/index.htm">Marx</a> is OK, even on Wall Street, there are people who love him today — Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamics, Marx of the Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives -, but Lenin, no, you can’t be serious! The working class movement, revolutionary Party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn’t Lenin stand precisely for the FAILURE to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire XXth century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in the contemporary academic politics, the idea to deal with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought... however, one should treat Lenin in an “objective critical and scientific way,” not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights — therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the XXth century totalitarianisms. </p>
<p>What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the “concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” as Lenin himself would have put it. “Fidelity to the democratic consensus” means the acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want — on condition that what you do, does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think. Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous <i>Berufsverbot </i>in Germany of the late 60s — the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!” The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: “Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!” And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for “scientific objectivity” means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic “post-ideological” consensus — or it means nothing. </p>
<p><a href="../../../../../reference/archive/habermas/index.htm" target="_top">Habermas</a> designated the present era as that of the <em>neue Undurchsichtlichkeit</em> — the new opacity.<a href="#1">1</a> More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances, one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which SEEMS to dominate. More then ever, one should bear in mind <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/b/e.htm#benjamin-walter">Walter Benjamin’s</a> reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles — one should also ask how it effectively functions IN these very struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious “Sensation” exhibitions ARE the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment. </p>
<p>One is therefore tempted to turn around <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm#018">Marx’s thesis 11</a>: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: “what can one do against the global capital?”), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like <em>Medecins sans frontiere</em>, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity<a href="#2">2</a>: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!” </p>
<p>Let us take two predominant topics of today’s American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, “postcolonial studies” tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities’ “right to narrate” their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress “otherness,” so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the “Stranger in Ourselves,” in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves — the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included — up to a point), but conceptual: notions of the “European” critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the Cultural Studies chic. </p>
<p>My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!” Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October — in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate. </p>
<p>It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: “we shouldn’t play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus — any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly helps the new Right!” This is the key line of separation: one should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus, up to questioning the very notion of democracy. </p>
<p>So how are we to respond to the eternal dilemma of the radical Left: should one strategical support center-Left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should one adopt the stance of “it doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t get involved in these fights — in a way, it is even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation"? The answer is the variation of old Stalin’s answer to the question “Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?": THEY ARE BOTH WORSE. What one should do is to adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox: in principle, of course, one should be indifferent towards the struggle between the liberal and conservative pole of today’s official politics — however, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power. Otherwise, the price to be paid may appear much too high — recall the catastrophic consequences of the decision of the <a href="../../../../../archive/trotsky/germany/1932-ger/next01.htm">German Communist Party in the early 30s NOT to focus on the struggle against the Nazis</a>, with the justification that the Nazi dictatorship is the last desperate stage of the capitalist domination, which will open eyes to the working class, shattering their belief in the “bourgeois” democratic institutions. Along these lines, Claude Lefort himself, whom no one can accuse of communist sympathies, recently made a crucial point in his answer to Francois Furet: today’s liberal consensus is the result of 150 years of the Leftist workers’ struggle and pressure upon the State, it incorporated demands which were 100 or even less years ago dismissed by liberals as horror.<a href="#3">3</a> As a proof, one should just look at the list of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto: apart from 2 or 3 of them (which, of course, are the key one), all others are today part of the consensus (at least the disintegrating Welfare State one): the universal vote, the right to free education, universal healthcare and care for the retired, limitation of child labor... </p>
<h3>Interpretation versus Formalization </h3>
<p>So where are we to begin? In the present climate of the New Age obscurantism, it may appear attractive to reassert the lesson of Lenin’s <em>Materialism and Empiriocriticism</em>: in today’s popular reading of quantum physics, as in Lenin’s times, the doxa is that science itself finally overcame materialism — matter is supposed to “disappear,” to dissolve in the immaterial waves of energy fields.<a href="#4">4</a> It is also true (as Lucio Colletti emphasized), that Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical and the scientific notion of matter, according to which, since the philosophical notion of matter as reality existing independently of mind precludes any intervention of philosophy into sciences, the very notion of “dialectics in/of nature” is thoroughly undermined. However... the “however” concerns the fact that, in <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/index.htm"><em>Materialism and Empiriocriticism</em></a>, there is NO PLACE FOR <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/d/i.htm#dialectics">DIALECTICS</a>, FOR <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/index.htm">HEGEL</a>. What are Lenin’s basic theses? The rejection to reduce knowledge to <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/h.htm#phenomenon">phenomenalist</a> or <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#pragmatism">pragmatic</a> instrumentalism (i.e., the assertion that, in scientific knowledge, we get to know the way things exist independently of our minds — the infamous “theory of reflection”), coupled with the insistence of the precarious nature of our knowledge (which is always limited, relative, and “reflects” external reality only in the infinite process of approximation). Does this not sound familiar? Is this, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, not the basic position of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/p/o.htm#popper-karl">Karl Popper</a>, the archetypal anti-Hegelian? In his short article “<em>Lenin and Popper</em>,"<a href="#5">5</a> Colletti recalls how, in a private letter from 1970, first published in <em>Die Zeit</em>, Popper effectively wrote: “Lenin’s book on empiriocriticism is, in my opinion, truly excellent."<a href="#6">6</a> </p>
<p>This hard materialist core of <em>Empiriocriticism</em> persists in the <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm"><em>Philosophical Notebooks</em></a> from 1915, in spite of Lenin’s rediscovery of Hegel — why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/a/d.htm#adorno-theodor">Adorno</a> in his “negative dialectics”: how to combine Hegel’s legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the “predominance of the objective” (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/e.htm#reflection">theory of reflection</a>” according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).<a href="#7">7</a> However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of objective reality OUTSIDE the thought’s subjective mediation, but by insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive “objective reality,” never being able to grasp it in it infinite complexity.<a href="#8">8</a> The problem with Lenin’s “theory of reflection” resides in its implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it “reflects.” The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality (distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects — only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see the whole of reality “the way it really is.”<a href="#9">9</a> </p>
<p>This, of course, in no way entails that the tracing of the difference between idealism and materialism is today not more crucial than ever: one should only proceed in a truly Leninist way, discerning — through the “concrete analysis of concrete circumstances” — WHERE this line of separation runs. One is thus tempted to claim that, even WITHIN the field of religion, the singular point of the emergence of materialism is signalled by Christ’s words on the cross “Father, why have you forsaken me?” — in this moment of total abandonment, the subject experiences and fully assumes the inexistence of the big Other. More generally, the line of division is that between the “idealist” Socratic-Gnostic tradition claiming that the truth is within us, just to be (re)discovered through an inner journey, and the Judeo-Christian “materialist” notion that truth can only emerge from an EXTERNAL traumatic encounter which shatters the subject’s balance. “Truth” requires an effort in which we have to fight our “spontaneous” tendency. </p>
<p>And what if we were to connect this notion of the truth emerging from an external encounter with the (in)famous Lenin’s notion, from <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm"><em>What Is to Be Done?</em></a>, of how the working class cannot achieve its adequate class consciousness “spontaneously,” through its own “organic” development, i.e. of how this truth has to be introduced into it from outside (by the Party intellectuals)? In <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ch02.htm">quoting Kautsky at this place</a>, Lenin makes a significant change in his paraphrase: while Kautsky speaks of how the non-working-class intellectuals, who are OUTSIDE THE CLASS STRUGGLE, should introduce SCIENCE (providing objective knowledge of history) to the working class, Lenin speaks of CONSCIOUSNESS which should be introduced from outside by intellectuals who are outside the ECONOMIC struggle, NOT outside the class struggle! Here is the passage from Kautsky which Lenin quotes approvingly — </p>
<p class="quoteb">“/.../ socialism and class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. /.../ The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia /.../ Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously."<a href="#10">10</a></p>
<p>— and here is <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ch02.htm">Lenin’s paraphrase of it</a>: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“ /.../ all worship of the spontaneity of the working-class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element,’ of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon workers. /.../ the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course /.../ the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology /.../ for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism."<a href="#11">11</a></p>
<p>It may SOUND the same, but it’s NOT: in <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/a.htm#kautsky-karl">Kautsky</a>, there is no space for politics proper, just the combination of the social (working class and its struggle, from which intellectuals are implicitly EXCLUDED) and the pure neutral classless, asubjective, knowledge of these intellectuals. In Lenin, on the contrary, “intellectuals” themselves are caught in the conflict of IDEOLOGIES (i.e. the ideological class struggle) which is unsurpassable. (It was already Marx who made this point, from his youth when he dreamt of the unity of German Idealist philosophy and the French revolutionary masses, to his insistence, in late years, that the leadership of the International should under no conditions be left to the English workers: although the most numerous and best organized, they — in contrast to German workers — lack theoretical stringency.) </p>
<p>The key question thus concerns the exact STATUS of this externality: is it simply the externality of an impartial “objective” scientist who, after studying history and establishing that, in the long run, the working class has a great future ahead, decides to join the winning side? So when Lenin says “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. (This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests.) Why not, then, shamelessly and courageously ENDORSE the boring standard reproach according to which, Marxism is a “secularized religion,” with Lenin as the Messiah, etc.? Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint IS EXACTLY like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, NOT to any neutral observers. What the EXTERNALITY means here is that this truth is nonetheless UNIVERSAL, not just the “point-of-view” of a particular historical subject: “external” intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive ITS OWN PLACE within the social totality which enables it to accomplish its “mission” — this insight has to be mediated through an external element. </p>
<p>And why not link these two externalities (that of the traumatic experience of the divine Real, and that of the Party) to the third one, that of the ANALYST in the psychoanalytic cure? In all three cases, we are dealing with the same impossibility which bears witness to a materialist obstacle: it is not possible for the believer to “discover God in himself,” through self-immersion, by spontaneously realizing its own Self — God must intervene from outside, disturbing our balance; it is not possible for the working class to actualize spontaneously its historical mission — the Party must intervene from outside, shaking it out of its self-indulgent spontaneity; it is not possible for the patient/analyst to analyze himself — in contrast to the Gnostic self-immersion, in psychoanalysis, there is no self-analysis proper, analysis is only possible if a foreign kernel which gives body to the object-cause of the subject’s desire. Why, then, this impossibility? Precisely because neither of the three subjects (believer, proletarian, analyst) is a self-centered agent of self-mediation, but a decentered agent struggling with a foreign kernel. God, Analyst, Party — the three forms of the “subject supposed to know,” of the transferential object, which is why, in all three cases, one hears the claim “God/Analyst/ the Party is always right”; and, as it was clear already to <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/i.htm#kierkegaard-soren">Kierkegaard</a>, the truth of this statement is always its negative — MAN is always wrong. This external element does not stand for objective knowledge, i.e. its externality is strictly INTERNAL: the need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never “fully itself.” </p>
<p>In his <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm"><em>Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right</em></a>, Marx already deploys something like the logic of hegemony: the emergence of a “universal class,” a particular class which imposes itself as universal, engendering global enthusiasm, standing for society AS SUCH against the <i>ancien regime</i>, anti-social crime AS SUCH (like bourgeoisie in the French revolution). After follows the disillusion so sarcastically described by Marx: the day after, the gap between universal and particular becomes visible again, capitalist vulgar profit as the actuality of universal freedom, etc. — For Marx, of course, the only universal class whose singularity (exclusion from society of property) guarantees its ACTUAL universality, is the proletariat. This is what Ernesto Laclau rejects in his logic of hegemony: for Laclau, the short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular is ALWAYS illusory, temporary, a kind of “transcendental paralogism.”<a href="#12">12</a> However, is Marx’s proletariat really the negative of positive full essential humanity, or “only” the gap of universality AS SUCH, irrecoverable in any positivity?<a href="#13">13</a> In Alain Badiou’s terms, proletariat is not another PARTICULAR class, but a SINGULARITY of the social structure, and AS SUCH the universal class, the non-class among the classes. </p>
<p>What is crucial here is the properly temporal-dialectical tension between the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/u/n.htm#universal">Universal</a> and the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/a.htm#particular">Particular</a>. When Marx says that, in Germany, because of the compromised pettiness of the bourgeoisie, it is too late for the partial bourgeois emancipation, and that, because of it, in Germany, the condition of every particular emancipation is the UNIVERSAL emancipation, one way to read this is to see in it the assertion of the universal “normal” paradigm and its exception: in the “normal” case, partial (false) bourgeois emancipation will be followed by the universal emancipation through the proletarian revolution, while in Germany, the “normal” order gets mixed up. There is, however, another, much more radical way to read it: the very German exception, the inability of its bourgeoisie to achieve partial emancipation, opens up the space for the possible UNIVERSAL emancipation. The dimension of universality thus emerges (only) where the “normal” order enchaining the succession of the particulars is perturbed. Because of this, there is no “normal” revolution, EACH revolutionary explosion is grounded in an exception, in a short-circuit of “too late” and “too early.” The French Revolution occurred because France was not able to follow the “normal” English path of capitalist development; the very “normal” English path resulted in the “unnatural” division of labor between the capitalists who hold socio-economic power and the aristocracy to which was left the political power. </p>
<p>One can also make the same point in the terms of the opposition between interpretation and formalization<a href="#14">14</a>: the external agent (Party, God, Analyst) is NOT the one who “understands us better than ourselves,” who can provide the true interpretation of what our acts and statements mean; it rather stands for the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/f/o.htm#form">FORM</a> of our activity. Say, Marx’s deployment of the commodity form in the Chapter 1 of Capital is NOT a “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/g/r.htm#grand-narrative">narrative</a>,” a <em>Vorstellung</em>, but a <em>Darstellung</em>, the deployment of the inner structure of the universe of merchandises — the narrative is, on the contrary, the story of the “primitive accumulation,” the myth capitalism proposes about its own origins. (Along the same lines, Hegel’s <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phconten.htm"><em>Phenomenology</em></a> — contrary to <a href="../us/rorty.htm">Rorty</a>’s reading — does not propose a large narrative, but the FORM of subjectivity; as Hegel himself emphasizes in the Foreword, it focuses on the “formal aspect /das Formelle/.<a href="#15">15</a> This is how one should approach the absence of large all-encompassing narratives today — recall <a href="../us/jameson.htm">Fredric Jameson</a>’s supple description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."<a href="#16">16</a></p>
<p>Jameson at the same time insists that Marxism still provides the universal meta-language enabling us to situate and relate all other partial narrativizations/interpretations — is he simply inconsistent? Are there two Jamesons: one, postmodern, the theorist of the irreducible multiplicity of the narratives, the other, the more traditional partisan of the Marxist universal hermeneutics? The only way to save Jameson from this predicament is to insist that Marxism is here not the all-encompassing interpretive horizon, but the matrix which enables us to account for (to generate) the multiplicity of narratives and/or interpretations. It is also here that one should introduce the key dialectical distinction between the FOUNDING figure of a movement and the later figure who FORMALIZED this movement: ultimately, it was Lenin who effectively “formalized” Marx by way of defining the Party as the political form of its historical intervention, in the same way that St. Paul “formalized” Christ and Lacan “formalized” Freud.<a href="#17">17</a> </p>
<p>This formalization is strictly correlative to focusing on the Real of an antagonism: “class struggle” is not the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the formal generative matrix of the different ideological horizons of understanding. That is to say, one should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can <a href="../../../../../glossary/events/p/e.htm#peaceful-coexistence">peacefully coexist</a>, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/f/o.htm#formalism">formalism</a>,” with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which “colors” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, which means that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it. </p>
<h3>Of Apes and Men </h3>
<p>Lenin’s legacy to be reinvented today is the politics of truth. We live in the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/o.htm#postmodernism">postmodern</a>” era in which truth-claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power-mechanisms — as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question, apropos of some statement, “Is it true?”, is supplanted by the question “Under what power conditions can this statement be uttered?”. What we get instead of the universal truth is the multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/t.htm#ethics">ethics</a> is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. THE two philosophers of today’s global capitalism are the two great Left-liberal “progressives,” Richard Rorty and Peter Singer — honest in their consequent stance. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation — consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to narrate one’s experience of suffering and humiliation.<a href="#18">18</a> Singer then provides the Darwinian background.<a href="#19">19</a> </p>
<p>Singer — usually designated as a “social Darwinist with a collectivist socialist face” — starts innocently enough, trying to argue that people will be happier if they lead lives committed to ethics: a life spent trying to help others and reduce suffering is really the most moral and fulfilling one. He radicalizes and actualizes <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/b/e.htm#bentham-jeremy">Jeremiah Bentham</a>, the father of <a href="../../../../archive/mill-john-stuart/1863/utility/ch01.htm" target="_top">Utilitarianism</a>: the ultimate ethical criterion is not the dignity (rationality, soul) of man, but the ability to SUFFER, to experience pain, which man shares with animals. With inexorable radicality, Singer levels the animal/human divide: better kill an old suffering woman that healthy animals... Look an orangutan straight in the eye and what do you see? A none-too-distant cousin — a creature worthy of all the legal rights and privileges that humans enjoy. One should thus extend aspects of equality — the right to life, the protection of individual liberties, the prohibition of torture — at least to the nonhuman great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas). </p>
<p>Singer argues that “speciesism” (privileging the human species) is no different from racism: our perception of a difference between humans and (other) animals is no less illogical and unethical than our one-time perception of an ethical difference between, say, men and women, or blacks and whites. Intelligence is no basis for determining ethical stature: the lives of humans are not worth more than the lives of animals simply because they display more intelligence (if intelligence were a standard of judgment, Singer points out, we could perform medical experiments on the mentally retarded with moral impunity). Ultimately, all things being equal, an animal has as much interest in living as a human. Therefore, all things being equal, medical experimentation on animals is immoral: those who advocate such experiments claim that sacrificing the lives of 20 animals will save millions of human lives — however, what about sacrificing 20 humans to save millions of animals? As Singer’s critics like to point out, the horrifying extension of this principle is that the interests of 20 people outweighs the interests of one, which gives the green light to all sorts of human rights abuses. </p>
<p>Consequently, Singer argues that we can no longer rely on traditional ethics for answers to the dilemmas which our constellation imposes on ourselves; he proposes a new ethics meant to protect the quality, not the sanctity, of human life. As sharp boundaries disappear between life and death, between humans and animals, this new ethics casts doubt on the morality of animal research, while offering a sympathetic assessment of infanticide. When a baby is born with severe defects of the sort that always used to kill babies, are doctors and parents now morally obligated to use the latest technologies, regardless of cost? NO. When a pregnant woman loses all brain function, should doctors use new procedures to keep her body living until the baby can be born? NO. Can a doctor ethically help terminally ill patients to kill themselves? YES. </p>
<p>The first thing to discern here is the hidden <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/u/t.htm#utopia">utopian</a> dimension of such a survivalist stance. The easiest way to detect ideological surplus-enjoyment in an ideological formation is to read it as a dream and analyze the displacement at work in it. Freud reports of a dream of one of his patients which consists of a simple scene: the patient is at a funeral of one of his relatives. The key to the dream (which repeats a real-life event from the previous day) is that, at this funeral, the patient unexpectedly encountered a woman, his old love towards whom he still felt very deeply — far from being a masochistic dream, this dream thus simply articulates the patient’s joy at meeting again his old love. Is the mechanism of displacement at work in this dream not strictly homologous to the one elaborated by Fredric Jameson apropos of a science-fiction film which takes place in California in near future, after a mysterious virus has very quickly killed a great majority of the population? When the film’s heroes wander in the empty shopping malls, with all the merchandises intact at their disposal, is this libidinal gain of having access to the material goods without the alienating market machinery not the true point of the film occluded by the displacement of the official focus of the narrative on the catastrophe caused by the virus? At an even more elementary level, is not one of the commonplaces of the sci-fi theory that the true point of the novels or movies about a global catastrophe resides in the sudden reassertion of social solidarity and the spirit of collaboration among the survivors? It is as if, in our society, global catastrophe is the price one has to pay for gaining access to solidary collaboration... </p>
<p>When my son was a small boy, his most cherished personal possession was a special large “survival knife” whose handle contained a compass, a sack of powder to disinfect water, a fishing hook and line, and other similar items — totally useless in our social reality, but perfectly fitting the survivalist fantasy of finding oneself alone in wild nature. It is this same fantasy which, perhaps, give the clue to the success of Joshua Piven’s and David Borgenicht’s surprise best-seller<em> The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook</em>.<a href="#20">20</a> Suffice it to mention two supreme examples from it: What to do if an alligator has its jaws closed on your limb? (Answer: you should tap or punch it on the snout, because alligators automatically react to it by opening their mouths.) What to do if you confront a lion which threatens to attack you? (Answer: try to make yourself appear bigger than you are by opening your coat wide.) The joke of the book thus consists in the discord between its enunciated content and its position of enunciation: the situations it describes are effectively serious and the solutions correct — the only problem is WHY IS THE AUTHOR TELLING US ALL THIS? WHO NEEDS THIS ADVICE? </p>
<p>The underlying irony is that, in our individualistic competitive society, the most useless advice concerns survival in extreme physical situations — what one effectively needs is the very opposite, the Dale Carnegie type of books which tell us how to win over (manipulate) other people: the situations rendered in <i>The Worst-Case Scenario</i> lack any symbolic dimension, they reduce us to pure survival machines. In short, <i>The Worst-Case Scenario</i> became a best-seller for the very same reason Sebastian Junger’s <i>The Perfect Storm</i>, the story (and the movie) about the struggle for survival of a fishing vessel caught in the “storm of the century” east of the Canadian coast in 1991, became one: they both stage the fantasy of the pure encounter with a natural threat in which the socio-symbolic dimension is suspended. In a way, The Perfect Storm even provides the secret utopian background of <i>The Worst-Case Scenario</i>: it is only in such extreme situations that an authentic intersubjective community, held together by solidarity, can emerge. Let us not forget that <i>The Perfect Storm</i> is ultimately the book about the solidarity of a small working class collective! The humorous appeal of <em>The Worst-Case Scenario</em> can thus be read as bearing witness to our utter alienation from nature, exemplified by the shortage of contact with “real life” dangers. </p>
<p>We all know the standard pragmatic-utilitarian criticism of the abstract humanist education: who needs philosophy, Latin quotes, classic literature — one should rather learn how to act and produce in real life... well, in <i>The Worst-Case Scenario</i>, we get such real life lessons, with the result that they uncannily resemble the useless classic humanist education. Recall the proverbial scenes of the drilling of young pupils, boring them to death by making them mechanically repeat some formulas (like the declination of the Latin verbs) — the Worst-Case Scenario counterpoint to it would have been the scene of forcing the small children in the elementary school to learn by heart the answers to the predicaments this book describes by repeating them mechanically after the teacher: “When the alligator bites your leg, you punch him on the nose with your hand! When the lion confronts you, you open your coat wide!"<a href="#21">21</a> </p>
<p>So, back to Singer, one cannot dismiss him as a monstrous exaggeration — what Adorno said about psychoanalysis (its truth resides in its very exaggerations)<a href="#22">22</a> fully holds for Singer: he is so traumatic and intolerable because his scandalous “exaggerations” directly renders visible the truth of the so-called postmodern ethics. Is effectively not the ultimate horizon of the postmodern “identity politics” Darwinian — defending the right of some particular species of the humankind within the panoply of their proliferating multitude (gays with AIDS, black single mothers...)? The very opposition between “conservative” and “progressive” politics can be conceived of in the terms of Darwinism: ultimately, conservatives defend the right of those with might (their very success proves that they won in the struggle for survival), while progressives advocate the protection of endangered human species, i.e., of those losing the struggle for survival.<a href="#23">23</a> </p>
<p><a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc1aa.htm#m258">One of the divisions in the chapter on Reason in Hegel’s <i>Phenomenology of Spirit</i></a> speaks about “das geistige Tierreich” (the spiritual animal kingdom): the social world which lacks any spiritual substance, so that, in it, individuals effectively interact as “intelligent animals.” They use reason, but only in order to assert their individual interests, to manipulate others into serving their own pleasures.<a href="#24">24</a> Is not a world in which the highest rights are human rights precisely such a “spiritual animal kingdom,” a universe? There is, however, a price to be paid for such liberation — in such a universe, human rights ultimately function as ANIMAL rights. This, then, is the ultimate truth of Singer: our universe of human right is the universe of animal rights. </p>
<p>The obvious counterargument is here: so what? Why should we not reduce humankind to its proper place, that of one of the animal species? What gets lost in this reduction? Jacques-Alain Miller, the main pupil of Jacques Lacan, once commented an uncanny laboratory experiment with rats<a href="#25">25</a>: in a labyrinthine set-up, a desired object (a piece of good food or a sexual partner) is first made easily accessible to a rat; then, the set-up is changed in such a way that the rat sees and thereby knows where the desired object is, but cannot gain access to it; in exchange for it, as a kind of consolation prize, a series of similar objects of inferior value is made easily accessible — how does the rat react to it? For some time, it tries to find its way to the “true” object; then, upon ascertaining that this object is definitely out of reach, the rat will renounce it and put up with some of the inferior substitute objects — in short, it will act as a “rational” subject of utilitarianism. </p>
<p>It is only now, however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed a surgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is better to know nothing. So what happened when the operated rat was again let loose in the labyrinth, the one in which the “true” object is inaccessible? The rat insisted: it never became fully reconciled with the loss of the “true” object and resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeatedly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat in a sense was humanized; it assumed the tragic “human” relationship towards the unattainable absolute object which, on account of its very inaccessibility, forever captivates our desire. On the other hand, it is this very “conservative” fixation that pushes man to continuing renovation, since he never can fully integrate this excess into his life process. So we can see why did Freud use the term <em>Todestrieb</em>: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive; on the top of it, they are possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things — and “death” stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary biological life. </p>
<p>This, then, is what gets lost in Singer’s “<em>geistige Tierreich</em>”: the Thing, something to which we are unconditionally attached irrespective of its positive qualities. In Singer’s universe, there is a place for mad cows, but no place for an Indian sacred cow. In other words, what gets lost here is simply the dimension of truth — NOT “objective truth” as the notion of reality from a point of view which somehow floats above the multitude of particular narratives, but truth as the Singular Universal.” When Lenin said “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests. If one does not specify the CRITERIA of the different, alternate, narrativization, then this endeavor courts the danger of endorsing, in the Politically Correct mood, ridiculous “narratives” like those about the supremacy of some aboriginal holistic wisdom, of dismissing science as just another narrative on a par with premodern superstitions. The Leninist narrative to the postmodern multiculturalist “right to narrate” should thus be an unashamed assertion of the right to truth. When, in the debacle of 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honorable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) succumbed to the war fervor and voted for the military credits, Lenin’s thorough rejection of the “patriotic line,” in its very isolation from the predominant mood, designated the singular emergence of the truth of the entire situation. </p>
<p>In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the “right-to-narrate” orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the Real of some trauma which resists its narrativization. This properly dialectical tension sustains today’s the academic “holocaust industry.” My own ultimate experience of the holocaust-industry police occurred in 1997 at a round table in the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I was viciously attacked for an intervention in which (among other things) I claimed, against the neoconservatives deploring the decline of faith today, that the basic need of a normal human being is not to believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him, at his place — the reaction of one of the distinguished participants was that, by claiming this, I am ultimately endorsing the holocaust revisionism, justifying the claim that, since everything is a discursive construct, this includes also the holocaust, so it is meaningless to search for what really happened there... Apart from displaying a hypocritical paranoia, my critic was doubly wrong: first, the holocaust revisionists (to my knowledge) NEVER argue in the terms of the postmodern discursive <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/o.htm#constructivism">constructionism</a>, but in the terms of very <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/m.htm#empiricism">empirical</a> factual analysis: their claims range from the “fact” that there is no written document in which Hitler would have ordered the holocaust, to the weird mathematics of “taking into account the number of gas ovens in Auschwitz, it was not possible to burn so many corpses.” Furthermore, not only is the postmodern logic of “everything is a discursive construction, there are no direct firm facts” NEVER used to deflate the holocaust; in a paradox worth noting, it is precisely the postmodern discursive constructionists (like <a href="../fr/lyotard.htm">Lyotard</a>) who tend to elevate the holocaust into the supreme ineffable <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/m/e.htm#metaphysics">metaphysical</a> Evil — the holocaust serves them as the untouchable-sacred <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/e.htm#reality">Real</a>, as the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/n/e.htm#negation">negative</a> of the contingent language games.<a href="#26">26</a> </p>
<p>The problem with those who perceive every comparison between the holocaust and other concentration camps and mass political crimes as an inadmissible <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/e.htm#relativism">relativization</a> of the holocaust, is that they miss the point and display their own doubt: yes, the holocaust WAS unique, but the only way to establish this uniqueness is to compare it with other similar phenomena and thus demonstrate the limit of this comparison. If one does not risk this comparison, of one prohibits it, one gets caught in the <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/w/i.htm#wittgenstein-ludwig">Wittgensteinian</a> paradox of prohibiting to speak about that about which we cannot speak: if we stick to the prohibition of the comparison, the gnawing suspicion emerges that, if we were to be allowed to compare the holocaust with other similar crimes, it would be deprived of its uniqueness... </p>
<h3>Lenin As a Listener of Schubert</h3>
<p>So how can the reference to Lenin deliver us from this stuff predicament? Some <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/l/i.htm#libertarianism">libertarian</a> Leftists want to redeem — partially, at least — Lenin by opposing the “bad” Jacobin-elitist Lenin of <i>What Is To Be Done?</i>, relying on the Party as the professional intellectual elite which enlightens the working class from OUTSIDE, and the “good” Lenin of <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm"><i>State and Revolution</i></a>, who envisioned the prospect of abolishing the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/t.htm#state">State</a>, of the broad masses directly taking into their hands the administration of the public affairs. However, this opposition has its limits: the key premise of <i>State and Revolution</i> is that one cannot fully “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/d/e.htm#democracy">democratize</a>” the State, that State “as such,” in its very notion, is a dictatorship of one class over another; the logical conclusion from this premise is that, insofar as we still dwell within the domain of the State, we are legitimized to exercise full violent terror, since, within this domain, every democracy is a fake. So, since state is an instrument of oppression, it is not worth trying to improve its apparatuses, the protection of the legal order, elections, laws guaranteeing personal freedoms... — all this becomes irrelevant. The moment of truth in this reproach is that one cannot separate the unique constellation which enabled the revolutionary takeover in October 1917 from its later “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/t.htm#stalinism">Stalinist</a>” turn: the very constellation that rendered the revolution possible (peasants’ dissatisfaction, a well-organized revolutionary elite, etc.) led to the “Stalinist” turn in its aftermath — therein resides the proper Leninist tragedy. <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/l/u.htm#luxemburg-rosa">Rosa Luxembourg</a>’s famous alternative “<a href="../../../../../archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/index.htm">socialism or barbarism</a>” ended up as the ultimate <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hl631.htm#HL3_641">infinite judgement</a>, asserting the speculative identity of the two opposed terms: the “really existing” socialism WAS barbarism.<a href="#27">27</a> </p>
<p>In the diaries of <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/dimitrov/index.htm">Georgi Dimitroff</a>, which were recently published in German,<a href="#28">28</a> we get a unique glimpse into how Stalin was fully aware what brought him to power, giving an unexpected twist to his well-known slogan that “people (cadres) are our greatest wealth.” When, at a diner in November 1937, Dimitroff praises the “great luck” of the international workers, that they had such a genius as their leader, Stalin, Stalin answers:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“... I do not agree with him. He even expressed himself in a non-Marxist way.<br>
Decisive are the middle cadres."(7.11.37)</p>
<p class="fst">He puts it in an even clearer way a paragraph earlier:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Why did we win over Trotsky and others? It is well known that, after Lenin, Trotsky was the most popular in our land.<br>
But we had the support of the middle cadres, and they explained our grasp of the situation to the masses ... Trotsky did not pay any attention to these cadres.”</p>
<p class="fst">Here Stalin spells out the secret of his rise to power: as a rather anonymous General Secretary, he nominated tens of thousands of cadres who owed their rise to him... This is why Stalin did not yet want <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/l/e.htm#testament">Lenin dead in the early 1922</a>, rejecting his demand to be given poison to end his life after the debilitating stroke: if Lenin were to die already in early 1922, the question of succession would not yet be resolved in Stalin’s favor, since Stalin as the general secretary did not yet penetrate enough the Party apparatus with his appointees — he needed another year or two, so that, when Lenin effectively dies, he could count on the support of thousands of mid-level cadres nominated by him to win over the big old names of the Bolshevik “aristocracy.” </p>
<p>Here are some details of the daily life of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the following years, which, in their very triviality, render palpable the gap from the Stalinist <em>nomenklatura</em>. When, in the evening of 24 October 1917, Lenin left his flat for the Smolny Institute to coordinate the revolutionary takeover, he took a tram and asked the conductress if there was any fighting going on in the center that day. In the years after the October Revolution, Lenin was mostly driving around in a car only with his faithful driver and bodyguard Gil; a couple of times they were shot at, stopped by the police and arrested (the policemen did not recognize Lenin), once, after visiting a school in suburbs, even robbed of the car and their guns by bandits posing as police, and then compelled to walk to the nearest police station. When, on 30 August 1918, Lenin was shot, this occurred while he got in a conversation with a couple of complaining women in front of a factory he just visited; the bleeding Lenin was driven by Gil to Kremlin, were there were no doctors, so his wife <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/r.htm#krupskaya">Nadezhda Krupskaya</a> suggested someone should run out to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon... The standard meal in the Kremlin <em>kantina</em> in 1918 was buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup. So much about the privileges of <em>nomenklatura</em>! </p>
<p>Lenin’s slanderers like to evoke his famous paranoiac reaction at listening to Beethoven’s <em>appasionata</em> (he first started to cry, then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford to let himself go to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat the enemies instead of mercilessly fighting them) as the proof of his cold self-control and cruelty — however, even at its own terms, is this accident effectively an argument AGAINST Lenin? Does it not rather bear witness to an extreme sensitivity for music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue the political struggle? Who of today’s cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a sensitivity? Is not Lenin here at the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with the extreme cruelty in taking political decisions (suffice it to recall Heydrich, the holocaust architect, who, after a hard day’s work, always found time to play with his comrades Beethoven’s string quartets) — is not the proof of Lenin’s humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic unity of high culture and political barbarism, he was still extremely sensitive to the irreducible antagonism between art in power struggle? </p>
<p>Furthermore, one is tempted to develop a Leninist theory of this high-cultured barbarism. Hans Hotter’s outstanding 1942 recording of Schubert’s <em>Winterreise</em> seems to call for an intentionally anachronistic reading: it is easy to imagine German officers and soldiers listening to this recording in the Stalingrad trenches in the cold Winter of 42/43. Does the topic of <em>Winterreise</em> not evoke a unique consonance with the historical moment? Was not the whole campaign to Stalingrad a gigantic <em>Winterreise</em>, where each German soldier can say for himself the very first lines of the cycle:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“I came here a stranger,<br>
As a stranger I depart"?</p>
<p class="fst">Do the following lines not render their basic experience:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Now the world is so gloomy,<br>
The road shrouded in snow.<br>
I cannot choose the time<br>
To begin my journey,<br>
Must find my own way<br>
In this darkness.” </p>
<p class="fst">Here we have the endless meaningless march:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“It burns under both my feet,<br>
Even though I walk on ice and snow;<br>
I don’t want to catch my breath<br>
Until I can no longer see the spires.”</p>
<p class="fst">
The dream of returning home in the Spring:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“I dreamed of many-colored flowers,<br>
The way they bloom in May;<br>
I dreamed of green meadows,<br>
Of merry bird calls.”</p>
<p class="fst">
The nervous waiting for the post:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“From the highroad a posthorn sounds.<br>
Why do you leap so high, my heart?”</p>
<p class="fst">
The shock of the morning artillery attack:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“The cloud tatters flutter<br>
Around in weary strife.<br>
And fiery red flames<br>
Dart around among them.”</p>
<p class="fst">
Utterly exhausted, the soldiers are refused even the solace of death:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“I'm tired enough to drop, have taken mortal hurt.<br>
Oh, merciless inn, you turn me away?<br>
Well, onward then, still further, my loyal walking staff!” </p>
<p class="fst">What can one do in such a desperate situation, but to go on with heroic persistence, closing one’s ears to the complaint of the heart, assuming the heavy burden of fate in a world deserted by Gods?</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“If the snow flies in my face,<br>
I shake it off again.<br>
When my heart speaks in my breast,<br>
I sing loudly and gaily.<br>
I don’t hear what it says to me,<br>
I have no ears to listen;<br>
I don’t feel when it laments,<br>
Complaining is for fools.<br>
Happy through the world along<br>
Facing wind and weather!<br>
If there’s no God upon the earth,<br>
Then we ourselves are Gods!” </p>
<p class="fst">
The obvious counter-argument is that all this is merely a superficial parallel: even if there is an echo of the atmosphere and emotions, they are in each case embedded in an entirely different context: in Schubert, the narrator wanders around in Winter because the beloved has dropped him, while the German soldiers were on the way to Stalingrad because of Hitler’s military plans. However, it is precisely in this displacement that the elementary ideological operation consists: the way for a German soldier to be able to endure his situation was to avoid the reference to concrete social circumstances which would become visible through reflection (what the hell were they doing in Russia? what destruction did they bring to this country? what about killing the Jews?), and, instead, to indulge in the Romantic bemoaning of one’s miserable fate, as if the large historical catastrophe just materializes the trauma of a rejected lover. Is this not the supreme proof of the emotional abstraction, of <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/sp/susoul.htm#SU404">Hegel’s idea that emotions are ABSTRACT</a>, an escape from the concrete socio-political network accessible only to THINKING. </p>
<p>And one is tempted to make here a Leninist step further: in our reading of the <em>Winterreise</em>, we did not just link Schubert to a contingent later historical catastrophe, we did not just try to imagine how this song-cycle resonated to the embattled German soldiers in Stalingrad. What if the link to this catastrophe enables us to read what was wrong in the Schubertian Romantic position itself? What if the position of the Romantic tragic hero, narcissistically focused on his own suffering and despair, elevating them into a source of perverted pleasure, is already in itself a fake one, an ideological screen masking the true trauma of the larger historical reality? One should thus accomplish the properly Hegelian gesture of projecting the split between the authentic original and its later reading colored by contingent circumstances back into the authentic original itself: what at first appears the secondary distortion, a reading twisted by the contingent external circumstances, tells us something about what the authentic original itself not only represses, leaves out, but had the function to repress. Therein resides the Leninist answer to the famous passage from the <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#p110">Introduction to the <em>Grundrisse</em> manuscript</a>, in which Marx mentions how easy it is to explain Homer’s poetry from its unique historical context — it is much more difficult to explain its universal appeal, i.e. why it continues to give us artistic pleasure long after its historical context disappeared<a href="#29">29</a>: this universal appeal is based in its very ideological function of enabling us to abstract from our concrete ideologico-political constellation by way of taking refuge in the “universal” (emotional) content. So, far from signalling some kind of trans-ideological heritage of the humankind, the universal attraction of Homer relies on the universalizing gesture of ideology. </p>
<h3>“Entre nous: If they kill me...” </h3>
<p>In what, then, resides Lenin’s greatness? Recall Lenin’s shock when, in the Fall of 1914, the Social Democratic parties adopted the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/o.htm#social-chauvinism">patriotic line</a>” — Lenin even thought that the issue of <i>Vorwärts</i>, the daily newspaper of the German Social Democracy, which reported how Social Democrats in Reichstag voted for the military credits, was a forgery of the Russian secret police destined to deceive the Russian workers. In that era of the military conflict that cut in half the European continent, how difficult it was to reject the notion that one should take sides in this conflict, and to fight against the “patriotic fervor” in one’s own country! How many great minds (inclusive of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/f/r.htm#freud-sigmund">Freud</a>) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks! This shock of 1914 was — in Badiou’s terms — a <em>desastre</em>, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but ALSO the socialist movement which accompanied it. Lenin himself (the Lenin of <i>What Is to Be Done?</i>) lost the ground under his feet — there is, in his desperate reaction, no satisfaction, no “I told you so!” THIS the moment of <em>Verzweiflung</em>, THIS catastrophe opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and only Lenin was the one at the level of this opening, the one to articulate the Truth of THIS catastrophe.<a href="#30">30</a> Through this moment of despair, the Lenin who, through reading Hegel, was able to detect the unique chance for revolution, was born. His <i>State and Revolution</i> is strictly correlative to this shattering experience — Lenin’s full subjective engagement in it is clear from this famous letter to <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/a.htm#kamenev">Kamenev</a> from July 1917: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“<em>Entre nous</em>: If they kill me, I ask you to publish my notebook “Marxism & the State” (stuck in Stockholm). It is bound in a blue cover. It is a collection of all the quotations from Marx & Engels, likewise from Kautsky against Pannekoek. There is a series of remarks & notes, formulations. I think with a week’s work it could be published. I consider it imp. for not only Plekhanov but also Kautsky got it wrong. Condition: all this is <em>entre nous</em>."<a href="#31">31</a></p>
<p>The existential engagement is here extreme, and the kernel of the Leninist “utopia” arises out of the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of the accounts with the <a href="../../../../../glossary/orgs/s/o.htm#socialist-international">Second International</a> orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state AS SUCH, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/b/u.htm#bureaucracy">bureaucracy</a>, in which all could take part in the administration of the social matters. This was for Lenin no theoretical project for some distant future — in October 1917, Lenin claimed that “we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituting of ten if not twenty million people."<a href="#32">32</a> This urge of the moment is the true utopia. One cannot overestimate the explosive potential of <i>The State and Revolution</i> — in this book, “the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.”<a href="#33">33</a> What then followed can be called, borrowing the title of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/a/l.htm#althusser-louis">Althusser</a>’s text on <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/machiavelli/index.htm">Machiavelli</a>, <em>la solitude de Lenine</em>: the time when he basically stood alone, struggling against the current in his own party. When, in his “<a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm">April Theses</a>” from 1917, Lenin discerned the <em>Augenblick</em>, the unique chance for a revolution, his proposals were first met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and <a href="../../../../../glossary/periodicals/p/r.htm#pravda"><i>Pravda</i></a> took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin’s “April Theses” — far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,"<a href="#34">34</a> and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy."<a href="#35">35</a> </p>
<p>“Lenin” is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism — recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word.” The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the “good old revolutionary times,” nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to “new conditions,” but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/i/m.htm#imperialism">imperialism</a> and colonialism, more precisely: after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn defined the CONCEPT of the XXth century as the time between 1914, the end of the long peaceful expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of the new form of global capitalism after the collapse of the Really Existing Socialism. What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990. “Lenin” stands for the compelling <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/f/r.htm#freedom">FREEDOM</a> to suspend the stale existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating <i>Denkverbot</i> in which we live — it simply means that we are allowed to think again. </p>
<p>One of the standard accusations against Lenin is that, insensible for the universal human dimension, he perceived all social events through the lenses of the class struggle, of “us against them.” However, are Lenin’s appeals against the patriotic fervor during the World War I not an exemplary case of practicing what Alain Badiou<a href="#36">36</a> calls the universal function of “humanity,” which has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/h/u.htm#humanism">humanism</a>.” This “humanity” is neither a notional abstraction, nor the pathetic imaginary assertion of the all-encompassing brotherhood, but a universal function which actualizes itself in unique ecstatic experiences, like those of the soldiers from the opposite trenches starting to fraternize. In Jaroslav Hasek’s legendary comical novel The <em>Good Soldier Schwejk</em>, the adventures of an ordinary Czech soldier who undermines the ruling order by simply following orders too literally, Schwejk finds himself at the frontline trenches in Galicia, where the Austrian army is confronting the Russians. When Austrian soldiers start to shoot, the desperate Schwejk runs into the no-man’s-land in front of their trenches, waving desperately his hands and shouting: “Don’t shoot! There are men on the other side!” This is what Lenin was aiming at in his call to the tired peasants and other working masses in the Summer of 1917 to stop fighting, dismissed as part of a ruthless strategy to win popular support and thus gain power, even if it meant the military defeat of one’s own country (recall the standard argument that, when, in the Spring of 1917, Lenin was allowed by the German state to pass on a sealed train through Germany on his way from Switzerland to Sweden, Finland and then Russia, he was de facto functioning as a German agent). </p>
<p>There is a long literary tradition of elevating the face to face encounter with an enemy soldier as THE authentic war experience (see the writings of Ernst Juenger, who celebrated such encounters in his memoirs of the trench attacks in World War I): soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy soldier in a face to face confrontation, looking him into the eyes before stabbing him. The singular experience of humanity occurs when the mystique of such a face to face encounter is rendered meaningless. The same sublime moment of solidarity took place in the battle for Stalingrad, when, on New Year’s Eve of December 31 1942, Russian actors and musicians visited the besieged city to entertain the troops; the violinist Mikhail Goldstein went to the trenches to perform a one-man concert for the soldiers: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“The melodies he created drifted out through loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow. </p>
<p class="quoteb">When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: ‘Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.'</p>
<p class="quoteb">Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach gavotte."<a href="#37">37</a></p>
<p>This same experience of humanity, of the meaninglessness of the conflict we are engaged in, can also take a much more mundane shape, that of a simple exchange of gazes which tells everything. During one of the anti-apartheid demonstrations in the old South Africa, when a troop of white policemen was dispersing and pursuing black demonstrators, a policeman was running after a black lady, a rubber truncheon in his hand. Unexpectedly, the lady lost one of her shoes; automatically obeying his “good manners,” the policeman picked up the shoes and gave it to her; at this moment, they exchanged glances and both became aware of the inanity of their situation — after such a gesture of politeness, i.e. after handling her the lost shoe and waiting for her to put it on again, it was simply IMPOSSIBLE for him to continue to run after her and to hit her with the truncheon; so, after politely nodding at her, the policeman turned around and walked away... The moral of this story is NOT that the policeman suddenly discovered his innate goodness, i.e. we are NOT dealing here with the case of natural goodness winning over the racist ideological training; on the contrary, in all probability, the policeman was — as to his psychological stance — a standard racist. What triumphed here was simply his “superficial” training in politeness. </p>
<p>When the policeman stretched his hand in order to pass the shoe, this gesture was more than a moment of physical contact. The white policeman and the black lady literally lived in two different socio-symbolic universes with no direct communication possible: for each of the two, the barrier which separated the two universes was for a brief moment suspended, and it was as if a hand from another, spectral, universe reached into one’s ordinary reality. The situation is similar to the scene in one of the early Joan Crawford films (<i>Possessed</i> from 1930), in which she plays a poor small town girl who, on her way home, has to stop before the rails since a train is passing slowly through the small town; through the wagon’s windows, she observes the wealthy life going on inside (a cook preparing an exquisite meal, a couple dancing...). It is as if she found herself in a cinema theatre, a spectator confronted with scenes of the life she longs for, scenes which are close, but nonetheless simultaneously somewhat ethereal, spectral, threatening to dissolve at any moment. And then, a true miracle occurs — when the train stops for a brief moment, an elder kind gentlemen is standing on the observation platform immediately in front of the girl, with his hand holding a glass with a drink stretching outwards, from the fantasmatic reality of the train to the everyday reality of the girl, and engages in a friendly conversation with her — a magical moments when the dream itself seems to intervene into our daily reality... The effect of this last shot resides in the way everyday reality itself — the scene of a train passing by an ordinary working girl — acquires the magic dimension of the poor girl encountering her dream. And it is against the background of this scene that one should interpret the eerie event which took place on the evening of November 7, 1942, when, in his special train rolling through Thuringia, Hitler was discussing the day’s major news with several aides in the dining car; since allied air raids had damaged the tracks, the train frequently slowed its passage: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“While dinner was served on exquisite china, the train stopped once more at a siding. A few feet away, a hospital train marked time, and from their tiered cots, wounded soldiers peered into the blazing light of the dining room where Hitler was immersed in conversation. Suddenly he looked up at the awed faces staring in at him. In great anger he ordered the curtains drawn, plunging his wounded warriors back into the darkness of their own bleak world."<a href="#38">38</a></p>
<p>The miracle of this scene is redoubled: on each side, they experienced what they saw through the window-frame as a fantasmatic apparition: for Hitler, it was a nightmarish view of the results of his military adventure; for the soldiers, it was the unexpected encounter with the Leader himself. The true miracle would have been here if a hand were to stretch through the window — say, Hitler reaching over to a wounded soldier. But, of course, it was precisely such an encounter, such an intrusion into his reality, that Hitler dreaded, so, instead of stretching his hand, he in panic ordered the curtains drawn. </p>
<h3>A Cyberspace Lenin? </h3>
<p>So what are we to say to the standard reproach of “extremism"? Lenin’s critique of the “<a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm">Leftism as the Child Illness of the Communism</a>” is more than actual in the last decades, in which Left often succumbed to the terrorist temptation. Political “extremism” or “excessive radicalism” should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to “go to the end.” What was the Jacobin’s recourse to radical “terror” if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called “excesses” of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard topos, shared by practically all the “postmodern” Leftists, according to which political “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/t/o.htm#totalitarianism">totalitarianism</a>” somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the “principle” of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political “terror” signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political “terror,” from Jacobins to <a href="../../../../../glossary/events/c/u.htm#cultural-revolution">Maoist Cultural Revolution</a>, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? </p>
<p>Recall Badiou’s exalted defense of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine for Lavoisier: “<em>La republique n'a pas de besoin de savants</em>. [The Republic has no need for scientists.]” Badiou’s thesis is that the truth of this statement emerges if we cut it short, depriving it of its caveat: “La republique n'a pas de besoins. [The Republic has no needs.]” The Republic gives body to the purely political logic of equality and freedom which should follow its path with no consideration for the “servicing of goods” destined to satisfy the needs of the individuals.<a href="#39">39</a> In the revolutionary process proper, freedom becomes an end-in-itself, caught in its own paroxysm — this suspension of the importance of the sphere of economy, of the (material) production, brings Badiou close to Hannah Arendt for whom, in a strict homology to Badiou, freedom is opposed to the domain of the provision of services and goods, of the maintenance of households and the exercise of administration, which do not belong to politics proper: the only place for freedom is the communal political space. In this precise sense, Badiou’s (and Sylvain Lazarus’<a href="#40">40</a>) plea for the reappraisal of Lenin is more ambiguous than it may appear: what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx’s key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics (“if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared ‘unpolitical’ — that is, naturalized — in liberal discourse”<a href="#41">41</a>). No wonder that the Lenin Badiou and Lazarus prefer is the Lenin of <em>What Is to Be Done?</em>, the Lenin who (in his thesis that the socialist-revolutionary consciousness has to be brought from without to the working class) breaks with Marx’s alleged “economism” and asserts the autonomy of the Political, NOT the Lenin of <em>The State and Revolution</em>, fascinated by the modern centralized industry, imagining the (depoliticized) ways to reorganize economy and the state apparatus. </p>
<p>What all the new French (or French oriented) theories of the political, from Balibar through Ranciere and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at is — to put it in the traditional philosophical terms — the reduction of the sphere of economy (of the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#production">material production</a>) to an “ontic” sphere deprived of the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/o/n.htm#ontology">ontological</a>” dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/r.htm#critique">critique</a> of political economy”: the structure of the universe of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/o.htm#commodity">commodities</a> and capital in Marx’s <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm"><i>Capital</i></a> is NOT just that of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental <i>a priori</i>, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations. The relationship between <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/c.htm#economics">economy</a> and <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/o.htm#politics">politics</a> is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the “two faces or a vase”: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them — one has to make a choice.<a href="#42">42</a> In the same way, one either focuses on the political, and the domain of economy is reduced to the empirical “servicing of goods,” or one focuses on economy, and politics is reduced to a theatre of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/a/p.htm#appearance">appearances</a>, to a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the arrival of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society, in which, as already Engels put it, the “administration of people” will vanish in the “administration of things.”<a href="#43">43</a> </p>
<p>The root of this notion of pure “politics,” radically autonomous with regard to history, society, economy, State, even Party, is Badiou’s opposition between Being and Event — it is here that Badiou remains “idealist.” From the materialist standpoint, an Event emerges “out of nowhere” within a specific constellation of Being — the space of an Event is the minimal “empty” distance between two beings, the “other” dimension which shines through this gap.<a href="#44">44</a> So when Badiou and Lazarus insist on the strict frontier between the Political and the Social (the domain of State, historicism...), they concede too much — namely, that SOCIETY EXISTS. They do not get the lesson, articulated by Laclau, that “society doesn’t exist,” that society is not a positive field, since the gap of the Political is inscribed into its very foundations (Marx’s name for the political which traverses the entire social body is “class struggle”). </p>
<p>Consequently, Lenin the ultimate political strategist should in no way be separated from Lenin the “technocrat” dreaming about the scientific reorganization of production. The greatness of Lenin is that, although he lacked the proper conceptual apparatus to think these two levels together, he was aware of the urgency to do it — an impossible, yet necessary, task.<a href="#45">45</a> What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n'y a pas de rapport...": if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp from the same neutral standpoint the two levels, although — or, rather, BECAUSE — these two levels are inextricably intertwined. The “political” class struggle takes place in the very midst of economy (recall that the very last paragraph of <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch52.htm"><em>Capital</em> III</a>, where the texts abruptly stops, tackles the class struggle), while, at the same time, the domain of economy serves as the key enabling us to decode political struggles. No wonder that the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius band: first, we have to progress from the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then, in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle in the very heart of the economy. </p>
<p>Here, Lenin’s stance against <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/c.htm#economism">economism</a> as well as against pure politics is crucial today, apropos of the split attitude towards economy in (what remains of) the radical circles: on the one hand, the above-mentioned pure “politicians” who abandon economy as the site of struggle and intervention; on the other hand, the economists, fascinated by the functioning of today’s global economy, who preclude any possibility of a political intervention proper. Today, more than ever, we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism — BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. The battle to be fought is thus a twofold one: first, yes, anti-capitalism. However, anti-capitalism without problematizing the capitalism’s POLITICAL form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient, no matter how “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/a.htm#radicalism">radical</a>” it is. Perhaps THE lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy which — as some Leftists claim — although engendered by capitalism, acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism. This lure is strictly correlative to its apparent opposite, to the pseudo-Deleuzian love-hate fascinating/fascinated poetic depiction of Capital as a rhizomatic monstre/vampire which deterritorializes and swallows all, indomitable, dynamic, ever raising from the dead, each crisis making it stronger, Dionysos-Phoenix reborn... It is in this poetic (anti)capitalist reference to Marx that Marx is really dead: appropriated when deprived of his political sting. </p>
<p>Marx was fascinated by the revolutionary “deterritorializing” impact of capitalism which, in its inexorable dynamics, undermines all stable traditional forms of human interaction; what he repproached capitalism with is that its “deterritorialization” was not thorough enough, that it generated new “reterritorializations” — the ultimate obstacle to capitalism is capitalism itself, i.e. capitalism unleashes a dynamics it is no longer be able to contain. Far from being outdated, this claim seems to gain actuality with today’s growing deadlocks of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/g/l.htm#globalisation">globalization</a> in which the inherently antagonistic nature of capitalism belies its worldwide triumph. However, the problem is: is it still possible to imagine <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/o.htm#communism">Communism</a> (or another form of post-capitalist society) as a formation which sets free the deterritorializing dynamics of capitalism, liberating it of its inherent constraints? Marx’s fundamental vision was that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. What Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism — if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment.<a href="#46">46</a> </p>
<p>While this constant self-propelling revolutionizing still holds for the high Stalinism with its total productive mobilization, the “stagnant” late Real Socialism legitimizes itself (between the lines, at least) as a society in which one can live peacefully, avoiding the capitalist competitive stress. This was the last line of defense when, from the late 60s onwards, after the fall of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/k/h.htm#khrushchev-nikita">Khrushchev</a> (the last enthusiast who, during his visit to the US, prophesied that “your grandchildren will be Communists”), it became clear that the Real Socialism was losing the competitive edge in its war with capitalism. So the stagnant late Real Socialism in a way already WAS “socialism with a human face": silently abandoning great historical tasks, it provided the security of the everyday life going on in a benevolent boredom. Today’s nostalgia for the defunct Socialism mostly consists in such a conservative nostalgia for the self-satisfied constrained way of life; even the nostalgic anti-capitalist artists from Peter Handke to Joseph Beuys celebrate this aspect of Socialism: the absence of stressful mobilization and frantic <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/o.htm#commodification">commodification</a>. Of course, this unexpected shift tells us something about the deficiency of the original Marxist project itself: it points towards the limitation of its goal of unleashed productive mobilization. </p>
<p>Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others — in a way, the once fashionable and today forgotten <a href="../us/fukuyama.htm">Francis Fukuyama</a> WAS right, global capitalism IS “the end of history.” A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints. Let us take the case of consumption: before modernity, we were dealing with the direct opposition between moderate consumption and its excess (gluttony, etc.); with capitalism, the excess (the consumption of “useless things”) becomes THE RULE, i.e. the elementary form of buying is the act of buying things we “do NOT really need.” And, perhaps, it is only today, in the global capitalism in its “postindustrial” digitalized form, that, to put it in Hegelian terms, the really-existing capitalism is reaching the level of its <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/n/o.htm#notion">notion</a>: perhaps, one should follow again <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#p105">Marx’s old anti-evolutionist motto</a> (incidentally, taken verbatim from <a href="../../../../../reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slsubjec.htm#SL166n_3">Hegel</a>) that the anatomy of man provides the key for the anatomy of a monkey, i.e. that, in order to deploy the inherent notional structure of a social formation, one must start with its most developed form. Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use- and <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/x.htm#exchange-value">exchange-value</a>: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values is acquires autonomy, is transformed into the spectre of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment. Marx derived the very notion of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/r.htm#crisis-capitalism">economic crisis</a> from this gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money — this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in ever stronger crises. The ultimate root of the crisis is for him the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people. It may appear that this analysis is more than actual today, when the tension between the virtual universe and the real is reaching almost palpably unbearable proportions: on the one hand, we have crazy solipsistic speculations about futures, mergers, etc., following their own inherent logic; on the other hand, reality is catching up in the guise of ecological catastrophes, poverty, the Third World collapse of social life, the Mad Cow Disease. This is why cyber-capitalists can appear as the paradigmatic capitalists today, this is why Bill Gates can dream of the cyberspace as providing the frame for what he calls “frictionless capitalism.” What we have here is an ideological short-circuit between the two version of the gap between reality and virtuality: the gap between real production and virtual spectral domain of the Capital, and the gap between experiential reality and virtual reality of cyberspace. It effectively seems that the cyberspace gap between my fascinating screen persona and the miserable flesh which is “me” off the screen translates into the immediate experience the gap between the Real of the speculative circulation of the capital and the drab reality of impoverished masses... However, is this — this recourse to “reality” which will sooner or later catch up with the virtual game — really the only way to operationalize a critique of capitalism? What if the problem of capitalism is not this solipsistic mad dance, but precisely the opposite: that it continues to disavow its gap with “reality,” that it presents itself as serving real needs of real people? The originality of Marx is that he played on both cards simultaneously: the origin of capitalist crises is the gap between use- and exchange-value, AND capitalism constrains the free deployment of productivity. </p>
<p>What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to REPEAT Marx’s “critique of political economy” without succumbing to the temptation of the multitude of the ideologies of “postindustrial” societies. The key change concerns the status of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#private-property">private property</a>: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who “really owns” the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/m/e.htm#means-production">means of production</a>. The ideal capitalist today functions in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, “really owning” nothing, even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, which is again borrowing money from banks, which may ultimately manipulate money owned by ordinary people like ourselves. With Bill Gates, the “private property of the means of production” becomes meaningless, at least in the standard meaning of the term. The paradox of this virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in the elementary particle physics. The mass of each element in our reality is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration of its movement, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself. Does today’s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way — his “net value” is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the future?<a href="#47">47</a> </p>
<p>So where is Lenin in all this? According to the predominant doxa, in the years after the October Revolution, Lenin’s decline of faith in the creative capacities of the masses led him to emphasize the role of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/c.htm#science">science</a> and the scientists, to rely on the authority of the expert: he hailed</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“the beginning of that very happy time when politics will recede into the background, /.../ and engineers and agronomists will do most of the talking."<a href="#48">48</a></p>
<p class="fst">Technocratic post-politics? Lenin’s ideas about how the road to socialism runs through the terrain of monopoly capitalism may appear dangerously naive today: </p>
<p class="quoteb">“Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers’ societies, and office employees unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible. /.../ our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. /.../ This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society."<a href="#49">49</a></p>
<p>Is this not the most radical expression of Marx’s notion of the general intellect regulating all social life in a transparent way, of the post-political world in which <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch01.htm#017">“administration of people” is supplanted by the “administration of things”</a>? It is, of course, easy to play against this quote the tune of the “critique on instrumental reason” and “administered world <em>/verwaltete Welt</em>/": the “totalitarian” potentials are inscribed in this very form of total social control. It is easy to remark sarcastically how, in the Stalinist epoch, the apparatus of social administration effectively became “even bigger.” Furthermore, is this postpolitical vision not the very opposite of the Maoist notion of the eternity of the class struggle (“everything is political”)? </p>
<p>Are, however, things really so unambiguous? What if one replaces the (obviously dated) example of the central bank with the World Wide Web, today’s perfect candidate for the General Intellect? Dorothy Sayers claimed that Aristotele’s <em>Poetics</em> effectively is the theory of the detective novels <i>avant la lettre</i> — since the poor Aristotle didn’t yet know of the detective novel, he had to refer to the only examples at his disposal, the tragedies... Along the same lines, Lenin was effectively developing the theory of a role of World Wide Web, but, since WWW was unknown to him, he had to refer to the unfortunate central banks. Consequently, can one also say that “without the World Wide Web socialism would be impossible. /.../ our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive”? In these conditions, one is tempted to resuscitate the old, opprobrious and half-forgotten, Marxian dialectics of the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#productive-forces">productive forces</a> and the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/e.htm#relations-production">relations of production</a>: it is already a commonplace to claim that, ironically, it was this very dialectics which buried the Really Existing Socialism: Socialism was not able to sustain the passage from industrial to postindustrial economy. However, does capitalism really provide the “natural” frame of the relations of production for the digital universe? Is there not in the World Wide Web an explosive potential also for capitalism itself? Is not the lesson of the <i>Microsoft</i> monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus (recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft Corporation), would it not be more “logical” just to SOCIALIZE it, rendering it freely accessible?<a href="#50">50</a> </p>
<p>So what about the basic reproach according to which, Lenin is irrelevant for us today because he remained stuck within the horizon of the industrial mass production (recall his celebration of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/f/o.htm#fordism">Fordism</a>)? The first thing to do here is to ask the elementary question: what is a factory? Leslie Kaplan’s essay-poem <i>L'exces-usine</i>,<a href="#51">51</a> with its description of the “Hell” of the factory life, renders palpable the dimension overlooked in the standard Marxist depictions of the workers’ “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/a/l.htm#alienation">alienation</a>.” Kaplan opposes the self-enclosed universe of the factory to the open environment of the previous work-process: the factory space is a timeless space in which fiction and reality ultimately coincide, i.e. the very reality of this space functions as the fantasmatic space cut off from its environs. What is lacking in this space is the full “background noise” which provides the life-world context to human individuals: in a factory, as Kaplan puts it, instead of the rich tapestry of the background-environment, there is only a whiteness — in short, it is as if, when we are in a factory, we enter an artificial universe which is deprived of the substantial wealth of the real-life texture. In this space, (historical-narrative) memory itself is threatened: workers are cut off their ancestral roots, and this also affects their utopian potentials themselves: reduced to robots endlessly repeating the same <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/m/e.htm#mechanisation">mechanical</a> gestures, they lose the very capacity to dream, to devise projects of alternate reality. What they experience is no longer the nostalgia for a determinate past (say, of their previous more “organic” farmers’ lives), but, as Kaplan puts it perspicuously, the “absolute nostalgia” for an empty Otherness whose sole positive content is, again, the factory life itself — say, the empty corridors of a factory. </p>
<p>So, within these coordinates, what does the passage from the factory production to the “postindustrial” production in which workers are again isolated and can even work at home, behind their computer screen, mean? The disabling alternative of today’s Marxism is: what to do apropos of the growing importance of the “<a href="../it/negri.htm">immaterial production</a>” today (cyber-workers)? Do we insist that only those involved in “real” material production are the working class, or do we accomplish the fateful step of accepting that the “symbolic workers” are the (true) proletarians today? One should resist this step, because it obfuscates the DIVISION between <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/g/o.htm#goods-and-services">immaterial and material production</a>, the SPLIT in the working class between (as a rule geographically separated) cyber-workers and material workers (programmers in the US or India, the sweat shops in China or Indonesia). Perhaps, it is the figure of the UNEMPLOYED (JOBLESS) who stands for the pure proletarian today: the unemployed substantial determination remains that of a worker, but they are prevented from actualizing it OR to renounce it, so they remain suspended in the potentiality of workers who cannot work. Perhaps, we are today in a sense “all jobless”: jobs tend to be more and more based on <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/o.htm#contract-labour">short term contracts</a>, so that the jobless state is the rule, the zero-level, and the temporary job the exception. </p>
<p>The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#profit">profit</a> can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music). And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? The key element of the new international trade agreements is the “protection of <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/i/n.htm#intellectual-property">intellectual property</a>”: whenever, in a merger, a big First World company takes over a <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/t/h.htm#third-world">Third World</a> company, the first thing they do is close down the research department. Phenomena emerge here which bring the notion of property to extraordinary dialectical paradoxes: in India, the local communities suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others... </p>
<p>However, the outcome of this crisis of the private property of the means of production is by no means guaranteed — it is HERE that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of the Stalinist society: against the capitalism which is the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/c/l.htm#class">class</a> society, but in principle <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/e/q.htm#equality">egalitarian</a>, without direct <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/g/r.htm#gd-hierarchy">hierarchical</a> divisions, the “mature” Stalinism is a classless society articulated in precisely defined hierarchical groups (top <em>nomenklatura</em>, technical intelligence, army...). What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the classic Marxist notion of the class struggle is no longer adequate to describe its hierarchy and domination: in the Soviet Union from the late 20s onwards, the key social division was not defined by property, but by the direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). And, perhaps, the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the same way Lenin’s vision of the “central bank Socialism” can be properly read only retroactively, from today’s World Wide Web, the Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed “post-property” society, of the true “late capitalism” in which the ruling class will be defined by the direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and control and to other material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but directly to run them, to have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top health care, etc. — privileges which will be acquired not by property, but by other (educational, managerial, etc.) mechanisms. </p>
<p>Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease — recall the series of events usually listed under the name of “Seattle.” The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue “seven years itch” is here — witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which — from the Time magazine to CNN — all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the “honest” protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one — how to ACTUALIZE the media’s accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key “Leninist” lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/o.htm#political-party">party</a> is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/o.htm#social-movement">New SOCIAL Movements</a>” is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: “You want revolution without a revolution!” Today’s blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the “long march through the institutions,” or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are “one issue movements” which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY. </p>
<p>Here, Lenin’s reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes’ discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.<a href="#52">52</a> Is this also not the case with today’s Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers’ grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It’s the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to “listen to their demands,” depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to “listen” to all — even if one insist on one’s demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements. </p>
<p>The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old ‘68 motto “<i>Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!</i>": in order to be truly a “realist,” one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears “possible” (or, as we usually out it, “feasible”). </p>
<h3>The Leninist Utopia </h3>
<p>Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn’t count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of <a href="../fr/merleaup.htm">Merleau-Ponty</a>, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his <i>Humanism and Terror</i>, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)<a href="#53">53</a>; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence — it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the <em>futur anterieur</em>, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth. </p>
<p>Let us recall the staged performance of “<a href="../../../../../subject/art/film/index.htm">Storming the Winter Palace</a>” in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event “really took place” three years earlier; their work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists, musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not “reality,” the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves — many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: “The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting”<a href="#54">54</a>; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that “some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical.”<a href="#55">55</a> We all remember the infamous self-celebratory First of May parades that were one of the supreme signs of recognition of the Stalinist regimes — if one needs a proof of how Leninism functioned in an entirely different way, are such performances not the supreme proof that the October Revolution was definitely NOT a simple coup d'etat by the small group of Bolsheviks, but an event which unleashed a tremendous emancipatory potential? </p>
<p>The archetypal Eisensteinian cinematic scene rendering the exuberant orgy of revolutionary destructive violence (what Eisenstein himself called “a veritable bacchanalia of destruction”) belongs to the same series: when, in October, the victorious revolutionaries penetrate the wine cellars of the Winter Palace, they indulge there in the ecstatic orgy of smashing thousands of the expensive wine bottles; in <i>Behzin Meadow</i>, after the village Pioneers discovers the body of the young Pavlik, brutally murdered by his own father, they force their way into the local church and desecrate it, robbing it of its relics, squabbling over an icon, sacrilegiously trying on vestments, heretically laughing at the statuary... In this suspension of the goal-oriented instrumental activity, we effectively get a kind of Bataillean “unrestrained expenditure” — the pious desire to deprive the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to have a revolution without revolution. It is against this background that one should approach the delicate issue of revolutionary violence which is an authentic act of liberation, not just a blind passage à l’acte.<a href="#56">56</a> </p>
<p>And did we not get exactly the same scene in the Great Cultural Revolution in China, with the thousands of Red Guardists ecstatically destroying old historical monuments, smashing old vases, desecrating old paintings, chirping off old walls?<a href="#57">57</a> In spite of (or, rather, because of) all its horrors, the Great Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of such an enacted utopia. At its very end, before the agitation was blocked by Mao himself (since he already achieved his goal of re-establishing his full power and getting rid of the top <em>nomenklatura</em> competition), there was the “Shanghai Commune”: one million workers who simply took the official slogans seriously, demanding the abolition of the State and even the Party itself, and the direct communal organization of society. It is significant that it was at this very point that Mao ordered the restoration of order. The (often noted) parallel between Mao and Lacan is fully justified here: the dissolution of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1979 was Lacan’s “Great Cultural Revolution,” mobilizing his young followers (who, incidentally, mostly were ex-Maoists from 1968!) in order to get rid of the inner circle of his “mandarins.” In both cases, the paradox is that of a leader who triggers an uncontrolled upheaval, while trying to exert full personal power — the paradoxical overlapping of extreme dictatorship and extreme emancipation of the masses. </p>
<p>It is at this precise point concerning political terror that one can locate the gap that separates Leninism from Stalinism<a href="#58">58</a>: in Lenin’s times, terror was openly admitted (<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/t/r.htm#trotsky">Trotsky</a> sometimes even boasted in an almost cocky way about the non-democratic nature of the Bolshevik regime and the terror it used), while in Stalin’s times, the symbolic status of the terror thoroughly changed: terror turned into the publicly non-acknowledged obscene shadowy supplement of the public official discourse. It is significant that the climax of terror (1936/37) took place after the new constitution was accepted in 1935 — this constitution was supposed to end the state of emergency and to mark the return of the things to normal: the suspension of the civil rights of the whole strata of population (kulaks, ex-capitalists) was recalled, the right to vote was now universal, etc. etc. The key idea of this constitution was that now, after the stabilization of the Socialist order and the annihilation of the enemy classes, the Soviet Union is no longer a class society: the subject of the State is no longer the working class (workers and peasants), but the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/e.htm#people">people</a>. However, this does NOT mean that the Stalinist constitution was a simple hypocrisy concealing the social reality — the possibility of terror is inscribed into its very core: since the class war is now proclaimed over and the Soviet Union is conceived of as the classless country of the People, those who (are still presumed to) oppose the regime are no longer mere class enemies in a conflict that tears apart the social body, but enemies of the people, insects, worthless scum, which is to be excluded from humanity itself. </p>
<p>This repression of the regime’s own excess was strictly correlative to something homologous to the invention of the liberal psychological individual not take place in the Soviet Union in the late 20s and early 30s. The Russian avant-garde art of the early 20s (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man — no longer the old man of sentimental passions and roots in traditions, but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine. As such, it was subversive in its very “ultra-orthodoxy,” i.e. in its over-identification with the core of the official ideology: the image of man that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, etc., emphasizes the beauty of his/her mechanical movements, his/her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/t/a.htm#taylorism">Taylorization</a>,” to the Fordist ribbon-work, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation: recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/b/e.htm#behaviourism">behaviorist</a>” approach to acting — no longer emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing, but the ruthless bodily training aimed at the cold bodily discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform the series of mechanized movements...<a href="#59">59</a> THIS is what was unbearable to AND IN the official Stalinist ideology, so that the Stalinist “<a href="../../../../../subject/art/index.htm">socialist realism</a>” effectively WAS an attempt to reassert a “Socialism with a human face,” i.e. to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of the traditional psychological individual: in the Socialist Realist texts, paintings and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global Machine, but as warm passionate persons. </p>
<p>In a recent pamphlet against the “excesses” of May '68 and, more generally, the “sexual liberation” of the 60s, <i>The Independent</i> brought back to memory what the radicals of '68 thought about the child sex. A quarter of a century ago, Daniel Cohn-Bendit wrote about his experience in a kindergarten: “My constant flirt with all the children soon took on erotic characteristics. I could really feel how from the age of five the small girls had already learned to make passes at me. /.../ Several times a few children opened the flies of my trousers and started to stroke me. /.../ When they insisted, I then stroked them.” <a href="../../../../../subject/women/authors/firestone-shulamith/dialectic-sex.htm">Shulamith Firestone</a> went even further, expressing her hopes that, in a world “without the incest taboo /.../ relations with children would include as much genital sex as they were capable of — probably considerably more than we now believe."<a href="#60">60</a> When confronted with these statements, Cohn-Bendit played them down, claiming that “this did not really happen, I only wanted to provoke people. When one reads it today, it is unacceptable.”<a href="#61">61</a> However, the question still hovers: how, at that time, was it possible to provoke people, presenting them sexual games with pre-school children as something appealing, while today, the same “provocation” would immediately give rise to an outburst of moral disgust? After all, child sexual harassment is one of THE notions of Evil today. Without directly taking sides in this debate, one should read it as a sign of the change in our mores from the utopian energies of the 60s and early 70s to the contemporary stale Political Correctness, in which every authentic encounter with another human being is denounced as a victimizing experience. What we are unable even to conjecture today is the idea of REVOLUTION, be it sexual or social. Perhaps, in today’s stale times of the proliferating pleas for tolerance, one should take the risk of recalling the liberating dimension of such “excesses.” </p>
<p>Perhaps the most succinct definition of ideology was produced by Christopher Hitchens, when he tackled the difficult question of what the North Koreans effectively think about their “Beloved Leader” Kim Yong Il: “mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.”<a href="#62">62</a> This paradox points towards the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/f/e.htm#fetishism">fetishistic</a> split in the very heart of an effectively functioning <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/i/d.htm#ideology">ideology</a>: individuals transpose their belief onto the big Other (embodied in the collective), which thus believes in their place — individuals thus remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance towards the “big Other” of the official discourse. It is not only the direct identification with the ideological “delusion” which would render individuals insane, but also the suspension of their (disavowed, displaced) belief. In other words, if individuals were to be deprived of this belief (projected onto the “big Other”), they would have to jump in and themselves directly assume the belief. (Perhaps, this explains the paradox that many a cynic turns into a sincere believer at the very point of the disintegration of the “official” belief.) This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/a/t.htm#atheism">God doesn’t exist</a>,” but “God is unconscious” — suffice it to recall what, in a letter to Max Brod, Milena Jesenska wrote about Kafka:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Above all, things like money, stock-exchange, the foreign currency administration, type-writer, are for him thoroughly mystical (what they effectively are, only not for us, the others).”<a href="#63">63</a></p>
<p class="fst">
One should read this statement against the background of <a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm#S4">Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism</a>: the fetishist illusion resides in our real social life, not in our perception of it — a bourgeois subject knows very well that there is nothing magic about <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/m/o.htm#money">money</a>, that money is just an object which stands for a set of social relations, but he nevertheless ACTS in real life as if he were to believe that money is a magic thing. This, then, gives us a precise insight into Kafka’s universe: Kafka was able to experience directly these fantasmatic beliefs we, “normal” people, disavow — Kafka’s “magic” is what Marx liked to refer to as the “theological freakishness” of commodities. </p>
<p>This definition of ideology points out the way to answer the boring standard reproach against the application of psychoanalysis to social-ideological processes: is it “legitimate” to expand the use of the notions which were originally deployed for the treatment of individuals, to collective entities and to speak, say, of religion as a “collective compulsive neurosis”? The focus of psychoanalysis is entirely different: the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply at a different level from the individual experience, but something to which the individual him/herself has to relate, which the individual him/herself has to experience as an order which is minimally “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/r/e.htm#reification">reified</a>,” externalized. The problem is therefore not “how to jump from the individual to the social level?”; the problem is: how should the decentered socio-symbolic order of institutionalized practices beliefs be structured, if the subject is to retain his/her “sanity,” his/her “normal” functioning? Which delusions should be deposited there so that individuals can remain sane? Recall the proverbial egotist, cynically dismissing the public system of moral norms: as a rule, such a subject can only function if this system is “out there,” publicly recognized, i.e. in order to be a private cynic, he has to presuppose the existence of naive other(s) who “really believe.” This is how a true “cultural revolution” should be conducted: not by directly targeting individuals, endeavouring to “re-educate” them, to “change their reactionary attitudes,” but by depriving individuals of the support in the “big Other,” in the institutional symbolic order. </p>
<p>When, on the weekend of March 6-7 2001, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan proceeded to destroy all “idols,” especially the two gigantic Buddha statues carved into the stone at Bamiyan, we got the usual spectacle of all the “civilized” nations unanimously condemning the “barbarism” of this act. All the known actors were here: from the UNICEF expressing concern about the desecration of an important part of the heritage of humanity, and the New York Metropolitan Museum offering to buy the statues, up to the Islamic states representatives and clerics eager to denounce the destruction as contrary to the spirit of Islam. This kind of protest means strictly NOTHING — it just contributes to the aseptic liberal (multi)cultural consensus. Instead of hypocritically bemoaning this destruction, one should rather ask the question: where do WE stand with regard to faith? Perhaps, therein resides the truly traumatic dimension of the destruction in Afghanistan: we have here people who REALLY BELIEVE. After the Taliban government made public its intention to destroy all statues, most of the Western media first thought that this is a bluff, part of the strategy to blackmail the Western powers into recognizing the Taliban regime and pouring the money into Afghanistan, if they do not execute the announced measure — now we know they meant it. And it is also not appropriate to compare this destruction with, say, the demolition of mosques by the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia a couple of years ago: this destruction was not a religious act, but a way to strike at the ethnic enemy. Even when, in European history, Catholics burned Protestant churches and books, they were trying to annihilate another religious sect. In today’s Afghanistan, on the contrary, there are no non-Muslims, no people to whom the Buddha statues are sacred objects, so their destruction is a pure act of annihilation with no roots in any actual ideologico-political struggles. </p>
<p>In the time of the Chinese Great Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard gangs were heinously destroying hundreds of monasteries with thousands of statues and other priceless historical artefacts, their frenetic activity displaying a desperate endeavor to cut off links with the reactionary ideological past. Recently, the Chinese strategy underwent a shift of accent: more than on sheer military coercion, they now rely on ethnic and economic colonization, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, where karaoke bars intermingle with the Disney-like “Buddhist theme parks” for the Western tourists. <a href="#64">64</a> What goes on beneath the media image of the brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorizing the Buddhist monks conceals is thus the much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the native Americans in the USA. Tibetan Buddhism survived the brutal Red Army onslaught — will it survive the much more artful economic colonization which, instead of directly attacking the material manifestations of a belief, undermines its very base, so that, even if Buddhism survives, it is deprived of its substance, turned into a simulacrum of itself? So when the Taliban minister of culture said “We are destroying just stones!”, he was in a way right: for a true Buddhist, the enlightenment/liberation of one single individual means more than all the statues! The true problem is that the Western economic-cultural colonization is doing more to undermine the life style within which Buddhism can thrive than all the Red Guards and Taliban militias combined: when Red Guards or the Taliban militias attack, it is still the direct violence and destruction and the struggle with one unconditional faith against another faith. </p>
<p>The problem with the Taliban regime is elsewhere. The Taliban state of Afghanistan is the prototypic postmodern state, an exemplary part of the contemporary global constellation, if there ever was one. First, its very emergence is the final result of the failure of the Soviet attempt, in the 70s and 80s, to impose <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/m/o.htm#modernism">modernization</a> on Afghanistan: the Taliban movement itself arose out of the religious groups financed by CIA through Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Secondly, if one is to believe the media, the whole economy of Afghanistan relies on opium: more than two thirds of the world opium crop comes from Afghanistan, and the Taliban government simply takes the 20% tax on the farmers’ income. The third feature: the Taliban government does not properly administer social affairs, it just rules. It is more or less totally indifferent towards of the well-being of its subjects, relying on the foreign aid or simply ignoring their plight. “Servicing the goods,” guaranteeing the well-being of the population, is simply not on their agenda — their sole preoccupation is the imposition of the strict religious order: while economy is more or less left to itself, the government takes care that all men have beards, that there are no TV sets and VCRs, that women are fully covered in public... </p>
<p>Far from being a traditional Islamic regime, the Taliban rule is thus thoroughly mediated by the process of modernization: relying on the (paradigmatically modern) split between economy and life-world, it combines the inclusion into the global market (the opium sales) with the ideological autarchy. So, paradoxically, we have here a twisted version of the unconditional Moral Majority rule which turns around the Western liberal state: instead of a state which limits itself to guaranteeing the material and institutional conditions for the well-being, while allowing individuals to pursue their own private life-styles, the Taliban state is interested ONLY in the life-style, leaving economy to itself, either to persist at a meager self-subsistence level or to export opium. In short, the Taliban state is ultimately nothing but a more radical and brutal version of the Singapore model of capitalism-cum-Asiatic-values? </p>
<h3>Return versus Repetition </h3>
<p>The entire history of the Soviet Union can be comprehended as homologous to Freud’s famous image of Rome, a city whose history is deposited in its present in the guise of the different layers of the archaeological remainders, each new level covering up the preceding none, like (another model) the seven layers of Troy, so that history, in its regress towards ever older epoches, proceeds like the archaeologist, discovering new layers by probing deeper and deeper into the ground. Was the (official ideological) history of the Soviet Union not the same accumulation of exclusions, of turning persons into non-persons, of retroactive rewriting of history? Quite logically, the “destalinization” was signalled by the opposite process of “rehabilitation,” of admitting “errors” in the past politics of the Party. The gradual “rehabilitation” of the demonized ex-leaders of the Bolsheviks can thus serve as perhaps the most sensitive index of how far (and in what direction) the “destalinization” of the Soviet Union was going. The first to be rehabilitated were the high military leaders shot in 1937 (Tukhachevsky and others); the last to be rehabilitated, already in the <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/g/o.htm#gorbachev-mikhail">Gorbachev</a> era, just before the collapse of the Communist regime, was <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/b/u.htm#bukharin-nikolai">Bukharin</a> — this last rehabilitation, of course, was a clear sign of the turn towards capitalism: the Bukharin which was rehabilitated was the one who, in the 20s, advocated the pact between workers and peasants (owners of their land), launching the famous slogan “Get rich!” and opposed forced collectivization. Significantly, however, one figure was NEVER rehabilitated, excluded by the Communists as well as by the anti-Communist Russian nationalists: Trotsky, the “wandering Jew” of the Revolution, the true anti-Stalin, the arch-enemy, opposing “permanent revolution” to the idea of “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/s/o.htm#socialism-in-one-country">building socialism in one country</a>.” One is tempted to risk here the parallel with Freud’s distinction between primordial (founding) and secondary repression in the Unconscious: Trotsky’s exclusion amounted to something like the “primordial repression” of the Soviet State, to something which cannot ever be readmitted through “rehabilitation,” since the entire Order relied on this negative gesture of exclusion. (It is fashionable to claim that the irony of Stalin’s politics from 1928 onwards was that it effectively WAS a kind of “<a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/e.htm#permanent-revolution">permanent revolution</a>,” a permanent state of emergency in which revolution repeatedly devoured its own children — however, this claim is misleading: the Stalinist terror is the paradoxical result of the attempt to STABILIZE the Soviet Union into a state like other, with firm boundaries and institutions, i.e. terror was a gesture of panic, a defense reaction against the threat to this State stability.) So Trotsky is the one for whom there is a place neither in the pre-1990 nor in the post-1990 capitalist universe in which even the Communist nostalgics don’t know what to do with Trotsky’s permanent revolution — perhaps, the signifier “Trotsky” is the most appropriate designation of that which is worth redeeming in the Leninist legacy. </p>
<p>The problem with those few remaining orthodox “Leninists” who behave as if one can simply recycle the old Leninism, continuing to speak on class struggle, on the betrayal by the corrupted leaders of the working masses revolutionary impulses, etc., is that it is not quite clear from which subjective position of enunciation they speak: they either engage themselves in passionate discussions about the past (demonstrating with admirable erudition how and where the anti-Communist “leninologists” falsify Lenin, etc.), in which case they avoid the question of why (apart from a purely historical interest) does this matter at all today, or, the closer they get to contemporary politics, the closer they are to adopting some purely jargonistic pose which threatens no one. When, in the last months of 2001, the Milosevic regime in Serbia was finally toppled, I was asked the same question from my radical friends from the West: “What about the coal miners whose strike led to the disruption of the electricity supply and thus effectively brought Milosevic down? Was that not a genuine workers’ movement, which was then manipulated by the politicians, who were nationalist or corrupted by the CIA?” The same symptomatic point emerges apropos of every new social upheaval (like the disintegration of the Real Socialism 10 years ago): in each of these cases, they identify some working class movement which allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, Socialist potential, but was first exploited and then betrayed by the procapitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that Revolution is round the corner: all we need is the authentic leadership which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarnosc was originally a worker’s democratic-socialist movement, later “betrayed” by being its leadership which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA... This mysterious working class whose revolutionary thrust is repeatedly thwarted by the treacherous nationalist and/or liberal politicians is one of the two fetishes of most of the remaining Trotskyites — the singular point of disavowal which enables them to sustain their overall interpretation of the state of things. This fetishist fixation on the old Marxist-Leninist frame is the exact opposite of the fashionable talk about “new paradigms,” about how we should leave behind the old “zombie-concepts” like working class, etc. — the two complementary ways to avoid the effort to THINK the New which effectively is emerging today. The first thing to do here is to cancel this disavowal by fully admitting that this “authentic” <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/r.htm#proletariat">working class</a> simply does not exist. (The other fetish is their belief that things took a bad turn in the Soviet Union only because Lenin did not succeed in joining forced with Trotsky in his effort to depose Stalin.) And if we add to this position four further ones, we get a pretty full picture of the sad predicament of today’s Left: the acceptance of the Cultural Wars (feminist, gay, anti-racist, etc., multiculturalist struggles) as the <a href="../../../../../glossary/terms/p/o.htm#political-terrain">dominant terrain</a> of the emancipatory politics; the purely defensive stance of protecting the achievements of the Welfare State; the naive belief in cybercommunism (the idea that the new media are directly creating conditions for a new authentic community); and, finally, the Third Way, the capitulation itself. The reference to Lenin should serve as the signifier of the effort to break the vicious circle of these false options. </p>
<p>John Berger recently made a salient point apropos of a French publicity poster of the internet investment brokers’ company Selftrade: under the image of a hammer and sickle cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds, the caption reads “And if the stock market profited everybody?” The strategy of this poster is obvious: today, the stock market fulfills the egalitarian Communist criteria, everybody can participate in it. Berger indulges in a simple mental experiment: “Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would of course not work. Why? The Swastika addressed potential victors not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice.”<a href="#65">65</a> In contrast to it, the Hammer and Sickle invoked the hope that “history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice.”<a href="#66">66</a> The irony is thus that, at the very moment when this hope is officially proclaimed dead by the hegemonic ideology of the “end of ideologies,” a paradigmatically “postindustrial” enterprise (is there anything more “postindustrial” than dealing with stocks on the internet?) has to mobilize this dormant hope in order to get its message through.<a href="#67">67</a> “Repeating Lenin” means giving new life to this hope which continues to still haunt us. </p>
<p>Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin — to repeat Lenin is to accept that “Lenin is dead,” that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. <a href="#68">68</a> To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was “in Lenin more than Lenin himself.” To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it’s not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a “totalitarian threat” — it’s rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, “out of sync” with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is “out of sync,” that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it?<a href="#69">69</a> If, to some people, such an assertion appears dangerously close to the infamous Hegel’s quip, when his deduction why there should be only eight planets circulating around the Sun was proven wrong by the discovery of the ninth planet (Pluto): “So much worse for the facts!”, then we should be ready to fully assume this paradox. </p>
<p>How did the ideology of Enlightenment evolve in the 18th century France? First, there was the epoch of salons, in which philosophers where trying to shock their benefactors, the generous Counts and Countesses, even Kings and Emperatrices (Holbach Frederick the Great, <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/d/i.htm#diderot-denis">Diderot</a> Catherine the Great), with their “radical” ideas on equality, the origin of power, the nature of men, etc. — all of this remaining a kind of intellectual game. At this stage, the idea that someone could take these ideas literally, as the blueprint for a radical socio-political transformation, would probably shock the ideologists themselves who were either part of the entourage of an enlightened nobleman or lone pathetic figures like <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/r/o.htm#rousseau-jean-jacques">Rousseau</a> — their reaction would have been that of Ivan Karamazov, disgusted upon learning that his bastard half-brother and servant acted on his nihilistic ruminations, killing his father. This passage from intellectual game to an idea which effectively “<a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm#32">seizes the masses</a>” is the moment of truth — in it, the intellectual gets back his own message in its inverted/true form. In France, we pass from the gentle reflections of Rousseau to the Jacobin Terror; within the history of Marxism, it is only with Lenin that this passage occurs, that the games are REALLY over. And it is up to us to repeat this same passage and accomplish the fateful step from the ludic “postmodern” radicalism to the domain in which the games are over. </p>
<p>There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the entire hitherto human history: from the prehistoric societies, it took primitivism, from the Ancient world slavery, from medieval society brutal domination, from capitalism exploitation, and from socialism the name...<a href="#70">70</a> Does something similar not hold about our attempt to repeat Lenin’s gesture? From the conservative cultural criticism, it takes the idea that today’s democracy is no longer the place where crucial decisions are made; from cyberspace ideologists the idea that the global digital network offers a new space of communal life; etc.etc., and from Lenin more or less just the name itself... However, this very fact could be turned in an argument FOR the “return to Lenin”: the extent to which the SIGNIFIER “Lenin” retains its subversive edge is easily demonstrated — say, when one makes the “Leninist” point that today’s democracy is exhausted, that the key decisions are not taken there, one is directly accused of “totalitarianism”; when a similar point is made by sociologists or even Vaclav Havel, they are praised for the depth of their insight... THIS resistance is the answer to the question “Why Lenin?”: it is the signifier “Lenin” which FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation. </p>
<h3>*</h3>
<p>The greatness of Lenin is that he WASN’T AFRAID TO SUCCEED — in contrast to the negative pathos discernible from Rosa Luxembourg to Adorno, where the only authentic act is the true failure, the failure which brings to light the antagonism of the constellation (what, apropos of Beethoven, Adorno says about the two modes of the artistic failure — the unauthentic, due simply to the authors subjective deficiency, and the authentic, which brings to light the limitation of the very objective social constellation — bears also on his own politics<a href="#71">71</a>). In 1917, instead of waiting for the right moment of maturity, Lenin organized a preemptive strike; in 1920, finding himself in a position of the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being killed in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, i.e. he fully accepted the paradox of the party organizing-creating its base, its working class. </p>
<p>Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in <a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/date/1917.htm">Lenin’s writings of 1917</a>, which cover the span from his initial grasp of the unique revolutionary chance (first elaborated in the “Letters From Afar”) to the “<a href="../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm">Letter to Central Committee Members</a>,” which finally convinced the Bolshevik majority that the moment to seize power has arrived. Everything is here, from “Lenin the ingenious revolutionary strategist” to “Lenin of the enacted utopia” (of the immediate abolishing of the state apparatuses). To refer to Kierkegaard, what we are allowed to perceive in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet “Lenin the Soviet institution,” but Lenin thrown into an OPEN situation. Are we, within our late capitalist closure of the “end of history,” still able to experience the shattering impact of such an authentic historical openness? </p>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<a name="1"></a>
<p class="fst">1. See Juergen Habermas, Die Neue Unuebersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1985. </p>
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<p class="fst">2. As to this notion, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso Books 1997. </p>
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<p class="fst">3. See Claude Lefort, La complication, Paris: Fayard 1999. </p>
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<p class="fst">4. For an Althusserian attempt to save Lenin’s Empiriocriticism, see Dominique Lecourt, Une crise et ses enjeux, Paris: Maspero 1973. </p>
<a name="5"></a>
<p class="fst">5. First published in 1990, then reprinted in Colletti, Fine della filosofia, Roma: Ideazione 1996. </p>
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<p class="fst">6. When, in a typical transferential pathos, Lenin repeats again and again how Marx and Engels always called their philosophy “dialectical materialism,” it is easy for an anti-Leninist Marxologue to draw attention to the fact that Marx and Engels NOT EVEN ONCE used this term (it was <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/p/l.htm#plekhanov">Georgi Plekhanov</a> who introduced it). This situation presented a nice deadlock to the Soviet editors of the collected works of Marx and Engels: in the Index, there HAD to be the entry “dialectical materialism,” which they then filled in with references to the pages where Marx or Engels speak of dialectics, of the materialist concept of history... However, this is not the whole story: there is a truth-effect in this hallucinatory projection of a later concept back into Marx. </p>
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<p class="fst">7. I owe this parallel to Eustache Kouvelakis, Paris (private conversation). </p>
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<p class="fst">8. For a more detailed critique of Adorno’s “predominance of the objective,” see <a href="zizek.htm">Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief</a>, London: Routledge 2001. </p>
<a name="9"></a>
<p class="fst">9. In a passage of his NoteBooks, Lenin comes to the edge of this insight when he notes how the very “abstraction” of thought, its “failure” to immediately grasp the object in its infinite complexity, its distance from the object, its stepping-back from it, brings us CLOSER to the “notion” of what the object effectively is: the very “one-sided” reduction the object to some of its abstract properties in the concept, this apparent “limitation” of our knowledge (sustaining the dream of a total intuitive knowledge) IS the very essence of knowledge... He comes to the edge of all this, and then again regresses to the predominant evolutionary notion of the infinite approaching to reality. </p>
<a name="10"></a>
<p class="fst">10. Quoted from V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, New York: International Publishers 1999, p. 40. </p>
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<p class="fst">11. Lenin, op.cit., p. 40-41. </p>
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<p class="fst">12. See Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” intervention at the conference Culture and Materiality, University of California, Davis, 23-25 April 1998. When today’s postmodern political philosophers emphasize the paradox of democracy, how democracy is possible only against the background of its impossibility, do they not reproduce the paradoxes of the Kantian practical reason discerned long ago by Hegel? </p>
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<p class="fst">13. See Eustache Kouvelakis’s commentary to L'Introduction a la Critique de la philosophie du droit de Hegel, Paris: Ellipses 2000. </p>
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<p class="fst">14. I owe this distinction to Alain Badiou (private conversation). </p>
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<p class="fst">15. This should be the answer to Veit Harlan, the Nazi director who, around 1950, despaired about the fact that Jews in the US did not show any understanding for his defense for making The Jew Suess, claimed that no American Jew can really understand what was his situation in the Nazi Germany: far from justifying him, this obscene (factual) truth is the ultimate lie. — At a different level, there are in Palestine today two opposite narratives (the Jewish and the Palestinian one) with absolutely no common horizon, no “synthesis” in a larger meta-narrative; the solution thus cannot be found in any all-encompassing narrative. </p>
<a name="16"></a>
<p class="fst">16. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2000, p. 237. </p>
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<p class="fst">17. This difference between interpretation and formalization is also crucial to introduce some (theoretical) order into the recent debates on the holocaust: although it is true that the holocaust cannot be adequately interpreted or narrated, in short: rendered meaningful, that all the attempts to do it fail and have to end in silence, it can and should be “formalized,” situated in its structural conditions of possibility. </p>
<a name="18"></a>
<p class="fst">18. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. — Along the similar lines, Habermas, Rorty’s great opponent, elevates the rise of “public space” of civil society, the space of free discussion that mediates between private lives and political/state apparatuses in the Enlightenment era. The problem is that this space of enlightened public debate was always redoubled by the fear of the irrational/passionate crowd which can, through the contamination (what Spinoza called imitatio affecti), explode into murderous violence based on superstitions manipulated by priests or other ideologists. So the enlightened space of rational debate was always based on certain exclusions: on the exclusion of those who were NOT considered “rational” enough (lower classes, women, children, savages, criminals...) — they needed the pressure of “irrational” authority to be kept in check, i.e. for them, Voltaire’s well-known motto “If there were no Gold, one would have to invent him” fully holds. </p>
<a name="19"></a>
<p class="fst">19. See Peter Singer, The Essential Singer: Writings on an Ethical Life, New York: Ecco Press 2000. </p>
<a name="20"></a>
<p class="fst">20. See Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (New York: Chronicle Books 1999). </p>
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<p class="fst">21. On account of its utter “realism,” The Worst-Case Scenario is a Western book par excellence; its Oriental counterpart is chindogu, arguably the finest spiritual achievement of Japan in the last decades, the art of inventing objects which are sublime in the strictest Kantian sense of the term — practically useless on account of their very excessive usefulness (say, glasses with electrically-run mini-windshields on them, so that your view will remain clear even if you have to walk in the rain without an umbrella; butter contained in a lipstick tube, so that you can carry it with you and spread it on the bread without a knife). That is to say, in order to be recognized, the chindogu objects have to meet two basic criteria: it should be possible to really construct them and they should work; simultaneously, they should not be “practical,” i.e. it should not be feasible to market them. The comparison between The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and chindogu offers us a unique insight into the difference between the Eastern and the Western sublime, an insight far superior to the New Age pseudo-philosophical treatises. In both cases, the effect of the Sublime resides in the way the uselessness of the product is the outcome of the extreme “realistic” and pragmatic approach itself. However, in the case of the West, we get simple, realistic advises for problems (situations) most of us will never encounter (who of us will really have to face alone a hungry lion?), while in the case of the East, we get unpractically complicated solutions for the problems all of us effectively encounter (who of us was not caught in the rain?). The Western sublime offers a practical solution for a problem which does not arise, while the Eastern sublime offers a useless solution for a real common problem. The underlying motto of the Eastern Sublime is “Why do it simply, when you can complicate it?” — is the principle of chindogu not discernible already in what appears to our Western eyes as the “impractical” clumsy form of the Japanese spoons? The underlying motto of the Western Sublime is, on the contrary, “If the problems do not fit our preferred way of solving them, let’s change problems, not the way we are used to solve them!” — is this principle not discernible in the sacred principle of Bureaucracy which has to invent problems in order to justify its existence which serves to solve them? </p>
<a name="22"></a>
<p class="fst">22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, London: Verso Books 1996. </p>
<a name="23"></a>
<p class="fst">23. In an incident at the US academia, a couple of years ago, a lesbian feminist claimed that gays are today the privileged victims, so that the analysis of how the gays are underprivileged provides the key to understanding all other exclusions, repressions, violences, etc. (religious, ethnic, class...). What is problematic with this thesis is precisely its implicit (or, in this case, explicit even) UNIVERSAL claim: it is making exemplary victims of those who are NOT that, of those who can be much easier than religious or ethnic Others (not to mention the socially — “class” — excluded) fully integrated into the public space, enjoying full rights. Here, one should approach the ambiguity of the connection between gay and class struggle. There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno — suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky’s infamous remark from his essay “Proletarian Humanism” (sic! — 1934): “Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear."(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, “Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland,” in Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky’s inciting statement, as well as Adorno’s reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the “revolutionary” paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their “sexual depravity”... In order to function as the support of a “totalitarian” community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed “dirty secret,” shared by those who are “in.” Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of “Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless... (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)"? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the “essentialist” mistake of dismissing the Rightist “militaristic” homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the “authentic” subversive homosexuality. </p>
<a name="24"></a>
<p class="fst">24. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 178. </p>
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<p class="fst">25. See Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce qui fait insigne (unpublished seminar 1984-85, the lecture on December 3 1984). </p>
<a name="26"></a>
<p class="fst">26. This also enables us to answer Dominick la Capra’s reproach according to which, the Lacanian notion of lack conflates two levels that have to be kept apart: the purely formal “ontological” lack constitutive of the symbolic order as such, and the particular traumatic experiences (exemplarily: holocaust) which could also NOT have occurred — particular historical catastrophes like the holocaust thus seem to be “legitimized” as directly grounded in the fundamental trauma that pertains to the very human existence. (See Dominick la Capra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry, Volume 25, Number 4 (Summer 1999), p. 696-727.) This distinction between structural and contingent-historical trauma, convincing as it may appear, is doubly inadequate in its reliance on the Kantian distinction between the formal/structural a priori and the contingent/empirical a posteriori. First, EVERY trauma, trauma “as such,” in its very concept, is experienced as something contingent, as an unexpected meaningless disturbance — trauma is by definition not “structural,” but something which disturbs the structural order. Secondly, the holocaust was NOT simply a historical contingency, but something which, in its unique combination of the mythical sacrifice with technological instrumental efficiency, realized a certain destructive potential inscribed into the very logic of the so-called Western civilization. We cannot adopt towards it the neutral position of a safe distance, from which we dismiss the holocaust as an unfortunate accident: the holocaust is in a way the “symptom” of our civilization, the singular point in which the universal repressed truth about it emerges. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, any account of the Western civilization which does not account for the holocaust thereby invalidates itself. </p>
<a name="27"></a>
<p class="fst">27. One possible counter-argument is here that the category of the tragic is not appropriate to analyze Stalinism: the problem is not that the original Marxist vision got subverted by its unintended consequences, it is this vision itself. If Lenin’s and even Marx’s project of Communism were to be fully realized as to their true core, things would have been MUCH WORSE than Stalinism — we would have a version of what Adorno and Horkheimer called “die verwaltete Welt (the administered society),” a totally self-transparent society run by the reified “general intellect” in which the last remainders of the human autonomy and freedom would have been obliterated... The way to answer this reproach is to draw the distinction between Marx’s analysis of the capitalist dynamic and his positive vision of Communism, as well as between this vision and the actuality of the revolutionary turmoil: what if Marx’s analysis of the capitalist dynamic is not dependent on his positive determinations of the Communist societies? And what if his theoretical expectations themselves were shattered by the actual revolutionary experience? (It is clear that Marx himself was surprised by the new political form of the Paris Commune.) </p>
<a name="28"></a>
<p class="fst">28. Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933-1943, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 2000. </p>
<a name="29"></a>
<p class="fst">29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1972, p. 112. </p>
<a name="30"></a>
<p class="fst">30. This passage is indebted to conversations with Sebastian Budgen (London) and Eustache Kouvelakis. </p>
<a name="31"></a>
<p class="fst">31. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress 1965, Volume 42, p. 67. </p>
<a name="32"></a>
<p class="fst">32. Quoted from Neil Harding, Leninism, Durham: Duke University Press 1996, p. 309. </p>
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<p class="fst">33. Harding, op.cit., p. 152. </p>
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<p class="fst">34. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 87. </p>
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<p class="fst">35. Ibid. </p>
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<p class="fst">36. See Alain Badiou, Conditions, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1992. </p>
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<p class="fst">37. William Craig, Enemy At the Gates, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2000, p. 307-308. </p>
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<p class="fst">38. Craig, op.cit., p. 153. </p>
<a name="39"></a>
<p class="fst">39. See Alain Badiou, “L'Un se divise en Deux,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001. </p>
<a name="40"></a>
<p class="fst">40. See Sylvain Lazarus, “La forme Parti,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin. </p>
<a name="41"></a>
<p class="fst">41. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, p. 14. </p>
<a name="42"></a>
<p class="fst">42. See Fredric Jameson, “The Concept of Revisionism,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001. </p>
<a name="43"></a>
<p class="fst">43. Is it not that the same “vase / two faces” paradox occurs in the case of the holocaust and gulag? We either elevate the holocaust into the ultimate crime, and the Stalinist terror is thereby half-redeemed, reduced to a minor role of an “ordinary” crime; or we focus on the gulag as the ultimate result of the logic of the modern revolutionary terror, and the holocaust is thereby at best reduced to another example of the same logic. Somehow, it doesn’t seem possible to deploy a truly “neutral” theory of totalitarianism, without giving a hidden preference either to the holocaust or to gulag. </p>
<a name="44"></a>
<p class="fst">44. For a more detailed elaboration of this point, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief. </p>
<a name="45"></a>
<p class="fst">45. And the achievement of <a href="../../../../../glossary/people/l/u.htm#lukacs-georg">Georg Lukacs</a>’ <i>History and Class Consciousness</i> is that it is one of the few works which succeed in bringing these two dimensions together: on the one hand, the topic of commodity fetishism and reification; on the other hand, the topic of the party and revolutionary strategy — the reason why this book is profoundly Leninist. </p>
<a name="46"></a>
<p class="fst">46. For a further development of this point, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, London: Verso Books 2000. — It is often said that the ultimate product of capitalism are piles of trash — useless computers, cars, TVs and VCRs ...: places like the famous “resting place” of the hundreds of abandoned planes in the Mojave desert confront us with the obverse truth of the capitalist dynamics, its inert objectal remainder. And it is against this background that one should read the ecological dream-notion of the total recycling (in which every remainder is used again) as the ultimate capitalist dream, even if it is coated in the terms of retaining the natural balance on the Planet Earth: the dream of the self-propelling circulation of the capital which would succeed in leaving behind no material leftover — the proof of how capitalism can appropriate ideologies which seem to oppose it. </p>
<a name="47"></a>
<p class="fst">47. Another figure of this inexplicable excess occurs in many cinema comedies in which the hero, stranded alone in a small town, is forced to take his expensive car to the local mechanic who, to the hero’s horror, proceeds to take the whole car to pieces; when, a day or two later, the mechanic puts the car together again, to everyone’s surprise, it runs perfectly, although there are always a piece or two standing aside, the remainders that the mechanic did not find the place for when putting the car together... </p>
<a name="48"></a>
<p class="fst">48. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 168. </p>
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<p class="fst">49. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 146. </p>
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<p class="fst">50. In this context, the myth to be debunked is that of the diminishing role of the state. What we are witnessing today is the shift in its functions: while partially withdrawing from its welfare functions, the state is strengthening its apparatuses in other domains of social regulation. In order to start a business now, one has to rely on the state to guarantee not only law and order, but the entire infrastructure (access to water and energy, means of transportation, ecological criteria, international regulations, etc.), in an incomparably larger extent than 100 years ago. The recent electricity supply debacle in California makes this point palpable: for a couple of weeks in January and February 2001, the privatization (“deregulation”) of the electricity supply changed Southern California, one of the highly developed “postindustrial” landscapes in the entire world, into a Third World country with regular black-outs. Of course, the defenders of deregulation claimed that it was not thorough enough, thereby engaging in the old false syllogism of “my fiancee is never late for the appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancee": deregulation by definition works, so if it doesn’t work, it wasn’t truly a deregulation... Does the recent Mad Cow Disease panic (which probably presages dozens of similar phenomena which await us in the near future) also not point towards the need for a strict state and global institutionalized control of the agriculture? </p>
<a name="51"></a>
<p class="fst">51. See Leslie Kaplan, L'exces-usine, Paris: Hachette 1984. </p>
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<p class="fst">52. I owe this point to Alan Shandro’s intervention “Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony” at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin. </p>
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<p class="fst">53. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: the Communist Problem, Oxford: Polity Press 2000. </p>
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<p class="fst">54. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 144. </p>
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<p class="fst">55. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, op.cit., p. 144. </p>
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<p class="fst">56. With regard to this point, the crucial figure of the Soviet cinema is not Eisenstein, but Alexander Medvedkin, appropriately named by Christ Marker “the last Bolshevik” (see Marker’s outstanding documentary The Last Bolshevik from 1993). While wholeheartedly supportive of the official politics, inclusive of the forced collectivization, Medvedkin made films which staged this support in a way which retained the initial ludic utopian-subversive revolutionary impulse; say, in his Happiness from 1935, in order to combat religion, he shows a priest who imagines seeing the breasts of a nun through her habit — un unheard-of scene for the Soviet film of the 30s. Medvedkin thus enjoys the unique privilege of an enthusiastically orthodox Communist film-maker whose films were ALL prohibited or at least heavily censored. </p>
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<p class="fst">57. Although it is also possible to argue that this violence effectively WAS an impotent passage a l'acte: an outburst which displayed the inability to break with the weight of the past symbolic tradition. In order to effectively get rid of the past, one does not need to physically smash the monuments — changing them into a part of the tourist industry is much more effective. Is this not what Tibetans are painfully discovering today? The true destruction of their culture will not occur through the Chinese destroying their monuments, but through the proliferation of the Buddhist Theme Parks in the downtown Lhasa. </p>
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<p class="fst">58. One is tempted to question the very term “Leninism": is it not that it was invented under Stalin? And does the same not go for Marxism (as a teaching) which was basically a Leninist invention, so that Marxism is a Leninist notion and Leninism a Stalinist one? </p>
<a name="59"></a>
<p class="fst">59. See Chapters 2 and 3 of Susan Buck-Morss’s outstanding Dreamworld and Catastrophe. </p>
<a name="60"></a>
<p class="fst">60. Both quotes from Maureen Freely, “Polymorphous sexuality in the Sixties,” The Independent, 29 January 2001, The Monday Review, p. 4. </p>
<a name="61"></a>
<p class="fst">61. Quoted from Konkret, Heft 3 (March 2001), p. 9. </p>
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<p class="fst">62. Christopher Hitchens, “Visit To a Small Planet,” Vanity Fair, January 2001, p. 24. </p>
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<p class="fst">63. Quoted from Jana Cerna, Kafka’s Milena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993, p. 174. </p>
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<p class="fst">64. One of the ultimate obscenities of the modern stance towards belief was formulated by the Chinese Communist Party: in the mid 90s, when the Chinese authorities claimed that THEIR Panchen Lama was the right one, not the one chosen and recognized by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, they accused the Dalai Lama of not respecting the old Buddhist tradition, of giving preference to political considerations over the old religious rules. So we had a Communist Party claiming that the birth of the child they identified as the Panchen Lama (who, as if by an accident, was born into a family of Communist cadres!) was accompanied by miraculous appearances on the sky, that, already when one year old, he displayed supernatural capacities. </p>
<a name="65"></a>
<p class="fst">65. John Berger, “The hammer and sickle,” in Janus 5 (2000), p. 16. </p>
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<p class="fst">66. Berger, op.cit., p. 17. </p>
<a name="67"></a>
<p class="fst">67. Or, to indulge in a similar mental experiment: in the last days of the Really Existing Socialism, the protesting crowds often sang the official songs, including national anthems, reminding the powers of their unfulfilled promises. What better thing for an East German crowd to do in 1989 than to simply sing the GDR national anthem? Because its words (“Deutschland einig Vaterland”) no longer fitted the emphasis on East Germans as a new Socialist nation, it was PROHIBITED to sing it in public from late 50s to 1989: at the official ceremonies, only the orchestral version was performed. (The GDR was thus a unique country in which singing the national anthem was a criminal act!). Can one imagine the same thing under Nazism? </p>
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<p class="fst">68. One should, perhaps, rehabilitate Marx’s (implicit) distinction between the working class (an “objective” social category, the topic of sociological studies) and the proletariat (a certain SUBJECTIVE position — the class “for itself,” the embodiment of social negativity, to use the old rather unfortunate expression). Instead of searching for the disappearing working class, one should rather ask: who occupies, who is able to subjectivize, today its position as proletarian? </p>
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<p class="fst">69. At a more general methodological level, one should also turn around the standard pseudo-Nietzschean view according to which, the past we construct in our historiography is a symptom, an articulation of our present problems: what if, on the contrary, we ourselves — our present — is a symptom of the unresolved deadlocks of the past? </p>
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<p class="fst">70. For a detailed Lacanian reading of this joke, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press 1993. </p>
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<p class="fst">71. See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993, p. 32. <br>
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Repeating Lenin
Slavoj Zizek
Lenin’s Choice
Source: lacan.com;
Mark-up: Styled and linked to Zizek's sources by Andy Blunden.
The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: Marx is OK, even on Wall Street, there are people who love him today — Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist dynamics, Marx of the Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives -, but Lenin, no, you can’t be serious! The working class movement, revolutionary Party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn’t Lenin stand precisely for the FAILURE to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the entire XXth century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in the contemporary academic politics, the idea to deal with Lenin is accompanied by two qualifications: yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought... however, one should treat Lenin in an “objective critical and scientific way,” not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from the perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights — therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the XXth century totalitarianisms.
What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications which can be easily discerned by the “concrete analysis of the concrete situation,” as Lenin himself would have put it. “Fidelity to the democratic consensus” means the acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns, and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose socio-political order would be different. In short, it means: say and write whatever you want — on condition that what you do, does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophe, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, the growing violence not only in the far-away countries, but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives... there is nothing easier today than to get international, state or corporate funds for a multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, the prohibition to think. Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late 60s — the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!” The ideological function of the constant reference to the holocaust, gulag and the more recent Third World catastrophes is thus to serve as the support of this Denkverbot by constantly reminding us how things may have been much worse: “Just look around and see for yourself what will happen if we follow your radical notions!” And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for “scientific objectivity” means: the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point on which one cannot and should not concede: today, the actual freedom of thought means the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic “post-ideological” consensus — or it means nothing.
Habermas designated the present era as that of the neue Undurchsichtlichkeit — the new opacity.1 More than ever, our daily experience is mystifying: modernization generates new obscurantisms, the reduction of freedom is presented to us as the arrival of new freedoms. In these circumstances, one should be especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which SEEMS to dominate. More then ever, one should bear in mind Walter Benjamin’s reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself to stay with regard to social struggles — one should also ask how it effectively functions IN these very struggles. In sex, the effectively hegemonic attitude is not patriarchal repression, but free promiscuity; in art, provocations in the style of the notorious “Sensation” exhibitions ARE the norm, the example of the art fully integrated into the establishment.
One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx’s thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT to succumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitably ends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: “what can one do against the global capital?”), but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act, this act will not be performed in an empty space — it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonic ideological coordinates: those who “really want to do something to help people” get involved in (undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if they seemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do not respect ecological conditions or which use child labor) — they are tolerated and supported as long as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity2: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!”
Let us take two predominant topics of today’s American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, “postcolonial studies” tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities’ “right to narrate” their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress “otherness,” so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance towards the “Stranger in Ourselves,” in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves — the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The true corruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included — up to a point), but conceptual: notions of the “European” critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of the Cultural Studies chic.
My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!” Symptomatic is here the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October — in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture towards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obliges no one to anything determinate.
It is true that, today, it is the radical populist Right which is usually breaking the (still) predominant liberal-democratic consensus, gradually rendering acceptable the hitherto excluded topics (the partial justification of Fascism, the need to constrain abstract citizenship on behalf of ethnic identity, etc.). However, the hegemonic liberal democracy is using this fact to blackmail the Left radicals: “we shouldn’t play with fire: against the new Rightist onslaught, one should more than ever insist on the democratic consensus — any criticism of it willingly or unwillingly helps the new Right!” This is the key line of separation: one should reject this blackmail, taking the risk of disturbing the liberal consensus, up to questioning the very notion of democracy.
So how are we to respond to the eternal dilemma of the radical Left: should one strategical support center-Left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should one adopt the stance of “it doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t get involved in these fights — in a way, it is even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation"? The answer is the variation of old Stalin’s answer to the question “Which deviation is worse, the Rightist or the Leftist one?": THEY ARE BOTH WORSE. What one should do is to adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox: in principle, of course, one should be indifferent towards the struggle between the liberal and conservative pole of today’s official politics — however, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power. Otherwise, the price to be paid may appear much too high — recall the catastrophic consequences of the decision of the German Communist Party in the early 30s NOT to focus on the struggle against the Nazis, with the justification that the Nazi dictatorship is the last desperate stage of the capitalist domination, which will open eyes to the working class, shattering their belief in the “bourgeois” democratic institutions. Along these lines, Claude Lefort himself, whom no one can accuse of communist sympathies, recently made a crucial point in his answer to Francois Furet: today’s liberal consensus is the result of 150 years of the Leftist workers’ struggle and pressure upon the State, it incorporated demands which were 100 or even less years ago dismissed by liberals as horror.3 As a proof, one should just look at the list of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto: apart from 2 or 3 of them (which, of course, are the key one), all others are today part of the consensus (at least the disintegrating Welfare State one): the universal vote, the right to free education, universal healthcare and care for the retired, limitation of child labor...
Interpretation versus Formalization
So where are we to begin? In the present climate of the New Age obscurantism, it may appear attractive to reassert the lesson of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism: in today’s popular reading of quantum physics, as in Lenin’s times, the doxa is that science itself finally overcame materialism — matter is supposed to “disappear,” to dissolve in the immaterial waves of energy fields.4 It is also true (as Lucio Colletti emphasized), that Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical and the scientific notion of matter, according to which, since the philosophical notion of matter as reality existing independently of mind precludes any intervention of philosophy into sciences, the very notion of “dialectics in/of nature” is thoroughly undermined. However... the “however” concerns the fact that, in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, there is NO PLACE FOR DIALECTICS, FOR HEGEL. What are Lenin’s basic theses? The rejection to reduce knowledge to phenomenalist or pragmatic instrumentalism (i.e., the assertion that, in scientific knowledge, we get to know the way things exist independently of our minds — the infamous “theory of reflection”), coupled with the insistence of the precarious nature of our knowledge (which is always limited, relative, and “reflects” external reality only in the infinite process of approximation). Does this not sound familiar? Is this, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, not the basic position of Karl Popper, the archetypal anti-Hegelian? In his short article “Lenin and Popper,"5 Colletti recalls how, in a private letter from 1970, first published in Die Zeit, Popper effectively wrote: “Lenin’s book on empiriocriticism is, in my opinion, truly excellent."6
This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the Philosophical Notebooks from 1915, in spite of Lenin’s rediscovery of Hegel — why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his “negative dialectics”: how to combine Hegel’s legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the “predominance of the objective” (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the “theory of reflection” according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).7 However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of objective reality OUTSIDE the thought’s subjective mediation, but by insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive “objective reality,” never being able to grasp it in it infinite complexity.8 The problem with Lenin’s “theory of reflection” resides in its implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it “reflects.” The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality (distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects — only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see the whole of reality “the way it really is.”9
This, of course, in no way entails that the tracing of the difference between idealism and materialism is today not more crucial than ever: one should only proceed in a truly Leninist way, discerning — through the “concrete analysis of concrete circumstances” — WHERE this line of separation runs. One is thus tempted to claim that, even WITHIN the field of religion, the singular point of the emergence of materialism is signalled by Christ’s words on the cross “Father, why have you forsaken me?” — in this moment of total abandonment, the subject experiences and fully assumes the inexistence of the big Other. More generally, the line of division is that between the “idealist” Socratic-Gnostic tradition claiming that the truth is within us, just to be (re)discovered through an inner journey, and the Judeo-Christian “materialist” notion that truth can only emerge from an EXTERNAL traumatic encounter which shatters the subject’s balance. “Truth” requires an effort in which we have to fight our “spontaneous” tendency.
And what if we were to connect this notion of the truth emerging from an external encounter with the (in)famous Lenin’s notion, from What Is to Be Done?, of how the working class cannot achieve its adequate class consciousness “spontaneously,” through its own “organic” development, i.e. of how this truth has to be introduced into it from outside (by the Party intellectuals)? In quoting Kautsky at this place, Lenin makes a significant change in his paraphrase: while Kautsky speaks of how the non-working-class intellectuals, who are OUTSIDE THE CLASS STRUGGLE, should introduce SCIENCE (providing objective knowledge of history) to the working class, Lenin speaks of CONSCIOUSNESS which should be introduced from outside by intellectuals who are outside the ECONOMIC struggle, NOT outside the class struggle! Here is the passage from Kautsky which Lenin quotes approvingly —
“/.../ socialism and class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. /.../ The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia /.../ Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously."10
— and here is Lenin’s paraphrase of it:
“ /.../ all worship of the spontaneity of the working-class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element,’ of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon workers. /.../ the only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course /.../ the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology /.../ for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism."11
It may SOUND the same, but it’s NOT: in Kautsky, there is no space for politics proper, just the combination of the social (working class and its struggle, from which intellectuals are implicitly EXCLUDED) and the pure neutral classless, asubjective, knowledge of these intellectuals. In Lenin, on the contrary, “intellectuals” themselves are caught in the conflict of IDEOLOGIES (i.e. the ideological class struggle) which is unsurpassable. (It was already Marx who made this point, from his youth when he dreamt of the unity of German Idealist philosophy and the French revolutionary masses, to his insistence, in late years, that the leadership of the International should under no conditions be left to the English workers: although the most numerous and best organized, they — in contrast to German workers — lack theoretical stringency.)
The key question thus concerns the exact STATUS of this externality: is it simply the externality of an impartial “objective” scientist who, after studying history and establishing that, in the long run, the working class has a great future ahead, decides to join the winning side? So when Lenin says “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. (This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests.) Why not, then, shamelessly and courageously ENDORSE the boring standard reproach according to which, Marxism is a “secularized religion,” with Lenin as the Messiah, etc.? Yes, assuming the proletarian standpoint IS EXACTLY like making a leap of faith and assuming a full subjective engagement for its Cause; yes, the “truth” of Marxism is perceptible only to those who accomplish this leap, NOT to any neutral observers. What the EXTERNALITY means here is that this truth is nonetheless UNIVERSAL, not just the “point-of-view” of a particular historical subject: “external” intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive ITS OWN PLACE within the social totality which enables it to accomplish its “mission” — this insight has to be mediated through an external element.
And why not link these two externalities (that of the traumatic experience of the divine Real, and that of the Party) to the third one, that of the ANALYST in the psychoanalytic cure? In all three cases, we are dealing with the same impossibility which bears witness to a materialist obstacle: it is not possible for the believer to “discover God in himself,” through self-immersion, by spontaneously realizing its own Self — God must intervene from outside, disturbing our balance; it is not possible for the working class to actualize spontaneously its historical mission — the Party must intervene from outside, shaking it out of its self-indulgent spontaneity; it is not possible for the patient/analyst to analyze himself — in contrast to the Gnostic self-immersion, in psychoanalysis, there is no self-analysis proper, analysis is only possible if a foreign kernel which gives body to the object-cause of the subject’s desire. Why, then, this impossibility? Precisely because neither of the three subjects (believer, proletarian, analyst) is a self-centered agent of self-mediation, but a decentered agent struggling with a foreign kernel. God, Analyst, Party — the three forms of the “subject supposed to know,” of the transferential object, which is why, in all three cases, one hears the claim “God/Analyst/ the Party is always right”; and, as it was clear already to Kierkegaard, the truth of this statement is always its negative — MAN is always wrong. This external element does not stand for objective knowledge, i.e. its externality is strictly INTERNAL: the need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never “fully itself.”
In his Introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx already deploys something like the logic of hegemony: the emergence of a “universal class,” a particular class which imposes itself as universal, engendering global enthusiasm, standing for society AS SUCH against the ancien regime, anti-social crime AS SUCH (like bourgeoisie in the French revolution). After follows the disillusion so sarcastically described by Marx: the day after, the gap between universal and particular becomes visible again, capitalist vulgar profit as the actuality of universal freedom, etc. — For Marx, of course, the only universal class whose singularity (exclusion from society of property) guarantees its ACTUAL universality, is the proletariat. This is what Ernesto Laclau rejects in his logic of hegemony: for Laclau, the short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular is ALWAYS illusory, temporary, a kind of “transcendental paralogism.”12 However, is Marx’s proletariat really the negative of positive full essential humanity, or “only” the gap of universality AS SUCH, irrecoverable in any positivity?13 In Alain Badiou’s terms, proletariat is not another PARTICULAR class, but a SINGULARITY of the social structure, and AS SUCH the universal class, the non-class among the classes.
What is crucial here is the properly temporal-dialectical tension between the Universal and the Particular. When Marx says that, in Germany, because of the compromised pettiness of the bourgeoisie, it is too late for the partial bourgeois emancipation, and that, because of it, in Germany, the condition of every particular emancipation is the UNIVERSAL emancipation, one way to read this is to see in it the assertion of the universal “normal” paradigm and its exception: in the “normal” case, partial (false) bourgeois emancipation will be followed by the universal emancipation through the proletarian revolution, while in Germany, the “normal” order gets mixed up. There is, however, another, much more radical way to read it: the very German exception, the inability of its bourgeoisie to achieve partial emancipation, opens up the space for the possible UNIVERSAL emancipation. The dimension of universality thus emerges (only) where the “normal” order enchaining the succession of the particulars is perturbed. Because of this, there is no “normal” revolution, EACH revolutionary explosion is grounded in an exception, in a short-circuit of “too late” and “too early.” The French Revolution occurred because France was not able to follow the “normal” English path of capitalist development; the very “normal” English path resulted in the “unnatural” division of labor between the capitalists who hold socio-economic power and the aristocracy to which was left the political power.
One can also make the same point in the terms of the opposition between interpretation and formalization14: the external agent (Party, God, Analyst) is NOT the one who “understands us better than ourselves,” who can provide the true interpretation of what our acts and statements mean; it rather stands for the FORM of our activity. Say, Marx’s deployment of the commodity form in the Chapter 1 of Capital is NOT a “narrative,” a Vorstellung, but a Darstellung, the deployment of the inner structure of the universe of merchandises — the narrative is, on the contrary, the story of the “primitive accumulation,” the myth capitalism proposes about its own origins. (Along the same lines, Hegel’s Phenomenology — contrary to Rorty’s reading — does not propose a large narrative, but the FORM of subjectivity; as Hegel himself emphasizes in the Foreword, it focuses on the “formal aspect /das Formelle/.15 This is how one should approach the absence of large all-encompassing narratives today — recall Fredric Jameson’s supple description of the deadlock of the dialogue between the Western New Left and the Eastern European dissidents, of the absence of any common language between them:
“To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant replies in its own favorite language."16
Jameson at the same time insists that Marxism still provides the universal meta-language enabling us to situate and relate all other partial narrativizations/interpretations — is he simply inconsistent? Are there two Jamesons: one, postmodern, the theorist of the irreducible multiplicity of the narratives, the other, the more traditional partisan of the Marxist universal hermeneutics? The only way to save Jameson from this predicament is to insist that Marxism is here not the all-encompassing interpretive horizon, but the matrix which enables us to account for (to generate) the multiplicity of narratives and/or interpretations. It is also here that one should introduce the key dialectical distinction between the FOUNDING figure of a movement and the later figure who FORMALIZED this movement: ultimately, it was Lenin who effectively “formalized” Marx by way of defining the Party as the political form of its historical intervention, in the same way that St. Paul “formalized” Christ and Lacan “formalized” Freud.17
This formalization is strictly correlative to focusing on the Real of an antagonism: “class struggle” is not the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the formal generative matrix of the different ideological horizons of understanding. That is to say, one should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with “formalism,” with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which “colors” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, which means that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.
Of Apes and Men
Lenin’s legacy to be reinvented today is the politics of truth. We live in the “postmodern” era in which truth-claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power-mechanisms — as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question, apropos of some statement, “Is it true?”, is supplanted by the question “Under what power conditions can this statement be uttered?”. What we get instead of the universal truth is the multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. THE two philosophers of today’s global capitalism are the two great Left-liberal “progressives,” Richard Rorty and Peter Singer — honest in their consequent stance. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation — consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to narrate one’s experience of suffering and humiliation.18 Singer then provides the Darwinian background.19
Singer — usually designated as a “social Darwinist with a collectivist socialist face” — starts innocently enough, trying to argue that people will be happier if they lead lives committed to ethics: a life spent trying to help others and reduce suffering is really the most moral and fulfilling one. He radicalizes and actualizes Jeremiah Bentham, the father of Utilitarianism: the ultimate ethical criterion is not the dignity (rationality, soul) of man, but the ability to SUFFER, to experience pain, which man shares with animals. With inexorable radicality, Singer levels the animal/human divide: better kill an old suffering woman that healthy animals... Look an orangutan straight in the eye and what do you see? A none-too-distant cousin — a creature worthy of all the legal rights and privileges that humans enjoy. One should thus extend aspects of equality — the right to life, the protection of individual liberties, the prohibition of torture — at least to the nonhuman great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas).
Singer argues that “speciesism” (privileging the human species) is no different from racism: our perception of a difference between humans and (other) animals is no less illogical and unethical than our one-time perception of an ethical difference between, say, men and women, or blacks and whites. Intelligence is no basis for determining ethical stature: the lives of humans are not worth more than the lives of animals simply because they display more intelligence (if intelligence were a standard of judgment, Singer points out, we could perform medical experiments on the mentally retarded with moral impunity). Ultimately, all things being equal, an animal has as much interest in living as a human. Therefore, all things being equal, medical experimentation on animals is immoral: those who advocate such experiments claim that sacrificing the lives of 20 animals will save millions of human lives — however, what about sacrificing 20 humans to save millions of animals? As Singer’s critics like to point out, the horrifying extension of this principle is that the interests of 20 people outweighs the interests of one, which gives the green light to all sorts of human rights abuses.
Consequently, Singer argues that we can no longer rely on traditional ethics for answers to the dilemmas which our constellation imposes on ourselves; he proposes a new ethics meant to protect the quality, not the sanctity, of human life. As sharp boundaries disappear between life and death, between humans and animals, this new ethics casts doubt on the morality of animal research, while offering a sympathetic assessment of infanticide. When a baby is born with severe defects of the sort that always used to kill babies, are doctors and parents now morally obligated to use the latest technologies, regardless of cost? NO. When a pregnant woman loses all brain function, should doctors use new procedures to keep her body living until the baby can be born? NO. Can a doctor ethically help terminally ill patients to kill themselves? YES.
The first thing to discern here is the hidden utopian dimension of such a survivalist stance. The easiest way to detect ideological surplus-enjoyment in an ideological formation is to read it as a dream and analyze the displacement at work in it. Freud reports of a dream of one of his patients which consists of a simple scene: the patient is at a funeral of one of his relatives. The key to the dream (which repeats a real-life event from the previous day) is that, at this funeral, the patient unexpectedly encountered a woman, his old love towards whom he still felt very deeply — far from being a masochistic dream, this dream thus simply articulates the patient’s joy at meeting again his old love. Is the mechanism of displacement at work in this dream not strictly homologous to the one elaborated by Fredric Jameson apropos of a science-fiction film which takes place in California in near future, after a mysterious virus has very quickly killed a great majority of the population? When the film’s heroes wander in the empty shopping malls, with all the merchandises intact at their disposal, is this libidinal gain of having access to the material goods without the alienating market machinery not the true point of the film occluded by the displacement of the official focus of the narrative on the catastrophe caused by the virus? At an even more elementary level, is not one of the commonplaces of the sci-fi theory that the true point of the novels or movies about a global catastrophe resides in the sudden reassertion of social solidarity and the spirit of collaboration among the survivors? It is as if, in our society, global catastrophe is the price one has to pay for gaining access to solidary collaboration...
When my son was a small boy, his most cherished personal possession was a special large “survival knife” whose handle contained a compass, a sack of powder to disinfect water, a fishing hook and line, and other similar items — totally useless in our social reality, but perfectly fitting the survivalist fantasy of finding oneself alone in wild nature. It is this same fantasy which, perhaps, give the clue to the success of Joshua Piven’s and David Borgenicht’s surprise best-seller The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook.20 Suffice it to mention two supreme examples from it: What to do if an alligator has its jaws closed on your limb? (Answer: you should tap or punch it on the snout, because alligators automatically react to it by opening their mouths.) What to do if you confront a lion which threatens to attack you? (Answer: try to make yourself appear bigger than you are by opening your coat wide.) The joke of the book thus consists in the discord between its enunciated content and its position of enunciation: the situations it describes are effectively serious and the solutions correct — the only problem is WHY IS THE AUTHOR TELLING US ALL THIS? WHO NEEDS THIS ADVICE?
The underlying irony is that, in our individualistic competitive society, the most useless advice concerns survival in extreme physical situations — what one effectively needs is the very opposite, the Dale Carnegie type of books which tell us how to win over (manipulate) other people: the situations rendered in The Worst-Case Scenario lack any symbolic dimension, they reduce us to pure survival machines. In short, The Worst-Case Scenario became a best-seller for the very same reason Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm, the story (and the movie) about the struggle for survival of a fishing vessel caught in the “storm of the century” east of the Canadian coast in 1991, became one: they both stage the fantasy of the pure encounter with a natural threat in which the socio-symbolic dimension is suspended. In a way, The Perfect Storm even provides the secret utopian background of The Worst-Case Scenario: it is only in such extreme situations that an authentic intersubjective community, held together by solidarity, can emerge. Let us not forget that The Perfect Storm is ultimately the book about the solidarity of a small working class collective! The humorous appeal of The Worst-Case Scenario can thus be read as bearing witness to our utter alienation from nature, exemplified by the shortage of contact with “real life” dangers.
We all know the standard pragmatic-utilitarian criticism of the abstract humanist education: who needs philosophy, Latin quotes, classic literature — one should rather learn how to act and produce in real life... well, in The Worst-Case Scenario, we get such real life lessons, with the result that they uncannily resemble the useless classic humanist education. Recall the proverbial scenes of the drilling of young pupils, boring them to death by making them mechanically repeat some formulas (like the declination of the Latin verbs) — the Worst-Case Scenario counterpoint to it would have been the scene of forcing the small children in the elementary school to learn by heart the answers to the predicaments this book describes by repeating them mechanically after the teacher: “When the alligator bites your leg, you punch him on the nose with your hand! When the lion confronts you, you open your coat wide!"21
So, back to Singer, one cannot dismiss him as a monstrous exaggeration — what Adorno said about psychoanalysis (its truth resides in its very exaggerations)22 fully holds for Singer: he is so traumatic and intolerable because his scandalous “exaggerations” directly renders visible the truth of the so-called postmodern ethics. Is effectively not the ultimate horizon of the postmodern “identity politics” Darwinian — defending the right of some particular species of the humankind within the panoply of their proliferating multitude (gays with AIDS, black single mothers...)? The very opposition between “conservative” and “progressive” politics can be conceived of in the terms of Darwinism: ultimately, conservatives defend the right of those with might (their very success proves that they won in the struggle for survival), while progressives advocate the protection of endangered human species, i.e., of those losing the struggle for survival.23
One of the divisions in the chapter on Reason in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit speaks about “das geistige Tierreich” (the spiritual animal kingdom): the social world which lacks any spiritual substance, so that, in it, individuals effectively interact as “intelligent animals.” They use reason, but only in order to assert their individual interests, to manipulate others into serving their own pleasures.24 Is not a world in which the highest rights are human rights precisely such a “spiritual animal kingdom,” a universe? There is, however, a price to be paid for such liberation — in such a universe, human rights ultimately function as ANIMAL rights. This, then, is the ultimate truth of Singer: our universe of human right is the universe of animal rights.
The obvious counterargument is here: so what? Why should we not reduce humankind to its proper place, that of one of the animal species? What gets lost in this reduction? Jacques-Alain Miller, the main pupil of Jacques Lacan, once commented an uncanny laboratory experiment with rats25: in a labyrinthine set-up, a desired object (a piece of good food or a sexual partner) is first made easily accessible to a rat; then, the set-up is changed in such a way that the rat sees and thereby knows where the desired object is, but cannot gain access to it; in exchange for it, as a kind of consolation prize, a series of similar objects of inferior value is made easily accessible — how does the rat react to it? For some time, it tries to find its way to the “true” object; then, upon ascertaining that this object is definitely out of reach, the rat will renounce it and put up with some of the inferior substitute objects — in short, it will act as a “rational” subject of utilitarianism.
It is only now, however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed a surgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is better to know nothing. So what happened when the operated rat was again let loose in the labyrinth, the one in which the “true” object is inaccessible? The rat insisted: it never became fully reconciled with the loss of the “true” object and resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeatedly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat in a sense was humanized; it assumed the tragic “human” relationship towards the unattainable absolute object which, on account of its very inaccessibility, forever captivates our desire. On the other hand, it is this very “conservative” fixation that pushes man to continuing renovation, since he never can fully integrate this excess into his life process. So we can see why did Freud use the term Todestrieb: the lesson of psychoanalysis is that humans are not simply alive; on the top of it, they are possessed by a strange drive to enjoy life in excess of the ordinary run of things — and “death” stands simply and precisely for the dimension beyond ordinary biological life.
This, then, is what gets lost in Singer’s “geistige Tierreich”: the Thing, something to which we are unconditionally attached irrespective of its positive qualities. In Singer’s universe, there is a place for mad cows, but no place for an Indian sacred cow. In other words, what gets lost here is simply the dimension of truth — NOT “objective truth” as the notion of reality from a point of view which somehow floats above the multitude of particular narratives, but truth as the Singular Universal.” When Lenin said “The theory of Marx is all-powerful, because it is true,” everything depends on how we understand “truth” here: is it a neutral “objective knowledge,” or the truth of an engaged subject? Lenin’s wager — today, in our era of postmodern relativism, more actual than ever — is that universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: in a concrete situation, its UNIVERSAL truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly PARTISAN position — truth is by definition one-sided. This, of course, goes against the predominant doxa of compromise, of finding a middle path among the multitude of conflicting interests. If one does not specify the CRITERIA of the different, alternate, narrativization, then this endeavor courts the danger of endorsing, in the Politically Correct mood, ridiculous “narratives” like those about the supremacy of some aboriginal holistic wisdom, of dismissing science as just another narrative on a par with premodern superstitions. The Leninist narrative to the postmodern multiculturalist “right to narrate” should thus be an unashamed assertion of the right to truth. When, in the debacle of 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honorable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) succumbed to the war fervor and voted for the military credits, Lenin’s thorough rejection of the “patriotic line,” in its very isolation from the predominant mood, designated the singular emergence of the truth of the entire situation.
In a closer analysis, one should exhibit how the cultural relativism of the “right-to-narrate” orientation contains its own apparent opposite, the fixation on the Real of some trauma which resists its narrativization. This properly dialectical tension sustains today’s the academic “holocaust industry.” My own ultimate experience of the holocaust-industry police occurred in 1997 at a round table in the Centre Pompidou in Paris: I was viciously attacked for an intervention in which (among other things) I claimed, against the neoconservatives deploring the decline of faith today, that the basic need of a normal human being is not to believe himself, but to have another subject who will believe for him, at his place — the reaction of one of the distinguished participants was that, by claiming this, I am ultimately endorsing the holocaust revisionism, justifying the claim that, since everything is a discursive construct, this includes also the holocaust, so it is meaningless to search for what really happened there... Apart from displaying a hypocritical paranoia, my critic was doubly wrong: first, the holocaust revisionists (to my knowledge) NEVER argue in the terms of the postmodern discursive constructionism, but in the terms of very empirical factual analysis: their claims range from the “fact” that there is no written document in which Hitler would have ordered the holocaust, to the weird mathematics of “taking into account the number of gas ovens in Auschwitz, it was not possible to burn so many corpses.” Furthermore, not only is the postmodern logic of “everything is a discursive construction, there are no direct firm facts” NEVER used to deflate the holocaust; in a paradox worth noting, it is precisely the postmodern discursive constructionists (like Lyotard) who tend to elevate the holocaust into the supreme ineffable metaphysical Evil — the holocaust serves them as the untouchable-sacred Real, as the negative of the contingent language games.26
The problem with those who perceive every comparison between the holocaust and other concentration camps and mass political crimes as an inadmissible relativization of the holocaust, is that they miss the point and display their own doubt: yes, the holocaust WAS unique, but the only way to establish this uniqueness is to compare it with other similar phenomena and thus demonstrate the limit of this comparison. If one does not risk this comparison, of one prohibits it, one gets caught in the Wittgensteinian paradox of prohibiting to speak about that about which we cannot speak: if we stick to the prohibition of the comparison, the gnawing suspicion emerges that, if we were to be allowed to compare the holocaust with other similar crimes, it would be deprived of its uniqueness...
Lenin As a Listener of Schubert
So how can the reference to Lenin deliver us from this stuff predicament? Some libertarian Leftists want to redeem — partially, at least — Lenin by opposing the “bad” Jacobin-elitist Lenin of What Is To Be Done?, relying on the Party as the professional intellectual elite which enlightens the working class from OUTSIDE, and the “good” Lenin of State and Revolution, who envisioned the prospect of abolishing the State, of the broad masses directly taking into their hands the administration of the public affairs. However, this opposition has its limits: the key premise of State and Revolution is that one cannot fully “democratize” the State, that State “as such,” in its very notion, is a dictatorship of one class over another; the logical conclusion from this premise is that, insofar as we still dwell within the domain of the State, we are legitimized to exercise full violent terror, since, within this domain, every democracy is a fake. So, since state is an instrument of oppression, it is not worth trying to improve its apparatuses, the protection of the legal order, elections, laws guaranteeing personal freedoms... — all this becomes irrelevant. The moment of truth in this reproach is that one cannot separate the unique constellation which enabled the revolutionary takeover in October 1917 from its later “Stalinist” turn: the very constellation that rendered the revolution possible (peasants’ dissatisfaction, a well-organized revolutionary elite, etc.) led to the “Stalinist” turn in its aftermath — therein resides the proper Leninist tragedy. Rosa Luxembourg’s famous alternative “socialism or barbarism” ended up as the ultimate infinite judgement, asserting the speculative identity of the two opposed terms: the “really existing” socialism WAS barbarism.27
In the diaries of Georgi Dimitroff, which were recently published in German,28 we get a unique glimpse into how Stalin was fully aware what brought him to power, giving an unexpected twist to his well-known slogan that “people (cadres) are our greatest wealth.” When, at a diner in November 1937, Dimitroff praises the “great luck” of the international workers, that they had such a genius as their leader, Stalin, Stalin answers:
“... I do not agree with him. He even expressed himself in a non-Marxist way.
Decisive are the middle cadres."(7.11.37)
He puts it in an even clearer way a paragraph earlier:
“Why did we win over Trotsky and others? It is well known that, after Lenin, Trotsky was the most popular in our land.
But we had the support of the middle cadres, and they explained our grasp of the situation to the masses ... Trotsky did not pay any attention to these cadres.”
Here Stalin spells out the secret of his rise to power: as a rather anonymous General Secretary, he nominated tens of thousands of cadres who owed their rise to him... This is why Stalin did not yet want Lenin dead in the early 1922, rejecting his demand to be given poison to end his life after the debilitating stroke: if Lenin were to die already in early 1922, the question of succession would not yet be resolved in Stalin’s favor, since Stalin as the general secretary did not yet penetrate enough the Party apparatus with his appointees — he needed another year or two, so that, when Lenin effectively dies, he could count on the support of thousands of mid-level cadres nominated by him to win over the big old names of the Bolshevik “aristocracy.”
Here are some details of the daily life of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 and the following years, which, in their very triviality, render palpable the gap from the Stalinist nomenklatura. When, in the evening of 24 October 1917, Lenin left his flat for the Smolny Institute to coordinate the revolutionary takeover, he took a tram and asked the conductress if there was any fighting going on in the center that day. In the years after the October Revolution, Lenin was mostly driving around in a car only with his faithful driver and bodyguard Gil; a couple of times they were shot at, stopped by the police and arrested (the policemen did not recognize Lenin), once, after visiting a school in suburbs, even robbed of the car and their guns by bandits posing as police, and then compelled to walk to the nearest police station. When, on 30 August 1918, Lenin was shot, this occurred while he got in a conversation with a couple of complaining women in front of a factory he just visited; the bleeding Lenin was driven by Gil to Kremlin, were there were no doctors, so his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya suggested someone should run out to the nearest grocer’s shop for a lemon... The standard meal in the Kremlin kantina in 1918 was buckwheat porridge and thin vegetable soup. So much about the privileges of nomenklatura!
Lenin’s slanderers like to evoke his famous paranoiac reaction at listening to Beethoven’s appasionata (he first started to cry, then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford to let himself go to such sentiments, because they make him too weak, wanting to pat the enemies instead of mercilessly fighting them) as the proof of his cold self-control and cruelty — however, even at its own terms, is this accident effectively an argument AGAINST Lenin? Does it not rather bear witness to an extreme sensitivity for music that needs to be kept in check in order to continue the political struggle? Who of today’s cynical politicians still displays even a trace of such a sensitivity? Is not Lenin here at the very opposite of the high-ranked Nazis who, without any difficulty, combined such a sensitivity with the extreme cruelty in taking political decisions (suffice it to recall Heydrich, the holocaust architect, who, after a hard day’s work, always found time to play with his comrades Beethoven’s string quartets) — is not the proof of Lenin’s humanity that, in contrast to this supreme barbarism, which resides in the very unproblematic unity of high culture and political barbarism, he was still extremely sensitive to the irreducible antagonism between art in power struggle?
Furthermore, one is tempted to develop a Leninist theory of this high-cultured barbarism. Hans Hotter’s outstanding 1942 recording of Schubert’s Winterreise seems to call for an intentionally anachronistic reading: it is easy to imagine German officers and soldiers listening to this recording in the Stalingrad trenches in the cold Winter of 42/43. Does the topic of Winterreise not evoke a unique consonance with the historical moment? Was not the whole campaign to Stalingrad a gigantic Winterreise, where each German soldier can say for himself the very first lines of the cycle:
“I came here a stranger,
As a stranger I depart"?
Do the following lines not render their basic experience:
“Now the world is so gloomy,
The road shrouded in snow.
I cannot choose the time
To begin my journey,
Must find my own way
In this darkness.”
Here we have the endless meaningless march:
“It burns under both my feet,
Even though I walk on ice and snow;
I don’t want to catch my breath
Until I can no longer see the spires.”
The dream of returning home in the Spring:
“I dreamed of many-colored flowers,
The way they bloom in May;
I dreamed of green meadows,
Of merry bird calls.”
The nervous waiting for the post:
“From the highroad a posthorn sounds.
Why do you leap so high, my heart?”
The shock of the morning artillery attack:
“The cloud tatters flutter
Around in weary strife.
And fiery red flames
Dart around among them.”
Utterly exhausted, the soldiers are refused even the solace of death:
“I'm tired enough to drop, have taken mortal hurt.
Oh, merciless inn, you turn me away?
Well, onward then, still further, my loyal walking staff!”
What can one do in such a desperate situation, but to go on with heroic persistence, closing one’s ears to the complaint of the heart, assuming the heavy burden of fate in a world deserted by Gods?
“If the snow flies in my face,
I shake it off again.
When my heart speaks in my breast,
I sing loudly and gaily.
I don’t hear what it says to me,
I have no ears to listen;
I don’t feel when it laments,
Complaining is for fools.
Happy through the world along
Facing wind and weather!
If there’s no God upon the earth,
Then we ourselves are Gods!”
The obvious counter-argument is that all this is merely a superficial parallel: even if there is an echo of the atmosphere and emotions, they are in each case embedded in an entirely different context: in Schubert, the narrator wanders around in Winter because the beloved has dropped him, while the German soldiers were on the way to Stalingrad because of Hitler’s military plans. However, it is precisely in this displacement that the elementary ideological operation consists: the way for a German soldier to be able to endure his situation was to avoid the reference to concrete social circumstances which would become visible through reflection (what the hell were they doing in Russia? what destruction did they bring to this country? what about killing the Jews?), and, instead, to indulge in the Romantic bemoaning of one’s miserable fate, as if the large historical catastrophe just materializes the trauma of a rejected lover. Is this not the supreme proof of the emotional abstraction, of Hegel’s idea that emotions are ABSTRACT, an escape from the concrete socio-political network accessible only to THINKING.
And one is tempted to make here a Leninist step further: in our reading of the Winterreise, we did not just link Schubert to a contingent later historical catastrophe, we did not just try to imagine how this song-cycle resonated to the embattled German soldiers in Stalingrad. What if the link to this catastrophe enables us to read what was wrong in the Schubertian Romantic position itself? What if the position of the Romantic tragic hero, narcissistically focused on his own suffering and despair, elevating them into a source of perverted pleasure, is already in itself a fake one, an ideological screen masking the true trauma of the larger historical reality? One should thus accomplish the properly Hegelian gesture of projecting the split between the authentic original and its later reading colored by contingent circumstances back into the authentic original itself: what at first appears the secondary distortion, a reading twisted by the contingent external circumstances, tells us something about what the authentic original itself not only represses, leaves out, but had the function to repress. Therein resides the Leninist answer to the famous passage from the Introduction to the Grundrisse manuscript, in which Marx mentions how easy it is to explain Homer’s poetry from its unique historical context — it is much more difficult to explain its universal appeal, i.e. why it continues to give us artistic pleasure long after its historical context disappeared29: this universal appeal is based in its very ideological function of enabling us to abstract from our concrete ideologico-political constellation by way of taking refuge in the “universal” (emotional) content. So, far from signalling some kind of trans-ideological heritage of the humankind, the universal attraction of Homer relies on the universalizing gesture of ideology.
“Entre nous: If they kill me...”
In what, then, resides Lenin’s greatness? Recall Lenin’s shock when, in the Fall of 1914, the Social Democratic parties adopted the “patriotic line” — Lenin even thought that the issue of Vorwärts, the daily newspaper of the German Social Democracy, which reported how Social Democrats in Reichstag voted for the military credits, was a forgery of the Russian secret police destined to deceive the Russian workers. In that era of the military conflict that cut in half the European continent, how difficult it was to reject the notion that one should take sides in this conflict, and to fight against the “patriotic fervor” in one’s own country! How many great minds (inclusive of Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks! This shock of 1914 was — in Badiou’s terms — a desastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but ALSO the socialist movement which accompanied it. Lenin himself (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) lost the ground under his feet — there is, in his desperate reaction, no satisfaction, no “I told you so!” THIS the moment of Verzweiflung, THIS catastrophe opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and only Lenin was the one at the level of this opening, the one to articulate the Truth of THIS catastrophe.30 Through this moment of despair, the Lenin who, through reading Hegel, was able to detect the unique chance for revolution, was born. His State and Revolution is strictly correlative to this shattering experience — Lenin’s full subjective engagement in it is clear from this famous letter to Kamenev from July 1917:
“Entre nous: If they kill me, I ask you to publish my notebook “Marxism & the State” (stuck in Stockholm). It is bound in a blue cover. It is a collection of all the quotations from Marx & Engels, likewise from Kautsky against Pannekoek. There is a series of remarks & notes, formulations. I think with a week’s work it could be published. I consider it imp. for not only Plekhanov but also Kautsky got it wrong. Condition: all this is entre nous."31
The existential engagement is here extreme, and the kernel of the Leninist “utopia” arises out of the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of the accounts with the Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state AS SUCH, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of the social matters. This was for Lenin no theoretical project for some distant future — in October 1917, Lenin claimed that “we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituting of ten if not twenty million people."32 This urge of the moment is the true utopia. One cannot overestimate the explosive potential of The State and Revolution — in this book, “the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with.”33 What then followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser’s text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: the time when he basically stood alone, struggling against the current in his own party. When, in his “April Theses” from 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, his proposals were first met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin’s “April Theses” — far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,"34 and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy."35
“Lenin” is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, THE Lenin which we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to REINVENT Marxism — recall his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word.” The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically reenacting the “good old revolutionary times,” nor at the opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old program to “new conditions,” but at repeating, in the present world-wide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism, more precisely: after the politico-ideological collapse of the long era of progressism in the catastrophe of 1914. Eric Hobsbawn defined the CONCEPT of the XXth century as the time between 1914, the end of the long peaceful expansion of capitalism, and 1990, the emergence of the new form of global capitalism after the collapse of the Really Existing Socialism. What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990. “Lenin” stands for the compelling FREEDOM to suspend the stale existing (post)ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live — it simply means that we are allowed to think again.
One of the standard accusations against Lenin is that, insensible for the universal human dimension, he perceived all social events through the lenses of the class struggle, of “us against them.” However, are Lenin’s appeals against the patriotic fervor during the World War I not an exemplary case of practicing what Alain Badiou36 calls the universal function of “humanity,” which has nothing whatsoever to do with so-called “humanism.” This “humanity” is neither a notional abstraction, nor the pathetic imaginary assertion of the all-encompassing brotherhood, but a universal function which actualizes itself in unique ecstatic experiences, like those of the soldiers from the opposite trenches starting to fraternize. In Jaroslav Hasek’s legendary comical novel The Good Soldier Schwejk, the adventures of an ordinary Czech soldier who undermines the ruling order by simply following orders too literally, Schwejk finds himself at the frontline trenches in Galicia, where the Austrian army is confronting the Russians. When Austrian soldiers start to shoot, the desperate Schwejk runs into the no-man’s-land in front of their trenches, waving desperately his hands and shouting: “Don’t shoot! There are men on the other side!” This is what Lenin was aiming at in his call to the tired peasants and other working masses in the Summer of 1917 to stop fighting, dismissed as part of a ruthless strategy to win popular support and thus gain power, even if it meant the military defeat of one’s own country (recall the standard argument that, when, in the Spring of 1917, Lenin was allowed by the German state to pass on a sealed train through Germany on his way from Switzerland to Sweden, Finland and then Russia, he was de facto functioning as a German agent).
There is a long literary tradition of elevating the face to face encounter with an enemy soldier as THE authentic war experience (see the writings of Ernst Juenger, who celebrated such encounters in his memoirs of the trench attacks in World War I): soldiers often fantasize about killing the enemy soldier in a face to face confrontation, looking him into the eyes before stabbing him. The singular experience of humanity occurs when the mystique of such a face to face encounter is rendered meaningless. The same sublime moment of solidarity took place in the battle for Stalingrad, when, on New Year’s Eve of December 31 1942, Russian actors and musicians visited the besieged city to entertain the troops; the violinist Mikhail Goldstein went to the trenches to perform a one-man concert for the soldiers:
“The melodies he created drifted out through loudspeakers to the German trenches and the shooting suddenly ceased. In the eerie quiet, the music flowed from Goldstein’s dipping bow.
When he finished, a hushed silence hung over the Russian soldiers. From another loudspeaker, in German territory, a voice broke the spell. In halting Russian it pleaded: ‘Play some more Bach. We won’t shoot.'
Goldstein picked up his violin and started a lively Bach gavotte."37
This same experience of humanity, of the meaninglessness of the conflict we are engaged in, can also take a much more mundane shape, that of a simple exchange of gazes which tells everything. During one of the anti-apartheid demonstrations in the old South Africa, when a troop of white policemen was dispersing and pursuing black demonstrators, a policeman was running after a black lady, a rubber truncheon in his hand. Unexpectedly, the lady lost one of her shoes; automatically obeying his “good manners,” the policeman picked up the shoes and gave it to her; at this moment, they exchanged glances and both became aware of the inanity of their situation — after such a gesture of politeness, i.e. after handling her the lost shoe and waiting for her to put it on again, it was simply IMPOSSIBLE for him to continue to run after her and to hit her with the truncheon; so, after politely nodding at her, the policeman turned around and walked away... The moral of this story is NOT that the policeman suddenly discovered his innate goodness, i.e. we are NOT dealing here with the case of natural goodness winning over the racist ideological training; on the contrary, in all probability, the policeman was — as to his psychological stance — a standard racist. What triumphed here was simply his “superficial” training in politeness.
When the policeman stretched his hand in order to pass the shoe, this gesture was more than a moment of physical contact. The white policeman and the black lady literally lived in two different socio-symbolic universes with no direct communication possible: for each of the two, the barrier which separated the two universes was for a brief moment suspended, and it was as if a hand from another, spectral, universe reached into one’s ordinary reality. The situation is similar to the scene in one of the early Joan Crawford films (Possessed from 1930), in which she plays a poor small town girl who, on her way home, has to stop before the rails since a train is passing slowly through the small town; through the wagon’s windows, she observes the wealthy life going on inside (a cook preparing an exquisite meal, a couple dancing...). It is as if she found herself in a cinema theatre, a spectator confronted with scenes of the life she longs for, scenes which are close, but nonetheless simultaneously somewhat ethereal, spectral, threatening to dissolve at any moment. And then, a true miracle occurs — when the train stops for a brief moment, an elder kind gentlemen is standing on the observation platform immediately in front of the girl, with his hand holding a glass with a drink stretching outwards, from the fantasmatic reality of the train to the everyday reality of the girl, and engages in a friendly conversation with her — a magical moments when the dream itself seems to intervene into our daily reality... The effect of this last shot resides in the way everyday reality itself — the scene of a train passing by an ordinary working girl — acquires the magic dimension of the poor girl encountering her dream. And it is against the background of this scene that one should interpret the eerie event which took place on the evening of November 7, 1942, when, in his special train rolling through Thuringia, Hitler was discussing the day’s major news with several aides in the dining car; since allied air raids had damaged the tracks, the train frequently slowed its passage:
“While dinner was served on exquisite china, the train stopped once more at a siding. A few feet away, a hospital train marked time, and from their tiered cots, wounded soldiers peered into the blazing light of the dining room where Hitler was immersed in conversation. Suddenly he looked up at the awed faces staring in at him. In great anger he ordered the curtains drawn, plunging his wounded warriors back into the darkness of their own bleak world."38
The miracle of this scene is redoubled: on each side, they experienced what they saw through the window-frame as a fantasmatic apparition: for Hitler, it was a nightmarish view of the results of his military adventure; for the soldiers, it was the unexpected encounter with the Leader himself. The true miracle would have been here if a hand were to stretch through the window — say, Hitler reaching over to a wounded soldier. But, of course, it was precisely such an encounter, such an intrusion into his reality, that Hitler dreaded, so, instead of stretching his hand, he in panic ordered the curtains drawn.
A Cyberspace Lenin?
So what are we to say to the standard reproach of “extremism"? Lenin’s critique of the “Leftism as the Child Illness of the Communism” is more than actual in the last decades, in which Left often succumbed to the terrorist temptation. Political “extremism” or “excessive radicalism” should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to “go to the end.” What was the Jacobin’s recourse to radical “terror” if not a kind of hysterical acting out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the very fundamentals of economic order (private property, etc.)? And does the same not go even for the so-called “excesses” of Political Correctness? Do they also not display the retreat from disturbing the effective (economic etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to render problematic the standard topos, shared by practically all the “postmodern” Leftists, according to which political “totalitarianism” somehow results from the predominance of material production and technology over the intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of the political terror resides in the fact that the “principle” of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is extended also to society, so that people are treated as raw stuff to be transformed into a New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political “terror” signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that all political “terror,” from Jacobins to Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle?
Recall Badiou’s exalted defense of Terror in the French Revolution, in which he quotes the justification of the guillotine for Lavoisier: “La republique n'a pas de besoin de savants. [The Republic has no need for scientists.]” Badiou’s thesis is that the truth of this statement emerges if we cut it short, depriving it of its caveat: “La republique n'a pas de besoins. [The Republic has no needs.]” The Republic gives body to the purely political logic of equality and freedom which should follow its path with no consideration for the “servicing of goods” destined to satisfy the needs of the individuals.39 In the revolutionary process proper, freedom becomes an end-in-itself, caught in its own paroxysm — this suspension of the importance of the sphere of economy, of the (material) production, brings Badiou close to Hannah Arendt for whom, in a strict homology to Badiou, freedom is opposed to the domain of the provision of services and goods, of the maintenance of households and the exercise of administration, which do not belong to politics proper: the only place for freedom is the communal political space. In this precise sense, Badiou’s (and Sylvain Lazarus’40) plea for the reappraisal of Lenin is more ambiguous than it may appear: what it effectively amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx’s key insight into how the political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics (“if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared ‘unpolitical’ — that is, naturalized — in liberal discourse”41). No wonder that the Lenin Badiou and Lazarus prefer is the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?, the Lenin who (in his thesis that the socialist-revolutionary consciousness has to be brought from without to the working class) breaks with Marx’s alleged “economism” and asserts the autonomy of the Political, NOT the Lenin of The State and Revolution, fascinated by the modern centralized industry, imagining the (depoliticized) ways to reorganize economy and the state apparatus.
What all the new French (or French oriented) theories of the political, from Balibar through Ranciere and Badiou to Laclau and Mouffe, aim at is — to put it in the traditional philosophical terms — the reduction of the sphere of economy (of the material production) to an “ontic” sphere deprived of the “ontological” dignity. Within this horizon, there is simply no place for the Marxian “critique of political economy”: the structure of the universe of commodities and capital in Marx’s Capital is NOT just that of a limited empirical sphere, but a kind of socio-transcendental a priori, the matrix which generates the totality of social and political relations. The relationship between economy and politics is ultimately that of the well-known visual paradox of the “two faces or a vase”: one either sees the two faces or a vase, never both of them — one has to make a choice.42 In the same way, one either focuses on the political, and the domain of economy is reduced to the empirical “servicing of goods,” or one focuses on economy, and politics is reduced to a theatre of appearances, to a passing phenomenon which will disappear with the arrival of the developed Communist (or technocratic) society, in which, as already Engels put it, the “administration of people” will vanish in the “administration of things.”43
The root of this notion of pure “politics,” radically autonomous with regard to history, society, economy, State, even Party, is Badiou’s opposition between Being and Event — it is here that Badiou remains “idealist.” From the materialist standpoint, an Event emerges “out of nowhere” within a specific constellation of Being — the space of an Event is the minimal “empty” distance between two beings, the “other” dimension which shines through this gap.44 So when Badiou and Lazarus insist on the strict frontier between the Political and the Social (the domain of State, historicism...), they concede too much — namely, that SOCIETY EXISTS. They do not get the lesson, articulated by Laclau, that “society doesn’t exist,” that society is not a positive field, since the gap of the Political is inscribed into its very foundations (Marx’s name for the political which traverses the entire social body is “class struggle”).
Consequently, Lenin the ultimate political strategist should in no way be separated from Lenin the “technocrat” dreaming about the scientific reorganization of production. The greatness of Lenin is that, although he lacked the proper conceptual apparatus to think these two levels together, he was aware of the urgency to do it — an impossible, yet necessary, task.45 What we are dealing with here is another version of the Lacanian “il n'y a pas de rapport...": if, for Lacan, there is no sexual relationship, then, for Marxism proper, there is no relationship between economy and politics, no “meta-language” enabling us to grasp from the same neutral standpoint the two levels, although — or, rather, BECAUSE — these two levels are inextricably intertwined. The “political” class struggle takes place in the very midst of economy (recall that the very last paragraph of Capital III, where the texts abruptly stops, tackles the class struggle), while, at the same time, the domain of economy serves as the key enabling us to decode political struggles. No wonder that the structure of this impossible relationship is that of the Moebius band: first, we have to progress from the political spectacle to its economic infrastructure; then, in the second step, we have to confront the irreducible dimension of the political struggle in the very heart of the economy.
Here, Lenin’s stance against economism as well as against pure politics is crucial today, apropos of the split attitude towards economy in (what remains of) the radical circles: on the one hand, the above-mentioned pure “politicians” who abandon economy as the site of struggle and intervention; on the other hand, the economists, fascinated by the functioning of today’s global economy, who preclude any possibility of a political intervention proper. Today, more than ever, we should here return to Lenin: yes, economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, one has to break the spell of the global capitalism — BUT the intervention should be properly POLITICAL, not economic. The battle to be fought is thus a twofold one: first, yes, anti-capitalism. However, anti-capitalism without problematizing the capitalism’s POLITICAL form (liberal parliamentary democracy) is not sufficient, no matter how “radical” it is. Perhaps THE lure today is the belief that one can undermine capitalism without effectively problematizing the liberal-democratic legacy which — as some Leftists claim — although engendered by capitalism, acquired autonomy and can serve to criticize capitalism. This lure is strictly correlative to its apparent opposite, to the pseudo-Deleuzian love-hate fascinating/fascinated poetic depiction of Capital as a rhizomatic monstre/vampire which deterritorializes and swallows all, indomitable, dynamic, ever raising from the dead, each crisis making it stronger, Dionysos-Phoenix reborn... It is in this poetic (anti)capitalist reference to Marx that Marx is really dead: appropriated when deprived of his political sting.
Marx was fascinated by the revolutionary “deterritorializing” impact of capitalism which, in its inexorable dynamics, undermines all stable traditional forms of human interaction; what he repproached capitalism with is that its “deterritorialization” was not thorough enough, that it generated new “reterritorializations” — the ultimate obstacle to capitalism is capitalism itself, i.e. capitalism unleashes a dynamics it is no longer be able to contain. Far from being outdated, this claim seems to gain actuality with today’s growing deadlocks of globalization in which the inherently antagonistic nature of capitalism belies its worldwide triumph. However, the problem is: is it still possible to imagine Communism (or another form of post-capitalist society) as a formation which sets free the deterritorializing dynamics of capitalism, liberating it of its inherent constraints? Marx’s fundamental vision was that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain, but even raise to a higher degree and effectively fully release the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. What Marx overlooked is that, to put it in the standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the “condition of impossibility” of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its “condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism — if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates... therein would reside a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlapping between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment.46
While this constant self-propelling revolutionizing still holds for the high Stalinism with its total productive mobilization, the “stagnant” late Real Socialism legitimizes itself (between the lines, at least) as a society in which one can live peacefully, avoiding the capitalist competitive stress. This was the last line of defense when, from the late 60s onwards, after the fall of Khrushchev (the last enthusiast who, during his visit to the US, prophesied that “your grandchildren will be Communists”), it became clear that the Real Socialism was losing the competitive edge in its war with capitalism. So the stagnant late Real Socialism in a way already WAS “socialism with a human face": silently abandoning great historical tasks, it provided the security of the everyday life going on in a benevolent boredom. Today’s nostalgia for the defunct Socialism mostly consists in such a conservative nostalgia for the self-satisfied constrained way of life; even the nostalgic anti-capitalist artists from Peter Handke to Joseph Beuys celebrate this aspect of Socialism: the absence of stressful mobilization and frantic commodification. Of course, this unexpected shift tells us something about the deficiency of the original Marxist project itself: it points towards the limitation of its goal of unleashed productive mobilization.
Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others — in a way, the once fashionable and today forgotten Francis Fukuyama WAS right, global capitalism IS “the end of history.” A certain excess which was as it were kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions, that is to say, in which the thing can only survive as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own “normal” constraints. Let us take the case of consumption: before modernity, we were dealing with the direct opposition between moderate consumption and its excess (gluttony, etc.); with capitalism, the excess (the consumption of “useless things”) becomes THE RULE, i.e. the elementary form of buying is the act of buying things we “do NOT really need.” And, perhaps, it is only today, in the global capitalism in its “postindustrial” digitalized form, that, to put it in Hegelian terms, the really-existing capitalism is reaching the level of its notion: perhaps, one should follow again Marx’s old anti-evolutionist motto (incidentally, taken verbatim from Hegel) that the anatomy of man provides the key for the anatomy of a monkey, i.e. that, in order to deploy the inherent notional structure of a social formation, one must start with its most developed form. Marx located the elementary capitalist antagonism in the opposition between use- and exchange-value: in capitalism, the potentials of this opposition are fully realized, the domain of exchange-values is acquires autonomy, is transformed into the spectre of self-propelling speculative capital which needs the productive capacities and needs of actual people only as its dispensable temporal embodiment. Marx derived the very notion of economic crisis from this gap: a crisis occurs when reality catches up with the illusory self-generating mirage of money begetting more money — this speculative madness cannot go on indefinitely, it has to explode in ever stronger crises. The ultimate root of the crisis is for him the gap between use and exchange value: the logic of exchange value follows its own path, its own mad dance, irrespective of the real needs of real people. It may appear that this analysis is more than actual today, when the tension between the virtual universe and the real is reaching almost palpably unbearable proportions: on the one hand, we have crazy solipsistic speculations about futures, mergers, etc., following their own inherent logic; on the other hand, reality is catching up in the guise of ecological catastrophes, poverty, the Third World collapse of social life, the Mad Cow Disease. This is why cyber-capitalists can appear as the paradigmatic capitalists today, this is why Bill Gates can dream of the cyberspace as providing the frame for what he calls “frictionless capitalism.” What we have here is an ideological short-circuit between the two version of the gap between reality and virtuality: the gap between real production and virtual spectral domain of the Capital, and the gap between experiential reality and virtual reality of cyberspace. It effectively seems that the cyberspace gap between my fascinating screen persona and the miserable flesh which is “me” off the screen translates into the immediate experience the gap between the Real of the speculative circulation of the capital and the drab reality of impoverished masses... However, is this — this recourse to “reality” which will sooner or later catch up with the virtual game — really the only way to operationalize a critique of capitalism? What if the problem of capitalism is not this solipsistic mad dance, but precisely the opposite: that it continues to disavow its gap with “reality,” that it presents itself as serving real needs of real people? The originality of Marx is that he played on both cards simultaneously: the origin of capitalist crises is the gap between use- and exchange-value, AND capitalism constrains the free deployment of productivity.
What all this means is that the urgent task of the economic analysis today is, again, to REPEAT Marx’s “critique of political economy” without succumbing to the temptation of the multitude of the ideologies of “postindustrial” societies. The key change concerns the status of private property: the ultimate element of power and control is no longer the last link in the chain of investments, the firm or individual who “really owns” the means of production. The ideal capitalist today functions in a wholly different way: investing borrowed money, “really owning” nothing, even indebted, but nonetheless controlling things. A corporation is owned by another corporation, which is again borrowing money from banks, which may ultimately manipulate money owned by ordinary people like ourselves. With Bill Gates, the “private property of the means of production” becomes meaningless, at least in the standard meaning of the term. The paradox of this virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in the elementary particle physics. The mass of each element in our reality is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron’s mass at rest is zero, its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration of its movement, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself. Does today’s virtual capitalist not function in a homologous way — his “net value” is zero, he directly operates just with the surplus, borrowing from the future?47
So where is Lenin in all this? According to the predominant doxa, in the years after the October Revolution, Lenin’s decline of faith in the creative capacities of the masses led him to emphasize the role of science and the scientists, to rely on the authority of the expert: he hailed
“the beginning of that very happy time when politics will recede into the background, /.../ and engineers and agronomists will do most of the talking."48
Technocratic post-politics? Lenin’s ideas about how the road to socialism runs through the terrain of monopoly capitalism may appear dangerously naive today:
“Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers’ societies, and office employees unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible. /.../ our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive. /.../ This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods, this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society."49
Is this not the most radical expression of Marx’s notion of the general intellect regulating all social life in a transparent way, of the post-political world in which “administration of people” is supplanted by the “administration of things”? It is, of course, easy to play against this quote the tune of the “critique on instrumental reason” and “administered world /verwaltete Welt/": the “totalitarian” potentials are inscribed in this very form of total social control. It is easy to remark sarcastically how, in the Stalinist epoch, the apparatus of social administration effectively became “even bigger.” Furthermore, is this postpolitical vision not the very opposite of the Maoist notion of the eternity of the class struggle (“everything is political”)?
Are, however, things really so unambiguous? What if one replaces the (obviously dated) example of the central bank with the World Wide Web, today’s perfect candidate for the General Intellect? Dorothy Sayers claimed that Aristotele’s Poetics effectively is the theory of the detective novels avant la lettre — since the poor Aristotle didn’t yet know of the detective novel, he had to refer to the only examples at his disposal, the tragedies... Along the same lines, Lenin was effectively developing the theory of a role of World Wide Web, but, since WWW was unknown to him, he had to refer to the unfortunate central banks. Consequently, can one also say that “without the World Wide Web socialism would be impossible. /.../ our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive”? In these conditions, one is tempted to resuscitate the old, opprobrious and half-forgotten, Marxian dialectics of the productive forces and the relations of production: it is already a commonplace to claim that, ironically, it was this very dialectics which buried the Really Existing Socialism: Socialism was not able to sustain the passage from industrial to postindustrial economy. However, does capitalism really provide the “natural” frame of the relations of production for the digital universe? Is there not in the World Wide Web an explosive potential also for capitalism itself? Is not the lesson of the Microsoft monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus (recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft Corporation), would it not be more “logical” just to SOCIALIZE it, rendering it freely accessible?50
So what about the basic reproach according to which, Lenin is irrelevant for us today because he remained stuck within the horizon of the industrial mass production (recall his celebration of Fordism)? The first thing to do here is to ask the elementary question: what is a factory? Leslie Kaplan’s essay-poem L'exces-usine,51 with its description of the “Hell” of the factory life, renders palpable the dimension overlooked in the standard Marxist depictions of the workers’ “alienation.” Kaplan opposes the self-enclosed universe of the factory to the open environment of the previous work-process: the factory space is a timeless space in which fiction and reality ultimately coincide, i.e. the very reality of this space functions as the fantasmatic space cut off from its environs. What is lacking in this space is the full “background noise” which provides the life-world context to human individuals: in a factory, as Kaplan puts it, instead of the rich tapestry of the background-environment, there is only a whiteness — in short, it is as if, when we are in a factory, we enter an artificial universe which is deprived of the substantial wealth of the real-life texture. In this space, (historical-narrative) memory itself is threatened: workers are cut off their ancestral roots, and this also affects their utopian potentials themselves: reduced to robots endlessly repeating the same mechanical gestures, they lose the very capacity to dream, to devise projects of alternate reality. What they experience is no longer the nostalgia for a determinate past (say, of their previous more “organic” farmers’ lives), but, as Kaplan puts it perspicuously, the “absolute nostalgia” for an empty Otherness whose sole positive content is, again, the factory life itself — say, the empty corridors of a factory.
So, within these coordinates, what does the passage from the factory production to the “postindustrial” production in which workers are again isolated and can even work at home, behind their computer screen, mean? The disabling alternative of today’s Marxism is: what to do apropos of the growing importance of the “immaterial production” today (cyber-workers)? Do we insist that only those involved in “real” material production are the working class, or do we accomplish the fateful step of accepting that the “symbolic workers” are the (true) proletarians today? One should resist this step, because it obfuscates the DIVISION between immaterial and material production, the SPLIT in the working class between (as a rule geographically separated) cyber-workers and material workers (programmers in the US or India, the sweat shops in China or Indonesia). Perhaps, it is the figure of the UNEMPLOYED (JOBLESS) who stands for the pure proletarian today: the unemployed substantial determination remains that of a worker, but they are prevented from actualizing it OR to renounce it, so they remain suspended in the potentiality of workers who cannot work. Perhaps, we are today in a sense “all jobless”: jobs tend to be more and more based on short term contracts, so that the jobless state is the rule, the zero-level, and the temporary job the exception.
The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music). And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? The key element of the new international trade agreements is the “protection of intellectual property”: whenever, in a merger, a big First World company takes over a Third World company, the first thing they do is close down the research department. Phenomena emerge here which bring the notion of property to extraordinary dialectical paradoxes: in India, the local communities suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they are using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others...
However, the outcome of this crisis of the private property of the means of production is by no means guaranteed — it is HERE that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of the Stalinist society: against the capitalism which is the class society, but in principle egalitarian, without direct hierarchical divisions, the “mature” Stalinism is a classless society articulated in precisely defined hierarchical groups (top nomenklatura, technical intelligence, army...). What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the classic Marxist notion of the class struggle is no longer adequate to describe its hierarchy and domination: in the Soviet Union from the late 20s onwards, the key social division was not defined by property, but by the direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). And, perhaps, the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the same way Lenin’s vision of the “central bank Socialism” can be properly read only retroactively, from today’s World Wide Web, the Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed “post-property” society, of the true “late capitalism” in which the ruling class will be defined by the direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and control and to other material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but directly to run them, to have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top health care, etc. — privileges which will be acquired not by property, but by other (educational, managerial, etc.) mechanisms.
Today, we already can discern the signs of a kind of general unease — recall the series of events usually listed under the name of “Seattle.” The 10 years honeymoon of the triumphant global capitalism is over, the long-overdue “seven years itch” is here — witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which — from the Time magazine to CNN — all of a sudden started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of the “honest” protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one — how to ACTUALIZE the media’s accusations: how to invent the organizational structure which will confer on this unrest the FORM of the universal political demand. Otherwise, the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is the marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, with certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key “Leninist” lesson today is: politics without the organizational FORM of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) “New SOCIAL Movements” is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: “You want revolution without a revolution!” Today’s blockade is that there are two ways open for the socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the “long march through the institutions,” or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And, again, the limit of these movements is that they are not POLITICAL in the sense of the Universal Singular: they are “one issue movements” which lack the dimension of the universality, i.e. they do not relate to the social TOTALITY.
Here, Lenin’s reproach to liberals is crucial: they only EXPLOIT the working classes’ discontent to strengthen their position vis-a-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.52 Is this also not the case with today’s Left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers’ grievances, etc., to score points over the conservatives WITHOUT ENDANGERING THE SYSTEM. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). It’s the same with all New Social Movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas: the systemic politics is always ready to “listen to their demands,” depriving them of their proper political sting. The system is by definition ecumenical, open, tolerant, ready to “listen” to all — even if one insist on one’s demands, they are deprived of their universal political sting by the very form of negotiation. The true Third Way we have to look for is this third way between the institutionalized parliamentary politics and the new social movements.
The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old ‘68 motto “Soyons realistes, demandons l'impossible!": in order to be truly a “realist,” one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears “possible” (or, as we usually out it, “feasible”).
The Leninist Utopia
Which, then, is the criterion of the political act? Success as such clearly doesn’t count, even if we define it in the dialectical way of Merleau-Ponty, as the wager that future will retroactively redeem our present horrible acts (this is how, in his Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the more intelligent justifications of the Stalinist terror: retroactively, it will become justified if its final outcome will be true freedom)53; neither does the reference to some abstract-universal ethical norms. The only criteria is the absolutely INHERENT one: that of the ENACTED UTOPIA. In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence — it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are — as if by Grace — for a brief time allowed to act AS IF the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow — in it, we ALREADY ARE FREE WHILE FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM, we ALREADY ARE HAPPY WHILE FIGHTING FOR HAPPINESS, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is not a Merleau-Pontyan wager, an act suspended in the futur anterieur, to be legitimized or delegitimized by the long term outcome of the present acts; it is as it were ITS OWN ONTOLOGICAL PROOF, an immediate index of its own truth.
Let us recall the staged performance of “Storming the Winter Palace” in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event “really took place” three years earlier; their work was coordinated by the Army officers, as well as by the avant-garde artists, musicians and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not “reality,” the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves — many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: “The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting”54; and the formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovski noted that “some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical.”55 We all remember the infamous self-celebratory First of May parades that were one of the supreme signs of recognition of the Stalinist regimes — if one needs a proof of how Leninism functioned in an entirely different way, are such performances not the supreme proof that the October Revolution was definitely NOT a simple coup d'etat by the small group of Bolsheviks, but an event which unleashed a tremendous emancipatory potential?
The archetypal Eisensteinian cinematic scene rendering the exuberant orgy of revolutionary destructive violence (what Eisenstein himself called “a veritable bacchanalia of destruction”) belongs to the same series: when, in October, the victorious revolutionaries penetrate the wine cellars of the Winter Palace, they indulge there in the ecstatic orgy of smashing thousands of the expensive wine bottles; in Behzin Meadow, after the village Pioneers discovers the body of the young Pavlik, brutally murdered by his own father, they force their way into the local church and desecrate it, robbing it of its relics, squabbling over an icon, sacrilegiously trying on vestments, heretically laughing at the statuary... In this suspension of the goal-oriented instrumental activity, we effectively get a kind of Bataillean “unrestrained expenditure” — the pious desire to deprive the revolution of this excess is simply the desire to have a revolution without revolution. It is against this background that one should approach the delicate issue of revolutionary violence which is an authentic act of liberation, not just a blind passage à l’acte.56
And did we not get exactly the same scene in the Great Cultural Revolution in China, with the thousands of Red Guardists ecstatically destroying old historical monuments, smashing old vases, desecrating old paintings, chirping off old walls?57 In spite of (or, rather, because of) all its horrors, the Great Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of such an enacted utopia. At its very end, before the agitation was blocked by Mao himself (since he already achieved his goal of re-establishing his full power and getting rid of the top nomenklatura competition), there was the “Shanghai Commune”: one million workers who simply took the official slogans seriously, demanding the abolition of the State and even the Party itself, and the direct communal organization of society. It is significant that it was at this very point that Mao ordered the restoration of order. The (often noted) parallel between Mao and Lacan is fully justified here: the dissolution of the École Freudienne de Paris in 1979 was Lacan’s “Great Cultural Revolution,” mobilizing his young followers (who, incidentally, mostly were ex-Maoists from 1968!) in order to get rid of the inner circle of his “mandarins.” In both cases, the paradox is that of a leader who triggers an uncontrolled upheaval, while trying to exert full personal power — the paradoxical overlapping of extreme dictatorship and extreme emancipation of the masses.
It is at this precise point concerning political terror that one can locate the gap that separates Leninism from Stalinism58: in Lenin’s times, terror was openly admitted (Trotsky sometimes even boasted in an almost cocky way about the non-democratic nature of the Bolshevik regime and the terror it used), while in Stalin’s times, the symbolic status of the terror thoroughly changed: terror turned into the publicly non-acknowledged obscene shadowy supplement of the public official discourse. It is significant that the climax of terror (1936/37) took place after the new constitution was accepted in 1935 — this constitution was supposed to end the state of emergency and to mark the return of the things to normal: the suspension of the civil rights of the whole strata of population (kulaks, ex-capitalists) was recalled, the right to vote was now universal, etc. etc. The key idea of this constitution was that now, after the stabilization of the Socialist order and the annihilation of the enemy classes, the Soviet Union is no longer a class society: the subject of the State is no longer the working class (workers and peasants), but the people. However, this does NOT mean that the Stalinist constitution was a simple hypocrisy concealing the social reality — the possibility of terror is inscribed into its very core: since the class war is now proclaimed over and the Soviet Union is conceived of as the classless country of the People, those who (are still presumed to) oppose the regime are no longer mere class enemies in a conflict that tears apart the social body, but enemies of the people, insects, worthless scum, which is to be excluded from humanity itself.
This repression of the regime’s own excess was strictly correlative to something homologous to the invention of the liberal psychological individual not take place in the Soviet Union in the late 20s and early 30s. The Russian avant-garde art of the early 20s (futurism, constructivism) not only zealously endorsed industrialization, it even endeavored to reinvent a new industrial man — no longer the old man of sentimental passions and roots in traditions, but the new man who gladly accepts his role as a bolt or screw in the gigantic coordinated industrial Machine. As such, it was subversive in its very “ultra-orthodoxy,” i.e. in its over-identification with the core of the official ideology: the image of man that we get in Eisenstein, Meyerhold, constructivist paintings, etc., emphasizes the beauty of his/her mechanical movements, his/her thorough depsychologization. What was perceived in the West as the ultimate nightmare of liberal individualism, as the ideological counterpoint to the “Taylorization,” to the Fordist ribbon-work, was in Russia hailed as the utopian prospect of liberation: recall how Meyerhold violently asserted the “behaviorist” approach to acting — no longer emphatic familiarization with the person the actor is playing, but the ruthless bodily training aimed at the cold bodily discipline, at the ability of the actor to perform the series of mechanized movements...59 THIS is what was unbearable to AND IN the official Stalinist ideology, so that the Stalinist “socialist realism” effectively WAS an attempt to reassert a “Socialism with a human face,” i.e. to reinscribe the process of industrialization into the constraints of the traditional psychological individual: in the Socialist Realist texts, paintings and films, individuals are no longer rendered as parts of the global Machine, but as warm passionate persons.
In a recent pamphlet against the “excesses” of May '68 and, more generally, the “sexual liberation” of the 60s, The Independent brought back to memory what the radicals of '68 thought about the child sex. A quarter of a century ago, Daniel Cohn-Bendit wrote about his experience in a kindergarten: “My constant flirt with all the children soon took on erotic characteristics. I could really feel how from the age of five the small girls had already learned to make passes at me. /.../ Several times a few children opened the flies of my trousers and started to stroke me. /.../ When they insisted, I then stroked them.” Shulamith Firestone went even further, expressing her hopes that, in a world “without the incest taboo /.../ relations with children would include as much genital sex as they were capable of — probably considerably more than we now believe."60 When confronted with these statements, Cohn-Bendit played them down, claiming that “this did not really happen, I only wanted to provoke people. When one reads it today, it is unacceptable.”61 However, the question still hovers: how, at that time, was it possible to provoke people, presenting them sexual games with pre-school children as something appealing, while today, the same “provocation” would immediately give rise to an outburst of moral disgust? After all, child sexual harassment is one of THE notions of Evil today. Without directly taking sides in this debate, one should read it as a sign of the change in our mores from the utopian energies of the 60s and early 70s to the contemporary stale Political Correctness, in which every authentic encounter with another human being is denounced as a victimizing experience. What we are unable even to conjecture today is the idea of REVOLUTION, be it sexual or social. Perhaps, in today’s stale times of the proliferating pleas for tolerance, one should take the risk of recalling the liberating dimension of such “excesses.”
Perhaps the most succinct definition of ideology was produced by Christopher Hitchens, when he tackled the difficult question of what the North Koreans effectively think about their “Beloved Leader” Kim Yong Il: “mass delusion is the only thing that keeps a people sane.”62 This paradox points towards the fetishistic split in the very heart of an effectively functioning ideology: individuals transpose their belief onto the big Other (embodied in the collective), which thus believes in their place — individuals thus remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance towards the “big Other” of the official discourse. It is not only the direct identification with the ideological “delusion” which would render individuals insane, but also the suspension of their (disavowed, displaced) belief. In other words, if individuals were to be deprived of this belief (projected onto the “big Other”), they would have to jump in and themselves directly assume the belief. (Perhaps, this explains the paradox that many a cynic turns into a sincere believer at the very point of the disintegration of the “official” belief.) This is what Lacan aimed at in his claim that the true formula of materialism is not “God doesn’t exist,” but “God is unconscious” — suffice it to recall what, in a letter to Max Brod, Milena Jesenska wrote about Kafka:
“Above all, things like money, stock-exchange, the foreign currency administration, type-writer, are for him thoroughly mystical (what they effectively are, only not for us, the others).”63
One should read this statement against the background of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism: the fetishist illusion resides in our real social life, not in our perception of it — a bourgeois subject knows very well that there is nothing magic about money, that money is just an object which stands for a set of social relations, but he nevertheless ACTS in real life as if he were to believe that money is a magic thing. This, then, gives us a precise insight into Kafka’s universe: Kafka was able to experience directly these fantasmatic beliefs we, “normal” people, disavow — Kafka’s “magic” is what Marx liked to refer to as the “theological freakishness” of commodities.
This definition of ideology points out the way to answer the boring standard reproach against the application of psychoanalysis to social-ideological processes: is it “legitimate” to expand the use of the notions which were originally deployed for the treatment of individuals, to collective entities and to speak, say, of religion as a “collective compulsive neurosis”? The focus of psychoanalysis is entirely different: the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply at a different level from the individual experience, but something to which the individual him/herself has to relate, which the individual him/herself has to experience as an order which is minimally “reified,” externalized. The problem is therefore not “how to jump from the individual to the social level?”; the problem is: how should the decentered socio-symbolic order of institutionalized practices beliefs be structured, if the subject is to retain his/her “sanity,” his/her “normal” functioning? Which delusions should be deposited there so that individuals can remain sane? Recall the proverbial egotist, cynically dismissing the public system of moral norms: as a rule, such a subject can only function if this system is “out there,” publicly recognized, i.e. in order to be a private cynic, he has to presuppose the existence of naive other(s) who “really believe.” This is how a true “cultural revolution” should be conducted: not by directly targeting individuals, endeavouring to “re-educate” them, to “change their reactionary attitudes,” but by depriving individuals of the support in the “big Other,” in the institutional symbolic order.
When, on the weekend of March 6-7 2001, the Taliban forces in Afghanistan proceeded to destroy all “idols,” especially the two gigantic Buddha statues carved into the stone at Bamiyan, we got the usual spectacle of all the “civilized” nations unanimously condemning the “barbarism” of this act. All the known actors were here: from the UNICEF expressing concern about the desecration of an important part of the heritage of humanity, and the New York Metropolitan Museum offering to buy the statues, up to the Islamic states representatives and clerics eager to denounce the destruction as contrary to the spirit of Islam. This kind of protest means strictly NOTHING — it just contributes to the aseptic liberal (multi)cultural consensus. Instead of hypocritically bemoaning this destruction, one should rather ask the question: where do WE stand with regard to faith? Perhaps, therein resides the truly traumatic dimension of the destruction in Afghanistan: we have here people who REALLY BELIEVE. After the Taliban government made public its intention to destroy all statues, most of the Western media first thought that this is a bluff, part of the strategy to blackmail the Western powers into recognizing the Taliban regime and pouring the money into Afghanistan, if they do not execute the announced measure — now we know they meant it. And it is also not appropriate to compare this destruction with, say, the demolition of mosques by the Serbs and Croats in Bosnia a couple of years ago: this destruction was not a religious act, but a way to strike at the ethnic enemy. Even when, in European history, Catholics burned Protestant churches and books, they were trying to annihilate another religious sect. In today’s Afghanistan, on the contrary, there are no non-Muslims, no people to whom the Buddha statues are sacred objects, so their destruction is a pure act of annihilation with no roots in any actual ideologico-political struggles.
In the time of the Chinese Great Cultural Revolution, the Red Guard gangs were heinously destroying hundreds of monasteries with thousands of statues and other priceless historical artefacts, their frenetic activity displaying a desperate endeavor to cut off links with the reactionary ideological past. Recently, the Chinese strategy underwent a shift of accent: more than on sheer military coercion, they now rely on ethnic and economic colonization, rapidly transforming Lhasa into a Chinese version of the capitalist Wild West, where karaoke bars intermingle with the Disney-like “Buddhist theme parks” for the Western tourists. 64 What goes on beneath the media image of the brutal Chinese soldiers and policemen terrorizing the Buddhist monks conceals is thus the much more effective American-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the status of the native Americans in the USA. Tibetan Buddhism survived the brutal Red Army onslaught — will it survive the much more artful economic colonization which, instead of directly attacking the material manifestations of a belief, undermines its very base, so that, even if Buddhism survives, it is deprived of its substance, turned into a simulacrum of itself? So when the Taliban minister of culture said “We are destroying just stones!”, he was in a way right: for a true Buddhist, the enlightenment/liberation of one single individual means more than all the statues! The true problem is that the Western economic-cultural colonization is doing more to undermine the life style within which Buddhism can thrive than all the Red Guards and Taliban militias combined: when Red Guards or the Taliban militias attack, it is still the direct violence and destruction and the struggle with one unconditional faith against another faith.
The problem with the Taliban regime is elsewhere. The Taliban state of Afghanistan is the prototypic postmodern state, an exemplary part of the contemporary global constellation, if there ever was one. First, its very emergence is the final result of the failure of the Soviet attempt, in the 70s and 80s, to impose modernization on Afghanistan: the Taliban movement itself arose out of the religious groups financed by CIA through Pakistan to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Secondly, if one is to believe the media, the whole economy of Afghanistan relies on opium: more than two thirds of the world opium crop comes from Afghanistan, and the Taliban government simply takes the 20% tax on the farmers’ income. The third feature: the Taliban government does not properly administer social affairs, it just rules. It is more or less totally indifferent towards of the well-being of its subjects, relying on the foreign aid or simply ignoring their plight. “Servicing the goods,” guaranteeing the well-being of the population, is simply not on their agenda — their sole preoccupation is the imposition of the strict religious order: while economy is more or less left to itself, the government takes care that all men have beards, that there are no TV sets and VCRs, that women are fully covered in public...
Far from being a traditional Islamic regime, the Taliban rule is thus thoroughly mediated by the process of modernization: relying on the (paradigmatically modern) split between economy and life-world, it combines the inclusion into the global market (the opium sales) with the ideological autarchy. So, paradoxically, we have here a twisted version of the unconditional Moral Majority rule which turns around the Western liberal state: instead of a state which limits itself to guaranteeing the material and institutional conditions for the well-being, while allowing individuals to pursue their own private life-styles, the Taliban state is interested ONLY in the life-style, leaving economy to itself, either to persist at a meager self-subsistence level or to export opium. In short, the Taliban state is ultimately nothing but a more radical and brutal version of the Singapore model of capitalism-cum-Asiatic-values?
Return versus Repetition
The entire history of the Soviet Union can be comprehended as homologous to Freud’s famous image of Rome, a city whose history is deposited in its present in the guise of the different layers of the archaeological remainders, each new level covering up the preceding none, like (another model) the seven layers of Troy, so that history, in its regress towards ever older epoches, proceeds like the archaeologist, discovering new layers by probing deeper and deeper into the ground. Was the (official ideological) history of the Soviet Union not the same accumulation of exclusions, of turning persons into non-persons, of retroactive rewriting of history? Quite logically, the “destalinization” was signalled by the opposite process of “rehabilitation,” of admitting “errors” in the past politics of the Party. The gradual “rehabilitation” of the demonized ex-leaders of the Bolsheviks can thus serve as perhaps the most sensitive index of how far (and in what direction) the “destalinization” of the Soviet Union was going. The first to be rehabilitated were the high military leaders shot in 1937 (Tukhachevsky and others); the last to be rehabilitated, already in the Gorbachev era, just before the collapse of the Communist regime, was Bukharin — this last rehabilitation, of course, was a clear sign of the turn towards capitalism: the Bukharin which was rehabilitated was the one who, in the 20s, advocated the pact between workers and peasants (owners of their land), launching the famous slogan “Get rich!” and opposed forced collectivization. Significantly, however, one figure was NEVER rehabilitated, excluded by the Communists as well as by the anti-Communist Russian nationalists: Trotsky, the “wandering Jew” of the Revolution, the true anti-Stalin, the arch-enemy, opposing “permanent revolution” to the idea of “building socialism in one country.” One is tempted to risk here the parallel with Freud’s distinction between primordial (founding) and secondary repression in the Unconscious: Trotsky’s exclusion amounted to something like the “primordial repression” of the Soviet State, to something which cannot ever be readmitted through “rehabilitation,” since the entire Order relied on this negative gesture of exclusion. (It is fashionable to claim that the irony of Stalin’s politics from 1928 onwards was that it effectively WAS a kind of “permanent revolution,” a permanent state of emergency in which revolution repeatedly devoured its own children — however, this claim is misleading: the Stalinist terror is the paradoxical result of the attempt to STABILIZE the Soviet Union into a state like other, with firm boundaries and institutions, i.e. terror was a gesture of panic, a defense reaction against the threat to this State stability.) So Trotsky is the one for whom there is a place neither in the pre-1990 nor in the post-1990 capitalist universe in which even the Communist nostalgics don’t know what to do with Trotsky’s permanent revolution — perhaps, the signifier “Trotsky” is the most appropriate designation of that which is worth redeeming in the Leninist legacy.
The problem with those few remaining orthodox “Leninists” who behave as if one can simply recycle the old Leninism, continuing to speak on class struggle, on the betrayal by the corrupted leaders of the working masses revolutionary impulses, etc., is that it is not quite clear from which subjective position of enunciation they speak: they either engage themselves in passionate discussions about the past (demonstrating with admirable erudition how and where the anti-Communist “leninologists” falsify Lenin, etc.), in which case they avoid the question of why (apart from a purely historical interest) does this matter at all today, or, the closer they get to contemporary politics, the closer they are to adopting some purely jargonistic pose which threatens no one. When, in the last months of 2001, the Milosevic regime in Serbia was finally toppled, I was asked the same question from my radical friends from the West: “What about the coal miners whose strike led to the disruption of the electricity supply and thus effectively brought Milosevic down? Was that not a genuine workers’ movement, which was then manipulated by the politicians, who were nationalist or corrupted by the CIA?” The same symptomatic point emerges apropos of every new social upheaval (like the disintegration of the Real Socialism 10 years ago): in each of these cases, they identify some working class movement which allegedly displayed a true revolutionary or, at least, Socialist potential, but was first exploited and then betrayed by the procapitalist and/or nationalist forces. This way, one can continue to dream that Revolution is round the corner: all we need is the authentic leadership which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarnosc was originally a worker’s democratic-socialist movement, later “betrayed” by being its leadership which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA... This mysterious working class whose revolutionary thrust is repeatedly thwarted by the treacherous nationalist and/or liberal politicians is one of the two fetishes of most of the remaining Trotskyites — the singular point of disavowal which enables them to sustain their overall interpretation of the state of things. This fetishist fixation on the old Marxist-Leninist frame is the exact opposite of the fashionable talk about “new paradigms,” about how we should leave behind the old “zombie-concepts” like working class, etc. — the two complementary ways to avoid the effort to THINK the New which effectively is emerging today. The first thing to do here is to cancel this disavowal by fully admitting that this “authentic” working class simply does not exist. (The other fetish is their belief that things took a bad turn in the Soviet Union only because Lenin did not succeed in joining forced with Trotsky in his effort to depose Stalin.) And if we add to this position four further ones, we get a pretty full picture of the sad predicament of today’s Left: the acceptance of the Cultural Wars (feminist, gay, anti-racist, etc., multiculturalist struggles) as the dominant terrain of the emancipatory politics; the purely defensive stance of protecting the achievements of the Welfare State; the naive belief in cybercommunism (the idea that the new media are directly creating conditions for a new authentic community); and, finally, the Third Way, the capitulation itself. The reference to Lenin should serve as the signifier of the effort to break the vicious circle of these false options.
John Berger recently made a salient point apropos of a French publicity poster of the internet investment brokers’ company Selftrade: under the image of a hammer and sickle cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds, the caption reads “And if the stock market profited everybody?” The strategy of this poster is obvious: today, the stock market fulfills the egalitarian Communist criteria, everybody can participate in it. Berger indulges in a simple mental experiment: “Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would of course not work. Why? The Swastika addressed potential victors not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice.”65 In contrast to it, the Hammer and Sickle invoked the hope that “history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice.”66 The irony is thus that, at the very moment when this hope is officially proclaimed dead by the hegemonic ideology of the “end of ideologies,” a paradigmatically “postindustrial” enterprise (is there anything more “postindustrial” than dealing with stocks on the internet?) has to mobilize this dormant hope in order to get its message through.67 “Repeating Lenin” means giving new life to this hope which continues to still haunt us.
Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin — to repeat Lenin is to accept that “Lenin is dead,” that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. 68 To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was “in Lenin more than Lenin himself.” To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it’s not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a “totalitarian threat” — it’s rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, “out of sync” with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is “out of sync,” that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it?69 If, to some people, such an assertion appears dangerously close to the infamous Hegel’s quip, when his deduction why there should be only eight planets circulating around the Sun was proven wrong by the discovery of the ninth planet (Pluto): “So much worse for the facts!”, then we should be ready to fully assume this paradox.
How did the ideology of Enlightenment evolve in the 18th century France? First, there was the epoch of salons, in which philosophers where trying to shock their benefactors, the generous Counts and Countesses, even Kings and Emperatrices (Holbach Frederick the Great, Diderot Catherine the Great), with their “radical” ideas on equality, the origin of power, the nature of men, etc. — all of this remaining a kind of intellectual game. At this stage, the idea that someone could take these ideas literally, as the blueprint for a radical socio-political transformation, would probably shock the ideologists themselves who were either part of the entourage of an enlightened nobleman or lone pathetic figures like Rousseau — their reaction would have been that of Ivan Karamazov, disgusted upon learning that his bastard half-brother and servant acted on his nihilistic ruminations, killing his father. This passage from intellectual game to an idea which effectively “seizes the masses” is the moment of truth — in it, the intellectual gets back his own message in its inverted/true form. In France, we pass from the gentle reflections of Rousseau to the Jacobin Terror; within the history of Marxism, it is only with Lenin that this passage occurs, that the games are REALLY over. And it is up to us to repeat this same passage and accomplish the fateful step from the ludic “postmodern” radicalism to the domain in which the games are over.
There is an old joke about socialism as the synthesis of the highest achievements of the entire hitherto human history: from the prehistoric societies, it took primitivism, from the Ancient world slavery, from medieval society brutal domination, from capitalism exploitation, and from socialism the name...70 Does something similar not hold about our attempt to repeat Lenin’s gesture? From the conservative cultural criticism, it takes the idea that today’s democracy is no longer the place where crucial decisions are made; from cyberspace ideologists the idea that the global digital network offers a new space of communal life; etc.etc., and from Lenin more or less just the name itself... However, this very fact could be turned in an argument FOR the “return to Lenin”: the extent to which the SIGNIFIER “Lenin” retains its subversive edge is easily demonstrated — say, when one makes the “Leninist” point that today’s democracy is exhausted, that the key decisions are not taken there, one is directly accused of “totalitarianism”; when a similar point is made by sociologists or even Vaclav Havel, they are praised for the depth of their insight... THIS resistance is the answer to the question “Why Lenin?”: it is the signifier “Lenin” which FORMALIZES this content found elsewhere, transforming a series of common notions into a truly subversive theoretical formation.
*
The greatness of Lenin is that he WASN’T AFRAID TO SUCCEED — in contrast to the negative pathos discernible from Rosa Luxembourg to Adorno, where the only authentic act is the true failure, the failure which brings to light the antagonism of the constellation (what, apropos of Beethoven, Adorno says about the two modes of the artistic failure — the unauthentic, due simply to the authors subjective deficiency, and the authentic, which brings to light the limitation of the very objective social constellation — bears also on his own politics71). In 1917, instead of waiting for the right moment of maturity, Lenin organized a preemptive strike; in 1920, finding himself in a position of the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it being killed in the civil war), he went on organizing a state, i.e. he fully accepted the paradox of the party organizing-creating its base, its working class.
Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in Lenin’s writings of 1917, which cover the span from his initial grasp of the unique revolutionary chance (first elaborated in the “Letters From Afar”) to the “Letter to Central Committee Members,” which finally convinced the Bolshevik majority that the moment to seize power has arrived. Everything is here, from “Lenin the ingenious revolutionary strategist” to “Lenin of the enacted utopia” (of the immediate abolishing of the state apparatuses). To refer to Kierkegaard, what we are allowed to perceive in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet “Lenin the Soviet institution,” but Lenin thrown into an OPEN situation. Are we, within our late capitalist closure of the “end of history,” still able to experience the shattering impact of such an authentic historical openness?
Notes
1. See Juergen Habermas, Die Neue Unuebersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1985.
2. As to this notion, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso Books 1997.
3. See Claude Lefort, La complication, Paris: Fayard 1999.
4. For an Althusserian attempt to save Lenin’s Empiriocriticism, see Dominique Lecourt, Une crise et ses enjeux, Paris: Maspero 1973.
5. First published in 1990, then reprinted in Colletti, Fine della filosofia, Roma: Ideazione 1996.
6. When, in a typical transferential pathos, Lenin repeats again and again how Marx and Engels always called their philosophy “dialectical materialism,” it is easy for an anti-Leninist Marxologue to draw attention to the fact that Marx and Engels NOT EVEN ONCE used this term (it was Georgi Plekhanov who introduced it). This situation presented a nice deadlock to the Soviet editors of the collected works of Marx and Engels: in the Index, there HAD to be the entry “dialectical materialism,” which they then filled in with references to the pages where Marx or Engels speak of dialectics, of the materialist concept of history... However, this is not the whole story: there is a truth-effect in this hallucinatory projection of a later concept back into Marx.
7. I owe this parallel to Eustache Kouvelakis, Paris (private conversation).
8. For a more detailed critique of Adorno’s “predominance of the objective,” see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief, London: Routledge 2001.
9. In a passage of his NoteBooks, Lenin comes to the edge of this insight when he notes how the very “abstraction” of thought, its “failure” to immediately grasp the object in its infinite complexity, its distance from the object, its stepping-back from it, brings us CLOSER to the “notion” of what the object effectively is: the very “one-sided” reduction the object to some of its abstract properties in the concept, this apparent “limitation” of our knowledge (sustaining the dream of a total intuitive knowledge) IS the very essence of knowledge... He comes to the edge of all this, and then again regresses to the predominant evolutionary notion of the infinite approaching to reality.
10. Quoted from V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, New York: International Publishers 1999, p. 40.
11. Lenin, op.cit., p. 40-41.
12. See Ernesto Laclau, “The Politics of Rhetoric,” intervention at the conference Culture and Materiality, University of California, Davis, 23-25 April 1998. When today’s postmodern political philosophers emphasize the paradox of democracy, how democracy is possible only against the background of its impossibility, do they not reproduce the paradoxes of the Kantian practical reason discerned long ago by Hegel?
13. See Eustache Kouvelakis’s commentary to L'Introduction a la Critique de la philosophie du droit de Hegel, Paris: Ellipses 2000.
14. I owe this distinction to Alain Badiou (private conversation).
15. This should be the answer to Veit Harlan, the Nazi director who, around 1950, despaired about the fact that Jews in the US did not show any understanding for his defense for making The Jew Suess, claimed that no American Jew can really understand what was his situation in the Nazi Germany: far from justifying him, this obscene (factual) truth is the ultimate lie. — At a different level, there are in Palestine today two opposite narratives (the Jewish and the Palestinian one) with absolutely no common horizon, no “synthesis” in a larger meta-narrative; the solution thus cannot be found in any all-encompassing narrative.
16. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Cambridge (Ma): MIT Press 2000, p. 237.
17. This difference between interpretation and formalization is also crucial to introduce some (theoretical) order into the recent debates on the holocaust: although it is true that the holocaust cannot be adequately interpreted or narrated, in short: rendered meaningful, that all the attempts to do it fail and have to end in silence, it can and should be “formalized,” situated in its structural conditions of possibility.
18. See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989. — Along the similar lines, Habermas, Rorty’s great opponent, elevates the rise of “public space” of civil society, the space of free discussion that mediates between private lives and political/state apparatuses in the Enlightenment era. The problem is that this space of enlightened public debate was always redoubled by the fear of the irrational/passionate crowd which can, through the contamination (what Spinoza called imitatio affecti), explode into murderous violence based on superstitions manipulated by priests or other ideologists. So the enlightened space of rational debate was always based on certain exclusions: on the exclusion of those who were NOT considered “rational” enough (lower classes, women, children, savages, criminals...) — they needed the pressure of “irrational” authority to be kept in check, i.e. for them, Voltaire’s well-known motto “If there were no Gold, one would have to invent him” fully holds.
19. See Peter Singer, The Essential Singer: Writings on an Ethical Life, New York: Ecco Press 2000.
20. See Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook (New York: Chronicle Books 1999).
21. On account of its utter “realism,” The Worst-Case Scenario is a Western book par excellence; its Oriental counterpart is chindogu, arguably the finest spiritual achievement of Japan in the last decades, the art of inventing objects which are sublime in the strictest Kantian sense of the term — practically useless on account of their very excessive usefulness (say, glasses with electrically-run mini-windshields on them, so that your view will remain clear even if you have to walk in the rain without an umbrella; butter contained in a lipstick tube, so that you can carry it with you and spread it on the bread without a knife). That is to say, in order to be recognized, the chindogu objects have to meet two basic criteria: it should be possible to really construct them and they should work; simultaneously, they should not be “practical,” i.e. it should not be feasible to market them. The comparison between The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and chindogu offers us a unique insight into the difference between the Eastern and the Western sublime, an insight far superior to the New Age pseudo-philosophical treatises. In both cases, the effect of the Sublime resides in the way the uselessness of the product is the outcome of the extreme “realistic” and pragmatic approach itself. However, in the case of the West, we get simple, realistic advises for problems (situations) most of us will never encounter (who of us will really have to face alone a hungry lion?), while in the case of the East, we get unpractically complicated solutions for the problems all of us effectively encounter (who of us was not caught in the rain?). The Western sublime offers a practical solution for a problem which does not arise, while the Eastern sublime offers a useless solution for a real common problem. The underlying motto of the Eastern Sublime is “Why do it simply, when you can complicate it?” — is the principle of chindogu not discernible already in what appears to our Western eyes as the “impractical” clumsy form of the Japanese spoons? The underlying motto of the Western Sublime is, on the contrary, “If the problems do not fit our preferred way of solving them, let’s change problems, not the way we are used to solve them!” — is this principle not discernible in the sacred principle of Bureaucracy which has to invent problems in order to justify its existence which serves to solve them?
22. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, London: Verso Books 1996.
23. In an incident at the US academia, a couple of years ago, a lesbian feminist claimed that gays are today the privileged victims, so that the analysis of how the gays are underprivileged provides the key to understanding all other exclusions, repressions, violences, etc. (religious, ethnic, class...). What is problematic with this thesis is precisely its implicit (or, in this case, explicit even) UNIVERSAL claim: it is making exemplary victims of those who are NOT that, of those who can be much easier than religious or ethnic Others (not to mention the socially — “class” — excluded) fully integrated into the public space, enjoying full rights. Here, one should approach the ambiguity of the connection between gay and class struggle. There is a long tradition of the Leftist gay bashing, whose traces are discernible up to Adorno — suffice it to mention Maxim Gorky’s infamous remark from his essay “Proletarian Humanism” (sic! — 1934): “Exterminate (sic!) homosexuals, and Fascism will disappear."(Quoted from Siegfried Tornow, “Maennliche Homosexualitaet und Politik in Sowjet-Russland,” in Homosexualitaet und Wissenschaft II, Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel 1992, p. 281.) All of this cannot be reduced to opportunistically flirting with the traditional patriarchal sexual morality of the working classes, or with the Stalinist reaction against the liberating aspects of the first years after the October Revolution; one should remember that the above-quoted Gorky’s inciting statement, as well as Adorno’s reservations towards homosexuality (his conviction about the libidinal link between homosexuality and the spirit of military male-bonding), are all based on the same historical experience: that of the SA, the “revolutionary” paramilitary Nazi organization of street-fighting thugs, in which homosexuality abounded up to its head (Roehm). The first thing to note here is that it was already Hitler himself who purged the SA in order to make the Nazi regime publicly acceptable by way of cleansing it of its obscene-violent excess, and that he justified the slaughter of the SA leadership precisely by evoking their “sexual depravity”... In order to function as the support of a “totalitarian” community, homosexuality has to remain a publicly disavowed “dirty secret,” shared by those who are “in.” Does this mean that, when gays are persecuted, they deserve only a qualified support, a kind of “Yes, we know we should support you, but nonetheless... (you are partially responsible for the Nazi violence)"? What one should only insist on is that the political overdetermination of homosexuality is far from simple, that the homosexual libidinal economy can be co-opted by different political orientations, and that it is HERE that one should avoid the “essentialist” mistake of dismissing the Rightist “militaristic” homosexuality as the secondary distortion of the “authentic” subversive homosexuality.
24. See G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977, p. 178.
25. See Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce qui fait insigne (unpublished seminar 1984-85, the lecture on December 3 1984).
26. This also enables us to answer Dominick la Capra’s reproach according to which, the Lacanian notion of lack conflates two levels that have to be kept apart: the purely formal “ontological” lack constitutive of the symbolic order as such, and the particular traumatic experiences (exemplarily: holocaust) which could also NOT have occurred — particular historical catastrophes like the holocaust thus seem to be “legitimized” as directly grounded in the fundamental trauma that pertains to the very human existence. (See Dominick la Capra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry, Volume 25, Number 4 (Summer 1999), p. 696-727.) This distinction between structural and contingent-historical trauma, convincing as it may appear, is doubly inadequate in its reliance on the Kantian distinction between the formal/structural a priori and the contingent/empirical a posteriori. First, EVERY trauma, trauma “as such,” in its very concept, is experienced as something contingent, as an unexpected meaningless disturbance — trauma is by definition not “structural,” but something which disturbs the structural order. Secondly, the holocaust was NOT simply a historical contingency, but something which, in its unique combination of the mythical sacrifice with technological instrumental efficiency, realized a certain destructive potential inscribed into the very logic of the so-called Western civilization. We cannot adopt towards it the neutral position of a safe distance, from which we dismiss the holocaust as an unfortunate accident: the holocaust is in a way the “symptom” of our civilization, the singular point in which the universal repressed truth about it emerges. To put it in somewhat pathetic terms, any account of the Western civilization which does not account for the holocaust thereby invalidates itself.
27. One possible counter-argument is here that the category of the tragic is not appropriate to analyze Stalinism: the problem is not that the original Marxist vision got subverted by its unintended consequences, it is this vision itself. If Lenin’s and even Marx’s project of Communism were to be fully realized as to their true core, things would have been MUCH WORSE than Stalinism — we would have a version of what Adorno and Horkheimer called “die verwaltete Welt (the administered society),” a totally self-transparent society run by the reified “general intellect” in which the last remainders of the human autonomy and freedom would have been obliterated... The way to answer this reproach is to draw the distinction between Marx’s analysis of the capitalist dynamic and his positive vision of Communism, as well as between this vision and the actuality of the revolutionary turmoil: what if Marx’s analysis of the capitalist dynamic is not dependent on his positive determinations of the Communist societies? And what if his theoretical expectations themselves were shattered by the actual revolutionary experience? (It is clear that Marx himself was surprised by the new political form of the Paris Commune.)
28. Georgi Dimitroff, Tagebücher 1933-1943, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag 2000.
29. Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1972, p. 112.
30. This passage is indebted to conversations with Sebastian Budgen (London) and Eustache Kouvelakis.
31. V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow: Progress 1965, Volume 42, p. 67.
32. Quoted from Neil Harding, Leninism, Durham: Duke University Press 1996, p. 309.
33. Harding, op.cit., p. 152.
34. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 87.
35. Ibid.
36. See Alain Badiou, Conditions, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1992.
37. William Craig, Enemy At the Gates, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 2000, p. 307-308.
38. Craig, op.cit., p. 153.
39. See Alain Badiou, “L'Un se divise en Deux,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001.
40. See Sylvain Lazarus, “La forme Parti,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin.
41. Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1995, p. 14.
42. See Fredric Jameson, “The Concept of Revisionism,” intervention at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin, Essen, February 2-4 2001.
43. Is it not that the same “vase / two faces” paradox occurs in the case of the holocaust and gulag? We either elevate the holocaust into the ultimate crime, and the Stalinist terror is thereby half-redeemed, reduced to a minor role of an “ordinary” crime; or we focus on the gulag as the ultimate result of the logic of the modern revolutionary terror, and the holocaust is thereby at best reduced to another example of the same logic. Somehow, it doesn’t seem possible to deploy a truly “neutral” theory of totalitarianism, without giving a hidden preference either to the holocaust or to gulag.
44. For a more detailed elaboration of this point, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, On Belief.
45. And the achievement of Georg Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness is that it is one of the few works which succeed in bringing these two dimensions together: on the one hand, the topic of commodity fetishism and reification; on the other hand, the topic of the party and revolutionary strategy — the reason why this book is profoundly Leninist.
46. For a further development of this point, see Chapter 3 of Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute, London: Verso Books 2000. — It is often said that the ultimate product of capitalism are piles of trash — useless computers, cars, TVs and VCRs ...: places like the famous “resting place” of the hundreds of abandoned planes in the Mojave desert confront us with the obverse truth of the capitalist dynamics, its inert objectal remainder. And it is against this background that one should read the ecological dream-notion of the total recycling (in which every remainder is used again) as the ultimate capitalist dream, even if it is coated in the terms of retaining the natural balance on the Planet Earth: the dream of the self-propelling circulation of the capital which would succeed in leaving behind no material leftover — the proof of how capitalism can appropriate ideologies which seem to oppose it.
47. Another figure of this inexplicable excess occurs in many cinema comedies in which the hero, stranded alone in a small town, is forced to take his expensive car to the local mechanic who, to the hero’s horror, proceeds to take the whole car to pieces; when, a day or two later, the mechanic puts the car together again, to everyone’s surprise, it runs perfectly, although there are always a piece or two standing aside, the remainders that the mechanic did not find the place for when putting the car together...
48. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 168.
49. Quoted from Harding, op.cit., p. 146.
50. In this context, the myth to be debunked is that of the diminishing role of the state. What we are witnessing today is the shift in its functions: while partially withdrawing from its welfare functions, the state is strengthening its apparatuses in other domains of social regulation. In order to start a business now, one has to rely on the state to guarantee not only law and order, but the entire infrastructure (access to water and energy, means of transportation, ecological criteria, international regulations, etc.), in an incomparably larger extent than 100 years ago. The recent electricity supply debacle in California makes this point palpable: for a couple of weeks in January and February 2001, the privatization (“deregulation”) of the electricity supply changed Southern California, one of the highly developed “postindustrial” landscapes in the entire world, into a Third World country with regular black-outs. Of course, the defenders of deregulation claimed that it was not thorough enough, thereby engaging in the old false syllogism of “my fiancee is never late for the appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancee": deregulation by definition works, so if it doesn’t work, it wasn’t truly a deregulation... Does the recent Mad Cow Disease panic (which probably presages dozens of similar phenomena which await us in the near future) also not point towards the need for a strict state and global institutionalized control of the agriculture?
51. See Leslie Kaplan, L'exces-usine, Paris: Hachette 1984.
52. I owe this point to Alan Shandro’s intervention “Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony” at the symposium The Retrieval of Lenin.
53. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: the Communist Problem, Oxford: Polity Press 2000.
54. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, p. 144.
55. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, op.cit., p. 144.
56. With regard to this point, the crucial figure of the Soviet cinema is not Eisenstein, but Alexander Medvedkin, appropriately named by Christ Marker “the last Bolshevik” (see Marker’s outstanding documentary The Last Bolshevik from 1993). While wholeheartedly supportive of the official politics, inclusive of the forced collectivization, Medvedkin made films which staged this support in a way which retained the initial ludic utopian-subversive revolutionary impulse; say, in his Happiness from 1935, in order to combat religion, he shows a priest who imagines seeing the breasts of a nun through her habit — un unheard-of scene for the Soviet film of the 30s. Medvedkin thus enjoys the unique privilege of an enthusiastically orthodox Communist film-maker whose films were ALL prohibited or at least heavily censored.
57. Although it is also possible to argue that this violence effectively WAS an impotent passage a l'acte: an outburst which displayed the inability to break with the weight of the past symbolic tradition. In order to effectively get rid of the past, one does not need to physically smash the monuments — changing them into a part of the tourist industry is much more effective. Is this not what Tibetans are painfully discovering today? The true destruction of their culture will not occur through the Chinese destroying their monuments, but through the proliferation of the Buddhist Theme Parks in the downtown Lhasa.
58. One is tempted to question the very term “Leninism": is it not that it was invented under Stalin? And does the same not go for Marxism (as a teaching) which was basically a Leninist invention, so that Marxism is a Leninist notion and Leninism a Stalinist one?
59. See Chapters 2 and 3 of Susan Buck-Morss’s outstanding Dreamworld and Catastrophe.
60. Both quotes from Maureen Freely, “Polymorphous sexuality in the Sixties,” The Independent, 29 January 2001, The Monday Review, p. 4.
61. Quoted from Konkret, Heft 3 (March 2001), p. 9.
62. Christopher Hitchens, “Visit To a Small Planet,” Vanity Fair, January 2001, p. 24.
63. Quoted from Jana Cerna, Kafka’s Milena, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1993, p. 174.
64. One of the ultimate obscenities of the modern stance towards belief was formulated by the Chinese Communist Party: in the mid 90s, when the Chinese authorities claimed that THEIR Panchen Lama was the right one, not the one chosen and recognized by the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, they accused the Dalai Lama of not respecting the old Buddhist tradition, of giving preference to political considerations over the old religious rules. So we had a Communist Party claiming that the birth of the child they identified as the Panchen Lama (who, as if by an accident, was born into a family of Communist cadres!) was accompanied by miraculous appearances on the sky, that, already when one year old, he displayed supernatural capacities.
65. John Berger, “The hammer and sickle,” in Janus 5 (2000), p. 16.
66. Berger, op.cit., p. 17.
67. Or, to indulge in a similar mental experiment: in the last days of the Really Existing Socialism, the protesting crowds often sang the official songs, including national anthems, reminding the powers of their unfulfilled promises. What better thing for an East German crowd to do in 1989 than to simply sing the GDR national anthem? Because its words (“Deutschland einig Vaterland”) no longer fitted the emphasis on East Germans as a new Socialist nation, it was PROHIBITED to sing it in public from late 50s to 1989: at the official ceremonies, only the orchestral version was performed. (The GDR was thus a unique country in which singing the national anthem was a criminal act!). Can one imagine the same thing under Nazism?
68. One should, perhaps, rehabilitate Marx’s (implicit) distinction between the working class (an “objective” social category, the topic of sociological studies) and the proletariat (a certain SUBJECTIVE position — the class “for itself,” the embodiment of social negativity, to use the old rather unfortunate expression). Instead of searching for the disappearing working class, one should rather ask: who occupies, who is able to subjectivize, today its position as proletarian?
69. At a more general methodological level, one should also turn around the standard pseudo-Nietzschean view according to which, the past we construct in our historiography is a symptom, an articulation of our present problems: what if, on the contrary, we ourselves — our present — is a symptom of the unresolved deadlocks of the past?
70. For a detailed Lacanian reading of this joke, see Chapter 2 of Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative, Durham: Duke University Press 1993.
71. See Theodor W. Adorno, Beethoven, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1993, p. 32.
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./articles/Barthes-Roland/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.subject.philosophy.works.fr.derrida | <body>
<p class="title">Jacques Derrida (1967)</p>
<img src="../../../../../glossary/people/d/pics/derrida.jpg" border="2" hspace="6" align="RIGHT" alt="sketch of Derrida">
<h1>Of Grammatology</h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source:</span> <em>Of Grammatology</em>, publ. John Hopkins University Press., 1974. Chapter Two, with one section deleted.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h3>2 Linguistics and Grammatology</h3>
<p class="quoteb">
Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre
that one gives more care to the determining of the image than
to the object. - J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai
sur les langues.</p>
<p class="fst">
The concept of writing should define the field of a science.
But can it be determined by scholars outside of all the historico-metaphysical
predeterminations that we have just situated so clinically? What
can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted:</p>
<ol class="numbered">
<li>that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch
of writing;</li>
<li>that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project,
in a language implying a certain kind of structurally and axiologically
determined relationship between speech and writing;</li>
<li>that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept
and the adventure of phonetic writing, valorised as the telos
of all writing, even though what was always the exemplary model
of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from that
goal;
</li><li>that the strictest notion of a <em>general science </em>of writing
was born, for nonfortuitous reasons, during a certain period of
the world's history (beginning around the eighteenth century)
and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between
“living” speech and inscription;</li>
<li>that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service
of science and possibly its object — but first, as Husserl in particular
pointed out in <em>The Origin of Geometry</em>, the condition of
the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.
Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè.</li>
<li>that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing;
to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular
forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples
without writing and without history. Before being the object
of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field
of history — of historical becoming. And the former (<em>Historie
</em>in German) presupposes the latter (<em>Geschichte</em>).</li>
</ol>
<p>
The science of writing should therefore look for its object at
the roots of scientificity,. The history of writing should turn
back toward the origin of historicity. , A science of the possibility
of science? A science of science which would no longer have the
form of logic but that of <em>grammatics? </em>A history of the
possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology,
a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?</p>
<p>
The <em>positive </em>and the classical sciences of writing are
obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point,
such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive
investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within
a philosophising logic, the ontophenomenological question of essence,
that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only
paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of
<em>facts.</em></p>
<p>
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question,
that dry, necessary, and somewhat facile question of right, against
the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may
witness today. The genesis and system of scripts bad never led
to such profound, extended, and assured explorations. It is not
really a matter of weighing the question against the importance
of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot
be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because
its repression has real consequences in the very content of the
researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way,
are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.</p>
<p>
The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself
about the essence of his object in the form of a question of origin:
“What is writing?” means “where and when does writing
begin?” The responses generally come very quickly. They
circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move
within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around
these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth
of writing are always organised. All works dealing with the history
of writing are composed along the same lines: a philosophical
and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems
in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts. We
have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions
and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical
wealth of information.</p>
<p>
The question of the origin of writing and the question of the
origin of language are difficult to separate. Grammatologists,
who are generally by training historians, epigraphists, and archaeologists,
seldom relate their researches to the modern science of language.
It is all the more surprising that, among the “sciences
of man,” linguistics is the one science whose scientificity
is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.</p>
<p>
Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an
essential assistance that it has almost never looked for? On
the contrary, does one not find efficaciously at work, in the
very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science,
a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech
and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the constitution
of a general science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition
an overthrowing of the landscape upon which the science of language
is peacefully installed? For better and for worse? For blindness
as well as for productivity? This is the second type of question
that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should
like to approach, as a privileged example, the project and texts
of Ferdinand de Saussure. That the particularity of the example
does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point
which I shall occasionally — try not merely to take for granted.</p>
<p>
Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us
set aside all the implicit decisions that have established such
a project and all the questions about its own origin that the
fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us first
simply consider that the scientificity of that science is often
acknowledged because of its phonological foundations. Phonology,
it is often said today, communicates its scientificity to linguistics,
which in turn serves as the epistemological model for all the
sciences of man. Since the deliberate and systematic phonological
orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet) carries
out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at
least provisionally, confine my-self to the latter. Will my argument
be equally applicable a fortiori to the most accentuated forms
of phonologism? The problem at least be stated.</p>
<p>
The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity
— in the last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its
essence, as the unity of the <em>phonè</em>, the <em>glossa</em>,
and the <em>logos</em>. This determination is by rights anterior
to all the eventual differentiations that could arise within the
systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech
[<em>langue/parole</em>]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic;
phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics). And even if one
wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent
signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal
identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities
that are not purely sensible), it would have to be admitted that
the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and
the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense
within the phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would always
be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the
signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle,
Rousseau, and Hegel.</p>
<p>
Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science
remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared
purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the
subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction
of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and
originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another
statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying
is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates
the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics-phonology
would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow
this tension between gesture and statement in Saussure.</p>
<h3>The Outside<br>
and the Inside</h3>
<p class="fst">
On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not
only in theory, but in practice (<em>in the principle of its practice</em>)
the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does
not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and derivative
function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among
others, a modality of the events which can befall a language whose
essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated
by writing. “Language does have an oral tradition that is
independent of writing” (<em>Cours de linguistique générale</em>).
Derivative because <em>representative </em>signifier of the first
signifier, representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate,
natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of the signified,
of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you). Saussure
takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already
in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic
script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian
definition: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience
and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” Saussure:
“Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs;
the second <em>exists for the sole purpose of representing</em>
the first”. This representative determination, beside communicating
without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not
translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psychological
or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes
or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing:
phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè
in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular,
could be founded. One should, moreover, say <em>mode</em>, rather
than <em>structure</em>; it is not a question of a system constructed
and functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing
a functioning which in fact is never completely phonetic.
In fact, but also for reasons of essence to which I shall frequently
return. To be sure this factum of phonetic writing is massive;
it commands our entire culture and our entire science, and it
is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it
does not respond to any necessity of an absolute and universal
essence. Using this as a point of departure, Saussure defines
the project and object of general linguistics: “The linguistic
object is not defined by the combination of the written word and
the spoken word: <em>the spoken form alone constitutes the object</em>”.</p>
<p>
The form of the question to which he responded thus entailed the
response. It was a matter of knowing what sort of word is the
object of linguistics and what the relationships arc between the
atomic unities that are the written and the spoken word. Now
the word (<em>vox</em>) is already a unity of sense and sound, of
concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian language,
of the signified and the signifier. This last terminology was
moreover first proposed in the domain of spoken language alone,
of linguistics in the narrow sense and not in the domain of semiology
(“I propose to retain the word <em>sign</em> [<em>signe</em>]
to designate the whole and to replace concept <em>and sound-image
</em>respectively by signified [<em>signifié</em>] and <em>signifier
</em>[<em>signifiant</em>]”). The word is thus already, a constituted
unity, an effect of “the somewhat mysterious fact ... that
'thought-sound' implies divisions”. Even if the word is
in its turn articulated, even if it implies other divisions, as
long as one poses the question of the relationships between speech
and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thought-sound,”
there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,”
it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language
and of this “thought-sound.” It must necessarily operate
from already constituted units of signification, in the formation
of which it has played no part.</p>
<p>
Perhaps the objection will be made that writing up to the present
has not on]y not contradicted, but indeed, confirmed the linguistics
of the word. Hitherto I seem to have maintained that only the
fascination of the unit called word has prevented giving to writing
the attention that it merited. By that I seemed to suppose that,
by ceasing to accord an absolute privilege to the word, modern
linguistics would become that much more attentive to writing and
would finally cease to regard it with suspicion. ...</p>
<hr class="section">
<p>
It is clear that the concepts of stability,, permanence, and duration,
which here assist thinking the relationships between speech and
writing, are too lax and open to every uncritical investiture.
They would require more attentive and minute analyses. The same
is applicable to an explanation according to which “most
people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because
these are sharper and more lasting than aural impressions. This
explanation of “usurpation” is not only empirical in
its form, it is problematic in its content, it refers to a metaphysics
and to an old physiology, of sensory faculties constantly, disproved
by science, as by the experience of language and by the body proper
as language. It imprudently makes of visibility the tangible,
simple, and essential element of writing. Above all, in considering
the audible as the natural milieu within which language must naturally
fragment and articulate its instituted signs, thus exercising
its arbitrariness, this explanation excludes all possibility,,
of some natural relationship between speech and writing at the,
very moment that it affirms it. Instead of deliberately dismissing
the notions of nature and institution that it constantly uses,
which ought to be done first, it thus confuses the two. It finally
and most importantly contradicts the principal affirmation according
to which “the thing that constitutes language [<em>l'essentiel
de la langue</em>] is . . . unrelated to the phonic character of
the linguistic sign”. This affirmation will soon occupy
us; within it the other side of the Saussurian proposition denouncing
the “illusions of script” comes to the fore.</p>
<p>
What do these limits and presuppositions signify? First that
a linguistics is not <em>general </em>as long as it defines its
outside and inside in terms of <em>deter</em>mined linguistic models;
as long as it does not rigorously distinguish essence from fact
in their respective degrees of generality. The system of writing
in general is not exterior to the system of language in general,
unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior
passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of
the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is
essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently
alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general
is not “image” or “figuration” of language
in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning
of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude
it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if
one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true.
If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign”
signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider
at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. What Saussure
saw without seeing, knew without being <em>able </em>to take into
account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition,
is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally
imposed (but for the inaccuracy in principle, insufficiency of
fact, and the permanent usurpation) as instrument and technique
of representation of a system of language. And that this movement,
unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking,
within <em>language, </em>of concepts like those of the sign, technique,
representation, language. The system of language associated with
phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics,
determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced.
This logocentrism, this <em>epoch </em>of the full speech, has
always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential
reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing,
all science of writing which was not technology and the <em>history
of a technique, </em>itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor
of a natural writing. It is this logocentrism which, limiting
the internal system of language in general by a bad abstraction,
prevents Saussure and the majority of his successors from determining
fully and explicitly that which is called “the integral and
concrete object of linguistics” </p>
<p>
But conversely, as I announced above, it is when he is not expressly
dealing with writing, when he feels be has closed the parentheses
on that subject, that Saussure opens the field of a general grammatology.
Which would not only no longer be excluded from general linguistics,
but would dominate it and contain it within itself. Then one
realises that what was chased off limits, the wandering outcast
of linguistics, has indeed never ceased to haunt language as its
primary and most intimate possibility. Then something which was
never spoken and which is nothing other than writing itself as
the origin of language writes itself within Saussure's discourse.
Then we glimpse the germ of a profound but indirect explanation
of the usurpation and the traps condemned in Chapter VI. This
explanation will overthrow even the form of the question to which
it was a premature reply.</p>
<h3>The Outside <strike>Is<br>
</strike>the Inside</h3>
<p class="fst">
The thesis of the <em>arbitrariness </em>of the sign (so grossly
misnamed, and not only for the reasons Saussure himself recognises)
must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the
graphic sign. No doubt this thesis concerns only the necessity
of relationships between specific signifiers and signifieds within
an allegedly natural relationship between the voice and sense
in general, between the order of phonic signifiers and the content
of the signifieds (“the only natural bond, the only true
bond, the bond of sound”). Only these relationships between
specific signifiers and signifieds would be regulated by arbitrariness.
Within the “natural” relationship between phonic signifiers
and their signifieds in general, the relationship between each
determined signifier and its determined signified would be “arbitrary”.</p>
<p>
Now from the moment that one considers the totality of determined
signs, spoken, and <i>a fortiori</i> written, as unmotivated institutions, one must exclude any relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or orders of signifiers. If “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, “graphic” in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted — hence “written,” even if they are “phonic” — signifiers. The very idea of institution — hence of the arbitrariness of the sign — is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the horizon itself, outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the <em>regulated play </em>of
their differences, even if they are “phonic.”</p>
<p>
Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution,
of <em>physis </em>and <em>nomos</em> (which also means, of course,
a distribution and division regulated in fact by law) which a
meditation on writing should disturb although it functions everywhere
as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics.
We must then conclude that only the signs called natural, those
that Hegel and Saussure call “symbols,” escape semiology
as grammatology. But they fall <i>a fortiori</i> outside the field of
linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of
the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably
contests Saussure's declared proposition when he chases writing
to the outer darkness of language. This thesis successfully accounts
for a conventional relationship between the phoneme and the grapheme
(in phonetic writing, between the phoneme, signifier-signified,
and the grapheme, pure signifier), but by the same token it forbids
that the latter be an “image” of the former. Now it
was indispensable to the exclusion of writing as “external
system,” that it come to impose an “image,” a “representation,” or a “figuration,” an exterior reflection of the reality of language.</p>
<p>
It matters little, here at least, that there is in fact an ideographic
filiation of the alphabet. This important question is much debated
by historians of writing. What matters here is that in the synchronic
structure and systematic principle of alphabetic writing — and
phonetic writing in general — no relationship of “natural” representation, none of resemblance or participation, no “symbolic” relationship in the Hegelian-Saussurian sense, no “iconographic” relationship in the Peircian sense, be implied.</p>
<p>
One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness
of the sign, the Saussurian definition of writing as “image” — hence
as natural symbol — of language. Not to mention the fact that the
phoneme is the <em>unimaginable </em>itself, and no visibility can
<em>resemble </em>it, it suffices to take into account what Saussure
says about the difference between the symbol and the sign in order
to be completely baffled as to how he can at the same time say
of writing that it is an “Image” or “figuration”
of language and define language and writing elsewhere as “two
distinct systems of signs”. For the property of the sign
is not to be an image. By a process exposed by Freud in <em>The
Interpretation of Dreams</em>, Saussure thus accumulates contradictory
arguments to bring about a satisfactory decision: the exclusion
of writing. In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing,
the “graphic” signifier refers to the phoneme through
a web of many dimensions which binds it, like all signifiers,
to other written and oral signifiers, within a “total”
system open, let us say, to all possible investments of sense.
We must begin with the possibility of that total system.</p>
<p>
Saussure was thus never able to think that writing was truly an
“Image,” a “figuration,” a “representation” of the spoken language, a symbol. If one considers that be nonetheless needed these inadequate notions to decide upon the exteriority of writing, one must conclude that an entire stratum of his discourse, the intention of Chapter VI (“Graphic Representation of Language”), was not at all scientific. When I say this, my quarry is not primarily Ferdinand de Saussure's intention or motivation, but
rather the entire uncritical tradition which he inherits. To
what zone of discourse does this strange functioning of argumentation
belong, this coherence of desire producing itself in a near-oneiric
way — although it clarifies the dream rather than allow itself to
be clarified by it — through a contradictory logic? How is this
functioning articulated with the entirety of theoretical discourse,
throughout the history of science? Better yet, bow does it work
from within the concept of science itself? It is only when this
question is elaborated if it is some day — when the concepts required
by this functioning are defined outside of all psychology (as
of all sciences of man), outside metaphysics (which can now be
“Marxist” or “structuralist”); when one is
able to respect all its levels of generality and articulation — it
is only then that one will be able to state rigorously the problem
of the articulated appurtenance of a text (theoretical or otherwise)
to an entire set: I obviously treat the Saussurian text at the
moment only as a telling example within a given situation, without
professing to use the concepts required by the functioning of
which I have just spoken. My justification would be as follows:
this and some other indices (in a general way the treatment of
the concept of writing) already give us the assured means of broaching
the de-construction of <em>the greatest </em>totality — the concept
of the <em>epistémè </em>and logocentric metaphysics — within which are produced, without ever posing the radical question of
writing, all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading,
or interpretation.</p>
<p>
Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior
to speech, not being its “image” or its “symbol,”
and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing.
Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or
the letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier
signified by it, the concept of the <em>graphic </em>[unit of a
possible graphic system] implies the framework of the <em>instituted
trace, </em>as the possibility common to all systems of signification.
My efforts will now be directed toward slowly detaching these
two concepts from the classical discourse from which I necessarily
borrow them. The effort will be laborious and we know a priori
that its effectiveness will never be pure and absolute.</p>
<p>
The instituted trace is “unmotivated” but not capricious.
Like the word “arbitrary” according to Saussure, it
“should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left
entirely to the speaker”. Simply, it has no “natural
attachment” to the signified within reality. For us, the
rupture of that “natural attachment” puts in question
the idea of naturalness rather than that of attachment. That
is why the word “institution” should not be too quickly
interpreted within the classical system of oppositions.</p>
<p>
The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the retention
of difference within a structure of reference where difference
appears as <em>such </em>and thus permits a certain liberty of variations
among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of
another transcendental present, of another origin of the world
appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within
the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted
for a scientific concept of writing. This formula, beside the
fact that it is the questioning of metaphysics itself, describes
the structure implied by the “arbitrariness of the sign,”
from the moment that one thinks of its possibility <em>short of
</em>the derived opposition between nature and convention, symbol
and sign, etc. These oppositions have meaning only after the
possibility of the trace. The “unmotivatedness” of
the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is
announced as such without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance
or continuity — within what is not it. <em>Is announced as such:
</em>there we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined
as “non-living” up to “consciousness,” passing
through all levels of animal organisation. The trace, where the
relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility,
in the entire field of the entity [<em>étant</em>]<em>, </em>which
metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the
occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before
the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted,
it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces
itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself.
This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat
hastily. The “theological” is a determined moment in
the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before
being determined as the field of presence, is structured according
to the diverse possibilities-genetic and structural — of the trace.
The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation
of its “as such,” has always already begun and no structure
of the entity escapes it.</p>
<p>
That is why the movement of “unmotivatedness” passes
from one structure to the other when the “sign” crosses
the stage of the “symbol.” It is in a certain sense
and according to a certain determined structure of the as such”
that one is authorised to say that there is vet no immotivation
in what Saussure calls “symbol” and which, according
to him, does not at least provisionally — interest semiology. The
general structure of the unmotivated trace connects within the
same possibility, and they cannot be separated except by abstraction,
the structure of the relationship with the other, the movement
of temporalisation, and language as writing. Without referring
back to a “nature,” the immotivation of the trace has
always become. In fact, there is no unmotivated trace: the trace
is indefinitely its own becoming-unmotivated. In Saussurian language,
what Saussure does not say would have to be said: there is neither
symbol nor sign but a becoming-sign of the symbol.</p>
<p>
Thus, as it goes without saving, the trace whereof I speak is
not more <em>natural </em>(it is not the mark, the natural sign,
or the index in the Husserlian sense) than cultural, not more
physical than psychic, biological than spiritual. It is that
starting from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with
it all the ulterior oppositions between physis and its other,
is possible.</p>
<p>
In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive
than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated.
In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated
of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous
to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other
signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking
of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs.
These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them
are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts
involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol
can grow. <em>Omne symbolum de symbolo</em>. [<em>Elements of Logic</em>,
Hartshorne and Weiss]</p>
<p>
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies.
The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It
must be recognised that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of “the
arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the non-symbolic,
in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols
grow. They come into being by development out of other signs,
particularly from icons, or from mixed signs.” But these
roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field
of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play:
“So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow.
<em>Omne symbolum de symbolo</em>.”</p>
<p>
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to
sign. No ground of nonsignification — understood as insignificance
or an intuition of a present truth — stretches out to give it foundation
under the play and the coming into being of signs. Semiotics
no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to Peirce, is only
a semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe
I 'have shown, only another name for semiotics (semeiotike), the
quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” And logic
in the classical sense, logic “properly speaking,” nonformal
logic commanded by the value of truth, occupies in that semiotics
only a determined and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl
(but the analogy, although it is most thought-provoking, would
stop there and one must apply it carefully), the lowest level,
the foundation of the possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds
to the project of the <em>Grammatica speculative </em>of Thomas
d'Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus. Like Husserl, Peirce
expressly refers to it. It is a matter of elaborating, in both
cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must
satisfy, in order to have a sense, in order to “mean,”
even if it is false or contradictory. The general morphology
of that meaning (<em>Bedeutung, vouloir-dire</em>) is independent
of all logic of truth.</p>
<p class="quoteb">
The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called
by Duns Scotus <em>grammatica speculative. </em>We may term it
pure grammar. It has for its task to ascertain what must be true
of the representamen used by every scientific intelligence in
order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic proper.
It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the representamina
of any scientific intelligence in order that they may hold good
of any object, that is, may be true. Or say, logic proper is
the formal science of the conditions of the truth of representations,
The third, in imitation of Kant's fashion of preserving old associations
of words in finding nomenclature for new conceptions, I call <em>pure
rhetoric. </em>Its task is to ascertain the laws by which in every
scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another, and especially
one thought brings forth another. [Peirce]</p>
<p>
Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction
of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another,
would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign.
I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence
as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire
for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness
of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognise that
we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What <em>broaches</em>
the movement <em>of signification is what makes its interruption
impossible.</em> <em>The thing itself is a sign. </em>An unacceptable
proposition for Husserl, whose Phenomenology remains therefore — in
its “principle of principles” — the most radical and most
critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference
between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental
since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation
of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and
the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this
point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word
phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce <em>the
theory of </em>things to the theory of <em>signs.” </em>According
to the “phaneoroscopy” or “Phenomenology”
of Peirce, <em>manifestat</em>ion itself does not reveal a presence,
it makes a sign. One may read in the <em>Principle of Phenomenology</em>
that “the idea of <em>manifestation </em>is the idea of a sign.”
There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer
so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in
the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself”
is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity
of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving
rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to
infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself
unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen
is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of
reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the <em>representamen</em>
is not to be <em>proper </em>[<em>propre</em>]<em>, </em>that is to
say absolutely proximate to itself (<em>prope, </em>proprius).
<em>The represented </em>is always already a <em>representamen.
</em>Definition of the sign:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to
refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the
same way, this interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on
ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants
comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least.
[<em>Elements of Logic</em>]</p>
<p>
From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs.
We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion
of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency
is recognised in the absoluteness of its right. One could call
play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness
of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and
the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock,
shaping and undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself
be <em>named as such </em>in the period when, refusing to
bind linguistics to semantics (which all European linguists, from
Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of meaning
outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly
refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing
as a game within language. (The <em>Phaedrus</em> condemned writing
precisely as play — <em>paidia </em> — and opposed such childishness
to the adult gravity [<em>spoudè</em>] of speech), This play,
thought as absence of the transcendental signified, is not a play
in <em>the </em>world, as it has always been defined, for the purposes
of containing it, by the philosophical tradition and as the theoreticians
of play also consider it (or those who, following and going beyond
Bloomfield, refer semantics to psychology or some other local
discipline). To think play radically the ontological and transcendental
problematics must first be seriously exhausted; the question of
the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the transcendental
origin of the world — of the world-ness of the world — must be patiently
and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the Husserlian
and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the
very end, and their effectiveness and legibility must be conserved.
Even if it were crossed out, without it the concepts of play
and writing to which I shall have recourse will remain caught
within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or metaphysical
discourse. The counter-move that the holders of such a discourse
would oppose to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical
speculation would be nothing but the worldly representation of
their own operation. It is therefore <em>the game of the </em>world
that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all
the forms of play in the world.</p>
<p>
From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated
of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of
diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able
to command a grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the
trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a
state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given
structure. Science of “the arbitrariness of the sign,”
science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before
speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field
within which linguistics would, by abstraction, delineate its
own area, with the limits that Saussure prescribes to its internal
system and which must be carefully re-examined in each speech/writing
system in the world and history.</p>
<p>
By a substitution which would be anything but verbal, one may
replace <em>semiology </em>by grammatology in the program of the
<em>Course in General</em> <em>Linguistics</em>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
I shall call it [grammatology] .... Since the science does not
yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right
to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only
a part of [that] general science . . . ; the laws discovered by
[grammatology] will be applicable to linguistics.</p>
<p>
The advantage of this substitution will not only be to give to
the theory of writing the scope needed to counter logocentric
repression and the subordination to linguistics. It will liberate
the semiological project itself from what, in spite of its greater
theoretical extension, remained governed by linguistics, organised
as if linguistics were at once its center and its telos. Even
though semiology <em>was in fact more general and </em>more <em>comprehensive
than linguistics, it </em>continued to <em>be regulated as if it
were</em> <em>one of the areas of linguistics. The linguistic sign
remained exemplary for</em> semiology, it dominated it as the master-sign
and as the generative model: the pattern [<em>patron</em>].</p>
<p class="quoteb">
One could therefore say that signs that are wholly arbitrary realise
better than the others the ideal of the semiological process;
that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems
of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense
linguistics can become <em>the master-pattern for all branches</em>
of semiology although language is only one particular semiological
system (italics added).</p>
<p>
Consequently, reconsidering the order of dependence prescribed
by Saussure, apparently inverting the relationship of the part
to the whole, Barthes in fact carries out the profoundest intention
of the <em>Course</em>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
From now on we must admit the possibility of reversing Saussure's
proposition some day: linguistics is not a part, even if privileged,
of the general science of signs, it is semiology that is a part
of linguistics. [<em>Communications</em>]</p>
<p>
This coherent reversal, submitting semiology to a “translinguistics,”
leads to its full explication a linguistics historically dominated
by logocentric metaphysics, for which in fact there is not and
there should not be
“any meaning except as named” (<em>ibid</em>.). Dominated
by the so-called “civilisation of writing” that we inhabit,
a civilisation of so-called phonetic writing, that is to say of
the logos where the sense of being is, in its telos, determined
as parousia. The Barthesian reversal is fecund and indispensable
for the description of the <em>fact and the vocation of </em>signification
within the closure of this epoch and this civilisation that is
in the process of disappearing in its very globalisation.</p>
<p>
Let us now try to go beyond these formal and architectonic considerations.
Let us ask in a more intrinsic and concrete way, how language
is not merely a sort of writing, “comparable to a system
of writing” — Saussure writes curiously — but a species of
writing. Or rather, since writing no longer relates to language
as an extension or frontier, let us ask bow language is a possibility
founded on the general possibility of writing. Demonstrating
this, one would give at the same time an account of that alleged
“usurpation” which could not be an unhappy accident.
It supposes on the contrary a common root and thus excludes the
resemblance of the “image,” derivation, or representative
reflexion. And thus one would bring back to its true meaning,
to its primary possibility, the apparently innocent and didactic
analogy which makes Saussure say:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Language is [comparable to] a system of signs that express ideas,
and is therefore <em>comparable to </em>writing, the alphabet of
deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals,
etc. But it is the most important of all these systems (italics
added).</p>
<p>
Further, it is not by chance that, a hundred and thirty pages
later, at the moment of explaining phonic <em>difference </em>as
the condition of linguistic value (“from a material viewpoint”)
he must again borrow all his pedagogic resources from the example
of writing:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Since an identical state of affairs is observable in writing,
another system of signs, we, shall use writing to draw some comparisons
that will clarify the whole issue.</p>
<p>
Four demonstrative items, borrowing pattern and content from writing,
follow.</p>
<p>
Once more, then, we definitely have to oppose Saussure to himself.
Before being or not being “noted,” “represented,”
“figured,” in a <em>“graphie,”</em> the linguistic
sign implies an originary writing. Henceforth, it is not to the
thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign that I shall appeal directly,
but to what Saussure associates with it as an indispensable correlative
and which would seem to me rather to lay the foundations for it:
the thesis of <em>difference </em>as the source of linguistic value.</p>
<p>
What are, from the grammatological point of view, the consequences
of this theme that is now so well-known (and upon which Plato
already reflected in the <em>Sophist</em>)?</p>
<p>
By definition, difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude.
Therefore, its necessity contradicts the allegation of a naturally
phonic essence of language. It contests by the same token the
professed natural dependence of the graphic signifier. That is
a consequence Saussure himself draws against the premises defining
the internal system of language. He must now exclude the very
thing which had permitted him to exclude writing: sound and its
“natural bond” [lien <em>naturel</em>] with meaning.
For example: “The thing that constitutes language is, as
I shall show later, unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic
sign”. And in a paragraph on difference:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
It is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong
to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put
to use. All our conventional values have the characteristic of
not being confused with the tangible element which supports them.
. . . The linguistic signifier . . . is not [in essence] phonic
but incorporeal — constituted not by its material substance but
the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.
The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less
importance than the other signs that surround it.</p>
<p>
Without this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction between
language and speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigour.
It would be the same for the oppositions that happened to descend
from it: between code and message, pattern and usage, etc. Conclusion:
“Phonologythis bears repeating — is only an auxiliary discipline
[of the science of language] and belongs exclusively to speaking”.
Speech thus draws from this stock of writing, noted or not, that
language is, and it is here that one must meditate upon the complicity
between the two “stabilities.” The reduction of the
phonè reveals this complicity. What Saussure says, for
example, about the sign in general and what he “confirms”
through the example of writing, applies also to language: “Signs
are governed by a principle of general semiology: continuity in
time is coupled to change in time; this is confirmed by orthrographic
systems, the speech of deaf-mutes, etc.”.</p>
<p>
The reduction of phonic substance thus does not only permit the
distinction between phonetics on the one hand (and a fortiori
acoustics or the physiology of the phonating organs) and phonology
on the other. It also makes of phonology itself an “auxiliary
discipline.” Here the direction indicated by Saussure takes
us beyond the phonologism of those who profess to follow him on
this point: in fact, Jakobson believes indifference to the phonic
substance of expression to be impossible and illegitimate. He
thus criticises the glossematic. — of Hjelmslev which requires
and practices the neutralising of sonorous substance. And in
the text cited above, Jakobson and Halle maintain that the “theoretical
requirement” of a research of invariables placing sonorous
substance in parenthesis (as an empirical and contingent content)
is:</p>
<ol class="numbered">
<li><em> impracticable </em>since, as “Eli Fischer-Jorgensen
exposes [it]”, “the sonorous substance [is taken into
account] at every step of the analysis.” [Jakobson and Halle]
But is that a “troubling discrepancy,” as Jakobson and
Halle would have it? Can one not account for it as a fact serving
as an example, as do the phenomenologists who always need, keeping
it always within sight, an exemplary empirical content in the
reading of an essence which is independent of it by right?</li>
<li><em>inadmissible in </em>principle since one cannot consider
“that in language form is opposed to substance as a constant
to a variable.” It is in the course of this second demonstration
that the literally Saussurian formulas reappear within the question
of the relationships between speech and writing; the order of
writing is the order of exteriority of the “occasional,”
of the accessory,” of the “auxiliary,” of the <em>“parasitic”</em>
(italics added). The argument of Jakobson and Halle appeals to
the factual genesis and invokes the secondariness of writing in
the colloquial sense: “Only after having mastered speech
does one graduate to reading and writing. Even if this commonsensical
proposition were rigorously proved — something that I do not believe
(since each of its concepts harbours an immense problem) — one
would still have to receive assurance of its pertinence to the
argument. Even if “after” were here a facile representation,
if one knew perfectly well what one thought and stated while assuring
that one learns to write after having learned to speak, would
that suffice to conclude that what thus comes “after”
is parasitic? And what is a parasite? And what if writing were
precisely that which makes us reconsider our logic of the parasite?</li>
</ol>
<p>
In another moment of the critique, Jakobson and Halle recall the
imperfection of graphic representation; that imperfection is due
to “the cardinally dissimilar patterning of letters and phonemes:”</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Letters never, or only partially, reproduce the different distinctive
features on which the phonemic pattern is based and unfailingly
disregard the structural relationship of these features.</p>
<p>
I have suggested it above: does not the radical dissimilarity
of the two elements-graphic and phonic-exclude derivation? Does
not the inadequacy of graphic representation concern only common
alphabetic writing, to which glossematic formalism does not essentially
refer? Finally, if one accepts all the phonologist arguments
thus presented, it must still be recognised that they oppose a
“scientific” concept of the spoken word to a vulgar
concept of writing. What I would wish to show is that one cannot
exclude writing from the general experience of “the structural
relationship of these features.” Which amounts, of course,
to reforming the concept of writing.</p>
<p>
In short, if the Jakobsonian analysis is faithful to Saussure
in this matter, is it not especially so to the Saussure of Chapter
VI? Up to what point would Saussure have maintained the inseparability
of matter and form, which remains the most important argument
of Jakobson and Halle? The question may be repeated in the case
of the position of André Martinet who, in this debate,
follows Chapter VI of the <em>Course</em> to the letter. And only
Chapter VI, from which Martinet <em>expressly</em> dissociates the
doctrine of what, in the <em>Course</em>, effaces the privilege
of phonic substance. After having explained why “a dead
language with a perfect ideography,” that is to say a communication
effective through the system of a generalised script, “could
not have any real autonomy,” and why <em>nevertheless, </em>“such
a system would be something so particular that one can well understand
why linguists want <em>to exclude it </em>from the domain of their
science” (La <em>linguistique syncronique, </em>p. i8; italics
added), Martinet criticises those who, following a certain trend
in Saussure, question the essentially phonic character of the
linguistic sign: “Much will be attempted to prove that Saussure
is right when he announces that 'the thing that constitutes language
[<em>1'essentiel de la langue</em>] is . . . unrelated to
the phonic character of the linguistic sign,' and, going beyond
the teaching of the master, to declare that the linguistic sign
does not necessarily have that phonic character”.</p>
<p>
On that precise point, it is not a question of “going beyond”
the master's teaching but of following and extending it. Not
to do it is to cling to what in Chapter VI greatly limits formal
and structural research and contradicts the least contestable
findings of Saussurian doctrine. To avoid “going beyond,”
one risks returning to a point that falls short.</p>
<p>
I believe that generalised writing is not just the idea of a system
to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility.
I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to
this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept
of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. Even supposing
that one is not given that modified concept, supposing that one
is considering a system of pure writing as an hypothesis for the
future or a working hypothesis, faced with that hypothesis, should
a linguist refuse himself the means of thinking it and of integrating
its formulation within his theoretical discourse? Does the fact
that most linguists do so create a theoretical right? Martinet
seems to be of that opinion. After having elaborated a purely
“dactylological” hypothesis of language, he writes,
in effect:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
It must be recognised that the parallelism between this “dactylology”
and phonology is complete as much in synchronic as in diachronic
material, and that the terminology associated with the latter
may be used for the former, except of course when the terms refer
to the phonic substance. Clearly, if we do not <em>desire </em>to
exclude from the domain of linguistics the systems of the type
we have just imagined, it is most important to modify traditional
terminology relative to the articulation of signifiers so as to
eliminate all reference to phonic substance; as does Louis Hjelmslev
when he uses “ceneme” and “cenematics” instead
of “phoneme” and “phonematics.” <em>Yet it
is understandable that the</em> <em>majority of linguists hesitate
to modify completely the traditional terminological</em> <em>edifice
for the only theoretical advantages of being able to include in
the field of</em> <em>their science </em>some purely <em>hypothetical
systems. To make them agree to engage such a revolution</em>,
they must be persuaded that, in attested linguistic systems, they
have no advantage in considering the phonic substance of units
of expression as to be of direct interest (italics added).</p>
<p>
Once again, we do not doubt the value of these phonological arguments,
the presuppositions behind which I have attempted to expose above.
Once one assumes these presuppositions, it would be absurd to
reintroduce confusedly a derivative writing, in the area of oral
language and within the system of this derivation. Not only would
ethnocentrism not be avoided, but all the frontiers within the
sphere of its legitimacy would then be confused. It is not a
question of rehabilitating writing in the narrow sense, nor of
reversing the order of dependence when it is evident. Phonologism
does not brook any objections as long as one conserves the colloquial
concepts of speech and writing which form the solid fabric of
its argumentation. Colloquial and quotidian conceptions, inhabited
besides — uncontradictorily enough — by an old history, limited
by frontiers that are hardly visible yet all the more rigorous
by that very fact.</p>
<p>
I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness
of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one
condition: that the original,” “natural,” etc.
language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by
writing, that it bad itself always been a writing. An archewriting
whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline
here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially
communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could
not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation
of the arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its
other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If
I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within
the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation,
destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened
the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it
<em>breached </em>living speech from within and from the very beginning.
And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without
the <em>trace.</em></p>
<p>
This arche-writing, although its concept is invoked by the themes
of “the arbitrariness of the sign” and of difference,
cannot and can never be recognised as the <em>object of a science.
</em>It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced
to the form of <em>presence. </em>The latter orders all objectivity
of the object and all relation of knowledge. That is why what
I would be tempted to consider in the development of the <em>Course
</em>as “progress,” calling into question in return the
uncritical positions of Chapter VI, never gives rise to a new
“scientific” concept of writing.</p>
<p>
Can one say as much of the algebraism of Hjelmslev, which undoubtedly
drew the most rigorous conclusions from that progress?</p>
<p>
The <em>Principes de grammaire g</em>é<em>nérale </em>(1928)
separated out within the doctrine of the <em>Course </em>the phonological
principle and the principle of difference: It isolated a concept
of form which permitted a distinction between formal difference
and phonic difference, and this even within “spoken”
language. Grammar is independent of semantics and phonology.</p>
<p>
That independence is the very principle of glossematics as the
formal science of language. Its formality supposes that “there
is no necessary connection between sounds and language.”
[<em>On the Principles of Phnomatics</em>] That formality is itself
the condition of a purely functional analysis. The idea of a
linguistic function and of a purely linguistic unit — the glosseme
— excludes then not only the consideration of the substance of
expression (material substance) but also that of the substance
of the content (immaterial substance). Since language is a form
and not a substance (Saussure), the glossemes are by definition
independent of substance, immaterial (semantic, psychological
and logical) and material (phonic, graphic, etc.).” [Hjelmslev
and Uldall] The study of the functioning of language, of its <em>play</em>,
presupposes that the substance of meaning and, among other possible
substances, that of <em>sound, </em>be placed in parenthesis. The
unity of sound and of sense is indeed here, as I proposed above,
the reassuring closing of plan,. Hjelmslev situates his concept
of the <em>scheme </em>or <em>play </em>of language within Saussure's
heritage of Saussure's formalism and his theory of value. Although
he prefers to compare linguistic value to the “value of exchange
in the economic sciences” rather than to the “purely
logico-mathematical value,” he assigns a limit to this analogy.</p>
<p class="quoteb">
An economic value is by definition a value with two faces: not
only does it play the role of a constant vis-á-vis the
concrete units of money, but it also itself plays the role of
a variable vis-á-vis a fixed quantity of merchandise which
serves it as a standard. In linguistics on the other hand there
is nothing that corresponds to a standard. That is why the game
of chess and not economic fact remains for Saussure the most faithful
image of a grammar. The scheme of language is in the last analysis
<em>a game</em> and nothing more. [Langue et parole, <em>Essais linguistiques</em>]</p>
<p>
In the <em>Prolegomena to a Theory of Language </em>(1943), setting
forth the opposition <em>expression/content, </em>which he substitutes
for the difference <em>signifier/signified, </em>and in which each
term may be considered from the point of view of form or <em>substance,
</em>Hjelmslev criticises the idea of a language naturally bound
to the substance of phonic expression. It is by mistake that
it has hitherto been supposed “that the substance-expression
of a spoken language should consist of 'sounds':”</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Thus, as has been pointed out by the Zwirners in particular, the
fact has been overlooked that speech is accompanied by, and that
certain components of speech can be replaced by, gesture, and
that in reality, as the Zwirners say, not only the so-called organs
of speech (throat, mouth, and nose), but very nearly all the striate
musculature cooperate in the exercise of “natural” language.
Further, it is possible to replace the usual sound-and-gesture
substance with any other that offers itself as appropriate under
changed external circumstances. Thus the same linguistic form
may also be manifested in writing, as happens with a phonetic
or phonemic notation and with the so-called phonetic orthographies,
as for example the Finnish. Here is a “graphic” substance
which is addressed exclusively to the eve and which need not be
transposed into a phonetic “substance” in order to be
grasped or understood. And this graphic “substance”
can, precisely from the point of view of the substance, be of
quite various sorts. [<em>Prolegomena to A Theory of Language</em>,
1943]</p>
<p>
Refusing to presuppose a “derivation” of substances
following from the substance of phonic expression, Hjelmslev places
this problem outside the area of structural analysis and of linguistics.</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Moreover it is not always certain what is derived and what not;
we must not forget that the discovery of alphabetic writing is
hidden in prehistory [n.: Bertrand Russell quite rightly calls
attention to the fact that we have no means of deciding whether
writing or speech is the older form of human expression (An Outline
<em>of Philosophy </em>, so that the assertion that it rests on
a phonetic analysis is only one of the possible diachronic hypotheses;
it may, also be rested on a formal analysis of linguistic structure.
But in any case, as is recognised by modern linguistics, diachronic
considerations are irrelevant for synchronic descriptions.</p>
<p>
H. J. Uldall provides a remarkable formulation of the fact that
glossematic criticism operates at the same time thanks to Saussure
and against him; that, as I suggested above, the proper space
of a grammatology is at the same time opened and closed by The
<em>Course in General Linguistics. </em>To show that Saussure did
not develop “all the theoretical consequences of his discovery”
he writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
It is even more curious when we consider that the practical consequences
have been widely drawn, indeed had been drawn thousands of years
before Saussure, for it is only through the concept of a difference
between form and substance that we can explain the possibility
of speech and writing existing at the same time as expressions
of one and the same language. If either of these two substances,
the stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part
of the language itself, it would not be possible to go from one
to the other without changing the language. [<em>Speech and Writing</em>,
1938]</p>
<p>
Undoubtedly the Copenhagen School thus frees a field of research:
it becomes possible to direct attention not only to the purity
of a form freed from all “natural” bonds to a substance
but also to everything that, in the stratification of language,
depends on the substance of graphic expression. An original and
rigorously delimited description of this may thus be promised.
Hjelmslev recognises that an “analysis of writing without
regard to sound has not yet been undertaken”. While regretting
also that “the substance of ink has not received the same
attention on the part of linguists that they have so lavishly
bestowed on the substance of air,” H. J. Uldall delimits
these problems and emphasises the mutual independence of the substances
of expression. He illustrates it particularly by the fact that,
in orthography, no grapheme corresponds to accents of pronunciation
(for Rousseau this was the misery, and the menace of writing)
and that, reciprocally, in pronunciation, no phoneme corresponds
to the spacing between written words.</p>
<p>
Recognising the specificity of writing, glossematics did not merely
give itself the means of describing the graphic element. It showed
bow to reach the literary element, to what in literature passes
through an irreducibly graphic text, tying the play of form to
a determined substance of expression. If there is something in
literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice,
to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously
isolating the bond that links <em>the play of form </em>to the substance
of graphic expression. (It will by the same token be seen that
“pure literature,” thus respected in its irreducibilty,
also risks limiting the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict
play is, moreover, irresistible.) This interest in literature
is effectively manifested in the Copenhagen School. It thus removes
the Rousseauist and Saussurian caution with regard to literary
arts. It radicalises the efforts of the Russian formalists, specifically
of the O.PO.IAZ, who, in their attention to the being-literary
of literature, perhaps favoured the phonological instance and
the literary models that it dominates. Notably poetry. That
which, within the history of literature and in the structure of
a literary text in general, escapes that framework, merits a type
of description whose norms and conditions of possibility glossematics
has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps thus better prepared
itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure
of the literary text within the history of the becoming-literary
of literality, notably in its “modernity.”</p>
<p>
Undoubtedly a new domain is thus opened to new and fecund researches.
But I am not primarily interested in such a parallelism or such
a recaptured parity of substances of expression. It is clear
that if the phonic substance lost its privilege, it was not to
the advantage of the graphic substance, which lends itself to
the same substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is
irrefutable, glossematics still operates with a popular concept
of writing. However original and irreducible it might be, the
“form of expression” linked by correlation to the graphic
“substance of expression” remains very determined.
It is very dependent and very derivative with regard to the arche-writing
of which I speak. This arche-writing would be at work not only
in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those
of non-graphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern
uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement
of the sign-function linking a content to an expression, whether
it be graphic or not. This theme could not have a place in Hjelmslev's
system.</p>
<p>
It is because arche-writing, movement of difference, irreducible
archesynthesis, opening in one and the same possibility, temporalisation
as well as relationship with the other and language, cannot, as
the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic
system itself and be situated as an object in its field. (which
does not mean it has a real field <em>elsewhere,</em> another assignable
site.) Its concept could in no way enrich the scientific, positive,
and “immanent” (in the Hjelmslevian sense) description
of the system itself. Therefore, the founder of glossematics
would no doubt have questioned its necessity, as be rejects, en
bloc and legitimately, all the extra-linguistic theories which
do not arise from the irreducible immanence of the linguistic
system. He would have seen in that notion one of those appeals
to experience which a theory should dispense with. He would not
have understood why the name writing continued — to be used for
that X which becomes so different from what has always been called
“writing.”</p>
<p>
I have already begun to justify this word, and especially the
necessity of the communication between the concept of arche-writing
and the vulgar concept of writing submitted to deconstruction
by it. I shall continue to do so below. As for the concept of
experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I
am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we
can only use it under erasure [<em>sous rature</em>]<em>. </em>“Experience”
has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether
that relationship bad the form of consciousness or not. At any
rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention
which the discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources
of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to
attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation. It is the
only way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive”
critiques of experience at the same time. Thus, for example,
the experience whose “theory,” Hjelmslev says, ,'must
be independent” is not the whole of experience. It always
corresponds to a certain type of factual or regional experience
(historical, psychological, physiological, sociological, etc.),
giving rise to a science that is itself regional and, as such,
rigorously outside linguistics. That is not so at all in the
case of experience as arche-writing. The parenthesising of regions
of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover
a field of transcendental experience. This experience is only
accessible in so far as, after having, like Hjelmslev, isolated
the specificity of the linguistic system and excluded all the
extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the
question of the transcendental origin of the system itself, as
a system of the objects of a science, and, correlatively, of the
theoretical system which studies it: here of the objective and
“deductive” system which glossematics wishes to be.
Without that, the decisive progress accomplished by a formalism
respectful of the originality of its object, of “the immanent
system of its objects,” is plagued by a scientificist objectivism,
that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed metaphysics.
This is often noticeable in the work of the Copenhagen School.
It is to escape falling back into this naive objectivism that
I refer here to a transcendentality that I elsewhere put into
question. It is because I believe that there is a short-of and
a beyond of transcendental criticism. To see to it that the beyond
does not return to the within is to recognise in the contortion
the necessity of a pathway [<em>parcours</em>]. That pathway must
leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the
simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text
will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable
from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance.
What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places
of that future meditation. For example, the value of the transcendental
arche [<em>archie</em>] must make its necessity felt before letting
itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with
both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory
and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is
not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that
we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that
the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted
except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes
the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept
of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it
from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would
make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary
trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys
its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above
all no originary trace. We must then <em>situate,</em> as a simple
moment <em>of the discourse, </em>the phenomenological reduction
and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience.
To the extent that the concept of experience in general — and of
transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular — remains governed
by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the
reduction of the trace. The Living Present (<em>lebendige Gegenwart</em>)
is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience
to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements
of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and
the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental
phenomenology belongs to metaphysics. But that must come to terms
with the forces of rupture. In the originary temporalisation
and the movement of relationship with the outside, as Husserl
actually describes them, nonpresentation or depresentation is
as “originary” as presentation. <em>That is</em> <em>why
a thought of the trace can </em>no more <em>break with a transcendental</em>
phenomenology <em>than be reduced to </em>it. Here as elsewhere,
to pose the problem in terms of choice, to oblige or to believe
oneself obliged to answer it by a <em>yes </em>or no, to conceive
of appurtenance as an allegiance or non-appurtenance as plain
speaking, is to confuse very different levels, paths, and styles.
In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a choice.</p>
<p>
Therefore I admit the necessity of going through the concept of
the arche-trace. How does that necessity direct us from the interior
of the linguistic system? How does the path that leads from Saussure
to Hjelmslev forbid us to avoid the originary trace?</p>
<p>
In that its passage through <em>form</em> is a passage through the
imprint. And the meaning of difference in general would be more
accessible to us if the unity of that double passage appeared
more clearly.</p>
<p>
In both cases, one must begin from the possibility of neutralising
the phonic substance.</p>
<p>
On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that
is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference
or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident
significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic
substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes
an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity.
Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the
minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining
the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work
and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted
difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content,
of the pure movement which produces difference. <em>The </em>(<em>pure</em>)<em>
trace is difference. </em>It does not depend on any sensible plenitude,
audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary,
the condition of such a plenitude. Although <em>it does not </em>exist,
although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude,
its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign
(signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation,
motor or sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible
than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among
themselves within the same abstract order — a phonic or graphic
text for example — or between two orders of expression. It permits
the articulation of speech and writing — in the colloquial sense — as
it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and
the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression
and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense,
a writing, no derived “notation” would be possible;
and the classical problem of relationships between speech and
writing could not arise. Of course, the positive <em>sciences
</em>of signification can only describe the work and the <em>fact
</em>of differance, the determined differences and the determined
presences that they make possible. There cannot be a science
of difference itself in its operation, as it is impossible to
have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say
of a certain non-origin.</p>
<p>
Differance is therefore the formation of form. But it is on <em>the
other</em> hand the being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known
that Saussure distinguishes between the “sound-image”
and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the right to “reduce,”
in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and physiology
at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The
sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound [<em>l'apparaître
du son</em>] which is anything but the sound appearing [<em>le son
apparaissant</em>]<em>. </em>It is the sound-image that be calls
signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to
be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language),
but for the “concept,” undoubtedly an unhappy notion
here; let us say for the ideality of the sense. “I propose
to retain the word <em>sign </em>[<em>signe</em>] to designate
the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively
by signified [<em>signifé</em>] and <em>signifier </em>[<em>signifiant</em>].” The sound-image is what is <em>heard; </em>not the sound heard
but the being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally
phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that
of the real sound in the world. One can only divide this subtle
but absolutely decisive heterogeneity by a phenomenological reduction.
The latter is therefore indispensable to all analyses of being-heard,
whether they be inspired by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other
preoccupations.</p>
<p>
Now the “sound-image,” the structured appearing [<em>l'apparaître</em>]
of the sound, the “sensory matter” lived and informed
by difference, what Husserl would name the <em>hylè/morphé</em>
structure, distinct from all mundane reality, is called the “psychic
image” by Saussure: “The latter [the sound-image] is
not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychic
imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses
[<em>la représentation que nous en donne le témoignage
de nos sens</em>]<em>. </em>The sound-image is sensors,, and if
I happen to call it 'material,' it is only in that sense, and
by way of opposing it, to the other term of the association, the
concept, which is generally more abstract”. Although the
word “psychic” is not perhaps convenient, except for
exercising in this matter a phenomenological caution, the originality
of a certain place is well marked.</p>
<p>
Before specifying it, let us note that this is not necessarily
what Jakobson and other linguists could criticise as “the
mentalist point of view”:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
In the oldest of these approaches, going back to Baudouin de Courtenay
and still surviving, the phoneme is a sound imagined or intended,
opposed to the emitted sound as a “psychophonetic” phenomenon
to the “physiophonetic” fact. It is the psychic equivalent
of an exteriorised sound.</p>
<p>
Although the notion of the “psychic image” thus defined
(that is to say according to a pre-phenomenological psychology
of the imagination) is indeed of this mentalist inspiration, it
could be defended against Jakobson's criticism by specifying:
(i) that it could be conserved without necessarily affirming that
“our internal speech is confined to the distinctive features
to the exclusion of the configurative, or redundant features;”
(2) that the qualification psychic is not retained if it designates
exclusively <em>another natural reality, internal and not </em>external.
Here the Husserlian correction is indispensable and transforms
even the premises of the debate. Real (<em>reell </em>and not real)
component of lived experience, the <em>hylè/morphé</em>
structure is not a reality (<em>Realität</em>). As to the
intentional object, for example, the content of the image, it
does not really (<em>reall</em>) belong either to the world or to
lived experience: the non-real component of lived experience.
The psychic image of which Saussure speaks must not be an internal
reality copying an external one. Husserl, who criticises this
concept of “portrait” in <em>Idee </em> shows also in
the <em>Krisis</em> how phenomenology should overcome the naturalist
opposition whereby psychology and the other sciences of man survive — between
internal” and “external” experience. It is therefore
indispensable to preserve the distinction between the appearing
sound [<em>le son apparaissant</em>] and the appearing of the sound
[<em>l'apparaître du son</em>] in order to escape the
worst and the most prevalent of confusions; and it is in principle
possible to do it without “attempt[ing] to overcome the antinomy
between invariance and variability by assigning the former to
the internal and the latter to the external experience” (Jakobson).
The difference between invariance and variability does not separate
the two domains from each other, it divides each of them within
itself. That gives enough indication that the essence of the
<em>phonè</em> cannot be read directly and primarily in the
text of a mundane science, of a psycho-physiophonetics.</p>
<p>
These precautions taken, it should be recognised that it is in
the specific zone of this imprint and this trace, in the temporalisation
of a <em>lived</em> experience which is neither in the world nor
in “another world,” which is not more sonorous than
luminous, not more in time than in space, that differences appear
among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as
such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of
traces. These chains and systems cannot be outlined except in
the fabric of this trace or imprint. The unheard difference between
the appearing and the appearance [<em>I'apparaissant et I'apparaître</em>]
(between the “world” and “lived experience”)
is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces,
and <em>it is already a trace. </em>This last concept is thus absolutely
and by rights “anterior” to all <em>physiological </em>problematics
concerning the nature of the engramme [the unit of engraving],
or metaphysical problematics concerning the meaning of absolute
presence whose trace is thus opened to deciphering. <em>The trace
is in fact the absolute </em>origin of <em>sense in general.</em>
<em>Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute
origin of</em> <em>sense in general. The trace is the difference
</em>which opens appearance [<em>I'apparaître</em>] and
signification. Articulating the living upon the non-living in
general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace
is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible,
not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and
no <em>concept of metaphysics can describe it. </em>And
as it is <em>a fortiori </em>anterior to the distinction between
regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light,
is there a sense in establishing a “natural” hierarchy
between the sound-imprint, for example, and the visual (graphic)
imprint? The graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image
is not heard. The difference between the full unities of the
voice remains unheard. And, the difference in the body of the
inscription is also invisible.</p>
<h3>The Hinge [<em>La Brisure</em>]</h3>
<p class="fst">
<em>You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating
difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance
in Robert['s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate
its double meaning. This word is </em>brisure<em> [joint, </em>break<em>]
“ — broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault,
split, fragment, [</em>bréche, cassure, fracture, faille,
fente, fragment.<em>] — Hinged articulation of two parts of wood-
or metal-work. The hinge, the </em>brisure<em> [folding-joint]
of a shutter. Cf.</em> joint.” — Roger Laporte (letter)</p>
<p>
Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference,
this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space
and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of
an experience (of a “same” lived out of a “same”
body proper [corps propre]). This articulation therefore permits
a graphic (“visual” or “tactile,” “spatial”)
chain to be adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken
(“phonic,” “temporal”) chain. It is from
the primary possibility of this articulation that one must begin.
Difference is articulation.</p>
<p>
This is, indeed, what Saussure says, contradicting Chapter VI:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
The question of the vocal apparatus obviously takes a secondary
place in the problem of language. One definition of <em>articulated
</em>language might confirm that conclusion. In Latin, <em>articulus</em>
means a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence; applied to
speech [<em>langage</em>], articulation designates either the subdivision
of a spoken chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain
of meanings into significant units. . . . Using the second definition,
we can say that what <em>is natural to mankind is not spoken language
</em>but the faculty of constructing a language; i.e., a system
of distinct signs Corresponding to distinct ideas (italics added).</p>
<p>
The idea of the “psychic imprint” therefore relates
essentially to the idea of articulation. Without the difference
between the sensory appearing [<em>apparaissant</em>] and
its lived appearing [<em>apparaître</em>] (“mental
imprint”), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences
to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That
the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech
is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane
metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship
to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of
the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility
of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary
presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what
authorised us to call <em>trace </em>that which does not let itself
be summed up in the simplicity of a present. It could in fact
have been objected that, in the indecomposable synthesis of temporalisation,
protection is as indispensable as retention. And their two dimensions
are not added up but the one implies the other in a strange fashion.
To be sure, what is anticipated in protention does not sever
the present any less from its self-identity than does that which
is retained in the trace. But if anticipation were privileged,
the irreducibility of the always-already-there and the fundamental
passivity that is called time would risk effacement. On the other
hand, if the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it
obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in
the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since past
has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained
in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past.”
Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of
the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: difference defers-differs
[differs]. With the same precaution and under the same erasure,
it may be said that its passivity is also its relationship with
the “future.” The concepts of <em>present, past, </em>and
<em>future</em>, everything in the concepts of time and history
which implies evidence of them — the metaphysical concept of time
in general — cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace.
And deconstructing the simplicity of presence does not amount
only to accounting for the horizons of potential presence, indeed
of “dialectic of protention and retention that one would
install in the heart of the present instead of surrounding it
with it. It is not a matter of complicating the structure of
time while conserving its homogeneity and its fundamental successivity,
by demonstrating for example that the past present and the future
present constitute originarily, by dividing it, the form of the
living present. Such a complication, which is in effect the same
that Husserl described, abides, in spite of an audacious phenomenological
reduction, by the evidence and presence of a linear, objective,
and mundane <em>model. Now </em>B would be as such constituted
by the retention of <em>Now</em> A and the protention of <em>Now</em>
C; in spite of all the play that would follow from it, from the
fact that each one of the three Now-s reproduces that structure
in itself, this model of successivity would prohibit a <em>Now</em>
X from taking the place of <em>Now</em> A, for example, and would
prohibit that, by a delay that is inadmissible to consciousness,
an experience be determined, in its very present, by a present
which would not have preceded it immediately but would be considerably
“anterior” to it. It is the problem of the deferred
effect (<em>Nachträglichkeit</em>) of ,which Freud speaks.
The temporality to which he refers cannot be that which lends
itself to a phenomenology of consciousness or of presence and
one may indeed wonder by what right all that is in question here
should still be called time, now, anterior present, delay, etc.</p>
<p>
In its greatest formality, this immense problem would be formulated
thus: is the temporality described by a transcendental phenomenology
as “dialectical” as possible, a ground which the structures,
let us say the unconscious structures, of temporality would simply
modify? Or is the phenomenological model itself constituted,
as a warp of language, logic, evidence, fundamental security,
upon a woof that is not its own? And which — such is the most difficult
problem — is no longer at all mundane? For it is not by chance
that the transcendental phenomenology of the internal time-consciousness,
so careful to place cosmic time within brackets, must, as consciousness
and even as internal consciousness, live a time that is an accomplice
of the time of the world. Between consciousness, perception (internal
or external), and the “world,” the rupture, even in
the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible.</p>
<p>
It is in a certain “unheard” sense, then, that speech
is in the world, rooted in that passivity which metaphysics calls
sensibility in general. Since there is no non-metaphoric language
to oppose to metaphors here, one must, as Bergson wished, multiply
antagonistic metaphors. “Wish sensibilised,” is bow
Maine de Biran, with a slightly different intention, named the
vocalic word. That the logos is first imprinted and that that
imprint is the writing-resource of language, signifies, to be
sure, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuous
full element of the divine word, etc. But it would not mean a
single step outside of metaphysics if nothing more than a new
motif of “return to finitude,” of “God's death,”
etc., were the result of this move. It is that conceptuality
and that problematics that must be deconstructed. They belong
to the onto-theology they fight against. Differance is also something
other than finitude.</p>
<p>
According to Saussure, the passivity of speech is first its relationship
with language. The relationship between passivity and difference
cannot be distinguished from the relationship between the fundamental
unconscious<em>ness </em>of language (as rootedness within the language)
and the <em>spacing</em> (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in
general, etc.) which constitutes the origin of signification.
It is because “language is a form and not a substance”
that, paradoxically, the activity of speech can and must always
draw from it. But if it is a form, it is because “in language
there are only differences”. Spacing (notice that this word
speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space
of time and the becoming-time of space) is always the unperceived,
the non-present, and the non-conscious. <em>As such, </em>if one
can still use that expression in a non-phenomenological way; for
here we pass the very limits of phenomenology. Arche-writing as
spacing cannot occur <em>as such </em>within the phenomenological
experience of a <em>presence. </em>It marks <em>the dead </em>time
within the presence of the living present, within the general
form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why,
once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the
former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will
never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology
of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible.
No intuition can be realised in the place where “the 'whites'
indeed take on an importance” (Preface to <em>Coup de dés</em>).</p>
<p>
Perhaps it is now easier to understand why Freud savs of the dreamwork
that it is comparable rather to a writing than to a language,
and to a hieroglyphic rather than to a phonetic writing. And to
understand why Saussure savs of language that it “is not
a function of the speaker”. With or without the complicity
of their authors, all these propositions must be understood as
more than the simple <em>reversals </em>of a metaphysics of presence
or of conscious subjectivity. Constituting and dislocating it
at the same time, writing is other than the subject, in whatever
sense the latter is understood. Writing can never be thought
under the category of the subject; however it is modified, however
it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, it will refer,
by the entire thread of its history, to the substantiality of
a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the
selfsame [<em>le propre</em>] in the presence of self-relationship.</p>
<p>
And the thread of that history clearly does not run within the
borders of metaphysics. To determine an X as a subject is never
an operation of a pure convention, it is never an indifferent
gesture in relation to writing.</p>
<p>
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious
of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [<em>dérive</em>]
the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire
of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not
befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let
itself be drawn along by it. As the subject's relationship with
its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity.
On all levels of life's organisation, that is to say, of <em>the
economy of death. </em>All graphemes are of a testamentary
essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is
also the absence of the thing or the referent.</p>
<p>
Within the horizontality of spacing, which is in fact the precise
dimension I have been speaking of so far, and which is not opposed
to it as surface opposes depth, it is not even necessary to say
that spacing cuts, drops, and causes to drop within the unconscious:
the unconscious is nothing without this cadence and before this
caesura. This signification is formed only within the hollow
of difference: of discontinuity and of discreteness, of the diversion
and the reserve of what does not appear. This hinge [<em>brisure</em>]
of language as writing, this discontinuity, could have, at
a given moment within linguistics, run up against a rather precious
continuist prejudice. Renouncing it, phonology must indeed renounce
all distinctions between writing and the spoken word, and thus
renounce not itself, phonology, but rather phonologism. What
Jakobson recognises in this respect is most important for us:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
The stream of oral speech, physically continuous, originally confronted
the mathematical theory of communication with a situation “considerably
more involved” [<em>The Mathematical Theory of Communication</em>,
Urbana, 1949] than in the case of a finite set of discrete constituents,
as presented by written speech. Linguistic analysis, however,
came to resolve oral speech into a finite series of elementary
informational units. These ultimate discrete units, the so-called
“distinctive features,” are aligned into simultaneous
bundles termed “phonemes,” which in turn are concatenated
into sequences. Thus form in language has a manifestly granular
structure and is subject to a quantal description. [<em>Linguistique
et théorie de la communication</em>]</p>
<p>
The hinge [<em>brisure</em>] marks the impossibility that a sign,
the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the
plenitude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why
there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore
it by means or without benefit of psychoanalysis. Before thinking
to reduce it or to restore the meaning of the full speech which
claims to be truth, one must ask the question of meaning and of
its origin in difference. Such is the place of a problematic
of the <em>trace.</em></p>
<p>
Why of the <em>trace? </em>What led us to the choice of this word?
I have begun to answer this question. But this question is such,
and such the nature of my answer, that the place of the one and
of the other must constantly be in movement. If words and concepts
receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can Justify
one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within a topic
[an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The justification
can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds
to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation.
Thus, over and above those that I have already defined, a certain
number of givens belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively
imposed this choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself
to a certain number of contemporary discourses whose force I intend
to take into account. Not that I accept them totally,. But the
word trace establishes the clearest connections with them and
thus permits me to dispense with certain developments which have
already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields. Thus,
I relate this concept of <em>trace </em>to what is at the center
of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology:
relationship to the illeity as to the alterity of a past that
never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified
form of presence. Reconciled here to a Heideggerian intention, — as
it is not in Levinas's thought — this notion signifies, sometimes
beyond Heideggerian discourse, the undermining of an ontology
which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of
being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity
of speech. To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands
by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “Presence”
(the proximate [<em>proche</em>], the own [<em>propre</em>], and the
pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book. This deconstruction
of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of
consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of
the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian
discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in
biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible.</p>
<p>
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of “memory,” which must
be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality
and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of signification,
then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not,
in one form or another, in a “sensible” and “spatial”
element that is called “exterior.” Arche-writing, at
first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the <em>“graphie”
</em>in the narrow sense, the birthplace of “usurpation,”
denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of
the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of
the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing.
The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority
which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world,
as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé,
without difference as temporalisation, without the nonpresense
of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without
the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living
present. Metaphor would be forbidden. The presence-absence of
the trace, which one should not even call its ambiguity but rather
its play (for the word “ambiguity” requires the logic
of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic), carries
in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and
soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled.
All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul or
of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist,
dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose
entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of
the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full presence
summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech
dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology
determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being
as presence, as parousia, as life without difference: another
name for death, historical metonymy where God's name holds death
in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the
form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite
being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the
name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism,
is the name of indifference itself. Only a positive infinity
can lift the trace, “sublimate” it (it has recently
been proposed that the Hegelian <em>Aufhebung</em> be translated
as sublimation; this translation may be of dubious worth as translation,
but the juxtaposition is of interest here). We must not therefore
speak of a “theological prejudice,” functioning sporadically
when it is a question of the plenitude of the logos; the logos
as the sublimation of the trace is <em>theological. </em>Infinitist
theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms
or not. Spinoza himself said of the understanding — or logos — that
it was the immediate infinite mode of the divine substance, even
calling it its eternal son in the <em>Short Treatise. </em>[Spinoza]
It is also to this epoch, “reaching completion”
with Hegel, with a theology of the absolute concept as logos,
that all the non-critical concepts accredited by linguistics belong,
at least to the extent that linguistics must confirm — and how can
a <em>science </em>avoid it? — the Saussurian decree marking out
“the internal system of language.”</p>
<p>
It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of
writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature
and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with
all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist,
objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between
outside and inside.</p>
<p>
And above all with a “vulgar concept of time.” I borrow
this expression from Heidegger. It designates, at the end of
<em>Being and </em>Time, a concept of time thought in terms of spatial
movement or of the now, and dominating all philosophy from Aristotle's
<em>Physics </em>to Hegel's <em>Logic</em>. This concept, which determines
all of classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's
carelessness or from a theoretical lapse. It is intrinsic to
the totality of the history of the Occident, of what unites its
metaphysics and its technics. And we shall see it later associated
with the linearisation of writing, and with the linearist concept
of speech. This linearism is undoubtedly inseparable from phonologism;
it can raise its voice to the same extent that a linear writing
can seem to submit to it. Saussure's entire theory of the “linearity
of the signifier” could be interpreted from this point of
view.</p>
<p class="quoteb">
Auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of
time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a
chain. This feature becomes readily apparent when they are represented
in writing.... The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely
in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a)
it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single
dimension; it is a line.</p>
<p>
It is a point on which Jakobson disagrees with Saussure decisively
by substituting for the homogeneousness of the line the structure
of the musical staff, “the chord in music.” What is
here in question is not Saussure's affirmation of the temporal
essence of discourse but the concept of time that guides this
affirmation and analysis: time conceived as linear successivity,
as “consecutivity.” This model works by itself and all
through the <em>Course</em>, but Saussure is seemingly less sure
of it in the Anagrams. At any rate, its value seems problematic
to him and an interesting paragraph elaborates a question left
suspended:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
That the elements forming a word follow one <em>another </em>is
a truth that it would be better for linguistics not to consider
uninteresting because evident, but rather as the truth which gives
in advance the central principle of all useful reflections on
words. In a domain as infinitely special as the one I am about
to enter, it is always by virtue of the fundamental law of the
human word in general that a question like that of consecutiveness
or non-consecutiveness may be posed. [<em>Mercure de France</em>,
1964]</p>
<p>
This linearist concept of time is therefore one of the deepest
adherences of the modern concept of the sign to its own history.
For at the limit it is indeed the concept of the sign itself,
and the distinction, however tenuous, between the signifying and
signified faces, that remain committed to the history of classical
ontology. The parallelism and correspondence of the faces or
the planes change nothing. That this distinction, first appearing
in Stoic logic, was necessary for the coherence of a scholastic
thematics dominated by infinitist theology, forbids us to treat
today's debt to it as a contingency or a convenience. I suggested
this at the outset, and perhaps the reasons are clearer now.
The signatum always referred, as to its referent, to a <em>res,
</em>to an entity created or at any rate first thought and spoken,
thinkable and speakable, in the eternal present of the divine
logos and specifically in its breath. If it came to relate to
the speech of a finite being (created or not; in any case of an
intracosmic entity) through the <em>intermediary </em>of a <em>signans,
the signatum </em>had an immediate relationship with the divine
logos which thought it within presence and for which it was not
a trace. And for modern linguistics, if the signifier is a trace,
the signified is a meaning thinkable in principle within the full
presence of an intuitive consciousness. The signfied face, to
the extent that it is still originarily distinguished from the
signifying face, is not considered a trace; by rights, it has
no need of the signifier to be what it is. It is at the depth
of this affirmation that the problem of relationships between
linguistics and semantics must be posed. This reference to the
meaning of a signified thinkable and possible outside of all signifiers
remains dependent upon the ontotheo-teleology that I have just
evoked. It is thus the idea of the sign that must be deconstructed
through a meditation upon writing which would merge, as it must,
with the undoing [<em>sollicitation</em>] of onto-theology, faithfully
repeating it in its totality and making it <em>insecure </em>in
its most assured evidences. One is necessarily led to this from
the moment that the trace affects the totality of the sign in
both its faces. That the signified is originarily and essentially
(and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it
is <em>always already in the position of the signifier, </em>is
the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics
of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon
writing as its death and its resource.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">
Further Reading:<br>
<a href="../fr/derrida1.htm">Speech & Writing according to Hegel</a>, Derrida 1971 |
<a href="../fr/derrida2.htm">Spectres of Marx</a>, Derrida 1994 |
<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/d/e.htm#derrida-jacques">Biography</a> |
<a href="../../../economics/rousseau/emile/ch01.htm">Rousseau</a> |
<a href="../fr/saussure.htm">Saussure</a> |
<a href="../ru/jakobson.htm">Jakobson</a> |
<a href="../fr/barthes.htm">Barthes</a> |
<a href="../fr/foucault.htm">Foucault</a> |
<a href="../../../../archive/althusser/index.htm">Althusser</a> |
<a href="../us/rorty.htm">Rorty</a> |
<a href="../us/chomsky.htm">Chomsky</a> |
<a href="../../../../../archive/vygotsky/index.htm">Vygotsky</a>
</p>
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<a href="../../../../../subject/art/lit_crit/index.htm" target="_top">Marxist Literary Criticism</a> |
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</body> |
Jacques Derrida (1967)
Of Grammatology
Source: Of Grammatology, publ. John Hopkins University Press., 1974. Chapter Two, with one section deleted.
2 Linguistics and Grammatology
Writing is nothing but the representation of speech; it is bizarre
that one gives more care to the determining of the image than
to the object. - J.-J. Rousseau, Fragment inédit d'un essai
sur les langues.
The concept of writing should define the field of a science.
But can it be determined by scholars outside of all the historico-metaphysical
predeterminations that we have just situated so clinically? What
can a science of writing begin to signify, if it is granted:
that the very idea of science was born in a certain epoch
of writing;
that it was thought and formulated, as task, idea, project,
in a language implying a certain kind of structurally and axiologically
determined relationship between speech and writing;
that, to that extent, it was first related to the concept
and the adventure of phonetic writing, valorised as the telos
of all writing, even though what was always the exemplary model
of scientificity — mathematics — constantly moved away from that
goal;
that the strictest notion of a general science of writing
was born, for nonfortuitous reasons, during a certain period of
the world's history (beginning around the eighteenth century)
and within a certain determined s stem of relationships between
“living” speech and inscription;
that writing is not only an auxiliary means in the service
of science and possibly its object — but first, as Husserl in particular
pointed out in The Origin of Geometry, the condition of
the possibility of ideal objects and therefore of scientific objectivity.
Before being its object, writing is the condition of the epistémè.
that historicity itself is tied to the possibility of writing;
to the possibility of writing in general, beyond those particular
forms of writing in the name of which we have long spoken of peoples
without writing and without history. Before being the object
of a history — of an historical science — writing opens the field
of history — of historical becoming. And the former (Historie
in German) presupposes the latter (Geschichte).
The science of writing should therefore look for its object at
the roots of scientificity,. The history of writing should turn
back toward the origin of historicity. , A science of the possibility
of science? A science of science which would no longer have the
form of logic but that of grammatics? A history of the
possibility of history which would no longer be an archaeology,
a philosophy of history or a history of philosophy?
The positive and the classical sciences of writing are
obliged to repress this sort of question. Up to a certain point,
such repression is even necessary to the progress of positive
investigation. Beside the fact that it would still be held within
a philosophising logic, the ontophenomenological question of essence,
that is to say of the origin of writing, could, by itself, only
paralyse or sterilise the typological or historical research of
facts.
My intention, therefore, is not to weigh that prejudicial question,
that dry, necessary, and somewhat facile question of right, against
the power and efficacy of the positive researches which we may
witness today. The genesis and system of scripts bad never led
to such profound, extended, and assured explorations. It is not
really a matter of weighing the question against the importance
of the discovery; since the questions are imponderable, they cannot
be weighed. If the issue is not quite that, it is perhaps because
its repression has real consequences in the very content of the
researches that, in the present case and in a privileged way,
are always arranged around problems of definition and beginning.
The grammatologist least of all can avoid questioning himself
about the essence of his object in the form of a question of origin:
“What is writing?” means “where and when does writing
begin?” The responses generally come very quickly. They
circulate within concepts that are seldom criticised and move
within evidence which always seems self-evident. It is around
these responses that a typology of and a perspective on the growth
of writing are always organised. All works dealing with the history
of writing are composed along the same lines: a philosophical
and teleological classification exhausts the critical problems
in a few pages; one passes next to an exposition of facts. We
have a contrast between the theoretical fragility of the reconstructions
and the historical, archaeological, ethnological, philosophical
wealth of information.
The question of the origin of writing and the question of the
origin of language are difficult to separate. Grammatologists,
who are generally by training historians, epigraphists, and archaeologists,
seldom relate their researches to the modern science of language.
It is all the more surprising that, among the “sciences
of man,” linguistics is the one science whose scientificity
is given as an example with a zealous and insistent unanimity.
Has grammatology, then, the right to expect from linguistics an
essential assistance that it has almost never looked for? On
the contrary, does one not find efficaciously at work, in the
very movement by which linguistics is instituted as a science,
a metaphysical presupposition about the relationship between speech
and writing? Would that presupposition not binder the constitution
of a general science of writing? Is not the lifting of that presupposition
an overthrowing of the landscape upon which the science of language
is peacefully installed? For better and for worse? For blindness
as well as for productivity? This is the second type of question
that I now wish to outlines To develop this question, I should
like to approach, as a privileged example, the project and texts
of Ferdinand de Saussure. That the particularity of the example
does not interfere with the generality of my argument is a point
which I shall occasionally — try not merely to take for granted.
Linguistics thus wishes to be the science of language. Let us
set aside all the implicit decisions that have established such
a project and all the questions about its own origin that the
fecundity of this science allows to remain dormant. Let us first
simply consider that the scientificity of that science is often
acknowledged because of its phonological foundations. Phonology,
it is often said today, communicates its scientificity to linguistics,
which in turn serves as the epistemological model for all the
sciences of man. Since the deliberate and systematic phonological
orientation of linguistics (Troubetzkoy, Jakobson, Martinet) carries
out an intention which was originally Saussure's, I shall, at
least provisionally, confine my-self to the latter. Will my argument
be equally applicable a fortiori to the most accentuated forms
of phonologism? The problem at least be stated.
The science of linguistics determines language — its field of objectivity
— in the last instance and in the irreducible simplicity of its
essence, as the unity of the phonè, the glossa,
and the logos. This determination is by rights anterior
to all the eventual differentiations that could arise within the
systems of terminology of the different schools (language/speech
[langue/parole]; code/message; scheme/usage; linguistic/logic;
phonology/phonematics/phonetics/glossematics). And even if one
wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent
signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal
identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities
that are not purely sensible), it would have to be admitted that
the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and
the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense
within the phonic. With regard to this unity, writing would always
be derivative, accidental, particular, exterior, doubling the
signifier: phonetic. “Sign of a sign,” said Aristotle,
Rousseau, and Hegel.
Yet, the intention that institutes general linguistics ,is a science
remains in this respect within a contradiction. Its declared
purpose indeed confirms, saying what goes without saying, the
subordination of grammatology, the historico-metaphysical reduction
of writing to the rank of an instrument enslaved to a full and
originarily spoken language. But another gesture (not another
statement of purpose, for here what does not go without saying
is done without being said, written without being uttered) liberates
the future of a general grammatology of which linguistics-phonology
would be only a dependent and circumscribed area. Let us follow
this tension between gesture and statement in Saussure.
The Outside
and the Inside
On the one hand, true to the Western tradition that controls not
only in theory, but in practice (in the principle of its practice)
the relationships between speech and writing, Saussure does
not recognise in the latter more than a narrow and derivative
function. Narrow because it is nothing but one modality among
others, a modality of the events which can befall a language whose
essence, as the facts seem to show, can remain forever uncontaminated
by writing. “Language does have an oral tradition that is
independent of writing” (Cours de linguistique générale).
Derivative because representative signifier of the first
signifier, representation of the self-present voice, of the immediate,
natural, and direct signification of the meaning (of the signified,
of the concept, of the ideal object or what have you). Saussure
takes up the traditional definition of writing which, already
in Plato and Aristotle, was restricted to the model of phonetic
script and the language of words. Let us recall the Aristotelian
definition: “Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience
and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” Saussure:
“Language and writing are two distinct systems of signs;
the second exists for the sole purpose of representing
the first”. This representative determination, beside communicating
without a doubt essentially with the idea of the sign, does not
translate a choice or an evaluation, does not betray a psychological
or metaphysical presupposition peculiar to Saussure; it describes
or rather reflects the structure of a certain type of writing:
phonetic writing, which we use and within whose element the epistémè
in general (science and philosophy), and linguistics in particular,
could be founded. One should, moreover, say mode, rather
than structure; it is not a question of a system constructed
and functioning perfectly, but of an ideal explicitly directing
a functioning which in fact is never completely phonetic.
In fact, but also for reasons of essence to which I shall frequently
return. To be sure this factum of phonetic writing is massive;
it commands our entire culture and our entire science, and it
is certainly not just one fact among others. Nevertheless it
does not respond to any necessity of an absolute and universal
essence. Using this as a point of departure, Saussure defines
the project and object of general linguistics: “The linguistic
object is not defined by the combination of the written word and
the spoken word: the spoken form alone constitutes the object”.
The form of the question to which he responded thus entailed the
response. It was a matter of knowing what sort of word is the
object of linguistics and what the relationships arc between the
atomic unities that are the written and the spoken word. Now
the word (vox) is already a unity of sense and sound, of
concept and voice, or, to speak a more rigorously Saussurian language,
of the signified and the signifier. This last terminology was
moreover first proposed in the domain of spoken language alone,
of linguistics in the narrow sense and not in the domain of semiology
(“I propose to retain the word sign [signe]
to designate the whole and to replace concept and sound-image
respectively by signified [signifié] and signifier
[signifiant]”). The word is thus already, a constituted
unity, an effect of “the somewhat mysterious fact ... that
'thought-sound' implies divisions”. Even if the word is
in its turn articulated, even if it implies other divisions, as
long as one poses the question of the relationships between speech
and writing in the light of the indivisible units of the “thought-sound,”
there will always be the ready response. Writing will be “phonetic,”
it will be the outside, the exterior representation of language
and of this “thought-sound.” It must necessarily operate
from already constituted units of signification, in the formation
of which it has played no part.
Perhaps the objection will be made that writing up to the present
has not on]y not contradicted, but indeed, confirmed the linguistics
of the word. Hitherto I seem to have maintained that only the
fascination of the unit called word has prevented giving to writing
the attention that it merited. By that I seemed to suppose that,
by ceasing to accord an absolute privilege to the word, modern
linguistics would become that much more attentive to writing and
would finally cease to regard it with suspicion. ...
It is clear that the concepts of stability,, permanence, and duration,
which here assist thinking the relationships between speech and
writing, are too lax and open to every uncritical investiture.
They would require more attentive and minute analyses. The same
is applicable to an explanation according to which “most
people pay more attention to visual impressions simply because
these are sharper and more lasting than aural impressions. This
explanation of “usurpation” is not only empirical in
its form, it is problematic in its content, it refers to a metaphysics
and to an old physiology, of sensory faculties constantly, disproved
by science, as by the experience of language and by the body proper
as language. It imprudently makes of visibility the tangible,
simple, and essential element of writing. Above all, in considering
the audible as the natural milieu within which language must naturally
fragment and articulate its instituted signs, thus exercising
its arbitrariness, this explanation excludes all possibility,,
of some natural relationship between speech and writing at the,
very moment that it affirms it. Instead of deliberately dismissing
the notions of nature and institution that it constantly uses,
which ought to be done first, it thus confuses the two. It finally
and most importantly contradicts the principal affirmation according
to which “the thing that constitutes language [l'essentiel
de la langue] is . . . unrelated to the phonic character of
the linguistic sign”. This affirmation will soon occupy
us; within it the other side of the Saussurian proposition denouncing
the “illusions of script” comes to the fore.
What do these limits and presuppositions signify? First that
a linguistics is not general as long as it defines its
outside and inside in terms of determined linguistic models;
as long as it does not rigorously distinguish essence from fact
in their respective degrees of generality. The system of writing
in general is not exterior to the system of language in general,
unless it is granted that the division between exterior and interior
passes through the interior of the interior or the exterior of
the exterior, to the point where the immanence of language is
essentially exposed to the intervention of forces that are apparently
alien to its system. For the same reason, writing in general
is not “image” or “figuration” of language
in general, except if the nature, the logic, and the functioning
of the image within the system from which one wishes to exclude
it be reconsidered. Writing is not a sign of a sign, except if
one says it of all signs, which would be more profoundly true.
If every sign refers to a sign, and if “sign of a sign”
signifies writing, certain conclusions — which I shall consider
at the appropriate moment will become inevitable. What Saussure
saw without seeing, knew without being able to take into
account, following in that the entire metaphysical tradition,
is that a certain model of writing was necessarily but provisionally
imposed (but for the inaccuracy in principle, insufficiency of
fact, and the permanent usurpation) as instrument and technique
of representation of a system of language. And that this movement,
unique in style, was so profound that it permitted the thinking,
within language, of concepts like those of the sign, technique,
representation, language. The system of language associated with
phonetic-alphabetic writing is that within which logocentric metaphysics,
determining the sense of being as presence, has been produced.
This logocentrism, this epoch of the full speech, has
always placed in parenthesis, suspended, and suppressed for essential
reasons, all free reflection on the origin and status of writing,
all science of writing which was not technology and the history
of a technique, itself leaning upon a mythology and a metaphor
of a natural writing. It is this logocentrism which, limiting
the internal system of language in general by a bad abstraction,
prevents Saussure and the majority of his successors from determining
fully and explicitly that which is called “the integral and
concrete object of linguistics”
But conversely, as I announced above, it is when he is not expressly
dealing with writing, when he feels be has closed the parentheses
on that subject, that Saussure opens the field of a general grammatology.
Which would not only no longer be excluded from general linguistics,
but would dominate it and contain it within itself. Then one
realises that what was chased off limits, the wandering outcast
of linguistics, has indeed never ceased to haunt language as its
primary and most intimate possibility. Then something which was
never spoken and which is nothing other than writing itself as
the origin of language writes itself within Saussure's discourse.
Then we glimpse the germ of a profound but indirect explanation
of the usurpation and the traps condemned in Chapter VI. This
explanation will overthrow even the form of the question to which
it was a premature reply.
The Outside Is
the Inside
The thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign (so grossly
misnamed, and not only for the reasons Saussure himself recognises)
must forbid a radical distinction between the linguistic and the
graphic sign. No doubt this thesis concerns only the necessity
of relationships between specific signifiers and signifieds within
an allegedly natural relationship between the voice and sense
in general, between the order of phonic signifiers and the content
of the signifieds (“the only natural bond, the only true
bond, the bond of sound”). Only these relationships between
specific signifiers and signifieds would be regulated by arbitrariness.
Within the “natural” relationship between phonic signifiers
and their signifieds in general, the relationship between each
determined signifier and its determined signified would be “arbitrary”.
Now from the moment that one considers the totality of determined
signs, spoken, and a fortiori written, as unmotivated institutions, one must exclude any relationship of natural subordination, any natural hierarchy among signifiers or orders of signifiers. If “writing” signifies inscription and especially the durable institution of a sign (and that is the only irreducible kernel of the concept of writing), writing in general covers the entire field of linguistic signs. In that field a certain sort of instituted signifiers may then appear, “graphic” in the narrow and derivative sense of the word, ordered by a certain relationship with other instituted — hence “written,” even if they are “phonic” — signifiers. The very idea of institution — hence of the arbitrariness of the sign — is unthinkable before the possibility of writing and outside of its horizon. Quite simply, that is, outside of the horizon itself, outside the world as space of inscription, as the opening to the emission and to the spatial distribution of signs, to the regulated play of
their differences, even if they are “phonic.”
Let us now persist in using this opposition of nature and institution,
of physis and nomos (which also means, of course,
a distribution and division regulated in fact by law) which a
meditation on writing should disturb although it functions everywhere
as self-evident, particularly in the discourse of linguistics.
We must then conclude that only the signs called natural, those
that Hegel and Saussure call “symbols,” escape semiology
as grammatology. But they fall a fortiori outside the field of
linguistics as the region of general semiology. The thesis of
the arbitrariness of the sign thus indirectly but irrevocably
contests Saussure's declared proposition when he chases writing
to the outer darkness of language. This thesis successfully accounts
for a conventional relationship between the phoneme and the grapheme
(in phonetic writing, between the phoneme, signifier-signified,
and the grapheme, pure signifier), but by the same token it forbids
that the latter be an “image” of the former. Now it
was indispensable to the exclusion of writing as “external
system,” that it come to impose an “image,” a “representation,” or a “figuration,” an exterior reflection of the reality of language.
It matters little, here at least, that there is in fact an ideographic
filiation of the alphabet. This important question is much debated
by historians of writing. What matters here is that in the synchronic
structure and systematic principle of alphabetic writing — and
phonetic writing in general — no relationship of “natural” representation, none of resemblance or participation, no “symbolic” relationship in the Hegelian-Saussurian sense, no “iconographic” relationship in the Peircian sense, be implied.
One must therefore challenge, in the very name of the arbitrariness
of the sign, the Saussurian definition of writing as “image” — hence
as natural symbol — of language. Not to mention the fact that the
phoneme is the unimaginable itself, and no visibility can
resemble it, it suffices to take into account what Saussure
says about the difference between the symbol and the sign in order
to be completely baffled as to how he can at the same time say
of writing that it is an “Image” or “figuration”
of language and define language and writing elsewhere as “two
distinct systems of signs”. For the property of the sign
is not to be an image. By a process exposed by Freud in The
Interpretation of Dreams, Saussure thus accumulates contradictory
arguments to bring about a satisfactory decision: the exclusion
of writing. In fact, even within so-called phonetic writing,
the “graphic” signifier refers to the phoneme through
a web of many dimensions which binds it, like all signifiers,
to other written and oral signifiers, within a “total”
system open, let us say, to all possible investments of sense.
We must begin with the possibility of that total system.
Saussure was thus never able to think that writing was truly an
“Image,” a “figuration,” a “representation” of the spoken language, a symbol. If one considers that be nonetheless needed these inadequate notions to decide upon the exteriority of writing, one must conclude that an entire stratum of his discourse, the intention of Chapter VI (“Graphic Representation of Language”), was not at all scientific. When I say this, my quarry is not primarily Ferdinand de Saussure's intention or motivation, but
rather the entire uncritical tradition which he inherits. To
what zone of discourse does this strange functioning of argumentation
belong, this coherence of desire producing itself in a near-oneiric
way — although it clarifies the dream rather than allow itself to
be clarified by it — through a contradictory logic? How is this
functioning articulated with the entirety of theoretical discourse,
throughout the history of science? Better yet, bow does it work
from within the concept of science itself? It is only when this
question is elaborated if it is some day — when the concepts required
by this functioning are defined outside of all psychology (as
of all sciences of man), outside metaphysics (which can now be
“Marxist” or “structuralist”); when one is
able to respect all its levels of generality and articulation — it
is only then that one will be able to state rigorously the problem
of the articulated appurtenance of a text (theoretical or otherwise)
to an entire set: I obviously treat the Saussurian text at the
moment only as a telling example within a given situation, without
professing to use the concepts required by the functioning of
which I have just spoken. My justification would be as follows:
this and some other indices (in a general way the treatment of
the concept of writing) already give us the assured means of broaching
the de-construction of the greatest totality — the concept
of the epistémè and logocentric metaphysics — within which are produced, without ever posing the radical question of
writing, all the Western methods of analysis, explication, reading,
or interpretation.
Now we must think that writing is at the same time more exterior
to speech, not being its “image” or its “symbol,”
and more interior to speech, which is already in itself a writing.
Even before it is linked to incision, engraving, drawing, or
the letter, to a signifier referring in general to a signifier
signified by it, the concept of the graphic [unit of a
possible graphic system] implies the framework of the instituted
trace, as the possibility common to all systems of signification.
My efforts will now be directed toward slowly detaching these
two concepts from the classical discourse from which I necessarily
borrow them. The effort will be laborious and we know a priori
that its effectiveness will never be pure and absolute.
The instituted trace is “unmotivated” but not capricious.
Like the word “arbitrary” according to Saussure, it
“should not imply that the choice of the signifier is left
entirely to the speaker”. Simply, it has no “natural
attachment” to the signified within reality. For us, the
rupture of that “natural attachment” puts in question
the idea of naturalness rather than that of attachment. That
is why the word “institution” should not be too quickly
interpreted within the classical system of oppositions.
The instituted trace cannot be thought without thinking the retention
of difference within a structure of reference where difference
appears as such and thus permits a certain liberty of variations
among the full terms. The absence of another here-and-now, of
another transcendental present, of another origin of the world
appearing as such, presenting itself as irreducible absence within
the presence of the trace, is not a metaphysical formula substituted
for a scientific concept of writing. This formula, beside the
fact that it is the questioning of metaphysics itself, describes
the structure implied by the “arbitrariness of the sign,”
from the moment that one thinks of its possibility short of
the derived opposition between nature and convention, symbol
and sign, etc. These oppositions have meaning only after the
possibility of the trace. The “unmotivatedness” of
the sign requires a synthesis in which the completely other is
announced as such without any simplicity, any identity, any resemblance
or continuity — within what is not it. Is announced as such:
there we have all history, from what metaphysics has defined
as “non-living” up to “consciousness,” passing
through all levels of animal organisation. The trace, where the
relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility,
in the entire field of the entity [étant], which
metaphysics has defined as the being-present starting from the
occulted movement of the trace. The trace must be thought before
the entity. But the movement of the trace is necessarily occulted,
it produces itself as self-occultation. When the other announces
itself as such, it presents itself in the dissimulation of itself.
This formulation is not theological, as one might believe somewhat
hastily. The “theological” is a determined moment in
the total movement of the trace. The field of the entity, before
being determined as the field of presence, is structured according
to the diverse possibilities-genetic and structural — of the trace.
The presentation of the other as such, that is to say the dissimulation
of its “as such,” has always already begun and no structure
of the entity escapes it.
That is why the movement of “unmotivatedness” passes
from one structure to the other when the “sign” crosses
the stage of the “symbol.” It is in a certain sense
and according to a certain determined structure of the as such”
that one is authorised to say that there is vet no immotivation
in what Saussure calls “symbol” and which, according
to him, does not at least provisionally — interest semiology. The
general structure of the unmotivated trace connects within the
same possibility, and they cannot be separated except by abstraction,
the structure of the relationship with the other, the movement
of temporalisation, and language as writing. Without referring
back to a “nature,” the immotivation of the trace has
always become. In fact, there is no unmotivated trace: the trace
is indefinitely its own becoming-unmotivated. In Saussurian language,
what Saussure does not say would have to be said: there is neither
symbol nor sign but a becoming-sign of the symbol.
Thus, as it goes without saving, the trace whereof I speak is
not more natural (it is not the mark, the natural sign,
or the index in the Husserlian sense) than cultural, not more
physical than psychic, biological than spiritual. It is that
starting from which a becoming-unmotivated of the sign, and with
it all the ulterior oppositions between physis and its other,
is possible.
In his project of semiotics, Peirce seems to have been more attentive
than Saussure to the irreducibility of this becoming-unmotivated.
In his terminology, one must speak of a becoming-unmotivated
of the symbol, the notion of the symbol playing here a role analogous
to that of the sign which Saussure opposes precisely to the symbol:
Symbols grow. They come into being by development out of other
signs, particularly from icons, or from mixed signs partaking
of the nature of icons and symbols. We think only in signs.
These mental signs are of mixed nature; the symbol parts of them
are called concepts. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts
involving concepts. So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol
can grow. Omne symbolum de symbolo. [Elements of Logic,
Hartshorne and Weiss]
Peirce complies with two apparently incompatible exigencies.
The mistake here would be to sacrifice one for the other. It
must be recognised that the symbolic (in Peirce's sense: of “the
arbitrariness of the sign”) is rooted in the non-symbolic,
in an anterior and related order of signification: “Symbols
grow. They come into being by development out of other signs,
particularly from icons, or from mixed signs.” But these
roots must not compromise the structural originality of the field
of symbols, the autonomy of a domain, a production, and a play:
“So it is only out of symbols that a new symbol can grow.
Omne symbolum de symbolo.”
But in both cases, the genetic root-system refers from sign to
sign. No ground of nonsignification — understood as insignificance
or an intuition of a present truth — stretches out to give it foundation
under the play and the coming into being of signs. Semiotics
no longer depends on logic. Logic, according to Peirce, is only
a semiotic: “Logic, in its general sense, is, as I believe
I 'have shown, only another name for semiotics (semeiotike), the
quasi-necessary, or formal, doctrine of signs.” And logic
in the classical sense, logic “properly speaking,” nonformal
logic commanded by the value of truth, occupies in that semiotics
only a determined and not a fundamental level. As in Husserl
(but the analogy, although it is most thought-provoking, would
stop there and one must apply it carefully), the lowest level,
the foundation of the possibility of logic (or semiotics) corresponds
to the project of the Grammatica speculative of Thomas
d'Erfurt, falsely attributed to Duns Scotus. Like Husserl, Peirce
expressly refers to it. It is a matter of elaborating, in both
cases, a formal doctrine of conditions which a discourse must
satisfy, in order to have a sense, in order to “mean,”
even if it is false or contradictory. The general morphology
of that meaning (Bedeutung, vouloir-dire) is independent
of all logic of truth.
The science of semiotic has three branches. The first is called
by Duns Scotus grammatica speculative. We may term it
pure grammar. It has for its task to ascertain what must be true
of the representamen used by every scientific intelligence in
order that they may embody any meaning. The second is logic proper.
It is the science of what is quasi-necessarily true of the representamina
of any scientific intelligence in order that they may hold good
of any object, that is, may be true. Or say, logic proper is
the formal science of the conditions of the truth of representations,
The third, in imitation of Kant's fashion of preserving old associations
of words in finding nomenclature for new conceptions, I call pure
rhetoric. Its task is to ascertain the laws by which in every
scientific intelligence one sign gives birth to another, and especially
one thought brings forth another. [Peirce]
Peirce goes very far in the direction that I have called the de-construction
of the transcendental signified, which, at one time or another,
would place a reassuring end to the reference from sign to sign.
I have identified logocentrism and the metaphysics of presence
as the exigent, powerful, systematic, and irrepressible desire
for such a signified. Now Peirce considers the indefiniteness
of reference as the criterion that allows us to recognise that
we are indeed dealing with a system of signs. What broaches
the movement of signification is what makes its interruption
impossible. The thing itself is a sign. An unacceptable
proposition for Husserl, whose Phenomenology remains therefore — in
its “principle of principles” — the most radical and most
critical restoration of the metaphysics of presence. The difference
between Husserl's and Peirce's phenomenologies is fundamental
since it concerns the concept of the sign and of the manifestation
of presence, the relationships between the re-presentation and
the originary presentation of the thing itself (truth). On this
point Peirce is undoubtedly closer to the inventor of the word
phenomenology: Lambert proposed in fact to “reduce the
theory of things to the theory of signs.” According
to the “phaneoroscopy” or “Phenomenology”
of Peirce, manifestation itself does not reveal a presence,
it makes a sign. One may read in the Principle of Phenomenology
that “the idea of manifestation is the idea of a sign.”
There is thus no phenomenality reducing the sign or the representer
so that the thing signified may be allowed to glow finally in
the luminosity of its presence. The so-called “thing itself”
is always already a representamen shielded from the simplicity
of intuitive evidence. The representamen functions only by giving
rise to an interpretant that itself becomes a sign and so on to
infinity. The self-identity of the signified conceals itself
unceasingly and is always on the move. The property of the representamen
is to be itself and another, to be produced as a structure of
reference, to be separated from itself. The property of the representamen
is not to be proper [propre], that is to
say absolutely proximate to itself (prope, proprius).
The represented is always already a representamen.
Definition of the sign:
Anything which determines something else (its interpretant) to
refer to an object to which itself refers (its object) in the
same way, this interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on
ad infinitum. . . . If the series of successive interpretants
comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least.
[Elements of Logic]
From the moment that there is meaning there are nothing but signs.
We think only in signs. Which amounts to ruining the notion
of the sign at the very moment when, as in Nietzsche, its exigency
is recognised in the absoluteness of its right. One could call
play the absence of the transcendental signified as limitlessness
of play, that is to say as the destruction of ontotheology and
the metaphysics of presence. It is not surprising that the shock,
shaping and undermining metaphysics since its origin, lets itself
be named as such in the period when, refusing to
bind linguistics to semantics (which all European linguists, from
Saussure to Hjemslev, still do), expelling the problem of meaning
outside of their researches, certain American linguists constantly
refer to the model of a game. Here one must think of writing
as a game within language. (The Phaedrus condemned writing
precisely as play — paidia — and opposed such childishness
to the adult gravity [spoudè] of speech), This play,
thought as absence of the transcendental signified, is not a play
in the world, as it has always been defined, for the purposes
of containing it, by the philosophical tradition and as the theoreticians
of play also consider it (or those who, following and going beyond
Bloomfield, refer semantics to psychology or some other local
discipline). To think play radically the ontological and transcendental
problematics must first be seriously exhausted; the question of
the meaning of being, the being of the entity and of the transcendental
origin of the world — of the world-ness of the world — must be patiently
and rigorously worked through, the critical movement of the Husserlian
and Heideggerian questions must be effectively followed to the
very end, and their effectiveness and legibility must be conserved.
Even if it were crossed out, without it the concepts of play
and writing to which I shall have recourse will remain caught
within regional limits and an empiricist, positivist, or metaphysical
discourse. The counter-move that the holders of such a discourse
would oppose to the precritical tradition and to metaphysical
speculation would be nothing but the worldly representation of
their own operation. It is therefore the game of the world
that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all
the forms of play in the world.
From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated
of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of
diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able
to command a grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the
trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a
state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given
structure. Science of “the arbitrariness of the sign,”
science of the immotivation of the trace, science of writing before
speech and in speech, grammatology would thus cover a vast field
within which linguistics would, by abstraction, delineate its
own area, with the limits that Saussure prescribes to its internal
system and which must be carefully re-examined in each speech/writing
system in the world and history.
By a substitution which would be anything but verbal, one may
replace semiology by grammatology in the program of the
Course in General Linguistics:
I shall call it [grammatology] .... Since the science does not
yet exist, no one can say what it would be; but it has a right
to existence, a place staked out in advance. Linguistics is only
a part of [that] general science . . . ; the laws discovered by
[grammatology] will be applicable to linguistics.
The advantage of this substitution will not only be to give to
the theory of writing the scope needed to counter logocentric
repression and the subordination to linguistics. It will liberate
the semiological project itself from what, in spite of its greater
theoretical extension, remained governed by linguistics, organised
as if linguistics were at once its center and its telos. Even
though semiology was in fact more general and more comprehensive
than linguistics, it continued to be regulated as if it
were one of the areas of linguistics. The linguistic sign
remained exemplary for semiology, it dominated it as the master-sign
and as the generative model: the pattern [patron].
One could therefore say that signs that are wholly arbitrary realise
better than the others the ideal of the semiological process;
that is why language, the most complex and universal of all systems
of expression, is also the most characteristic; in this sense
linguistics can become the master-pattern for all branches
of semiology although language is only one particular semiological
system (italics added).
Consequently, reconsidering the order of dependence prescribed
by Saussure, apparently inverting the relationship of the part
to the whole, Barthes in fact carries out the profoundest intention
of the Course:
From now on we must admit the possibility of reversing Saussure's
proposition some day: linguistics is not a part, even if privileged,
of the general science of signs, it is semiology that is a part
of linguistics. [Communications]
This coherent reversal, submitting semiology to a “translinguistics,”
leads to its full explication a linguistics historically dominated
by logocentric metaphysics, for which in fact there is not and
there should not be
“any meaning except as named” (ibid.). Dominated
by the so-called “civilisation of writing” that we inhabit,
a civilisation of so-called phonetic writing, that is to say of
the logos where the sense of being is, in its telos, determined
as parousia. The Barthesian reversal is fecund and indispensable
for the description of the fact and the vocation of signification
within the closure of this epoch and this civilisation that is
in the process of disappearing in its very globalisation.
Let us now try to go beyond these formal and architectonic considerations.
Let us ask in a more intrinsic and concrete way, how language
is not merely a sort of writing, “comparable to a system
of writing” — Saussure writes curiously — but a species of
writing. Or rather, since writing no longer relates to language
as an extension or frontier, let us ask bow language is a possibility
founded on the general possibility of writing. Demonstrating
this, one would give at the same time an account of that alleged
“usurpation” which could not be an unhappy accident.
It supposes on the contrary a common root and thus excludes the
resemblance of the “image,” derivation, or representative
reflexion. And thus one would bring back to its true meaning,
to its primary possibility, the apparently innocent and didactic
analogy which makes Saussure say:
Language is [comparable to] a system of signs that express ideas,
and is therefore comparable to writing, the alphabet of
deaf-mutes, symbolic rites, polite formulas, military signals,
etc. But it is the most important of all these systems (italics
added).
Further, it is not by chance that, a hundred and thirty pages
later, at the moment of explaining phonic difference as
the condition of linguistic value (“from a material viewpoint”)
he must again borrow all his pedagogic resources from the example
of writing:
Since an identical state of affairs is observable in writing,
another system of signs, we, shall use writing to draw some comparisons
that will clarify the whole issue.
Four demonstrative items, borrowing pattern and content from writing,
follow.
Once more, then, we definitely have to oppose Saussure to himself.
Before being or not being “noted,” “represented,”
“figured,” in a “graphie,” the linguistic
sign implies an originary writing. Henceforth, it is not to the
thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign that I shall appeal directly,
but to what Saussure associates with it as an indispensable correlative
and which would seem to me rather to lay the foundations for it:
the thesis of difference as the source of linguistic value.
What are, from the grammatological point of view, the consequences
of this theme that is now so well-known (and upon which Plato
already reflected in the Sophist)?
By definition, difference is never in itself a sensible plenitude.
Therefore, its necessity contradicts the allegation of a naturally
phonic essence of language. It contests by the same token the
professed natural dependence of the graphic signifier. That is
a consequence Saussure himself draws against the premises defining
the internal system of language. He must now exclude the very
thing which had permitted him to exclude writing: sound and its
“natural bond” [lien naturel] with meaning.
For example: “The thing that constitutes language is, as
I shall show later, unrelated to the phonic character of the linguistic
sign”. And in a paragraph on difference:
It is impossible for sound alone, a material element, to belong
to language. It is only a secondary thing, substance to be put
to use. All our conventional values have the characteristic of
not being confused with the tangible element which supports them.
. . . The linguistic signifier . . . is not [in essence] phonic
but incorporeal — constituted not by its material substance but
the differences that separate its sound-image from all others.
The idea or phonic substance that a sign contains is of less
importance than the other signs that surround it.
Without this reduction of phonic matter, the distinction between
language and speech, decisive for Saussure, would have no rigour.
It would be the same for the oppositions that happened to descend
from it: between code and message, pattern and usage, etc. Conclusion:
“Phonologythis bears repeating — is only an auxiliary discipline
[of the science of language] and belongs exclusively to speaking”.
Speech thus draws from this stock of writing, noted or not, that
language is, and it is here that one must meditate upon the complicity
between the two “stabilities.” The reduction of the
phonè reveals this complicity. What Saussure says, for
example, about the sign in general and what he “confirms”
through the example of writing, applies also to language: “Signs
are governed by a principle of general semiology: continuity in
time is coupled to change in time; this is confirmed by orthrographic
systems, the speech of deaf-mutes, etc.”.
The reduction of phonic substance thus does not only permit the
distinction between phonetics on the one hand (and a fortiori
acoustics or the physiology of the phonating organs) and phonology
on the other. It also makes of phonology itself an “auxiliary
discipline.” Here the direction indicated by Saussure takes
us beyond the phonologism of those who profess to follow him on
this point: in fact, Jakobson believes indifference to the phonic
substance of expression to be impossible and illegitimate. He
thus criticises the glossematic. — of Hjelmslev which requires
and practices the neutralising of sonorous substance. And in
the text cited above, Jakobson and Halle maintain that the “theoretical
requirement” of a research of invariables placing sonorous
substance in parenthesis (as an empirical and contingent content)
is:
impracticable since, as “Eli Fischer-Jorgensen
exposes [it]”, “the sonorous substance [is taken into
account] at every step of the analysis.” [Jakobson and Halle]
But is that a “troubling discrepancy,” as Jakobson and
Halle would have it? Can one not account for it as a fact serving
as an example, as do the phenomenologists who always need, keeping
it always within sight, an exemplary empirical content in the
reading of an essence which is independent of it by right?
inadmissible in principle since one cannot consider
“that in language form is opposed to substance as a constant
to a variable.” It is in the course of this second demonstration
that the literally Saussurian formulas reappear within the question
of the relationships between speech and writing; the order of
writing is the order of exteriority of the “occasional,”
of the accessory,” of the “auxiliary,” of the “parasitic”
(italics added). The argument of Jakobson and Halle appeals to
the factual genesis and invokes the secondariness of writing in
the colloquial sense: “Only after having mastered speech
does one graduate to reading and writing. Even if this commonsensical
proposition were rigorously proved — something that I do not believe
(since each of its concepts harbours an immense problem) — one
would still have to receive assurance of its pertinence to the
argument. Even if “after” were here a facile representation,
if one knew perfectly well what one thought and stated while assuring
that one learns to write after having learned to speak, would
that suffice to conclude that what thus comes “after”
is parasitic? And what is a parasite? And what if writing were
precisely that which makes us reconsider our logic of the parasite?
In another moment of the critique, Jakobson and Halle recall the
imperfection of graphic representation; that imperfection is due
to “the cardinally dissimilar patterning of letters and phonemes:”
Letters never, or only partially, reproduce the different distinctive
features on which the phonemic pattern is based and unfailingly
disregard the structural relationship of these features.
I have suggested it above: does not the radical dissimilarity
of the two elements-graphic and phonic-exclude derivation? Does
not the inadequacy of graphic representation concern only common
alphabetic writing, to which glossematic formalism does not essentially
refer? Finally, if one accepts all the phonologist arguments
thus presented, it must still be recognised that they oppose a
“scientific” concept of the spoken word to a vulgar
concept of writing. What I would wish to show is that one cannot
exclude writing from the general experience of “the structural
relationship of these features.” Which amounts, of course,
to reforming the concept of writing.
In short, if the Jakobsonian analysis is faithful to Saussure
in this matter, is it not especially so to the Saussure of Chapter
VI? Up to what point would Saussure have maintained the inseparability
of matter and form, which remains the most important argument
of Jakobson and Halle? The question may be repeated in the case
of the position of André Martinet who, in this debate,
follows Chapter VI of the Course to the letter. And only
Chapter VI, from which Martinet expressly dissociates the
doctrine of what, in the Course, effaces the privilege
of phonic substance. After having explained why “a dead
language with a perfect ideography,” that is to say a communication
effective through the system of a generalised script, “could
not have any real autonomy,” and why nevertheless, “such
a system would be something so particular that one can well understand
why linguists want to exclude it from the domain of their
science” (La linguistique syncronique, p. i8; italics
added), Martinet criticises those who, following a certain trend
in Saussure, question the essentially phonic character of the
linguistic sign: “Much will be attempted to prove that Saussure
is right when he announces that 'the thing that constitutes language
[1'essentiel de la langue] is . . . unrelated to
the phonic character of the linguistic sign,' and, going beyond
the teaching of the master, to declare that the linguistic sign
does not necessarily have that phonic character”.
On that precise point, it is not a question of “going beyond”
the master's teaching but of following and extending it. Not
to do it is to cling to what in Chapter VI greatly limits formal
and structural research and contradicts the least contestable
findings of Saussurian doctrine. To avoid “going beyond,”
one risks returning to a point that falls short.
I believe that generalised writing is not just the idea of a system
to be invented, an hypothetical characteristic or a future possibility.
I think on the contrary that oral language already belongs to
this writing. But that presupposes a modification of the concept
of writing that we for the moment merely anticipate. Even supposing
that one is not given that modified concept, supposing that one
is considering a system of pure writing as an hypothesis for the
future or a working hypothesis, faced with that hypothesis, should
a linguist refuse himself the means of thinking it and of integrating
its formulation within his theoretical discourse? Does the fact
that most linguists do so create a theoretical right? Martinet
seems to be of that opinion. After having elaborated a purely
“dactylological” hypothesis of language, he writes,
in effect:
It must be recognised that the parallelism between this “dactylology”
and phonology is complete as much in synchronic as in diachronic
material, and that the terminology associated with the latter
may be used for the former, except of course when the terms refer
to the phonic substance. Clearly, if we do not desire to
exclude from the domain of linguistics the systems of the type
we have just imagined, it is most important to modify traditional
terminology relative to the articulation of signifiers so as to
eliminate all reference to phonic substance; as does Louis Hjelmslev
when he uses “ceneme” and “cenematics” instead
of “phoneme” and “phonematics.” Yet it
is understandable that the majority of linguists hesitate
to modify completely the traditional terminological edifice
for the only theoretical advantages of being able to include in
the field of their science some purely hypothetical
systems. To make them agree to engage such a revolution,
they must be persuaded that, in attested linguistic systems, they
have no advantage in considering the phonic substance of units
of expression as to be of direct interest (italics added).
Once again, we do not doubt the value of these phonological arguments,
the presuppositions behind which I have attempted to expose above.
Once one assumes these presuppositions, it would be absurd to
reintroduce confusedly a derivative writing, in the area of oral
language and within the system of this derivation. Not only would
ethnocentrism not be avoided, but all the frontiers within the
sphere of its legitimacy would then be confused. It is not a
question of rehabilitating writing in the narrow sense, nor of
reversing the order of dependence when it is evident. Phonologism
does not brook any objections as long as one conserves the colloquial
concepts of speech and writing which form the solid fabric of
its argumentation. Colloquial and quotidian conceptions, inhabited
besides — uncontradictorily enough — by an old history, limited
by frontiers that are hardly visible yet all the more rigorous
by that very fact.
I would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness
of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one
condition: that the original,” “natural,” etc.
language had never existed, never been intact and untouched by
writing, that it bad itself always been a writing. An archewriting
whose necessity and new concept I wish to indicate and outline
here; and which I continue to call writing only because it essentially
communicates with the vulgar concept of writing. The latter could
not have imposed itself historically except by the dissimulation
of the arche-writing, by the desire for a speech displacing its
other and its double and working to reduce its difference. If
I persist in calling that difference writing, it is because, within
the work of historical repression, writing was, by its situation,
destined to signify the most formidable difference. It threatened
the desire for the living speech from the closest proximity, it
breached living speech from within and from the very beginning.
And as we shall begin to see, difference cannot be thought without
the trace.
This arche-writing, although its concept is invoked by the themes
of “the arbitrariness of the sign” and of difference,
cannot and can never be recognised as the object of a science.
It is that very thing which cannot let itself be reduced
to the form of presence. The latter orders all objectivity
of the object and all relation of knowledge. That is why what
I would be tempted to consider in the development of the Course
as “progress,” calling into question in return the
uncritical positions of Chapter VI, never gives rise to a new
“scientific” concept of writing.
Can one say as much of the algebraism of Hjelmslev, which undoubtedly
drew the most rigorous conclusions from that progress?
The Principes de grammaire générale (1928)
separated out within the doctrine of the Course the phonological
principle and the principle of difference: It isolated a concept
of form which permitted a distinction between formal difference
and phonic difference, and this even within “spoken”
language. Grammar is independent of semantics and phonology.
That independence is the very principle of glossematics as the
formal science of language. Its formality supposes that “there
is no necessary connection between sounds and language.”
[On the Principles of Phnomatics] That formality is itself
the condition of a purely functional analysis. The idea of a
linguistic function and of a purely linguistic unit — the glosseme
— excludes then not only the consideration of the substance of
expression (material substance) but also that of the substance
of the content (immaterial substance). Since language is a form
and not a substance (Saussure), the glossemes are by definition
independent of substance, immaterial (semantic, psychological
and logical) and material (phonic, graphic, etc.).” [Hjelmslev
and Uldall] The study of the functioning of language, of its play,
presupposes that the substance of meaning and, among other possible
substances, that of sound, be placed in parenthesis. The
unity of sound and of sense is indeed here, as I proposed above,
the reassuring closing of plan,. Hjelmslev situates his concept
of the scheme or play of language within Saussure's
heritage of Saussure's formalism and his theory of value. Although
he prefers to compare linguistic value to the “value of exchange
in the economic sciences” rather than to the “purely
logico-mathematical value,” he assigns a limit to this analogy.
An economic value is by definition a value with two faces: not
only does it play the role of a constant vis-á-vis the
concrete units of money, but it also itself plays the role of
a variable vis-á-vis a fixed quantity of merchandise which
serves it as a standard. In linguistics on the other hand there
is nothing that corresponds to a standard. That is why the game
of chess and not economic fact remains for Saussure the most faithful
image of a grammar. The scheme of language is in the last analysis
a game and nothing more. [Langue et parole, Essais linguistiques]
In the Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (1943), setting
forth the opposition expression/content, which he substitutes
for the difference signifier/signified, and in which each
term may be considered from the point of view of form or substance,
Hjelmslev criticises the idea of a language naturally bound
to the substance of phonic expression. It is by mistake that
it has hitherto been supposed “that the substance-expression
of a spoken language should consist of 'sounds':”
Thus, as has been pointed out by the Zwirners in particular, the
fact has been overlooked that speech is accompanied by, and that
certain components of speech can be replaced by, gesture, and
that in reality, as the Zwirners say, not only the so-called organs
of speech (throat, mouth, and nose), but very nearly all the striate
musculature cooperate in the exercise of “natural” language.
Further, it is possible to replace the usual sound-and-gesture
substance with any other that offers itself as appropriate under
changed external circumstances. Thus the same linguistic form
may also be manifested in writing, as happens with a phonetic
or phonemic notation and with the so-called phonetic orthographies,
as for example the Finnish. Here is a “graphic” substance
which is addressed exclusively to the eve and which need not be
transposed into a phonetic “substance” in order to be
grasped or understood. And this graphic “substance”
can, precisely from the point of view of the substance, be of
quite various sorts. [Prolegomena to A Theory of Language,
1943]
Refusing to presuppose a “derivation” of substances
following from the substance of phonic expression, Hjelmslev places
this problem outside the area of structural analysis and of linguistics.
Moreover it is not always certain what is derived and what not;
we must not forget that the discovery of alphabetic writing is
hidden in prehistory [n.: Bertrand Russell quite rightly calls
attention to the fact that we have no means of deciding whether
writing or speech is the older form of human expression (An Outline
of Philosophy , so that the assertion that it rests on
a phonetic analysis is only one of the possible diachronic hypotheses;
it may, also be rested on a formal analysis of linguistic structure.
But in any case, as is recognised by modern linguistics, diachronic
considerations are irrelevant for synchronic descriptions.
H. J. Uldall provides a remarkable formulation of the fact that
glossematic criticism operates at the same time thanks to Saussure
and against him; that, as I suggested above, the proper space
of a grammatology is at the same time opened and closed by The
Course in General Linguistics. To show that Saussure did
not develop “all the theoretical consequences of his discovery”
he writes:
It is even more curious when we consider that the practical consequences
have been widely drawn, indeed had been drawn thousands of years
before Saussure, for it is only through the concept of a difference
between form and substance that we can explain the possibility
of speech and writing existing at the same time as expressions
of one and the same language. If either of these two substances,
the stream of air or the stream of ink, were an integral part
of the language itself, it would not be possible to go from one
to the other without changing the language. [Speech and Writing,
1938]
Undoubtedly the Copenhagen School thus frees a field of research:
it becomes possible to direct attention not only to the purity
of a form freed from all “natural” bonds to a substance
but also to everything that, in the stratification of language,
depends on the substance of graphic expression. An original and
rigorously delimited description of this may thus be promised.
Hjelmslev recognises that an “analysis of writing without
regard to sound has not yet been undertaken”. While regretting
also that “the substance of ink has not received the same
attention on the part of linguists that they have so lavishly
bestowed on the substance of air,” H. J. Uldall delimits
these problems and emphasises the mutual independence of the substances
of expression. He illustrates it particularly by the fact that,
in orthography, no grapheme corresponds to accents of pronunciation
(for Rousseau this was the misery, and the menace of writing)
and that, reciprocally, in pronunciation, no phoneme corresponds
to the spacing between written words.
Recognising the specificity of writing, glossematics did not merely
give itself the means of describing the graphic element. It showed
bow to reach the literary element, to what in literature passes
through an irreducibly graphic text, tying the play of form to
a determined substance of expression. If there is something in
literature which does not allow itself to be reduced to the voice,
to epos or to poetry, one cannot recapture it except by rigorously
isolating the bond that links the play of form to the substance
of graphic expression. (It will by the same token be seen that
“pure literature,” thus respected in its irreducibilty,
also risks limiting the play, restricting it. The desire to restrict
play is, moreover, irresistible.) This interest in literature
is effectively manifested in the Copenhagen School. It thus removes
the Rousseauist and Saussurian caution with regard to literary
arts. It radicalises the efforts of the Russian formalists, specifically
of the O.PO.IAZ, who, in their attention to the being-literary
of literature, perhaps favoured the phonological instance and
the literary models that it dominates. Notably poetry. That
which, within the history of literature and in the structure of
a literary text in general, escapes that framework, merits a type
of description whose norms and conditions of possibility glossematics
has perhaps better isolated. It has perhaps thus better prepared
itself to study the purely graphic stratum within the structure
of the literary text within the history of the becoming-literary
of literality, notably in its “modernity.”
Undoubtedly a new domain is thus opened to new and fecund researches.
But I am not primarily interested in such a parallelism or such
a recaptured parity of substances of expression. It is clear
that if the phonic substance lost its privilege, it was not to
the advantage of the graphic substance, which lends itself to
the same substitutions. To the extent that it liberates and is
irrefutable, glossematics still operates with a popular concept
of writing. However original and irreducible it might be, the
“form of expression” linked by correlation to the graphic
“substance of expression” remains very determined.
It is very dependent and very derivative with regard to the arche-writing
of which I speak. This arche-writing would be at work not only
in the form and substance of graphic expression but also in those
of non-graphic expression. It would constitute not only the pattern
uniting form to all substance, graphic or otherwise, but the movement
of the sign-function linking a content to an expression, whether
it be graphic or not. This theme could not have a place in Hjelmslev's
system.
It is because arche-writing, movement of difference, irreducible
archesynthesis, opening in one and the same possibility, temporalisation
as well as relationship with the other and language, cannot, as
the condition of all linguistic systems, form a part of the linguistic
system itself and be situated as an object in its field. (which
does not mean it has a real field elsewhere, another assignable
site.) Its concept could in no way enrich the scientific, positive,
and “immanent” (in the Hjelmslevian sense) description
of the system itself. Therefore, the founder of glossematics
would no doubt have questioned its necessity, as be rejects, en
bloc and legitimately, all the extra-linguistic theories which
do not arise from the irreducible immanence of the linguistic
system. He would have seen in that notion one of those appeals
to experience which a theory should dispense with. He would not
have understood why the name writing continued — to be used for
that X which becomes so different from what has always been called
“writing.”
I have already begun to justify this word, and especially the
necessity of the communication between the concept of arche-writing
and the vulgar concept of writing submitted to deconstruction
by it. I shall continue to do so below. As for the concept of
experience, it is most unwieldy here. Like all the notions I
am using here, it belongs to the history of metaphysics and we
can only use it under erasure [sous rature]. “Experience”
has always designated the relationship with a presence, whether
that relationship bad the form of consciousness or not. At any
rate, we must, according to this sort of contortion and contention
which the discourse is obliged to undergo, exhaust the resources
of the concept of experience before attaining and in order to
attain, by deconstruction, its ultimate foundation. It is the
only way to escape “empiricism” and the “naive”
critiques of experience at the same time. Thus, for example,
the experience whose “theory,” Hjelmslev says, ,'must
be independent” is not the whole of experience. It always
corresponds to a certain type of factual or regional experience
(historical, psychological, physiological, sociological, etc.),
giving rise to a science that is itself regional and, as such,
rigorously outside linguistics. That is not so at all in the
case of experience as arche-writing. The parenthesising of regions
of experience or of the totality of natural experience must discover
a field of transcendental experience. This experience is only
accessible in so far as, after having, like Hjelmslev, isolated
the specificity of the linguistic system and excluded all the
extrinsic sciences and metaphysical speculations, one asks the
question of the transcendental origin of the system itself, as
a system of the objects of a science, and, correlatively, of the
theoretical system which studies it: here of the objective and
“deductive” system which glossematics wishes to be.
Without that, the decisive progress accomplished by a formalism
respectful of the originality of its object, of “the immanent
system of its objects,” is plagued by a scientificist objectivism,
that is to say by another unperceived or unconfessed metaphysics.
This is often noticeable in the work of the Copenhagen School.
It is to escape falling back into this naive objectivism that
I refer here to a transcendentality that I elsewhere put into
question. It is because I believe that there is a short-of and
a beyond of transcendental criticism. To see to it that the beyond
does not return to the within is to recognise in the contortion
the necessity of a pathway [parcours]. That pathway must
leave a track in the text. Without that track, abandoned to the
simple content of its conclusions, the ultra-transcendental text
will so closely resemble the precritical text as to be indistinguishable
from it. We must now form and meditate upon the law of this resemblance.
What I call the erasure of concepts ought to mark the places
of that future meditation. For example, the value of the transcendental
arche [archie] must make its necessity felt before letting
itself be erased. The concept of arche-trace must comply with
both that necessity and that erasure. It is in fact contradictory
and not acceptable within the logic of identity. The trace is
not only the disappearance of origin — within the discourse that
we sustain and according to the path that we follow it means that
the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted
except reciprocally by a non-origin, the trace, which thus becomes
the origin of the origin. From then on, to wrench the concept
of the trace from the classical scheme, which would derive it
from a presence or from an originary non-trace and which would
make of it an empirical mark, one must indeed speak of an originary
trace or arche-trace. Yet we know that that concept destroys
its name and that, if all begins with the trace, there is above
all no originary trace. We must then situate, as a simple
moment of the discourse, the phenomenological reduction
and the Husserlian reference to a transcendental experience.
To the extent that the concept of experience in general — and of
transcendental experience, in Husserl in particular — remains governed
by the theme of presence, it participates in the movement of the
reduction of the trace. The Living Present (lebendige Gegenwart)
is the universal and absolute form of transcendental experience
to which Husserl refers us. In the descriptions of the movements
of temporalisation, all that does not torment the simplicity and
the domination of that form seems to indicate to us how much transcendental
phenomenology belongs to metaphysics. But that must come to terms
with the forces of rupture. In the originary temporalisation
and the movement of relationship with the outside, as Husserl
actually describes them, nonpresentation or depresentation is
as “originary” as presentation. That is why
a thought of the trace can no more break with a transcendental
phenomenology than be reduced to it. Here as elsewhere,
to pose the problem in terms of choice, to oblige or to believe
oneself obliged to answer it by a yes or no, to conceive
of appurtenance as an allegiance or non-appurtenance as plain
speaking, is to confuse very different levels, paths, and styles.
In the deconstruction of the arche, one does not make a choice.
Therefore I admit the necessity of going through the concept of
the arche-trace. How does that necessity direct us from the interior
of the linguistic system? How does the path that leads from Saussure
to Hjelmslev forbid us to avoid the originary trace?
In that its passage through form is a passage through the
imprint. And the meaning of difference in general would be more
accessible to us if the unity of that double passage appeared
more clearly.
In both cases, one must begin from the possibility of neutralising
the phonic substance.
On the one band, the phonic element, the term, the plenitude that
is called sensible, would not appear as such without the difference
or opposition which gives them form. Such is the most evident
significance of the appeal to difference as the reduction of phonic
substance. Here the appearing and functioning of difference presupposes
an originary synthesis not preceded by any absolute simplicity.
Such would be the originary trace. Without a retention in the
minimal unit of temporal experience, without a trace retaining
the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work
and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted
difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content,
of the pure movement which produces difference. The (pure)
trace is difference. It does not depend on any sensible plenitude,
audible or visible, phonic or graphic. It is, on the contrary,
the condition of such a plenitude. Although it does not exist,
although it is never a being-present outside of all plenitude,
its possibility is by rights anterior to all that one calls sign
(signified/signifier, content/expression, etc.), concept or operation,
motor or sensory. This difference is therefore not more sensible
than intelligible and it permits the articulation of signs among
themselves within the same abstract order — a phonic or graphic
text for example — or between two orders of expression. It permits
the articulation of speech and writing — in the colloquial sense — as
it founds the metaphysical opposition between the sensible and
the intelligible, then between signifier and signified, expression
and content, etc. If language were not already, in that sense,
a writing, no derived “notation” would be possible;
and the classical problem of relationships between speech and
writing could not arise. Of course, the positive sciences
of signification can only describe the work and the fact
of differance, the determined differences and the determined
presences that they make possible. There cannot be a science
of difference itself in its operation, as it is impossible to
have a science of the origin of presence itself, that is to say
of a certain non-origin.
Differance is therefore the formation of form. But it is on the
other hand the being-imprinted of the imprint. It is well-known
that Saussure distinguishes between the “sound-image”
and the objective sound. He thus gives himself the right to “reduce,”
in the phenomenological sense, the sciences of acoustics and physiology
at the moment that he institutes the science of language. The
sound-image is the structure of the appearing of the sound [l'apparaître
du son] which is anything but the sound appearing [le son
apparaissant]. It is the sound-image that be calls
signifier, reserving the name signified not for the thing, to
be sure (it is reduced by the act and the very ideality of language),
but for the “concept,” undoubtedly an unhappy notion
here; let us say for the ideality of the sense. “I propose
to retain the word sign [signe] to designate
the whole and to replace concept and sound-image respectively
by signified [signifé] and signifier [signifiant].” The sound-image is what is heard; not the sound heard
but the being-beard of the sound. Being-heard is structurally
phenomenal and belongs to an order radically dissimilar to that
of the real sound in the world. One can only divide this subtle
but absolutely decisive heterogeneity by a phenomenological reduction.
The latter is therefore indispensable to all analyses of being-heard,
whether they be inspired by linguistic, psychoanalytic, or other
preoccupations.
Now the “sound-image,” the structured appearing [l'apparaître]
of the sound, the “sensory matter” lived and informed
by difference, what Husserl would name the hylè/morphé
structure, distinct from all mundane reality, is called the “psychic
image” by Saussure: “The latter [the sound-image] is
not the material sound, a purely physical thing, but the psychic
imprint of the sound, the impression that it makes on our senses
[la représentation que nous en donne le témoignage
de nos sens]. The sound-image is sensors,, and if
I happen to call it 'material,' it is only in that sense, and
by way of opposing it, to the other term of the association, the
concept, which is generally more abstract”. Although the
word “psychic” is not perhaps convenient, except for
exercising in this matter a phenomenological caution, the originality
of a certain place is well marked.
Before specifying it, let us note that this is not necessarily
what Jakobson and other linguists could criticise as “the
mentalist point of view”:
In the oldest of these approaches, going back to Baudouin de Courtenay
and still surviving, the phoneme is a sound imagined or intended,
opposed to the emitted sound as a “psychophonetic” phenomenon
to the “physiophonetic” fact. It is the psychic equivalent
of an exteriorised sound.
Although the notion of the “psychic image” thus defined
(that is to say according to a pre-phenomenological psychology
of the imagination) is indeed of this mentalist inspiration, it
could be defended against Jakobson's criticism by specifying:
(i) that it could be conserved without necessarily affirming that
“our internal speech is confined to the distinctive features
to the exclusion of the configurative, or redundant features;”
(2) that the qualification psychic is not retained if it designates
exclusively another natural reality, internal and not external.
Here the Husserlian correction is indispensable and transforms
even the premises of the debate. Real (reell and not real)
component of lived experience, the hylè/morphé
structure is not a reality (Realität). As to the
intentional object, for example, the content of the image, it
does not really (reall) belong either to the world or to
lived experience: the non-real component of lived experience.
The psychic image of which Saussure speaks must not be an internal
reality copying an external one. Husserl, who criticises this
concept of “portrait” in Idee shows also in
the Krisis how phenomenology should overcome the naturalist
opposition whereby psychology and the other sciences of man survive — between
internal” and “external” experience. It is therefore
indispensable to preserve the distinction between the appearing
sound [le son apparaissant] and the appearing of the sound
[l'apparaître du son] in order to escape the
worst and the most prevalent of confusions; and it is in principle
possible to do it without “attempt[ing] to overcome the antinomy
between invariance and variability by assigning the former to
the internal and the latter to the external experience” (Jakobson).
The difference between invariance and variability does not separate
the two domains from each other, it divides each of them within
itself. That gives enough indication that the essence of the
phonè cannot be read directly and primarily in the
text of a mundane science, of a psycho-physiophonetics.
These precautions taken, it should be recognised that it is in
the specific zone of this imprint and this trace, in the temporalisation
of a lived experience which is neither in the world nor
in “another world,” which is not more sonorous than
luminous, not more in time than in space, that differences appear
among the elements or rather produce them, make them emerge as
such and constitute the texts, the chains, and the systems of
traces. These chains and systems cannot be outlined except in
the fabric of this trace or imprint. The unheard difference between
the appearing and the appearance [I'apparaissant et I'apparaître]
(between the “world” and “lived experience”)
is the condition of all other differences, of all other traces,
and it is already a trace. This last concept is thus absolutely
and by rights “anterior” to all physiological problematics
concerning the nature of the engramme [the unit of engraving],
or metaphysical problematics concerning the meaning of absolute
presence whose trace is thus opened to deciphering. The trace
is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general.
Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute
origin of sense in general. The trace is the difference
which opens appearance [I'apparaître] and
signification. Articulating the living upon the non-living in
general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace
is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible,
not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and
no concept of metaphysics can describe it. And
as it is a fortiori anterior to the distinction between
regions of sensibility, anterior to sound as much as to light,
is there a sense in establishing a “natural” hierarchy
between the sound-imprint, for example, and the visual (graphic)
imprint? The graphic image is not seen; and the acoustic image
is not heard. The difference between the full unities of the
voice remains unheard. And, the difference in the body of the
inscription is also invisible.
The Hinge [La Brisure]
You have, I suppose, dreamt of finding a single word for designating
difference and articulation. I have perhaps located it by chance
in Robert['s Dictionary] if I play on the word, or rather indicate
its double meaning. This word is brisure [joint, break]
“ — broken, cracked part. Cf. breach, crack, fracture, fault,
split, fragment, [bréche, cassure, fracture, faille,
fente, fragment.] — Hinged articulation of two parts of wood-
or metal-work. The hinge, the brisure [folding-joint]
of a shutter. Cf. joint.” — Roger Laporte (letter)
Origin of the experience of space and time, this writing of difference,
this fabric of the trace, permits the difference between space
and time to be articulated, to appear as such, in the unity of
an experience (of a “same” lived out of a “same”
body proper [corps propre]). This articulation therefore permits
a graphic (“visual” or “tactile,” “spatial”)
chain to be adapted, on occasion in a linear fashion, to a spoken
(“phonic,” “temporal”) chain. It is from
the primary possibility of this articulation that one must begin.
Difference is articulation.
This is, indeed, what Saussure says, contradicting Chapter VI:
The question of the vocal apparatus obviously takes a secondary
place in the problem of language. One definition of articulated
language might confirm that conclusion. In Latin, articulus
means a member, part, or subdivision of a sequence; applied to
speech [langage], articulation designates either the subdivision
of a spoken chain into syllables or the subdivision of the chain
of meanings into significant units. . . . Using the second definition,
we can say that what is natural to mankind is not spoken language
but the faculty of constructing a language; i.e., a system
of distinct signs Corresponding to distinct ideas (italics added).
The idea of the “psychic imprint” therefore relates
essentially to the idea of articulation. Without the difference
between the sensory appearing [apparaissant] and
its lived appearing [apparaître] (“mental
imprint”), the temporalising synthesis, which permits differences
to appear in a chain of significations, could not operate. That
the “imprint” is irreducible means also that speech
is originarily passive, but in a sense of passivity that all intramundane
metaphors would only betray. This passivity is also the relationship
to a past, to an always-already-there that no reactivation of
the origin could fully master and awaken to presence. This impossibility
of reanimating absolutely the manifest evidence of an originary
presence refers us therefore to an absolute past. That is what
authorised us to call trace that which does not let itself
be summed up in the simplicity of a present. It could in fact
have been objected that, in the indecomposable synthesis of temporalisation,
protection is as indispensable as retention. And their two dimensions
are not added up but the one implies the other in a strange fashion.
To be sure, what is anticipated in protention does not sever
the present any less from its self-identity than does that which
is retained in the trace. But if anticipation were privileged,
the irreducibility of the always-already-there and the fundamental
passivity that is called time would risk effacement. On the other
hand, if the trace refers to an absolute past, it is because it
obliges us to think a past that can no longer be understood in
the form of a modified presence, as a present-past. Since past
has always signified present-past, the absolute past that is retained
in the trace no longer rigorously merits the name “past.”
Another name to erase, especially since the strange movement of
the trace proclaims as much as it recalls: difference defers-differs
[differs]. With the same precaution and under the same erasure,
it may be said that its passivity is also its relationship with
the “future.” The concepts of present, past, and
future, everything in the concepts of time and history
which implies evidence of them — the metaphysical concept of time
in general — cannot adequately describe the structure of the trace.
And deconstructing the simplicity of presence does not amount
only to accounting for the horizons of potential presence, indeed
of “dialectic of protention and retention that one would
install in the heart of the present instead of surrounding it
with it. It is not a matter of complicating the structure of
time while conserving its homogeneity and its fundamental successivity,
by demonstrating for example that the past present and the future
present constitute originarily, by dividing it, the form of the
living present. Such a complication, which is in effect the same
that Husserl described, abides, in spite of an audacious phenomenological
reduction, by the evidence and presence of a linear, objective,
and mundane model. Now B would be as such constituted
by the retention of Now A and the protention of Now
C; in spite of all the play that would follow from it, from the
fact that each one of the three Now-s reproduces that structure
in itself, this model of successivity would prohibit a Now
X from taking the place of Now A, for example, and would
prohibit that, by a delay that is inadmissible to consciousness,
an experience be determined, in its very present, by a present
which would not have preceded it immediately but would be considerably
“anterior” to it. It is the problem of the deferred
effect (Nachträglichkeit) of ,which Freud speaks.
The temporality to which he refers cannot be that which lends
itself to a phenomenology of consciousness or of presence and
one may indeed wonder by what right all that is in question here
should still be called time, now, anterior present, delay, etc.
In its greatest formality, this immense problem would be formulated
thus: is the temporality described by a transcendental phenomenology
as “dialectical” as possible, a ground which the structures,
let us say the unconscious structures, of temporality would simply
modify? Or is the phenomenological model itself constituted,
as a warp of language, logic, evidence, fundamental security,
upon a woof that is not its own? And which — such is the most difficult
problem — is no longer at all mundane? For it is not by chance
that the transcendental phenomenology of the internal time-consciousness,
so careful to place cosmic time within brackets, must, as consciousness
and even as internal consciousness, live a time that is an accomplice
of the time of the world. Between consciousness, perception (internal
or external), and the “world,” the rupture, even in
the subtle form of the reduction, is perhaps not possible.
It is in a certain “unheard” sense, then, that speech
is in the world, rooted in that passivity which metaphysics calls
sensibility in general. Since there is no non-metaphoric language
to oppose to metaphors here, one must, as Bergson wished, multiply
antagonistic metaphors. “Wish sensibilised,” is bow
Maine de Biran, with a slightly different intention, named the
vocalic word. That the logos is first imprinted and that that
imprint is the writing-resource of language, signifies, to be
sure, that the logos is not a creative activity, the continuous
full element of the divine word, etc. But it would not mean a
single step outside of metaphysics if nothing more than a new
motif of “return to finitude,” of “God's death,”
etc., were the result of this move. It is that conceptuality
and that problematics that must be deconstructed. They belong
to the onto-theology they fight against. Differance is also something
other than finitude.
According to Saussure, the passivity of speech is first its relationship
with language. The relationship between passivity and difference
cannot be distinguished from the relationship between the fundamental
unconsciousness of language (as rootedness within the language)
and the spacing (pause, blank, punctuation, interval in
general, etc.) which constitutes the origin of signification.
It is because “language is a form and not a substance”
that, paradoxically, the activity of speech can and must always
draw from it. But if it is a form, it is because “in language
there are only differences”. Spacing (notice that this word
speaks the articulation of space and time, the becoming-space
of time and the becoming-time of space) is always the unperceived,
the non-present, and the non-conscious. As such, if one
can still use that expression in a non-phenomenological way; for
here we pass the very limits of phenomenology. Arche-writing as
spacing cannot occur as such within the phenomenological
experience of a presence. It marks the dead time
within the presence of the living present, within the general
form of all presence. The dead time is at work. That is why,
once again, in spite of all the discursive resources that the
former may borrow from the latter, the concept of the trace will
never be merged with a phenomenology of writing. As the phenomenology
of the sign in general, a phenomenology of writing is impossible.
No intuition can be realised in the place where “the 'whites'
indeed take on an importance” (Preface to Coup de dés).
Perhaps it is now easier to understand why Freud savs of the dreamwork
that it is comparable rather to a writing than to a language,
and to a hieroglyphic rather than to a phonetic writing. And to
understand why Saussure savs of language that it “is not
a function of the speaker”. With or without the complicity
of their authors, all these propositions must be understood as
more than the simple reversals of a metaphysics of presence
or of conscious subjectivity. Constituting and dislocating it
at the same time, writing is other than the subject, in whatever
sense the latter is understood. Writing can never be thought
under the category of the subject; however it is modified, however
it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, it will refer,
by the entire thread of its history, to the substantiality of
a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the
selfsame [le propre] in the presence of self-relationship.
And the thread of that history clearly does not run within the
borders of metaphysics. To determine an X as a subject is never
an operation of a pure convention, it is never an indifferent
gesture in relation to writing.
Spacing as writing is the becoming-absent and the becoming-unconscious
of the subject. By the movement of its drift/derivation [dérive]
the emancipation of the sign constitutes in return the desire
of presence. That becoming-or that drift/derivation-does not
befall the subject which would choose it or would passively let
itself be drawn along by it. As the subject's relationship with
its own death, this becoming is the constitution of subjectivity.
On all levels of life's organisation, that is to say, of the
economy of death. All graphemes are of a testamentary
essence. And the original absence of the subject of writing is
also the absence of the thing or the referent.
Within the horizontality of spacing, which is in fact the precise
dimension I have been speaking of so far, and which is not opposed
to it as surface opposes depth, it is not even necessary to say
that spacing cuts, drops, and causes to drop within the unconscious:
the unconscious is nothing without this cadence and before this
caesura. This signification is formed only within the hollow
of difference: of discontinuity and of discreteness, of the diversion
and the reserve of what does not appear. This hinge [brisure]
of language as writing, this discontinuity, could have, at
a given moment within linguistics, run up against a rather precious
continuist prejudice. Renouncing it, phonology must indeed renounce
all distinctions between writing and the spoken word, and thus
renounce not itself, phonology, but rather phonologism. What
Jakobson recognises in this respect is most important for us:
The stream of oral speech, physically continuous, originally confronted
the mathematical theory of communication with a situation “considerably
more involved” [The Mathematical Theory of Communication,
Urbana, 1949] than in the case of a finite set of discrete constituents,
as presented by written speech. Linguistic analysis, however,
came to resolve oral speech into a finite series of elementary
informational units. These ultimate discrete units, the so-called
“distinctive features,” are aligned into simultaneous
bundles termed “phonemes,” which in turn are concatenated
into sequences. Thus form in language has a manifestly granular
structure and is subject to a quantal description. [Linguistique
et théorie de la communication]
The hinge [brisure] marks the impossibility that a sign,
the unity of a signifier and a signified, be produced within the
plenitude of a present and an absolute presence. That is why
there is no full speech, however much one might wish to restore
it by means or without benefit of psychoanalysis. Before thinking
to reduce it or to restore the meaning of the full speech which
claims to be truth, one must ask the question of meaning and of
its origin in difference. Such is the place of a problematic
of the trace.
Why of the trace? What led us to the choice of this word?
I have begun to answer this question. But this question is such,
and such the nature of my answer, that the place of the one and
of the other must constantly be in movement. If words and concepts
receive meaning only in sequences of differences, one can Justify
one's language, and one's choice of terms, only within a topic
[an orientation in space] and an historical strategy. The justification
can therefore never be absolute and definitive. It corresponds
to a condition of forces and translates an historical calculation.
Thus, over and above those that I have already defined, a certain
number of givens belonging to the discourse of our time have progressively
imposed this choice upon me. The word trace must refer to itself
to a certain number of contemporary discourses whose force I intend
to take into account. Not that I accept them totally,. But the
word trace establishes the clearest connections with them and
thus permits me to dispense with certain developments which have
already demonstrated their effectiveness in those fields. Thus,
I relate this concept of trace to what is at the center
of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology:
relationship to the illeity as to the alterity of a past that
never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified
form of presence. Reconciled here to a Heideggerian intention, — as
it is not in Levinas's thought — this notion signifies, sometimes
beyond Heideggerian discourse, the undermining of an ontology
which, in its innermost course, has determined the meaning of
being as presence and the meaning of language as the full continuity
of speech. To make enigmatic what one thinks one understands
by the words “proximity,” “immediacy,” “Presence”
(the proximate [proche], the own [propre], and the
pre- of presence), is my final intention in this book. This deconstruction
of presence accomplishes itself through the deconstruction of
consciousness, and therefore through the irreducible notion of
the trace (Spur), as it appears in both Nietzschean and Freudian
discourse. And finally, in all scientific fields, notably in
biology, this notion seems currently to be dominant and irreducible.
If the trace, arche-phenomenon of “memory,” which must
be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality
and humanity, etc., belongs to the very movement of signification,
then signification is a priori written, whether inscribed or not,
in one form or another, in a “sensible” and “spatial”
element that is called “exterior.” Arche-writing, at
first the possibility of the spoken word, then of the “graphie”
in the narrow sense, the birthplace of “usurpation,”
denounced from Plato to Saussure, this trace is the opening of
the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of
the living to its other and of an inside to an outside: spacing.
The outside, “spatial” and “objective” exteriority
which we believe we know as the most familiar thing in the world,
as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé,
without difference as temporalisation, without the nonpresense
of the other inscribed within the sense of the present, without
the relationship with death as the concrete structure of the living
present. Metaphor would be forbidden. The presence-absence of
the trace, which one should not even call its ambiguity but rather
its play (for the word “ambiguity” requires the logic
of presence, even when it begins to disobey that logic), carries
in itself the problems of the letter and the spirit, of body and
soul, and of all the problems whose primary affinity I have recalled.
All dualisms, all theories of the immortality of the soul or
of the spirit, as well as all monisms, spiritualist or materialist,
dialectical or vulgar, are the unique theme of a metaphysics whose
entire history was compelled to strive toward the reduction of
the trace. The subordination of the trace to the full presence
summed up in the logos, the humbling of writing beneath a speech
dreaming its plenitude, such are the gestures required by an onto-theology
determining the archaeological and eschatological meaning of being
as presence, as parousia, as life without difference: another
name for death, historical metonymy where God's name holds death
in check. That is why, if this movement begins its era in the
form of Platonism, it ends in infinitist metaphysics. Only infinite
being can reduce the difference in presence. In that sense, the
name of God, at least as it is pronounced within classical rationalism,
is the name of indifference itself. Only a positive infinity
can lift the trace, “sublimate” it (it has recently
been proposed that the Hegelian Aufhebung be translated
as sublimation; this translation may be of dubious worth as translation,
but the juxtaposition is of interest here). We must not therefore
speak of a “theological prejudice,” functioning sporadically
when it is a question of the plenitude of the logos; the logos
as the sublimation of the trace is theological. Infinitist
theologies are always logocentrisms, whether they are creationisms
or not. Spinoza himself said of the understanding — or logos — that
it was the immediate infinite mode of the divine substance, even
calling it its eternal son in the Short Treatise. [Spinoza]
It is also to this epoch, “reaching completion”
with Hegel, with a theology of the absolute concept as logos,
that all the non-critical concepts accredited by linguistics belong,
at least to the extent that linguistics must confirm — and how can
a science avoid it? — the Saussurian decree marking out
“the internal system of language.”
It is precisely these concepts that permitted the exclusion of
writing: image or representation, sensible and intelligible, nature
and culture, nature and technics, etc. They are solidary with
all metaphysical conceptuality and particularly with a naturalist,
objectivist, and derivative determination of the difference between
outside and inside.
And above all with a “vulgar concept of time.” I borrow
this expression from Heidegger. It designates, at the end of
Being and Time, a concept of time thought in terms of spatial
movement or of the now, and dominating all philosophy from Aristotle's
Physics to Hegel's Logic. This concept, which determines
all of classical ontology, was not born out of a philosopher's
carelessness or from a theoretical lapse. It is intrinsic to
the totality of the history of the Occident, of what unites its
metaphysics and its technics. And we shall see it later associated
with the linearisation of writing, and with the linearist concept
of speech. This linearism is undoubtedly inseparable from phonologism;
it can raise its voice to the same extent that a linear writing
can seem to submit to it. Saussure's entire theory of the “linearity
of the signifier” could be interpreted from this point of
view.
Auditory signifiers have at their command only the dimension of
time. Their elements are presented in succession; they form a
chain. This feature becomes readily apparent when they are represented
in writing.... The signifier, being auditory, is unfolded solely
in time from which it gets the following characteristics: (a)
it represents a span, and (b) the span is measurable in a single
dimension; it is a line.
It is a point on which Jakobson disagrees with Saussure decisively
by substituting for the homogeneousness of the line the structure
of the musical staff, “the chord in music.” What is
here in question is not Saussure's affirmation of the temporal
essence of discourse but the concept of time that guides this
affirmation and analysis: time conceived as linear successivity,
as “consecutivity.” This model works by itself and all
through the Course, but Saussure is seemingly less sure
of it in the Anagrams. At any rate, its value seems problematic
to him and an interesting paragraph elaborates a question left
suspended:
That the elements forming a word follow one another is
a truth that it would be better for linguistics not to consider
uninteresting because evident, but rather as the truth which gives
in advance the central principle of all useful reflections on
words. In a domain as infinitely special as the one I am about
to enter, it is always by virtue of the fundamental law of the
human word in general that a question like that of consecutiveness
or non-consecutiveness may be posed. [Mercure de France,
1964]
This linearist concept of time is therefore one of the deepest
adherences of the modern concept of the sign to its own history.
For at the limit it is indeed the concept of the sign itself,
and the distinction, however tenuous, between the signifying and
signified faces, that remain committed to the history of classical
ontology. The parallelism and correspondence of the faces or
the planes change nothing. That this distinction, first appearing
in Stoic logic, was necessary for the coherence of a scholastic
thematics dominated by infinitist theology, forbids us to treat
today's debt to it as a contingency or a convenience. I suggested
this at the outset, and perhaps the reasons are clearer now.
The signatum always referred, as to its referent, to a res,
to an entity created or at any rate first thought and spoken,
thinkable and speakable, in the eternal present of the divine
logos and specifically in its breath. If it came to relate to
the speech of a finite being (created or not; in any case of an
intracosmic entity) through the intermediary of a signans,
the signatum had an immediate relationship with the divine
logos which thought it within presence and for which it was not
a trace. And for modern linguistics, if the signifier is a trace,
the signified is a meaning thinkable in principle within the full
presence of an intuitive consciousness. The signfied face, to
the extent that it is still originarily distinguished from the
signifying face, is not considered a trace; by rights, it has
no need of the signifier to be what it is. It is at the depth
of this affirmation that the problem of relationships between
linguistics and semantics must be posed. This reference to the
meaning of a signified thinkable and possible outside of all signifiers
remains dependent upon the ontotheo-teleology that I have just
evoked. It is thus the idea of the sign that must be deconstructed
through a meditation upon writing which would merge, as it must,
with the undoing [sollicitation] of onto-theology, faithfully
repeating it in its totality and making it insecure in
its most assured evidences. One is necessarily led to this from
the moment that the trace affects the totality of the sign in
both its faces. That the signified is originarily and essentially
(and not only for a finite and created spirit) trace, that it
is always already in the position of the signifier, is
the apparently innocent proposition within which the metaphysics
of the logos, of presence and consciousness, must reflect upon
writing as its death and its resource.
Further Reading:
Speech & Writing according to Hegel, Derrida 1971 |
Spectres of Marx, Derrida 1994 |
Biography |
Rousseau |
Saussure |
Jakobson |
Barthes |
Foucault |
Althusser |
Rorty |
Chomsky |
Vygotsky
Marxist Literary Criticism |
France Subject Archive
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org
|
./articles/Barthes-Roland/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.subject.philosophy.works.ru.jakobson | <body>
<p class="title">Roman Jakobson (1942)</p>
<img src="../../../../../glossary/people/j/pics/jakobson.jpg" align="RIGHT" vspace="2" hspace="2" border="4" alt="fiery-looking man gesticulating">
<h4>Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning</h4>
<h2>Lecture I</h2>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Lectures on Sound & Meaning</em>, publ. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1937, Preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Most of first and all of last lectures reproduced here.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">
I AM SURE you are familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem <em>The Raven, </em>and with its melancholy refrain, ‘Nevermore.’ This is the only word uttered by the ominous visitor, and the poet emphasises that ‘what it utters is its only stock and store.’ This vocable, which amounts to no more than a few sounds, is none the less rich in semantic content. It announces negation, negation for the future, negation for ever. This prophetic refrain is made up of seven sounds seven, because Poe insists on including the final <em>r</em> which is, he says, ‘the most producible consonant.’ It is able to project us into the future, or even into eternity. Yet while it is rich in what it discloses, it is even richer in what it secretes, in its wealth of virtual connotations, of those particular connotations which are indicated by the context of its utterance or by the overall narrative situation. Abstracted from its particular context it carries an indefinite range of implications. ‘I betook myself to linking/ fancy unto fancy,’ the poet tells us, ‘thinking what this ominous bird of yore -/ What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore/ Meant in croaking "Nevermore"./ This I sat engaged in guessing ... This and more I sat divining... .’ Given the context of the dialogue the refrain conveys a series of different meanings: you will never forget her, you will never regain peace of mind, you will never again embrace her, I will never leave you! Moreover this same word can function as a name, the symbolic name which the poet bestows upon his nocturnal visitor.</p>
<p>
Yet this expression’s value is not entirely accounted for in terms of its purely semantic value, narrowly defined, i.e., its general meaning plus its contingent, contextual meanings. Poe himself tells us that it was the potential onomatopoeic quality of the sounds of the word <em>nevermore </em>which suggested to him its association with the croaking of a raven, and which was even the inspiration for the whole poem. Also, although the poet has no wish to weaken the sameness, the monotony, of the refrain, and while he repeatedly introduces it in the same way (‘Quoth the raven, "Nevermore" ‘) it is nevertheless certain that variation of its phonic qualities, such as modulation of tone, stress and cadence, the detailed articulation of the sounds and of the groups of sounds, that such variations allow the emotive value of the word to be quantitatively and qualitatively varied in all kinds of ways.</p>
<p>
The utterance of Poe’s refrain involves only a very small number of articulatory motions – or, to look at this from the point of view of the acoustic rather than the motor aspect of speech, only a small number of vibratory motions are necessary for the word to be heard. In short, only minimal phonic means are required in order to express and communicate a wealth of conceptual, emotive and aesthetic content.. Here we are directly confronted with the mystery of the idea embodied in phonic matter, the mystery of the word, of the linguistic symbol, of the Logos, a mystery which requires elucidation.</p>
<p>
Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components. The sign has two sides: the sound, or the material side on the one hand, and meaning, or the intelligible side on the other. Every word, and more generally every verbal sign, is a combination of sound and meaning, or to put it another way, a combination of signifier and signified, a combination which has been represented diagrammatically as follows:</p> <img src="../../images/jakobso1.gif" hspace="8" vspace="8" align="RIGHT" alt="signified and signifier"> <p> But while the fact that there is such a combination is perfectly clear, its structure has remained very little understood. A sequence of sounds can function as the vehicle for the meaning, but how exactly do the sounds perform this function? What exactly is the relation between sound and meaning within a word, or within language generally? In the end this comes down to the problem of identifying the ultimate phonic elements, or the smallest units bearing signifying value, or to put this metaphorically, it is a matter of identifying the quanta of language. In spite of its fundamental importance for the science of language it is only recently that this set of problems has at last been submitted to thorough and systematic investigation.</p>
<p>
It would certainly be wrong to ignore the brilliant insights concerning the role of sounds in language which can be found scattered through the work of the thinkers of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages, for example those of Thomas Aquinas, who was among the most profound of philosophers of language: and it would equally be wrong to ignore the subtle observations of the ancient oriental, and above all Hindu, grammarians. But it is only in the last two centuries that our science has devoted itself really energetically to the detailed study of linguistic sounds.</p>
<p>
This interest in linguistic sounds derived at first from essentially practical objectives, such as singing technique or teaching the deaf and dumb to speak: or else phonation was studied by physicians as a complex problem in human physiology. But during the nineteenth century, as linguistics gained ground, it was this science which gradually took over research into the sounds of language, research which came to be called <em>phonetics. </em>In the second half of the nineteenth century linguistics became dominated by the most naive form of sensualist empiricism, focusing directly and exclusively on <em>sensations. </em>As one would expect the intelligible aspect of language, its signifying aspect, the world of meanings, was lost sight of, was obscured by its sensuous, perceptible aspect, by the substantial, material aspect of sound. Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. The neogrammarian school of thought, which was the most orthodox and characteristic current of thought in linguistics at the time, and which was dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, rigorously excluded from linguistics all problems of teleology. They searched for the origin of linguistic phenomena but obstinately refused to recognise that they are goal-directed. They studied language but never stopped to ask how it functions to satisfy cultural needs. One of the most distinguished of the neogrammarians, when asked about the content of the Lithuanian manuscript which he had been assiduously studying, could only reply with embarrassment, ‘As for the content, I didn’t notice it.’ At this time they investigated <em>forms </em>in isolation from their <em>functions. </em>And most important, and most typical of the school in question, was the way in which they regarded linguistic sounds; in conformity with the spirit of the time their view was a strictly empiricist and naturalistic one. The fact that linguistic sounds are signifiers was deliberately put aside, for these linguists were not at all concerned with the linguistic function of sounds, but only with sounds as such, with their ‘flesh and blood’ aspect, without regard for the role they play in language.</p>
<p>
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic. What is the immediate goal of the phonatory act? Is it the acoustic phenomenon or is it the motor phenomenon itself? Obviously it is the acoustic phenomenon which the ‘ speaker aims at producing, and it is only the acoustic phenomenon which is directly accessible to the listener. When I speak it is in order to be heard. Of the two aspects of sound it is, therefore, the acoustic aspect which has intersubjective, social significance, whereas the motor phenomenon, in other words the workings of the vocal apparatus, is merely a physiological prerequisite of the acoustic phenomenon. Yet phonetics in the neogrammarian period concerned itself in the first place with the <em>articulation </em>of sound and not with its acoustic aspect. In other words it was not strictly speaking the sound itself but its production which was the focus of attention, and it was this which formed the basis for the description and classification of sounds. This perspective may seem odd or even perverse to us, but it is not surprising in the context of neogrammarian doctrine. According to this doctrine, and to all others which were influential in that period, the genetic perspective was the only one considered acceptable. They chose to investigate not the object itself but the conditions of its coming into being. Instead of describing the phenomenon one was to go back to its origins. Thus the study of linguistic sounds was replaced by historical phonetics, i.e., by a search for their prototypes in earlier forms of each given language, while so-called static phonetics was more or less entirely given over to the observation of the vocal apparatus and its functioning. This discipline was incorporated into linguistics in spite of the obviously heterogeneous character of the two domains. Linguists tried to pick up a bit of physiology with results that are well illustrated by the following typical example: Edward W. Scripture, a famous phonetician who also had training as a physician, ironically quotes the current description of a particular laryngal articulation which would, had this description been accurate, have inevitably resulted in the fatal strangulation of the speaker! But even disregarding mistakes like this we can ask what results would the study of linguistic sounds in their motor aspect arrive at.</p>
<p>
At first, even though linguists attempted to discuss sounds in a strictly naturalistic manner and to scrupulously leave aside the problem of the functions they perform in language, they did in fact unconsciously employ properly linguistic criteria in their classifications of sounds, and especially in their demarcation of sounds in the speech chain. This illicit importation was facilitated by the fact that linguists, and psychologists too, were as yet quite unfamiliar with the role of the unconscious, and in particular with its great importance in all linguistic operations. But as the observation of phonatory acts was improved and as the employment of special instruments came to replace reliance on purely subjective experience, the linguistic correlate of the physiological phenomena was increasingly lost sight of.</p>
<p>
It was towards the end of the century that instrumental phonetics (or as it was usually but less accurately called ‘experimental phonetics’) began to make rapid progress. With the help of increasingly numerous and improved instruments a remarkable precision was achieved in the study of all the factors involved in buccal articulation and in the measurement of expiration. A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography. X-rays, used in conjunction with sound film, revealed the functioning of the vocal apparatus in all its details; the whole of <em>sound </em>production, the entire phonatory act, was uncovered and could be actually seen as it happened. When this method became practically and technically available to phoneticians a large number of the previous phonetic instruments became redundant.</p>
<p>
It was radiography above all which brought to light the crucial role of the posterior parts of the vocal apparatus, parts which are most hidden and which were until then most inaccessible to the available methods of experimental phonetics. Before the arrival of radiography there was, for example, very little accurate knowledge of the functioning in the process of the phonatory act of the hyoid bone, of the epiglottis, of the pharynx, or even of the soft palate. The importance of these parts, and especially of the pharynx, was suspected, but nothing about them was known in detail. Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx. Each of these upper two passages is opened or closed by the velum whereas the lower passage, to the larynx, is opened or closed by the epiglottis. It was only a few dozen years ago that one could read on the subject of the pharynx, in the text-book of Ludwig Sütterlin, a well-known linguist and phonetician: ‘The pharynx seems to be very important in sound production, in that it can be narrowed and widened, but at the present time nothing more definite is known with certainty on the subject’ <em>(Die Lehre von der Lautbildung</em>, Leipzig<em>,</em> 1908).</p>
<p>
As a result especially of recent work by Czech and Finnish phoneticians using radiography we do now have a more adequate understanding of the functioning of the pharynx in phonation, and we can now affirm that the phonetic role of this organ is no less important than, for example, that of the lips, which are in some ways analogous to it. It can be seen from these more recent observations that so long as the physiological investigation of sounds had no grasp of the functioning of the pharynx and of contiguous parts, it was only possible to arrive at a fragmentary and unsatisfactory description. A physiological classification of sounds which scrupulously takes into account the varying degrees of opening of the mouth but which fails to consider the varying degrees of opening of the pharynx can lead us into error. If phoneticians concentrated on the functioning of the lips and not on that of the pharynx this was not because the former had been shown to be the more important. If the physiology of sound production were to refuse to draw on other disciplines it would have no way of establishing the relative importance of the various organs involved. If phoneticians, in classifying linguistic sounds, took the labial factor but not the pharyngal factor into account, this was solely because the former was more accessible to observation than the latter. As it broadened the field of inquiry and as it became an increasingly precise discipline, the autonomous investigation of phonation decomposed the sounds which it analysed into a disconcerting multitude of detail without, however, being able to answer the fundamental question, namely that of the value which is assigned by language to each of these innumerable details. In its analysis of the various sounds of a language, or of several languages, motor phonetics uncovers for us a stunning multitude of variations, but it has no criterion for distinguishing the functions and the degrees of relative significance of all these observed variations, and thus has no way of discovering the invariants among all this variety.</p>
<p>
Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding. To the extent that phonetics is concerned exclusively with the act of phonation, that is with the production of sounds by the various organs, it is not in a position to accomplish this, as Ferdinand de Saussure had already made clear. In his <em>Cours de linguistique general, </em>given between 1906 and 1911 and edited after his death (1913) by his pupils Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, and published in 1916, the great linguist said with foresight: ‘Even if we could record on film all the movements of the mouth and larynx in producing a chain of sounds it would still be impossible to discover the subdivisions in this sequence of articulatory movements; we would not know where one sound began and where another ended. Without acoustic perception how could we assert, for example, that in <em>fal</em> there are three units and not two or four?’ Saussure imagined that <em>hearing </em>the speech chain would enable us to directly perceive whether a sound had changed or had remained the same. But subsequent investigations have shown that it is not the acoustic phenomenon in itself which enables us to subdivide the speech chain into distinct elements; only the linguistic value of the phenomenon can do this. Saussure’s great merit was to have understood clearly that in the study of the phonatory act, when we raise the question of phonetic <em>units </em>and that of demarcating the sounds in the speech chain, something extrinsic is unconsciously brought into play. Twenty years after his death the film that Saussure would have liked to have seen was in fact made. The German phonetician Paul Menzerath made an X-ray sound film of the workings of the vocal apparatus, and this film completely confirmed Saussure’s predictions. Drawing on this film and on the latest results of experimental phonetics Menzerath and his Portuguese associate Armando Lacerda demonstrated that the act of speech is a continuous, uninterrupted movement (<em>Koartikulation, Steuerung und Lautabgrenzung</em>, 1933). Whereas traditional doctrine had distinguished between <em>positional </em>sounds, which are held steady, and <em>transitional </em>sounds which lack this stability and which occur in the transition from one position to another, these two phoneticians showed that all sounds are in fact transitional. As for the speech chain, they arrived at an even more paradoxical conclusion. From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no <em>succession</em> of sounds. Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it. However interesting and important the study of linguistic sounds in their purely motor aspect may be everything indicates to us that such a study is no more than an auxiliary tool for linguistics, and that we must look elsewhere for the principles by which the phonic matter of language is organised.</p>
<p>
Even though they focused on the motor aspect of language, phoneticians were nevertheless unable to ignore the quite obvious, indeed tautological, fact that sound as such is an acoustic phenomenon. But they believed that the investigation of the <em>production of</em> sound, rather than of the sound itself, gave one the motor equivalent of the acoustic phenomenon, an equivalent which is more accessible, more instructive and open to more profitable methods of analysis. This view was put forward, for example, by Pierre Rousselot. They assumed that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two aspects and that the classification of motor phenomena has an exact equivalent in the classification of acoustic phenomena. Thus one need only construct the former, since the latter follows automatically from it. Now this argument, which has been put forward time and again right up to the present day, and which has many implications for the science of linguistics, is utterly refuted, contradicted by the facts. Arguments against this position were put forward long ago, even before the very first hand-books on phonetics.</p>
<p>
We can mention, in the first place, a French book, dating from 1630, which was called <em>Aglossostomographie ou description d’une bouche sans langue quells parle et fait naturellement toutes ses autres fonctions</em> [Aglossostomography, or the description of a tongueless mouth which speaks and naturally performs all its other functions]. In 1718 Jussien published in <em>the Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences</em> a treatise called ‘Sur la fille sans langue’ [On the girl with no tongue]. Each of these works contained a detailed description of people who, though they had only rudimentary tongues, were capable of an impeccable pronunciation of all the sounds which in phonetics nowadays are called the ‘linguals,’ and which are defined as sounds the emission of which necessarily involves the tongue. These interesting facts have since then been confirmed many times. For example, at the beginning of this century the physician Hermann Gutzmann, who was one of the best known of researchers in the field of errors of pronunciation, was forced to admit that while in French the very same <em>word (langue) </em>is used to designate a part of the mouth (the tongue) and language itself, in fact as far as the latter is concerned the former is dispensable, for almost all the sounds which we emit can be produced if necessary in quite a different way without the acoustic phenomena being altered at all (<em>Des Kindes Sprache und Sprachfehler, </em>Leipzig, 1894). If one of the phonatory organs is missing then another one can function in its place, without the hearer being aware of this. Gutzmann, however, stated that there are exceptions to this. Thus the sibilants – the fricatives <em>z, s, </em>and the corresponding affricates – require the involvement of the teeth. Subsequent research, however, has shown conclusively that these apparent exceptions are not in fact so at all. Godfrey E. Arnold, director of the Vienna clinic for language disorders, has shown <em>(Archiv für gesamte Phonetik, </em>III, 1939) that even with the loss of the incisors the ability to pronounce the sibilants correctly remains intact as long as the subject’s hearing is normal. In cases where dental abnormality gives rise to errors of pronunciation one always finds that the subject’s hearing is impaired, and it is this that prevents the functional compensation for the anatomical abnormality.</p>
<p>
...</p>
<p>
Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of <em>sound, </em>mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve. However, even though it has infinitely greater organising power, acoustic phonetics, no more than motor phonetics, cannot provide an autonomous basis for the systematisation and the classification of the phonic phenomena of language. Basically it is faced with just the same obstacles as is motor phonetics. At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features. This did not mean that these particular features were the most essential ones. The limits were due above all to the fact that the analytical capacities of the new discipline were as yet rather restricted. But if we consult a thoroughly modern work in the field of acoustic phonetics, such as for example the fine monograph by Antti Sovijärvi on the Finnish vowels and nasals, <em>Die gehaltenen, geflüsterten und gesungenen Vokale und</em> <em>Nasale derfinnischen Sprache </em>(Helsinki, 1938), we find ourselves once again confronted with a stunning multitude of details concerning the features of each sound, the sound being decomposed into an innumerable variety of fractions. Motor and acoustic phonetics have proved equally incapable of offering any guidance in this chaos, of identifying the pertinent characteristics, the constitutive and inalienable features of each sound. Acoustics can provide us, in impressive detail, with the micrographic image of each sound, but it cannot interpret this image; it is not in a position to make use of its own results. It is as if they were the hieroglyphics of an unknown language. When, as is always the case, two sounds show both similarities and dissimilarities, acoustics, having no intrinsic criteria for distinguishing what is significant from what is not, has no way of knowing whether it is the similarity or the dissimilarity which is crucial in any given case. It cannot tell whether it is a case of two variants of one sound or of two different sounds.</p>
<p>
This crucial difficulty is faced not only by experimental acoustics but by any method of phonetic transcription of auditory phenomena, to the extent that the transcription is based solely on purely auditory perception. Such transcriptions, being obliged to note all nuances of pronunciation, even the most subtle, scarcely perceptible and fortuitous among them, are as Antoine Meillet pointed out, difficult to read and difficult to print. This is not a purely technical difficulty. It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification. The phonic substance of language becomes as dust. When faced with a similar problem in relation to motor phonetics we had to make reference to an extrinsic criterion and to ask about the immediate aim of articulations, or more precisely about their acoustic aim. Now we must ask what is the immediate aim of sounds, considered as acoustic phenomena? In raising this question we straight away go beyond the level of the signifier, beyond the domain of sound as such, and we enter the domain of the signified, the domain of meaning. We have said that we speak in order to be heard; we must add that we seek to be <em>heard </em>in order to be understood. </p>
<p>
The road goes from the phonatory act to <em>sound, </em>in a narrow sense, and from sound to meaning! At this point we leave the territory of phonetics, the discipline which studies sounds solely in their motor and acoustic aspects, and we enter a new territory, that of phonology, which studies the sounds of language in their linguistic aspect.</p>
<p>
One hundred years ago the Romantic Russian writer Vladimir Odoevskij told the story of a man who received from a malevolent magician the gift of being able to see everything and to hear everything: ‘Everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed into a whole in his mind,’ and for this unfortunate man the sounds of speech became trans- formed into a torrent of innumerable articulatory motions and of mechanical vibrations, aimless and without meaning. The victory of naive empiricism could not have been foretold and represented in a more forceful way. In the laboratories of the scientists of this tendency the phonic resources of language were split up into a multitude of microscopic facts which they proceeded to measure with great care while deliberately neglecting their goal and <em>raison d’être</em>. It was in conformity with this approach that metrists at that time taught that one can only study verse if one forgets both the language it is written in and the meaning which it conveys. The study of the sounds of language completely lost touch with the truly linguistic problem, that of their value as verbal signs. The disheartening picture of the chaotic multitude of facts inevitably suggested the antithetical principle, that of unity and organisation. ‘Phonology,’ said the master of French linguistics, Antoine Meillet, ‘frees us from a kind of nightmare which had weighed upon us.’ In the next lecture we shall try to state more exactly what phonology is and how it succeeds in reconnecting the problem of sound with that of meaning.</p> <h4>Lecture IV</h4>
<p class="fst">
TO START the last of our discussions on sounds and meaning I want to summarise rapidly the points raised in my earlier lectures. Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language. Motor, acoustic and auditory description of phonic matter must be subordinated to a structural analysis of it. In other words the auxiliary discipline of <em>phonetics </em>must be placed in the service of <em>phonology,</em> which is an integral part of linguistics. Phonology, which in its early days relied far too much on a mechanistic and creeping empiricism, inherited from an obsolete form of phonetics, now seeks more and more to overcome these vestiges. The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning. In analysing a word from the point of view of its phonic aspect we decompose it into a sequence of distinctive units, or phonemes. The phoneme, although it is an element at the service of meaning, is itself devoid of meaning. What distinguishes it from all other linguistic, and more generally, semiotic values, is that it has only a negative charge.</p>
<p>
The phoneme is dissociable into distinctive features. It is a bundle of these features; therefore, notwithstanding outmoded but still current conceptions, the phoneme is a complex entity: it is not the phoneme but each of its distinctive features which is an irreducible and purely appositive entity. Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession. The phoneme is the smallest linguistic entity which disposes of these two axes. The distinctive features are subdivided into a class of inherent features, which are bound to the axis of simultaneity, and a class of prosodic features which involve the other axis, that of succession.</p>
<p>
Ferdinand de Saussure attributes to the linguistic sign two essential characters which he states in the form of two fundamental principles. The analysis of the phoneme, and especially of the distinctive qualities which are its constituents, has led us to abandon one of these two principles, that which asserts ‘the linear character of the signifier.’ The inquiry into the system of phonemes allows us also to reevaluate the other principle, ‘the arbitrariness of the sign.’ According to Saussure it was the pioneer of general linguistics in America, William Dwight Whitney, who in his book <em>The Life and Growth of Language, </em>published in 1875, ‘pointed linguistics in the right direction’ by his emphasis on the arbitrary character of verbal signs.</p>
<p>
This principle has provoked disagreement, especially in recent years. Saussure taught <em>(Course, 100/68)</em> that in the word its ‘signified’ is not connected by any internal relation to the sequence of phonemes which serve as its ‘signifier’: ‘It could equally well be represented by any other: this is proved by differences between languages, and by the very existence of different languages: the signified ‘ox’ has as its signifier<em> b-ö-f</em> (<em>bœuf</em>) on one side of the border and <em>o-k-s (Ochs)</em> on the other.’ Now this theory is in blatant contradiction with the most valuable and the most fertile ideas of Saussurian linguistics. This theory would have us believe that different languages use a variety of signifiers to correspond to one common and unvarying signified, but it was Saussure himself who, in his <em>Course, </em>correctly defended the view that the meanings of words themselves vary from one language to another. The scope of the word <em>bœuf</em> and that of the word <em>Ochs </em>do not coincide; Saussure himself cites ‘the difference in value’ between the French <em>mouton </em>and the English <em>sheep (Course, </em>160/115). There is no meaning in and by itself ;- meaning always belongs to something which we use as a sign; for example, we interpret the meaning of a linguistic sign, the meaning of a word. In language there is neither signified without signifier nor signifier without signified.</p>
<p>
The most profound of modern French linguists, Émile Benveniste, in his article ‘<em>Nature du signe linguistique</em>’ which appeared in the first volume of <em>Acta Linguistica </em>(1939), says in opposition to Saussure that ‘the connection between the signifier and the signified is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is <em>necessary</em>.’ From the point of view of the French language the signified ‘<em>boeuf</em>’ is inevitably tantamount to the signifier, the phonic group <em>b-ö-f</em>. ‘The two have been imprinted on my mind together,’ Benveniste stresses; ‘they are mutually evocative in all circumstances. There is between them such an intimate symbiosis that the concept "boeuf" is like the soul of the acoustic image <em>b-ö-f</em>.’</p>
<p>
Saussure invokes the differences between languages, but actually the question of the arbitrary relation or the necessary connection between the signified and the signifier cannot be answered except by reference to a given state of a given language. Recall Saussure’s own shrewd advice: ‘It would be absurd to draw a panorama of the Alps from the points of view of several peaks of the Jura simultaneously; a panorama must be drawn from a single point.’ And, from the point of view of her native language, a peasant woman from Francophone Switzerland was right to be astonished: how can cheese be called <em>Käse</em> since<em> fromage </em>is its only natural name.</p>
<p>
Contrary to Saussure’s thesis, the connection between signifier and signified, or in other words between the sequence of phonemes and meaning, <strong>is </strong>a necessary one; but the only necessary relation between the two aspects is here an association based on contiguity, and thus on an external relation, whereas association based on resemblance (on an internal relation) is only occasional. It only appears on the periphery of the conceptual lexicon, in onomatopoeic and expressive words such as <em>cuckoo, zigzag, crack, </em>etc. But the question of the internal relation between the sounds and the meaning of a word is not thereby exhausted. Lack of time prevents us from being able to do more than touch on this subtle and complex question. We have said that distinctive features, while performing a significative function, are themselves devoid of meaning. Neither a distinctive feature taken in isolation, nor a bundle of concurrent distinctive features (i.e., a phoneme) taken in isolation, means anything. Neither nasality as such nor the nasal phoneme /n/ has any meaning of its own.</p>
<p>
But this void seeks to be filled. The intimacy of the connection between the sounds and the meaning of a word gives rise to a desire by speakers to add an internal relation to the external relation, resemblance to contiguity, to complement the signified by a rudimentary image. Owing to the neuropsychological laws of synaesthesia, phonic oppositions can themselves evoke relations with musical, chromatic, olfactory, tactile, etc. sensations. For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc. This ‘sound symbolism,’ as it was called by one of its original investigators, Edward Sapir, this inner value of the distinctive features, although latent, is brought to life as soon as it finds a correspondence in the meaning of a given word and in our emotional or aesthetic attitude towards this word and even more towards pairs of words with two opposite meanings.</p>
<p>
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified. The Czech words <em>den </em>‘day’ and <em>noc </em>‘night,’ which contain a vocalic opposition between acute and grave, are easily associated in poetry with the contrast between the brightness of midday and the nocturnal darkness. Mallarmé deplored the collision between the sounds and the meanings of the French words <em>jour </em>‘day’ and <em>nuit </em>‘night.’ But poetry successfully eliminates this discordance by surrounding the word <em>jour</em> with acute vowelled vocables and the word <em>nuit </em>with grave vowelled vocables; or alternatively it highlights semantic contrasts which are in harmony with that of the grave and acute vowels, such as that between the heaviness of the day and the mildness of the night.</p>
<p>
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. These latter are invested with a purely appositive character and each of these oppositions lends itself to the action of synaesthesia, as is demonstrated in the most striking way in the language of children.</p>
<p>
For Whitney everything in the formation of a linguistic sign is arbitrary and fortuitous, including the selection of its constitutive elements. Saussure remarked in this connection: ‘Whitney goes too far when he says that the vocal organs were selected by us quite by chance’ and that men would have been able equally well to choose gesture and to use visual images instead of acoustic images.’ The Genevan master correctly objects that the vocal organs ‘were certainly in some way imposed on us by nature,’ but at the same time Saussure believes that the American linguist was right on the essential point: ‘Language is a convention, and the nature of the sign which is agreed upon makes no difference.’ In discussing the relations between static linguistics and evolutionary linguistics’ Saussure, followed by his disciples, went so far as to say that in the science of language ‘there is no place for natural givens,’ and to assert ‘the always <em>fortuitous</em> character’ of any state of any language as well as of whatever change brought this state about. The repertory of distinctive elements of any given language can only be contingent, and any one of these elements could be replaced by another one which, though completely lacking any material similarity with the former, would be invested with, indeed would embody, the same distinctive value. Saussure identifies this state of things with the game of chess in which one can replace a destroyed or mislaid piece by one of completely different shape as long as one gives it the same role in the game. So the question is raised of whether the distinctive features, whether the assortment of phonemes in operation, is in reality purely arbitrary or whether this assortment, although obviously a social phenomenon, is not – just like the very fact of using the vocal apparatus – ‘in some way imposed on us by nature.’</p>
<p>
We have pointed out that the distinctive features of the phonemes are strictly appositive entities. It follows from this that a distinctive property never stands alone in the phonological system. Because of the nature, in particular the logical nature, of oppositions, each of these properties implies the coexistence in the same system of the opposite property; length could not exist without shortness, voicing without voicelessness, the acute character without the grave character, and vice versa. The duality of opposites is therefore not arbitrary, but necessary. The oppositions themselves also do not stand alone in the phonological system. The oppositions of the distinctive features are interdependent, i.e., the existence of one opposition implies, permits or precludes the coexistence of such and such other opposition in the same phonological system, in the same way that the presence of one particular distinctive feature implies the absence, or the necessary (or at least probable) presence of such and such other distinctive properties in the same phoneme. Here again arbitrariness has very restricted scope.</p>
<p>
Apart from the typological study of the greatest variety of the world’s language systems, it is the structural analysis of language in the process of development – the analysis of children’s language and its general laws – and of language in the process of disintegration – aphasic language – which enables us to throw light on the selection of phonemes, the distinctive features, and their mutual relations, and to get closer to the main principles of this selection and of this interdependence so as to be in a position to establish and explain the universal laws which underlie the phonological structure of the world’s languages. The systematic investigation of the way in which phonological resources are put to use in the construction of grammatical forms, which was initiated by Baudouin’s school and by the Prague circle under the name of ‘morphology,’ promises to construct an indispensable bridge between the study of sound and that of meaning, as long as one takes into account the range of linguistic levels and what is specifically fundamental to each of them.</p>
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Roman Jakobson (1942)
Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning
Lecture I
Source: Lectures on Sound & Meaning, publ. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1937, Preface by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Most of first and all of last lectures reproduced here.
I AM SURE you are familiar with Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem The Raven, and with its melancholy refrain, ‘Nevermore.’ This is the only word uttered by the ominous visitor, and the poet emphasises that ‘what it utters is its only stock and store.’ This vocable, which amounts to no more than a few sounds, is none the less rich in semantic content. It announces negation, negation for the future, negation for ever. This prophetic refrain is made up of seven sounds seven, because Poe insists on including the final r which is, he says, ‘the most producible consonant.’ It is able to project us into the future, or even into eternity. Yet while it is rich in what it discloses, it is even richer in what it secretes, in its wealth of virtual connotations, of those particular connotations which are indicated by the context of its utterance or by the overall narrative situation. Abstracted from its particular context it carries an indefinite range of implications. ‘I betook myself to linking/ fancy unto fancy,’ the poet tells us, ‘thinking what this ominous bird of yore -/ What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore/ Meant in croaking "Nevermore"./ This I sat engaged in guessing ... This and more I sat divining... .’ Given the context of the dialogue the refrain conveys a series of different meanings: you will never forget her, you will never regain peace of mind, you will never again embrace her, I will never leave you! Moreover this same word can function as a name, the symbolic name which the poet bestows upon his nocturnal visitor.
Yet this expression’s value is not entirely accounted for in terms of its purely semantic value, narrowly defined, i.e., its general meaning plus its contingent, contextual meanings. Poe himself tells us that it was the potential onomatopoeic quality of the sounds of the word nevermore which suggested to him its association with the croaking of a raven, and which was even the inspiration for the whole poem. Also, although the poet has no wish to weaken the sameness, the monotony, of the refrain, and while he repeatedly introduces it in the same way (‘Quoth the raven, "Nevermore" ‘) it is nevertheless certain that variation of its phonic qualities, such as modulation of tone, stress and cadence, the detailed articulation of the sounds and of the groups of sounds, that such variations allow the emotive value of the word to be quantitatively and qualitatively varied in all kinds of ways.
The utterance of Poe’s refrain involves only a very small number of articulatory motions – or, to look at this from the point of view of the acoustic rather than the motor aspect of speech, only a small number of vibratory motions are necessary for the word to be heard. In short, only minimal phonic means are required in order to express and communicate a wealth of conceptual, emotive and aesthetic content.. Here we are directly confronted with the mystery of the idea embodied in phonic matter, the mystery of the word, of the linguistic symbol, of the Logos, a mystery which requires elucidation.
Of course, we have known for a long time that a word, like any verbal sign, is a unity of two components. The sign has two sides: the sound, or the material side on the one hand, and meaning, or the intelligible side on the other. Every word, and more generally every verbal sign, is a combination of sound and meaning, or to put it another way, a combination of signifier and signified, a combination which has been represented diagrammatically as follows: But while the fact that there is such a combination is perfectly clear, its structure has remained very little understood. A sequence of sounds can function as the vehicle for the meaning, but how exactly do the sounds perform this function? What exactly is the relation between sound and meaning within a word, or within language generally? In the end this comes down to the problem of identifying the ultimate phonic elements, or the smallest units bearing signifying value, or to put this metaphorically, it is a matter of identifying the quanta of language. In spite of its fundamental importance for the science of language it is only recently that this set of problems has at last been submitted to thorough and systematic investigation.
It would certainly be wrong to ignore the brilliant insights concerning the role of sounds in language which can be found scattered through the work of the thinkers of Antiquity and of the Middle Ages, for example those of Thomas Aquinas, who was among the most profound of philosophers of language: and it would equally be wrong to ignore the subtle observations of the ancient oriental, and above all Hindu, grammarians. But it is only in the last two centuries that our science has devoted itself really energetically to the detailed study of linguistic sounds.
This interest in linguistic sounds derived at first from essentially practical objectives, such as singing technique or teaching the deaf and dumb to speak: or else phonation was studied by physicians as a complex problem in human physiology. But during the nineteenth century, as linguistics gained ground, it was this science which gradually took over research into the sounds of language, research which came to be called phonetics. In the second half of the nineteenth century linguistics became dominated by the most naive form of sensualist empiricism, focusing directly and exclusively on sensations. As one would expect the intelligible aspect of language, its signifying aspect, the world of meanings, was lost sight of, was obscured by its sensuous, perceptible aspect, by the substantial, material aspect of sound. Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language. The neogrammarian school of thought, which was the most orthodox and characteristic current of thought in linguistics at the time, and which was dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, rigorously excluded from linguistics all problems of teleology. They searched for the origin of linguistic phenomena but obstinately refused to recognise that they are goal-directed. They studied language but never stopped to ask how it functions to satisfy cultural needs. One of the most distinguished of the neogrammarians, when asked about the content of the Lithuanian manuscript which he had been assiduously studying, could only reply with embarrassment, ‘As for the content, I didn’t notice it.’ At this time they investigated forms in isolation from their functions. And most important, and most typical of the school in question, was the way in which they regarded linguistic sounds; in conformity with the spirit of the time their view was a strictly empiricist and naturalistic one. The fact that linguistic sounds are signifiers was deliberately put aside, for these linguists were not at all concerned with the linguistic function of sounds, but only with sounds as such, with their ‘flesh and blood’ aspect, without regard for the role they play in language.
Linguistic sounds, considered as external, physical phenomena have two aspects, the motor and the acoustic. What is the immediate goal of the phonatory act? Is it the acoustic phenomenon or is it the motor phenomenon itself? Obviously it is the acoustic phenomenon which the ‘ speaker aims at producing, and it is only the acoustic phenomenon which is directly accessible to the listener. When I speak it is in order to be heard. Of the two aspects of sound it is, therefore, the acoustic aspect which has intersubjective, social significance, whereas the motor phenomenon, in other words the workings of the vocal apparatus, is merely a physiological prerequisite of the acoustic phenomenon. Yet phonetics in the neogrammarian period concerned itself in the first place with the articulation of sound and not with its acoustic aspect. In other words it was not strictly speaking the sound itself but its production which was the focus of attention, and it was this which formed the basis for the description and classification of sounds. This perspective may seem odd or even perverse to us, but it is not surprising in the context of neogrammarian doctrine. According to this doctrine, and to all others which were influential in that period, the genetic perspective was the only one considered acceptable. They chose to investigate not the object itself but the conditions of its coming into being. Instead of describing the phenomenon one was to go back to its origins. Thus the study of linguistic sounds was replaced by historical phonetics, i.e., by a search for their prototypes in earlier forms of each given language, while so-called static phonetics was more or less entirely given over to the observation of the vocal apparatus and its functioning. This discipline was incorporated into linguistics in spite of the obviously heterogeneous character of the two domains. Linguists tried to pick up a bit of physiology with results that are well illustrated by the following typical example: Edward W. Scripture, a famous phonetician who also had training as a physician, ironically quotes the current description of a particular laryngal articulation which would, had this description been accurate, have inevitably resulted in the fatal strangulation of the speaker! But even disregarding mistakes like this we can ask what results would the study of linguistic sounds in their motor aspect arrive at.
At first, even though linguists attempted to discuss sounds in a strictly naturalistic manner and to scrupulously leave aside the problem of the functions they perform in language, they did in fact unconsciously employ properly linguistic criteria in their classifications of sounds, and especially in their demarcation of sounds in the speech chain. This illicit importation was facilitated by the fact that linguists, and psychologists too, were as yet quite unfamiliar with the role of the unconscious, and in particular with its great importance in all linguistic operations. But as the observation of phonatory acts was improved and as the employment of special instruments came to replace reliance on purely subjective experience, the linguistic correlate of the physiological phenomena was increasingly lost sight of.
It was towards the end of the century that instrumental phonetics (or as it was usually but less accurately called ‘experimental phonetics’) began to make rapid progress. With the help of increasingly numerous and improved instruments a remarkable precision was achieved in the study of all the factors involved in buccal articulation and in the measurement of expiration. A new era in the physiological investigation of linguistic sounds was opened up by X-ray photography. X-rays, used in conjunction with sound film, revealed the functioning of the vocal apparatus in all its details; the whole of sound production, the entire phonatory act, was uncovered and could be actually seen as it happened. When this method became practically and technically available to phoneticians a large number of the previous phonetic instruments became redundant.
It was radiography above all which brought to light the crucial role of the posterior parts of the vocal apparatus, parts which are most hidden and which were until then most inaccessible to the available methods of experimental phonetics. Before the arrival of radiography there was, for example, very little accurate knowledge of the functioning in the process of the phonatory act of the hyoid bone, of the epiglottis, of the pharynx, or even of the soft palate. The importance of these parts, and especially of the pharynx, was suspected, but nothing about them was known in detail. Remember that the pharynx is at a crossroads from which leads off, at the top, the passage to the mouth cavity and the passage to the nasal cavity, and below, the passage to the larynx. Each of these upper two passages is opened or closed by the velum whereas the lower passage, to the larynx, is opened or closed by the epiglottis. It was only a few dozen years ago that one could read on the subject of the pharynx, in the text-book of Ludwig Sütterlin, a well-known linguist and phonetician: ‘The pharynx seems to be very important in sound production, in that it can be narrowed and widened, but at the present time nothing more definite is known with certainty on the subject’ (Die Lehre von der Lautbildung, Leipzig, 1908).
As a result especially of recent work by Czech and Finnish phoneticians using radiography we do now have a more adequate understanding of the functioning of the pharynx in phonation, and we can now affirm that the phonetic role of this organ is no less important than, for example, that of the lips, which are in some ways analogous to it. It can be seen from these more recent observations that so long as the physiological investigation of sounds had no grasp of the functioning of the pharynx and of contiguous parts, it was only possible to arrive at a fragmentary and unsatisfactory description. A physiological classification of sounds which scrupulously takes into account the varying degrees of opening of the mouth but which fails to consider the varying degrees of opening of the pharynx can lead us into error. If phoneticians concentrated on the functioning of the lips and not on that of the pharynx this was not because the former had been shown to be the more important. If the physiology of sound production were to refuse to draw on other disciplines it would have no way of establishing the relative importance of the various organs involved. If phoneticians, in classifying linguistic sounds, took the labial factor but not the pharyngal factor into account, this was solely because the former was more accessible to observation than the latter. As it broadened the field of inquiry and as it became an increasingly precise discipline, the autonomous investigation of phonation decomposed the sounds which it analysed into a disconcerting multitude of detail without, however, being able to answer the fundamental question, namely that of the value which is assigned by language to each of these innumerable details. In its analysis of the various sounds of a language, or of several languages, motor phonetics uncovers for us a stunning multitude of variations, but it has no criterion for distinguishing the functions and the degrees of relative significance of all these observed variations, and thus has no way of discovering the invariants among all this variety.
Now the identification of individual sounds by phonetic observation is an artificial way of proceeding. To the extent that phonetics is concerned exclusively with the act of phonation, that is with the production of sounds by the various organs, it is not in a position to accomplish this, as Ferdinand de Saussure had already made clear. In his Cours de linguistique general, given between 1906 and 1911 and edited after his death (1913) by his pupils Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, and published in 1916, the great linguist said with foresight: ‘Even if we could record on film all the movements of the mouth and larynx in producing a chain of sounds it would still be impossible to discover the subdivisions in this sequence of articulatory movements; we would not know where one sound began and where another ended. Without acoustic perception how could we assert, for example, that in fal there are three units and not two or four?’ Saussure imagined that hearing the speech chain would enable us to directly perceive whether a sound had changed or had remained the same. But subsequent investigations have shown that it is not the acoustic phenomenon in itself which enables us to subdivide the speech chain into distinct elements; only the linguistic value of the phenomenon can do this. Saussure’s great merit was to have understood clearly that in the study of the phonatory act, when we raise the question of phonetic units and that of demarcating the sounds in the speech chain, something extrinsic is unconsciously brought into play. Twenty years after his death the film that Saussure would have liked to have seen was in fact made. The German phonetician Paul Menzerath made an X-ray sound film of the workings of the vocal apparatus, and this film completely confirmed Saussure’s predictions. Drawing on this film and on the latest results of experimental phonetics Menzerath and his Portuguese associate Armando Lacerda demonstrated that the act of speech is a continuous, uninterrupted movement (Koartikulation, Steuerung und Lautabgrenzung, 1933). Whereas traditional doctrine had distinguished between positional sounds, which are held steady, and transitional sounds which lack this stability and which occur in the transition from one position to another, these two phoneticians showed that all sounds are in fact transitional. As for the speech chain, they arrived at an even more paradoxical conclusion. From a strictly articulatory point of view there is no succession of sounds. Instead of following one another the sounds overlap; a sound which is acoustically perceived as coming after another one can be articulated simultaneously with the latter or even in part before it. However interesting and important the study of linguistic sounds in their purely motor aspect may be everything indicates to us that such a study is no more than an auxiliary tool for linguistics, and that we must look elsewhere for the principles by which the phonic matter of language is organised.
Even though they focused on the motor aspect of language, phoneticians were nevertheless unable to ignore the quite obvious, indeed tautological, fact that sound as such is an acoustic phenomenon. But they believed that the investigation of the production of sound, rather than of the sound itself, gave one the motor equivalent of the acoustic phenomenon, an equivalent which is more accessible, more instructive and open to more profitable methods of analysis. This view was put forward, for example, by Pierre Rousselot. They assumed that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the two aspects and that the classification of motor phenomena has an exact equivalent in the classification of acoustic phenomena. Thus one need only construct the former, since the latter follows automatically from it. Now this argument, which has been put forward time and again right up to the present day, and which has many implications for the science of linguistics, is utterly refuted, contradicted by the facts. Arguments against this position were put forward long ago, even before the very first hand-books on phonetics.
We can mention, in the first place, a French book, dating from 1630, which was called Aglossostomographie ou description d’une bouche sans langue quells parle et fait naturellement toutes ses autres fonctions [Aglossostomography, or the description of a tongueless mouth which speaks and naturally performs all its other functions]. In 1718 Jussien published in the Mémoires de l’Académie royale des sciences a treatise called ‘Sur la fille sans langue’ [On the girl with no tongue]. Each of these works contained a detailed description of people who, though they had only rudimentary tongues, were capable of an impeccable pronunciation of all the sounds which in phonetics nowadays are called the ‘linguals,’ and which are defined as sounds the emission of which necessarily involves the tongue. These interesting facts have since then been confirmed many times. For example, at the beginning of this century the physician Hermann Gutzmann, who was one of the best known of researchers in the field of errors of pronunciation, was forced to admit that while in French the very same word (langue) is used to designate a part of the mouth (the tongue) and language itself, in fact as far as the latter is concerned the former is dispensable, for almost all the sounds which we emit can be produced if necessary in quite a different way without the acoustic phenomena being altered at all (Des Kindes Sprache und Sprachfehler, Leipzig, 1894). If one of the phonatory organs is missing then another one can function in its place, without the hearer being aware of this. Gutzmann, however, stated that there are exceptions to this. Thus the sibilants – the fricatives z, s, and the corresponding affricates – require the involvement of the teeth. Subsequent research, however, has shown conclusively that these apparent exceptions are not in fact so at all. Godfrey E. Arnold, director of the Vienna clinic for language disorders, has shown (Archiv für gesamte Phonetik, III, 1939) that even with the loss of the incisors the ability to pronounce the sibilants correctly remains intact as long as the subject’s hearing is normal. In cases where dental abnormality gives rise to errors of pronunciation one always finds that the subject’s hearing is impaired, and it is this that prevents the functional compensation for the anatomical abnormality.
...
Acoustic phonetics, which is developing and increasing in richness very rapidly, already enables us to solve many of the mysteries of sound, mysteries which motor phonetics could not even begin to solve. However, even though it has infinitely greater organising power, acoustic phonetics, no more than motor phonetics, cannot provide an autonomous basis for the systematisation and the classification of the phonic phenomena of language. Basically it is faced with just the same obstacles as is motor phonetics. At first acoustics attributed to the different sounds only a limited number of characteristic features. This did not mean that these particular features were the most essential ones. The limits were due above all to the fact that the analytical capacities of the new discipline were as yet rather restricted. But if we consult a thoroughly modern work in the field of acoustic phonetics, such as for example the fine monograph by Antti Sovijärvi on the Finnish vowels and nasals, Die gehaltenen, geflüsterten und gesungenen Vokale und Nasale derfinnischen Sprache (Helsinki, 1938), we find ourselves once again confronted with a stunning multitude of details concerning the features of each sound, the sound being decomposed into an innumerable variety of fractions. Motor and acoustic phonetics have proved equally incapable of offering any guidance in this chaos, of identifying the pertinent characteristics, the constitutive and inalienable features of each sound. Acoustics can provide us, in impressive detail, with the micrographic image of each sound, but it cannot interpret this image; it is not in a position to make use of its own results. It is as if they were the hieroglyphics of an unknown language. When, as is always the case, two sounds show both similarities and dissimilarities, acoustics, having no intrinsic criteria for distinguishing what is significant from what is not, has no way of knowing whether it is the similarity or the dissimilarity which is crucial in any given case. It cannot tell whether it is a case of two variants of one sound or of two different sounds.
This crucial difficulty is faced not only by experimental acoustics but by any method of phonetic transcription of auditory phenomena, to the extent that the transcription is based solely on purely auditory perception. Such transcriptions, being obliged to note all nuances of pronunciation, even the most subtle, scarcely perceptible and fortuitous among them, are as Antoine Meillet pointed out, difficult to read and difficult to print. This is not a purely technical difficulty. It is once again the vexing problem of identity within variety; without a solution to this disturbing problem there can be no system, no classification. The phonic substance of language becomes as dust. When faced with a similar problem in relation to motor phonetics we had to make reference to an extrinsic criterion and to ask about the immediate aim of articulations, or more precisely about their acoustic aim. Now we must ask what is the immediate aim of sounds, considered as acoustic phenomena? In raising this question we straight away go beyond the level of the signifier, beyond the domain of sound as such, and we enter the domain of the signified, the domain of meaning. We have said that we speak in order to be heard; we must add that we seek to be heard in order to be understood.
The road goes from the phonatory act to sound, in a narrow sense, and from sound to meaning! At this point we leave the territory of phonetics, the discipline which studies sounds solely in their motor and acoustic aspects, and we enter a new territory, that of phonology, which studies the sounds of language in their linguistic aspect.
One hundred years ago the Romantic Russian writer Vladimir Odoevskij told the story of a man who received from a malevolent magician the gift of being able to see everything and to hear everything: ‘Everything in nature became fragmented before him, and nothing formed into a whole in his mind,’ and for this unfortunate man the sounds of speech became trans- formed into a torrent of innumerable articulatory motions and of mechanical vibrations, aimless and without meaning. The victory of naive empiricism could not have been foretold and represented in a more forceful way. In the laboratories of the scientists of this tendency the phonic resources of language were split up into a multitude of microscopic facts which they proceeded to measure with great care while deliberately neglecting their goal and raison d’être. It was in conformity with this approach that metrists at that time taught that one can only study verse if one forgets both the language it is written in and the meaning which it conveys. The study of the sounds of language completely lost touch with the truly linguistic problem, that of their value as verbal signs. The disheartening picture of the chaotic multitude of facts inevitably suggested the antithetical principle, that of unity and organisation. ‘Phonology,’ said the master of French linguistics, Antoine Meillet, ‘frees us from a kind of nightmare which had weighed upon us.’ In the next lecture we shall try to state more exactly what phonology is and how it succeeds in reconnecting the problem of sound with that of meaning. Lecture IV
TO START the last of our discussions on sounds and meaning I want to summarise rapidly the points raised in my earlier lectures. Speech sounds cannot be understood, delimited, classified and explained except in the light of the tasks which they perform in language. Motor, acoustic and auditory description of phonic matter must be subordinated to a structural analysis of it. In other words the auxiliary discipline of phonetics must be placed in the service of phonology, which is an integral part of linguistics. Phonology, which in its early days relied far too much on a mechanistic and creeping empiricism, inherited from an obsolete form of phonetics, now seeks more and more to overcome these vestiges. The task is to investigate speech sounds in relation to the meanings with which they are invested, i.e., sounds viewed as signifiers, and above all to throw light on the structure of the relation between sounds and meaning. In analysing a word from the point of view of its phonic aspect we decompose it into a sequence of distinctive units, or phonemes. The phoneme, although it is an element at the service of meaning, is itself devoid of meaning. What distinguishes it from all other linguistic, and more generally, semiotic values, is that it has only a negative charge.
The phoneme is dissociable into distinctive features. It is a bundle of these features; therefore, notwithstanding outmoded but still current conceptions, the phoneme is a complex entity: it is not the phoneme but each of its distinctive features which is an irreducible and purely appositive entity. Every linguistic sign is located on two axes: the axis of simultaneity and that of succession. The phoneme is the smallest linguistic entity which disposes of these two axes. The distinctive features are subdivided into a class of inherent features, which are bound to the axis of simultaneity, and a class of prosodic features which involve the other axis, that of succession.
Ferdinand de Saussure attributes to the linguistic sign two essential characters which he states in the form of two fundamental principles. The analysis of the phoneme, and especially of the distinctive qualities which are its constituents, has led us to abandon one of these two principles, that which asserts ‘the linear character of the signifier.’ The inquiry into the system of phonemes allows us also to reevaluate the other principle, ‘the arbitrariness of the sign.’ According to Saussure it was the pioneer of general linguistics in America, William Dwight Whitney, who in his book The Life and Growth of Language, published in 1875, ‘pointed linguistics in the right direction’ by his emphasis on the arbitrary character of verbal signs.
This principle has provoked disagreement, especially in recent years. Saussure taught (Course, 100/68) that in the word its ‘signified’ is not connected by any internal relation to the sequence of phonemes which serve as its ‘signifier’: ‘It could equally well be represented by any other: this is proved by differences between languages, and by the very existence of different languages: the signified ‘ox’ has as its signifier b-ö-f (bœuf) on one side of the border and o-k-s (Ochs) on the other.’ Now this theory is in blatant contradiction with the most valuable and the most fertile ideas of Saussurian linguistics. This theory would have us believe that different languages use a variety of signifiers to correspond to one common and unvarying signified, but it was Saussure himself who, in his Course, correctly defended the view that the meanings of words themselves vary from one language to another. The scope of the word bœuf and that of the word Ochs do not coincide; Saussure himself cites ‘the difference in value’ between the French mouton and the English sheep (Course, 160/115). There is no meaning in and by itself ;- meaning always belongs to something which we use as a sign; for example, we interpret the meaning of a linguistic sign, the meaning of a word. In language there is neither signified without signifier nor signifier without signified.
The most profound of modern French linguists, Émile Benveniste, in his article ‘Nature du signe linguistique’ which appeared in the first volume of Acta Linguistica (1939), says in opposition to Saussure that ‘the connection between the signifier and the signified is not arbitrary; on the contrary, it is necessary.’ From the point of view of the French language the signified ‘boeuf’ is inevitably tantamount to the signifier, the phonic group b-ö-f. ‘The two have been imprinted on my mind together,’ Benveniste stresses; ‘they are mutually evocative in all circumstances. There is between them such an intimate symbiosis that the concept "boeuf" is like the soul of the acoustic image b-ö-f.’
Saussure invokes the differences between languages, but actually the question of the arbitrary relation or the necessary connection between the signified and the signifier cannot be answered except by reference to a given state of a given language. Recall Saussure’s own shrewd advice: ‘It would be absurd to draw a panorama of the Alps from the points of view of several peaks of the Jura simultaneously; a panorama must be drawn from a single point.’ And, from the point of view of her native language, a peasant woman from Francophone Switzerland was right to be astonished: how can cheese be called Käse since fromage is its only natural name.
Contrary to Saussure’s thesis, the connection between signifier and signified, or in other words between the sequence of phonemes and meaning, is a necessary one; but the only necessary relation between the two aspects is here an association based on contiguity, and thus on an external relation, whereas association based on resemblance (on an internal relation) is only occasional. It only appears on the periphery of the conceptual lexicon, in onomatopoeic and expressive words such as cuckoo, zigzag, crack, etc. But the question of the internal relation between the sounds and the meaning of a word is not thereby exhausted. Lack of time prevents us from being able to do more than touch on this subtle and complex question. We have said that distinctive features, while performing a significative function, are themselves devoid of meaning. Neither a distinctive feature taken in isolation, nor a bundle of concurrent distinctive features (i.e., a phoneme) taken in isolation, means anything. Neither nasality as such nor the nasal phoneme /n/ has any meaning of its own.
But this void seeks to be filled. The intimacy of the connection between the sounds and the meaning of a word gives rise to a desire by speakers to add an internal relation to the external relation, resemblance to contiguity, to complement the signified by a rudimentary image. Owing to the neuropsychological laws of synaesthesia, phonic oppositions can themselves evoke relations with musical, chromatic, olfactory, tactile, etc. sensations. For example, the opposition between acute and grave phonemes has the capacity to suggest an image of bright and dark, of pointed and rounded, of thin and thick, of light and heavy, etc. This ‘sound symbolism,’ as it was called by one of its original investigators, Edward Sapir, this inner value of the distinctive features, although latent, is brought to life as soon as it finds a correspondence in the meaning of a given word and in our emotional or aesthetic attitude towards this word and even more towards pairs of words with two opposite meanings.
In poetic language, in which the sign as such takes on an autonomous value, this sound symbolism becomes an actual factor and creates a sort of accompaniment to the signified. The Czech words den ‘day’ and noc ‘night,’ which contain a vocalic opposition between acute and grave, are easily associated in poetry with the contrast between the brightness of midday and the nocturnal darkness. Mallarmé deplored the collision between the sounds and the meanings of the French words jour ‘day’ and nuit ‘night.’ But poetry successfully eliminates this discordance by surrounding the word jour with acute vowelled vocables and the word nuit with grave vowelled vocables; or alternatively it highlights semantic contrasts which are in harmony with that of the grave and acute vowels, such as that between the heaviness of the day and the mildness of the night.
The search for the symbolic value of phonemes, each taken as a whole, runs the risk of giving rise to ambiguous and trivial interpretations because phonemes are complex entities, bundles of different distinctive features. These latter are invested with a purely appositive character and each of these oppositions lends itself to the action of synaesthesia, as is demonstrated in the most striking way in the language of children.
For Whitney everything in the formation of a linguistic sign is arbitrary and fortuitous, including the selection of its constitutive elements. Saussure remarked in this connection: ‘Whitney goes too far when he says that the vocal organs were selected by us quite by chance’ and that men would have been able equally well to choose gesture and to use visual images instead of acoustic images.’ The Genevan master correctly objects that the vocal organs ‘were certainly in some way imposed on us by nature,’ but at the same time Saussure believes that the American linguist was right on the essential point: ‘Language is a convention, and the nature of the sign which is agreed upon makes no difference.’ In discussing the relations between static linguistics and evolutionary linguistics’ Saussure, followed by his disciples, went so far as to say that in the science of language ‘there is no place for natural givens,’ and to assert ‘the always fortuitous character’ of any state of any language as well as of whatever change brought this state about. The repertory of distinctive elements of any given language can only be contingent, and any one of these elements could be replaced by another one which, though completely lacking any material similarity with the former, would be invested with, indeed would embody, the same distinctive value. Saussure identifies this state of things with the game of chess in which one can replace a destroyed or mislaid piece by one of completely different shape as long as one gives it the same role in the game. So the question is raised of whether the distinctive features, whether the assortment of phonemes in operation, is in reality purely arbitrary or whether this assortment, although obviously a social phenomenon, is not – just like the very fact of using the vocal apparatus – ‘in some way imposed on us by nature.’
We have pointed out that the distinctive features of the phonemes are strictly appositive entities. It follows from this that a distinctive property never stands alone in the phonological system. Because of the nature, in particular the logical nature, of oppositions, each of these properties implies the coexistence in the same system of the opposite property; length could not exist without shortness, voicing without voicelessness, the acute character without the grave character, and vice versa. The duality of opposites is therefore not arbitrary, but necessary. The oppositions themselves also do not stand alone in the phonological system. The oppositions of the distinctive features are interdependent, i.e., the existence of one opposition implies, permits or precludes the coexistence of such and such other opposition in the same phonological system, in the same way that the presence of one particular distinctive feature implies the absence, or the necessary (or at least probable) presence of such and such other distinctive properties in the same phoneme. Here again arbitrariness has very restricted scope.
Apart from the typological study of the greatest variety of the world’s language systems, it is the structural analysis of language in the process of development – the analysis of children’s language and its general laws – and of language in the process of disintegration – aphasic language – which enables us to throw light on the selection of phonemes, the distinctive features, and their mutual relations, and to get closer to the main principles of this selection and of this interdependence so as to be in a position to establish and explain the universal laws which underlie the phonological structure of the world’s languages. The systematic investigation of the way in which phonological resources are put to use in the construction of grammatical forms, which was initiated by Baudouin’s school and by the Prague circle under the name of ‘morphology,’ promises to construct an indispensable bridge between the study of sound and that of meaning, as long as one takes into account the range of linguistic levels and what is specifically fundamental to each of them.
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<p class="title">Ferdinand de Saussure (1910)</p>
<h1><em>Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics</em></h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linghuistics (1910-1911)</em> publ. Pergamon Press, 1993. Reproduced here are the first few and last few pages of what are notes taken by a student of Saussure's lectures.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h3><span class="term">[28 October 1910]</span><br>
Introductory chapter: Brief survey of the history of linguistics</h3>
<p class="fst">
The course will deal with <strong>linguistics proper</strong>, not with
languages and language. This science has gone through phases
with shortcomings. <strong>Three phases</strong> may be distinguished, or
three successive approaches adopted by those who took a language
as an object of study. <strong>Later on came a linguistics
proper</strong>, aware of its object.</p>
<p>
The first of these phases is that of <strong>grammar</strong>, invented
by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never
had any philosophical view of a language as such. That's more
the concern of logic. All traditional grammar is normative grammar,
that is, dominated by a preoccupation with laying down rules,
and distinguishing between a certain allegedly 'correct' language
and another, allegedly 'incorrect'; which straight away precludes
any broader view of the language phenomenon as a whole.</p>
<p>
Later and only at the beginning of the 19th century, if we are
talking of major movements (and leaving out the precursors, the
'philological' school at Alexandria), came <strong>2)</strong>
the great <strong>philological movement</strong> of classical philology,
carrying on down to our own day. In 1777, Friedrich Wolf, as
a student, wished to be enrolled as a philologist. Philology
introduced a new principle: the method of critical examination
of texts. The language was just one of the many objects coming
within the sphere of philology, and consequently subjected to
this criticism. Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed
merely towards correcting grammar. The critical principle demanded
an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different
periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
Ritschl's revision of the text of Plautus may be considered the
work of a linguist. In general, the philological movement opened
up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them
in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance,
the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in
the spirit of linguistics.</p>
<p>
A <strong>third phase</strong> in which this spirit of linguistics is still
not evident: this is the sensational phase of discovering that
languages could be compared with one another; that a bond or relationship
existed between languages often separated geographically by great
distances; that, as well as languages, there were also great language
families, in particular the one which came to be called the Indo-European
family.</p>
<p>
Surprisingly, there was never a more flawed or absurd idea of
what a language is than during the thirty years that followed
this discovery by Bopp (1816). In fact, from then on scholars
engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European
languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail
to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they
should be interpreted in concrete terms. Until nearly 1870, they
played this game without any concern for the conditions affecting
the life of a language.</p>
<p>
This very prolific phase, which produced many publications, differs
from its predecessors by focussing attention on a great number
of languages and the relations between them, but, just like its
predecessors, has no linguistic perspective, or at least none
which is correct, acceptable and reasonable. It is purely comparative.
You cannot altogether condemn the more or less hostile attitude
of the philological tradition towards the comparativists, because
the latter did not in fact bring any renewal bearing on the principles
themselves, none which in practice immediately opened up any new
horizons, and with which they can clearly be credited. When was
it recognised that comparison is, in short, only a method to employ
when we have no more direct way of ascertaining the facts, and
when did comparative grammar give way to a linguistics which included
comparative grammar and gave it a new direction?</p>
<p>
It was mainly the study of the Romance languages which led the
IndoEuropeanists themselves to a more balanced view and afforded
a glimpse of what the study of linguistics was to be in general.
Doubtless the growth of Romance studies, inaugurated by Diehls,
was a development of Bopp's rules for the IndoEuropean languages.
In the Romance sphere, other conditions quickly became apparent;
in the first place, the actual presence of the prototype of each
form; thanks to Latin, which we know, Romance scholars have this
prototype in front of them from the start, whereas for the Indo-European
languages we have to reconstruct hypothetically the prototype
of each form. Second, with the Romance languages it is perfectly
possible, at least in certain periods, to follow the language
from century to century through documents, and so inspect closely
what was happening. These two circumstances reduce the area of
conjecture and made Romance linguistics look quite different from
Indo-European linguistics. It must also be said that Germanic
studies to some extent played the same role as well. There the
prototype does not exist, but in the case of Germanic there are
long historical periods that can be followed.</p>
<p>
The historical perspective that the Indo-Europeanists lacked,
because they viewed everything on the same level, was indispensable
for the Romance scholars. And the historical perspective revealed
how the facts were connected. Thus it came about that the influence
of Romance studies was very salutary. One of the great defects,
from a scholarly point of view, which is common to philology and
the comparative phase is a servile attachment to the letter, to
the written language, or a failure to draw a clear distinction
between what might pertain to the real spoken language and what
to its graphic sign. Hence, it comes about that the literary
point of view is more or less confused with the linguistic point
of view, and furthermore, more concretely, the written word is
confused with the spoken word; two superimposed systems of signs
which have nothing to do with each other, the written and the
spoken, are conflated. The linguistics which gradually developed
in this way is a science for which we can take the definition
given by Hatzfeld, Darmstetter and Thomas's Dictionary: <strong>'the
scientific study of languages'</strong>, which is satisfactory, but
it is this word <em>scientific </em>that distinguishes it from all
earlier studies.</p>
<p>
What does it take: <span class="term">1)</span> as its subject matter <span class="term">2)</span>
as its object or task? </p>
<p>
<span class="term">1)</span> a scientific study will take as its subject
matter every kind of variety of human language: it will not select
one period or another for its literary brilliance or for the renown
of the people in question. It will Pay attention to any tongue,
whether obscure or famous, and likewise to any period, giving
no preference, for example, to what is called a classical period',
but according equal interest to so-called decadent or archaic
periods. Similarly, for any given period, it will refrain from
selecting the most educated language, but will concern itself
at the same time with popular forms more or less in contrast with
the so-called educated or literary language, as well as the forms
of the so-called educated or literary language. Thus linguistics
deals with language of every period and in all the guises it assumes.</p>
<p>
Necessarily, it should be pointed out, in order to have documentation
for all periods, as far as possible, linguistics will constantly
have to deal with the written language, and will often have to
rely on the insights of philology in order to take its bearings
among these written texts; but it will always distinguish between
the written text and what lies underneath; treating the former
as being only the envelope or external mode of presentation of
its true object, which is solely the spoken language.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">2)</span> The business, task or object of the scientific
study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history
of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a
very limited extent and for very few languages.</p>
<p>
In attempting to trace the history of a language, one will very
soon find oneself obliged to trace the history of a language family.
Before Latin, there is a period which Greek and Slavic share
in common. So this involves the history of language families,
as and when relevant.</p>
<p>
But in the second place 2), and this is very different, it will
be necessary to derive from this history of all the languages
themselves laws of the greatest generality. Linguistics will
have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and
in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from
those restricted to one branch of languages or another. There
are more special tasks to add; concerning the relations between
linguistics and various sciences. Some are related by reason
of the information and data they borrow, while others, on the
contrary, supply it and assist its work. It often happens that
the respective domains of two sciences are not obvious on first
inspection; in the very first place, what ought to be mentioned
here are the relations between linguistics and psychology - which
are often difficult to demarcate.</p>
<p>
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise
what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies
upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.</p>
<p>
Once linguistics is conceived in this way, i.e. as concerned with
language in all its manifestations, an object of the broadest
possible scope, we can immediately, so to speak, understand what
perhaps was not always clear: <strong>the utility of linguistics</strong>,
or its claim to be included among those studies relevant to what
is called 'general culture'.</p>
<p>
As long as the activity of linguists was limited to comparing
one language with another, this general utility cannot have been
apparent to most of the general public, and indeed the study was
so specialised that there was no real reason to suppose it of
possible interest to a wider audience. It is only since linguistics
has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the
whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make
a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest
to almost anyone. It is by no means useless, for instance, to
those who have to deal with texts. It is useful to the historian,
among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different
phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language
lives, carries on and changes over time. More generally, it is
evident that language plays such a considerable role in human
societies, and is a factor of such importance both for the individual
human being and human society, that we cannot suppose that the
study of such a substantial part of human nature should remain
simply and solely the business of a few specialists; everyone,
it would seem, is called upon to form as correct an idea as possible
of what this particular aspect of human behaviour amounts to in
general. All the more so inasmuch as really rational, acceptable
ideas about it, the conception that linguistics has eventually
reached, by no means coincides with what at first sight seems
to be the case. There is no sphere in which more fantastic and
absurd ideas have arisen than in the study of languages. Language
is an object which gives rise to all kinds of mirage. Most interesting
of all, from a psychological point of view, are the errors language
produces. Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about
what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.</p>
<p>
Thus it is equally legitimate in that respect for linguistics
today to Claim to be able to put many ideas right, to throw light
on areas where the general run of scholars would be very liable
to go wrong and make very serious mistakes.</p>
<p>
I have left on one side the question of languages and language
in order to discuss the object of linguistics and its possible
utility.</p>
<hr class="section">
<p> </p>
<h3><span class="term">[4 November 1910]</span><br>
Main sections of the course:</h3>
<p>
<span class="term">1)</span> <strong>Languages</strong> <span class="term">2)</span> <strong>The
language</strong> <span class="term">3)</span> <strong>The language faculty and its
use by</strong> <strong>the individual</strong>.</p>
<p>
Without for the moment distinguishing terminologically between
languages and language, where do we find the linguistic phenomenon
in its concrete, complete, integral form? That is: where do we
find the object we have to confront? With all its characteristics
as yet contained within it and unanalysed? This is a difficulty
which does not arise in many other disciplines - not having your
subject matter there in front of you. It would be a mistake to
believe that this integral, complete object can be grasped by
picking out whatever is most general. The operation of generalisation
presupposes that we have already investigated the object under
scrutiny in such a way as to be able to pronounce upon what its
general features are. What is general in language will not be
what we are looking for; that is, the object immediately given.
But nor must we focus on what is only part of it.</p>
<p>
Thus, it is clear that the vocal apparatus has an importance which
may monopolise our attention, and when we have studied this articulatory
aspect of languages we shall soon realise that there is a corresponding
acoustic aspect. But even that does not go beyond purely material
considerations. It does not take us as far as the word, the combination
of the idea and the articulatory product; but if we take the combination
of the idea and the vocal sign, we must ask if this is to be studied
in the individual or in a society, a corporate body: we still
seem to be left with something which is incomplete. Proceeding
thus, we see that in catching hold of the language by one end
at random we are far from being able to grasp the whole phenomenon.
It may seem, after approaching our study from several angles
simultaneously, that there is no homogeneous entity which is the
language, but only a conglomerate of composite items (articulation
of a sound, idea connected to it) which must be studied piecemeal
and cannot be studied as an integral object.</p>
<p>
The solution we can adopt is this:</p>
<p>
In every individual there is a faculty which can be called the
<strong>faculty of articulated language</strong>. This faculty is available
to us in the first instance in the form of organs, and then by
the operations we can perform with those organs. But it is only
a faculty, and it would be a material impossibility to utilise
it in the absence of something else - a language - which is given
to the individual from outside: it is necessary that the individual
should be provided with this facility - with what we call a language
- by the combined effort of his fellows, here we see, incidentally,
perhaps the most accurate way of drawing a distinction between
language and languages. A language is necessarily social: language
is not especially so. The latter can be defined at the level
of the individual. It is an abstract thing and requires the human
being for its realisation. This faculty which exists in individuals
might perhaps be compared to others: man has the faculty of song,
for example; perhaps no one would invent a tune unless the community
gave a lead. A language presupposes that all the individual users
possess the organs. By distinguishing between the language and
the faculty of language, we distinguish <span class="term">1)</span> what
is social from what is individual, <span class="term">2)</span> what is
essential from what is more or less accidental. As a matter of
fact, we shall see later on that it is the combination of the
idea with a vocal sign which suffices to constitute the whole
language. Sound production - that is what falls within the domain
of the faculty of the individual and is the individual's responsibility.
But it is comparable to the performance of a musical masterpiece
on an instrument; many are capable of playing the piece of music,
but it is entirely independent of these various performances.</p>
<p>
The acoustic image linked to an idea - that is what is essential
to the language. It is in the phonetic execution that all the
accidental things occur; for inaccurate repetition of what was
given is at the root of that immense class of facts, phonetic
changes, which are a host of accidents.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">3)</span> By distinguishing thus between the language
and the faculty of language, we see that the language is what
we may call a 'product': it is <strong>a 'social product';</strong> we have
set it apart from the operation of the vocal apparatus, which
is a permanent action. You can conjure up a very precise idea
of this product - and thus set the language, so to speak, materially
in front of you - by focussing on what is potentially in the brains
of a set of individuals (belonging to one and the same community)
even when they are asleep; we can say that in each of these heads
is the whole product that we call the language. We can say that
the object to be studied is the hoard deposited in the brain of
each one of us; doubtless this hoard, in any individual case,
will never turn Out to be absolutely complete. We can say that
language always works through a language', without that, it does
not exist. The language, in turn, is quite independent of the
individual; it cannot be a creation of the individual-, it is
essentially social; it presupposes the collectivity. Finally,
its only essential feature is the combination of sound and acoustic
image with an idea. (The acoustic image is the impression that
remains with us the latent impression in the brain (D.)). There
is no need to conceive it (the language) as necessarily spoken
all the time.</p>
<p>
Let us come down to details; let us consider the language as a
social product. Among social products, it is natural to ask whether
there is any other which offers a parallel.</p>
<p>
The American linguist <strong>Whitney</strong> who, about 1870, became very
influential through his book <em>The principles and the life of
language,</em> caused astonishment by comparing languages to social
Institutions, saying that they fell in general into the great
class of social institutions. In this, he was on the right track-,
his ideas are in agreement with mine. 'It is, in the end, fortuitous,'
he said, 'that men made use of the larynx, lips and tongue in
order to speak. They discovered it was more convenient; but if
they had used visual signs, or hand signals, the language would
remain in essence exactly the same: nothing would have changed.'
This was right, for he attributed no great importance to execution.
Which comes down to what I was saying: the only change would
be the replacement of the acoustic images I mentioned by visual
images. Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case
of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact,
social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions.</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, you cannot find any social institution that can
be set on a par with a language and is comparable to it. There
are very many differences. The very special place that a language
occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more
to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.
In a general way, institutions such as legal institutions, or
for instance a set ,of rituals, or a ceremony established once
and for all, have many characteristics which make them like languages,
and the changes they undergo over time a.-e very reminiscent of
linguistic changes. But there are enormous differences.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">1)</span> No other institution involves all the individuals
all the time; no other is open to all in such a way that each
person participates in it and naturally influences it.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">2)</span> Most institutions can be improved, corrected
at certain times, reformed by an act of will, whereas on the contrary
we see that such an initiative is impossible where languages are
concerned, that even academies cannot change by decree the course
taken by the institution we call the language, etc.</p>
<p>
Before proceeding further, another idea must be introduced: that
of <strong>semiological facts in</strong> societies. Let us go back to
the language considered as a product of society at work: it is
a set of signs fixed by agreement between the members of that
society; these signs evoke ideas, but in that respect it's rather
like rituals, for instance.</p>
<p>
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs,
but these signs do not directly evoke things. In all societies
we find this phenomenon: that for various purposes systems of
signs are established that directly evoke the ideas one wishes;
it is obvious that a language is one such system, and that it
is the most important of them all; but it is not the only one,
and consequently we cannot leave the others out of account. A
language must thus be classed among semiological institutions;
for example, ships' signals (visual signs), army bugle calls,
the sign language of the deaf-and-dumb, etc. Writing is likewise
a vast system of signs. Any psychology of sign systems will be
part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively
social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in
the case of languages. The laws governing changes in these systems
of signs will often be significantly similar to laws of linguistic
change. This can easily be seen in the case of writing - although
the signs are visual signs - which undergoes alterations comparable
to phonetic phenomena.</p>
<p>
Having identified the language as a social product to be studied
in linguistics, one must add that language in humanity as a whole
is manifested in an infinite diversity of languages: a language
is the product of a society, but different societies do not have
the same language. Where does this diversity come from? Sometimes
it is a relative diversity, sometimes an absolute diversity, but
we have finally located the concrete object in this product that
can be supposed to be lodged in the brain of each of us. But
this product varies, depending On where you are in the world,
what is given is not only the language but languages. And the
linguist has no other choice than to study initially the diversity
of languages. He must first study languages, as many languages
as possible, and widen his horizons as far as he can. So this
is how we shall proceed. From the study and observation of these
languages, the linguist will be able to abstract general features,
retaining everything that seems essential and universal, and setting
aside what is particular and accidental. He will thus end up
with a set of abstractions, which will be the language. That
is what is summarised in the second section: the language. Under
'the language' I shall summarise what can be observed in the different
languages.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">3)</span> However, there is still the individual to
be examined, since it is clear that what creates general phenomena
is the collaboration of all the individuals involved. Consequently
we have to take a look at how language operates in the individual.
This individual implementation of the social product is not a
part of the object I have defined. This third chapter reveals,
so to speak, what lies underneath - the individual mechanism,
which cannot ultimately fail to have repercussions in one way
or another on the general product, but which must not be confused,
for purposes of study, with that general product, from which it
is quite separate.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3><span class="term">[8 November 1910]</span><br>
Part One: Languages</h3>
<p class="fst">
This heading contrasts with that of my second chapter: the language.
There is no point in giving a more detailed specification and
the meaning of these two contrasting headings is sufficiently
self-evident. Just as, although comparisons with the natural
sciences must not be abused, it would likewise be immediately
evident what was meant in a work on natural history by contrasting
'the plant' with 'plants' (c.f. also .'insects, versus 'the insect').</p>
<p>
These divisions would correspond reasonably well even in content
to what we shall get in linguistics if we distinguish between
'the language' and 'languages'. Some botanists and naturalists
devote their entire careers to one approach or the other. There
are botanists who classify plants without concerning themselves
with the circulation of the sap, etc., that is to say, without
concerning themselves with 'the plant'.</p>
<p>
Considerations relevant to the language (and equally to some extent
to languages as well) will lead us to consider languages from
an external point of view, without making any internal analysis;
but the distinction is not hard and fast, for the detailed study
of the history of a language or of a group of languages is perfectly
well accommodated under the heading 'languages', and that presupposes
internal analysis. To some extent one could also say that in
my second part 'the language' could be expanded to read 'the life
of the language', that this second part would contain things of
importance for the characterisation of the language, and that
these things are all part of a life, a biology. But there are
other things that would not be included: among others, the whole
logical side of the language, involving invariables unaffected
by time or geographical boundaries. Languages constitute the
concrete object that the linguist encounters on the earth's surface;
'the language' is the heading one can provide for whatever generalisations
the linguist may be able to extract from all his observations
across time and space.</p>
<hr class="section">
<p> </p>
<h3><span class="term">[30 June 1911]</span></h3>
<p>
Reversing the order of the two series I have considered, we can
say that the mind establishes just two orders of relations between
words.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">1)</span> Outside speech, the association that is made
in the memory between words having something in common creates
different groups, series, families, within which very diverse
relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are
associative relations.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">2)</span> Within speech, words are subject to a kind
of relation that is independent of the first and based on their
linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.</p>
<p>
Here of course there is a problem, because the second order of
relations appears to appeal to facts of speech and not linguistic
facts. But the language itself includes such relations, even if
only in compound words (German <em>Hauptmann), </em>or even in a
word like <em>Dummheit, </em>or expressions like <em>s'il vous plait
</em>['if you please'] where a syntagmatic relation holds.</p>
<p>
When we speak of the structure of a word, we are referring to
the second kind of relation: these are units arranged end to end
as exponents of certain relations. If we speak of something like
a flexional paradigm <em>(dominus, domini, domino) </em>we are referring
to a group based on associative relations. These are not units
arranged end to end and related in a certain way in virtue of
that fact.</p>
<p>
<em>Magn-animus: </em>the relation involving <em>animus </em>is syntagmatic.
Idea expressed by juxtaposition of the two parts in sequence.
Nowhere, either in <em>magn </em>or in <em>animus </em>do you find
something meaning 'possessing a great soul'.</p>
<p>
If you take <em>animus </em>in relation to <em>anima and animal,
</em>it is a different order of relations. There is an associative
family:</p>
<p style="text-align: CENTER; text-indent: 0px;">
animus<br>
anima<br>
animal
</p>
<p>
Neither order of relations is reducible to the other: both are
operative.</p>
<p>
If we compare them to the parts of a building: columns will stand
in a. certain relation to a frieze they support. These two components
are related in a wax which is comparable to the syntagmatic relation.
It is an arrangement of two co-present units. If I see a Doric
column, I might link it by association with a series of objects
that are not present, associative relations (Ionic column, Corinthian
column).</p>
<p>
The sum total of word relations that the mind associates with
any word that is present gives a virtual series, a series formed
by the memory (a mnemonic series), as opposed to a chain, a syntagma
formed by two units present together. This is an <strong>actual</strong>
series, as opposed to a virtual series, and gives rise to other
relations.</p>
<p>
The <strong>conclusion</strong> I should like to draw from this is as follows:
in whichever order of relations a words functions (it is required
to function in both), a word is always, first and foremost, a
member of a system, interconnected with other words, sometimes
in one order of relations, sometimes in another.</p>
<p>
This will have to be taken into account in considering what constitutes
value. First, it was necessary to consider words as <strong>terms</strong>
in a system.</p>
<p>
As soon as we substitute <em>term</em> for <em>word</em>, this implies
consideration of its relations with others (appeal to the idea
of interconnections with other words).</p>
<p>
We must not begin with the word, the term, in order to construct
the system. This would be to suppose that the terms have an absolute
value given in advance, and that you have only to pile them up
one on top of the other in order to reach the system. On the
contrary, one must start from the system, the interconnected whole;
this may be decomposed into particular terms, although these are
not so easily distinguished as it seems. Starting from the whole
of the system of values, in order to distinguish the various values,
it is possible that we shall encounter words as recognisable series
of terms. (Incidentally: associatively, I can summon up the word
<em>dominos </em>just as easily as <em>domino, domine, domin-?; </em>syntagmatically,
I have to choose either <em>dominos or domini.</em>)</p>
<p>
Attach no importance to the word <em>word</em>. The word <em>word</em>
as far as I am concerned has no specific meaning here. The word
<em>term is</em> sufficient; furthermore, the word <em>word</em> does
not mean the same in the two series.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3>Chapter V. Value of terms and meanings of words.<br>
How the two coincide and differ.</h3>
<p>
Where there are terms, there are also values. The idea of value
is tacitly implied in that of term. Always hard to keep these
two ideas apart.</p>
<p>
When you speak of value, you feel it here becomes synonymous <em>with
sense (meaning) </em>and that points to another area of confusion
(here the confusion will reside more in the things themselves).</p>
<p>
The value is indeed an element of the sense, but what matters
is to avoid taking the sense as anything other than a value.</p>
<p>
It is perhaps one of the most subtle points there is in linguistics,
to see how sense depends on but nevertheless remains distinct
from value. On this the linguist's view and the simplistic view
that sees the language as a nomenclature differ strikingly.</p>
<p>
First let us take meaning as I have represented it and have myself
set it out:</p>
<p><img src="../../images/saussur1.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="image going into concept">
The arrow indicates meaning as counterpart of the auditory image</p>
<p>
In this view, the meaning is the counterpart of the auditory image
and nothing else. The word appears, or is taken as, an isolated,
self-contained whole; internally, it contains the auditory image
having a concept as its counterpart.</p>
<p>
The paradox - in Baconian terms the trap in the 'cave' - is this:
the meaning, which appears to us to be the counterpart of the
auditory image, is just as much the counterpart of terms coexisting
in the language. We have just seen that the language represents
a system in which all the terms appear as linked by relations.
</p><p><img src="../../images/saussur2.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="series of cricles joined by double-headed arrows">
At first sight, no relation between the <strong>a)</strong> and the <strong>b)</strong>
arrows. The value of a word will be the result only of the coexistence
of the different terms. The value is the counterpart of the coexisting
terms. How does that come to be confused with the counterpart
of the auditory image?</p>
<p>
Another diagram: series of slots:</p>
<p><img src="../../images/saussur3.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="line divided up into sections">
the relation inside one slot and between slots is
very hard to distinguish.</p>
<p>
The meaning as counterpart of the image and the meaning as counterpart
of coexisting terms merge.</p>
<p>
Before example, note that: Outside linguistics, value always seems
to involve the same paradoxical truth. Tricky area. Very difficult
in any domain to say what value consists of. So let us be very
wary. There are two elements comprising value. Value is determined
<span class="term">1)</span> by a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged,
and that can be marked <strong>|</strong> [an up-arrow] and <span class="term">2)</span> by similar things that can be compared <strong><- -></strong> [left-right arrows].
</p><p><img src="../../images/saussur4.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="up-arrow with to and from arrows either side">
These two elements are essential for value. For example, a 20-franc
coin. Its value is a matter of a dissimilar thing that I can
exchange (e.g. pounds of bread), 2) the comparison between the
20-franc coin and one-franc and two-franc coins, etc., or coins
of similar value (guinea).</p>
<p>
The value is at the same time the counterpart of the one and the
counterpart of the other.</p>
<p>
You can never find the meaning of a word by considering only the
exchangeable item, but you have to compare the similar series
of comparable words. You cannot take words in isolation. This
is how the system to which the term belongs is one of the sources
of value. It is the sum of comparable terms set against the idea
exchanged.</p>
<p>
The value of a word can never be determined except by the contribution
of coexisting terms which delimit it: or, to insist on the paradox
already mentioned: what is in the word is only ever determined
by the contribution of what exists around it. (What is in the
word is the value.) Around it syntagmatically or around it associatively.</p>
<p>
You must approach the word from outside by starting from the system
and coexisting terms.</p>
<p>
<strong>A few examples.</strong></p>
<p>
The plural and whatever terms mark the plural.</p>
<p>
The value of a German or Latin plural is not the value of a Sanskrit
plural. But the meaning, if you like, is the same.</p>
<p>
In Sanskrit, there is the dual.</p>
<p>
Anyone who assigns the same value to the Sanskrit plural as to
the Latin plural is mistaken because I cannot use the Sanskrit
plural in all the cases where I use the Latin plural.</p>
<p>
Why is that? The value depends on something outside.</p>
<p>
If you take on the other hand a simple lexical fact, any word
such as, I suppose, <em>mouton - mutton, </em>it doesn't have the
same value as <em>sheep</em> in English. For if you speak of the
animal on the hoof and not on the table, you say <em>sheep.</em></p>
<p>
It is the presence in the language of a second term that limits
the value attributable to <em>sheep.</em></p>
<p>
<em>mutton</em> / <em>sheep / mouton</em> (Restrictive example.)</p>
<p>
So the | arrow is not enough. The <- -> arrows must always be
taken into account.</p>
<p>
Something similar in the example of <em>decrepit.</em></p>
<p>
How does it come about that an old man who is <em>decrepit </em>and
a wall that is <em>decrepit </em>have a similar sense?</p>
<p>
It is the influence of the neighbouring word. What happens to
<em>decrepit </em>(an old man) comes from the coexistence of the
neighbouring term <em>decrepit </em>(a wall).</p>
<p>
Example of contagion.</p>
<p> </p>
<h3><span class="term">[4 July 1911]</span></h3>
<p>
It is not possible <strong>even</strong> to determine what the value of
the word <em>sun is</em> in itself without considering all the neighbouring
words which will restrict its sense. There are languages in which
I can say: <em>Sit in the sun. </em>In others, not the same
meaning for the word <em>sun</em> (= star). The sense of a term
depends on presence or absence of a neighbouring term.</p>
<p>
The system leads to the term and the term to the value. Then you
will see that the meaning is determined by what surrounds it.</p>
<p>
I shall also refer back to the preceding chapters, but in the
proper way, via the system, and not starting from the word in
isolation.</p>
<p>
To get to the notion of value, I have chosen to start from the
system of words as opposed to the word in isolation. I could
have chosen a different basis to start from.</p>
<p>
Psychologically, what are our ideas, apart from our language ?
They probably do not exist. Or in a form that may be described
as amorphous. We should probably be unable according to philosophers
and linguists to distinguish two ideas clearly without the help
of a language (internal language naturally).</p>
<p>
Consequently, in itself, the purely conceptual mass of our ideas,
the mass separated from the language, is like a kind of shapeless
nebula, in which it is impossible to distinguish anything initially.
The same goes, then, for the language: the different ideas represent
nothing pre-existing. There are no: <span class="term">a)</span> ideas
already established and quite distinct from one another, <span class="term">b)</span>
signs for these ideas. But there is nothing at all distinct in
thought before the linguistic sign. This is the main thing.
On the other hand, it is also worth asking if, beside this entirely
indistinct realm of ideas, the realm of sound offers in advance
quite distinct ideas (taken in itself apart from the idea).</p>
<p>
There are no distinct units of sound either, delimited in advance.</p>
<p>
The linguistic fact is situated in between the two:</p>
<p>
This linguistic fact will engender values which for the first
time will be determinate, but which nevertheless will remain values,
in the sense that can be attached to that word. There is even
something to add to the fact itself, and I come back to it now.
Not only are these two domains between which the linguistic fact
is situated amorphous, but the choice of connection between the
two, the marriage (of the two) which will create value is perfectly
arbitrary.</p>
<p>
Otherwise the values would be to some extent absolute. If it were
not arbitrary, this idea of value would have to be restricted,
there would be an absolute element.</p>
<p>
But since this contract is entirely arbitrary, the values will
be entirely relative.</p>
<p>
If we go back now to the diagram representing the signified and
signifying elements together <img src="../../images/saussur5.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="signified and signifier with up arrow"></p>
<p>
we see that it is doubtless justified but is only a secondary
product of value. The signified element alone is nothing, it
blurs into a shapeless mass. Likewise the signifying element.</p>
<p>
But the signifying and signified elements contract a bond in virtue
of the determinate values that are engendered by the combination
of such and such acoustic signs with such and such cuts that can
be made in the mass. What would have to be the case in order
to have this relation between signified and signifying elements
given in itself ? It would above all be necessary that the idea
should be determinate in advance, and it is not. It would above
all be necessary that the signified element should be something
determined in advance, and it is not.</p>
<p>
That is why this relation is only another expression of values
in contrast (in the system). That is true on any linguistic level.</p>
<p>
<strong>A few examples</strong>. If ideas were predetermined in the human
mind before being linguistic values, one thing that would necessarily
happen is that terms would correspond exactly as between one language
and another.</p>
<table align="center" width="60%">
<tbody><tr><td><p class="fst">French</p></td><td><p class="fst">German</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><p class="fst"><em>cher </em>['dear']</p></td><td><p class="fst"><em>lieb, teuer </em>(also moral)</p></td></tr>
<tr><td colspan="2"><p class="fst">There is no exact correspondence.</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><p class="fst"><em>juger, estimer</em><br>['judge, estimate']</p></td><td><p class="fst"><em>urteilen, erachten</em><br>have a set of meanings only partly coinciding with French <em>juger, estimer .</em></p></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<p>
We see that in advance of the language there is nothing which
is the notion 'cher' in itself. So we see that this representation:
<img src="../../images/saussur6.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" alt="idea and auditory image">
although useful, is only a way of expressing the fact that there
is in French a certain value cher delimited in French system by
contrast with other terms.</p>
<p>
It will be a certain combination of a certain quantity of concepts
with a certain quantity of sounds.</p>
<p>
So the schema <img src="../../images/saussur5.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="middle" width="100" alt="signified and signifier"> is not the starting point in the language.</p>
<p>
The value <em>cher </em>is determined on both sides. The contours
of the idea itself is what we are given by the distribution of
ideas in the words of a language. Once we have the contours, the
schema can come into play. <img src="../../images/saussur5.gif" hspace="1" vspace="1" align="LEFT" width="100" alt="signified and signifing"></p>
<p>
This example was taken from vocabulary, but anything will do.</p>
<p>
Another example. Idea of different tenses, which seems quite
natural to us, is quite alien to certain languages. As in the
Semitic system (Hebrew) there is no distinction, as between present,
future and past; that is to say these ideas of tense are not predetermined,
but exist only as values in one language or another.</p>
<p>
Old German has no future, no proper form for the future. It expresses
it by means of the present. But this is a manner, of speaking.
Hence Old German present value is not the same as in French future.</p>
<p>
Similarly if we take the difference between the perfective aspect
of the verb and the imperfective aspect in the Slavic languages
(difficulty in the study of these languages). In Slavic languages,
constant distinction between aspects of the verb: action outside
any question of time or in process of accomplishment. We find
these distinctions difficult because the categories are unfamiliar.
So not predetermined, but value.</p>
<p>
This value will result from the opposition of terms in the language.</p>
<p>
Hence what I have just said: The notion of value was deduced from
the indeterminacy of concepts. The schema linking the signified
to the signifying element is not a primary schema. Value cannot
be determined by the linguist any more than in other domains:
we take it with all its clarity and obscurity.</p>
<p>
To sum up, the word does not exist without a signified as well
as a signifying element. But the signified element is only a
summary of the linguistic value, presupposing the mutual interaction
of terms, in each language system.</p>
<h3>Chapter VI</h3>
<p>
In a later chapter, if I have time: What I have said by focussing
on the term value can be alternatively expressed by laying down
the following principle: in the language (that is, a language
state) there are only differences. Difference implies to our
mind two positive terms between which the difference is established.
But the paradox is that: In the language, there are only differences,
without positive terms. That is the paradoxical truth. At least,
there are only differences if you are speaking either of meanings,
or of signified or signifying elements.</p>
<p>
When you come to the terms themselves, resulting from relations
between signifying and signified elements you can speak of <em>oppositions.</em></p>
<p>
Strictly speaking there are no signs but differences between signs.</p>
<p>
Example in Czech: <em>zhena</em>, 'woman'; genitive plural, <em>zhen</em>.</p>
<p>
It is clear that in the language one sign is as good as another.
Here there is none.</p>
<p>
<em>(zhena, zhen </em>functions as well as <em>zhena, </em>gen. pl.
<em>zhenu</em> which existed previously.)</p>
<p>
[This example shows that only the difference between signs is
operative.</p>
<p>
<em>zhenu</em> works because it is different from <em>zhena.</em></p>
<p>
<em>zhen</em> works because it is different from <em>zhena</em>.</p>
<p>
There are only differences; no positive term at all.</p>
<p>
Here I am speaking of a difference in the signifying element.</p>
<p>
The mechanism of signifying elements is based on differences.</p>
<p>
Likewise for signified elements, there are only differences that
will be governed by differences of an acoustic nature. The idea
of a future will exist more or less, depending on whether the
differences established by signs of the language (between the
future and the rest) are more or less marked.</p>
<p>
<em>Aller</em> ['to go'] functions because it is different from
<em>allant </em>['going'] and <em>allons </em>['(we) go'].</p>
<p>
<em>aller </em>|<em> allons</em> |<em> allant</em></p>
<p>
English <em>going = aller, allant</em></p>
<p>
Unsegmented, given no acoustic difference between two ideas, the
ideas themselves will not be differentiated, at any rate as much
as in French.</p>
<p>
So the whole language system can be envisaged as sound differences
combined with differences between ideas.</p>
<p>
There are no positive ideas given, and there are no determinate
acoustic signs that are independent of ideas. Thanks to the fact
that the differences are mutually dependent, we shall get something
looking like positive terms through the matching of a certain
difference of ideas with a certain difference in signs. We shall
then be able to speak of the opposition of terms and so not claim
that there are only differences (because of this positive element
in the combination).</p>
<p>
In the end, the principle it comes down to is the fundamental
principle of the arbitrariness of the sign.</p>
<p>
It is only through the differences between signs that it will
be possible to give them a function, a value.</p>
<p>
If the sign were not arbitrary, one would not be able to say that
in the language there are only differences.</p>
<p>
The link with the chapter entitled <strong>Absolute arbitrariness,
relative</strong> <strong>arbitrariness</strong> is this: I have considered the
word as a term placed in a system, that is to say as a value.
Now the interconnection of terms in the system can be conceived
as a limitation on arbitrariness, whether through syntagmatic
interconnection or associative interconnection.</p>
<p>
So: In <em>co<u>upe</u>ret </em>syntagma between root and suffix,
as opposed to <em>hache.</em></p>
<p>
(Interconnection, syntagmatic link between the two elements.)</p>
<p>
<em>Hache </em>['axe'] is absolutely arbitrary, <em>couperet </em>['chopper']
is relatively motivated (syntagmatic association with <em>coupe</em> ['chop']),</p>
<table align="center" width="60%">
<tbody><tr><td><p class="fst"><em>co<u>uper</u>et <br>hache </em></p></td><td><p class="fst">syntagmatic limitation absolutely arbitrary.</p></td></tr>
<tr><td><p class="fst"><em>plu </em>['pleased'] <br><em>plaire </em>['to please']</p></td><td><p class="fst">associative limitation</p></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<hr class="section">
<p>
In this course only the external part is more or less complete.</p>
<p>
In <strong>the internal</strong> part, evolutionary linguistics has been
neglected in favour of synchronic linguistics and I have dealt
only with a few general principles of linguistics.</p>
<p>
These general principles provide the basis for a productive approach
to the details of a static state or the law of static states.</p>
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Ferdinand de Saussure (1910)
Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics
Source: Saussure's Third Course of Lectures on General Linghuistics (1910-1911) publ. Pergamon Press, 1993. Reproduced here are the first few and last few pages of what are notes taken by a student of Saussure's lectures.
[28 October 1910]
Introductory chapter: Brief survey of the history of linguistics
The course will deal with linguistics proper, not with
languages and language. This science has gone through phases
with shortcomings. Three phases may be distinguished, or
three successive approaches adopted by those who took a language
as an object of study. Later on came a linguistics
proper, aware of its object.
The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented
by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never
had any philosophical view of a language as such. That's more
the concern of logic. All traditional grammar is normative grammar,
that is, dominated by a preoccupation with laying down rules,
and distinguishing between a certain allegedly 'correct' language
and another, allegedly 'incorrect'; which straight away precludes
any broader view of the language phenomenon as a whole.
Later and only at the beginning of the 19th century, if we are
talking of major movements (and leaving out the precursors, the
'philological' school at Alexandria), came 2)
the great philological movement of classical philology,
carrying on down to our own day. In 1777, Friedrich Wolf, as
a student, wished to be enrolled as a philologist. Philology
introduced a new principle: the method of critical examination
of texts. The language was just one of the many objects coming
within the sphere of philology, and consequently subjected to
this criticism. Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed
merely towards correcting grammar. The critical principle demanded
an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different
periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.
Ritschl's revision of the text of Plautus may be considered the
work of a linguist. In general, the philological movement opened
up countless sources relevant to linguistic issues, treating them
in quite a different spirit from traditional grammar; for instance,
the study of inscriptions and their language. But not yet in
the spirit of linguistics.
A third phase in which this spirit of linguistics is still
not evident: this is the sensational phase of discovering that
languages could be compared with one another; that a bond or relationship
existed between languages often separated geographically by great
distances; that, as well as languages, there were also great language
families, in particular the one which came to be called the Indo-European
family.
Surprisingly, there was never a more flawed or absurd idea of
what a language is than during the thirty years that followed
this discovery by Bopp (1816). In fact, from then on scholars
engaged in a kind of game of comparing different Indo-European
languages with one another, and eventually they could not fail
to wonder what exactly these connections showed, and how they
should be interpreted in concrete terms. Until nearly 1870, they
played this game without any concern for the conditions affecting
the life of a language.
This very prolific phase, which produced many publications, differs
from its predecessors by focussing attention on a great number
of languages and the relations between them, but, just like its
predecessors, has no linguistic perspective, or at least none
which is correct, acceptable and reasonable. It is purely comparative.
You cannot altogether condemn the more or less hostile attitude
of the philological tradition towards the comparativists, because
the latter did not in fact bring any renewal bearing on the principles
themselves, none which in practice immediately opened up any new
horizons, and with which they can clearly be credited. When was
it recognised that comparison is, in short, only a method to employ
when we have no more direct way of ascertaining the facts, and
when did comparative grammar give way to a linguistics which included
comparative grammar and gave it a new direction?
It was mainly the study of the Romance languages which led the
IndoEuropeanists themselves to a more balanced view and afforded
a glimpse of what the study of linguistics was to be in general.
Doubtless the growth of Romance studies, inaugurated by Diehls,
was a development of Bopp's rules for the IndoEuropean languages.
In the Romance sphere, other conditions quickly became apparent;
in the first place, the actual presence of the prototype of each
form; thanks to Latin, which we know, Romance scholars have this
prototype in front of them from the start, whereas for the Indo-European
languages we have to reconstruct hypothetically the prototype
of each form. Second, with the Romance languages it is perfectly
possible, at least in certain periods, to follow the language
from century to century through documents, and so inspect closely
what was happening. These two circumstances reduce the area of
conjecture and made Romance linguistics look quite different from
Indo-European linguistics. It must also be said that Germanic
studies to some extent played the same role as well. There the
prototype does not exist, but in the case of Germanic there are
long historical periods that can be followed.
The historical perspective that the Indo-Europeanists lacked,
because they viewed everything on the same level, was indispensable
for the Romance scholars. And the historical perspective revealed
how the facts were connected. Thus it came about that the influence
of Romance studies was very salutary. One of the great defects,
from a scholarly point of view, which is common to philology and
the comparative phase is a servile attachment to the letter, to
the written language, or a failure to draw a clear distinction
between what might pertain to the real spoken language and what
to its graphic sign. Hence, it comes about that the literary
point of view is more or less confused with the linguistic point
of view, and furthermore, more concretely, the written word is
confused with the spoken word; two superimposed systems of signs
which have nothing to do with each other, the written and the
spoken, are conflated. The linguistics which gradually developed
in this way is a science for which we can take the definition
given by Hatzfeld, Darmstetter and Thomas's Dictionary: 'the
scientific study of languages', which is satisfactory, but
it is this word scientific that distinguishes it from all
earlier studies.
What does it take: 1) as its subject matter 2)
as its object or task?
1) a scientific study will take as its subject
matter every kind of variety of human language: it will not select
one period or another for its literary brilliance or for the renown
of the people in question. It will Pay attention to any tongue,
whether obscure or famous, and likewise to any period, giving
no preference, for example, to what is called a classical period',
but according equal interest to so-called decadent or archaic
periods. Similarly, for any given period, it will refrain from
selecting the most educated language, but will concern itself
at the same time with popular forms more or less in contrast with
the so-called educated or literary language, as well as the forms
of the so-called educated or literary language. Thus linguistics
deals with language of every period and in all the guises it assumes.
Necessarily, it should be pointed out, in order to have documentation
for all periods, as far as possible, linguistics will constantly
have to deal with the written language, and will often have to
rely on the insights of philology in order to take its bearings
among these written texts; but it will always distinguish between
the written text and what lies underneath; treating the former
as being only the envelope or external mode of presentation of
its true object, which is solely the spoken language.
2) The business, task or object of the scientific
study of languages will if possible be 1) to trace the history
of all known languages. Naturally this is possible only to a
very limited extent and for very few languages.
In attempting to trace the history of a language, one will very
soon find oneself obliged to trace the history of a language family.
Before Latin, there is a period which Greek and Slavic share
in common. So this involves the history of language families,
as and when relevant.
But in the second place 2), and this is very different, it will
be necessary to derive from this history of all the languages
themselves laws of the greatest generality. Linguistics will
have to recognise laws operating universally in language, and
in a strictly rational manner, separating general phenomena from
those restricted to one branch of languages or another. There
are more special tasks to add; concerning the relations between
linguistics and various sciences. Some are related by reason
of the information and data they borrow, while others, on the
contrary, supply it and assist its work. It often happens that
the respective domains of two sciences are not obvious on first
inspection; in the very first place, what ought to be mentioned
here are the relations between linguistics and psychology - which
are often difficult to demarcate.
It is one of the aims of linguistics to define itself, to recognise
what belongs within its domain. In those cases where it relies
upon psychology, it will do so indirectly, remaining independent.
Once linguistics is conceived in this way, i.e. as concerned with
language in all its manifestations, an object of the broadest
possible scope, we can immediately, so to speak, understand what
perhaps was not always clear: the utility of linguistics,
or its claim to be included among those studies relevant to what
is called 'general culture'.
As long as the activity of linguists was limited to comparing
one language with another, this general utility cannot have been
apparent to most of the general public, and indeed the study was
so specialised that there was no real reason to suppose it of
possible interest to a wider audience. It is only since linguistics
has become more aware of its object of study, i.e. perceives the
whole extent of it, that it is evident that this science can make
a contribution to a range of studies that will be of interest
to almost anyone. It is by no means useless, for instance, to
those who have to deal with texts. It is useful to the historian,
among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different
phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language
lives, carries on and changes over time. More generally, it is
evident that language plays such a considerable role in human
societies, and is a factor of such importance both for the individual
human being and human society, that we cannot suppose that the
study of such a substantial part of human nature should remain
simply and solely the business of a few specialists; everyone,
it would seem, is called upon to form as correct an idea as possible
of what this particular aspect of human behaviour amounts to in
general. All the more so inasmuch as really rational, acceptable
ideas about it, the conception that linguistics has eventually
reached, by no means coincides with what at first sight seems
to be the case. There is no sphere in which more fantastic and
absurd ideas have arisen than in the study of languages. Language
is an object which gives rise to all kinds of mirage. Most interesting
of all, from a psychological point of view, are the errors language
produces. Everyone, left to his own devices, forms an idea about
what goes on in language which is very far from the truth.
Thus it is equally legitimate in that respect for linguistics
today to Claim to be able to put many ideas right, to throw light
on areas where the general run of scholars would be very liable
to go wrong and make very serious mistakes.
I have left on one side the question of languages and language
in order to discuss the object of linguistics and its possible
utility.
[4 November 1910]
Main sections of the course:
1) Languages 2) The
language 3) The language faculty and its
use by the individual.
Without for the moment distinguishing terminologically between
languages and language, where do we find the linguistic phenomenon
in its concrete, complete, integral form? That is: where do we
find the object we have to confront? With all its characteristics
as yet contained within it and unanalysed? This is a difficulty
which does not arise in many other disciplines - not having your
subject matter there in front of you. It would be a mistake to
believe that this integral, complete object can be grasped by
picking out whatever is most general. The operation of generalisation
presupposes that we have already investigated the object under
scrutiny in such a way as to be able to pronounce upon what its
general features are. What is general in language will not be
what we are looking for; that is, the object immediately given.
But nor must we focus on what is only part of it.
Thus, it is clear that the vocal apparatus has an importance which
may monopolise our attention, and when we have studied this articulatory
aspect of languages we shall soon realise that there is a corresponding
acoustic aspect. But even that does not go beyond purely material
considerations. It does not take us as far as the word, the combination
of the idea and the articulatory product; but if we take the combination
of the idea and the vocal sign, we must ask if this is to be studied
in the individual or in a society, a corporate body: we still
seem to be left with something which is incomplete. Proceeding
thus, we see that in catching hold of the language by one end
at random we are far from being able to grasp the whole phenomenon.
It may seem, after approaching our study from several angles
simultaneously, that there is no homogeneous entity which is the
language, but only a conglomerate of composite items (articulation
of a sound, idea connected to it) which must be studied piecemeal
and cannot be studied as an integral object.
The solution we can adopt is this:
In every individual there is a faculty which can be called the
faculty of articulated language. This faculty is available
to us in the first instance in the form of organs, and then by
the operations we can perform with those organs. But it is only
a faculty, and it would be a material impossibility to utilise
it in the absence of something else - a language - which is given
to the individual from outside: it is necessary that the individual
should be provided with this facility - with what we call a language
- by the combined effort of his fellows, here we see, incidentally,
perhaps the most accurate way of drawing a distinction between
language and languages. A language is necessarily social: language
is not especially so. The latter can be defined at the level
of the individual. It is an abstract thing and requires the human
being for its realisation. This faculty which exists in individuals
might perhaps be compared to others: man has the faculty of song,
for example; perhaps no one would invent a tune unless the community
gave a lead. A language presupposes that all the individual users
possess the organs. By distinguishing between the language and
the faculty of language, we distinguish 1) what
is social from what is individual, 2) what is
essential from what is more or less accidental. As a matter of
fact, we shall see later on that it is the combination of the
idea with a vocal sign which suffices to constitute the whole
language. Sound production - that is what falls within the domain
of the faculty of the individual and is the individual's responsibility.
But it is comparable to the performance of a musical masterpiece
on an instrument; many are capable of playing the piece of music,
but it is entirely independent of these various performances.
The acoustic image linked to an idea - that is what is essential
to the language. It is in the phonetic execution that all the
accidental things occur; for inaccurate repetition of what was
given is at the root of that immense class of facts, phonetic
changes, which are a host of accidents.
3) By distinguishing thus between the language
and the faculty of language, we see that the language is what
we may call a 'product': it is a 'social product'; we have
set it apart from the operation of the vocal apparatus, which
is a permanent action. You can conjure up a very precise idea
of this product - and thus set the language, so to speak, materially
in front of you - by focussing on what is potentially in the brains
of a set of individuals (belonging to one and the same community)
even when they are asleep; we can say that in each of these heads
is the whole product that we call the language. We can say that
the object to be studied is the hoard deposited in the brain of
each one of us; doubtless this hoard, in any individual case,
will never turn Out to be absolutely complete. We can say that
language always works through a language', without that, it does
not exist. The language, in turn, is quite independent of the
individual; it cannot be a creation of the individual-, it is
essentially social; it presupposes the collectivity. Finally,
its only essential feature is the combination of sound and acoustic
image with an idea. (The acoustic image is the impression that
remains with us the latent impression in the brain (D.)). There
is no need to conceive it (the language) as necessarily spoken
all the time.
Let us come down to details; let us consider the language as a
social product. Among social products, it is natural to ask whether
there is any other which offers a parallel.
The American linguist Whitney who, about 1870, became very
influential through his book The principles and the life of
language, caused astonishment by comparing languages to social
Institutions, saying that they fell in general into the great
class of social institutions. In this, he was on the right track-,
his ideas are in agreement with mine. 'It is, in the end, fortuitous,'
he said, 'that men made use of the larynx, lips and tongue in
order to speak. They discovered it was more convenient; but if
they had used visual signs, or hand signals, the language would
remain in essence exactly the same: nothing would have changed.'
This was right, for he attributed no great importance to execution.
Which comes down to what I was saying: the only change would
be the replacement of the acoustic images I mentioned by visual
images. Whitney wanted to eradicate the idea that in the case
of a language we are dealing with a natural faculty; in fact,
social institutions stand opposed to natural institutions.
Nevertheless, you cannot find any social institution that can
be set on a par with a language and is comparable to it. There
are very many differences. The very special place that a language
occupies among institutions is undeniable, but there is much more
to be said-, a comparison would tend rather to bring out the differences.
In a general way, institutions such as legal institutions, or
for instance a set ,of rituals, or a ceremony established once
and for all, have many characteristics which make them like languages,
and the changes they undergo over time a.-e very reminiscent of
linguistic changes. But there are enormous differences.
1) No other institution involves all the individuals
all the time; no other is open to all in such a way that each
person participates in it and naturally influences it.
2) Most institutions can be improved, corrected
at certain times, reformed by an act of will, whereas on the contrary
we see that such an initiative is impossible where languages are
concerned, that even academies cannot change by decree the course
taken by the institution we call the language, etc.
Before proceeding further, another idea must be introduced: that
of semiological facts in societies. Let us go back to
the language considered as a product of society at work: it is
a set of signs fixed by agreement between the members of that
society; these signs evoke ideas, but in that respect it's rather
like rituals, for instance.
Nearly all institutions, it might be said, are based on signs,
but these signs do not directly evoke things. In all societies
we find this phenomenon: that for various purposes systems of
signs are established that directly evoke the ideas one wishes;
it is obvious that a language is one such system, and that it
is the most important of them all; but it is not the only one,
and consequently we cannot leave the others out of account. A
language must thus be classed among semiological institutions;
for example, ships' signals (visual signs), army bugle calls,
the sign language of the deaf-and-dumb, etc. Writing is likewise
a vast system of signs. Any psychology of sign systems will be
part of social psychology - that is to say, will be exclusively
social; it will involve the same psychology as is applicable in
the case of languages. The laws governing changes in these systems
of signs will often be significantly similar to laws of linguistic
change. This can easily be seen in the case of writing - although
the signs are visual signs - which undergoes alterations comparable
to phonetic phenomena.
Having identified the language as a social product to be studied
in linguistics, one must add that language in humanity as a whole
is manifested in an infinite diversity of languages: a language
is the product of a society, but different societies do not have
the same language. Where does this diversity come from? Sometimes
it is a relative diversity, sometimes an absolute diversity, but
we have finally located the concrete object in this product that
can be supposed to be lodged in the brain of each of us. But
this product varies, depending On where you are in the world,
what is given is not only the language but languages. And the
linguist has no other choice than to study initially the diversity
of languages. He must first study languages, as many languages
as possible, and widen his horizons as far as he can. So this
is how we shall proceed. From the study and observation of these
languages, the linguist will be able to abstract general features,
retaining everything that seems essential and universal, and setting
aside what is particular and accidental. He will thus end up
with a set of abstractions, which will be the language. That
is what is summarised in the second section: the language. Under
'the language' I shall summarise what can be observed in the different
languages.
3) However, there is still the individual to
be examined, since it is clear that what creates general phenomena
is the collaboration of all the individuals involved. Consequently
we have to take a look at how language operates in the individual.
This individual implementation of the social product is not a
part of the object I have defined. This third chapter reveals,
so to speak, what lies underneath - the individual mechanism,
which cannot ultimately fail to have repercussions in one way
or another on the general product, but which must not be confused,
for purposes of study, with that general product, from which it
is quite separate.
[8 November 1910]
Part One: Languages
This heading contrasts with that of my second chapter: the language.
There is no point in giving a more detailed specification and
the meaning of these two contrasting headings is sufficiently
self-evident. Just as, although comparisons with the natural
sciences must not be abused, it would likewise be immediately
evident what was meant in a work on natural history by contrasting
'the plant' with 'plants' (c.f. also .'insects, versus 'the insect').
These divisions would correspond reasonably well even in content
to what we shall get in linguistics if we distinguish between
'the language' and 'languages'. Some botanists and naturalists
devote their entire careers to one approach or the other. There
are botanists who classify plants without concerning themselves
with the circulation of the sap, etc., that is to say, without
concerning themselves with 'the plant'.
Considerations relevant to the language (and equally to some extent
to languages as well) will lead us to consider languages from
an external point of view, without making any internal analysis;
but the distinction is not hard and fast, for the detailed study
of the history of a language or of a group of languages is perfectly
well accommodated under the heading 'languages', and that presupposes
internal analysis. To some extent one could also say that in
my second part 'the language' could be expanded to read 'the life
of the language', that this second part would contain things of
importance for the characterisation of the language, and that
these things are all part of a life, a biology. But there are
other things that would not be included: among others, the whole
logical side of the language, involving invariables unaffected
by time or geographical boundaries. Languages constitute the
concrete object that the linguist encounters on the earth's surface;
'the language' is the heading one can provide for whatever generalisations
the linguist may be able to extract from all his observations
across time and space.
[30 June 1911]
Reversing the order of the two series I have considered, we can
say that the mind establishes just two orders of relations between
words.
1) Outside speech, the association that is made
in the memory between words having something in common creates
different groups, series, families, within which very diverse
relations obtain but belonging to a single category: these are
associative relations.
2) Within speech, words are subject to a kind
of relation that is independent of the first and based on their
linkage: these are syntagmatic relations, of which I have spoken.
Here of course there is a problem, because the second order of
relations appears to appeal to facts of speech and not linguistic
facts. But the language itself includes such relations, even if
only in compound words (German Hauptmann), or even in a
word like Dummheit, or expressions like s'il vous plait
['if you please'] where a syntagmatic relation holds.
When we speak of the structure of a word, we are referring to
the second kind of relation: these are units arranged end to end
as exponents of certain relations. If we speak of something like
a flexional paradigm (dominus, domini, domino) we are referring
to a group based on associative relations. These are not units
arranged end to end and related in a certain way in virtue of
that fact.
Magn-animus: the relation involving animus is syntagmatic.
Idea expressed by juxtaposition of the two parts in sequence.
Nowhere, either in magn or in animus do you find
something meaning 'possessing a great soul'.
If you take animus in relation to anima and animal,
it is a different order of relations. There is an associative
family:
animus
anima
animal
Neither order of relations is reducible to the other: both are
operative.
If we compare them to the parts of a building: columns will stand
in a. certain relation to a frieze they support. These two components
are related in a wax which is comparable to the syntagmatic relation.
It is an arrangement of two co-present units. If I see a Doric
column, I might link it by association with a series of objects
that are not present, associative relations (Ionic column, Corinthian
column).
The sum total of word relations that the mind associates with
any word that is present gives a virtual series, a series formed
by the memory (a mnemonic series), as opposed to a chain, a syntagma
formed by two units present together. This is an actual
series, as opposed to a virtual series, and gives rise to other
relations.
The conclusion I should like to draw from this is as follows:
in whichever order of relations a words functions (it is required
to function in both), a word is always, first and foremost, a
member of a system, interconnected with other words, sometimes
in one order of relations, sometimes in another.
This will have to be taken into account in considering what constitutes
value. First, it was necessary to consider words as terms
in a system.
As soon as we substitute term for word, this implies
consideration of its relations with others (appeal to the idea
of interconnections with other words).
We must not begin with the word, the term, in order to construct
the system. This would be to suppose that the terms have an absolute
value given in advance, and that you have only to pile them up
one on top of the other in order to reach the system. On the
contrary, one must start from the system, the interconnected whole;
this may be decomposed into particular terms, although these are
not so easily distinguished as it seems. Starting from the whole
of the system of values, in order to distinguish the various values,
it is possible that we shall encounter words as recognisable series
of terms. (Incidentally: associatively, I can summon up the word
dominos just as easily as domino, domine, domin-?; syntagmatically,
I have to choose either dominos or domini.)
Attach no importance to the word word. The word word
as far as I am concerned has no specific meaning here. The word
term is sufficient; furthermore, the word word does
not mean the same in the two series.
Chapter V. Value of terms and meanings of words.
How the two coincide and differ.
Where there are terms, there are also values. The idea of value
is tacitly implied in that of term. Always hard to keep these
two ideas apart.
When you speak of value, you feel it here becomes synonymous with
sense (meaning) and that points to another area of confusion
(here the confusion will reside more in the things themselves).
The value is indeed an element of the sense, but what matters
is to avoid taking the sense as anything other than a value.
It is perhaps one of the most subtle points there is in linguistics,
to see how sense depends on but nevertheless remains distinct
from value. On this the linguist's view and the simplistic view
that sees the language as a nomenclature differ strikingly.
First let us take meaning as I have represented it and have myself
set it out:
The arrow indicates meaning as counterpart of the auditory image
In this view, the meaning is the counterpart of the auditory image
and nothing else. The word appears, or is taken as, an isolated,
self-contained whole; internally, it contains the auditory image
having a concept as its counterpart.
The paradox - in Baconian terms the trap in the 'cave' - is this:
the meaning, which appears to us to be the counterpart of the
auditory image, is just as much the counterpart of terms coexisting
in the language. We have just seen that the language represents
a system in which all the terms appear as linked by relations.
At first sight, no relation between the a) and the b)
arrows. The value of a word will be the result only of the coexistence
of the different terms. The value is the counterpart of the coexisting
terms. How does that come to be confused with the counterpart
of the auditory image?
Another diagram: series of slots:
the relation inside one slot and between slots is
very hard to distinguish.
The meaning as counterpart of the image and the meaning as counterpart
of coexisting terms merge.
Before example, note that: Outside linguistics, value always seems
to involve the same paradoxical truth. Tricky area. Very difficult
in any domain to say what value consists of. So let us be very
wary. There are two elements comprising value. Value is determined
1) by a dissimilar thing that can be exchanged,
and that can be marked | [an up-arrow] and 2) by similar things that can be compared <- -> [left-right arrows].
These two elements are essential for value. For example, a 20-franc
coin. Its value is a matter of a dissimilar thing that I can
exchange (e.g. pounds of bread), 2) the comparison between the
20-franc coin and one-franc and two-franc coins, etc., or coins
of similar value (guinea).
The value is at the same time the counterpart of the one and the
counterpart of the other.
You can never find the meaning of a word by considering only the
exchangeable item, but you have to compare the similar series
of comparable words. You cannot take words in isolation. This
is how the system to which the term belongs is one of the sources
of value. It is the sum of comparable terms set against the idea
exchanged.
The value of a word can never be determined except by the contribution
of coexisting terms which delimit it: or, to insist on the paradox
already mentioned: what is in the word is only ever determined
by the contribution of what exists around it. (What is in the
word is the value.) Around it syntagmatically or around it associatively.
You must approach the word from outside by starting from the system
and coexisting terms.
A few examples.
The plural and whatever terms mark the plural.
The value of a German or Latin plural is not the value of a Sanskrit
plural. But the meaning, if you like, is the same.
In Sanskrit, there is the dual.
Anyone who assigns the same value to the Sanskrit plural as to
the Latin plural is mistaken because I cannot use the Sanskrit
plural in all the cases where I use the Latin plural.
Why is that? The value depends on something outside.
If you take on the other hand a simple lexical fact, any word
such as, I suppose, mouton - mutton, it doesn't have the
same value as sheep in English. For if you speak of the
animal on the hoof and not on the table, you say sheep.
It is the presence in the language of a second term that limits
the value attributable to sheep.
mutton / sheep / mouton (Restrictive example.)
So the | arrow is not enough. The <- -> arrows must always be
taken into account.
Something similar in the example of decrepit.
How does it come about that an old man who is decrepit and
a wall that is decrepit have a similar sense?
It is the influence of the neighbouring word. What happens to
decrepit (an old man) comes from the coexistence of the
neighbouring term decrepit (a wall).
Example of contagion.
[4 July 1911]
It is not possible even to determine what the value of
the word sun is in itself without considering all the neighbouring
words which will restrict its sense. There are languages in which
I can say: Sit in the sun. In others, not the same
meaning for the word sun (= star). The sense of a term
depends on presence or absence of a neighbouring term.
The system leads to the term and the term to the value. Then you
will see that the meaning is determined by what surrounds it.
I shall also refer back to the preceding chapters, but in the
proper way, via the system, and not starting from the word in
isolation.
To get to the notion of value, I have chosen to start from the
system of words as opposed to the word in isolation. I could
have chosen a different basis to start from.
Psychologically, what are our ideas, apart from our language ?
They probably do not exist. Or in a form that may be described
as amorphous. We should probably be unable according to philosophers
and linguists to distinguish two ideas clearly without the help
of a language (internal language naturally).
Consequently, in itself, the purely conceptual mass of our ideas,
the mass separated from the language, is like a kind of shapeless
nebula, in which it is impossible to distinguish anything initially.
The same goes, then, for the language: the different ideas represent
nothing pre-existing. There are no: a) ideas
already established and quite distinct from one another, b)
signs for these ideas. But there is nothing at all distinct in
thought before the linguistic sign. This is the main thing.
On the other hand, it is also worth asking if, beside this entirely
indistinct realm of ideas, the realm of sound offers in advance
quite distinct ideas (taken in itself apart from the idea).
There are no distinct units of sound either, delimited in advance.
The linguistic fact is situated in between the two:
This linguistic fact will engender values which for the first
time will be determinate, but which nevertheless will remain values,
in the sense that can be attached to that word. There is even
something to add to the fact itself, and I come back to it now.
Not only are these two domains between which the linguistic fact
is situated amorphous, but the choice of connection between the
two, the marriage (of the two) which will create value is perfectly
arbitrary.
Otherwise the values would be to some extent absolute. If it were
not arbitrary, this idea of value would have to be restricted,
there would be an absolute element.
But since this contract is entirely arbitrary, the values will
be entirely relative.
If we go back now to the diagram representing the signified and
signifying elements together
we see that it is doubtless justified but is only a secondary
product of value. The signified element alone is nothing, it
blurs into a shapeless mass. Likewise the signifying element.
But the signifying and signified elements contract a bond in virtue
of the determinate values that are engendered by the combination
of such and such acoustic signs with such and such cuts that can
be made in the mass. What would have to be the case in order
to have this relation between signified and signifying elements
given in itself ? It would above all be necessary that the idea
should be determinate in advance, and it is not. It would above
all be necessary that the signified element should be something
determined in advance, and it is not.
That is why this relation is only another expression of values
in contrast (in the system). That is true on any linguistic level.
A few examples. If ideas were predetermined in the human
mind before being linguistic values, one thing that would necessarily
happen is that terms would correspond exactly as between one language
and another.
FrenchGerman
cher ['dear']lieb, teuer (also moral)
There is no exact correspondence.
juger, estimer['judge, estimate']urteilen, erachtenhave a set of meanings only partly coinciding with French juger, estimer .
We see that in advance of the language there is nothing which
is the notion 'cher' in itself. So we see that this representation:
although useful, is only a way of expressing the fact that there
is in French a certain value cher delimited in French system by
contrast with other terms.
It will be a certain combination of a certain quantity of concepts
with a certain quantity of sounds.
So the schema is not the starting point in the language.
The value cher is determined on both sides. The contours
of the idea itself is what we are given by the distribution of
ideas in the words of a language. Once we have the contours, the
schema can come into play.
This example was taken from vocabulary, but anything will do.
Another example. Idea of different tenses, which seems quite
natural to us, is quite alien to certain languages. As in the
Semitic system (Hebrew) there is no distinction, as between present,
future and past; that is to say these ideas of tense are not predetermined,
but exist only as values in one language or another.
Old German has no future, no proper form for the future. It expresses
it by means of the present. But this is a manner, of speaking.
Hence Old German present value is not the same as in French future.
Similarly if we take the difference between the perfective aspect
of the verb and the imperfective aspect in the Slavic languages
(difficulty in the study of these languages). In Slavic languages,
constant distinction between aspects of the verb: action outside
any question of time or in process of accomplishment. We find
these distinctions difficult because the categories are unfamiliar.
So not predetermined, but value.
This value will result from the opposition of terms in the language.
Hence what I have just said: The notion of value was deduced from
the indeterminacy of concepts. The schema linking the signified
to the signifying element is not a primary schema. Value cannot
be determined by the linguist any more than in other domains:
we take it with all its clarity and obscurity.
To sum up, the word does not exist without a signified as well
as a signifying element. But the signified element is only a
summary of the linguistic value, presupposing the mutual interaction
of terms, in each language system.
Chapter VI
In a later chapter, if I have time: What I have said by focussing
on the term value can be alternatively expressed by laying down
the following principle: in the language (that is, a language
state) there are only differences. Difference implies to our
mind two positive terms between which the difference is established.
But the paradox is that: In the language, there are only differences,
without positive terms. That is the paradoxical truth. At least,
there are only differences if you are speaking either of meanings,
or of signified or signifying elements.
When you come to the terms themselves, resulting from relations
between signifying and signified elements you can speak of oppositions.
Strictly speaking there are no signs but differences between signs.
Example in Czech: zhena, 'woman'; genitive plural, zhen.
It is clear that in the language one sign is as good as another.
Here there is none.
(zhena, zhen functions as well as zhena, gen. pl.
zhenu which existed previously.)
[This example shows that only the difference between signs is
operative.
zhenu works because it is different from zhena.
zhen works because it is different from zhena.
There are only differences; no positive term at all.
Here I am speaking of a difference in the signifying element.
The mechanism of signifying elements is based on differences.
Likewise for signified elements, there are only differences that
will be governed by differences of an acoustic nature. The idea
of a future will exist more or less, depending on whether the
differences established by signs of the language (between the
future and the rest) are more or less marked.
Aller ['to go'] functions because it is different from
allant ['going'] and allons ['(we) go'].
aller | allons | allant
English going = aller, allant
Unsegmented, given no acoustic difference between two ideas, the
ideas themselves will not be differentiated, at any rate as much
as in French.
So the whole language system can be envisaged as sound differences
combined with differences between ideas.
There are no positive ideas given, and there are no determinate
acoustic signs that are independent of ideas. Thanks to the fact
that the differences are mutually dependent, we shall get something
looking like positive terms through the matching of a certain
difference of ideas with a certain difference in signs. We shall
then be able to speak of the opposition of terms and so not claim
that there are only differences (because of this positive element
in the combination).
In the end, the principle it comes down to is the fundamental
principle of the arbitrariness of the sign.
It is only through the differences between signs that it will
be possible to give them a function, a value.
If the sign were not arbitrary, one would not be able to say that
in the language there are only differences.
The link with the chapter entitled Absolute arbitrariness,
relative arbitrariness is this: I have considered the
word as a term placed in a system, that is to say as a value.
Now the interconnection of terms in the system can be conceived
as a limitation on arbitrariness, whether through syntagmatic
interconnection or associative interconnection.
So: In couperet syntagma between root and suffix,
as opposed to hache.
(Interconnection, syntagmatic link between the two elements.)
Hache ['axe'] is absolutely arbitrary, couperet ['chopper']
is relatively motivated (syntagmatic association with coupe ['chop']),
couperet hache syntagmatic limitation absolutely arbitrary.
plu ['pleased'] plaire ['to please']associative limitation
In this course only the external part is more or less complete.
In the internal part, evolutionary linguistics has been
neglected in favour of synchronic linguistics and I have dealt
only with a few general principles of linguistics.
These general principles provide the basis for a productive approach
to the details of a static state or the law of static states.
Further Reading:
Biography |
Weber |
Jakobson |
Durkheim |
Barthes |
Lévi-Strauss |
Derrida
Marxist Psychology |
Vygotsky
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org
|
./articles/Barthes-Roland/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.subject.philosophy.works.fr.durkheim | <body>
<p class="title">Emile Durkheim (1914)</p>
<img src="../../../../../glossary/people/d/pics/durkheim.jpg" hspace="12" vspace="2" align="RIGHT" alt="Durkheim">
<h4>from Pragmatism and Sociology</h4>
<h1><i>Pragmatism & the Question of Truth</i></h1>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source</span>: <em>Pragmatism & Sociology</em> publ. by Cambridge University Press, 1983. The latter 8 of the twenty lectures plus one of two appendices reproduced here.</p>
<hr class="end">
<h3>The General Spirit of Pragmatism</h3>
<p class="fst">
It has been said that pragmatism is above all an attempt to <em>liberate
the will</em>. If the world is to solicit our activity, we must
be able to change it; and for that to occur, it must be malleable.
Things are not chiefly important for what they are, but for what
they are worth. The basis of our action is a hierarchy of values
which we ourselves have established. Our action is therefore
only worthwhile if that system of values can be realised, made
incarnate, in our world. Pragmatism thus gives a meaning to action.</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, this preoccupation with action, which has been seen
as the defining characteristic of pragmatism, is not, in my view,
its major feature. Man's burning desire to transform things is
apparent in the thought of all the idealists. When we have an
ideal, we see the world as something obliged to conform to it.
Pragmatism, however, is not a form of idealism, but a radical
empiricism. What is there in it which could justify such a desire
to transform things? We have seen that for pragmatism there are
not two planes of existence, but only one, and consequently it
is impossible to see where the ideal could be located. As has
just been shown, God himself is an object of experience in pragmatist
doctrine.</p>
<p>
We can therefore conclude that pragmatism is much less of an undertaking
to encourage action than an attack on <em>pure speculation and
theoretical thought</em>. What is really characteristic of it
is an impatience with any rigorous intellectual discipline. It
aspires to 'liberate' thought much more than it does action.
Its ambition, as James says, is to 'make the truth more supple'.
We shall see later what reasons it adduces to support its view
that truth must not remain 'rigid'.</p>
<h3>THIRTEENTH LECTURE<br>
General criticism of pragmatism</h3>
<p class="fst">
We can now move on to the general discussion of pragmatist doctrines.</p>
<p>
They can, first of all, be criticised for certain gaps in them.
As I have already pointed out, the pragmatists often take too
many liberties with historical doctrines. They interpret them
as they wish, and often rather inexactly.</p>
<p>
Above all, however, we must indicate the <em>abstract nature </em>of
their argument, since it clashes with the general orientation,
which they claim is empirical, of their doctrine. Most of the
time, their proofs have a <em>dialectical </em>character; everything
is reduced to a purely logical construction. This provides one
contradiction.</p>
<p>
But their thought presents other flagrant contradictions. Here
is an example: on the one hand, we are told that consciousness
as such does <em>not exist</em>, that it is nothing original, that
it is neither a factor <em>sui generis</em> nor a true reality,
but is only a simple echo, a 'vain noise' left behind by the 'soul'
that has vanished from the heaven of philosophy. This, as we know,
is the theme of the famous article, 'Does consciousness exist?',
a theme which James took up again in the form of a communication
in French to the Congress of 1905. On the other hand, however,
the pragmatists maintain that reality is a <em>construction</em>
of thought, that reality is apperception itself. In so doing they
attribute to thought the same power and the same qualities as
the idealists ascribe to it. They urge both epiphenomenalism
and idealism, two incompatible theses. Pragmatism therefore lacks
those basic characteristics which one has the right to expect
of a philosophical doctrine.</p>
<p>
Here we must ask ourselves a question. How does it happen that,
with such defects, pragmatism has imposed itself on so many minds?
It must be based on something in the human consciousness and
have a strength that we have yet to discover.</p>
<h4>The Fundamental Motivation of the Pragmatist Attitude</h4>
<p class="fst">
Let us ask ourselves, then, what feeling animates the doctrine,
what motivation is its essential factor. I have said already
that it is not a practical need, a need to extend the field of
human action. There is, to be sure, particularly in James, a
liking for risk, a need for adventure; he prefers an uncertain,
'malleable' world to a fixed and immobile world, because it is
a world in which there is something to do. This is certainly
the ideal of the strong man who wishes to expand the field of
his activity. But how, then, can the same philosopher show us
as an ideal the ascetic who renounces the world and turns away
from it?</p>
<p>
Actually, pragmatism has not been concerned with picturing a particular
ideal for us. Its dominant trait is the need to 'soften the truth',
to make it 'less rigid', as James says - to free it, in short,
from the discipline of logical thought. This appears very clearly
in James's <em>The Will to Believe</em> .Once this is posited, everything
becomes clear. If thought had as its object simply to 'reproduce'
reality, it would be the slave of things, and chained to reality.
It would simply have to slavishly 'copy' the reality before it.
If thought is to be freed, it must become the creator of its
own object, and the only way to attain this goal is to give it
a reality to make or construct. Therefore, <em>thought has as
its aim not the reproduction of a datum, but the construction
of a future reality</em>. It follows that the value of ideas can
no longer be assessed by reference to objects but must be determined
by their degree of utility, their more or less 'advantageous'
character.</p>
<p>
We can thus see the scope of the pragmatist theses. If, in classical
rationalism, thought has this character of 'rigidity', for which
pragmatism criticises it, it is because in rationalism truth is
conceived of as a simple thing, a thing quasi-divine, that draws
its whole value from itself. Since it is seen as sufficient unto
itself, it is necessarily placed above human life. It cannot
conform to the demands of circumstances and differing temperaments.
It is valid by itself and is good with an absolute goodness.
It does not exist for our sake, but for its own. Its role is
to let itself be contemplated. It is so to speak deified; it
becomes the object of a real cult. This is still Plato's conception.
It extends to the faculty by means of which we attain truth,
that is, reason. Reason serves to explain things to us, but,
in this conception, itself remains unexplained; it is placed outside
scientific analysis.</p>
<p>
'To soften' the truth is to take from it this absolute and as
it were sacrosanct character. It is to tear it away from this
state of immobility that removes it from all becoming, from all
change and, consequently, from all explanation. Imagine that
instead of being thus confined in a separate world, it is itself
part of reality and life, not by a kind of fall or degradation
that would disfigure and corrupt it, but because it is naturally
part of reality and life.' It is placed in the series of facts,
at the very heart of things having antecedents and consequences.
It poses problems: we are authorised to ask ourselves where it
comes from, what good it is and so on. It becomes itself an object
of knowledge. Herein lies the interest of the pragmatist enterprise:
we can see it as an effort to understand truth and reason themselves,
to restore to them their human interest, to make of them human
things that derive from temporal causes and give rise to temporal
consequences. To 'soften' truth is to make it into something
that can be analysed and explained.</p>
<p>
It is here that we can establish a PARALLEL BETWEEN PRAGMATISM
AND SOCIOLOGY. By applying the <em>historical</em> point of view
to the order of things human, sociology is led to set itself the
same problem. Man is a product of history and hence of becoming;
there is nothing in him that is either given or defined in advance.
History begins nowhere and it ends nowhere. Everything in man
has been made by mankind in the course of time. Consequently,
if truth is human, it too is a human product. Sociology applies
the same conception to reason. All that constitutes reason, its
principles and categories, has been made in the course of history.</p>
<p>
Everything is a product of certain causes. Phenomena must not
be represented in closed series: things have a 'circular' character,
and analysis can be prolonged to infinity. This is why I can
accept neither the statement of the idealists, that <em>in the
beginning there is thought</em>, nor that of the pragmatists, that
<em>in the </em>beginning <em>there is action</em>.</p>
<p>
But if sociology poses the problem in the same way as does pragmatism,
it is in a better position to solve it. The latter, in fact,
claims to explain truth psychologically and subjectively. However,
the nature of the individual is too limited to explain alone all
things human. Therefore, if we envisage individual elements alone,
we are led to diminish unduly the amplitude of the effects that
we have to account for. How could reason, in particular, have
arisen in the course of the experiences undergone by a single
individual? Sociology provides us with broader explanations.
For it, truth, reason and morality are the results of a becoming
that includes the entire unfolding of human history.</p>
<p>
Thus we see the advantage of the sociological over the pragmatist
point of view. For the pragmatist philosophers, as we have already
said several times, experience can take place <em>on one level
only</em>. Reason is placed on the same plane as sensitivity;
truth, on the same plane as sensations and instincts. But men
have always recognised in truth something that in certain respects
imposes itself on us, something that is independent of the facts
of sensitivity and individual impulse. Such a universally held
conception of truth must correspond to something real. It is
one thing to cast doubt on the correspondence between symbols
and reality; but it is quite another to reject the thing symbolised
along with the symbol. This pressure that truth is seen as exercising
on minds is itself a symbol that must be interpreted, even if
we refuse to make of truth something absolute and extra-human.</p>
<p>
Pragmatism, which levels everything, deprives itself of the means
of making this interpretation by failing to recognise the <em>duality</em>
that exists between the mentality which results from individual
experiences and that which results from collective experiences.
Sociology, however, reminds us that what is <em>social</em> always
possesses a higher dignity than what is individual. It can be
assumed that truth, like reason and morality, will always retain
this character of being a higher value. This in no way prevents
us from trying to explain it. The sociological point of view
has the advantage of enabling us to analyse even that august thing,
truth.</p>
<p>
Until now there has been no particularly urgent need to choose
between the points of view of sociology and pragmatism. In contrast
to rationalism, pragmatism sees clearly that error does not lie
on one side and truth on the other, but that in reality truths
and errors are mixed, the latter having often been moments in
the evolution of truth. In the history of creations, there are
unforeseeable novelties. How, then, could truth be conceived
of as something fixed and definitive?</p>
<p>
But <em>the reasons that pragmatism adduces </em>to support this
idea are susceptible to a great many objections. Moreover, the
fact that things change does not necessarily mean that truth changes
at the same time. Truth, one could say, <em>is enriched; </em>but
it does not really change. It has certainly been enlarged and
increased in the course of the development of history; but saying
that truth grows is quite different from saying that it varies
in its very nature.</p>
<h3>FOURTEENTH LECTURE<br>
The variations of truth</h3>
<p class="fst">
Let us return to the reasons that pragmatism gives in order to
prove that truth is subject to change. There are really two:
(<span class="term">1</span>) truth cannot be immutable because reality
itself is not immutable; hence truth changes in time. (<span class="term">2</span>)
Truth cannot be one because this oneness would be incompatible
with the diversity of minds; hence truth changes in space. </p>
<p>
<span class="term">1</span> In order to be able to say that truth has varied
in time, one would have to show that a proposition can legitimately
be considered true at a given moment and in particular circumstances,
and that this same proposition at another moment and in other
circumstances cannot be held to be true, even though it relates
to the same object. This has not been shown. Pragmatism alleges
that reality has changed; but does this mean that old truths become
false? Reality can evolve without truth thereby ceasing to be
truth. The laws of the physical world, for example, have remained
what they were when life first appeared, and as the biological
world has taken form.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">2</span> The pragmatists base their case on the diversity
of individual minds. But does progress perhaps not consist precisely
in the removal of individual differences? Will the pragmatist
then maintain that truth belongs only to the individual? This
is a paradox that pragmatism itself has not dared to attempt to
resolve. Nor do the pragmatists explain what relationship there
is between the diversity of minds and the diversity of truth.
From the fact that in penetrating individual minds, truth takes
on diverse forms, it does not follow that truth in itself is multiple.
In short, pragmatism offers no proof of the thesis that it advances,
the thesis that <em>truth is amorphous.</em></p>
<p>
Yet this thesis is not without some foundation, for it rests on
certain facts. However, these facts, which the pragmatists sense
only vaguely, must be restored to their true meaning. Let us
see what explanation of them is offered by sociology.</p>
<p>
Sociology introduces a <em>relativism</em> that rests on the relation
between the physical environment on the one hand and man on the
other. The physical environment presents a relative fixity.
It undergoes evolution, of course; but reality never ceases to
be what it was in order to give way to a reality of a new kind,
or to one consisting of new elements. The original world survives
under successive additions that enrich it. New realities were,
in a sense, already present in the old ones. The organic world
does not abolish the physical world and the social world has not
been formed in contradistinction to the organic world, but together
with it.</p>
<p>
The laws that ruled the movements of the primitive nebulae are
conserved in the stabilised universe of today. It seems that
in the organic world the era of great transformations closed with
the appearance of the human species. Can this be true of man
and the social milieux in which he lives? Social milieux are
the products of different elements, combined and fused together.
Our present-day French society is made up of Gallic, Germanic,
Roman and other elements; but these-elements can no longer be
discerned in an isolated state in our present civilisation, which
is something new and original, a synthesis which is the product
of a true creation. Social environments are thus different from
each other, since each of them presents something new. Therefore,
the institutions of which they are composed must also be different.
Nevertheless, these institutions fulfil the same functions as
those that preceded them. Thus it is that the family has evolved
in the course of history, but it has always remained the family
and has continued to fulfil the same functions. Each of the various
forms has been adapted to these functions. Similarly, we see
that the same ideal political regime cannot be suitable for all
types of societies. And yet the city regime was proper for the
ancient cities, just as our present political regime is suitable
for us. In the same way, there is no single morality, and we
cannot condemn as immoral the moral systems that preceded ours,
for the ideal that they represent was valid for the society in
which they were established. The same can be said for religion.
In sum, there is not one religion, one morality and one political
regime, but different types of religion, types of morality and
types of political organisation. In the practical order, diversity
may be considered as established.</p>
<p>
Why should things not be the same in the theoretical order, in
thought itself? If the value of a particular act has changed,
it means that speculative thought has changed, and if speculative
thought has changed, why should the content of truth not change
too?</p>
<p>
Action cannot be separated from thou ht. It is impossible for
us to say that the generations which preceded us were capable
of living in total error, in complete aberration. For false thoughts
produce erroneous acts. Thus if men had been completely mistaken
about the nature of things, their actions would not have been
the right ones; and their failures would have produced suffering
which would have led them to seek something else. Nothing authorises
us to think that the affective capacities of men of former times
were radically different from our own.</p>
<p>
Speculative and theoretical thought vary as practice varies.
Aesthetic speculation itself shows variations, each people has
its own aesthetic. Hence we tend to believe that speculation
and its value are variable and that consequently, truth, too,
is variable.</p>
<p>
These variations occur not only in time but also in space, that
is to say, not only from one type of historical society to another
but also among the individuals of the same society. In fact,
an excess of homogeneity within a society would be its death.
No social group can live or - more particularly - progress in
absolute homogeneity. Both intellectual and practical life, both
thought and action, need diversity, which is, consequently, a
condition of truth. We have moved beyond the intellectual excommunication
of all those who do not think as we do. We respect the truths
of others. We tolerate them, and this tolerance is no longer
the sort that preceded the development of our modern civilisation.
It is not the kind of tolerance that has its source in weariness
(as happened at the end of the wars of religion), nor is it the
kind that is born of a feeling of charity. Rather it is the tolerance
of the intellectual, of the scientist, who knows that truth is
a complex thing and understands that it is very likely that no
one of us will see the whole of all its aspects. Such tolerance
mistrusts all orthodoxy, but it does not prevent the investigator
from expressing the truth as he feels it.</p>
<p>
It is in this way that the thesis enunciated by pragmatism is
justified from the sociological point of view. Considerations
of an abstract or metaphysical order cannot provide us with a
satisfactory explanation. It is provided instead by its heightened
sense of human reality, the feeling for the extreme variability
of everything human. We can no longer accept a single, invariable
system of categories or intellectual frameworks. The frameworks
that had a reason to exist in past civilisations do not have it
today. It goes without saying that this removes none of the value
that they had for their own eras. Variability in time and variability
in space are, moreover, closely connected. If the conditions
of life in society are complex, it is naturally to be expected
that this complexity and with it many variations are to be found
in the individuals who make up the social groups.</p>
<h4>How these Variations can be Explained</h4>
<p class="fst">
Given this variability of truth in time and space, let us see
what explanation of it pragmatism offers. (So far, of course,
we have seen this dual variability posited, but not explained.)</p>
<p>
Pragmatism gives us the 'why' of these variations very briefly:
<em>it is the useful that is true</em>. However, it finds the attempt
to demonstrate this proposition a far from easy undertaking.
In our view, the proper way to do this would very probably be
to take all the propositions recognised as true and determine
whether or not they are useful and, if so, how. But such a procedure
would be contrary to the method of pragmatism. If, as pragmatism
maintains, there is no true idea but that constructed, there can
be no given or established idea of truth that can be verified.</p>
<p>
Pragmatism attempts to show that its own <em>theory</em> of truth
is useful. For it, the important thing is not so much what truth
really is but what it must be, even if it is recognised by no
one. What the pragmatists are trying to determine is the <em>ideal</em>
notion of truth. But how can we know that the notion thus constructed
is really the ideal one? Pragmatism can call anything it pleases
'ideal truth'. Therefore, its method is arbitrary and leads to
a purely verbal definition with no objective validity. It is
analogous to the method used by the classical moralists when they
try to determine the ideal notion of morality, a notion which
may well be unrelated to morality as it is actually practised.
But just as it is better to begin by studying moral facts, the
best method of establishing an ideal notion of truth seems to
consist in observing the characteristics of recognised truths.</p>
<p>
That is only a question of method, however. Much more important
is the pragmatist thesis itself. We shall see that the proposition
that <em>the useful is the true</em> is a formula that brings us
back to utilitarianism. The pragmatist theory of truth is a <em>logical
utilitarianism</em>.</p>
<h3>FIFTEENTH LECTURE<br>
Truth and utility</h3>
<p class="fst">
Before examining the value of pragmatism as a form of logical
utilitarianism, let us look first at the characteristics of truth.
We see at once that it is linked to:</p>
<p>
<span class="term">1</span> a<em> moral obligation</em>. Truth cannot be
separated from a certain moral character. In every age, men have
felt that they <em>were obliged</em> to seek truth. In truth, there
is something which commands respect, and a moral power to which
the mind feels properly bound to assent; </p>
<p>
<span class="term">2</span> a <em>de facto necessitating power. </em>There
is a more or less physical impossibility of not admitting the
truth. When our mind perceives a true representation, we feel
that we cannot not accept it as true. The true idea <em>imposes
itself </em>on us. It is this character that is expressed in the
old theory of the <em>evident</em> nature of truth; there emanates
from truth an irresistible light.</p>
<p>
Is pragmatism, as a form of logical utilitarianism, capable of
explaining these two characters? It can explain <em>neither</em>
of them. </p>
<p>
<span class="term">1</span> Seeking the useful is following nature, not
mastering it or taming it. There is no place here for the <em>moral
constraint</em> implied in the idea of obligation. Pragmatism
indeed cannot entail a hierarchy of values, since everything in
it is placed on the same level. The true and the good are both
on our level, that of the useful, and no effort is needed to lift
ourselves to it. For James, the truth is what is 'expedient',
and it is because it is advantageous that it is good and has value.
Clearly this means that truth has its demands, its loyalties,
and can give rise to enthusiasm, but at the level of the useful,
this enthusiasm is only related to what is capable of pleasing
us, that which is in conformity with our <em>interests.</em></p>
<p>
<span class="term">2</span> Nor is it possible to see how pragmatists could
explain the necessitating character of truth. Pragmatists believe
that it is we who construct both the world and the representations
which express it. We 'make' truth in conformity with our needs.
How then could it resist us? Pragmatism no doubt accepts that
beneath those intellectual constructions which make up truth there
is nevertheless a prime matter which we have not created. For
pragmatism, however, this prime matter is only an ideal limit
which we never reach, although we always tend towards it. It
is wiser, says Schiller, to ignore it, since absolute truth could
'give us no aid', and is rather an obstacle to a more adequate
knowledge of realities which are in effect accessible to us.
Besides that prime matter, there is of course the whole system
of mental organisation, acquired truths and 'previous truths'.
But that is 'a much less obdurately resisting factor' which 'often
ends by giving way': ideas are soft things, which we can twist
as we like when there is no objective reality (provided by sensations)
which prevents us from doing so.</p>
<p>
in short, when pragmatists speak of truth as something good, desirable
and attractive, one wonders whether a whole aspect of it has not
escaped them. Truth is often painful, and may well disorganise
thought and trouble the serenity of the mind. When man perceives
it, he is sometimes obliged to change his whole way of thinking.
This can cause a crisis which leaves him disconcerted and disabled.
If, for example, when he is an adult, he suddenly realises that
all his religious beliefs have no solid basis, he experiences
a moral collapse and his intellectual and affective life is in
a sense paralysed. This sense of confusion has been expressed
by Jouffroy in his famous article <em>Comment les dogmes finissent</em>.
Thus the truth is not always attractive and appealing. Very often
it resists us, is opposed to our desires and has a certain quality
of hardness.</p>
<p>
<span class="term">3</span> Truth has a third character, and one which
is undeniable: impersonality. The pragmatists themselves have
indicated this. But how can this character be reconciled with
their definition of truth? It has been said, with some justice,
that moral utilitarianism implies moral subjectivism. Is the
same not true of logical utilitarianism?</p>
<p>
The notion of the useful is, moreover, a very obscure one. Everything
is useful in relation to certain ends, and even the worst things
are useful from a certain point of view. Inversely, even the
best, such as knowledge, have their disadvantages and can cause
suffering: those ages in which knowledge has increased must have
been the most anguished. Any phenomenon has infinite repercussions
in the universe, some of them good and others bad. How could
we weigh advantages against drawbacks? It would probably be possible
to trace all effects back to a cause and consequently to a criterion
which would both be single and determining. One could, for example,
accept the existence of an impersonal and universal moral end
which all men are obliged to seek. But pragmatism excludes any
determination of this kind. The truth, says James, is what is
'expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run
and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the
experience in sight won't necessarily meet all further experiences
equally satisfactorily'. And yet not everything can be true.
A choice has to be made, but on what basis? Only on that of personal
experience. If something causes us more <em>satisfaction</em> than
discomfort, we can say that yes, it is useful. But the experience
of other people can be different. Although pragmatism does not
totally accept this consequence, truth can be totally subjective
in such conditions. It is a question of temperament: the temperament
of the ascetic, for example, and that of the man of action; both
have their reason for being, and thus correspond to two different
modes of action.</p>
<p>
But here a problem arises. If truth thus has a personal character,
how can <em>impersonal truth </em>be possible? Pragmatists see
it as the ideal final stage towards which all individual opinions
would ultimately converge." What then are the causes which
would determine such a convergence? Two are mentioned by the
pragmatists. (<span class="term">1</span>) just as experience varies with
individuals, so does its extent. The person who possesses the
widest and best-organised experience is in a better position to
see what is really useful. Gradually, his authority here imposes
itself and attracts the commendation of others. But is that a
decisive argument? Since all experience and all judgements are
essentially personal matters, the experience of others is valid
for them, but not for me. (<span class="term">2</span>) There are also
social considerations. 'Every recognition of a judgement by others
is a social problem', says Schiller. Everyone, in fact, has an
interest in acting in concert with his fellow men, since if he
does he feels himself to be stronger and consequently more efficient
and more 'useful'. But the usefulness of joint action implies
shared views, judgements and ideas. The pragmatists have not
disregarded this entirely. The difficulty is that we do not in
fact picture things as we desire them to be, and that the pragmatist
theses run the risk of making us not see this gap, and consequently
of making us see as true that which conforms to our desires.
In order to overcome this difficulty, we should have to agree
to see the general opinion, not as something artificial, but as
an authority capable of silencing the differences between individuals
and of countering the particularism of individual points of view.
If, however, public opinion is to be able to impose itself in
this way it is essential that it should have an extra-individual
origin. But this is not possible in pragmatist doctrine, since
it holds that individual judgements are at the root of all human
thought: no purely individual judgement could ever become an objective
truth.</p>
<p>
Moreover, above all these dialectics, there is one fact. If,
as pragmatism maintains, the 'common' truth was the product of
the gradual convergence of individual judgements, one would have
to be able to observe an ever-greater divergence between the ways
of thinking of individuals as one went further and further back
through history. However, what happens is exactly the opposite."
It is in the very earliest ages that men, in every social group,
all think in the same way. It is then that uniformity of thought
can be found. The great differences only begin to appear with
the very first Greek philosophers. The Middle Ages once again
achieved the very type of the intellectual consensus. Then came
the Reformation, and with it came heresies and schisms which were
to continue to multiply until we eventually came to realise that
everyone has the right to think as he wishes.</p>
<p>
Let us also go back in the series of propositions of pragmatist
doctrine. We see that if pragmatism defines the true as the useful,
it is because it has proposed the principle that truth is simply
an instrument of action. For pragmatism, truth <em>has no speculative
function</em>: all that concerns it is its <em>practical utility</em>.
For pragmatists, this speculative function is present only in
play and dreams. But for centuries humanity has lived on non-practical
truths, beliefs which were something quite other than 'instruments
of action'. <em>Myths</em> have no essentially practical character.
In primitive civilisations they are accepted for themselves,
and are objects of belief. They are not merely poetic forms.
They are groupings of representations aimed at explaining the
world, systems of ideas whose function is essentially speculative.
For a long time, myths were the means of expression of the intellectual
life of human societies. If men found a speculative interest
in them, it is because this need corresponded to a reality.</p>
<h3>SIXTEENTH LECTURE<br>
Speculation and practice</h3>
<p class="fst">
The pragmatist philosophers, and Schiller in particular, deny
that thought <em>has </em>a speculative value. How valid is that
opinion?</p>
<p>
It is contradicted by the facts. According to pragmatism, knowledge
is essentially a plan of action, and proposes practical ends to
be attained. Yet the <em>mythological beliefs</em> encountered
in primitive societies are cosmologies, and are directed not towards
the future but towards the past and the present. What lies at
the root of myths is not a practical need: it is the intellectual
need to understand. Basically, therefore, a rationalist mind
is present there, perhaps in an unsophisticated form, but nevertheless
enough to prove that the need to understand is universal and essentially
human.</p>
<p>
After mythology came <em>philosophy</em>, born from mythology, and
it too satisfies purely intellectual needs. The belief in the
existence of speculative truths has neither been a hallucination
nor a view more purely appropriate to Plato. It predates him
by a long time, and is affirmed in all the philosophers. It is
true that from a very early age philosophy set itself practical
problems, both moral and political. But even if it tried to engage
in practical action (of a very general nature, be it noted) with
regard to human problems, it has never claimed to have any effect
with regard to action or things. Morality has never been more
than the handmaiden of philosophy. In the Middle Ages, it was
a secondary concern; and scholastic philosophy often paid no attention
to it. The same is true of the seventeenth century. A practical
concern does not therefore represent a permanent current of philosophical
thought.</p>
<p>
The same is also true of science. Speculation and practice were
of course intermingled in the very early stages. Alchemy, for
example, was less concerned with finding the real nature of bodies
than with a method of producing gold. In this sense, it could
be said that in origin the sciences are pragmatic. But as history
progresses, the more scientific research loses the mixed character
that it originally possessed. Science has increasingly less to
do with purely technical concerns. The scientist contemplates
reality, and becomes less concerned with the practical consequences
of his discoveries. In all research there is no doubt a point
of departure, an optimistic act of faith in the utility of research;
but that is a transitory stage. The essence of the scientific
mind is that the scientist takes up a point of view which is sharply
opposed to that of the pragmatists.</p>
<p>
History too is no less of an embarrassment for pragmatists. Their
view is that ideas exist to act on the real. But historical facts
are facts from the past. How could there be any question of acting
on this? James and Dewey reply that the past is not wholly dead,
that there are 'present prolongations or effects of what the past
harboured', and that an assertion relating to the past can make
a present assertion true or false. But this is playing with words,
for the adaptation of thought to historical reality is entirely
an intellectual process and satisfies purely speculative needs,
not practical ones.</p>
<p>
Moore says that historical knowledge can be useful in directing
our individual conduct in circumstances similar to those of the
past. Although the eventuality of using history for practical
and individual ends is perhaps not impossible, it has nothing
to do with historical studies and the establishment of historical
truth as such. When the historian asks whether Caesar really
crossed the Rubicon, as is related in his Commentaries on the
Civil War, he does so solely to know and to make known. Fustel
de Coulanges said that history serves no purpose, and that that
was its greatness. That aphorism is perhaps rather too absolute;
but we must admit that the practical benefits of history are singularly
slim. Times change, circumstances change, and the events of history
cannot recur in precisely the same way, because the conditions
are different.</p>
<p>
There is of course one science which is close to history and which
can extract practical consequences from historical facts. This
science is sociology. It is however a recent one, and still in
its very early stages. Even if it were more advanced than it
actually is, it would still be separate from history. For example,
it is no pressing concern of sociology to know whether Madame
de Montespan played a political role in the events of her time
or not, but history certainly does not neglect problems of this
kind.</p>
<p>
Thus, the search for truth for truth's sake is neither an isolated
case, nor a pathological fact, nor a deflection of thought. Indeed,
even if we suppose that it is an aberration, and that men were
driven by illusion to seek for a truth which could not be grasped,
we should still have to explain that illusion.</p>
<h4>Dewey's Argument for Subordinating Thought to Action</h4>
<p class="fst">
Let us now examine those arguments which pragmatism has used in
claiming to have established that knowledge exists only for the
sake of action.</p>
<p>
Dewey in particular thought that he could cite a number of facts
which he saw as conclusive. These are: (<span class="term">1</span>) consciousness
and reflection most often come into being in such conditions that
they seem to have been called into existence by the very necessity
of practice. When balance is disturbed in a living organism,
consciousness awakes: it begins to question itself, the subject
becomes aware of problems. Consequently, it can be said that
the appearance of consciousness is a response to practical ends,
for it comes into being to re-establish the disturbed equilibrium.
(<span class="term">2</span>) The same applies to habits of all kinds:
consciousness disappears when it no longer serves a purpose.
It only awakes when habit is disrupted, when a process on non-adaptation
occurs. (<span class="term">3</span>) This is also true of human society.
When a political or social regime is functioning smoothly, it
is accepted passively and men do not reflect on it. It is when
it does not function smoothly that we seek remedies and think
of getting to the causes of the trouble.</p>
<p>
These facts are clearly undeniable. What provokes argument, however,
is the way in which they are interpreted. From them, it is concluded
that since consciousness appears only for the sake of action,
it is simply a substitute for it. In this view, an idea is no
more than a representation of an end to be achieved, the movement
-itself being this representation expressed as an act. But there
are facts which contradict this assertion of the pragmatists,
and which show that there can be antagonism between thought and
action. (a) In some cases, consciousness can hinder action instead
of facilitating it. For example, a pianist who can play a given
piece perfectly will make mistakes if he thinks about what he
is doing. Similarly, someone who searches for words instead of
speaking naturally will stutter. In both cases, consciousness
slows down, overloads or paralyses action. (b) Inversely, action
can paralyse thought, and this is constantly happening. The psychology
of attention indicates it. Attention is a concentrated form of
awareness: consciousness sharpened in this way is what enables
us to understand better what the constitutive characters of consciousness
are. Attention implies a tension in organic functions, a suspension
of movement, and that suspension of movement is even, as Ribot
has shown, an essential condition for it. That is why it has
been said that in order to think deeply it is necessary to abstain
from all movement: 'To think is to refrain from ... acting.' It
is impossible to think intensely while walking, playing and so
on.</p>
<p>
Hence it is a fact that the two very different human types, the
man of action and the intellectual, are so diametrically opposed.
What is dominant in the man of action is overall sensations,
which are synthetic and confused, but sharp and strong. With
his representations are associated motor mechanisms which he combines
appropriately and adapts almost unthinkingly to circumstances.
If you want his advice, do not ask his reasons for giving it,
for more often than not he does not know what they are, and thinking
about them would disturb him and make him hesitant. On the other
hand, the intellectual, the thinker, always tends to put off the
decisions he has to take. He hesitates because he never finds
satisfactory reasons for acting. For him, the time for reflection
is unlimited; and when he finally decides to act, he violates
his intellectual temperament. We never of course encounter these
two types in as absolute or clear-cut a form as that which I have
just described, but it is quite true that there are in fact two
contrasting casts of mind.</p>
<p>
Why is there this sharp contrast? Because the <em>conditions</em>
of thought and those of action are different. (<span class="term">1</span>)
First, thought is a <em>hyperconcentration</em> of consciousness,
and the greater the concentration, the smaller the circle of reflection.
Action, on the other hand, is a sudden release. Acting means
<em>externalising oneself</em>, and spreading out beyond oneself.
Man cannot at one and the same time be both entirely within himself
and entirely outside himself. (<span class="term">2</span>) Secondly, thought,
the reflecting consciousness, demands time. The faster a representation
passes through consciousness, the greater the proportion of the
unknown it contains. We can only truly know a representation
in successive stages, part by part. To know it, we must analyse
it, and to analyse it we must fix it, hold it in our consciousness;
that is to say, keep it motionless for a certain time. Action
does not call for that kind of fixity. What it wants is the exact
opposite. Movement flows, and to the extent that it is also flux
and movement consciousness does the same. But if it is to exist
truly, to manifest itself, it must stop, and this also supposes
a halt, a suspension of action. By way of contrast, when there
is an equilibrium between our dispositions and the surrounding
environment, our vital movements occur automatically, and pass
so quickly that we have no time to know them, since they merely
skim over consciousness. Consciousness does not therefore move
off-stage like an actor whose part is over. It disappears because
the conditions for its existence have not been met. And in the
same way, if the movement is stopped and consciousness appears,
it is not only because something must fill the gap which movement
no longer occupies, but also because the suspension of movement
has made consciousness possible.</p>
<p>
We can conclude that, contrary to the pragmatist thesis, thought
and action are not akin in nature. It is therefore very surprising
to see the pragmatists maintain that knowledge has only practical
ends, since the opposite is the case: it has demands radically
different from practice.</p>
<h3>SEVENTEENTH LECTURE<br>
The role of truth</h3>
<p class="fst">
The antithesis noted in the last lecture between truth and action
is all the more marked when one considers higher forms of thought.
Knowledge ascends in a series of stages.</p>
<p>
<em>Sensation</em> is the lowest. It provides us with merely fleeting
knowledge, and is barely sufficient to set off the necessary reactions.
This is apparent in the working of instinct.</p>
<p>
<em>Images, </em>like sensations, are closely connected with tendencies
to action. We cannot imagine something called desire without
movements making themselves felt to some degree. These movements
remain, however, in a state of potentiality and are, as it were,
unfinished sketches. Nevertheless, representations at this stage
begin to take on an appearance of having a life of their own.</p>
<p>
<em>Concepts</em> have a very low motive power. If we are to think
in concepts, we have to put aside the emotions which cause us
to act, and reject feelings which would prevent us isolating the
intellectual element. Concepts are isolated from acts, and they
are posited for their own sake.</p>
<p>
The error of the pragmatists is precisely that of denying the
specific nature of knowledge and consequently of thought and even
of consciousness. The role of consciousness is not to direct
the behaviour of a being with no need of knowledge: it is <em>to
constitute a being who would not exist without it</em>. This seems
to me to be proved by the role played in psychic life by 'coenaesthetic'
sensations, which emanate from all parts of our body and are,
so to speak, the kernel of our personal consciousness. This is
what caused Spinoza to say that the soul is the idea of the body.
Consciousness is therefore not a function with the role of directing
the movements of the body, but <em>the organism knowing itself,
</em>and solely by virtue of the fact that the organism knows itself,
we can say that something new occurs.</p>
<p>
For consciousness to come into being, there must be gaps or spaces
in action; and it is through these that the being becomes aware
of himself. A being who knows himself is one who stops movement
and then starts it again. Consciousness, far from having only
the role of directing the movements of beings, exists in order
to produce beings.</p>
<p>
Pragmatism tends to? deny this function of consciousness, which
it sees as part of the external world, simply a moment in the
series of movements which make up this world, and is lost in them.
And yet pragmatism claims to be a <em>spiritualist</em> doctrine.
It is a strange kind of spiritualism which claims to deny the
specific nature of consciousness!</p>
<p>
It is no doubt quite natural that when the unthinking play of
movements is disturbed thought should intervene to stimulate those
which are deficient. This practical role of thought is not unimportant;
but it is neither the only nor perhaps the chief one. Indeed,
a conscious being, a being which knows itself, cannot act completely
like a being which has no knowledge of itself. Its activity will
rather be of a new kind. It will of course still consist of movements;
but these movements will now be directed by ideas. In other words,
there will be <em>psychological</em> activity.</p>
<p>
Reducing the conscious being to nothing but his actions means
taking from him the very thing which makes him what he is. Moreover,
consciousness finds such a role distasteful, for it forms only
schematic plans and can never take immediate command over real
behaviour. Intelligence can only provide very general and hypothetical
plans of action, whereas movement needs to be categorical and
precise. Only the experience of action itself can tell us whether
a given act is really the appropriate one in given circumstances.
We have to act in order to know how we should act.</p>
<p>
What really shows us that consciousness is in some measure obliged
to do violence to itself, when it attempts to direct attention,
is the fact that once it is freed from this task or escapes from
it, movements gradually become established in the organism and
consciousness itself disappears. This is what occurs in the formation
of habit.</p>
<p>
The initial error of pragmatism is thus to deny the proper nature
of consciousness and subsequently of knowledge. It does, however,
have the merit of causing us to reflect on the question of <em>how
the notion of truth should be constructed</em>.</p>
<p>
As I have already said, the reply to that question is that one
must look at truths which are recognised as such, and examine
why it is that they are accepted. A representation is considered
to be a true one when it is thought to express reality. I am
not concerned here with whether that is a correct view. We may
hold it erroneously. It may be that ideas are held to be true
for other reasons. That is of little consequence for the moment.
Let us simply say that when <em>we believe</em> an idea to be true,
it is because we see it as adequately conveying reality.</p>
<p>
The problem is not to know by what right we can say that a given
proposition is true or false. What is accepted as true today
may quite well be held to be false tomorrow. What is important
is to know what has made men believe that a representation conforms
to reality. Representations which have been accepted as true
in the course of history are of the same interest for us: there
are no privileged ones. If we wish to escape from all that is
too narrow in traditional rationalism, we shall have to broaden
our horizons by freeing ourselves from ourselves, from our own
point of view.</p>
<p>
Generally nowadays, when we speak of 'truth', we have in mind
particularly scientific truth. But truth existed before science;
and to answer the question properly, we must also consider pre-scientific
and non-scientific truths such as <em>mythologies</em>. What were
mythologies? They were bodies of truths which were considered
to express reality (the universe), and which imposed themselves
on men with an obligatory character which was just as marked and
as powerful as moral truths.</p>
<p>
What, then, caused men to consider these mythological propositions
or beliefs as true? Was it because they had tested them against
a given reality, against spirits, for example, or against divinities
of which they had had real experience? Not at all. The world
of mythical beings is not a real world, and yet men believed in
it. Mythological ideas were not considered as true because they
were based on an objective reality. The very opposite is the
case: it is our ideas and beliefs which give the objects of thought
their vitality. Thus, an idea is true, not because it conforms
to reality, but by virtue of its creative power.</p>
<h4>Collective Representations</h4>
<p class="fst">
These ideas, however, do not originate with individuals. They
are <em>collective representations</em>, made up of all the mental
states of a people or a social group which thinks together. In
these collectivities, of course, there are individuals who do
have some role to play; but this very role is only possible as
a result of the action of the collectivity. In the life of the
human race, it is the collectivity which maintains ideas and representations,
and all collective representations are by virtue of their origin
invested with a prestige which means that they have the power
to impose themselves. They have a greater psychological energy
than representations emanating from the individual. This is why
they settle with such force in our consciousness. That is where
the very strength of truth lies.</p>
<p>
Thus, we come back to the double thesis of pragmatism, but this
time transposed onto a different level: (<span class="term">1</span>) the
model and the copy are one; (<span class="term">2</span>) we are the co-authors
of reality. However, one can now see the differences. Pragmatism
said that we make reality. But in this case, 'we' means the individual.
But individuals are different beings who cannot all make the
world in the same way; and the pragmatists have had great difficulty
in solving the problem of knowing how several different minds
can know the same world at once. If, however, one admits that
representation is a collective achievement, it recovers a unity
which pragmatism denies to it. This is what explains the impression
of resistance, the sense of something greater than the individual,
which we experience in the presence of truth, and which provides
the indispensable basis of objectivity.</p>
<p>
In the last analysis, it is thought which creates reality; and
the major role of the collective representations is to 'make'
that higher reality which is <em>society</em> itself. This is perhaps
an unexpected role for truth, but one which indicates it does
not exist simply in order to direct practical affairs.</p>
<h3>EIGHTEENTH LECTURE<br>
The different types of truth</h3>
<p class="fst">
In the history of human thought there are two kinds of mutually
contrasting truths, namely, <em>mythological</em> and <em>scientific</em>
truths.</p>
<h4>Mythological Truths</h4>
<p class="fst">
In the first type, all truth is a body of propositions which are
accepted without verification, as against scientific truths, which
are always subjected to testing or demonstration. If they are
unproven, from where do they acquire the character of truth attributed
to them? It is representations which create the character of
objectivity which mythologies have, and it is their collective
character which confers on them the creative power that enables
them to impose themselves on the mind. Collective representations
carry with them their objects, and entail their existence. Mythological
truths have been, for those societies that have believed in them,
the conditions necessary for their existence. Communal life in
fact presupposes common ideas and intellectual unanimity. By
the very fact that the collectivity accepts them, mythological
ideas are no longer subject to individual contingencies. Hence
their objective and necessitating character.</p>
<p>
But are peoples completely free to create truth as they will?
Can society transform reality just as it wishes? If this were
the case, we should be able to adopt a more or less attenuated
version of pragmatism, giving it a more or less sociological slant.
But a correction of that kind would not be enough. Ideas and
representations cannot become collective if they do not correspond
to something real. Nor can they remain divorced from the conduct
of individuals; for experiencing failure, disappointment and suffering
tells us that our action corresponds to an inadequate representation,
and we immediately detach ourselves from both of these. Indeed,
it is untrue to say, as the pragmatists do, that an idea which
brings us 'satisfaction' is a true one by the very fact that it
does so. But, although it is false to think that any idea which
satisfies us is a true one, the reciprocal idea that an idea cannot
be true without bringing us some satisfaction is not false.</p>
<p>
It is the same with truth as with moral rules. Moral rules are
not made <em>with the purpose </em>of being useful to the individual.
However, we could not do what we ought to do if duty contained
no attraction for individuals or if they found nothing satisfying
in it. Truth is similar to moral rules, in having an impersonal
and a necessitating character; but if that were the sum of its
characteristics we should constantly tend to reject or ignore
it. In order to become really a part of ourselves, it must serve
us and be useful to us. At the practical level, any collective
representation must serve individuals, in the sense that it must
give rise to acts which are adjusted to things, to the realities
to which the representation corresponds. Hence, if it is to be
able to give rise to such acts, the representation itself must
be adapted to these realities.</p>
<p>
Mythological creations therefore have some connection with reality.
There must be a reality of which these representations are the
expression. That reality is none other than society. The forces
that religions and myths believe that they recognise in mythological
creations are not mere illusions, but forces which are collective
in origin. What religion expresses in its representations, its
beliefs and myths, is social realities and the way in which they
act upon individuals. Monotheism, for example, is the expression
of the social group's tendency towards greater concentration,
as a result of which particularist groups increasingly disappear.
just as 'coenaesthetic' sensations are the central core of consciousness
for the individual, collective truths are the basis of the common
consciousness for society.</p>
<p>
Society cannot become aware of itself in the absence of any relationship
with things. Social life demands agreement between individual
consciousnesses. In order to notice it, each one must express
what it experiences. It can only do so, however, by means of
things taken as symbols. It is because society expresses itself
through things that it has managed to transform and transfigure
reality. That is why, in representations in the form of a myth,
plants, for example, become beings capable of expressing human
feelings. Such representations are false with respect to things,
but true with respect to the subjects who think them.</p>
<p>
It is for this reason that truth has varied historically. We
have seen that the pragmatists have been well aware of that idea;
but they express it by talking of the truth as neither fixed nor
definite, as being constantly formed. This formulation is not
satisfactory; for although there are new truths, that does not
mean that old ones change or are abolished. All the cosmologies
immanent in mythological systems are different from each other,
but can nevertheless be said to be equally true, because they
have fulfilled the same function for all the peoples who have
believed in them, and because they performed the same social role.</p>
<h4>Scientific Truths</h4>
<p class="fst">
Nowadays we see <em>scientific truths</em> as being the very type
of truth. At first glance, scientific representations seem very
different from mythological ones. The latter express ideas which
society has about itself, the former express the world as it is.
The social sciences, in particular, express what society is in
itself, and not what it is subjectively to the person thinking
about it. Nevertheless, scientific representations are also collective
representations.</p>
<p>
It will be objected that scientific representations are impersonal;
but perhaps so too are collective representations? We can answer
in the affirmative, for they express something which is outside
and above individuals.</p>
<p>
Scientific ideas have all the characteristics necessary to become
collective representations. Scientific truth helps to Strengthen
social consciousness, as does mythological thought, though by
different means. One might ask how individual minds can communicate.
In two possible ways: either by uniting to form a single collective
mind, or by communicating in one object which is the same for
all, with each however retaining his own personality; like Leibnitz's
monads, each expressing the entirety of the universe while keeping
its individuality. The first way is that of mythological thought,
the second that of scientific thought.</p>
<p>
Nor has science taken on this task fortuitously or, as it were,
unconsciously, for it is its very <em>raison d'étre. </em>When
pragmatists wonder why science exists, and what its function is,
they should turn to history for a reply. History shows us that
it came into existence in Greece, and nowhere else, to meet certain
needs. For both Plato and Socrates, the role of science is to
unify individual judgements. The proof is that the method used
to construct it is 'dialectics', or the art of comparing contradictory
human judgements with a view to finding those in which there is
agreement. If dialectics is the first among scientific methods,
and its aim is to eliminate contradictions, it is because the
role of science is to turn minds towards impersonal truths and
to eliminate contradictions and particularisms.</p>
<h3>NINETEENTH LECTURE<br>
Science and the collective consciousness</h3>
<p class="fst">
We have seen that the great thinkers of Greece tried to ensure
intellectual unity and understanding among men. The means they
used was to take <em>objective reality</em> as their object, since
it must necessarily be the same for all men, given its independence
from the observing subject. This aim will therefore be achieved
if one can attain a representation of things in the manner in
which an impersonal understanding would represent them.</p>
<p>
But the object of science as we see it today is precisely to represent
things as if they were seen by a purely impersonal understanding.
August Comte understood that perfectly, and saw the role of 'positive
philosophy' as that of ending the intellectual anarchy paramount
since the Revolution, but having much earlier real origins. From
the 'metaphysical age', that is, from the birth of the critical
mind, there could no longer be a common consciousness. Comte's
view was that it was science that could provide the mental equipment
to reconstitute that common consciousness. Individual sciences,
however, are not up to that task, since they are too specialised.
A discipline capable of including all specialisms and synthesising
individual -sciences was needed, and that discipline was philosophy.
It is possible to see Comte as mistaken here, as he did not see
that philosophy can never be anything but personal.</p>
<p>
Yet the collective consciousness can, even if not necessarily
by means of a philosophical approach, take possession of scientific
truths and fashion them into a coordinated whole. That is how
a <em>popular philosophy</em>, made by and for all, can be created.
Such a philosophy will not have as its concern solely physical
things, but also, and indeed chiefly, man and society. Hence
the important part that history must play. As Comte said, philosophy
looks not so much towards the future (which is what the pragmatists
believe) as towards the past; and it is through philosophy that
society becomes aware of itself. There is also a science which,
with the help of history, is called to play the most important
role in this area. That science is sociology.</p>
<h4>The Survival of Mythological Representations</h4>
<p class="fst">
It is not, however, necessary that philosophy should investigate
all the forms of scientific knowledge, for they are recorded and
retained in the collective consciousness. Philosophy can only
provide general orientations; it cannot be coercive. Comte exaggerated
not only the role of philosophy, but also that of science. He
believed that once mankind reached the positive age, there would
be an end to mythological ideas. Men, he thought, would no longer
have views on questions not elucidated by science. Our lives
would be based on positive scientific truths, which would be considered
established, and the rest would be the domain of intellectual
doubt. I accept that this is so with regard to knowledge about
the physical world, but it cannot be the case as far as the human
and social world is concerned. In these areas, science is still
in a rudimentary state. Its methods of investigation are difficult,
since direct experiment is impossible. Under such conditions
it is not hard to understand why ideas expressing social matters
in a really objective way are still rather rare.</p>
<p>
If Comte could believe that sociology would one day be able to
provide guidelines for the public consciousness, it was because
he had simplistic ideas about social development, or rather an
essentially philosophical concept of it. His sociology was really
a philosophy of history. He was fascinated by the 'law of the
three stages' and thought that in enunciating it he had established
the whole of sociology. This was, of course, far from being the
case. Sociology, as he himself recognised, has a more complex
object than other sciences. It can only express fragmentary hypotheses,
and so far these have had scarcely any effect on popular consciousness.</p>
<p>
What action should we take in these circumstances? Should we
take refuge in doubt? That would certainly be a kind of wisdom,
at least with regard to the physical world. But, as we have said,
it is difficult to extend that attitude to the social and human
world. In that world, we have to act and live; and in order to
live we need something other than doubt. Society cannot wait
for its problems to be solved scientifically. It has to make
decisions about what action to take, and in order to make these
decisions it has to have an idea of what it is.</p>
<p>
Where can we find that representation of it, which is indispensable
for its action and its life? There is only one solution. If
there is no objective knowledge, society can only know itself
from within, attempt to express this sense of itself, and to use
that as its guide. In other words, it must conduct itself with
reference to a representation of the same kind as those which
constitute mythological truths.</p>
<p>
What characterises such mythological representations is the fact
that they express a unanimous conception, and this is what gives
them a force and authority which enables them to impose themselves
without their being subject to verification or doubt. That is
why there are formulae in our societies which we imagine are not
religious, but which nevertheless do have the character of dogma,
and are not questioned. Of this kind are ideas such as 'democracy',
'progress', 'the class struggle' and so on. Thus, we can see
that scientific thought cannot rule alone. There is, and there
always will be, room in social life for a form of truth which
will perhaps be expressed in a very secular way, but will nevertheless
have a mythological and religious basis. For a long time to come,
there will be two tendencies in any society: a tendency towards
objective scientific truth and a tendency towards subjectively
perceived truth, towards mythological truth. This is also one
of the great obstacles which obstruct the development of sociology.</p>
<h4>Impersonal Truth and Individual Diversities</h4>
<p class="fst">
We are now faced with a further problem. So far we have seen
truth as characterised by its impersonal nature. But should we
not keep a place within it for <em>individual diversity? </em>As
long as mythological truth holds sway, conformity is the rule.
Once scientific thought becomes paramount, however, intellectual
individualism appears. Indeed, it is this very individualism
which has made scientific truth necessary, since social unanimity
can no longer centre on mythological beliefs. The impersonal truth
developed by science can leave room for everyone's individuality.
The fact is that the diversity of objects found in the world
encourages the differentiation of minds; for individual minds
are not all equally suited to studying the same things, and thus
tend to parcel out amongst themselves the questions to be investigated.</p>
<p>
But this is not all, and not even the real question, which is
whether, with a <em>given problem</em>, there is room for a plurality
of mental attitudes all of which in a sense are justified. Each
object is, of course, extremely complex and includes a multitude
of elements which intermingle. We cannot exhaust reality either
as a whole or in any of its constituent parts. Therefore every
object of knowledge offers an opportunity for an infinity of possible
points of view, such as the point of view of life, of purely mechanical
movement, of stasis and dynamics, of contingency and determination,
of physics and biology and so on. Individual minds, however, are
finite, and none can work from all points of view at once. If
each of these aspects is to be given the attention it merits,
the whole mind must be devoted to it. Consequently, each mind
is free to choose the point of view from which it feels itself
most competent to view things. This means that for every object
of knowledge there are differing but equally justified ways of
examining it. These are probably partial truths, but all these
partial truths come together in the collective consciousness and
find their limits and their necessary complements. Thus intellectual
individualism, far from making for anarchy, as would be the case
during the period of the domination of mythological truth, becomes
a necessary factor in the establishment of scientific truth, so
that the diversity of intellectual temperaments can serve the
cause of impersonal truth.</p>
<p>
Furthermore, intellectual individualism does not necessarily imply,
as James seems to think, that everyone may arbitrarily believe
what he wishes to believe. It simply means that there are separate
tasks within the joint enterprise, and that everyone may choose
his own in accordance with his temperament.</p>
<p>
Thus, on the one hand, scientific truth is not incompatible with
the diversity of minds; and on the other, as social groups be
come increasingly complex, it is impossible that society should
have a single sense of itself. Hence there are various social
currents. Here, society will be seen as a static phenomenon;
there as a dynamic one. Now it will be seen as subject to determinism;
now chiefly sensed as an essentially contingent entity, and so
on. Basically, all these ideas are reasonable, for they each
correspond to various needs which express the different ways in
which society senses and experiences itself.</p>
<p>
A further consequence of this transformation is that <em>tolerance</em>
must henceforth be based on this idea of the complexity and richness
of reality, and then on the diversity of opinions, which is both
necessary and effective. Everyone must be able to admit that
someone else has perceived an aspect of reality, which he himself
had not grasped, but which is as real and as true as those to
which he had gone from preference.</p>
<p>
We can also see at the same time that the task of speculative
truth is to provide nourishment for the collective consciousness.
This means that we can answer the pragmatists' objection, which
says that if the sole function of truth is to express reality,
it is merely redundant; it must <em>add</em> something to truth,
and if it does, it is no longer a faithful copy. The fact is
that truth the 'copy' of reality, is not merely redundant or pleonastic.
It certainly 'adds' a new world to reality, a world which is
more complex than any other: That world is the human and social
one. Truth is the means by which a new order of things becomes
possible, and that new order is nothing less than <em>civilisation</em>.</p>
<h3>TWENTIETH LECTURE<br>
Are thought and reality heterogeneous?</h3>
<p class="fst">
We must now examine pragmatism as a doctrine which claims that
thought and reality are heterogeneous. At the same time, we shall
have to examine the arguments which the pragmatists borrow from
Bergson to support that thesis.</p>
<p>
We recall that the pragmatists' line of argument is as follows:
truth implies the existence of distinctions between elements;
reality consists of a lack of distinction; therefore truth cannot
express reality without presenting as distinct something which
is not distinct; without, in short, distorting reality. Reality,
like a mass, forms a unity where everything holds together without
any radical separation. What emanates from one part has repercussions
within the whole. Thus it is only in abstracts that we separate
one part from the whole. Concepts, on the other hand, are limited,
determined and clearly circumscribed; and the world of concepts
is discontinuous and distinct. The conceptual and the real are
thus heterogeneous.</p>
<p>
This heterogeneity is heightened when we try to express, not the
universe as a whole, but change, movement and, above all, life.
In order to express change, we have to break it down into its
components, split it up into its elements, and each of these elements
necessarily becomes something fixed. A series of fixed elements,
however, will never restore the mobility of change, just as from
inert matter one can never create life. Concepts express only
the coagulated, the ready-made, and never what is being made or
is becoming. But in reality everything is continuous. complex
and moving. There is nothing simple about the world. Everything
can be broken down infinitely; and it is pluralism, as <em>a</em>
negation of simplicity and an affirmation of diversity, which
is all affirmation of the true.</p>
<p>
That is the pragmatist line of argument. But, because reality
is continuous and undivided, does it necessarily follow that what
is distinct is simply a product of thought and that alone? Because
there are no absolute distinctions, does it follow that there
is a lack of distinction and absolute confusion? There is nothing
absolute in the universe, and absolute confusion is as impossible
as absolute separation. In things there is already a relative
discrimination. If the real were in fact totally indistinct,
if confusion were paramount in it, we should have to admit that
the principle of contradiction could not apply there. In order
to be able to say that A is A, it is necessary that A should be
determined, must be what it is and not something else. Pragmatism
itself rests on reasoning which involves concepts and which is
based on the principle of contradiction. Denying this principle
would mean denying the possibility of any intellectual relationship.
We cannot make a judgement or understand anything at all if we
do not first agree that it is this object and not another that
is at issue. Similarly, in discussion, we first have to agree
that we are talking about this object, and not another.</p>
<p>
But it may be objected, with Bergson, that the natural state of
life is precisely one of undividedness. Life is a unity, a concentration,
in which nothing is properly speaking outside the other parts.</p>
<p>
Our answer is that reality, whatever it is, is far from resistant
to any form of distinction, and to some degree tends of itself
towards it. When Spencer says that the universe moves from 'the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous', the expression is inexact.
What exists originally is also heterogeneous in nature; but it
is the heterogeneity entailed by a state of confusion. The initial
state is a multiplicity of germs, of ways and means, and of different
activities which are not only intermingled, but, as it were, lost
in each other, so that it is extremely difficult to separate them.
They are indistinct from each other. Thus, in the cell of monocellular
organisms, all the vital functions are so to speak included.
They are all there, but not separately, and the functions of nutrition
and of sensitivity seem confused, and it seems difficult to distinguish
them. The same is true of the embryo: in the human foetus, all
the functions of the human organism are already present. The
child who is born carries within him all his hereditary tendencies,
although it is not possible to see them clearly at that stage,
and it is not until later that they will really separate.</p>
<p>
In social life, that primitive undivided state is even more striking.
<em>Religious </em>life, for example, contains a rich abundance
of forms of thought and activities of all kinds. In the field
of thought, these include myths and religious beliefs, an embryonic
science' and a certain poetry. In the sphere of action we find
rites, a morality and a form of law' and arts (aesthetic elements,
songs and music in particular). All these elements are gathered
up into a whole and it seems extremely difficult to separate them.
Science and art, myth and poetry, morality, law and religion
are all confused or, rather, fused. The same observations could
be made about the early family, which is at one and the same time,
for example, a social, religious, political and legal unit.</p>
<p>
Thus the primitive form of any reality is a concentration of all
kinds of energies, undivided in the sense that they are only various
aspects of one and the same thing. Evolution consists of a gradual
separation of all these various functions which were originally
indistinct. Secular and scientific thought has moved away from
religious thought; art has moved away from religious ceremonies;
morality and law have moved away from ritual. The social group
has been divided into the family group, the political group, the
economic group and so on.</p>
<p>
We are thus brought round to the view that what we are <em>told
is the</em> <em>major form </em>of reality, that is, the non-separation
and interpenetration of all its elements, <em>is really its most
rudimentary </em>form. Confusion is the original state.</p>
<h4>Distinct Thought and the 'Life Force'</h4>
<p class="fst">
But here once again we encounter Bergson's objection. Life is
seen as essentially an undivided force; and this 'life force',
struggling with rigid, fixed, inert matter, is obliged to diffract
and sub-divide. Matter itself is also seen as a slackening, an
intermission and an inversion, of this rising force.</p>
<p>
We do not see, however, if matter is still life in a slowed-down
and so to speak condensed form, how both can engage in a struggle
or why they should be opposed to each other. The hypothesis of
life and matter as two mutually hostile forces is inadmissible.
Life does not break up and sub-divide <em>in spite of itself.
</em>It does so spontaneously to achieve its potential more fully
and to emancipate itself. In the beginning, all forms of activity
and all functions were gathered together, and were, in a manner
of speaking, each other's prisoners. Consequently they were obstacles
for each other, each preventing the other from achieving its nature
fully. That is why, if science is to come into being, it must
differentiate itself from religion and myths. If the link which
originally united them slackens and weakens, it is not a fall
or a collapse, but progress.</p>
<p>
The need for distinction and separation thus lies <em>in things
themselves,</em> and is not simply a mental need. Things are rich
in potentially diverse elements, separable parts and varied aspects.
Consequently, there are discernible elements, since they tend
of themselves to separate, although they never manage to free
themselves of each other completely.</p>
<p>
In social life, individuation is simply one of the forms of that
movement towards distinction.</p>
<p>
Such a distinction probably cannot be a mere abstraction, as we
know that every element that we isolate keeps its relationship
with all the rest. Nevertheless, the isolation of one element
from everything to which it is connected is a legitimate action.
We have the right to say that A is A, provided we are aware that
we are doing so in abstracts and conditionally. In so far as
we are considering A, not as absolutely distinct from B and C,
but in itself, we are making a concept of it. Isolating this
real aspect of things is not doing violence to the nature of things.
All we are doing is to follow the natural articulations of each
thing. Using concepts to think about things means establishing
a quite relative distinction. The concept certainly expresses
a reality and, if it is distinct, it is because it expresses distinctions
which are in no way purely mental ones. Thought and reality are
thus not at all heterogeneous.</p>
<p>
There remains the objection which sees concepts as unable to express
change and life. Becoming, we are told, is something which 'occurs',
not a series of ready-made states. Concepts are unable to express
the transition from one stage to another. There is however a
contradiction in that idea of life. Life cannot be defined by
mobility alone. Reality has a static aspect. That aspect, in
the view of the doctrine we are discussing, is that of matter.
If matter is spoilt, or fixed by life, there must be something
in life which is inclined towards that process of becoming fixed.
Even in change itself there must be a static aspect.</p>
<p>
The fact is that nothing changes except to achieve a result.
What right have we to postulate that these results have no fixity?
Life has a perfect right to rest on its laurels occasionally!
Movement and change can surely be seen as means of achieving
results. If becoming were a kind of frantic, incessant and restless
flight, with never a fixed point, it would simply be sound and
fury. By fixing consecutive states, we are therefore expressing
real elements of becoming, and they are indeed its most important
ones.</p>
<p>
Nor can we represent something changing without representing something';
and that something is necessarily something already constituted.
We make the new from what we have, and the new is new and meaningful
only in relation to what we already have.</p>
<p>
It is true that we still have to think out the link between the
two. One might ask how it is possible to think about what is
'making itself'. Things in that state do not yet exist, they
are indeterminate in nature, and therefore not susceptible to
thought. We can only represent what is, because it 'is' in a
certain way, and this offers some purchase for thought.</p>
<p>
The tendency to be can only be thought about in terms of elements
already acquired.</p>
<p>
But is it really true that we cannot think of movement and the
transition from one stage to another? When thought is applied
to change, it always contains three terms: the idea of an achieved
state, the idea of a state thought about in rudimentary terms
because it still does not exist and the idea of a relationship
between these two notions. That last idea can certainly be represented
by a concept.</p>
<p>
The difficulty lies chiefly in understanding how a participatory
relationship can be expressed. Concepts are never really isolated
by us. We can loosen the context which constrains them, but we
have judgement and reason which enable us to re-establish mutual
relationships. That is how we learn that two things are in communication.</p>
<p>
Distinction is thus a need of conceptual thought, but it already
exists in things as it does in the mind. Similarly, continuity
and communication exist in the mind, as they do in things.</p>
<h4>Conclusion</h4>
<p class="fst">
Rationalists were accused of seeing truth as a sort of luxury
of reality, something given, achieved, created simply to be contemplated.
But that contemplation, it was also said, is a sterile, selfish
intellectual's joy, of no use from the human point of view.</p>
<p>
The expression of reality, however, does have a truly useful function,
for it is what makes societies, although it could equally well
be said that it also derives from them . It is true that when
we imagine truth as something ready-made, we are obliged to see
it as a transcendence. But although truth is a social thing,
it is also a human one at the same time, and thus comes closer
to us, rather than moves away and disappears in the distant realms
of an intelligible world or a divine understanding. It is no
doubt still superior to individual consciousness; but even the
collective element in it exists only through the consciousness
of individuals, and truth is only ever achieved by individuals.</p>
<p>
We should also add that truth, at the same time as being a social
and human thing, is also something living. It mingles with life
because it is a product of that higher form of life, social life,
as well as being the condition for its existence. It is diverse,
because that form of life presents itself in multiple and diverse
forms. This 'diversification', and the carving out' of concepts
of which pragmatism speaks, are by no means arbitrary. They are
modelled on realities, and in particular on the realities of social
life.</p>
<p>
There is also one final characteristic of truth on which I have
already insisted, but which I would like to recapitulate in conclusion:
that is its obligatory nature. We have seen that pragmatism,
that logical utilitarianism, cannot offer an adequate explanation
of the authority of truth, an authority which is easy to conceive
of, however, if one sees a social aspect of truth. That is why
truth <em>is a norm for thought in </em>the same way <em>that the
</em>moral ideal <em>is a norm for conduct.</em></p>
<h3>Appendix<br>
Concepts</h3>
<p class="fst">
We might be tempted to define concepts by their breadth and generality,
as opposed to sensations and images which represent only particular
objects.</p>
<p>
Such a definition would, however, simply provide a generic notion,
and would not specifically distinguish concepts from sensations
and images. It would imply that thinking logically means simply
thinking in general terms. But the general only exists as entailed
by the particular. Thinking in general terms therefore means
thinking in particular terms, but in a certain way.</p>
<p>
It would be extraordinary if such a simple definition was enough
to give rise to a type of thought which is as distinct from 'thought
through sensations' and 'thought through images' as logical thought
is. How would the particular, once it had been impoverished and
simplified, come to possess those virtues which the particular
in its richness and denseness does not possess? How would one,
by mutilating the real, obtain a set of specially privileged representations?
We must consider whether concepts are not something more.</p>
<p>
There is no discontinuity between the individual and the genus.
There are concepts for genera. Why should there not be concepts
for individuals? Is the genus necessary for the existence of
a concept?</p>
<p>
There are in fact many concepts which designate only individuals.
Each people and nation has a great number of heroes either legendary
or historical (it matters little which). In what terms do we
think about them? Not in general ideas, nor yet in images, for
we have never seen them. We do have concepts of them, for we
argue about them, and these concepts are the starting-points for
our discussions and our reasoning.</p>
<p>
In the same way, the concept of God is an individual concept.
For believers, God is certainly an individual being, and we think
of Him neither through sensations nor through images.</p>
<p>
The idea of the native land is also a concept.</p>
<p>
Furthermore, sensations and images are characterised by their
fleeting nature and their mobility. The concept on the other
hand is immutable, or at least should be. Thinking in concepts
means thinking of the variable, but subsuming it under the <em>form
of </em>the immutable. The fixity of vocabulary expresses the
fixity of concepts, and at the same time partly causes it.</p>
<p>
Concepts are universal or at least capable of being universal
amongst men of the same civilisation. They are common to all
men who have the same language, or at least communicable. One
cannot talk about my concept; although one can talk about my sensation.
Sensations, like images, cannot be communicated to others. We
can only suggest similar ones, by association. Concepts are impersonal,
and above individual contingencies. That, indeed, is the feature
of logical thought.</p>
<p>
The problem is thus that of how thought has been able to fix itself
in this way and, so to speak, to make itself impersonal, and not
of how it has become generalised.</p>
<p>
When the Socratics discovered that there were fixed representations,
they were full of wonder; and Plato felt impelled to hypostasise,
almost to make divine, these fixed thoughts.</p>
<p>
We can, however, find other explanations of the properties of
concepts. If they are common to all, is it not because they are
the work of the community? Classical dogmatism, which postulates
the agreement of all human reasons, is a little childish. There
is no need to go beyond experience to seek this one, impersonal
thought. A form of it, collective thought, occurs within experience.
Why should concepts not be collective representations?</p>
<p>
Everything collective tends to become fixed, and to eliminate
the changing and the contingent. In addition, it is because they
are collective that concepts impose themselves upon us, and are
transmitted to us. Words too play a major role where concepts
are concerned, and words are collective things.</p>
<p>
Collective thought is only feebly and incompletely represented
in each individual consciousness, as we have already seen in the
case of moral thought. The same is true intellectually. Each
of our words goes beyond our individual experience, and often
expresses things about which we know nothing whatsoever. If some
of the objects connotated by the word are known to us, they are
only examples. Concepts themselves go even further beyond our
personal experience; for they are formed by what a whole series
of generations has experienced. What is superimposed on our individual
experience, and 'subsumes' it by means of concepts, is thus collective
experience.</p>
<p>
In addition, concepts are systematised because collective thought
itself is systematised. In relation to that collective thought,
we stand in the same relationship as Plato's <em>nous </em>to the
world of Ideas. We never manage to see it in its entirety, or
in its reality. We do not know all the concepts worked out by
our own civilisation; and in addition, we individualise them,
and give words a particular meaning which they do not have. Hence
the many differences which arise amongst individuals. Hence too
lies, the lies which are said to be necessary ...</p>
<p>
One can make an objection to this sociological theory of concepts.
As we have defined them here, concepts ensure agreement between
individuals. One might ask, however, where their agreement with
reality comes from. We tend to think that if concepts are collective
they are likely to be true; but only scientific concepts present
this character. The others are worked out without method.</p>
<p>
One can nevertheless reply that collective representations do
not stand outside logical truth. The generality and fixity which
they have would not be possible if they were totally inadequate
with respect to truth. Verification is a reciprocal process:
the experiences of all individuals are mutually critical. The
concepts worked out by the masses and those worked out by scientists
are not essentially different in nature.</p>
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Emile Durkheim (1914)
from Pragmatism and Sociology
Pragmatism & the Question of Truth
Source: Pragmatism & Sociology publ. by Cambridge University Press, 1983. The latter 8 of the twenty lectures plus one of two appendices reproduced here.
The General Spirit of Pragmatism
It has been said that pragmatism is above all an attempt to liberate
the will. If the world is to solicit our activity, we must
be able to change it; and for that to occur, it must be malleable.
Things are not chiefly important for what they are, but for what
they are worth. The basis of our action is a hierarchy of values
which we ourselves have established. Our action is therefore
only worthwhile if that system of values can be realised, made
incarnate, in our world. Pragmatism thus gives a meaning to action.
Nevertheless, this preoccupation with action, which has been seen
as the defining characteristic of pragmatism, is not, in my view,
its major feature. Man's burning desire to transform things is
apparent in the thought of all the idealists. When we have an
ideal, we see the world as something obliged to conform to it.
Pragmatism, however, is not a form of idealism, but a radical
empiricism. What is there in it which could justify such a desire
to transform things? We have seen that for pragmatism there are
not two planes of existence, but only one, and consequently it
is impossible to see where the ideal could be located. As has
just been shown, God himself is an object of experience in pragmatist
doctrine.
We can therefore conclude that pragmatism is much less of an undertaking
to encourage action than an attack on pure speculation and
theoretical thought. What is really characteristic of it
is an impatience with any rigorous intellectual discipline. It
aspires to 'liberate' thought much more than it does action.
Its ambition, as James says, is to 'make the truth more supple'.
We shall see later what reasons it adduces to support its view
that truth must not remain 'rigid'.
THIRTEENTH LECTURE
General criticism of pragmatism
We can now move on to the general discussion of pragmatist doctrines.
They can, first of all, be criticised for certain gaps in them.
As I have already pointed out, the pragmatists often take too
many liberties with historical doctrines. They interpret them
as they wish, and often rather inexactly.
Above all, however, we must indicate the abstract nature of
their argument, since it clashes with the general orientation,
which they claim is empirical, of their doctrine. Most of the
time, their proofs have a dialectical character; everything
is reduced to a purely logical construction. This provides one
contradiction.
But their thought presents other flagrant contradictions. Here
is an example: on the one hand, we are told that consciousness
as such does not exist, that it is nothing original, that
it is neither a factor sui generis nor a true reality,
but is only a simple echo, a 'vain noise' left behind by the 'soul'
that has vanished from the heaven of philosophy. This, as we know,
is the theme of the famous article, 'Does consciousness exist?',
a theme which James took up again in the form of a communication
in French to the Congress of 1905. On the other hand, however,
the pragmatists maintain that reality is a construction
of thought, that reality is apperception itself. In so doing they
attribute to thought the same power and the same qualities as
the idealists ascribe to it. They urge both epiphenomenalism
and idealism, two incompatible theses. Pragmatism therefore lacks
those basic characteristics which one has the right to expect
of a philosophical doctrine.
Here we must ask ourselves a question. How does it happen that,
with such defects, pragmatism has imposed itself on so many minds?
It must be based on something in the human consciousness and
have a strength that we have yet to discover.
The Fundamental Motivation of the Pragmatist Attitude
Let us ask ourselves, then, what feeling animates the doctrine,
what motivation is its essential factor. I have said already
that it is not a practical need, a need to extend the field of
human action. There is, to be sure, particularly in James, a
liking for risk, a need for adventure; he prefers an uncertain,
'malleable' world to a fixed and immobile world, because it is
a world in which there is something to do. This is certainly
the ideal of the strong man who wishes to expand the field of
his activity. But how, then, can the same philosopher show us
as an ideal the ascetic who renounces the world and turns away
from it?
Actually, pragmatism has not been concerned with picturing a particular
ideal for us. Its dominant trait is the need to 'soften the truth',
to make it 'less rigid', as James says - to free it, in short,
from the discipline of logical thought. This appears very clearly
in James's The Will to Believe .Once this is posited, everything
becomes clear. If thought had as its object simply to 'reproduce'
reality, it would be the slave of things, and chained to reality.
It would simply have to slavishly 'copy' the reality before it.
If thought is to be freed, it must become the creator of its
own object, and the only way to attain this goal is to give it
a reality to make or construct. Therefore, thought has as
its aim not the reproduction of a datum, but the construction
of a future reality. It follows that the value of ideas can
no longer be assessed by reference to objects but must be determined
by their degree of utility, their more or less 'advantageous'
character.
We can thus see the scope of the pragmatist theses. If, in classical
rationalism, thought has this character of 'rigidity', for which
pragmatism criticises it, it is because in rationalism truth is
conceived of as a simple thing, a thing quasi-divine, that draws
its whole value from itself. Since it is seen as sufficient unto
itself, it is necessarily placed above human life. It cannot
conform to the demands of circumstances and differing temperaments.
It is valid by itself and is good with an absolute goodness.
It does not exist for our sake, but for its own. Its role is
to let itself be contemplated. It is so to speak deified; it
becomes the object of a real cult. This is still Plato's conception.
It extends to the faculty by means of which we attain truth,
that is, reason. Reason serves to explain things to us, but,
in this conception, itself remains unexplained; it is placed outside
scientific analysis.
'To soften' the truth is to take from it this absolute and as
it were sacrosanct character. It is to tear it away from this
state of immobility that removes it from all becoming, from all
change and, consequently, from all explanation. Imagine that
instead of being thus confined in a separate world, it is itself
part of reality and life, not by a kind of fall or degradation
that would disfigure and corrupt it, but because it is naturally
part of reality and life.' It is placed in the series of facts,
at the very heart of things having antecedents and consequences.
It poses problems: we are authorised to ask ourselves where it
comes from, what good it is and so on. It becomes itself an object
of knowledge. Herein lies the interest of the pragmatist enterprise:
we can see it as an effort to understand truth and reason themselves,
to restore to them their human interest, to make of them human
things that derive from temporal causes and give rise to temporal
consequences. To 'soften' truth is to make it into something
that can be analysed and explained.
It is here that we can establish a PARALLEL BETWEEN PRAGMATISM
AND SOCIOLOGY. By applying the historical point of view
to the order of things human, sociology is led to set itself the
same problem. Man is a product of history and hence of becoming;
there is nothing in him that is either given or defined in advance.
History begins nowhere and it ends nowhere. Everything in man
has been made by mankind in the course of time. Consequently,
if truth is human, it too is a human product. Sociology applies
the same conception to reason. All that constitutes reason, its
principles and categories, has been made in the course of history.
Everything is a product of certain causes. Phenomena must not
be represented in closed series: things have a 'circular' character,
and analysis can be prolonged to infinity. This is why I can
accept neither the statement of the idealists, that in the
beginning there is thought, nor that of the pragmatists, that
in the beginning there is action.
But if sociology poses the problem in the same way as does pragmatism,
it is in a better position to solve it. The latter, in fact,
claims to explain truth psychologically and subjectively. However,
the nature of the individual is too limited to explain alone all
things human. Therefore, if we envisage individual elements alone,
we are led to diminish unduly the amplitude of the effects that
we have to account for. How could reason, in particular, have
arisen in the course of the experiences undergone by a single
individual? Sociology provides us with broader explanations.
For it, truth, reason and morality are the results of a becoming
that includes the entire unfolding of human history.
Thus we see the advantage of the sociological over the pragmatist
point of view. For the pragmatist philosophers, as we have already
said several times, experience can take place on one level
only. Reason is placed on the same plane as sensitivity;
truth, on the same plane as sensations and instincts. But men
have always recognised in truth something that in certain respects
imposes itself on us, something that is independent of the facts
of sensitivity and individual impulse. Such a universally held
conception of truth must correspond to something real. It is
one thing to cast doubt on the correspondence between symbols
and reality; but it is quite another to reject the thing symbolised
along with the symbol. This pressure that truth is seen as exercising
on minds is itself a symbol that must be interpreted, even if
we refuse to make of truth something absolute and extra-human.
Pragmatism, which levels everything, deprives itself of the means
of making this interpretation by failing to recognise the duality
that exists between the mentality which results from individual
experiences and that which results from collective experiences.
Sociology, however, reminds us that what is social always
possesses a higher dignity than what is individual. It can be
assumed that truth, like reason and morality, will always retain
this character of being a higher value. This in no way prevents
us from trying to explain it. The sociological point of view
has the advantage of enabling us to analyse even that august thing,
truth.
Until now there has been no particularly urgent need to choose
between the points of view of sociology and pragmatism. In contrast
to rationalism, pragmatism sees clearly that error does not lie
on one side and truth on the other, but that in reality truths
and errors are mixed, the latter having often been moments in
the evolution of truth. In the history of creations, there are
unforeseeable novelties. How, then, could truth be conceived
of as something fixed and definitive?
But the reasons that pragmatism adduces to support this
idea are susceptible to a great many objections. Moreover, the
fact that things change does not necessarily mean that truth changes
at the same time. Truth, one could say, is enriched; but
it does not really change. It has certainly been enlarged and
increased in the course of the development of history; but saying
that truth grows is quite different from saying that it varies
in its very nature.
FOURTEENTH LECTURE
The variations of truth
Let us return to the reasons that pragmatism gives in order to
prove that truth is subject to change. There are really two:
(1) truth cannot be immutable because reality
itself is not immutable; hence truth changes in time. (2)
Truth cannot be one because this oneness would be incompatible
with the diversity of minds; hence truth changes in space.
1 In order to be able to say that truth has varied
in time, one would have to show that a proposition can legitimately
be considered true at a given moment and in particular circumstances,
and that this same proposition at another moment and in other
circumstances cannot be held to be true, even though it relates
to the same object. This has not been shown. Pragmatism alleges
that reality has changed; but does this mean that old truths become
false? Reality can evolve without truth thereby ceasing to be
truth. The laws of the physical world, for example, have remained
what they were when life first appeared, and as the biological
world has taken form.
2 The pragmatists base their case on the diversity
of individual minds. But does progress perhaps not consist precisely
in the removal of individual differences? Will the pragmatist
then maintain that truth belongs only to the individual? This
is a paradox that pragmatism itself has not dared to attempt to
resolve. Nor do the pragmatists explain what relationship there
is between the diversity of minds and the diversity of truth.
From the fact that in penetrating individual minds, truth takes
on diverse forms, it does not follow that truth in itself is multiple.
In short, pragmatism offers no proof of the thesis that it advances,
the thesis that truth is amorphous.
Yet this thesis is not without some foundation, for it rests on
certain facts. However, these facts, which the pragmatists sense
only vaguely, must be restored to their true meaning. Let us
see what explanation of them is offered by sociology.
Sociology introduces a relativism that rests on the relation
between the physical environment on the one hand and man on the
other. The physical environment presents a relative fixity.
It undergoes evolution, of course; but reality never ceases to
be what it was in order to give way to a reality of a new kind,
or to one consisting of new elements. The original world survives
under successive additions that enrich it. New realities were,
in a sense, already present in the old ones. The organic world
does not abolish the physical world and the social world has not
been formed in contradistinction to the organic world, but together
with it.
The laws that ruled the movements of the primitive nebulae are
conserved in the stabilised universe of today. It seems that
in the organic world the era of great transformations closed with
the appearance of the human species. Can this be true of man
and the social milieux in which he lives? Social milieux are
the products of different elements, combined and fused together.
Our present-day French society is made up of Gallic, Germanic,
Roman and other elements; but these-elements can no longer be
discerned in an isolated state in our present civilisation, which
is something new and original, a synthesis which is the product
of a true creation. Social environments are thus different from
each other, since each of them presents something new. Therefore,
the institutions of which they are composed must also be different.
Nevertheless, these institutions fulfil the same functions as
those that preceded them. Thus it is that the family has evolved
in the course of history, but it has always remained the family
and has continued to fulfil the same functions. Each of the various
forms has been adapted to these functions. Similarly, we see
that the same ideal political regime cannot be suitable for all
types of societies. And yet the city regime was proper for the
ancient cities, just as our present political regime is suitable
for us. In the same way, there is no single morality, and we
cannot condemn as immoral the moral systems that preceded ours,
for the ideal that they represent was valid for the society in
which they were established. The same can be said for religion.
In sum, there is not one religion, one morality and one political
regime, but different types of religion, types of morality and
types of political organisation. In the practical order, diversity
may be considered as established.
Why should things not be the same in the theoretical order, in
thought itself? If the value of a particular act has changed,
it means that speculative thought has changed, and if speculative
thought has changed, why should the content of truth not change
too?
Action cannot be separated from thou ht. It is impossible for
us to say that the generations which preceded us were capable
of living in total error, in complete aberration. For false thoughts
produce erroneous acts. Thus if men had been completely mistaken
about the nature of things, their actions would not have been
the right ones; and their failures would have produced suffering
which would have led them to seek something else. Nothing authorises
us to think that the affective capacities of men of former times
were radically different from our own.
Speculative and theoretical thought vary as practice varies.
Aesthetic speculation itself shows variations, each people has
its own aesthetic. Hence we tend to believe that speculation
and its value are variable and that consequently, truth, too,
is variable.
These variations occur not only in time but also in space, that
is to say, not only from one type of historical society to another
but also among the individuals of the same society. In fact,
an excess of homogeneity within a society would be its death.
No social group can live or - more particularly - progress in
absolute homogeneity. Both intellectual and practical life, both
thought and action, need diversity, which is, consequently, a
condition of truth. We have moved beyond the intellectual excommunication
of all those who do not think as we do. We respect the truths
of others. We tolerate them, and this tolerance is no longer
the sort that preceded the development of our modern civilisation.
It is not the kind of tolerance that has its source in weariness
(as happened at the end of the wars of religion), nor is it the
kind that is born of a feeling of charity. Rather it is the tolerance
of the intellectual, of the scientist, who knows that truth is
a complex thing and understands that it is very likely that no
one of us will see the whole of all its aspects. Such tolerance
mistrusts all orthodoxy, but it does not prevent the investigator
from expressing the truth as he feels it.
It is in this way that the thesis enunciated by pragmatism is
justified from the sociological point of view. Considerations
of an abstract or metaphysical order cannot provide us with a
satisfactory explanation. It is provided instead by its heightened
sense of human reality, the feeling for the extreme variability
of everything human. We can no longer accept a single, invariable
system of categories or intellectual frameworks. The frameworks
that had a reason to exist in past civilisations do not have it
today. It goes without saying that this removes none of the value
that they had for their own eras. Variability in time and variability
in space are, moreover, closely connected. If the conditions
of life in society are complex, it is naturally to be expected
that this complexity and with it many variations are to be found
in the individuals who make up the social groups.
How these Variations can be Explained
Given this variability of truth in time and space, let us see
what explanation of it pragmatism offers. (So far, of course,
we have seen this dual variability posited, but not explained.)
Pragmatism gives us the 'why' of these variations very briefly:
it is the useful that is true. However, it finds the attempt
to demonstrate this proposition a far from easy undertaking.
In our view, the proper way to do this would very probably be
to take all the propositions recognised as true and determine
whether or not they are useful and, if so, how. But such a procedure
would be contrary to the method of pragmatism. If, as pragmatism
maintains, there is no true idea but that constructed, there can
be no given or established idea of truth that can be verified.
Pragmatism attempts to show that its own theory of truth
is useful. For it, the important thing is not so much what truth
really is but what it must be, even if it is recognised by no
one. What the pragmatists are trying to determine is the ideal
notion of truth. But how can we know that the notion thus constructed
is really the ideal one? Pragmatism can call anything it pleases
'ideal truth'. Therefore, its method is arbitrary and leads to
a purely verbal definition with no objective validity. It is
analogous to the method used by the classical moralists when they
try to determine the ideal notion of morality, a notion which
may well be unrelated to morality as it is actually practised.
But just as it is better to begin by studying moral facts, the
best method of establishing an ideal notion of truth seems to
consist in observing the characteristics of recognised truths.
That is only a question of method, however. Much more important
is the pragmatist thesis itself. We shall see that the proposition
that the useful is the true is a formula that brings us
back to utilitarianism. The pragmatist theory of truth is a logical
utilitarianism.
FIFTEENTH LECTURE
Truth and utility
Before examining the value of pragmatism as a form of logical
utilitarianism, let us look first at the characteristics of truth.
We see at once that it is linked to:
1 a moral obligation. Truth cannot be
separated from a certain moral character. In every age, men have
felt that they were obliged to seek truth. In truth, there
is something which commands respect, and a moral power to which
the mind feels properly bound to assent;
2 a de facto necessitating power. There
is a more or less physical impossibility of not admitting the
truth. When our mind perceives a true representation, we feel
that we cannot not accept it as true. The true idea imposes
itself on us. It is this character that is expressed in the
old theory of the evident nature of truth; there emanates
from truth an irresistible light.
Is pragmatism, as a form of logical utilitarianism, capable of
explaining these two characters? It can explain neither
of them.
1 Seeking the useful is following nature, not
mastering it or taming it. There is no place here for the moral
constraint implied in the idea of obligation. Pragmatism
indeed cannot entail a hierarchy of values, since everything in
it is placed on the same level. The true and the good are both
on our level, that of the useful, and no effort is needed to lift
ourselves to it. For James, the truth is what is 'expedient',
and it is because it is advantageous that it is good and has value.
Clearly this means that truth has its demands, its loyalties,
and can give rise to enthusiasm, but at the level of the useful,
this enthusiasm is only related to what is capable of pleasing
us, that which is in conformity with our interests.
2 Nor is it possible to see how pragmatists could
explain the necessitating character of truth. Pragmatists believe
that it is we who construct both the world and the representations
which express it. We 'make' truth in conformity with our needs.
How then could it resist us? Pragmatism no doubt accepts that
beneath those intellectual constructions which make up truth there
is nevertheless a prime matter which we have not created. For
pragmatism, however, this prime matter is only an ideal limit
which we never reach, although we always tend towards it. It
is wiser, says Schiller, to ignore it, since absolute truth could
'give us no aid', and is rather an obstacle to a more adequate
knowledge of realities which are in effect accessible to us.
Besides that prime matter, there is of course the whole system
of mental organisation, acquired truths and 'previous truths'.
But that is 'a much less obdurately resisting factor' which 'often
ends by giving way': ideas are soft things, which we can twist
as we like when there is no objective reality (provided by sensations)
which prevents us from doing so.
in short, when pragmatists speak of truth as something good, desirable
and attractive, one wonders whether a whole aspect of it has not
escaped them. Truth is often painful, and may well disorganise
thought and trouble the serenity of the mind. When man perceives
it, he is sometimes obliged to change his whole way of thinking.
This can cause a crisis which leaves him disconcerted and disabled.
If, for example, when he is an adult, he suddenly realises that
all his religious beliefs have no solid basis, he experiences
a moral collapse and his intellectual and affective life is in
a sense paralysed. This sense of confusion has been expressed
by Jouffroy in his famous article Comment les dogmes finissent.
Thus the truth is not always attractive and appealing. Very often
it resists us, is opposed to our desires and has a certain quality
of hardness.
3 Truth has a third character, and one which
is undeniable: impersonality. The pragmatists themselves have
indicated this. But how can this character be reconciled with
their definition of truth? It has been said, with some justice,
that moral utilitarianism implies moral subjectivism. Is the
same not true of logical utilitarianism?
The notion of the useful is, moreover, a very obscure one. Everything
is useful in relation to certain ends, and even the worst things
are useful from a certain point of view. Inversely, even the
best, such as knowledge, have their disadvantages and can cause
suffering: those ages in which knowledge has increased must have
been the most anguished. Any phenomenon has infinite repercussions
in the universe, some of them good and others bad. How could
we weigh advantages against drawbacks? It would probably be possible
to trace all effects back to a cause and consequently to a criterion
which would both be single and determining. One could, for example,
accept the existence of an impersonal and universal moral end
which all men are obliged to seek. But pragmatism excludes any
determination of this kind. The truth, says James, is what is
'expedient in almost any fashion; and expedient in the long run
and on the whole of course; for what meets expediently all the
experience in sight won't necessarily meet all further experiences
equally satisfactorily'. And yet not everything can be true.
A choice has to be made, but on what basis? Only on that of personal
experience. If something causes us more satisfaction than
discomfort, we can say that yes, it is useful. But the experience
of other people can be different. Although pragmatism does not
totally accept this consequence, truth can be totally subjective
in such conditions. It is a question of temperament: the temperament
of the ascetic, for example, and that of the man of action; both
have their reason for being, and thus correspond to two different
modes of action.
But here a problem arises. If truth thus has a personal character,
how can impersonal truth be possible? Pragmatists see
it as the ideal final stage towards which all individual opinions
would ultimately converge." What then are the causes which
would determine such a convergence? Two are mentioned by the
pragmatists. (1) just as experience varies with
individuals, so does its extent. The person who possesses the
widest and best-organised experience is in a better position to
see what is really useful. Gradually, his authority here imposes
itself and attracts the commendation of others. But is that a
decisive argument? Since all experience and all judgements are
essentially personal matters, the experience of others is valid
for them, but not for me. (2) There are also
social considerations. 'Every recognition of a judgement by others
is a social problem', says Schiller. Everyone, in fact, has an
interest in acting in concert with his fellow men, since if he
does he feels himself to be stronger and consequently more efficient
and more 'useful'. But the usefulness of joint action implies
shared views, judgements and ideas. The pragmatists have not
disregarded this entirely. The difficulty is that we do not in
fact picture things as we desire them to be, and that the pragmatist
theses run the risk of making us not see this gap, and consequently
of making us see as true that which conforms to our desires.
In order to overcome this difficulty, we should have to agree
to see the general opinion, not as something artificial, but as
an authority capable of silencing the differences between individuals
and of countering the particularism of individual points of view.
If, however, public opinion is to be able to impose itself in
this way it is essential that it should have an extra-individual
origin. But this is not possible in pragmatist doctrine, since
it holds that individual judgements are at the root of all human
thought: no purely individual judgement could ever become an objective
truth.
Moreover, above all these dialectics, there is one fact. If,
as pragmatism maintains, the 'common' truth was the product of
the gradual convergence of individual judgements, one would have
to be able to observe an ever-greater divergence between the ways
of thinking of individuals as one went further and further back
through history. However, what happens is exactly the opposite."
It is in the very earliest ages that men, in every social group,
all think in the same way. It is then that uniformity of thought
can be found. The great differences only begin to appear with
the very first Greek philosophers. The Middle Ages once again
achieved the very type of the intellectual consensus. Then came
the Reformation, and with it came heresies and schisms which were
to continue to multiply until we eventually came to realise that
everyone has the right to think as he wishes.
Let us also go back in the series of propositions of pragmatist
doctrine. We see that if pragmatism defines the true as the useful,
it is because it has proposed the principle that truth is simply
an instrument of action. For pragmatism, truth has no speculative
function: all that concerns it is its practical utility.
For pragmatists, this speculative function is present only in
play and dreams. But for centuries humanity has lived on non-practical
truths, beliefs which were something quite other than 'instruments
of action'. Myths have no essentially practical character.
In primitive civilisations they are accepted for themselves,
and are objects of belief. They are not merely poetic forms.
They are groupings of representations aimed at explaining the
world, systems of ideas whose function is essentially speculative.
For a long time, myths were the means of expression of the intellectual
life of human societies. If men found a speculative interest
in them, it is because this need corresponded to a reality.
SIXTEENTH LECTURE
Speculation and practice
The pragmatist philosophers, and Schiller in particular, deny
that thought has a speculative value. How valid is that
opinion?
It is contradicted by the facts. According to pragmatism, knowledge
is essentially a plan of action, and proposes practical ends to
be attained. Yet the mythological beliefs encountered
in primitive societies are cosmologies, and are directed not towards
the future but towards the past and the present. What lies at
the root of myths is not a practical need: it is the intellectual
need to understand. Basically, therefore, a rationalist mind
is present there, perhaps in an unsophisticated form, but nevertheless
enough to prove that the need to understand is universal and essentially
human.
After mythology came philosophy, born from mythology, and
it too satisfies purely intellectual needs. The belief in the
existence of speculative truths has neither been a hallucination
nor a view more purely appropriate to Plato. It predates him
by a long time, and is affirmed in all the philosophers. It is
true that from a very early age philosophy set itself practical
problems, both moral and political. But even if it tried to engage
in practical action (of a very general nature, be it noted) with
regard to human problems, it has never claimed to have any effect
with regard to action or things. Morality has never been more
than the handmaiden of philosophy. In the Middle Ages, it was
a secondary concern; and scholastic philosophy often paid no attention
to it. The same is true of the seventeenth century. A practical
concern does not therefore represent a permanent current of philosophical
thought.
The same is also true of science. Speculation and practice were
of course intermingled in the very early stages. Alchemy, for
example, was less concerned with finding the real nature of bodies
than with a method of producing gold. In this sense, it could
be said that in origin the sciences are pragmatic. But as history
progresses, the more scientific research loses the mixed character
that it originally possessed. Science has increasingly less to
do with purely technical concerns. The scientist contemplates
reality, and becomes less concerned with the practical consequences
of his discoveries. In all research there is no doubt a point
of departure, an optimistic act of faith in the utility of research;
but that is a transitory stage. The essence of the scientific
mind is that the scientist takes up a point of view which is sharply
opposed to that of the pragmatists.
History too is no less of an embarrassment for pragmatists. Their
view is that ideas exist to act on the real. But historical facts
are facts from the past. How could there be any question of acting
on this? James and Dewey reply that the past is not wholly dead,
that there are 'present prolongations or effects of what the past
harboured', and that an assertion relating to the past can make
a present assertion true or false. But this is playing with words,
for the adaptation of thought to historical reality is entirely
an intellectual process and satisfies purely speculative needs,
not practical ones.
Moore says that historical knowledge can be useful in directing
our individual conduct in circumstances similar to those of the
past. Although the eventuality of using history for practical
and individual ends is perhaps not impossible, it has nothing
to do with historical studies and the establishment of historical
truth as such. When the historian asks whether Caesar really
crossed the Rubicon, as is related in his Commentaries on the
Civil War, he does so solely to know and to make known. Fustel
de Coulanges said that history serves no purpose, and that that
was its greatness. That aphorism is perhaps rather too absolute;
but we must admit that the practical benefits of history are singularly
slim. Times change, circumstances change, and the events of history
cannot recur in precisely the same way, because the conditions
are different.
There is of course one science which is close to history and which
can extract practical consequences from historical facts. This
science is sociology. It is however a recent one, and still in
its very early stages. Even if it were more advanced than it
actually is, it would still be separate from history. For example,
it is no pressing concern of sociology to know whether Madame
de Montespan played a political role in the events of her time
or not, but history certainly does not neglect problems of this
kind.
Thus, the search for truth for truth's sake is neither an isolated
case, nor a pathological fact, nor a deflection of thought. Indeed,
even if we suppose that it is an aberration, and that men were
driven by illusion to seek for a truth which could not be grasped,
we should still have to explain that illusion.
Dewey's Argument for Subordinating Thought to Action
Let us now examine those arguments which pragmatism has used in
claiming to have established that knowledge exists only for the
sake of action.
Dewey in particular thought that he could cite a number of facts
which he saw as conclusive. These are: (1) consciousness
and reflection most often come into being in such conditions that
they seem to have been called into existence by the very necessity
of practice. When balance is disturbed in a living organism,
consciousness awakes: it begins to question itself, the subject
becomes aware of problems. Consequently, it can be said that
the appearance of consciousness is a response to practical ends,
for it comes into being to re-establish the disturbed equilibrium.
(2) The same applies to habits of all kinds:
consciousness disappears when it no longer serves a purpose.
It only awakes when habit is disrupted, when a process on non-adaptation
occurs. (3) This is also true of human society.
When a political or social regime is functioning smoothly, it
is accepted passively and men do not reflect on it. It is when
it does not function smoothly that we seek remedies and think
of getting to the causes of the trouble.
These facts are clearly undeniable. What provokes argument, however,
is the way in which they are interpreted. From them, it is concluded
that since consciousness appears only for the sake of action,
it is simply a substitute for it. In this view, an idea is no
more than a representation of an end to be achieved, the movement
-itself being this representation expressed as an act. But there
are facts which contradict this assertion of the pragmatists,
and which show that there can be antagonism between thought and
action. (a) In some cases, consciousness can hinder action instead
of facilitating it. For example, a pianist who can play a given
piece perfectly will make mistakes if he thinks about what he
is doing. Similarly, someone who searches for words instead of
speaking naturally will stutter. In both cases, consciousness
slows down, overloads or paralyses action. (b) Inversely, action
can paralyse thought, and this is constantly happening. The psychology
of attention indicates it. Attention is a concentrated form of
awareness: consciousness sharpened in this way is what enables
us to understand better what the constitutive characters of consciousness
are. Attention implies a tension in organic functions, a suspension
of movement, and that suspension of movement is even, as Ribot
has shown, an essential condition for it. That is why it has
been said that in order to think deeply it is necessary to abstain
from all movement: 'To think is to refrain from ... acting.' It
is impossible to think intensely while walking, playing and so
on.
Hence it is a fact that the two very different human types, the
man of action and the intellectual, are so diametrically opposed.
What is dominant in the man of action is overall sensations,
which are synthetic and confused, but sharp and strong. With
his representations are associated motor mechanisms which he combines
appropriately and adapts almost unthinkingly to circumstances.
If you want his advice, do not ask his reasons for giving it,
for more often than not he does not know what they are, and thinking
about them would disturb him and make him hesitant. On the other
hand, the intellectual, the thinker, always tends to put off the
decisions he has to take. He hesitates because he never finds
satisfactory reasons for acting. For him, the time for reflection
is unlimited; and when he finally decides to act, he violates
his intellectual temperament. We never of course encounter these
two types in as absolute or clear-cut a form as that which I have
just described, but it is quite true that there are in fact two
contrasting casts of mind.
Why is there this sharp contrast? Because the conditions
of thought and those of action are different. (1)
First, thought is a hyperconcentration of consciousness,
and the greater the concentration, the smaller the circle of reflection.
Action, on the other hand, is a sudden release. Acting means
externalising oneself, and spreading out beyond oneself.
Man cannot at one and the same time be both entirely within himself
and entirely outside himself. (2) Secondly, thought,
the reflecting consciousness, demands time. The faster a representation
passes through consciousness, the greater the proportion of the
unknown it contains. We can only truly know a representation
in successive stages, part by part. To know it, we must analyse
it, and to analyse it we must fix it, hold it in our consciousness;
that is to say, keep it motionless for a certain time. Action
does not call for that kind of fixity. What it wants is the exact
opposite. Movement flows, and to the extent that it is also flux
and movement consciousness does the same. But if it is to exist
truly, to manifest itself, it must stop, and this also supposes
a halt, a suspension of action. By way of contrast, when there
is an equilibrium between our dispositions and the surrounding
environment, our vital movements occur automatically, and pass
so quickly that we have no time to know them, since they merely
skim over consciousness. Consciousness does not therefore move
off-stage like an actor whose part is over. It disappears because
the conditions for its existence have not been met. And in the
same way, if the movement is stopped and consciousness appears,
it is not only because something must fill the gap which movement
no longer occupies, but also because the suspension of movement
has made consciousness possible.
We can conclude that, contrary to the pragmatist thesis, thought
and action are not akin in nature. It is therefore very surprising
to see the pragmatists maintain that knowledge has only practical
ends, since the opposite is the case: it has demands radically
different from practice.
SEVENTEENTH LECTURE
The role of truth
The antithesis noted in the last lecture between truth and action
is all the more marked when one considers higher forms of thought.
Knowledge ascends in a series of stages.
Sensation is the lowest. It provides us with merely fleeting
knowledge, and is barely sufficient to set off the necessary reactions.
This is apparent in the working of instinct.
Images, like sensations, are closely connected with tendencies
to action. We cannot imagine something called desire without
movements making themselves felt to some degree. These movements
remain, however, in a state of potentiality and are, as it were,
unfinished sketches. Nevertheless, representations at this stage
begin to take on an appearance of having a life of their own.
Concepts have a very low motive power. If we are to think
in concepts, we have to put aside the emotions which cause us
to act, and reject feelings which would prevent us isolating the
intellectual element. Concepts are isolated from acts, and they
are posited for their own sake.
The error of the pragmatists is precisely that of denying the
specific nature of knowledge and consequently of thought and even
of consciousness. The role of consciousness is not to direct
the behaviour of a being with no need of knowledge: it is to
constitute a being who would not exist without it. This seems
to me to be proved by the role played in psychic life by 'coenaesthetic'
sensations, which emanate from all parts of our body and are,
so to speak, the kernel of our personal consciousness. This is
what caused Spinoza to say that the soul is the idea of the body.
Consciousness is therefore not a function with the role of directing
the movements of the body, but the organism knowing itself,
and solely by virtue of the fact that the organism knows itself,
we can say that something new occurs.
For consciousness to come into being, there must be gaps or spaces
in action; and it is through these that the being becomes aware
of himself. A being who knows himself is one who stops movement
and then starts it again. Consciousness, far from having only
the role of directing the movements of beings, exists in order
to produce beings.
Pragmatism tends to? deny this function of consciousness, which
it sees as part of the external world, simply a moment in the
series of movements which make up this world, and is lost in them.
And yet pragmatism claims to be a spiritualist doctrine.
It is a strange kind of spiritualism which claims to deny the
specific nature of consciousness!
It is no doubt quite natural that when the unthinking play of
movements is disturbed thought should intervene to stimulate those
which are deficient. This practical role of thought is not unimportant;
but it is neither the only nor perhaps the chief one. Indeed,
a conscious being, a being which knows itself, cannot act completely
like a being which has no knowledge of itself. Its activity will
rather be of a new kind. It will of course still consist of movements;
but these movements will now be directed by ideas. In other words,
there will be psychological activity.
Reducing the conscious being to nothing but his actions means
taking from him the very thing which makes him what he is. Moreover,
consciousness finds such a role distasteful, for it forms only
schematic plans and can never take immediate command over real
behaviour. Intelligence can only provide very general and hypothetical
plans of action, whereas movement needs to be categorical and
precise. Only the experience of action itself can tell us whether
a given act is really the appropriate one in given circumstances.
We have to act in order to know how we should act.
What really shows us that consciousness is in some measure obliged
to do violence to itself, when it attempts to direct attention,
is the fact that once it is freed from this task or escapes from
it, movements gradually become established in the organism and
consciousness itself disappears. This is what occurs in the formation
of habit.
The initial error of pragmatism is thus to deny the proper nature
of consciousness and subsequently of knowledge. It does, however,
have the merit of causing us to reflect on the question of how
the notion of truth should be constructed.
As I have already said, the reply to that question is that one
must look at truths which are recognised as such, and examine
why it is that they are accepted. A representation is considered
to be a true one when it is thought to express reality. I am
not concerned here with whether that is a correct view. We may
hold it erroneously. It may be that ideas are held to be true
for other reasons. That is of little consequence for the moment.
Let us simply say that when we believe an idea to be true,
it is because we see it as adequately conveying reality.
The problem is not to know by what right we can say that a given
proposition is true or false. What is accepted as true today
may quite well be held to be false tomorrow. What is important
is to know what has made men believe that a representation conforms
to reality. Representations which have been accepted as true
in the course of history are of the same interest for us: there
are no privileged ones. If we wish to escape from all that is
too narrow in traditional rationalism, we shall have to broaden
our horizons by freeing ourselves from ourselves, from our own
point of view.
Generally nowadays, when we speak of 'truth', we have in mind
particularly scientific truth. But truth existed before science;
and to answer the question properly, we must also consider pre-scientific
and non-scientific truths such as mythologies. What were
mythologies? They were bodies of truths which were considered
to express reality (the universe), and which imposed themselves
on men with an obligatory character which was just as marked and
as powerful as moral truths.
What, then, caused men to consider these mythological propositions
or beliefs as true? Was it because they had tested them against
a given reality, against spirits, for example, or against divinities
of which they had had real experience? Not at all. The world
of mythical beings is not a real world, and yet men believed in
it. Mythological ideas were not considered as true because they
were based on an objective reality. The very opposite is the
case: it is our ideas and beliefs which give the objects of thought
their vitality. Thus, an idea is true, not because it conforms
to reality, but by virtue of its creative power.
Collective Representations
These ideas, however, do not originate with individuals. They
are collective representations, made up of all the mental
states of a people or a social group which thinks together. In
these collectivities, of course, there are individuals who do
have some role to play; but this very role is only possible as
a result of the action of the collectivity. In the life of the
human race, it is the collectivity which maintains ideas and representations,
and all collective representations are by virtue of their origin
invested with a prestige which means that they have the power
to impose themselves. They have a greater psychological energy
than representations emanating from the individual. This is why
they settle with such force in our consciousness. That is where
the very strength of truth lies.
Thus, we come back to the double thesis of pragmatism, but this
time transposed onto a different level: (1) the
model and the copy are one; (2) we are the co-authors
of reality. However, one can now see the differences. Pragmatism
said that we make reality. But in this case, 'we' means the individual.
But individuals are different beings who cannot all make the
world in the same way; and the pragmatists have had great difficulty
in solving the problem of knowing how several different minds
can know the same world at once. If, however, one admits that
representation is a collective achievement, it recovers a unity
which pragmatism denies to it. This is what explains the impression
of resistance, the sense of something greater than the individual,
which we experience in the presence of truth, and which provides
the indispensable basis of objectivity.
In the last analysis, it is thought which creates reality; and
the major role of the collective representations is to 'make'
that higher reality which is society itself. This is perhaps
an unexpected role for truth, but one which indicates it does
not exist simply in order to direct practical affairs.
EIGHTEENTH LECTURE
The different types of truth
In the history of human thought there are two kinds of mutually
contrasting truths, namely, mythological and scientific
truths.
Mythological Truths
In the first type, all truth is a body of propositions which are
accepted without verification, as against scientific truths, which
are always subjected to testing or demonstration. If they are
unproven, from where do they acquire the character of truth attributed
to them? It is representations which create the character of
objectivity which mythologies have, and it is their collective
character which confers on them the creative power that enables
them to impose themselves on the mind. Collective representations
carry with them their objects, and entail their existence. Mythological
truths have been, for those societies that have believed in them,
the conditions necessary for their existence. Communal life in
fact presupposes common ideas and intellectual unanimity. By
the very fact that the collectivity accepts them, mythological
ideas are no longer subject to individual contingencies. Hence
their objective and necessitating character.
But are peoples completely free to create truth as they will?
Can society transform reality just as it wishes? If this were
the case, we should be able to adopt a more or less attenuated
version of pragmatism, giving it a more or less sociological slant.
But a correction of that kind would not be enough. Ideas and
representations cannot become collective if they do not correspond
to something real. Nor can they remain divorced from the conduct
of individuals; for experiencing failure, disappointment and suffering
tells us that our action corresponds to an inadequate representation,
and we immediately detach ourselves from both of these. Indeed,
it is untrue to say, as the pragmatists do, that an idea which
brings us 'satisfaction' is a true one by the very fact that it
does so. But, although it is false to think that any idea which
satisfies us is a true one, the reciprocal idea that an idea cannot
be true without bringing us some satisfaction is not false.
It is the same with truth as with moral rules. Moral rules are
not made with the purpose of being useful to the individual.
However, we could not do what we ought to do if duty contained
no attraction for individuals or if they found nothing satisfying
in it. Truth is similar to moral rules, in having an impersonal
and a necessitating character; but if that were the sum of its
characteristics we should constantly tend to reject or ignore
it. In order to become really a part of ourselves, it must serve
us and be useful to us. At the practical level, any collective
representation must serve individuals, in the sense that it must
give rise to acts which are adjusted to things, to the realities
to which the representation corresponds. Hence, if it is to be
able to give rise to such acts, the representation itself must
be adapted to these realities.
Mythological creations therefore have some connection with reality.
There must be a reality of which these representations are the
expression. That reality is none other than society. The forces
that religions and myths believe that they recognise in mythological
creations are not mere illusions, but forces which are collective
in origin. What religion expresses in its representations, its
beliefs and myths, is social realities and the way in which they
act upon individuals. Monotheism, for example, is the expression
of the social group's tendency towards greater concentration,
as a result of which particularist groups increasingly disappear.
just as 'coenaesthetic' sensations are the central core of consciousness
for the individual, collective truths are the basis of the common
consciousness for society.
Society cannot become aware of itself in the absence of any relationship
with things. Social life demands agreement between individual
consciousnesses. In order to notice it, each one must express
what it experiences. It can only do so, however, by means of
things taken as symbols. It is because society expresses itself
through things that it has managed to transform and transfigure
reality. That is why, in representations in the form of a myth,
plants, for example, become beings capable of expressing human
feelings. Such representations are false with respect to things,
but true with respect to the subjects who think them.
It is for this reason that truth has varied historically. We
have seen that the pragmatists have been well aware of that idea;
but they express it by talking of the truth as neither fixed nor
definite, as being constantly formed. This formulation is not
satisfactory; for although there are new truths, that does not
mean that old ones change or are abolished. All the cosmologies
immanent in mythological systems are different from each other,
but can nevertheless be said to be equally true, because they
have fulfilled the same function for all the peoples who have
believed in them, and because they performed the same social role.
Scientific Truths
Nowadays we see scientific truths as being the very type
of truth. At first glance, scientific representations seem very
different from mythological ones. The latter express ideas which
society has about itself, the former express the world as it is.
The social sciences, in particular, express what society is in
itself, and not what it is subjectively to the person thinking
about it. Nevertheless, scientific representations are also collective
representations.
It will be objected that scientific representations are impersonal;
but perhaps so too are collective representations? We can answer
in the affirmative, for they express something which is outside
and above individuals.
Scientific ideas have all the characteristics necessary to become
collective representations. Scientific truth helps to Strengthen
social consciousness, as does mythological thought, though by
different means. One might ask how individual minds can communicate.
In two possible ways: either by uniting to form a single collective
mind, or by communicating in one object which is the same for
all, with each however retaining his own personality; like Leibnitz's
monads, each expressing the entirety of the universe while keeping
its individuality. The first way is that of mythological thought,
the second that of scientific thought.
Nor has science taken on this task fortuitously or, as it were,
unconsciously, for it is its very raison d'étre. When
pragmatists wonder why science exists, and what its function is,
they should turn to history for a reply. History shows us that
it came into existence in Greece, and nowhere else, to meet certain
needs. For both Plato and Socrates, the role of science is to
unify individual judgements. The proof is that the method used
to construct it is 'dialectics', or the art of comparing contradictory
human judgements with a view to finding those in which there is
agreement. If dialectics is the first among scientific methods,
and its aim is to eliminate contradictions, it is because the
role of science is to turn minds towards impersonal truths and
to eliminate contradictions and particularisms.
NINETEENTH LECTURE
Science and the collective consciousness
We have seen that the great thinkers of Greece tried to ensure
intellectual unity and understanding among men. The means they
used was to take objective reality as their object, since
it must necessarily be the same for all men, given its independence
from the observing subject. This aim will therefore be achieved
if one can attain a representation of things in the manner in
which an impersonal understanding would represent them.
But the object of science as we see it today is precisely to represent
things as if they were seen by a purely impersonal understanding.
August Comte understood that perfectly, and saw the role of 'positive
philosophy' as that of ending the intellectual anarchy paramount
since the Revolution, but having much earlier real origins. From
the 'metaphysical age', that is, from the birth of the critical
mind, there could no longer be a common consciousness. Comte's
view was that it was science that could provide the mental equipment
to reconstitute that common consciousness. Individual sciences,
however, are not up to that task, since they are too specialised.
A discipline capable of including all specialisms and synthesising
individual -sciences was needed, and that discipline was philosophy.
It is possible to see Comte as mistaken here, as he did not see
that philosophy can never be anything but personal.
Yet the collective consciousness can, even if not necessarily
by means of a philosophical approach, take possession of scientific
truths and fashion them into a coordinated whole. That is how
a popular philosophy, made by and for all, can be created.
Such a philosophy will not have as its concern solely physical
things, but also, and indeed chiefly, man and society. Hence
the important part that history must play. As Comte said, philosophy
looks not so much towards the future (which is what the pragmatists
believe) as towards the past; and it is through philosophy that
society becomes aware of itself. There is also a science which,
with the help of history, is called to play the most important
role in this area. That science is sociology.
The Survival of Mythological Representations
It is not, however, necessary that philosophy should investigate
all the forms of scientific knowledge, for they are recorded and
retained in the collective consciousness. Philosophy can only
provide general orientations; it cannot be coercive. Comte exaggerated
not only the role of philosophy, but also that of science. He
believed that once mankind reached the positive age, there would
be an end to mythological ideas. Men, he thought, would no longer
have views on questions not elucidated by science. Our lives
would be based on positive scientific truths, which would be considered
established, and the rest would be the domain of intellectual
doubt. I accept that this is so with regard to knowledge about
the physical world, but it cannot be the case as far as the human
and social world is concerned. In these areas, science is still
in a rudimentary state. Its methods of investigation are difficult,
since direct experiment is impossible. Under such conditions
it is not hard to understand why ideas expressing social matters
in a really objective way are still rather rare.
If Comte could believe that sociology would one day be able to
provide guidelines for the public consciousness, it was because
he had simplistic ideas about social development, or rather an
essentially philosophical concept of it. His sociology was really
a philosophy of history. He was fascinated by the 'law of the
three stages' and thought that in enunciating it he had established
the whole of sociology. This was, of course, far from being the
case. Sociology, as he himself recognised, has a more complex
object than other sciences. It can only express fragmentary hypotheses,
and so far these have had scarcely any effect on popular consciousness.
What action should we take in these circumstances? Should we
take refuge in doubt? That would certainly be a kind of wisdom,
at least with regard to the physical world. But, as we have said,
it is difficult to extend that attitude to the social and human
world. In that world, we have to act and live; and in order to
live we need something other than doubt. Society cannot wait
for its problems to be solved scientifically. It has to make
decisions about what action to take, and in order to make these
decisions it has to have an idea of what it is.
Where can we find that representation of it, which is indispensable
for its action and its life? There is only one solution. If
there is no objective knowledge, society can only know itself
from within, attempt to express this sense of itself, and to use
that as its guide. In other words, it must conduct itself with
reference to a representation of the same kind as those which
constitute mythological truths.
What characterises such mythological representations is the fact
that they express a unanimous conception, and this is what gives
them a force and authority which enables them to impose themselves
without their being subject to verification or doubt. That is
why there are formulae in our societies which we imagine are not
religious, but which nevertheless do have the character of dogma,
and are not questioned. Of this kind are ideas such as 'democracy',
'progress', 'the class struggle' and so on. Thus, we can see
that scientific thought cannot rule alone. There is, and there
always will be, room in social life for a form of truth which
will perhaps be expressed in a very secular way, but will nevertheless
have a mythological and religious basis. For a long time to come,
there will be two tendencies in any society: a tendency towards
objective scientific truth and a tendency towards subjectively
perceived truth, towards mythological truth. This is also one
of the great obstacles which obstruct the development of sociology.
Impersonal Truth and Individual Diversities
We are now faced with a further problem. So far we have seen
truth as characterised by its impersonal nature. But should we
not keep a place within it for individual diversity? As
long as mythological truth holds sway, conformity is the rule.
Once scientific thought becomes paramount, however, intellectual
individualism appears. Indeed, it is this very individualism
which has made scientific truth necessary, since social unanimity
can no longer centre on mythological beliefs. The impersonal truth
developed by science can leave room for everyone's individuality.
The fact is that the diversity of objects found in the world
encourages the differentiation of minds; for individual minds
are not all equally suited to studying the same things, and thus
tend to parcel out amongst themselves the questions to be investigated.
But this is not all, and not even the real question, which is
whether, with a given problem, there is room for a plurality
of mental attitudes all of which in a sense are justified. Each
object is, of course, extremely complex and includes a multitude
of elements which intermingle. We cannot exhaust reality either
as a whole or in any of its constituent parts. Therefore every
object of knowledge offers an opportunity for an infinity of possible
points of view, such as the point of view of life, of purely mechanical
movement, of stasis and dynamics, of contingency and determination,
of physics and biology and so on. Individual minds, however, are
finite, and none can work from all points of view at once. If
each of these aspects is to be given the attention it merits,
the whole mind must be devoted to it. Consequently, each mind
is free to choose the point of view from which it feels itself
most competent to view things. This means that for every object
of knowledge there are differing but equally justified ways of
examining it. These are probably partial truths, but all these
partial truths come together in the collective consciousness and
find their limits and their necessary complements. Thus intellectual
individualism, far from making for anarchy, as would be the case
during the period of the domination of mythological truth, becomes
a necessary factor in the establishment of scientific truth, so
that the diversity of intellectual temperaments can serve the
cause of impersonal truth.
Furthermore, intellectual individualism does not necessarily imply,
as James seems to think, that everyone may arbitrarily believe
what he wishes to believe. It simply means that there are separate
tasks within the joint enterprise, and that everyone may choose
his own in accordance with his temperament.
Thus, on the one hand, scientific truth is not incompatible with
the diversity of minds; and on the other, as social groups be
come increasingly complex, it is impossible that society should
have a single sense of itself. Hence there are various social
currents. Here, society will be seen as a static phenomenon;
there as a dynamic one. Now it will be seen as subject to determinism;
now chiefly sensed as an essentially contingent entity, and so
on. Basically, all these ideas are reasonable, for they each
correspond to various needs which express the different ways in
which society senses and experiences itself.
A further consequence of this transformation is that tolerance
must henceforth be based on this idea of the complexity and richness
of reality, and then on the diversity of opinions, which is both
necessary and effective. Everyone must be able to admit that
someone else has perceived an aspect of reality, which he himself
had not grasped, but which is as real and as true as those to
which he had gone from preference.
We can also see at the same time that the task of speculative
truth is to provide nourishment for the collective consciousness.
This means that we can answer the pragmatists' objection, which
says that if the sole function of truth is to express reality,
it is merely redundant; it must add something to truth,
and if it does, it is no longer a faithful copy. The fact is
that truth the 'copy' of reality, is not merely redundant or pleonastic.
It certainly 'adds' a new world to reality, a world which is
more complex than any other: That world is the human and social
one. Truth is the means by which a new order of things becomes
possible, and that new order is nothing less than civilisation.
TWENTIETH LECTURE
Are thought and reality heterogeneous?
We must now examine pragmatism as a doctrine which claims that
thought and reality are heterogeneous. At the same time, we shall
have to examine the arguments which the pragmatists borrow from
Bergson to support that thesis.
We recall that the pragmatists' line of argument is as follows:
truth implies the existence of distinctions between elements;
reality consists of a lack of distinction; therefore truth cannot
express reality without presenting as distinct something which
is not distinct; without, in short, distorting reality. Reality,
like a mass, forms a unity where everything holds together without
any radical separation. What emanates from one part has repercussions
within the whole. Thus it is only in abstracts that we separate
one part from the whole. Concepts, on the other hand, are limited,
determined and clearly circumscribed; and the world of concepts
is discontinuous and distinct. The conceptual and the real are
thus heterogeneous.
This heterogeneity is heightened when we try to express, not the
universe as a whole, but change, movement and, above all, life.
In order to express change, we have to break it down into its
components, split it up into its elements, and each of these elements
necessarily becomes something fixed. A series of fixed elements,
however, will never restore the mobility of change, just as from
inert matter one can never create life. Concepts express only
the coagulated, the ready-made, and never what is being made or
is becoming. But in reality everything is continuous. complex
and moving. There is nothing simple about the world. Everything
can be broken down infinitely; and it is pluralism, as a
negation of simplicity and an affirmation of diversity, which
is all affirmation of the true.
That is the pragmatist line of argument. But, because reality
is continuous and undivided, does it necessarily follow that what
is distinct is simply a product of thought and that alone? Because
there are no absolute distinctions, does it follow that there
is a lack of distinction and absolute confusion? There is nothing
absolute in the universe, and absolute confusion is as impossible
as absolute separation. In things there is already a relative
discrimination. If the real were in fact totally indistinct,
if confusion were paramount in it, we should have to admit that
the principle of contradiction could not apply there. In order
to be able to say that A is A, it is necessary that A should be
determined, must be what it is and not something else. Pragmatism
itself rests on reasoning which involves concepts and which is
based on the principle of contradiction. Denying this principle
would mean denying the possibility of any intellectual relationship.
We cannot make a judgement or understand anything at all if we
do not first agree that it is this object and not another that
is at issue. Similarly, in discussion, we first have to agree
that we are talking about this object, and not another.
But it may be objected, with Bergson, that the natural state of
life is precisely one of undividedness. Life is a unity, a concentration,
in which nothing is properly speaking outside the other parts.
Our answer is that reality, whatever it is, is far from resistant
to any form of distinction, and to some degree tends of itself
towards it. When Spencer says that the universe moves from 'the
homogeneous to the heterogeneous', the expression is inexact.
What exists originally is also heterogeneous in nature; but it
is the heterogeneity entailed by a state of confusion. The initial
state is a multiplicity of germs, of ways and means, and of different
activities which are not only intermingled, but, as it were, lost
in each other, so that it is extremely difficult to separate them.
They are indistinct from each other. Thus, in the cell of monocellular
organisms, all the vital functions are so to speak included.
They are all there, but not separately, and the functions of nutrition
and of sensitivity seem confused, and it seems difficult to distinguish
them. The same is true of the embryo: in the human foetus, all
the functions of the human organism are already present. The
child who is born carries within him all his hereditary tendencies,
although it is not possible to see them clearly at that stage,
and it is not until later that they will really separate.
In social life, that primitive undivided state is even more striking.
Religious life, for example, contains a rich abundance
of forms of thought and activities of all kinds. In the field
of thought, these include myths and religious beliefs, an embryonic
science' and a certain poetry. In the sphere of action we find
rites, a morality and a form of law' and arts (aesthetic elements,
songs and music in particular). All these elements are gathered
up into a whole and it seems extremely difficult to separate them.
Science and art, myth and poetry, morality, law and religion
are all confused or, rather, fused. The same observations could
be made about the early family, which is at one and the same time,
for example, a social, religious, political and legal unit.
Thus the primitive form of any reality is a concentration of all
kinds of energies, undivided in the sense that they are only various
aspects of one and the same thing. Evolution consists of a gradual
separation of all these various functions which were originally
indistinct. Secular and scientific thought has moved away from
religious thought; art has moved away from religious ceremonies;
morality and law have moved away from ritual. The social group
has been divided into the family group, the political group, the
economic group and so on.
We are thus brought round to the view that what we are told
is the major form of reality, that is, the non-separation
and interpenetration of all its elements, is really its most
rudimentary form. Confusion is the original state.
Distinct Thought and the 'Life Force'
But here once again we encounter Bergson's objection. Life is
seen as essentially an undivided force; and this 'life force',
struggling with rigid, fixed, inert matter, is obliged to diffract
and sub-divide. Matter itself is also seen as a slackening, an
intermission and an inversion, of this rising force.
We do not see, however, if matter is still life in a slowed-down
and so to speak condensed form, how both can engage in a struggle
or why they should be opposed to each other. The hypothesis of
life and matter as two mutually hostile forces is inadmissible.
Life does not break up and sub-divide in spite of itself.
It does so spontaneously to achieve its potential more fully
and to emancipate itself. In the beginning, all forms of activity
and all functions were gathered together, and were, in a manner
of speaking, each other's prisoners. Consequently they were obstacles
for each other, each preventing the other from achieving its nature
fully. That is why, if science is to come into being, it must
differentiate itself from religion and myths. If the link which
originally united them slackens and weakens, it is not a fall
or a collapse, but progress.
The need for distinction and separation thus lies in things
themselves, and is not simply a mental need. Things are rich
in potentially diverse elements, separable parts and varied aspects.
Consequently, there are discernible elements, since they tend
of themselves to separate, although they never manage to free
themselves of each other completely.
In social life, individuation is simply one of the forms of that
movement towards distinction.
Such a distinction probably cannot be a mere abstraction, as we
know that every element that we isolate keeps its relationship
with all the rest. Nevertheless, the isolation of one element
from everything to which it is connected is a legitimate action.
We have the right to say that A is A, provided we are aware that
we are doing so in abstracts and conditionally. In so far as
we are considering A, not as absolutely distinct from B and C,
but in itself, we are making a concept of it. Isolating this
real aspect of things is not doing violence to the nature of things.
All we are doing is to follow the natural articulations of each
thing. Using concepts to think about things means establishing
a quite relative distinction. The concept certainly expresses
a reality and, if it is distinct, it is because it expresses distinctions
which are in no way purely mental ones. Thought and reality are
thus not at all heterogeneous.
There remains the objection which sees concepts as unable to express
change and life. Becoming, we are told, is something which 'occurs',
not a series of ready-made states. Concepts are unable to express
the transition from one stage to another. There is however a
contradiction in that idea of life. Life cannot be defined by
mobility alone. Reality has a static aspect. That aspect, in
the view of the doctrine we are discussing, is that of matter.
If matter is spoilt, or fixed by life, there must be something
in life which is inclined towards that process of becoming fixed.
Even in change itself there must be a static aspect.
The fact is that nothing changes except to achieve a result.
What right have we to postulate that these results have no fixity?
Life has a perfect right to rest on its laurels occasionally!
Movement and change can surely be seen as means of achieving
results. If becoming were a kind of frantic, incessant and restless
flight, with never a fixed point, it would simply be sound and
fury. By fixing consecutive states, we are therefore expressing
real elements of becoming, and they are indeed its most important
ones.
Nor can we represent something changing without representing something';
and that something is necessarily something already constituted.
We make the new from what we have, and the new is new and meaningful
only in relation to what we already have.
It is true that we still have to think out the link between the
two. One might ask how it is possible to think about what is
'making itself'. Things in that state do not yet exist, they
are indeterminate in nature, and therefore not susceptible to
thought. We can only represent what is, because it 'is' in a
certain way, and this offers some purchase for thought.
The tendency to be can only be thought about in terms of elements
already acquired.
But is it really true that we cannot think of movement and the
transition from one stage to another? When thought is applied
to change, it always contains three terms: the idea of an achieved
state, the idea of a state thought about in rudimentary terms
because it still does not exist and the idea of a relationship
between these two notions. That last idea can certainly be represented
by a concept.
The difficulty lies chiefly in understanding how a participatory
relationship can be expressed. Concepts are never really isolated
by us. We can loosen the context which constrains them, but we
have judgement and reason which enable us to re-establish mutual
relationships. That is how we learn that two things are in communication.
Distinction is thus a need of conceptual thought, but it already
exists in things as it does in the mind. Similarly, continuity
and communication exist in the mind, as they do in things.
Conclusion
Rationalists were accused of seeing truth as a sort of luxury
of reality, something given, achieved, created simply to be contemplated.
But that contemplation, it was also said, is a sterile, selfish
intellectual's joy, of no use from the human point of view.
The expression of reality, however, does have a truly useful function,
for it is what makes societies, although it could equally well
be said that it also derives from them . It is true that when
we imagine truth as something ready-made, we are obliged to see
it as a transcendence. But although truth is a social thing,
it is also a human one at the same time, and thus comes closer
to us, rather than moves away and disappears in the distant realms
of an intelligible world or a divine understanding. It is no
doubt still superior to individual consciousness; but even the
collective element in it exists only through the consciousness
of individuals, and truth is only ever achieved by individuals.
We should also add that truth, at the same time as being a social
and human thing, is also something living. It mingles with life
because it is a product of that higher form of life, social life,
as well as being the condition for its existence. It is diverse,
because that form of life presents itself in multiple and diverse
forms. This 'diversification', and the carving out' of concepts
of which pragmatism speaks, are by no means arbitrary. They are
modelled on realities, and in particular on the realities of social
life.
There is also one final characteristic of truth on which I have
already insisted, but which I would like to recapitulate in conclusion:
that is its obligatory nature. We have seen that pragmatism,
that logical utilitarianism, cannot offer an adequate explanation
of the authority of truth, an authority which is easy to conceive
of, however, if one sees a social aspect of truth. That is why
truth is a norm for thought in the same way that the
moral ideal is a norm for conduct.
Appendix
Concepts
We might be tempted to define concepts by their breadth and generality,
as opposed to sensations and images which represent only particular
objects.
Such a definition would, however, simply provide a generic notion,
and would not specifically distinguish concepts from sensations
and images. It would imply that thinking logically means simply
thinking in general terms. But the general only exists as entailed
by the particular. Thinking in general terms therefore means
thinking in particular terms, but in a certain way.
It would be extraordinary if such a simple definition was enough
to give rise to a type of thought which is as distinct from 'thought
through sensations' and 'thought through images' as logical thought
is. How would the particular, once it had been impoverished and
simplified, come to possess those virtues which the particular
in its richness and denseness does not possess? How would one,
by mutilating the real, obtain a set of specially privileged representations?
We must consider whether concepts are not something more.
There is no discontinuity between the individual and the genus.
There are concepts for genera. Why should there not be concepts
for individuals? Is the genus necessary for the existence of
a concept?
There are in fact many concepts which designate only individuals.
Each people and nation has a great number of heroes either legendary
or historical (it matters little which). In what terms do we
think about them? Not in general ideas, nor yet in images, for
we have never seen them. We do have concepts of them, for we
argue about them, and these concepts are the starting-points for
our discussions and our reasoning.
In the same way, the concept of God is an individual concept.
For believers, God is certainly an individual being, and we think
of Him neither through sensations nor through images.
The idea of the native land is also a concept.
Furthermore, sensations and images are characterised by their
fleeting nature and their mobility. The concept on the other
hand is immutable, or at least should be. Thinking in concepts
means thinking of the variable, but subsuming it under the form
of the immutable. The fixity of vocabulary expresses the
fixity of concepts, and at the same time partly causes it.
Concepts are universal or at least capable of being universal
amongst men of the same civilisation. They are common to all
men who have the same language, or at least communicable. One
cannot talk about my concept; although one can talk about my sensation.
Sensations, like images, cannot be communicated to others. We
can only suggest similar ones, by association. Concepts are impersonal,
and above individual contingencies. That, indeed, is the feature
of logical thought.
The problem is thus that of how thought has been able to fix itself
in this way and, so to speak, to make itself impersonal, and not
of how it has become generalised.
When the Socratics discovered that there were fixed representations,
they were full of wonder; and Plato felt impelled to hypostasise,
almost to make divine, these fixed thoughts.
We can, however, find other explanations of the properties of
concepts. If they are common to all, is it not because they are
the work of the community? Classical dogmatism, which postulates
the agreement of all human reasons, is a little childish. There
is no need to go beyond experience to seek this one, impersonal
thought. A form of it, collective thought, occurs within experience.
Why should concepts not be collective representations?
Everything collective tends to become fixed, and to eliminate
the changing and the contingent. In addition, it is because they
are collective that concepts impose themselves upon us, and are
transmitted to us. Words too play a major role where concepts
are concerned, and words are collective things.
Collective thought is only feebly and incompletely represented
in each individual consciousness, as we have already seen in the
case of moral thought. The same is true intellectually. Each
of our words goes beyond our individual experience, and often
expresses things about which we know nothing whatsoever. If some
of the objects connotated by the word are known to us, they are
only examples. Concepts themselves go even further beyond our
personal experience; for they are formed by what a whole series
of generations has experienced. What is superimposed on our individual
experience, and 'subsumes' it by means of concepts, is thus collective
experience.
In addition, concepts are systematised because collective thought
itself is systematised. In relation to that collective thought,
we stand in the same relationship as Plato's nous to the
world of Ideas. We never manage to see it in its entirety, or
in its reality. We do not know all the concepts worked out by
our own civilisation; and in addition, we individualise them,
and give words a particular meaning which they do not have. Hence
the many differences which arise amongst individuals. Hence too
lies, the lies which are said to be necessary ...
One can make an objection to this sociological theory of concepts.
As we have defined them here, concepts ensure agreement between
individuals. One might ask, however, where their agreement with
reality comes from. We tend to think that if concepts are collective
they are likely to be true; but only scientific concepts present
this character. The others are worked out without method.
One can nevertheless reply that collective representations do
not stand outside logical truth. The generality and fixity which
they have would not be possible if they were totally inadequate
with respect to truth. Verification is a reciprocal process:
the experiences of all individuals are mutually critical. The
concepts worked out by the masses and those worked out by scientists
are not essentially different in nature.
Further Reading:
Biography |
James |
Peirce |
Spencer |
Comte |
Weber |
Lévi-Strauss
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org
|
./articles/Barthes-Roland/https:..www.marxists.org.reference.subject.philosophy.works.fr.levistra | <body>
<p class="title">Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958)</p>
<h1>Structural Anthropology<br>
Chapter II</h1>
<h3>Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology</h3>
<hr class="end">
<p class="information">
<span class="info">Source:</span> <em>Structural Anthropology</em>, 1958 publ. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press., 1968. Various excerpts reproduced here.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="fst">
LINGUISTICS OCCUPIES a special place among the social sciences,
to whose ranks it unquestionably belongs. It is not merely a
social science like the others, but, rather, the one in which
by far the greatest progress has been made. It is probably the
only one which can truly claim to be a science and which has achieved
both the formulation of an empirical method and an understanding
of the nature of the data submitted to its analysis. This privileged
position carries with it several obligations. The linguist will
often find scientists from related but different disciplines drawing
inspiration from his example and trying to follow his lead. <em>Noblesse
oblige</em>. A linguistic journal like <em>Word</em> cannot confine
itself to the illustration of strictly linguistic theories and
points of view. It must also welcome psychologists, sociologists,
and anthropologists eager to learn from modern linguistics the
road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena.
As Marcel Mauss wrote – already forty years ago: “Sociology
would certainly have progressed much further if it had everywhere
followed the lead of the linguists. ...” The close methodological
which exists between the two disciplines imposes a special obligation
of collaboration upon them.</p>
<p>
Ever since the work of Schrader it has been unnecessary to demonstrate
the assistance which linguistics can render to the anthropologist
in the study of kinship. It was a linguist and a philologist
(Schrader and Rose) who showed the improbability of the hypothesis
of matrilineal survivals in the family in antiquity, to which
so many anthropologists still clung at that time. The linguist
provides the anthropologist with etymologies which permit him
to establish between certain kinship terms relationships that
were not immediately apparent. The anthropologist, on the other
hand, can bring to the attention of the linguist customs, prescriptions,
and prohibitions that help him to understand the persistence of
certain features of language or the instability of terms or groups
of terms. At a meeting of the Linguistic Circle of New York,
Julien Bonfante once illustrated this point of view by reviewing
the etymology of the word for uncle in several Romance languages.
The Greek <em>theios</em> corresponds in Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese to <em>zio</em> and <em>tio</em>; and he added that in
certain regions of Italy the uncle is called <em>barba</em>. The
“beard,” the “divine” uncle – what a wealth
of suggestions for the anthropologist! The investigations of
the late A. M. Hocart into the religious character of the avuncular
relationship and “theft of the sacrifice” by the maternal
kinsmen immediately come to mind. Whatever interpretation is given
to the data collected by Hocart (and his own interpretation is
not entirely satisfactory), there is no doubt that the linguist
contributes to the solution of the problem by revealing the tenacious
survival in contemporary vocabulary of relationships which have
long since disappeared. At the same time, the anthropologist explains
to the linguist the bases of etymology and confirms its validity.
Paul K. Benedict, in examining, as a linguist, the kinship systems
of South East Asia, was able to make an important contribution
to the anthropology of the family in that area.</p>
<p>
But linguists and anthropologists follow their own paths independently.
They halt , no doubt, from time to time to communicate to one
another certain of their findings; these findings, however, derive
from different operations, and no effort is made to enable one
group to benefit from the technical and methodological advances
of the other. This attitude might have been justified in the
era when linguistic research leaned most heavily on historical
analysis. In relation to the anthropological research conducted
during the same period, the difference was one of degree rather
than of kind. The linguists employed a more rigorous method,
and their findings were established on more solid grounds; the
sociologists could follow their example in renouncing consideration
of the spatial distribution of contemporary types as a basis for
their classifications. But, after all, anthropology and
sociology were looking to linguistics only for insights; nothing
foretold a revelation.</p>
<p>
The advent of structural linguistics completely changed this situation.
Not only did it renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation
of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural
linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with
respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example,
has played for the physical sciences. In what does this revolution
consist, as we try to assess its broadest implications? N. Troubetzkoy,
the illustrious founder of structural linguistics, himself furnished
the answer to this question. In one programmatic statement,
he reduced the structural method to four basic operations. First,
structural linguistics shifts from the study of <em>conscious linguistic</em>
phenomena to study of their <em>unconscious </em>infrastructure;
second, it does not treat <em>terms </em>as independent entities,
taking instead as its – basis of analysis the <em>relations </em>between
terms; third, it introduces the concept of <em>system</em> – “Modern
phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part
of a system; it <em>shows </em>concrete phonemic systems and elucidates
their structure” finally, structural linguistics aims
at discovering <em>general laws, </em>either by induction “or
... by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute
character.” </p>
<p>
Thus, for the first time, a social science is able to formulate
necessary relationships. This is the meaning of Troubetzkoy's
last point, while the preceding rules show how linguistics must
proceed in order to attain this end. It is not for us to show
that Troubetzkoy's claims are justified. The vast majority of
modern linguists seem sufficiently agreed on this point. But
when an event of this importance takes place in one of the sciences
of man, it is not only permissible for, but required of, representatives
of related disciplines immediately to examine its consequences
and its possible application to phenomena of another order.</p>
<p>
New perspectives then open up. We are no longer dealing with
an occasional collaboration where the linguist and the anthropologist,
each working by himself, occasionally communicate those findings
which each thinks may interest the other. In the study of kinship
problems (and, no doubt, the study of other problems as well),
the anthropologist finds himself in a situation which formally
resembles that of the structural linguist. Like phonemes, kinship
terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning
only if they are integrated into systems. “Kinship systems,”
Eke “phonemic systems,” are built by the mind on the
level of unconscious thought. Finally, the recurrence of kinship
patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between
certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions
of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us
to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics,
the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which
are general but implicit. The problem can therefore be formulated
as follows: Although they belong to <em>another order of reality</em>,
kinship phenomena are <em>of the same type </em>as linguistic
phenomena. Can the anthropologist, using a method analogous <em>in
form </em>(if not in content) to the method used in structural
linguistics, achieve the same kind of progress in his own science
as that which has taken place in linguistics?</p>
<p>
We shall be even more strongly inclined to follow this path after
an additional observation has been made. The study of kinship
problems is today broached in the same terms and seems to be in
the throes of the same difficulties as was linguistics on the
eve of the structuralist revolution. There is a striking analogy
between certain attempts by Rivers and the old linguistics, which
sought its explanatory principles first of all in history. In
both cases, it is solely (or almost solely) diachronic analysis
which must account for synchronic phenomena. Troubetzkoy, comparing
structural linguistics and the old linguistics, defines structural
linguistics as a “systematic structuralism and universalism,”
which he contrasts with the individualism and “atomism”
of former schools. And when he considers diachronic analysis,
his perspective is a profoundly modified one: “The evolution
of a phonemic system at any given moment is directed by the <em>tendency
toward a goal. ... </em>This evolution thus has a direction, an
internal logic, which historical phonemics is called upon to elucidate.”
The “individualistic” and “atomistic” interpretation,
founded exclusively on historical contingency, which is criticised
by Troubetzkoy and Jakobson, is actually the same as that which
is generally applied to kinship problems. Each detail of terminology
and each special marriage rule is associated with a specific custom
as either its consequence or its survival. We thus meet with
a chaos of discontinuity. No one asks how kinship systems, regarded
as synchronic wholes, could be the arbitrary product of a convergence
of several heterogeneous institutions (most of which are hypothetical),
yet nevertheless function with some sort of regularity and effectiveness.</p>
<p>
However, a preliminary difficulty impedes the transposition of
the phonemic method to the anthropological study of primitive
peoples. The superficial analogy between phonemic systems and
kinship systems is so strong that it immediately sets us on the
wrong track. It is incorrect to equate kinship terms and linguistic
phonemes from the viewpoint of their formal treatment. We know
that to obtain a structural law the linguist analyses phonemes
into “distinctive features,” which he can then group
into one or several “pairs of oppositions.” Following
an analogous method, the anthropologist might be tempted to break
down analytically the kinship terms of any given system into their
components. In our own kinship system, for instance, the term
<em>father</em> has positive connotations with respect to sex, relative
age, and generation; but it has a zero value on the dimension
of collaterality, and it cannot express an affinal relationship.
Thus, for each system, one might ask what relationships are expressed
and, for each term of the system, what connotation – positive
or negative – it carries regarding each of the following relationships:
generation, collaterality, sex, relative age, affinity, etc.
It is at this “micro-sociological” level that one might
hope to discover the most general structural laws, just as the
linguist discovers his at the infraphonemic level or the physicist
at the infra-molecular or atomic level. One might interpret the
interesting attempt of Davis and Warner in these terms.</p>
<p>
But a threefold objection immediately arises. A truly scientific
analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory. Thus the
distinctive features which are the product of phonemic analysis
have an objective existence from three points of view: psychological,
physiological, and even physical; they are fewer in number than
the phonemes which result from their combination; and, finally,
they allow us to understand and reconstruct the system. Nothing
of the kind would emerge from the preceding hypothesis. The treatment
of kinship terms which we have just sketched is analytical in
appearance only; for, actually, the result is more abstract than
the principle; instead of moving toward the concrete, one moves
away from it, and the definitive system – if system there is -
is only conceptual. Secondly, Davis and Warner's experiment proves
that the system achieved through this procedure is infinitely
more complex and more difficult to interpret than the empirical
data. Finally, the hypothesis has no explanatory value;
that is, it does not lead to an understanding of the nature of
the system and still less to a reconstruction of its origins.</p>
<p>
What is the reason for this failure? A too literal adherence
to linguistic method actually betrays its very essence. Kinship
terms not only have a sociological existence; they are also elements
of speech. In our haste to apply the methods of linguistic analysis,
we must not forget that, as a part of vocabulary, kinship terms
must be treated with linguistic methods in direct and not analogous
fashion. Linguistics teaches us precisely that structural analysis
cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously
broken down into phonemes. <em>There are no necessary relationships
at the vocabulary level</em>. This applies to all vocabulary
elements, including kinship terms. Since this applies to linguistics,
it ought to apply <em>ipso facto </em>to the sociology of language.
An attempt like the one whose possibility we are now discussing
would thus consist in extending the method of structural linguistics
while ignoring its basic requirements. Kroeber prophetically
foresaw this difficulty in an article written many years ago.
And if, at that time, he concluded that a structural analysis
of kinship terminology was impossible, we must remember that linguistics
itself was then restricted to phonetic, psychological, and historical
analysis. While it is true that the social sciences must share
the limitations of linguistics, they can also benefit from its
progress.</p>
<p>
Nor should we overlook the profound differences between the phonemic
chart of a language and the chart of kinship terms of a society.
In the first instance there can be no question as to function;
we all know that language serves as a means of communication.
On the other hand, what the linguist did not know and what structural
linguistics alone has allowed him to discover is the way in which
language achieves this end. The function was obvious; the system
remained unknown. In this respect, the anthropologist finds himself
in the opposite situation. We know, since the work of Lewis H.
Morgan, that kinship terms constitute systems; on the other hand,
we still do not know their function. The misinterpretation of
this initial situation reduces most structural analyses of kinship
systems to pure tautologies. They demonstrate the obvious and
neglect the unknown.</p>
<p>
This does not mean that we must abandon hope of introducing order
and discovering meaning in kinship nomenclature. But, we should
at least recognise the special problems raised by the sociology
of vocabulary and the ambiguous character of the relations between
its methods and those of linguistics. For this reason it would
be preferable to limit the discussion to a case where the analogy
can be clearly established. Fortunately, we have just such a
case available.</p>
<p>
What is generally called a “kinship system” comprises
two quite different orders of reality. First, there are terms
through which various kinds of family relationships are expressed.
But kinship is not expressed solely through nomenclature. The
individuals or classes of individuals who employ these terms feel
(or do not feel, as the case may be) bound by prescribed behaviour
in their relations with one another, such as respect or familiarity,
rights or obligations, and affection or hostility. Thus, along
with what we propose to call the <em>system of terminology </em>(which,
strictly speaking, constitutes the vocabulary system), there is
another system, both psychological and social in nature, which
we shall call the <em>system of attitudes. </em>Although it is
true (as we have shown, above) that the study of systems of terminology
places us in a situation analogous, but opposite, to the situation
in which we are dealing with phonemic systems, this difficulty
is “inversed,” as it were, when we examine systems of
attitudes. We can guess at the role played by systems of attitudes,
that is, to insure group cohesion and equilibrium, but we do not
understand the nature of the interconnections between the various
attitudes, nor do we perceive their necessity. In other words,
as in the case of language, we know their function, but the system
is unknown.</p>
<p>
Thus we find a profound difference between the <em>system of
terminology </em>and the <em>system of attitudes, </em>and we
have to disagree with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown if he really believed,
as has been said of him, that attitudes are nothing but the expression
or transposition of terms on the affective level. The last few
years have provided numerous examples of groups whose chart of
kinship terms does not accurately reflect family attitudes, and
vice versa. It would be incorrect to assume that the kinship
system constitutes the principal means of regulating interpersonal
relationships in all societies. Even in societies where the kinship
system does function as such, it does not fulfil that role everywhere
to the same extent. Furthermore, it is always necessary to distinguish
between two types of attitudes: first, the diffuse, uncrystallised,
and non-institutionalised attitudes, which we may consider as
the reflection or transposition of the terminology on the psychological
level; and second, along with, or in addition to, the preceding
ones, those attitudes which are stylised, prescribed, and sanctioned
by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual.
These attitudes, far from automatically reflecting the nomenclature,
often appear as secondary elaborations, which serve to resolve
the contradictions and overcome the deficiencies inherent in the
terminological system. This synthetic character is strikingly
apparent among the Wik Munkan of Australia. In this group, joking
privileges sanction a contradiction between the kinship relations
which link two unmarried men and the theoretical relationship
which must be assumed to exist between them in order to account
for their later marriages to two women who do not stand themselves
in the corresponding relationship. There is a contradiction between
two possible systems of nomenclature, and
the emphasis placed on attitudes represents an attempt to integrate
or transcend this contradiction. We can easily agree with Radcliffe-Brown
and assert the existence of real relations of interdependence
between the terminology and the rest of the system. Some of his
critics made the mistake of inferring from the absence of a rigorous
parallelism between attitudes and nomenclature, that the two systems
were mutually independent. But this relationship of interdependence
does not imply a one-to-one correlation. The system of attitudes
constitutes, rather, a dynamic integration of the system of terminology.</p>
<p>
Granted the hypothesis (to which we wholeheartedly subscribe)
of a functional relationship between the two systems, we are nevertheless
entitled, for methodological reasons, to treat independently the
problems pertaining to each system. This is what we propose to
do here for a problem which is rightly considered the point of
departure for any theory of attitudes – that of the maternal uncle.
We shall attempt to show how a formal transposition of the method
of structural linguistics allows us to shed new light upon this
problem. Because the relationship between nephew and maternal
uncle appears to have been the focus of significant elaboration
in a great many primitive societies, anthropologists have devoted
special attention to it. It is not enough to note the frequency
of this theme; we must also account for it. ...</p>
<h3>Chapter XII<br>
Structure and Dialectics</h3>
<p class="fst">
From Lang to Malinowski, through Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl,
and van der Leeuw, sociologists and anthropologists who were interested
in the interrelations between myth and ritual have considered
them as mutually redundant. Some of these thinkers see in each
myth the ideological projection of a rite, the purpose of the
myth being to provide a foundation for the rite. Others reverse
the relationship and regard ritual as a kind of dramatised illustration
of the myth. Regardless of whether the myth or the ritual is
the original, they replicate each other; the myth exists on the
conceptual level and the ritual on the level of action. In both
cases, one assumes an orderly correspondence between the two,
in other words, a homology. Curiously enough, this homology is
demonstrable in only a small number of cases. It remains to be
seen why all myths do not correspond to rites and vice versa,
and most important, why there should be such a curious replication
in the first place.</p>
<p>
I intend to show by means of a concrete example that this homology
does not always exist; or, more specifically, that when we do
find such a homology, it might very well constitute a particular
illustration of a more generalised relationship between myth and
ritual and between the rites themselves. Such a generalised relationship
would imply a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of
rites which seem to differ, or between the elements of any one
rite and any one myth. Such a correspondence could not, however,
be considered a homology. In the example to be discussed here,
the reconstruction of the correspondence requires a series of
preliminary operations. – that is, permutations or transformations
which may furnish the key to the correspondence. If this hypothesis
is correct, we shall have to give up mechanical causality as an
explanation and, instead, conceive of the relationship between
myth and ritual as dialectical, accessible only if both have first
been reduced to their structural elements. ...</p>
<h3>Chapter XV<br>
Social Structure</h3>
<p class="fst">
THE TERM “social structure” refers to a group of problems
the scope of which appears so wide and the definition so imprecise
that it is hardly possible for a paper strictly limited in size
to meet them fully. This is reflected in the program of this
symposium, in which problems closely related to social structure
have been allotted to several papers, such as those on “Style,”
“Universal Categories of Culture,” and “Structural
Linguistics.” These should be read in connection with the
present paper.</p>
<p>
On the other hand, studies in social structure have to do with
the formal aspects of social phenomena; they are therefore difficult
to define, and still more difficult to discuss, without overlapping
other fields pertaining to the exact and natural sciences, where
problems are similarly set in formal terms or, rather, where the
formal expression of different problems admits of the same kind
of treatment. As a matter of fact, the main interest of social
structure studies seems to be that they give the anthropologist
hope that, thanks to the formalisation of his problems, he may
borrow methods and types of solutions from disciplines which have
gone far ahead of his own in that direction.</p>
<p>
Such being the case, it is obvious that the term “social
structure” needs first to be defined and that some explanation
should be given of the difference which helps to distinguish studies
in social structure from the unlimited field of descriptions,
analyses, and theories dealing with social relations at large,
which merge with the whole scope of social anthropology. This
is all the more necessary, since some of those who have contributed
toward setting apart social structure as a special field of anthropological
studies conceived the former in many different manners and even
sometimes, so it seems, came to nurture grave doubts as to the
validity of their enterprise. For instance, Kroeber writes in
the second edition of his <em>Anthropology:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">
“Structure” appears to be just a yielding to a word
that has perfectly good meaning but suddenly becomes fashionably
attractive for a decade or so – like “streamlining”
- and during its vogue tends to be applied indiscriminately because
of the pleasurable connotations of its sound. Of course a typical
personality can be viewed as having a structure. But so can a
physiology, any organism, all societies and all cultures, crystals,
machines – in fact everything that is not wholly amorphous has
a structure. So what “structure” adds to the meaning
of our phrase seems to be nothing, except to provoke a degree
of pleasant puzzlement.'
</p>
<p>
Although this passage concerns more particularly the notion of
“basic personality structure,” it has devastating implications
as regards the generalised use of the notion of structure in anthropology.</p>
<p>
Another reason makes a definition of social structure compulsory:
From the structuralist point of view which one has to adopt if
only to give the problem its meaning, it would be hopeless to
try to reach a valid definition of social structure on an inductive
basis, by abstracting common elements from the uses and definitions
current among all the scholars who claim to have made “social
structure” the object of their studies. If these concepts
have a meaning at all, they mean, first, that the notion of structure
has a structure. This we shall try to outline from the beginning
as a precaution against letting ourselves be submerged by a tedious
inventory of books and papers dealing with social relations, the
mere listing of which would more than exhaust the limited space
at our disposal. At a further stage we will have to see how far
and in what directions the term “social structure,”
as used by the different authors, departs from our definition.
This will be done in the section devoted to kinship, since the
notion of structure has found its chief application in that field
and since anthropologists have generally chosen to express their
theoretical views also in that connection.</p>
<h4>DEFINITION AND PROBLEMS OF METHOD</h4>
<p class="fst">
Passing now to the task of defining “social structure,”
there is a point which should be cleared up immediately. The
term “social structure” has nothing to do with empirical
reality but with models which are built up after it. This should
help one to clarify difference between two concepts which are
so close to each that they have often been confused, namely, those
of <em>social structure</em> and of <em>social relations.
</em>It will be enough to state at this social relations consist
of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social
structure are built, while social structure can, by no means,
be reduced to the ensemble of the social relations to be described
in a given society. Therefore, social structure cannot claim
a field of its own among others in the social studies. It is
rather a method to be applied to any kind of social studies, similar
to the structural analysis current in other disciplines.</p>
<p>
The question then becomes that of ascertaining what kind of model
deserves the name “structure.” This is not an anthropological
question, but one which belongs to the methodology of science
in general. Keeping this in mind, we can say that a structure
consists of a model meeting with several requirements.</p>
<p>
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system.
It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo
a change without effecting changes in all the other elements.</p>
<p>
Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering
a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of
the same type.</p>
<p>
Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the
model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to
certain modifications.</p>
<p>
Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately
intelligible all the observed facts.</p>
<p>
These being the requirements for any model with structural value,
several consequences follow. These, however, do not pertain to
the definition of structure, but have to do with the chief properties
exhibited and problems raised by structural analysis when contemplated
in the social and other fields.</p>
<h4>Observation and Experimentation.</h4>
<p class="fst">
Great care should be taken to distinguish between the observational
and the experimental levels. To observe facts and elaborate methodological
devices which permit the construction of models out of these facts
is not at all the same thing as to experiment on the models.
By “experimenting on models,” we mean the set of procedures
aiming at ascertaining how a given model will react when subjected
to change and at comparing models of the same or different types.
This distinction is all the more necessary, since many discussions
on social structure revolve around the apparent contradiction
between the concreteness and individuality of ethnological data
and the abstract and formal character generally exhibited by structural
studies. This contradiction, disappears as one comes to realise
that these features belong to two entirely different levels,
or rather to two stages of the same process. On the observational
level, in the main one could almost say the only rule is that all
the facts should be carefully observed and described, without
allowing any theoretical preconception to decide whether some
are more important than others. This rule implies, in turn, that
facts should be studied in relation to themselves (by what kind
of concrete process did they come into being?) and in relation
to the whole (always aiming to relate each modification which
can be observed in a sector to the global situation in which it
first appeared).</p>
<p>
This rule together with its corollaries has been explicitly formulated
by K. Goldstein in relation to psycho-physiological studies, and
it may be considered valid for any kind of structural analysis.
Its immediate consequence is that, far from being contradictory,
there is a direct relationship between the detail and concreteness
of ethnographical description and the validity and generality
of the model which is constructed after it. For, though many
models may be used as convenient devices to describe and explain
the phenomena, it is obvious that the best model will always be
that which is <em>true, </em>that is, the simplest possible model
which, while being derived exclusively from the facts under consideration,
also makes it possible to account for all of them. Therefore,
the first task is to ascertain what those facts are.</p>
<h4>Consciousness and Unconsciousness</h4>
<p class="fst">
A second distinction has to do with the conscious or unconscious
character of the models. In the history of structural thought,
Boas may be credited with having introduced this distinction.
He made clear that a category of facts can more easily yield
to structural analysis when the social group in which it is manifested
has not elaborated a conscious model to interpret or justify it.
Some readers may be surprised to find Boas' name quoted in connection
with structural theory, since he has often been described as one
of the main obstacles in its path. But this writer has tried
to demonstrate that Boas' shortcomings in matters of structural
studies did not lie in his failure to understand their importance
and significance, which he did, as a matter of fact, in the most
prophetic way. They rather resulted from the fact that he imposed
on structural studies conditions of validity, some of which will
remain forever part of their methodology, while some others are
so exacting and impossible to meet that they would have withered
scientific development in any field.</p>
<p>
A structural model may be conscious or unconscious without this
difference affecting its nature. It can only be said that when
the structure of a certain type of phenomena does not lie at a
great depth, it is more likely that some kind of model, standing
as a screen to hide it, will exist in the collective consciousness.
For conscious models, which are usually known as “norms,”
are by definition very poor ones, since they are not intended
to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them. Therefore, structural
analysis is confronted with a strange paradox well known to the
linguist, that is: the more obvious structural organisation is,
the more difficult it becomes to reach it because of the inaccurate
conscious models lying across the path which leads to it.</p>
<p>
From the point of view of the degree of consciousness, the anthropologist
is confronted with two kinds of situations. He may have to construct
a model from phenomena the systematic character of which has evoked
no awareness on the part of the culture; this is the kind of simpler
situation referred to by Boas as providing the easiest ground
for anthropological research. Or else the anthropologist will
be dealing on the one hand with raw phenomena and on the other
with the models already constructed by the culture to interpret
the former. Though it is likely that, for the reasons stated
above, these models will prove unsatisfactory, it is by no means
necessary that this should always be the case. As a matter of
fact, many “primitive” cultures have built models of
their marriage regulations which are much more to the point than
models built by professional anthropologists Thus one cannot dispense
with studying a culture's “home-made” models for two
reasons. First, these models might prove to be accurate or, at
least, to provide some insight into the structure of the phenomena;
after all, each culture has its own theoreticians whose contributions
deserve the same attention as that which the anthropologist gives
to colleagues. And, second, even if the models are biased or
erroneous, the very bias and type of error are a part of the facts
under study and probably rank among the most significant ones.
But even when taking into consideration these culturally produced
models, the anthropologist does not forget – as he has sometimes
been accused of doing – that the cultural norms are not of themselves
structures. Rather, they furnish an important contribution to
an understanding of the structures, either as factual documents
or as theoretical contributions similar to those of the anthropologist
himself.</p>
<p>
This point has been given great attention by the French sociological
school. Durkheim and Mauss, for instance, have always taken care
to substitute, as a starting point for the survey of native categories
of thought, the conscious representations prevailing among the
natives themselves for those stemming from the anthropologist's
own culture. This was undoubtedly an important step, which,
nevertheless, fell short of its goal because these authors were
not sufficiently aware that native conscious representations,
important as they are, may be just as remote from the unconscious
reality as any other.</p>
<h4>Structure and Measure.</h4>
<p class="fst">
It is often believed that one of the main interests of the notion of structure
is to permit the introduction of measurement in social anthropology.
This view has been favoured by the frequent appearance of mathematical
or semi-mathematical aids in books or articles dealing with social
structure. It is true that in some cases structural analysis
has made it possible to attach numerical values to invariants.
This was, for instance, the result of Kroeber's study of women's
dress fashions, a landmark in structural research, as well as
of a few other studies which will be discussed below.</p>
<p>
However, one should keep in mind that there is no necessary connection
between <em>measure and structure. </em>Structural studies are,
in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of modern developments
in mathematics which have given increasing importance to the qualitative
point of view in contradistinction to the quantitative point of
view of traditional mathematics. It has become possible, therefore,
in fields such as mathematical logic, set theory, group theory,
and topology, to develop a rigorous approach to problems which
do not admit of a metrical solution. The outstanding achievements
in this connection – which offer themselves as springboards not
yet utilised by social scientist e to be found in J. von Neumann
and O. Morgenstern, <em>Theory of Games and</em> <em>Economic Behaviour;
N. Wiener, Cybernetics;</em> and C. Shannon and W. Weaver, <em>The
Mathematical Theory of Communication</em>. ...</p>
<h3>Chapter XVI ...</h3>
<p class="fst">
I do not postulate a kind of pre-existent harmony between different
levels of structure. They may be – and often are – completely
contradictory, but the modes of contradiction all belong the same
type. Indeed, according to dialectic materialism it should always
be possible to proceed, by transformation, from economic or social
structure to the structure of law, art, or religion. But Marx
never claimed that there was only one type of transformation -
for example, that ideology was simply a “mirror image” of social
relations. In his view, these transformations were dialectic,
and in some cases he went to great lengths to discover the crucial
transformation which at first sight seemed to defy analysis.</p>
<p>
If we grant, following Marxian thought, that infrastructures and
superstructures are made up of multiple levels and that there
various types of transformations from one level to another, it
becomes possible – in the final analysis, and on the condition
that we disregard content – to characterise different types
in terms of the types of transformations which occur within them.
These types of transformations amount to formulas showing the
number, magnitude, direction, and order of the convolutions that
must be unravelled, so to speak, in order to uncover (logically,
not normatively) an ideal homologous relationship between the
different structural levels.</p>
<p>
Now, this reduction to an ideal homologous relationship is at
the same time a critique. By replacing a complex model with a
simple model that has greater logical value, the anthropologist
reveals the detours and manoeuvres, conscious and unconscious,
that each society uses in an effort to resolve its inherent contradictions
– or at any rate to conceal them.</p>
<p>
This clarification, already furnished by my previous studies,
which Gurvitch should have taken into consideration, may expose
me to still another criticism. If every society has the same
flaw, manifested by the two-fold problem – of logical disharmony
and social inequality, why should its more thoughtful members
endeavour to change it? Change would mean only the replacement
of one social form by another; and if one is no better than the
other, why bother?</p>
<p>
In support of this argument, Rodinson cites a passage from <em>Tristes
Tropiques: </em>“No human society is fundamentally good, but
neither is any of them fundamentally bad; all offer their members
certain advantages, though we must bear in mind a residue of iniquity,
apparently more or less constant in its importance... .</p>
<p>
But here Rodinson isolates, in biased fashion, one step in a reasoning
process by which I tried to resolve the apparent conflict between
thought and action. Actually:</p>
<p class="indentb">
(1) In the passage criticised by Rodinson, the relativistic argument
serves only to oppose any attempt at classifying, <em>in relation
to one another, </em>societies remote from that of the observer
- for instance, from our point of view, a Melanesian group and
a North American tribe. I hold that we have no conceptual framework
available that can be legitimately applied to societies located
opposite poles of the sociological world and considered in their
mutual relationships.</p>
<p class="indentb">
(2) On the other hand, I carefully distinguished this first frame
from a very different one, which would consist in comparing remote
societies, but two historically related stages in the development
of our own society – or, to generalise, of the observer's society.
When the frame of reference is thus “internalised,”
everything changes. This second phase permits us, without retaining
anything from any particular society,</p>
<p>
... to make use of one and all of them in order to distinguish
those principles of social life which may be applied to the reform
of our own customs, and not of those of societies foreign to our
own. That is to say, in relation to our own society we stand
in a position of privilege which is exactly contrary to that which
I have just described; for our own society is the only one that
we can transform and yet not destroy, since the changes we should
introduce would come from within.</p>
<p>
Far from being satisfied, then, with a static relativism – as
are certain American anthropologists justly criticised by Rodinson
(but with whom he wrongly identifies me) – I denounce it as a
danger ever-present on the anthropologist's path. My solution
is constructive, since it derives from the same principles, two
apparently contradictory attitudes, namely, respect for societies
very different from ours, and active participation in the transformation
of our own society.</p>
<p>
Is there any reason here, as Rodinson claims, “to reduce
Billancourt to desperation”? Billancourt would deserve
little consideration if cannibalism in its own way (and more
seriously so than primitive man-eaters, for its cannibalism would
be <em>spiritual</em>), should feel it necessary to its intellectual
and moral security that the Papuans become nothing but proletarians.
Fortunately, anthropological theory does not play such an important
role in trade union demands. On the other hand, I am surprised
that a scientist with advanced ideas should present an argument
already formulated by thinkers of an entirely different orientation.</p>
<p>
Neither in <em>Race and History </em>nor in <em>Tristes Tropiques
</em>did I intend to disparage the idea of progress; rather, I
should like to see progress transferred from the rank of a universal
category of human development to that of a particular mode of
existence, characteristic of our own society – and perhaps of
several others – whenever that society reaches the stage of self-awareness.</p>
<p>
To say that this concept of progress – progress considered as
an internal property of a given society and devoid of a transcendent
meaning outside it – would lead men to discouragement, seems to
me to be a transposition in the historical idiom and on the level
of collective life, of the familiar argument that all morality
would be jeopardised if the individual ceased to believe in the
immortality of his soul. For centuries, this argument, so much
like Rodinson's, was raised to oppose atheism. Atheism would
“reduce men to desperation” – most particularly the
working classes, who, it was feared, would lose their motivation
for work if there were no punishments or rewards promised in the
hereafter.</p>
<p>
Nevertheless, there are many men (especially in Billancourt) who
accept the idea of a personal existence confined to the duration
of their earthly life; they have not for this reason abandoned
their sense of morality or their willingness to work for the improvement
of their lot and that of their descendants.</p>
<p>
Is what is true of individuals less true of groups? A society
can live, act, and be transformed, and still avoid becoming intoxicated
with the conviction that all the societies which preceded it during
tens of millenniums did nothing more than prepare the ground for
<em>its </em>advent, that all its contemporaries – even those at
the antipodes – are diligently striving to overtake it, and that
the societies which will succeed it until the end of time ought
to be mainly concerned with following in its path. This attitude
is as naive as maintaining that the earth occupies the center
of the universe and that man is the summit of creation. When
it is professed today in support of our particular society, it
is odious.</p>
<p>
What is more, Rodinson attacks me in the name of Marxism, whereas
my conception is infinitely closer to Marx's position than his.
I wish to point out, first, that the distinctions developed in
<em>Race and History </em>among stationary history, fluctuating
history and cumulative history can be derived from Marx himself:</p>
<p class="quoteb">
The simplicity of the organisation for production in those, self-sufficing
communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form
and, when accidentally destroyed, spring again on the spot and
with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret
of the unchangeableness of Asiatic Societies, an unchangeableness
in such striking contrast with constant dissolution and refounding
of Asiatic states, and never-ceasing changes of dynasty.
</p>
<p>
Actually, Marx and Engels frequently express the idea that primitive,
or allegedly primitive, societies are governed by “blood
ties” (which, today, we call kinship systems) and not by
economic relationships. If these societies were not destroyed
from without, they might endure indefinitely. The temporal category
applicable to them has nothing to do with the one we employ to
understand, the development of our own society.</p>
<p>
Nor does this conception contradict in the least the famous dictum
of the <em>Communist Manifesto </em>that “the history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In the light of Hegel's philosophy of the State, this dictum does
not mean that the class struggle is co-extensive with humanity,
but that the ideas of history and society can be applied, in the
full sense which Marx gives them, only from the time when the
class struggle first appeared. The letter to Weydemeyer clearly
supports this: “What I did that was new,” Marx wrote,
“was prove ... that the <em>existence of classes</em> is
only bound up with <em>particular historical phases in the development
of production</em>... .”</p>
<p>
Rodinson should, therefore, ponder the following comment by Marx
in his posthumously published introduction to <em>A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb">
The so-called historical development amounts in the last analysis
to this, that the last form considers its predecessors as stages
leading up to itself and perceives them always one-sidedly, since
it is very seldom and only under certain conditions that it is
capable of self-criticism ...
</p>
<p>
This chapter had already been written when Jean-François
Revel published his lively, provocative, but often unfair study.</p>
<p>
Since part of his chapter VIII concerns my work, I shall briefly
reply – </p>
<p>
Revel criticises me, but not without misgivings. If he recognised
me for what I am an anthropologist who has conducted field work
and who, having presented his findings, has re-examined the theoretical
principles of his discipline on the basis of these specific findings
and the findings of his colleagues – Revel would, according to
his own principles, refrain from discussing my work. But he begins
by changing me into a sociologist, after which he insinuates that,
because of my philosophical training, my sociology is nothing
but disguised philosophy. From then on we are among colleagues,
and Revel can freely tread on my reserves, without realising that
he is behaving toward anthropology exactly as, throughout his
book, he upbraids philosophers for behaving toward the other empirical
sciences.</p>
<p>
But I am not a sociologist, and my interest in our own society
is only a secondary one. Those societies which I seek first to
understand are the so-called primitive societies with which anthropologists
are concerned. When, to Revel's great displeasure, I interpret
the exchange of wine in the restaurants of southern France in
terms of social prestations, my primary aim is not to explain
contemporary customs by means of archaic institutions but to help
the reader, a member of a contemporary society, to rediscover,
in his own experience and on the basis of either vestigial or
embryonic practices, institutions that would otherwise remain
unintelligible to him. The question, then, is not whether the
exchange of wine is a survival of the <em>potlatch, </em>but whether,
by means of this comparison we succeed better in grasping the
feelings, intentions, and attitudes of the native involved in
a cycle of prestations. The ethnographer who has lived among
natives and has experienced such ceremonies as either a spectator
or a participant, is entitled to an opinion on this question; Revel
is not.</p>
<p>
Moreover, by a curious contradiction, Revel refuses to admit that
the categories of primitive societies may be applied to our own
society, although he insists upon applying our categories to primitive
societies. “It is absolutely certain,” he says, that
prestations “in which the goods of a society are finally
used up ... correspond to the specific conditions of a mode
of production and a social structure.” And he further declares
that “it is even probable – an exception unique in history,
which would then have to be explained – that prestations mask
the economic exploitation of certain members of each society of
this type by others.”</p>
<p>
How can Revel be “absolutely certain”? And how does
he know that the exception would be “unique in history”?
Has he studied Melanesian and Amerindian institutions in the
field? Has, he so much as analysed the numerous works dealing
with the <em>kula</em> and its evolution from 1910 to 1950, or with
the <em>potlatch </em>from the beginning of the nineteenth century
until the twentieth? If he had, he would know, first of all, that
it is absurd to think that all the goods of a society are used
up in these exchanges. And he would have more precise ideas of
the proportions and the kinds of goods involved in certain cases
and in certain periods. Finally, and above all, he would be aware
that, from the particular viewpoint that interests him – namely,
the economic exploitation of man by man – the two culture areas
to which he refers cannot be compared. In one of them, this exploitation
presents characteristics which we might at best call pre-capitalistic.
Even in Alaska and British Columbia, however, this exploitation
is an external factor: It acts only to give greater scope to institutions
which can exist without it, and whose general character must be
defined in other terms.</p>
<p>
Should Revel hasten to protest, let me add that I am only paraphrasing
Engels, who by chance expressed his opinion on this problem, and
with respect to the same societies which Revel has in mind. Engels
wrote:</p>
<p class="indentb">
In order finally to get clear about the parallel between the Germans
of Tacitus and the American Redskins I have made some gentle extractions
from the first volume of your Bancroft [<em>The Native
Races of the Pacific States, </em>etc.]. The similarity is indeed
all the more surprising because the method of production is so
fundamentally different – here hunters and fishers without cattle-raising
or agriculture, there nomadic cattle-raising passing into agriculture.
It just proves how at this stage the type of production is less
decisive than the degree in which the old blood bonds and the
old mutual community of the sexes within the tribe have been dissolved.
Otherwise the Tlingit in the former Russian America could not
be the exact counterpart of the Germanic tribes . ...
</p>
<p>
It remained for Marcel Mauss, in <em>Essai sur le Don </em>(which
Revel criticises quite inappropriately) to justify and develop
Engels' hypothesis that there is a striking parallelism between
certain Germanic and Celtic institutions and those of societies
having the <em>potlatch</em>. He did this with no concern
about uncovering the “specific conditions of a mode of production,”
which, as Engels had already understood, would be useless. But
then Marx and Engels knew incomparably more anthropology almost
a hundred years ago than Revel knows today.</p>
<p>
I am, on the other hand, in full agreement with Revel when he
writes, “Perhaps the most serious defect which philosophy
has transmitted to sociology is ... the obsession with creating
in one stroke holistic explanations." He has here laid down
his own indictment. He rebukes me because I have not proposed
explanations and because I have acted as if I believed “that
there is fundamentally no reason why one society adopts one set
of institutions and another society other institutions.”
He requires anthropologists to answer questions such as: “Why
are societies structured along different lines? Why does each
structure evolve? ... <em>Why are there differences </em>[Revel's
italics] between institutions and between societies, and what
responses to what conditions do these differences imply ...
?” These questions are highly pertinent, and we should like
to be able to answer them. In our present state of knowledge,
however, we are in a position to provide answers only for specific
and limited cases, and even here our interpretations remain fragmentary
and isolated. Revel can believe that the task is easy, since
for him “it is absolutely certain” that ever since the
social evolution of man began, approximately 500,000 years ago,
economic exploitation can explain everything.</p>
<p>
As we noted, this was not the opinion of Marx and Engels. According
to their view, in the non- or pre-capitalistic societies kinship
ties played a more important role than class relations. I do
not believe that I am being unfaithful to their teachings by trying,
seventy years after Lewis H. Morgan, whom they admired so greatly,
to resume Morgan's endeavour – that is, to work out a new typology
of kinship systems in the light of knowledge acquired in the field
since then, by myself and others.”</p>
<p>
I ask to be judged on the basis of this typology, and not on that
of the psychological or sociological hypotheses which Revel seizes
upon; these hypotheses are only a kind of mental scaffolding,
momentarily useful to the anthropologist as a means of organising
his observations, building his classifications, and arranging
his types in some sort of order. If one of my colleagues were
to come to me and say that my theoretical analysis of Murngin
or Gilyak kinship systems was inconsistent with his observations,
or that while was in the field I misinterpreted chieftainship
among the Nambicuara, the place of art in Caduveo society, the
social structure of the Bororo, or the nature of clans among the
Tupi-Cawahib, I should listen to him with deference and attention.
But Revel, who could not care less about patrilineal descent,
bilateral marriage, dual organisation, or dysharmonic systems,
attacks me – without even understanding that I seek only to describe
and analyse certain aspects of the objective world – for “flattening
out social reality,” For him everything is flat that cannot
be instantaneously expressed in a, language which he may perhaps
use correctly in reference to Western civilisation, but to which
its inventors explicitly denied any other application. Now it
is my turn to exclaim: Indeed, “what is the use of philosophers?”</p>
<p>
Reasoning in the fashion of Revel and Rodinson would mean surrendering
the social sciences to obscurantism. What would we think of building
contractors and architects who condemned cosmic physics in the
name of the law of gravity and under the argument that a geometry
based on curved spaces would render obsolete the traditional techniques
for demolishing or building houses? The house-wrecker and the
architect are right to believe only in Euclidean geometry, but
they do not try to force it upon the astronomer. And if the help
of the astronomer is required in remodelling his house, the categories
he uses to understand the universe do not automatically prevent
him from handling the pick-axe and plumb-line.</p>
<hr class="end">
<p class="footer">Further Reading:<br>
<a href="../../../../../archive/reed-evelyn/1967/savage-mind.htm" target="_top">Review by Evelyn Reed</a> |
<a href="../../../../../glossary/people/l/e.htm#levi-strauss-claude">Biography</a> |
<a href="../fr/levi-strauss.htm">Dialectic and History</a><br>
<a href="../fr/durkheim.htm">Durkheim</a> |
<a href="../fr/saussure.htm">Saussure</a> |
<a href="../ru/jakobson.htm">Jakobson</a> |
<a href="../us/parsons.htm">Parsons</a> |
<a href="../../../../../archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface-abs.htm" target="_top">Marx</a> |
<a href="../../../../archive/althusser/index.htm" target="_top">Althusser</a> <br>
<a href="http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/levi-strauss.htm" target="_top">Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War</a>
</p>
<p class="footer">
<a href="../../index.htm" target="_top">Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org</a></p>
</body> |
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1958)
Structural Anthropology
Chapter II
Structural Analysis in Linguistics and in Anthropology
Source: Structural Anthropology, 1958 publ. Allen Lane, The Penguin Press., 1968. Various excerpts reproduced here.
LINGUISTICS OCCUPIES a special place among the social sciences,
to whose ranks it unquestionably belongs. It is not merely a
social science like the others, but, rather, the one in which
by far the greatest progress has been made. It is probably the
only one which can truly claim to be a science and which has achieved
both the formulation of an empirical method and an understanding
of the nature of the data submitted to its analysis. This privileged
position carries with it several obligations. The linguist will
often find scientists from related but different disciplines drawing
inspiration from his example and trying to follow his lead. Noblesse
oblige. A linguistic journal like Word cannot confine
itself to the illustration of strictly linguistic theories and
points of view. It must also welcome psychologists, sociologists,
and anthropologists eager to learn from modern linguistics the
road which leads to the empirical knowledge of social phenomena.
As Marcel Mauss wrote – already forty years ago: “Sociology
would certainly have progressed much further if it had everywhere
followed the lead of the linguists. ...” The close methodological
which exists between the two disciplines imposes a special obligation
of collaboration upon them.
Ever since the work of Schrader it has been unnecessary to demonstrate
the assistance which linguistics can render to the anthropologist
in the study of kinship. It was a linguist and a philologist
(Schrader and Rose) who showed the improbability of the hypothesis
of matrilineal survivals in the family in antiquity, to which
so many anthropologists still clung at that time. The linguist
provides the anthropologist with etymologies which permit him
to establish between certain kinship terms relationships that
were not immediately apparent. The anthropologist, on the other
hand, can bring to the attention of the linguist customs, prescriptions,
and prohibitions that help him to understand the persistence of
certain features of language or the instability of terms or groups
of terms. At a meeting of the Linguistic Circle of New York,
Julien Bonfante once illustrated this point of view by reviewing
the etymology of the word for uncle in several Romance languages.
The Greek theios corresponds in Italian, Spanish, and
Portuguese to zio and tio; and he added that in
certain regions of Italy the uncle is called barba. The
“beard,” the “divine” uncle – what a wealth
of suggestions for the anthropologist! The investigations of
the late A. M. Hocart into the religious character of the avuncular
relationship and “theft of the sacrifice” by the maternal
kinsmen immediately come to mind. Whatever interpretation is given
to the data collected by Hocart (and his own interpretation is
not entirely satisfactory), there is no doubt that the linguist
contributes to the solution of the problem by revealing the tenacious
survival in contemporary vocabulary of relationships which have
long since disappeared. At the same time, the anthropologist explains
to the linguist the bases of etymology and confirms its validity.
Paul K. Benedict, in examining, as a linguist, the kinship systems
of South East Asia, was able to make an important contribution
to the anthropology of the family in that area.
But linguists and anthropologists follow their own paths independently.
They halt , no doubt, from time to time to communicate to one
another certain of their findings; these findings, however, derive
from different operations, and no effort is made to enable one
group to benefit from the technical and methodological advances
of the other. This attitude might have been justified in the
era when linguistic research leaned most heavily on historical
analysis. In relation to the anthropological research conducted
during the same period, the difference was one of degree rather
than of kind. The linguists employed a more rigorous method,
and their findings were established on more solid grounds; the
sociologists could follow their example in renouncing consideration
of the spatial distribution of contemporary types as a basis for
their classifications. But, after all, anthropology and
sociology were looking to linguistics only for insights; nothing
foretold a revelation.
The advent of structural linguistics completely changed this situation.
Not only did it renew linguistic perspectives; a transformation
of this magnitude is not limited to a single discipline. Structural
linguistics will certainly play the same renovating role with
respect to the social sciences that nuclear physics, for example,
has played for the physical sciences. In what does this revolution
consist, as we try to assess its broadest implications? N. Troubetzkoy,
the illustrious founder of structural linguistics, himself furnished
the answer to this question. In one programmatic statement,
he reduced the structural method to four basic operations. First,
structural linguistics shifts from the study of conscious linguistic
phenomena to study of their unconscious infrastructure;
second, it does not treat terms as independent entities,
taking instead as its – basis of analysis the relations between
terms; third, it introduces the concept of system – “Modern
phonemics does not merely proclaim that phonemes are always part
of a system; it shows concrete phonemic systems and elucidates
their structure” finally, structural linguistics aims
at discovering general laws, either by induction “or
... by logical deduction, which would give them an absolute
character.”
Thus, for the first time, a social science is able to formulate
necessary relationships. This is the meaning of Troubetzkoy's
last point, while the preceding rules show how linguistics must
proceed in order to attain this end. It is not for us to show
that Troubetzkoy's claims are justified. The vast majority of
modern linguists seem sufficiently agreed on this point. But
when an event of this importance takes place in one of the sciences
of man, it is not only permissible for, but required of, representatives
of related disciplines immediately to examine its consequences
and its possible application to phenomena of another order.
New perspectives then open up. We are no longer dealing with
an occasional collaboration where the linguist and the anthropologist,
each working by himself, occasionally communicate those findings
which each thinks may interest the other. In the study of kinship
problems (and, no doubt, the study of other problems as well),
the anthropologist finds himself in a situation which formally
resembles that of the structural linguist. Like phonemes, kinship
terms are elements of meaning; like phonemes, they acquire meaning
only if they are integrated into systems. “Kinship systems,”
Eke “phonemic systems,” are built by the mind on the
level of unconscious thought. Finally, the recurrence of kinship
patterns, marriage rules, similar prescribed attitudes between
certain types of relatives, and so forth, in scattered regions
of the globe and in fundamentally different societies, leads us
to believe that, in the case of kinship as well as linguistics,
the observable phenomena result from the action of laws which
are general but implicit. The problem can therefore be formulated
as follows: Although they belong to another order of reality,
kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic
phenomena. Can the anthropologist, using a method analogous in
form (if not in content) to the method used in structural
linguistics, achieve the same kind of progress in his own science
as that which has taken place in linguistics?
We shall be even more strongly inclined to follow this path after
an additional observation has been made. The study of kinship
problems is today broached in the same terms and seems to be in
the throes of the same difficulties as was linguistics on the
eve of the structuralist revolution. There is a striking analogy
between certain attempts by Rivers and the old linguistics, which
sought its explanatory principles first of all in history. In
both cases, it is solely (or almost solely) diachronic analysis
which must account for synchronic phenomena. Troubetzkoy, comparing
structural linguistics and the old linguistics, defines structural
linguistics as a “systematic structuralism and universalism,”
which he contrasts with the individualism and “atomism”
of former schools. And when he considers diachronic analysis,
his perspective is a profoundly modified one: “The evolution
of a phonemic system at any given moment is directed by the tendency
toward a goal. ... This evolution thus has a direction, an
internal logic, which historical phonemics is called upon to elucidate.”
The “individualistic” and “atomistic” interpretation,
founded exclusively on historical contingency, which is criticised
by Troubetzkoy and Jakobson, is actually the same as that which
is generally applied to kinship problems. Each detail of terminology
and each special marriage rule is associated with a specific custom
as either its consequence or its survival. We thus meet with
a chaos of discontinuity. No one asks how kinship systems, regarded
as synchronic wholes, could be the arbitrary product of a convergence
of several heterogeneous institutions (most of which are hypothetical),
yet nevertheless function with some sort of regularity and effectiveness.
However, a preliminary difficulty impedes the transposition of
the phonemic method to the anthropological study of primitive
peoples. The superficial analogy between phonemic systems and
kinship systems is so strong that it immediately sets us on the
wrong track. It is incorrect to equate kinship terms and linguistic
phonemes from the viewpoint of their formal treatment. We know
that to obtain a structural law the linguist analyses phonemes
into “distinctive features,” which he can then group
into one or several “pairs of oppositions.” Following
an analogous method, the anthropologist might be tempted to break
down analytically the kinship terms of any given system into their
components. In our own kinship system, for instance, the term
father has positive connotations with respect to sex, relative
age, and generation; but it has a zero value on the dimension
of collaterality, and it cannot express an affinal relationship.
Thus, for each system, one might ask what relationships are expressed
and, for each term of the system, what connotation – positive
or negative – it carries regarding each of the following relationships:
generation, collaterality, sex, relative age, affinity, etc.
It is at this “micro-sociological” level that one might
hope to discover the most general structural laws, just as the
linguist discovers his at the infraphonemic level or the physicist
at the infra-molecular or atomic level. One might interpret the
interesting attempt of Davis and Warner in these terms.
But a threefold objection immediately arises. A truly scientific
analysis must be real, simplifying, and explanatory. Thus the
distinctive features which are the product of phonemic analysis
have an objective existence from three points of view: psychological,
physiological, and even physical; they are fewer in number than
the phonemes which result from their combination; and, finally,
they allow us to understand and reconstruct the system. Nothing
of the kind would emerge from the preceding hypothesis. The treatment
of kinship terms which we have just sketched is analytical in
appearance only; for, actually, the result is more abstract than
the principle; instead of moving toward the concrete, one moves
away from it, and the definitive system – if system there is -
is only conceptual. Secondly, Davis and Warner's experiment proves
that the system achieved through this procedure is infinitely
more complex and more difficult to interpret than the empirical
data. Finally, the hypothesis has no explanatory value;
that is, it does not lead to an understanding of the nature of
the system and still less to a reconstruction of its origins.
What is the reason for this failure? A too literal adherence
to linguistic method actually betrays its very essence. Kinship
terms not only have a sociological existence; they are also elements
of speech. In our haste to apply the methods of linguistic analysis,
we must not forget that, as a part of vocabulary, kinship terms
must be treated with linguistic methods in direct and not analogous
fashion. Linguistics teaches us precisely that structural analysis
cannot be applied to words directly, but only to words previously
broken down into phonemes. There are no necessary relationships
at the vocabulary level. This applies to all vocabulary
elements, including kinship terms. Since this applies to linguistics,
it ought to apply ipso facto to the sociology of language.
An attempt like the one whose possibility we are now discussing
would thus consist in extending the method of structural linguistics
while ignoring its basic requirements. Kroeber prophetically
foresaw this difficulty in an article written many years ago.
And if, at that time, he concluded that a structural analysis
of kinship terminology was impossible, we must remember that linguistics
itself was then restricted to phonetic, psychological, and historical
analysis. While it is true that the social sciences must share
the limitations of linguistics, they can also benefit from its
progress.
Nor should we overlook the profound differences between the phonemic
chart of a language and the chart of kinship terms of a society.
In the first instance there can be no question as to function;
we all know that language serves as a means of communication.
On the other hand, what the linguist did not know and what structural
linguistics alone has allowed him to discover is the way in which
language achieves this end. The function was obvious; the system
remained unknown. In this respect, the anthropologist finds himself
in the opposite situation. We know, since the work of Lewis H.
Morgan, that kinship terms constitute systems; on the other hand,
we still do not know their function. The misinterpretation of
this initial situation reduces most structural analyses of kinship
systems to pure tautologies. They demonstrate the obvious and
neglect the unknown.
This does not mean that we must abandon hope of introducing order
and discovering meaning in kinship nomenclature. But, we should
at least recognise the special problems raised by the sociology
of vocabulary and the ambiguous character of the relations between
its methods and those of linguistics. For this reason it would
be preferable to limit the discussion to a case where the analogy
can be clearly established. Fortunately, we have just such a
case available.
What is generally called a “kinship system” comprises
two quite different orders of reality. First, there are terms
through which various kinds of family relationships are expressed.
But kinship is not expressed solely through nomenclature. The
individuals or classes of individuals who employ these terms feel
(or do not feel, as the case may be) bound by prescribed behaviour
in their relations with one another, such as respect or familiarity,
rights or obligations, and affection or hostility. Thus, along
with what we propose to call the system of terminology (which,
strictly speaking, constitutes the vocabulary system), there is
another system, both psychological and social in nature, which
we shall call the system of attitudes. Although it is
true (as we have shown, above) that the study of systems of terminology
places us in a situation analogous, but opposite, to the situation
in which we are dealing with phonemic systems, this difficulty
is “inversed,” as it were, when we examine systems of
attitudes. We can guess at the role played by systems of attitudes,
that is, to insure group cohesion and equilibrium, but we do not
understand the nature of the interconnections between the various
attitudes, nor do we perceive their necessity. In other words,
as in the case of language, we know their function, but the system
is unknown.
Thus we find a profound difference between the system of
terminology and the system of attitudes, and we
have to disagree with A. R. Radcliffe-Brown if he really believed,
as has been said of him, that attitudes are nothing but the expression
or transposition of terms on the affective level. The last few
years have provided numerous examples of groups whose chart of
kinship terms does not accurately reflect family attitudes, and
vice versa. It would be incorrect to assume that the kinship
system constitutes the principal means of regulating interpersonal
relationships in all societies. Even in societies where the kinship
system does function as such, it does not fulfil that role everywhere
to the same extent. Furthermore, it is always necessary to distinguish
between two types of attitudes: first, the diffuse, uncrystallised,
and non-institutionalised attitudes, which we may consider as
the reflection or transposition of the terminology on the psychological
level; and second, along with, or in addition to, the preceding
ones, those attitudes which are stylised, prescribed, and sanctioned
by taboos or privileges and expressed through a fixed ritual.
These attitudes, far from automatically reflecting the nomenclature,
often appear as secondary elaborations, which serve to resolve
the contradictions and overcome the deficiencies inherent in the
terminological system. This synthetic character is strikingly
apparent among the Wik Munkan of Australia. In this group, joking
privileges sanction a contradiction between the kinship relations
which link two unmarried men and the theoretical relationship
which must be assumed to exist between them in order to account
for their later marriages to two women who do not stand themselves
in the corresponding relationship. There is a contradiction between
two possible systems of nomenclature, and
the emphasis placed on attitudes represents an attempt to integrate
or transcend this contradiction. We can easily agree with Radcliffe-Brown
and assert the existence of real relations of interdependence
between the terminology and the rest of the system. Some of his
critics made the mistake of inferring from the absence of a rigorous
parallelism between attitudes and nomenclature, that the two systems
were mutually independent. But this relationship of interdependence
does not imply a one-to-one correlation. The system of attitudes
constitutes, rather, a dynamic integration of the system of terminology.
Granted the hypothesis (to which we wholeheartedly subscribe)
of a functional relationship between the two systems, we are nevertheless
entitled, for methodological reasons, to treat independently the
problems pertaining to each system. This is what we propose to
do here for a problem which is rightly considered the point of
departure for any theory of attitudes – that of the maternal uncle.
We shall attempt to show how a formal transposition of the method
of structural linguistics allows us to shed new light upon this
problem. Because the relationship between nephew and maternal
uncle appears to have been the focus of significant elaboration
in a great many primitive societies, anthropologists have devoted
special attention to it. It is not enough to note the frequency
of this theme; we must also account for it. ...
Chapter XII
Structure and Dialectics
From Lang to Malinowski, through Durkheim, Lévy-Bruhl,
and van der Leeuw, sociologists and anthropologists who were interested
in the interrelations between myth and ritual have considered
them as mutually redundant. Some of these thinkers see in each
myth the ideological projection of a rite, the purpose of the
myth being to provide a foundation for the rite. Others reverse
the relationship and regard ritual as a kind of dramatised illustration
of the myth. Regardless of whether the myth or the ritual is
the original, they replicate each other; the myth exists on the
conceptual level and the ritual on the level of action. In both
cases, one assumes an orderly correspondence between the two,
in other words, a homology. Curiously enough, this homology is
demonstrable in only a small number of cases. It remains to be
seen why all myths do not correspond to rites and vice versa,
and most important, why there should be such a curious replication
in the first place.
I intend to show by means of a concrete example that this homology
does not always exist; or, more specifically, that when we do
find such a homology, it might very well constitute a particular
illustration of a more generalised relationship between myth and
ritual and between the rites themselves. Such a generalised relationship
would imply a one-to-one correspondence between the elements of
rites which seem to differ, or between the elements of any one
rite and any one myth. Such a correspondence could not, however,
be considered a homology. In the example to be discussed here,
the reconstruction of the correspondence requires a series of
preliminary operations. – that is, permutations or transformations
which may furnish the key to the correspondence. If this hypothesis
is correct, we shall have to give up mechanical causality as an
explanation and, instead, conceive of the relationship between
myth and ritual as dialectical, accessible only if both have first
been reduced to their structural elements. ...
Chapter XV
Social Structure
THE TERM “social structure” refers to a group of problems
the scope of which appears so wide and the definition so imprecise
that it is hardly possible for a paper strictly limited in size
to meet them fully. This is reflected in the program of this
symposium, in which problems closely related to social structure
have been allotted to several papers, such as those on “Style,”
“Universal Categories of Culture,” and “Structural
Linguistics.” These should be read in connection with the
present paper.
On the other hand, studies in social structure have to do with
the formal aspects of social phenomena; they are therefore difficult
to define, and still more difficult to discuss, without overlapping
other fields pertaining to the exact and natural sciences, where
problems are similarly set in formal terms or, rather, where the
formal expression of different problems admits of the same kind
of treatment. As a matter of fact, the main interest of social
structure studies seems to be that they give the anthropologist
hope that, thanks to the formalisation of his problems, he may
borrow methods and types of solutions from disciplines which have
gone far ahead of his own in that direction.
Such being the case, it is obvious that the term “social
structure” needs first to be defined and that some explanation
should be given of the difference which helps to distinguish studies
in social structure from the unlimited field of descriptions,
analyses, and theories dealing with social relations at large,
which merge with the whole scope of social anthropology. This
is all the more necessary, since some of those who have contributed
toward setting apart social structure as a special field of anthropological
studies conceived the former in many different manners and even
sometimes, so it seems, came to nurture grave doubts as to the
validity of their enterprise. For instance, Kroeber writes in
the second edition of his Anthropology:
“Structure” appears to be just a yielding to a word
that has perfectly good meaning but suddenly becomes fashionably
attractive for a decade or so – like “streamlining”
- and during its vogue tends to be applied indiscriminately because
of the pleasurable connotations of its sound. Of course a typical
personality can be viewed as having a structure. But so can a
physiology, any organism, all societies and all cultures, crystals,
machines – in fact everything that is not wholly amorphous has
a structure. So what “structure” adds to the meaning
of our phrase seems to be nothing, except to provoke a degree
of pleasant puzzlement.'
Although this passage concerns more particularly the notion of
“basic personality structure,” it has devastating implications
as regards the generalised use of the notion of structure in anthropology.
Another reason makes a definition of social structure compulsory:
From the structuralist point of view which one has to adopt if
only to give the problem its meaning, it would be hopeless to
try to reach a valid definition of social structure on an inductive
basis, by abstracting common elements from the uses and definitions
current among all the scholars who claim to have made “social
structure” the object of their studies. If these concepts
have a meaning at all, they mean, first, that the notion of structure
has a structure. This we shall try to outline from the beginning
as a precaution against letting ourselves be submerged by a tedious
inventory of books and papers dealing with social relations, the
mere listing of which would more than exhaust the limited space
at our disposal. At a further stage we will have to see how far
and in what directions the term “social structure,”
as used by the different authors, departs from our definition.
This will be done in the section devoted to kinship, since the
notion of structure has found its chief application in that field
and since anthropologists have generally chosen to express their
theoretical views also in that connection.
DEFINITION AND PROBLEMS OF METHOD
Passing now to the task of defining “social structure,”
there is a point which should be cleared up immediately. The
term “social structure” has nothing to do with empirical
reality but with models which are built up after it. This should
help one to clarify difference between two concepts which are
so close to each that they have often been confused, namely, those
of social structure and of social relations.
It will be enough to state at this social relations consist
of the raw materials out of which the models making up the social
structure are built, while social structure can, by no means,
be reduced to the ensemble of the social relations to be described
in a given society. Therefore, social structure cannot claim
a field of its own among others in the social studies. It is
rather a method to be applied to any kind of social studies, similar
to the structural analysis current in other disciplines.
The question then becomes that of ascertaining what kind of model
deserves the name “structure.” This is not an anthropological
question, but one which belongs to the methodology of science
in general. Keeping this in mind, we can say that a structure
consists of a model meeting with several requirements.
First, the structure exhibits the characteristics of a system.
It is made up of several elements, none of which can undergo
a change without effecting changes in all the other elements.
Second, for any given model there should be a possibility of ordering
a series of transformations resulting in a group of models of
the same type.
Third, the above properties make it possible to predict how the
model will react if one or more of its elements are submitted to
certain modifications.
Finally, the model should be constituted so as to make immediately
intelligible all the observed facts.
These being the requirements for any model with structural value,
several consequences follow. These, however, do not pertain to
the definition of structure, but have to do with the chief properties
exhibited and problems raised by structural analysis when contemplated
in the social and other fields.
Observation and Experimentation.
Great care should be taken to distinguish between the observational
and the experimental levels. To observe facts and elaborate methodological
devices which permit the construction of models out of these facts
is not at all the same thing as to experiment on the models.
By “experimenting on models,” we mean the set of procedures
aiming at ascertaining how a given model will react when subjected
to change and at comparing models of the same or different types.
This distinction is all the more necessary, since many discussions
on social structure revolve around the apparent contradiction
between the concreteness and individuality of ethnological data
and the abstract and formal character generally exhibited by structural
studies. This contradiction, disappears as one comes to realise
that these features belong to two entirely different levels,
or rather to two stages of the same process. On the observational
level, in the main one could almost say the only rule is that all
the facts should be carefully observed and described, without
allowing any theoretical preconception to decide whether some
are more important than others. This rule implies, in turn, that
facts should be studied in relation to themselves (by what kind
of concrete process did they come into being?) and in relation
to the whole (always aiming to relate each modification which
can be observed in a sector to the global situation in which it
first appeared).
This rule together with its corollaries has been explicitly formulated
by K. Goldstein in relation to psycho-physiological studies, and
it may be considered valid for any kind of structural analysis.
Its immediate consequence is that, far from being contradictory,
there is a direct relationship between the detail and concreteness
of ethnographical description and the validity and generality
of the model which is constructed after it. For, though many
models may be used as convenient devices to describe and explain
the phenomena, it is obvious that the best model will always be
that which is true, that is, the simplest possible model
which, while being derived exclusively from the facts under consideration,
also makes it possible to account for all of them. Therefore,
the first task is to ascertain what those facts are.
Consciousness and Unconsciousness
A second distinction has to do with the conscious or unconscious
character of the models. In the history of structural thought,
Boas may be credited with having introduced this distinction.
He made clear that a category of facts can more easily yield
to structural analysis when the social group in which it is manifested
has not elaborated a conscious model to interpret or justify it.
Some readers may be surprised to find Boas' name quoted in connection
with structural theory, since he has often been described as one
of the main obstacles in its path. But this writer has tried
to demonstrate that Boas' shortcomings in matters of structural
studies did not lie in his failure to understand their importance
and significance, which he did, as a matter of fact, in the most
prophetic way. They rather resulted from the fact that he imposed
on structural studies conditions of validity, some of which will
remain forever part of their methodology, while some others are
so exacting and impossible to meet that they would have withered
scientific development in any field.
A structural model may be conscious or unconscious without this
difference affecting its nature. It can only be said that when
the structure of a certain type of phenomena does not lie at a
great depth, it is more likely that some kind of model, standing
as a screen to hide it, will exist in the collective consciousness.
For conscious models, which are usually known as “norms,”
are by definition very poor ones, since they are not intended
to explain the phenomena but to perpetuate them. Therefore, structural
analysis is confronted with a strange paradox well known to the
linguist, that is: the more obvious structural organisation is,
the more difficult it becomes to reach it because of the inaccurate
conscious models lying across the path which leads to it.
From the point of view of the degree of consciousness, the anthropologist
is confronted with two kinds of situations. He may have to construct
a model from phenomena the systematic character of which has evoked
no awareness on the part of the culture; this is the kind of simpler
situation referred to by Boas as providing the easiest ground
for anthropological research. Or else the anthropologist will
be dealing on the one hand with raw phenomena and on the other
with the models already constructed by the culture to interpret
the former. Though it is likely that, for the reasons stated
above, these models will prove unsatisfactory, it is by no means
necessary that this should always be the case. As a matter of
fact, many “primitive” cultures have built models of
their marriage regulations which are much more to the point than
models built by professional anthropologists Thus one cannot dispense
with studying a culture's “home-made” models for two
reasons. First, these models might prove to be accurate or, at
least, to provide some insight into the structure of the phenomena;
after all, each culture has its own theoreticians whose contributions
deserve the same attention as that which the anthropologist gives
to colleagues. And, second, even if the models are biased or
erroneous, the very bias and type of error are a part of the facts
under study and probably rank among the most significant ones.
But even when taking into consideration these culturally produced
models, the anthropologist does not forget – as he has sometimes
been accused of doing – that the cultural norms are not of themselves
structures. Rather, they furnish an important contribution to
an understanding of the structures, either as factual documents
or as theoretical contributions similar to those of the anthropologist
himself.
This point has been given great attention by the French sociological
school. Durkheim and Mauss, for instance, have always taken care
to substitute, as a starting point for the survey of native categories
of thought, the conscious representations prevailing among the
natives themselves for those stemming from the anthropologist's
own culture. This was undoubtedly an important step, which,
nevertheless, fell short of its goal because these authors were
not sufficiently aware that native conscious representations,
important as they are, may be just as remote from the unconscious
reality as any other.
Structure and Measure.
It is often believed that one of the main interests of the notion of structure
is to permit the introduction of measurement in social anthropology.
This view has been favoured by the frequent appearance of mathematical
or semi-mathematical aids in books or articles dealing with social
structure. It is true that in some cases structural analysis
has made it possible to attach numerical values to invariants.
This was, for instance, the result of Kroeber's study of women's
dress fashions, a landmark in structural research, as well as
of a few other studies which will be discussed below.
However, one should keep in mind that there is no necessary connection
between measure and structure. Structural studies are,
in the social sciences, the indirect outcome of modern developments
in mathematics which have given increasing importance to the qualitative
point of view in contradistinction to the quantitative point of
view of traditional mathematics. It has become possible, therefore,
in fields such as mathematical logic, set theory, group theory,
and topology, to develop a rigorous approach to problems which
do not admit of a metrical solution. The outstanding achievements
in this connection – which offer themselves as springboards not
yet utilised by social scientist e to be found in J. von Neumann
and O. Morgenstern, Theory of Games and Economic Behaviour;
N. Wiener, Cybernetics; and C. Shannon and W. Weaver, The
Mathematical Theory of Communication. ...
Chapter XVI ...
I do not postulate a kind of pre-existent harmony between different
levels of structure. They may be – and often are – completely
contradictory, but the modes of contradiction all belong the same
type. Indeed, according to dialectic materialism it should always
be possible to proceed, by transformation, from economic or social
structure to the structure of law, art, or religion. But Marx
never claimed that there was only one type of transformation -
for example, that ideology was simply a “mirror image” of social
relations. In his view, these transformations were dialectic,
and in some cases he went to great lengths to discover the crucial
transformation which at first sight seemed to defy analysis.
If we grant, following Marxian thought, that infrastructures and
superstructures are made up of multiple levels and that there
various types of transformations from one level to another, it
becomes possible – in the final analysis, and on the condition
that we disregard content – to characterise different types
in terms of the types of transformations which occur within them.
These types of transformations amount to formulas showing the
number, magnitude, direction, and order of the convolutions that
must be unravelled, so to speak, in order to uncover (logically,
not normatively) an ideal homologous relationship between the
different structural levels.
Now, this reduction to an ideal homologous relationship is at
the same time a critique. By replacing a complex model with a
simple model that has greater logical value, the anthropologist
reveals the detours and manoeuvres, conscious and unconscious,
that each society uses in an effort to resolve its inherent contradictions
– or at any rate to conceal them.
This clarification, already furnished by my previous studies,
which Gurvitch should have taken into consideration, may expose
me to still another criticism. If every society has the same
flaw, manifested by the two-fold problem – of logical disharmony
and social inequality, why should its more thoughtful members
endeavour to change it? Change would mean only the replacement
of one social form by another; and if one is no better than the
other, why bother?
In support of this argument, Rodinson cites a passage from Tristes
Tropiques: “No human society is fundamentally good, but
neither is any of them fundamentally bad; all offer their members
certain advantages, though we must bear in mind a residue of iniquity,
apparently more or less constant in its importance... .
But here Rodinson isolates, in biased fashion, one step in a reasoning
process by which I tried to resolve the apparent conflict between
thought and action. Actually:
(1) In the passage criticised by Rodinson, the relativistic argument
serves only to oppose any attempt at classifying, in relation
to one another, societies remote from that of the observer
- for instance, from our point of view, a Melanesian group and
a North American tribe. I hold that we have no conceptual framework
available that can be legitimately applied to societies located
opposite poles of the sociological world and considered in their
mutual relationships.
(2) On the other hand, I carefully distinguished this first frame
from a very different one, which would consist in comparing remote
societies, but two historically related stages in the development
of our own society – or, to generalise, of the observer's society.
When the frame of reference is thus “internalised,”
everything changes. This second phase permits us, without retaining
anything from any particular society,
... to make use of one and all of them in order to distinguish
those principles of social life which may be applied to the reform
of our own customs, and not of those of societies foreign to our
own. That is to say, in relation to our own society we stand
in a position of privilege which is exactly contrary to that which
I have just described; for our own society is the only one that
we can transform and yet not destroy, since the changes we should
introduce would come from within.
Far from being satisfied, then, with a static relativism – as
are certain American anthropologists justly criticised by Rodinson
(but with whom he wrongly identifies me) – I denounce it as a
danger ever-present on the anthropologist's path. My solution
is constructive, since it derives from the same principles, two
apparently contradictory attitudes, namely, respect for societies
very different from ours, and active participation in the transformation
of our own society.
Is there any reason here, as Rodinson claims, “to reduce
Billancourt to desperation”? Billancourt would deserve
little consideration if cannibalism in its own way (and more
seriously so than primitive man-eaters, for its cannibalism would
be spiritual), should feel it necessary to its intellectual
and moral security that the Papuans become nothing but proletarians.
Fortunately, anthropological theory does not play such an important
role in trade union demands. On the other hand, I am surprised
that a scientist with advanced ideas should present an argument
already formulated by thinkers of an entirely different orientation.
Neither in Race and History nor in Tristes Tropiques
did I intend to disparage the idea of progress; rather, I
should like to see progress transferred from the rank of a universal
category of human development to that of a particular mode of
existence, characteristic of our own society – and perhaps of
several others – whenever that society reaches the stage of self-awareness.
To say that this concept of progress – progress considered as
an internal property of a given society and devoid of a transcendent
meaning outside it – would lead men to discouragement, seems to
me to be a transposition in the historical idiom and on the level
of collective life, of the familiar argument that all morality
would be jeopardised if the individual ceased to believe in the
immortality of his soul. For centuries, this argument, so much
like Rodinson's, was raised to oppose atheism. Atheism would
“reduce men to desperation” – most particularly the
working classes, who, it was feared, would lose their motivation
for work if there were no punishments or rewards promised in the
hereafter.
Nevertheless, there are many men (especially in Billancourt) who
accept the idea of a personal existence confined to the duration
of their earthly life; they have not for this reason abandoned
their sense of morality or their willingness to work for the improvement
of their lot and that of their descendants.
Is what is true of individuals less true of groups? A society
can live, act, and be transformed, and still avoid becoming intoxicated
with the conviction that all the societies which preceded it during
tens of millenniums did nothing more than prepare the ground for
its advent, that all its contemporaries – even those at
the antipodes – are diligently striving to overtake it, and that
the societies which will succeed it until the end of time ought
to be mainly concerned with following in its path. This attitude
is as naive as maintaining that the earth occupies the center
of the universe and that man is the summit of creation. When
it is professed today in support of our particular society, it
is odious.
What is more, Rodinson attacks me in the name of Marxism, whereas
my conception is infinitely closer to Marx's position than his.
I wish to point out, first, that the distinctions developed in
Race and History among stationary history, fluctuating
history and cumulative history can be derived from Marx himself:
The simplicity of the organisation for production in those, self-sufficing
communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form
and, when accidentally destroyed, spring again on the spot and
with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret
of the unchangeableness of Asiatic Societies, an unchangeableness
in such striking contrast with constant dissolution and refounding
of Asiatic states, and never-ceasing changes of dynasty.
Actually, Marx and Engels frequently express the idea that primitive,
or allegedly primitive, societies are governed by “blood
ties” (which, today, we call kinship systems) and not by
economic relationships. If these societies were not destroyed
from without, they might endure indefinitely. The temporal category
applicable to them has nothing to do with the one we employ to
understand, the development of our own society.
Nor does this conception contradict in the least the famous dictum
of the Communist Manifesto that “the history of all
hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
In the light of Hegel's philosophy of the State, this dictum does
not mean that the class struggle is co-extensive with humanity,
but that the ideas of history and society can be applied, in the
full sense which Marx gives them, only from the time when the
class struggle first appeared. The letter to Weydemeyer clearly
supports this: “What I did that was new,” Marx wrote,
“was prove ... that the existence of classes is
only bound up with particular historical phases in the development
of production... .”
Rodinson should, therefore, ponder the following comment by Marx
in his posthumously published introduction to A Contribution
to the Critique of Political Economy:
The so-called historical development amounts in the last analysis
to this, that the last form considers its predecessors as stages
leading up to itself and perceives them always one-sidedly, since
it is very seldom and only under certain conditions that it is
capable of self-criticism ...
This chapter had already been written when Jean-François
Revel published his lively, provocative, but often unfair study.
Since part of his chapter VIII concerns my work, I shall briefly
reply –
Revel criticises me, but not without misgivings. If he recognised
me for what I am an anthropologist who has conducted field work
and who, having presented his findings, has re-examined the theoretical
principles of his discipline on the basis of these specific findings
and the findings of his colleagues – Revel would, according to
his own principles, refrain from discussing my work. But he begins
by changing me into a sociologist, after which he insinuates that,
because of my philosophical training, my sociology is nothing
but disguised philosophy. From then on we are among colleagues,
and Revel can freely tread on my reserves, without realising that
he is behaving toward anthropology exactly as, throughout his
book, he upbraids philosophers for behaving toward the other empirical
sciences.
But I am not a sociologist, and my interest in our own society
is only a secondary one. Those societies which I seek first to
understand are the so-called primitive societies with which anthropologists
are concerned. When, to Revel's great displeasure, I interpret
the exchange of wine in the restaurants of southern France in
terms of social prestations, my primary aim is not to explain
contemporary customs by means of archaic institutions but to help
the reader, a member of a contemporary society, to rediscover,
in his own experience and on the basis of either vestigial or
embryonic practices, institutions that would otherwise remain
unintelligible to him. The question, then, is not whether the
exchange of wine is a survival of the potlatch, but whether,
by means of this comparison we succeed better in grasping the
feelings, intentions, and attitudes of the native involved in
a cycle of prestations. The ethnographer who has lived among
natives and has experienced such ceremonies as either a spectator
or a participant, is entitled to an opinion on this question; Revel
is not.
Moreover, by a curious contradiction, Revel refuses to admit that
the categories of primitive societies may be applied to our own
society, although he insists upon applying our categories to primitive
societies. “It is absolutely certain,” he says, that
prestations “in which the goods of a society are finally
used up ... correspond to the specific conditions of a mode
of production and a social structure.” And he further declares
that “it is even probable – an exception unique in history,
which would then have to be explained – that prestations mask
the economic exploitation of certain members of each society of
this type by others.”
How can Revel be “absolutely certain”? And how does
he know that the exception would be “unique in history”?
Has he studied Melanesian and Amerindian institutions in the
field? Has, he so much as analysed the numerous works dealing
with the kula and its evolution from 1910 to 1950, or with
the potlatch from the beginning of the nineteenth century
until the twentieth? If he had, he would know, first of all, that
it is absurd to think that all the goods of a society are used
up in these exchanges. And he would have more precise ideas of
the proportions and the kinds of goods involved in certain cases
and in certain periods. Finally, and above all, he would be aware
that, from the particular viewpoint that interests him – namely,
the economic exploitation of man by man – the two culture areas
to which he refers cannot be compared. In one of them, this exploitation
presents characteristics which we might at best call pre-capitalistic.
Even in Alaska and British Columbia, however, this exploitation
is an external factor: It acts only to give greater scope to institutions
which can exist without it, and whose general character must be
defined in other terms.
Should Revel hasten to protest, let me add that I am only paraphrasing
Engels, who by chance expressed his opinion on this problem, and
with respect to the same societies which Revel has in mind. Engels
wrote:
In order finally to get clear about the parallel between the Germans
of Tacitus and the American Redskins I have made some gentle extractions
from the first volume of your Bancroft [The Native
Races of the Pacific States, etc.]. The similarity is indeed
all the more surprising because the method of production is so
fundamentally different – here hunters and fishers without cattle-raising
or agriculture, there nomadic cattle-raising passing into agriculture.
It just proves how at this stage the type of production is less
decisive than the degree in which the old blood bonds and the
old mutual community of the sexes within the tribe have been dissolved.
Otherwise the Tlingit in the former Russian America could not
be the exact counterpart of the Germanic tribes . ...
It remained for Marcel Mauss, in Essai sur le Don (which
Revel criticises quite inappropriately) to justify and develop
Engels' hypothesis that there is a striking parallelism between
certain Germanic and Celtic institutions and those of societies
having the potlatch. He did this with no concern
about uncovering the “specific conditions of a mode of production,”
which, as Engels had already understood, would be useless. But
then Marx and Engels knew incomparably more anthropology almost
a hundred years ago than Revel knows today.
I am, on the other hand, in full agreement with Revel when he
writes, “Perhaps the most serious defect which philosophy
has transmitted to sociology is ... the obsession with creating
in one stroke holistic explanations." He has here laid down
his own indictment. He rebukes me because I have not proposed
explanations and because I have acted as if I believed “that
there is fundamentally no reason why one society adopts one set
of institutions and another society other institutions.”
He requires anthropologists to answer questions such as: “Why
are societies structured along different lines? Why does each
structure evolve? ... Why are there differences [Revel's
italics] between institutions and between societies, and what
responses to what conditions do these differences imply ...
?” These questions are highly pertinent, and we should like
to be able to answer them. In our present state of knowledge,
however, we are in a position to provide answers only for specific
and limited cases, and even here our interpretations remain fragmentary
and isolated. Revel can believe that the task is easy, since
for him “it is absolutely certain” that ever since the
social evolution of man began, approximately 500,000 years ago,
economic exploitation can explain everything.
As we noted, this was not the opinion of Marx and Engels. According
to their view, in the non- or pre-capitalistic societies kinship
ties played a more important role than class relations. I do
not believe that I am being unfaithful to their teachings by trying,
seventy years after Lewis H. Morgan, whom they admired so greatly,
to resume Morgan's endeavour – that is, to work out a new typology
of kinship systems in the light of knowledge acquired in the field
since then, by myself and others.”
I ask to be judged on the basis of this typology, and not on that
of the psychological or sociological hypotheses which Revel seizes
upon; these hypotheses are only a kind of mental scaffolding,
momentarily useful to the anthropologist as a means of organising
his observations, building his classifications, and arranging
his types in some sort of order. If one of my colleagues were
to come to me and say that my theoretical analysis of Murngin
or Gilyak kinship systems was inconsistent with his observations,
or that while was in the field I misinterpreted chieftainship
among the Nambicuara, the place of art in Caduveo society, the
social structure of the Bororo, or the nature of clans among the
Tupi-Cawahib, I should listen to him with deference and attention.
But Revel, who could not care less about patrilineal descent,
bilateral marriage, dual organisation, or dysharmonic systems,
attacks me – without even understanding that I seek only to describe
and analyse certain aspects of the objective world – for “flattening
out social reality,” For him everything is flat that cannot
be instantaneously expressed in a, language which he may perhaps
use correctly in reference to Western civilisation, but to which
its inventors explicitly denied any other application. Now it
is my turn to exclaim: Indeed, “what is the use of philosophers?”
Reasoning in the fashion of Revel and Rodinson would mean surrendering
the social sciences to obscurantism. What would we think of building
contractors and architects who condemned cosmic physics in the
name of the law of gravity and under the argument that a geometry
based on curved spaces would render obsolete the traditional techniques
for demolishing or building houses? The house-wrecker and the
architect are right to believe only in Euclidean geometry, but
they do not try to force it upon the astronomer. And if the help
of the astronomer is required in remodelling his house, the categories
he uses to understand the universe do not automatically prevent
him from handling the pick-axe and plumb-line.
Further Reading:
Review by Evelyn Reed |
Biography |
Dialectic and History
Durkheim |
Saussure |
Jakobson |
Parsons |
Marx |
Althusser
Anti-Historicism and the Algerian War
Philosophy Archive @ marxists.org
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Hickman Case</h1>
<h3>(9 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_32" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 32</a>, 9 August 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party isn’t just another TALKING party – it’s an ACTING party. That’s one thing, among others, that makes the SWP different from all other parties in the 1948 presidential elections.</p>
<p>Although the SWP is still small in numbers and resources, it has done more than all other parties put together in the fight for civil rights and in defense of labor and the Negro people.</p>
<p>This is the first of a series of articles to inform our new friends and readers on the record of the Socialist Workers Party. We have earned the right to ask your support of our candidates, Farrell Dobbs for President and Grace Carlson for Vice President, by our record in the struggle against the labor-haters, fascists and Negro-baiters.</p>
<p>If there’s one real test of any party, that is its record in the fight for Negro equality. The proud record of the SWP is written large in such recent historic actions as the Fontana case in California, the Freeport case in New York and the Hickman case in Chicago.</p>
<p>An appropriate start for our series is a description of the role of the SWP in the successful defense of the life of the Negro steel worker, James Hickman, twice tried for the killing of his landlord after his four children had burned to death in a fire-trap blaze in Chicago’s Black Ghetto.</p>
<p>The significance of the Hickman case and the historic mass defense movement initiated and inspired by the Chicago Local of the SWP is attested to by a 14-page article, <i>The Hickman Story</i>, written by John Bartlow Martin and published in this month’s issue of <b>Harper’s Magazine</b>. It is a dramatic, moving and honest account of the events.</p>
<p>During the war, James Hickman brought his wife and eight children up North from Mississippi, seeking an opportunity to work at decent wages, raise his children to be honest, self-respecting citizens. He came to Chicago, hoping there to find the “promised land.”</p>
<p>He didn’t find it. He found the misery and degradation of the Black Ghetto, the incredibly crowded segregated area to which Negroes are confined because of restrictive covenants and the greed of real estate interests.</p>
<p>Hickman was forced to house his family in a fourth-floor attic room of a dilapidated old dwelling. His “home” had no running water, no toilet – and just one exit. He paid the landlord, David Coleman, $100 for the “privilege” of moving in and the promise of a basement flat later on, plus $6 a week rent.</p>
<p>Then Hickman found out the promised basement apartment was leased to another family. He went to the landlord Coleman and demanded back his $100 deposit. Coleman refused, threatened to burn the Hickman family out if Hickman held back the rent.</p>
<p>On the night of January 16, 1947, while Hickman was at work on the night shift; a fire broke out on the landing outside the Hickmans’ door.</p>
<p>There was no escape. Mrs. Hickman and an older son leaped from a fourth-floor window. They lived, but horribly burned and injured. Four of the youngsters, huddled under the bed, were burned to death.</p>
<p>That was when the SWP entered the picture. It investigated the fire and began a campaign to organize the tenants into a Tenants League. It secured legal aid for Hickman to sue the landlord. It pressed for a city investigation and action against fire-traps and restrictive covenants.</p>
<p>Hickman was a man bereft. He was convinced Cqleman had set the fire – -and all evidence pointed to arson. He brooded until he got a gun. He went to look for Coleman, found him, and shot him to death. Hickman gave himself up to tne police. He was hooked without bail. He had no money for a lawyer. He faced the electric chair.</p>
<p>“But suddenly to his rescue came some citizens – an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party, Mike Bartell, and two labor union men, Willoughby Abner, a Negro and first vice president of the central CIO Council in Chicago, and Charles Chiakulas, president of a United Auto Workers (CIO) local,” writes John Bartlow Martin.</p>
<p>The SWP representatives proposed and secured a broad united labor and Negro defense of Hickman. A campaign was launched to arouse the conscience and support of the city and the nation. One of the chief attorneys for the defense was M.J. Myer, noted for his legal assistance in the famous Minneapolis Labor Trial of the SWP leaders.</p>
<p>The <b>Harper’s</b> article states: “Many such groups degenerate into luncheons and resolutions. Hickman’s defenders worked hard, effectively, fast, and according to plan.” Before the trial was over, money and moral support poured in from organizations all over the country.</p>
<p>Hickman was tried by an all-white jury and a white judge. But the defense soon turned the case into a trial of the Jim Crow system, restrictive covenants and greedy landlordism. The result was a hung jury – seven to five for acquittal.</p>
<p>The prosecution started a new trial. By now the Defense Committee, in which SWP representatives played a leading role, had aroused a nationwide response. The pressure was so great, the court agreed to accept a plea of manslaughter instead of murder. On Dec. 16, 1947, Hickman was found “guilty” and released on two years probation. Hickman, his wife and three remaining sons, are now living in a housing project. He is working at a job obtained for him by the Defense Committee.</p>
<p>The Hickman defense, initiated by the SWP, saved the life of a poor, unknown, victimized Negro worker. It put a national spotlight on the shame of the nation – the Black Ghettoes of the cities. And, above all, it taught the lesson of how to mobilize the workers, Negro and white, for successful mass struggle.</p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Art Preis
The Hickman Case
(9 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 32, 9 August 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Socialist Workers Party isn’t just another TALKING party – it’s an ACTING party. That’s one thing, among others, that makes the SWP different from all other parties in the 1948 presidential elections.
Although the SWP is still small in numbers and resources, it has done more than all other parties put together in the fight for civil rights and in defense of labor and the Negro people.
This is the first of a series of articles to inform our new friends and readers on the record of the Socialist Workers Party. We have earned the right to ask your support of our candidates, Farrell Dobbs for President and Grace Carlson for Vice President, by our record in the struggle against the labor-haters, fascists and Negro-baiters.
If there’s one real test of any party, that is its record in the fight for Negro equality. The proud record of the SWP is written large in such recent historic actions as the Fontana case in California, the Freeport case in New York and the Hickman case in Chicago.
An appropriate start for our series is a description of the role of the SWP in the successful defense of the life of the Negro steel worker, James Hickman, twice tried for the killing of his landlord after his four children had burned to death in a fire-trap blaze in Chicago’s Black Ghetto.
The significance of the Hickman case and the historic mass defense movement initiated and inspired by the Chicago Local of the SWP is attested to by a 14-page article, The Hickman Story, written by John Bartlow Martin and published in this month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine. It is a dramatic, moving and honest account of the events.
During the war, James Hickman brought his wife and eight children up North from Mississippi, seeking an opportunity to work at decent wages, raise his children to be honest, self-respecting citizens. He came to Chicago, hoping there to find the “promised land.”
He didn’t find it. He found the misery and degradation of the Black Ghetto, the incredibly crowded segregated area to which Negroes are confined because of restrictive covenants and the greed of real estate interests.
Hickman was forced to house his family in a fourth-floor attic room of a dilapidated old dwelling. His “home” had no running water, no toilet – and just one exit. He paid the landlord, David Coleman, $100 for the “privilege” of moving in and the promise of a basement flat later on, plus $6 a week rent.
Then Hickman found out the promised basement apartment was leased to another family. He went to the landlord Coleman and demanded back his $100 deposit. Coleman refused, threatened to burn the Hickman family out if Hickman held back the rent.
On the night of January 16, 1947, while Hickman was at work on the night shift; a fire broke out on the landing outside the Hickmans’ door.
There was no escape. Mrs. Hickman and an older son leaped from a fourth-floor window. They lived, but horribly burned and injured. Four of the youngsters, huddled under the bed, were burned to death.
That was when the SWP entered the picture. It investigated the fire and began a campaign to organize the tenants into a Tenants League. It secured legal aid for Hickman to sue the landlord. It pressed for a city investigation and action against fire-traps and restrictive covenants.
Hickman was a man bereft. He was convinced Cqleman had set the fire – -and all evidence pointed to arson. He brooded until he got a gun. He went to look for Coleman, found him, and shot him to death. Hickman gave himself up to tne police. He was hooked without bail. He had no money for a lawyer. He faced the electric chair.
“But suddenly to his rescue came some citizens – an organizer for the Socialist Workers Party, Mike Bartell, and two labor union men, Willoughby Abner, a Negro and first vice president of the central CIO Council in Chicago, and Charles Chiakulas, president of a United Auto Workers (CIO) local,” writes John Bartlow Martin.
The SWP representatives proposed and secured a broad united labor and Negro defense of Hickman. A campaign was launched to arouse the conscience and support of the city and the nation. One of the chief attorneys for the defense was M.J. Myer, noted for his legal assistance in the famous Minneapolis Labor Trial of the SWP leaders.
The Harper’s article states: “Many such groups degenerate into luncheons and resolutions. Hickman’s defenders worked hard, effectively, fast, and according to plan.” Before the trial was over, money and moral support poured in from organizations all over the country.
Hickman was tried by an all-white jury and a white judge. But the defense soon turned the case into a trial of the Jim Crow system, restrictive covenants and greedy landlordism. The result was a hung jury – seven to five for acquittal.
The prosecution started a new trial. By now the Defense Committee, in which SWP representatives played a leading role, had aroused a nationwide response. The pressure was so great, the court agreed to accept a plea of manslaughter instead of murder. On Dec. 16, 1947, Hickman was found “guilty” and released on two years probation. Hickman, his wife and three remaining sons, are now living in a housing project. He is working at a job obtained for him by the Defense Committee.
The Hickman defense, initiated by the SWP, saved the life of a poor, unknown, victimized Negro worker. It put a national spotlight on the shame of the nation – the Black Ghettoes of the cities. And, above all, it taught the lesson of how to mobilize the workers, Negro and white, for successful mass struggle.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Socialist Workers Party<br>
Stands for Class Politics</h1>
<h3>(13 September 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_37" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 37</a>, 13 September 1923, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">As one result of its first national election campaign, the Socialist Workers Party is receiving more publicity in capitalist newspapers than ever before in its history. A favorite sideswipe of the capitalist writers at the SWP goes something like this: The “Trotskyites” are mad at everybody – they’re equally against the Democrats, the Republicans, the Wallaceites, the Norman Thomas Socialists, the Stalinist Communist Party and all the top leaders of the unions, from Murray and Reuther to Green and Tobin.</p>
<p>This is deliberately designed to give the impression that the Trotskyists are just a bunch of disgruntled crackpots and chronic gripers, against everything and everyone just for the hell of it.</p>
<p><em>The fact is there is a definite, clear-cut fundamental dividing line of principle between the SWP and all the other parties. That is the CLASS line.</em></p>
<p>While all the other political groups which the SWP opposes have differences among themselves – a fact that the SWP does not at all dismiss – they have nevertheless, a common position on one decisive point: They are all hostile to the political class organization of the workers. The SWP in contrast, stands foursquare for a class party of the American workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Deceive Working Class</h4>
<p class="fst">The Republicans and Democrats stand for capitalism “as is.” Some, like the Wallaceites and their Stalinist supporters, proclaim “progressive” capitalism as their aim. Others, like Norman Thomas, even claim they are for socialism. But all of them, in one way or another, strive to keep the workers from uniting politically as a class and from building <em>their own independent class party</em>.</p>
<p>No matter how “progressive” or “radical” a political group may claim to-be, no matter how much it professes to serve the interests of the workers, it all boils down to deception and lies if they deny to labor its own class political instrument, <em>its own class party</em>.</p>
<p><em>The biggest political myth the ruling capitalists are trying to sell to the workers is that this country is different from any in history, that here there are no real class divisions and, therefore, no basis for class politics.</em></p>
<p>We saw one frank expression of this fear in a series of full-page advertisements run in leading newspapers last November by the powerful McGraw-Hill publishing company. Under a huge headline, <em>“POLITICAL ACTION – LABOR’S BLIND ALLEY</em>,” the publishers of <strong>Business Week</strong> and dozens of big trade magazines went all out in warnings to the workers not “to let their union leader’s lure them down the blind alley of political action ... Unions exist for collective bargaining, not politicking.”<br>
</p>
<h4>OK for Their Class</h4>
<p class="fst">But the McGraw-Hill interests and the other big capitalists aren’t against class patties at all. On the contrary, they have, as they have always had, <em>their</em> class parties, which they have consciously developed and maintained to serve their class interests. <em>That is what the Republican and Democratic parties are.</em></p>
<p>The capitalists believe in class politics, all right. They are only against class politics for the majority, the workers.</p>
<p><em>The root of the capitalist opposition to a “third party” – right now – is fear that once the “two-party” myth is destroyed and the present two-party political monopoly is broken, the way will be open for a class party of labor.</em></p>
<p>That doesn’t mean the capitalists aren’t ready to put forward a “third party” of their own when they feel it to be to their interests. During their progressive period, back in 1854, the American industrialists organized a “third party” – the Republicans – to fight against the two old parties, the Democrats and Whigs. Today, 'the reactionary capitalist class has another “third party” up its sleeve – the fascist party. The American capitalists will be all for this “third party” – as were their class brothers in Germany and Italy – when they feel they can no longer maintain their rule through the “two-party system.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Hamstring Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">The Wallace party, despite its pretensions to progressivistn, is in 100% agreement with the other capitalist parties on one thilig: Don’t let the workers build their own party! The Wallace party is dominated from the top by capitalist-minded liberal politicians who have no connections with or responsibility to the labor movement. The credentials report at their recent convention revealed that less than 15% of the delegates had any connection with the organized labor movement.</p>
<p>Or take the case of Walter Reuther. The CIO auto workers union president has his ears to the ground. He knows the workers are pressing hard against the old, decrepit two-party political structure. He sees sentiment developing for a class party of labor. <em>Reuther, who like Wallace stands for “enlightened” capitalism, is determined to seize hold of the independent political action movement in labor’s ranks and direct it away from class channels back into the old sewer of capitalist politics.</em> His proposal is for a “third party” of all so-called “progressive” elements now in the two old parties in coalition with the top union bureaucrats. The only difference between what Reuther proposes and the Wallace party is a difference over foreign policy. But Reuther, like Wallace and the Stalinists, are dead set against any genuine party of labor, run <em>by</em> and <em>for</em> the workers through <em>their</em> mass organizations, the unions.</p>
<p>As for the so-called “socialist” party of Norman Thomas, it is just living for the day that it can wind up its independent existence and merge in the broader stream of a. party uniting the “progressive” capitalists and workers. In short, Reuther and Norman Thomas both seek the same <em>type</em> of party the Stalinists have everywhere tried to build and to which they give the name, “People’s Front.”<br>
</p>
<h4>The Real Fact</h4>
<p class="fst">But all politics is class politics. It is to the interests of the ruling capitalists and their various agents and dupes to conceal this elementary fact of the realities of political life. It is the contrary purpose of the Socialist Workers Party to strip the veil from politics and reveal its true class nature.</p>
<p>It is in this that we differ from all other political parties on the American scene today. We show the workers the true face of politics and call on them to act accordingly by building their own class party.</p>
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Art Preis
The Socialist Workers Party
Stands for Class Politics
(13 September 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 37, 13 September 1923, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
As one result of its first national election campaign, the Socialist Workers Party is receiving more publicity in capitalist newspapers than ever before in its history. A favorite sideswipe of the capitalist writers at the SWP goes something like this: The “Trotskyites” are mad at everybody – they’re equally against the Democrats, the Republicans, the Wallaceites, the Norman Thomas Socialists, the Stalinist Communist Party and all the top leaders of the unions, from Murray and Reuther to Green and Tobin.
This is deliberately designed to give the impression that the Trotskyists are just a bunch of disgruntled crackpots and chronic gripers, against everything and everyone just for the hell of it.
The fact is there is a definite, clear-cut fundamental dividing line of principle between the SWP and all the other parties. That is the CLASS line.
While all the other political groups which the SWP opposes have differences among themselves – a fact that the SWP does not at all dismiss – they have nevertheless, a common position on one decisive point: They are all hostile to the political class organization of the workers. The SWP in contrast, stands foursquare for a class party of the American workers.
Deceive Working Class
The Republicans and Democrats stand for capitalism “as is.” Some, like the Wallaceites and their Stalinist supporters, proclaim “progressive” capitalism as their aim. Others, like Norman Thomas, even claim they are for socialism. But all of them, in one way or another, strive to keep the workers from uniting politically as a class and from building their own independent class party.
No matter how “progressive” or “radical” a political group may claim to-be, no matter how much it professes to serve the interests of the workers, it all boils down to deception and lies if they deny to labor its own class political instrument, its own class party.
The biggest political myth the ruling capitalists are trying to sell to the workers is that this country is different from any in history, that here there are no real class divisions and, therefore, no basis for class politics.
We saw one frank expression of this fear in a series of full-page advertisements run in leading newspapers last November by the powerful McGraw-Hill publishing company. Under a huge headline, “POLITICAL ACTION – LABOR’S BLIND ALLEY,” the publishers of Business Week and dozens of big trade magazines went all out in warnings to the workers not “to let their union leader’s lure them down the blind alley of political action ... Unions exist for collective bargaining, not politicking.”
OK for Their Class
But the McGraw-Hill interests and the other big capitalists aren’t against class patties at all. On the contrary, they have, as they have always had, their class parties, which they have consciously developed and maintained to serve their class interests. That is what the Republican and Democratic parties are.
The capitalists believe in class politics, all right. They are only against class politics for the majority, the workers.
The root of the capitalist opposition to a “third party” – right now – is fear that once the “two-party” myth is destroyed and the present two-party political monopoly is broken, the way will be open for a class party of labor.
That doesn’t mean the capitalists aren’t ready to put forward a “third party” of their own when they feel it to be to their interests. During their progressive period, back in 1854, the American industrialists organized a “third party” – the Republicans – to fight against the two old parties, the Democrats and Whigs. Today, 'the reactionary capitalist class has another “third party” up its sleeve – the fascist party. The American capitalists will be all for this “third party” – as were their class brothers in Germany and Italy – when they feel they can no longer maintain their rule through the “two-party system.”
Hamstring Workers
The Wallace party, despite its pretensions to progressivistn, is in 100% agreement with the other capitalist parties on one thilig: Don’t let the workers build their own party! The Wallace party is dominated from the top by capitalist-minded liberal politicians who have no connections with or responsibility to the labor movement. The credentials report at their recent convention revealed that less than 15% of the delegates had any connection with the organized labor movement.
Or take the case of Walter Reuther. The CIO auto workers union president has his ears to the ground. He knows the workers are pressing hard against the old, decrepit two-party political structure. He sees sentiment developing for a class party of labor. Reuther, who like Wallace stands for “enlightened” capitalism, is determined to seize hold of the independent political action movement in labor’s ranks and direct it away from class channels back into the old sewer of capitalist politics. His proposal is for a “third party” of all so-called “progressive” elements now in the two old parties in coalition with the top union bureaucrats. The only difference between what Reuther proposes and the Wallace party is a difference over foreign policy. But Reuther, like Wallace and the Stalinists, are dead set against any genuine party of labor, run by and for the workers through their mass organizations, the unions.
As for the so-called “socialist” party of Norman Thomas, it is just living for the day that it can wind up its independent existence and merge in the broader stream of a. party uniting the “progressive” capitalists and workers. In short, Reuther and Norman Thomas both seek the same type of party the Stalinists have everywhere tried to build and to which they give the name, “People’s Front.”
The Real Fact
But all politics is class politics. It is to the interests of the ruling capitalists and their various agents and dupes to conceal this elementary fact of the realities of political life. It is the contrary purpose of the Socialist Workers Party to strip the veil from politics and reveal its true class nature.
It is in this that we differ from all other political parties on the American scene today. We show the workers the true face of politics and call on them to act accordingly by building their own class party.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(15 June 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_24" target="new">Vol. X No. 24</a>, 15 June 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>How Not to Defeat Anti-Labor Drive</h3>
<p class="fst">Despite “tough” talk from some top union leaders in opposition to the anti-labor drive of Truman and Congress, they are beginning to demonstrate once more that they have no stomach for a fight. They are wilting under the Big Business-government onslaught and seeking formulas behind cover of which they can retreat with “honor.”</p>
<p>Such capitulatory moods were expressed by ranking AFL leaders before the fifth biennial convention of the AFL United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers, held last week in New York City. Max Zaritsky, UHCMW president, David Dubinsky, head of the AFL International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and Matthew Woll, AFL vice president, delivered speeches which might be summed up under one heading: <b>How Not To Defeat The Anti-Labor Drive.</b></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Surrender Labor’s Economic Weapons</h3>
<p class="fst">Zaritsky proposed nothing less than “this union carry its wartime ‘no-strike’ policy over into the reconversion period.” He boasted that “wage rates and total earnings of members increased substantially despite the fact that the union did not resort to strikes in order to make its gains.”</p>
<p>Zaritsky spoke from the smug and narrow outlook of the head of a union of 40,000 members which deals with a swarm of competing petty manufacturers in a secondary consumers goods industry. Because of various special factors, this particular industry suffers a relative labor shortage, a favorable circumstance for collective bargaining.</p>
<p>In addition, this small union has been able to ride with the gains won by the great industrial unions through their strike struggles against the giant monopoly corporations – a different calibre of opposition than the “cockroach” employers confronting Zaritsky.</p>
<p>Zaritsky’s theory is that the way to avoid repressive legislation is to surrender labor’s strike weapon and depend on “labor statesmen’’ like himself to win gains by ingratiating themselves with the employers and capitalist government. But even “labor statesmen” <i>par excellence</i>, like Philip Murray and some of the railroad union leaders, were forced into leading tremendous strike actions despite all their efforts to put ideas like Zaritsky’s into practice.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Surrender Labor’s Political Weapons</h3>
<p class="fst">While Zaritsky proposes that labor yield up its economic weapons of struggle, Matthew Woll represents the other side of the theory of “defending” labor by capitulation. He advocated at the Hatters’ convention that labor “give the other fellow (the ruling capitalists) all titles to property, give him the political power.” With “the invincible power of labor on the economic field,” contended Woll. “I will match his power and I will reign supreme.”</p>
<p>To support his argument that labor should surrender any struggle for political power and rely solely on its “economic power,” Woll pointed to the example of the miners strike. He did not point out, however, how the intervention of the government served to prolong the strike and whittle down the possible gains of the mine workers. He did not show how labor’s weakness in the political field helped the government to break the railroad strike.</p>
<p>Woll’s horse-and-buggy theory of no-politics for labor (in reality he means support only capitalist politics) would keep labor in the position of fighting against the employers with one arm tied behind it.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>New Back-Door Deals with ‘Friends of Labor’</h3>
<p class="fst">Dubinsky, on the other hand, said he wants labor in politics. He even advocated the idea of an independent national labor party at the convention.</p>
<p>But, while paying lip service to the labor party idea, Dubinsky indicated he was ready to make still another political deal with Truman. The ILGWU president said he did not agree with calling Truman “strikebreaker No. 1.” “I say that the test of judging the position of the President,” claimed Dubinsky, “will be his signing or vetoing of the Case bill.”</p>
<p>Dubinsky is ready to accept Truman as a “friend of labor” even if he broke the railroad strike, tried to smash the mine strike, and is pushing the “work-under-bayonets” bill to draft strikers into the Army. All Dubinsky asks is one little veto.</p>
<p>Zaritsky, Woll and Dubinsky have come up with three tried- and-true methods for leading labor to defeat: give up labor’s economic weapons; give up labor’s political weapons; seek some more back-door deals with “friends of labor” like Truman.</p>
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Art Preis
Trade Union Notes
(15 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 24, 15 June 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
How Not to Defeat Anti-Labor Drive
Despite “tough” talk from some top union leaders in opposition to the anti-labor drive of Truman and Congress, they are beginning to demonstrate once more that they have no stomach for a fight. They are wilting under the Big Business-government onslaught and seeking formulas behind cover of which they can retreat with “honor.”
Such capitulatory moods were expressed by ranking AFL leaders before the fifth biennial convention of the AFL United Hatters, Cap and Millinery Workers, held last week in New York City. Max Zaritsky, UHCMW president, David Dubinsky, head of the AFL International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, and Matthew Woll, AFL vice president, delivered speeches which might be summed up under one heading: How Not To Defeat The Anti-Labor Drive.
* * *
Surrender Labor’s Economic Weapons
Zaritsky proposed nothing less than “this union carry its wartime ‘no-strike’ policy over into the reconversion period.” He boasted that “wage rates and total earnings of members increased substantially despite the fact that the union did not resort to strikes in order to make its gains.”
Zaritsky spoke from the smug and narrow outlook of the head of a union of 40,000 members which deals with a swarm of competing petty manufacturers in a secondary consumers goods industry. Because of various special factors, this particular industry suffers a relative labor shortage, a favorable circumstance for collective bargaining.
In addition, this small union has been able to ride with the gains won by the great industrial unions through their strike struggles against the giant monopoly corporations – a different calibre of opposition than the “cockroach” employers confronting Zaritsky.
Zaritsky’s theory is that the way to avoid repressive legislation is to surrender labor’s strike weapon and depend on “labor statesmen’’ like himself to win gains by ingratiating themselves with the employers and capitalist government. But even “labor statesmen” par excellence, like Philip Murray and some of the railroad union leaders, were forced into leading tremendous strike actions despite all their efforts to put ideas like Zaritsky’s into practice.
* * *
Surrender Labor’s Political Weapons
While Zaritsky proposes that labor yield up its economic weapons of struggle, Matthew Woll represents the other side of the theory of “defending” labor by capitulation. He advocated at the Hatters’ convention that labor “give the other fellow (the ruling capitalists) all titles to property, give him the political power.” With “the invincible power of labor on the economic field,” contended Woll. “I will match his power and I will reign supreme.”
To support his argument that labor should surrender any struggle for political power and rely solely on its “economic power,” Woll pointed to the example of the miners strike. He did not point out, however, how the intervention of the government served to prolong the strike and whittle down the possible gains of the mine workers. He did not show how labor’s weakness in the political field helped the government to break the railroad strike.
Woll’s horse-and-buggy theory of no-politics for labor (in reality he means support only capitalist politics) would keep labor in the position of fighting against the employers with one arm tied behind it.
* * *
New Back-Door Deals with ‘Friends of Labor’
Dubinsky, on the other hand, said he wants labor in politics. He even advocated the idea of an independent national labor party at the convention.
But, while paying lip service to the labor party idea, Dubinsky indicated he was ready to make still another political deal with Truman. The ILGWU president said he did not agree with calling Truman “strikebreaker No. 1.” “I say that the test of judging the position of the President,” claimed Dubinsky, “will be his signing or vetoing of the Case bill.”
Dubinsky is ready to accept Truman as a “friend of labor” even if he broke the railroad strike, tried to smash the mine strike, and is pushing the “work-under-bayonets” bill to draft strikers into the Army. All Dubinsky asks is one little veto.
Zaritsky, Woll and Dubinsky have come up with three tried- and-true methods for leading labor to defeat: give up labor’s economic weapons; give up labor’s political weapons; seek some more back-door deals with “friends of labor” like Truman.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(26 May 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_21" target="new">Vol. IX No. 21</a>, 26 May 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Thomas’ Bright Idea</h3>
<p class="fst">After fumbling around with the problem of employment for the thousands to be laid-off with the closing of the huge Ford Willow Run Bomber plant, R.J. Thomas, president of the CIO United Automobile Workers finally burst into print with an “inspiration.”</p>
<p>The government claims it has no more war contracts for this government-owned plant. Henry Ford, who operated it most profitably during the war, says it would be a white elephant to him. So Thomas proposed on May 15 in Detroit that Henry J. Kaiser, shipbuilding tycoon and government contract promoter, buy up the plant and produce automobiles.</p>
<p>Evidently, Thomas has swallowed without even chewing the myth about Kaiser, the “industrial genius.” That “genius” consisted exclusively of the ability to wangle new plants and profitable contracts out of the government. On that basis, Kaiser ran a $100,000 investment up to a profit of $27,274,487 on just two of his west coast shipyards. Even Thomas himself, whom no one describes as a genius of any kind, could have done as much if the government had handed him the plants and stuffed the dough into his pockets, as it did with Kaiser.</p>
<p><em>It’s a funny thing, though, that Kaiser the “industrial genius” has run dry in the shipyard industry with the turning off of the tap of government orders. He can’t even provide jobs for the tens of thousands of shipyard workers he employed on war orders. Most of them will he on the street by the first of the year.</em></p>
<p>Why should Thomas ask that the government turn over the Willow Run plant, built with the people’s taxes, to some plutocratic profiteer like Kaiser? He ought to be shouting for the government to operate this and all other government-built plants to produce consumers goods. And the auto workers should control these plants to ensure their efficient and uninterrupted operation.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>“Work or Quit” Order</h3>
<p class="fst">Sixty-four soaking pit workers, members of the United Steel Workers, CIO, went on strike last week at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., South Side plant in Pittsburgh.</p>
<p>It’s a sign of the times that the company didn’t howl for the government to drive them back to work. Instead it sent them individual telegrams to return to work within 24 hours or be considered as having “quit your job,” and forfeiting “all vacation, pension, seniority and other rights.”</p>
<p>Just a short while ago the corporations and their government were insisting that a worker couldn’t “quit” his job. There was a job freeze, draft threats, government plant “seizures” and even troops to force strikers back to work.</p>
<p><em>Evidently the corporations are now beginning to feel in position to revert to the pre-war pattern of pressure on striking workers. That is the threat that a jobless worker is standing outside the gate waiting for your job and if you strike you are merely “quitting” to make room for an eager job applicant.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>How Low Can They Go?</h3>
<p class="fst">How low can the Stalinists bend in order to lick the boots of the employers and capitalist government, is a question being asked more and more frequently these days.</p>
<p>The answer can be seen in the statement of Stalinist John Anderson, president of the Detroit East Side Tool & Die Local 155, UAW-CIO, before the emergency meeting of nearly 40 local UAW presidents in Detroit, May 15.</p>
<p>Anderson just spilled all over with the auto corporation propaganda about the high pay of the auto workers in attempting to refute R.J. Thomas’ absolutely correct statement that a return to the 40-hour week with no overtime pay would reduce average auto wages to around $32 a week.</p>
<p><em>Anderson called Thomas’ statement, substantiated by the other local presidents present, “eyewash” and “union propaganda.” He further expressed the fear that such “union propaganda” would hurt “labor-management relations” – thereby showing he prefers to expound the corporation propaganda.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>What Price “Peace”?</h3>
<p class="fst">An editorial in the May 18 <strong>Toledo Union Journal</strong>, organ of 60,000 Northwest Ohio CIO members, states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Today, to millions of American workers, the threat of sudden peace is almost as terrifying as the sudden coming of war, for many realize that at no time has peace ever provided an adequate number of jobs for the workers. The talk of 60,000,000 jobs up to now is just talk and headlines which mean nothing to the worker awaiting with misgivings the doubtful blessing of a peace which may again bring him unemployment and want.”</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(26 May 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 21, 26 May 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Thomas’ Bright Idea
After fumbling around with the problem of employment for the thousands to be laid-off with the closing of the huge Ford Willow Run Bomber plant, R.J. Thomas, president of the CIO United Automobile Workers finally burst into print with an “inspiration.”
The government claims it has no more war contracts for this government-owned plant. Henry Ford, who operated it most profitably during the war, says it would be a white elephant to him. So Thomas proposed on May 15 in Detroit that Henry J. Kaiser, shipbuilding tycoon and government contract promoter, buy up the plant and produce automobiles.
Evidently, Thomas has swallowed without even chewing the myth about Kaiser, the “industrial genius.” That “genius” consisted exclusively of the ability to wangle new plants and profitable contracts out of the government. On that basis, Kaiser ran a $100,000 investment up to a profit of $27,274,487 on just two of his west coast shipyards. Even Thomas himself, whom no one describes as a genius of any kind, could have done as much if the government had handed him the plants and stuffed the dough into his pockets, as it did with Kaiser.
It’s a funny thing, though, that Kaiser the “industrial genius” has run dry in the shipyard industry with the turning off of the tap of government orders. He can’t even provide jobs for the tens of thousands of shipyard workers he employed on war orders. Most of them will he on the street by the first of the year.
Why should Thomas ask that the government turn over the Willow Run plant, built with the people’s taxes, to some plutocratic profiteer like Kaiser? He ought to be shouting for the government to operate this and all other government-built plants to produce consumers goods. And the auto workers should control these plants to ensure their efficient and uninterrupted operation.
* * *
“Work or Quit” Order
Sixty-four soaking pit workers, members of the United Steel Workers, CIO, went on strike last week at the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corp., South Side plant in Pittsburgh.
It’s a sign of the times that the company didn’t howl for the government to drive them back to work. Instead it sent them individual telegrams to return to work within 24 hours or be considered as having “quit your job,” and forfeiting “all vacation, pension, seniority and other rights.”
Just a short while ago the corporations and their government were insisting that a worker couldn’t “quit” his job. There was a job freeze, draft threats, government plant “seizures” and even troops to force strikers back to work.
Evidently the corporations are now beginning to feel in position to revert to the pre-war pattern of pressure on striking workers. That is the threat that a jobless worker is standing outside the gate waiting for your job and if you strike you are merely “quitting” to make room for an eager job applicant.
* * *
How Low Can They Go?
How low can the Stalinists bend in order to lick the boots of the employers and capitalist government, is a question being asked more and more frequently these days.
The answer can be seen in the statement of Stalinist John Anderson, president of the Detroit East Side Tool & Die Local 155, UAW-CIO, before the emergency meeting of nearly 40 local UAW presidents in Detroit, May 15.
Anderson just spilled all over with the auto corporation propaganda about the high pay of the auto workers in attempting to refute R.J. Thomas’ absolutely correct statement that a return to the 40-hour week with no overtime pay would reduce average auto wages to around $32 a week.
Anderson called Thomas’ statement, substantiated by the other local presidents present, “eyewash” and “union propaganda.” He further expressed the fear that such “union propaganda” would hurt “labor-management relations” – thereby showing he prefers to expound the corporation propaganda.
* * *
What Price “Peace”?
An editorial in the May 18 Toledo Union Journal, organ of 60,000 Northwest Ohio CIO members, states:
“Today, to millions of American workers, the threat of sudden peace is almost as terrifying as the sudden coming of war, for many realize that at no time has peace ever provided an adequate number of jobs for the workers. The talk of 60,000,000 jobs up to now is just talk and headlines which mean nothing to the worker awaiting with misgivings the doubtful blessing of a peace which may again bring him unemployment and want.”
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(20 April 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_17" target="new">Vol. X No. 16</a>, 20 April 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>900 Strikes Planned Within Next 30 Days</h3>
<p class="fst">More than 900 strikes are scheduled to be called in the 30 days after April 10 unless the workers’ demands are satisfied, according to a report last week of the Department of Labor.</p>
<p>This flood of strike notices, totalling 830 in the month ending April 10, surpassed the previous monthly high of slightly more than 600 set last fall before Congress voted to withhold NLRB funds to prevent the taking of strike polls. Only 16 strike notices are being withdrawn on the average per week. Labor Department officials glumly admitted, while 210 were filed in the last week covered by the report.</p>
<p>Most of the notices have been filed against individual plants. This indicates a new wave of strikes, largely against the independent concerns. These latter, some of them extremely wealthy, are notoriously anti-union. They can be expected to put up bitter resistance to the unions demands.</p>
<p>The wage gains won by the big strikes in auto, steel and other basic industries have inspired a sweeping spirit of militancy throughout all sections of the organized workers.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>CIO Utility Workers Hold First Convention</h3>
<p class="fst">The first convention of the newly organized CIO Utility Workers Union of America was held in Atlantic City last week. This union was chartered by the CIO last August. Its most important contract to date, secured in January, covers 20,000 members in the Consolidated Edison Company, New York City.</p>
<p>An industrial union for the hundreds of thousands of utility workers is needed to unify the poorly-organized utility workers and fight for improvement of their conditions.</p>
<p>One bad step which the convention took was the incorporation of an “anti-red” clause into its new constitution. This would bar any person who formerly belonged to the Communist Party from ever holding office and provides for the expulsion of present members.</p>
<p>Clauses of this type not only violate the right of union members to freely maintain their political opinions, but often become the means for victimization of good union militants or bureaucratic hounding of anyone else the leadership may not like.</p>
<p>This anti-democratic clause had been approved by Allen S. Haywood, CIO National Organization Director. It was endorsed in violently red-baiting speeches at the convention by two other chief lieutenants of CIO President Philip Murray, CIO Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey and CIO Steel Workers Secretary-Treasurer David J. McDonald.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Time Marches Back for Luce Publications</h3>
<p class="fst">In a prominent advertisement in the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, April 10, the <strong>Time</strong> Magazine Unit of the CIO Newspaper Guild of New York published an open letter, headed “TIME marches back!”. It was addressed to Henry R. Luce, tycoon-publisher of such powerful organs as <strong>Time</strong>, <strong>Life</strong> and <strong>Fortune</strong>, and producer of the <em>March of Time</em>, with its slogan “Time marches on.”</p>
<p>The Guild charges representatives of the Luce interests with refusing to grant <strong>Time</strong> editorial employes the maintenance of membership clause contained in the previous contract which had been in effect 18 months. This clause had been approved by the War Labor Board. Negotiations for a new contract have been in progress since last November.</p>
<p>In its advertisement, the Guild reports that the Luce spokesmen “have refused to bargain with us on one of the most vital points in our 1945 contract – the continued security and existence of our union at <em>Time Inc.</em>” </p>
<p>The attitude of the capitalist press to its own employees is indicative of its policies in writing about organized labor generally.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Disabled Veterans Get UAW Support</h3>
<p class="fst">One more illustration of the fact that only the workers have any real interest in aiding the veterans was given at the recent CIO United Automobile Workers convention in Atlantic City.</p>
<p>A committee of four white and Negro disabled veterans from the Atlantic City hospital made a moving appeal to the convention to support their plea for specially-equipped automobiles to be provided by the government so that they might be able to travel about and lead lives as close to normal as possible.</p>
<p>The convention passed a strong resolution demanding that the government provide such automobiles for all veterans who are unable to move about freely because of loss or paralysis of lower limbs. It instructed the officers of the union to present this demand personally to President Truman and the officials of the War and Navy Departments.</p>
<p>In addition, the convention authorized the purchase of three specially equipped automobiles as a gift for the veterans at the Atlantic City hospital to be used in training them to drive automobile’s despite their physical handicaps.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(20 April 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 16, 20 April 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
900 Strikes Planned Within Next 30 Days
More than 900 strikes are scheduled to be called in the 30 days after April 10 unless the workers’ demands are satisfied, according to a report last week of the Department of Labor.
This flood of strike notices, totalling 830 in the month ending April 10, surpassed the previous monthly high of slightly more than 600 set last fall before Congress voted to withhold NLRB funds to prevent the taking of strike polls. Only 16 strike notices are being withdrawn on the average per week. Labor Department officials glumly admitted, while 210 were filed in the last week covered by the report.
Most of the notices have been filed against individual plants. This indicates a new wave of strikes, largely against the independent concerns. These latter, some of them extremely wealthy, are notoriously anti-union. They can be expected to put up bitter resistance to the unions demands.
The wage gains won by the big strikes in auto, steel and other basic industries have inspired a sweeping spirit of militancy throughout all sections of the organized workers.
* * *
CIO Utility Workers Hold First Convention
The first convention of the newly organized CIO Utility Workers Union of America was held in Atlantic City last week. This union was chartered by the CIO last August. Its most important contract to date, secured in January, covers 20,000 members in the Consolidated Edison Company, New York City.
An industrial union for the hundreds of thousands of utility workers is needed to unify the poorly-organized utility workers and fight for improvement of their conditions.
One bad step which the convention took was the incorporation of an “anti-red” clause into its new constitution. This would bar any person who formerly belonged to the Communist Party from ever holding office and provides for the expulsion of present members.
Clauses of this type not only violate the right of union members to freely maintain their political opinions, but often become the means for victimization of good union militants or bureaucratic hounding of anyone else the leadership may not like.
This anti-democratic clause had been approved by Allen S. Haywood, CIO National Organization Director. It was endorsed in violently red-baiting speeches at the convention by two other chief lieutenants of CIO President Philip Murray, CIO Secretary-Treasurer James B. Carey and CIO Steel Workers Secretary-Treasurer David J. McDonald.
* * *
Time Marches Back for Luce Publications
In a prominent advertisement in the N.Y. Times, April 10, the Time Magazine Unit of the CIO Newspaper Guild of New York published an open letter, headed “TIME marches back!”. It was addressed to Henry R. Luce, tycoon-publisher of such powerful organs as Time, Life and Fortune, and producer of the March of Time, with its slogan “Time marches on.”
The Guild charges representatives of the Luce interests with refusing to grant Time editorial employes the maintenance of membership clause contained in the previous contract which had been in effect 18 months. This clause had been approved by the War Labor Board. Negotiations for a new contract have been in progress since last November.
In its advertisement, the Guild reports that the Luce spokesmen “have refused to bargain with us on one of the most vital points in our 1945 contract – the continued security and existence of our union at Time Inc.”
The attitude of the capitalist press to its own employees is indicative of its policies in writing about organized labor generally.
* * *
Disabled Veterans Get UAW Support
One more illustration of the fact that only the workers have any real interest in aiding the veterans was given at the recent CIO United Automobile Workers convention in Atlantic City.
A committee of four white and Negro disabled veterans from the Atlantic City hospital made a moving appeal to the convention to support their plea for specially-equipped automobiles to be provided by the government so that they might be able to travel about and lead lives as close to normal as possible.
The convention passed a strong resolution demanding that the government provide such automobiles for all veterans who are unable to move about freely because of loss or paralysis of lower limbs. It instructed the officers of the union to present this demand personally to President Truman and the officials of the War and Navy Departments.
In addition, the convention authorized the purchase of three specially equipped automobiles as a gift for the veterans at the Atlantic City hospital to be used in training them to drive automobile’s despite their physical handicaps.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Politics of the Spy Scare</h1>
<h3>(23 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_34" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 34</a>, 23 August 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Spy scares are a standard and well-worn part of the political techniques of all reactionary regimes. They are whipped up artificially for the purpose of smearing political opposition and providing a pretext for its suppression.</p>
<p>The current spy scare in this country is no exception. It is strictly politically motivated. It is intended to whip up “anti-communist” and war hysteria among the more gullible section of the public nourished on the cloak-and-dagger type of popular spy fiction and movies.</p>
<p>Truman, it is true, is now squealing “red herring” because the Republican-controlled Congressional committees have turned his spy scare into a smear of the Democratic administration itself. But that is only an ironic and incidental aspect of the spy hysteria being generated by Washington.</p>
<p>The fact is that the Truman Administration for the past three years has been building up a spy scare as part of its “cold war” propaganda against the Soviet Union. The spy scare is a natural complement of Truman’s highly-publicized “loyalty purge” of government employees, his political blacklist of “subversive organizations” and the frame-up now being attempted against 12 indicted Communist Party leaders.</p>
<p>It was, in fact, Truman’s Department of Justice and FBI which introduced the testimony of self-confessed former GPU agents before the Federal Grand Jury that indicted the CP leaders. But after getting the Grand Jury steamed up over the spy testimony, the government recommended that the Stalinists leaders be framed under the infamous Smith “Gag” Act for the patently false charge of “advocating overthrow of the government by force and violence.”</p>
<p>By this procedure, the Truman Administration hoped to avoid the necessity of producing evidence in court which, if closely investigated, might prove embarrassing to the Democratic Administration.</p>
<p>For, of course, during the wartime honeymoon between Washington and the Kremlin, there was a considerable free interchange of information and collaboration of their intelligence services. Not that they didn’t try to hold out on each other and do considerable spying on each other. But that was understood and winked at by both sides.</p>
<p>Principally, the American and Russian intelligence services co-operated in tracking down working class revolutionists and suppressing anti-capitalist movements in Europe. In this country, the Stalinists were the chief wartime agents of the government in putting the finger on militants in the unions.</p>
<p>Neither the Roosevelt nor the Truman administration was greatly disturbed about the known criminal activities of Stalin’s secret agents on American soil as assassins of Stalin’s political opponents. There was the case of the murder of Walter Krivitsky in Washington itself. And most flagrant of all, the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, long known by the FBI to have been prepared, in part, in this country according to the self-implicating confessions of former GPU agents Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Politics of the Spy Scare
(23 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 34, 23 August 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Spy scares are a standard and well-worn part of the political techniques of all reactionary regimes. They are whipped up artificially for the purpose of smearing political opposition and providing a pretext for its suppression.
The current spy scare in this country is no exception. It is strictly politically motivated. It is intended to whip up “anti-communist” and war hysteria among the more gullible section of the public nourished on the cloak-and-dagger type of popular spy fiction and movies.
Truman, it is true, is now squealing “red herring” because the Republican-controlled Congressional committees have turned his spy scare into a smear of the Democratic administration itself. But that is only an ironic and incidental aspect of the spy hysteria being generated by Washington.
The fact is that the Truman Administration for the past three years has been building up a spy scare as part of its “cold war” propaganda against the Soviet Union. The spy scare is a natural complement of Truman’s highly-publicized “loyalty purge” of government employees, his political blacklist of “subversive organizations” and the frame-up now being attempted against 12 indicted Communist Party leaders.
It was, in fact, Truman’s Department of Justice and FBI which introduced the testimony of self-confessed former GPU agents before the Federal Grand Jury that indicted the CP leaders. But after getting the Grand Jury steamed up over the spy testimony, the government recommended that the Stalinists leaders be framed under the infamous Smith “Gag” Act for the patently false charge of “advocating overthrow of the government by force and violence.”
By this procedure, the Truman Administration hoped to avoid the necessity of producing evidence in court which, if closely investigated, might prove embarrassing to the Democratic Administration.
For, of course, during the wartime honeymoon between Washington and the Kremlin, there was a considerable free interchange of information and collaboration of their intelligence services. Not that they didn’t try to hold out on each other and do considerable spying on each other. But that was understood and winked at by both sides.
Principally, the American and Russian intelligence services co-operated in tracking down working class revolutionists and suppressing anti-capitalist movements in Europe. In this country, the Stalinists were the chief wartime agents of the government in putting the finger on militants in the unions.
Neither the Roosevelt nor the Truman administration was greatly disturbed about the known criminal activities of Stalin’s secret agents on American soil as assassins of Stalin’s political opponents. There was the case of the murder of Walter Krivitsky in Washington itself. And most flagrant of all, the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, long known by the FBI to have been prepared, in part, in this country according to the self-implicating confessions of former GPU agents Louis Budenz and Elizabeth Bentley.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Saga of Henry J. Kaiser</h1>
<h3>(6 July 1946)</h3>
<hr>
<p class="information"><span class="info">Source:</span> <em>The Militant</em>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_27" target="new">Vol. 10 No. 27</a>, 6 July 1946, p. 8.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">At the outbreak of World War II, the Maritime Commission propositioned Henry J. Kaiser to build ships for the government. Kaiser was willing. He put up $100,000 and the Martime Commission put up the rest, including the shipyards to build the ships. In short order Kaiser shook down a cool $9,000,000.</p>
<p>His ambitions aroused by this success, Kaiser set out to become a big-time millionaire. He put up his freshly acquired $9,000,000 and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation “loaned” him the rest – $111,805,000. Out of this deal Kaiser got a brand new steel plant at Fontana, California.</p>
<p>Having reaped a fortune in this spectacular fashion, Kaiser decided to make a real killing. He cooked up a scheme to make 5,000 mammoth cargo planes to ferry 500,000 troops a day across the Atlantic. Aviation experts pointed out that Kaiser had never made a plane in his life and that no aluminum was available. However, brains win every time. Kaiser proposed to make the planes out of wood!</p>
<p>$18,000,000 splashed out of the public treasury into the waiting hands of the genius who had discovered the secret of becoming a millionaire. Kaiser set his carpenters to work. But the experts proved right. You can’t equip a barn with engines and wings and expect it to fly across the Atlantic. Kaiser’s first flying barn is still on the ground.</p>
<p>With the close of the war, the newly-made millionaire entered the automobile business. The government again rewarded his spirit of dare and do. Kaiser got the enormous Willow Run plant which had been built out of public funds during the war.</p>
<p>Then he issued 1,700,000 shares of common stock at $1 and began dumping the gilt-edged paper on an unsuspecting public at $10 a share. The gamble paid off so well that Kaiser decided he’d like a repeat. This time he palmed off 1,800,000 additional $1 shares of common stock at $20.25.</p>
<p>In these two deals, Kaiser sold $57,000,000 worth of stock. Yet he has neither machinery in place to make cars nor steel for bodies or parts.</p>
<p>These are only the highlights in the remarkable saga of Henry J. Kaiser. But they are sufficient to reveal his secret. All it takes to become a millionaire is to pinch pennies, work long and hard, don’t ask the boss for a raise – and make sure a capitalist government runs the country.</p>
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Art Preis
Saga of Henry J. Kaiser
(6 July 1946)
Source: The Militant, Vol. 10 No. 27, 6 July 1946, p. 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
At the outbreak of World War II, the Maritime Commission propositioned Henry J. Kaiser to build ships for the government. Kaiser was willing. He put up $100,000 and the Martime Commission put up the rest, including the shipyards to build the ships. In short order Kaiser shook down a cool $9,000,000.
His ambitions aroused by this success, Kaiser set out to become a big-time millionaire. He put up his freshly acquired $9,000,000 and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation “loaned” him the rest – $111,805,000. Out of this deal Kaiser got a brand new steel plant at Fontana, California.
Having reaped a fortune in this spectacular fashion, Kaiser decided to make a real killing. He cooked up a scheme to make 5,000 mammoth cargo planes to ferry 500,000 troops a day across the Atlantic. Aviation experts pointed out that Kaiser had never made a plane in his life and that no aluminum was available. However, brains win every time. Kaiser proposed to make the planes out of wood!
$18,000,000 splashed out of the public treasury into the waiting hands of the genius who had discovered the secret of becoming a millionaire. Kaiser set his carpenters to work. But the experts proved right. You can’t equip a barn with engines and wings and expect it to fly across the Atlantic. Kaiser’s first flying barn is still on the ground.
With the close of the war, the newly-made millionaire entered the automobile business. The government again rewarded his spirit of dare and do. Kaiser got the enormous Willow Run plant which had been built out of public funds during the war.
Then he issued 1,700,000 shares of common stock at $1 and began dumping the gilt-edged paper on an unsuspecting public at $10 a share. The gamble paid off so well that Kaiser decided he’d like a repeat. This time he palmed off 1,800,000 additional $1 shares of common stock at $20.25.
In these two deals, Kaiser sold $57,000,000 worth of stock. Yet he has neither machinery in place to make cars nor steel for bodies or parts.
These are only the highlights in the remarkable saga of Henry J. Kaiser. But they are sufficient to reveal his secret. All it takes to become a millionaire is to pinch pennies, work long and hard, don’t ask the boss for a raise – and make sure a capitalist government runs the country.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Wage Fight – Top Point on CIO Agenda</h1>
<h3>(5 January 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_01" target="new">Vol. XII No. 1</a>, 5 January 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Congress and Truman have left the unions no alternative but to launch a new wage fight, if workers’ real wages are not to suffer a further 10 to 20% slash in the next six months.</p>
<p>The misnamed “anti-inflation” bill passed by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and signed by Truman on Dec. 30, was obviously a cheap last-minute gesture. Even the capitalist press admits the bill is worthless.</p>
<p>Industrial executives, whose views are reported in the Dec. 21 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, unanimously expressed “fears that the Government effort may have just the opposite effect and spur higher prices and large-scale buying. No one could cite a single product in which lower prices are expected as a result of the latest anti-inflation program.”</p>
<p>Philip Murray and the other CIO leaders, who held forth the hope of a government “rollback of prices,” have been forced to the reluctant conclusion that a “third round” of wage increases is now the top point on labor’s agenda.</p>
<p>But what their wage program is and how they intend to achieve it remains a deep-dyed mystery to the union rank and file. They have raised no concrete wage demands. They have initiated no preparations for a serious struggle. They have failed to take the elementary steps of developing a unified strategy.</p>
<p>The CIO’s national organ, the <strong>CIO News</strong>, presents no wage program of action. But in the original wage statement of the CIO officers and in subsequent brief articles there are positive hints that Murray and his lieutenants intend to follow the timid and disorganized tactics they pursued last spring.</p>
<p>Each CIO international union will take its own course, make its own demands and settle for whatever it can get whenever it can, regardless of the consequences for other CIO affiliates. Last spring, Murray quickly grabbed the inadequate wage offer of the steel corporations. This set a wage pattern for the other unions, which accepted settlements that did not begin to meet the previous loss in real wages due to fast-rising prices.</p>
<p><em>Nor was this all. Murray bound the CIO Steelworkers with a two-year no-strike pledge in its contract, although the union can reopen wage negotiations next April. The CIO Auto Workers and other leading affiliates have contracts running until next spring and summer. By the time the top CIO leaders get around to negotiating more wages, the gains will be wiped out in advance by the continuing price increases.</em></p>
<p>Indeed, Big Business and its government agents have already more than discounted future wage increases. They have ensured such a swift rise in prices prior to anticipated wage demands that they even hint in the press about their willingness to hand out a few crumbs to labor. That is what most of the union leaders are getting ready to settle for – a few crumbs.</p>
<p>There are significant signs however, that the union ranks are far from satisfied with the prospects held out by the timid officialdom. Organized pressure is developing from below to compel the leadership to adopt an effective wage program that will protect real wages in this inflationary period.</p>
<p>Thus, the current <strong>CIO News</strong> has had to take cognizance of the extremely important developments in the CIO auto and packinghouse workers unions. For the first time, the <strong>News</strong> has broken its silence on the demand raised by far-sighted militants over the past years for a sliding scale cost-of-living bonus as the most effective answer to price inflation.</p>
<p><em>The <strong>CIO News</strong> reports the initiative taken by the five General Motors locals in Flint which have launched a campaign inside the UAW for adoption of a 25-cent hourly wage raise demand and for a sliding wale cost-of-living bonus that will provide automatic wage increases for all price increases. The Flint program is gaining wide support, having been endorsed by Briggs Local 212, Ford Local GOO, Cadillac Local 22, Fleetwood Local 15, Budd Local 300 and others.</em></p>
<p>The CIO Packinghouse Workers have served a 30-day notice on the leading meat packers for reopening of the wage clause and will demand a cost-of-living bonus.</p>
<p>These are good beginnings. But a lot more heat will have to be generated under Murray and his lieutenants to force through a militant unified strategy of struggle to establish an adequate wage program for American labor in this period of inflation.</p>
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Art Preis
Wage Fight – Top Point on CIO Agenda
(5 January 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 1, 5 January 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Congress and Truman have left the unions no alternative but to launch a new wage fight, if workers’ real wages are not to suffer a further 10 to 20% slash in the next six months.
The misnamed “anti-inflation” bill passed by a majority of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, and signed by Truman on Dec. 30, was obviously a cheap last-minute gesture. Even the capitalist press admits the bill is worthless.
Industrial executives, whose views are reported in the Dec. 21 N.Y. Times, unanimously expressed “fears that the Government effort may have just the opposite effect and spur higher prices and large-scale buying. No one could cite a single product in which lower prices are expected as a result of the latest anti-inflation program.”
Philip Murray and the other CIO leaders, who held forth the hope of a government “rollback of prices,” have been forced to the reluctant conclusion that a “third round” of wage increases is now the top point on labor’s agenda.
But what their wage program is and how they intend to achieve it remains a deep-dyed mystery to the union rank and file. They have raised no concrete wage demands. They have initiated no preparations for a serious struggle. They have failed to take the elementary steps of developing a unified strategy.
The CIO’s national organ, the CIO News, presents no wage program of action. But in the original wage statement of the CIO officers and in subsequent brief articles there are positive hints that Murray and his lieutenants intend to follow the timid and disorganized tactics they pursued last spring.
Each CIO international union will take its own course, make its own demands and settle for whatever it can get whenever it can, regardless of the consequences for other CIO affiliates. Last spring, Murray quickly grabbed the inadequate wage offer of the steel corporations. This set a wage pattern for the other unions, which accepted settlements that did not begin to meet the previous loss in real wages due to fast-rising prices.
Nor was this all. Murray bound the CIO Steelworkers with a two-year no-strike pledge in its contract, although the union can reopen wage negotiations next April. The CIO Auto Workers and other leading affiliates have contracts running until next spring and summer. By the time the top CIO leaders get around to negotiating more wages, the gains will be wiped out in advance by the continuing price increases.
Indeed, Big Business and its government agents have already more than discounted future wage increases. They have ensured such a swift rise in prices prior to anticipated wage demands that they even hint in the press about their willingness to hand out a few crumbs to labor. That is what most of the union leaders are getting ready to settle for – a few crumbs.
There are significant signs however, that the union ranks are far from satisfied with the prospects held out by the timid officialdom. Organized pressure is developing from below to compel the leadership to adopt an effective wage program that will protect real wages in this inflationary period.
Thus, the current CIO News has had to take cognizance of the extremely important developments in the CIO auto and packinghouse workers unions. For the first time, the News has broken its silence on the demand raised by far-sighted militants over the past years for a sliding scale cost-of-living bonus as the most effective answer to price inflation.
The CIO News reports the initiative taken by the five General Motors locals in Flint which have launched a campaign inside the UAW for adoption of a 25-cent hourly wage raise demand and for a sliding wale cost-of-living bonus that will provide automatic wage increases for all price increases. The Flint program is gaining wide support, having been endorsed by Briggs Local 212, Ford Local GOO, Cadillac Local 22, Fleetwood Local 15, Budd Local 300 and others.
The CIO Packinghouse Workers have served a 30-day notice on the leading meat packers for reopening of the wage clause and will demand a cost-of-living bonus.
These are good beginnings. But a lot more heat will have to be generated under Murray and his lieutenants to force through a militant unified strategy of struggle to establish an adequate wage program for American labor in this period of inflation.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Philip Murray – Self Made Man</h1>
<h3>(28 June 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_26" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 26</a>, 28 June 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">CIO President Philip Murray has climbed up there with the “rags to riches” boys. His autobiographical success story, <em>If We Pull Together</em>, is featured in the June issue of <strong>American Magazine</strong>, a monthly devoted mainly to the glorification of “self-made” business tycoons.</p>
<p>Murray’s right between the covers with the well-heeled citizens who build the <strong>American Magazine</strong>’s circulation with their modest descriptions of how they got rich by hard work, intelligence, character, patriotism and other virtues – not to mention their talents for squeezing labor and turning over a fast buck.</p>
<p>Like most <strong>American Magazine</strong> success stories, Murray’s suffers the minor omission of the most significant details, like how he succeeded John L. Lewis in the CIO presidency by playing politics with a certain U.S. President known’ as the “unofficial leader of the American labor movement.”</p>
<p>All Murray tells us of his career from the time Lewis put him on his payroll to the present day is modestly contained in the few words:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Position and power likewise hold no lure. I have never played politics to gain or hold a union office, and I never will. Naturally, I’m proud to have had a hand in creating the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in organizing the United Steelworkers of America ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Certainly, Murray is too modest in omitting from his personal success story his most recent achievement – getting the steelworkers convention to boost his salary $5,000, to $25,000 per annum, after his failure to get the membership even a cent more in wages.</em></p>
<p>We can understand better why Murray rates space in the <strong>American Magazine</strong> when we read the conclusions of his article. There we learn the ideas which have made Murray the “labor statesman” he admits he is.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Today, progressive businessmen regard their workers, not as antagonists, but as welcome partners ... They accept trade unionism ... In the steel industry, especially, we have found that the free and frank exchange of ideas by management and labor at all levels has generated a better spirit and better understanding of our mutual problems.”</p>
<p class="fst">That after the steel moguls had just slapped the steel union in the face with a flat rejection of any wage increase!</p>
<p>We read on to the bitter end to find out that Murray does not offer “a ‘class’ program” because, you see, “we have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of the class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here.”</p>
<p>Now isn’t that nice. The parasite billionaires who own the steel industry and live off the labor of the workers are really in the same class as the workers they exploit. The Taft-Hartley Law isn’t “class legislation,” as even Truman termed it. The strike struggles that have engulfed this country, rising to a crescendo in the past three years, are just “misunderstandings.” The heirs of the Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt, Mellon, DuPont and other giant fortunes are just “honest toilers.”</p>
<p>Yes sir! “America is still the land of opportunity” – even with an atomic war on the horizon, monopolies in the saddle, inflation blowing up the economy, the draft due in 90 days, and strikebreaking injunctions the law of the land. After all, hasn’t Murray – the one-time pit boy – made the <strong>American Magazine</strong>!</p>
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Joseph Keller
Philip Murray – Self Made Man
(28 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 26, 28 June 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
CIO President Philip Murray has climbed up there with the “rags to riches” boys. His autobiographical success story, If We Pull Together, is featured in the June issue of American Magazine, a monthly devoted mainly to the glorification of “self-made” business tycoons.
Murray’s right between the covers with the well-heeled citizens who build the American Magazine’s circulation with their modest descriptions of how they got rich by hard work, intelligence, character, patriotism and other virtues – not to mention their talents for squeezing labor and turning over a fast buck.
Like most American Magazine success stories, Murray’s suffers the minor omission of the most significant details, like how he succeeded John L. Lewis in the CIO presidency by playing politics with a certain U.S. President known’ as the “unofficial leader of the American labor movement.”
All Murray tells us of his career from the time Lewis put him on his payroll to the present day is modestly contained in the few words:
“Position and power likewise hold no lure. I have never played politics to gain or hold a union office, and I never will. Naturally, I’m proud to have had a hand in creating the Congress of Industrial Organizations and in organizing the United Steelworkers of America ...”
Certainly, Murray is too modest in omitting from his personal success story his most recent achievement – getting the steelworkers convention to boost his salary $5,000, to $25,000 per annum, after his failure to get the membership even a cent more in wages.
We can understand better why Murray rates space in the American Magazine when we read the conclusions of his article. There we learn the ideas which have made Murray the “labor statesman” he admits he is.
“Today, progressive businessmen regard their workers, not as antagonists, but as welcome partners ... They accept trade unionism ... In the steel industry, especially, we have found that the free and frank exchange of ideas by management and labor at all levels has generated a better spirit and better understanding of our mutual problems.”
That after the steel moguls had just slapped the steel union in the face with a flat rejection of any wage increase!
We read on to the bitter end to find out that Murray does not offer “a ‘class’ program” because, you see, “we have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of the class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here.”
Now isn’t that nice. The parasite billionaires who own the steel industry and live off the labor of the workers are really in the same class as the workers they exploit. The Taft-Hartley Law isn’t “class legislation,” as even Truman termed it. The strike struggles that have engulfed this country, rising to a crescendo in the past three years, are just “misunderstandings.” The heirs of the Morgan, Rockefeller, Astor, Vanderbilt, Mellon, DuPont and other giant fortunes are just “honest toilers.”
Yes sir! “America is still the land of opportunity” – even with an atomic war on the horizon, monopolies in the saddle, inflation blowing up the economy, the draft due in 90 days, and strikebreaking injunctions the law of the land. After all, hasn’t Murray – the one-time pit boy – made the American Magazine!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>GM Workers Get First<br>
Sliding Scale Pay Boost</h1>
<h3>(6 September 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_36" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 36</a>, 6 September 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Thanks to their sliding scale cost-of-living wage contract, some 330,000 General Motors workers will get an additional three cents an hour wage increase starting September 1.</p>
<p>This, added to the original 11-cent raise put into effect May 30, gives the GM workers a total pay boost so far of 14 cents, or a cent more than the flat wage increase won by the Chrysler and Ford workers.</p>
<p>According to their escalator agreement, the GM workers every three months receive an automatic hourly raise of one cent for each 1.14 point rise in the Bureau of Labor Statistics cost-of-living index.</p>
<p>For the first three-month period on which the sliding scale was calculated, from April 15 to July 15, the BLS index jumped from 169.3 to 173.7, or 4.4 points. This figures out to an average one-cent wage increase for each month.</p>
<p><em>If prices continue upward, as they have since July 15, the GM workers stand to gain another wage hike next Dec. 1, based on the Oct. 15 index.</em></p>
<p>The first test of the GM escalator clause has pretty well silenced those union leaders and elements like the Stalinists who attacked the sliding scale feature of the GM agreement.</p>
<p>When the GM contract was signed last May, the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong> misrepresented it as a “wage-cutting agreement.” The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> last week mentioned the GM sliding scale wage increase in a tiny, <em>obscure item</em>, and <em>without comment</em>.<br>
</p>
<h4>Weak Clause</h4>
<p class="fst">It is true, as <strong>The Militant</strong> pointed out last May, that the GM escalator clause is weak in a number of respects. It permits a reduction in the wage scale of up to five cents an hour for comparable decreases in the BLS cost-of-living index. However, it places no ceiling on the possible amount of automatic wage increases.</p>
<p><em>The chief weakness of the GM wage clause is that it started at too low a base wage. Moreover, the contract allows the company to raise production quotas almost at will. Now the corporation is putting on a speed-up drive to squeeze more production out of the workers. This weakness has always been a notorious feature of recent GM contracts, however, and has nothing to do with the sliding scale clause.</em></p>
<p>Undoubtedly, many workers and unions will start to investigate closely the advantages of the sliding scale clause as a result of the benefits already gained for the GM workers. Although the GM contract by no means contains the ideal escalator clause, it has demonstrated the possibilities of such clauses in protecting real wages during an inflationary period.<br>
</p>
<h4>CIO Position</h4>
<p class="fst">In spite of this fact, the CIO leaders, for instance, are trying to belittle the value of the sliding scale wage program. The Aug. SO <strong>CIO News</strong> greets the GM wage increase with the headline: “GM Workers Know Cost-Of-Living Bonus ‘Does Not Raise Their Living Standard.’”</p>
<p>That’s true. But it does enable their living standard to keep better pace with prices—and that’s all an escalator clause is intended for. Certainly, the CIO workers who obtained only limited flat increases last Spring are having their living standards reduced daily by inflation.</p>
<p><em>The <strong>CIO News</strong> tries to counterpose to the sliding scale wage program the fight to halt inflation. But the sliding scale program is the first immediate and effective measure in that fight. If all wages were protected by escalator clauses, the corporations would hesitate to raise prices knowing it would mean an automatic and equal wage increase.</em></p>
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Art Preis
GM Workers Get First
Sliding Scale Pay Boost
(6 September 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 36, 6 September 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Thanks to their sliding scale cost-of-living wage contract, some 330,000 General Motors workers will get an additional three cents an hour wage increase starting September 1.
This, added to the original 11-cent raise put into effect May 30, gives the GM workers a total pay boost so far of 14 cents, or a cent more than the flat wage increase won by the Chrysler and Ford workers.
According to their escalator agreement, the GM workers every three months receive an automatic hourly raise of one cent for each 1.14 point rise in the Bureau of Labor Statistics cost-of-living index.
For the first three-month period on which the sliding scale was calculated, from April 15 to July 15, the BLS index jumped from 169.3 to 173.7, or 4.4 points. This figures out to an average one-cent wage increase for each month.
If prices continue upward, as they have since July 15, the GM workers stand to gain another wage hike next Dec. 1, based on the Oct. 15 index.
The first test of the GM escalator clause has pretty well silenced those union leaders and elements like the Stalinists who attacked the sliding scale feature of the GM agreement.
When the GM contract was signed last May, the Stalinist Daily Worker misrepresented it as a “wage-cutting agreement.” The Daily Worker last week mentioned the GM sliding scale wage increase in a tiny, obscure item, and without comment.
Weak Clause
It is true, as The Militant pointed out last May, that the GM escalator clause is weak in a number of respects. It permits a reduction in the wage scale of up to five cents an hour for comparable decreases in the BLS cost-of-living index. However, it places no ceiling on the possible amount of automatic wage increases.
The chief weakness of the GM wage clause is that it started at too low a base wage. Moreover, the contract allows the company to raise production quotas almost at will. Now the corporation is putting on a speed-up drive to squeeze more production out of the workers. This weakness has always been a notorious feature of recent GM contracts, however, and has nothing to do with the sliding scale clause.
Undoubtedly, many workers and unions will start to investigate closely the advantages of the sliding scale clause as a result of the benefits already gained for the GM workers. Although the GM contract by no means contains the ideal escalator clause, it has demonstrated the possibilities of such clauses in protecting real wages during an inflationary period.
CIO Position
In spite of this fact, the CIO leaders, for instance, are trying to belittle the value of the sliding scale wage program. The Aug. SO CIO News greets the GM wage increase with the headline: “GM Workers Know Cost-Of-Living Bonus ‘Does Not Raise Their Living Standard.’”
That’s true. But it does enable their living standard to keep better pace with prices—and that’s all an escalator clause is intended for. Certainly, the CIO workers who obtained only limited flat increases last Spring are having their living standards reduced daily by inflation.
The CIO News tries to counterpose to the sliding scale wage program the fight to halt inflation. But the sliding scale program is the first immediate and effective measure in that fight. If all wages were protected by escalator clauses, the corporations would hesitate to raise prices knowing it would mean an automatic and equal wage increase.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Government Hits Mine Union<br>
with Huge Fine for ‘Contempt’</h1>
<h4>Pennsylvania CIO Condemns Attack on Coal Miners</h4>
<h3>(26 April 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_17" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 17</a>, 26 April 1948, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><b>APRIL 22 – Enraged and vindictive, the capitalist government has framed up the United Mine Workers and John L. Lewis on trumped-up charges of criminal and civil “contempt.”</b></p>
<p><b>Federal Judge T. Alan Goldsborough, a faithful Democratic wheelhorse, for the second time has levied an extortionate fine on the miners for their defiance of federal strikebreaking injunctions.</b></p>
<p>On the recommendation of Truman’s Attorney General, Judge Goldsborough on April 20 exacted the punitive fine of $1,400,000 from the UMW and $20,000 from Lewis, the union’s president, on the criminal contempt conviction.<br>
</p>
<h4>Threat of Reprisals</h4>
<p class="fst">At this writing, the judge is still holding over the miners’ heads the threat of further reprisals if they do not end their protest, strike against the convictions by Friday, April 23.</p>
<p>If the contempt prosecution was intended to crush the fighting spirit of the miners, it has proved a miserable failure. When Goldsborough handed down his contempt conviction on April 19, the miners began pouring out of the pits once more.</p>
<p><em>Confronted by more than 250,000 miners still on strike and the certainty of a total shutdown if Lewis were railroaded to prison, the most the government dared do at the moment was to rob the miners of some of their hard-earned dollars. But the union remains solid as granite, determined and unyielding as ever.</em></p>
<p>Not that the miners are out of danger or even assured of their pensions. In announcing the sentence for criminal contempt, Goldsborough invited the mine owners to sock the union with a federal Court injunction to big damage suits on the basis of his civil contempt ruling. Moreover, the operators are now seeking a federal Court injunction to hold up the pension payments approved by the majority of the miners welfare fund Board of Trustees.<br>
</p>
<h4>Crudely Biased</h4>
<p class="fst">From start to finish, the government has appeared crudely biased in favor of the operators and malevolent in its open hostility to the miners. Spearheading the conspiracy of the government and operators is the Democratic Administration.</p>
<p><em>When the miners went on strike March 15, Truman almost immediately set his strikebreaking machinery into motion, this time with the aid of the Taft-Hartley Act. He set up a “fact-finding” board of three men notoriously hostile to the miners. They promptly “found” that the mine strike constituted a “national emergency” and had been “induced” by Lewis when he reported to the union that the operators had dishonored the contract.</em></p>
<p>It was mere child’s play for Truman to get a compliant federal judge to issue an injunction barring the strike and commanding Lewis to “order” the miners back to work. Lewis insisted that he had never ordered the men out in the first place, that they had ceased work of their own accord on the basis that union miners never work without a recognized contract.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Contempt” Charges</h4>
<p class="fst">At this juncture, the final frame-up machinery was set in motion. The government filed “contempt” charges. And, very conveniently, the same “tough” judge was ready at hand to perform the same service as in 1946.</p>
<p><em>Remember, the UMW and Lewis have not been convicted of violating any law – not even the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law. They are convicted of defying an arbitrary judge-made law – an injunction issued without even a hearing.</em></p>
<p>Even so, the judge had to twist the law beyond recognition and invent the main evidence in order to justify his utter violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.<br>
</p>
<h4>No Evidence</h4>
<p class="fst">First, he had to establish that the UMW and its officers had officially called the strike. There was not a shred of evidence, supportable before any honest jury, that the miners had walked out on orders. But, said the judge, the simple fact that Lewis, had informed the miners that their contract was dishonored was, in effect, calling a strike. It was like “a nod or a wink or a code.”</p>
<p>But can you say a union leader called a strike when he merely exercised his rights of free speech and his duty by giving certain vital, information to his union? That argument of the judge was too crude, too transparent. So he invented a new and unprecedented point of law! “A principle of law which, as far as I know, no court has ever been called up on to announce,” he himself admitted.</p>
<p><em>That principle is: “That as long as a union is functioning as a union it must be held responsible for the mass action of its members.” Neat – and deadly!</em></p>
<p>What frameups can be engineered under this judge-made principle! A corporation deliberately provokes a strike – the union leaders can be sent to jail. Provocateurs incite an incident – the union can be fined. Workers cease work of their own volition – the union and its officers as a whole can be prosecuted and persecuted.</p>
<p>On the basis of an unproven assumption of fact and this new “legal principle,” the judge handed out an unprecedentedly savage penalty. A frameup and the precedent for future frameups in one package.</p>
<p>Here’s what the action against the miners means for all unions:</p>
<p class="fst"><em>Any judge can halt and break a strike by issuing an injunction. Even if the whole procedure is illegal, failure to obey the injunction can mean any penalty the judge chooses to exact for “contempt.”</em></p>
<p>A union leader risks imprisonment if he reports anything to his membership which might, even at some future time, provide a reason for a strike that subsequently may be banned or enjoined.</p>
<p><em>Any judge can order workers at any time to work against their will, and fine and jail them if they refuse. This is the principle of forced labor and involuntary servitude with a vengeance.</em></p>
<p>This is a set of anti-labor precedents that should bring the whole American labor movement to its feet – fighting! Indeed, the instincts and sentiments of the workers in the shops and plants are to fight this raw frameup tooth and nail. The Pennsylvania State CIO convention voted stormy approval of a resolution condemning Judge Goldsborough and supporting the miners. The big Westinghouse CIO United Electrical Workers Local 601 in Pittsburgh voted to strike if Lewis were sent to jail.<br>
</p>
<h4>Green and Murray?</h4>
<p class="fst">But where are CIO President Philip Murray and AFL President William Green? They don’t want to “embarrass” the Truman administration; they are too full of factional hatred for Lewis to challenge this danger to their own unions. Murray has said nothing. Green has issued <em>a last-minute pip-squeak verbal protest. Their failure to act must be branded as criminal.</em></p>
<p>It is up to the ranks of every union to take action. Pass resolutions in support of the miners and denouncing the government’s frameup. Mobilize united labor mass meetings and other mass protests in every community. <em>Demand that the top union leaders call a United Conference of Labor, with representation from CIO, AFL, Mine Workers and the independents, to map out an immediate action campaign in defense of the miners and to smash the Taft-Hartley Law.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Government Hits Mine Union
with Huge Fine for ‘Contempt’
Pennsylvania CIO Condemns Attack on Coal Miners
(26 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 17, 26 April 1948, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
APRIL 22 – Enraged and vindictive, the capitalist government has framed up the United Mine Workers and John L. Lewis on trumped-up charges of criminal and civil “contempt.”
Federal Judge T. Alan Goldsborough, a faithful Democratic wheelhorse, for the second time has levied an extortionate fine on the miners for their defiance of federal strikebreaking injunctions.
On the recommendation of Truman’s Attorney General, Judge Goldsborough on April 20 exacted the punitive fine of $1,400,000 from the UMW and $20,000 from Lewis, the union’s president, on the criminal contempt conviction.
Threat of Reprisals
At this writing, the judge is still holding over the miners’ heads the threat of further reprisals if they do not end their protest, strike against the convictions by Friday, April 23.
If the contempt prosecution was intended to crush the fighting spirit of the miners, it has proved a miserable failure. When Goldsborough handed down his contempt conviction on April 19, the miners began pouring out of the pits once more.
Confronted by more than 250,000 miners still on strike and the certainty of a total shutdown if Lewis were railroaded to prison, the most the government dared do at the moment was to rob the miners of some of their hard-earned dollars. But the union remains solid as granite, determined and unyielding as ever.
Not that the miners are out of danger or even assured of their pensions. In announcing the sentence for criminal contempt, Goldsborough invited the mine owners to sock the union with a federal Court injunction to big damage suits on the basis of his civil contempt ruling. Moreover, the operators are now seeking a federal Court injunction to hold up the pension payments approved by the majority of the miners welfare fund Board of Trustees.
Crudely Biased
From start to finish, the government has appeared crudely biased in favor of the operators and malevolent in its open hostility to the miners. Spearheading the conspiracy of the government and operators is the Democratic Administration.
When the miners went on strike March 15, Truman almost immediately set his strikebreaking machinery into motion, this time with the aid of the Taft-Hartley Act. He set up a “fact-finding” board of three men notoriously hostile to the miners. They promptly “found” that the mine strike constituted a “national emergency” and had been “induced” by Lewis when he reported to the union that the operators had dishonored the contract.
It was mere child’s play for Truman to get a compliant federal judge to issue an injunction barring the strike and commanding Lewis to “order” the miners back to work. Lewis insisted that he had never ordered the men out in the first place, that they had ceased work of their own accord on the basis that union miners never work without a recognized contract.
“Contempt” Charges
At this juncture, the final frame-up machinery was set in motion. The government filed “contempt” charges. And, very conveniently, the same “tough” judge was ready at hand to perform the same service as in 1946.
Remember, the UMW and Lewis have not been convicted of violating any law – not even the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law. They are convicted of defying an arbitrary judge-made law – an injunction issued without even a hearing.
Even so, the judge had to twist the law beyond recognition and invent the main evidence in order to justify his utter violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.
No Evidence
First, he had to establish that the UMW and its officers had officially called the strike. There was not a shred of evidence, supportable before any honest jury, that the miners had walked out on orders. But, said the judge, the simple fact that Lewis, had informed the miners that their contract was dishonored was, in effect, calling a strike. It was like “a nod or a wink or a code.”
But can you say a union leader called a strike when he merely exercised his rights of free speech and his duty by giving certain vital, information to his union? That argument of the judge was too crude, too transparent. So he invented a new and unprecedented point of law! “A principle of law which, as far as I know, no court has ever been called up on to announce,” he himself admitted.
That principle is: “That as long as a union is functioning as a union it must be held responsible for the mass action of its members.” Neat – and deadly!
What frameups can be engineered under this judge-made principle! A corporation deliberately provokes a strike – the union leaders can be sent to jail. Provocateurs incite an incident – the union can be fined. Workers cease work of their own volition – the union and its officers as a whole can be prosecuted and persecuted.
On the basis of an unproven assumption of fact and this new “legal principle,” the judge handed out an unprecedentedly savage penalty. A frameup and the precedent for future frameups in one package.
Here’s what the action against the miners means for all unions:
Any judge can halt and break a strike by issuing an injunction. Even if the whole procedure is illegal, failure to obey the injunction can mean any penalty the judge chooses to exact for “contempt.”
A union leader risks imprisonment if he reports anything to his membership which might, even at some future time, provide a reason for a strike that subsequently may be banned or enjoined.
Any judge can order workers at any time to work against their will, and fine and jail them if they refuse. This is the principle of forced labor and involuntary servitude with a vengeance.
This is a set of anti-labor precedents that should bring the whole American labor movement to its feet – fighting! Indeed, the instincts and sentiments of the workers in the shops and plants are to fight this raw frameup tooth and nail. The Pennsylvania State CIO convention voted stormy approval of a resolution condemning Judge Goldsborough and supporting the miners. The big Westinghouse CIO United Electrical Workers Local 601 in Pittsburgh voted to strike if Lewis were sent to jail.
Green and Murray?
But where are CIO President Philip Murray and AFL President William Green? They don’t want to “embarrass” the Truman administration; they are too full of factional hatred for Lewis to challenge this danger to their own unions. Murray has said nothing. Green has issued a last-minute pip-squeak verbal protest. Their failure to act must be branded as criminal.
It is up to the ranks of every union to take action. Pass resolutions in support of the miners and denouncing the government’s frameup. Mobilize united labor mass meetings and other mass protests in every community. Demand that the top union leaders call a United Conference of Labor, with representation from CIO, AFL, Mine Workers and the independents, to map out an immediate action campaign in defense of the miners and to smash the Taft-Hartley Law.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>NAM Launches Offensive<br>
to Shatter Price Controls</h1>
<h3>(2 March 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_09" target="new">Vol. X No. 9</a>, 2 March 1946, pp. 1 & 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Spearheaded by a multi-million, dollar campaign of the National Association of Manufacturers, American Big Business has launched a powerful offensive to destroy all price controls and rob labor of any wage gains won in the current great strike wave.</p>
<p>Full-page advertisements are appearing almost daily in 600 newspapers throughout the country heralding the demand of the NAM for the removal of all price controls as Wall Street’s “answer” to “inflation.”</p>
<p>These advertisements are timed to coincide with House Banking and Currency Committee hearings on extension of the Price Control Act after June 1946.</p>
<p>The NAM advertisements carry a brazen threat to sabotage production and increase the scarcity of goods unless the profits-swollen corporations secure the “right” to raise prices without restriction.</p>
<p>This threat is contained in the key sentence of the NAM ad: “Remove price controls on manufactured goods and production will step up fast.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Corporation Blackmail</h4>
<p class="fst">If price controls are not removed, the implication is clear. The manufacturers threaten to impede and restrict production and force up prices by a deliberately contrived scarcity. In this fashion, the corporations are attempting to blackmail the American people into granting their outrageous inflationary demands.</p>
<p>The green light for this intensified offensive against even the prevailing ineffective price controls has been given by the Truman administration. The government has compliantly granted exorbitant price increases to the steel magnates and proposes to provide no less than a billion and a half dollars in government subsidies to the meat-packing and other food trusts.</p>
<p>At the same time, the administration is fearful of the political repercussions that will inevitably ensue in the event of the completely uncontrolled inflation, which the corporations desire in order to make a monumental price “killing” and sustain their super-profits at wartime levels.</p>
<p>This fear that Big Business may push inflation too far and too fast, and thus provoke further great labor struggles as the workers fight to defend their shrinking purchasing power, was reflected in the appeal of Economic Stabilization Director Bowles before the House committee hearings on price control.</p>
<p>Bowles defended the principle of permitting price increases to guarantee “normal” high profits to the corporations. But he cited as a frightening example of the unrestricted greed of Big Business the fact that the Ford Motor Company had asked for a 55 per cent price increase! This, he said, offered a “pretty good idea” of the devastating inflation that would sweep the country if all price controls were eliminated.</p>
<p>Bowles’ reference to the price extortion attempted by Ford infuriated Congressmen at the hearing. They rose not to protect the people against the price-gougers but to defend Henry Ford II, scion of the billion-dollar Ford empire. One Congressman irately demanded: “Did Congress give you the right to browbeat Mr. Ford?”</p>
<p>Citing government figures, Bowles pointed out how generous the government has been to the profiteers. He declared that “in the last three months of 1945, dividends were as high as at any time in our history. Corporations are looking forward to an excellent year in 1946.”</p>
<p>But grave danger exists that the Big Business-dominated Congress will either kill price control altogether or emasculate it to a point where it will be totally ineffective.</p>
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Art Preis
NAM Launches Offensive
to Shatter Price Controls
(2 March 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 9, 2 March 1946, pp. 1 & 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Spearheaded by a multi-million, dollar campaign of the National Association of Manufacturers, American Big Business has launched a powerful offensive to destroy all price controls and rob labor of any wage gains won in the current great strike wave.
Full-page advertisements are appearing almost daily in 600 newspapers throughout the country heralding the demand of the NAM for the removal of all price controls as Wall Street’s “answer” to “inflation.”
These advertisements are timed to coincide with House Banking and Currency Committee hearings on extension of the Price Control Act after June 1946.
The NAM advertisements carry a brazen threat to sabotage production and increase the scarcity of goods unless the profits-swollen corporations secure the “right” to raise prices without restriction.
This threat is contained in the key sentence of the NAM ad: “Remove price controls on manufactured goods and production will step up fast.”
Corporation Blackmail
If price controls are not removed, the implication is clear. The manufacturers threaten to impede and restrict production and force up prices by a deliberately contrived scarcity. In this fashion, the corporations are attempting to blackmail the American people into granting their outrageous inflationary demands.
The green light for this intensified offensive against even the prevailing ineffective price controls has been given by the Truman administration. The government has compliantly granted exorbitant price increases to the steel magnates and proposes to provide no less than a billion and a half dollars in government subsidies to the meat-packing and other food trusts.
At the same time, the administration is fearful of the political repercussions that will inevitably ensue in the event of the completely uncontrolled inflation, which the corporations desire in order to make a monumental price “killing” and sustain their super-profits at wartime levels.
This fear that Big Business may push inflation too far and too fast, and thus provoke further great labor struggles as the workers fight to defend their shrinking purchasing power, was reflected in the appeal of Economic Stabilization Director Bowles before the House committee hearings on price control.
Bowles defended the principle of permitting price increases to guarantee “normal” high profits to the corporations. But he cited as a frightening example of the unrestricted greed of Big Business the fact that the Ford Motor Company had asked for a 55 per cent price increase! This, he said, offered a “pretty good idea” of the devastating inflation that would sweep the country if all price controls were eliminated.
Bowles’ reference to the price extortion attempted by Ford infuriated Congressmen at the hearing. They rose not to protect the people against the price-gougers but to defend Henry Ford II, scion of the billion-dollar Ford empire. One Congressman irately demanded: “Did Congress give you the right to browbeat Mr. Ford?”
Citing government figures, Bowles pointed out how generous the government has been to the profiteers. He declared that “in the last three months of 1945, dividends were as high as at any time in our history. Corporations are looking forward to an excellent year in 1946.”
But grave danger exists that the Big Business-dominated Congress will either kill price control altogether or emasculate it to a point where it will be totally ineffective.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>CP Licks Hillman’s Boots</h1>
<h4>But Gets Kicked in the Face as Reward<br>
for Cheering Hillman at IUMSW Convention</h4>
<h3>(4 October 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_40" target="new">Vol. V No. 40</a>, 4 October 1941, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">A face which had not graced the pages of the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong> in many a moon suddenly appeared on the front page ot the September 25 issue.</p>
<p>It was a portrait of the lean and wily features of Sidney Hillman, associate director of the OPM, and leader of the CIO faction which has long sought to tie the CIO to the Roosevelt Administration’s war machine.</p>
<p>To those who know the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>’s policies, the appearance of Hillman’s picture is a significant symbol. The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> publishes pictures only of those who represent Stalinist views or with whom the Communist Party is seeking to gain favor.</p>
<p>Thus, up to June 22, did John L. Lewis receive recognition and publicity from the Stalinists.</p>
<p>While of Hillman, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> (May 17) wrote in those days:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The workers can now see that when a war government selects a union leader to sit in its councils, it is only for one purpose: to have him act as the spearhead in the open-shop and wage cutting drive against the workers. And Hillman, it can be said, is faithfully living up to these duties.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Whitewash for Hillman</h4>
<p class="fst">No such condemnation of Hillman is included in the story accompanying his picture in the September 25 issue. This reports Hillman’s speech to the Seventh Convention of the International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers (CIO) held last week in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> approvingly reports Hillman’s address “praising the shipyard workers for the production records they have already set – but records that he said must still go higher ...”</p>
<p>Hillman, whom the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> formerly correctly called “the spearhead in the open-shop and wage-cutting drive,” is paving the way, in these words, for longer hours, speed-up, wagefreezing, in the interests of Roosevelt’s war program. That, today, is the program of the Stalinists also, and therefore their one definite aim in the CIO is to establish a formal unit with the Hillmanites against the militant and anti-war sections of the labor movement, and against that sector of the CIO which opposes sacrificing the gains of industrial unionism for the sake of pro-war “unity” with the AFL.</p>
<p>From first to last, in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> reports of the IUMSW convention, the Stalinists have sought to establish their affinity with the Hillmanites and their policies. And since the Hillmanites hold outright control of the IUMSW, almost the entire convention was consumed with speeches and resolutions in support of Roosevelt’s war policies, calling for the repeal of the Neutrality Act, etc. All this was fulsomely reported in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>.</p>
<p>But. in the very act of bending over to polish Hillman’s boots with their tongues, the Stalinists received a resounding blow on their protrudent posteriors from these same boot tips. On September 26, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, in the middle of an IUMSW convention story, suddenly whines:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The harmony that marked the convention for two days was broken this morning, and, as usual, red-baiting was the instrument through which prejudices and old squabbles were raked up. It came with a resolution ... throwing Communism into the same basket with Nazism.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Unity with Red-Baiters</h4>
<p class="fst">After going down the line on their hands and knees with the IUMSW Hillmanite leaders on support of the war, the Stalinists were confronted with a resolution which stated that the union “would not condone the workings of fascism, nazism or communism within our ranks” and “that any member who advocates the overthrow of the democratic constitutional government of the United States shall be, on proven guilty, asked or be forced to resign from national or local membership, in our union.”</p>
<p>Nowhere does the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> indicate that this resolution, which the convention passed, was the product of Hillman. Instead, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> attempts to spread the idea that the resolution doesn’t mean too much and isn’t going to affect the Stalinists materially.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In some respects,” reports the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, “the red-baiters retreated, as from all indications a move to insert a bar to Communists in the constitution was abandoned.”</p>
<p class="fst">At the very same session of the convention, however, me Stalinists found out whether the Hillmanites “mean” it, when Carl Bradley and Edward Dorland, expelled from the union’s general executive board and their union local on charges of “communism,” were refused reinstatement into union membership, and even denied the right personally to appeal their case to the convention.</p>
<p>On the last day of the convention, the delegates, led by the Hillmanites, passed a resolution barring “Communists, Nazis and fascists” from holding any union offices. That is how the Hillmanites “retreated”!</p>
<p>Once more, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, September 27, had to report about the red-baiting actions of the Hillmanites – without mention of the Hillmanites.<br>
</p>
<h4>Small Favors Gratefully Received</h4>
<p class="fst">John Green, Hillmanite president of the IUSMW, gave the Stalinists some small consolation in his final remarks before the convention adjourned. He indicated Hillman’s present position toward the Stalinists when he stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Employers hire communists, and as long as they hire them we’ll organize them. But they’ve got to keep their philosophies out of the councils of this union.”</p>
<p class="fst">In a word, Green is telling the Stalinist that they can pay their dues and belong to the union so long as they’re “good boys,” raise their hands promptly for everything the Hillmanites propose, sit in the back rows and keep their mouths shut.</p>
<p>The Stalinists, for all their eagerness to support the Hillmanites under any conditions, have a long row to hoe before they will be accepted on any equal terms by the Hillmanites.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hillman’s Line Toward Stalinists</h4>
<p class="fst">Hillman and his followers are quite willing to take whatever the Stalinists offer them gratis, but they propose to grant the Stalinists as little influence or control as possible, particularly in those unions, like the IUMSW, where the Stalinists have relatively little strength.</p>
<p>The Hillman gang represents a different bureaucracy than the Stalinists. The Hillmanites are part of the labor bureaucracy directly representing the interests of the American bourgeois democrats, specifically the Roosevelt administration. The Stalinists, as the Hillmanites are well aware, are the agents of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Within the limits of this difference in bureaucratic loyalties, the Hillmanites continue to be wary of any too close ties with the Stalinists.</p>
<p>For their part, the Stalinists want to gain as much union influence as they can, within the framework of their political unity with the Hillmanites on the war question. But the Hillmanites hold the whip-hand. It is they who have the “in” with the Roosevelt administration, and they will not permit the Stalinists to approach the administration except through the Hillmanite pipeline.</p>
<p>The Stalinists are willing to pay any price in servility and treachery to the workers for a bloc with Hillman. That is clearly indicated by the actions at the IUMSW convention and the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>’s response to them. Hillman’s program includes concretely a red-baiting attack on all militant and progressive elements in the labor movement. “Deplore” as they might this red-baiting – and it is merely to save their own organizational hides that they do so – the Stalinists cannot escape the responsibility for defending and endorsing Hillman’s basic political policies, whose inevitable consequences are just as vicious anti-labor tactics as red-baiting.</p>
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Art Preis
CP Licks Hillman’s Boots
But Gets Kicked in the Face as Reward
for Cheering Hillman at IUMSW Convention
(4 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 40, 4 October 1941, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A face which had not graced the pages of the Stalinist Daily Worker in many a moon suddenly appeared on the front page ot the September 25 issue.
It was a portrait of the lean and wily features of Sidney Hillman, associate director of the OPM, and leader of the CIO faction which has long sought to tie the CIO to the Roosevelt Administration’s war machine.
To those who know the Daily Worker’s policies, the appearance of Hillman’s picture is a significant symbol. The Daily Worker publishes pictures only of those who represent Stalinist views or with whom the Communist Party is seeking to gain favor.
Thus, up to June 22, did John L. Lewis receive recognition and publicity from the Stalinists.
While of Hillman, the Daily Worker (May 17) wrote in those days:
“The workers can now see that when a war government selects a union leader to sit in its councils, it is only for one purpose: to have him act as the spearhead in the open-shop and wage cutting drive against the workers. And Hillman, it can be said, is faithfully living up to these duties.”
Whitewash for Hillman
No such condemnation of Hillman is included in the story accompanying his picture in the September 25 issue. This reports Hillman’s speech to the Seventh Convention of the International Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers (CIO) held last week in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The Daily Worker approvingly reports Hillman’s address “praising the shipyard workers for the production records they have already set – but records that he said must still go higher ...”
Hillman, whom the Daily Worker formerly correctly called “the spearhead in the open-shop and wage-cutting drive,” is paving the way, in these words, for longer hours, speed-up, wagefreezing, in the interests of Roosevelt’s war program. That, today, is the program of the Stalinists also, and therefore their one definite aim in the CIO is to establish a formal unit with the Hillmanites against the militant and anti-war sections of the labor movement, and against that sector of the CIO which opposes sacrificing the gains of industrial unionism for the sake of pro-war “unity” with the AFL.
From first to last, in the Daily Worker reports of the IUMSW convention, the Stalinists have sought to establish their affinity with the Hillmanites and their policies. And since the Hillmanites hold outright control of the IUMSW, almost the entire convention was consumed with speeches and resolutions in support of Roosevelt’s war policies, calling for the repeal of the Neutrality Act, etc. All this was fulsomely reported in the Daily Worker.
But. in the very act of bending over to polish Hillman’s boots with their tongues, the Stalinists received a resounding blow on their protrudent posteriors from these same boot tips. On September 26, the Daily Worker, in the middle of an IUMSW convention story, suddenly whines:
“The harmony that marked the convention for two days was broken this morning, and, as usual, red-baiting was the instrument through which prejudices and old squabbles were raked up. It came with a resolution ... throwing Communism into the same basket with Nazism.”
Unity with Red-Baiters
After going down the line on their hands and knees with the IUMSW Hillmanite leaders on support of the war, the Stalinists were confronted with a resolution which stated that the union “would not condone the workings of fascism, nazism or communism within our ranks” and “that any member who advocates the overthrow of the democratic constitutional government of the United States shall be, on proven guilty, asked or be forced to resign from national or local membership, in our union.”
Nowhere does the Daily Worker indicate that this resolution, which the convention passed, was the product of Hillman. Instead, the Daily Worker attempts to spread the idea that the resolution doesn’t mean too much and isn’t going to affect the Stalinists materially.
“In some respects,” reports the Daily Worker, “the red-baiters retreated, as from all indications a move to insert a bar to Communists in the constitution was abandoned.”
At the very same session of the convention, however, me Stalinists found out whether the Hillmanites “mean” it, when Carl Bradley and Edward Dorland, expelled from the union’s general executive board and their union local on charges of “communism,” were refused reinstatement into union membership, and even denied the right personally to appeal their case to the convention.
On the last day of the convention, the delegates, led by the Hillmanites, passed a resolution barring “Communists, Nazis and fascists” from holding any union offices. That is how the Hillmanites “retreated”!
Once more, the Daily Worker, September 27, had to report about the red-baiting actions of the Hillmanites – without mention of the Hillmanites.
Small Favors Gratefully Received
John Green, Hillmanite president of the IUSMW, gave the Stalinists some small consolation in his final remarks before the convention adjourned. He indicated Hillman’s present position toward the Stalinists when he stated:
“Employers hire communists, and as long as they hire them we’ll organize them. But they’ve got to keep their philosophies out of the councils of this union.”
In a word, Green is telling the Stalinist that they can pay their dues and belong to the union so long as they’re “good boys,” raise their hands promptly for everything the Hillmanites propose, sit in the back rows and keep their mouths shut.
The Stalinists, for all their eagerness to support the Hillmanites under any conditions, have a long row to hoe before they will be accepted on any equal terms by the Hillmanites.
Hillman’s Line Toward Stalinists
Hillman and his followers are quite willing to take whatever the Stalinists offer them gratis, but they propose to grant the Stalinists as little influence or control as possible, particularly in those unions, like the IUMSW, where the Stalinists have relatively little strength.
The Hillman gang represents a different bureaucracy than the Stalinists. The Hillmanites are part of the labor bureaucracy directly representing the interests of the American bourgeois democrats, specifically the Roosevelt administration. The Stalinists, as the Hillmanites are well aware, are the agents of the Kremlin bureaucracy. Within the limits of this difference in bureaucratic loyalties, the Hillmanites continue to be wary of any too close ties with the Stalinists.
For their part, the Stalinists want to gain as much union influence as they can, within the framework of their political unity with the Hillmanites on the war question. But the Hillmanites hold the whip-hand. It is they who have the “in” with the Roosevelt administration, and they will not permit the Stalinists to approach the administration except through the Hillmanite pipeline.
The Stalinists are willing to pay any price in servility and treachery to the workers for a bloc with Hillman. That is clearly indicated by the actions at the IUMSW convention and the Daily Worker’s response to them. Hillman’s program includes concretely a red-baiting attack on all militant and progressive elements in the labor movement. “Deplore” as they might this red-baiting – and it is merely to save their own organizational hides that they do so – the Stalinists cannot escape the responsibility for defending and endorsing Hillman’s basic political policies, whose inevitable consequences are just as vicious anti-labor tactics as red-baiting.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>‘Peace Pact’ Is Smokescreen for Anti-Union Drive</h1>
<h3>(19 May 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_20" target="new">Vol. IX No. 20</a>, 19 May 1945, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The top national committees of the CIO, AFL and U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all hastened to formally adopt the so-called capital-labor “postwar peace charter” designed in secret and signed by the respective heads of these bodies, Philip Murray, William Green and Eric Johnston. On May 4, the executive council of the AFL and the Board of Directors of the C. of C„ following the previous action of the CIO National Executive Board, ratified the peace pact.</p>
<p>As on all other questions of major policy, the ranks of the labor unions were neither consulted nor permitted to vote on the “peace charter.” It is being thrust down their throats in the same fashion as the wartime “peace charter,” drafted in the week after Pearl Harbor. This deprived the workers of the right to strike while the employers remained free to undermine collective bargaining and amass colossal profits.</p>
<p><em>But even as the union leaders try to sell labor on the idea that the employers are changing their stripes and moving in the direction of “good will” toward the unions, they are compelled to register complaints. These belie the fiction that the capitalists are interested in anything but expanding their profits and intensifying their exploitation of labor.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Warns of “Conspiracy”</h4>
<p class="fst">Thus, on May 8, Philip Murray addressed a letter to all CIO affiliates charging that a “dangerous and well-organized conspiracy” is being conducted to destroy the National Labor Relations Act. This basic law is supposed to guarantee the right of collective bargaining.</p>
<p>The sole “concession” made to labor in the “peace charter,” the recognition of collective bargaining rights, according to Murray, is being furiously assailed by the “representatives of the Michigan automobile lobby and the powerful food lobby, the same food lobby which has operated with such disastrous effectiveness in connection with the current OPA hearings.”</p>
<p><em>Murray need not have limited himself to these two major capitalist groups. The truth is that every single important section of industry – steel, rubber, oil, shipbuilding – is equally involved in this anti-labor conspiracy. Their most powerful organization, the National Association of Manufacturers, has openly admitted it is engaged in a legislative drive to outlaw strikes and the closed shop through a 5-point program drafted jointly with the Chamber of Commerce.</em></p>
<p>The “peace charter” is contrived as a smokescreen of benevolence behind which the employers can slam away at labor. Murray and Green, however, ballyhoo it as a prerequisite for postwar “prosperity,” “60,000,000 jobs,” “high wages,” etc. They contend that if only capital and labor would “get together” in the spirit of brotherly love – and on condition that the capitalists are guaranteed their “prerogatives” to control and run American economy as they please – then all would be hunky-dory for the workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Industrial War</h4>
<p class="fst">This very basis of the “peace charter” is absurd. Only the past week, the government spokesmen for Big Business, as reported on the front page of this issue of <strong>The Militant</strong> formally revealed some of their plans and perspectives. They forecast rising mass unemployment, wage slashes, price inflation. They foresee not industrial “peace” but industrial war, which they propose to forestall simply by disarming the workers with the continued enforcement of the no-strike policy and compulsory arbitration.</p>
<p>Will mere “industrial harmony” under the monopoly “free enterprise” system ensure full employment? Even Senator George, author of the government’s bill on reconversion, on May 14 cynically rejected the possibility of providing 60,000,000 jobs. Such a goal, he claims, would require “the most rigid regimentation we ever had in peace ... we can’t reach any such arbitrary figure as. 60,000,000 jobs without controlling industry itself.” Naturally, he opposes such “regimentation.”</p>
<p><em>It is therefore a transparent fraud when Murray, Green and their lieutenants tell labor to submit peacefully to the anarchy of “free enterprise” and the “prerogatives” of the capitalist profiteers as a guarantee of security.</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
‘Peace Pact’ Is Smokescreen for Anti-Union Drive
(19 May 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 20, 19 May 1945, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The top national committees of the CIO, AFL and U.S. Chamber of Commerce have all hastened to formally adopt the so-called capital-labor “postwar peace charter” designed in secret and signed by the respective heads of these bodies, Philip Murray, William Green and Eric Johnston. On May 4, the executive council of the AFL and the Board of Directors of the C. of C„ following the previous action of the CIO National Executive Board, ratified the peace pact.
As on all other questions of major policy, the ranks of the labor unions were neither consulted nor permitted to vote on the “peace charter.” It is being thrust down their throats in the same fashion as the wartime “peace charter,” drafted in the week after Pearl Harbor. This deprived the workers of the right to strike while the employers remained free to undermine collective bargaining and amass colossal profits.
But even as the union leaders try to sell labor on the idea that the employers are changing their stripes and moving in the direction of “good will” toward the unions, they are compelled to register complaints. These belie the fiction that the capitalists are interested in anything but expanding their profits and intensifying their exploitation of labor.
Warns of “Conspiracy”
Thus, on May 8, Philip Murray addressed a letter to all CIO affiliates charging that a “dangerous and well-organized conspiracy” is being conducted to destroy the National Labor Relations Act. This basic law is supposed to guarantee the right of collective bargaining.
The sole “concession” made to labor in the “peace charter,” the recognition of collective bargaining rights, according to Murray, is being furiously assailed by the “representatives of the Michigan automobile lobby and the powerful food lobby, the same food lobby which has operated with such disastrous effectiveness in connection with the current OPA hearings.”
Murray need not have limited himself to these two major capitalist groups. The truth is that every single important section of industry – steel, rubber, oil, shipbuilding – is equally involved in this anti-labor conspiracy. Their most powerful organization, the National Association of Manufacturers, has openly admitted it is engaged in a legislative drive to outlaw strikes and the closed shop through a 5-point program drafted jointly with the Chamber of Commerce.
The “peace charter” is contrived as a smokescreen of benevolence behind which the employers can slam away at labor. Murray and Green, however, ballyhoo it as a prerequisite for postwar “prosperity,” “60,000,000 jobs,” “high wages,” etc. They contend that if only capital and labor would “get together” in the spirit of brotherly love – and on condition that the capitalists are guaranteed their “prerogatives” to control and run American economy as they please – then all would be hunky-dory for the workers.
Industrial War
This very basis of the “peace charter” is absurd. Only the past week, the government spokesmen for Big Business, as reported on the front page of this issue of The Militant formally revealed some of their plans and perspectives. They forecast rising mass unemployment, wage slashes, price inflation. They foresee not industrial “peace” but industrial war, which they propose to forestall simply by disarming the workers with the continued enforcement of the no-strike policy and compulsory arbitration.
Will mere “industrial harmony” under the monopoly “free enterprise” system ensure full employment? Even Senator George, author of the government’s bill on reconversion, on May 14 cynically rejected the possibility of providing 60,000,000 jobs. Such a goal, he claims, would require “the most rigid regimentation we ever had in peace ... we can’t reach any such arbitrary figure as. 60,000,000 jobs without controlling industry itself.” Naturally, he opposes such “regimentation.”
It is therefore a transparent fraud when Murray, Green and their lieutenants tell labor to submit peacefully to the anarchy of “free enterprise” and the “prerogatives” of the capitalist profiteers as a guarantee of security.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Widespread Coal Strikes Show<br>
Miners Really Mean Business</h1>
<h3>(10 April 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_14" target="new">Vol. IX No. 14</a>, 14 April 1945, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">APRIL 10. – The nation’s fighting soft-coal miners weren’t fooling when they voted two weeks ago by an eight to one majority to authorize strike action if they didn’t obtain an acceptable contract.</p>
<p>Last week, following termination of their old contract on March 31 and despite a 30-day further extension of the former contract, an estimated 100,000 miners in some 300 mines throughout eight states engaged in spontaneous strike actions to show the profit-greedy operators they mean business.</p>
<p>Many of the strikes were concentrated in the “captive” mines of the steel corporations, traditionally the worst hold-outs among the mine operators.</p>
<p>The boss press and government spokesmen had tried to picture the miners’ strike vote as a mere gesture. The press actually tried to conceal the extent of the walkouts during the early part of last week. But Secretary of Interior Ickes’ blustering demand last Thursday for a government mine “seizure” and his admission of the closure of over 200 mines disclosed the real situation.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Tentative Agreement”</h4>
<p class="fst">In Alabama, some 25,000 of 28,000 bituminous miners, members of the United Mine Workers, were out in protest against the operators’ delay in signing an acceptable contract. In Western Pennsylvania alone an admitted 57,000 were out. Roving pickets saw to it that there was no return to work.</p>
<p><i>Under this pressure, the hard-boiled mine owners rapidly softened. On April 9, with 200 mines still reported closed, spokesmen for the operators announced that a “tentative agreement” had been reached with the UMW negotiating committee, with only one union demand still in dispute.</i></p>
<p>According to the first reports, the proposed new contract will provide for $1.25 to $1.50 increased daily pay, through the payment of time-and-a-half for two hours overtime beyond the regular seven-hour workday in the mines. The operators are said to be balking still at the demand for contract coverage of all mine employees except one mine supervisor and one foreman.<br>
</p>
<h4>WLB Steps In</h4>
<p class="fst">On the day this was announced, the WLB intervened to declare that it has certified the mine dispute to Roosevelt, through War Mobilization Director Davis, recommending “seizure” of the 200 closed mines. During the strikes two years ago, such “seizures” meant simply making the mine operators government officials and running the mines still under their control.</p>
<p><i>Meanwhile, 72,000 hard coal miners whose contract expires April 30, are waiting for an NLRB strike poll on April 26. They have presented the anthracite operators with 30 demands, including one for a 25 per cent wage increase, because, as stated by John L. Lewis, they have received “only a 15 per cent increase since 1923,” and the owners are more “prosperous” than in all their history.</i></p>
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Joseph Keller
Widespread Coal Strikes Show
Miners Really Mean Business
(10 April 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 14, 14 April 1945, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
APRIL 10. – The nation’s fighting soft-coal miners weren’t fooling when they voted two weeks ago by an eight to one majority to authorize strike action if they didn’t obtain an acceptable contract.
Last week, following termination of their old contract on March 31 and despite a 30-day further extension of the former contract, an estimated 100,000 miners in some 300 mines throughout eight states engaged in spontaneous strike actions to show the profit-greedy operators they mean business.
Many of the strikes were concentrated in the “captive” mines of the steel corporations, traditionally the worst hold-outs among the mine operators.
The boss press and government spokesmen had tried to picture the miners’ strike vote as a mere gesture. The press actually tried to conceal the extent of the walkouts during the early part of last week. But Secretary of Interior Ickes’ blustering demand last Thursday for a government mine “seizure” and his admission of the closure of over 200 mines disclosed the real situation.
“Tentative Agreement”
In Alabama, some 25,000 of 28,000 bituminous miners, members of the United Mine Workers, were out in protest against the operators’ delay in signing an acceptable contract. In Western Pennsylvania alone an admitted 57,000 were out. Roving pickets saw to it that there was no return to work.
Under this pressure, the hard-boiled mine owners rapidly softened. On April 9, with 200 mines still reported closed, spokesmen for the operators announced that a “tentative agreement” had been reached with the UMW negotiating committee, with only one union demand still in dispute.
According to the first reports, the proposed new contract will provide for $1.25 to $1.50 increased daily pay, through the payment of time-and-a-half for two hours overtime beyond the regular seven-hour workday in the mines. The operators are said to be balking still at the demand for contract coverage of all mine employees except one mine supervisor and one foreman.
WLB Steps In
On the day this was announced, the WLB intervened to declare that it has certified the mine dispute to Roosevelt, through War Mobilization Director Davis, recommending “seizure” of the 200 closed mines. During the strikes two years ago, such “seizures” meant simply making the mine operators government officials and running the mines still under their control.
Meanwhile, 72,000 hard coal miners whose contract expires April 30, are waiting for an NLRB strike poll on April 26. They have presented the anthracite operators with 30 demands, including one for a 25 per cent wage increase, because, as stated by John L. Lewis, they have received “only a 15 per cent increase since 1923,” and the owners are more “prosperous” than in all their history.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman, Big Brass Plot to Impose<br>
Militarist Censorship on Press</h1>
<h3>(15 March 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_11" target="new">Vol. XII No. 11</a>, 15 March 1948, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The iron boot of militarist censorship and suppression is poised over freedom of the press in America.</p>
<p>So drastic and far-reaching are plans of the military authorities for control of the press that even some publishers are alarmed:</p>
<p>In a four-article series entitled <i>The Problem of Secrecy</i> (<b>N.Y. Times</b>, March 3, 5, 6 and 7), Hanson W. Baldwin, commentator on military affairs for the <b>N.Y. Times</b>, reveals that suppression of news, intimidation and harassment of reporters and publishers, and censorship for alleged “military security” is already far advanced.<br>
</p>
<h4>Complete Blackout</h4>
<p class="fst">He discloses that the Big Brass and the Truman administration are building up a system of news censorship that would in a short time impose a complete blackout on any information or criticism they did not want published.</p>
<p>There have been “months of behind-the-scenes discussions and considerable pressure by some Government officials, particularly some in the National Military Establishment, to control the military, semimilitary and even politico-military information published in this country,” Baldwin reports. These officials “are plainly impatient with public criticism and would like to devise some system by which the press could be better ‘controlled’.”</p>
<p>This pressure, he adds, “has also come from the White House.”</p>
<p><i>The first “considerable anxiety” felt about the military threat to press freedom, says Baldwin, was last Fall “when it became known that the Security Advisory Board of the State Department-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee had proposed to ‘classify’ and to ban from public disclosure even information that might cause ‘serious administrative embarrassment’.”</i></p>
<p>Such censorship, Baldwin points out, could “provide a cloak to hide” any inefficient and even criminal conduct of government and military officials, such as the case of Maj. Gen. Bennett E. Meyers.</p>
<p>Protest against this proposal was “so vocal” that the Security Advisory Board revised its definition of. “classified” and “secret” information by rewording some of the cruder formulas. But it still defines as “secret” any information that would cause “unwarranted injury to an individual.” This, says Baldwin, could obviously be used “to protect Government officials from criticism.”</p>
<p>In addition to the extensive system of “classified” information, reports Baldwin, there are many other methods of censorship and suppression now being practiced. He cites, for instance, the repeated complaints of censorship of correspondents in Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.</p>
<p>Recently, MacArthur refused to reaccredit to his command area the <b>Newsweek</b> correspondent, Compton Pakenham, because he showed “marked antipathy toward American policy and American personnel in the occupation zone.” Some correspondents “have been subjected to threats and grilling; the home of one man was searched by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Department.” The “MacArthur precedent,” says Baldwin, “has now been extended to Europe.”</p>
<p><i>A United Press correspondent, Robert Miller, who recently visited Saudi Arabia, “learned that King Ibn Saud, with the full cooperation, and perhaps at the instigation of the United States Army, State Department and oil company officials, had banned all American newspaper correspondents from his country.”</i></p>
<p>In another case, an interview with Charles F. Wennerstrum, who presided over the recent trial of Nazis in Frankfurt, was subject to harsh attack before it was even published in the <b>Chicago Tribune</b>. “Obviously, some Army source read the dispatch before or during its transmission ... despite the fact that wire communications are supposed to be inviolable,” says Baldwin. He adds: “This sort of ‘censorship by surveillance’ or by threat was practiced extensively before the war in Nazi Germany.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Grilled by FBI</h4>
<p class="fst">Robert H. Wood, editor of <b>Aviation Week</b>, a McGraw-Hill publication, has been grilled repeatedly by FBI agents for publishing a story, well-known outside of Air Force circles, about the supersonic speed of the Bell XS-1, modeled on a captured Nazi design. The Russians had also captured the design, so anything <b>Aviation Week</b> published was not news to them.</p>
<p><i>What is serious about this case, Baldwin points out, is that the Air Force secured the aid of the Department of Justice and FBI for a “punitive and threatening measure” to force a publication to disclose the source of its information “and presumably to impress and overawe it.” This case, further, is being used as an argument for legislation to “give the Government the legal club needed to restrict the flow of news to what it considered desirable.”</i></p>
<p>A bill has been prepared with terms “so broad – it defines as a criminal offense, for instance, the transmission of any ‘information’ concerning the national defense ‘to any person not entitled to receive it’ – that it could be used, and undoubtedly would be used, in the light of past experience, to limit the legitimate information media of the country.”</p>
<p>But, as Baldwin shows, the military aren’t even waiting to get their censorship system legalized.</p>
<p><i>On March 3, representatives of the big newspapers, magazines and publishing houses conferred with Secretary of Defense Forrestal and proposed a system of “voluntary censorship” as a means of avoiding direct censorship.</i></p>
<p>This “voluntary censorship,” says Baldwin, “might well turn out more theoretical than real.” Any publication that printed information the government wanted withheld would be “subjected to all sorts of government pressure; its sources of information might be closed up: it would probably be called ‘unpatriotic,’ etc.” Even “voluntary censorship,” he says, can be used “as a powerful restraining influence on the flow of information.”</p>
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Art Preis
Truman, Big Brass Plot to Impose
Militarist Censorship on Press
(15 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 11, 15 March 1948, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The iron boot of militarist censorship and suppression is poised over freedom of the press in America.
So drastic and far-reaching are plans of the military authorities for control of the press that even some publishers are alarmed:
In a four-article series entitled The Problem of Secrecy (N.Y. Times, March 3, 5, 6 and 7), Hanson W. Baldwin, commentator on military affairs for the N.Y. Times, reveals that suppression of news, intimidation and harassment of reporters and publishers, and censorship for alleged “military security” is already far advanced.
Complete Blackout
He discloses that the Big Brass and the Truman administration are building up a system of news censorship that would in a short time impose a complete blackout on any information or criticism they did not want published.
There have been “months of behind-the-scenes discussions and considerable pressure by some Government officials, particularly some in the National Military Establishment, to control the military, semimilitary and even politico-military information published in this country,” Baldwin reports. These officials “are plainly impatient with public criticism and would like to devise some system by which the press could be better ‘controlled’.”
This pressure, he adds, “has also come from the White House.”
The first “considerable anxiety” felt about the military threat to press freedom, says Baldwin, was last Fall “when it became known that the Security Advisory Board of the State Department-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee had proposed to ‘classify’ and to ban from public disclosure even information that might cause ‘serious administrative embarrassment’.”
Such censorship, Baldwin points out, could “provide a cloak to hide” any inefficient and even criminal conduct of government and military officials, such as the case of Maj. Gen. Bennett E. Meyers.
Protest against this proposal was “so vocal” that the Security Advisory Board revised its definition of. “classified” and “secret” information by rewording some of the cruder formulas. But it still defines as “secret” any information that would cause “unwarranted injury to an individual.” This, says Baldwin, could obviously be used “to protect Government officials from criticism.”
In addition to the extensive system of “classified” information, reports Baldwin, there are many other methods of censorship and suppression now being practiced. He cites, for instance, the repeated complaints of censorship of correspondents in Japan by Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
Recently, MacArthur refused to reaccredit to his command area the Newsweek correspondent, Compton Pakenham, because he showed “marked antipathy toward American policy and American personnel in the occupation zone.” Some correspondents “have been subjected to threats and grilling; the home of one man was searched by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Department.” The “MacArthur precedent,” says Baldwin, “has now been extended to Europe.”
A United Press correspondent, Robert Miller, who recently visited Saudi Arabia, “learned that King Ibn Saud, with the full cooperation, and perhaps at the instigation of the United States Army, State Department and oil company officials, had banned all American newspaper correspondents from his country.”
In another case, an interview with Charles F. Wennerstrum, who presided over the recent trial of Nazis in Frankfurt, was subject to harsh attack before it was even published in the Chicago Tribune. “Obviously, some Army source read the dispatch before or during its transmission ... despite the fact that wire communications are supposed to be inviolable,” says Baldwin. He adds: “This sort of ‘censorship by surveillance’ or by threat was practiced extensively before the war in Nazi Germany.”
Grilled by FBI
Robert H. Wood, editor of Aviation Week, a McGraw-Hill publication, has been grilled repeatedly by FBI agents for publishing a story, well-known outside of Air Force circles, about the supersonic speed of the Bell XS-1, modeled on a captured Nazi design. The Russians had also captured the design, so anything Aviation Week published was not news to them.
What is serious about this case, Baldwin points out, is that the Air Force secured the aid of the Department of Justice and FBI for a “punitive and threatening measure” to force a publication to disclose the source of its information “and presumably to impress and overawe it.” This case, further, is being used as an argument for legislation to “give the Government the legal club needed to restrict the flow of news to what it considered desirable.”
A bill has been prepared with terms “so broad – it defines as a criminal offense, for instance, the transmission of any ‘information’ concerning the national defense ‘to any person not entitled to receive it’ – that it could be used, and undoubtedly would be used, in the light of past experience, to limit the legitimate information media of the country.”
But, as Baldwin shows, the military aren’t even waiting to get their censorship system legalized.
On March 3, representatives of the big newspapers, magazines and publishing houses conferred with Secretary of Defense Forrestal and proposed a system of “voluntary censorship” as a means of avoiding direct censorship.
This “voluntary censorship,” says Baldwin, “might well turn out more theoretical than real.” Any publication that printed information the government wanted withheld would be “subjected to all sorts of government pressure; its sources of information might be closed up: it would probably be called ‘unpatriotic,’ etc.” Even “voluntary censorship,” he says, can be used “as a powerful restraining influence on the flow of information.”
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(17 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_11" target="new">Vol. IX No. 11</a>, 17 March 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>Treason to Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">Daniel J. Tobin, AFL Teamsters’ Czar and initiator of the
Minneapolis Case frameup, has maintained himself in the forefront of
the labor traitors by endorsing the wage-freezing Little Steel
Formula through an editorial in the March <strong>International Teamster</strong>,
the personal organ he operates in the name of the union.</p>
<p><em>Tobin’s mouthpiece spouts that “you can’t
scrap the Little Steel Formula without scrapping the entire
stabilization program.” It moans that politicians and
profiteers who “want to see all economic controls removed”
are “encouraging some labor leaders to break the Little Steel
Formula” and advises that “labor better do some serious
thinking” before attacking Roosevelt’s wage-freezing
formula.</em></p>
<p>Evidently, Tobin was subsequently quickly apprised of the fact
that labor has already done “some serious thinking.” The
workers think that the Little Steel Formula was designed by the
corporations and Roosevelt to put the squeeze on labor while
protecting the war-profiteers. At any rate, Tobin issued a hasty
“repudiation” of the editorial, claiming it had “escaped”
his attention before publication.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>Knifing the Miners</h4>
<p class="fst">The same Stalinists in the New York CIO who secretly lobbied for
Congressional endorsement of the May-Bailey slave labor bill have
tried to stick a knife in the nation’s mine workers at the
opening of the United Mine Worker contract negotiations. At a
shop-stewards meeting of the Stalinist-dominated Greater New York CIO
Council, the finky leadership shoved through a resolution calling on
Roosevelt to “seize” the mines because of an alleged
“strike threat” by John L. Lewis.</p>
<p>Singing the tune of the most vicious labor-haters, the Stalinist
resolution charged the Mine Union leaders with a “strike plot
against the nation” and called on “every citizen”
to “denounce and defeat the sabotage of John L. Lewis.”</p>
<p><em>This anti-labor action was denounced last week by Martin Gerber
and Charles H. Kerrigan, eastern regional directors of the powerful
CIO United Automobile Workers, at the UAW executive board meeting in
New York. Gerber stated:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“I am not a follower of John L. Lewis, but I
support the legitimate wage demands of any groups of American
workers. The miners should not be sabotaged by any organization and
when they are sabotaged by a CIO Council, as was done by the New York
Council, I feel ashamed.” Kerrigan observed: “Apparently
some elements think unconditional surrender means unconditional
surrender by labor.”</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Phone Strike Vote</h4>
<p class="fst">A huge overflow joint mass meeting of New York City’s
organized local and long distance telephone operators last week voted
unanimously to file a 30-day strike notice with the NLRB. This vote
followed a WLB decision granting only a $3 weekly wage increase after
the telephone companies agreed to $4 and a special WLB panel
recommended the full $5 demanded by the unions.</p>
<p>So aroused were the members of Local 101, Federation of Long Lines
Telephone Operators, and the local New York Telephone Traffic
Employees Association, that the leaders had difficulty persuading the
workers not to strike immediately, but to follow the procedure under
the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act. Many militant young women
operators took the floor amid cheers and applause to urge “an
immediate strike, starting right away.”</p>
<p><em>These operators, who are making wages as low as $20 a week, had
been stalled by the WLB for over 2 years. They evidently mean
business. The WLB has announced that it will render a decision this
week on the petition of the unions for a reconsideration of its $3
wage award.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>Textile Strike Vote</h4>
<p class="fst">Over 100,000 cotton-rayon textile workers, member of the CIO
Textile Workers Union, will take a strike vote in 150 Southern mills
on March 18. The announcement of this largest strike vote of any CIO
union during the war was made by Emil Rieve, the TWU’s
international president, on March 8.</p>
<p>This is a sequel to the recent decision of the TWU Executive
Council revoking the no-strike pledge for this large section of the
exploited textile workers, and the resignation of Rieve from the WLB.
The WLB after 19 month’s of stalling released “recommendations”
– not yet approved by the Economic Stabilization Administration
– granting meager “fringe” increases and a 55¢ an
hour minimum wage. The union had demanded a 10¢ hourly general wage
increase and a 65¢ minimum wage.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p5"></a>
<h4>Lockout in Detroit</h4>
<p class="fst">The latest union-busting corporation provocation against UAW
locals in Detroit is the firing of 35 officers and shop stewards and
the “disciplinary” layoff for one week of 140 workers, at
the Thompson Products plant for alleged responsibility for a strike
10 days previously. Thompson Products is headed by Frederick
Crawford, former President of the National Association of
Manufacturers and a leading open-shopper.</p>
<p><em>The UAW-CIO international executive board, meeting in New York,
when informed of this move to smash the Thompson Products Detroit
local, declared the firings and lay-offs a lockout by the company and
stated that unless all workers are reinstated plant operations will
not be resumed. The board also called on Roosevelt to “seize”
the plant.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p6"></a>
<h4>Where Was PAC?</h4>
<p class="fst">The lead editorial in the February 28 <strong>Midwest Labor World</strong>,
official organ of the St. Louis Joint Council, United Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Employees, CIO, asks the question
“WHERE WAS PAC?” during the height of the Roosevelt-brass
hat campaign to put over the forced labor bill.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is a phase to the labor draft fight that
will surprise many workers. It is a fact that up to the time this was
written, after weeks of struggle in Congress by CIO, AFL, the miners
and the railroad brotherhoods, PAC – the political arm of CIO –
was silent. They have money, organization and paid spokesmen. Why
weren’t they used? The millions of workers who supported PAC
with their dollars are due an explanation of why the bureaucrats of
this organization sat on their expensive hind ends when labor’s
liberties were at stake.”</p>
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<a href="#top">Top of page</a></p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(17 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 11, 17 March 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Treason to Labor
Daniel J. Tobin, AFL Teamsters’ Czar and initiator of the
Minneapolis Case frameup, has maintained himself in the forefront of
the labor traitors by endorsing the wage-freezing Little Steel
Formula through an editorial in the March International Teamster,
the personal organ he operates in the name of the union.
Tobin’s mouthpiece spouts that “you can’t
scrap the Little Steel Formula without scrapping the entire
stabilization program.” It moans that politicians and
profiteers who “want to see all economic controls removed”
are “encouraging some labor leaders to break the Little Steel
Formula” and advises that “labor better do some serious
thinking” before attacking Roosevelt’s wage-freezing
formula.
Evidently, Tobin was subsequently quickly apprised of the fact
that labor has already done “some serious thinking.” The
workers think that the Little Steel Formula was designed by the
corporations and Roosevelt to put the squeeze on labor while
protecting the war-profiteers. At any rate, Tobin issued a hasty
“repudiation” of the editorial, claiming it had “escaped”
his attention before publication.
* * *
Knifing the Miners
The same Stalinists in the New York CIO who secretly lobbied for
Congressional endorsement of the May-Bailey slave labor bill have
tried to stick a knife in the nation’s mine workers at the
opening of the United Mine Worker contract negotiations. At a
shop-stewards meeting of the Stalinist-dominated Greater New York CIO
Council, the finky leadership shoved through a resolution calling on
Roosevelt to “seize” the mines because of an alleged
“strike threat” by John L. Lewis.
Singing the tune of the most vicious labor-haters, the Stalinist
resolution charged the Mine Union leaders with a “strike plot
against the nation” and called on “every citizen”
to “denounce and defeat the sabotage of John L. Lewis.”
This anti-labor action was denounced last week by Martin Gerber
and Charles H. Kerrigan, eastern regional directors of the powerful
CIO United Automobile Workers, at the UAW executive board meeting in
New York. Gerber stated:
“I am not a follower of John L. Lewis, but I
support the legitimate wage demands of any groups of American
workers. The miners should not be sabotaged by any organization and
when they are sabotaged by a CIO Council, as was done by the New York
Council, I feel ashamed.” Kerrigan observed: “Apparently
some elements think unconditional surrender means unconditional
surrender by labor.”
* * *
Phone Strike Vote
A huge overflow joint mass meeting of New York City’s
organized local and long distance telephone operators last week voted
unanimously to file a 30-day strike notice with the NLRB. This vote
followed a WLB decision granting only a $3 weekly wage increase after
the telephone companies agreed to $4 and a special WLB panel
recommended the full $5 demanded by the unions.
So aroused were the members of Local 101, Federation of Long Lines
Telephone Operators, and the local New York Telephone Traffic
Employees Association, that the leaders had difficulty persuading the
workers not to strike immediately, but to follow the procedure under
the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act. Many militant young women
operators took the floor amid cheers and applause to urge “an
immediate strike, starting right away.”
These operators, who are making wages as low as $20 a week, had
been stalled by the WLB for over 2 years. They evidently mean
business. The WLB has announced that it will render a decision this
week on the petition of the unions for a reconsideration of its $3
wage award.
* * *
Textile Strike Vote
Over 100,000 cotton-rayon textile workers, member of the CIO
Textile Workers Union, will take a strike vote in 150 Southern mills
on March 18. The announcement of this largest strike vote of any CIO
union during the war was made by Emil Rieve, the TWU’s
international president, on March 8.
This is a sequel to the recent decision of the TWU Executive
Council revoking the no-strike pledge for this large section of the
exploited textile workers, and the resignation of Rieve from the WLB.
The WLB after 19 month’s of stalling released “recommendations”
– not yet approved by the Economic Stabilization Administration
– granting meager “fringe” increases and a 55¢ an
hour minimum wage. The union had demanded a 10¢ hourly general wage
increase and a 65¢ minimum wage.
* * *
Lockout in Detroit
The latest union-busting corporation provocation against UAW
locals in Detroit is the firing of 35 officers and shop stewards and
the “disciplinary” layoff for one week of 140 workers, at
the Thompson Products plant for alleged responsibility for a strike
10 days previously. Thompson Products is headed by Frederick
Crawford, former President of the National Association of
Manufacturers and a leading open-shopper.
The UAW-CIO international executive board, meeting in New York,
when informed of this move to smash the Thompson Products Detroit
local, declared the firings and lay-offs a lockout by the company and
stated that unless all workers are reinstated plant operations will
not be resumed. The board also called on Roosevelt to “seize”
the plant.
* * *
Where Was PAC?
The lead editorial in the February 28 Midwest Labor World,
official organ of the St. Louis Joint Council, United Retail,
Wholesale and Department Store Employees, CIO, asks the question
“WHERE WAS PAC?” during the height of the Roosevelt-brass
hat campaign to put over the forced labor bill.
“There is a phase to the labor draft fight that
will surprise many workers. It is a fact that up to the time this was
written, after weeks of struggle in Congress by CIO, AFL, the miners
and the railroad brotherhoods, PAC – the political arm of CIO –
was silent. They have money, organization and paid spokesmen. Why
weren’t they used? The millions of workers who supported PAC
with their dollars are due an explanation of why the bureaucrats of
this organization sat on their expensive hind ends when labor’s
liberties were at stake.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>UAW-CIO International Board Meets<br>
as Auto Crisis Grows</h1>
<h3>(17 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_11" target="new">Vol. IX No. 11</a>, 17 March 1945, pp. 1 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">As Detroit shook with the mightiest auto strike wave since Pearl Harbor, the CIO United Automobile Workers’ International Executive Board hastened into a three-day special session last week at the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. The frightened and hard-pressed UAW leaders faced a crisis of major proportions.</p>
<p>This acute crisis resulted from events on both the national labor scene and in the industry. Roosevelt’s War Labor Board had just placed its seal of approval on the wage-freezing Little Steel Formula. Over 500,000 General Motors and Chrysler workers were denied long-sought general wage increases and were granted instead a few picayune concessions. <strong>Business Week</strong>, a leading organ of Big Business, crowed: “CIO’s United Auto Workers gains very little.”</p>
<p>On top of these blows came a concerted, savage campaign of corporation provocations in the plants designed to cripple the most militant UAW locals. Against this assault on their organizations, over 40,000 Detroit auto workers had gone on strike in defiance of their own national leaders and the no-strike surrender policy.</p>
<p>This opposition and pressure of the ranks was reflected in the first wartime division within the UAW executive board over a major policy question. That was the question of the War Labor Board, whose pro-corporation actions had exasperated the auto workers to widespread revolt.</p>
<p>The minority of the UAW board, which opposed the idea of withdrawing the labor members from the WLB, was led by R.J. Thomas, President,. and George. Addes, Secretary-Treasurer. The majority, which renewed a recommendation passed originally several weeks ago for withdrawal of the CIO members from the WLB, was headed by Walter Reuther, a vice-president.<br>
</p>
<h4>Basic Agreement</h4>
<p class="fst">An examination of the opposing position, however, reveals that their differences are minor compared to their essential agreement. Both groups agreed that the WLB as now constituted and functioning is a detriment to labor. Both condemned corporation provocations. Thomas declared, “Chrysler Corp. accepts unions in the same way an individual accepts smallpox.” But both proposed a continuation of some form of tripartite government compulsory arbitration board and enforcement of the no-strike policy.</p>
<p>Thomas, who had just returned from the London World Labor Congress more inflated than ever and more closely tied to government policy, voiced the position of the minority. In a press interview, he opined that “at first” the WLB did a “splendid job.” But then the WLB members just got “too busy to know what is going on.”</p>
<p>The whole trouble lay in the four “public” members. “I think all the public members of the WLB should resign to give the President an opportunity to appoint new public members who are unbiased.” Thomas gave no assurances that the new Roosevelt appointees would be more “unbiased” or less “busy” than the old.</p>
<p>But he opposed scuttling the WLB as such by withdrawal of the labor members – because then “there would be no means for adjusting grievances.” Thomas just closed his eyes to the method of direct and independent collective bargaining with the employers, through which all the major union gains have been secured and maintained.</p>
<p>Reuther and his followers had no fundamental disagreement with the Thomas-Addes group. They wished, however, to ride the crest of the auto workers’ dissatisfaction while achieving the same aims as the executive board minority. Their resolution called for resignation of the CIO members from the WLB and urged Roosevelt, who founded the WLB and dictates its policy, to replace the WLB “with a new tripartite agency, representing labor, management and Government, which shall have full authority to grant labor equity.”<br>
</p>
<h4>A New WLB</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>However, the UAW board carefully refrained from withdrawing its own representatives front the WLB. Such an action, like the miners’ withdrawal from the National Defense Mediation Board in 1941, would have toppled the WLB. The Reutherites were interested in a verbal gesture, not effective action.</em></p>
<p>Moreover, though the mechanics of achieving it would be slightly different, Reuther’s proposed “new” compulsory arbitration board would be identical with a WLB reconstituted along the lines proposed by Thomas. It would have the same labor and corporation members. It would merely replace one set of Roosevelt’s “public” members, for another set of “unbiased” stooges.</p>
<p>Its “authority to grant labor equity” would not be increased – because the very purpose of such boards is to frustrate the demands of the workers. In fact, a “new” arbitration board, differing only in name from the old but free from the latter’s tarnished reputation, might be even more effective in curbing the workers and enforcing the wage-freeze.</p>
<p>And even while seemingly attacking the WLB, Reuther sought to cover up for his own bankrupt policy of dependence upon it. As the UAW’s GM Division Director, Reuther hailed the WLB’s GM decision, denying all major demands of the union, as representing “substantial contract gains ... lays the basis for dealing with basic economic problems.” Actually, as <strong>Business Week</strong> approvingly reported, the WLB granted only a few fifth-rate concessions – after, stalling 18 months. The only wage concession was a slight boost in the night- shift premium at a time when “third-shift operations are currently greatly reduced.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt’s Reply</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>On the very day the UAW heads were calling upon Roosevelt for a reconstituted war labor hoard, he gave them his contemptuous reply. He announced his appointment of WLB Vice-Chairman Taylor, author of the Little Steel Formula and main target of the CIO attack, as the new WLB Chairman to replace Davis, who was promoted for his wage-freezing services to Director of Economic Stabilization.</em></p>
<p>The real program of the UAW tops, to stifle all independent struggle of the ranks, was expressed by the executive board’s action against the leaders of the 10-day Chrysler strike. The local leaders of this struggle to defend the Detroit Chrysler union against corporation assault were “severely condemned.” They would have been expelled and a receiver-dictator appointed over the local, as happened in previous cases, except that the UAW heads did not dare take such a step in the face of the anger of the Detroit auto workers.</p>
<p>In themselves, the board’s decisions were deceptive and meaningless. But the fact that the gesture against the WLB was made and that a division was provoked in the Board indicates the tremendous opposition of the ranks and the wide cleavage between, them and the leadership.</p>
<p>The crisis within the UAW, however, cannot be resolved under the present program and leadership. That leadership is utterly cowardly and bankrupt. Only a fighting leadership. from the ranks, committed to a militant program, can beat off the corporation attacks.</p>
<p><em>One group alone today offers the program and leadership required. That is the Rank and File caucus which has led the fight for revocation of the no-strike pledge, withdrawal of labor support from the WLB, a rising scale of wages to meet rising prices, and the building of an independent labor party. With such a program labor, including the auto workers, will no longer be reduced to whining before capitalist government agents for crumbs. Only with such a program will labor march forward to new gains.</em></p>
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</body> |
Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Art Preis
UAW-CIO International Board Meets
as Auto Crisis Grows
(17 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 11, 17 March 1945, pp. 1 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
As Detroit shook with the mightiest auto strike wave since Pearl Harbor, the CIO United Automobile Workers’ International Executive Board hastened into a three-day special session last week at the Hotel McAlpin, New York City. The frightened and hard-pressed UAW leaders faced a crisis of major proportions.
This acute crisis resulted from events on both the national labor scene and in the industry. Roosevelt’s War Labor Board had just placed its seal of approval on the wage-freezing Little Steel Formula. Over 500,000 General Motors and Chrysler workers were denied long-sought general wage increases and were granted instead a few picayune concessions. Business Week, a leading organ of Big Business, crowed: “CIO’s United Auto Workers gains very little.”
On top of these blows came a concerted, savage campaign of corporation provocations in the plants designed to cripple the most militant UAW locals. Against this assault on their organizations, over 40,000 Detroit auto workers had gone on strike in defiance of their own national leaders and the no-strike surrender policy.
This opposition and pressure of the ranks was reflected in the first wartime division within the UAW executive board over a major policy question. That was the question of the War Labor Board, whose pro-corporation actions had exasperated the auto workers to widespread revolt.
The minority of the UAW board, which opposed the idea of withdrawing the labor members from the WLB, was led by R.J. Thomas, President,. and George. Addes, Secretary-Treasurer. The majority, which renewed a recommendation passed originally several weeks ago for withdrawal of the CIO members from the WLB, was headed by Walter Reuther, a vice-president.
Basic Agreement
An examination of the opposing position, however, reveals that their differences are minor compared to their essential agreement. Both groups agreed that the WLB as now constituted and functioning is a detriment to labor. Both condemned corporation provocations. Thomas declared, “Chrysler Corp. accepts unions in the same way an individual accepts smallpox.” But both proposed a continuation of some form of tripartite government compulsory arbitration board and enforcement of the no-strike policy.
Thomas, who had just returned from the London World Labor Congress more inflated than ever and more closely tied to government policy, voiced the position of the minority. In a press interview, he opined that “at first” the WLB did a “splendid job.” But then the WLB members just got “too busy to know what is going on.”
The whole trouble lay in the four “public” members. “I think all the public members of the WLB should resign to give the President an opportunity to appoint new public members who are unbiased.” Thomas gave no assurances that the new Roosevelt appointees would be more “unbiased” or less “busy” than the old.
But he opposed scuttling the WLB as such by withdrawal of the labor members – because then “there would be no means for adjusting grievances.” Thomas just closed his eyes to the method of direct and independent collective bargaining with the employers, through which all the major union gains have been secured and maintained.
Reuther and his followers had no fundamental disagreement with the Thomas-Addes group. They wished, however, to ride the crest of the auto workers’ dissatisfaction while achieving the same aims as the executive board minority. Their resolution called for resignation of the CIO members from the WLB and urged Roosevelt, who founded the WLB and dictates its policy, to replace the WLB “with a new tripartite agency, representing labor, management and Government, which shall have full authority to grant labor equity.”
A New WLB
However, the UAW board carefully refrained from withdrawing its own representatives front the WLB. Such an action, like the miners’ withdrawal from the National Defense Mediation Board in 1941, would have toppled the WLB. The Reutherites were interested in a verbal gesture, not effective action.
Moreover, though the mechanics of achieving it would be slightly different, Reuther’s proposed “new” compulsory arbitration board would be identical with a WLB reconstituted along the lines proposed by Thomas. It would have the same labor and corporation members. It would merely replace one set of Roosevelt’s “public” members, for another set of “unbiased” stooges.
Its “authority to grant labor equity” would not be increased – because the very purpose of such boards is to frustrate the demands of the workers. In fact, a “new” arbitration board, differing only in name from the old but free from the latter’s tarnished reputation, might be even more effective in curbing the workers and enforcing the wage-freeze.
And even while seemingly attacking the WLB, Reuther sought to cover up for his own bankrupt policy of dependence upon it. As the UAW’s GM Division Director, Reuther hailed the WLB’s GM decision, denying all major demands of the union, as representing “substantial contract gains ... lays the basis for dealing with basic economic problems.” Actually, as Business Week approvingly reported, the WLB granted only a few fifth-rate concessions – after, stalling 18 months. The only wage concession was a slight boost in the night- shift premium at a time when “third-shift operations are currently greatly reduced.”
Roosevelt’s Reply
On the very day the UAW heads were calling upon Roosevelt for a reconstituted war labor hoard, he gave them his contemptuous reply. He announced his appointment of WLB Vice-Chairman Taylor, author of the Little Steel Formula and main target of the CIO attack, as the new WLB Chairman to replace Davis, who was promoted for his wage-freezing services to Director of Economic Stabilization.
The real program of the UAW tops, to stifle all independent struggle of the ranks, was expressed by the executive board’s action against the leaders of the 10-day Chrysler strike. The local leaders of this struggle to defend the Detroit Chrysler union against corporation assault were “severely condemned.” They would have been expelled and a receiver-dictator appointed over the local, as happened in previous cases, except that the UAW heads did not dare take such a step in the face of the anger of the Detroit auto workers.
In themselves, the board’s decisions were deceptive and meaningless. But the fact that the gesture against the WLB was made and that a division was provoked in the Board indicates the tremendous opposition of the ranks and the wide cleavage between, them and the leadership.
The crisis within the UAW, however, cannot be resolved under the present program and leadership. That leadership is utterly cowardly and bankrupt. Only a fighting leadership. from the ranks, committed to a militant program, can beat off the corporation attacks.
One group alone today offers the program and leadership required. That is the Rank and File caucus which has led the fight for revocation of the no-strike pledge, withdrawal of labor support from the WLB, a rising scale of wages to meet rising prices, and the building of an independent labor party. With such a program labor, including the auto workers, will no longer be reduced to whining before capitalist government agents for crumbs. Only with such a program will labor march forward to new gains.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Toledo Auto Strike Looms</h1>
<h4>Men Flocking into Chevrolet Union</h4>
<h3>(April 1935)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_17" target="new">Vol. I No. 17</a>, 13 April 1935, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<h4>BULLETIN</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>TOLEDO, O.</strong>, April 9. – Despite instructions from the A.F. of L. to the workers not to participate in the election at the Chevrolet plant in Toledo arranged by the Auto Labor Board, 1,326 men voted for the A.F. of L. and only 508 voted for no affiliation. Only a handful failed to vote at all. Organization sentiment is running high, and the workers are flocking into the Federal union. Action talk is heard everywhere and a strike appears likely in the immediate future.</p>
<hr class="section" size="1" noshade="">
<p class="fst"><strong>TOLEDO, O.</strong>, April 9. – Organization of the production and skilled and office workers in the large Toledo plant of the Chevrolet Motor Corp. is proceeding rapidly following two jammed and enthusiastic mass meetings conducted by the Toledo local of the United Automobile Workers Federal Labor Union.</p>
<p>Over 900 workers have attended the meetings and it is expected that all will be signed up in the union by this Saturday. This is one of the most successful attempts which has been made to unionize a plant of the giant General Motors Corp.</p>
<p>As an evidence of the growing progressiveness in the union, the colored sweepers in the Chevrolet plant were brought into the Federal Auto Union along with the fellow-white workers.</p>
<p>Over 400 of the new union men appeared today in the plant this morning wearing their red union buttons for April. Hundreds of workers from the Willys-Overland plant, are likewise joining the Federal Auto union. With the addition of these two major corporations, the entire auto parts and production industry of Toledo, excepting the Champion Spark Plug Corp., will be unionized.</p>
<p>The rush to the genuine union has followed the calling of an election, by the Detroit Auto Labor Board, in the Chevrolet and Willys-Overland plants on April 9, for the supposed purpose of determining which group the workers wish to represent them in collective bargaining. This election was engineered by officials of the two plants, which up until a few weeks ago were non-union, and the Auto labor Board, in an effort to foist company unionism upon the workers. The real union has publicly repudiated these elections, which it did not call for, and has flatly stated that its members will not participate in them nor abide by their results.</p>
<p>This fake maneuvering on the part of the companies has served as a boomerang against the bosses, because it angered the workers and drove them voluntarily into the federal union. Terrific speed-up, differentials in wages and unbearable working conditions have aided to the workers’ desire for genuine organization.</p>
<p>Jim Roland, Chevrolet employee, who is famous for his “one-man picket line” on the Chevrolet plant last June whereby he compelled the company to reinstate him after he had been fired for joining the union, is the acting chairman of the Chevrolet shop section of the union. Among the union members who have taken an active part in organizing these key plants have been several Workers Party members.</p>
<p>Organization of the Toledo Chevrolet plant is of major importance for the entire motor industry, as this plant produces all the transmission parts for the Chevrolet Corp. Demands for a 6 hour day, 30-hour week, union recognition and wage increases are being drawn up to be presented to the Chevrolet company. It is very probable that the intensive union drive is the prelude to a strike which will break in the immediate future.</p>
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Art Preis
Toledo Auto Strike Looms
Men Flocking into Chevrolet Union
(April 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 17, 13 April 1935, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
BULLETIN
TOLEDO, O., April 9. – Despite instructions from the A.F. of L. to the workers not to participate in the election at the Chevrolet plant in Toledo arranged by the Auto Labor Board, 1,326 men voted for the A.F. of L. and only 508 voted for no affiliation. Only a handful failed to vote at all. Organization sentiment is running high, and the workers are flocking into the Federal union. Action talk is heard everywhere and a strike appears likely in the immediate future.
TOLEDO, O., April 9. – Organization of the production and skilled and office workers in the large Toledo plant of the Chevrolet Motor Corp. is proceeding rapidly following two jammed and enthusiastic mass meetings conducted by the Toledo local of the United Automobile Workers Federal Labor Union.
Over 900 workers have attended the meetings and it is expected that all will be signed up in the union by this Saturday. This is one of the most successful attempts which has been made to unionize a plant of the giant General Motors Corp.
As an evidence of the growing progressiveness in the union, the colored sweepers in the Chevrolet plant were brought into the Federal Auto Union along with the fellow-white workers.
Over 400 of the new union men appeared today in the plant this morning wearing their red union buttons for April. Hundreds of workers from the Willys-Overland plant, are likewise joining the Federal Auto union. With the addition of these two major corporations, the entire auto parts and production industry of Toledo, excepting the Champion Spark Plug Corp., will be unionized.
The rush to the genuine union has followed the calling of an election, by the Detroit Auto Labor Board, in the Chevrolet and Willys-Overland plants on April 9, for the supposed purpose of determining which group the workers wish to represent them in collective bargaining. This election was engineered by officials of the two plants, which up until a few weeks ago were non-union, and the Auto labor Board, in an effort to foist company unionism upon the workers. The real union has publicly repudiated these elections, which it did not call for, and has flatly stated that its members will not participate in them nor abide by their results.
This fake maneuvering on the part of the companies has served as a boomerang against the bosses, because it angered the workers and drove them voluntarily into the federal union. Terrific speed-up, differentials in wages and unbearable working conditions have aided to the workers’ desire for genuine organization.
Jim Roland, Chevrolet employee, who is famous for his “one-man picket line” on the Chevrolet plant last June whereby he compelled the company to reinstate him after he had been fired for joining the union, is the acting chairman of the Chevrolet shop section of the union. Among the union members who have taken an active part in organizing these key plants have been several Workers Party members.
Organization of the Toledo Chevrolet plant is of major importance for the entire motor industry, as this plant produces all the transmission parts for the Chevrolet Corp. Demands for a 6 hour day, 30-hour week, union recognition and wage increases are being drawn up to be presented to the Chevrolet company. It is very probable that the intensive union drive is the prelude to a strike which will break in the immediate future.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h4>Dobbs and Carlson Address Nation in Broadcasts from SWP Convention</h4>
<h1>Call for a Workers and Farmers Government<br>
As Only Answer to Wall Street War-Makers</h1>
<h4>Inspiring Five-Day Gathering Opens<br>
Presidential Campaign Of Socialist Workers Party</h4>
<h3>(6 July 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_28" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 28</a>, 12 July 1948, pp. 1 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><b>NEW YORK, July 6 – Cheering to the echo the choice of Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson as first Trotskyist candidates for U. S. President and Vice-President, the 13th National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party summoned the American people to join with the SWP in a forward march to a Workers and Farmers Government and socialism.</b></p>
<p><i>In an atmosphere charged with confidence and enthusiasm, the delegates, who sat in session from July 1 to 5 at the Irving Plaza Hall here, ratified the nominations of Dobbs and Carlson and launched a national election campaign for revolutionary socialism that recalls the day of Eugene Victor Debs.</i></p>
<p><i>Climaxing and high-pointing this inspiring convention, were three national radio broadcasts from the sessions. They included the keynote speech over ABC of James P. Cannon, SWP National Secretary and 40-year veteran of the American class struggle, and the acceptance speeches of Comrades Dobbs and Carlson over Mutual and ABC. Another address is being delivered by Dobbs tonight over the NBC network.</i><br>
</p>
<h4>Powerful Appeals</h4>
<p class="fst">These radio addresses are unquestionably the most powerful socialist appeals that have ever been made to the American working class, the working farmers and Negro people. Never has such a propaganda blow, been struck in this country for the socialist cause. That millions of people heard the SWP call is shown by the flood of letters and postcards that hit the SWP National Headquarters in the first post-holiday mail deliveries this morning.</p>
<p>Thus, the SWP, convention, it is already clear, marks a turn of the tide in the fight for the socialist emancipation of the American masses. The first great upsurge began in 1904 under the dynamic leadership of Debs. It took another brief leap forward in the early twenties with the pioneer Communist movement inspired by Lenin and Trotsky, before it was corrupted and betrayed by Stalinism. Now, after many setbacks, the SWP election campaign marks the socialist resurgence on a higher plane.</p>
<p>After 20 years of uphill battling as a small and isolated group, the Socialist Workers Party celebrated its coming of age at this convention. It revealed itself united in principle, tested in action, rooted in the working masses of America. <i>From first to last, this convention showed that the Trotskyist movement – the authentic heir of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Debs and Haywood – is prepared to take its rightful place as a national political force in America.</i></p>
<p>That fact is attested to not only by the SWP national election campaign but by the SWP’s demonstrated ability to grapple with the most complex problems cf American life and to give the most realistic and scientific answers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Negro Discussion</h4>
<p class="fst">It was no accident that the same convention which nominated the first national candidates of the SWP also adopted, after a full day’s discussion, a rounded resolution on the Negro Struggle that makes the fight for Negro rights a front-line task of American Trotskyism.</p>
<p>Every major question of international and national political life came in for full-scale reports and discussion. Prior to the convention, drafts of resolutions had gone out to the membership for study. These covered the crisis of world capitalism; American imperialism and its war preparations; the militarization of the U.S. and the fight against the coming imperialist war; the struggle for the independence of the American labor movement and the building of the labor party; the political developments of the election year and the Wallace movement.</p>
<p>To all of these questions, the delegates from more than 30 cities gave the most serious attention, illuminating each with the light of Marxist analysis. <i>The vigorous and intelligent discussion from the floor revealed a party in which the decisive voice is the membership – a membership trained in the labor struggle and alert to safeguard the principles of the Marxist party.</i><br>
</p>
<h4>Fighting Campaign</h4>
<p class="fst">They showed they could not only analyze but act. The nomination of presidential candidates and adoption of a fighting election platform were accompanied by decisions for conducting an election campaign such as no party of comparable size has every undertaken in this country.</p>
<p>First came the decision to raise an initial $25,000 Election Campaign and Party Building Fund. This decision was adopted with tremendous enthusiasm on the second day of the convention.</p>
<p>The convention also adopted a report by Election Campaign Manager George Clarke outlining plans for election activities on a most ambitious scale. These will include national tours by Dobbs and Carlson, mass meetings, radio programs, street corner rallies, addresses before public forums and social affairs. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of election literature will be distributed.</p>
<p><i>An important part of the campaign will be a special <b>Militant</b> subscription campaign, to secure, thousands of new regular readers of our weekly paper. Workers will be urged to subscribe during the election campaign for 15 issues of <b>The Militant</b> for 25 cents.</i><br>
</p>
<h4>Party Platform</h4>
<p class="fst">The adoption of the election platform was a key convention action. This platform, as the delegates pointed out, is not window-dressing. The SWP means business.</p>
<p>Arthur Burch, who introduced the draft platform prepared by the National Committee, pointed cut:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Above all, this is a revolutionary document that calls for nothing less than the mobilization of the American people for the coming socialist revolution. Our Platform calls for a Workers and Farmers Government – a socialist government.”</p>
<p class="fst">The ratification of the party’s presidential candidates previously nominated by the National Committee, followed adoption of the platform. United on program and principle, the convention was unanimous in endorsing by tremendous ovation Farrell Dobbs for President and Grace Carlson for Vice-President.</p>
<p>Murray Weiss of Los Angeles had the honor of placing Dobbs’ name in nomination. He stated that “we are a party founded on principle and those who take these principles seriously.” Dobbs, he said, “is a symbol of our ideas and way of life, whose whole adult life has been devoted to the emancipating movement of socialism, a man tested in life on the field of action of the labor struggle.”</p>
<p>Grace Carlson’s name was put in nomination by Genora Dollinger, Flint, leader of the Women’s Brigade in the 1937 GM sitdown. Comrade Carlson, she said, has held the Trotskyist banner “firm in her hands, even in the face of the greatest intimidation by the most powerful imperialist government in the whole world.” Grace had the opportunity to make “a brilliant mark” in the educational and scientific world, the speaker said, but “all these honors and posts she gladly forsook for the greater but more difficult road of the socialist revolution.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Keynote Address</h4>
<p class="fst">When Comrade Cannon, founder of the American Trotskyist movement and its leading figure since 1928, stepped to the ABC mikes before the packed convention hall and amid ear-shattering cheers of the audience to deliver his convention keynote speech to America, everyone felt he was witnessing history in the making.</p>
<p>He spoke of the <i>Two Americas</i>, the America of the imperialists, “of the little clique of capitalists, landlords and militarists” who exploit the American people while “simultaneously threatening and terrifying the world.” Against them is “the other America which we, the Socialist Workers Party, by our program, represent – the America of the workers and farmers.” He concluded with the ringing words: “We, the National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, summon our America to her great world destiny – not as dominator, oppressor and exploiter, but as the liberator of the world.”</p>
<p>The acceptance speeches of Dobbs and Carlson on Friday night over the Mutual network and on Saturday afternoon over ABC continued and developed the keynote struck by Cannon. In his first address, Dobbs described the basic plank of the Socialist Workers Party, <i>For a Workers and Farmers Government</i>, as the sole realistic answer to the capitalist war program. Grace Carlson, speaking on <i>The Only Road to Peace</i>, reminded American mothers and fathers of the promises made them by Wilson and Roosevelt and their betrayals. “There is only one way to fight war,” she said, “that is, to do away with the capitalist system, which, breeds war, and replace it with an international socialist society.” (Text of two speeches on Page 4).<br>
</p>
<h4>ABC Addresses</h4>
<p class="fst">Their second addresses, over ABC on Saturday afternoon, continued to explain the basic issues. Dobbs spoke on <i>Socialism or Barbarism</i>, tearing apart the lie that American imperialism plans war against the Soviet Union to destroy “totalitarianism.” Stalinism “will be removed, not through capitalist wars of conquest, but by the unpostponable struggle against capitalism itself.”</p>
<p>Addressing herself to the most oppressed sections of the population, the Negro people in particular, Grace Carlson, spoke on <i>The Struggle for Civil Rights</i>, concluding with a direct message to the Negroes of the Deep South, “the most oppressed, the most exploited, the most humiliated” people in the land. “We want you to know, brothers and sisters,” she said, “that for us there can be no talk of freedom in the United Statqs until you are free.”</p>
<p>The final address in the radio series, tonight over NBC, will be Dobb’s speech on <i>Why Labor Needs Its Own Party</i>. In this speech, he will expose the fakery of the “anti-war” program of the millionaire Wallace, and tell why the American labor movement must break with the capitalist parties and form its own class party. (Next week’s <b>Militant</b> will publish the last three radio speeches.)</p>
<p>Convention discussion on the election campaign was concluded by National Secretary Cannon’s report on <i>Election Policy and Party Perspectives</i>.<br>
</p>
<h4>Our Concept</h4>
<p class="fst"><i>“Our concept is not a routine Socialist Labor Party type of campaign,” he said, “but a fighting campaign, an aggressive, slugging campaign against all other parties. We must exploit all legal possibilities for propaganda.” In this connection, he spoke of the need for funds for radio time, hailing the convention broadcasts in which “the revolutionary program for the first time is flaring out over the radio.”</i></p>
<p>J. Lyons, of Chicago, presented a minority report, with equal time, criticizing the party’s election policy. Representing a minority of the Chicago local, Lyons attacked the party’s characterization of the Wallace movement as a “capitalist third party” and called it instead a “step in the direction of a labor party.” After a thorough discussion, the minority resolution was put to a vote, and received three votes, with four abstentions. Cannon’s report was adopted.</p>
<p>In keeping with the internationalism of the Trotskyist program, the first report on the convention agenda was on the international situation and the world Trotskyist movement.<br>
</p>
<h4>International Report</h4>
<p class="fst">M. Stein, SWP National Organization Secretary, gave information on the recent World Congress of the Fourth International, which was attended by delegates from 22 parties in 19 countries on five continents. He deplored the fact that the SWP, because of Voorhees Act, was forced to disaffiliate from the Fourth International, but declared the party’s firm ideological solidarity with it.</p>
<p>“At a time when the American capitalist class tries to purge itself of all isolationism,” he said, “it seeks to impose isolationism on the working class and to destroy working class internationalism.” “But,” he said, “we rejoice at the successful conclusion of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International.” The SWP convention unanimously approved Comrade Stein’s report.</p>
<p>A thoroughgoing discussion was held on the key political resolution: <i>The Militarization of the USA and the Tasks of the Socialist Workers Party</i>.</p>
<p>William F. Warde, National Educational Director, delivered the report on this basic document. This resolution, he pointed out, analyzer the insoluble contradictions facing American capitalism, which is resting on the shaky foundations of world capitalism in mortal crisis. “The temporary postponement of the maturing capitalist crisis, purchased by the Marshall Plan, will be paid for later by the accumulation of conditions for an even more catastrophic military or economic explosion.”</p>
<p>In the discussion, B. Lenz and D. Weiss of New York criticized the resolution for what they claimed was a failure to put forward adequately the SWP’s program for trade union control of military training as an answer to capitalist conscription. The convention rejected their amendment on the grounds that it made it mandatory for the party to advance this program to front position without regard to its immediate effectiveness. The convention left it up to the National Committee to determine when and how to advance this program most effectively.</p>
<p><i>The resolution on the Negro Question evoked a truly inspiring discussion. J. Meyer gave a brilliant summation of the party’s position on the Negro question that won a tremendous ovation. (This report is summarized on Page 5). He gave the historical background of the Negro struggle and showed how the Negro people are the greatest allies of the working class in the battle for socialism.</i></p>
<p>After his report, the convention, with Negro delegates taking the lead, discussed the resolution with great earnestness and animation. The contributions of the Negro delegates showed that the SWP has developed a cadre of Negro Marxists who are going to play a decisive role in the struggle for Negro freedom and the socialist emancipation of labor.</p>
<p>The convention approved the report of Comrade Meyer, adopted the basic line of the resolution and voted to open a six-months discussion to educate and train the party membership for the great tasks ahead in the Negro struggle.<br>
</p>
<h4>Trade Union Report</h4>
<p class="fst"><i>A vital part of the convention discussion centered on the work of the Trotskyist militants in the trade union movement. The report on the trade union resolution was delivered by E.R. Frank, active for many years in the industrial unions and Acting Editor of <b>The Militant</b>.</i></p>
<p>He pointed out that just as the crisis of 1929 and the betrayals of the AFL craft leaders produced the CIO industrial union movement, “just as surely, just as inevitably, the growing economic hardships and the encroachments of a creeping military dictatorship plus the abject surrender, the inadequacy, the helplessness and betrayal of the new CIO bureaucracy are right now working, germinating, producing the forces that will go into the making and eventual emergence of a new type of leadership in the labor union movement.”</p>
<p>The floor discussion centered on the question of how to build a genuine left-wing on a class struggle program in the trade unions. Numerous trade unionists’ spoke of their experiences in auto, steel, rubber and other basic industries on the question of building the left wing, pointing cut that a left-wing movement will grow out of the struggles within the labor movement from a crystallization of the most militant and progressive forces against the bureaucracy.</p>
<p>The final action of the convention was to close the discussion on unity negotiations with the Schactmanite [<i>sic!</i>] Workers Party, which split from the SWP in 1940. This group in 1944 opened attempts to penetrate the SWP with a “unity” maneuver. Paul Stevens, who gave the report, described how this maneuver, was designed to split the SWP and how it finally resulted in a complete exposure of the unprincipled politics of the petty-bourgeois WP and a major split in its own ranks.</p>
<p>A leader of the former Johnson-Forrest tendency which split from the WP and returned to the SWP told the convention that since rejoining the SWP the Johnson-Forrest group was “overwhelmed” by the revolutionary dynamism inside the SWP and would yield first place to none in their devotion and work for the party.</p>
<p>When the convention concluded on schedule yesterday afternoon, every delegate and visitor felt imbued with the spirit of revolutionary action. The walls shook as they sang <i>Solidarity</i>, <i>We Shall Not Be Moved</i> and the workers’ international battle-song <i>The International</i>.</p>
<p>The delegates – 74% of them active trade unionists, young, bold and permeated with the will to revolutionary socialism – are going forth to their shops, factories and homes to put the Socialist Workers Party “on the map” in the campaign for Dobbs and Carlson.</p>
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Art Preis
Dobbs and Carlson Address Nation in Broadcasts from SWP Convention
Call for a Workers and Farmers Government
As Only Answer to Wall Street War-Makers
Inspiring Five-Day Gathering Opens
Presidential Campaign Of Socialist Workers Party
(6 July 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 28, 12 July 1948, pp. 1 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
NEW YORK, July 6 – Cheering to the echo the choice of Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carlson as first Trotskyist candidates for U. S. President and Vice-President, the 13th National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party summoned the American people to join with the SWP in a forward march to a Workers and Farmers Government and socialism.
In an atmosphere charged with confidence and enthusiasm, the delegates, who sat in session from July 1 to 5 at the Irving Plaza Hall here, ratified the nominations of Dobbs and Carlson and launched a national election campaign for revolutionary socialism that recalls the day of Eugene Victor Debs.
Climaxing and high-pointing this inspiring convention, were three national radio broadcasts from the sessions. They included the keynote speech over ABC of James P. Cannon, SWP National Secretary and 40-year veteran of the American class struggle, and the acceptance speeches of Comrades Dobbs and Carlson over Mutual and ABC. Another address is being delivered by Dobbs tonight over the NBC network.
Powerful Appeals
These radio addresses are unquestionably the most powerful socialist appeals that have ever been made to the American working class, the working farmers and Negro people. Never has such a propaganda blow, been struck in this country for the socialist cause. That millions of people heard the SWP call is shown by the flood of letters and postcards that hit the SWP National Headquarters in the first post-holiday mail deliveries this morning.
Thus, the SWP, convention, it is already clear, marks a turn of the tide in the fight for the socialist emancipation of the American masses. The first great upsurge began in 1904 under the dynamic leadership of Debs. It took another brief leap forward in the early twenties with the pioneer Communist movement inspired by Lenin and Trotsky, before it was corrupted and betrayed by Stalinism. Now, after many setbacks, the SWP election campaign marks the socialist resurgence on a higher plane.
After 20 years of uphill battling as a small and isolated group, the Socialist Workers Party celebrated its coming of age at this convention. It revealed itself united in principle, tested in action, rooted in the working masses of America. From first to last, this convention showed that the Trotskyist movement – the authentic heir of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Debs and Haywood – is prepared to take its rightful place as a national political force in America.
That fact is attested to not only by the SWP national election campaign but by the SWP’s demonstrated ability to grapple with the most complex problems cf American life and to give the most realistic and scientific answers.
Negro Discussion
It was no accident that the same convention which nominated the first national candidates of the SWP also adopted, after a full day’s discussion, a rounded resolution on the Negro Struggle that makes the fight for Negro rights a front-line task of American Trotskyism.
Every major question of international and national political life came in for full-scale reports and discussion. Prior to the convention, drafts of resolutions had gone out to the membership for study. These covered the crisis of world capitalism; American imperialism and its war preparations; the militarization of the U.S. and the fight against the coming imperialist war; the struggle for the independence of the American labor movement and the building of the labor party; the political developments of the election year and the Wallace movement.
To all of these questions, the delegates from more than 30 cities gave the most serious attention, illuminating each with the light of Marxist analysis. The vigorous and intelligent discussion from the floor revealed a party in which the decisive voice is the membership – a membership trained in the labor struggle and alert to safeguard the principles of the Marxist party.
Fighting Campaign
They showed they could not only analyze but act. The nomination of presidential candidates and adoption of a fighting election platform were accompanied by decisions for conducting an election campaign such as no party of comparable size has every undertaken in this country.
First came the decision to raise an initial $25,000 Election Campaign and Party Building Fund. This decision was adopted with tremendous enthusiasm on the second day of the convention.
The convention also adopted a report by Election Campaign Manager George Clarke outlining plans for election activities on a most ambitious scale. These will include national tours by Dobbs and Carlson, mass meetings, radio programs, street corner rallies, addresses before public forums and social affairs. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of election literature will be distributed.
An important part of the campaign will be a special Militant subscription campaign, to secure, thousands of new regular readers of our weekly paper. Workers will be urged to subscribe during the election campaign for 15 issues of The Militant for 25 cents.
Party Platform
The adoption of the election platform was a key convention action. This platform, as the delegates pointed out, is not window-dressing. The SWP means business.
Arthur Burch, who introduced the draft platform prepared by the National Committee, pointed cut:
“Above all, this is a revolutionary document that calls for nothing less than the mobilization of the American people for the coming socialist revolution. Our Platform calls for a Workers and Farmers Government – a socialist government.”
The ratification of the party’s presidential candidates previously nominated by the National Committee, followed adoption of the platform. United on program and principle, the convention was unanimous in endorsing by tremendous ovation Farrell Dobbs for President and Grace Carlson for Vice-President.
Murray Weiss of Los Angeles had the honor of placing Dobbs’ name in nomination. He stated that “we are a party founded on principle and those who take these principles seriously.” Dobbs, he said, “is a symbol of our ideas and way of life, whose whole adult life has been devoted to the emancipating movement of socialism, a man tested in life on the field of action of the labor struggle.”
Grace Carlson’s name was put in nomination by Genora Dollinger, Flint, leader of the Women’s Brigade in the 1937 GM sitdown. Comrade Carlson, she said, has held the Trotskyist banner “firm in her hands, even in the face of the greatest intimidation by the most powerful imperialist government in the whole world.” Grace had the opportunity to make “a brilliant mark” in the educational and scientific world, the speaker said, but “all these honors and posts she gladly forsook for the greater but more difficult road of the socialist revolution.”
Keynote Address
When Comrade Cannon, founder of the American Trotskyist movement and its leading figure since 1928, stepped to the ABC mikes before the packed convention hall and amid ear-shattering cheers of the audience to deliver his convention keynote speech to America, everyone felt he was witnessing history in the making.
He spoke of the Two Americas, the America of the imperialists, “of the little clique of capitalists, landlords and militarists” who exploit the American people while “simultaneously threatening and terrifying the world.” Against them is “the other America which we, the Socialist Workers Party, by our program, represent – the America of the workers and farmers.” He concluded with the ringing words: “We, the National Convention of the Socialist Workers Party, summon our America to her great world destiny – not as dominator, oppressor and exploiter, but as the liberator of the world.”
The acceptance speeches of Dobbs and Carlson on Friday night over the Mutual network and on Saturday afternoon over ABC continued and developed the keynote struck by Cannon. In his first address, Dobbs described the basic plank of the Socialist Workers Party, For a Workers and Farmers Government, as the sole realistic answer to the capitalist war program. Grace Carlson, speaking on The Only Road to Peace, reminded American mothers and fathers of the promises made them by Wilson and Roosevelt and their betrayals. “There is only one way to fight war,” she said, “that is, to do away with the capitalist system, which, breeds war, and replace it with an international socialist society.” (Text of two speeches on Page 4).
ABC Addresses
Their second addresses, over ABC on Saturday afternoon, continued to explain the basic issues. Dobbs spoke on Socialism or Barbarism, tearing apart the lie that American imperialism plans war against the Soviet Union to destroy “totalitarianism.” Stalinism “will be removed, not through capitalist wars of conquest, but by the unpostponable struggle against capitalism itself.”
Addressing herself to the most oppressed sections of the population, the Negro people in particular, Grace Carlson, spoke on The Struggle for Civil Rights, concluding with a direct message to the Negroes of the Deep South, “the most oppressed, the most exploited, the most humiliated” people in the land. “We want you to know, brothers and sisters,” she said, “that for us there can be no talk of freedom in the United Statqs until you are free.”
The final address in the radio series, tonight over NBC, will be Dobb’s speech on Why Labor Needs Its Own Party. In this speech, he will expose the fakery of the “anti-war” program of the millionaire Wallace, and tell why the American labor movement must break with the capitalist parties and form its own class party. (Next week’s Militant will publish the last three radio speeches.)
Convention discussion on the election campaign was concluded by National Secretary Cannon’s report on Election Policy and Party Perspectives.
Our Concept
“Our concept is not a routine Socialist Labor Party type of campaign,” he said, “but a fighting campaign, an aggressive, slugging campaign against all other parties. We must exploit all legal possibilities for propaganda.” In this connection, he spoke of the need for funds for radio time, hailing the convention broadcasts in which “the revolutionary program for the first time is flaring out over the radio.”
J. Lyons, of Chicago, presented a minority report, with equal time, criticizing the party’s election policy. Representing a minority of the Chicago local, Lyons attacked the party’s characterization of the Wallace movement as a “capitalist third party” and called it instead a “step in the direction of a labor party.” After a thorough discussion, the minority resolution was put to a vote, and received three votes, with four abstentions. Cannon’s report was adopted.
In keeping with the internationalism of the Trotskyist program, the first report on the convention agenda was on the international situation and the world Trotskyist movement.
International Report
M. Stein, SWP National Organization Secretary, gave information on the recent World Congress of the Fourth International, which was attended by delegates from 22 parties in 19 countries on five continents. He deplored the fact that the SWP, because of Voorhees Act, was forced to disaffiliate from the Fourth International, but declared the party’s firm ideological solidarity with it.
“At a time when the American capitalist class tries to purge itself of all isolationism,” he said, “it seeks to impose isolationism on the working class and to destroy working class internationalism.” “But,” he said, “we rejoice at the successful conclusion of the Second World Congress of the Fourth International.” The SWP convention unanimously approved Comrade Stein’s report.
A thoroughgoing discussion was held on the key political resolution: The Militarization of the USA and the Tasks of the Socialist Workers Party.
William F. Warde, National Educational Director, delivered the report on this basic document. This resolution, he pointed out, analyzer the insoluble contradictions facing American capitalism, which is resting on the shaky foundations of world capitalism in mortal crisis. “The temporary postponement of the maturing capitalist crisis, purchased by the Marshall Plan, will be paid for later by the accumulation of conditions for an even more catastrophic military or economic explosion.”
In the discussion, B. Lenz and D. Weiss of New York criticized the resolution for what they claimed was a failure to put forward adequately the SWP’s program for trade union control of military training as an answer to capitalist conscription. The convention rejected their amendment on the grounds that it made it mandatory for the party to advance this program to front position without regard to its immediate effectiveness. The convention left it up to the National Committee to determine when and how to advance this program most effectively.
The resolution on the Negro Question evoked a truly inspiring discussion. J. Meyer gave a brilliant summation of the party’s position on the Negro question that won a tremendous ovation. (This report is summarized on Page 5). He gave the historical background of the Negro struggle and showed how the Negro people are the greatest allies of the working class in the battle for socialism.
After his report, the convention, with Negro delegates taking the lead, discussed the resolution with great earnestness and animation. The contributions of the Negro delegates showed that the SWP has developed a cadre of Negro Marxists who are going to play a decisive role in the struggle for Negro freedom and the socialist emancipation of labor.
The convention approved the report of Comrade Meyer, adopted the basic line of the resolution and voted to open a six-months discussion to educate and train the party membership for the great tasks ahead in the Negro struggle.
Trade Union Report
A vital part of the convention discussion centered on the work of the Trotskyist militants in the trade union movement. The report on the trade union resolution was delivered by E.R. Frank, active for many years in the industrial unions and Acting Editor of The Militant.
He pointed out that just as the crisis of 1929 and the betrayals of the AFL craft leaders produced the CIO industrial union movement, “just as surely, just as inevitably, the growing economic hardships and the encroachments of a creeping military dictatorship plus the abject surrender, the inadequacy, the helplessness and betrayal of the new CIO bureaucracy are right now working, germinating, producing the forces that will go into the making and eventual emergence of a new type of leadership in the labor union movement.”
The floor discussion centered on the question of how to build a genuine left-wing on a class struggle program in the trade unions. Numerous trade unionists’ spoke of their experiences in auto, steel, rubber and other basic industries on the question of building the left wing, pointing cut that a left-wing movement will grow out of the struggles within the labor movement from a crystallization of the most militant and progressive forces against the bureaucracy.
The final action of the convention was to close the discussion on unity negotiations with the Schactmanite [sic!] Workers Party, which split from the SWP in 1940. This group in 1944 opened attempts to penetrate the SWP with a “unity” maneuver. Paul Stevens, who gave the report, described how this maneuver, was designed to split the SWP and how it finally resulted in a complete exposure of the unprincipled politics of the petty-bourgeois WP and a major split in its own ranks.
A leader of the former Johnson-Forrest tendency which split from the WP and returned to the SWP told the convention that since rejoining the SWP the Johnson-Forrest group was “overwhelmed” by the revolutionary dynamism inside the SWP and would yield first place to none in their devotion and work for the party.
When the convention concluded on schedule yesterday afternoon, every delegate and visitor felt imbued with the spirit of revolutionary action. The walls shook as they sang Solidarity, We Shall Not Be Moved and the workers’ international battle-song The International.
The delegates – 74% of them active trade unionists, young, bold and permeated with the will to revolutionary socialism – are going forth to their shops, factories and homes to put the Socialist Workers Party “on the map” in the campaign for Dobbs and Carlson.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>UAW Convention Marks<br>
New Stage for Auto Union</h1>
<h3>(30 March 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_14" target="new">Vol. X No. 14</a>, 6 April 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., March 30. – Some 1,877 delegates to the 10th National Convention of the CIO United Automobile Workers this afternoon adjourned their eight days of tumultuous deliberations.</p>
<p>This convention recorded, though in a distorted and unclear form, two far-reaching achievements. It approved and vindicated the bitter strike and advanced program of the General Motors workers. And again indirectly, it chalked up an important triumph of program over factional, machine politics.</p>
<p>Not a single basic issue was thrashed out openly on the convention floor. Nevertheless, the issues of the General Motors strike and the program it advanced were implicit in the central and dominant conflict of the convention, the battle for the UAW presidency between GM strike leader Walter Reuther and the incumbent R.J. Thomas.<br>
</p>
<h4>Issues Implicit</h4>
<p class="fst">Reuther was elected, though by a narrow margin, because he was the aggressive leader of the GM strike and because in the course of that strike he had advocated hew and far-reaching progressive demands.</p>
<p>In electing Reuther, the majority of the auto workers were voting for the program which in their minds his leadership of the GM strike represented. They expressed in this fashion their approval of a policy of militant union struggle and their desire for a program, going beyond immediate wage issues, aimed at resolving those basic economic and political issues which emerged on the crest of the titanic strike wave.</p>
<p>But because the battle over program was conducted within the narrow framework of struggle for posts rather than in the open arena of direct debate on the actual issues, the triumph of the progressive and militant delegates was limited and inconclusive.</p>
<p>The old-line conservative leaders of the Thomas-Addes faction, supported by the Stalinists, were able to swing enough votes away from the Reuther caucus to win three of the four top executive posts and a majority of the executive board.<br>
</p>
<h4>Coming Struggle</h4>
<p class="fst">Both the top bureaucracy of the CIO and the capitalist press clearly indicated their appreciation of the underlying significance of the Reuther-Thomas fight. CIO President Philip Murray appeared in person at the UAW convention to throw his prestige and influence behind the Thomas-Addes-Stalinist machine.</p>
<p>At the same time, the boss press treated the UAW convention and particularly the race for the UAW presidency as news of top-ranking national importance. The preference of the capitalist press for the Thomas- Addes leadership as against the “socialistic” Reuther was made plain.</p>
<p>From the very outset of the convention, in the opening “keynote” address of R.J. Thomas on Saturday, March 23, the character of the central convention struggle was indicated. The major point of Thomas’ speech was a scarcely-veiled attack on Reuther and the conduct of the GM strike. This was cloaked in a slanderous accusation, lifted bodily from the Stalinist press, that Reuther was plotting with AFL International Ladies Garment Workers’ president David Dubinsky, whose union had contributed $86,000 to aid the GM strikers, to swing the UAW into the AFL.</p>
<p>This lying accusation, expressed only by innuendo in the convention itself, was repeated openly in the corridors and hotel rooms, and in the meetings and literature of the Thomas-Addes caucus.<br>
</p>
<h4>Lying Accusation</h4>
<p class="fst">But the crux of their opposition to Reuther and the militant forces who supported him was their opposition to the GM strike and the advanced slogans which had been projected in that strike. This real issue the Thomas-Addes caucus plus their Stalinist supporters never dared to bring out openly on the convention floor.</p>
<p>The GM battle had been fought out on the picket lines, it had spearheaded the whole strike wave which won the largest single wage increases ever attained by key American unions. The policies and demands of the strike were approved by the GM workers themselves through, their rank and file delegates to the representative GM Delegates’ Conference. They had made national issues of not only the immediate wage question, but of such crucial factors as prices and profits, through their progressive demands of “Open the Books of the Corporation!” and “Wage Increases Without Price Increases.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Thomas-Addes Method</h4>
<p class="fst">By contrast to this in the Ford negotiations the Thomas-Addes leadership had compromised on the wage issue without any real battle. They conducted the negotiations behind the backs of the Ford workers. They yielded to the company’s. demand for “company security” and agreed to the inclusion in the Ford contract of a clause which would permit the company to victimize union militants for “unauthorised strikes.”</p>
<p>None of the key issues was brought directly before the convention. The first four days of the convention were occupied primarily with organizational questions. Everything was pointed toward the fight for leadership in which the real issues were reflected only indirectly.</p>
<p>Such discussion of issues as did occur took place in the big caucus rallies held at night after the Convention sessions. Here, however, there was little opportunity for a thorough airing of the questions by the ranks. Discussion was limited to the onesided presentation of speeches by the respective caucus leaders.<br>
</p>
<h4>Issues Not Discussed</h4>
<p class="fst">Thomas, Addes and the Stalinists concentrated on reckless and crude personal attacks against Reuther, not excluding red-baiting against his “extremist” and “socialistic experimentation.” This reached the low- point when Thomas bellowed in the course of one caucus speech, “Don’t forget that Mussolini was once a socialist too!”</p>
<p>On the other hand, the Reuther caucus meetings were distinguished by a greater attention to program. Reuther spent one entire evening discussing in detail a program for the union dealing with many of the important problems confronting the workers.</p>
<p>He avoided, however, as did the Thomas-Addes group, any discussion on the key issues arising from the strike wave, such as “company security,” the participation of the union leaders on the pro-corporation government boards, and offered no program of independent labor political action through the formation of an independent labor party.</p>
<p>The closest approach to a convention discussion of issues occurred during the closing moments of the third day’s session. The Reuther caucus had issued a leaflet challenging Thomas to a formal debate with Reuther on the issues in the GM strike. The</p>
<p>Thomas-Addes group had issued a counter-leaflet contemptuously rejecting the idea of a debate on the issues.</p>
<p>During the last hour of the Monday session, while Secretary-Treasurer Addes was in the chair, Delegate Murphy of Detroit Dodge Local 3 secured the floor on a point of special privilege. The convention was thrown into pandemonium when she introduced a motion for “a closed session tonight at 8 o’clock in order to have the candidates discuss the issues involved between Brother R.J. Thomas and Brother Walter Reuther.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Addes Evades</h4>
<p class="fst">Delegate Murphy called directly on Thomas to answer if he would “agree to debate this question tonight.”</p>
<p>Addes sought to divert the matter by giving the floor to another delegate, but persistent shouts arose from all sections of the vast auditorium, “Answer the question! Answer the question! Are you afraid of a debate?”</p>
<p>A Thomas supporter. Delegate Paul Silvers of Local 351, took the floor amid constant boos and interruptions to argue against the proposed debate because “Sister Murphy would have made her request on Saturday if she was as disturbed as she contends she was.”</p>
<p>Delegate Thornton of Flint Buick Local 590 demanded that the convention “bring them (Reuther and Thomas) together and have them make their statements in the presence of each other” and “deny them if they can.”</p>
<p>Then the Thomas-Addes-Stalinist group put forward the discredited Vice-President Richard Frankensteen. Frankensteen, who had announced his intention to retire from office to take one of the “fine opportunities” offered him, was greeted with a tremendous demonstration of hostility. His sole argument, when he finally could be heard, was that the debate proposal was “tomfoolery?’ He said “when President Roosevelt was running for re-election, and Tom Dewey knew he was beat, he challenged Roosevelt to a debate, too, because he wanted an out.”</p>
<p>Delegate Shelton Tappes of Ford Local 600 tried to come to the rescue of the Thomas-Addes forces by a motion to table the question of a debate. After twice taking a standing vote. Chairman Addes had to rule the motion to table lost.</p>
<p>Finally, the question of the night session to hold the debate was put to a vote. An overwhelming majority of the delegates supported the motion for a debate. But Addes ruled that the motion was lost because a motion to amend the rules of the convention “requires a two-thirds vote.”</p>
<p>The desperate maneuvers of the Thomas-Addes forces to avoid a real discussion of the issues left a majority with the well-founded suspicion that the Thomas-Addes group feared any direct debate.<br>
</p>
<h4>Election Session Tense</h4>
<p class="fst">On Wednesday morning, March 27, the climactic point of the convention was reached, the election of a president. The auditorium was packed to capacity. The atmosphere was tense and explosive. The long press tables below the huge platform were jammed, testifying to the significance the boss publications and radio networks placed on the outcome of the UAW convention.</p>
<p>Ben Garrison, of Ford Highland Park local 400, nominated Thomas. The opportunist Garrison had become known through his opposition to the no-strike pledge at the September 1944 UAW convention. He was used to try to swing the votes of militants against Reuther.</p>
<p>At a previous session of the convention, Garrison, a reporter for the Resolutions Committee, had launched a full-blown red-baiting attack against the Stalinists during a discussion on Negro discrimination. It was this red-baiter who nominated Thomas, the candidate whom the Stalinists supported all down the line.</p>
<p>Reuther was placed in nomination by Delegate Cote of Detroit Local 174. The nomination and seconding speeches for Reuther provided an opportunity for a discussion of Reuther’s policies in contrast to Thomas’, but the Reuther spokesmen failed to avail themselves of this opportunity.</p>
<p>Each nomination was followed by boisterous and tumultuous demonstrations and parades intended to stampede wavering elements.<br>
</p>
<h4>Narrow Margin</h4>
<p class="fst">The decision was in doubt almost to the last moment of the hours-long roll call. It was finally reported that Reuther had won by the narrow margin of 124 votes, with more than 8,800 cast. This announcement touched off another tremendous demonstration.</p>
<p>Reuther spoke briefly and called for “unity” of the top leadership. He stated “I extend my hand’’ to Addes and pledged to work to make the UAW a “source of strength to President Murray” of the CIO, who had tried to swing the convention against Reuther.</p>
<p>The jubilation of the Reuther caucus and its hopes for “unity” were short-lived. The very next day the Thomas-Addes group came back to capture by narrow margins the three other top officers’ posts, two vice-presidencies and the secretary-treasurership.</p>
<p>Reuther had attempted to get agreement for a division of the two vice-presidential posts between the two contending caucuses. In a surprise move, the Thomas-Addes group nominated Thomas to run against Reuther’s man, Melvin Bishop, for first vice-president. This was clearly a declaration of continuing warfare.</p>
<p>The nomination of Bishop, the result of a purely factional deal, played an important part in the election of Thomas. Bishop, as Regional Director for the important Detroit East Side region of the UAW, had aroused real enmity because of his bureaucratic and reactionary policies. He was heartily disliked by most delegates from the East Side region. The powerful Detroit Briggs Local 212 delegation, staunch militants and supporters of Reuther’s candidacy, did an about-face in protest against Bishop and demonstratively voted in a bloc for Thomas. The tide swung decisively in Thomas’ favor.</p>
<p>Secretary-Treasurer Addes, who ran unopposed, was reelected.</p>
<p>The Thomas-Addes group then secured a three-to-one majority of the executive officers when Richard T. Leonard, Ford negotiator and leading exponent of the notorious “company security” clause, won by a narrow margin of 42 votes over his Reuther opponent, John Livingston. The Reuther caucus had failed to expose the “company security” position of Leonard. Had they done so, they might have rallied many more votes for Livingston.</p>
<p>The election of executive board members left the decisive voting strength in the top leadership of the UAW in the hands of the Thomas-Addes faction. There were only two changes on the board of 18.<br>
</p>
<h4>Emil Mazey Elected</h4>
<p class="fst">One of these was extremely significant. The delegates from Detroit East Side Region 1, which contains some of the oldest and most militant locals in the UAW, elected former Briggs Local 212 President Emil Mazey to replace Melvin Bishop.</p>
<p>Mazey, a GI on his way back from Okinawa, was elected in his absence as a delegate from Local 212. At the 1943 UAW convention, he led the fight against the no-strike pledge and called for the formation of a labor party. He received prominence only a few months ago as a leader of the soldier “Get Us Home!” protests in the Philippines.</p>
<p>Mazey was elected by the large Region 1 delegation on the very first ballot. He received more than 1,000 votes, nearly double the number cast for the leading contender against him, the well- known Stalinist floor-whip, John Anderson of Detroit Amalgamated Local 155. Mazey is expected to fight on the board for more militant policies.</p>
<p>A number of key resolutions on policy questions were not acted upon by the convention but “referred” to the incoming executive board. These included resolutions on the union’s wage-price policy, a subject of sharp difference between the Reuther and the Thomas-Addes groups, and on “So-Called Company Security.”</p>
<p>The wage-price resolution, drafted by the Resolutions Committee, correctly exposed the threat of Big Business and the Truman administration to rob the workers of their wage gains by deliberate price inflation. It condemned the Wage Stabilization Board, but made no reference to the “fact-finding” boards which have served to whittle down the workers’ wage demands. It said nothing about withdrawing union representatives from all government wage-freezing, semi-compulsory arbitration bodies.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Company Security”</h4>
<p class="fst">The resolution entitled “So-Called Company Security” declared the union “stands unalterably opposed, and will struggle to prevent or eliminate, any and all types of penalty systems which the corporations have falsely labeled ‘company security’.” This position, which undoubtedly expresses the opinion of the great majority of UAW members, never came to the floor for action.</p>
<p>No resolution on labor political action was reported out by the Resolutions Committee. On this most crucial question neither Reuther nor the Thomas-Addes faction offered a program for genuine independent labor political action through a labor party. Both continued to speak of support for “progressive” candidates of “both major parties” and merely gave lip service to the idea of a possible “third progressive party.” Reuther, in a press interview, spoke of the “impracticality” of “a third party” even in the 1948 elections.</p>
<p>The one vital question the delegates did have an opportunity to discuss was the issue of discrimination against the Negro workers. Several resolutions, containing many progressive points, were adopted by the convention.</p>
<p>But several Negro and white delegates pointed out that similar resolutions had been adopted in the past but the leadership had not carried them out effectively. Representative Negro delegates rose to plead for “more teeth” in the anti-discrimination resolutions.</p>
<p>The Stalinists, taking advantage of the failure of the Reuther caucus to make a clear-cut and militant stand on the question of discrimination and demagogically seeking the support of the Negro delegates, introduced a proposal to provide a post on the Executive Board for a Negro representative.</p>
<p>This proposal was fought by both the Thomas-Addes group, whom the Stalinists support, and the Reuther followers, except for some of the most advanced militants. The latter, despite the fact that the proposal for a Negro Board member had been introduced by the Stalinists for factional reasons, favored it as a demonstration of the sincerity of the union in eliminating discrimination and giving recognition to the Negro members.<br>
</p>
<h4>Anti-Discrimination Proposal Debated</h4>
<p class="fst">The debate on this issue began the second day of the convention on a resolution for the establishment of a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department, headed by the International President who shall appoint its administrative staff.</p>
<p>Nat Ganley of Local 165, a leading Stalinist, proposed that the Fair Practices Department be headed by a Negro member who would be a member of the International Executive Board. Hodges Mason, of Local 208, a Stalinist supporter and prominent Negro delegate, also spoke in favor of the idea.</p>
<p>Members of the Resolutions Committee opposed the proposal with the stock arguments that this would lead to special posts for “all groups” and “we don’t recognize any differences in our ranks.” This, of course, ignored that fact that, even in the outstandingly progressive UAW, which has done more than any other union on the question of discrimination, qualified Negro members still have to buck under-currents of discrimination which deny them an equal opportunity to secure top office.</p>
<p>This was pointed out by Delegate Irwin Bauer, of Detroit Budd Local 306, who scored both factions in the leadership for their failure to nominate any Negro delegate for a top office. He declared that “either we must create a special post in the top Executive Board for the Negroes so they can have representation in the top leadership of the union, or the top caucuses of this union, the Addes and Reuther caucus both, must combine on an agreed top officer for the Union.”</p>
<p>The issue was then referred back to the Resolutions Committee, which returned the next day with a majority and minority report on the question. The minority report, which was presented by the Stalinists whose position was represented by Shelton Tappes of Local 600, this time eliminated the question of a Negro representative on the board. It called only for an additional board member, to be elected by the convention at large, to head the Fair Practices Department.</p>
<p>At that point delegate Garrison, who spoke for the majority of the Resolutions Committee and who was later to nominate Thomas for president, launched into a red-baiting tirade against his Stalinist colleagues in the Thomas-Addes caucus. He opposed what he called an organizational policy “on the basis of lines adopted by the Soviet Union” and the establishment of “a commissar over any particular segment of our membership.”</p>
<p>The Stalinists this time evaded the question of a Negro board member, but merely pointed out that the minority proposal for an additional board member elected by the entire convention offered a more favorable opportunity for the election of a Negro to the board.<br>
</p>
<h4>“A Disgrace”</h4>
<p class="fst">Briggs Local 212 Delegate Ernest Mazey, brother of Emil, the newly-elected board member, gave support to the minority resolution, pointing out that it “is regrettable and a disgrace” that the top leadership had permitted the issue to be raised in the manner it did, when the issue could have been easily settled “if the four top leaders had gotten together and agreed on a mutual candidate, a Negro candidate.”</p>
<p>With the whole top leadership supporting the majority resolution, it was passed, overwhelmingly. The minority resolution was supported by about 300 delegates.</p>
<p>Some resolutions of a generally progressive and constructive character on which there was no controversy were acted upon by the convention on the opening day and in the last couple of hours before adjournment. These included resolutions supporting the CIO’s campaigns to “Organize the Unorganized” and “Organize the South,” a program of demands for the veterans, and the establishment of a $1 assessment for a special strike fund to aid GM workers and all other UAW members still on strike.</p>
<p>A special resolution in support of GM strikers still out because of the corporation’s refusal to settle local grievances was unanimously adopted.<br>
</p>
<h4>Democratic Character</h4>
<p class="fst">The democratic character of the UAW-CIO and the membership’s suspicion of any moves by the top leadership to strengthen its bureaucratic hold on the union were demonstrated several times on important organizational questions.</p>
<p>The first of these was the unanimous proposal of the Constitution Committee to extend the officers’ term to two years instead of one. The argument that this would “prevent politics” in the union was hooted down by the delegates, who after brief debate voted virtually unanimously to continue the one-year term of office.</p>
<p>Another issue was the proposal for a dues increase, to raise the present monthly dues from $1 to $2. The leadership had also cooked up an alternative proposal for $1.50 dues, with most of the increase going to the International.</p>
<p>The delegates voted down both proposals. They adopted instead a proposal for $1,50 dues, the additional 60 cents to be equally divided between the local unions and the International. The motion provided for the allocation of the International’s additional 25 cents to special funds, including 5 cents to an emergency strike fund.</p>
<p>The Constitution Committee, with the behind-the-scenes support of the top officers, also tried to put over an across-the-board salary increase for the executive officers and board members. Present salaries range from $5,000 for board members to $9,000 for the UAW president.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reject Increases</h4>
<p class="fst">Among the arguments were that the top officers were “entitled to” a “17½ per cent increase like they had won for the members” and “it would look bad” if the union which has fought for wage increases denied proposed annual increases of from $1,000 to $1,500 to the officers.</p>
<p>It was pointed out by several delegates that the officers had had a substantial increase voted in 1943, while the workers wages were frozen. The delegates made it clear they did not want their officers to live too far above the standards of the membership. By an overwhelming vote, the membership flatly rejected all proposals for salary increases to officers.</p>
<p>The 1946 UAW convention, as reflected in the policies implicitly endorsed by the election of Reuther, marked a high point in the militant, progressive trend of the auto workers. The failure to thrash out the issues openly, however, has left the settlement of these issues inconclusive.</p>
<p>The relationship between program and leadership received a clearer expression than ever before. But this was insufficiently appreciated to effect a cleanout break with the old leadership.<br>
</p>
<h4>Coming Issues</h4>
<p class="fst">The mounting inflation and pressure on the workers’ living standards, the Increasingly reactionary attacks of Congress and the Truman administration on labor, the new anti-labor offensive which Big Business is preparing, serve to clarify the questions of program and will widen the cleavage between the ranks and the top conservative leadership.</p>
<p>The auto workers have in an indirect fashion shown their readiness to break with conservative, bureaucratic leadership. They have indicated their desire for militant policies and for a program which will meet fundamental economic and political problems.</p>
<p>The next period will see the continuation of the fight on the issues which this convention failed to resolve – the elimination of “company security” clauses, the withdrawal of union representatives from all government wage-freezing and arbitration bodies, and above all the formation of a labor party.</p>
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Art Preis
UAW Convention Marks
New Stage for Auto Union
(30 March 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 14, 6 April 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., March 30. – Some 1,877 delegates to the 10th National Convention of the CIO United Automobile Workers this afternoon adjourned their eight days of tumultuous deliberations.
This convention recorded, though in a distorted and unclear form, two far-reaching achievements. It approved and vindicated the bitter strike and advanced program of the General Motors workers. And again indirectly, it chalked up an important triumph of program over factional, machine politics.
Not a single basic issue was thrashed out openly on the convention floor. Nevertheless, the issues of the General Motors strike and the program it advanced were implicit in the central and dominant conflict of the convention, the battle for the UAW presidency between GM strike leader Walter Reuther and the incumbent R.J. Thomas.
Issues Implicit
Reuther was elected, though by a narrow margin, because he was the aggressive leader of the GM strike and because in the course of that strike he had advocated hew and far-reaching progressive demands.
In electing Reuther, the majority of the auto workers were voting for the program which in their minds his leadership of the GM strike represented. They expressed in this fashion their approval of a policy of militant union struggle and their desire for a program, going beyond immediate wage issues, aimed at resolving those basic economic and political issues which emerged on the crest of the titanic strike wave.
But because the battle over program was conducted within the narrow framework of struggle for posts rather than in the open arena of direct debate on the actual issues, the triumph of the progressive and militant delegates was limited and inconclusive.
The old-line conservative leaders of the Thomas-Addes faction, supported by the Stalinists, were able to swing enough votes away from the Reuther caucus to win three of the four top executive posts and a majority of the executive board.
Coming Struggle
Both the top bureaucracy of the CIO and the capitalist press clearly indicated their appreciation of the underlying significance of the Reuther-Thomas fight. CIO President Philip Murray appeared in person at the UAW convention to throw his prestige and influence behind the Thomas-Addes-Stalinist machine.
At the same time, the boss press treated the UAW convention and particularly the race for the UAW presidency as news of top-ranking national importance. The preference of the capitalist press for the Thomas- Addes leadership as against the “socialistic” Reuther was made plain.
From the very outset of the convention, in the opening “keynote” address of R.J. Thomas on Saturday, March 23, the character of the central convention struggle was indicated. The major point of Thomas’ speech was a scarcely-veiled attack on Reuther and the conduct of the GM strike. This was cloaked in a slanderous accusation, lifted bodily from the Stalinist press, that Reuther was plotting with AFL International Ladies Garment Workers’ president David Dubinsky, whose union had contributed $86,000 to aid the GM strikers, to swing the UAW into the AFL.
This lying accusation, expressed only by innuendo in the convention itself, was repeated openly in the corridors and hotel rooms, and in the meetings and literature of the Thomas-Addes caucus.
Lying Accusation
But the crux of their opposition to Reuther and the militant forces who supported him was their opposition to the GM strike and the advanced slogans which had been projected in that strike. This real issue the Thomas-Addes caucus plus their Stalinist supporters never dared to bring out openly on the convention floor.
The GM battle had been fought out on the picket lines, it had spearheaded the whole strike wave which won the largest single wage increases ever attained by key American unions. The policies and demands of the strike were approved by the GM workers themselves through, their rank and file delegates to the representative GM Delegates’ Conference. They had made national issues of not only the immediate wage question, but of such crucial factors as prices and profits, through their progressive demands of “Open the Books of the Corporation!” and “Wage Increases Without Price Increases.”
Thomas-Addes Method
By contrast to this in the Ford negotiations the Thomas-Addes leadership had compromised on the wage issue without any real battle. They conducted the negotiations behind the backs of the Ford workers. They yielded to the company’s. demand for “company security” and agreed to the inclusion in the Ford contract of a clause which would permit the company to victimize union militants for “unauthorised strikes.”
None of the key issues was brought directly before the convention. The first four days of the convention were occupied primarily with organizational questions. Everything was pointed toward the fight for leadership in which the real issues were reflected only indirectly.
Such discussion of issues as did occur took place in the big caucus rallies held at night after the Convention sessions. Here, however, there was little opportunity for a thorough airing of the questions by the ranks. Discussion was limited to the onesided presentation of speeches by the respective caucus leaders.
Issues Not Discussed
Thomas, Addes and the Stalinists concentrated on reckless and crude personal attacks against Reuther, not excluding red-baiting against his “extremist” and “socialistic experimentation.” This reached the low- point when Thomas bellowed in the course of one caucus speech, “Don’t forget that Mussolini was once a socialist too!”
On the other hand, the Reuther caucus meetings were distinguished by a greater attention to program. Reuther spent one entire evening discussing in detail a program for the union dealing with many of the important problems confronting the workers.
He avoided, however, as did the Thomas-Addes group, any discussion on the key issues arising from the strike wave, such as “company security,” the participation of the union leaders on the pro-corporation government boards, and offered no program of independent labor political action through the formation of an independent labor party.
The closest approach to a convention discussion of issues occurred during the closing moments of the third day’s session. The Reuther caucus had issued a leaflet challenging Thomas to a formal debate with Reuther on the issues in the GM strike. The
Thomas-Addes group had issued a counter-leaflet contemptuously rejecting the idea of a debate on the issues.
During the last hour of the Monday session, while Secretary-Treasurer Addes was in the chair, Delegate Murphy of Detroit Dodge Local 3 secured the floor on a point of special privilege. The convention was thrown into pandemonium when she introduced a motion for “a closed session tonight at 8 o’clock in order to have the candidates discuss the issues involved between Brother R.J. Thomas and Brother Walter Reuther.”
Addes Evades
Delegate Murphy called directly on Thomas to answer if he would “agree to debate this question tonight.”
Addes sought to divert the matter by giving the floor to another delegate, but persistent shouts arose from all sections of the vast auditorium, “Answer the question! Answer the question! Are you afraid of a debate?”
A Thomas supporter. Delegate Paul Silvers of Local 351, took the floor amid constant boos and interruptions to argue against the proposed debate because “Sister Murphy would have made her request on Saturday if she was as disturbed as she contends she was.”
Delegate Thornton of Flint Buick Local 590 demanded that the convention “bring them (Reuther and Thomas) together and have them make their statements in the presence of each other” and “deny them if they can.”
Then the Thomas-Addes-Stalinist group put forward the discredited Vice-President Richard Frankensteen. Frankensteen, who had announced his intention to retire from office to take one of the “fine opportunities” offered him, was greeted with a tremendous demonstration of hostility. His sole argument, when he finally could be heard, was that the debate proposal was “tomfoolery?’ He said “when President Roosevelt was running for re-election, and Tom Dewey knew he was beat, he challenged Roosevelt to a debate, too, because he wanted an out.”
Delegate Shelton Tappes of Ford Local 600 tried to come to the rescue of the Thomas-Addes forces by a motion to table the question of a debate. After twice taking a standing vote. Chairman Addes had to rule the motion to table lost.
Finally, the question of the night session to hold the debate was put to a vote. An overwhelming majority of the delegates supported the motion for a debate. But Addes ruled that the motion was lost because a motion to amend the rules of the convention “requires a two-thirds vote.”
The desperate maneuvers of the Thomas-Addes forces to avoid a real discussion of the issues left a majority with the well-founded suspicion that the Thomas-Addes group feared any direct debate.
Election Session Tense
On Wednesday morning, March 27, the climactic point of the convention was reached, the election of a president. The auditorium was packed to capacity. The atmosphere was tense and explosive. The long press tables below the huge platform were jammed, testifying to the significance the boss publications and radio networks placed on the outcome of the UAW convention.
Ben Garrison, of Ford Highland Park local 400, nominated Thomas. The opportunist Garrison had become known through his opposition to the no-strike pledge at the September 1944 UAW convention. He was used to try to swing the votes of militants against Reuther.
At a previous session of the convention, Garrison, a reporter for the Resolutions Committee, had launched a full-blown red-baiting attack against the Stalinists during a discussion on Negro discrimination. It was this red-baiter who nominated Thomas, the candidate whom the Stalinists supported all down the line.
Reuther was placed in nomination by Delegate Cote of Detroit Local 174. The nomination and seconding speeches for Reuther provided an opportunity for a discussion of Reuther’s policies in contrast to Thomas’, but the Reuther spokesmen failed to avail themselves of this opportunity.
Each nomination was followed by boisterous and tumultuous demonstrations and parades intended to stampede wavering elements.
Narrow Margin
The decision was in doubt almost to the last moment of the hours-long roll call. It was finally reported that Reuther had won by the narrow margin of 124 votes, with more than 8,800 cast. This announcement touched off another tremendous demonstration.
Reuther spoke briefly and called for “unity” of the top leadership. He stated “I extend my hand’’ to Addes and pledged to work to make the UAW a “source of strength to President Murray” of the CIO, who had tried to swing the convention against Reuther.
The jubilation of the Reuther caucus and its hopes for “unity” were short-lived. The very next day the Thomas-Addes group came back to capture by narrow margins the three other top officers’ posts, two vice-presidencies and the secretary-treasurership.
Reuther had attempted to get agreement for a division of the two vice-presidential posts between the two contending caucuses. In a surprise move, the Thomas-Addes group nominated Thomas to run against Reuther’s man, Melvin Bishop, for first vice-president. This was clearly a declaration of continuing warfare.
The nomination of Bishop, the result of a purely factional deal, played an important part in the election of Thomas. Bishop, as Regional Director for the important Detroit East Side region of the UAW, had aroused real enmity because of his bureaucratic and reactionary policies. He was heartily disliked by most delegates from the East Side region. The powerful Detroit Briggs Local 212 delegation, staunch militants and supporters of Reuther’s candidacy, did an about-face in protest against Bishop and demonstratively voted in a bloc for Thomas. The tide swung decisively in Thomas’ favor.
Secretary-Treasurer Addes, who ran unopposed, was reelected.
The Thomas-Addes group then secured a three-to-one majority of the executive officers when Richard T. Leonard, Ford negotiator and leading exponent of the notorious “company security” clause, won by a narrow margin of 42 votes over his Reuther opponent, John Livingston. The Reuther caucus had failed to expose the “company security” position of Leonard. Had they done so, they might have rallied many more votes for Livingston.
The election of executive board members left the decisive voting strength in the top leadership of the UAW in the hands of the Thomas-Addes faction. There were only two changes on the board of 18.
Emil Mazey Elected
One of these was extremely significant. The delegates from Detroit East Side Region 1, which contains some of the oldest and most militant locals in the UAW, elected former Briggs Local 212 President Emil Mazey to replace Melvin Bishop.
Mazey, a GI on his way back from Okinawa, was elected in his absence as a delegate from Local 212. At the 1943 UAW convention, he led the fight against the no-strike pledge and called for the formation of a labor party. He received prominence only a few months ago as a leader of the soldier “Get Us Home!” protests in the Philippines.
Mazey was elected by the large Region 1 delegation on the very first ballot. He received more than 1,000 votes, nearly double the number cast for the leading contender against him, the well- known Stalinist floor-whip, John Anderson of Detroit Amalgamated Local 155. Mazey is expected to fight on the board for more militant policies.
A number of key resolutions on policy questions were not acted upon by the convention but “referred” to the incoming executive board. These included resolutions on the union’s wage-price policy, a subject of sharp difference between the Reuther and the Thomas-Addes groups, and on “So-Called Company Security.”
The wage-price resolution, drafted by the Resolutions Committee, correctly exposed the threat of Big Business and the Truman administration to rob the workers of their wage gains by deliberate price inflation. It condemned the Wage Stabilization Board, but made no reference to the “fact-finding” boards which have served to whittle down the workers’ wage demands. It said nothing about withdrawing union representatives from all government wage-freezing, semi-compulsory arbitration bodies.
“Company Security”
The resolution entitled “So-Called Company Security” declared the union “stands unalterably opposed, and will struggle to prevent or eliminate, any and all types of penalty systems which the corporations have falsely labeled ‘company security’.” This position, which undoubtedly expresses the opinion of the great majority of UAW members, never came to the floor for action.
No resolution on labor political action was reported out by the Resolutions Committee. On this most crucial question neither Reuther nor the Thomas-Addes faction offered a program for genuine independent labor political action through a labor party. Both continued to speak of support for “progressive” candidates of “both major parties” and merely gave lip service to the idea of a possible “third progressive party.” Reuther, in a press interview, spoke of the “impracticality” of “a third party” even in the 1948 elections.
The one vital question the delegates did have an opportunity to discuss was the issue of discrimination against the Negro workers. Several resolutions, containing many progressive points, were adopted by the convention.
But several Negro and white delegates pointed out that similar resolutions had been adopted in the past but the leadership had not carried them out effectively. Representative Negro delegates rose to plead for “more teeth” in the anti-discrimination resolutions.
The Stalinists, taking advantage of the failure of the Reuther caucus to make a clear-cut and militant stand on the question of discrimination and demagogically seeking the support of the Negro delegates, introduced a proposal to provide a post on the Executive Board for a Negro representative.
This proposal was fought by both the Thomas-Addes group, whom the Stalinists support, and the Reuther followers, except for some of the most advanced militants. The latter, despite the fact that the proposal for a Negro Board member had been introduced by the Stalinists for factional reasons, favored it as a demonstration of the sincerity of the union in eliminating discrimination and giving recognition to the Negro members.
Anti-Discrimination Proposal Debated
The debate on this issue began the second day of the convention on a resolution for the establishment of a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department, headed by the International President who shall appoint its administrative staff.
Nat Ganley of Local 165, a leading Stalinist, proposed that the Fair Practices Department be headed by a Negro member who would be a member of the International Executive Board. Hodges Mason, of Local 208, a Stalinist supporter and prominent Negro delegate, also spoke in favor of the idea.
Members of the Resolutions Committee opposed the proposal with the stock arguments that this would lead to special posts for “all groups” and “we don’t recognize any differences in our ranks.” This, of course, ignored that fact that, even in the outstandingly progressive UAW, which has done more than any other union on the question of discrimination, qualified Negro members still have to buck under-currents of discrimination which deny them an equal opportunity to secure top office.
This was pointed out by Delegate Irwin Bauer, of Detroit Budd Local 306, who scored both factions in the leadership for their failure to nominate any Negro delegate for a top office. He declared that “either we must create a special post in the top Executive Board for the Negroes so they can have representation in the top leadership of the union, or the top caucuses of this union, the Addes and Reuther caucus both, must combine on an agreed top officer for the Union.”
The issue was then referred back to the Resolutions Committee, which returned the next day with a majority and minority report on the question. The minority report, which was presented by the Stalinists whose position was represented by Shelton Tappes of Local 600, this time eliminated the question of a Negro representative on the board. It called only for an additional board member, to be elected by the convention at large, to head the Fair Practices Department.
At that point delegate Garrison, who spoke for the majority of the Resolutions Committee and who was later to nominate Thomas for president, launched into a red-baiting tirade against his Stalinist colleagues in the Thomas-Addes caucus. He opposed what he called an organizational policy “on the basis of lines adopted by the Soviet Union” and the establishment of “a commissar over any particular segment of our membership.”
The Stalinists this time evaded the question of a Negro board member, but merely pointed out that the minority proposal for an additional board member elected by the entire convention offered a more favorable opportunity for the election of a Negro to the board.
“A Disgrace”
Briggs Local 212 Delegate Ernest Mazey, brother of Emil, the newly-elected board member, gave support to the minority resolution, pointing out that it “is regrettable and a disgrace” that the top leadership had permitted the issue to be raised in the manner it did, when the issue could have been easily settled “if the four top leaders had gotten together and agreed on a mutual candidate, a Negro candidate.”
With the whole top leadership supporting the majority resolution, it was passed, overwhelmingly. The minority resolution was supported by about 300 delegates.
Some resolutions of a generally progressive and constructive character on which there was no controversy were acted upon by the convention on the opening day and in the last couple of hours before adjournment. These included resolutions supporting the CIO’s campaigns to “Organize the Unorganized” and “Organize the South,” a program of demands for the veterans, and the establishment of a $1 assessment for a special strike fund to aid GM workers and all other UAW members still on strike.
A special resolution in support of GM strikers still out because of the corporation’s refusal to settle local grievances was unanimously adopted.
Democratic Character
The democratic character of the UAW-CIO and the membership’s suspicion of any moves by the top leadership to strengthen its bureaucratic hold on the union were demonstrated several times on important organizational questions.
The first of these was the unanimous proposal of the Constitution Committee to extend the officers’ term to two years instead of one. The argument that this would “prevent politics” in the union was hooted down by the delegates, who after brief debate voted virtually unanimously to continue the one-year term of office.
Another issue was the proposal for a dues increase, to raise the present monthly dues from $1 to $2. The leadership had also cooked up an alternative proposal for $1.50 dues, with most of the increase going to the International.
The delegates voted down both proposals. They adopted instead a proposal for $1,50 dues, the additional 60 cents to be equally divided between the local unions and the International. The motion provided for the allocation of the International’s additional 25 cents to special funds, including 5 cents to an emergency strike fund.
The Constitution Committee, with the behind-the-scenes support of the top officers, also tried to put over an across-the-board salary increase for the executive officers and board members. Present salaries range from $5,000 for board members to $9,000 for the UAW president.
Reject Increases
Among the arguments were that the top officers were “entitled to” a “17½ per cent increase like they had won for the members” and “it would look bad” if the union which has fought for wage increases denied proposed annual increases of from $1,000 to $1,500 to the officers.
It was pointed out by several delegates that the officers had had a substantial increase voted in 1943, while the workers wages were frozen. The delegates made it clear they did not want their officers to live too far above the standards of the membership. By an overwhelming vote, the membership flatly rejected all proposals for salary increases to officers.
The 1946 UAW convention, as reflected in the policies implicitly endorsed by the election of Reuther, marked a high point in the militant, progressive trend of the auto workers. The failure to thrash out the issues openly, however, has left the settlement of these issues inconclusive.
The relationship between program and leadership received a clearer expression than ever before. But this was insufficiently appreciated to effect a cleanout break with the old leadership.
Coming Issues
The mounting inflation and pressure on the workers’ living standards, the Increasingly reactionary attacks of Congress and the Truman administration on labor, the new anti-labor offensive which Big Business is preparing, serve to clarify the questions of program and will widen the cleavage between the ranks and the top conservative leadership.
The auto workers have in an indirect fashion shown their readiness to break with conservative, bureaucratic leadership. They have indicated their desire for militant policies and for a program which will meet fundamental economic and political problems.
The next period will see the continuation of the fight on the issues which this convention failed to resolve – the elimination of “company security” clauses, the withdrawal of union representatives from all government wage-freezing and arbitration bodies, and above all the formation of a labor party.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>They’d Rather Have Stalin</h1>
<h3>(27 December 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_52" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 52</a>, 27 December 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court, who acted as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, recently made some unusual statements about the Soviet Union. In an address on Dec. 8, Jackson pointed to Stalin’s persecution of Soviet scientists, his bureaucratic straitjacket on thought and information, and said; “I condemn it as inhuman, but I don’t think it imperils our security.” He then drew the astounding conclusion:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“What I think we need to fear would be an open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union, thirsting for truth.”</p>
<p class="fst">In an indirect and somewhat distorted fashion, these words express the hundred-fold greater fear that U.S. imperialism has of a democratic workers’ regime in the Soviet Union than of the reactionary nationalistic, totalitarian regime of Stalin.</p>
<p>The astute imperialists recognize that a genuinely revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union would have long since inspired the workers of Europe and Asia to the overthrow of capitalism. The capitalists infinitely prefer the totalitarianism and narrow nationalism of Stalin, whose policies and methods have discredited the ideas of communism, turned many millions against the Soviet Union and disoriented and betrayed revolutionary struggles everywhere.</p>
<p>Look back 31 years to the time when the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky had just made a revolution and founded the first workers state in history. They had the most democratic government ever known, directly run by the workers and peasants through their elected councils, known as soviets. This government had no money, no arms, no food and medical supplies – its only heritage from Czarism and the imperialist war was famine and ruin. Yet the capitalist governments of the world were frenzied in their fear of it. They couldn’t allow it to live for a minute if they could help it. They blockaded it. They poured armies on a score of fronts onto Russian soil in a desperate effort to destroy it.</p>
<p>For the capitalists recognized then – and have always recognized – that the peril of the Soviet Union to them lay not in its armies, but in the revolutionary ideas and party that gave it birth. It was the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky they wanted to stamp out at all cost.</p>
<p>Stalinism gave world capitalism a new lease on life by destroying the party and program of Lenin and Trotsky and building a counter-revolutionary machine designed solely to maintain the powers and privileges of the new bureaucracy. Stalinism sold out the revolutionary movements everywhere for the sake of temporary deals with the imperialists, from Hitler to Churchill and Roosevelt.</p>
<p>That is why a Jackson can sincerely say that the thing he and his class fear most is an “open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union” – that is, a Soviet Union that would reawaken the revolutionary fervor of the oppressed of the world and inspire them to complete the socialist task that Lenin and Trotsky began in October 1917.</p>
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Art Preis
They’d Rather Have Stalin
(27 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Associate Justice Robert H. Jackson of the U.S. Supreme Court, who acted as chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials, recently made some unusual statements about the Soviet Union. In an address on Dec. 8, Jackson pointed to Stalin’s persecution of Soviet scientists, his bureaucratic straitjacket on thought and information, and said; “I condemn it as inhuman, but I don’t think it imperils our security.” He then drew the astounding conclusion:
“What I think we need to fear would be an open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union, thirsting for truth.”
In an indirect and somewhat distorted fashion, these words express the hundred-fold greater fear that U.S. imperialism has of a democratic workers’ regime in the Soviet Union than of the reactionary nationalistic, totalitarian regime of Stalin.
The astute imperialists recognize that a genuinely revolutionary regime in the Soviet Union would have long since inspired the workers of Europe and Asia to the overthrow of capitalism. The capitalists infinitely prefer the totalitarianism and narrow nationalism of Stalin, whose policies and methods have discredited the ideas of communism, turned many millions against the Soviet Union and disoriented and betrayed revolutionary struggles everywhere.
Look back 31 years to the time when the Bolshevik Party of Lenin and Trotsky had just made a revolution and founded the first workers state in history. They had the most democratic government ever known, directly run by the workers and peasants through their elected councils, known as soviets. This government had no money, no arms, no food and medical supplies – its only heritage from Czarism and the imperialist war was famine and ruin. Yet the capitalist governments of the world were frenzied in their fear of it. They couldn’t allow it to live for a minute if they could help it. They blockaded it. They poured armies on a score of fronts onto Russian soil in a desperate effort to destroy it.
For the capitalists recognized then – and have always recognized – that the peril of the Soviet Union to them lay not in its armies, but in the revolutionary ideas and party that gave it birth. It was the Bolshevik program of Lenin and Trotsky they wanted to stamp out at all cost.
Stalinism gave world capitalism a new lease on life by destroying the party and program of Lenin and Trotsky and building a counter-revolutionary machine designed solely to maintain the powers and privileges of the new bureaucracy. Stalinism sold out the revolutionary movements everywhere for the sake of temporary deals with the imperialists, from Hitler to Churchill and Roosevelt.
That is why a Jackson can sincerely say that the thing he and his class fear most is an “open-minded, tolerant and inquiring Soviet Union” – that is, a Soviet Union that would reawaken the revolutionary fervor of the oppressed of the world and inspire them to complete the socialist task that Lenin and Trotsky began in October 1917.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h4>No Classes in US?</h4>
<h1>Myth of “People’s Capitalism”</h1>
<h3>(May 1961)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr62win" target="new">Vol.23 No.1</a>, Winter 1962, pp.3-9.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">TODAY, American employers and trade union leaders alike insist there is no basis in this country for class struggle. They claim, in fact, that “class distinctions” and even classes themselves have disappeared from our society.</p>
<p>The founders of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 did not deny the fact of the class struggle. They said in the Preamble of the AFL Constitution:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A struggle is going on in all nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer ...”</p>
<p class="fst">It is true that Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founding president, disavowed class struggle methods. He proclaimed in his 1910 Labor Day statement, for instance, that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Labor Day stands for industrial peace ... Our labor movement has no system to crush ... It has nothing to overturn ...”</p>
<p class="fst">William Green, Gompers’ successor, announced in 1935, on the eve of the stormy rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that <em>we</em> were at the dawn of class peace. He assured labor that “the majority of employers sincerely and honestly wish to maintain decent wage standards and humane conditions ...” He boasted of his “consistent refusal to commit our movement” to “tactics based upon belief that irreconcilable conflict exists between owners of capital and labor ...”</p>
<p>The modern union leaders have gone Green one better. They have banished economic classes altogether or reduced class differences to the vanishing point. Without classes or class differences, they ask, how can there be class struggle? The late Philip Murray, president of both the CIO and the United Steelworkers of America, thus wrote in July 1948:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Today, progressive businessmen regard their workers ... as welcome partners ... We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of the class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here.”</p>
<p class="fst">Walter Reuther, United Automobile Workers President and Murray’s successor in the CIO, spoke at the 1954 CIO Convention against a labor party here because he said this country does not have the same type of class structure as in Europe. Over there, he claimed,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“society developed along very classical economic lines, there you have rigid class groupings ... But America is a society in which social groups are in flux, in which we do not have this rigid class structure ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Reuther has never made clear whether we are becoming “all workers here,” as Murray said, all capitalists or some new hybrid class. But he is sure of one thing:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We don’t believe in the class struggle. The labor movement in America has never believed in the class struggle.” (<strong>New York Times</strong>, March 28, 1958).</p>
<p class="fst">AFL-CIO President George Meany also abhors class struggle. But Meany, unlike Murray, has liquidated the working class. At the AFL-CIO merger in December 1955, Meany decreed:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We must not think of ourselves as a group apart; there is no such thing as a proletariat in America.”</p>
<p class="fst">This echoes a note sounded since the end of World War II by ideologists and propagandists of big business, who spread the myth that in America we have achieved – or soon will – a “classless” society – and without abolishing the private profit system. This unique form of society they call “people’s capitalism.” Thus, the General Electric Corporation in a large advertising spread in the February 22, 1959, <strong>New York Times Magazine</strong>, explained that its shareowners “come from all walks of life” and “this trend has made American capitalism more and more a <em>people’s capitalism</em>.” (Original emphasis.)</p>
<p>Adolph A. Berle Jr., Roosevelt’s wartime Assistant Secretary of State and a luminary early in the Kennedy Administration, specializes in this type of myth-making. In the <strong>New York Times Magazine</strong>, November 1, 1959, Berle states that what Marxists describe as capitalism “perhaps did exist a century ago. But in America it stopped existing somewhere between 1920 and 1930.” He informs us: “This American system has not received a distinctive name. It has been called ‘people’s capitalism’.” This “people’s capitalism,” according to Berle, is a transformation from the “age of moguls” which existed seventy or eighty years ago. In</p>
<p>the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, Berle concedes, “individual owners of private capitalist enterprise were ... piling up fabulous fortunes from the profits of railroads and mines, steel, copper and oil ...” But today the corporations have “displaced the tycoons and moguls, substituting professional management.” In a subsequent <strong>New York Times</strong> article, Berle dissolved the working class as easily as he had eliminated the “tycoons and moguls.” He wrote on December 18, 1960, that “in America the ‘proletariat’ is hard to find.”</p>
<p>The <strong>New York Times</strong> editors also claim it is absurd to speak of class distinctions. In a Labor Day editorial, the September 5, 1960, <strong>Times</strong> instructs us:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“What we most need to remember is that such expressions as ‘labor’ and the ‘workingman’ have a diminished meaning today. We have no class distinctions to fit such words. Among the crowds on our Appian Ways it is difficult to tell employer and employee apart ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Let the <strong>Times</strong> editors – and Berle and Meany, too – seek beyond “our Appian Ways” and go to the unemployment compensation offices or welfare relief agencies. Let them survey the vast and rotting slum areas of New York City and our other large population centers. They will find, by some odd chance, that such places and such areas, are frequented almost exclusively by workers.</p>
<p>Here we have one rule-of-thumb measure of class distinctions in America. Unemployment and the need for unemployment relief are almost exclusively conditions affecting wage workers. A study of unemployment, published in June, 1958, by the US Bureau of the Census, disclosed that 11,600,000 workers had suffered some period of unemployment in 1957, a “good” year. If we count as proletarians only those subject to unemployment and their dependents, we must conclude that, contrary to Berle’s claim, the proletariat in the United States is not at all “hard to find.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">CLASS divisions in America have been the subject of serious studies in recent years by outstanding sociologists and scholars – all non-Marxists. Their findings are contained in such widely heralded books as <strong>The Status Seekers</strong> by Vance Packard, <strong>The Power Elite</strong> by C. Wright Mills and <strong>Social Class and Mental Illness</strong> by August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich. They all confirm, in their own way, that class lines exist and are hardening more than ever.</p>
<p><strong>The Status Seekers</strong>, a best-seller in 1959 and 1960, marshals an impressive array of facts to answer the directly posed question: has the United States become a classless society or is it even approaching such a condition?</p>
<p>Packard concludes that class lines in this country are becoming more rigid and that even within the upper strata of society the straining for status and privileged position has intensified. Moreover, he dismisses the “widespread assumption” that the rise in available “spending money” in the late fifties is making everyone equal. He stresses that a working-class man does not move into a higher social class even if he should succeed in purchasing a “limousine” or some other material status symbol. And the worker knows it, says Packard. For, in terms of the worker’s productive role, class lines are becoming “more rigid, rather than withering away.”</p>
<p>Packard refutes the widely circulated propaganda that the working class is being absorbed into the middle class. In 1940, only about one-third of those gainfully employed were in so-called “white collar” occupations. By 1959, it was claimed, at least half were in the “white collar” group. This, says Packard, has been incorrectly interpreted to signify a great upthrust of working-class people into the middle class. Actually, a large percentage of those recruited into the new “white collar” jobs are women who did not previously work. Besides, many jobs classified as “white collar,” Packard points out, are really low-paid manual occupations that require little skill, such as that of office machine operators, gas station attendants, retail store clerks and many government employees.</p>
<p>Today, there are some 23,000,000 women workers, almost a third of the entire labor force. They provide a high percentage of the clerical and other “white collar” workers. The average full-time yearly pay of women workers in 1960 was $3,102, or two-thirds of men’s average earnings. Thus, the majority of working women get wages close to or below the poverty level, fixed by government experts at $2,500 a year. This hardly qualifies these new “white collar” workers as middle-class, even if one believes that a poorly paid typist or mimeograph machine operator has a status superior to a union-scale linotypist or pressman in the printing industry.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE FACTS cited above confirm Packard’s contention that there has been a “revolutionary blurring” between so-called “white collar” and “blue collar” workers in the sense that every basis for the claim of “white collar” clerical workers to superior status over “blue collar” workers has been undermined. Furthermore, Packard divides the “white collar” classification into a “lower” and an “upper” group. The latter includes the managers and executive employees, as well as self-employed professionals like doctors and lawyers. He explains, however, that between the “lower” and “upper” “white collar” groups there is a “sharp and formidable” boundary line.</p>
<p>We are forced to conclude from Packard’s findings that the “blue collar” workers are not being uplifted into the middle class. Rather, there has been a massive “proletarianization” of the lower middle class. Our society has become polarized into two primary classes, the wage workers and the owners. The letter’s top richest circles are the dominant sector of the American ruling class.</p>
<p>There was a time, however, when the American people might have spoken of “people’s capitalism” with a large degree of truth. That was before the American Civil War. Packard has noted this significant historical fact. There has been a tremendous shrinkage in the relative number of small entrepreneurs and self-employed people – farm owners, small tradesmen and shopkeepers, and craftsmen with their own workshops. These independent enterprisers originally constituted a true middle class in this country. They owned their means of production; they did not sell their labor power for wages.</p>
<p>Thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, four out of five Americans were self-employed enterprisers, a majority of them being farmers, Packard points out. By 1940, these enterprisers were only about one-fifth of the income earners. In 1959, they were reduced to about 13% of the “gainfully employed.” (By April 1960, the farm population, including all “hired hands,” had fallen to only 8.7% of the national total.)</p>
<p>In the late fifties, Packard also notes, some 87% of the income-earning populace were employed by others, by a tiny minority of employers, usually in corporate guise. I add the very significant fact that less than 1% of the corporations employ nearly 60% of all paid workers. (US Department of Commerce report, September 22, 1959.) Packard himself, I must further add, fervently disapproves of the hardening of class lines and wishes something might be done about it for the sake of the private profit system itself. But at least he does not shrink from the facts.</p>
<p>The “free enterprise” system in its corporate monopoly phase is not dominated by faceless “professional managers.” The Commissioner of Internal Revenue revealed in 1957 that 201 individuals had reported personal incomes of a million dollars or more in 1954 compared to “only” 145 in 1953. A further rise was expected in 1955. <strong>Fortune</strong> magazine, in its November 1957 issue, noted the significance of this data. Its article, <em>The Fifty-Million-Dollar Man</em> by Richard Austin Smith, observed there had been a lot of “poor-mouthing” about the million-dollar income dying out. It is plain from the statistics, said the <strong>Fortune</strong> writer, that “America’s Very Rich” have not gone the way of the pre-historic dinosaurs and do not seem likely to. The evidence points rather to what <strong>Fortune</strong> called “the resurgent Very Rich,” defined as individuals with personal estates of not less than fifty million dollars. That is the minimum wealth, <strong>Fortune</strong> contended, to be rich enough never to escape “the aura of money” or to conceive of ever being broke. A Treasury official cited by <strong>Fortune</strong> estimated there are between 150 and 500 persons in the golden circle of the “fifty-millionaires.”</p>
<p><strong>Fortune</strong> itself identified 155 “fifty-millionaires” and thought it likely there were another hundred. Under the heading, <em>America’s Biggest Fortunes</em>, the magazine printed the names and chief sources of wealth of the 76 richest people in the country, so far as <strong>Fortune</strong> was able to uncover them.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE majority of these super-rich “tycoons and moguls” have inherited their fortunes; their family names, such as Rockefeller, Harriman, Mellon, duPont, Astor, Whitney and Ford, have been associated with fabulous wealth for three or more generations. The minority of “self-made” rich listed by <strong>Fortune</strong> “made their pile” mainly during World War I and the post-war boom. They include the General Motors quartet, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., Charles F. Kettering, John L. Pratt and Charles S. Mott. Joseph P. Kennedy, stock market and real estate speculator whose son John was then in the Senate, was listed in <strong>Fortune</strong>’s $200 million to $400 million bracket.</p>
<p>Of <strong>Fortune</strong>’s 76 richest Americans, 31 were in the $75 million to $100 million group; 29, in the $100 million to $200 million; eight, in the $200 million to $400 million; and seven, in the $400 million to $700 million sector. J. Paul Getty, a California oil “tycoon” domiciled in Paris, occupied the $700 million to $1 billion niche alone. Getty in 1959 stated that his fortune was probably greater than a billion. (<strong>New York Times</strong>, October 16, 1959.) Several billionaire families are on the list, including seven Rockefellers, four Mellons and four duPonts. Forty one of the 76 inherited their fortunes; of the remaining 35, thirteen got rich from oil. <strong>Fortune</strong> explained its estimates were “conservative.” I put the combined wealth of the 76 at between $17 billion and $20 billion. Several of the 76 have died since 1957. But the corporations and banks which they or their heirs control or directly influence reflect the spectrum of American industry and finance, with many scores of billions in assets.</p>
<p>The “moguls” dominate more than ever. But the individual or family ownership and operation of a single enterprise, which characterized the economy of the last century, has been transformed into vast industrial and financial complexes owned and controlled largely by single individuals, families or small inner groups who hire and fire professional managers at will.</p>
<p>When confronted with these facts proving that there are more and richer “moguls” than ever, the propagandists of “people’s capitalism” brush the whole matter aside. G. Keith Funston, President of the New York Stock Exchange, has erected the final and, presumably, most invulnerable line of defense of the “people’s capitalism” theory. This Maginot Line of “people’s capitalism” is “broadened ownership of corporation stock.” The <strong>New York Post</strong>, April 21, 1959, published an interview with Funston and explained:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“G. Keith Funston did not invent the phrase ‘peoples capitalism.’ But he’s done such a job popularizing it ... that people’s capitalism – broadened ownership of corporation stock – has become pretty much of a Funston hallmark.”</p>
<p class="fst">Funston is quoted:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I like the term because it’s expressive and because the Russians hate it so. They say, yes, there may be over 8,600,000 Americans owning stock but that only 1 per cent own more than 90 per cent of it – or some such figure. Well, we don’t know exactly how stock ownership is spread, but we estimate that two-thirds of those 8,600,000 shareowning Americans have incomes of $7,500 and under ... we know there’s been a significant increase of stockownership in recent years – about one-third more buyers than in 1951.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">FUNSTON infers that the question of the vast proportion of all stocks owned by the top one per cent of stockholders is just “Russian” propaganda. This “Russian” propaganda happens to be based on data published by such ardently pro-capitalist institutions as the US Senate and the National Bureau of Economic Research.</p>
<p>A 1946 Report on Monopolies by the Senate Small Business Committee disclosed that the top 1% of shareholders then owned 60% of the outstanding stock of the 200 largest corporations. “The rich are getting richer,” said the February 29, 1960, <strong>New York Times</strong>, in describing a survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This survey, said the <strong>Times</strong>, “showed that since 1949 there has been a trend toward more wealth in the hands of fewer people ...” This trend, the <strong>Times</strong> reported, “was clearly evident in 1953 ... when 1.6 per cent of the country’s population held 30 per cent of the nation’s personal wealth” including “at least 80 per cent of the corporate stock held in the personal sector, virtually all of the state and local government bonds and between 10 and 35 per cent of each type of property.”</p>
<p>What is true of the division of all shareholdings is also true for the shareholdings in individual corporations. The classic case is the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. For many years, AT&T has been cited as the outstanding example of “people’s capitalism” because it has more stockholders than any other corporation.</p>
<p>In 1951, AT&T celebrated the attainment of one million shareholders. Widely publicized ceremonies were held in the New York Stock Exchange. The publicity neglected to mention, however, that the vast majority of AT&T stockholders individually and collectively owned very little of AT&T. While just 30 top shareholders in 1950 owned 1,160,000 of AT&T’s 29 million outstanding shares, some 200,000 AT&T wage workers who had been induced to become “capitalists” by buying AT&T shares controlled less stock than the top 30 owners. These AT&T worker-shareowners, representing 20% of all the company’s shareholders, had to strike repeatedly just to win union recognition.</p>
<p>CIO Communications Workers President Joseph A. Beirne called the publicity about the one-millionth shareholder a “shallow and cheap device to fool the public.” He cited AT&T’s own figures to show that “7.5 per cent of stockholders own over one half of the outstanding shares.” He added: “Conversely, the remaining 92.5 per cent of the shareholders combined don’t even have majority control of the company ...” Today, AT&T boasts nearly two million stockholders. More than 90% of them possess insignificant holdings. All of the latter combined have less control over AT&T than a man with a paddle has over an ocean liner.</p>
<p>The head of the New York Stock Exchange, however, has declared that anyone who talks about how few own so much is practically an agent of the Kremlin. I will limit myself, therefore, to examining simon-pure “people’s capitalism” as defined by G. Keith Funston. In his <strong>New York Post</strong> interview, he saw this new and better economic order in the fact that about 8,600,000 Americans in the spring of 1959 owned at least one share of stock. That is, only 5% of the population owned stock.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THERE was more “people’s capitalism” during the great depression in 1936. That year there were 8,039,000 shareholders, or 6.3% of the population. (<strong>The Economic Almanac for 1946-47</strong>, Page 45.) By 1952, when Funston began unfolding his propaganda campaign, the number had dropped to 6,490,000, or only 4.2% of the population, according to the New York Stock Exchange’s own report. In 1956, the Exchange reported 8,630,000 shareholders, or 5.2% of the American people – still a smaller percentage than in 1936. Finally, in June 1959, Funston was able to come up with a figure on stock ownership representing a higher ratio to population than the 1936 depression figure. The New York Stock Exchange claimed there were 12,493,000 shareholders in June 1959, or about 7% of the population, compared to 6.3% in 1936.</p>
<p>Let us turn from the America of the 1.6% who own 80% of all privately held corporation shares to the <em>proletarian</em> America of the 87% who live primarily by the sale of their labor power for wages. If the “Very Rich” of <strong>Fortune</strong>’s 1957 survey are those who cannot conceive of ever becoming broke, the people of the wage-workers’ America never know what it’s like not to feel insecure, not to fear that a day will come when they will be broke or nearly so. Most of them at some time in their lives have been broke, or next to it, and many are broke right now.</p>
<p>Under the present private-profit order, the wage workers never escape the fear of pauperization. Insecurity nags the workers even in periods of relative “prosperity.” What if a prolonged illness strikes? What if the job folds up? What if a depression comes? These questions are never far from the surface of the minds of even the best-paid workers.</p>
<p>A US Department of Labor survey indicated that the average family of four needed an annual income of $6,120 in 1959 to maintain a “modest but adequate” standard of living. This did not allow for any prolonged illness or savings. This budget required a full year’s income of $118 every week. The average factory wage at the time was $90.78 a week before withholding taxes. I have before me a recent Labor Department report showing that in February 1961 the actual average weekly <em>take-home</em> pay of factory production workers in the metropolitan New York-Northeastern New Jersey area was $80.87 for a worker with three dependents and $73.31 for a single worker.</p>
<p>The US Census Bureau reported on January 5, 1961, that the median family income in 1959 – before the current recession – was $5,400 before taxes. That is, half the families in this country had incomes during the last “boom” year below $5,400, or at least $720 less than the government’s own “modest but adequate” family budget.</p>
<p>In the peak “prosperity” year, 1959, a large segment of the population lived close to or in dire poverty. Nearly 25% – one in four – families had to subsist on $3,000 a year or less, the equivalent in buying power of about $1,250 at pre-war 1939 price and tax levels. <strong>Fortune</strong> magazine, March 1961, cites the fact that today there are 32 million American people living in outright poverty – below the $2,500 a year level per family.</p>
<p>The impoverished in America are equal to nearly 75% of the population of France; about 60% of West Germany or 65% of Italy; nearly double the population of East Germany; and five times the population of Cuba. Many more than half the American people live well below what is officially considered the minimum “decency and comfort” standard for a country as rich and productive as the United States.</p>
<p>Remember, we are not speaking of a land newly emerged from age-long backwardness, like China. Our country, with 6.2% of the world’s population, owns 50% of its wealth. (<strong>Information Please Almanac – 1961</strong>, page 628.) Our governmental units (federal, state and local) together spent $153 billion in the fiscal year 1960. Since the end of World War II, we have spent more than $500 billion for direct military purposes – enough to have built fifty million modern $10,000 homes. In fact, we spend a million dollars a day just for storage of the “surplus” farm commodities bought by the government to prop up agricultural prices.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">AMIDST these Himalayas of waste, great sectors of the American people live in permanent misery. Far from benefiting from the “social flux” that Reuther has conjured up, tens of millions of Americans are condemned by race, age and sex alone to suffer permanently in abysmal living conditions while abundance overflows all about them.</p>
<p>Take, for example, the more than 19,000,000 Negro Americans (or Afro-Americans as some of them now prefer to be called). Most of them exist in a permanent depression – economically deprived, physically segregated, socially degraded and politically disfranchised. The Negro workers earn little more than half the average wages of the white workers, although few of the latter attain the blessed estate of a “modest but adequate” family income. As of 1958, half of the nonwhite male workers earned $3,368 or less compared to a median income for whites of $5,186. Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg reported on February 17, 1961, that 13.8% of all Negroes in the labor force were out of work in January 1961, compared to 7% of white workers. At this point, it is well to remind ourselves that there is one vast area of this country, the former Southern slave states with more than twice the population of fascist Spain, that has maintained a one-party dictatorship since the end of Reconstruction and denies civil rights to more Negroes than the entire black population of South Africa.</p>
<p>It is miserable indeed to be a Negro worker in the United States; but, strange as it may seem, it is even worse to be an aged worker, whatever one’s color. <strong>Life</strong> magazine, July 13, 1959, gave a shocking account of the plight of persons 65 years of age or older. There were 15.4 million people over 65 in 1959. Three-fifths of them, some 9.2 million, had personal incomes of less than $1,000 a year. Another fifth, about 3,000,000, received less than a $2,000 annual income.</p>
<p>Our society prides itself on being based on the Ten Commandments, including one that says: “Honor thy father and thy mother ...” Yet, the United States has well over ten million pauperized aged (mostly white) who are “badgered by economic worries, harassed by failing health ... for the most part in dire need,” write Robert and Leone Train Rienow in the January 28, 1961, <strong>Saturday Review</strong>. Their article, <em>The Desperate World of the Senior Citizen</em>, tells how these 10 million impoverished aged Americans hidden away in our dingy back rooms “are, almost without exception, cruelly lonely, suffering from feelings of rejection and neglect.” This plight of America’s aged, I might add, is a sufficient commentary on the highly touted “social security” system in this richest country of all.</p>
<p>Our dependent and orphaned young also subsist on mere dregs. Payments in many states for dependent children as well as for old-age assistance, “often represent little more than slow starvation,” admitted William L. Mitchell, US Commissioner of Social Security, in an address on September 10, 1959. More than three million youngsters are trying to survive on this aid to dependent children under the Social Security Act. <strong>Life</strong> magazine recently ran pictures of children in parts of the former Belgian Congo starving as a result of civil war and foreign intervention. But just as horrible sights were to be seen down in our own Louisiana. In August 1960, the Louisiana legislature struck 23,500 children off the state-administered aid-to-dependent-children rolls. They were deemed to be living in “unsuitable” homes – the mothers of many of them were unmarried. State Senator Jack Fruge of Ville Platte on November 8, 1960, pleaded unsuccessfully for repeal of the Louisiana law, saying that he knew many instances in his own parish (county) of Evangeline where “children are so hungry they go to garbage cans for food.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">BUT nothing quite equals the vile conditions of the two million hired farm workers. Their average income in 1960 fell below $900. The majority are Negroes, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. They are denied even the meager protection of the minimum wage and collective bargaining laws.</p>
<p>As previously noted, average wages of our 23 million women workers are only two-thirds of men’s and provide only half the income necessary for a “modest but adequate” standard of family living. Many women are the sole support of their families.</p>
<p>No proletariat in America? I have just described scores of millions of proletarians – the impoverished aged and the dependent children, the racial and national minorities, the women workers and the farm hands. And I have not yet touched on the main body of proletarians – the white male wage-earners.</p>
<p>Two-thirds of all the gainfully employed are males – 90% of them white. An outright majority – 58.4% – of all employed males are in the manual, service and farm laborer classifications, according to BLS data for July 10-16, 1960. Factory operatives and kindred workers form the largest single group of male employees, 19.2%. Then come craftsmen, 18.7%; non-agricultural laborers, 9%; service workers (a wide category including domestic servants, repairmen, laundry workers, elevator operators, janitors, clothes pressers, garbage collectors, barbers, hotel, restaurant and bar workers, etc.) 6.5%; and hired farm laborers, 4.9%.</p>
<p>All income earners of both sexes totaled 68,689,000 in the above-cited BLS report. Of these, 37,449,000 – or a 54% majority – are in physical labor categories, including operatives, craftsmen, laborers, service workers and hired farm hands. Clerical workers number 9,907,000 and sales workers, 4,405,000. The latter two “white collar” groups total 14,312,000. They formed 20.8% of the employed working force in July 1960. Even if we add to them a mixed category listed as “professional, technical and kindred workers,” numbering 7,042,000, or 10.3% of the total, we cannot stretch the “white collar” workers to more than 31.1% of the gainfully employed. However, the “professional, technical and kindred workers” label is deceptive. In January 1960 an AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department seminar on the space-age industries heard a warning that many employers are trying to “bleed” the unions by labeling as “technicians” workers who do about the same tasks as other production employees.</p>
<p>The remaining classifications are “managers, officials and proprietors” and “farm owners and farm managers.” Together, they represent 14.4% of the total.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THERE is extensive manipulation of statistical data to exaggerate the number and social status of the so-called “white collar class.” Thus, the Census Bureau’s occupational classification system puts file clerks, typists, office boys, grocery wrappers and cashiers, variety-store sales girls and similar low-paid workers in the same general “white collar” occupational division as “managers, officials and proprietors.” Recently, the classification of “service workers,” who include many in the most menial physical labor jobs, has been shifted from the “Manual and Services” general category to the broad “White Collar Occupations” listing.</p>
<p>The great increase in clerical and “technical” workers in the past 20 years, due mainly to doubling of government civilian employment and expansion of the war industries, is being used to “prove” that “blue collar” workers are in swift decline, that the proletariat is vanishing and that the unions are disintegrating.</p>
<p>Under the headline, <em>Union Membership Declines</em>, a <strong>New York Times</strong> editorial on February 7, 1960, takes special note of a 300,000 loss in total union membership from the 18,400,000 peak in 1956. The <strong>Times</strong> attributes this 1.7% decline in part to the fact that “white collar workers now account for more than half of the labor force but only 12 per cent of American unionists were white collar workers in 1958 ...” The <strong>Times</strong>’ figure on the predominance of the “white collar” workers, as the Census data I have cited show, is false. There were almost three times as many wage workers employed in physical labor categories as in “white collar” in 1960, although mass unemployment has since cut down paid union memberships by as much as 1½ million.</p>
<p>It is true that union leaders themselves blame the over-all decline of union membership since 1956 in part on the “changing composition” of the nation’s work force. Yet some 20 million workers in the physical labor category – many in the South – remain unorganized. Every time there has been a slackening of union growth we have heard the plaint about the “white collar” workers. The fault lies, however, in the class-collaborationist policies, methods and outlook of the union leaders.</p>
<p>But before anyone hangs a wreath on the American labor movement to mourn the simultaneous demise of the American proletariat and its unions, let us review certain basic facts. Twenty-eight years ago – in 1933 – there were only 2,782,296 union members, or 7.8% of the organizable workers, after 47 years of AFL activity. In 1935, the year the CIO was formed, organized workers numbered 3,616,847, or 10.6% of potential unionists. By 1937, after the CIO went into action, union membership more than doubled, numbering 7,687,087, or 21.9% of organizable workers.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">MOREOVER, during the first two years of the CIO’s aggressive drive to organize industrial workers, scores of thousands of “white collar” workers were swept into the CIO’s fold – a combined total of 90,000 in the State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Retail Employees and the United Office and Professional Workers unions. Some 15,000 editorial employees joined the new American Newspaper Guild. (Edward Levinson, <strong>Labor on the March</strong>, 1938, Page 309-315.)</p>
<p>Today, despite recent losses, organized labor represents between 16 million and 17 million members, almost five times as many as in the founding year of the CIO and two and a third times more than in 1937, when the almost-broke CIO unions, amidst a depression, crashed through for their first great victories.</p>
<p>In examining the contention that “there is no proletariat” in the United States, I have touched only in passing on the crucial point of mass unemployment. Despite more than a trillion dollars (1,000,000,000,000) of direct military expenditures in the past twenty years, we have experienced a series of recessions – 1945-46, 1949-50, 1953-54, 1957-58 and 1960-61. The unemployment peak in July 1958 reached 5,294,000. Eight million workers drew unemployment compensation at some time during 1958. In February 1961, a new post-war record of 5,705,000 full-time jobless was reached. Another 3,000,000 were on reduced work-weeks with corresponding loss of pay. Nearly nine million wage earners were suffering directly the consequences of falling production at the low point of the latest recession. About 45% of the unemployed are not covered by unemployment compensation. It is estimated that in 1960 not less than fifteen to sixteen million workers suffered some period of full unemployment.</p>
<p>In February 1961, one in every ten factory workers was unemployed – an outright depression ratio. Most heavily hit were steel, auto and textile workers. Coal miners have lost two-thirds of their jobs since World War II. Detroit unemployment in February 1961 reached a depression level of 11.8% of the city’s work force. The Michigan jobless rate was 10.8%. Mass layoffs accompanied sharp drops in production. Auto factories in February 1961 worked at only 44% of the February 1960 rate. The steel industry, from June 1960 through March 1961, operated at between 45% and 55% of capacity.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">BECAUSE of their relatively high wage rates, coal, steel and automobile workers have frequently been cited as wage-earners who have been lifted above the proletariat. Compared to the $2.30 average hourly wage rates for all manufacturing workers in February 1961, the soft coal miners received $3.27; steel workers, $3.02; and auto workers, $2.87. But frequency of layoffs and short work-weeks in these basic industries have meant deep slashes in annual earnings. Moreover, welfare funds and “fringe” benefits are proving insufficient to meet the need during the current depressed conditions of these industries.</p>
<p>The independent United Mine Workers was forced in December 1960 to cut pensions of 65,000 retired soft-coal miners from $100 down to $75 a month because of “economic conditions that have caused a large decline in the revenues of the trust fund.” A supplementary unemployed benefit (SUB), combined with state unemployment compensation, was supposed to provide laid-off AFL-CIO steel workers with 65% of their normal weekly take-home pay for as long as a year. By February 1961, the US Steel Corporation had reduced its individual SUB payments 40% because of the heavy drain on its fund. AFL-CIO United Automobile Workers officials have reported an unspecified number of laid-off UAW members have lost their SUB payments. These are discontinued when state unemployment benefits end. American society is indeed “in flux” – but not in Reuther’s sense. It is “in flux” between employment and unemployment; between inadequate unemployment payments and none at all.</p>
<p>I have cited the statistics to prove beyond doubt the class divisions in the United States, the decisive numbers of the proletariat and the tremendous size of organized labor compared to earlier periods. These facts demonstrate that the widely advertised “people’s capitalism” is a myth based upon massive falsifications about the conditions of the working people and their struggles for existence in this richest and most favored of capitalist countries. The economy of the United States is neither owned by the people nor operated for their benefit. Our capitalism remains essentially what it has been from birth: a system of exploitation of the many for the enrichment and aggrandizement of the few.</p>
<p class="date"><em>May 1, 1961</em></p>
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Art Preis
No Classes in US?
Myth of “People’s Capitalism”
(May 1961)
From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, pp.3-9.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
TODAY, American employers and trade union leaders alike insist there is no basis in this country for class struggle. They claim, in fact, that “class distinctions” and even classes themselves have disappeared from our society.
The founders of the American Federation of Labor in 1886 did not deny the fact of the class struggle. They said in the Preamble of the AFL Constitution:
“A struggle is going on in all nations of the civilized world between the oppressors and the oppressed of all countries, a struggle between the capitalist and the laborer ...”
It is true that Samuel Gompers, the AFL’s founding president, disavowed class struggle methods. He proclaimed in his 1910 Labor Day statement, for instance, that
“Labor Day stands for industrial peace ... Our labor movement has no system to crush ... It has nothing to overturn ...”
William Green, Gompers’ successor, announced in 1935, on the eve of the stormy rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) that we were at the dawn of class peace. He assured labor that “the majority of employers sincerely and honestly wish to maintain decent wage standards and humane conditions ...” He boasted of his “consistent refusal to commit our movement” to “tactics based upon belief that irreconcilable conflict exists between owners of capital and labor ...”
The modern union leaders have gone Green one better. They have banished economic classes altogether or reduced class differences to the vanishing point. Without classes or class differences, they ask, how can there be class struggle? The late Philip Murray, president of both the CIO and the United Steelworkers of America, thus wrote in July 1948:
“Today, progressive businessmen regard their workers ... as welcome partners ... We have no classes in this country; that’s why the Marxist theory of the class struggle has gained so few adherents. We’re all workers here.”
Walter Reuther, United Automobile Workers President and Murray’s successor in the CIO, spoke at the 1954 CIO Convention against a labor party here because he said this country does not have the same type of class structure as in Europe. Over there, he claimed,
“society developed along very classical economic lines, there you have rigid class groupings ... But America is a society in which social groups are in flux, in which we do not have this rigid class structure ...”
Reuther has never made clear whether we are becoming “all workers here,” as Murray said, all capitalists or some new hybrid class. But he is sure of one thing:
“We don’t believe in the class struggle. The labor movement in America has never believed in the class struggle.” (New York Times, March 28, 1958).
AFL-CIO President George Meany also abhors class struggle. But Meany, unlike Murray, has liquidated the working class. At the AFL-CIO merger in December 1955, Meany decreed:
“We must not think of ourselves as a group apart; there is no such thing as a proletariat in America.”
This echoes a note sounded since the end of World War II by ideologists and propagandists of big business, who spread the myth that in America we have achieved – or soon will – a “classless” society – and without abolishing the private profit system. This unique form of society they call “people’s capitalism.” Thus, the General Electric Corporation in a large advertising spread in the February 22, 1959, New York Times Magazine, explained that its shareowners “come from all walks of life” and “this trend has made American capitalism more and more a people’s capitalism.” (Original emphasis.)
Adolph A. Berle Jr., Roosevelt’s wartime Assistant Secretary of State and a luminary early in the Kennedy Administration, specializes in this type of myth-making. In the New York Times Magazine, November 1, 1959, Berle states that what Marxists describe as capitalism “perhaps did exist a century ago. But in America it stopped existing somewhere between 1920 and 1930.” He informs us: “This American system has not received a distinctive name. It has been called ‘people’s capitalism’.” This “people’s capitalism,” according to Berle, is a transformation from the “age of moguls” which existed seventy or eighty years ago. In
the last decades of the Nineteenth Century, Berle concedes, “individual owners of private capitalist enterprise were ... piling up fabulous fortunes from the profits of railroads and mines, steel, copper and oil ...” But today the corporations have “displaced the tycoons and moguls, substituting professional management.” In a subsequent New York Times article, Berle dissolved the working class as easily as he had eliminated the “tycoons and moguls.” He wrote on December 18, 1960, that “in America the ‘proletariat’ is hard to find.”
The New York Times editors also claim it is absurd to speak of class distinctions. In a Labor Day editorial, the September 5, 1960, Times instructs us:
“What we most need to remember is that such expressions as ‘labor’ and the ‘workingman’ have a diminished meaning today. We have no class distinctions to fit such words. Among the crowds on our Appian Ways it is difficult to tell employer and employee apart ...”
Let the Times editors – and Berle and Meany, too – seek beyond “our Appian Ways” and go to the unemployment compensation offices or welfare relief agencies. Let them survey the vast and rotting slum areas of New York City and our other large population centers. They will find, by some odd chance, that such places and such areas, are frequented almost exclusively by workers.
Here we have one rule-of-thumb measure of class distinctions in America. Unemployment and the need for unemployment relief are almost exclusively conditions affecting wage workers. A study of unemployment, published in June, 1958, by the US Bureau of the Census, disclosed that 11,600,000 workers had suffered some period of unemployment in 1957, a “good” year. If we count as proletarians only those subject to unemployment and their dependents, we must conclude that, contrary to Berle’s claim, the proletariat in the United States is not at all “hard to find.”
CLASS divisions in America have been the subject of serious studies in recent years by outstanding sociologists and scholars – all non-Marxists. Their findings are contained in such widely heralded books as The Status Seekers by Vance Packard, The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills and Social Class and Mental Illness by August B. Hollingshead and Frederick C. Redlich. They all confirm, in their own way, that class lines exist and are hardening more than ever.
The Status Seekers, a best-seller in 1959 and 1960, marshals an impressive array of facts to answer the directly posed question: has the United States become a classless society or is it even approaching such a condition?
Packard concludes that class lines in this country are becoming more rigid and that even within the upper strata of society the straining for status and privileged position has intensified. Moreover, he dismisses the “widespread assumption” that the rise in available “spending money” in the late fifties is making everyone equal. He stresses that a working-class man does not move into a higher social class even if he should succeed in purchasing a “limousine” or some other material status symbol. And the worker knows it, says Packard. For, in terms of the worker’s productive role, class lines are becoming “more rigid, rather than withering away.”
Packard refutes the widely circulated propaganda that the working class is being absorbed into the middle class. In 1940, only about one-third of those gainfully employed were in so-called “white collar” occupations. By 1959, it was claimed, at least half were in the “white collar” group. This, says Packard, has been incorrectly interpreted to signify a great upthrust of working-class people into the middle class. Actually, a large percentage of those recruited into the new “white collar” jobs are women who did not previously work. Besides, many jobs classified as “white collar,” Packard points out, are really low-paid manual occupations that require little skill, such as that of office machine operators, gas station attendants, retail store clerks and many government employees.
Today, there are some 23,000,000 women workers, almost a third of the entire labor force. They provide a high percentage of the clerical and other “white collar” workers. The average full-time yearly pay of women workers in 1960 was $3,102, or two-thirds of men’s average earnings. Thus, the majority of working women get wages close to or below the poverty level, fixed by government experts at $2,500 a year. This hardly qualifies these new “white collar” workers as middle-class, even if one believes that a poorly paid typist or mimeograph machine operator has a status superior to a union-scale linotypist or pressman in the printing industry.
THE FACTS cited above confirm Packard’s contention that there has been a “revolutionary blurring” between so-called “white collar” and “blue collar” workers in the sense that every basis for the claim of “white collar” clerical workers to superior status over “blue collar” workers has been undermined. Furthermore, Packard divides the “white collar” classification into a “lower” and an “upper” group. The latter includes the managers and executive employees, as well as self-employed professionals like doctors and lawyers. He explains, however, that between the “lower” and “upper” “white collar” groups there is a “sharp and formidable” boundary line.
We are forced to conclude from Packard’s findings that the “blue collar” workers are not being uplifted into the middle class. Rather, there has been a massive “proletarianization” of the lower middle class. Our society has become polarized into two primary classes, the wage workers and the owners. The letter’s top richest circles are the dominant sector of the American ruling class.
There was a time, however, when the American people might have spoken of “people’s capitalism” with a large degree of truth. That was before the American Civil War. Packard has noted this significant historical fact. There has been a tremendous shrinkage in the relative number of small entrepreneurs and self-employed people – farm owners, small tradesmen and shopkeepers, and craftsmen with their own workshops. These independent enterprisers originally constituted a true middle class in this country. They owned their means of production; they did not sell their labor power for wages.
Thus, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, during Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, four out of five Americans were self-employed enterprisers, a majority of them being farmers, Packard points out. By 1940, these enterprisers were only about one-fifth of the income earners. In 1959, they were reduced to about 13% of the “gainfully employed.” (By April 1960, the farm population, including all “hired hands,” had fallen to only 8.7% of the national total.)
In the late fifties, Packard also notes, some 87% of the income-earning populace were employed by others, by a tiny minority of employers, usually in corporate guise. I add the very significant fact that less than 1% of the corporations employ nearly 60% of all paid workers. (US Department of Commerce report, September 22, 1959.) Packard himself, I must further add, fervently disapproves of the hardening of class lines and wishes something might be done about it for the sake of the private profit system itself. But at least he does not shrink from the facts.
The “free enterprise” system in its corporate monopoly phase is not dominated by faceless “professional managers.” The Commissioner of Internal Revenue revealed in 1957 that 201 individuals had reported personal incomes of a million dollars or more in 1954 compared to “only” 145 in 1953. A further rise was expected in 1955. Fortune magazine, in its November 1957 issue, noted the significance of this data. Its article, The Fifty-Million-Dollar Man by Richard Austin Smith, observed there had been a lot of “poor-mouthing” about the million-dollar income dying out. It is plain from the statistics, said the Fortune writer, that “America’s Very Rich” have not gone the way of the pre-historic dinosaurs and do not seem likely to. The evidence points rather to what Fortune called “the resurgent Very Rich,” defined as individuals with personal estates of not less than fifty million dollars. That is the minimum wealth, Fortune contended, to be rich enough never to escape “the aura of money” or to conceive of ever being broke. A Treasury official cited by Fortune estimated there are between 150 and 500 persons in the golden circle of the “fifty-millionaires.”
Fortune itself identified 155 “fifty-millionaires” and thought it likely there were another hundred. Under the heading, America’s Biggest Fortunes, the magazine printed the names and chief sources of wealth of the 76 richest people in the country, so far as Fortune was able to uncover them.
THE majority of these super-rich “tycoons and moguls” have inherited their fortunes; their family names, such as Rockefeller, Harriman, Mellon, duPont, Astor, Whitney and Ford, have been associated with fabulous wealth for three or more generations. The minority of “self-made” rich listed by Fortune “made their pile” mainly during World War I and the post-war boom. They include the General Motors quartet, Alfred P. Sloan Jr., Charles F. Kettering, John L. Pratt and Charles S. Mott. Joseph P. Kennedy, stock market and real estate speculator whose son John was then in the Senate, was listed in Fortune’s $200 million to $400 million bracket.
Of Fortune’s 76 richest Americans, 31 were in the $75 million to $100 million group; 29, in the $100 million to $200 million; eight, in the $200 million to $400 million; and seven, in the $400 million to $700 million sector. J. Paul Getty, a California oil “tycoon” domiciled in Paris, occupied the $700 million to $1 billion niche alone. Getty in 1959 stated that his fortune was probably greater than a billion. (New York Times, October 16, 1959.) Several billionaire families are on the list, including seven Rockefellers, four Mellons and four duPonts. Forty one of the 76 inherited their fortunes; of the remaining 35, thirteen got rich from oil. Fortune explained its estimates were “conservative.” I put the combined wealth of the 76 at between $17 billion and $20 billion. Several of the 76 have died since 1957. But the corporations and banks which they or their heirs control or directly influence reflect the spectrum of American industry and finance, with many scores of billions in assets.
The “moguls” dominate more than ever. But the individual or family ownership and operation of a single enterprise, which characterized the economy of the last century, has been transformed into vast industrial and financial complexes owned and controlled largely by single individuals, families or small inner groups who hire and fire professional managers at will.
When confronted with these facts proving that there are more and richer “moguls” than ever, the propagandists of “people’s capitalism” brush the whole matter aside. G. Keith Funston, President of the New York Stock Exchange, has erected the final and, presumably, most invulnerable line of defense of the “people’s capitalism” theory. This Maginot Line of “people’s capitalism” is “broadened ownership of corporation stock.” The New York Post, April 21, 1959, published an interview with Funston and explained:
“G. Keith Funston did not invent the phrase ‘peoples capitalism.’ But he’s done such a job popularizing it ... that people’s capitalism – broadened ownership of corporation stock – has become pretty much of a Funston hallmark.”
Funston is quoted:
“I like the term because it’s expressive and because the Russians hate it so. They say, yes, there may be over 8,600,000 Americans owning stock but that only 1 per cent own more than 90 per cent of it – or some such figure. Well, we don’t know exactly how stock ownership is spread, but we estimate that two-thirds of those 8,600,000 shareowning Americans have incomes of $7,500 and under ... we know there’s been a significant increase of stockownership in recent years – about one-third more buyers than in 1951.”
FUNSTON infers that the question of the vast proportion of all stocks owned by the top one per cent of stockholders is just “Russian” propaganda. This “Russian” propaganda happens to be based on data published by such ardently pro-capitalist institutions as the US Senate and the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A 1946 Report on Monopolies by the Senate Small Business Committee disclosed that the top 1% of shareholders then owned 60% of the outstanding stock of the 200 largest corporations. “The rich are getting richer,” said the February 29, 1960, New York Times, in describing a survey by the National Bureau of Economic Research. This survey, said the Times, “showed that since 1949 there has been a trend toward more wealth in the hands of fewer people ...” This trend, the Times reported, “was clearly evident in 1953 ... when 1.6 per cent of the country’s population held 30 per cent of the nation’s personal wealth” including “at least 80 per cent of the corporate stock held in the personal sector, virtually all of the state and local government bonds and between 10 and 35 per cent of each type of property.”
What is true of the division of all shareholdings is also true for the shareholdings in individual corporations. The classic case is the American Telephone and Telegraph Company. For many years, AT&T has been cited as the outstanding example of “people’s capitalism” because it has more stockholders than any other corporation.
In 1951, AT&T celebrated the attainment of one million shareholders. Widely publicized ceremonies were held in the New York Stock Exchange. The publicity neglected to mention, however, that the vast majority of AT&T stockholders individually and collectively owned very little of AT&T. While just 30 top shareholders in 1950 owned 1,160,000 of AT&T’s 29 million outstanding shares, some 200,000 AT&T wage workers who had been induced to become “capitalists” by buying AT&T shares controlled less stock than the top 30 owners. These AT&T worker-shareowners, representing 20% of all the company’s shareholders, had to strike repeatedly just to win union recognition.
CIO Communications Workers President Joseph A. Beirne called the publicity about the one-millionth shareholder a “shallow and cheap device to fool the public.” He cited AT&T’s own figures to show that “7.5 per cent of stockholders own over one half of the outstanding shares.” He added: “Conversely, the remaining 92.5 per cent of the shareholders combined don’t even have majority control of the company ...” Today, AT&T boasts nearly two million stockholders. More than 90% of them possess insignificant holdings. All of the latter combined have less control over AT&T than a man with a paddle has over an ocean liner.
The head of the New York Stock Exchange, however, has declared that anyone who talks about how few own so much is practically an agent of the Kremlin. I will limit myself, therefore, to examining simon-pure “people’s capitalism” as defined by G. Keith Funston. In his New York Post interview, he saw this new and better economic order in the fact that about 8,600,000 Americans in the spring of 1959 owned at least one share of stock. That is, only 5% of the population owned stock.
THERE was more “people’s capitalism” during the great depression in 1936. That year there were 8,039,000 shareholders, or 6.3% of the population. (The Economic Almanac for 1946-47, Page 45.) By 1952, when Funston began unfolding his propaganda campaign, the number had dropped to 6,490,000, or only 4.2% of the population, according to the New York Stock Exchange’s own report. In 1956, the Exchange reported 8,630,000 shareholders, or 5.2% of the American people – still a smaller percentage than in 1936. Finally, in June 1959, Funston was able to come up with a figure on stock ownership representing a higher ratio to population than the 1936 depression figure. The New York Stock Exchange claimed there were 12,493,000 shareholders in June 1959, or about 7% of the population, compared to 6.3% in 1936.
Let us turn from the America of the 1.6% who own 80% of all privately held corporation shares to the proletarian America of the 87% who live primarily by the sale of their labor power for wages. If the “Very Rich” of Fortune’s 1957 survey are those who cannot conceive of ever becoming broke, the people of the wage-workers’ America never know what it’s like not to feel insecure, not to fear that a day will come when they will be broke or nearly so. Most of them at some time in their lives have been broke, or next to it, and many are broke right now.
Under the present private-profit order, the wage workers never escape the fear of pauperization. Insecurity nags the workers even in periods of relative “prosperity.” What if a prolonged illness strikes? What if the job folds up? What if a depression comes? These questions are never far from the surface of the minds of even the best-paid workers.
A US Department of Labor survey indicated that the average family of four needed an annual income of $6,120 in 1959 to maintain a “modest but adequate” standard of living. This did not allow for any prolonged illness or savings. This budget required a full year’s income of $118 every week. The average factory wage at the time was $90.78 a week before withholding taxes. I have before me a recent Labor Department report showing that in February 1961 the actual average weekly take-home pay of factory production workers in the metropolitan New York-Northeastern New Jersey area was $80.87 for a worker with three dependents and $73.31 for a single worker.
The US Census Bureau reported on January 5, 1961, that the median family income in 1959 – before the current recession – was $5,400 before taxes. That is, half the families in this country had incomes during the last “boom” year below $5,400, or at least $720 less than the government’s own “modest but adequate” family budget.
In the peak “prosperity” year, 1959, a large segment of the population lived close to or in dire poverty. Nearly 25% – one in four – families had to subsist on $3,000 a year or less, the equivalent in buying power of about $1,250 at pre-war 1939 price and tax levels. Fortune magazine, March 1961, cites the fact that today there are 32 million American people living in outright poverty – below the $2,500 a year level per family.
The impoverished in America are equal to nearly 75% of the population of France; about 60% of West Germany or 65% of Italy; nearly double the population of East Germany; and five times the population of Cuba. Many more than half the American people live well below what is officially considered the minimum “decency and comfort” standard for a country as rich and productive as the United States.
Remember, we are not speaking of a land newly emerged from age-long backwardness, like China. Our country, with 6.2% of the world’s population, owns 50% of its wealth. (Information Please Almanac – 1961, page 628.) Our governmental units (federal, state and local) together spent $153 billion in the fiscal year 1960. Since the end of World War II, we have spent more than $500 billion for direct military purposes – enough to have built fifty million modern $10,000 homes. In fact, we spend a million dollars a day just for storage of the “surplus” farm commodities bought by the government to prop up agricultural prices.
AMIDST these Himalayas of waste, great sectors of the American people live in permanent misery. Far from benefiting from the “social flux” that Reuther has conjured up, tens of millions of Americans are condemned by race, age and sex alone to suffer permanently in abysmal living conditions while abundance overflows all about them.
Take, for example, the more than 19,000,000 Negro Americans (or Afro-Americans as some of them now prefer to be called). Most of them exist in a permanent depression – economically deprived, physically segregated, socially degraded and politically disfranchised. The Negro workers earn little more than half the average wages of the white workers, although few of the latter attain the blessed estate of a “modest but adequate” family income. As of 1958, half of the nonwhite male workers earned $3,368 or less compared to a median income for whites of $5,186. Secretary of Labor Arthur J. Goldberg reported on February 17, 1961, that 13.8% of all Negroes in the labor force were out of work in January 1961, compared to 7% of white workers. At this point, it is well to remind ourselves that there is one vast area of this country, the former Southern slave states with more than twice the population of fascist Spain, that has maintained a one-party dictatorship since the end of Reconstruction and denies civil rights to more Negroes than the entire black population of South Africa.
It is miserable indeed to be a Negro worker in the United States; but, strange as it may seem, it is even worse to be an aged worker, whatever one’s color. Life magazine, July 13, 1959, gave a shocking account of the plight of persons 65 years of age or older. There were 15.4 million people over 65 in 1959. Three-fifths of them, some 9.2 million, had personal incomes of less than $1,000 a year. Another fifth, about 3,000,000, received less than a $2,000 annual income.
Our society prides itself on being based on the Ten Commandments, including one that says: “Honor thy father and thy mother ...” Yet, the United States has well over ten million pauperized aged (mostly white) who are “badgered by economic worries, harassed by failing health ... for the most part in dire need,” write Robert and Leone Train Rienow in the January 28, 1961, Saturday Review. Their article, The Desperate World of the Senior Citizen, tells how these 10 million impoverished aged Americans hidden away in our dingy back rooms “are, almost without exception, cruelly lonely, suffering from feelings of rejection and neglect.” This plight of America’s aged, I might add, is a sufficient commentary on the highly touted “social security” system in this richest country of all.
Our dependent and orphaned young also subsist on mere dregs. Payments in many states for dependent children as well as for old-age assistance, “often represent little more than slow starvation,” admitted William L. Mitchell, US Commissioner of Social Security, in an address on September 10, 1959. More than three million youngsters are trying to survive on this aid to dependent children under the Social Security Act. Life magazine recently ran pictures of children in parts of the former Belgian Congo starving as a result of civil war and foreign intervention. But just as horrible sights were to be seen down in our own Louisiana. In August 1960, the Louisiana legislature struck 23,500 children off the state-administered aid-to-dependent-children rolls. They were deemed to be living in “unsuitable” homes – the mothers of many of them were unmarried. State Senator Jack Fruge of Ville Platte on November 8, 1960, pleaded unsuccessfully for repeal of the Louisiana law, saying that he knew many instances in his own parish (county) of Evangeline where “children are so hungry they go to garbage cans for food.”
BUT nothing quite equals the vile conditions of the two million hired farm workers. Their average income in 1960 fell below $900. The majority are Negroes, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans. They are denied even the meager protection of the minimum wage and collective bargaining laws.
As previously noted, average wages of our 23 million women workers are only two-thirds of men’s and provide only half the income necessary for a “modest but adequate” standard of family living. Many women are the sole support of their families.
No proletariat in America? I have just described scores of millions of proletarians – the impoverished aged and the dependent children, the racial and national minorities, the women workers and the farm hands. And I have not yet touched on the main body of proletarians – the white male wage-earners.
Two-thirds of all the gainfully employed are males – 90% of them white. An outright majority – 58.4% – of all employed males are in the manual, service and farm laborer classifications, according to BLS data for July 10-16, 1960. Factory operatives and kindred workers form the largest single group of male employees, 19.2%. Then come craftsmen, 18.7%; non-agricultural laborers, 9%; service workers (a wide category including domestic servants, repairmen, laundry workers, elevator operators, janitors, clothes pressers, garbage collectors, barbers, hotel, restaurant and bar workers, etc.) 6.5%; and hired farm laborers, 4.9%.
All income earners of both sexes totaled 68,689,000 in the above-cited BLS report. Of these, 37,449,000 – or a 54% majority – are in physical labor categories, including operatives, craftsmen, laborers, service workers and hired farm hands. Clerical workers number 9,907,000 and sales workers, 4,405,000. The latter two “white collar” groups total 14,312,000. They formed 20.8% of the employed working force in July 1960. Even if we add to them a mixed category listed as “professional, technical and kindred workers,” numbering 7,042,000, or 10.3% of the total, we cannot stretch the “white collar” workers to more than 31.1% of the gainfully employed. However, the “professional, technical and kindred workers” label is deceptive. In January 1960 an AFL-CIO Industrial Union Department seminar on the space-age industries heard a warning that many employers are trying to “bleed” the unions by labeling as “technicians” workers who do about the same tasks as other production employees.
The remaining classifications are “managers, officials and proprietors” and “farm owners and farm managers.” Together, they represent 14.4% of the total.
THERE is extensive manipulation of statistical data to exaggerate the number and social status of the so-called “white collar class.” Thus, the Census Bureau’s occupational classification system puts file clerks, typists, office boys, grocery wrappers and cashiers, variety-store sales girls and similar low-paid workers in the same general “white collar” occupational division as “managers, officials and proprietors.” Recently, the classification of “service workers,” who include many in the most menial physical labor jobs, has been shifted from the “Manual and Services” general category to the broad “White Collar Occupations” listing.
The great increase in clerical and “technical” workers in the past 20 years, due mainly to doubling of government civilian employment and expansion of the war industries, is being used to “prove” that “blue collar” workers are in swift decline, that the proletariat is vanishing and that the unions are disintegrating.
Under the headline, Union Membership Declines, a New York Times editorial on February 7, 1960, takes special note of a 300,000 loss in total union membership from the 18,400,000 peak in 1956. The Times attributes this 1.7% decline in part to the fact that “white collar workers now account for more than half of the labor force but only 12 per cent of American unionists were white collar workers in 1958 ...” The Times’ figure on the predominance of the “white collar” workers, as the Census data I have cited show, is false. There were almost three times as many wage workers employed in physical labor categories as in “white collar” in 1960, although mass unemployment has since cut down paid union memberships by as much as 1½ million.
It is true that union leaders themselves blame the over-all decline of union membership since 1956 in part on the “changing composition” of the nation’s work force. Yet some 20 million workers in the physical labor category – many in the South – remain unorganized. Every time there has been a slackening of union growth we have heard the plaint about the “white collar” workers. The fault lies, however, in the class-collaborationist policies, methods and outlook of the union leaders.
But before anyone hangs a wreath on the American labor movement to mourn the simultaneous demise of the American proletariat and its unions, let us review certain basic facts. Twenty-eight years ago – in 1933 – there were only 2,782,296 union members, or 7.8% of the organizable workers, after 47 years of AFL activity. In 1935, the year the CIO was formed, organized workers numbered 3,616,847, or 10.6% of potential unionists. By 1937, after the CIO went into action, union membership more than doubled, numbering 7,687,087, or 21.9% of organizable workers.
MOREOVER, during the first two years of the CIO’s aggressive drive to organize industrial workers, scores of thousands of “white collar” workers were swept into the CIO’s fold – a combined total of 90,000 in the State, County and Municipal Employees, the United Retail Employees and the United Office and Professional Workers unions. Some 15,000 editorial employees joined the new American Newspaper Guild. (Edward Levinson, Labor on the March, 1938, Page 309-315.)
Today, despite recent losses, organized labor represents between 16 million and 17 million members, almost five times as many as in the founding year of the CIO and two and a third times more than in 1937, when the almost-broke CIO unions, amidst a depression, crashed through for their first great victories.
In examining the contention that “there is no proletariat” in the United States, I have touched only in passing on the crucial point of mass unemployment. Despite more than a trillion dollars (1,000,000,000,000) of direct military expenditures in the past twenty years, we have experienced a series of recessions – 1945-46, 1949-50, 1953-54, 1957-58 and 1960-61. The unemployment peak in July 1958 reached 5,294,000. Eight million workers drew unemployment compensation at some time during 1958. In February 1961, a new post-war record of 5,705,000 full-time jobless was reached. Another 3,000,000 were on reduced work-weeks with corresponding loss of pay. Nearly nine million wage earners were suffering directly the consequences of falling production at the low point of the latest recession. About 45% of the unemployed are not covered by unemployment compensation. It is estimated that in 1960 not less than fifteen to sixteen million workers suffered some period of full unemployment.
In February 1961, one in every ten factory workers was unemployed – an outright depression ratio. Most heavily hit were steel, auto and textile workers. Coal miners have lost two-thirds of their jobs since World War II. Detroit unemployment in February 1961 reached a depression level of 11.8% of the city’s work force. The Michigan jobless rate was 10.8%. Mass layoffs accompanied sharp drops in production. Auto factories in February 1961 worked at only 44% of the February 1960 rate. The steel industry, from June 1960 through March 1961, operated at between 45% and 55% of capacity.
BECAUSE of their relatively high wage rates, coal, steel and automobile workers have frequently been cited as wage-earners who have been lifted above the proletariat. Compared to the $2.30 average hourly wage rates for all manufacturing workers in February 1961, the soft coal miners received $3.27; steel workers, $3.02; and auto workers, $2.87. But frequency of layoffs and short work-weeks in these basic industries have meant deep slashes in annual earnings. Moreover, welfare funds and “fringe” benefits are proving insufficient to meet the need during the current depressed conditions of these industries.
The independent United Mine Workers was forced in December 1960 to cut pensions of 65,000 retired soft-coal miners from $100 down to $75 a month because of “economic conditions that have caused a large decline in the revenues of the trust fund.” A supplementary unemployed benefit (SUB), combined with state unemployment compensation, was supposed to provide laid-off AFL-CIO steel workers with 65% of their normal weekly take-home pay for as long as a year. By February 1961, the US Steel Corporation had reduced its individual SUB payments 40% because of the heavy drain on its fund. AFL-CIO United Automobile Workers officials have reported an unspecified number of laid-off UAW members have lost their SUB payments. These are discontinued when state unemployment benefits end. American society is indeed “in flux” – but not in Reuther’s sense. It is “in flux” between employment and unemployment; between inadequate unemployment payments and none at all.
I have cited the statistics to prove beyond doubt the class divisions in the United States, the decisive numbers of the proletariat and the tremendous size of organized labor compared to earlier periods. These facts demonstrate that the widely advertised “people’s capitalism” is a myth based upon massive falsifications about the conditions of the working people and their struggles for existence in this richest and most favored of capitalist countries. The economy of the United States is neither owned by the people nor operated for their benefit. Our capitalism remains essentially what it has been from birth: a system of exploitation of the many for the enrichment and aggrandizement of the few.
May 1, 1961
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>‘Hire’ Learning in America</h1>
<h3>(20 December 1972)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_51" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 51</a>, 20 December 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">America’s colleges and universities are often called institutions of “hire” education. Most of them are controlled by boards of trustees who are largely wealthy businessmen and corporation executives. They govern the funds – which means they dictate salaries, promotions, selection of personnel, hiring and firing. It is their views on matters economic, social and political that are pumped into the heads of students.</p>
<p>In recent years the ties of higher education to the capitalist profit system have been greatly strengthened. A large number of leading colleges and universities are investing endowment funds in private businesses – ranging from Rockefeller Center to a spaghetti factory – whose profits are used to maintain these educational institutions.</p>
<p>A nation-wide study reported by Benjamin Fine in the Dec. 13 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong> reveals that of the $2½ billion of endowments held by the country’s colleges and universities “about $1 billion, or 40 per cent, is invested in real property, business or commodities. Before the war less than 20 per cent was so invested, the rest being in government bonds or gilt-edged securities.”</p>
<p>Last year 455 colleges and universities, including such giants as Columbia and New York University, reported they owned or operated private-profit enterprises whose products were sold to outside persons. The profits from this billion-dollar investment totalled $150,492,583 – all tax-exempt.</p>
<p>A large part of this investment is in speculative real estate “which then usually is leased to the original owner or operated by the institution itself.” Another financial device is “establishment by alumni and friends of holding companies, organized to own and operate businesses, the income of which goes to the university.” An important source of profit is the “creation of research ind patent-holding companies.”</p>
<p>New York University has acquired in the last few years f our different types of businesses, namely, the C.F. Mueller spaghetti company; the Ramsey Corp., making pistons; American Limoges China, Inc.; and Howes Leather Co., a $35 million outfit that nets two to three millions profit yearly. The tax savings on profits of these four firms – since they are used for “educational purposes” – amounts to $1½ million a year.</p>
<p>The country’s largest university, Columbia, in addition to $16,471,685 invested in apartment houses and similar real estate, owns a $28,230,311 slice of Rockefeller Center – which indicates how much say Standard Oil and Chase National Bank have in the directing of “hire” learning in the United States.</p>
<p>Many businessmen and corporations zye eager to encourage this method of financing universities, because it provides a means of dodging the 38% corporate-profits tax. “Almost all the major institutions,” reports Fine, “are besieged by offers from business organizations to ‘buy out’ their buildings and then lease them back.”</p>
<p>Dr. Carter Davidson, president of Union College which a year ago acquired the real estate, store building and warehouse of Abraham Straus & Co., Brooklyn department store, conceded that “some institutions have abused their privilege somewhat in buying factories and then claiming tax exemption for these corporations.”</p>
<p>At any rate, it’s easy to see why higher education in America is devoted to “shielding” the youth from the ideas of Marxian socialism.</p>
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Art Preis
‘Hire’ Learning in America
(20 December 1972)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 51, 20 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
America’s colleges and universities are often called institutions of “hire” education. Most of them are controlled by boards of trustees who are largely wealthy businessmen and corporation executives. They govern the funds – which means they dictate salaries, promotions, selection of personnel, hiring and firing. It is their views on matters economic, social and political that are pumped into the heads of students.
In recent years the ties of higher education to the capitalist profit system have been greatly strengthened. A large number of leading colleges and universities are investing endowment funds in private businesses – ranging from Rockefeller Center to a spaghetti factory – whose profits are used to maintain these educational institutions.
A nation-wide study reported by Benjamin Fine in the Dec. 13 N.Y. Times reveals that of the $2½ billion of endowments held by the country’s colleges and universities “about $1 billion, or 40 per cent, is invested in real property, business or commodities. Before the war less than 20 per cent was so invested, the rest being in government bonds or gilt-edged securities.”
Last year 455 colleges and universities, including such giants as Columbia and New York University, reported they owned or operated private-profit enterprises whose products were sold to outside persons. The profits from this billion-dollar investment totalled $150,492,583 – all tax-exempt.
A large part of this investment is in speculative real estate “which then usually is leased to the original owner or operated by the institution itself.” Another financial device is “establishment by alumni and friends of holding companies, organized to own and operate businesses, the income of which goes to the university.” An important source of profit is the “creation of research ind patent-holding companies.”
New York University has acquired in the last few years f our different types of businesses, namely, the C.F. Mueller spaghetti company; the Ramsey Corp., making pistons; American Limoges China, Inc.; and Howes Leather Co., a $35 million outfit that nets two to three millions profit yearly. The tax savings on profits of these four firms – since they are used for “educational purposes” – amounts to $1½ million a year.
The country’s largest university, Columbia, in addition to $16,471,685 invested in apartment houses and similar real estate, owns a $28,230,311 slice of Rockefeller Center – which indicates how much say Standard Oil and Chase National Bank have in the directing of “hire” learning in the United States.
Many businessmen and corporations zye eager to encourage this method of financing universities, because it provides a means of dodging the 38% corporate-profits tax. “Almost all the major institutions,” reports Fine, “are besieged by offers from business organizations to ‘buy out’ their buildings and then lease them back.”
Dr. Carter Davidson, president of Union College which a year ago acquired the real estate, store building and warehouse of Abraham Straus & Co., Brooklyn department store, conceded that “some institutions have abused their privilege somewhat in buying factories and then claiming tax exemption for these corporations.”
At any rate, it’s easy to see why higher education in America is devoted to “shielding” the youth from the ideas of Marxian socialism.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>AFL Gave Undue Prominence<br>
to the Racketeering Issue</h1>
<h4>But Neither Dubinsky Nor the AFL Chieftains<br>
Took a Correct Working Class Attitude Toward It</h4>
<h3>(14 December 1940)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_50" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 50</a>, 14 December 1940, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst"><b>The problem of racketeering occupied an altogether disproportionate place at the AFL convention at New Orleans. It is a very minor problem in the trade union movement as a whole. Had the AFL chieftains been grappling, with the basic problems facing the workers, the racketeering question would have automatically been relegated to the subordinate place it should have taken. But since the convention was given no real problems to deal with – the main time was consumed with canned speeches from government officials and other people who had no business being on the platform</b> – it is no wonder that both at the convention and in the press the question of rackeetering loomed out of all proportion to its importance.<br>
</p>
<h4>Dubinsky’s Proposal</h4>
<p class="fst">Dubinsky, too yellow to tight on real issues – he didn't open his mouth even to second Philip Randolph’s eloquent plea against Jim Crow – picked this “popular” issue – i.e., popular with the capitalist press.</p>
<p>Dubinsky’s proposal to empower the AFL Executive Council to suspend any union official “convicted of an act of moral turpitude” would have placed in the hands of the reactionary Council the exact powers which Dubinsky had opposed when, they appeared in the form of the right to suspend international unions for “dual” unionism. Militant union leaders, convicted or framed-up in strike activities, could be tossed out of the AFL by a simple vote of the Council.</p>
<p>By its terms only, “convicted” persons could be suspended. The well-known tie-up between the police, courts and racketeers precludes many such convictions. Except, of course, in the case of honest union strikers.</p>
<p>Further, this proposal placed the responsibility for dealing with racketeers on the shoulders of a few leaders, instead of on the rank-and-file of the unions.</p>
<p>The convention leaders turned this proposal down. Green and Co. didn’t want to be placed in a position where at any time in the future they might be compelled to act against a “pal.” The defeat of Dubinsky’s proposal also reflected the concern of the various international officers for their jealously-guarded control over their individual unions.</p>
<p>As a counter proposal to Dubinsky’s, the Executive Council merely put. through a resolution piously “condemning” labor racketeering in general and suggesting that the various internationals “take steps” on their own initiative.</p>
<p>The convention failed to expose the real character and causes of racketeering, and to open the way for strengthening the democratic processes within the local unions which would enable the membership to make short shift of dishonest elements.<br>
</p>
<h4>Little Racketeering Exists</h4>
<p class="fst">What is the extent of the “racketeering” within the AFL? Contrary to the impression deliberately fostered by the boss press there is relatively very little.</p>
<p>Such racketeering as does exist is almost entirely confined to small unions, and these mainly in a few secondary service industries.</p>
<p>This fact is made clear by Louis Stark in an article in the <b>New York Times</b>, Dec. 1: “Investigations by prosecuting officials in New York, Chicago and other large cities have disclosed that racketeering is prevalent in small industries where cut-throat competition prevails, such as in cleaning and dying, laundry and restaurants.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Bosses Responsible</h4>
<p class="fst">What is more significant than the limited extent of union racketeering. is the fact that it is directly invited and sanctioned by the bosses in these industries. As Stark points out, “Almost invariably the union racketeers have been found linked with dishonest business men, crooked politicians and outright criminals.”</p>
<p>He adds:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Small employers in these industries, by their own motion or through outside instigation, form so-called trade associations to limit or increase prices. The crooked union leaders lend themselves to the associations at a price. They ‘police’ the industry and supply the ‘police’ from criminals among their number.</p>
<p class="quote">“Racketeering union leaders cooperate with dishonest business men to force other business men to join trade associations or to keep them out of trade associations. In either case the object of the trade association is monopoly and higher prices.”</p>
<p class="fst">From this it is apparent that racketeering is a <i>direct measure of the influence of the bosses</i> within any union, and not a phenomenon native to unionism itself, as the bosses try to claim.<br>
</p>
<h4>Why It Isn’t Ended</h4>
<p class="fst">The question is: If the extent of such racketeering is really so limited, if the vast bulk of the AFL local unions and leaders are free of any such taint, why is it seemingly so difficult to eradicate the evil?</p>
<p>The answer is simple. A policy which would clean out the Racketeers in double-quick time is possible: <i>But it poses a threat to the reactionary craft leaders, and it is the one policy of which the bosses – those who cry loudest against the evil – are in deadly fear.</i></p>
<p><i>That simple policy is to restore democratic rank-and-file control within the unions of the AFL!</i></p>
<p>The prevalent leadership dominates the ranks with an iron fist. Concerned primarily with the questions of dues collections, ironing out interminable jurisdictional disputes, and curbing the desires of the 'members for militant trade union action, the leadership enforces the principle of dictatorial control from the top. So long as these unions pay their dues, Green and Co. do not care whether the members attend meetings, or whether local meetings are ever held. If members who dare to oppose the policies of their officials are arbitrarily expelled without proper trial, that’s no skin off Bill Green’s nose.<br>
</p>
<h4>CIO Hasn’t Any Racketeering</h4>
<p class="fst">The proof that it is the lack of democratic practices within the AFL which enables the few racketeers to flourish within it, and that racketeering flourishes only in small crafts, is demonstrated by the complete freedom of, the CIO from racketeers. It might seem that the new unions of the CIO, formed quickly of inexperienced workers and prey to many unknown and untested elements, would be duck-soup for the penetration of boss racketeers. But it isn’t.</p>
<p>No handful of rats or gangsters who valued their necks would dare try to intimidate a meeting of industrial workers who had stood up to clubs, revolvers, rifles; machine guns, sawed-off shot-guns and tear gas in the hands of police and National Guardsmen!</p>
<p>It is hard to conceive of the appearance of a racketeering situation in an industrial union. To appear it would require a type of connivance with the bosses which is alien to a mass-production industry and an industrial union. It pays a boss to connive with a small craft union, even to the extent of paying relatively good wages. He could never feel that way about a mass-production industry, where the wage bill looms as the key factor and where an industrial union is bargaining on behalf of all the workers in the plant.</p>
<p>The CIO is thus well-nigh guaranteed in advance against, racketeering. The less favorable situation of the smaller craft unions in the AFL could, however, be overcome if the rank and file in any union were aided by the national AFL leadership to establish genuine democracy and use it against any racketeer.</p>
<p>But real union democracy – that means militancy and strikes; and you can’t get the Greens and Wolls to go for that!</p>
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Art Preis
AFL Gave Undue Prominence
to the Racketeering Issue
But Neither Dubinsky Nor the AFL Chieftains
Took a Correct Working Class Attitude Toward It
(14 December 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 50, 14 December 1940, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The problem of racketeering occupied an altogether disproportionate place at the AFL convention at New Orleans. It is a very minor problem in the trade union movement as a whole. Had the AFL chieftains been grappling, with the basic problems facing the workers, the racketeering question would have automatically been relegated to the subordinate place it should have taken. But since the convention was given no real problems to deal with – the main time was consumed with canned speeches from government officials and other people who had no business being on the platform – it is no wonder that both at the convention and in the press the question of rackeetering loomed out of all proportion to its importance.
Dubinsky’s Proposal
Dubinsky, too yellow to tight on real issues – he didn't open his mouth even to second Philip Randolph’s eloquent plea against Jim Crow – picked this “popular” issue – i.e., popular with the capitalist press.
Dubinsky’s proposal to empower the AFL Executive Council to suspend any union official “convicted of an act of moral turpitude” would have placed in the hands of the reactionary Council the exact powers which Dubinsky had opposed when, they appeared in the form of the right to suspend international unions for “dual” unionism. Militant union leaders, convicted or framed-up in strike activities, could be tossed out of the AFL by a simple vote of the Council.
By its terms only, “convicted” persons could be suspended. The well-known tie-up between the police, courts and racketeers precludes many such convictions. Except, of course, in the case of honest union strikers.
Further, this proposal placed the responsibility for dealing with racketeers on the shoulders of a few leaders, instead of on the rank-and-file of the unions.
The convention leaders turned this proposal down. Green and Co. didn’t want to be placed in a position where at any time in the future they might be compelled to act against a “pal.” The defeat of Dubinsky’s proposal also reflected the concern of the various international officers for their jealously-guarded control over their individual unions.
As a counter proposal to Dubinsky’s, the Executive Council merely put. through a resolution piously “condemning” labor racketeering in general and suggesting that the various internationals “take steps” on their own initiative.
The convention failed to expose the real character and causes of racketeering, and to open the way for strengthening the democratic processes within the local unions which would enable the membership to make short shift of dishonest elements.
Little Racketeering Exists
What is the extent of the “racketeering” within the AFL? Contrary to the impression deliberately fostered by the boss press there is relatively very little.
Such racketeering as does exist is almost entirely confined to small unions, and these mainly in a few secondary service industries.
This fact is made clear by Louis Stark in an article in the New York Times, Dec. 1: “Investigations by prosecuting officials in New York, Chicago and other large cities have disclosed that racketeering is prevalent in small industries where cut-throat competition prevails, such as in cleaning and dying, laundry and restaurants.”
Bosses Responsible
What is more significant than the limited extent of union racketeering. is the fact that it is directly invited and sanctioned by the bosses in these industries. As Stark points out, “Almost invariably the union racketeers have been found linked with dishonest business men, crooked politicians and outright criminals.”
He adds:
“Small employers in these industries, by their own motion or through outside instigation, form so-called trade associations to limit or increase prices. The crooked union leaders lend themselves to the associations at a price. They ‘police’ the industry and supply the ‘police’ from criminals among their number.
“Racketeering union leaders cooperate with dishonest business men to force other business men to join trade associations or to keep them out of trade associations. In either case the object of the trade association is monopoly and higher prices.”
From this it is apparent that racketeering is a direct measure of the influence of the bosses within any union, and not a phenomenon native to unionism itself, as the bosses try to claim.
Why It Isn’t Ended
The question is: If the extent of such racketeering is really so limited, if the vast bulk of the AFL local unions and leaders are free of any such taint, why is it seemingly so difficult to eradicate the evil?
The answer is simple. A policy which would clean out the Racketeers in double-quick time is possible: But it poses a threat to the reactionary craft leaders, and it is the one policy of which the bosses – those who cry loudest against the evil – are in deadly fear.
That simple policy is to restore democratic rank-and-file control within the unions of the AFL!
The prevalent leadership dominates the ranks with an iron fist. Concerned primarily with the questions of dues collections, ironing out interminable jurisdictional disputes, and curbing the desires of the 'members for militant trade union action, the leadership enforces the principle of dictatorial control from the top. So long as these unions pay their dues, Green and Co. do not care whether the members attend meetings, or whether local meetings are ever held. If members who dare to oppose the policies of their officials are arbitrarily expelled without proper trial, that’s no skin off Bill Green’s nose.
CIO Hasn’t Any Racketeering
The proof that it is the lack of democratic practices within the AFL which enables the few racketeers to flourish within it, and that racketeering flourishes only in small crafts, is demonstrated by the complete freedom of, the CIO from racketeers. It might seem that the new unions of the CIO, formed quickly of inexperienced workers and prey to many unknown and untested elements, would be duck-soup for the penetration of boss racketeers. But it isn’t.
No handful of rats or gangsters who valued their necks would dare try to intimidate a meeting of industrial workers who had stood up to clubs, revolvers, rifles; machine guns, sawed-off shot-guns and tear gas in the hands of police and National Guardsmen!
It is hard to conceive of the appearance of a racketeering situation in an industrial union. To appear it would require a type of connivance with the bosses which is alien to a mass-production industry and an industrial union. It pays a boss to connive with a small craft union, even to the extent of paying relatively good wages. He could never feel that way about a mass-production industry, where the wage bill looms as the key factor and where an industrial union is bargaining on behalf of all the workers in the plant.
The CIO is thus well-nigh guaranteed in advance against, racketeering. The less favorable situation of the smaller craft unions in the AFL could, however, be overcome if the rank and file in any union were aided by the national AFL leadership to establish genuine democracy and use it against any racketeer.
But real union democracy – that means militancy and strikes; and you can’t get the Greens and Wolls to go for that!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>OPA Wrecks Many Price Ceilings</h1>
<h4>Government ‘Price Control’ Agency Helps<br>
Big Business Drive to Hike Living Costs</h4>
<h3>(20 April 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_16" target="new">Vol. X No. 16</a>, 20 April 1946, pp. 1 & 7.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Brushing aside all labor and consumer protests, OPA Administrator Paul Porter last week signed an order, approved by Economic Stabilizer Chester Bowles, to remove price ceilings from several thousand consumer goods items representing about 15 per cent of all consumer goods in terms of dollars.</strong></p>
<p>This action of the agency which is supposed to “control prices” gives legal cover and a great additional impetus to the inflationary drive of Big Business, which is seeking to rob labor of its recent wage gains and to augment huge profits through charging “all the traffic will bear” for scarce goods.</p>
<p>Through appeals to both Porter and Bowles, a Joint committee of the CIO, API, and railway brotherhoods unsuccessfully attempted to block the Office of Price Administration’s Inflationary order.. The union committee warned that this action “Is a major gamble with the economic future of America.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Protests</h4>
<p class="fst">The order lifting price ceilings on hundreds of essential household Items, as well as many products customary to the average standard of living in this country, was issued on the pretext that it would have no great bearing on the cost of living since it did not effect “necessities.” Anything the masses don’t need for mere survival is considered “not a necessity” by the capitalist government.</p>
<p>But the government is preparing to legalize extortionate price increases even for indisputable necessities. This was shown by the action last week of the House Agricultural Committee, which unanimously voted approval of a proposal to discontinue the present huge government subsidies to the meat trust and to permit the meat barons to rob the people directly through a six cent a pound hike in meat prices. Meanwhile, the meat packers are channelling a large portion of supplies into illegal, black market outlets.</p>
<p>The House Agricultural Committee’s proposal is one of several inflationary amendments which Congress is planning to attach to the bill for extending the Price Control Act for a year beyond its present expiration date of June 30, 1946. The extension bill is scheduled to reach the House floor next week.<br>
</p>
<h4>Capital Goods</h4>
<p class="fst">Porter’s order lifting price ceilings on consumers items also Included the suspension entirely of price regulations on six broad classes of machinery and industrial equipment, including printing presses, textile machinery, railway cars, telephone equipment, machine tools, etc. This affects about one-third of the country’s capital goods industry.</p>
<p>The Joint labor committee, which sharply protested this phase of the OPA’s order, disputed the OPA’s flimsy claim that its “suspension action” on capital goods “will not affect the cost of living.”</p>
<p>Boris Shiskin, AFL economist and OPA Labor Policy Committee member, charged: “The price pattern in the machinery industry generally and in heavy machinery particularly has been traditionally monopolistic. Decontrol now, in the face of the present avid demand and cross-bidding for machinery, will mean immediate and drastic price increases.” These increases, he pointed out, inevitably will be “promptly passed on” to the American consumers.<br>
</p>
<h4>OPA Sanction</h4>
<p class="fst">Big Business and its Congress intend to extend OPA only if its powers are shorn to a minimum. The OPA itself is again demonstrating, however, that it is more than ready to give legal sanction to price gouging.</p>
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Art Preis
OPA Wrecks Many Price Ceilings
Government ‘Price Control’ Agency Helps
Big Business Drive to Hike Living Costs
(20 April 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 16, 20 April 1946, pp. 1 & 7.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Brushing aside all labor and consumer protests, OPA Administrator Paul Porter last week signed an order, approved by Economic Stabilizer Chester Bowles, to remove price ceilings from several thousand consumer goods items representing about 15 per cent of all consumer goods in terms of dollars.
This action of the agency which is supposed to “control prices” gives legal cover and a great additional impetus to the inflationary drive of Big Business, which is seeking to rob labor of its recent wage gains and to augment huge profits through charging “all the traffic will bear” for scarce goods.
Through appeals to both Porter and Bowles, a Joint committee of the CIO, API, and railway brotherhoods unsuccessfully attempted to block the Office of Price Administration’s Inflationary order.. The union committee warned that this action “Is a major gamble with the economic future of America.”
Labor Protests
The order lifting price ceilings on hundreds of essential household Items, as well as many products customary to the average standard of living in this country, was issued on the pretext that it would have no great bearing on the cost of living since it did not effect “necessities.” Anything the masses don’t need for mere survival is considered “not a necessity” by the capitalist government.
But the government is preparing to legalize extortionate price increases even for indisputable necessities. This was shown by the action last week of the House Agricultural Committee, which unanimously voted approval of a proposal to discontinue the present huge government subsidies to the meat trust and to permit the meat barons to rob the people directly through a six cent a pound hike in meat prices. Meanwhile, the meat packers are channelling a large portion of supplies into illegal, black market outlets.
The House Agricultural Committee’s proposal is one of several inflationary amendments which Congress is planning to attach to the bill for extending the Price Control Act for a year beyond its present expiration date of June 30, 1946. The extension bill is scheduled to reach the House floor next week.
Capital Goods
Porter’s order lifting price ceilings on consumers items also Included the suspension entirely of price regulations on six broad classes of machinery and industrial equipment, including printing presses, textile machinery, railway cars, telephone equipment, machine tools, etc. This affects about one-third of the country’s capital goods industry.
The Joint labor committee, which sharply protested this phase of the OPA’s order, disputed the OPA’s flimsy claim that its “suspension action” on capital goods “will not affect the cost of living.”
Boris Shiskin, AFL economist and OPA Labor Policy Committee member, charged: “The price pattern in the machinery industry generally and in heavy machinery particularly has been traditionally monopolistic. Decontrol now, in the face of the present avid demand and cross-bidding for machinery, will mean immediate and drastic price increases.” These increases, he pointed out, inevitably will be “promptly passed on” to the American consumers.
OPA Sanction
Big Business and its Congress intend to extend OPA only if its powers are shorn to a minimum. The OPA itself is again demonstrating, however, that it is more than ready to give legal sanction to price gouging.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(10 February 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_06" target="new">Vol. IX No. 6</a>, 10 February 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>Telephone Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">Last month, inspired by the November strike of the Ohio, Michigan
and Washington, D.C., operators, 17,000 local and long distance
telephone workers in New York overwhelmingly voted to strike for a
general $5 weekly raise. Their demands had been stalled by the
companies and WLB for over two years. Before the 30-day “cooling
off” period imposed under the Smith-Connally Act was concluded,
a WLB telephone wage panel hastily recommended granting the $5
increase, and the company representatives conceded to a $4 raise.</p>
<p>Continuing their demand for the full $5, the local Traffic
Employees Association of the New York Telephone Co. and the
Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers of the American Telegraph
and Telephone Co., agreed to postpone strike action pending a final
decision of the WLB’s National Telephone Panel in Washington.</p>
<p>WLB panels have also recommended increases for telephone workers
in other leading cities who had either participated in the
Thanksgiving week strike or threatened to follow this example.</p>
<p><em>The organized telephone operators have thus demonstrated that
the strike weapon is the only effective means of getting speedy
action from the government and corporations and securing the
possibility for workers to win their wage demands.</em></p>
<h4>*</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>UAW and WLB</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>The Militant</strong> last week reported the action of the CTO
United Automobile Workers international executive board in calling on
the CIO to withdraw its members from the War Labor Board. The text of
the resolution has been made public in the current issue of the UAW’S
official publication, the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>.</p>
<p>While enumerating a long series of complaints against the WLB,
whose procedure is termed a “time-wasting, meaningless
rigmarole,” the UAW board still upholds the principle of
compulsory arbitration. Their grievance is not that the WLB was
specifically organized to curb labor, but that it “has no
authority to act.”</p>
<p>The UAW bureaucrats, who are united in fearful opposition to
rescinding the no-strike pledge in the current UAW referendum, are
clamoring for a “new” board. This will differ from the
WLB only in that its “prerogatives” would be more
“comprehensive, clearly defined.” That is, more binding
upon the workers.</p>
<p><em>The resolution makes so bold as to declare that Roosevelt
“cannot escape full responsibility for the present inaction and
indecision of the WLB.” When did these pro-Roosevelt lackeys
discover that? They denied that before the elections. They themselves
for three years bolstered and gave a labor cover to the WLB.</em></p>
<p>We repeat what <strong>The Militant</strong> wrote last week. The UAW
bureaucrats don’t mean business.</p>
<p>They are trying to put on a “militant” front and save
face among the auto workers who are becoming thoroughly aroused
against the cowardly policies of the officialdom.</p>
<p>The auto militants are demonstrating through their campaign to
revoke the no-strike pledge that they oppose the whole policy of
dependence on capitalist “friends of labor” and
government boards. They are learning to have faith only in their own
organized strength in action. That’s the only policy that can
win an iota for the workers in this period.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Westinghouse</h4>
<p class="fst">The National Westinghouse Conference Board, of the CIO Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers, representing 80,000 Westinghouse Electric
Workers, recently issued a demand to Roosevelt for a general wage
increase of 17 cents an hour.</p>
<p>They appealed to Roosevelt “to counteract the failures and
blunders of his subordinates by granting an immediate national
cost-of-living wage adjustment of 17 cents an hour retroactive to
Jan. 1, 1944.”</p>
<p><em>Of course, Roosevelt’s subordinates committed no
“failures and blunders.” They very capably fulfilled
their function of frustrating the demands of the workers in
accordance with the policies laid down by Roosevelt himself.</em></p>
<p>Nevertheless, this wage raise demand from an important section of
a union notoriously dominated by the reactionary Stalinists is a
significant sign. It indicates growing pressure from the UE ranks.
For the Stalinist UE leaders certainly would like to suppress the
embarrassing clamor for cost-of-living wage increases.</p>
<h4>*</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>Secretary Addes</h4>
<p class="fst">UAW-CIO Secretary-Treasurer George Addes must have been born with
two tongues in his mouth. One tongue could not possibly stand the
strain of the double-talk he pours forth.</p>
<p>Addes, as is known to all among the auto workers, represents the
extreme right wing in the UAW leadership and has for several years
maintained a bloc with the Stalinists. He is among the most
unrestrained flag-wavers and abject labor lieutenants of Roosevelt
trying to maintain the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>So it might come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the
remarkable quality of double-talk put but by Addes, to read his
remarks on the Forced Labor Bill in his column, <em>Secretary Addes
Says</em>, in the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>, February 1.</p>
<p>Addes, a henchman of the Stalinists who support the “National
Service” scheme of Roosevelt, complains:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“When we wrote our column a month ago protesting
against those who were openly advocating a national service law, we
had no idea that President Roosevelt would once again join their
ranks ... Whether President Roosevelt actively Campaigns for passage
of a national service law or lets it die a peaceful death, as he did
last year, might possibly be the answer to some of the questions we
are today asking.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Three lies in two sentences:</p>
<ol>
<li>Roosevelt didn’t “join the ranks” of forced
labor advocates; he has spearheaded their offensive.<br>
</li>
<li>Roosevelt did not “let it die last year;” he just
shut up about it prior to the elections – as did Addes.<br>
</li>
<li>Addes never asked any questions about Roosevelt. But if he
has some, let him speak out.</li>
</ol>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(10 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 6, 10 February 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Telephone Workers
Last month, inspired by the November strike of the Ohio, Michigan
and Washington, D.C., operators, 17,000 local and long distance
telephone workers in New York overwhelmingly voted to strike for a
general $5 weekly raise. Their demands had been stalled by the
companies and WLB for over two years. Before the 30-day “cooling
off” period imposed under the Smith-Connally Act was concluded,
a WLB telephone wage panel hastily recommended granting the $5
increase, and the company representatives conceded to a $4 raise.
Continuing their demand for the full $5, the local Traffic
Employees Association of the New York Telephone Co. and the
Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers of the American Telegraph
and Telephone Co., agreed to postpone strike action pending a final
decision of the WLB’s National Telephone Panel in Washington.
WLB panels have also recommended increases for telephone workers
in other leading cities who had either participated in the
Thanksgiving week strike or threatened to follow this example.
The organized telephone operators have thus demonstrated that
the strike weapon is the only effective means of getting speedy
action from the government and corporations and securing the
possibility for workers to win their wage demands.
*
UAW and WLB
The Militant last week reported the action of the CTO
United Automobile Workers international executive board in calling on
the CIO to withdraw its members from the War Labor Board. The text of
the resolution has been made public in the current issue of the UAW’S
official publication, the United Automobile Worker.
While enumerating a long series of complaints against the WLB,
whose procedure is termed a “time-wasting, meaningless
rigmarole,” the UAW board still upholds the principle of
compulsory arbitration. Their grievance is not that the WLB was
specifically organized to curb labor, but that it “has no
authority to act.”
The UAW bureaucrats, who are united in fearful opposition to
rescinding the no-strike pledge in the current UAW referendum, are
clamoring for a “new” board. This will differ from the
WLB only in that its “prerogatives” would be more
“comprehensive, clearly defined.” That is, more binding
upon the workers.
The resolution makes so bold as to declare that Roosevelt
“cannot escape full responsibility for the present inaction and
indecision of the WLB.” When did these pro-Roosevelt lackeys
discover that? They denied that before the elections. They themselves
for three years bolstered and gave a labor cover to the WLB.
We repeat what The Militant wrote last week. The UAW
bureaucrats don’t mean business.
They are trying to put on a “militant” front and save
face among the auto workers who are becoming thoroughly aroused
against the cowardly policies of the officialdom.
The auto militants are demonstrating through their campaign to
revoke the no-strike pledge that they oppose the whole policy of
dependence on capitalist “friends of labor” and
government boards. They are learning to have faith only in their own
organized strength in action. That’s the only policy that can
win an iota for the workers in this period.
*
Westinghouse
The National Westinghouse Conference Board, of the CIO Electrical,
Radio and Machine Workers, representing 80,000 Westinghouse Electric
Workers, recently issued a demand to Roosevelt for a general wage
increase of 17 cents an hour.
They appealed to Roosevelt “to counteract the failures and
blunders of his subordinates by granting an immediate national
cost-of-living wage adjustment of 17 cents an hour retroactive to
Jan. 1, 1944.”
Of course, Roosevelt’s subordinates committed no
“failures and blunders.” They very capably fulfilled
their function of frustrating the demands of the workers in
accordance with the policies laid down by Roosevelt himself.
Nevertheless, this wage raise demand from an important section of
a union notoriously dominated by the reactionary Stalinists is a
significant sign. It indicates growing pressure from the UE ranks.
For the Stalinist UE leaders certainly would like to suppress the
embarrassing clamor for cost-of-living wage increases.
*
Secretary Addes
UAW-CIO Secretary-Treasurer George Addes must have been born with
two tongues in his mouth. One tongue could not possibly stand the
strain of the double-talk he pours forth.
Addes, as is known to all among the auto workers, represents the
extreme right wing in the UAW leadership and has for several years
maintained a bloc with the Stalinists. He is among the most
unrestrained flag-wavers and abject labor lieutenants of Roosevelt
trying to maintain the no-strike pledge.
So it might come as a surprise to those unacquainted with the
remarkable quality of double-talk put but by Addes, to read his
remarks on the Forced Labor Bill in his column, Secretary Addes
Says, in the United Automobile Worker, February 1.
Addes, a henchman of the Stalinists who support the “National
Service” scheme of Roosevelt, complains:
“When we wrote our column a month ago protesting
against those who were openly advocating a national service law, we
had no idea that President Roosevelt would once again join their
ranks ... Whether President Roosevelt actively Campaigns for passage
of a national service law or lets it die a peaceful death, as he did
last year, might possibly be the answer to some of the questions we
are today asking.”
Three lies in two sentences:
Roosevelt didn’t “join the ranks” of forced
labor advocates; he has spearheaded their offensive.
Roosevelt did not “let it die last year;” he just
shut up about it prior to the elections – as did Addes.
Addes never asked any questions about Roosevelt. But if he
has some, let him speak out.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Representative Government?</h1>
<h3>(28 March 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_13" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 13</a>, 28 March 1949, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">There is a popular assumption, constantly reinforced by the capitalist propaganda of the state, school, church and press, that the American people enjoy representative and democratic government. We are supposed to govern ourselves through officials we have freely elected to represent the will and interests of the majority.</p>
<p>It has come as a shock to many people, therefore, to see how a minority of Senators, through the use of the filibuster, can block any measure no matter how much desired by the people. And the “right” of such a Senatorial minority to obstruct indefinitely the passage of bills mandated by the people has just been upheld by a majority vote of the entire Senate.</p>
<p>The undemocratic procedure of the filibuster is but one aspect of the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the Senate as such. For the Senate was designed from its very founding as a means for frustrating the popular will.</p>
<p>Most of the constitutional founders were not convinced democrats. A majority of them were wealthy land-owners and merchants. They therefore established two federal legislative bodies, with an “upper chamber,” the Senate, as a “check and balance” on the “lower chamber,” the House of Representatives. While the number of Representatives is based, in part, on the proportional population of the states, the Senate is elected on a strict geographic basis, two from each state regardless of size.</p>
<p>Today, six Southern poll-tax states Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia – with a combined population about equal to that of New York state, have a total of 12 Senators to New York’s two. The seven poll-tax states, including Texas, because of the poll-tax restriction on voting cast a total vote in the 1948 presidential elections of 2,911,305, as compared to New York’s 6,111,530. A similar proportion holds in the voting for Senators. Thus, the 14 Senators from the seven poll-tax states who spearheaded the recent filibuster against civil rights legislation were elected by less than half the votes cast for just two Senators from New York. Over 50% of New Yorkers voted, as against the 10 to 15% permitted to vote in the poll-tax states. The Southern Senators literally represent a minority of a minority.</p>
<p>We can see how unrepresentative the Senate is when we consider that Nevada, the smallest state with 110,247 population, has the same number of Senators as New York, with 125 times as many people. The two Nevada Senators have just as much power as the two from New York, and if they have been in the Senate longer they can wield even greater power, because they are in better position to succeed to the powerful committee posts, whose chairmen are selected by seniority.</p>
<p>The Southern Senators, because of the virtual one-party system in most Southern states, are almost irremovable. Some have held their seats for decades. A number of the most important committee posts this session are held by the aged chair-warmers from the Bourbon South who are able to keep themselves longest in Senatorial office through the poll-tax and terrorism against the Negro people. As heads of committees, these Southern Senators are in position to bottle up most legislation they oppose.</p>
<p>Two-thirds of the Senators who held forth in the 80th Congress still remain in the Senate. They are elected for six-year terms and even though the people voiced their mandate for social reforms in the election of Truman, they could not touch the two out of every three Senators who were not up for re-election. Senators elected on a six-year basis are far less responsive to popular demands than Representatives who come up for re-election every two years.</p>
<p>Some political commentators have called the Senate “Our House of Lords.” But the British House of Lords, while based on inherited titles of nobility, is far less powerful than the U.S. Senate. The House of Commons in England, similar to our House of Representatives, can pass any measure over the adverse vote of the House of Lords. The 96 long-term Senators – or even a filibustering minority of them – can indefinitely block any bill.</p>
<p>But if, by some miracle, they do pass a bill in the interests of the people, there is still another “check and balance” – the Supreme Court. This appointed body of nine who hold office for life can set aside any law passed by Congress. Between them, the 96-man Senate and the nine-man Supreme Court constitute an oligarchy of government standing completely above the will of the people.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Representative Government?
(28 March 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 13, 28 March 1949, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
There is a popular assumption, constantly reinforced by the capitalist propaganda of the state, school, church and press, that the American people enjoy representative and democratic government. We are supposed to govern ourselves through officials we have freely elected to represent the will and interests of the majority.
It has come as a shock to many people, therefore, to see how a minority of Senators, through the use of the filibuster, can block any measure no matter how much desired by the people. And the “right” of such a Senatorial minority to obstruct indefinitely the passage of bills mandated by the people has just been upheld by a majority vote of the entire Senate.
The undemocratic procedure of the filibuster is but one aspect of the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the Senate as such. For the Senate was designed from its very founding as a means for frustrating the popular will.
Most of the constitutional founders were not convinced democrats. A majority of them were wealthy land-owners and merchants. They therefore established two federal legislative bodies, with an “upper chamber,” the Senate, as a “check and balance” on the “lower chamber,” the House of Representatives. While the number of Representatives is based, in part, on the proportional population of the states, the Senate is elected on a strict geographic basis, two from each state regardless of size.
Today, six Southern poll-tax states Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia – with a combined population about equal to that of New York state, have a total of 12 Senators to New York’s two. The seven poll-tax states, including Texas, because of the poll-tax restriction on voting cast a total vote in the 1948 presidential elections of 2,911,305, as compared to New York’s 6,111,530. A similar proportion holds in the voting for Senators. Thus, the 14 Senators from the seven poll-tax states who spearheaded the recent filibuster against civil rights legislation were elected by less than half the votes cast for just two Senators from New York. Over 50% of New Yorkers voted, as against the 10 to 15% permitted to vote in the poll-tax states. The Southern Senators literally represent a minority of a minority.
We can see how unrepresentative the Senate is when we consider that Nevada, the smallest state with 110,247 population, has the same number of Senators as New York, with 125 times as many people. The two Nevada Senators have just as much power as the two from New York, and if they have been in the Senate longer they can wield even greater power, because they are in better position to succeed to the powerful committee posts, whose chairmen are selected by seniority.
The Southern Senators, because of the virtual one-party system in most Southern states, are almost irremovable. Some have held their seats for decades. A number of the most important committee posts this session are held by the aged chair-warmers from the Bourbon South who are able to keep themselves longest in Senatorial office through the poll-tax and terrorism against the Negro people. As heads of committees, these Southern Senators are in position to bottle up most legislation they oppose.
Two-thirds of the Senators who held forth in the 80th Congress still remain in the Senate. They are elected for six-year terms and even though the people voiced their mandate for social reforms in the election of Truman, they could not touch the two out of every three Senators who were not up for re-election. Senators elected on a six-year basis are far less responsive to popular demands than Representatives who come up for re-election every two years.
Some political commentators have called the Senate “Our House of Lords.” But the British House of Lords, while based on inherited titles of nobility, is far less powerful than the U.S. Senate. The House of Commons in England, similar to our House of Representatives, can pass any measure over the adverse vote of the House of Lords. The 96 long-term Senators – or even a filibustering minority of them – can indefinitely block any bill.
But if, by some miracle, they do pass a bill in the interests of the people, there is still another “check and balance” – the Supreme Court. This appointed body of nine who hold office for life can set aside any law passed by Congress. Between them, the 96-man Senate and the nine-man Supreme Court constitute an oligarchy of government standing completely above the will of the people.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“Children Not Wanted”</h1>
<h3>(3 January 1949)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_01" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 1</a>, 3 January 1949, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">“I never realized how unpopular children are – how discriminated against, even how hated – until I went across America in search of apartments to rent,” Howard Whitman declares in the January <strong>Woman’s Home Companion</strong>. “My mind still echoes with ‘No Children,’ ‘Adults only,’ ‘No dogs or children.’ Discrimination against children would be bad enough any time. It’s fantastic in the worst housing shortage in American history.”</p>
<p>From coast to coast Whitman found apartment house doors barred to children.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In Chicago, after dismal plodding, I was offered only two places to live – provided I boarded out the children. In a small Missouri town a professor’s wife denied me even a trailer which she had advertised for ‘adults only.’</p>
<p class="quote">“Out of 43 ads in a Cincinnati paper, 22 openly barred children. In a Pittsburg paper 17 out of 26. In Columbus, Ohio, the total reached 87% – 13 out of 15!”</p>
<p class="fst">In New York, the world’s largest city, conditions are no better.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The New York City Housing Authority maintains a Vacancy Listing Bureau. In its sparse files 88% of the listings contain a ban against children. Many of those which admit children are either priced sky-high or far removed from working centers.”</p>
<p class="fst">Whitman discovered that this universal discrimination against children embitters parents. “I was aghast at the number of couples who have apparently been convinced that somehow it is a crime to have children these days. One father walked into the Los Angeles Housing Authority and said, ‘Every time I find a vacancy I know there is no use because I have two little children I shouldn’t have had.’”</p>
<p>Why do landlords discriminate against children? The most common excuse is that “Children are destructive. However, that is not the real reason.” “When stripped of masquerade,” says Whitman, “the basis of child discrimination is largely a greedy axiom: “Get the most money for the least occupancy.’”</p>
<p>“What can we do about it?” asks the author. He proposes “educating” the landlords. “A small landlord can be painfully ignorant,” Whitman says. “He hasn’t been educated to the basic tenet of the free enterprise system: a profit motive conditioned by the public good.”</p>
<p>This is a hopeless proposal. Capitalism has existed for hundreds of years, yet the capitalist class has not yet learned to “condition” the profit motive “by the public good.” Capitalism puts profits first. It always has and always will.</p>
<p>Only under socialism will the welfare of the family be placed first and children welcomed as our most precious asset. Under socialism, America for the first time will be able to fully solve its housing problem and provide every family with the ideal living conditions that children require.</p>
<p>A step in that direction can be taken right now by mobilizing public pressure on Congress for a federal housing program to relieve the present impossible conditions. If the money now spent in armaments were turned into the construction of homes it would not take long to break the back of the housing shortage.</p>
<p>With plenty of vacant apartments for rent, landlords would begin to think twice before putting up their cruel sign, “Dogs and children not wanted.”</p>
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Art Preis
“Children Not Wanted”
(3 January 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 1, 3 January 1949, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
“I never realized how unpopular children are – how discriminated against, even how hated – until I went across America in search of apartments to rent,” Howard Whitman declares in the January Woman’s Home Companion. “My mind still echoes with ‘No Children,’ ‘Adults only,’ ‘No dogs or children.’ Discrimination against children would be bad enough any time. It’s fantastic in the worst housing shortage in American history.”
From coast to coast Whitman found apartment house doors barred to children.
“In Chicago, after dismal plodding, I was offered only two places to live – provided I boarded out the children. In a small Missouri town a professor’s wife denied me even a trailer which she had advertised for ‘adults only.’
“Out of 43 ads in a Cincinnati paper, 22 openly barred children. In a Pittsburg paper 17 out of 26. In Columbus, Ohio, the total reached 87% – 13 out of 15!”
In New York, the world’s largest city, conditions are no better.
“The New York City Housing Authority maintains a Vacancy Listing Bureau. In its sparse files 88% of the listings contain a ban against children. Many of those which admit children are either priced sky-high or far removed from working centers.”
Whitman discovered that this universal discrimination against children embitters parents. “I was aghast at the number of couples who have apparently been convinced that somehow it is a crime to have children these days. One father walked into the Los Angeles Housing Authority and said, ‘Every time I find a vacancy I know there is no use because I have two little children I shouldn’t have had.’”
Why do landlords discriminate against children? The most common excuse is that “Children are destructive. However, that is not the real reason.” “When stripped of masquerade,” says Whitman, “the basis of child discrimination is largely a greedy axiom: “Get the most money for the least occupancy.’”
“What can we do about it?” asks the author. He proposes “educating” the landlords. “A small landlord can be painfully ignorant,” Whitman says. “He hasn’t been educated to the basic tenet of the free enterprise system: a profit motive conditioned by the public good.”
This is a hopeless proposal. Capitalism has existed for hundreds of years, yet the capitalist class has not yet learned to “condition” the profit motive “by the public good.” Capitalism puts profits first. It always has and always will.
Only under socialism will the welfare of the family be placed first and children welcomed as our most precious asset. Under socialism, America for the first time will be able to fully solve its housing problem and provide every family with the ideal living conditions that children require.
A step in that direction can be taken right now by mobilizing public pressure on Congress for a federal housing program to relieve the present impossible conditions. If the money now spent in armaments were turned into the construction of homes it would not take long to break the back of the housing shortage.
With plenty of vacant apartments for rent, landlords would begin to think twice before putting up their cruel sign, “Dogs and children not wanted.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>A Midwesterner Is Flabbergasted<br>
by the New New York</h1>
<h3>(28 December 1940)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_52" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 52</a>, 28 December 1940, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst">I've just sat through most of a two-day convention of the New York District of the Socialist Workers Party. I’ve come away with the impression that maybe I've had an attack of amnesia and accidentally wandered off to my old bailiwick out in the mid-west, where a party gathering has always meant a gathering of workers.</p>
<p>When I first entered the convention hall. I was struck by a flaring banner. “Beat Minneapolis in The Fund Drive: Quota $1,000 Each.”</p>
<p>Now, I know the New York local from the old days, when a sign like that would have wound me up with taped ribs from laughing so hard. The idea of New York’s dilettantes challenging Minneapolis teamsters to anything! But things have changed.</p>
<p>From start to finish this was a workers’ convention. In its composition and in its serious concentration upon the problems of the working class this convention reflected the fact that the New York section of the party has at last overcome the poison of its petti-bourgeois past and is spreading deep roots into fertile proletarian soil.</p>
<p>Almost the entire two days were devoted to reports and discussion on trade union problems; to the recital of experiences in the organized labor movement; to planning the party's program for advancing the principles of militant class-struggle.</p>
<p>Active union fighters in the food, maritime, ship-building, electrical and radio, garment and other industries spoke. Their reports painted a graphic and living picture of the workers’ struggles in the New York area, a picture made real because these delegates are a vital part of these struggles.</p>
<p>Gone are the phrase-mongers, bohemians, and fake intellectuals. Gone with the wind-bags, – the petty-bourgeois splitters of last April. In their place are loyal and serious-minded workers striving to plunge themselves deeper and deeper into the task of organizing and leading the working class to the conquest of power.<br>
</p>
<h4>Who’s Who Now in New York</h4>
<p class="fst"><i>Over 50 percent of the New York party members are active trade unionists.</i> 35 percent of the New York party members are concentrated in the three huge and vital industries, food, electrical manufacturing and marine transport.</p>
<p>An additional sizeable sector of the party are workers in trades and industries as yet unorganized. These, taken together with those in organized trades, make a party membership that is decisively proletarian in character. A complete reversal of the condition that existed just eight months ago under the domination of the petty-bourgeois play-boys!'</p>
<p>A day and a half of listening to reports distilled from the daily experiences of the class struggle has convinced me that the old days of phoney gab-fests that passed for an SWP convention in New York are ended – but definitely!</p>
<p>One incident which occurred during the convention deserves special mention. Two former SWP members from Gloversville, N.Y„ workers who had been misled temporarily into the ranks of the petty-bourgeois opposition at the time of the split, paid a visit to the convention. They had just come from a call on the so-called Workers Party.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>“But we couldn’t find any workers there,” they explained, “So we’ve quit them.”</i></p>
<p class="fst">A few hours in attendance at our convention revealed enough real live workers. They asked for re-admittance into the SWP and were immediately welcomed by vote of the convention.<br>
</p>
<h4>Watch Their Smoke, Minneapolis!</h4>
<p class="fst">Every phase of party activity came in for thorough discussion. A vigorous drive was made on the question of building the mass circulation of the party press. Real plans were outlined; and they won’t be pigeon-holed either, like in the old days.</p>
<p>I might not have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. But I’m here to tell the Minneapolis comrades not to take lightly the New York challenge about beating them in the Trotsky Memorial Fund Drive. Stop reading last year’s newspapers, Minneapolis. You’re not confronting Bronx hill-billies. You’re up against proletarian fighters. And they’re not kidding!</p>
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Art Preis
A Midwesterner Is Flabbergasted
by the New New York
(28 December 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 52, 28 December 1940, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
I've just sat through most of a two-day convention of the New York District of the Socialist Workers Party. I’ve come away with the impression that maybe I've had an attack of amnesia and accidentally wandered off to my old bailiwick out in the mid-west, where a party gathering has always meant a gathering of workers.
When I first entered the convention hall. I was struck by a flaring banner. “Beat Minneapolis in The Fund Drive: Quota $1,000 Each.”
Now, I know the New York local from the old days, when a sign like that would have wound me up with taped ribs from laughing so hard. The idea of New York’s dilettantes challenging Minneapolis teamsters to anything! But things have changed.
From start to finish this was a workers’ convention. In its composition and in its serious concentration upon the problems of the working class this convention reflected the fact that the New York section of the party has at last overcome the poison of its petti-bourgeois past and is spreading deep roots into fertile proletarian soil.
Almost the entire two days were devoted to reports and discussion on trade union problems; to the recital of experiences in the organized labor movement; to planning the party's program for advancing the principles of militant class-struggle.
Active union fighters in the food, maritime, ship-building, electrical and radio, garment and other industries spoke. Their reports painted a graphic and living picture of the workers’ struggles in the New York area, a picture made real because these delegates are a vital part of these struggles.
Gone are the phrase-mongers, bohemians, and fake intellectuals. Gone with the wind-bags, – the petty-bourgeois splitters of last April. In their place are loyal and serious-minded workers striving to plunge themselves deeper and deeper into the task of organizing and leading the working class to the conquest of power.
Who’s Who Now in New York
Over 50 percent of the New York party members are active trade unionists. 35 percent of the New York party members are concentrated in the three huge and vital industries, food, electrical manufacturing and marine transport.
An additional sizeable sector of the party are workers in trades and industries as yet unorganized. These, taken together with those in organized trades, make a party membership that is decisively proletarian in character. A complete reversal of the condition that existed just eight months ago under the domination of the petty-bourgeois play-boys!'
A day and a half of listening to reports distilled from the daily experiences of the class struggle has convinced me that the old days of phoney gab-fests that passed for an SWP convention in New York are ended – but definitely!
One incident which occurred during the convention deserves special mention. Two former SWP members from Gloversville, N.Y„ workers who had been misled temporarily into the ranks of the petty-bourgeois opposition at the time of the split, paid a visit to the convention. They had just come from a call on the so-called Workers Party.
“But we couldn’t find any workers there,” they explained, “So we’ve quit them.”
A few hours in attendance at our convention revealed enough real live workers. They asked for re-admittance into the SWP and were immediately welcomed by vote of the convention.
Watch Their Smoke, Minneapolis!
Every phase of party activity came in for thorough discussion. A vigorous drive was made on the question of building the mass circulation of the party press. Real plans were outlined; and they won’t be pigeon-holed either, like in the old days.
I might not have believed it, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. But I’m here to tell the Minneapolis comrades not to take lightly the New York challenge about beating them in the Trotsky Memorial Fund Drive. Stop reading last year’s newspapers, Minneapolis. You’re not confronting Bronx hill-billies. You’re up against proletarian fighters. And they’re not kidding!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>How Labor Can Smash the Taft-Hartley Act</h1>
<h3>(1 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_44" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 44</a>, 1 November 1948, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Taft-Hartley knife has struck again – this time into the very vitals of the labor movement. In a unanimous decision, the National Labor Relations Board in Washington on Oct. 5 ruled that mass picketing, and certain other specific acts in the conduct of a strike violate the Taft-Hartley Act. The majority of the Board went further, to hold international union officials responsible for alleged illegal acts of local unionists.</p>
<p>This ruling, involving a small strike led by the CIO longshoremen in Petaluma, Calif., makes mass picketing, even if peaceful, “coercion” within the meaning of the section of the law that forbids coercion of employees in their right to join, or not to join, a union. Blocking the entrance of a plant parking lot and following scabs in a car were also ruled criminal offenses – even if no one is molested.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Major Landmark”</h4>
<p class="fst">According to NLRB Chairman Paul Herzog, the ruling establishes “a major landmark in the evolution of labor relations law.” And indeed it does. For by making mass picketing illegal, the. NLRB destroys the only really effective weapon in a major strike. Had this ruling operated a decade ago, there would have been no CIO, no unions in mass production industry. The mass picket line has been the only potent defense against strikebreakers since the dawn of organized labor.</p>
<p>To make more effective its deadly thrust against the unions, the NLRB gave the knife a further vicious twist. It placed on the entire leadership of the international unions the legal responsibility for those acts of local unions which the Board holds to be illegal. And this same responsibility holds for an entire union local when some of its members engage in allegedly illegal acts.</p>
<p><em>This flagrant strikebreaking decision – which, if enforced, would all but nullify the right to strike and paralyze the unions – has at last brought home to Some of the top union leaders that this is really a Slave Labor Law, fully capable of slashing the unions to pieces. And destroying the union leaders, no matter how conservative and compliant, in the progress.</em></p>
<p>But the growing fears of the top union bureaucrats is matched by their helplessness and cowardice in action. The only program most of them have been pushing these past few months is try ing to line up votes for Truman – the man who has broken more strikes than any president in history, who has been wielding the injunction club of the Taft-Hartley Act with deadly effect, and who hand-picked the very NLRB members now slipping thd knife into the unions with their “interpretations” of the Taft-Hartley law.</p>
<p>True enough, these union leaders have been wailing in the union publications and in press statements about how bad the Taft-Hartley Act is. But at the same time many of them have been using the Taft-Hartley Act to feather their own nests by raiding established unions that have refused to sign the yellowdog affidavits. They have turned the labor movement into a battleground of fratricidal warfare, including wholesale scab-herding and strike-breaking against rival unions. These self-styled “labor statesmen” present the picture of scavengers seeking to live off bits and pieces snatched from the bleeding body of labor.</p>
<p><em>Their conduct is all the more despicable because an effective, realistic program to combat the Taft-Hartley Act has been offered. It is the program which the AFL International Typographical Union adopted at its recent convention.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Congress</h4>
<p class="fst">The ITU, engaged in a militant, single-handed fight against the Taft-Hartley Act, appealed to all unions to join, forces in a National Emergency Congress of Labor to be held in Washington, D.C. It proposed that this Congress of Labor map out a plan of nationwide united labor action to smash the Slave Labor Law.</p>
<p><em>There is no other effective program but this – and none of the other union leaders have offered any. Yet not a single other international union leadership has responded as yet to the call of the ITU. Not even the United Mine Workers, which within its own industry has fought so valiantly against the Taft-Hartley Act. The UMW Journal hailed the ITU for its fight – but did not even mention the most significant action of the ITU convention, the appeal for a Congress of Labor.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Local Action</h4>
<p class="fst">The workers cannot wait for the timid, narrow-minded, selfishly-engrossed union bureaucrats to act. The workers feel the lash of the Taft-Hartley Act every day, in the speed-up, in the worsening of working conditions, in the intolerable provocations and arrogance of the bosses, in the weakening of their locals and grievance committees, in strikebreaking violence and the smashing of strikes. They can see the terrible shadow of the old open-shop days creeping over the land.</p>
<p>If the union, members depend on the top bureaucrats to act, they will suffer cruel consequences. These leaders have never taken one major step forward until pushed and prodded and shoved by the ranks. The pressure, the demand, the initiative must come from below.</p>
<p><em>The rank and file must put the heat on the leadership as never before. All local unions and central labor bodies should pass strong resolutions demanding that their national leaders join in summoning a National Emergency Congress of Labor. Start the band-wagon rolling in the local communities by organizing united conferences of all local unions. Once the bandwagon gathers speed, the “labor statesmen” will either have to jump on or be left in the lurch.</em></p>
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Art Preis
How Labor Can Smash the Taft-Hartley Act
(1 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 44, 1 November 1948, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Taft-Hartley knife has struck again – this time into the very vitals of the labor movement. In a unanimous decision, the National Labor Relations Board in Washington on Oct. 5 ruled that mass picketing, and certain other specific acts in the conduct of a strike violate the Taft-Hartley Act. The majority of the Board went further, to hold international union officials responsible for alleged illegal acts of local unionists.
This ruling, involving a small strike led by the CIO longshoremen in Petaluma, Calif., makes mass picketing, even if peaceful, “coercion” within the meaning of the section of the law that forbids coercion of employees in their right to join, or not to join, a union. Blocking the entrance of a plant parking lot and following scabs in a car were also ruled criminal offenses – even if no one is molested.
“Major Landmark”
According to NLRB Chairman Paul Herzog, the ruling establishes “a major landmark in the evolution of labor relations law.” And indeed it does. For by making mass picketing illegal, the. NLRB destroys the only really effective weapon in a major strike. Had this ruling operated a decade ago, there would have been no CIO, no unions in mass production industry. The mass picket line has been the only potent defense against strikebreakers since the dawn of organized labor.
To make more effective its deadly thrust against the unions, the NLRB gave the knife a further vicious twist. It placed on the entire leadership of the international unions the legal responsibility for those acts of local unions which the Board holds to be illegal. And this same responsibility holds for an entire union local when some of its members engage in allegedly illegal acts.
This flagrant strikebreaking decision – which, if enforced, would all but nullify the right to strike and paralyze the unions – has at last brought home to Some of the top union leaders that this is really a Slave Labor Law, fully capable of slashing the unions to pieces. And destroying the union leaders, no matter how conservative and compliant, in the progress.
But the growing fears of the top union bureaucrats is matched by their helplessness and cowardice in action. The only program most of them have been pushing these past few months is try ing to line up votes for Truman – the man who has broken more strikes than any president in history, who has been wielding the injunction club of the Taft-Hartley Act with deadly effect, and who hand-picked the very NLRB members now slipping thd knife into the unions with their “interpretations” of the Taft-Hartley law.
True enough, these union leaders have been wailing in the union publications and in press statements about how bad the Taft-Hartley Act is. But at the same time many of them have been using the Taft-Hartley Act to feather their own nests by raiding established unions that have refused to sign the yellowdog affidavits. They have turned the labor movement into a battleground of fratricidal warfare, including wholesale scab-herding and strike-breaking against rival unions. These self-styled “labor statesmen” present the picture of scavengers seeking to live off bits and pieces snatched from the bleeding body of labor.
Their conduct is all the more despicable because an effective, realistic program to combat the Taft-Hartley Act has been offered. It is the program which the AFL International Typographical Union adopted at its recent convention.
Labor Congress
The ITU, engaged in a militant, single-handed fight against the Taft-Hartley Act, appealed to all unions to join, forces in a National Emergency Congress of Labor to be held in Washington, D.C. It proposed that this Congress of Labor map out a plan of nationwide united labor action to smash the Slave Labor Law.
There is no other effective program but this – and none of the other union leaders have offered any. Yet not a single other international union leadership has responded as yet to the call of the ITU. Not even the United Mine Workers, which within its own industry has fought so valiantly against the Taft-Hartley Act. The UMW Journal hailed the ITU for its fight – but did not even mention the most significant action of the ITU convention, the appeal for a Congress of Labor.
Local Action
The workers cannot wait for the timid, narrow-minded, selfishly-engrossed union bureaucrats to act. The workers feel the lash of the Taft-Hartley Act every day, in the speed-up, in the worsening of working conditions, in the intolerable provocations and arrogance of the bosses, in the weakening of their locals and grievance committees, in strikebreaking violence and the smashing of strikes. They can see the terrible shadow of the old open-shop days creeping over the land.
If the union, members depend on the top bureaucrats to act, they will suffer cruel consequences. These leaders have never taken one major step forward until pushed and prodded and shoved by the ranks. The pressure, the demand, the initiative must come from below.
The rank and file must put the heat on the leadership as never before. All local unions and central labor bodies should pass strong resolutions demanding that their national leaders join in summoning a National Emergency Congress of Labor. Start the band-wagon rolling in the local communities by organizing united conferences of all local unions. Once the bandwagon gathers speed, the “labor statesmen” will either have to jump on or be left in the lurch.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(7 April 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_14" target="new">Vol. IX No. 14</a>, 7 April 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Addes and Thomas</h3>
<p class="fst">In a personal interview in the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, March 28, George Addes, secretary-treasurer of the CIO United Automobile Workers, indicates the UAW leaders intend to use the majority vote for the no-strike pledge in the recent referendum as a further pretext for bureaucratic reprisals against the auto militants.</p>
<p>The fact that an unholy alliance of UAWand CIO leaders, the government and the corporations succeeded in pressuring a majority vote for the pledge “strengthens the hands of those union officers who believe in the CIO no-strike policy,” Addes is quoted. “This outcome,” he adds ominously, “ought to serve as a warning to all disruptive forces” – including, presumably, the 36 percent of the UAW voters who opposed the pledge and the 60,000 who have gone on strike in the past six weeks in Detroit.</p>
<p><em>However, states the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, Addes “spoke bitterly of ‘demagogues’ who will continue to stir up trouble ... and let it be known that he has no illusions that the fight is over.”</em></p>
<p>UAW President R.J. Thomas also tries to make the most of the referendum results, which he terms a “mandate to me, as president.” After trying to squeeze some personal satisfaction out of this “victory” in his column in the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>, April 1, Thomas concludes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There are definite signs that the period ahead is to be marked by a vicious public onslaught against our union and against labor. The Automobile Manufacturers’ Association and its stooge, the ‘Automotive Council for War Production’ are filling the columns of the press with malicious falsehoods aimed at undermining labor ...”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>The way to “silence these dishonest attacks,” Thomas opines, is to enforce the no-strike pledge. This is just what the auto barons want since they can continue their union-busting drive by firing local union leaders wholesale without fear of strikes. Tens of thousands of Detroit auto workers have demonstrated since the referendum that they have an opposite and more effective method than Thomas for “silencing these dishonest attacks.”</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Recognize Foremen</h3>
<p class="fst">Under pressure of the labor movement and recurrent foremen’s strikes, tlhe NLRB last week ruled that supervisory employees are entitled to belong to independent unions of their own choosing and to engage in collective bargaining under the Wagner Act.</p>
<p>The corporation owners, who fear the organized collaboration of supervisory workers with the rest of labor, have tried to contend that foremen are “part of management.” However, the NLRB majority was forced to admit that the foreman “now is an executor carrying out orders, plans, and policies determined above; he is more managed than managing ...”</p>
<p><em>This NLRB ruling, reversing its decision of two years ago, grew out of the Packard Motor case where the foremen, organized in the Foremen’s Assn. of America, went on strike in Detroit last May. The decision will have considerable bearing, it is believed, on the United Mine Workers’ demand for contract coverage of most of the mine foremen and supervisors.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>More Stalinist Finkery</h3>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists, operating through various local CIO Councils which they control, are continuing their vicious campaign against the coal miners now negotiating for a new contract.</p>
<p>Last week, the Cleveland CIO, long under Stalinist domination, passed an “appeal” to the miners “not to strike.” Previously, similar finky resolutions were passed by the Greater New York City CIO and the Detroit CIO, in which they called on Roosevelt to “seize the mines” to forestall an alleged “strike plot.”</p>
<p>The <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, March, 30, runs a big scarehead editorial, <em>Not an Hour’s Stoppage! The Mines Must Be Seized</em>, advising the capitalist government and mine owners that “no matter what Lewis thinks or would like the miners to do, he knows and the country knows that the coal miners will not strike against the government.”</p>
<p><em>The miners, who have voted eight to one in favor of strike in an NLRB poll, showed two years ago in their four strikes that they were unaffected by similar antilabor bleats from the Stalinists.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Telephone Strike Poll</h3>
<p class="fst">Some 18,000 local and long distance telephone operators in New York City will take an NLRB strike vote on April 16, after filing notice on March 17 of intention to strike.</p>
<p>They are continuing to demand a $5 raise over their present $20 weekly minimum. The WLB rejected the recommendation of its own special panel endorsing the $5 increase sought by the 12,000 members of the New York Telephone Co. Workers’ Union and the 6,000 members of the Federation of Long Lines Operators, New York local. The national WLB instead awarded a $3 raise, $1 less than the multibillion dollar telephone trust itself finally agreed to pay.</p>
<p><em>The WLB has been giving the exploited women telephone operators a runaround for over two years. These women workers are now in a thoroughly fighting mood. And they are strategically situated in the very hub of the country’s communications system.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p5"></a>
<h3>Prisoner-of-War Labor</h3>
<p class="fst">Aiding the campaign to undermine wages and working conditions of the American workers, the government is extending the use of German and Italian prisoners of war by private employers in both industry and agriculture.</p>
<p>Both AFL and CIO unions, according to a report buried in a leading government war agency, have been objecting bitterly to “the use of war prisoners in foundries, canneries and for maintenance work on railroads.”</p>
<p>There are now some 400,000 POWs in the United States. Another 100,000 are being transferred here by the War Department. The unions charge that employers in low-wage industries – logging and lumbering, farming and canneries – are refusing to raise wages “in the hope the prisoners may be brought in to replace civilian labor at the existing wage scale.”</p>
<p><em>The report, whose existence was disclosed by the <strong>New York Post</strong> labor correspondent, Victor Riesel, states that “the Int’l. Woodworkers (CIO), the chiefs of the Standard Railroad Labor Organizations, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union are among the unions which have passed resolutions opposing the use of prisoners of war under private employers.”</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(7 April 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 14, 7 April 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Addes and Thomas
In a personal interview in the Stalinist Daily Worker, March 28, George Addes, secretary-treasurer of the CIO United Automobile Workers, indicates the UAW leaders intend to use the majority vote for the no-strike pledge in the recent referendum as a further pretext for bureaucratic reprisals against the auto militants.
The fact that an unholy alliance of UAWand CIO leaders, the government and the corporations succeeded in pressuring a majority vote for the pledge “strengthens the hands of those union officers who believe in the CIO no-strike policy,” Addes is quoted. “This outcome,” he adds ominously, “ought to serve as a warning to all disruptive forces” – including, presumably, the 36 percent of the UAW voters who opposed the pledge and the 60,000 who have gone on strike in the past six weeks in Detroit.
However, states the Daily Worker, Addes “spoke bitterly of ‘demagogues’ who will continue to stir up trouble ... and let it be known that he has no illusions that the fight is over.”
UAW President R.J. Thomas also tries to make the most of the referendum results, which he terms a “mandate to me, as president.” After trying to squeeze some personal satisfaction out of this “victory” in his column in the United Automobile Worker, April 1, Thomas concludes:
“There are definite signs that the period ahead is to be marked by a vicious public onslaught against our union and against labor. The Automobile Manufacturers’ Association and its stooge, the ‘Automotive Council for War Production’ are filling the columns of the press with malicious falsehoods aimed at undermining labor ...”
The way to “silence these dishonest attacks,” Thomas opines, is to enforce the no-strike pledge. This is just what the auto barons want since they can continue their union-busting drive by firing local union leaders wholesale without fear of strikes. Tens of thousands of Detroit auto workers have demonstrated since the referendum that they have an opposite and more effective method than Thomas for “silencing these dishonest attacks.”
* * *
Recognize Foremen
Under pressure of the labor movement and recurrent foremen’s strikes, tlhe NLRB last week ruled that supervisory employees are entitled to belong to independent unions of their own choosing and to engage in collective bargaining under the Wagner Act.
The corporation owners, who fear the organized collaboration of supervisory workers with the rest of labor, have tried to contend that foremen are “part of management.” However, the NLRB majority was forced to admit that the foreman “now is an executor carrying out orders, plans, and policies determined above; he is more managed than managing ...”
This NLRB ruling, reversing its decision of two years ago, grew out of the Packard Motor case where the foremen, organized in the Foremen’s Assn. of America, went on strike in Detroit last May. The decision will have considerable bearing, it is believed, on the United Mine Workers’ demand for contract coverage of most of the mine foremen and supervisors.
* * *
More Stalinist Finkery
The Stalinists, operating through various local CIO Councils which they control, are continuing their vicious campaign against the coal miners now negotiating for a new contract.
Last week, the Cleveland CIO, long under Stalinist domination, passed an “appeal” to the miners “not to strike.” Previously, similar finky resolutions were passed by the Greater New York City CIO and the Detroit CIO, in which they called on Roosevelt to “seize the mines” to forestall an alleged “strike plot.”
The Daily Worker, March, 30, runs a big scarehead editorial, Not an Hour’s Stoppage! The Mines Must Be Seized, advising the capitalist government and mine owners that “no matter what Lewis thinks or would like the miners to do, he knows and the country knows that the coal miners will not strike against the government.”
The miners, who have voted eight to one in favor of strike in an NLRB poll, showed two years ago in their four strikes that they were unaffected by similar antilabor bleats from the Stalinists.
* * *
Telephone Strike Poll
Some 18,000 local and long distance telephone operators in New York City will take an NLRB strike vote on April 16, after filing notice on March 17 of intention to strike.
They are continuing to demand a $5 raise over their present $20 weekly minimum. The WLB rejected the recommendation of its own special panel endorsing the $5 increase sought by the 12,000 members of the New York Telephone Co. Workers’ Union and the 6,000 members of the Federation of Long Lines Operators, New York local. The national WLB instead awarded a $3 raise, $1 less than the multibillion dollar telephone trust itself finally agreed to pay.
The WLB has been giving the exploited women telephone operators a runaround for over two years. These women workers are now in a thoroughly fighting mood. And they are strategically situated in the very hub of the country’s communications system.
* * *
Prisoner-of-War Labor
Aiding the campaign to undermine wages and working conditions of the American workers, the government is extending the use of German and Italian prisoners of war by private employers in both industry and agriculture.
Both AFL and CIO unions, according to a report buried in a leading government war agency, have been objecting bitterly to “the use of war prisoners in foundries, canneries and for maintenance work on railroads.”
There are now some 400,000 POWs in the United States. Another 100,000 are being transferred here by the War Department. The unions charge that employers in low-wage industries – logging and lumbering, farming and canneries – are refusing to raise wages “in the hope the prisoners may be brought in to replace civilian labor at the existing wage scale.”
The report, whose existence was disclosed by the New York Post labor correspondent, Victor Riesel, states that “the Int’l. Woodworkers (CIO), the chiefs of the Standard Railroad Labor Organizations, the Southern Tenant Farmers Union are among the unions which have passed resolutions opposing the use of prisoners of war under private employers.”
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<h4>Art Preis</h4>
<h1>What the Communist Party Supports<br>
When It Backs Hillman’s Program</h1>
<h3>(September 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_39" target="new">Vol. V No. 39</a>, 27 September 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">The Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong> is making ever more tempting bids to Hillman and his followers to achieve organizational, as well as political, unity against the militant and anti-war sectors of the CIO.</p>
<p>As ardent wooers of the Hillmanites, the Stalinists place no conditions on the terms which they are prepared to accept in the proposed marriage contract.</p>
<p>The Hillmanites, for their part, are quite willing to be the object of such an eager courtship, provided they write the resultant contract <em>in toto</em>, along the lines they have pursued unremittingly in the labor movement.</p>
<p>Thus, the unity forged between these two most reactionary pro-war tendencies in the labor movement, will be a unity built four-square on Hillman’s program. And that is the program which the Stalinists, along with the major section of the CIO led by John L. Lewis, decisively repudiated less than a year ago at the last CIO convention.</p>
<p>What is this Hillmanite program around which the Stalinists today are willing to unite?</p>
<p>It is unqualified endorsement of Hillman’s concrete strikebreaking and union-smashing acts of the past two years.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hillman’s Program of Strikebreaking</h4>
<p class="fst">Hillman has served as the outstanding “labor” front for the Roosevelt Administration in its attempts to break the strikes of the CIO, hog-tie organized labor with repressive anti-labor legislation, and conceal the corporations’ domination of the government and the government’s war agencies.</p>
<p>It was Hillman who went to the front for the Administration a year ago in sanctioning the policy of granting big government war orders to corporations like Bethlehem Steel, which had consistently flouted every labor law in the land.</p>
<p>In the name of “national defense,” for months Hillman prevented the Bethlehem Steel workers from striking for union recognition, while over a billion dollars of government war orders poured into the corporation’s files. Hillman directly intervened to intimidate the Bethlehem workers and attempted to force them back to work without any conditions.</p>
<p>Hillman’s policy has been to get organized labor to yield its right to strike “voluntarily.” Had his policy been adopted by the CIO in the past year, Bethlehem Steel, Ford, International Harvester, the great aircraft corporations, might still be operating on a completely open-shop basis.</p>
<p>Hillman gave direct sanction to reactionary Governor James of Pennsylvania to send the state troopers against the Vanadium Corporation strikers at Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, last March. Hillman himself issued and signed the order demanding that the strikers permit scabs to enter the plant to ship materials, the order which gave James the go-ahead signal for strikebreaking.</p>
<p>Hillman has intervened directly, or indirectly, against the strikers in every important CIO strike of the past year.</p>
<p>Not one person at the recent CIO legislative conference in Washington attempted to refute John L. Lewis’ specific charges that Hillman had stood at Roosevelt’s elbow when the President signed the order sending regular army troops against the North American Aviation strikers, and that Hillman was behind the action of the National Defense Mediation Board in attempting to put over the proposals of the Southern coal mine operators during the strike of 400,000 miners last April.</p>
<p>Although an associate director of the OPM, Hillman did not raise his voice against the OPM policy of preventing industrial expansion in the interests of the aluminum, steel and other monopolies.</p>
<p>His sole plea against repressive labor legislation was that such laws are “unnecessary at the present time.” He proposed, instead, that union “leaders” like himself be permitted a further opportunity to persuade the union members to a “voluntary no-strike” policy. Hillman, during the few times he testified on such legislation, did not oppose it on any principled basis. He was for compulsion against the unions if “voluntary” methods “failed” to prevent strikes. In this, his policy differed not one whit from that expressed by Knudsen and the rest of the “ex”-corporation heads running the government’s war production program.</p>
<p>At the last convention of the CIO, Hillman and his henchmen proposed that the CIO accept Roosevelt’s demand that the CIO and AFL unite on terms which would mean the liquidation of industrial unionism in America.</p>
<p>Lewis and the great majority of the CIO members, including the Stalinists, wisely and correctly repudiated Hillman’s treacherous proposal.</p>
<p>Today, however, the Stalinists are backing this program of suicidal “unity” to the hilt. It is the proffer of support for Hillman’s “unity” program which constitutes a chief lure now being put forth by the Stalinists to attract the Hillmanites to a united front against Lewis and the CIO progressives and militants.</p>
<p>Hillman has been the most widely despised labor “leader” among the ranks of the CIO. His support of government strikebreaking, his efforts to tie the CIO to the government, his boot-licking of the Administration and the employers, in the past have made his name anathema to most of the CIO workers.</p>
<p>Hillman is preparing to shove over his full pro-war, strikebreaking, anti-industrial union program at the coming CIO national convention. His most devoted followers in this traitorous move will be the Stalinists.</p>
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Art Preis
What the Communist Party Supports
When It Backs Hillman’s Program
(September 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 39, 27 September 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Stalinist Daily Worker is making ever more tempting bids to Hillman and his followers to achieve organizational, as well as political, unity against the militant and anti-war sectors of the CIO.
As ardent wooers of the Hillmanites, the Stalinists place no conditions on the terms which they are prepared to accept in the proposed marriage contract.
The Hillmanites, for their part, are quite willing to be the object of such an eager courtship, provided they write the resultant contract in toto, along the lines they have pursued unremittingly in the labor movement.
Thus, the unity forged between these two most reactionary pro-war tendencies in the labor movement, will be a unity built four-square on Hillman’s program. And that is the program which the Stalinists, along with the major section of the CIO led by John L. Lewis, decisively repudiated less than a year ago at the last CIO convention.
What is this Hillmanite program around which the Stalinists today are willing to unite?
It is unqualified endorsement of Hillman’s concrete strikebreaking and union-smashing acts of the past two years.
Hillman’s Program of Strikebreaking
Hillman has served as the outstanding “labor” front for the Roosevelt Administration in its attempts to break the strikes of the CIO, hog-tie organized labor with repressive anti-labor legislation, and conceal the corporations’ domination of the government and the government’s war agencies.
It was Hillman who went to the front for the Administration a year ago in sanctioning the policy of granting big government war orders to corporations like Bethlehem Steel, which had consistently flouted every labor law in the land.
In the name of “national defense,” for months Hillman prevented the Bethlehem Steel workers from striking for union recognition, while over a billion dollars of government war orders poured into the corporation’s files. Hillman directly intervened to intimidate the Bethlehem workers and attempted to force them back to work without any conditions.
Hillman’s policy has been to get organized labor to yield its right to strike “voluntarily.” Had his policy been adopted by the CIO in the past year, Bethlehem Steel, Ford, International Harvester, the great aircraft corporations, might still be operating on a completely open-shop basis.
Hillman gave direct sanction to reactionary Governor James of Pennsylvania to send the state troopers against the Vanadium Corporation strikers at Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, last March. Hillman himself issued and signed the order demanding that the strikers permit scabs to enter the plant to ship materials, the order which gave James the go-ahead signal for strikebreaking.
Hillman has intervened directly, or indirectly, against the strikers in every important CIO strike of the past year.
Not one person at the recent CIO legislative conference in Washington attempted to refute John L. Lewis’ specific charges that Hillman had stood at Roosevelt’s elbow when the President signed the order sending regular army troops against the North American Aviation strikers, and that Hillman was behind the action of the National Defense Mediation Board in attempting to put over the proposals of the Southern coal mine operators during the strike of 400,000 miners last April.
Although an associate director of the OPM, Hillman did not raise his voice against the OPM policy of preventing industrial expansion in the interests of the aluminum, steel and other monopolies.
His sole plea against repressive labor legislation was that such laws are “unnecessary at the present time.” He proposed, instead, that union “leaders” like himself be permitted a further opportunity to persuade the union members to a “voluntary no-strike” policy. Hillman, during the few times he testified on such legislation, did not oppose it on any principled basis. He was for compulsion against the unions if “voluntary” methods “failed” to prevent strikes. In this, his policy differed not one whit from that expressed by Knudsen and the rest of the “ex”-corporation heads running the government’s war production program.
At the last convention of the CIO, Hillman and his henchmen proposed that the CIO accept Roosevelt’s demand that the CIO and AFL unite on terms which would mean the liquidation of industrial unionism in America.
Lewis and the great majority of the CIO members, including the Stalinists, wisely and correctly repudiated Hillman’s treacherous proposal.
Today, however, the Stalinists are backing this program of suicidal “unity” to the hilt. It is the proffer of support for Hillman’s “unity” program which constitutes a chief lure now being put forth by the Stalinists to attract the Hillmanites to a united front against Lewis and the CIO progressives and militants.
Hillman has been the most widely despised labor “leader” among the ranks of the CIO. His support of government strikebreaking, his efforts to tie the CIO to the government, his boot-licking of the Administration and the employers, in the past have made his name anathema to most of the CIO workers.
Hillman is preparing to shove over his full pro-war, strikebreaking, anti-industrial union program at the coming CIO national convention. His most devoted followers in this traitorous move will be the Stalinists.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Toledo – Union Town</h1>
<h4>Militant Battles That Defeated the Bosses</h4>
<h3>(30 November 1935)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_49" target="new">Vol. 1 No. 49</a>, 30 November 1935, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">Over one and a half years have passed since that memorable night in May, 1934 when some ten thousand embattled Toledo workers besieged the stronghold of the Toledo Auto-Lite plant and fought through those six days of magnificent struggle against all the armed hosts of the capitalist state. The echo of that victorious “Battle of Chestnut Hill” beat against the eager ears of the American workers and inspired the first great strike wave under the “New Deal.”</p>
<p>Hard in the wake of the Auto-Lite strike came the two famous and historic battles, of the Minneapolis truck-drivers under the leadership of Local 574, the general textile strike, the San Francisco general strike, and a flood of other militant labor struggles.<br>
</p>
<h4>Toledo a Union Town</h4>
<p class="fst">Emboldened by the lessons of the Auto-Lite encounter, Toledo labor began a steady organizational, upsurge. Although every step of the path toward a solid and fighting union front has been marked by the fiercest opposition, both from the employers and government on the outside and reactionary union bureaucrats from within, the onetime notorious “scab-town” Toledo is today a genuinely union town.</p>
<p>This development did not spring to full flower overnight out of the earth. Following the Auto-Lite affair, Toledo experienced one strike battle after another, the Armour and Swift, Larrowe Milling, General Milk Drivers, FERA strikes and a flock of others. The primary Issue of most of these scraps was the establishment of the union, union recognition and the fulfillment of the grandiose promises of the late-lamented NRA.<br>
</p>
<h4>Chevrolet Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">It was therefore no mere coincidence that in May of 1935, but one year after the Auto-Lite strike, Toledo labor again set oft the spark which revitalized the apathetic workers in the giant auto industry and launched the second strike wave under the Roosevelt regime. The Chevrolet strike, under the leadership of hard-hitting, intelligent union progressives, served not only to entrench unionism in several General Motors plants, but exposed to the workers of the nation the treacherous role of Green, Dillon and other enemies of industrial unionism, stimulated the fight for union progressivism and the organization of the workers in basic industries.</p>
<p>The three weeks battle of the Chevrolet workers, climaxed by the unforgettable demonstration of the strikers against Francis Dillon, right-hand Green man, on the night when they were finally, bludgeoned into partial but short-lived defeat, served to crystallize anti-Dillon-Green sentiment in the auto, rubber and other unions, led to the formation of autonomous internationals in these industries, and spurred the fight for industrial unionism in the recent A.F. of L. convention and subsequently.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Unemployed Leagues</h4>
<p class="fst">No history of the class struggle in Toledo for the past two years, however brief, would be accurate or complete without some mention of the Lucas County Unemployed League. The militancy and persistent fight of the Unemployed League here on almost every picket line is traditional. For three years the Unemployed League has inspired the Toledo unemployed to steady battle for their rights. A half dozen or more organizations, including the Unemployment Councils, have risen and sunk into quiet oblivion, but the Unemployed League continues in a stable and steadfast fashion. It is the Unemployed League which has led and organized every unemployed demonstration in the past two years, which was the backbone of the Single Men’s Death March and the FERA strike. It was the Unemployed League which first violated the Auto-Lite injunction, revived a dying strike and inspired that first victorious struggle. The Unemployed League has been a powerful ally in numerous other industrial conflicts.<br>
</p>
<h4>W.P. Active and Influential</h4>
<p class="fst">The W.P. and its members have played no small role in this entire labor development. It has projected the idea of genuine fighting unionism, of class struggle, inevery labor issue; out of the accumulated experience which it represents, the W. P. has helped devise strategy and lent suggestions and guidance which have proven sound and invaluable for successful working class struggle.</p>
<p>Today, Toledo workers are making ready for a further step forward, a step which may well lead to the beginning of the third great “New Deal” strike wave. The Chevrolet union men are now faced with an attempt to weaken and smash their union. General Motors, after laying off 2,500 men for machine replacements several weeks ago, is rehiring only 1,400 with the reopening of the plant. But the Chevy men are not taking this lying down. They are demanding the rehiring of all those laid off. Meanwhile, the auto workers in Detroit and other centers are beginning to stir. The clouds are gathering and the storm may break soon.</p>
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Art Preis
Toledo – Union Town
Militant Battles That Defeated the Bosses
(30 November 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. 1 No. 49, 30 November 1935, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Over one and a half years have passed since that memorable night in May, 1934 when some ten thousand embattled Toledo workers besieged the stronghold of the Toledo Auto-Lite plant and fought through those six days of magnificent struggle against all the armed hosts of the capitalist state. The echo of that victorious “Battle of Chestnut Hill” beat against the eager ears of the American workers and inspired the first great strike wave under the “New Deal.”
Hard in the wake of the Auto-Lite strike came the two famous and historic battles, of the Minneapolis truck-drivers under the leadership of Local 574, the general textile strike, the San Francisco general strike, and a flood of other militant labor struggles.
Toledo a Union Town
Emboldened by the lessons of the Auto-Lite encounter, Toledo labor began a steady organizational, upsurge. Although every step of the path toward a solid and fighting union front has been marked by the fiercest opposition, both from the employers and government on the outside and reactionary union bureaucrats from within, the onetime notorious “scab-town” Toledo is today a genuinely union town.
This development did not spring to full flower overnight out of the earth. Following the Auto-Lite affair, Toledo experienced one strike battle after another, the Armour and Swift, Larrowe Milling, General Milk Drivers, FERA strikes and a flock of others. The primary Issue of most of these scraps was the establishment of the union, union recognition and the fulfillment of the grandiose promises of the late-lamented NRA.
Chevrolet Strike
It was therefore no mere coincidence that in May of 1935, but one year after the Auto-Lite strike, Toledo labor again set oft the spark which revitalized the apathetic workers in the giant auto industry and launched the second strike wave under the Roosevelt regime. The Chevrolet strike, under the leadership of hard-hitting, intelligent union progressives, served not only to entrench unionism in several General Motors plants, but exposed to the workers of the nation the treacherous role of Green, Dillon and other enemies of industrial unionism, stimulated the fight for union progressivism and the organization of the workers in basic industries.
The three weeks battle of the Chevrolet workers, climaxed by the unforgettable demonstration of the strikers against Francis Dillon, right-hand Green man, on the night when they were finally, bludgeoned into partial but short-lived defeat, served to crystallize anti-Dillon-Green sentiment in the auto, rubber and other unions, led to the formation of autonomous internationals in these industries, and spurred the fight for industrial unionism in the recent A.F. of L. convention and subsequently.
The Unemployed Leagues
No history of the class struggle in Toledo for the past two years, however brief, would be accurate or complete without some mention of the Lucas County Unemployed League. The militancy and persistent fight of the Unemployed League here on almost every picket line is traditional. For three years the Unemployed League has inspired the Toledo unemployed to steady battle for their rights. A half dozen or more organizations, including the Unemployment Councils, have risen and sunk into quiet oblivion, but the Unemployed League continues in a stable and steadfast fashion. It is the Unemployed League which has led and organized every unemployed demonstration in the past two years, which was the backbone of the Single Men’s Death March and the FERA strike. It was the Unemployed League which first violated the Auto-Lite injunction, revived a dying strike and inspired that first victorious struggle. The Unemployed League has been a powerful ally in numerous other industrial conflicts.
W.P. Active and Influential
The W.P. and its members have played no small role in this entire labor development. It has projected the idea of genuine fighting unionism, of class struggle, inevery labor issue; out of the accumulated experience which it represents, the W. P. has helped devise strategy and lent suggestions and guidance which have proven sound and invaluable for successful working class struggle.
Today, Toledo workers are making ready for a further step forward, a step which may well lead to the beginning of the third great “New Deal” strike wave. The Chevrolet union men are now faced with an attempt to weaken and smash their union. General Motors, after laying off 2,500 men for machine replacements several weeks ago, is rehiring only 1,400 with the reopening of the plant. But the Chevy men are not taking this lying down. They are demanding the rehiring of all those laid off. Meanwhile, the auto workers in Detroit and other centers are beginning to stir. The clouds are gathering and the storm may break soon.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Taft-Hartley Act Incites<br>
Inter-Union Warfare</h1>
<h3>(16 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_33" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 33</a>, 16 August 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">One of the deadliest booby-traps in the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law is now spreading havoc among the trade unions. This is the “yellow dog” affidavit, a device cleverly designed to split the unions along “communist” and “anti-communist” lines. It has touched off virtual civil war within the labor movement at a time when all organized labor is under the heaviest assault in decades.</p>
<p>Employers and government, acting in collusion, are employing the refusal of unions to sign “yellow dog” oaths as the chief legal pretext to break strikes and deny collective bargaining rights to previously recognized unions. The union-busters are effectively using this weapon because of the connivance of many unscrupulous union officials who are working hand-in-glove with anti-labor employers to raid established unions and even scab-herd in strikes.</p>
<p>These scavengers – some of whom have shown exceptional ineptness in organizing workers within their own jurisdiction and in defending the interests of their own members – swarm down like vultures on unions made vulnerable by their refusal to submit to the Taft-Hartley Act.</p>
<p>A flagrant example of how employers, government and scavenging union raiders combine to try to destroy an established union is shown in the case of Oppenheim, Collins & Co., a large Manhattan department store, which refused to renew the contract of Local 1250, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees.</p>
<p><i>Several weeks before the old contract was to expire, the company announced it would not renew the Local 1250 contract on the grounds that the union was “run by Communists” who had refused to sign Taft-Hartley affidavits. In response to an appeal from Oppenheim Collins and other big department stores, the House Labor and Education Committee sent a sub-committee to New York to “investigate” the “Communists” in New York department store unions.</i></p>
<p>This committee hauled the local union leaders before a typical inquisition. Naturally, the company loudly proclaimed it would have no dealings with “enemies of our government.”</p>
<p>At- the same time, scenting prey, officials of the AFL Retail Clerks claimed jurisdiction. The NLRB ordered an election – with the CIO union kept off the ballot because it had not signed a “yellow dog” oath. On the day the old contract ended and the CIO union went on strike, the NLRB held its “Ja” election, which the AFL union naturally “won.” The latter began to scab-herd for the company, which obtained an injunction limiting pickets of the striking union and placed a huge sign over its entrance:.“The Issue is COMMUNISM!”</p>
<h4>Final Touch</h4>
<p class="fst">The final touch was added when national officials of the CIO union itself, opponents Of the Stalinist leaders of the New York locals, gave aid and comfort to the employers, government witchhunters and AFL raiders. URWD-SE-CIO President Samuel Wolchok, on Aug. 9, stated: “The Taft-Hartley law is the law of the land and it must be obeyed. There is no reason why officers of locals should not sign the non-com-munist affidavits.”</p>
<p>The type of jurisdictional warfare now being carried out under cover of the Taft-Hartley Act is far from limited to AFL raids on CIO unions. In fact, the Philip Murray machine in the CIO – which howls the loudest about “raiding” by the AFL – has turned the CIO itself into a battlefield of warring unions seeking to dismember and steal dues-payers away from other CIO unions – chiefly Stalinist-led – -which are under Taft-Hartley attack.</p>
<p><i>The Walter Reuther leadership in the auto union is trying to tear the large CIO United Electrical Workers to pieces, rushing in to grab off locals through direct raiding, or cooperating with the Taft-Hartley Board in government-run elections from which UE locals are excluded.</i> Reuther is also conducting raids on the Farm Equipment Workers and Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Murray’s catch-all set-up, the Shipyard Workers beaded by John Green, is splitting off sections of the Public Workers, Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, and other unions as remote from the shipyard industry as the North Pole is from the South Pole.</p>
<p>One. of the latest developments of this disruptive internal warfare is the move of the CIO paper workers to raid the CIO Office and Professional Workers, where the sole similarity between the two occupations is that one manufactures paper and the other uses it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Ugly Picture</h4>
<p class="fst">That is the ugly picture we see today. AFL unions raiding other AFL unions and CIO unions; CIO unions rushing in to tear apart other CIO unions; the top leaderships of both completely indifferent to the fate of the labor movement.</p>
<p><i>We saw a similar situation in the AFL during the Twenties. Then the great need was for industrial Organization. But the narrow-minded AFL leaders refused to take this necessary step. They turned inward, engaged in jurisdictional squabbles, forced the unions to devour themselves.</i></p>
<p>The present. situation flows from the fact that the top union leaders again are drawing back from the next great forward step demanded by the times. Unable to advance a step further because they reject genuine independent labor political action through the formation of a labor party, having no program to advance the interests of the workers or to defend them from government assault, these union leaders are trying to protect their own narrow interests and salvage a little for themselves no matter if the rest of the union movement goes to hell in a high-speed elevator.<br>
</p>
<h4>New Leadership</h4>
<p class="fst">So long as the narrow outlook and primitive aims of these union leaders continue to dominate the labor movement, the unions will be torn with internal strife and dissension. Only a new leadership, with a broad and fundamental understanding of the great class issues and with will and courage to lead the unions into a new political avenue, can save the labor movement, restore its unity and inspire the workers to successful struggle against their enemies.</p>
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Art Preis
Taft-Hartley Act Incites
Inter-Union Warfare
(16 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 33, 16 August 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
One of the deadliest booby-traps in the Taft-Hartley Slave Labor Law is now spreading havoc among the trade unions. This is the “yellow dog” affidavit, a device cleverly designed to split the unions along “communist” and “anti-communist” lines. It has touched off virtual civil war within the labor movement at a time when all organized labor is under the heaviest assault in decades.
Employers and government, acting in collusion, are employing the refusal of unions to sign “yellow dog” oaths as the chief legal pretext to break strikes and deny collective bargaining rights to previously recognized unions. The union-busters are effectively using this weapon because of the connivance of many unscrupulous union officials who are working hand-in-glove with anti-labor employers to raid established unions and even scab-herd in strikes.
These scavengers – some of whom have shown exceptional ineptness in organizing workers within their own jurisdiction and in defending the interests of their own members – swarm down like vultures on unions made vulnerable by their refusal to submit to the Taft-Hartley Act.
A flagrant example of how employers, government and scavenging union raiders combine to try to destroy an established union is shown in the case of Oppenheim, Collins & Co., a large Manhattan department store, which refused to renew the contract of Local 1250, CIO United Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Employees.
Several weeks before the old contract was to expire, the company announced it would not renew the Local 1250 contract on the grounds that the union was “run by Communists” who had refused to sign Taft-Hartley affidavits. In response to an appeal from Oppenheim Collins and other big department stores, the House Labor and Education Committee sent a sub-committee to New York to “investigate” the “Communists” in New York department store unions.
This committee hauled the local union leaders before a typical inquisition. Naturally, the company loudly proclaimed it would have no dealings with “enemies of our government.”
At- the same time, scenting prey, officials of the AFL Retail Clerks claimed jurisdiction. The NLRB ordered an election – with the CIO union kept off the ballot because it had not signed a “yellow dog” oath. On the day the old contract ended and the CIO union went on strike, the NLRB held its “Ja” election, which the AFL union naturally “won.” The latter began to scab-herd for the company, which obtained an injunction limiting pickets of the striking union and placed a huge sign over its entrance:.“The Issue is COMMUNISM!”
Final Touch
The final touch was added when national officials of the CIO union itself, opponents Of the Stalinist leaders of the New York locals, gave aid and comfort to the employers, government witchhunters and AFL raiders. URWD-SE-CIO President Samuel Wolchok, on Aug. 9, stated: “The Taft-Hartley law is the law of the land and it must be obeyed. There is no reason why officers of locals should not sign the non-com-munist affidavits.”
The type of jurisdictional warfare now being carried out under cover of the Taft-Hartley Act is far from limited to AFL raids on CIO unions. In fact, the Philip Murray machine in the CIO – which howls the loudest about “raiding” by the AFL – has turned the CIO itself into a battlefield of warring unions seeking to dismember and steal dues-payers away from other CIO unions – chiefly Stalinist-led – -which are under Taft-Hartley attack.
The Walter Reuther leadership in the auto union is trying to tear the large CIO United Electrical Workers to pieces, rushing in to grab off locals through direct raiding, or cooperating with the Taft-Hartley Board in government-run elections from which UE locals are excluded. Reuther is also conducting raids on the Farm Equipment Workers and Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Murray’s catch-all set-up, the Shipyard Workers beaded by John Green, is splitting off sections of the Public Workers, Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, and other unions as remote from the shipyard industry as the North Pole is from the South Pole.
One. of the latest developments of this disruptive internal warfare is the move of the CIO paper workers to raid the CIO Office and Professional Workers, where the sole similarity between the two occupations is that one manufactures paper and the other uses it.
Ugly Picture
That is the ugly picture we see today. AFL unions raiding other AFL unions and CIO unions; CIO unions rushing in to tear apart other CIO unions; the top leaderships of both completely indifferent to the fate of the labor movement.
We saw a similar situation in the AFL during the Twenties. Then the great need was for industrial Organization. But the narrow-minded AFL leaders refused to take this necessary step. They turned inward, engaged in jurisdictional squabbles, forced the unions to devour themselves.
The present. situation flows from the fact that the top union leaders again are drawing back from the next great forward step demanded by the times. Unable to advance a step further because they reject genuine independent labor political action through the formation of a labor party, having no program to advance the interests of the workers or to defend them from government assault, these union leaders are trying to protect their own narrow interests and salvage a little for themselves no matter if the rest of the union movement goes to hell in a high-speed elevator.
New Leadership
So long as the narrow outlook and primitive aims of these union leaders continue to dominate the labor movement, the unions will be torn with internal strife and dissension. Only a new leadership, with a broad and fundamental understanding of the great class issues and with will and courage to lead the unions into a new political avenue, can save the labor movement, restore its unity and inspire the workers to successful struggle against their enemies.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h4>World War II and the Monopolies</h4>
<h1>What Is the Future for Monopoly?</h1>
<h3>(3 August 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_31" target="new">Vol. X No. 31</a>, 3 August 1946, p. 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The Senate Small Business Committee, in its voluminous study, <strong>Economic Concentration And World War II</strong>, shows with a wealth of data how World War II benefited only Big Business and how the giant monopolies became even more powerful and dominating. (See <strong>The Militant</strong>, July 20 and 27)</p>
<p>“What will be the effect of this wartime concentration (of wealth and economic power) upon the peacetime economy?”, asks the report. “Will the wartime gains in concentration be retained, or increased, or will the economy return to its prewar state? – which, it should not be forgotten was already highly concentrated.”</p>
<p>The report states: “During both World Wars, the relative importance of American big business rose sharply. War contracts were issued predominantly to the large concerns, and they accumulated huge profits and controlled the destinies of great numbers of workers.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Pattern Continues</h4>
<p class="fst">World War II not only continued this historical pattern, it developed it more rapidly than ever.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The evidence is compelling that big business will be able to use a number of other wartime developments to increase its relative importance in the postwar economy. These include such factors as production improvements, scientific research, wartime advertising, increased working capital and new facilities.”</p>
<p class="fst">The biggest corporations throughout the war were able to “keep their company names, their trademarks, or their brand names before the public eye by means of expensive advertising campaigns. Much of this was of the so-called institutional type in which the firm identified itself with the war effort. Furthermore, much of it was ultimately paid for by the Federal Government, the advertising campaigns being charged off as an expense before taxes, thereby reducing the corporation’s tax payments.”</p>
<p>But these are relatively only minor advantages over small competitors gained by the big monopolies during the war. One of the biggest advantages is the increase in working capital accumulated in the hands of a few “giants of industry.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the immediate postwar years, big business will have billions of dollars in cash that can be used in a variety of ways to improve its position ... By the middle of 1945, the 63 largest listed manufacturing corporations with assets of over $100,000,000 (each) had increased their net working capital to 8.4 billion dollars, more than that of all listed manufacturing corporations (802 listed with Securities and Exchange Commission) in 1939, and, for the reasons indicated above (excess profits tax refunds and tax credits) at the end of 1945 they will hold nearly 10 billion dollars of highly liquid working capital.”</p>
<p class="fst">With this capital, the 63 corporations could buy up at option price all government-owned production facilities or “they could purchase the assets of 71,700 smaller manufacturing corporations with assets of less than $3,000,000 each, which represent 94 per cent of the total number of manufacturing corporations in the United States.”</p>
<p>The prospects for further growth of monopoly, the report summarizes, are:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Economic concentration will probably be higher in the postwar years than before the war as a result of: The production improvements and scientific research which big business gained during the war; the increase in liquid funds and general financial strength of big business; the ability of big business to keep its name and trade-marks before the public eye during the war; and finally the fact that big business will probably acquire a greater share of the war-built facilities which it operated than will small business, regardless of whether economic conditions are prosperous or depressed.”</p>
<p class="fst">Significantly, the report notes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The rate of mergers and acquisitions in manufacturing was higher in the fourth quarter of 1945 than at any time in the previous decade and a half.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">What to do about this tremendous arid ever growing concentration of economic power, the very power of life and death over the American people, in the hands of a tiny oligarchy of wealth and privilege?</p>
<p>The Senate committee’s report breaks down at this point. In a couple of brief sentences it summarizes its position. It merely states, without any attempt to argue its point, that while the facts it has piled up show that it is “probable” big business will grow still bigger, it should not be concluded that this is “inevitable.” “Concentration not only can be held to its present position; it can be reduced substantiality below that level.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Crumbs for Small Business</h4>
<p class="fst">How? The answer of the committee is given in one sentence, “This would require an anti-trust program, a small business program (including financial aid), and a surplus-disposal program directed, specifically, to assist small business on a scale never before contemplated.”</p>
<p>Boiled down to its essence, this program for “substantially” reducing monopoly is – throw a few crumbs to the small businessmen, turn some government-built facilities over to them, help the little capitalist to become bigger and more able to resist the competition of the big corporations. As for an “anti-trust program” – the anti-trust laws on the statute books now cannot be enforced. Big business controls the government too.</p>
<p>This has been the utopian program of the weaker and smaller capitalists since the trusts began to grow. It is, in reality, a program for a return to the era of small-scale production. Those days are gone forever.</p>
<p>The only road is forward. The people want and have a right to more and better things. These are the things which can be secured only by mass production, by organized production on a vast and concentrated scale.</p>
<p>The problem is not the bigness or concentration of production. The problem is <em>Who controls production.</em></p>
<p>Monopoly in the hands of a few tremendously wealthy and powerful families and groups is an inevitable development under capitalism. Under the system of capitalist “free enterprise” the big sharks devour the small. That is what the facts in the Senate committee’s report prove beyond question.</p>
<p>The same giant plants and facilities which today are used to benefit only the ruling monopolists can also be used to benefit the masses – provided the control is taken away from private individuals and groups and placed in the hands of the working populace.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Socialist Answer</h4>
<p class="fst">To capitalist monopoly – its evils of imperialist war and fascism, its depressions and unemployment, its withholding of goods for inflationary price rises, its restriction of production – the only answer is socialism.</p>
<p>The great trusts and monopolies must be expropriated – taken away from the private interests. They must become the property of society as a whole. They must be operated under a system of planned economy and under the control of the workers themselves. Production for the profit of a few must give way to production for the needs of the many.</p>
<p>The end of the private profit system will be the end of private monopolies.</p>
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Art Preis
World War II and the Monopolies
What Is the Future for Monopoly?
(3 August 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 31, 3 August 1946, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Senate Small Business Committee, in its voluminous study, Economic Concentration And World War II, shows with a wealth of data how World War II benefited only Big Business and how the giant monopolies became even more powerful and dominating. (See The Militant, July 20 and 27)
“What will be the effect of this wartime concentration (of wealth and economic power) upon the peacetime economy?”, asks the report. “Will the wartime gains in concentration be retained, or increased, or will the economy return to its prewar state? – which, it should not be forgotten was already highly concentrated.”
The report states: “During both World Wars, the relative importance of American big business rose sharply. War contracts were issued predominantly to the large concerns, and they accumulated huge profits and controlled the destinies of great numbers of workers.”
Pattern Continues
World War II not only continued this historical pattern, it developed it more rapidly than ever.
“The evidence is compelling that big business will be able to use a number of other wartime developments to increase its relative importance in the postwar economy. These include such factors as production improvements, scientific research, wartime advertising, increased working capital and new facilities.”
The biggest corporations throughout the war were able to “keep their company names, their trademarks, or their brand names before the public eye by means of expensive advertising campaigns. Much of this was of the so-called institutional type in which the firm identified itself with the war effort. Furthermore, much of it was ultimately paid for by the Federal Government, the advertising campaigns being charged off as an expense before taxes, thereby reducing the corporation’s tax payments.”
But these are relatively only minor advantages over small competitors gained by the big monopolies during the war. One of the biggest advantages is the increase in working capital accumulated in the hands of a few “giants of industry.”
“In the immediate postwar years, big business will have billions of dollars in cash that can be used in a variety of ways to improve its position ... By the middle of 1945, the 63 largest listed manufacturing corporations with assets of over $100,000,000 (each) had increased their net working capital to 8.4 billion dollars, more than that of all listed manufacturing corporations (802 listed with Securities and Exchange Commission) in 1939, and, for the reasons indicated above (excess profits tax refunds and tax credits) at the end of 1945 they will hold nearly 10 billion dollars of highly liquid working capital.”
With this capital, the 63 corporations could buy up at option price all government-owned production facilities or “they could purchase the assets of 71,700 smaller manufacturing corporations with assets of less than $3,000,000 each, which represent 94 per cent of the total number of manufacturing corporations in the United States.”
The prospects for further growth of monopoly, the report summarizes, are:
“Economic concentration will probably be higher in the postwar years than before the war as a result of: The production improvements and scientific research which big business gained during the war; the increase in liquid funds and general financial strength of big business; the ability of big business to keep its name and trade-marks before the public eye during the war; and finally the fact that big business will probably acquire a greater share of the war-built facilities which it operated than will small business, regardless of whether economic conditions are prosperous or depressed.”
Significantly, the report notes:
“The rate of mergers and acquisitions in manufacturing was higher in the fourth quarter of 1945 than at any time in the previous decade and a half.”
What to do about this tremendous arid ever growing concentration of economic power, the very power of life and death over the American people, in the hands of a tiny oligarchy of wealth and privilege?
The Senate committee’s report breaks down at this point. In a couple of brief sentences it summarizes its position. It merely states, without any attempt to argue its point, that while the facts it has piled up show that it is “probable” big business will grow still bigger, it should not be concluded that this is “inevitable.” “Concentration not only can be held to its present position; it can be reduced substantiality below that level.”
Crumbs for Small Business
How? The answer of the committee is given in one sentence, “This would require an anti-trust program, a small business program (including financial aid), and a surplus-disposal program directed, specifically, to assist small business on a scale never before contemplated.”
Boiled down to its essence, this program for “substantially” reducing monopoly is – throw a few crumbs to the small businessmen, turn some government-built facilities over to them, help the little capitalist to become bigger and more able to resist the competition of the big corporations. As for an “anti-trust program” – the anti-trust laws on the statute books now cannot be enforced. Big business controls the government too.
This has been the utopian program of the weaker and smaller capitalists since the trusts began to grow. It is, in reality, a program for a return to the era of small-scale production. Those days are gone forever.
The only road is forward. The people want and have a right to more and better things. These are the things which can be secured only by mass production, by organized production on a vast and concentrated scale.
The problem is not the bigness or concentration of production. The problem is Who controls production.
Monopoly in the hands of a few tremendously wealthy and powerful families and groups is an inevitable development under capitalism. Under the system of capitalist “free enterprise” the big sharks devour the small. That is what the facts in the Senate committee’s report prove beyond question.
The same giant plants and facilities which today are used to benefit only the ruling monopolists can also be used to benefit the masses – provided the control is taken away from private individuals and groups and placed in the hands of the working populace.
The Socialist Answer
To capitalist monopoly – its evils of imperialist war and fascism, its depressions and unemployment, its withholding of goods for inflationary price rises, its restriction of production – the only answer is socialism.
The great trusts and monopolies must be expropriated – taken away from the private interests. They must become the property of society as a whole. They must be operated under a system of planned economy and under the control of the workers themselves. Production for the profit of a few must give way to production for the needs of the many.
The end of the private profit system will be the end of private monopolies.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>A 100 Percent American</h1>
<h3>(16 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_33" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 33</a>, 16 August 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The <b>Chicago Tribune</b>’s biography of John Parnell Thomas observes: “He seems to have been molded by life for the job he now faces.” That job is chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, first made notorious under ex-Congressman Dies and which is currently seeking to hold the spotlight in whipping, up the spy scare.</p>
<p>In a more critical appraisal of Thomas, <i>White Knight or False Prophet?</i> by Milton Lehman, published by the Aug. 1 <b>N.Y. Times</b>, the job for which “the stocky, florid Congressman” has been molded is as “a hunter ... he tracks down people he considers subversive, un-American and dangerous to the national welfare” – as defined by J. Parnell Thomas.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In his hunt,” says Mr. Lehman, “he is usually flanked by a battery of photographers and reporters, and when he fires, he sometimes brings down a few of his quarry. But his buckshot has also hit a number of innocent bystanders.”</p>
<p class="fst">Congressman Thomas has a very simple definition of “Americanism.” He told Mr. Lehman that “Americanism is conservative. We’ve got to stop the radicals and stop them now.” You’d better not differ with his definition, either. Several who have done so in his presence are now studying his definition in jail under a conviction for “contempt.”</p>
<p>When Mr. Lehman asked Thomas during an interview to define such terms as “communist,” “fascist,” “subversive” and “un-American,” the man who can smear you at will and send you to jail for any of these things “buzzed for his secretary and asked her to bring in ‘that list on communism and the rest of it I always use.’ He wagged his finger. ‘Every time I define them,’ he said, ‘I do it differently.’”</p>
<p>This. flexibility in defining terms like “communism” and “subversive” is a wonderful aid to Thomas and his colleagues of the Un-American Committee. He can make these terms fit just about anyone he dislikes or who disagrees with him. Moreover, Congressional immunity gives him the right to question, accuse, smear or otherwise “expose” anyone, without fear of suit for libel or even cross-questioning.</p>
<p>The two terms Thomas seems to have most difficulty in defining are “fascism” and “democracy.” He told Mr. Lehman: “Fascism – I guess I’ve never been asked to define it. I’d say it’s just like communism, dangerous to America. And democracy – why, everybody knows what that is.”</p>
<p>With respect to fascism, Congressman Thomas is in the same position as a man with halitosis – even his best friend won’t tell him. His subcommittee on fascism recently reported there was “no danger of fascism in America” and declared that such organizations as the Columbians of Georgia and the Ku Klux Klan are “native-American institutions and not subject to investigation by the committee.” Which just goes to show how nature blunts people to their own smell.</p>
<p>We might add to this portrait of a 100% American – who looks like a Laura Gray cartoon of a Wall Street capitalist – that his zeal for hunting down “subversives” was undoubtedly nurtured in his years as a successful Wall Street bond and insurance salesman. He also managed to get through the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, where, he now modestly admits: “I was never a good student, but I could always tell a troublemaker.” And a troublemaker, for the New Jersey Republican who likes to make up definitions as he goes along, is anybody who makes trouble for J. Parnell Thomas.</p>
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Art Preis
A 100 Percent American
(16 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 33, 16 August 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Chicago Tribune’s biography of John Parnell Thomas observes: “He seems to have been molded by life for the job he now faces.” That job is chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, first made notorious under ex-Congressman Dies and which is currently seeking to hold the spotlight in whipping, up the spy scare.
In a more critical appraisal of Thomas, White Knight or False Prophet? by Milton Lehman, published by the Aug. 1 N.Y. Times, the job for which “the stocky, florid Congressman” has been molded is as “a hunter ... he tracks down people he considers subversive, un-American and dangerous to the national welfare” – as defined by J. Parnell Thomas.
“In his hunt,” says Mr. Lehman, “he is usually flanked by a battery of photographers and reporters, and when he fires, he sometimes brings down a few of his quarry. But his buckshot has also hit a number of innocent bystanders.”
Congressman Thomas has a very simple definition of “Americanism.” He told Mr. Lehman that “Americanism is conservative. We’ve got to stop the radicals and stop them now.” You’d better not differ with his definition, either. Several who have done so in his presence are now studying his definition in jail under a conviction for “contempt.”
When Mr. Lehman asked Thomas during an interview to define such terms as “communist,” “fascist,” “subversive” and “un-American,” the man who can smear you at will and send you to jail for any of these things “buzzed for his secretary and asked her to bring in ‘that list on communism and the rest of it I always use.’ He wagged his finger. ‘Every time I define them,’ he said, ‘I do it differently.’”
This. flexibility in defining terms like “communism” and “subversive” is a wonderful aid to Thomas and his colleagues of the Un-American Committee. He can make these terms fit just about anyone he dislikes or who disagrees with him. Moreover, Congressional immunity gives him the right to question, accuse, smear or otherwise “expose” anyone, without fear of suit for libel or even cross-questioning.
The two terms Thomas seems to have most difficulty in defining are “fascism” and “democracy.” He told Mr. Lehman: “Fascism – I guess I’ve never been asked to define it. I’d say it’s just like communism, dangerous to America. And democracy – why, everybody knows what that is.”
With respect to fascism, Congressman Thomas is in the same position as a man with halitosis – even his best friend won’t tell him. His subcommittee on fascism recently reported there was “no danger of fascism in America” and declared that such organizations as the Columbians of Georgia and the Ku Klux Klan are “native-American institutions and not subject to investigation by the committee.” Which just goes to show how nature blunts people to their own smell.
We might add to this portrait of a 100% American – who looks like a Laura Gray cartoon of a Wall Street capitalist – that his zeal for hunting down “subversives” was undoubtedly nurtured in his years as a successful Wall Street bond and insurance salesman. He also managed to get through the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School, where, he now modestly admits: “I was never a good student, but I could always tell a troublemaker.” And a troublemaker, for the New Jersey Republican who likes to make up definitions as he goes along, is anybody who makes trouble for J. Parnell Thomas.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(23 March 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_12" target="new">Vol. X No. 12</a>, 23 March 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Capitalist Press and Sour Grapes</h3>
<p class="fst">One interesting sidelight of the GM strike victory is the attempt of the anti-labor press to “explain” away the gains of the GM workers and to minimize the significance of their well-earned triumph.</p>
<p>Typically, the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, March 14, carefully pointed out that “It was apparent that the wage increase of 18½ cents an hour and other concessions fell short of the original demand for almost twice as much.” It gloated because the “net take-home pay on a 40-hour week will be less than it was at the old rate during the war.”</p>
<p>True enough, the GM workers didn’t get their full and justified demands. But they came a long way from the demands of the corporation which originally proposed a wage cut in the form of a 45-hour week at straight time, elimination of union security and seniority provisions, and demanded union-busting “company security.”</p>
<p>By their magnificent and unyielding fight the GM workers paved the way for the biggest single wage increase for American labor in its history, frustrated Wall Street’s union-busting offensive, placed an obstacle before the all-out price inflation slated by the auto barons, and forced the mighty General Motors, spearhead of the open- shop offensive, to beat a retreat.</p>
<p>Well, one can hardly blame the capitalist press for exhibiting) an aggravated case of “sour grapes.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Judases in Search of a Market</h3>
<p class="fst">George Morris, hatchetman of the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, wrote an article called <em>A Market for Judases</em>, in which he bemoaned some “disquieting signs” and “a serious danger within the CIO.”</p>
<p>Said danger, explains Morris, is the “type of degeneration one meets these days” among “certain” union leaders who recently have gone over to the bosses’ camp as highly paid “personnel managers,” “labor relations advisors,” etc.</p>
<p>It is illuminating, however, to examine more closely the three examples cited by Morris. Each – as Morris carefully refrains from stating – went to the Stalinist “finishing school.”</p>
<p>Morris is “nauseated to vomiting” at Edward Cheyfitz, formei head of the CIO Die Casten Union. Cheyfitz has lined up a $15,000-a-year job as “advisor” to Eric Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president. Cheyfitz will be recalled as the lad wha started out as a Young Communist (Stalinist) League member is Toledo, was sent expense-free to the Soviet Union for a couple of years, returned to a cushy job with the Doehler Die Company. He took over the lead of the union, worked his way up to local CIO recording secretary and finally became a key Stalinist trade union functionary. His specialty for many years was baiting “Trotskyites” and sending goon squads against union militants.</p>
<p>When in Ohio, Morris “was told” of “a regional head of another union who suddenly quit” to become “personnel director for the company.” Morris “forgets” to mention this individual’s name, but we will jog his memory.</p>
<p>It was Victor DeCavitch, international vice-president of the CIO United Electrical Workers, and long a leading and notorious Stalinist in the CIO.</p>
<p>The case which most turns Morris’ delicate stomach is that of UAW Vice-President Richard T. Frankensteen. After a career in New York and Miami night clubs, Frankensteen recently announced he was contemplating accepting one of the “fine opportunities” being offered him by Big Business firms.</p>
<p>Although Frankensteen was never a Stalinist, he and the Stalinists maintained a reactionary bloc for years in the UAW. Together they sought to put over “incentive pay,” expel militants, and conducted a super-jingo wartime policy. He is a Stalinist “correspondence school” graduate.</p>
<p>These graduates of the Stalinist school of betrayal have merely followed the examples of their teachers, like Earl Browder, 16 years the head of the Communist (Stalinist) Party, and Louis Budenz, former editor of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>.</p>
<p>Morris himself acts like an accomplice who tries to cover himself up by appearing as the most “zealous” hunter of his fellow criminals.</p>
<p>Yes, indeed! The labor movement is well-advised to look out for Judases – especially Stalinist Judases – in search of a market.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(23 March 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 12, 23 March 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Capitalist Press and Sour Grapes
One interesting sidelight of the GM strike victory is the attempt of the anti-labor press to “explain” away the gains of the GM workers and to minimize the significance of their well-earned triumph.
Typically, the N.Y. Times, March 14, carefully pointed out that “It was apparent that the wage increase of 18½ cents an hour and other concessions fell short of the original demand for almost twice as much.” It gloated because the “net take-home pay on a 40-hour week will be less than it was at the old rate during the war.”
True enough, the GM workers didn’t get their full and justified demands. But they came a long way from the demands of the corporation which originally proposed a wage cut in the form of a 45-hour week at straight time, elimination of union security and seniority provisions, and demanded union-busting “company security.”
By their magnificent and unyielding fight the GM workers paved the way for the biggest single wage increase for American labor in its history, frustrated Wall Street’s union-busting offensive, placed an obstacle before the all-out price inflation slated by the auto barons, and forced the mighty General Motors, spearhead of the open- shop offensive, to beat a retreat.
Well, one can hardly blame the capitalist press for exhibiting) an aggravated case of “sour grapes.”
* * *
Judases in Search of a Market
George Morris, hatchetman of the Stalinist Daily Worker, wrote an article called A Market for Judases, in which he bemoaned some “disquieting signs” and “a serious danger within the CIO.”
Said danger, explains Morris, is the “type of degeneration one meets these days” among “certain” union leaders who recently have gone over to the bosses’ camp as highly paid “personnel managers,” “labor relations advisors,” etc.
It is illuminating, however, to examine more closely the three examples cited by Morris. Each – as Morris carefully refrains from stating – went to the Stalinist “finishing school.”
Morris is “nauseated to vomiting” at Edward Cheyfitz, formei head of the CIO Die Casten Union. Cheyfitz has lined up a $15,000-a-year job as “advisor” to Eric Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce president. Cheyfitz will be recalled as the lad wha started out as a Young Communist (Stalinist) League member is Toledo, was sent expense-free to the Soviet Union for a couple of years, returned to a cushy job with the Doehler Die Company. He took over the lead of the union, worked his way up to local CIO recording secretary and finally became a key Stalinist trade union functionary. His specialty for many years was baiting “Trotskyites” and sending goon squads against union militants.
When in Ohio, Morris “was told” of “a regional head of another union who suddenly quit” to become “personnel director for the company.” Morris “forgets” to mention this individual’s name, but we will jog his memory.
It was Victor DeCavitch, international vice-president of the CIO United Electrical Workers, and long a leading and notorious Stalinist in the CIO.
The case which most turns Morris’ delicate stomach is that of UAW Vice-President Richard T. Frankensteen. After a career in New York and Miami night clubs, Frankensteen recently announced he was contemplating accepting one of the “fine opportunities” being offered him by Big Business firms.
Although Frankensteen was never a Stalinist, he and the Stalinists maintained a reactionary bloc for years in the UAW. Together they sought to put over “incentive pay,” expel militants, and conducted a super-jingo wartime policy. He is a Stalinist “correspondence school” graduate.
These graduates of the Stalinist school of betrayal have merely followed the examples of their teachers, like Earl Browder, 16 years the head of the Communist (Stalinist) Party, and Louis Budenz, former editor of the Daily Worker.
Morris himself acts like an accomplice who tries to cover himself up by appearing as the most “zealous” hunter of his fellow criminals.
Yes, indeed! The labor movement is well-advised to look out for Judases – especially Stalinist Judases – in search of a market.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(4 May 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_18" target="new">Vol. X No. 18</a>, 4 May 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>How Press Buried McCoy Disaster News</h3>
<p class="fst">Any spokesman of the coal mine operators just needs to open his mouth against the AFL United Mine Workers demands for safety and welfare improvements to rate front-page billing in the capitalist press. But when coal miners go to their deaths in mines that are operated in violation of every safety regulation, the news is usually stuck back in the “Want Ads” section.</p>
<p>People who failed to scan their papers very closely last Thursday and Friday, surely missed the buried accounts of the latest mine disaster down in McCoy, Virginia, where 12 hard-coal miners died on April 18. The <strong>N.Y. Times</strong> – “All the news that’s fit to print” – contained a one paragraph mention of the disaster on April 19, down in the middle of a story headed: <em>Coal Operators Quit Washington</em>. The next day, in a story with a one-column, two-line head, the Times condescended to devote six inches of type to a UMW statement on the disaster – back between the sports page and business news.</p>
<p>The “impartial” press, usually indifferent to the continuous murder of coal miners, was even more reluctant to give this terrible tragedy a “play.” It was a thunderous punctuation of the miners’ demand for an operator-financed, union-controlled health and welfare fund, improved safety measures, etc. More than 400,000 soft coal miners have been striking for these demands since April 1, and 75,000 hard- coal miners like those at McCoy will be raising the same demands shortly.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Rail Unions Seek Bigger Pay Award</h3>
<p class="fst">Fifteen non-operating employees railroad unions are seeking an additional 14 cents an hour wage increase to make up the difference between their 30 cents demand and the 16 cents awarded by a government arbitration board.</p>
<p>The railway workers were kicked in the teeth when their leaders went to arbitration instead of conducting a militant fight like the CIO unions did. In seeking additional awards, however, the rail union leaders are proposing to go through the same rigmarole that resulted in the arbitration ruling of only 16 cents, which all the rail workers are roundly condemning. The union officials are again following the procedure of the Railway Labor Act and will finally wind up, if a deadlock persists, with – more arbitration.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in Cleveland starting April 24, some 175 general chairmen of two operating unions, the brotherhoods of railroad trainmen and locomotive engineers, will consider the question of strike action to win their 30-cents demand, which another arbitration board cut down to 16 cents.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Westinghouse Strike Passes 100-Day Mark</h3>
<p class="fst">On April 24, the 75,000 Westinghouse Electric strikers marked their 100th day on the picket lines in their battle to force the hold-out international trust to grant an 18½ cents an hour wage increase similar to those won in General Electric and the GM Electrical Division.</p>
<p>On the same day, the directors of the huge corporation, which has plants in Japan and Germany and collected from both sides of the battle-lines during the war, declared a stock dividend, cutting up a $3,150,000 melon.</p>
<p>The Westinghouse strike is the most critical labor struggle now in progress. All sections of organized labor must rally to give full moral and material support to the courageous members of the CIO United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers who have held out more than 13 weeks against hunger, injunction, police terror and a flood of company propaganda.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Women Strikers Ask Maternity Leave Clause</h3>
<p class="fst">150 women workers went on strike at the Dearborn Glass Co., Chicago, on April 22, demanding a special clause in their CIO United Auto Workers local contract providing for maternity leaves.</p>
<p>The bosses are always talking about the virtues of “home and babies,” but when it comes to permitting women workers to have babies without losing their jobs the employers don’t sing any sentimental tune.</p>
<p>The striking union points out that the present contract provides for leaves for “satisfactory cause.” It insists quite correctly that time out for bringing forth the next generation is more than a satisfactory cause.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(4 May 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 18, 4 May 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
How Press Buried McCoy Disaster News
Any spokesman of the coal mine operators just needs to open his mouth against the AFL United Mine Workers demands for safety and welfare improvements to rate front-page billing in the capitalist press. But when coal miners go to their deaths in mines that are operated in violation of every safety regulation, the news is usually stuck back in the “Want Ads” section.
People who failed to scan their papers very closely last Thursday and Friday, surely missed the buried accounts of the latest mine disaster down in McCoy, Virginia, where 12 hard-coal miners died on April 18. The N.Y. Times – “All the news that’s fit to print” – contained a one paragraph mention of the disaster on April 19, down in the middle of a story headed: Coal Operators Quit Washington. The next day, in a story with a one-column, two-line head, the Times condescended to devote six inches of type to a UMW statement on the disaster – back between the sports page and business news.
The “impartial” press, usually indifferent to the continuous murder of coal miners, was even more reluctant to give this terrible tragedy a “play.” It was a thunderous punctuation of the miners’ demand for an operator-financed, union-controlled health and welfare fund, improved safety measures, etc. More than 400,000 soft coal miners have been striking for these demands since April 1, and 75,000 hard- coal miners like those at McCoy will be raising the same demands shortly.
* * *
Rail Unions Seek Bigger Pay Award
Fifteen non-operating employees railroad unions are seeking an additional 14 cents an hour wage increase to make up the difference between their 30 cents demand and the 16 cents awarded by a government arbitration board.
The railway workers were kicked in the teeth when their leaders went to arbitration instead of conducting a militant fight like the CIO unions did. In seeking additional awards, however, the rail union leaders are proposing to go through the same rigmarole that resulted in the arbitration ruling of only 16 cents, which all the rail workers are roundly condemning. The union officials are again following the procedure of the Railway Labor Act and will finally wind up, if a deadlock persists, with – more arbitration.
Meanwhile, in Cleveland starting April 24, some 175 general chairmen of two operating unions, the brotherhoods of railroad trainmen and locomotive engineers, will consider the question of strike action to win their 30-cents demand, which another arbitration board cut down to 16 cents.
* * *
Westinghouse Strike Passes 100-Day Mark
On April 24, the 75,000 Westinghouse Electric strikers marked their 100th day on the picket lines in their battle to force the hold-out international trust to grant an 18½ cents an hour wage increase similar to those won in General Electric and the GM Electrical Division.
On the same day, the directors of the huge corporation, which has plants in Japan and Germany and collected from both sides of the battle-lines during the war, declared a stock dividend, cutting up a $3,150,000 melon.
The Westinghouse strike is the most critical labor struggle now in progress. All sections of organized labor must rally to give full moral and material support to the courageous members of the CIO United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers who have held out more than 13 weeks against hunger, injunction, police terror and a flood of company propaganda.
* * *
Women Strikers Ask Maternity Leave Clause
150 women workers went on strike at the Dearborn Glass Co., Chicago, on April 22, demanding a special clause in their CIO United Auto Workers local contract providing for maternity leaves.
The bosses are always talking about the virtues of “home and babies,” but when it comes to permitting women workers to have babies without losing their jobs the employers don’t sing any sentimental tune.
The striking union points out that the present contract provides for leaves for “satisfactory cause.” It insists quite correctly that time out for bringing forth the next generation is more than a satisfactory cause.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Split in the Socialist Party on Aid to Britain</h1>
<h3>(1 February 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_05" target="new">Vol. V No. 5</a>, 1 February 1941, p. 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">A deep split in the ranks of the Socialist Party became public in connection with the appearance of Norman Thomas last week before the House committee hearings on the Lease-Lend bill.</p>
<p>Coincident with Thomas’ testimony, a group of leading figures in the Socialist Party issued a statement to the press, repudiating Thomas’ opinions on the bill and declaring that he did not represent the true sentiments of the majority of the Socialist Party members.</p>
<p>The press statement accompanied a petition to Representative Bloom, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, requesting that a spokesman of the petitioning group be afforded an opportunity to speak at the hearing in full support of the bill granting unlimited war powers to the president.<br>
</p>
<h4>Thomas Loses His Chief Lieutenants</h4>
<p class="fst">The extent of the cleavage in the Socialist Party and the strength of the opposition to the Thomas faction is indicated by the fact that the petition signers included Thomas’ chief lieutenants. Among them were Jack Altman, former secretary of the New York local; Professor Reinhold Neibuhr of Union Theological Seminary; Frank Crosswaith, general organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; Alfred Baker Lewis, former Massachusetts party secretary; Murray Gross, former chairman of the National Labor Committee of the Socialist Party; Lazar Becker, of the New York state committee; and Gus Tyler, former editor of the <strong>Call</strong>.</p>
<p>Those of us who were in the left wing of the Socialist Party in 1937 may be forgiven if we laugh in glee at the sight of this roster of denouncers of Thomas. For these were the gentlemen who upheld Thomas’ right arm as he smote the left wing of the party in 1937. With their backing Thomas resorted to the desperate venture of expelling the left wing, without daring to wait for the verdict of an honestly-elected party convention. The interested reader – particularly any worker of revolutionary spirit who may have wandered by accident into the Socialist Party since 1037 – should read the story of the 1937 split in the issues of the <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong> (now <strong>The Militant</strong>) of that period. He will find that we predicted the degeneration of the Socialist Party into a chauvinistic sect like the Social Democratic Federation, once the left wing was not there to prevent it. The left wing is now in the Socialist Workers Party.</p>
<p>Jack Altman, next to Thomas the most important figure in engineering the split in 1937, predicted in a press statement last week that the Norman Thomas group will be repudiated at the S.P. national com-mit.ee meeting next mouth. Altman claimed – and the next issue of Thomas’ <strong>Call</strong> has not denied it – that the two largest units of the party, Illinois and Wisconsin, support the Altman group.</p>
<p>Although his name was not attached to this statement, Daniel Hoan, former mayor of Milwaukee, has already gone completely over to the pro-war Roosevelt camp. He is now a member of one of Roosevelt’s “national defense” boards.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the Split Is About</h4>
<p class="fst">The Altman group has adopted a completely pro-war position, indistinguishable from that of the Roosevelt administration, whose policies it now accords full support.</p>
<p>The split in the Socialist Party ranks is not a fight between an anti-war proletarian wing and petty-bourgeois capitulators. It merely mirrors faithfully the differences that exist within the capitalist camp, the “isolationists” <em>versus</em> the interventionists. At no point does the conflict in the Socialist Party take on the aspect of u struggle between two opposing class tendencies.</p>
<p>The basis of Thomas’ opposition to the Lease-Lend bill was identical with that of Hanford MacNider, former national commander of the American Legion, who spoke at the same session of the hearings as Thomas and represented that section of the Republican party and Wall Street who disagree with the administration only on the tactics to be pursued leading up to the war.</p>
<p>Thomas, like MacNider, based his principal objection to the bill as it now stands solely on the fact that it is “undemocratic” and gives the President too much individual power.</p>
<p>In the same breath that he condemned Churchill as “an imperialist to the core,” Thomas declared that he was for aid to Britain and a British victory. Even in his opposition to the powers given Roosevelt in the hill, he hastened to make clear that he recognized the “excellence” of Roosevelt’s “normal intentions.”</p>
<p>It is true that Thomas qualified his support of aid to imperialist Britain by stating that he is for only such aid as will help “to repel the Nazi invasion” but will not assist Churchill in his plans for a “reconquest of Europe.”</p>
<p>At what point aid to Britain ceases to be for the purpose of repulsing a Nazi invasion and become an aid to British imperialist ambitions, Thomas failed to make clear.</p>
<p>How little principled difference there is between the two Socialist Party factions is, indicated by Thomas’ recent endorsement of Mathew Woll’s committee to aid Britain. The program and sponsors of this committee are completely pro-war and in entire accord with Roosevelt’s foreign policies.</p>
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Art Preis
The Split in the Socialist Party on Aid to Britain
(1 February 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 5, 1 February 1941, p. 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A deep split in the ranks of the Socialist Party became public in connection with the appearance of Norman Thomas last week before the House committee hearings on the Lease-Lend bill.
Coincident with Thomas’ testimony, a group of leading figures in the Socialist Party issued a statement to the press, repudiating Thomas’ opinions on the bill and declaring that he did not represent the true sentiments of the majority of the Socialist Party members.
The press statement accompanied a petition to Representative Bloom, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, requesting that a spokesman of the petitioning group be afforded an opportunity to speak at the hearing in full support of the bill granting unlimited war powers to the president.
Thomas Loses His Chief Lieutenants
The extent of the cleavage in the Socialist Party and the strength of the opposition to the Thomas faction is indicated by the fact that the petition signers included Thomas’ chief lieutenants. Among them were Jack Altman, former secretary of the New York local; Professor Reinhold Neibuhr of Union Theological Seminary; Frank Crosswaith, general organizer of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; Alfred Baker Lewis, former Massachusetts party secretary; Murray Gross, former chairman of the National Labor Committee of the Socialist Party; Lazar Becker, of the New York state committee; and Gus Tyler, former editor of the Call.
Those of us who were in the left wing of the Socialist Party in 1937 may be forgiven if we laugh in glee at the sight of this roster of denouncers of Thomas. For these were the gentlemen who upheld Thomas’ right arm as he smote the left wing of the party in 1937. With their backing Thomas resorted to the desperate venture of expelling the left wing, without daring to wait for the verdict of an honestly-elected party convention. The interested reader – particularly any worker of revolutionary spirit who may have wandered by accident into the Socialist Party since 1037 – should read the story of the 1937 split in the issues of the Socialist Appeal (now The Militant) of that period. He will find that we predicted the degeneration of the Socialist Party into a chauvinistic sect like the Social Democratic Federation, once the left wing was not there to prevent it. The left wing is now in the Socialist Workers Party.
Jack Altman, next to Thomas the most important figure in engineering the split in 1937, predicted in a press statement last week that the Norman Thomas group will be repudiated at the S.P. national com-mit.ee meeting next mouth. Altman claimed – and the next issue of Thomas’ Call has not denied it – that the two largest units of the party, Illinois and Wisconsin, support the Altman group.
Although his name was not attached to this statement, Daniel Hoan, former mayor of Milwaukee, has already gone completely over to the pro-war Roosevelt camp. He is now a member of one of Roosevelt’s “national defense” boards.
What the Split Is About
The Altman group has adopted a completely pro-war position, indistinguishable from that of the Roosevelt administration, whose policies it now accords full support.
The split in the Socialist Party ranks is not a fight between an anti-war proletarian wing and petty-bourgeois capitulators. It merely mirrors faithfully the differences that exist within the capitalist camp, the “isolationists” versus the interventionists. At no point does the conflict in the Socialist Party take on the aspect of u struggle between two opposing class tendencies.
The basis of Thomas’ opposition to the Lease-Lend bill was identical with that of Hanford MacNider, former national commander of the American Legion, who spoke at the same session of the hearings as Thomas and represented that section of the Republican party and Wall Street who disagree with the administration only on the tactics to be pursued leading up to the war.
Thomas, like MacNider, based his principal objection to the bill as it now stands solely on the fact that it is “undemocratic” and gives the President too much individual power.
In the same breath that he condemned Churchill as “an imperialist to the core,” Thomas declared that he was for aid to Britain and a British victory. Even in his opposition to the powers given Roosevelt in the hill, he hastened to make clear that he recognized the “excellence” of Roosevelt’s “normal intentions.”
It is true that Thomas qualified his support of aid to imperialist Britain by stating that he is for only such aid as will help “to repel the Nazi invasion” but will not assist Churchill in his plans for a “reconquest of Europe.”
At what point aid to Britain ceases to be for the purpose of repulsing a Nazi invasion and become an aid to British imperialist ambitions, Thomas failed to make clear.
How little principled difference there is between the two Socialist Party factions is, indicated by Thomas’ recent endorsement of Mathew Woll’s committee to aid Britain. The program and sponsors of this committee are completely pro-war and in entire accord with Roosevelt’s foreign policies.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Open the Books!<br>
An Answer to GM</h1>
<h3>(19 January 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_03" target="new">Vol. X No. 3</a>, 19 January 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">In the fight against General Motors the CIO United Automobile Workers have put forward a most significant and far-reaching demand: “Open the Books of the Corporation!”</p>
<p>This is the first time in American history that a union has wielded this powerful weapon in a major struggle against the employers.</p>
<p>The mere suggestion that the union has the right to investigate the corporation’s records has sent General Motors and its Big Business confederates into convulsions of fear and rage.</p>
<p>For the billionaire Wall Street financial cliques like the du Ponts and Morgans correctly see in this demand more than a simple issue of wages or hours.</p>
<p>To the capitalist overlords who have a stranglehold on the natural resources and means of production, a “look at the books” contains a threat to their continued rule and their profits, privileges and power.</p>
<p>In answer to the UAW’s demand, General Motors Corporation published from coast-to-coast a newspaper advertisement entitled:. “A ‘Look at the Books’ or a ‘Finger in the Pie’?”</p>
<p>GM follows up with this $64 question: “Which is the UAW- CIO really after? Is it seeking facts – or new economic power? Does it want to know things – or run things?”</p>
<p>First of all, the GM workers do want to know things – plenty of things. When they raised their demand to investigate GM’s books, their immediate purpose was to throw full light upon the corporation’s enormous profits and profit-potential to prove conclusively that the company can easily afford to pay the full wage demands of its workers.</p>
<p>“We have firmly declined to recognize this as a basis for bargaining,” says GM’s advertisement. Thus with one contemptuous gesture. General Motors rejects any inspection of its books for the purpose of ascertaining the facts of its ability to pay higher wages.</p>
<p>Even if we can pay the wages asked, says General Motors in effect, we refuse to consider this fact as relevant to the merits of the union’s wage case.</p>
<p>At the same time, the GM propagandists go on to assert that “the full facts are published” already “in annual reports ... audited by outside auditors. Similar figures are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”</p>
<p>“Does the UAW-CIO honestly believe,” asks the corporation in self-righteous indignation, “that General Motors would or could deceive these experts?”</p>
<p>This mammoth corporation has no need to “deceive” its own “experts.” Corporation auditors are not likely to differ with their high-paying clientele on what constitutes “legitimate” cost and profits. Nor does the SEC, a hand-picked agency of the Big Business government, often question the carefully-drawn reports of the most powerful corporations.<br>
</p>
<h4>What the Workers Want to Know</h4>
<p class="fst">What the workers want to know are all those facts the corporations misrepresent or fail to report: The hidden profits concealed as “costs”; the hundreds of millions piled up in fake “depreciation” and “contingency” funds; the watered stock and phony “capitalization” on which the corporations pay out millions in profits from the wealth produced by the workers.</p>
<p>If the corporations have nothing to hide, if their hands are clean even within the definition of capitalist law, why should they fear to let the representatives of their own workers see the books?</p>
<p>The answer is clear. They don’t dare permit investigation of their records. Such a thorough going scrutiny as a workers’ committee might make would inevitably uncover scandalous acts of fraud, double-bookkeeping, fictitious losses, padded costs, diversion of assets, price-rigging, falsified production figures, etc. The corporation owners would be fully exposed as grand-scale swindlers and outright violators of the law.</p>
<p>That is one real reason why the corporations threaten to resist to the end rather than willingly permit the workers any glimpse into the company books.</p>
<p>But there is a further and equally weighty reason why General Motors refuses to divulge its “secrets” to those who create all its wealth.</p>
<p>The unions, howls the GM ad, “hope to pry their way into the whole field of management.” And this “surely leads to the day” when the organized workers “will demand the right to tell what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we must charge you – all with an eye on what labor can take out of the business ...”</p>
<p>Thus, says GM, “the idea itself (a ‘look at the books’) hides a threat to GM, to all business ...” Because questions of “earnings, prices, sales volume, taxes and the like ... are recognized as the problems of management,” and the owners alone have the right to deal with such matters.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Nub of the Corporation’s Fears</h4>
<p class="fst">Here we come to the nub of the corporation fears. Once the workers turn an x-ray on the corporation books, once they get a clear picture of the stupendous robbery and exploitation registered in those books, they would Inevitably be aroused to demand greater control over the predatory operations of the private owners.</p>
<p>The workers would eventually come to the conclusion that the best thing for them to do would be to KICK OUT THE PARASITIC OWNERS ENTIRELY and operate industry under the” control and for the benefit of the working people.</p>
<p>Just what is this “management” and its function that the GM owners speak so awesomely about and whose “rights” the workers must never invade? These are functionaries hired to squeeze the maximum profits for the owners out of the labor force and means of production. For the capitalists aren’t interested in producing for the needs of the people. They are solely concerned with grabbing ever-greater profits.</p>
<p>The tax laws have been rigged so that the monopolists can operate industry even at low capacity and still realize enormous profits from tax refunds. Giant monopolies like General Motors conspire to restrict production in order to create artificial scarcity and impose high prices. In the last months of 1945, many corporations deliberately curtailed production in order to avoid paying excess profits taxes which are to be eliminated in 1946.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Has the Right to Say</h4>
<p class="fst">The workers who suffer from the greed, swindling and sabotage of the monopolists have not only the right but the duty precisely to tell the owners “what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we must charge ...”</p>
<p>Thus labor not only has the right and obligation to “know things,” but to “run things.”</p>
<p>The handful of billionaire monopolists who arrogate to themselves the “right” to control the means of subsistence of the people serve no useful function in production. Their “management” has been only mismanagement.</p>
<p>They manipulate the means of production to serve their selfish profit interests. They have converted the means for potential plenty into a monstrous exploitative mechanism creating scarcity, terrible depressions, starvation wages, poverty, wars.</p>
<p>For economic planning and the rational administration of industry a new “management” has long been needed. The only ones truly capable of organizing and operating industry for full and efficient production and for the needs of the people are the organized workers themselves.</p>
<p>Standing in the way of the needs of the masses, blocking the read to plenty, are the plutocratic parasites who hypocritically prate, as does General Motors, about “more and better things for the people,” but who actually provide less and less for the working people and more and more for the idle rich.</p>
<p>To screen their predatory and criminal operations, the capitalists have Invariably invoked the “sanctity of business secrets.” But this is a sham intended only to deceive the people and ward off exposure of the capitalists’ real secrets – the monstrous degree of their exploitation of labor and their criminal acts.</p>
<p>Between the big monopolies themselves there are no “business secrets.” They cooperate closely, not only on a national but an international scale, to exploit the toiling masses.</p>
<p>Thus, America’s leading corporations were caught red-handed in secret cartel agreements with the Nazi and Japanese corporations whereby all these Big Business conspirators freely exchanged the most vital patents and industrial processes essential to war. These deals were concealed not only from the people but from the American capitalist government itself.<br>
</p>
<h4>GM Workers’ Battle Cry</h4>
<p class="fst">These are facts which the Trotskyists have long since exposed. That is why the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 advanced for the first time in this country the slogan of “Open the Books of the Corporations!” For the past seven years, the Trotskyists have been advocating the need for this step.</p>
<p>Today the GM workers have taken up this slogan and made it the battle cry of the most progressive sections of the labor movement. Tomorrow. American labor is going to go even further.</p>
<p>To Wall Street’s and GM’s question, “a ‘look at the books’ or ‘a finger in the pie’?”, American labor is going to answer:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We are not only going to inspect your books. We are going to eliminate your despotic and ruinous rule over our economic life. We want nothing less than the whole pie our sweat and toil produces.”</p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Art Preis
Open the Books!
An Answer to GM
(19 January 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 3, 19 January 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In the fight against General Motors the CIO United Automobile Workers have put forward a most significant and far-reaching demand: “Open the Books of the Corporation!”
This is the first time in American history that a union has wielded this powerful weapon in a major struggle against the employers.
The mere suggestion that the union has the right to investigate the corporation’s records has sent General Motors and its Big Business confederates into convulsions of fear and rage.
For the billionaire Wall Street financial cliques like the du Ponts and Morgans correctly see in this demand more than a simple issue of wages or hours.
To the capitalist overlords who have a stranglehold on the natural resources and means of production, a “look at the books” contains a threat to their continued rule and their profits, privileges and power.
In answer to the UAW’s demand, General Motors Corporation published from coast-to-coast a newspaper advertisement entitled:. “A ‘Look at the Books’ or a ‘Finger in the Pie’?”
GM follows up with this $64 question: “Which is the UAW- CIO really after? Is it seeking facts – or new economic power? Does it want to know things – or run things?”
First of all, the GM workers do want to know things – plenty of things. When they raised their demand to investigate GM’s books, their immediate purpose was to throw full light upon the corporation’s enormous profits and profit-potential to prove conclusively that the company can easily afford to pay the full wage demands of its workers.
“We have firmly declined to recognize this as a basis for bargaining,” says GM’s advertisement. Thus with one contemptuous gesture. General Motors rejects any inspection of its books for the purpose of ascertaining the facts of its ability to pay higher wages.
Even if we can pay the wages asked, says General Motors in effect, we refuse to consider this fact as relevant to the merits of the union’s wage case.
At the same time, the GM propagandists go on to assert that “the full facts are published” already “in annual reports ... audited by outside auditors. Similar figures are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
“Does the UAW-CIO honestly believe,” asks the corporation in self-righteous indignation, “that General Motors would or could deceive these experts?”
This mammoth corporation has no need to “deceive” its own “experts.” Corporation auditors are not likely to differ with their high-paying clientele on what constitutes “legitimate” cost and profits. Nor does the SEC, a hand-picked agency of the Big Business government, often question the carefully-drawn reports of the most powerful corporations.
What the Workers Want to Know
What the workers want to know are all those facts the corporations misrepresent or fail to report: The hidden profits concealed as “costs”; the hundreds of millions piled up in fake “depreciation” and “contingency” funds; the watered stock and phony “capitalization” on which the corporations pay out millions in profits from the wealth produced by the workers.
If the corporations have nothing to hide, if their hands are clean even within the definition of capitalist law, why should they fear to let the representatives of their own workers see the books?
The answer is clear. They don’t dare permit investigation of their records. Such a thorough going scrutiny as a workers’ committee might make would inevitably uncover scandalous acts of fraud, double-bookkeeping, fictitious losses, padded costs, diversion of assets, price-rigging, falsified production figures, etc. The corporation owners would be fully exposed as grand-scale swindlers and outright violators of the law.
That is one real reason why the corporations threaten to resist to the end rather than willingly permit the workers any glimpse into the company books.
But there is a further and equally weighty reason why General Motors refuses to divulge its “secrets” to those who create all its wealth.
The unions, howls the GM ad, “hope to pry their way into the whole field of management.” And this “surely leads to the day” when the organized workers “will demand the right to tell what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we must charge you – all with an eye on what labor can take out of the business ...”
Thus, says GM, “the idea itself (a ‘look at the books’) hides a threat to GM, to all business ...” Because questions of “earnings, prices, sales volume, taxes and the like ... are recognized as the problems of management,” and the owners alone have the right to deal with such matters.
The Nub of the Corporation’s Fears
Here we come to the nub of the corporation fears. Once the workers turn an x-ray on the corporation books, once they get a clear picture of the stupendous robbery and exploitation registered in those books, they would Inevitably be aroused to demand greater control over the predatory operations of the private owners.
The workers would eventually come to the conclusion that the best thing for them to do would be to KICK OUT THE PARASITIC OWNERS ENTIRELY and operate industry under the” control and for the benefit of the working people.
Just what is this “management” and its function that the GM owners speak so awesomely about and whose “rights” the workers must never invade? These are functionaries hired to squeeze the maximum profits for the owners out of the labor force and means of production. For the capitalists aren’t interested in producing for the needs of the people. They are solely concerned with grabbing ever-greater profits.
The tax laws have been rigged so that the monopolists can operate industry even at low capacity and still realize enormous profits from tax refunds. Giant monopolies like General Motors conspire to restrict production in order to create artificial scarcity and impose high prices. In the last months of 1945, many corporations deliberately curtailed production in order to avoid paying excess profits taxes which are to be eliminated in 1946.
Labor Has the Right to Say
The workers who suffer from the greed, swindling and sabotage of the monopolists have not only the right but the duty precisely to tell the owners “what we can make, when we can make it, where we can make it, and how much we must charge ...”
Thus labor not only has the right and obligation to “know things,” but to “run things.”
The handful of billionaire monopolists who arrogate to themselves the “right” to control the means of subsistence of the people serve no useful function in production. Their “management” has been only mismanagement.
They manipulate the means of production to serve their selfish profit interests. They have converted the means for potential plenty into a monstrous exploitative mechanism creating scarcity, terrible depressions, starvation wages, poverty, wars.
For economic planning and the rational administration of industry a new “management” has long been needed. The only ones truly capable of organizing and operating industry for full and efficient production and for the needs of the people are the organized workers themselves.
Standing in the way of the needs of the masses, blocking the read to plenty, are the plutocratic parasites who hypocritically prate, as does General Motors, about “more and better things for the people,” but who actually provide less and less for the working people and more and more for the idle rich.
To screen their predatory and criminal operations, the capitalists have Invariably invoked the “sanctity of business secrets.” But this is a sham intended only to deceive the people and ward off exposure of the capitalists’ real secrets – the monstrous degree of their exploitation of labor and their criminal acts.
Between the big monopolies themselves there are no “business secrets.” They cooperate closely, not only on a national but an international scale, to exploit the toiling masses.
Thus, America’s leading corporations were caught red-handed in secret cartel agreements with the Nazi and Japanese corporations whereby all these Big Business conspirators freely exchanged the most vital patents and industrial processes essential to war. These deals were concealed not only from the people but from the American capitalist government itself.
GM Workers’ Battle Cry
These are facts which the Trotskyists have long since exposed. That is why the Socialist Workers Party in 1938 advanced for the first time in this country the slogan of “Open the Books of the Corporations!” For the past seven years, the Trotskyists have been advocating the need for this step.
Today the GM workers have taken up this slogan and made it the battle cry of the most progressive sections of the labor movement. Tomorrow. American labor is going to go even further.
To Wall Street’s and GM’s question, “a ‘look at the books’ or ‘a finger in the pie’?”, American labor is going to answer:
“We are not only going to inspect your books. We are going to eliminate your despotic and ruinous rule over our economic life. We want nothing less than the whole pie our sweat and toil produces.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>America’s Permanent Depression</h1>
<h3>(July/August 1930)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_31" target="new">Vol. II No. 31</a>, 30 July 1938, p. 4, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_32" target="new">Vol. II No. 32</a>, 6 August 1938, p. 4, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_33" target="new">Vol. II No. 33</a>, 13 August 1938, p. 4, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_34" target="new">Vol. II No. 34</a>, 20 August 1938, p. 2 & <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1938/index.htm#sa02_35" target="new">Vol. II No. 35</a>, 27 August 1938, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<h4><a href="depression1.htm">Experts Baffled for Explanation<br>
But New Millions Face Unemployment</a><br>
<br>
<a href="../08/depression2.htm">New Deal Takes Care of Bankers First;<br>
Juggles Relief as Riot Insurance</a><br>
<br>
<a href="../08/depression3.htm">Roosevelt Smiles on the Unemployed<br>
When Elections Roll Around I</a><br>
<br>
<a href="../08/depression4.htm">Roosevelt Smiles on the Unemployed<br>
When Elections Roll Around II</a><br>
<br>
<a href="../08/depression5.htm">Only Destruction of Capitalism<br>
Can Rid Society of Mass Unemployment</a></h4>
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Art Preis
America’s Permanent Depression
(July/August 1930)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. II No. 31, 30 July 1938, p. 4, Vol. II No. 32, 6 August 1938, p. 4, Vol. II No. 33, 13 August 1938, p. 4, Vol. II No. 34, 20 August 1938, p. 2 & Vol. II No. 35, 27 August 1938, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Experts Baffled for Explanation
But New Millions Face Unemployment
New Deal Takes Care of Bankers First;
Juggles Relief as Riot Insurance
Roosevelt Smiles on the Unemployed
When Elections Roll Around I
Roosevelt Smiles on the Unemployed
When Elections Roll Around II
Only Destruction of Capitalism
Can Rid Society of Mass Unemployment
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Wallace – A Defender of Capitalism<br>
and Supporter of Imperialist War</h1>
<h3>(18 October 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_42" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 42</a>, 18 October 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Sudden conversions invite suspicion. Henry Wallace’s case is no exception. There is a remarkable coincidence between his decision to run for president and his interest in labor, the Negro people, civil rights, etc.</p>
<p>Wallace has already left many footprints in the political sands. We can trace his imprints back through 14 years as Cabinet member, Vice President and loyal servant of the Democratic Administration. That record of 14 years speaks more loudly than the promises of 14 months.</p>
<p>The <em>Fact Book</em> published by Wallace’s campaign committee says that in office “he invariably used this power and influence to advance labor’s cause.” The record proves otherwise.</p>
<p>Through all the great labor battles of the Thirties, Wallace was as silent as the Sphinx, if he ever defended labor, it was the most silent defense ever known. You won’t find a hint of it in airy public document or the public press.</p>
<p>You will find that in 1935 Secretary of Agriculture Wallace tried to sneak out the back door of his office to avoid talking with H.L. Mitchell, president of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who led a delegation to protest Wallace’s policy of subsidizing Southern landowners to limit cotton production and thus providing them with a pretext for evicting hundreds of thousands of share-croppers and tenant farmers. You will also find that Wallace suppressed the report of his own investigators, who upheld the position of the STFU, on the grounds that the report was “too hot to handle.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Bad Record</h4>
<p class="fst">During the war, while he was Vice President, Wallace never said a word against the wage-freeze, the pro-employer War Labor Board, the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Law. When the Smith-Connally predecessor of the Taft-Hartley Act was pending, a committee of union leaders called on Wallace as President of the Senate to use his influence to block this strikebreaking law. The <strong>Unifed Mine Workers Journal</strong> of August 15 recalls:</p>
<p><em>“The report on the Wallace visit was to the effect that Wallace didn’t seem to know what the bill provided or what the committee was talking about, and the committee in turn could not understand what Wallace thought or said.”</em></p>
<p>Wallace now poses as a champion of Negro rights. We do not recall, however, that Wallace ever protested segregation in the armed forces during the war. And we do have the testimony of Walter White, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that the worst conditions of segregation and discrimination prevailed in the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce and that Wallace, when head of these departments, was deaf to all appeals to eliminate the anti-Negro practices in his departments. Wallace had full power to change conditions but refused to do so.</p>
<p><em>The mere recital of the record – which is evidence enough for the politically astute – will not suffice to convince many ardent Wallaceites. They will argue that Wallace was not in position, while in office, to do much on the issues about which he speaks so loudly today. Or they will grant that the record is extremely unfavorable, but that Wallace has “changed.”</em></p>
<p>But Wallace’s fundamental ideas remain the same as before. These have not changed. And from the seed of weeds, only weeds can grow.</p>
<p><em>Wallace’s basic social conception is his complete faith in capitalism. He promises to bring about reforms, to prevent imperialist war, to eliminate the dangers of both inflation and depression within the framework of the outmoded, anarchic capitalist system, It is this fact which belies all his promises and makes them mere demagogy.</em></p>
<p>When Wallace says he can prevent war under capitalism, he practices a base deception. American capitalism, with its vast and growing accumulations of idle capital, is forced inexorably to seek new fields for profitable investment, new markets, new sources of cheap labor. In its insatiable drive for profits, American capitalism must exterminate all that stands in its path, tolerate no rivals or competitors. War – costly and temporary expedient that it is – is the only prospect. Wall Street capitalism sees for its own survival.</p>
<p>Against this fundamental inner urge of the capitalist system, Wallace counterposes his childish notion that all that is needed to keep the peace is a sensible and cool-headed man-to-man conference between himself and Stalin.</p>
<p><em>The essence of his plan, for example, of restoring European economy is nothing but a crasser and cruder form of the Potsdam agreement – a cold-blooded division of the world between the great powers, with the peoples of the world as the pawns.</em></p>
<p><em>Wallace was for the Morgenthau plan, to gut and loot Germany, the heart of industrial Europe, and reduce it to an agricultural province. Last February, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Wallace proposed “the United Nations plan (to) place the Ruhr under international administration and control by the Big Four – the United States, Britain, Soviet Russia, France,” This program would condemn not only the people of Germany – but of all Europe – to starvation.</em></p>
<p><em>Against the assurances of the utopian Wallace that he can secure peace through mere “good will” and “negotiations,” we have the more realistic conclusions of a Winston Churchill who last week declared that war is “remorselessly approaching” and that even if “some formula will be found or some artificial compromise; effected which will be hailed as a solution and a deliverance ... the fundamental danger and antagonisms will still remain.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>To Support War</h4>
<p class="fst">Moreover, Wallace has already promised in advance, on April 25, that, “If the U.S. should go to war I, of course, would withdraw” from candidacy and opposition to the U.S. foreign policy. Regardless of its foreign policy, Wallace said, he would “certainly” support the U.S. war effort.</p>
<p><em>And in the same sense, this defender of capitalism would have to support the consequences of the war – military dictatorship, suppression of the rights of the workers, forced labor, conscription, terrible shortages and scarcity, incalculable death and destruction.</em></p>
<p>In spite of this, there are those who will say that by voting, for Wallace “right now” they will at least be casting a protest vote against war. This is a delusion. By voting for Wallace they will he helping to disorient the people as to the true, cause and cure of capitalist war.</p>
<p><em>The only genuine vote that will help to build an effective movement against the war is a vote for Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carl-sop,, of the Socialist Workers party – the party that by its actions as well as words has demonstrated that it is dedicated to the mobilization of the working masses for the elimination of capitalism, the breeder of wars.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Wallace – A Defender of Capitalism
and Supporter of Imperialist War
(18 October 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 42, 18 October 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Sudden conversions invite suspicion. Henry Wallace’s case is no exception. There is a remarkable coincidence between his decision to run for president and his interest in labor, the Negro people, civil rights, etc.
Wallace has already left many footprints in the political sands. We can trace his imprints back through 14 years as Cabinet member, Vice President and loyal servant of the Democratic Administration. That record of 14 years speaks more loudly than the promises of 14 months.
The Fact Book published by Wallace’s campaign committee says that in office “he invariably used this power and influence to advance labor’s cause.” The record proves otherwise.
Through all the great labor battles of the Thirties, Wallace was as silent as the Sphinx, if he ever defended labor, it was the most silent defense ever known. You won’t find a hint of it in airy public document or the public press.
You will find that in 1935 Secretary of Agriculture Wallace tried to sneak out the back door of his office to avoid talking with H.L. Mitchell, president of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, who led a delegation to protest Wallace’s policy of subsidizing Southern landowners to limit cotton production and thus providing them with a pretext for evicting hundreds of thousands of share-croppers and tenant farmers. You will also find that Wallace suppressed the report of his own investigators, who upheld the position of the STFU, on the grounds that the report was “too hot to handle.”
Bad Record
During the war, while he was Vice President, Wallace never said a word against the wage-freeze, the pro-employer War Labor Board, the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Law. When the Smith-Connally predecessor of the Taft-Hartley Act was pending, a committee of union leaders called on Wallace as President of the Senate to use his influence to block this strikebreaking law. The Unifed Mine Workers Journal of August 15 recalls:
“The report on the Wallace visit was to the effect that Wallace didn’t seem to know what the bill provided or what the committee was talking about, and the committee in turn could not understand what Wallace thought or said.”
Wallace now poses as a champion of Negro rights. We do not recall, however, that Wallace ever protested segregation in the armed forces during the war. And we do have the testimony of Walter White, Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, that the worst conditions of segregation and discrimination prevailed in the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Commerce and that Wallace, when head of these departments, was deaf to all appeals to eliminate the anti-Negro practices in his departments. Wallace had full power to change conditions but refused to do so.
The mere recital of the record – which is evidence enough for the politically astute – will not suffice to convince many ardent Wallaceites. They will argue that Wallace was not in position, while in office, to do much on the issues about which he speaks so loudly today. Or they will grant that the record is extremely unfavorable, but that Wallace has “changed.”
But Wallace’s fundamental ideas remain the same as before. These have not changed. And from the seed of weeds, only weeds can grow.
Wallace’s basic social conception is his complete faith in capitalism. He promises to bring about reforms, to prevent imperialist war, to eliminate the dangers of both inflation and depression within the framework of the outmoded, anarchic capitalist system, It is this fact which belies all his promises and makes them mere demagogy.
When Wallace says he can prevent war under capitalism, he practices a base deception. American capitalism, with its vast and growing accumulations of idle capital, is forced inexorably to seek new fields for profitable investment, new markets, new sources of cheap labor. In its insatiable drive for profits, American capitalism must exterminate all that stands in its path, tolerate no rivals or competitors. War – costly and temporary expedient that it is – is the only prospect. Wall Street capitalism sees for its own survival.
Against this fundamental inner urge of the capitalist system, Wallace counterposes his childish notion that all that is needed to keep the peace is a sensible and cool-headed man-to-man conference between himself and Stalin.
The essence of his plan, for example, of restoring European economy is nothing but a crasser and cruder form of the Potsdam agreement – a cold-blooded division of the world between the great powers, with the peoples of the world as the pawns.
Wallace was for the Morgenthau plan, to gut and loot Germany, the heart of industrial Europe, and reduce it to an agricultural province. Last February, before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Wallace proposed “the United Nations plan (to) place the Ruhr under international administration and control by the Big Four – the United States, Britain, Soviet Russia, France,” This program would condemn not only the people of Germany – but of all Europe – to starvation.
Against the assurances of the utopian Wallace that he can secure peace through mere “good will” and “negotiations,” we have the more realistic conclusions of a Winston Churchill who last week declared that war is “remorselessly approaching” and that even if “some formula will be found or some artificial compromise; effected which will be hailed as a solution and a deliverance ... the fundamental danger and antagonisms will still remain.”
To Support War
Moreover, Wallace has already promised in advance, on April 25, that, “If the U.S. should go to war I, of course, would withdraw” from candidacy and opposition to the U.S. foreign policy. Regardless of its foreign policy, Wallace said, he would “certainly” support the U.S. war effort.
And in the same sense, this defender of capitalism would have to support the consequences of the war – military dictatorship, suppression of the rights of the workers, forced labor, conscription, terrible shortages and scarcity, incalculable death and destruction.
In spite of this, there are those who will say that by voting, for Wallace “right now” they will at least be casting a protest vote against war. This is a delusion. By voting for Wallace they will he helping to disorient the people as to the true, cause and cure of capitalist war.
The only genuine vote that will help to build an effective movement against the war is a vote for Farrell Dobbs and Grace Carl-sop,, of the Socialist Workers party – the party that by its actions as well as words has demonstrated that it is dedicated to the mobilization of the working masses for the elimination of capitalism, the breeder of wars.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1><i>Daily Worker</i> on Dobbs</h1>
<h3>(26 July 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_30" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 30</a>, 26 July 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<b>The following is the <i>Daily Worker</i> comment on Dobbs’ radio speech, appearing in its July 13th issue:</b><p></p><p class="quoteb"><b>Last week Farrell Dobbs was awarded 15 minutes of WCBS time to speak on <i>Why Labor Needs Its Own Party</i>. Dobbs is a Trotskyite and candidate for President on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.</b></p><p class="quote"><b>His speech was an object lesson on how to disorient people from the major issues. After an introduction in which he characterized the two major parties as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – leading an unsuspecting audience to await a positive program – Dobbs got to the meat of his talk. This was an all-out attack on Wallace and the Third Party, an attack which made his comments on the Democrats and Republicans fade into the background.</b></p><p class="quote"><b>The purpose of the attack on Wallace was clearly to split the coalition behind the New Party by characterizing Wallace as a “capitalist” and an “imperialist.” Then Dobbs made a direct bid to split away Negro support of the Third Party and direct it into the channels of phony “independent action.”</b></p><p class="quote"><b>His call to people to “take the road of independent political action to establish a workers and farmers government,” was primarily a call to split and sabotage the New Party and deprive the people of their only weapon against Wall Street imperialism.</b></p><table align="center" width="80%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3§>
<tr>
<td>
<p class=" fst"="">
</table>
<p class="fst">In the box above, we publish in full the <b>Daily Worker</b> attack on Farrell Dobbs’ radio speech, <i>Why Labor Needs Its Own Party</i>. The text of Dobbs’ speech appears in the next column. The <b>Daily Worker</b>’s bleats show Dobbs’ speech hit. the Stalinists where it hurts.</p>
<p>They don’t mind Wallace being attacked for what he isn’t – that is, a “red,” an “anti-imperialist,” etc. That’s the phony bill of goods the Stalinists have been trying to sell. But Dobbs exposes the real Wallace – the millionaire demagogue who is trying to build a third capitalist party to head off a genuine labor party. Dobbs exposes the fakery of Wallace’s “anti-war” program.</p>
<p>That’s what the <b>Daily Worker</b> calls “the meat” of Dobbs’ talk – and finds it tough chewing.</p>
<p>It’s especially tough because many sincere workers caught in the mesh of the Stalinist machine are beginning to raise questions about Wallace. Many of them who heard Dobbs’ talk undoubtedly think his characterization of Wallace as a capitalist and a defender of capitalism is 100% correct. Wallace himself has publicly boasted he is “the best defender of capitalism.” He has likewise publicly stated that once war comes, he will “naturally”’ support U.S. imperialism.</p>
<p>The present Stalinist leaders have been leaning heavily on radical phrases. They even manage now and then to pay their verbal respects to “socialism.” But many CP members and sympathizers are beginning to suspect that the “socialism” of the present Stalinist leaders goes no deeper than Browder’s, who was demonstratively expelled for his pro-capitalist “right deviations.”</p>
<p>They must surely ask what’s wrong, for instance, with Dobbs’ call to the people to “take the road of independent political action to establish a workers and farmers government?”</p>
<p>The Stalinist leaders are trying first of all to stifle internal complaints about the party’s opportunist course by the traditional methods of bureaucratic intimidation. That’s the real purpose of this hysterical – and self-exposing – outburst against Dobbs’ speech. It’s designed as a warning to anyone in the CP who criticizes the Wallace move that he will be tagged as a “Trotskyite” and kicked out of the Stalinist party.</p>
<p>There’s been a slew of such expulsions already.</p>
<p>It appears the “Trotskyite” virus is spreading. The July 11 <b>Sunday Worker</b> uses an entire page to exorcize this malady under the screaming headline: <i>Fight Against Trotskyite Wreckers in the Pacific Northwest District</i>.</p>
<p>It seems one such “wrecker,” who “agitated for so-called ‘freedom of criticism’ as a cover for disruption,” has already been expelled and this is a warning to others that the party is “capable of dealing” with all such elements. In fact, the article warns that the Stalinist leaders are well aware that:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Some of the more recent developments demonstrate beyond question that there exists at the present time an organized attempt to penetrate and destroy the Party, headed by a clique of Troskyites.”</p>
<p class="fst">Yelling “Trotskyite,” however, doesn’t seem to be as effective as it once was. Because the Stalinist bureaucracy, is forced to defend itself programatically against the internal criticism.</p>
<p>Thus, in answer to the criticism that the CP is adapting itself completely to the pro-capitalist program of Wallace, the July 16 <b>Daily Worker</b> carries a lengthy article by Simon Gerson which claims that “in building this great new coalition (Wallace party) we Communists will do our share. Our Socialist outlook and firm conviction that only a Socialist reorganization of society can bring permanent peace, security and prosperity are no barriers to cooperation with persons of non-Socialist convictions in creating this great new alignment.”</p>
<p>The key sentence then follows: “We of course will freely advance our own fraternal criticism of policies within the great coalition.”</p>
<p>The July 17 <b>N.Y. Times</b> quoted this sentence in a story headlined: <i>Communists Plan to Use Wallace – Gerson, State Leader, Sees Socialism as First Goal by Means of Third Party</i>.</p>
<p>On July 19, the <b>Daily Worker</b> charged that the <b>Times</b> had “distorted” Gerson’s statement. Gerson is once more quoted, this time saying the Wallace party “is not by its very nature” a socialist or communist party “and we are not seeding to make it one.”</p>
<p>One word from the <b>N.Y. Times</b> and the CP’s “socialism” flew out the window. The Stalinists are mobilizing for Wallace’s avowedly pro-capitalist program, and not the other way around. And that’s just what Dobbs said in his speech. No wonder the <b>Daily Worker</b> raves. Nobody likes to be stripped bare in public.</p>
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Art Preis
Daily Worker on Dobbs
(26 July 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 30, 26 July 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The following is the Daily Worker comment on Dobbs’ radio speech, appearing in its July 13th issue:Last week Farrell Dobbs was awarded 15 minutes of WCBS time to speak on Why Labor Needs Its Own Party. Dobbs is a Trotskyite and candidate for President on the Socialist Workers Party ticket.His speech was an object lesson on how to disorient people from the major issues. After an introduction in which he characterized the two major parties as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – leading an unsuspecting audience to await a positive program – Dobbs got to the meat of his talk. This was an all-out attack on Wallace and the Third Party, an attack which made his comments on the Democrats and Republicans fade into the background.The purpose of the attack on Wallace was clearly to split the coalition behind the New Party by characterizing Wallace as a “capitalist” and an “imperialist.” Then Dobbs made a direct bid to split away Negro support of the Third Party and direct it into the channels of phony “independent action.”His call to people to “take the road of independent political action to establish a workers and farmers government,” was primarily a call to split and sabotage the New Party and deprive the people of their only weapon against Wall Street imperialism.
In the box above, we publish in full the Daily Worker attack on Farrell Dobbs’ radio speech, Why Labor Needs Its Own Party. The text of Dobbs’ speech appears in the next column. The Daily Worker’s bleats show Dobbs’ speech hit. the Stalinists where it hurts.
They don’t mind Wallace being attacked for what he isn’t – that is, a “red,” an “anti-imperialist,” etc. That’s the phony bill of goods the Stalinists have been trying to sell. But Dobbs exposes the real Wallace – the millionaire demagogue who is trying to build a third capitalist party to head off a genuine labor party. Dobbs exposes the fakery of Wallace’s “anti-war” program.
That’s what the Daily Worker calls “the meat” of Dobbs’ talk – and finds it tough chewing.
It’s especially tough because many sincere workers caught in the mesh of the Stalinist machine are beginning to raise questions about Wallace. Many of them who heard Dobbs’ talk undoubtedly think his characterization of Wallace as a capitalist and a defender of capitalism is 100% correct. Wallace himself has publicly boasted he is “the best defender of capitalism.” He has likewise publicly stated that once war comes, he will “naturally”’ support U.S. imperialism.
The present Stalinist leaders have been leaning heavily on radical phrases. They even manage now and then to pay their verbal respects to “socialism.” But many CP members and sympathizers are beginning to suspect that the “socialism” of the present Stalinist leaders goes no deeper than Browder’s, who was demonstratively expelled for his pro-capitalist “right deviations.”
They must surely ask what’s wrong, for instance, with Dobbs’ call to the people to “take the road of independent political action to establish a workers and farmers government?”
The Stalinist leaders are trying first of all to stifle internal complaints about the party’s opportunist course by the traditional methods of bureaucratic intimidation. That’s the real purpose of this hysterical – and self-exposing – outburst against Dobbs’ speech. It’s designed as a warning to anyone in the CP who criticizes the Wallace move that he will be tagged as a “Trotskyite” and kicked out of the Stalinist party.
There’s been a slew of such expulsions already.
It appears the “Trotskyite” virus is spreading. The July 11 Sunday Worker uses an entire page to exorcize this malady under the screaming headline: Fight Against Trotskyite Wreckers in the Pacific Northwest District.
It seems one such “wrecker,” who “agitated for so-called ‘freedom of criticism’ as a cover for disruption,” has already been expelled and this is a warning to others that the party is “capable of dealing” with all such elements. In fact, the article warns that the Stalinist leaders are well aware that:
“Some of the more recent developments demonstrate beyond question that there exists at the present time an organized attempt to penetrate and destroy the Party, headed by a clique of Troskyites.”
Yelling “Trotskyite,” however, doesn’t seem to be as effective as it once was. Because the Stalinist bureaucracy, is forced to defend itself programatically against the internal criticism.
Thus, in answer to the criticism that the CP is adapting itself completely to the pro-capitalist program of Wallace, the July 16 Daily Worker carries a lengthy article by Simon Gerson which claims that “in building this great new coalition (Wallace party) we Communists will do our share. Our Socialist outlook and firm conviction that only a Socialist reorganization of society can bring permanent peace, security and prosperity are no barriers to cooperation with persons of non-Socialist convictions in creating this great new alignment.”
The key sentence then follows: “We of course will freely advance our own fraternal criticism of policies within the great coalition.”
The July 17 N.Y. Times quoted this sentence in a story headlined: Communists Plan to Use Wallace – Gerson, State Leader, Sees Socialism as First Goal by Means of Third Party.
On July 19, the Daily Worker charged that the Times had “distorted” Gerson’s statement. Gerson is once more quoted, this time saying the Wallace party “is not by its very nature” a socialist or communist party “and we are not seeding to make it one.”
One word from the N.Y. Times and the CP’s “socialism” flew out the window. The Stalinists are mobilizing for Wallace’s avowedly pro-capitalist program, and not the other way around. And that’s just what Dobbs said in his speech. No wonder the Daily Worker raves. Nobody likes to be stripped bare in public.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Can Wall Street Afford Peace?</h1>
<h3>(Fall 1962)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>International Socialist Review</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/isr/index.htm#isr62fal" target="new">Vol.23 No.4</a>, Fall 1962, pp.99-104.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">ON THE eve of the 17-nation disarmament conference convened last March 14 in Geneva, a large-scale propaganda campaign was launched to allay widespread fears in the capitalist world that any significant cut in military spending will lead to a severe economic crisis, particularly in the United States. Moscow, as well as Washington, joined in this historically unique campaign.</p>
<p>In this age of potential nuclear annihilation, it might seem that the exclusive concern would be whether the United States, as well as all other atomic powers, can afford not to disarm. But just before the Geneva conference opened, agencies of both the United States government and the United Nations released official reports and studies devoted to serious and extensive analyses of whether capitalist United States can afford – economically speaking – to disarm. Never before has disarmament been discussed as a possibly grave threat to US economic stability in such an open and official manner.</p>
<p>“The new attempt that will be made in Geneva next week to negotiate a world-wide treaty for general and complete disarmament has again raised the question of whether the United States could afford to disarm,” began Max Frankel in his special Washington dispatch to the March 5 <strong>New York Times</strong>. His lengthy article immediately makes clear that he’s not discussing some military hazard which the US cannot “afford” to risk. He explains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Since World War II, when huge military expenditures became an important element of the country’s economy, the thought of eliminating these expenditures from the federal budget has raised fears of a major depression. The quick downward response of the stock market to ‘peace scares’ has been symbolic of a widespread suspicion that even if the country wished to disarm and felt safe enough to do so it could not agree to disarm without risking financial chaos.”</p>
<p class="fst">Frankel’s article is a report and analysis of a study made by a panel of American economists for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency set up last year by President John F. Kennedy. The panel is headed by Emil Benoit, associate professor of international business in the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. He is also Director of the Program of Research on Economic Adjustments to Disarmament, financed by private foundations. Prof. Benoit’s own formulations on the subject may be read in the chapter he contributed to <strong>The Liberal Papers</strong>, a symposium edited by James Roosevelt and published in April 1962 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.</p>
<p>On March 11, less than a week after Frankel’s report on the Benoit panel study and three days before the Geneva parley opened, the United Nations made public its report by ten economics experts on “the national economic and social consequences of disarmament in countries with different economic systems and at different stages of economic development.” The ten experts, who had been chosen by the late UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, came from countries as politically and economically divergent as the United States, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Sudan and Venezuela, all with capitalist economies, and the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, all non-capitalist countries with nationalized economies.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">WE MUST carefully note at the outset that the United Nations and the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency studies both concede, either directly or by implication, that rapid and total disarmament by the Soviet Union can be achieved without any economic crisis or serious dislocation of economic activity. Moreover, these reports, as well as commentaries on them in the US press, agree that disarmament would be immediately advantageous to the Soviet Union and the other non-capitalist countries.</p>
<p>The summary of the UN study published in the March 12 <strong>New York Times</strong>, disposes of the major economic problem posed by disarmament in the Soviet Union and other countries with nationalized, planned economies, in one paragraph:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In the centrally planned economies, where productive capacity is usually fully utilized, it would be necessary to convert plants producing military equipment to production of durable consumer goods and of such investment goods as can be produced in them with only minor retooling. This can be done rapidly.”</p>
<p class="fst">Almost four columns of condensed type are used in the <strong>Times</strong> summary of the UN report to explain how it might be possible for the highly industrialized capitalist countries, particularly the United States and Great Britain, to avert economic decline and mass unemployment despite disarmament.</p>
<p>Both the US and the UN studies emphasize disarmament as a serious economic problem only for the private-profit economies. We will examine more fully what the official reports have to say on this aspect of the problem further on in this article. First, let us see what they say about the economic consequences of disarmament for the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>In the very last paragraph of his analysis of the Benoit panel report, Max Frankel summarizes all it has to say on the effect of disarmament on the Soviet Union:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Should disarmament come, the experts point out, the fate of the non-Communist world would depend more than ever upon the peaceful economic competition between East and West and the two worlds’ capacities for aiding underdeveloped continents. If the United States were unprepared, they say, it could lose that long-range contest the day it achieves the long-elusive goal of freedom from war.”<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE experts – this special panel of American economists headed by Columbia University’s Professor Benoit – have trepidations about the “long-range” economic prospects of the United States compared to those of the Soviet Union once “freedom from war” is achieved.</p>
<p>On the basis of this same study, Frankel asserts that “the Russians ... derive from their Marxist schooling a deeply held conviction that disarmament would quickly give them the lead in any peaceful economic race with the West.”</p>
<p>But just two paragraphs before, Frankel admits that it’s not the Russians at all who voice doubts about the economic viability of American capitalism in a disarmed world. The <strong>Times</strong> correspondent writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“However, although the Russians, for their own political reasons, now agree that the capitalist system could withstand the shock of disarming, a great many persons both here and abroad have their doubts.”</p>
<p class="fst">The subversive talk about the economic hazards of peace for US capitalism is not being spread by the Russians after all, but by anonymous “great many persons both here and abroad.” The great many persons “here,” at least, are identified in part by Frankel when he notes the “quick downward response of the stock market to ‘peace scares’ ...”</p>
<p>Another <strong>New York Times</strong> analyst, C.L. Sulzberger, reporting from Geneva in the March 17 issue, also repeats ritualistically the formula: “Moscow is convinced the United States cannot afford to disarm because this would wreck our capitalist economy.” But then he goes on immediately to cite a more compelling reason why the Russians are most anxious for disarmament:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Washington suspects Russia is almost forced to end the present arms race because it needs to tap the reservoir of military manpower to aid its faltering agriculture.”</p>
<p class="fst">Sulzberger elaborates this point and also indicates an economic motivation for the capitalist leaders to drag their feet on the disarmament issue. He writes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“No doubt disarmament on any major scale would convenience the Soviet economy. It would provide more men to expand food production, Russia’s Achilles heel. It would afford new capital for investment in consumer goods and political exports to under-developed countries.</p>
<p class="quote">“Conversely, massive disarmament might for a time worry the US economy at an awkward moment. We are in the throes of adjusting ourselves to competition with the dynamic European Common Market and we have not yet solved the gold leakage. During the last dozen years our bullion holdings dropped by $7.5 billion.”</p>
<p class="fst">To Sulzberger’s inventory of international economic tribulations comprising an “awkward moment” for US disarmament, he would have been able to add two months later the worst stock market crash since 1929 plus signs of an approaching recession marked by industrial overcapacity, persistent mass unemployment and slackening capital investment.</p>
<p>But, Sulzberger nevertheless assures us, “Our immense armaments effort could be shifted with surprising ease and ultimate convenience to new, non-military endeavors ...”</p>
<p>Since “disarmament on any major scale would convenience the Soviet economy” and also provide “ultimate convenience to new, non-military endeavors” in this country, what prevents our achieving that “diversion to peaceful purposes of the resources now in military use” which, the UN study says, “could be accomplished to the benefit of all countries and lead to the improvement of world economic and social conditions”?<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">NONE of these studies, reports and commentaries offers a rational explanation of why the Soviet Union would want to obstruct disarmament. Indeed, they all concede or at least imply that the Soviet Union and its leaders yearn for disarmament and visualize enormous economic benefits from it.</p>
<p>Benoit, furthermore, on page 236 of <strong>The Liberal Papers</strong>, ascribes to “Marxian fantasies” the belief that a capitalist economy requires military expenditures to “keep going.” Sulzberger, as cited above, claims that “Moscow is convinced the United States cannot afford to disarm because this would wreck our capitalist economy.” Isn’t this all the more reason why the Soviet Union would earnestly and urgently desire immediate, full and unconditional disarmament?</p>
<p>But the alleged belief of the Soviet leaders that disarmament would wreck the capitalist economy is not really involved. US capitalism could quickly disprove such a belief by a disarmament agreement and a shift “with surprising ease” to “new, non-military endeavors,” if Sulzberger is correct.</p>
<p>There is some evidence, however, that US strategists are weighing the competitive advantage, in the economic sense, enjoyed by the United States over the Soviet Union in a continuation and intensification of the arms race. This line of thought is reflected in <em>Military Defense: Free World Strategy in the 60s</em>, by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe and Dr. William Kintner, political science professors at the University of Pennsylvania, director and deputy director respectively of the Foreign Policy Research Institute with close ties in the Pentagon. Their joint article, published in the January-March 1962 issue of <strong>General Electric Forum</strong>, says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Contrary to general belief, the [arms] race need not work against world stability and peace. It could serve as the most effective means to bring the Communist rulers to reasonable terms. <em>For the Free World can better</em> afford <em>such a competition than the Communist bloc</em>.” (Original emphasis)<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THIS, of course, is only the opposite side of the coin tossed by Sulzberger when he states that Washington “suspects” the Soviet leaders want to end the arms race because it “would convenience the Soviet economy” by providing “more men to expand food production” and “new capital” for investment to produce more consumer goods and for exports to the poorer lands.</p>
<p>The Strausz-Hupe-Kintner thesis, however, does not answer the question whether capitalist United States can substantially reduce its military establishment and expenditures without grave consequences for the economy. It simply argues that forcing the Soviet Union into an arms race would put an intolerable economic squeeze on the USSR’s non-capitalist, planned economy. This argument does carry the implication that armaments spending is economically more supportable and more advantageous for the private profit economy than for the nationalized economy.</p>
<p>In its own way, therefore, this line affirms what is stated or implied in both the UN and the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency studies: There is every economic and material reason for the <em>Soviet Union</em> to desire and seek speedy and total disarmament.</p>
<p>The whole issue of disarmament narrows down to the economic consequences of disarmament – of a non-militaristic program – for the United States. In other words, can Wall Street, the symbol of US finance monopoly capitalism, afford peace?</p>
<p>It must be clearly understood that no real Marxist (Stalinists or Khrushchevites are excluded from this category) has ever contended that a capitalist economy can be kept going only by armaments spending. That is a crude and vulgar distortion of Marxism by the Benoits and Sulzbergers. The basic Marxist analysis of modern capitalism and war was made in the spring of 1916 in a pamphlet, <strong>Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism</strong>. It was written by Lenin who less than two years later, with his co-worker Leon Trotsky, was to lead the first successful socialist revolution.</p>
<p>Lenin pointed out, with supporting statistical data, that World War I was being fought between competing gangs of monopoly capitalists for the redivision of the world, all of whose important areas had been gobbled up by 1914 and turned into colonies or “spheres of influence” by the largest and the richest capitalist powers. He called this the “imperialist” stage of capitalism, which he defined as follows:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”</p>
<p class="fst">Lenin pointed out that great financial oligarchies, able to dispose of immense concentrations of finance capital, were fighting for international control of markets, sources of raw materials and, above all, spheres for the profitable investment of rapidly accumulating capital lying idle at home.</p>
<p>Lenin subsequently described the whole epoch of the ascendancy of finance capital as the period of imperialist wars, colonial uprisings and proletarian revolutions. This historical record since 1914 gives overwhelming verification to this succinct formulation of the explosive character of the most advanced stage of capitalism. Within the brief historic span of less than half a century, living mankind has experienced two world wars among the dominant capitalist powers, including the United States; a series of successful colonial uprisings in Asia, Africa and Latin America which have wrested huge chunks of the globe from the direct rule of the capitalist imperialist powers or their indirect rule through economic domination; and several proletarian revolutions which have destroyed the capitalist state structures in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, East Germany, Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and now, for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, in Cuba.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THESE shattering events have had their roots in the observable and measurable laws of development of world capitalism. These laws have manifested themselves in intolerable economic contradictions. The foremost of these has been the tendency of the productive forces to outstrip the available markets, resulting in what has been called “overproduction” or the production of unmarketable surpluses of commodities and the accumulation of capital at a faster rate than can be profitably invested.</p>
<p>Capitalism has no peaceful, non-violent, socially beneficial way of resolving this basic contradiction because it has an automatic, built-in limitation: it may not overstep the profit interests of the dominant finance capitalists. Therefore, capitalism must seek to resolve the contradiction of the “overproduction” of commodities and capital by periodic destruction or liquidation of the “surpluses.” The stronger capitalists seek to achieve a new level of economic stability – that is, an increase in the rate of profits – by wiping out the weaker competing capitalists and obtaining a monopoly of both the productive forces and the markets. This is attempted in both depressions and wars.</p>
<p>The world-wide capitalist depression of the Thirties, however, proved incapable of solution through purely economic measures and maneuvers, even with the massive intervention of the capitalist state. The elimination of “surplus” capital and commodities by liquidation through bankruptcies and failures, plus the direct use of government power to create scarcity through physical curtailment of production, such as the slaughter of live stock and the plowing under of a fixed percentage of crops, momentarily caused a revival of the capitalist economy in the middle Thirties. But by the end of the decade a new decline had set in.</p>
<p>The attempt in the United States, for instance, to restore the economy primarily through internal measures proved unsuccessful. By 1938, in fact, unemployment had again passed the 10 million mark and industrial production had fallen in one year by 25 per cent. More and more, <em>all</em> the major capitalist powers turned toward external measures, seeking economic rehabilitation at the expense of international competitors and rivals.</p>
<p>The world war that ensued solved nothing. Momentarily, the United States emerged from the war economically dominant and able to dictate terms to its imperialist rivals. At the same time it had to rehabilitate them and together with its former enemies it sought to prepare for a military accounting with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the war had shaken loose revolutionary forces all over the world – India, China, Korea, Indo-China, Indonesia, North Africa, East Europe, Cuba. The whole colonial and semi-colonial world, comprising four-fifths of the world’s population and two-thirds of its land mass, was smashing the imperialist yoke. A large sector broke away from the capitalist economy toward nationalized economy; another sector – and a growing one – has sought to limit its economic and political dependency on the capitalist powers.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">IT IS within this larger world historic framework that the question of the economic role of armaments in the United States must be viewed. The armaments program was not designed as an internal economic measure to bolster the economy. It was and is intended ultimately to resolve the intolerable contradictions of monopoly capitalism through the obliteration of the non-capitalist third of the earth and through the subjection of the rest of the world to the profit interests of US finance capital.</p>
<p>We can arrive at a correct answer to the question posed at the start – “Can American capitalism afford to disarm?” – only within this larger and more decisive context. We must understand that the military program, initiated and intended for conquest, is the consequence of impelling forces in the very structure of capitalism.</p>
<p>Let us now turn to our delayed examination of what the UN and US economics experts have to say about the effect of disarmament on the United States economy.</p>
<p>To begin with, neither group is talking about rapid and total disarmament. At best, they are discussing the economic consequences of a gradual slackening of the arms race. The UN study is much more vague on this – as well as several other points – than the study made for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The UN report, without setting any specific time limit or degree of disarmament, simply notes that “hypothetical studies,” based on the “assumption” that military expenditures will be replaced “wholly” by increased government expenditures for non-military purposes, “suggest” that “some 6 or 7 per cent (including the armed forces) of the total labor force in the United States ... would have to find civilian instead of military employment or change their employment from one industry to another.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“These shifts would be small if spread out over a number of years ... The higher the rate of the growth of the economy, the easier the adaptation.”</p>
<p class="fst">This estimate leaves out two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>the number of unemployed in this country in June was already 4,463,000, or 5.5 per cent of the civilian labor force, so that the total of those for whom jobs would have to be supplied would be more than ten million in the event of “rapid disarmament”;</li>
<li>the rate of growth of the economy would have to be faster than at any time since World War II, even to keep the number of unemployed from rising above the 10 million level, according to estimates of almost all US economists.</li>
</ol>
<p class="fst">But we will leave these matters aside – for the moment. What is meant by the UN report’s phrase, “a number of years” for the shift to disarmament? The Benoit panel report tells us more explicity. As described by Max Frankel in his <strong>New York Times</strong> analysis, one of the major points of the Benoit report is:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Assuming that disarmament will be accomplished in stages over ten to twelve years, and that it will be accompanied by greater outlays for international inspection and police forces, as well as civilian space and nuclear energy programs, it is unlikely to result in immediate depression of the United States economy.”</p>
<p class="fst">We will ignore the qualifying “immediate” before the word “depression” – for the time being. Certainly, no “immediate” is placed before the word “disarmament.” It is to take “ten to twelve years.” But wait, the panel is not speaking of ten to twelve years from <em>now</em>. Further on, Frankel explains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“For the convenience of planning, therefore, it is assumed that disarmament is not likely to begin before 1965 and that at best it would take effect in four periods of three years, and be completed about 1977.”</p>
<p class="fst">In short, disarmament is envisaged “at best” within 15 years. But pause some more.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">THE Benoit report doesn’t really base itself on “total” disarmament. As a matter of fact, it expects armaments spending to rise to $60 billion in 1965 with “more than 7,000,000 persons employed in civilian or Government defense work.” Then it will start to taper off. One thing the study is sure of: arms spending is going to grow bigger before it grows smaller.</p>
<p>When it starts to grow smaller, just how much smaller will it grow? Well, by 1969 it will be down to a mere $43 billion a year – about what it was just before Kennedy took office, or the highest in US peacetime history up to 1961. By 1972, ten years from now, the reduction would be to $31 billion annually. By 1977, “defense spending by the Government is expected to drop from about $60,000,000,000 to $28,000,000,000.” In other words, war spending will continue to be at a pace more than double the average annual military spending from 1946 through 1950, which in turn was thirteen times greater than in pre-war 1939. From now, until 1977, 15 years hence, the US will have “disarmed” to a total of about $600 billion of <em>additional</em> military spending.</p>
<p>Since we have had two major – that is, <em>world</em> – wars within the past half century, it is natural to seek in historical experience some guide to the problem of disarmament as faced by the great capitalist powers, particularly the United States where the military expenditures comprise about 45 per cent of the world’s total arms spending and four times that of the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Curiously, neither the UN nor the US Arms Control Agency study investigates the economic experience following World War I. In the United States, at least, the decade following World War I was known as the “Golden Twenties.” The index of industrial production (1957=100) rose from 26 in 1920 to 38 in 1929, a 46 per cent growth. It is true that an economic decline in 1921 reduced the industrial production index to 20, down 23 per cent from the year before. But by 1923, the index stood at 30, rising almost steadily with no serious reversal until 1930. This was accomplished with an almost continuous decline in both federal spending and federal debt. Total federal spending dropped more than half between 1920 and 1925, from $6.4 billion annually to $3.06 billion, while military spending fell from $4.6 billion to $600 million. The federal debt fell from a 1919 post-war high of $25.5 billion to $16.9 billion in 1929. In short, in that period the US economy was able to advance despite a sharp <em>decline</em> in federal spending and with a drastic slash in military expenditures.</p>
<p>But both the UN and US agency reports quite correctly see no precedent in the post-World War I experience and do not bother to mention it. For by 1929, even the United States, banker to the world, could not maintain a stable and advancing economy strictly through “free enterprise.” As a matter of fact, even massive federal spending and ten straight years of federal budget deficits could not restore the US economy to the 1929 level. The job was done by war spending, piling up the federal debt from $45.9 billion in 1939 to $269.9 billion in 1946.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">WHAT happened at the end of World War II is examined by both reports to see if it contains some guide for disarmament today. Here we find a wide difference of opinion.</p>
<p>The UN report emphasizes:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The post-war conversion was a much larger one and involved a more rapid transfer of resources than total disarmament would require today. Nevertheless, huge armies were quickly demobilized without a significant rise in unemployment in most countries.”</p>
<p class="fst">Only as a quite casual afterthought, does the UN study add:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“During the post-war conversion, however, the major concern of economic policy was to restrain, rather than maintain, over-all demand.”</p>
<p class="fst">The Benoit panel report, as described by Max Frankel, dismisses as totally inapplicable to the present situation the post-World War II experience.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Demobilizations after World War II and the Korean War are not comparable, the experts maintain, because consumer saving and demand has not been pent up, as it was then. The employment problem now, they note, is much more serious than it was after Korea with both the labor force and the productivity of each worker growing rapidly in the Nineteen Sixties.”</p>
<p class="fst">One simple fact, which neither report mentions, underscores the difference between disarming today and after World War II. During World War II it was necessary to drastically limit and curtail civilian production to provide enough labor, plants and resources for war production. Today, with military spending within a billion dollars of the Korean War peak in 1953, we are having the beginnings of an economic crisis of <em>overproduction</em> in <em>civilian</em> commodities and uninvested <em>private capital</em>.</p>
<p>What is the weight of militarism in the US economy today? An extensive review of “the pattern of defense spending” in the Sunday Business Section of the April 29 <strong>New York Times</strong>, begins:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There’s no business like big business and the biggest of all is defense business ... the biggest single economic activity, not only in the United States but in the world.”</p>
<p class="fst">In the United States, according to Frankel’s review of the Benoit panel study, the military business involves</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... nearly one in ten of every dollar produced in goods and services ... nearly one in ten of all workers ... 86 per cent of all federal government purchases of goods and services ... 95 per cent of all jobs in the aircraft and missile industries, 60 per cent of jobs in ship and boat-loading industries and 40 per cent of the jobs in radio and communications equipment manufacturing.”</p>
<p class="fst">Now keep in mind that the “defense business” has not replaced normal civilian production but has been incorporated into the regular economic machinery as the “biggest of all” the big businesses. How can this be eliminated, or even reduced about 50 per cent, as the Benoit study really envisages “disarmament,” without a serious economic convulsion?</p>
<p>It can be done, say the various official reports from the UN and US agencies, with a couple of mammoth-sized “ifs.” If “total effective demand can be maintained” (UN study). If “military expenditures were fully replaced by public and private non-military spending ...” (UN study). If the government “could strike the proper balance between immediate tax reductions to spur civilian demands, and increased Government spending on longer-range needs ... school construction, teacher training, roads, urban renewal, area redevelopment, public health and social services.” (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency study).</p>
<p>Unfortunately, Frankel observes in his summary of the Benoit panel report,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... the experts also note that under present laws, without vigorous Government action of the kind the country has never before been required to take, a drop of $5,000,000,000 in defense spending could cause a serious slowdown.”</p>
<p class="fst">But that wouldn’t be the half of it, Frankel indicated back last March 5, if another development took place:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Pessimism and a break in the stock market, the experts say, might make matters very bad.”</p>
<p class="fst">Matters have become “very bad,” because the worst break in the stock market since 1929 occurred in May and June, little more than two months after Frankel’s report.</p>
<p>The Benoit panel concluded, “education, welfare and public works projects are the most attractive aspects of disarmament.” But, these same experts concede, “it remains a problem how these can be achieved in a way that will maintain and spur economic growth in the absence of defense spending.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Students of the economics of disarmament have begun to explore these areas,” we are informed. “But they are not certain that a tradition-oriented Congress would accept such Government activity in time.”</p>
<p class="fst">A Congress which would vote down a Medicare bill to provide a little medical assistance to aged sick through funds levied by a payroll tax is certainly going to need a lot of persuading to vote for thirty or forty billions of federal spending for socially beneficial purposes to replace the decline in arms spending some fifteen years from now.<br>
</p>
<p class="fst">IT IS in the light of such political considerations, if nothing else, that we must evaluate the Kremlin’s line on disarmament as expressed by Professor Oskar Lange once Poland’s representative in the UN Security Council, in the April 16 issue of a leading Moscow newspaper, <strong>Izvestia</strong>. Lange wrote that in many capitalist countries “there are fears that disarmament would provoke mass unemployment and economic crisis” and that “reactionary imperialist circles as well as the monopolies that have profited from military contracts make use of these fears in their struggle against disarmament.” But, Lange assures the ruling US Monopoly capitalists,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“... this does not mean that it would be impossible to bring about disarmament in the capitalist countries without economic shocks. Such shocks could be avoided by application of certain measures of economic policy directed toward the replacement of military contracts by orders connected with peaceful aims ...”</p>
<p class="fst">Let us assume that the reactionary US Congress, the political agency of the monopolists who benefit from military contracts, agrees to disarmament and a titanic increase in social and welfare spending. Let us assume that the private real estate interests are unable to block new low-rent housing, that the giant industrial corporations permit the government to invade the fields of industrial production, that the Church hierarchs and the Southern segregationists cease to obstruct federal spending for public education. Let us assume all this and a great deal more and we still have not answered the question about armaments and the economy. Can Wall Street afford to disarm? But this is not really the decisive question. In fact, it’s the wrong question.</p>
<p>The question that must be answered is this: if more than a trillion dollars of military spending since 1946, if the accumulation of a $300 billion federal debt now maturing at a dizzying rate of nearly $100 billion a year, if the withholding of millions of youth from the labor force by their sequestration in the armed forces – if all these have failed to stabilize the US capitalist economy, how will the same amount or less of federal spending for peaceful purposes in place of militarism fundamentally solve the basic contradictions of capitalism? If the monstrous armaments spending won’t do the trick, how will welfare spending?</p>
<p>This contradiction can be resolved in just one way, as Socialist Workers Party Chairman James P. Cannon once put it, by “one small, but good, social revolution” to replace capitalist anarchy with socialist planning.</p>
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Art Preis
Can Wall Street Afford Peace?
(Fall 1962)
From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.4, Fall 1962, pp.99-104.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
ON THE eve of the 17-nation disarmament conference convened last March 14 in Geneva, a large-scale propaganda campaign was launched to allay widespread fears in the capitalist world that any significant cut in military spending will lead to a severe economic crisis, particularly in the United States. Moscow, as well as Washington, joined in this historically unique campaign.
In this age of potential nuclear annihilation, it might seem that the exclusive concern would be whether the United States, as well as all other atomic powers, can afford not to disarm. But just before the Geneva conference opened, agencies of both the United States government and the United Nations released official reports and studies devoted to serious and extensive analyses of whether capitalist United States can afford – economically speaking – to disarm. Never before has disarmament been discussed as a possibly grave threat to US economic stability in such an open and official manner.
“The new attempt that will be made in Geneva next week to negotiate a world-wide treaty for general and complete disarmament has again raised the question of whether the United States could afford to disarm,” began Max Frankel in his special Washington dispatch to the March 5 New York Times. His lengthy article immediately makes clear that he’s not discussing some military hazard which the US cannot “afford” to risk. He explains:
“Since World War II, when huge military expenditures became an important element of the country’s economy, the thought of eliminating these expenditures from the federal budget has raised fears of a major depression. The quick downward response of the stock market to ‘peace scares’ has been symbolic of a widespread suspicion that even if the country wished to disarm and felt safe enough to do so it could not agree to disarm without risking financial chaos.”
Frankel’s article is a report and analysis of a study made by a panel of American economists for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency set up last year by President John F. Kennedy. The panel is headed by Emil Benoit, associate professor of international business in the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University. He is also Director of the Program of Research on Economic Adjustments to Disarmament, financed by private foundations. Prof. Benoit’s own formulations on the subject may be read in the chapter he contributed to The Liberal Papers, a symposium edited by James Roosevelt and published in April 1962 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.
On March 11, less than a week after Frankel’s report on the Benoit panel study and three days before the Geneva parley opened, the United Nations made public its report by ten economics experts on “the national economic and social consequences of disarmament in countries with different economic systems and at different stages of economic development.” The ten experts, who had been chosen by the late UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, came from countries as politically and economically divergent as the United States, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Sudan and Venezuela, all with capitalist economies, and the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia, all non-capitalist countries with nationalized economies.
WE MUST carefully note at the outset that the United Nations and the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency studies both concede, either directly or by implication, that rapid and total disarmament by the Soviet Union can be achieved without any economic crisis or serious dislocation of economic activity. Moreover, these reports, as well as commentaries on them in the US press, agree that disarmament would be immediately advantageous to the Soviet Union and the other non-capitalist countries.
The summary of the UN study published in the March 12 New York Times, disposes of the major economic problem posed by disarmament in the Soviet Union and other countries with nationalized, planned economies, in one paragraph:
“In the centrally planned economies, where productive capacity is usually fully utilized, it would be necessary to convert plants producing military equipment to production of durable consumer goods and of such investment goods as can be produced in them with only minor retooling. This can be done rapidly.”
Almost four columns of condensed type are used in the Times summary of the UN report to explain how it might be possible for the highly industrialized capitalist countries, particularly the United States and Great Britain, to avert economic decline and mass unemployment despite disarmament.
Both the US and the UN studies emphasize disarmament as a serious economic problem only for the private-profit economies. We will examine more fully what the official reports have to say on this aspect of the problem further on in this article. First, let us see what they say about the economic consequences of disarmament for the Soviet Union.
In the very last paragraph of his analysis of the Benoit panel report, Max Frankel summarizes all it has to say on the effect of disarmament on the Soviet Union:
“Should disarmament come, the experts point out, the fate of the non-Communist world would depend more than ever upon the peaceful economic competition between East and West and the two worlds’ capacities for aiding underdeveloped continents. If the United States were unprepared, they say, it could lose that long-range contest the day it achieves the long-elusive goal of freedom from war.”
THE experts – this special panel of American economists headed by Columbia University’s Professor Benoit – have trepidations about the “long-range” economic prospects of the United States compared to those of the Soviet Union once “freedom from war” is achieved.
On the basis of this same study, Frankel asserts that “the Russians ... derive from their Marxist schooling a deeply held conviction that disarmament would quickly give them the lead in any peaceful economic race with the West.”
But just two paragraphs before, Frankel admits that it’s not the Russians at all who voice doubts about the economic viability of American capitalism in a disarmed world. The Times correspondent writes:
“However, although the Russians, for their own political reasons, now agree that the capitalist system could withstand the shock of disarming, a great many persons both here and abroad have their doubts.”
The subversive talk about the economic hazards of peace for US capitalism is not being spread by the Russians after all, but by anonymous “great many persons both here and abroad.” The great many persons “here,” at least, are identified in part by Frankel when he notes the “quick downward response of the stock market to ‘peace scares’ ...”
Another New York Times analyst, C.L. Sulzberger, reporting from Geneva in the March 17 issue, also repeats ritualistically the formula: “Moscow is convinced the United States cannot afford to disarm because this would wreck our capitalist economy.” But then he goes on immediately to cite a more compelling reason why the Russians are most anxious for disarmament:
“Washington suspects Russia is almost forced to end the present arms race because it needs to tap the reservoir of military manpower to aid its faltering agriculture.”
Sulzberger elaborates this point and also indicates an economic motivation for the capitalist leaders to drag their feet on the disarmament issue. He writes:
“No doubt disarmament on any major scale would convenience the Soviet economy. It would provide more men to expand food production, Russia’s Achilles heel. It would afford new capital for investment in consumer goods and political exports to under-developed countries.
“Conversely, massive disarmament might for a time worry the US economy at an awkward moment. We are in the throes of adjusting ourselves to competition with the dynamic European Common Market and we have not yet solved the gold leakage. During the last dozen years our bullion holdings dropped by $7.5 billion.”
To Sulzberger’s inventory of international economic tribulations comprising an “awkward moment” for US disarmament, he would have been able to add two months later the worst stock market crash since 1929 plus signs of an approaching recession marked by industrial overcapacity, persistent mass unemployment and slackening capital investment.
But, Sulzberger nevertheless assures us, “Our immense armaments effort could be shifted with surprising ease and ultimate convenience to new, non-military endeavors ...”
Since “disarmament on any major scale would convenience the Soviet economy” and also provide “ultimate convenience to new, non-military endeavors” in this country, what prevents our achieving that “diversion to peaceful purposes of the resources now in military use” which, the UN study says, “could be accomplished to the benefit of all countries and lead to the improvement of world economic and social conditions”?
NONE of these studies, reports and commentaries offers a rational explanation of why the Soviet Union would want to obstruct disarmament. Indeed, they all concede or at least imply that the Soviet Union and its leaders yearn for disarmament and visualize enormous economic benefits from it.
Benoit, furthermore, on page 236 of The Liberal Papers, ascribes to “Marxian fantasies” the belief that a capitalist economy requires military expenditures to “keep going.” Sulzberger, as cited above, claims that “Moscow is convinced the United States cannot afford to disarm because this would wreck our capitalist economy.” Isn’t this all the more reason why the Soviet Union would earnestly and urgently desire immediate, full and unconditional disarmament?
But the alleged belief of the Soviet leaders that disarmament would wreck the capitalist economy is not really involved. US capitalism could quickly disprove such a belief by a disarmament agreement and a shift “with surprising ease” to “new, non-military endeavors,” if Sulzberger is correct.
There is some evidence, however, that US strategists are weighing the competitive advantage, in the economic sense, enjoyed by the United States over the Soviet Union in a continuation and intensification of the arms race. This line of thought is reflected in Military Defense: Free World Strategy in the 60s, by Dr. Robert Strausz-Hupe and Dr. William Kintner, political science professors at the University of Pennsylvania, director and deputy director respectively of the Foreign Policy Research Institute with close ties in the Pentagon. Their joint article, published in the January-March 1962 issue of General Electric Forum, says:
“Contrary to general belief, the [arms] race need not work against world stability and peace. It could serve as the most effective means to bring the Communist rulers to reasonable terms. For the Free World can better afford such a competition than the Communist bloc.” (Original emphasis)
THIS, of course, is only the opposite side of the coin tossed by Sulzberger when he states that Washington “suspects” the Soviet leaders want to end the arms race because it “would convenience the Soviet economy” by providing “more men to expand food production” and “new capital” for investment to produce more consumer goods and for exports to the poorer lands.
The Strausz-Hupe-Kintner thesis, however, does not answer the question whether capitalist United States can substantially reduce its military establishment and expenditures without grave consequences for the economy. It simply argues that forcing the Soviet Union into an arms race would put an intolerable economic squeeze on the USSR’s non-capitalist, planned economy. This argument does carry the implication that armaments spending is economically more supportable and more advantageous for the private profit economy than for the nationalized economy.
In its own way, therefore, this line affirms what is stated or implied in both the UN and the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency studies: There is every economic and material reason for the Soviet Union to desire and seek speedy and total disarmament.
The whole issue of disarmament narrows down to the economic consequences of disarmament – of a non-militaristic program – for the United States. In other words, can Wall Street, the symbol of US finance monopoly capitalism, afford peace?
It must be clearly understood that no real Marxist (Stalinists or Khrushchevites are excluded from this category) has ever contended that a capitalist economy can be kept going only by armaments spending. That is a crude and vulgar distortion of Marxism by the Benoits and Sulzbergers. The basic Marxist analysis of modern capitalism and war was made in the spring of 1916 in a pamphlet, Imperialism – The Highest Stage of Capitalism. It was written by Lenin who less than two years later, with his co-worker Leon Trotsky, was to lead the first successful socialist revolution.
Lenin pointed out, with supporting statistical data, that World War I was being fought between competing gangs of monopoly capitalists for the redivision of the world, all of whose important areas had been gobbled up by 1914 and turned into colonies or “spheres of influence” by the largest and the richest capitalist powers. He called this the “imperialist” stage of capitalism, which he defined as follows:
“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”
Lenin pointed out that great financial oligarchies, able to dispose of immense concentrations of finance capital, were fighting for international control of markets, sources of raw materials and, above all, spheres for the profitable investment of rapidly accumulating capital lying idle at home.
Lenin subsequently described the whole epoch of the ascendancy of finance capital as the period of imperialist wars, colonial uprisings and proletarian revolutions. This historical record since 1914 gives overwhelming verification to this succinct formulation of the explosive character of the most advanced stage of capitalism. Within the brief historic span of less than half a century, living mankind has experienced two world wars among the dominant capitalist powers, including the United States; a series of successful colonial uprisings in Asia, Africa and Latin America which have wrested huge chunks of the globe from the direct rule of the capitalist imperialist powers or their indirect rule through economic domination; and several proletarian revolutions which have destroyed the capitalist state structures in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, East Germany, Yugoslavia, China, North Korea, North Vietnam and now, for the first time in the Western Hemisphere, in Cuba.
THESE shattering events have had their roots in the observable and measurable laws of development of world capitalism. These laws have manifested themselves in intolerable economic contradictions. The foremost of these has been the tendency of the productive forces to outstrip the available markets, resulting in what has been called “overproduction” or the production of unmarketable surpluses of commodities and the accumulation of capital at a faster rate than can be profitably invested.
Capitalism has no peaceful, non-violent, socially beneficial way of resolving this basic contradiction because it has an automatic, built-in limitation: it may not overstep the profit interests of the dominant finance capitalists. Therefore, capitalism must seek to resolve the contradiction of the “overproduction” of commodities and capital by periodic destruction or liquidation of the “surpluses.” The stronger capitalists seek to achieve a new level of economic stability – that is, an increase in the rate of profits – by wiping out the weaker competing capitalists and obtaining a monopoly of both the productive forces and the markets. This is attempted in both depressions and wars.
The world-wide capitalist depression of the Thirties, however, proved incapable of solution through purely economic measures and maneuvers, even with the massive intervention of the capitalist state. The elimination of “surplus” capital and commodities by liquidation through bankruptcies and failures, plus the direct use of government power to create scarcity through physical curtailment of production, such as the slaughter of live stock and the plowing under of a fixed percentage of crops, momentarily caused a revival of the capitalist economy in the middle Thirties. But by the end of the decade a new decline had set in.
The attempt in the United States, for instance, to restore the economy primarily through internal measures proved unsuccessful. By 1938, in fact, unemployment had again passed the 10 million mark and industrial production had fallen in one year by 25 per cent. More and more, all the major capitalist powers turned toward external measures, seeking economic rehabilitation at the expense of international competitors and rivals.
The world war that ensued solved nothing. Momentarily, the United States emerged from the war economically dominant and able to dictate terms to its imperialist rivals. At the same time it had to rehabilitate them and together with its former enemies it sought to prepare for a military accounting with its wartime ally, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the war had shaken loose revolutionary forces all over the world – India, China, Korea, Indo-China, Indonesia, North Africa, East Europe, Cuba. The whole colonial and semi-colonial world, comprising four-fifths of the world’s population and two-thirds of its land mass, was smashing the imperialist yoke. A large sector broke away from the capitalist economy toward nationalized economy; another sector – and a growing one – has sought to limit its economic and political dependency on the capitalist powers.
IT IS within this larger world historic framework that the question of the economic role of armaments in the United States must be viewed. The armaments program was not designed as an internal economic measure to bolster the economy. It was and is intended ultimately to resolve the intolerable contradictions of monopoly capitalism through the obliteration of the non-capitalist third of the earth and through the subjection of the rest of the world to the profit interests of US finance capital.
We can arrive at a correct answer to the question posed at the start – “Can American capitalism afford to disarm?” – only within this larger and more decisive context. We must understand that the military program, initiated and intended for conquest, is the consequence of impelling forces in the very structure of capitalism.
Let us now turn to our delayed examination of what the UN and US economics experts have to say about the effect of disarmament on the United States economy.
To begin with, neither group is talking about rapid and total disarmament. At best, they are discussing the economic consequences of a gradual slackening of the arms race. The UN study is much more vague on this – as well as several other points – than the study made for the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. The UN report, without setting any specific time limit or degree of disarmament, simply notes that “hypothetical studies,” based on the “assumption” that military expenditures will be replaced “wholly” by increased government expenditures for non-military purposes, “suggest” that “some 6 or 7 per cent (including the armed forces) of the total labor force in the United States ... would have to find civilian instead of military employment or change their employment from one industry to another.
“These shifts would be small if spread out over a number of years ... The higher the rate of the growth of the economy, the easier the adaptation.”
This estimate leaves out two things:
the number of unemployed in this country in June was already 4,463,000, or 5.5 per cent of the civilian labor force, so that the total of those for whom jobs would have to be supplied would be more than ten million in the event of “rapid disarmament”;
the rate of growth of the economy would have to be faster than at any time since World War II, even to keep the number of unemployed from rising above the 10 million level, according to estimates of almost all US economists.
But we will leave these matters aside – for the moment. What is meant by the UN report’s phrase, “a number of years” for the shift to disarmament? The Benoit panel report tells us more explicity. As described by Max Frankel in his New York Times analysis, one of the major points of the Benoit report is:
“Assuming that disarmament will be accomplished in stages over ten to twelve years, and that it will be accompanied by greater outlays for international inspection and police forces, as well as civilian space and nuclear energy programs, it is unlikely to result in immediate depression of the United States economy.”
We will ignore the qualifying “immediate” before the word “depression” – for the time being. Certainly, no “immediate” is placed before the word “disarmament.” It is to take “ten to twelve years.” But wait, the panel is not speaking of ten to twelve years from now. Further on, Frankel explains:
“For the convenience of planning, therefore, it is assumed that disarmament is not likely to begin before 1965 and that at best it would take effect in four periods of three years, and be completed about 1977.”
In short, disarmament is envisaged “at best” within 15 years. But pause some more.
THE Benoit report doesn’t really base itself on “total” disarmament. As a matter of fact, it expects armaments spending to rise to $60 billion in 1965 with “more than 7,000,000 persons employed in civilian or Government defense work.” Then it will start to taper off. One thing the study is sure of: arms spending is going to grow bigger before it grows smaller.
When it starts to grow smaller, just how much smaller will it grow? Well, by 1969 it will be down to a mere $43 billion a year – about what it was just before Kennedy took office, or the highest in US peacetime history up to 1961. By 1972, ten years from now, the reduction would be to $31 billion annually. By 1977, “defense spending by the Government is expected to drop from about $60,000,000,000 to $28,000,000,000.” In other words, war spending will continue to be at a pace more than double the average annual military spending from 1946 through 1950, which in turn was thirteen times greater than in pre-war 1939. From now, until 1977, 15 years hence, the US will have “disarmed” to a total of about $600 billion of additional military spending.
Since we have had two major – that is, world – wars within the past half century, it is natural to seek in historical experience some guide to the problem of disarmament as faced by the great capitalist powers, particularly the United States where the military expenditures comprise about 45 per cent of the world’s total arms spending and four times that of the Soviet Union.
Curiously, neither the UN nor the US Arms Control Agency study investigates the economic experience following World War I. In the United States, at least, the decade following World War I was known as the “Golden Twenties.” The index of industrial production (1957=100) rose from 26 in 1920 to 38 in 1929, a 46 per cent growth. It is true that an economic decline in 1921 reduced the industrial production index to 20, down 23 per cent from the year before. But by 1923, the index stood at 30, rising almost steadily with no serious reversal until 1930. This was accomplished with an almost continuous decline in both federal spending and federal debt. Total federal spending dropped more than half between 1920 and 1925, from $6.4 billion annually to $3.06 billion, while military spending fell from $4.6 billion to $600 million. The federal debt fell from a 1919 post-war high of $25.5 billion to $16.9 billion in 1929. In short, in that period the US economy was able to advance despite a sharp decline in federal spending and with a drastic slash in military expenditures.
But both the UN and US agency reports quite correctly see no precedent in the post-World War I experience and do not bother to mention it. For by 1929, even the United States, banker to the world, could not maintain a stable and advancing economy strictly through “free enterprise.” As a matter of fact, even massive federal spending and ten straight years of federal budget deficits could not restore the US economy to the 1929 level. The job was done by war spending, piling up the federal debt from $45.9 billion in 1939 to $269.9 billion in 1946.
WHAT happened at the end of World War II is examined by both reports to see if it contains some guide for disarmament today. Here we find a wide difference of opinion.
The UN report emphasizes:
“The post-war conversion was a much larger one and involved a more rapid transfer of resources than total disarmament would require today. Nevertheless, huge armies were quickly demobilized without a significant rise in unemployment in most countries.”
Only as a quite casual afterthought, does the UN study add:
“During the post-war conversion, however, the major concern of economic policy was to restrain, rather than maintain, over-all demand.”
The Benoit panel report, as described by Max Frankel, dismisses as totally inapplicable to the present situation the post-World War II experience.
“Demobilizations after World War II and the Korean War are not comparable, the experts maintain, because consumer saving and demand has not been pent up, as it was then. The employment problem now, they note, is much more serious than it was after Korea with both the labor force and the productivity of each worker growing rapidly in the Nineteen Sixties.”
One simple fact, which neither report mentions, underscores the difference between disarming today and after World War II. During World War II it was necessary to drastically limit and curtail civilian production to provide enough labor, plants and resources for war production. Today, with military spending within a billion dollars of the Korean War peak in 1953, we are having the beginnings of an economic crisis of overproduction in civilian commodities and uninvested private capital.
What is the weight of militarism in the US economy today? An extensive review of “the pattern of defense spending” in the Sunday Business Section of the April 29 New York Times, begins:
“There’s no business like big business and the biggest of all is defense business ... the biggest single economic activity, not only in the United States but in the world.”
In the United States, according to Frankel’s review of the Benoit panel study, the military business involves
“... nearly one in ten of every dollar produced in goods and services ... nearly one in ten of all workers ... 86 per cent of all federal government purchases of goods and services ... 95 per cent of all jobs in the aircraft and missile industries, 60 per cent of jobs in ship and boat-loading industries and 40 per cent of the jobs in radio and communications equipment manufacturing.”
Now keep in mind that the “defense business” has not replaced normal civilian production but has been incorporated into the regular economic machinery as the “biggest of all” the big businesses. How can this be eliminated, or even reduced about 50 per cent, as the Benoit study really envisages “disarmament,” without a serious economic convulsion?
It can be done, say the various official reports from the UN and US agencies, with a couple of mammoth-sized “ifs.” If “total effective demand can be maintained” (UN study). If “military expenditures were fully replaced by public and private non-military spending ...” (UN study). If the government “could strike the proper balance between immediate tax reductions to spur civilian demands, and increased Government spending on longer-range needs ... school construction, teacher training, roads, urban renewal, area redevelopment, public health and social services.” (US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency study).
Unfortunately, Frankel observes in his summary of the Benoit panel report,
“... the experts also note that under present laws, without vigorous Government action of the kind the country has never before been required to take, a drop of $5,000,000,000 in defense spending could cause a serious slowdown.”
But that wouldn’t be the half of it, Frankel indicated back last March 5, if another development took place:
“Pessimism and a break in the stock market, the experts say, might make matters very bad.”
Matters have become “very bad,” because the worst break in the stock market since 1929 occurred in May and June, little more than two months after Frankel’s report.
The Benoit panel concluded, “education, welfare and public works projects are the most attractive aspects of disarmament.” But, these same experts concede, “it remains a problem how these can be achieved in a way that will maintain and spur economic growth in the absence of defense spending.
“Students of the economics of disarmament have begun to explore these areas,” we are informed. “But they are not certain that a tradition-oriented Congress would accept such Government activity in time.”
A Congress which would vote down a Medicare bill to provide a little medical assistance to aged sick through funds levied by a payroll tax is certainly going to need a lot of persuading to vote for thirty or forty billions of federal spending for socially beneficial purposes to replace the decline in arms spending some fifteen years from now.
IT IS in the light of such political considerations, if nothing else, that we must evaluate the Kremlin’s line on disarmament as expressed by Professor Oskar Lange once Poland’s representative in the UN Security Council, in the April 16 issue of a leading Moscow newspaper, Izvestia. Lange wrote that in many capitalist countries “there are fears that disarmament would provoke mass unemployment and economic crisis” and that “reactionary imperialist circles as well as the monopolies that have profited from military contracts make use of these fears in their struggle against disarmament.” But, Lange assures the ruling US Monopoly capitalists,
“... this does not mean that it would be impossible to bring about disarmament in the capitalist countries without economic shocks. Such shocks could be avoided by application of certain measures of economic policy directed toward the replacement of military contracts by orders connected with peaceful aims ...”
Let us assume that the reactionary US Congress, the political agency of the monopolists who benefit from military contracts, agrees to disarmament and a titanic increase in social and welfare spending. Let us assume that the private real estate interests are unable to block new low-rent housing, that the giant industrial corporations permit the government to invade the fields of industrial production, that the Church hierarchs and the Southern segregationists cease to obstruct federal spending for public education. Let us assume all this and a great deal more and we still have not answered the question about armaments and the economy. Can Wall Street afford to disarm? But this is not really the decisive question. In fact, it’s the wrong question.
The question that must be answered is this: if more than a trillion dollars of military spending since 1946, if the accumulation of a $300 billion federal debt now maturing at a dizzying rate of nearly $100 billion a year, if the withholding of millions of youth from the labor force by their sequestration in the armed forces – if all these have failed to stabilize the US capitalist economy, how will the same amount or less of federal spending for peaceful purposes in place of militarism fundamentally solve the basic contradictions of capitalism? If the monstrous armaments spending won’t do the trick, how will welfare spending?
This contradiction can be resolved in just one way, as Socialist Workers Party Chairman James P. Cannon once put it, by “one small, but good, social revolution” to replace capitalist anarchy with socialist planning.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Union Leaders Fail to Fight<br>
for Effective Jobs Program</h1>
<h3>Thomas Pleads with Bosses<br>
While Unemployment Mounts</h3>
<h4>UAW-CIO Head Ignores Union’s Program<br>
for Government Operation of Big Industry</h4>
<h3>(16 June 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_24" target="new">Vol. IX No. 24</a>, 16 June 1945, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>Mass unemployment is no mere prediction. It is already a cruel reality. More than a million war workers are officially admitted to be seeking jobs. By the end of October, 4,800,000 war workers and returned veterans will be on the ‘no longer required’ list, according to WPB Chairman Krug. He hoped it would be only ‘temporary.’</strong></p>
<p><em>Typical headlines of the past week proclaim: “6 Million War Workers To Lose Jobs V-J Day;” “12,500 To Be Fired By July 31 At Lockheed Plant In Burbank;” “First Mass Layoffs Hit Indianapolis; GM Fires , 5,000;” “Cutbacks Hit Reading.” Multiply these headlines for every city and town in the land. An appalling picture emerges.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>A Grim Reality</h4>
<p class="fst">There is no denying the grim reality. Nor is there any denying of the fact that Big Business which dominates American economy and politics, its government and political agents, have no program to provide either adequate relief for the unemployed or jobs.</p>
<p>Even Truman in his message to Congress two weeks ago was compelled to admit that present unemployment insurance standards are “clearly inadequate to protect unemployed workers against ruthless cuts in living standards.” As for any plans to provide full employment for all, most, government officials will agree that these are merely in the “preparatory” stage or, more truthfully, don’t even exist.</p>
<p>Thus, the authoritative acting commissioner of labor statistics for the U.S. Department of Labor, Dr. A. Ford Hinrichs, declared before the Institute of Labor at Rutgers University on June 5, that current plans of American business men “don’t add up to full employment” (<strong>PM</strong>, June 5) and envisage not more than 50,000,000 of the 60,000,000 jobs promised. Full employment without a genuine government program – which does not now exist – would be only “accidental,” he added.</p>
<p>Labor knows what leaving the question of jobs to “accident” means. That was Hoover’s program of 1932, as it was also largely Roosevelt’s. It was Roosevelt who larded over the plight of 11,000,000 to 15,000,000 unemployed with: a couple of million WPA jobs at from $19 to $60 a month.</p>
<p><em>The question of jobs, of adequate compensation during unemployment, is posed squarely before the entire American labor movement. Nobody but the organized workers themselves are capable, ready and willing to fight for a bold and radical program of JOBS FOR ALL which will brush aside the profit and monopoly interests of a handful of ruling profiteers and compel the government to operate the plants at full capacity.</em></p>
<p>But it is precisely at this crucial juncture that the leadership of the American labor movement has shown itself least capable or willing to offer an adequate program and to mobilize the forces of labor for the type of all-out fight, on the economic and political field, which can achieve it.</p>
<p>The real and official program of the top leadership of the CIO and AFL is summed up in their capital-labor “peace charter” with the Chamber of Commerce. This provides nothing less than a written guarantee from Murray and Green that labor will strive for the maintenance of monopoly capitalist “free enterprise” and “freedom from government interference” – the classic formula of the capitalist freebooters who insist on their “right” to exploit labor without restriction.</p>
<p>An even more graphic commentary on the “program” and conduct of the union officialdom ill this crisis is afforded by the antics of R.J. Thomas, president of the CIO United Automobile Workers, the nation’s largest union. In the single state of Michigan over 200,000 auto and aircraft workers have been fired; 21,000 have been emptied out of the $100,000,000 government-owned Willow Run bomber plant, operated by Ford during the war for his own profit.</p>
<p>Yet all Thomas can think of in this situation is to run off hat in hand from Detroit to the west coast to a fat war profiteer like Henry Kaiser, who can’t even keep his shipyard workers in steady jobs. Thomas can only plead with a Kaiser won’t he please get the government to hand him some free plants like Willow Run and “give” the workers some jobs producing autos or whatnot. So we are treated to the spectacle of Thomas running from the “industrial genius” Ford to the “industrial genius” Kaiser – a “genius” at wangling juicy government war contracts. But that angle’s played out. If there were a nickel in it for Kaiser or Ford, they wouldn’t be waiting for Thomas’ pleas.</p>
<p>What’s Thomas grovelling before the profiteering industrialists for? He has an official program adopted two years ago by the UAW-CIO – a program for full employment and security that he and the other UAW officials proclaimed lustily – when it wasn’t a question of an immediate, showdown fight.</p>
<p>Consider that program, which occupied nearly two full pages of the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>, July 15, 1943. Consider some of its basic proposals and premises. “Our industries can no longer be operated to serve private interests where those interests conflict with the public need,” it boldly asserted. Point one on its program for full production and employment of “every able bodied person in America,” read:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Government or municipal ownership and operation of monopolistic industries and of industries strategically essential to the national safety” and;</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Government control and regulation of other industries to prevent the abuses of monopoly and to assure production in the public interest” and;</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Reduction of working week to thirty hours without reduction of pay, as a result of a full production program.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">There it is! That’s the program adopted two years ago by the UAW-CIO Executive Board! That’s the program that Thomas – and a lot of other leading union officials – said THEN they were going to fight for! That’s the minimum they said THEN was needed to provide postwar full employment and decent wages! Well, what’s wrong with it today?</p>
<p>Nothing – not a thing! What’s wrong is with the union leadership. Two years ago they were trying to clamp the no-strike, do- nothing policy on the workers who were beginning to resist the wage-freeze. Sit tight, take it, the union Officials like Thomas advised. Don’t worry, AFTER THE WAR we’re really going to town. No more knuckling under to the corporations. If they don’t provide jobs and the wages of decent living, we’re going to be the first, to say “the hell with ’em, take over the plants and the workers will run them better without a bunch, of profiteering parasites.”</p>
<p>That’s the kind of big talk, Thomas was spouting two years ago, before the issue really began to bang on his front door. Today he wants to forget all that – and hopes the auto and aircraft workers will, too.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Union Leaders Fail to Fight
for Effective Jobs Program
Thomas Pleads with Bosses
While Unemployment Mounts
UAW-CIO Head Ignores Union’s Program
for Government Operation of Big Industry
(16 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 24, 16 June 1945, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Mass unemployment is no mere prediction. It is already a cruel reality. More than a million war workers are officially admitted to be seeking jobs. By the end of October, 4,800,000 war workers and returned veterans will be on the ‘no longer required’ list, according to WPB Chairman Krug. He hoped it would be only ‘temporary.’
Typical headlines of the past week proclaim: “6 Million War Workers To Lose Jobs V-J Day;” “12,500 To Be Fired By July 31 At Lockheed Plant In Burbank;” “First Mass Layoffs Hit Indianapolis; GM Fires , 5,000;” “Cutbacks Hit Reading.” Multiply these headlines for every city and town in the land. An appalling picture emerges.
A Grim Reality
There is no denying the grim reality. Nor is there any denying of the fact that Big Business which dominates American economy and politics, its government and political agents, have no program to provide either adequate relief for the unemployed or jobs.
Even Truman in his message to Congress two weeks ago was compelled to admit that present unemployment insurance standards are “clearly inadequate to protect unemployed workers against ruthless cuts in living standards.” As for any plans to provide full employment for all, most, government officials will agree that these are merely in the “preparatory” stage or, more truthfully, don’t even exist.
Thus, the authoritative acting commissioner of labor statistics for the U.S. Department of Labor, Dr. A. Ford Hinrichs, declared before the Institute of Labor at Rutgers University on June 5, that current plans of American business men “don’t add up to full employment” (PM, June 5) and envisage not more than 50,000,000 of the 60,000,000 jobs promised. Full employment without a genuine government program – which does not now exist – would be only “accidental,” he added.
Labor knows what leaving the question of jobs to “accident” means. That was Hoover’s program of 1932, as it was also largely Roosevelt’s. It was Roosevelt who larded over the plight of 11,000,000 to 15,000,000 unemployed with: a couple of million WPA jobs at from $19 to $60 a month.
The question of jobs, of adequate compensation during unemployment, is posed squarely before the entire American labor movement. Nobody but the organized workers themselves are capable, ready and willing to fight for a bold and radical program of JOBS FOR ALL which will brush aside the profit and monopoly interests of a handful of ruling profiteers and compel the government to operate the plants at full capacity.
But it is precisely at this crucial juncture that the leadership of the American labor movement has shown itself least capable or willing to offer an adequate program and to mobilize the forces of labor for the type of all-out fight, on the economic and political field, which can achieve it.
The real and official program of the top leadership of the CIO and AFL is summed up in their capital-labor “peace charter” with the Chamber of Commerce. This provides nothing less than a written guarantee from Murray and Green that labor will strive for the maintenance of monopoly capitalist “free enterprise” and “freedom from government interference” – the classic formula of the capitalist freebooters who insist on their “right” to exploit labor without restriction.
An even more graphic commentary on the “program” and conduct of the union officialdom ill this crisis is afforded by the antics of R.J. Thomas, president of the CIO United Automobile Workers, the nation’s largest union. In the single state of Michigan over 200,000 auto and aircraft workers have been fired; 21,000 have been emptied out of the $100,000,000 government-owned Willow Run bomber plant, operated by Ford during the war for his own profit.
Yet all Thomas can think of in this situation is to run off hat in hand from Detroit to the west coast to a fat war profiteer like Henry Kaiser, who can’t even keep his shipyard workers in steady jobs. Thomas can only plead with a Kaiser won’t he please get the government to hand him some free plants like Willow Run and “give” the workers some jobs producing autos or whatnot. So we are treated to the spectacle of Thomas running from the “industrial genius” Ford to the “industrial genius” Kaiser – a “genius” at wangling juicy government war contracts. But that angle’s played out. If there were a nickel in it for Kaiser or Ford, they wouldn’t be waiting for Thomas’ pleas.
What’s Thomas grovelling before the profiteering industrialists for? He has an official program adopted two years ago by the UAW-CIO – a program for full employment and security that he and the other UAW officials proclaimed lustily – when it wasn’t a question of an immediate, showdown fight.
Consider that program, which occupied nearly two full pages of the United Automobile Worker, July 15, 1943. Consider some of its basic proposals and premises. “Our industries can no longer be operated to serve private interests where those interests conflict with the public need,” it boldly asserted. Point one on its program for full production and employment of “every able bodied person in America,” read:
“Government or municipal ownership and operation of monopolistic industries and of industries strategically essential to the national safety” and;
“Government control and regulation of other industries to prevent the abuses of monopoly and to assure production in the public interest” and;
“Reduction of working week to thirty hours without reduction of pay, as a result of a full production program.”
There it is! That’s the program adopted two years ago by the UAW-CIO Executive Board! That’s the program that Thomas – and a lot of other leading union officials – said THEN they were going to fight for! That’s the minimum they said THEN was needed to provide postwar full employment and decent wages! Well, what’s wrong with it today?
Nothing – not a thing! What’s wrong is with the union leadership. Two years ago they were trying to clamp the no-strike, do- nothing policy on the workers who were beginning to resist the wage-freeze. Sit tight, take it, the union Officials like Thomas advised. Don’t worry, AFTER THE WAR we’re really going to town. No more knuckling under to the corporations. If they don’t provide jobs and the wages of decent living, we’re going to be the first, to say “the hell with ’em, take over the plants and the workers will run them better without a bunch, of profiteering parasites.”
That’s the kind of big talk, Thomas was spouting two years ago, before the issue really began to bang on his front door. Today he wants to forget all that – and hopes the auto and aircraft workers will, too.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>His Master’s Voice</h1>
<h3>(18 October 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_42" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 42</a>, 18 October 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Right while Harry S. Truman was touring the country trying to convince voters how big and tough and independent-minded he is, the real powers-that-be slapped him down publicly and let the people know who really runs the government, including the President of the United States.</p>
<p>In the enthusiasm of his election campaign, Truman got the notion that he really has a lot to do with determining the conduct of foreign policy. So he cooked up the idea of sending one of his cronies, Supreme Court Chief Justice. Fred M. Vinson, as a personal emissary to Moscow to negotiate man-to-man with Stalin over the Berlin crisis.</p>
<p>But he didn’t hold on to that project very long. Secretary of State George Marshall – who is a non-elective appointee with no constitutional powers of any kind – came flying across the ocean from the UN conference to let the man who appointed him know he wasn’t standing for any mere President reversing decisions of the Wall Street bosses.</p>
<p>Truman dropped the Vinson idea like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. And Marshall took off to Paris again with a statement to the press that made his “Boss” out to be nothing but a political stumblebum.</p>
<p>If anybody thinks the President calls the tune on policy, this incident helps to correct that illusion. Truman may be the highest elected official in the land – but he doesn’t run the government. This government is run – its most fateful decisions are made – by a small handful of individuals operating behind the scenes for the real masters – the Wall Street money lords.</p>
<p>They don’t hesitate to crack down on anyone, including the President, who gets out of line.</p>
<p>The maneuvers in the UN, the war preparations, the very decisions on war and peace are determined by this tiny clique of Brass Hats and Wall Street representatives who run the State Department and dominate the White House. No less an authority than the well-known columnist Walter Lippman wrote in the Sept. 27 <strong>N.Y. Herald-Tribune</strong>:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is, one might say, a certain honesty in admitting that Mr. Marshall, Mr. Lovett and Mr. Bohlen, Mr. Forrestal, Mr. Draper, Mr. Royall, General Clay and Mr. Douglas have been handling the great conflict, which may mean peace or war, that they have not had guidance and leadership from the President, and that therefore his absence from Washington makes no difference.”</p>
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Joseph Keller
His Master’s Voice
(18 October 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 42, 18 October 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Right while Harry S. Truman was touring the country trying to convince voters how big and tough and independent-minded he is, the real powers-that-be slapped him down publicly and let the people know who really runs the government, including the President of the United States.
In the enthusiasm of his election campaign, Truman got the notion that he really has a lot to do with determining the conduct of foreign policy. So he cooked up the idea of sending one of his cronies, Supreme Court Chief Justice. Fred M. Vinson, as a personal emissary to Moscow to negotiate man-to-man with Stalin over the Berlin crisis.
But he didn’t hold on to that project very long. Secretary of State George Marshall – who is a non-elective appointee with no constitutional powers of any kind – came flying across the ocean from the UN conference to let the man who appointed him know he wasn’t standing for any mere President reversing decisions of the Wall Street bosses.
Truman dropped the Vinson idea like a boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar. And Marshall took off to Paris again with a statement to the press that made his “Boss” out to be nothing but a political stumblebum.
If anybody thinks the President calls the tune on policy, this incident helps to correct that illusion. Truman may be the highest elected official in the land – but he doesn’t run the government. This government is run – its most fateful decisions are made – by a small handful of individuals operating behind the scenes for the real masters – the Wall Street money lords.
They don’t hesitate to crack down on anyone, including the President, who gets out of line.
The maneuvers in the UN, the war preparations, the very decisions on war and peace are determined by this tiny clique of Brass Hats and Wall Street representatives who run the State Department and dominate the White House. No less an authority than the well-known columnist Walter Lippman wrote in the Sept. 27 N.Y. Herald-Tribune:
“There is, one might say, a certain honesty in admitting that Mr. Marshall, Mr. Lovett and Mr. Bohlen, Mr. Forrestal, Mr. Draper, Mr. Royall, General Clay and Mr. Douglas have been handling the great conflict, which may mean peace or war, that they have not had guidance and leadership from the President, and that therefore his absence from Washington makes no difference.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>AFL Chiefs Play into Hands<br>
of Labor’s Foes on Taft Act</h1>
<h4>Turn Convention into Orgy of Reaction, Warmongering</h4>
<h3>(29 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_48" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 48</a>, 29 November 1948, p. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>From the debate and decisions of the AFL convention in Cincinnati last week, you’d never know that American labor had just given a powerful demonstration of its strength and an overwhelming expression of its desire to combat reaction. The AFL leaders converted the convention into a rampage of reaction itself, cynically betraying the progressive aspirations voiced by the workers on Nov. 2.</strong></p>
<p>Even as they boasted of labor’s “victory,” these leaders showed utter cowardice about pushing labor’s demands, particularly on the key question of repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. Instead of pressing to the utmost for unconditional repeal of the Slave Labor Laws, they virtually invited Congress to pass a “substitute” law that would be a Taft-Hartley Act with its face lifted. “Restraint,” “moderation,” “caution” – this was the keynote of the AFL bureaucrats when it came to labor’s needs.</p>
<p>Now that they had helped restore an unregenerate Democratic Party to full power, the AFL high moguls tossed out of the window all their pre-election hints about forming a new party after the election. Although they voted to continue Labor’s League for Political Education as a permanent organization, they made it clear their aim is to use the LLPE merely to tie labor more firmly to the capitalist two-party system. They rejected a resolution for the building of an independent labor party.</p>
<p><em>All the problems of the workers – inflation, housing, health and education, civil rights – were shoved into a corner. Instead, the dominant theme of the convention was anti-communism, militarism and war preparations.</em></p>
<p>The well-heeled bureaucrats went far beyond anything even the capitalist bi-partisan coalition itself has dared attempt in unrestrained incitation of war hysteria. They adopted a resolution calling for a blockade of Russia and a full-scale military alliance of world capitalism, armed by the U.S., against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>If there is one thing all past experience teaches about capitalist politics, it is that politicians once in office quickly forget their promises or try to water them down. This fact dictates to the. union leaders the absolute duty to mobilize the workers to fight<sustrong>; </sustrong>for the fulfillment of Truman’s promises – particularly, unqualified, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Substitute” Law</h4>
<p class="fst">There have been more than enough signs that Truman is trying to weasel out of this promise by proposing a “substitute” law that would include many of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act. Vice President-elect Barkley told the AFL convention as much when he advised the delegates in a speech not to expect “miracles” on labor legislation. This should have been ample warning to the AFL leaders.</p>
<p>Instead they proposed to leave the door open for new curbs on labor, backed by their sanction and support. Their resolution calls for “substitute” legislation to ensure that “the public welfare is paramount ... the economic health, safety and welfare of the nation must not again be placed in jeopardy by the irresponsible action of anyone.” The speakers on this resolution made it clear they meant measures to outlaw industrywide or any other large strikes which the bosses complain are against “public welfare.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Doctrine of “Restraint”</h4>
<p class="fst">The doctrine of “restraint” was preached boldly by Joseph D. Keenan, director of the AFL’s Labor’s League for Political Education, who said that “we might as well admit that the Wagner Act went too far in our favor.”</p>
<p>George M. Harrison, head of the resolutions committee, and George Meany, AFL secretary-treasurer, said that Truman’s anti-labor proposals of January 1947 – including a ban on various forms of strikes and machinery to break strikes involving a “national emergency” – would be looked upon “favorably” by the AFL.</p>
<p>Boilermakers’ President Charles J. MacGowan, who was the chief speaker on the resolution, urged “restraint” in seeking repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act so that “the people” should not think that “labor now is in an arrogant and vindictive frame of mind.” He said that labor “should be alert to the excesses committed by certain segments of labor.” He wound up by asserting that “labor is not contemplating a wave of strikes which would paralyze any part of our economy” and that “instead of agitating for a general fourth round of wage increases,” everyone should urge a “price rollback.”</p>
<p>The fact is that labor’s living standards are already reduced by the tremendous inflation from which the monopolists have reaped record profits. “But the only recognition the AFL leaders gave this crucial problem was to raise the already rat salaries of William Green, their president, and George Meany. For the AFL membership, however, they counseled “restraint.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Selling Out</h4>
<p class="fst">It is clear these union leaders are preparing to give away everything the workers thought they had won when they voted for Truman in the mistaken belief that this would help restore the unions’ unrestricted right to fight for higher wages and better conditions.</p>
<p>The truth is that the AFL leaders are slavishly following the policies of the Truman administration. This is clear from the obvious way in which they are adapting themselves to Truman’s moves to hedge on his promise to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. It is even clearer jn their position on foreign policy – the real signpost pointing the reactionary direction of Truman’s regime.<br>
</p>
<h4>Beat War Drums</h4>
<p class="fst">All Truman’s promises of progressive reforms must go up in smoke because his drive toward militarism and war is consuming the substance of the people through the vast arms budget. Everything in the AFL convention was subordinated to a demonstration for Truman’s war program.</p>
<p>The delegates were whipped up by a string of government spokesmen, including Paul G. Hoffman and W. Averill Harriman, and. rabid professional Stalinophobes like the renegade ex-radical intellectual, Max Eastman. Then the AFL leaders – undoubtedly anticipating their mentors in the State Department – pushed through a resolution calling on the U.S. and the Marshall Plan countries to sever trade relations with Russia; unequivocally supporting the imperialist Marshall Plan; and demanding not only all-out military preparations by the U.S., but that America “should also provide arms and enter into a defensive military alliance” with all “friendly nations in Europe, Asia or elsewhere” against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p><em>Committed to a program which can only lead to militarism, dictatorship and war, the AFL leaders cannot at the same time fight on labor’s behalf against inflation, for a higher standard of living, for adequate housing, for more unemployment insurance and old-age benefits.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Reactionary Foreign Policy</h4>
<p class="fst">But even in their all-out backing of the bi-partisan war program, the AFL chiefs were forced to give an intimation of the real anti-labor and anti-democratic character of the foreign policies of U.S. imperialism. Their resolution sharply criticizes the “Taft-Hartleyism” of the American military governments in Germany and Japan. It complains about the refusal of U.S. authorities “to grant German labor the right to participate effectively in ERP machinery”; demands a halt to the policy of placing former Nazi industrialists and financial magnates in posts of authority; and demands a “redefinition” of U.S. official policy toward Japanese labor.<br>
</p>
<h4>To Continue LLPE</h4>
<p class="fst">In one respect, the AFL leaders made a radical departure from their horse-and-buggy traditions. They definitely abandoned their old policy of “no-politics.” They voted to continue Labor’s League for Political Education on a permanent basis, organized throughout every precinct of the country.</p>
<p><em>This formal step into politics through an independent organisation has been imposed on the AFL leaders by the pressure of the Workers, who refuse any longer to rally to the direct summons of the old capitalist parties. It likewise reflects the great fear and shock felt by the labor leaders when they realized their total political helplessness before the Taft-Hartley assault of Big Business.</em></p>
<p>But these union leaders once more revealed themselves as thoroughly capitalist-minded and Unalterably devoted to the capitalist system and its political, rule. Their aim is not to organize labor independently in the political field to fight for its own class aims through its own class party – not even eventually.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reject Labor Party</h4>
<p class="fst">They demonstratively voted down a resolution for the formation of a new political party and completely ignored the plea of A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to consider the question of building a labor party along the lines of the British Labor Party.</p>
<p>But the AFL leaders in no wise reflect the deep leftward moving currents in the American working class. Right now these bureaucrats are riding the crest of their “victory” smug in the enjoyment of their full treasuries, their big salaries and the constant flow of dues. This will not last for long.</p>
<p>They tried to hold back the progress of the workers in the mid-Thirties, but economic and social conditions raised a tide of labor revolt that swept right over the old-line leaders and brought with it the CIO and the era of industrial unionism.</p>
<p>Tomorrow, the inevitable crisis of American capitalism, the refusal of the capitalist government of Truman to yield anything but crumbs to the workers, will set the ranks of labor into irresistible motion. Labor – with or without its present leaders – will move forward to its next historic step, class political action through its own party.</p>
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Art Preis
AFL Chiefs Play into Hands
of Labor’s Foes on Taft Act
Turn Convention into Orgy of Reaction, Warmongering
(29 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 48, 29 November 1948, p. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
From the debate and decisions of the AFL convention in Cincinnati last week, you’d never know that American labor had just given a powerful demonstration of its strength and an overwhelming expression of its desire to combat reaction. The AFL leaders converted the convention into a rampage of reaction itself, cynically betraying the progressive aspirations voiced by the workers on Nov. 2.
Even as they boasted of labor’s “victory,” these leaders showed utter cowardice about pushing labor’s demands, particularly on the key question of repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. Instead of pressing to the utmost for unconditional repeal of the Slave Labor Laws, they virtually invited Congress to pass a “substitute” law that would be a Taft-Hartley Act with its face lifted. “Restraint,” “moderation,” “caution” – this was the keynote of the AFL bureaucrats when it came to labor’s needs.
Now that they had helped restore an unregenerate Democratic Party to full power, the AFL high moguls tossed out of the window all their pre-election hints about forming a new party after the election. Although they voted to continue Labor’s League for Political Education as a permanent organization, they made it clear their aim is to use the LLPE merely to tie labor more firmly to the capitalist two-party system. They rejected a resolution for the building of an independent labor party.
All the problems of the workers – inflation, housing, health and education, civil rights – were shoved into a corner. Instead, the dominant theme of the convention was anti-communism, militarism and war preparations.
The well-heeled bureaucrats went far beyond anything even the capitalist bi-partisan coalition itself has dared attempt in unrestrained incitation of war hysteria. They adopted a resolution calling for a blockade of Russia and a full-scale military alliance of world capitalism, armed by the U.S., against the Soviet Union.
If there is one thing all past experience teaches about capitalist politics, it is that politicians once in office quickly forget their promises or try to water them down. This fact dictates to the. union leaders the absolute duty to mobilize the workers to fight; for the fulfillment of Truman’s promises – particularly, unqualified, repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act.
“Substitute” Law
There have been more than enough signs that Truman is trying to weasel out of this promise by proposing a “substitute” law that would include many of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act. Vice President-elect Barkley told the AFL convention as much when he advised the delegates in a speech not to expect “miracles” on labor legislation. This should have been ample warning to the AFL leaders.
Instead they proposed to leave the door open for new curbs on labor, backed by their sanction and support. Their resolution calls for “substitute” legislation to ensure that “the public welfare is paramount ... the economic health, safety and welfare of the nation must not again be placed in jeopardy by the irresponsible action of anyone.” The speakers on this resolution made it clear they meant measures to outlaw industrywide or any other large strikes which the bosses complain are against “public welfare.”
Doctrine of “Restraint”
The doctrine of “restraint” was preached boldly by Joseph D. Keenan, director of the AFL’s Labor’s League for Political Education, who said that “we might as well admit that the Wagner Act went too far in our favor.”
George M. Harrison, head of the resolutions committee, and George Meany, AFL secretary-treasurer, said that Truman’s anti-labor proposals of January 1947 – including a ban on various forms of strikes and machinery to break strikes involving a “national emergency” – would be looked upon “favorably” by the AFL.
Boilermakers’ President Charles J. MacGowan, who was the chief speaker on the resolution, urged “restraint” in seeking repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act so that “the people” should not think that “labor now is in an arrogant and vindictive frame of mind.” He said that labor “should be alert to the excesses committed by certain segments of labor.” He wound up by asserting that “labor is not contemplating a wave of strikes which would paralyze any part of our economy” and that “instead of agitating for a general fourth round of wage increases,” everyone should urge a “price rollback.”
The fact is that labor’s living standards are already reduced by the tremendous inflation from which the monopolists have reaped record profits. “But the only recognition the AFL leaders gave this crucial problem was to raise the already rat salaries of William Green, their president, and George Meany. For the AFL membership, however, they counseled “restraint.”
Selling Out
It is clear these union leaders are preparing to give away everything the workers thought they had won when they voted for Truman in the mistaken belief that this would help restore the unions’ unrestricted right to fight for higher wages and better conditions.
The truth is that the AFL leaders are slavishly following the policies of the Truman administration. This is clear from the obvious way in which they are adapting themselves to Truman’s moves to hedge on his promise to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act. It is even clearer jn their position on foreign policy – the real signpost pointing the reactionary direction of Truman’s regime.
Beat War Drums
All Truman’s promises of progressive reforms must go up in smoke because his drive toward militarism and war is consuming the substance of the people through the vast arms budget. Everything in the AFL convention was subordinated to a demonstration for Truman’s war program.
The delegates were whipped up by a string of government spokesmen, including Paul G. Hoffman and W. Averill Harriman, and. rabid professional Stalinophobes like the renegade ex-radical intellectual, Max Eastman. Then the AFL leaders – undoubtedly anticipating their mentors in the State Department – pushed through a resolution calling on the U.S. and the Marshall Plan countries to sever trade relations with Russia; unequivocally supporting the imperialist Marshall Plan; and demanding not only all-out military preparations by the U.S., but that America “should also provide arms and enter into a defensive military alliance” with all “friendly nations in Europe, Asia or elsewhere” against the Soviet Union.
Committed to a program which can only lead to militarism, dictatorship and war, the AFL leaders cannot at the same time fight on labor’s behalf against inflation, for a higher standard of living, for adequate housing, for more unemployment insurance and old-age benefits.
Reactionary Foreign Policy
But even in their all-out backing of the bi-partisan war program, the AFL chiefs were forced to give an intimation of the real anti-labor and anti-democratic character of the foreign policies of U.S. imperialism. Their resolution sharply criticizes the “Taft-Hartleyism” of the American military governments in Germany and Japan. It complains about the refusal of U.S. authorities “to grant German labor the right to participate effectively in ERP machinery”; demands a halt to the policy of placing former Nazi industrialists and financial magnates in posts of authority; and demands a “redefinition” of U.S. official policy toward Japanese labor.
To Continue LLPE
In one respect, the AFL leaders made a radical departure from their horse-and-buggy traditions. They definitely abandoned their old policy of “no-politics.” They voted to continue Labor’s League for Political Education on a permanent basis, organized throughout every precinct of the country.
This formal step into politics through an independent organisation has been imposed on the AFL leaders by the pressure of the Workers, who refuse any longer to rally to the direct summons of the old capitalist parties. It likewise reflects the great fear and shock felt by the labor leaders when they realized their total political helplessness before the Taft-Hartley assault of Big Business.
But these union leaders once more revealed themselves as thoroughly capitalist-minded and Unalterably devoted to the capitalist system and its political, rule. Their aim is not to organize labor independently in the political field to fight for its own class aims through its own class party – not even eventually.
Reject Labor Party
They demonstratively voted down a resolution for the formation of a new political party and completely ignored the plea of A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to consider the question of building a labor party along the lines of the British Labor Party.
But the AFL leaders in no wise reflect the deep leftward moving currents in the American working class. Right now these bureaucrats are riding the crest of their “victory” smug in the enjoyment of their full treasuries, their big salaries and the constant flow of dues. This will not last for long.
They tried to hold back the progress of the workers in the mid-Thirties, but economic and social conditions raised a tide of labor revolt that swept right over the old-line leaders and brought with it the CIO and the era of industrial unionism.
Tomorrow, the inevitable crisis of American capitalism, the refusal of the capitalist government of Truman to yield anything but crumbs to the workers, will set the ranks of labor into irresistible motion. Labor – with or without its present leaders – will move forward to its next historic step, class political action through its own party.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>The Case of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam</h1>
<h3>(7 March 1947)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_10" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 10</a>, 7 March 1947, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>The Roman Catholic hierarchy’s drive to censor and silence liberal criticism of its reactionary political activities and its moves, particularly in the field of education, to breach the wall separating church and state, reached their latest climax in connection with the award dinner given by <em>The Churchman</em>, Protestant Episcopal magazine in honor of Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam.</strong></p>
<p>Announcement that Bishop Oxnam was to receive the annual <em>Churchman</em> award “for the promotion of good will and better understanding among all people,” was the signal for a campaign of pressure and intimidation to get sponsors of the award dinner, held in New York City on Feb. 23, to withdraw from the affair with public statements.<br>
</p>
<h4>Oxnam’s “Crime”</h4>
<p class="fst">Although the standard charge of “communism” was hurled at <strong>The Churchman</strong> and its editor, Rev. Dr. Guy Emery Shipler, it is well known that Bishop Oxnam, former president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and present co-president of the World Council of Churches, had aroused the ire of the Catholic hierarchy by his outspoken opposition to attempts of the American Catholic hierarchy to gain state support for parochial Schools.</p>
<p><em>Only a few weeks before the scheduled <strong>Churchman</strong> dinner, Bishop Oxnam wrote a powerful documented exposure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s increasingly successful drive to gain influence over public education in this country and to secure public funds for Catholic schools.</em> His article, entitled <em>Church, State, and Schools</em>, appeared in the Jan. 15 <strong>Nation</strong>, liberal magazine which Catholic pressure had succeeded last year in banning from public school libraries in New York City and Newark.</p>
<p>The drive to sabotage the <strong>Churchman</strong> award dinner for Bishop Oxnam first came to light when Benjamin Fairless, president of the United States Steel Corporation and a co-sponsor of the dinner, announced that he was withdrawing his sponsorship, stating, “Innocently I accepted, thinking it was a church movement, and therefore having no connection with non-Americanism.” The alleged “non-Americanism” is <strong>The Churchman</strong>’s sometimes critical attitude toward the Truman administration’s foreign policy. Fairless’s action may not be unrelated to the fact that Myron C. Taylor, former head of U.S. Steel, has been Truman’s “personal envoy” to the Vatican.</p>
<p>Subsequently, a number of other sponsors of the dinner publicly announced their withdrawals on one pretext or another. Among these was Democratic Senator Hubert. H. Humphrey, darling of the Democratic liberals and national chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, who pleaded unexpected pressure of senatorial work.</p>
<p><em>The real source of the attack on The Churchman and Bishop Oxnam was revealed the day before the dinner by Judge Jerome N. Frank of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and former SEC chairman. In a last-minute withdrawal statement, Judge Frank gave as his reason that The Churchman is “systematically and sweepingly critical of all the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church.”</em></p>
<p>Answering the attacks on Bishop Oxnam and <strong>The Churchman</strong>, forty leading Protestant clergymen and laymen issued a statement on Feb. 22, saying:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We denounce the current propaganda which asserts that a person who opposes the political Vatican State is a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. The attacks on <strong>The Churchman</strong> represent a fully organized, well-financed threat to one of the freest sections of American journalism, the Protestant press. We stand for the right of Protestant individuals and organizations to promote peace without having such free journals as <strong>The Churchman</strong> prohibited by self-appointed censors.”<br>
</p>
<h4>From Requests to Threat</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>In his award acceptance speech at the <strong>Churchman</strong> dinner, Bishop Oxnam revealed that “representations were made to me that ran the gamut from request to demand to threat, the object being to secure the withdrawal of my acceptance and the destruction of <strong>The Churchman</strong>, a liberal church journal with more than a hundred years of history behind it.”</em></p>
<p>Attacking the U.S. State Department’s flirtation with Spanish dictator Franco, Bishop Oxnam said,</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We cannot expect the common man to believe our democratic pronouncements if we make deals with, dictators or ally ourselves with political, economic or ecclesiastical reaction.”</p>
<p class="fst">He challenged the Catholic hierarchy to join with all other churches in enunciating a doctrine of universal religious liberty, stating:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“A church that denies religious liberty to others, when it has power to do so, is in an embarrassing position when it creates the hysteria antecedent to war when others deny religious liberty to it ... Religious liberty means freedom for Roman Catholics in Hungary, and also freedom for Protestants in Spam, in Colombia and the Argentine.”</p>
<p class="fst">Liberal Protestant forces are becoming extremely concerned over this and other examples of intimidation and censorship by the Catholic hierarchy. A group of ten Protestant ministers in Danbury and Newtown, Conn., has issued a declaration disapproving the action of the Danbury Lions Club in withdrawing its invitation to Henry Wallace to speak at a meeting after six local Catholic priests had demanded the Progressive Party leader be barred.</p>
<p><em>The Protestant clergymen called the club’s action a “humiliating defeat” and said that “a decision of the club, democratically arrived at, has been invalidated by intimidation. It is sincerely hoped that in the future the people of Danbury will maintain an allegiance that goes beyond our city and includes the hallowed traditions of freedom that have distinguished our country since its foundation.”</em></p>
<p>The current Catholic clerical offensive against free speech, political freedom and the separation of church and state has been given impetus by the lynch-hysteria campaign against “communism” whipped up around the Mindszenty case in Hungary, by the Truman administration, the Big Business press, the Catholic hierarchy and sections of the Protestant and Jewish clergy.</p>
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Joseph Keller
The Case of Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam
(7 March 1947)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 10, 7 March 1947, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Roman Catholic hierarchy’s drive to censor and silence liberal criticism of its reactionary political activities and its moves, particularly in the field of education, to breach the wall separating church and state, reached their latest climax in connection with the award dinner given by The Churchman, Protestant Episcopal magazine in honor of Methodist Bishop G. Bromley Oxnam.
Announcement that Bishop Oxnam was to receive the annual Churchman award “for the promotion of good will and better understanding among all people,” was the signal for a campaign of pressure and intimidation to get sponsors of the award dinner, held in New York City on Feb. 23, to withdraw from the affair with public statements.
Oxnam’s “Crime”
Although the standard charge of “communism” was hurled at The Churchman and its editor, Rev. Dr. Guy Emery Shipler, it is well known that Bishop Oxnam, former president of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America and present co-president of the World Council of Churches, had aroused the ire of the Catholic hierarchy by his outspoken opposition to attempts of the American Catholic hierarchy to gain state support for parochial Schools.
Only a few weeks before the scheduled Churchman dinner, Bishop Oxnam wrote a powerful documented exposure of the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s increasingly successful drive to gain influence over public education in this country and to secure public funds for Catholic schools. His article, entitled Church, State, and Schools, appeared in the Jan. 15 Nation, liberal magazine which Catholic pressure had succeeded last year in banning from public school libraries in New York City and Newark.
The drive to sabotage the Churchman award dinner for Bishop Oxnam first came to light when Benjamin Fairless, president of the United States Steel Corporation and a co-sponsor of the dinner, announced that he was withdrawing his sponsorship, stating, “Innocently I accepted, thinking it was a church movement, and therefore having no connection with non-Americanism.” The alleged “non-Americanism” is The Churchman’s sometimes critical attitude toward the Truman administration’s foreign policy. Fairless’s action may not be unrelated to the fact that Myron C. Taylor, former head of U.S. Steel, has been Truman’s “personal envoy” to the Vatican.
Subsequently, a number of other sponsors of the dinner publicly announced their withdrawals on one pretext or another. Among these was Democratic Senator Hubert. H. Humphrey, darling of the Democratic liberals and national chairman of the Americans for Democratic Action, who pleaded unexpected pressure of senatorial work.
The real source of the attack on The Churchman and Bishop Oxnam was revealed the day before the dinner by Judge Jerome N. Frank of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and former SEC chairman. In a last-minute withdrawal statement, Judge Frank gave as his reason that The Churchman is “systematically and sweepingly critical of all the attitudes of the Roman Catholic Church.”
Answering the attacks on Bishop Oxnam and The Churchman, forty leading Protestant clergymen and laymen issued a statement on Feb. 22, saying:
“We denounce the current propaganda which asserts that a person who opposes the political Vatican State is a Communist or a Communist sympathizer. The attacks on The Churchman represent a fully organized, well-financed threat to one of the freest sections of American journalism, the Protestant press. We stand for the right of Protestant individuals and organizations to promote peace without having such free journals as The Churchman prohibited by self-appointed censors.”
From Requests to Threat
In his award acceptance speech at the Churchman dinner, Bishop Oxnam revealed that “representations were made to me that ran the gamut from request to demand to threat, the object being to secure the withdrawal of my acceptance and the destruction of The Churchman, a liberal church journal with more than a hundred years of history behind it.”
Attacking the U.S. State Department’s flirtation with Spanish dictator Franco, Bishop Oxnam said,
“We cannot expect the common man to believe our democratic pronouncements if we make deals with, dictators or ally ourselves with political, economic or ecclesiastical reaction.”
He challenged the Catholic hierarchy to join with all other churches in enunciating a doctrine of universal religious liberty, stating:
“A church that denies religious liberty to others, when it has power to do so, is in an embarrassing position when it creates the hysteria antecedent to war when others deny religious liberty to it ... Religious liberty means freedom for Roman Catholics in Hungary, and also freedom for Protestants in Spam, in Colombia and the Argentine.”
Liberal Protestant forces are becoming extremely concerned over this and other examples of intimidation and censorship by the Catholic hierarchy. A group of ten Protestant ministers in Danbury and Newtown, Conn., has issued a declaration disapproving the action of the Danbury Lions Club in withdrawing its invitation to Henry Wallace to speak at a meeting after six local Catholic priests had demanded the Progressive Party leader be barred.
The Protestant clergymen called the club’s action a “humiliating defeat” and said that “a decision of the club, democratically arrived at, has been invalidated by intimidation. It is sincerely hoped that in the future the people of Danbury will maintain an allegiance that goes beyond our city and includes the hallowed traditions of freedom that have distinguished our country since its foundation.”
The current Catholic clerical offensive against free speech, political freedom and the separation of church and state has been given impetus by the lynch-hysteria campaign against “communism” whipped up around the Mindszenty case in Hungary, by the Truman administration, the Big Business press, the Catholic hierarchy and sections of the Protestant and Jewish clergy.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Marine Engineers’ Official Gives<br>
Proof of Curran’s Strikebreaking</h1>
<h4>Trainer, N.Y. MEBA Head, Tells <em>Militant</em> Reporter<br>
Full Facts of Export Line Strike</h4>
<h3>(May 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_20" target="new">Vol. V No. 20</a>, 17 May 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<br>
<p class="fst">Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union (CIO), is guilty of attempting to break a <em>bona-fide</em> strike of the CIO Marine Engineers now striking the ships of the American Export Lines at the Jersey City docks.</p>
<p>Indisputable proof of this was presented to <strong>The Militant</strong> in an interview, last Monday afternoon, with Edward P. Trainer, secretary and business agent of Local 33, Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (CIO) which is conducting the strike.</p>
<p>Trainer not only proved that Curran is attempting to break a legitimate strike, but had documentary evidence which established beyond any doubt that Curran lied to the members of the NMU in order to get them to carry out Curran’s strikebreaking moves.</p>
<p>On May 1, Curran ordered members of the NMU to cross the picket line of the MEBA and man the <em>S.S. Siboney</em>, an American Export Line ship, which the marine engineers had struck on its arrival at the Jersey City dock on April 26.</p>
<p>The <em>Siboney</em> had been transferred recently from the Ward Line, with which the MEBA has a contract, to the American Export Line which has a company union for licensed men. When it took over the <em>Siboney</em>, the Export Line tried to force the ship’s MEBA staff into the company union.</p>
<p>This was the principal cause of the strike, which then spread to two other Export Line ships as the engineers on them, mostly MEBA men, joined the strike.<br>
</p>
<h4>Curran Changes Alibi</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“Curran has given two different excuses, both of which can’t be true, for violating our picket line,” said Trainer.</p>
<p class="quote">“Last week Curran issued a statement published in the NMU paper, <strong>The Pilot</strong>, that the engineers couldn’t maintain a picket line, that they were afraid to picket because of fear of company discrimination.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“But the week before that, Curran admitted were maintaining a picket line when he gave as his excuse for violating our picket line that we were paying the pickets.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“I asked Curran, ‘What should we do? Let them starve?’ Sure we paid the pickets, $7 a day. That’s what we have a strike fund for.</p>
<p class="quote">“The truth is that not a single engineer who walked off those three ships has returned to work.</p>
<p class="quote">“The company brought on strikebreakers and when the NMU unlicensed men went on board the <em>Siboney</em> they violated a legitimate union picket line in order to work with strikebreakers.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Curran’s Lies Nailed</h4>
<p class="fst">What about Curran’s claim that the company union was not the issue, and that the fight was over the question of the war bonuses, and that the bonus issue could be settled without a strike ? I asked Trainer.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The issue is company unionism and nothing else,” he answered. “Sure we asked for improved conditions, including war bonuses, but these are not the main issues. The main thing is how can we get anything until the company agrees to discontinue the company union and recognize us. Even Curran has to admit that we’re fighting a company union set-up.”</p>
<p class="fst">But, I said, Curran claims in <strong>The Pilot</strong> that the company union has won an election and has been certified by the NLRB.</p>
<p>Trainer brought out a May 9 issue of the <strong>Pilot</strong> and together we read a paragraph in it, from a statement of the NMU National Office, which said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“There is a company union organization among the officers of the Export Line which has been certified by the National Labor Relations Board, as an independent union. Because of this, the company claimed that before they could sign another contract, it would be necessary to hold another election.”</p>
<p class="fst">Well, what about it? I asked.</p>
<p>With a broad grin, Trainer handed me a letter from the NLRB, a copy of which he gave <strong>The Militant</strong> for publication. This letter is dated May 9, 1941, and is signed by Elinore M. Herrick, Regional Director, Second Region, NLRB. The letter is addressed to Trainer and reads:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“This will acknowledge your letter of May 5th in which you inquire as to the date the National Labor Relations Board designated the Brotherhood of Marine Officers as the bargaining agent for the marine engineers employed by the above company (Export Steamship Corp.)</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“We have no record of any proceeding under Section 9 (c) of the act involving the Brotherhood of Marine Officers. The only matter affecting this union, of which we have a record, is an 8 (2) charge filed by you on February 4, 1939, which was dismissed on September 9, 1939, the dismissal being sustained by the Board on November 4th, 1939.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Trainer said:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“So you see, there’s never been any election held, so the NLRB could never have certified the company union. This letter proves that Curran’s excuses for violating our picket line are absolutely phoney!”<br>
</p>
<h4>Engineers Helped NMU</h4>
<p class="fst">Trainer then told the story of how the MEBA had helped to found the NMU.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Our union is one of the oldest in the country. And we’ve always been a militant outfit. We’ve conducted more strikes than any other maritime union in the country.</p>
<p class="quote">“In 1936 we began to make real headway. Right now we have over 300 contracts. And while our jurisdiction – licensed men – does not cover more than eight men on any ship, our membership is more than half as large as the NMU’s. And they have anywhere from 40 to 400 unlicensed men to organize on a ship.</p>
<p class="quote">“Our men went out in the Fall of ’36 on the West Coast along with the West Coast sailors. We began to picket the West Coast vessels when they arrived on the East Coast. When we went to the old – now dead – International Seamen’s Union and told them we were setting up picket lines on the inter-coastal vessels from the West Coast, Grange, Hunter and their other officials said they were going to crash the picket lines and that they were out to smash the West Coast Sailors and Harry Bridges’ union.</p>
<p class="quote">“That’s when we got together for the first time with Curran. It was over the question of the ISU attempt to break a picket line that we got together. Curran was representing the unlicensed men. They didn’t even have a regular union affiliation. We’d never heard of Curran before, never met him.</p>
<p class="quote">“Well, we went out on strike five days before Thanksgiving Day 1936. The engineers came out solid. Few of Curran’s men came off. But we gave the unlicensed men, who were trying to get their union started, 100 per cent backing.<br>
</p>
<h4>First Export Line Fight</h4>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“And now,” said Trainer grimly, “We come to the story of the Export Line fight – the story that begins not in 1941, as the <strong>Pilot</strong> seems to indicate, but back in 1936.</em></p>
<p class="quote"><em>“Five days after we pulled out on strike, on Thanksgiving Day 1936, the Export Line offered the MEBA a closed shop contract and a 15 per cent wage increase if we’d sign without Curran. We flatly refused to sign unless the company also signed with Curran’s organization.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“As a result of this, we finally lost out on the Export Line, because Curran’s organization then couldn’t enforce its strike against the Export Line. But we did stick it out together with Curran and won five joint contracts on other lines.</p>
<p class="quote">“We stood by the unlicensed men even when they couldn’t really be called a union. The companies held out two days in those negotiations on this account. All the unlicensed men could call themselves was the ‘Strike Strategy Committee.’ It took the lawyers a couple of hours to decide what to call them in the contract. And they finally called them the ‘Strike Strategy Committee.’ That was the embryo NMU.</p>
<p class="quote">“Well, when we lost the strike on the Export Lines in ’36–’37, the strikebreakers took the places of our union men. These strikebreakers were the ones who formed the nucleus of the company union – we call it the ‘Mystic Knights of the Sea’ – that is the Brotherhood of Marine Officers. But strikebreakers never did make satisfactory engineers, so the company had to take back some of our men. But 44 of our men never did get back.<br>
</p>
<h4>Curran’s Gratitude</h4>
<p class="quoteb">“In ’37 ... there was a scarcity of unlicensed men. Three months after the ’36–’37 strike, Curran pulled another strike on the Export Lines. Through the strike and an NLRB appeal, the NMU won recognition. But when we went to Curran to give us support in getting recognition for the MEBA on the Export Lines, he refused to do anything for us.</p>
<p class="quote">“We’ve had our case before the NLRB over three years now. But because of the political tie-up of the company, which is owned by the Lehman banking interests, with the NLRB officials, Mrs. Herrick threw our case out of the second Region board. This board under her has a company union bias to begin with. The figures show that this one board has certified four-fifths of the total company unions certified in the entire country. We appealed to Washington, which ordered another hearing before the regional board again.</p>
<p class="quote">“We’ve won any number of cases with one-tenth the evidence we had against the Export Lines, But Mrs. Herrick deliberately stalled us off for nine or ten months before calling another hearing. By then most of our witnesses were working and not available. They were all out to sea.</p>
<p class="quote">“That’s the kind of set-up we were up against and we knew that the only way we could crack the company union set-up was by striking the line. And that’s what we finally did when the proper occasion arose.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Danger to NMU</h4>
<p class="fst">Trainer repeatedly stressed the fact that Curran’s present strikebreaking actions are paving the way for the shipowners to strike deadly blows at the NMU itself.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The heaviest defeats of the NMU – not only defeats, but complete annihilation – have occurred on those lines where the owners have succeeded in first forcing the licensed men into company unions. That’s what happened on the tanker ships of Standard Oil of New York and New Jersey, Tidewater and Texas Company. That’s what happened out on the West Coast with Standard Oil of California and the Union Oil Company.</em></p>
<p class="quote">”And that’s exactly what the Export Line is aiming to do. When Curran sends his men through our picket line in this Export strike he’s helping to cut the throat of his own union.</p>
<p class="quote">“Curran can’t point to a single company where the unlicensed seamen have been forced into a company union set-up, where the licensed men had not been forced in first.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Curran Ducks Hearing</h4>
<p class="fst">The MEBA has asked for a hearing on the dispute with Curran before the New Jersey CIO state body, in addition to wiring a protest against Curran’s actions to Philip Murray, CIO president. The hearing is asked before the Jersey council because the strike is within New Jersey.</p>
<p>Trainer has already sent a statement of the MEBA’s case to the Jersey CIO body, which asked Curran to make a reply. But Curran has as yet failed to comply with this request.</p>
<p>Instead, Curran tried to get the MEBA to accept as a substitute for the Jersey hearing an appearance before the Greater New York Industrial Council – a preposterous proposition since the New York council has no jurisdiction in the matter. This body, in which many CIO unions do not participate, is Stalinist-controlled and through it Curran could, of course, give himself a clean bill of health.</p>
<p>Trainer stated that the MEBA had withdrawn from the New York council in protest against its failure to condemn Curran’s strikebreaking. “They’re a too well oiled machine,” he said.</p>
<p>Curran had previously asked him to appear for a “hearing” before an NMU meeting, Trainer informed me.</p>
<p><em>And then he laughed heartily.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“That’s not the kind of hearing we want. I didn’t intend to go to any one-sided meeting. Curran was just offering me a Moscow Trial.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Why Curran Finked</h4>
<p class="fst">Toward the end of the interview, Trainer showed me a mimeographed <em>Statement on the MEBA-American Export Line Dispute</em> issued by the National Council of the NMU. He pointed out one paragraph and said, “This tells the whole story.” The paragraph read:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We called to Mr. Trainer’s attention the fact that a meeting had been arranged between the American Merchant Marine Institute and the NMU to discuss the war bonuses. The dispute on the Export Lines prevented this meeting from materializing because the companies claimed that the refusal of the unlicensed personnel to sail these ships constituted a violation of contract. They stated that until such time as the dispute was straightened out, they would not meet with the NMU to discuss the important question of war bonuses.”</p>
<p class="fst">Trainer rapped the document with his knuckles.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“That’s the way Curran’s paid us back for our refusal to sign a contract on the Export Lines without a contract being given the unlicensed men in the ’36–’37 strike. The companies want the Export strike ‘straightened out.’ So Curran obliges them by strikebreaking.</p>
<p class="quote">“This is a clear case of Curran sacrificing the interests of the striking MEBA men in return for some quick concessions for his own members. It’s pretty significant that within 24 hours of his violating our picket lines, after his return from a conference with the ship-owners in Washington, that increases for the NMU men were announced on a number of lines, including the American-West African and the East African.</p>
<p class="quote"><em>“There was a good reason why the owners were willing to make this deal. They have always wanted to break up the industrial set-up on the ships, the cooperation between the different crafts and between the licensed and unlicensed men. By creating a rift between us now, the employers hope to be able to hit the NMU later.”</em></p>
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Art Preis
Marine Engineers’ Official Gives
Proof of Curran’s Strikebreaking
Trainer, N.Y. MEBA Head, Tells Militant Reporter
Full Facts of Export Line Strike
(May 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 20, 17 May 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Joseph Curran, president of the National Maritime Union (CIO), is guilty of attempting to break a bona-fide strike of the CIO Marine Engineers now striking the ships of the American Export Lines at the Jersey City docks.
Indisputable proof of this was presented to The Militant in an interview, last Monday afternoon, with Edward P. Trainer, secretary and business agent of Local 33, Marine Engineers’ Beneficial Association (CIO) which is conducting the strike.
Trainer not only proved that Curran is attempting to break a legitimate strike, but had documentary evidence which established beyond any doubt that Curran lied to the members of the NMU in order to get them to carry out Curran’s strikebreaking moves.
On May 1, Curran ordered members of the NMU to cross the picket line of the MEBA and man the S.S. Siboney, an American Export Line ship, which the marine engineers had struck on its arrival at the Jersey City dock on April 26.
The Siboney had been transferred recently from the Ward Line, with which the MEBA has a contract, to the American Export Line which has a company union for licensed men. When it took over the Siboney, the Export Line tried to force the ship’s MEBA staff into the company union.
This was the principal cause of the strike, which then spread to two other Export Line ships as the engineers on them, mostly MEBA men, joined the strike.
Curran Changes Alibi
“Curran has given two different excuses, both of which can’t be true, for violating our picket line,” said Trainer.
“Last week Curran issued a statement published in the NMU paper, The Pilot, that the engineers couldn’t maintain a picket line, that they were afraid to picket because of fear of company discrimination.
“But the week before that, Curran admitted were maintaining a picket line when he gave as his excuse for violating our picket line that we were paying the pickets.
“I asked Curran, ‘What should we do? Let them starve?’ Sure we paid the pickets, $7 a day. That’s what we have a strike fund for.
“The truth is that not a single engineer who walked off those three ships has returned to work.
“The company brought on strikebreakers and when the NMU unlicensed men went on board the Siboney they violated a legitimate union picket line in order to work with strikebreakers.”
Curran’s Lies Nailed
What about Curran’s claim that the company union was not the issue, and that the fight was over the question of the war bonuses, and that the bonus issue could be settled without a strike ? I asked Trainer.
“The issue is company unionism and nothing else,” he answered. “Sure we asked for improved conditions, including war bonuses, but these are not the main issues. The main thing is how can we get anything until the company agrees to discontinue the company union and recognize us. Even Curran has to admit that we’re fighting a company union set-up.”
But, I said, Curran claims in The Pilot that the company union has won an election and has been certified by the NLRB.
Trainer brought out a May 9 issue of the Pilot and together we read a paragraph in it, from a statement of the NMU National Office, which said:
“There is a company union organization among the officers of the Export Line which has been certified by the National Labor Relations Board, as an independent union. Because of this, the company claimed that before they could sign another contract, it would be necessary to hold another election.”
Well, what about it? I asked.
With a broad grin, Trainer handed me a letter from the NLRB, a copy of which he gave The Militant for publication. This letter is dated May 9, 1941, and is signed by Elinore M. Herrick, Regional Director, Second Region, NLRB. The letter is addressed to Trainer and reads:
“This will acknowledge your letter of May 5th in which you inquire as to the date the National Labor Relations Board designated the Brotherhood of Marine Officers as the bargaining agent for the marine engineers employed by the above company (Export Steamship Corp.)
“We have no record of any proceeding under Section 9 (c) of the act involving the Brotherhood of Marine Officers. The only matter affecting this union, of which we have a record, is an 8 (2) charge filed by you on February 4, 1939, which was dismissed on September 9, 1939, the dismissal being sustained by the Board on November 4th, 1939.”
Trainer said:
“So you see, there’s never been any election held, so the NLRB could never have certified the company union. This letter proves that Curran’s excuses for violating our picket line are absolutely phoney!”
Engineers Helped NMU
Trainer then told the story of how the MEBA had helped to found the NMU.
“Our union is one of the oldest in the country. And we’ve always been a militant outfit. We’ve conducted more strikes than any other maritime union in the country.
“In 1936 we began to make real headway. Right now we have over 300 contracts. And while our jurisdiction – licensed men – does not cover more than eight men on any ship, our membership is more than half as large as the NMU’s. And they have anywhere from 40 to 400 unlicensed men to organize on a ship.
“Our men went out in the Fall of ’36 on the West Coast along with the West Coast sailors. We began to picket the West Coast vessels when they arrived on the East Coast. When we went to the old – now dead – International Seamen’s Union and told them we were setting up picket lines on the inter-coastal vessels from the West Coast, Grange, Hunter and their other officials said they were going to crash the picket lines and that they were out to smash the West Coast Sailors and Harry Bridges’ union.
“That’s when we got together for the first time with Curran. It was over the question of the ISU attempt to break a picket line that we got together. Curran was representing the unlicensed men. They didn’t even have a regular union affiliation. We’d never heard of Curran before, never met him.
“Well, we went out on strike five days before Thanksgiving Day 1936. The engineers came out solid. Few of Curran’s men came off. But we gave the unlicensed men, who were trying to get their union started, 100 per cent backing.
First Export Line Fight
“And now,” said Trainer grimly, “We come to the story of the Export Line fight – the story that begins not in 1941, as the Pilot seems to indicate, but back in 1936.
“Five days after we pulled out on strike, on Thanksgiving Day 1936, the Export Line offered the MEBA a closed shop contract and a 15 per cent wage increase if we’d sign without Curran. We flatly refused to sign unless the company also signed with Curran’s organization.
“As a result of this, we finally lost out on the Export Line, because Curran’s organization then couldn’t enforce its strike against the Export Line. But we did stick it out together with Curran and won five joint contracts on other lines.
“We stood by the unlicensed men even when they couldn’t really be called a union. The companies held out two days in those negotiations on this account. All the unlicensed men could call themselves was the ‘Strike Strategy Committee.’ It took the lawyers a couple of hours to decide what to call them in the contract. And they finally called them the ‘Strike Strategy Committee.’ That was the embryo NMU.
“Well, when we lost the strike on the Export Lines in ’36–’37, the strikebreakers took the places of our union men. These strikebreakers were the ones who formed the nucleus of the company union – we call it the ‘Mystic Knights of the Sea’ – that is the Brotherhood of Marine Officers. But strikebreakers never did make satisfactory engineers, so the company had to take back some of our men. But 44 of our men never did get back.
Curran’s Gratitude
“In ’37 ... there was a scarcity of unlicensed men. Three months after the ’36–’37 strike, Curran pulled another strike on the Export Lines. Through the strike and an NLRB appeal, the NMU won recognition. But when we went to Curran to give us support in getting recognition for the MEBA on the Export Lines, he refused to do anything for us.
“We’ve had our case before the NLRB over three years now. But because of the political tie-up of the company, which is owned by the Lehman banking interests, with the NLRB officials, Mrs. Herrick threw our case out of the second Region board. This board under her has a company union bias to begin with. The figures show that this one board has certified four-fifths of the total company unions certified in the entire country. We appealed to Washington, which ordered another hearing before the regional board again.
“We’ve won any number of cases with one-tenth the evidence we had against the Export Lines, But Mrs. Herrick deliberately stalled us off for nine or ten months before calling another hearing. By then most of our witnesses were working and not available. They were all out to sea.
“That’s the kind of set-up we were up against and we knew that the only way we could crack the company union set-up was by striking the line. And that’s what we finally did when the proper occasion arose.”
Danger to NMU
Trainer repeatedly stressed the fact that Curran’s present strikebreaking actions are paving the way for the shipowners to strike deadly blows at the NMU itself.
“The heaviest defeats of the NMU – not only defeats, but complete annihilation – have occurred on those lines where the owners have succeeded in first forcing the licensed men into company unions. That’s what happened on the tanker ships of Standard Oil of New York and New Jersey, Tidewater and Texas Company. That’s what happened out on the West Coast with Standard Oil of California and the Union Oil Company.
”And that’s exactly what the Export Line is aiming to do. When Curran sends his men through our picket line in this Export strike he’s helping to cut the throat of his own union.
“Curran can’t point to a single company where the unlicensed seamen have been forced into a company union set-up, where the licensed men had not been forced in first.”
Curran Ducks Hearing
The MEBA has asked for a hearing on the dispute with Curran before the New Jersey CIO state body, in addition to wiring a protest against Curran’s actions to Philip Murray, CIO president. The hearing is asked before the Jersey council because the strike is within New Jersey.
Trainer has already sent a statement of the MEBA’s case to the Jersey CIO body, which asked Curran to make a reply. But Curran has as yet failed to comply with this request.
Instead, Curran tried to get the MEBA to accept as a substitute for the Jersey hearing an appearance before the Greater New York Industrial Council – a preposterous proposition since the New York council has no jurisdiction in the matter. This body, in which many CIO unions do not participate, is Stalinist-controlled and through it Curran could, of course, give himself a clean bill of health.
Trainer stated that the MEBA had withdrawn from the New York council in protest against its failure to condemn Curran’s strikebreaking. “They’re a too well oiled machine,” he said.
Curran had previously asked him to appear for a “hearing” before an NMU meeting, Trainer informed me.
And then he laughed heartily.
“That’s not the kind of hearing we want. I didn’t intend to go to any one-sided meeting. Curran was just offering me a Moscow Trial.”
Why Curran Finked
Toward the end of the interview, Trainer showed me a mimeographed Statement on the MEBA-American Export Line Dispute issued by the National Council of the NMU. He pointed out one paragraph and said, “This tells the whole story.” The paragraph read:
“We called to Mr. Trainer’s attention the fact that a meeting had been arranged between the American Merchant Marine Institute and the NMU to discuss the war bonuses. The dispute on the Export Lines prevented this meeting from materializing because the companies claimed that the refusal of the unlicensed personnel to sail these ships constituted a violation of contract. They stated that until such time as the dispute was straightened out, they would not meet with the NMU to discuss the important question of war bonuses.”
Trainer rapped the document with his knuckles.
“That’s the way Curran’s paid us back for our refusal to sign a contract on the Export Lines without a contract being given the unlicensed men in the ’36–’37 strike. The companies want the Export strike ‘straightened out.’ So Curran obliges them by strikebreaking.
“This is a clear case of Curran sacrificing the interests of the striking MEBA men in return for some quick concessions for his own members. It’s pretty significant that within 24 hours of his violating our picket lines, after his return from a conference with the ship-owners in Washington, that increases for the NMU men were announced on a number of lines, including the American-West African and the East African.
“There was a good reason why the owners were willing to make this deal. They have always wanted to break up the industrial set-up on the ships, the cooperation between the different crafts and between the licensed and unlicensed men. By creating a rift between us now, the employers hope to be able to hit the NMU later.”
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(24 February 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_08" target="new">Vol. IX No. 8</a>, 24 February 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>Gang-Up on Miners</h4>
<p class="fst">The government agencies and coal operators are laying down, their
preliminary joint barrage in; anticipation of the impending struggle
against the mine workers. Negotiations for a union contract renewal
begin March 1 with the bituminous mine owners and April 1 with the
anthracite bosses.</p>
<p>An editorial in the February 15 <strong>United Mine Workers Journal</strong>
warns the miners that “poisoned publicity designed to arouse
the populace against any and all wage demands” is already being
widely peddled.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The membership of the UMWA may just as well know
how the deck is stacked in advance of the policy committee meeting
and wage negotiations. It is a formidable opposition.”</p>
<p class="fst"><em>All the government agencies are “backing the attack
against the UMW” declares the editorial.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The lineup includes Director of War
Mobilization James Byrnes, Director of Stabilization Fred Vinson, the
WLB, the Solid Fuels Administration, the OPA, the Roosevelt
administration and the coal operators, all concentrating upon
utilizing an assumed authority under executive decrees and the
infamous Smith-Connally enslavement law to deny the mine workers’
wage demands on toto, regardless of the economic justice of the UMWA
wage proposals.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The editorial charged Secretary of Interior Ickes with “planting”
statements in the public press designed to prejudice the miners’
case and discredit the UMW leaders. It further charged that one of
the primary reason’s for Vinson’s recent ruling requiring
OPA approval prior to any WLB grant of “fringe” wage
increases is “to stop the UMWA.”</p>
<p><em>It is reported that the UMW’s policy committee, which
meets to formulate demands on February 26, will consider a demand for
a 25 per cent hourly wage increase, from $1 to $1.25, and full
portal-to-portal pay instead of the present approximately 50 per cent
won in the 1943 general coal strikes.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>UMW and AFL</h4>
<p class="fst">Of great importance for the impending miners’ struggle is
the outcome of the negotiations for reaffiliation of the UMW, with
its over 600,000 members, to the AFL.</p>
<p>The AFL executive council meeting in Miami, Fla., last week voted
to accept the UMW’s request for reaffiliation with an apparent
major concession to the mine union on the chief issue previously
blocking the reaffiliation. That was the matter of jurisdictional
disputes, especially around the disposition of District 50, the UMW’s
organization for coal by-products workers. The AFL leaders agreed to
accept the UMW “as is,” with jurisdictional questions to
be ironed out after reaffiliation.</p>
<p><em>However, a further obstacle has arisen with the UMW’s
insistence upon a post on the AFL executive council. The council
members contend they have no power to give Lewis such a post without
approval of the AFL convention. This new issue, it appears, will not
halt further negotiations, as AFL President William Green is reported
to be getting together with UMW President John L. Lewis for
additional parleys.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Not Out Yet!</h4>
<p class="fst">The CIO United Automobile Workers, through its executive board,
has declared “Three Strikes on WLB.” The union’s
official organ, the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>, February 15,
announces the decision of the board calling on the CIO to “quit”
the WLB. The paper states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The ‘little steel formula’ froze
labor’s pay and deprived the War Labor Board of any authority
to grant increases. STRIKE ONE! Current orders from ‘assistant
President’ James F. Byrnes, transmitted through ‘Stabilization
Director’ Judge Vinson, deprives the War Labor Board of the
right to grant labor any concessions on ‘fringe’ economic
issues, such as correction of inequalities, shift bonuses, severance
pay, etc. STRIKE TWO! Federal Judge Philip L. Sullivan, declaring
that government operation of the Montgomery Ward stores is illegal,
has ruled that War Labor Board decisions cannot be enforced, they are
merely ‘advisory.’ STRIKE THREE AND OUT!”</p>
<p class="fst">However the WLB is not “out” yet – and neither
are the UAW officials on the WLB. Three strikes doesn’t
disqualify in this game where the rules are made by the government
and the employers. In fact, the UAW, whose president R.J. Thomas and
other officials still function on the WLB, are still “playing
ball.”</p>
<p>This game should never have been started, because the rules were
all stacked against labor from the start. The UAW board just wants
the WLB to retire to the dugout, but offers to give the big business
government another chance at bat against labor with a new board.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>NLRB Strike Polls</h4>
<p class="fst">A real indication of the mood of the workers toward the no-strike
policy is shown by the record of strike votes conducted during the
past 12 months by the NLRB under the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act.</p>
<p><em>Seventy-one percent of the 98,224 workers voting in 381 strike
polls favored strike action. Strike majorities resulted in 323 of the
381 voting units. Only 34 voted against strike. In 63 per cent of the
cases where unions filed notices for strike, the notices were
withdrawn before the vote, after mere notice of intent served to
speed up settlements. In many cases after strike votes were taken,
walkouts did not occur because settlements were hastily concluded.</em></p>
<p>These figures would indicate that the mere threat of strike backed
by a solid vote of the workers in a number of instances proved
effective in halting government and employer stalling on union
grievances.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p5"></a>
<h4>Employment Decline</h4>
<p class="fst">Another exposure of Roosevelt’s phony manpower “shortage”
claim, which he deliberately cooked up in an attempt to push through
his forced labor scheme, was presented by UAW Secretary-Treasurer
Addes to Senate committee hearings last week on, the May-Bailey slave
labor bill.</p>
<p>Addes presented figures showing a 16 per cent employment decline
in Detroit, key war-plants center. A survey of 192 major war plants
showed a drop of 57,000 workers from the level of 347,000 in
December, 1943, to the January 1945 level of 289,000. This would
indicate a total decline of 100,000 from the Detroit employment peak
of 700,000.</p>
<p><em>CIO Textile Workers President Emil Rieve disclosed that two
thousand textile workers in the New Bedford area are threatened with
unemployment because Army officials have demanded transfer of 800 key
workers, whose removal from their present jobs would jeopardize
production.</em></p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(24 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 8, 24 February 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Gang-Up on Miners
The government agencies and coal operators are laying down, their
preliminary joint barrage in; anticipation of the impending struggle
against the mine workers. Negotiations for a union contract renewal
begin March 1 with the bituminous mine owners and April 1 with the
anthracite bosses.
An editorial in the February 15 United Mine Workers Journal
warns the miners that “poisoned publicity designed to arouse
the populace against any and all wage demands” is already being
widely peddled.
“The membership of the UMWA may just as well know
how the deck is stacked in advance of the policy committee meeting
and wage negotiations. It is a formidable opposition.”
All the government agencies are “backing the attack
against the UMW” declares the editorial.
“The lineup includes Director of War
Mobilization James Byrnes, Director of Stabilization Fred Vinson, the
WLB, the Solid Fuels Administration, the OPA, the Roosevelt
administration and the coal operators, all concentrating upon
utilizing an assumed authority under executive decrees and the
infamous Smith-Connally enslavement law to deny the mine workers’
wage demands on toto, regardless of the economic justice of the UMWA
wage proposals.”
The editorial charged Secretary of Interior Ickes with “planting”
statements in the public press designed to prejudice the miners’
case and discredit the UMW leaders. It further charged that one of
the primary reason’s for Vinson’s recent ruling requiring
OPA approval prior to any WLB grant of “fringe” wage
increases is “to stop the UMWA.”
It is reported that the UMW’s policy committee, which
meets to formulate demands on February 26, will consider a demand for
a 25 per cent hourly wage increase, from $1 to $1.25, and full
portal-to-portal pay instead of the present approximately 50 per cent
won in the 1943 general coal strikes.
* * *
UMW and AFL
Of great importance for the impending miners’ struggle is
the outcome of the negotiations for reaffiliation of the UMW, with
its over 600,000 members, to the AFL.
The AFL executive council meeting in Miami, Fla., last week voted
to accept the UMW’s request for reaffiliation with an apparent
major concession to the mine union on the chief issue previously
blocking the reaffiliation. That was the matter of jurisdictional
disputes, especially around the disposition of District 50, the UMW’s
organization for coal by-products workers. The AFL leaders agreed to
accept the UMW “as is,” with jurisdictional questions to
be ironed out after reaffiliation.
However, a further obstacle has arisen with the UMW’s
insistence upon a post on the AFL executive council. The council
members contend they have no power to give Lewis such a post without
approval of the AFL convention. This new issue, it appears, will not
halt further negotiations, as AFL President William Green is reported
to be getting together with UMW President John L. Lewis for
additional parleys.
* * *
Not Out Yet!
The CIO United Automobile Workers, through its executive board,
has declared “Three Strikes on WLB.” The union’s
official organ, the United Automobile Worker, February 15,
announces the decision of the board calling on the CIO to “quit”
the WLB. The paper states:
“The ‘little steel formula’ froze
labor’s pay and deprived the War Labor Board of any authority
to grant increases. STRIKE ONE! Current orders from ‘assistant
President’ James F. Byrnes, transmitted through ‘Stabilization
Director’ Judge Vinson, deprives the War Labor Board of the
right to grant labor any concessions on ‘fringe’ economic
issues, such as correction of inequalities, shift bonuses, severance
pay, etc. STRIKE TWO! Federal Judge Philip L. Sullivan, declaring
that government operation of the Montgomery Ward stores is illegal,
has ruled that War Labor Board decisions cannot be enforced, they are
merely ‘advisory.’ STRIKE THREE AND OUT!”
However the WLB is not “out” yet – and neither
are the UAW officials on the WLB. Three strikes doesn’t
disqualify in this game where the rules are made by the government
and the employers. In fact, the UAW, whose president R.J. Thomas and
other officials still function on the WLB, are still “playing
ball.”
This game should never have been started, because the rules were
all stacked against labor from the start. The UAW board just wants
the WLB to retire to the dugout, but offers to give the big business
government another chance at bat against labor with a new board.
* * *
NLRB Strike Polls
A real indication of the mood of the workers toward the no-strike
policy is shown by the record of strike votes conducted during the
past 12 months by the NLRB under the Smith-Connally Anti-Strike Act.
Seventy-one percent of the 98,224 workers voting in 381 strike
polls favored strike action. Strike majorities resulted in 323 of the
381 voting units. Only 34 voted against strike. In 63 per cent of the
cases where unions filed notices for strike, the notices were
withdrawn before the vote, after mere notice of intent served to
speed up settlements. In many cases after strike votes were taken,
walkouts did not occur because settlements were hastily concluded.
These figures would indicate that the mere threat of strike backed
by a solid vote of the workers in a number of instances proved
effective in halting government and employer stalling on union
grievances.
* * *
Employment Decline
Another exposure of Roosevelt’s phony manpower “shortage”
claim, which he deliberately cooked up in an attempt to push through
his forced labor scheme, was presented by UAW Secretary-Treasurer
Addes to Senate committee hearings last week on, the May-Bailey slave
labor bill.
Addes presented figures showing a 16 per cent employment decline
in Detroit, key war-plants center. A survey of 192 major war plants
showed a drop of 57,000 workers from the level of 347,000 in
December, 1943, to the January 1945 level of 289,000. This would
indicate a total decline of 100,000 from the Detroit employment peak
of 700,000.
CIO Textile Workers President Emil Rieve disclosed that two
thousand textile workers in the New Bedford area are threatened with
unemployment because Army officials have demanded transfer of 800 key
workers, whose removal from their present jobs would jeopardize
production.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Mine Strikers Win $100 Pension Demand</h1>
<h4>Await Outcome of Trial Before Return to Work</h4>
<h3>(8 April 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_16" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 16</a>, 19 April 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">APRIL 8 – The country’s 400,000 soft coal miners have scored another victory for themselves and all labor by winning their strike demand for a $100 monthly old-age retirement pension payable from the operator-financed health and welfare fund. But more than two-thirds of the strikers were still “sitting it out” this morning in defiance of a federal strikebreaking injunction. They intend to “wait and see” if John L. Lewis and the union are again subjected to harsh reprisals in the government’s trial for “contempt” which opened yesterday.</p>
<p>The Truman Administration is vindictively pressing for conviction of Lewis and the union, with possible extortionate fines and imprisonment. Again the administration has secured the services of Federal Judge T. Allan Goldsborough, who acted as judge, prosecutor and jury 17 months ago in fining the UMW $3,510,000 for a similar charge of “contempt” of an anti-strike injunction.</p>
<p><em>Judge Goldsborough has revealed himself as no less biased and prejudiced now than in November 1946, when he raved that the mine strike was “an evil, demoniac, monstrous thing.”</em></p>
<p><em>Yesterday, he overruled almost every one of the UMW attorney’s objections to irrelevant proceedings and testimony.</em></p>
<p>How far Judge Goldsborough will dare to go in “throwing the book” at the Miners’ Union is still undecided. The one thing that may restrain him is fear that the miners will stay out of the pits to a man, particularly if Lewis personally is given a harsh sentence.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Pensions Granted”</h4>
<p class="fst">Lewis on Monday, prior to the opening of Goldsborough’s hearings, wired the UMW locals: “pensions granted, agreement is now honored” and advised that “your voluntary cessation of work should now be terminated.”</p>
<p><em>The break in the deadlock over the pension issue came when Speaker of the House Joseph W. Martin Jr., a Republican, intervened to effect a quick settlement outside the machinery of the Taft-Hartley Act, which the Republicans put over last June with the miners as their immediate target.</em></p>
<p>It is reported that big steel and coal interests, linked with the Republican party, sought Martin’s intervention when it became clear that the miners would not knuckle under to government intimidation. By agreement with Lewis, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire was named to fill the third-man vacancy on the welfare fund’s Board of Trustees, which includes Lewis for the miners and Ezra Van Horn for the operators.</p>
<p><em>Within 48 hours, Lewis and Bridges agreed to a pension for all miners 62 years or over who have worked 20 years in the mines and retired after May 28, 1946, including members in Southern mines, whose owners have not signed the contract.</em></p>
<p>The operators threaten to challenge the decision as violating the Taft-Hartley Law. They are insisting among other things that $100 a month is too much for old men who have toiled away a third or more of their lives in the bowels of the earth. Lewis branded this greedy attitude of the operators when he pointed out that Benjamin Fairless, head of U.S. Steel which is the largest mine operator, “when he retires ... will receive an annual pension of $26,687 a year.”</p>
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Art Preis
Mine Strikers Win $100 Pension Demand
Await Outcome of Trial Before Return to Work
(8 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 16, 19 April 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
APRIL 8 – The country’s 400,000 soft coal miners have scored another victory for themselves and all labor by winning their strike demand for a $100 monthly old-age retirement pension payable from the operator-financed health and welfare fund. But more than two-thirds of the strikers were still “sitting it out” this morning in defiance of a federal strikebreaking injunction. They intend to “wait and see” if John L. Lewis and the union are again subjected to harsh reprisals in the government’s trial for “contempt” which opened yesterday.
The Truman Administration is vindictively pressing for conviction of Lewis and the union, with possible extortionate fines and imprisonment. Again the administration has secured the services of Federal Judge T. Allan Goldsborough, who acted as judge, prosecutor and jury 17 months ago in fining the UMW $3,510,000 for a similar charge of “contempt” of an anti-strike injunction.
Judge Goldsborough has revealed himself as no less biased and prejudiced now than in November 1946, when he raved that the mine strike was “an evil, demoniac, monstrous thing.”
Yesterday, he overruled almost every one of the UMW attorney’s objections to irrelevant proceedings and testimony.
How far Judge Goldsborough will dare to go in “throwing the book” at the Miners’ Union is still undecided. The one thing that may restrain him is fear that the miners will stay out of the pits to a man, particularly if Lewis personally is given a harsh sentence.
“Pensions Granted”
Lewis on Monday, prior to the opening of Goldsborough’s hearings, wired the UMW locals: “pensions granted, agreement is now honored” and advised that “your voluntary cessation of work should now be terminated.”
The break in the deadlock over the pension issue came when Speaker of the House Joseph W. Martin Jr., a Republican, intervened to effect a quick settlement outside the machinery of the Taft-Hartley Act, which the Republicans put over last June with the miners as their immediate target.
It is reported that big steel and coal interests, linked with the Republican party, sought Martin’s intervention when it became clear that the miners would not knuckle under to government intimidation. By agreement with Lewis, Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire was named to fill the third-man vacancy on the welfare fund’s Board of Trustees, which includes Lewis for the miners and Ezra Van Horn for the operators.
Within 48 hours, Lewis and Bridges agreed to a pension for all miners 62 years or over who have worked 20 years in the mines and retired after May 28, 1946, including members in Southern mines, whose owners have not signed the contract.
The operators threaten to challenge the decision as violating the Taft-Hartley Law. They are insisting among other things that $100 a month is too much for old men who have toiled away a third or more of their lives in the bowels of the earth. Lewis branded this greedy attitude of the operators when he pointed out that Benjamin Fairless, head of U.S. Steel which is the largest mine operator, “when he retires ... will receive an annual pension of $26,687 a year.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Anti-Labor Front Aids<br>
UAW ‘No-Strike’ Group</h1>
<h3>(20 January 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_03" target="new">Vol. IX No. 3</a>, 20 January 1945, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">A nationwide united front of reaction, both outside and within the CIO United Automobile Workers, has been mobilized for an attempt to propagandize and pressure the 1,200,000 organized auto workers into reaffirming the no-strike pledge in the union’s referendum which began January 4.</p>
<p>Every agency which the corporations, the Roosevelt administration and their bureaucratic CIO lieutenants can muster is being used to bolster the UAW-CIO leadership’s defense of the no-strike surrender policy. Big Business views the referendum, which provides the militant auto workers with an opportunity for scrapping the no-strike pledge, as a tremendous threat to its wartime program for shackling the unions and paralyzing labor militancy.</p>
<p>In Detroit and Michigan, center of the upsurge against the no-strike policy, the capitalist press has unleashed a strident campaign, threatening dire consequences to the auto workers if they dare to revoke the pledge. The <strong>Detroit Free Press</strong>, voice of the auto corporations, led the attack with an editorial stink-bomb against the rank and file militants for opposing “labor’s solemn vow,” saying nothing, however, about Roosevelt’s “solemn vow” to curb war profiteering. The Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, January 10, which quotes most of this anti-labor diatribe approvingly, nevertheless complains because the <strong>Free Press</strong> “editorial is weakened by the fact that it goes all out to champion management.”</p>
<p><em>In their attack on union militancy, the profiteering corporations and the labor bureaucrats are even seeking to enlist the churches. The Detroit Council of Applied Religion, whose co-chairmen are the Reverend Ellsworth Smith, emergency chaplain of the Detroit Council of Churches, and Shelton Tappes, Stalinist secretary of Local 600, has issued a public appeal to all clergymen to “use their influence to convince” the auto workers to vote for the no-strike pledge.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Roosevelt Intervenes</h4>
<p class="fst">Roosevelt himself has intervened to use the power and prestige of his office to influence the vote of the auto workers. He sent a letter recently to UAW president R.J. Thomas “congratulating” the latter on pushing through, at least temporarily, a continuation of the no-strike pledge at the last auto convention and expressing the hope that the pledge “will always be reaffirmed by responsible men of labor.” The CIO and UAW flunkies of Roosevelt promptly featured his letter in the official CIO and UAW organs.</p>
<p>The Murray-Hillman bureaucracy is throwing the CIO’s resources and prestige behind the hard-pressed UAW leaders. Dipping generously into the CIO treasury, the CIO officials have rushed to the auto workers hundreds of thousands of copies of the January 8 <strong>CIO News</strong>, a special no-strike pledge edition including an extra four-page two-color insert demanding “patriotic” adherence to the no-strike policy and replete with pictures of Roosevelt and his leading generals. State and local CIO councils, dominated primarily by the Murray machine or the Stalinists, have been confronted simultaneously with resolutions calling on the auto workers not to “violate” the “sacred pledge.”</p>
<p>Earl Browder’s Communist (Stalinist) Political Association, the only group within the labor movement to attack the Montgomery Ward strikes and publicly endorse Roosevelt’s National Service forced labor demand, is attempting to curry further favor in the eyes of the American capitalists, Roosevelt and the CIO “labor statesmen” by taking the lead in the slanderous campaign against the auto militants. What the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong> lacks in influence among the auto workers, it seeks to make up by the volume and hysteria of its attacks on the militants and its fawning support for the anti-strike CIO and UAW leaders.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinists Take Lead</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>The Stalinists, regarding the referendum struggle as a golden opportunity for strengthening their position in the CIO and UAW bureaucracy, have mobilized their resources behind the UAW leadership. They are rallying all their forces within the union movement to defeat the auto militants. Much of the finances for the UAW Committee to Uphold the No-Strike Pledge, formed by the Stalinists and adopted as the official caucus of the UAW no-strike forces, comes from Stalinist sources.</em></p>
<p>Treasuries of unions under Stalinist control are being utilized to finance this committee. Stalinist Joseph Curran, head of the CIO National Maritime Union, has publicly announced his donation of $500 from union funds which he has sent to George Addes, UAW secretary-treasurer and “honorary” secretary of the UAW anti-strike committee. Every Stalinist-dominated union local or CIO council is rushing through resolutions in support of the UAW no-strike caucus.</p>
<p>Propped up by outside forces of reaction and spurred by the referendum’s threat not only to their cowardly policies but ultimately to their posts of leadership, all the international UAW officials have united to resist the offensive against the no-strike pledge. They have thrust to the background their secondary differences of factional power politics. Peeling the rising cold wind of militancy at their backs, Thomas, Addes, Reuther and Frankensteen are huddled together for mutual warmth and protection.</p>
<p><em>This protective alliance was formally acknowledged last week when the four spoke jointly under the auspices of the Stalinist Committee to Uphold the No- Strike Pledge over a Michigan radio hook-up. Thus the auto workers were treated to the spectacle of Addes, Frankensteen, Thomas and Reuther – bitter factionalists in the struggle for posts – joining hands under Stalinist sponsorship to hold the line for the no-strike policy ip the referendum.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>UAW Heads</h4>
<p class="fst">While a convention motion prohibits them from using the union’s resources or institutions for propagandizing their partisan position in the referendum, the UAW heads have uncovered enough loop-holes to evade the intent of the motion. Under the technical heading of “news,” the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>, official UAW organ, has printed huge slugs of CIO President Philip Murray’s speeches for the no-strike policy, CIO resolutions, Roosevelt’s anti-strike letter, etc.</p>
<p>This is but a minor example of the ability of the leadership to get around the restricting motion. All the payrollees and porkchoppers of the international, beholden to the officialdom for their cushy jobs, are being pressed into service – or else. Under the pretext of performing union “business”, and travelling at union expense, the officials find time to do a “little” anti-strike caucus organizing “on the side.”</p>
<p><em>Last week, they called a National UAW Educational Conference in Milwaukee. The assembled local and district officials and porkchoppers, after going through the motions of a formal session, adjourned to an anti-strike caucus meeting in the same hotel. This meeting was openly announced by leaflet. Addes himself flew to Milwaukee to address this pep meeting for the no-strike pledge.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Anti-Labor Front Aids
UAW ‘No-Strike’ Group
(20 January 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 3, 20 January 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A nationwide united front of reaction, both outside and within the CIO United Automobile Workers, has been mobilized for an attempt to propagandize and pressure the 1,200,000 organized auto workers into reaffirming the no-strike pledge in the union’s referendum which began January 4.
Every agency which the corporations, the Roosevelt administration and their bureaucratic CIO lieutenants can muster is being used to bolster the UAW-CIO leadership’s defense of the no-strike surrender policy. Big Business views the referendum, which provides the militant auto workers with an opportunity for scrapping the no-strike pledge, as a tremendous threat to its wartime program for shackling the unions and paralyzing labor militancy.
In Detroit and Michigan, center of the upsurge against the no-strike policy, the capitalist press has unleashed a strident campaign, threatening dire consequences to the auto workers if they dare to revoke the pledge. The Detroit Free Press, voice of the auto corporations, led the attack with an editorial stink-bomb against the rank and file militants for opposing “labor’s solemn vow,” saying nothing, however, about Roosevelt’s “solemn vow” to curb war profiteering. The Stalinist Daily Worker, January 10, which quotes most of this anti-labor diatribe approvingly, nevertheless complains because the Free Press “editorial is weakened by the fact that it goes all out to champion management.”
In their attack on union militancy, the profiteering corporations and the labor bureaucrats are even seeking to enlist the churches. The Detroit Council of Applied Religion, whose co-chairmen are the Reverend Ellsworth Smith, emergency chaplain of the Detroit Council of Churches, and Shelton Tappes, Stalinist secretary of Local 600, has issued a public appeal to all clergymen to “use their influence to convince” the auto workers to vote for the no-strike pledge.
Roosevelt Intervenes
Roosevelt himself has intervened to use the power and prestige of his office to influence the vote of the auto workers. He sent a letter recently to UAW president R.J. Thomas “congratulating” the latter on pushing through, at least temporarily, a continuation of the no-strike pledge at the last auto convention and expressing the hope that the pledge “will always be reaffirmed by responsible men of labor.” The CIO and UAW flunkies of Roosevelt promptly featured his letter in the official CIO and UAW organs.
The Murray-Hillman bureaucracy is throwing the CIO’s resources and prestige behind the hard-pressed UAW leaders. Dipping generously into the CIO treasury, the CIO officials have rushed to the auto workers hundreds of thousands of copies of the January 8 CIO News, a special no-strike pledge edition including an extra four-page two-color insert demanding “patriotic” adherence to the no-strike policy and replete with pictures of Roosevelt and his leading generals. State and local CIO councils, dominated primarily by the Murray machine or the Stalinists, have been confronted simultaneously with resolutions calling on the auto workers not to “violate” the “sacred pledge.”
Earl Browder’s Communist (Stalinist) Political Association, the only group within the labor movement to attack the Montgomery Ward strikes and publicly endorse Roosevelt’s National Service forced labor demand, is attempting to curry further favor in the eyes of the American capitalists, Roosevelt and the CIO “labor statesmen” by taking the lead in the slanderous campaign against the auto militants. What the Stalinist Daily Worker lacks in influence among the auto workers, it seeks to make up by the volume and hysteria of its attacks on the militants and its fawning support for the anti-strike CIO and UAW leaders.
Stalinists Take Lead
The Stalinists, regarding the referendum struggle as a golden opportunity for strengthening their position in the CIO and UAW bureaucracy, have mobilized their resources behind the UAW leadership. They are rallying all their forces within the union movement to defeat the auto militants. Much of the finances for the UAW Committee to Uphold the No-Strike Pledge, formed by the Stalinists and adopted as the official caucus of the UAW no-strike forces, comes from Stalinist sources.
Treasuries of unions under Stalinist control are being utilized to finance this committee. Stalinist Joseph Curran, head of the CIO National Maritime Union, has publicly announced his donation of $500 from union funds which he has sent to George Addes, UAW secretary-treasurer and “honorary” secretary of the UAW anti-strike committee. Every Stalinist-dominated union local or CIO council is rushing through resolutions in support of the UAW no-strike caucus.
Propped up by outside forces of reaction and spurred by the referendum’s threat not only to their cowardly policies but ultimately to their posts of leadership, all the international UAW officials have united to resist the offensive against the no-strike pledge. They have thrust to the background their secondary differences of factional power politics. Peeling the rising cold wind of militancy at their backs, Thomas, Addes, Reuther and Frankensteen are huddled together for mutual warmth and protection.
This protective alliance was formally acknowledged last week when the four spoke jointly under the auspices of the Stalinist Committee to Uphold the No- Strike Pledge over a Michigan radio hook-up. Thus the auto workers were treated to the spectacle of Addes, Frankensteen, Thomas and Reuther – bitter factionalists in the struggle for posts – joining hands under Stalinist sponsorship to hold the line for the no-strike policy ip the referendum.
UAW Heads
While a convention motion prohibits them from using the union’s resources or institutions for propagandizing their partisan position in the referendum, the UAW heads have uncovered enough loop-holes to evade the intent of the motion. Under the technical heading of “news,” the United Automobile Worker, official UAW organ, has printed huge slugs of CIO President Philip Murray’s speeches for the no-strike policy, CIO resolutions, Roosevelt’s anti-strike letter, etc.
This is but a minor example of the ability of the leadership to get around the restricting motion. All the payrollees and porkchoppers of the international, beholden to the officialdom for their cushy jobs, are being pressed into service – or else. Under the pretext of performing union “business”, and travelling at union expense, the officials find time to do a “little” anti-strike caucus organizing “on the side.”
Last week, they called a National UAW Educational Conference in Milwaukee. The assembled local and district officials and porkchoppers, after going through the motions of a formal session, adjourned to an anti-strike caucus meeting in the same hotel. This meeting was openly announced by leaflet. Addes himself flew to Milwaukee to address this pep meeting for the no-strike pledge.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Aluminum Trust Prospers</h1>
<h4>Uncle Sam Plays Santa Claus to Add to Mellon’s Millions —</h4>
<h3>(July 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_29" target="new">Vol. V No. 29</a>, 19 July 1941, p. 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">On June 9th, when Roosevelt sent the Army to break the North American aviation strike which had been on but a few days, there was elsewhere, unknown to the public, a far longer and more important cessation of work. Since early in May, work on the giant Boeing bombers had been halted and was not likely to be resumed until some time in July.</p>
<p>Why didn’t Roosevelt send the troops to get work started on the Boeing bombers?</p>
<p>Because he couldn’t blame that on strikers. Boeing was shut down because of lack of aluminum. On May 24 the <strong>New York Herald Tribune</strong> reported in an obscure item that work on Boeing bombers had “ceased entirely early this month and will not be resumed until some time in July.” Nor is Boeing the only plant affected. It is now officially admitted that potential production of military aircraft will in all probability be curtailed by some 25 per cent for lack of aluminum.</p>
<p><em>That loss is equivalent to a three-month continuous strike shutting down the entire aircraft industry. If such a strike took place, the Army would be shooting down the strikers. But neither the Army nor any other agency of government is doing anything to the Mellon family’s Aluminum Corporation of America, the monopoly which deliberately engineered this aluminum shortage.</em></p>
<p>This shortage is not a result of miscalculation. On the contrary, it is a deliberately contrived shortage, as the following account will demonstrate.<br>
</p>
<h4>OPM Connived at Concealing Shortage</h4>
<p class="fst">For a year and a half the OPM and other government agencies issued misleading reports assuring the country that there were ample production facilities for aluminum. These reports were based solely on the estimates supplied to the government by the Aluminum Corporation of America – ALCOA.</p>
<p>That this was a conscious deception, carried out in the interest of ALCOA, has been established by the facts uncovered by the Truman Senate Investigating Committee, which issued its report on June 26.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“It is reasonable to conclude,” charged the Truman report, “that ALCOA had convinced OPM of the adequacy of the supply in order to avoid the possibility that anyone else would go into a field which they had for so many years successfully monopolized.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">ALCOA, as the committee discloses, was producing only 327,000,000 pounds of aluminum in 1939, the total national supply By next year it will be unable to produce more than 730,000,000 pounds. Yet the total civilian and war needs for this vital metal in 1942 are fixed by the committee at not less than 2,100,000,000 pounds, – 1,600,000,000 for military purposes alone.</p>
<p>When the Reynolds Metal company sought government aid in 1940 to enter into aluminum production. Stettinius, acting for the OPM, cold-shouldered the proposition, stating that the production facilities were already adequate. Reynolds went instead to the RFC, and finally secured a loan with which it is building a plant in the Tennessee Valley which will be able to produce 120,000,000 pounds by next year. Thus, the total production of aluminum by 1942 will be not more than 850,000,000 pounds as compared to a need for 2,100,000,000 pounds.</p>
<p>The OPM ignored offers of other companies, including that of a Swiss company which proposed to build a plant here entirely at its own expense.<br>
</p>
<h4>ALCOA Reaps the Fruit Gained by Its Lies</h4>
<p class="fst">Why did ALCOA lie about its producing capacity? What was behind this fraud, the Truman report makes clear:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“They (the company) may have reasoned that in its desperation the Government would do almost anything to increase the supply and that ALCOA would be favorably treated by the Government in order to insure an adequate supply for defense purposes.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">That’s just what is happening. Instead of being punished for its lies, ALCOA has the government doing “almost anything” for ALCOA.</p>
<p>The main item in the cost of production of aluminum is electric power. Power production, says the Truman report, represents “the greatest dollar investment in the facilities for the production of aluminum.”</p>
<p>But for decades ALCOA has been battling with the Federal Power Commission, refusing to build power plants under the government regulations, which set certain limitations on profits chargeable to power plants. For example, in 1937 ALCOA abandoned plans to build a power plant in North Carolina, for reasons which the Federal Power Commission termed the company’s “complete unwillingness, to accept the provisions of federal law.” Likewise, despite an announcement by the OPM in October 1940 that ALCOA had agreed to build a power project at Fontana on the Little Tennessee River as its “contribution to national defense,” no actual steps to build it have occurred.</p>
<p><em>And why should ALCOA spend its own money to build power plants? When it can get the government to build them with its own money and “sell” the power to the company at the cheapest possible rates? When it can get the government to arrange for tens of millions of people to curtail their use of electric power for the benefit of ALCOA?</em></p>
<p>Southerners are being told to do without, lights, air-conditioning, electric fans. Movie houses are being run on short schedules and night ball-games are being cancelled. Atlanta turned out its brightest street lights, required merchants to shut off their electric signs, etc.</p>
<p>OPM chiefs William S. Knudsen, and Sidney Hillman, in a “message to the people of the South” on July 1 called on them to “make every possible effort to save electric current in their area so that it could be devoted to the production of aluminum so vitally needed for airplanes.”</p>
<p>ALCOA’s plan to get the people to foot the bill for its major production cost, power, is thus bearing fruit!<br>
</p>
<h4>Government Will Build for Alcoa’s Benefit</h4>
<p class="fst">Although the desperate aluminum situation could not be concealed after February, the OPM did not in any way propose to intrude on the ALCOA monopoly. Instead of preparing to erect goverment plants to meet the needs of “national defense,” the OPM simply instituted priorities, that is, it arbitrarily diverted aluminum supplies from civilian consumption goods to military needs, thus immediately raising the prices on aluminum products and throwing thousands of workers in the consumers goods industries out of work. Even so, aluminum production was still short by some 600,000,000 pounds of military needs alone.</p>
<p>Than began a heightened campaign to get scrap aluminum from civilians. Housewives were, to sacrifice their pots and pans, etc. The impression was falsely given that this would help to meet the need. Yet all that OPM experts expect to get by this means is 15 million pounds of aluminum – 2½ per cent of the shortage!</p>
<p>Now the government has announced plans to build eight new aluminum plants, with a total capacity of 600,000,000 pounds. When these plants are completed, they will bring the supply of aluminum, including imports, from ALCOA’S Canadian subsidiary, just about up to military needs, with none to spare for civilian goods.</p>
<p><em>But these plants will not be ready for a year and more; and when they are completed, the government announces, they will be operated by the Reynolds Metal Company, Bohn Aluminum and – ALCOA. ALCOA is to get the lion’s share!</em></p>
<p>As for power, TWA is now building four new dams, with a capacity of 300,000 kilowatts a year, and $40,000,000 was appropriated last week for the construction of four more TVA dams and additional turbines and transmission facilities. These additional facilities will just about meet the needs of ALCOA, which is the largest industrial consumer of TVA power.</p>
<p>The government is thus planning to provide just enough additional power to give ALCOA the cheapest possible production costs, but not enough to infringe on the private power companies or to prevent the restriction of electricity in the homes.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, the Department of Justice monopoly suit against the Aluminum Company of America, which was instituted last February, has been pigeon-holed, like the similar suit in 1937.</p>
<p>The aluminum situation gives immediate and decisive point to the demand of the Socialist Workers Party:</p>
<p class="c"><strong>Expropriate the war industries and operate them under workers control!</strong></p>
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Art Preis
The Aluminum Trust Prospers
Uncle Sam Plays Santa Claus to Add to Mellon’s Millions —
(July 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 29, 19 July 1941, p. 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
On June 9th, when Roosevelt sent the Army to break the North American aviation strike which had been on but a few days, there was elsewhere, unknown to the public, a far longer and more important cessation of work. Since early in May, work on the giant Boeing bombers had been halted and was not likely to be resumed until some time in July.
Why didn’t Roosevelt send the troops to get work started on the Boeing bombers?
Because he couldn’t blame that on strikers. Boeing was shut down because of lack of aluminum. On May 24 the New York Herald Tribune reported in an obscure item that work on Boeing bombers had “ceased entirely early this month and will not be resumed until some time in July.” Nor is Boeing the only plant affected. It is now officially admitted that potential production of military aircraft will in all probability be curtailed by some 25 per cent for lack of aluminum.
That loss is equivalent to a three-month continuous strike shutting down the entire aircraft industry. If such a strike took place, the Army would be shooting down the strikers. But neither the Army nor any other agency of government is doing anything to the Mellon family’s Aluminum Corporation of America, the monopoly which deliberately engineered this aluminum shortage.
This shortage is not a result of miscalculation. On the contrary, it is a deliberately contrived shortage, as the following account will demonstrate.
OPM Connived at Concealing Shortage
For a year and a half the OPM and other government agencies issued misleading reports assuring the country that there were ample production facilities for aluminum. These reports were based solely on the estimates supplied to the government by the Aluminum Corporation of America – ALCOA.
That this was a conscious deception, carried out in the interest of ALCOA, has been established by the facts uncovered by the Truman Senate Investigating Committee, which issued its report on June 26.
“It is reasonable to conclude,” charged the Truman report, “that ALCOA had convinced OPM of the adequacy of the supply in order to avoid the possibility that anyone else would go into a field which they had for so many years successfully monopolized.”
ALCOA, as the committee discloses, was producing only 327,000,000 pounds of aluminum in 1939, the total national supply By next year it will be unable to produce more than 730,000,000 pounds. Yet the total civilian and war needs for this vital metal in 1942 are fixed by the committee at not less than 2,100,000,000 pounds, – 1,600,000,000 for military purposes alone.
When the Reynolds Metal company sought government aid in 1940 to enter into aluminum production. Stettinius, acting for the OPM, cold-shouldered the proposition, stating that the production facilities were already adequate. Reynolds went instead to the RFC, and finally secured a loan with which it is building a plant in the Tennessee Valley which will be able to produce 120,000,000 pounds by next year. Thus, the total production of aluminum by 1942 will be not more than 850,000,000 pounds as compared to a need for 2,100,000,000 pounds.
The OPM ignored offers of other companies, including that of a Swiss company which proposed to build a plant here entirely at its own expense.
ALCOA Reaps the Fruit Gained by Its Lies
Why did ALCOA lie about its producing capacity? What was behind this fraud, the Truman report makes clear:
“They (the company) may have reasoned that in its desperation the Government would do almost anything to increase the supply and that ALCOA would be favorably treated by the Government in order to insure an adequate supply for defense purposes.”
That’s just what is happening. Instead of being punished for its lies, ALCOA has the government doing “almost anything” for ALCOA.
The main item in the cost of production of aluminum is electric power. Power production, says the Truman report, represents “the greatest dollar investment in the facilities for the production of aluminum.”
But for decades ALCOA has been battling with the Federal Power Commission, refusing to build power plants under the government regulations, which set certain limitations on profits chargeable to power plants. For example, in 1937 ALCOA abandoned plans to build a power plant in North Carolina, for reasons which the Federal Power Commission termed the company’s “complete unwillingness, to accept the provisions of federal law.” Likewise, despite an announcement by the OPM in October 1940 that ALCOA had agreed to build a power project at Fontana on the Little Tennessee River as its “contribution to national defense,” no actual steps to build it have occurred.
And why should ALCOA spend its own money to build power plants? When it can get the government to build them with its own money and “sell” the power to the company at the cheapest possible rates? When it can get the government to arrange for tens of millions of people to curtail their use of electric power for the benefit of ALCOA?
Southerners are being told to do without, lights, air-conditioning, electric fans. Movie houses are being run on short schedules and night ball-games are being cancelled. Atlanta turned out its brightest street lights, required merchants to shut off their electric signs, etc.
OPM chiefs William S. Knudsen, and Sidney Hillman, in a “message to the people of the South” on July 1 called on them to “make every possible effort to save electric current in their area so that it could be devoted to the production of aluminum so vitally needed for airplanes.”
ALCOA’s plan to get the people to foot the bill for its major production cost, power, is thus bearing fruit!
Government Will Build for Alcoa’s Benefit
Although the desperate aluminum situation could not be concealed after February, the OPM did not in any way propose to intrude on the ALCOA monopoly. Instead of preparing to erect goverment plants to meet the needs of “national defense,” the OPM simply instituted priorities, that is, it arbitrarily diverted aluminum supplies from civilian consumption goods to military needs, thus immediately raising the prices on aluminum products and throwing thousands of workers in the consumers goods industries out of work. Even so, aluminum production was still short by some 600,000,000 pounds of military needs alone.
Than began a heightened campaign to get scrap aluminum from civilians. Housewives were, to sacrifice their pots and pans, etc. The impression was falsely given that this would help to meet the need. Yet all that OPM experts expect to get by this means is 15 million pounds of aluminum – 2½ per cent of the shortage!
Now the government has announced plans to build eight new aluminum plants, with a total capacity of 600,000,000 pounds. When these plants are completed, they will bring the supply of aluminum, including imports, from ALCOA’S Canadian subsidiary, just about up to military needs, with none to spare for civilian goods.
But these plants will not be ready for a year and more; and when they are completed, the government announces, they will be operated by the Reynolds Metal Company, Bohn Aluminum and – ALCOA. ALCOA is to get the lion’s share!
As for power, TWA is now building four new dams, with a capacity of 300,000 kilowatts a year, and $40,000,000 was appropriated last week for the construction of four more TVA dams and additional turbines and transmission facilities. These additional facilities will just about meet the needs of ALCOA, which is the largest industrial consumer of TVA power.
The government is thus planning to provide just enough additional power to give ALCOA the cheapest possible production costs, but not enough to infringe on the private power companies or to prevent the restriction of electricity in the homes.
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice monopoly suit against the Aluminum Company of America, which was instituted last February, has been pigeon-holed, like the similar suit in 1937.
The aluminum situation gives immediate and decisive point to the demand of the Socialist Workers Party:
Expropriate the war industries and operate them under workers control!
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>FEPC Filibuster</h1>
<h3>(26 January 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_04" target="new">Vol. X No. 4</a>, 26 January 1946, p. 8.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Last week the Southern Bourbon Democrats fee the Senate were caught on the horns of a dilemma.</p>
<p>They were torn between two frenzied desires. While anxious to speed enactment of anti-labor legislation, they were confronted by the unexpected “emergency” called forth by the sudden presentation of a bill for establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission.</p>
<p>The Bilbo Bourbons decided that the most immediately pressing problem before the nation is to defend “white supremacy” against the ominous consequences of any federal law against racial discrimination in industry,</p>
<p>When a Senate majority on January 17 passed Senator Chavez’s motion to take up the FEPC bill, a bloc of 15 Southern Senators rose to arms and launched their mightiest weapon – the filibuster.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">Again a handful of wilful, vicious Southern leaders of the Democratic Party, dredged from the malodorous swamps of Southern white ruling class anti-Negro hatred, prepared to rant indefinitely in order to block action on the FEPC.</p>
<p>Senator George of Georgia declaimed in outrage, against introducing the FEPC bill “in a time of industrial crisis, when the very life of this nation as at stake.”</p>
<p>But that did not prevent him and his colleagues from proceeding to gum up the machinery of the Senate indefinitely in order to ensure that 13,000,000 Negro citizens of the United States are kept in a permanent position of servitude and second-class citizenship.</p>
<p>Senators Eastland and Bilbo, veteran banner- bearers for the “white supermacy” scum, proclaimed their determination to talk the Senate to death, if need be. Eastland said he personally was prepared to talk two years against the measure. More modestly, Bilbo said, “I propose to exercise my right to speak twice on the measure – for 30 days each time.”</p>
<p>Cautious Senator Ellender of Louisiana merely promised to spout “as long as God gives me breath.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">First in the hopper of the “1,000 amendments” which the Bourbon bloc threatens to attach to the FEPC bill is an anti-closed shop rider prohibiting discrimination in employment because of “race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, OR MEMBERSHIP OR NON-MEMBERSHIP IN OR AFFILIATION OR NON-AFFILIATION WITH ANY LABOR UNIONS.”</p>
<p>On January 18 the FEPC opponents revealed their first filibuster tactic. They began introducing “corrective” proposals for the permanent journal of proceedings which required the reading of interminable records out loud.</p>
<p>Senator Overton of Louisiana opened a discussion devoted to the Journal, the Congressional Record, the Bible and anecdotes of his childhood days (apparently not yet over.)</p>
<p>This included the usual insulting tirade against Negroes such as:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Any nigger girl can walk into my office and the Federal Government would attempt to make me place her side by side by side with the other girls. I don’t know what I’d do if anyone told me to do that.”</p>
<p class="fst">Meanwhile the threat of “secession” spread its pall over the Senate. Senator Eastland telegraphed the Mississippi state legislature to “protect the sovereignty of Mississippi and the liberty and freedom of our people (meaning the rich Southern whites) by the passage of a nullification proclamation” if the FEPC bill should pass.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">As for the Senate majority, they stand apparently helpless to halt the filibuster. They excuse their inaction on the ground of respecting the “democratic right” of this ultra-reactionary handful of “white supremacists” elected by a tiny minority in the poll-tax states.</p>
<p>For what are the democratic rights of 13,000,000 Negro Americans compared to the right of Senatorial “free speech” for their most vicious oppressors?</p>
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Joseph Keller
FEPC Filibuster
(26 January 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 4, 26 January 1946, p. 8.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Last week the Southern Bourbon Democrats fee the Senate were caught on the horns of a dilemma.
They were torn between two frenzied desires. While anxious to speed enactment of anti-labor legislation, they were confronted by the unexpected “emergency” called forth by the sudden presentation of a bill for establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission.
The Bilbo Bourbons decided that the most immediately pressing problem before the nation is to defend “white supremacy” against the ominous consequences of any federal law against racial discrimination in industry,
When a Senate majority on January 17 passed Senator Chavez’s motion to take up the FEPC bill, a bloc of 15 Southern Senators rose to arms and launched their mightiest weapon – the filibuster.
* * *
Again a handful of wilful, vicious Southern leaders of the Democratic Party, dredged from the malodorous swamps of Southern white ruling class anti-Negro hatred, prepared to rant indefinitely in order to block action on the FEPC.
Senator George of Georgia declaimed in outrage, against introducing the FEPC bill “in a time of industrial crisis, when the very life of this nation as at stake.”
But that did not prevent him and his colleagues from proceeding to gum up the machinery of the Senate indefinitely in order to ensure that 13,000,000 Negro citizens of the United States are kept in a permanent position of servitude and second-class citizenship.
Senators Eastland and Bilbo, veteran banner- bearers for the “white supermacy” scum, proclaimed their determination to talk the Senate to death, if need be. Eastland said he personally was prepared to talk two years against the measure. More modestly, Bilbo said, “I propose to exercise my right to speak twice on the measure – for 30 days each time.”
Cautious Senator Ellender of Louisiana merely promised to spout “as long as God gives me breath.”
* * *
First in the hopper of the “1,000 amendments” which the Bourbon bloc threatens to attach to the FEPC bill is an anti-closed shop rider prohibiting discrimination in employment because of “race, creed, color, national origin, ancestry, OR MEMBERSHIP OR NON-MEMBERSHIP IN OR AFFILIATION OR NON-AFFILIATION WITH ANY LABOR UNIONS.”
On January 18 the FEPC opponents revealed their first filibuster tactic. They began introducing “corrective” proposals for the permanent journal of proceedings which required the reading of interminable records out loud.
Senator Overton of Louisiana opened a discussion devoted to the Journal, the Congressional Record, the Bible and anecdotes of his childhood days (apparently not yet over.)
This included the usual insulting tirade against Negroes such as:
“Any nigger girl can walk into my office and the Federal Government would attempt to make me place her side by side by side with the other girls. I don’t know what I’d do if anyone told me to do that.”
Meanwhile the threat of “secession” spread its pall over the Senate. Senator Eastland telegraphed the Mississippi state legislature to “protect the sovereignty of Mississippi and the liberty and freedom of our people (meaning the rich Southern whites) by the passage of a nullification proclamation” if the FEPC bill should pass.
* * *
As for the Senate majority, they stand apparently helpless to halt the filibuster. They excuse their inaction on the ground of respecting the “democratic right” of this ultra-reactionary handful of “white supremacists” elected by a tiny minority in the poll-tax states.
For what are the democratic rights of 13,000,000 Negro Americans compared to the right of Senatorial “free speech” for their most vicious oppressors?
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman ‘Fair Deal’ Proposals<br>
Sugar-coat Military Program</h1>
<h4>Calls for Universal Military Training,<br>
Curb on Strikes and Power to Freeze Wages</h4>
<h3>(10 January 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_02" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 2</a>, 10 January 1949, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst"><strong>Truman’s ‘State of the Union’ message to Congress on Jan. 5 is largely a restatement of various promises of limited social reforms he has made over the past three years. Some of them he now puts forth in watered-down form. Others he repeats in vague language. Together they amount to no more than crumbs in terms of the needs of the people and the vast potentialities of this nation to produce abundance and security for everyone.</strong></p>
<p>But this “Fair Deal” program, as it is being described, is mere sugar-coating for. Truman’s basic program. That is the total militarization of the country. It is this program Truman emphasized when he called once more for the establishment of universal military training and the creation of the most costly and gigantic military machine ever known.</p>
<p><em>His administration, he stressed, would “hold resolutely” to its course of the “cold war,” creation and arming of a world-wide military alliance against the Soviet Union, intervention in other countries, bolstering of bankrupt capitalist regimes everywhere, financing the suppression of colonial revolts and working class uprisings, etc.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Its Real Meaning</h4>
<p class="fst">Truman did not mention the veal, meaning of this program for the American people themselves. For instance, just before delivering his message, he held a White House conference with Democratic Congressional leaders at which it was agreed that Truman will propose the biggest peacetime federal budget in history – about $42 billion. Of this, not less than $25 billion will go for direct military expenditures and the conduct of the “cold war.”</p>
<p>This budget, represents one-fifth of the total annual national income. Taken together with the astronomical U.S. war debt of $252 billion, to which Truman made pointed reference in his message, this cost of militarism past and present is the chief force powering the inflation rocket.</p>
<p>Although Truman dwelt at length on the dangers of inflation, he did not dare to put his finger on the basic cause – the military program. Therefore he could not propose a continuation or repetition of feeble and inadequate measures. His principal proposal was for “stand-by” powers to put price ceilings on certain commodities. Tied to this was a demand for power'“to limitArt Preis Truman ‘Fair Deal’ Proposals Sugar-coat Military Program Calls for Universal Military Training, Curb on Strikes and Power to Freeze Wages (10 January 1949) unjustified wage adjustments” – that is, to freeze wages. It was under this same formula: that wages were frozen during the war, while, prices kept rising steadily.</p>
<p><em>In his references to his military program Truman was silent about the sinister invasion of. all spheres of American life by the military machine and its officer caste. He said nothing about the legislation being urged by his Defense Secretary James Forrest al to give the military agencies, without prior Congressional permission, blanket authority to send military forces anywhere in the world, and to provide military support to any country at war and, in the process, to clamp the vise of military control on the people at home.</em></p>
<p>It is against this background of wealth-devouring militarism and the extension of totalitarian Prussian-type military control that the reform proposals of Truman must be viewed. Then it can be seen now meager and temporary these proposed reforms are.<br>
</p>
<h4>Housing Inadequacy</h4>
<p class="fst">Nothing makes the contrast so clear as Truman’s specific program on the most acute and pressing social problem in America today – housing. Housing experts agree that we need, for the adequate housing of America’s growing population, not less than 25 million new housing units in the shortest possible time. Truman in his message proposed a government low-cost building program of – one million units in the next seven years! That wouldn’t even make up for the annual loss of housing due to deterioration, fire and flood. He himself said: “Five million families are still living in slums and firetraps. Three million families share their homes with others.”</p>
<p>He admitted the gross inadequacy of the social security system, in which a third of the workers are not covered, and which provides the starvation pittance of $25 a month on the average to the pauperized aged. Truman said the coverage should be extended and the sums increased – but he mentioned nothing specific. He was equally vague when it came to the details of his proposed health insurance bill, extension of unemployment insurance benefits, etc. Even if present benefits were doubled, remember, they would only be restored to their purchasing power of 1939. Moreover, this entire program is to be paid out of new payroll taxes on the workers.</p>
<p><em>On the most publicized promise of his campaign, to press for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act Truman is openly hedging.</em> He is <em>not</em> for unconditional repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law and restoration intact of the Wagner Act, as most of labor had demanded. He proposes to restore some of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act in the form of an “improved” Wagner Act which, he said, calls for “means for settling or preventing strikes in vital industries which affect the public interest.” His advisor: have spelled this out as injunctive powers, “cooling off” period: and “fact-finding” government boards – all key clauses of the Taft-Hartley Act.<br>
</p>
<h4>Civil Rights</h4>
<p class="fst">Truman, devoted just five sentences to his much - promised civil rights program – a key pledge of his campaign. He merely stated that he still stood on his program of last year, including an anti-poll tax law, anti-lynching law and a Fair Employment Practices Commission. It remains to be seen whether he will really fight for these things, or continue as in the past to merely repeat them for the record.</p>
<p>But we know that Truman is not doing anything to end conditions of racial discrimination and segregation where he can act right now. As Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces he could end military segregation with a simple executive order – but he doesn’t do so. As Chief Executive he could end discrimination and segregation in the rest of the government departments and agencies – but he doesn’t do so.</p>
<p><em>Meanwhile, in spite of the protests of the CIO and other labor organizations, he is continuing and extending his Gestapo-like witch-hunt among government- employes and is victimizing individuals and organizations on the basis of his “subversive” political blacklist. He is sponsoring revision of the Espionage Act to legalize the present invasion of constitutional rights being perpetrated in his “loyalty” purge.</em></p>
<p>One thing Truman was most specific on – another $4 billion in taxes must be raised. He said these must be raised from the corporations “principally.” But he said not a word on the quickest and surest way to get these taxes – the restoration of the excess profits tax that the Democratic-controlled 79th Congress abolished. That’s the tax. above all, the corporations don’t want restored. And Truman indicated he’s respecting their wishes.</p>
<p>The Trumanite labor leaders have promptly hailed Truman’s message as a “Fair Deal.” On cold analysis it is a War Deal, with some sops for the people thrown in. It solves none of the basic problems now facing the masses. It promises new burdens when the full program of militarism is unfolded.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman ‘Fair Deal’ Proposals
Sugar-coat Military Program
Calls for Universal Military Training,
Curb on Strikes and Power to Freeze Wages
(10 January 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 2, 10 January 1949, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Truman’s ‘State of the Union’ message to Congress on Jan. 5 is largely a restatement of various promises of limited social reforms he has made over the past three years. Some of them he now puts forth in watered-down form. Others he repeats in vague language. Together they amount to no more than crumbs in terms of the needs of the people and the vast potentialities of this nation to produce abundance and security for everyone.
But this “Fair Deal” program, as it is being described, is mere sugar-coating for. Truman’s basic program. That is the total militarization of the country. It is this program Truman emphasized when he called once more for the establishment of universal military training and the creation of the most costly and gigantic military machine ever known.
His administration, he stressed, would “hold resolutely” to its course of the “cold war,” creation and arming of a world-wide military alliance against the Soviet Union, intervention in other countries, bolstering of bankrupt capitalist regimes everywhere, financing the suppression of colonial revolts and working class uprisings, etc.
Its Real Meaning
Truman did not mention the veal, meaning of this program for the American people themselves. For instance, just before delivering his message, he held a White House conference with Democratic Congressional leaders at which it was agreed that Truman will propose the biggest peacetime federal budget in history – about $42 billion. Of this, not less than $25 billion will go for direct military expenditures and the conduct of the “cold war.”
This budget, represents one-fifth of the total annual national income. Taken together with the astronomical U.S. war debt of $252 billion, to which Truman made pointed reference in his message, this cost of militarism past and present is the chief force powering the inflation rocket.
Although Truman dwelt at length on the dangers of inflation, he did not dare to put his finger on the basic cause – the military program. Therefore he could not propose a continuation or repetition of feeble and inadequate measures. His principal proposal was for “stand-by” powers to put price ceilings on certain commodities. Tied to this was a demand for power'“to limitArt Preis Truman ‘Fair Deal’ Proposals Sugar-coat Military Program Calls for Universal Military Training, Curb on Strikes and Power to Freeze Wages (10 January 1949) unjustified wage adjustments” – that is, to freeze wages. It was under this same formula: that wages were frozen during the war, while, prices kept rising steadily.
In his references to his military program Truman was silent about the sinister invasion of. all spheres of American life by the military machine and its officer caste. He said nothing about the legislation being urged by his Defense Secretary James Forrest al to give the military agencies, without prior Congressional permission, blanket authority to send military forces anywhere in the world, and to provide military support to any country at war and, in the process, to clamp the vise of military control on the people at home.
It is against this background of wealth-devouring militarism and the extension of totalitarian Prussian-type military control that the reform proposals of Truman must be viewed. Then it can be seen now meager and temporary these proposed reforms are.
Housing Inadequacy
Nothing makes the contrast so clear as Truman’s specific program on the most acute and pressing social problem in America today – housing. Housing experts agree that we need, for the adequate housing of America’s growing population, not less than 25 million new housing units in the shortest possible time. Truman in his message proposed a government low-cost building program of – one million units in the next seven years! That wouldn’t even make up for the annual loss of housing due to deterioration, fire and flood. He himself said: “Five million families are still living in slums and firetraps. Three million families share their homes with others.”
He admitted the gross inadequacy of the social security system, in which a third of the workers are not covered, and which provides the starvation pittance of $25 a month on the average to the pauperized aged. Truman said the coverage should be extended and the sums increased – but he mentioned nothing specific. He was equally vague when it came to the details of his proposed health insurance bill, extension of unemployment insurance benefits, etc. Even if present benefits were doubled, remember, they would only be restored to their purchasing power of 1939. Moreover, this entire program is to be paid out of new payroll taxes on the workers.
On the most publicized promise of his campaign, to press for the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act Truman is openly hedging. He is not for unconditional repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law and restoration intact of the Wagner Act, as most of labor had demanded. He proposes to restore some of the worst features of the Taft-Hartley Act in the form of an “improved” Wagner Act which, he said, calls for “means for settling or preventing strikes in vital industries which affect the public interest.” His advisor: have spelled this out as injunctive powers, “cooling off” period: and “fact-finding” government boards – all key clauses of the Taft-Hartley Act.
Civil Rights
Truman, devoted just five sentences to his much - promised civil rights program – a key pledge of his campaign. He merely stated that he still stood on his program of last year, including an anti-poll tax law, anti-lynching law and a Fair Employment Practices Commission. It remains to be seen whether he will really fight for these things, or continue as in the past to merely repeat them for the record.
But we know that Truman is not doing anything to end conditions of racial discrimination and segregation where he can act right now. As Commander-in-Chief of all the armed forces he could end military segregation with a simple executive order – but he doesn’t do so. As Chief Executive he could end discrimination and segregation in the rest of the government departments and agencies – but he doesn’t do so.
Meanwhile, in spite of the protests of the CIO and other labor organizations, he is continuing and extending his Gestapo-like witch-hunt among government- employes and is victimizing individuals and organizations on the basis of his “subversive” political blacklist. He is sponsoring revision of the Espionage Act to legalize the present invasion of constitutional rights being perpetrated in his “loyalty” purge.
One thing Truman was most specific on – another $4 billion in taxes must be raised. He said these must be raised from the corporations “principally.” But he said not a word on the quickest and surest way to get these taxes – the restoration of the excess profits tax that the Democratic-controlled 79th Congress abolished. That’s the tax. above all, the corporations don’t want restored. And Truman indicated he’s respecting their wishes.
The Trumanite labor leaders have promptly hailed Truman’s message as a “Fair Deal.” On cold analysis it is a War Deal, with some sops for the people thrown in. It solves none of the basic problems now facing the masses. It promises new burdens when the full program of militarism is unfolded.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Toledo Edison Strike Is Called Off<br>
After Paralyzing Industry</h1>
<h3>Press Frantic</h3>
<h4>Enormous Pressure Causes Cave-In of Strike</h4>
<h3>(June 1935)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_25" target="new">Vol. I No. 25</a>, 8 June 1935, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<td>
<h4>BULLETIN</h4>
<p class="fst"><strong>As we go to press news comes from Toledo that the power strike which threatened to shut down power in a radius of 800 square miles and effecting twenty-three cities in three states has been called off pending negotiations on their demand for a 20 percent increase in wages. It is understood that these negotiations are to start Monday with officials of the Henry L. Doherty Company in New York, parent company of the Toledo Edison. Oliver Myers, business agent of the union, attributed the sudden termination of the strike to pressure “from many sources,” The union workers voted 237 to 22 to end the strike. The men are to be paid in full for the day of the strike.</strong></p>
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<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">TOLEDO, Ohio, Jane 5. – A strike of employees of the Toledo Edison Co., which supplies the electrical power for Toledo, northwest Ohio, northeast Indiana and southeast Michigan. Including a score of communities, began at 7:00 A.M. this morning. 500 maintenance, production and technical workers, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 245, were the first to walk out. 126 office workers also struck and picketed the Toledo Edison Building. Plans for the strike, announced by Oliver Myers, business agent of the local, indicated that it will not be totally effective until tomorrow morning, as the shut-down will be progressive, only a portion of workers having been called on strike today.</p>
<p>Hysteria has struck the local press, as well as all the other agencies and groups of the capitalist class of the city. Operation of industrial plants, street cars, street lights and other major sources of electrical consumption has not as yet been seriously curtailed.<br>
</p>
<h4>Frenzied Attack on Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">There is a strong possibility that the strike may be suspended or terminated before morning. Terrific pressure is being exerted from every side, press, government, “outstanding citizens,” business and church groups – and the international officers of the union – upon the local strikers and their representatives to suspend the strike for arbitration or pending negotiations. A meeting of striking electrical workers will be held at midnight tonight to act upon the suggestion of the international officers that the strike be suspended pending further negotiations.</p>
<p>The striking office workers have already voted in meeting tonight to return to work if the maintenance, production and technical workers decide to accept the proposal of the international officers.</p>
<p>There is a strong feeling in organized labor circles here that such a move may prove to be disastrous for the strikers, as arbitration or negotiations without picket lines will mean another shell-game settlement which will give the workers nothing. Edward F. McGrady, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and notorious government strike-breaker who did such effective work here just three weeks ago in the Chevrolet strike, is expected on the scene momentarily.<br>
</p>
<h4>Press Demands Violence</h4>
<p class="fst">The company has already announced its intentions of operating the power and transmission plants in the face of mass picket lines. The newspapers are openly calling for police force and demanding that the plants be operated under any conditions. Should the strike continue and go into full effect, a certain amount of power will be brought into the city from outside Ohio communities. This will be sufficient only for emergency maintenance of electric power for hospitals and similar institutions, it is believed.</p>
<p>The question of the maintenance of the strike rests largely at present upon the position taken by Oliver Myers, in whom the almost sole leadership of the strike now rests. While Myers has been known to have strong progressive and militant tendencies, it is felt that his long association with the old-line A.F. of L. officialdom may influence him to agree to suspension of the strike under this terrific pressure.</p>
<p>The strike was called following lengthy negotiations with the Toledo Edison management, when union requests for a 20 percent wage-increase were flatly turned down. The Toledo Edison Co. is one of Henry L. Dougherty’s holdings. It has been making enormous profits and has been exacting terrifically high rates from the consumers.</p>
<p>Failure of the strikers’ representatives to issue statements or a strike-bulletin or leaflets to offset the unrestrained lies and frenzied distortions of the press has been a distinct weakness of the strike tactics so far.</p>
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Art Preis
Toledo Edison Strike Is Called Off
After Paralyzing Industry
Press Frantic
Enormous Pressure Causes Cave-In of Strike
(June 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 25, 8 June 1935, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
BULLETIN
As we go to press news comes from Toledo that the power strike which threatened to shut down power in a radius of 800 square miles and effecting twenty-three cities in three states has been called off pending negotiations on their demand for a 20 percent increase in wages. It is understood that these negotiations are to start Monday with officials of the Henry L. Doherty Company in New York, parent company of the Toledo Edison. Oliver Myers, business agent of the union, attributed the sudden termination of the strike to pressure “from many sources,” The union workers voted 237 to 22 to end the strike. The men are to be paid in full for the day of the strike.
* * *
TOLEDO, Ohio, Jane 5. – A strike of employees of the Toledo Edison Co., which supplies the electrical power for Toledo, northwest Ohio, northeast Indiana and southeast Michigan. Including a score of communities, began at 7:00 A.M. this morning. 500 maintenance, production and technical workers, members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Local 245, were the first to walk out. 126 office workers also struck and picketed the Toledo Edison Building. Plans for the strike, announced by Oliver Myers, business agent of the local, indicated that it will not be totally effective until tomorrow morning, as the shut-down will be progressive, only a portion of workers having been called on strike today.
Hysteria has struck the local press, as well as all the other agencies and groups of the capitalist class of the city. Operation of industrial plants, street cars, street lights and other major sources of electrical consumption has not as yet been seriously curtailed.
Frenzied Attack on Strike
There is a strong possibility that the strike may be suspended or terminated before morning. Terrific pressure is being exerted from every side, press, government, “outstanding citizens,” business and church groups – and the international officers of the union – upon the local strikers and their representatives to suspend the strike for arbitration or pending negotiations. A meeting of striking electrical workers will be held at midnight tonight to act upon the suggestion of the international officers that the strike be suspended pending further negotiations.
The striking office workers have already voted in meeting tonight to return to work if the maintenance, production and technical workers decide to accept the proposal of the international officers.
There is a strong feeling in organized labor circles here that such a move may prove to be disastrous for the strikers, as arbitration or negotiations without picket lines will mean another shell-game settlement which will give the workers nothing. Edward F. McGrady, Assistant Secretary of Labor, and notorious government strike-breaker who did such effective work here just three weeks ago in the Chevrolet strike, is expected on the scene momentarily.
Press Demands Violence
The company has already announced its intentions of operating the power and transmission plants in the face of mass picket lines. The newspapers are openly calling for police force and demanding that the plants be operated under any conditions. Should the strike continue and go into full effect, a certain amount of power will be brought into the city from outside Ohio communities. This will be sufficient only for emergency maintenance of electric power for hospitals and similar institutions, it is believed.
The question of the maintenance of the strike rests largely at present upon the position taken by Oliver Myers, in whom the almost sole leadership of the strike now rests. While Myers has been known to have strong progressive and militant tendencies, it is felt that his long association with the old-line A.F. of L. officialdom may influence him to agree to suspension of the strike under this terrific pressure.
The strike was called following lengthy negotiations with the Toledo Edison management, when union requests for a 20 percent wage-increase were flatly turned down. The Toledo Edison Co. is one of Henry L. Dougherty’s holdings. It has been making enormous profits and has been exacting terrifically high rates from the consumers.
Failure of the strikers’ representatives to issue statements or a strike-bulletin or leaflets to offset the unrestrained lies and frenzied distortions of the press has been a distinct weakness of the strike tactics so far.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Toledo Auto Progressives Organize</h1>
<h3>Dillon and Co. Wreck Chance to Win Strike</h3>
<h4>Temporary Setback Is Signal to Cement Ranks</h4>
<h3>(May 1935)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_22" target="new">Vol. I No. 22</a>, 18 May 1935, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<p class="fst">TOLEDO, May 14. – After three weeks of magnificent battling, the union auto workers of the Chevrolet Motor Ohio Company, whose mass picket lines had stopped the production of Chevrolet transmissions and closed down almost the entire Chevrolet Corporation, voted last night to accept the offer of a four cents an hour wage-increase and other slight concessions and to return to work. For three weeks these inexperienced workers, who have been in the union but a month, fought back blow for blow against the financial might of General Motors, the pressure of the government, the cunning propaganda of the capitalist press. They went down to temporary and partial defeat at last through the treachery of Francis Dillon, national organizer for the A.F. of L, in the auto industry, and Fred Schwake, the business agent of their local whom they had trusted. But they went down fighting.</p>
<p>In one of the most spectacular and rousing floor fights ever waged, the militant progressives in the union, denounced as “Muste men” by Dillon, took the meeting last night by storm, hooted Dillon from the Civic Auditorium at the outset of the session, and were on the verge of tearing to pieces the General Motors offer, which failed to grant them one important concession, including their demands for union recognition, a signed contract and straight seniority without the notorious “merit clause.”</p>
<h4>Lack of Experience</h4>
<p class="fst">Their lack of experience and desire for “democracy” and “fair play,” which was appealed to by equally inexperienced members of the strike committee, caused them to rescind a previous motion which they had passed excluding all persons from speaking on the proposals but the strikers and the members of the strike committee.</p>
<p>Dillon was recalled into the meeting and given the chance to speak on the agreement which he, Edward F. McGrady, assistant secretary of labor, and William S. Knudsen, executive vice-president of General Motors, had devised last Saturday. Dillon had already expressed his sentiments on this union-busting agreement Monday in the daily press, which featured his statement urging the strikers to accept the terms of the proposal, and hinted that the progressives who fought its acceptance, including every one of the elected strike committee but one, were “reds,” through a vague allusion to “those who presume without authority to speak in the interests of the workers the language of a Soviet Dictatorship.” His public statement was in direct violation of an agreement made with the strike committee not to express himself on the proposed settlement prior to the meeting.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fulminates at Muste</h4>
<p class="fst">Dillon was given the platform to speak. Two hours before he had raged from the auditorium howling that the union was expelled from the A.F. of L. The press reported him as saying then, before he entered a cab to go to his hotel, “Let Muste run their outfit. If they want an I.W.W. or a communist outfit let them have it. They’re out! They’re out! I disown them.”</p>
<p>Three times during his ensuing speech Dillon was booed and hissed down. But with infinite cunning, demagogy and the basest lies he shouted and threatened. His big club was the threat to withdraw the charter of the entire local if the strikers did not accept the company’s offer. The local has members in nineteen Toledo plants. Slowly he ground into the minds of many of the strikers the fear that he would smash their union if they did not end the strike. In return for the “democratic” gesture pf the strikers, Dillon used the foulest and most undemocratic tactics ever devised to force the company agreement down the strikers’ throats. He used their very union loyalty, their desire to maintain their union at all costs, to betray them.</p>
<p>During the course of his tirade, Dillon snarled an attack at A.J. Muste, who has been in Toledo assisting the local branch in developing the forces and strategy of the union progressives in the strike. He shouted “Muste won’t feed you!” A score of voices hurled back, “Neither will you!”<br>
</p>
<h4>Schwake Rats for Dillon</h4>
<p class="fst">Despite Dillon’s threats, lies, cajolery and brow-beating, it is doubtful that Dillon would have succeeded in his purpose of smashing the strike, had it not been for Schwake.</p>
<p>While slips of paper were being passed out for ballots intended to record a secret vote – a maneuver to catch the “weak-sisters” in the union put over by the pressure of the executive committee of the local which has been stringing along with the Dillon gang and bucking the progressives on the strike committee – Schwake stepped to the “mike” and pleaded with the strikers to accept the proposals. He told the strikers to think of their wives and children going hungry if the strike continued further, he argued that they weren’t strong enough to battle General Motors despite the fact that the strikers had forced the company to terms on point after point in the course of the strike, he pointed to Dillon’s threat to lift their charter.</p>
<p>Schwake swung enough of them to carry the vote for Dillon. Until he spoke, the strikers were dead-set against acceptance. But Schwake was the man whom they regarded as one of their own trusted leaders. It was he they had voted for in the Auto Labor Board election one month before. All during the strike he had presented himself as a militant, although behind the scenes he went along with Dillon, fought the progressives under cover, prevented the publication of the strike bulletin, helped keep strike funds from the strike committee, tried to start a “red scare” and prevented the distribution of hand-bills by other working class organizations, and sought to take over the leadership of the strike from the elected strike committee. Knifes Roland</p>
<p>But the strikers didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t understand, these things. They didn’t know Schwake was betraying Jimmy Roland, their fighting chairman of the strike committee and leader of the militants. They didn’t know that it was Jim Roland who was most active in the organizing of the progressives in the local after last year’s Auto-Lite strike, in ousting Ramsey and Bossier, the former reactionary leaders, and putting Schwake in as business agent. They didn’t know Schwake was inexperienced and vacillating and that he had been run for office with the promise that he would accept the advice of the experienced union men like Roland. When Schwake turned tail, the props were knocked from under many of them. They became confused. Their confidence in the correctness of their militant position was shattered. Many faltered as he spoke all through the vote-taking. Only after the vote was announced and the meeting officially adjourned did they begin to realize that they had voted for something they did not want, that they had been fooled and tricked.</p>
<p>Several hundred of the most militant remained in the hall for an hour after adjournment. They were fighting mad. They wanted to hold another meeting to reconsider. They wanted to return and man the picket lines despite everything. In this group were the best fighters, the most self-sacrificing, the picket captains, strike committee members. But it was too late. For the moment demoralization had set in. The majority of the strikers had dispersed, most of them in disgust. They were weary of body and torn in spirit. Some of the bravest of them wept.</p>
<p>Jimmy Roland had given the real militant leadership and direction, had fought Dillon and his gang almost single-handed, had kept the strike committee time after time from capitulating to the pressure of the government, the press and the General Motors officials, had personally spread the strike to other cities in the face of the opposition of the A.F. of L. bureaucrats, was indeed the spark-plug of the entire fight. He fought in his grim bull-dog honest fashion to the bitter end, but he seemed in a daze during the entire meeting. Only 24 years old, he did not as yet possess the skill and knowledge to offset the maneuvers of Dillon. His very incorruptible honesty and sense of fair play betrayed him. For it was he who finally persuaded the strikers to permit Dillon to speak. He did it in the sense of demonstrating to Dillon what democratic unionism means. And then Dillon thanked him by knifing him and the strikers in the back.<br>
</p>
<h4>Progressives Organize</h4>
<p class="fst">The results of this strike cannot be termed an utter defeat, however, although the auto workers have lost their finest opportunity to date to force the auto barons to their knees throughout the country.</p>
<p>Out of this fight has grown, a force of militant progressives in the auto unions who have demonstrated conclusively their power and ability. The struggle they put on in Toledo, although meeting with temporary defeat, has already aroused progressives in the auto unions throughout the country. Tonight these progressives are planning to get together, to lay out a national program, to organize, train and discipline themselves more thoroughly.</p>
<p>Moreover, this strike has proved to the auto workers that the auto barons and corporations are not invincible. A small handful, comparatively, of Toledo strikers, militant and determined, forced General Motors to negotiate with them directly, against all the previously declared policy of General Motors. They won some concessions, even though meagre and apt to be withdrawn if the union men fail to push forward their organization and fight every attempt to violate the terms. Further, they have demonstrated the power of organized labor in action, when even a small group of workers, willing to fight, can successfully cripple a giant organization like the Chevrolet Corp.<br>
</p>
<h4>W.P. in the Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">The methods by which the progressives in this strike were organized have laid the groundwork for more successful and wide-spread attempts in the future. Although most of the strikers were new union men, the militants were drawn together. Bill Prior did a splendid job on this. A real floor machine, inexperienced as it was, was developed, and it put up a magnificent battle when all the circumstances are considered. A regular series of leaflets were issued to the strikers by the Workers Party. These were eagerly read and were tremendously effective in suggesting to the strikers the practical and necessary course to be pursued in the strike. Key men, rank and file leaders, were educated and trained in parliamentary procedure, strike tactics, and militant unionism. For one brief period, despite all the handicaps, it seemed as though the progressives would carry the day.</p>
<p>This year the production season is almost over. But the seeds of clean, progressive, fighting unionism which the W.P. has succeeded in implanting in the minds of the auto union members will bear fruit.</p>
<p>At a meeting of the Chevrolet local held tonight, a thousand union men cheered the President of the local when he said: “In three weeks you won more than General Motors has granted any group of workers in twenty years. What can you do in another six months! Build the union for the next fight.” Walter Gunthrop, President of the Central Labor Union of Toledo, denounced the settlement as a bastard affair whose mother was Francis J. Dillon. Midwife at the birth was James Wilson, Green’s personal representative, he stated. The men unanimously pledged themselves to stick in the union, throw out their false leaders, and build the organization toward a fight to a finish with General Motors.</p>
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Art Preis
Toledo Auto Progressives Organize
Dillon and Co. Wreck Chance to Win Strike
Temporary Setback Is Signal to Cement Ranks
(May 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 22, 18 May 1935, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
TOLEDO, May 14. – After three weeks of magnificent battling, the union auto workers of the Chevrolet Motor Ohio Company, whose mass picket lines had stopped the production of Chevrolet transmissions and closed down almost the entire Chevrolet Corporation, voted last night to accept the offer of a four cents an hour wage-increase and other slight concessions and to return to work. For three weeks these inexperienced workers, who have been in the union but a month, fought back blow for blow against the financial might of General Motors, the pressure of the government, the cunning propaganda of the capitalist press. They went down to temporary and partial defeat at last through the treachery of Francis Dillon, national organizer for the A.F. of L, in the auto industry, and Fred Schwake, the business agent of their local whom they had trusted. But they went down fighting.
In one of the most spectacular and rousing floor fights ever waged, the militant progressives in the union, denounced as “Muste men” by Dillon, took the meeting last night by storm, hooted Dillon from the Civic Auditorium at the outset of the session, and were on the verge of tearing to pieces the General Motors offer, which failed to grant them one important concession, including their demands for union recognition, a signed contract and straight seniority without the notorious “merit clause.”
Lack of Experience
Their lack of experience and desire for “democracy” and “fair play,” which was appealed to by equally inexperienced members of the strike committee, caused them to rescind a previous motion which they had passed excluding all persons from speaking on the proposals but the strikers and the members of the strike committee.
Dillon was recalled into the meeting and given the chance to speak on the agreement which he, Edward F. McGrady, assistant secretary of labor, and William S. Knudsen, executive vice-president of General Motors, had devised last Saturday. Dillon had already expressed his sentiments on this union-busting agreement Monday in the daily press, which featured his statement urging the strikers to accept the terms of the proposal, and hinted that the progressives who fought its acceptance, including every one of the elected strike committee but one, were “reds,” through a vague allusion to “those who presume without authority to speak in the interests of the workers the language of a Soviet Dictatorship.” His public statement was in direct violation of an agreement made with the strike committee not to express himself on the proposed settlement prior to the meeting.
Fulminates at Muste
Dillon was given the platform to speak. Two hours before he had raged from the auditorium howling that the union was expelled from the A.F. of L. The press reported him as saying then, before he entered a cab to go to his hotel, “Let Muste run their outfit. If they want an I.W.W. or a communist outfit let them have it. They’re out! They’re out! I disown them.”
Three times during his ensuing speech Dillon was booed and hissed down. But with infinite cunning, demagogy and the basest lies he shouted and threatened. His big club was the threat to withdraw the charter of the entire local if the strikers did not accept the company’s offer. The local has members in nineteen Toledo plants. Slowly he ground into the minds of many of the strikers the fear that he would smash their union if they did not end the strike. In return for the “democratic” gesture pf the strikers, Dillon used the foulest and most undemocratic tactics ever devised to force the company agreement down the strikers’ throats. He used their very union loyalty, their desire to maintain their union at all costs, to betray them.
During the course of his tirade, Dillon snarled an attack at A.J. Muste, who has been in Toledo assisting the local branch in developing the forces and strategy of the union progressives in the strike. He shouted “Muste won’t feed you!” A score of voices hurled back, “Neither will you!”
Schwake Rats for Dillon
Despite Dillon’s threats, lies, cajolery and brow-beating, it is doubtful that Dillon would have succeeded in his purpose of smashing the strike, had it not been for Schwake.
While slips of paper were being passed out for ballots intended to record a secret vote – a maneuver to catch the “weak-sisters” in the union put over by the pressure of the executive committee of the local which has been stringing along with the Dillon gang and bucking the progressives on the strike committee – Schwake stepped to the “mike” and pleaded with the strikers to accept the proposals. He told the strikers to think of their wives and children going hungry if the strike continued further, he argued that they weren’t strong enough to battle General Motors despite the fact that the strikers had forced the company to terms on point after point in the course of the strike, he pointed to Dillon’s threat to lift their charter.
Schwake swung enough of them to carry the vote for Dillon. Until he spoke, the strikers were dead-set against acceptance. But Schwake was the man whom they regarded as one of their own trusted leaders. It was he they had voted for in the Auto Labor Board election one month before. All during the strike he had presented himself as a militant, although behind the scenes he went along with Dillon, fought the progressives under cover, prevented the publication of the strike bulletin, helped keep strike funds from the strike committee, tried to start a “red scare” and prevented the distribution of hand-bills by other working class organizations, and sought to take over the leadership of the strike from the elected strike committee. Knifes Roland
But the strikers didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t understand, these things. They didn’t know Schwake was betraying Jimmy Roland, their fighting chairman of the strike committee and leader of the militants. They didn’t know that it was Jim Roland who was most active in the organizing of the progressives in the local after last year’s Auto-Lite strike, in ousting Ramsey and Bossier, the former reactionary leaders, and putting Schwake in as business agent. They didn’t know Schwake was inexperienced and vacillating and that he had been run for office with the promise that he would accept the advice of the experienced union men like Roland. When Schwake turned tail, the props were knocked from under many of them. They became confused. Their confidence in the correctness of their militant position was shattered. Many faltered as he spoke all through the vote-taking. Only after the vote was announced and the meeting officially adjourned did they begin to realize that they had voted for something they did not want, that they had been fooled and tricked.
Several hundred of the most militant remained in the hall for an hour after adjournment. They were fighting mad. They wanted to hold another meeting to reconsider. They wanted to return and man the picket lines despite everything. In this group were the best fighters, the most self-sacrificing, the picket captains, strike committee members. But it was too late. For the moment demoralization had set in. The majority of the strikers had dispersed, most of them in disgust. They were weary of body and torn in spirit. Some of the bravest of them wept.
Jimmy Roland had given the real militant leadership and direction, had fought Dillon and his gang almost single-handed, had kept the strike committee time after time from capitulating to the pressure of the government, the press and the General Motors officials, had personally spread the strike to other cities in the face of the opposition of the A.F. of L. bureaucrats, was indeed the spark-plug of the entire fight. He fought in his grim bull-dog honest fashion to the bitter end, but he seemed in a daze during the entire meeting. Only 24 years old, he did not as yet possess the skill and knowledge to offset the maneuvers of Dillon. His very incorruptible honesty and sense of fair play betrayed him. For it was he who finally persuaded the strikers to permit Dillon to speak. He did it in the sense of demonstrating to Dillon what democratic unionism means. And then Dillon thanked him by knifing him and the strikers in the back.
Progressives Organize
The results of this strike cannot be termed an utter defeat, however, although the auto workers have lost their finest opportunity to date to force the auto barons to their knees throughout the country.
Out of this fight has grown, a force of militant progressives in the auto unions who have demonstrated conclusively their power and ability. The struggle they put on in Toledo, although meeting with temporary defeat, has already aroused progressives in the auto unions throughout the country. Tonight these progressives are planning to get together, to lay out a national program, to organize, train and discipline themselves more thoroughly.
Moreover, this strike has proved to the auto workers that the auto barons and corporations are not invincible. A small handful, comparatively, of Toledo strikers, militant and determined, forced General Motors to negotiate with them directly, against all the previously declared policy of General Motors. They won some concessions, even though meagre and apt to be withdrawn if the union men fail to push forward their organization and fight every attempt to violate the terms. Further, they have demonstrated the power of organized labor in action, when even a small group of workers, willing to fight, can successfully cripple a giant organization like the Chevrolet Corp.
W.P. in the Strike
The methods by which the progressives in this strike were organized have laid the groundwork for more successful and wide-spread attempts in the future. Although most of the strikers were new union men, the militants were drawn together. Bill Prior did a splendid job on this. A real floor machine, inexperienced as it was, was developed, and it put up a magnificent battle when all the circumstances are considered. A regular series of leaflets were issued to the strikers by the Workers Party. These were eagerly read and were tremendously effective in suggesting to the strikers the practical and necessary course to be pursued in the strike. Key men, rank and file leaders, were educated and trained in parliamentary procedure, strike tactics, and militant unionism. For one brief period, despite all the handicaps, it seemed as though the progressives would carry the day.
This year the production season is almost over. But the seeds of clean, progressive, fighting unionism which the W.P. has succeeded in implanting in the minds of the auto union members will bear fruit.
At a meeting of the Chevrolet local held tonight, a thousand union men cheered the President of the local when he said: “In three weeks you won more than General Motors has granted any group of workers in twenty years. What can you do in another six months! Build the union for the next fight.” Walter Gunthrop, President of the Central Labor Union of Toledo, denounced the settlement as a bastard affair whose mother was Francis J. Dillon. Midwife at the birth was James Wilson, Green’s personal representative, he stated. The men unanimously pledged themselves to stick in the union, throw out their false leaders, and build the organization toward a fight to a finish with General Motors.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>WLB Chairman Davis Gives Whitewash<br>
Excuse for Board’s Stalling Policies</h1>
<h3>(24 February 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_08" target="new">Vol. IX No. 8</a>, 24 February 1945, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">William H. Davis, chairman of the pro-corporation War Labor Board,
last week came out with a prize example of hypocrisy. Trying to
conceal the Board’s function as the “graveyard of
grievances,” Davis complained that the Board is receiving too
many cases which could be settled by direct negotiations between
unions and employers.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Too often,” he asserted with a straight
face, “the board finds a tendency among both unions and
employers to drop small differences into the board’s lap for
settlement rather than seek agreement through negotiations. This
delays the settlement of major issues, since the board refers back to
the parties issues it feels have not been adequately negotiated.”</p>
<p class="fst">The statement that, “both” the unions and employers
“drop small differences into the board’s lap,” can
evoke only a big horse-laugh from the workers. The very existence of
the compulsory arbitration board, dominated by the employers and
their “public” agents, has provided the pretext for the
corporations to brush aside direct negotiations with the unions.</p>
<p>The employers know that without the right to strike the workers
cannot clinch their bargaining power. They know that the WLB was
established to permit the corporations to stall the workers’
just demands. And they know that Roosevelt’s wage-freezing
policy has bound the WLB to the policy of forbidding wage grants to
the workers.</p>
<p>Of course, the corporations have not hesitated to make the best
possible use of this anti-labor board. As most local union grievance
committees can testify, the moment the board was put into operation,
the bosses answered: every grievance complaint with “Take it to
the WLB!” The workers were put on a merry-go-round, chasing
back and forth between, the board and the employers.</p>
<p>But suppose the companies and unions did agree beforehand to a
contract? Then the WLB insisted on its “right” to pass
upon the terms of such a contract. Wage concessions made to the
workers were often and promptly prohibited – and the board
didn’t spend a year or two years coming to a decision.</p>
<p><em>That’s what happened in the coal miners case two years
ago. After the union and the operators agreed to a contract, the WLB
intervened to rule the wage concessions a “violation” of
Roosevelt’s “wage-stabilization” policy. Just a
couple of weeks ago in New York, the WLB stepped in to order a wage
cut for 8,000 pocketbook workers after the manufacturers had granted
bonus and merit increases.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Sheer Hypocrisy</h4>
<p class="fst">What Davis is trying to do with his hypocritical statement is to
whitewash the WLB and refurbish its tattered prestige. The workers
have come to understand its function. They are demanding that the
union representatives withdraw from the board. Davis is seeking to
prop up the board by disclaiming its pro-employer function as an
agency for stalling the workers’ demands. That is why he tries
to attribute its red- tape to “both” the workers and
bosses who “refuse” to negotiate “small
grievances.”</p>
<p>This hypocrisy stands doubly exposed in the light of the most
important wage cases now pending in the WLB. What has held up the
decisions in the packinghouse, auto, textile, glass, aluminum cases?
Some of them have been before the WLB for over two years. Were they
just swamped out by the volume of “small grievances”
pouring into the board? No, these cases have been deliberately
stalled by the WLB. And when this device became too crude and
obvious, Roosevelt tried to take the heat off his WLB by getting his
Director of Economic Stabilization Vinson to block any WLB wage
decisions.</p>
<p><em>For Davis to pretend that the Board would not continue to stall
grievances if it didn’t have so many is as absurd as contending
that a wild tiger devours raw meat not by preference but only because
it can’t get fresh vegetables.</em></p>
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Art Preis
WLB Chairman Davis Gives Whitewash
Excuse for Board’s Stalling Policies
(24 February 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 8, 24 February 1945, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
William H. Davis, chairman of the pro-corporation War Labor Board,
last week came out with a prize example of hypocrisy. Trying to
conceal the Board’s function as the “graveyard of
grievances,” Davis complained that the Board is receiving too
many cases which could be settled by direct negotiations between
unions and employers.
“Too often,” he asserted with a straight
face, “the board finds a tendency among both unions and
employers to drop small differences into the board’s lap for
settlement rather than seek agreement through negotiations. This
delays the settlement of major issues, since the board refers back to
the parties issues it feels have not been adequately negotiated.”
The statement that, “both” the unions and employers
“drop small differences into the board’s lap,” can
evoke only a big horse-laugh from the workers. The very existence of
the compulsory arbitration board, dominated by the employers and
their “public” agents, has provided the pretext for the
corporations to brush aside direct negotiations with the unions.
The employers know that without the right to strike the workers
cannot clinch their bargaining power. They know that the WLB was
established to permit the corporations to stall the workers’
just demands. And they know that Roosevelt’s wage-freezing
policy has bound the WLB to the policy of forbidding wage grants to
the workers.
Of course, the corporations have not hesitated to make the best
possible use of this anti-labor board. As most local union grievance
committees can testify, the moment the board was put into operation,
the bosses answered: every grievance complaint with “Take it to
the WLB!” The workers were put on a merry-go-round, chasing
back and forth between, the board and the employers.
But suppose the companies and unions did agree beforehand to a
contract? Then the WLB insisted on its “right” to pass
upon the terms of such a contract. Wage concessions made to the
workers were often and promptly prohibited – and the board
didn’t spend a year or two years coming to a decision.
That’s what happened in the coal miners case two years
ago. After the union and the operators agreed to a contract, the WLB
intervened to rule the wage concessions a “violation” of
Roosevelt’s “wage-stabilization” policy. Just a
couple of weeks ago in New York, the WLB stepped in to order a wage
cut for 8,000 pocketbook workers after the manufacturers had granted
bonus and merit increases.
Sheer Hypocrisy
What Davis is trying to do with his hypocritical statement is to
whitewash the WLB and refurbish its tattered prestige. The workers
have come to understand its function. They are demanding that the
union representatives withdraw from the board. Davis is seeking to
prop up the board by disclaiming its pro-employer function as an
agency for stalling the workers’ demands. That is why he tries
to attribute its red- tape to “both” the workers and
bosses who “refuse” to negotiate “small
grievances.”
This hypocrisy stands doubly exposed in the light of the most
important wage cases now pending in the WLB. What has held up the
decisions in the packinghouse, auto, textile, glass, aluminum cases?
Some of them have been before the WLB for over two years. Were they
just swamped out by the volume of “small grievances”
pouring into the board? No, these cases have been deliberately
stalled by the WLB. And when this device became too crude and
obvious, Roosevelt tried to take the heat off his WLB by getting his
Director of Economic Stabilization Vinson to block any WLB wage
decisions.
For Davis to pretend that the Board would not continue to stall
grievances if it didn’t have so many is as absurd as contending
that a wild tiger devours raw meat not by preference but only because
it can’t get fresh vegetables.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Protocol M and Project X</h1>
<h3>(19 April 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_16" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 16</a>, 19 April 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">An important commodity on the international market has suffered a recent slump – forgeries. Time was when the intelligence services of the big powers could pick up first-class, detection-proof political forgeries for a song. Then shady operators, eager for quick killings in this profitable trade, began to flood the market with cheap, shoddy products. Not only has the saturation of the market tended to depress prices, but the crude quality of the goods has undermined public confidence.</p>
<p>A case in point is “Protocol M.” That is the document, you may recall, which the British several months ago alleged was a copy of the Cominform’s blueprint for launching large-scale sabotage, strikes and revolts in the Ruhr. The British intelligence service, by sheer coincidence, released this document to the public press at precisely the moment when the Ruhr workers were striking because of starvation rations.</p>
<p>Now it is revealed that the British intelligence service – generally reputed to be shrewd and sharp traders – were “hoodwinked” when they laid out good British sterling for “Protocol M.” They have “discovered that it actually had been prepared by an anti-Communist German,” reports C.L. Sulzberger in the April 11 <b>N.Y. Times</b>. “Moreover, a few days ago,” reports Sulzberger, “the French Ministry of the Interior was duped by a document purporting to give inside information on the future activities of the French Communist Party.” As a consequence, observes Sulzberger, “it is likely this bonanza for fake documents will end.”</p>
<p>Fortunately this does not affect reliable brokers for the Allied imperialists like the Social Democratic labor leaders, ex-Gestapo agents, etc. Washington already has an international WPA project ready to take care of these worthy persons. It is called “Project X” and is in the nature of a supplement to the European “Recovery” Program. In fact, it’s Wall Street’s “Protocol M” – and no forgery either.</p>
<p>“Project X,” we are informed by a March 25 United Press dispatch from Washington “is a mysterious, multi-million dollar” program “to finance anti-Communist underground-forces behind the iron curtain” and similar groups in the Western Bloc countries. A bill before Congress would provide 30 million dollars as a starter to finance anything from newspapers to arms for pro-capitalist and anti-Soviet agents.</p>
<p>“Project X” – even without benefit of official Congressional sanction – has already been spreading its benificence. In Italy, Sulzberger reports, in the current election campaign “the United States and the Catholic Church have been helping out with funds.” He says “it is also known that United States agents are trying to break the hammerlock of Communist control over French dock workers.”</p>
<p>With Washington tossing big money around in Europe, ready to buy up anything from “good” forged documents to political parties, it is rumored that certain American labor leaders are thinking of emigrating back to the Old Country. Why should foreigners lap up the gravy, while 100 American union leaders do the State Department’s dirty chores for nothing?</p>
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Art Preis
Protocol M and Project X
(19 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 16, 19 April 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
An important commodity on the international market has suffered a recent slump – forgeries. Time was when the intelligence services of the big powers could pick up first-class, detection-proof political forgeries for a song. Then shady operators, eager for quick killings in this profitable trade, began to flood the market with cheap, shoddy products. Not only has the saturation of the market tended to depress prices, but the crude quality of the goods has undermined public confidence.
A case in point is “Protocol M.” That is the document, you may recall, which the British several months ago alleged was a copy of the Cominform’s blueprint for launching large-scale sabotage, strikes and revolts in the Ruhr. The British intelligence service, by sheer coincidence, released this document to the public press at precisely the moment when the Ruhr workers were striking because of starvation rations.
Now it is revealed that the British intelligence service – generally reputed to be shrewd and sharp traders – were “hoodwinked” when they laid out good British sterling for “Protocol M.” They have “discovered that it actually had been prepared by an anti-Communist German,” reports C.L. Sulzberger in the April 11 N.Y. Times. “Moreover, a few days ago,” reports Sulzberger, “the French Ministry of the Interior was duped by a document purporting to give inside information on the future activities of the French Communist Party.” As a consequence, observes Sulzberger, “it is likely this bonanza for fake documents will end.”
Fortunately this does not affect reliable brokers for the Allied imperialists like the Social Democratic labor leaders, ex-Gestapo agents, etc. Washington already has an international WPA project ready to take care of these worthy persons. It is called “Project X” and is in the nature of a supplement to the European “Recovery” Program. In fact, it’s Wall Street’s “Protocol M” – and no forgery either.
“Project X,” we are informed by a March 25 United Press dispatch from Washington “is a mysterious, multi-million dollar” program “to finance anti-Communist underground-forces behind the iron curtain” and similar groups in the Western Bloc countries. A bill before Congress would provide 30 million dollars as a starter to finance anything from newspapers to arms for pro-capitalist and anti-Soviet agents.
“Project X” – even without benefit of official Congressional sanction – has already been spreading its benificence. In Italy, Sulzberger reports, in the current election campaign “the United States and the Catholic Church have been helping out with funds.” He says “it is also known that United States agents are trying to break the hammerlock of Communist control over French dock workers.”
With Washington tossing big money around in Europe, ready to buy up anything from “good” forged documents to political parties, it is rumored that certain American labor leaders are thinking of emigrating back to the Old Country. Why should foreigners lap up the gravy, while 100 American union leaders do the State Department’s dirty chores for nothing?
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Budget Sacrifices<br>
Human Needs to War Costs</h1>
<h4>A-Bomb Gets 7 Times More Than New Housing Program</h4>
<h3>(17 January 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_03" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 3</a>, 17 January 1950, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>$32 billion of Truman’s proposed $42 billion federal budget for the next fiscal year will go to jiay for past wars and preparations for the next war. Only $10 billion will go to all other government expenditures.</strong></p>
<p>Less than $600 million is formally budgeted for the start of Truman’s promised “Fair Deal” program of housing, aid to education, health insurance, etc. This contrasts with $740 million Truman asks for the Atomic Energy Commission to develop and produce atomic bombs.</p>
<p><em>The A-bomb alone will get nearly seven times as much as Truman’s much-vaunted low-cost housing program. Proposed new projects for low-rent housing will get only $129 million.</em></p>
<p>Extension of social security benefits, including old-age pensions, and financing of the proposed health insurance program will come directly from the pay envelopes of the workers themselves. The budget calls for increased payroll taxes of nearly $2 billion per year.</p>
<p>Topping the budget list is $14.3 billion for direct military expenditures – an increase of $2.5 billion over last year’s budget. For “international affairs” – that is, the conduct of the “cold war” another $6.7 billion is added.</p>
<p><em>Thus, one half of the entire budget – the largest war budget in peacetime history – will go to feed militarism at home and abroad.</em> However, Truman warns in his budget message that “defense expenditures ... are expected to he higher in 1951.” He added that the budget for “international affairs” does not include sums for military supplies that he intends to request later for North Atlantic Pact countries and “certain other countries.”</p>
<p>One of the four biggest budget items is interest on the country’s $252 billion war debt – $5.4 billion to the bankers and bond-holders to maintain the government’s Credit, so it can pile up new debt to keep the arms profiteers happy.</p>
<p>Another 13% of the budget – $5.5 billion – goes to veterans benefits. This is a slash of $1.3 billion from last year’s figures. Part of this cut in benefits to the victims of past wars is the cancellation of 24 veterans’ hospital projects and a reduction in the planned capacity of 14 other hospitals. This is the only war cost that has not been increased.</p>
<p><em>Proposed expenditures for direct military and “cold war”, purposes – exclusive of the A-bomb and other war items concealed under headings like “Natural Resources Development” – are nearly ten times the total sums-budgeted for social welfare, health and security; These amount, to less than $2.4 billion, an increase of only $400 million over the last budget.</em></p>
<p>Total expenditures for “Housing and Community Facilities,” including projects already authorized and under way, will be increased by only $39 million, to $388 million. But only $144 million of this is for public housing, including the $129 million project yet to be authorized by Congress.</p>
<p><em>Here in cold dollars and cents, stripped of all demagogy and “Fair Deal” phraseology, is the real Truman program. It spells “guns instead of butter,” a heavier and heavier tax load on the masses, militarism and war.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Truman Budget Sacrifices
Human Needs to War Costs
A-Bomb Gets 7 Times More Than New Housing Program
(17 January 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 3, 17 January 1950, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
$32 billion of Truman’s proposed $42 billion federal budget for the next fiscal year will go to jiay for past wars and preparations for the next war. Only $10 billion will go to all other government expenditures.
Less than $600 million is formally budgeted for the start of Truman’s promised “Fair Deal” program of housing, aid to education, health insurance, etc. This contrasts with $740 million Truman asks for the Atomic Energy Commission to develop and produce atomic bombs.
The A-bomb alone will get nearly seven times as much as Truman’s much-vaunted low-cost housing program. Proposed new projects for low-rent housing will get only $129 million.
Extension of social security benefits, including old-age pensions, and financing of the proposed health insurance program will come directly from the pay envelopes of the workers themselves. The budget calls for increased payroll taxes of nearly $2 billion per year.
Topping the budget list is $14.3 billion for direct military expenditures – an increase of $2.5 billion over last year’s budget. For “international affairs” – that is, the conduct of the “cold war” another $6.7 billion is added.
Thus, one half of the entire budget – the largest war budget in peacetime history – will go to feed militarism at home and abroad. However, Truman warns in his budget message that “defense expenditures ... are expected to he higher in 1951.” He added that the budget for “international affairs” does not include sums for military supplies that he intends to request later for North Atlantic Pact countries and “certain other countries.”
One of the four biggest budget items is interest on the country’s $252 billion war debt – $5.4 billion to the bankers and bond-holders to maintain the government’s Credit, so it can pile up new debt to keep the arms profiteers happy.
Another 13% of the budget – $5.5 billion – goes to veterans benefits. This is a slash of $1.3 billion from last year’s figures. Part of this cut in benefits to the victims of past wars is the cancellation of 24 veterans’ hospital projects and a reduction in the planned capacity of 14 other hospitals. This is the only war cost that has not been increased.
Proposed expenditures for direct military and “cold war”, purposes – exclusive of the A-bomb and other war items concealed under headings like “Natural Resources Development” – are nearly ten times the total sums-budgeted for social welfare, health and security; These amount, to less than $2.4 billion, an increase of only $400 million over the last budget.
Total expenditures for “Housing and Community Facilities,” including projects already authorized and under way, will be increased by only $39 million, to $388 million. But only $144 million of this is for public housing, including the $129 million project yet to be authorized by Congress.
Here in cold dollars and cents, stripped of all demagogy and “Fair Deal” phraseology, is the real Truman program. It spells “guns instead of butter,” a heavier and heavier tax load on the masses, militarism and war.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Imprisoned Miner Has Long<br>
Record of Union Struggle</h1>
<h3>(3 June 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_23" target="new">Vol. IX No. 23</a>, 9 June 1945, pp. 1 & 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">RICHEYVILLE, Pa., June 3 – What sort of man is William Patterson, the first American worker to be imprisoned under the Smith-Connally anti-strike law? Why did the capitalist government pick him as its first victim?</p>
<p>This afternoon, in this small mining town where UMW Local 2399 meets, I learned about Bill Patterson from the men who know him best, his union brothers, some of whom have worked in the mines with him since 1927.</p>
<p>Steve Panak, Local 2399 president, stated as a score of others crowded around the meeting platform and expressed their confirmation, that “ever since I’ve known Bill, he’s been a good union man, one hundred per cent.<br>
</p>
<h4>Miner 17 Years</h4>
<p class="fst">“He’s worked in this mine here (Vesta No. 4), why, I should say, for about 17 years.” Someone supplied the date. “Yes, that’s right, since 1927.”</p>
<p>To show the regard his fellow workers have for Patterson, Panak explained, “he’s served as mine committeeman off and on for four or five terms. He was always a man to put up a good fight for the rest of the men.”</p>
<p>As a committeeman, what kind of conditions was it his duty to fight against, I asked.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Well, just to give you an idea of the kind of chiseling the company tries to put over all the time,” Panak explained, “we had to have the scales at the tipple checked six times in the past three months. And we found them off balance five out of six times. They’re always trying to short-weigh us.” .</p>
<p class="fst">Another worker interjected, “And how about the hard slate?” What was that, I asked.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The company won’t pay us for when we have to work on hard slate where you can’t get the coal out. We have to pay for the powder to blast the slate where we can’t get any coal out.”</p>
<p class="quote">“If you want to know about chiseling, like Bill always had to fight against,” another stated, “it’s like the company putting supervisory monthly salary men, who’re non-union, to doing the jobs that’re under union contract – taking the work from the union men.”</p>
<p class="fst">Then they told me about the terrible accidents that are always happening in the mine. They told me case after case of men killed, maimed, seriously injured, in the past few months alone because the company doesn’t maintain proper equipment and safety conditions.</p>
<p>One worker was killed last Good Friday. Another was killed by a fall of rock on April 23. His brother had been badly hurt at the very same spot only the week before. Another man recently had his leg cut off. He was struck by a trip of coal – he had no man-way to go into on the haulage road. Another recently had his arm “cut clean off” by a fall of rock. Dozens of others have been injured – too numerous to mention.</p>
<p>Those are the conditions that Bill Patterson has fought against for 17 years. “He was a good fighter for the men – that’s why they made him the goat!” That’s how one worker summed it up, explaining why Bill Patterson is sitting in prison in Uniontown today.</p>
<p>I asked about Bill’s wife and family, because I was unable to get over to Daisytown to visit his home in time to get a report in to <strong>The Militant</strong>.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Naturally, she’s very shocked and upset by what they put onto Bill,” said one of the men who’d been to see her to find out what the union could do for her.</p>
<p class="quote">“Bill’s wife, Ruby, is right with the union. She’s a real miner’s wife. Brought up in a miner’s family. She knows what the miners have to put up with. Why I bet you she’s been put out on the road three or four times with her family back in some of the strikes in the ’twenties.”</p>
<p class="fst">The miners here aren’t going to let Bill Patterson and his “real miner’s wife” down. And it’s up to the rest of labor not to let them down either.</p>
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Art Preis
Imprisoned Miner Has Long
Record of Union Struggle
(3 June 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 23, 9 June 1945, pp. 1 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
RICHEYVILLE, Pa., June 3 – What sort of man is William Patterson, the first American worker to be imprisoned under the Smith-Connally anti-strike law? Why did the capitalist government pick him as its first victim?
This afternoon, in this small mining town where UMW Local 2399 meets, I learned about Bill Patterson from the men who know him best, his union brothers, some of whom have worked in the mines with him since 1927.
Steve Panak, Local 2399 president, stated as a score of others crowded around the meeting platform and expressed their confirmation, that “ever since I’ve known Bill, he’s been a good union man, one hundred per cent.
Miner 17 Years
“He’s worked in this mine here (Vesta No. 4), why, I should say, for about 17 years.” Someone supplied the date. “Yes, that’s right, since 1927.”
To show the regard his fellow workers have for Patterson, Panak explained, “he’s served as mine committeeman off and on for four or five terms. He was always a man to put up a good fight for the rest of the men.”
As a committeeman, what kind of conditions was it his duty to fight against, I asked.
“Well, just to give you an idea of the kind of chiseling the company tries to put over all the time,” Panak explained, “we had to have the scales at the tipple checked six times in the past three months. And we found them off balance five out of six times. They’re always trying to short-weigh us.” .
Another worker interjected, “And how about the hard slate?” What was that, I asked.
“The company won’t pay us for when we have to work on hard slate where you can’t get the coal out. We have to pay for the powder to blast the slate where we can’t get any coal out.”
“If you want to know about chiseling, like Bill always had to fight against,” another stated, “it’s like the company putting supervisory monthly salary men, who’re non-union, to doing the jobs that’re under union contract – taking the work from the union men.”
Then they told me about the terrible accidents that are always happening in the mine. They told me case after case of men killed, maimed, seriously injured, in the past few months alone because the company doesn’t maintain proper equipment and safety conditions.
One worker was killed last Good Friday. Another was killed by a fall of rock on April 23. His brother had been badly hurt at the very same spot only the week before. Another man recently had his leg cut off. He was struck by a trip of coal – he had no man-way to go into on the haulage road. Another recently had his arm “cut clean off” by a fall of rock. Dozens of others have been injured – too numerous to mention.
Those are the conditions that Bill Patterson has fought against for 17 years. “He was a good fighter for the men – that’s why they made him the goat!” That’s how one worker summed it up, explaining why Bill Patterson is sitting in prison in Uniontown today.
I asked about Bill’s wife and family, because I was unable to get over to Daisytown to visit his home in time to get a report in to The Militant.
“Naturally, she’s very shocked and upset by what they put onto Bill,” said one of the men who’d been to see her to find out what the union could do for her.
“Bill’s wife, Ruby, is right with the union. She’s a real miner’s wife. Brought up in a miner’s family. She knows what the miners have to put up with. Why I bet you she’s been put out on the road three or four times with her family back in some of the strikes in the ’twenties.”
The miners here aren’t going to let Bill Patterson and his “real miner’s wife” down. And it’s up to the rest of labor not to let them down either.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Vatican’s “Model State” –<br>
Franco’s Fascism in Spain</h1>
<h3>(14 June 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_24" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 24</a>, 14 June 1948, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">A vast propaganda campaign is being waged in the United States to whitewash the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s connection with the fascist movement.</p>
<p>Last week’s <strong>Militant</strong> article, <em>The Roman Catholic Church and Fascism</em>, cited chapter and verse on the alliance between Mussolini and the Vatican, which culminated in the latter’s support of Italy’s rape of Ethiopia in 1935.</p>
<p>On August 22, 1935, the very day the League of Nations met to consider the Italo-Ethiopian war, the <strong>Osservatore Romano</strong>, official newspaper of the Vatican State, reported that 57 bishops and 19 archbishops of Italy had wired Mussolini:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Catholic Italy thanked Jesus Christ for the renewed greatness of the country made stronger by Mussolini’s policy.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">When Fascist troops seized Addis Ababa, Ethiopian capital, Pope Pius XI declared that Mussolini’s imperialist conquest “will initiate a true European and world-wide peace.”<br>
</p>
<h4>State Religion</h4>
<p class="fst">The single and unchanging objective of the Roman Catholic hierarchy is to become the only legally recognized church in the world, the official state religion everywhere. It regards governments as mere pillars of the Church, the secular “guardians of the law” as dictated and interpreted by the super-government of the Vatican and its “infallible” Pope.</p>
<p>To this end, the Vatican follows a devious, slippery and opportunist course, when it must. Today, its agents and functionaries in the United States pay pious lip-service to “democracy” and “Americanism.” Cardinal Spellman, in his article <em>Communism is Un-American</em> published in the July 1946 <strong>American Magazine</strong>, Claimed that “my sole objective ... is to help save America from the godless governing of totalitarianism.”</p>
<p>This utterly false statement is belied by the 1,500-year history of the Roman Catholic Church, and not the least by its consistent support of one after another of the capitalist totalitarian regimes of the past three decades. <em>There is hardly a fascist regime anywhere in Europe or the Western Hemisphere which has not been supported and officially recognized by the Vatican and which has not made the Roman Catholic Church the official religion.</em></p>
<p>Within six months after Hitler, Goebbels and their crew took power in Germany in 1933, Pope Pius XII signed his Concordat with Hitler’s Third Reich. The Catholic <strong>Revue des Deux Mondes</strong>, Jan. 15, 1935, reported the orders to all German bishops that all Catholic opposition to Hitler must cease. As late as August 1940, according to the <strong>N.Y. Times</strong> of August 27, the German bishops, meeting at Fulda, issued a pastoral letter containing “a solemn pledge of loyalty to Chancellor Hitler.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Nazism and Catholicism”</h4>
<p class="fst">The betrayer, of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s puppet ruler and president of Slovakia after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, was the priest Josef Tiso. His premier, Volpetch Tuka, announced that “Slovakia’s government in the future will be a combination of German Nazism and Roman Catholicism.” Pope Pius XII demonstratively made Tiso a Papal Chamberlain with the title of Monsignor, while the Vatican radio broadcast:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The announcement by Monsignor Tiso ... of his intention to reconstruct Slovakia on a Christian plan, is greatly welcomed by the Holy See. The new organization of the State is to be based on the Corporate system which has proved so successful in Portugal ... This coming so soon after Marshall Petain’s statement that he intended to reconstruct France on a Christian basis, is doubly welcome.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">Thus did the Vatican express its joy at the three-fold advance of clerical fascism – in Tiso’s Slovakia, Petain’s France and Salazar’s Portugal. Thus had it previously hailed the bloody dictatorships of Dolfuss in Austria and Franco in Spain.<br>
</p>
<h4>Franco’s Fascist Spain</h4>
<p class="fst">The present attitude of the Vatican toward fascism is most fully revealed in the case of Spain, which the United Nations has been forced to formally describe as a “fascist, totalitarian” regime.</p>
<p>In October 1943, four years after Franco came to power over the dead bodies of two million Spanish Catholic workers and peasants, the Pope’s newspaper <strong>Osservatore Romano</strong> hailed Spanish fascism as the “model state.”</p>
<p><em>This “model state” in 1947, eight years after Franco’s rule began, still held 300,000 anti-fascists in prison and kept 700,000 under surveillance. It averaged 2,000 death-sentences a year against its political opponents.</em> About 60% of its budget went to the armed forces; a large part of the remainder to the police and Church, the latter state-financed. Wheat production was 53% of 1935; barley, 53%. <em>Wages had risen 171% in money; but prices rose 570% at the same time.</em></p>
<p>Why was Spain the “model state” for the Vatican ? On July 6, 1941, Franco signed a Concordat with the Vatican whose first article reads:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The Roman Catholic religion, to the exclusion of any other, continues to be the sole religion of the Spanish nation.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">A 1942 report of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid to the American State Department stated: “Protestant Churches for Spaniards have no legal status and enjoy no state guarantees.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Wealth Retirned</h4>
<p class="fst">Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of “great joy” at the victory of the “dearest sons of Catholic Spain” was not based altogether on spiritual values gained. Franco restored the State Ecclesiastical Budget of 65 million pesetas a year, plus allotments for repairing all Church property. The Spanish Jesuits were given back all their enormous wealth estimated before the advent of the Spanish Republic at a third of the entire wealth of Spain and including such lucrative enterprises as the fish markets and the most expensive cabarets.</p>
<p>Ope of the crowning achievements of the Catholic Church in Spain is the complete monopoly of education, which, according to law, must “conform to the principles of Catholic dogma and faith and to the prescriptions of cannon law.”</p>
<p>The American Catholic liberal, Emmet J. Hughes, in his recent book, <strong>Report on Spain</strong>, bitterly describes the precepts taught in the manual of religious instruction, <strong>Nuevo Ripalda</strong>, to all Spanish school children:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. What are the freedoms which liberalism defends? A. Freedom of conscience, freedom of worship and freedom of the press.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. What does freedom of the press mean? A. The right to print and publish without previous censorship all kinds of opinions, however absurd and corrupting they may be.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. Must the government suppress this freedom by means of censorship? A. Obviously, yes.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. Why? A. Because it must prevent the deception, calumny and corruption of its subjects, which harm the general good.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. Are there other pernicious freedoms? A. Yes, freedom of propaganda, and freedom of assembly.</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>Q. Why are these freedoms pernicious? A. Because they serve to teach error, propagate vice, and plot against the church ...</em></p>
<p class="fst">These are the concepts which the Roman Catholic hierarchy teaches in its “model state!” This is what the emissary of the Vatican, Cardinal Spellman, really means when he speaks of “saving America from the godless governings of totalitarianism.”</p>
<p class="c"><em><strong>(This is the second of a series of articles on the political role of the Vatican.)</strong></em></p>
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Art Preis
The Vatican’s “Model State” –
Franco’s Fascism in Spain
(14 June 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 24, 14 June 1948, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
A vast propaganda campaign is being waged in the United States to whitewash the Roman Catholic hierarchy’s connection with the fascist movement.
Last week’s Militant article, The Roman Catholic Church and Fascism, cited chapter and verse on the alliance between Mussolini and the Vatican, which culminated in the latter’s support of Italy’s rape of Ethiopia in 1935.
On August 22, 1935, the very day the League of Nations met to consider the Italo-Ethiopian war, the Osservatore Romano, official newspaper of the Vatican State, reported that 57 bishops and 19 archbishops of Italy had wired Mussolini:
“Catholic Italy thanked Jesus Christ for the renewed greatness of the country made stronger by Mussolini’s policy.”
When Fascist troops seized Addis Ababa, Ethiopian capital, Pope Pius XI declared that Mussolini’s imperialist conquest “will initiate a true European and world-wide peace.”
State Religion
The single and unchanging objective of the Roman Catholic hierarchy is to become the only legally recognized church in the world, the official state religion everywhere. It regards governments as mere pillars of the Church, the secular “guardians of the law” as dictated and interpreted by the super-government of the Vatican and its “infallible” Pope.
To this end, the Vatican follows a devious, slippery and opportunist course, when it must. Today, its agents and functionaries in the United States pay pious lip-service to “democracy” and “Americanism.” Cardinal Spellman, in his article Communism is Un-American published in the July 1946 American Magazine, Claimed that “my sole objective ... is to help save America from the godless governing of totalitarianism.”
This utterly false statement is belied by the 1,500-year history of the Roman Catholic Church, and not the least by its consistent support of one after another of the capitalist totalitarian regimes of the past three decades. There is hardly a fascist regime anywhere in Europe or the Western Hemisphere which has not been supported and officially recognized by the Vatican and which has not made the Roman Catholic Church the official religion.
Within six months after Hitler, Goebbels and their crew took power in Germany in 1933, Pope Pius XII signed his Concordat with Hitler’s Third Reich. The Catholic Revue des Deux Mondes, Jan. 15, 1935, reported the orders to all German bishops that all Catholic opposition to Hitler must cease. As late as August 1940, according to the N.Y. Times of August 27, the German bishops, meeting at Fulda, issued a pastoral letter containing “a solemn pledge of loyalty to Chancellor Hitler.”
“Nazism and Catholicism”
The betrayer, of Czechoslovakia, Hitler’s puppet ruler and president of Slovakia after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, was the priest Josef Tiso. His premier, Volpetch Tuka, announced that “Slovakia’s government in the future will be a combination of German Nazism and Roman Catholicism.” Pope Pius XII demonstratively made Tiso a Papal Chamberlain with the title of Monsignor, while the Vatican radio broadcast:
“The announcement by Monsignor Tiso ... of his intention to reconstruct Slovakia on a Christian plan, is greatly welcomed by the Holy See. The new organization of the State is to be based on the Corporate system which has proved so successful in Portugal ... This coming so soon after Marshall Petain’s statement that he intended to reconstruct France on a Christian basis, is doubly welcome.”
Thus did the Vatican express its joy at the three-fold advance of clerical fascism – in Tiso’s Slovakia, Petain’s France and Salazar’s Portugal. Thus had it previously hailed the bloody dictatorships of Dolfuss in Austria and Franco in Spain.
Franco’s Fascist Spain
The present attitude of the Vatican toward fascism is most fully revealed in the case of Spain, which the United Nations has been forced to formally describe as a “fascist, totalitarian” regime.
In October 1943, four years after Franco came to power over the dead bodies of two million Spanish Catholic workers and peasants, the Pope’s newspaper Osservatore Romano hailed Spanish fascism as the “model state.”
This “model state” in 1947, eight years after Franco’s rule began, still held 300,000 anti-fascists in prison and kept 700,000 under surveillance. It averaged 2,000 death-sentences a year against its political opponents. About 60% of its budget went to the armed forces; a large part of the remainder to the police and Church, the latter state-financed. Wheat production was 53% of 1935; barley, 53%. Wages had risen 171% in money; but prices rose 570% at the same time.
Why was Spain the “model state” for the Vatican ? On July 6, 1941, Franco signed a Concordat with the Vatican whose first article reads:
“The Roman Catholic religion, to the exclusion of any other, continues to be the sole religion of the Spanish nation.”
A 1942 report of the U.S. Embassy in Madrid to the American State Department stated: “Protestant Churches for Spaniards have no legal status and enjoy no state guarantees.”
Wealth Retirned
Pope Pius XII’s proclamation of “great joy” at the victory of the “dearest sons of Catholic Spain” was not based altogether on spiritual values gained. Franco restored the State Ecclesiastical Budget of 65 million pesetas a year, plus allotments for repairing all Church property. The Spanish Jesuits were given back all their enormous wealth estimated before the advent of the Spanish Republic at a third of the entire wealth of Spain and including such lucrative enterprises as the fish markets and the most expensive cabarets.
Ope of the crowning achievements of the Catholic Church in Spain is the complete monopoly of education, which, according to law, must “conform to the principles of Catholic dogma and faith and to the prescriptions of cannon law.”
The American Catholic liberal, Emmet J. Hughes, in his recent book, Report on Spain, bitterly describes the precepts taught in the manual of religious instruction, Nuevo Ripalda, to all Spanish school children:
Q. What are the freedoms which liberalism defends? A. Freedom of conscience, freedom of worship and freedom of the press.
Q. What does freedom of the press mean? A. The right to print and publish without previous censorship all kinds of opinions, however absurd and corrupting they may be.
Q. Must the government suppress this freedom by means of censorship? A. Obviously, yes.
Q. Why? A. Because it must prevent the deception, calumny and corruption of its subjects, which harm the general good.
Q. Are there other pernicious freedoms? A. Yes, freedom of propaganda, and freedom of assembly.
Q. Why are these freedoms pernicious? A. Because they serve to teach error, propagate vice, and plot against the church ...
These are the concepts which the Roman Catholic hierarchy teaches in its “model state!” This is what the emissary of the Vatican, Cardinal Spellman, really means when he speaks of “saving America from the godless governings of totalitarianism.”
(This is the second of a series of articles on the political role of the Vatican.)
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(24 March 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_12" target="new">Vol. IX No. 12</a>, 24 March 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a id="p1"></a>
<h4>Textile Strike Poll</h4>
<p class="fst">Without one dissenting vote some 50,000 New England cotton-rayon
textile workers last week in a poll conducted by the CIO Textile
Workers Union empowered the TWU officers to demand an NLRB strike
vote under the Smith-Connally anti-strike law provisions.</p>
<p>In Fall River, Mass., 3,500 union members went even further. They
empowered the TWU leaders to call a strike without going through the
formality of a government-supervised election and an additional
30-day stalling period.</p>
<p><em>The TWU executive board several weeks ago revoked the no-strike
pledge for 100,000 cotton- rayon workers. They acted after a
long-delayed WLB decision granting “fringe” increases and
raising the minimum wage from 50 cents to 55 cents an hour was
blocked by Roosevelt’s former Economic Stabilization Director
Vinson. TWU President Emil Rieve at the same time resigned from the
WLB.</em></p>
<p>An editorial on <em>The No-Strike Pledge</em> in the March <strong>Textile
Labor</strong>, official organ of the TWU-CIO, explains why the union
scrapped the pledge. After describing the
administration-manufacturers conspiracy to deprive the exploited
textile workers of their just demands, the editorial says:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“While all this was going on, no attempt was made
to ‘stabilize’ cotton manufacturers’ profits, which
were continuing at the rate of $365,000,000 a year, five times
pre-war figures ... But there are other considerations back of the
action ... Nearly 100,000 TWUA members are now in the armed forces.
Are they to come back to $24 a week wages? Are they fighting for
another chance to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed? If we do not
fight their home-front battles for them, if we capitulate to
reaction, what else can they come home to?”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p2"></a>
<h4>UAW Dues Decline</h4>
<p class="fst">Dues-paying membership in the CIO United Automobile, Aircraft and
Agricultural Implement Workers, largest union in the country,
declined by 113,741 during the period between May and November 1944
according to the latest report of UAW Secretary-Treasurer George
Addes.</p>
<p><em>The monthly average of dues-paying members during the reported
period was 1,008,159. Over half the membership is in Michigan, with
528,429 members, 345,127 of them concentrated in Detroit.</em></p>
<p>A primary reason for the sharp membership decline – over 10
per cent within six months – is unemployment due to cut-backs
and layoffs, despite the Roosevelt administration’s claims of a
“labor shortage” to bolster its demand for a forced labor
bill.</p>
<p>Unemployment compensation claims since December 1, 1944 in
Michigan have been averaging between 18,000 and 20,000 weekly.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p3"></a>
<h4>Hush-Hush in Auto</h4>
<p class="fst">Every newspaper from coast to coast headlined the great strike
wave the past few weeks in Detroit. During a period of three weeks
some 60,000 auto workers, the greatest number since Pearl Harbor, hit
the picket lines to defend their unions against the union-busting
provocations of the corporations.</p>
<p>A microscopic examination of the <strong>United Automobile Worker</strong>,
official organ of the UAW-CIO, for the past two issues, March 1 and
15, reveals not a word about this tremendous development of such
importance and interest not only to the auto workers but to the whole
labor movement. There is not even a line in protest against the open,
savage, concerted campaign of the corporations to break the unions by
wholesale firing of local union officers, committeemen and shop
stewards.</p>
<p><em>During the recently concluded UAW referendum on the no-strike
pledge, the UAW top officials did not hesitate to use the union’s
paper, in violation of a convention mandate, to plug for the nostrike
pledge by printing whole pages of CIO President Philip Murray’s
anti-strike speeches under the heading of “news.”</em></p>
<p>But when the auto rank and file themselves make real news by
militant defense of their unions, the UAW leaders stupidly try to
play ostrich. They soft-peddle the struggle and bureaucratically
deprive the membership of the aid of their own paper.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p4"></a>
<h4>AFL Asks 11% Boost</h4>
<p class="fst">The AFL, through its members on the War Labor Board, answered the
WLB’s endorsement of the wage-freezing Little Steel Formula by
petitioning Roosevelt with a demand for a general immediate 11 per
cent wage increase.</p>
<p>This petition refutes the lying “statistics” of the
WLB “public” members about wages rising “faster”
than the cost of living.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Since the war wage rates have increased by 19 per
cent,” the AFL representatives pointed out, “while the
cost of living has increased – based upon official figures –
by 30 per cent. To correct the maladjustment between wages and the
cost of living – when measured by the same standard that was
used when the Little Steel Formula was adopted – an adjustment
of approximately 11 per cent is justified.”</p>
<p class="fst">The only thing wrong with the AFL’s demand is that it gives
away too much to the government and employers. The government’s
cost-of-living figures are as phony as a nine-dollar hill. The cost
of living has gone up nearer to 50 per cent than 30. On this real
basis, labor is justified in demanding not an 11 per cent but a 30
per cent wage boost.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a id="p5"></a>
<h4>Philadelphia Aftermath</h4>
<p class="fst">Twenty-seven company-union members and leaders of the Philadelphia
transit walkout last August against the upgrading of Negro workers
took the rap in federal court last week for the company-inspired
action. They were each fined $100 under the Smith-Connally Act after
reversing their not guilty pleas to no defense.</p>
<p>Among the questions the court failed to answer were these. Why was
the Jim-Crow stoppage organized on company property and strike
meetings freely held there? What company officials advised the
workers to initiate the walkout by getting “sick” in a
body in order to prevent the use of Negro workers as motormen and
conductors? Why was the walkout organized by leaders of the PRT
(Philadelphia Rapid Transit) Employees Union, the old company union,
just after it had been defeated by the CIO for collective bargaining
representative? Why did the company say not a word against the
walkout – aiding it by cutting off the subway power?</p>
<p><em>One defense attorney bluntly declared:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The race question was dragged in by officials
of PTC (Philadelphia Transportation Co.). They were out to smash the
bridgehead that organized labor has finally succeeded in holding in
PTC.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">A hand-picked grand jury which brought down the original
indictments against the misled workers who were made the scapegoats
of this affair simply covered up for the company and turned the
proceedings into an attack on the CIO and a defense of company
unionism.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(24 March 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 12, 24 March 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Textile Strike Poll
Without one dissenting vote some 50,000 New England cotton-rayon
textile workers last week in a poll conducted by the CIO Textile
Workers Union empowered the TWU officers to demand an NLRB strike
vote under the Smith-Connally anti-strike law provisions.
In Fall River, Mass., 3,500 union members went even further. They
empowered the TWU leaders to call a strike without going through the
formality of a government-supervised election and an additional
30-day stalling period.
The TWU executive board several weeks ago revoked the no-strike
pledge for 100,000 cotton- rayon workers. They acted after a
long-delayed WLB decision granting “fringe” increases and
raising the minimum wage from 50 cents to 55 cents an hour was
blocked by Roosevelt’s former Economic Stabilization Director
Vinson. TWU President Emil Rieve at the same time resigned from the
WLB.
An editorial on The No-Strike Pledge in the March Textile
Labor, official organ of the TWU-CIO, explains why the union
scrapped the pledge. After describing the
administration-manufacturers conspiracy to deprive the exploited
textile workers of their just demands, the editorial says:
“While all this was going on, no attempt was made
to ‘stabilize’ cotton manufacturers’ profits, which
were continuing at the rate of $365,000,000 a year, five times
pre-war figures ... But there are other considerations back of the
action ... Nearly 100,000 TWUA members are now in the armed forces.
Are they to come back to $24 a week wages? Are they fighting for
another chance to be ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed? If we do not
fight their home-front battles for them, if we capitulate to
reaction, what else can they come home to?”
* * *
UAW Dues Decline
Dues-paying membership in the CIO United Automobile, Aircraft and
Agricultural Implement Workers, largest union in the country,
declined by 113,741 during the period between May and November 1944
according to the latest report of UAW Secretary-Treasurer George
Addes.
The monthly average of dues-paying members during the reported
period was 1,008,159. Over half the membership is in Michigan, with
528,429 members, 345,127 of them concentrated in Detroit.
A primary reason for the sharp membership decline – over 10
per cent within six months – is unemployment due to cut-backs
and layoffs, despite the Roosevelt administration’s claims of a
“labor shortage” to bolster its demand for a forced labor
bill.
Unemployment compensation claims since December 1, 1944 in
Michigan have been averaging between 18,000 and 20,000 weekly.
* * *
Hush-Hush in Auto
Every newspaper from coast to coast headlined the great strike
wave the past few weeks in Detroit. During a period of three weeks
some 60,000 auto workers, the greatest number since Pearl Harbor, hit
the picket lines to defend their unions against the union-busting
provocations of the corporations.
A microscopic examination of the United Automobile Worker,
official organ of the UAW-CIO, for the past two issues, March 1 and
15, reveals not a word about this tremendous development of such
importance and interest not only to the auto workers but to the whole
labor movement. There is not even a line in protest against the open,
savage, concerted campaign of the corporations to break the unions by
wholesale firing of local union officers, committeemen and shop
stewards.
During the recently concluded UAW referendum on the no-strike
pledge, the UAW top officials did not hesitate to use the union’s
paper, in violation of a convention mandate, to plug for the nostrike
pledge by printing whole pages of CIO President Philip Murray’s
anti-strike speeches under the heading of “news.”
But when the auto rank and file themselves make real news by
militant defense of their unions, the UAW leaders stupidly try to
play ostrich. They soft-peddle the struggle and bureaucratically
deprive the membership of the aid of their own paper.
* * *
AFL Asks 11% Boost
The AFL, through its members on the War Labor Board, answered the
WLB’s endorsement of the wage-freezing Little Steel Formula by
petitioning Roosevelt with a demand for a general immediate 11 per
cent wage increase.
This petition refutes the lying “statistics” of the
WLB “public” members about wages rising “faster”
than the cost of living.
“Since the war wage rates have increased by 19 per
cent,” the AFL representatives pointed out, “while the
cost of living has increased – based upon official figures –
by 30 per cent. To correct the maladjustment between wages and the
cost of living – when measured by the same standard that was
used when the Little Steel Formula was adopted – an adjustment
of approximately 11 per cent is justified.”
The only thing wrong with the AFL’s demand is that it gives
away too much to the government and employers. The government’s
cost-of-living figures are as phony as a nine-dollar hill. The cost
of living has gone up nearer to 50 per cent than 30. On this real
basis, labor is justified in demanding not an 11 per cent but a 30
per cent wage boost.
* * *
Philadelphia Aftermath
Twenty-seven company-union members and leaders of the Philadelphia
transit walkout last August against the upgrading of Negro workers
took the rap in federal court last week for the company-inspired
action. They were each fined $100 under the Smith-Connally Act after
reversing their not guilty pleas to no defense.
Among the questions the court failed to answer were these. Why was
the Jim-Crow stoppage organized on company property and strike
meetings freely held there? What company officials advised the
workers to initiate the walkout by getting “sick” in a
body in order to prevent the use of Negro workers as motormen and
conductors? Why was the walkout organized by leaders of the PRT
(Philadelphia Rapid Transit) Employees Union, the old company union,
just after it had been defeated by the CIO for collective bargaining
representative? Why did the company say not a word against the
walkout – aiding it by cutting off the subway power?
One defense attorney bluntly declared:
“The race question was dragged in by officials
of PTC (Philadelphia Transportation Co.). They were out to smash the
bridgehead that organized labor has finally succeeded in holding in
PTC.”
A hand-picked grand jury which brought down the original
indictments against the misled workers who were made the scapegoats
of this affair simply covered up for the company and turned the
proceedings into an attack on the CIO and a defense of company
unionism.
Top of page
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(22 June 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_25" target="new">Vol. X No. 25</a>, 22 June 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Anthracite Bosses Fold Up in 9 Days</h3>
<p class="fst">After stalling for nine days, just long enough to give the 76,000 striking anthracite coal-miners in Pennsylvania a well-deserved vacation, the hard-coal operators conceded the major social and wage demands of the AFL United Mine Workers. An agreement was reached on June 7.</p>
<p>This agreement includes not only an 18½ cent hourly wage increase, with time and a half after 35 hours a week and seven hours a day, but welfare and safety concessions similar to those previously won in the bitter strike of the 400,000 soft coal miners.</p>
<p>The contract includes an operator-financed health and welfare fund of five cents on each ton of coal produced, expected to amount to about $2,500,000 annually. The control of the fund is vested In a three-man committee, two from the union, and one from the operators. This is an even better agreement than secured by the soft coal miners, whose fund committee consists of one each from the union and operators, and a third jointly acceptable to both.</p>
<p>By their successful struggle for far-reaching social, as well as wage, demands, the miners have set an example for the rest of labor to follow in the battles ahead.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Whitney’s Plea to Truman and Congress</h3>
<p class="fst">If a man bumps his head against a stone wall once, it’s probably an accident; twice, it may still be an accident; a hundred times, and he’s just a damn fool.</p>
<p>That’s the thought that comes to mind in reading the big advertisements by A.F. Whitney, head of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, published in metropolitan newspapers last week. Headed, <i>Strikes Can Be Prevented</i>, the ads contain a plea by Whitney for Truman and Congress to “stay on the job” and “prevent strikes” by “action to remedy the conditions which cause American workers to strike.”</p>
<p>“A President and Congress wanting workers to ‘stay on the job’ must themselves get on the job. The Congress must not be allowed to adjourn without taking positive steps to eliminate the causes of strikes,” says Whitney.</p>
<p>No decent-minded person can possibly oppose social legislation to better the conditions of the American workers. But to direct a plea to THIS Congress to “stay on the job” in the interests of labor is like banging your head a hundred times against a stone wall.</p>
<p>Instead of pleading with the Big-Business Congress, Whitney would have done far better to have spent the Trainmen’s money for advertisements calling on the workers to organize a labor party, run labor candidates and boot the whole gang of Wall</p>
<p>Street politicians out of Washington. Labor’s slogan should be not “Congress Must Stay on the Job,” but – KICK OUT WALL STREET’S CONGRESS! ELECT A WORKERS’ AND FARMERS’ CONGRESS!</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Tobin’s Warning on AFL Southern Drive</h3>
<p class="fst">Daniel Tobin, head of the AFL Teamsters, is finding employer opposition very tough down below the Mason and Dixon Line, where the AFL, like the CIO, is engaged in a big organizing drive.</p>
<p>Hence, his magazine, <b>The International Teamster</b>, in its June issue presents a view point quite unique for his publication, in an article entitled, <i>AFL Starts to Organize the South</i>, Tobin’g magazine states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Under the pretext of ‘saving the South from Communism,’ the Ku Klux Klan is preparing to inject itself into the struggle to maintain the open shop. Every union organizer will probably be branded a ‘Communist’ as the Klan attempts to ride the crest of a wave of patriotic prejudice to organize the South itself and promote the sale of cotton fabrics woven into the hoods and shrouds of its official costume. Thus the southern industrialists will profit both ways. They will keep wages low and sell cotton to the nightshirt cavalry.”</p>
<p class="fst">We can but welcome Tobin’s timely warning against the Southern reactionary red-baiters and the anti-”communist” agitation of the open shoppers. But it is well to keep in mind that Tobin’s opposition to red-baiting is still confined to a limited field – and only when it hits him and his organizers over the head.</p>
<p>We are still waiting to hear from Tobin any criticism of AFL President William Green and other AFL big-wigs, who launched tne AFL Southern drive with a bid to the employers to sign up with the AFL before the “communistic” CIO organizes the workers. The AFL leaders themselves have been lending red-baiting ammunition to the Southern bosses – and the latter are shooting it at the AFL as well as the CIO.</p>
<p>In addition, we would be doing less than our duty if we overlooked Tobin’s own record of red-baiting – and specifically his attack on the progressive and militant leadership of Minneapolis Drivers Local 544. Tobin not only conducted an unprecedented red-baiting drive against the Trotskyists and militants, but he collaborated in a conspiracy with Roosevelt to frame-up and imprison 18 Local 544 and Socialist Workers Party leaders during the war.</p>
<p>Red-baiting is indeed a sinister and treacherous weapon. Those who use it within the labor movement only help the bosses. And sometimes, as Tobin has found in the South, are apt to find it may explode in their own faces.</p>
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Art Preis
Trade Union Notes
(22 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 25, 22 June 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Anthracite Bosses Fold Up in 9 Days
After stalling for nine days, just long enough to give the 76,000 striking anthracite coal-miners in Pennsylvania a well-deserved vacation, the hard-coal operators conceded the major social and wage demands of the AFL United Mine Workers. An agreement was reached on June 7.
This agreement includes not only an 18½ cent hourly wage increase, with time and a half after 35 hours a week and seven hours a day, but welfare and safety concessions similar to those previously won in the bitter strike of the 400,000 soft coal miners.
The contract includes an operator-financed health and welfare fund of five cents on each ton of coal produced, expected to amount to about $2,500,000 annually. The control of the fund is vested In a three-man committee, two from the union, and one from the operators. This is an even better agreement than secured by the soft coal miners, whose fund committee consists of one each from the union and operators, and a third jointly acceptable to both.
By their successful struggle for far-reaching social, as well as wage, demands, the miners have set an example for the rest of labor to follow in the battles ahead.
* * *
Whitney’s Plea to Truman and Congress
If a man bumps his head against a stone wall once, it’s probably an accident; twice, it may still be an accident; a hundred times, and he’s just a damn fool.
That’s the thought that comes to mind in reading the big advertisements by A.F. Whitney, head of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen, published in metropolitan newspapers last week. Headed, Strikes Can Be Prevented, the ads contain a plea by Whitney for Truman and Congress to “stay on the job” and “prevent strikes” by “action to remedy the conditions which cause American workers to strike.”
“A President and Congress wanting workers to ‘stay on the job’ must themselves get on the job. The Congress must not be allowed to adjourn without taking positive steps to eliminate the causes of strikes,” says Whitney.
No decent-minded person can possibly oppose social legislation to better the conditions of the American workers. But to direct a plea to THIS Congress to “stay on the job” in the interests of labor is like banging your head a hundred times against a stone wall.
Instead of pleading with the Big-Business Congress, Whitney would have done far better to have spent the Trainmen’s money for advertisements calling on the workers to organize a labor party, run labor candidates and boot the whole gang of Wall
Street politicians out of Washington. Labor’s slogan should be not “Congress Must Stay on the Job,” but – KICK OUT WALL STREET’S CONGRESS! ELECT A WORKERS’ AND FARMERS’ CONGRESS!
* * *
Tobin’s Warning on AFL Southern Drive
Daniel Tobin, head of the AFL Teamsters, is finding employer opposition very tough down below the Mason and Dixon Line, where the AFL, like the CIO, is engaged in a big organizing drive.
Hence, his magazine, The International Teamster, in its June issue presents a view point quite unique for his publication, in an article entitled, AFL Starts to Organize the South, Tobin’g magazine states:
“Under the pretext of ‘saving the South from Communism,’ the Ku Klux Klan is preparing to inject itself into the struggle to maintain the open shop. Every union organizer will probably be branded a ‘Communist’ as the Klan attempts to ride the crest of a wave of patriotic prejudice to organize the South itself and promote the sale of cotton fabrics woven into the hoods and shrouds of its official costume. Thus the southern industrialists will profit both ways. They will keep wages low and sell cotton to the nightshirt cavalry.”
We can but welcome Tobin’s timely warning against the Southern reactionary red-baiters and the anti-”communist” agitation of the open shoppers. But it is well to keep in mind that Tobin’s opposition to red-baiting is still confined to a limited field – and only when it hits him and his organizers over the head.
We are still waiting to hear from Tobin any criticism of AFL President William Green and other AFL big-wigs, who launched tne AFL Southern drive with a bid to the employers to sign up with the AFL before the “communistic” CIO organizes the workers. The AFL leaders themselves have been lending red-baiting ammunition to the Southern bosses – and the latter are shooting it at the AFL as well as the CIO.
In addition, we would be doing less than our duty if we overlooked Tobin’s own record of red-baiting – and specifically his attack on the progressive and militant leadership of Minneapolis Drivers Local 544. Tobin not only conducted an unprecedented red-baiting drive against the Trotskyists and militants, but he collaborated in a conspiracy with Roosevelt to frame-up and imprison 18 Local 544 and Socialist Workers Party leaders during the war.
Red-baiting is indeed a sinister and treacherous weapon. Those who use it within the labor movement only help the bosses. And sometimes, as Tobin has found in the South, are apt to find it may explode in their own faces.
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<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(12 May 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_19" target="new">Vol. IX No. 19</a>, 12 May 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Union-Busting Pretext</h3>
<p class="fst">George Romney, managing director of the Automotive Council for War Production, on May 2 revealed the scheme of the automobile monopolists to break up the CIO United Automobile Workers on the pretext that the union is creating a crisis in the industry which will result in widespread post-war unemployment.</p>
<p>This spokesman for the big auto corporations stated that they are “convinced it is time to scrutinize the operation of collective bargaining to determine why it is not working in the manner that promotes the national interest.” To Romney, the interests of the auto profiteers are identical with the “national interest.”</p>
<p>Hypocritically claiming “the industry, is not seeking the destruction of unionism,” Romney asserted that “we are alarmed at the decline in productivity and its far reaching effects on the post-war economy.” The auto barons demand that the “excessive power of the CIO must be decentralized” – that is, that the UAW-CIO must be broken up.</p>
<p>“Irrefutable evidence shows that productivity has declined continually,” added Romney.</p>
<p><em>But the Automotive Council For War Production boasted in its April bulletin that the industry had achieved a record $10-billion yearly production, “a ten-fold increase over 1941’s defense production.” In fact, “between the fourth quarter of 1943, when automotive employment reached an all-time high, and the corresponding quarter in 1944, deliveries of war materials ROSE approximately 11 per cent. During the same period employment DROPPED some 16 per cent.</em></p>
<p>Thus, Romney’s own organization has refuted the union-busting lie he and his associates are now peddling.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Cutbacks and Pay Cuts</h3>
<p class="fst">The CIO and AFL, spurred on by the threat of huge production cutbacks and reduction of the work week once more have urged the War Labor Board to loosen the wage-freeze in view of anticipated drastic declines in weekly wages. The CIO has submitted proposals for a new “reconversion wage policy” to War Mobilization Director Vinson, who has consistently advocated the continuation of wartime labor policies in the “reconversion” period.</p>
<p>R.J. Thomas, UAW-CIO president, wrote from Detroit to WEB Chairman Taylor that “the wage policies of the WLB need immediate and marked revision, which will make possible maintenance of present overall wage levels, notwithstanding reductions in working hours.”</p>
<p><em>Thomas reported that 140,000 Ford workers have already been cut back to a 40-hour week, resulting in an average loss of $10 a week pay for those working 45 hours and considerably more for those working longer.</em></p>
<p>The CIO proposals to Vinson, it is reported, call for a minimum 20 per cent increase in basic wage rates, 10 per cent to provide for past living cost increases and 10 per cent for increased labor productivity during the war.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>“A Family Affair”</h3>
<p class="fst">On May 1 the War Labor Board in Washington held a hearing on the Detroit Kelsey-Hayes case, involving the reinstatement of 13 fired workers by order of the regional WLB after 5,500 workers twice went on strike.</p>
<p>While upholding the regional WLB order, WLB Chairman took occasion to assail “both” the union and the company because “it is not good business that if one man gets fired 10,000 others must lose a week’s work.” After the hearing, he stated he did not think the board should be called on to inject itself into a “clearly family affair.”</p>
<p><em>To Taylor the wholesale firing of union officers and committeemen which has provoked numerous auto strikes in the past three months is just a “family affair.” He conceals the fact that it is not a question of any “one worker” getting fired, but of the leading union militants being picked out and fired in a deliberate campaign to undermine the unions.</em></p>
<p>Even when it is compelled to make a concession to the workers, the WLB finds a way to smear the unions and cover up the dirty game of the employers.</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(12 May 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 19, 12 May 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Union-Busting Pretext
George Romney, managing director of the Automotive Council for War Production, on May 2 revealed the scheme of the automobile monopolists to break up the CIO United Automobile Workers on the pretext that the union is creating a crisis in the industry which will result in widespread post-war unemployment.
This spokesman for the big auto corporations stated that they are “convinced it is time to scrutinize the operation of collective bargaining to determine why it is not working in the manner that promotes the national interest.” To Romney, the interests of the auto profiteers are identical with the “national interest.”
Hypocritically claiming “the industry, is not seeking the destruction of unionism,” Romney asserted that “we are alarmed at the decline in productivity and its far reaching effects on the post-war economy.” The auto barons demand that the “excessive power of the CIO must be decentralized” – that is, that the UAW-CIO must be broken up.
“Irrefutable evidence shows that productivity has declined continually,” added Romney.
But the Automotive Council For War Production boasted in its April bulletin that the industry had achieved a record $10-billion yearly production, “a ten-fold increase over 1941’s defense production.” In fact, “between the fourth quarter of 1943, when automotive employment reached an all-time high, and the corresponding quarter in 1944, deliveries of war materials ROSE approximately 11 per cent. During the same period employment DROPPED some 16 per cent.
Thus, Romney’s own organization has refuted the union-busting lie he and his associates are now peddling.
* * *
Cutbacks and Pay Cuts
The CIO and AFL, spurred on by the threat of huge production cutbacks and reduction of the work week once more have urged the War Labor Board to loosen the wage-freeze in view of anticipated drastic declines in weekly wages. The CIO has submitted proposals for a new “reconversion wage policy” to War Mobilization Director Vinson, who has consistently advocated the continuation of wartime labor policies in the “reconversion” period.
R.J. Thomas, UAW-CIO president, wrote from Detroit to WEB Chairman Taylor that “the wage policies of the WLB need immediate and marked revision, which will make possible maintenance of present overall wage levels, notwithstanding reductions in working hours.”
Thomas reported that 140,000 Ford workers have already been cut back to a 40-hour week, resulting in an average loss of $10 a week pay for those working 45 hours and considerably more for those working longer.
The CIO proposals to Vinson, it is reported, call for a minimum 20 per cent increase in basic wage rates, 10 per cent to provide for past living cost increases and 10 per cent for increased labor productivity during the war.
* * *
“A Family Affair”
On May 1 the War Labor Board in Washington held a hearing on the Detroit Kelsey-Hayes case, involving the reinstatement of 13 fired workers by order of the regional WLB after 5,500 workers twice went on strike.
While upholding the regional WLB order, WLB Chairman took occasion to assail “both” the union and the company because “it is not good business that if one man gets fired 10,000 others must lose a week’s work.” After the hearing, he stated he did not think the board should be called on to inject itself into a “clearly family affair.”
To Taylor the wholesale firing of union officers and committeemen which has provoked numerous auto strikes in the past three months is just a “family affair.” He conceals the fact that it is not a question of any “one worker” getting fired, but of the leading union militants being picked out and fired in a deliberate campaign to undermine the unions.
Even when it is compelled to make a concession to the workers, the WLB finds a way to smear the unions and cover up the dirty game of the employers.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>The Medical Monopoly</h1>
<h3>(13 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_50" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 50</a>, 13 December 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">Capitalism “has left no other bond between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’,” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> of 1848. “It has resolved personal worth into exchange value ... stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe ... the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science ...”</p>
<p>The American Medical Association today gives striking confirmation of this profound observation about the universally corrupting influence of capitalism. It is the powerful medical monopoly, controlled by a bureaucracy of high-paid officials and supported in part by the drug corporations, which is devoted to maintaining the high cost of medical aid.</p>
<p>Last week the AMA Board of Trustees, after a secret meeting of its House of Delegates in St. Louis, announced it is raising a $3,500,000 fund to campaign against the proposed federal health insurance bill. This fund is to be raised by exacting a $25 assessment from each of the 140,000 physician-members of the AMA.</p>
<p>The high moguls of the AMA, who represent the well-to-do physicians and “society doctors” mainly, claim that any government measure to provide low-cost medical care to millions of American workers is nothing less than “a variety of socialized medicine.” These staunch medical royalists want to solve the “economic problem of the distribution of medical care within the existing framework of private enterprise.”</p>
<p>Unfortunately, as every public health survey and the tragic figures of the medical rejections by Selective Service reveal, “private enterprise” has failed miserably in providing even minimum medical care for tens of millions. Even the higher-paid workers cannot carry the burden of the exorbitant fees demanded by doctors, specialists and hospitals. The wreckage of “private enterprise” in medicine is crowding to bursting the inadequate public hospitals now available.</p>
<p>Of course, the AMA officials’ talk about the “American way” and the “catastrophe” of “any scheme of political medicine” is pure cant to hide naked self interest. They fear that if the government provides a system for better medical care at less cost to the workers, it will cut into the big fees of the medical monopoly. And it will help to break the grip of the AMA over the medical profession.</p>
<p>Fronting for the AMA in Washington is the high-sounding National Physicians Committee for the Extension of Medical Service (NPC). This is a lobby composed of former officials of the AMA which has spent millions to fight public health insurance over the last nine years. The AMA, as a tax-exempt organization, cannot engage in direct lobbying. A large part of NPC funds comes from the big drug firms, who fear the unfavorable effect of national health insurance on their $750 million annual sale of patent medicines.</p>
<p>Not every physician is concerned solely with “callous ‘cash payment’.” Many doctors are, or would like to be, selfless and hard-working, devoted to alleviating suffering and raising the health standards of the people. But they too suffer from the general insecurity of the capitalist system and their ideals are swamped under the cynical philosophy of “hard-cash” that pervades capitalist society.</p>
<p>It is precisely under socialism, where the profit motive and “dog-eat-dog” philosophy will be eliminated, that the physicians and men of science will be able to serve society selflessly, with genuine dignity and honor, free of economic pressure and insecurity.</p>
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Joseph Keller
The Medical Monopoly
(13 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 50, 13 December 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Capitalism “has left no other bond between man and man than naked self interest, than callous ‘cash payment’,” wrote Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in their Communist Manifesto of 1848. “It has resolved personal worth into exchange value ... stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe ... the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science ...”
The American Medical Association today gives striking confirmation of this profound observation about the universally corrupting influence of capitalism. It is the powerful medical monopoly, controlled by a bureaucracy of high-paid officials and supported in part by the drug corporations, which is devoted to maintaining the high cost of medical aid.
Last week the AMA Board of Trustees, after a secret meeting of its House of Delegates in St. Louis, announced it is raising a $3,500,000 fund to campaign against the proposed federal health insurance bill. This fund is to be raised by exacting a $25 assessment from each of the 140,000 physician-members of the AMA.
The high moguls of the AMA, who represent the well-to-do physicians and “society doctors” mainly, claim that any government measure to provide low-cost medical care to millions of American workers is nothing less than “a variety of socialized medicine.” These staunch medical royalists want to solve the “economic problem of the distribution of medical care within the existing framework of private enterprise.”
Unfortunately, as every public health survey and the tragic figures of the medical rejections by Selective Service reveal, “private enterprise” has failed miserably in providing even minimum medical care for tens of millions. Even the higher-paid workers cannot carry the burden of the exorbitant fees demanded by doctors, specialists and hospitals. The wreckage of “private enterprise” in medicine is crowding to bursting the inadequate public hospitals now available.
Of course, the AMA officials’ talk about the “American way” and the “catastrophe” of “any scheme of political medicine” is pure cant to hide naked self interest. They fear that if the government provides a system for better medical care at less cost to the workers, it will cut into the big fees of the medical monopoly. And it will help to break the grip of the AMA over the medical profession.
Fronting for the AMA in Washington is the high-sounding National Physicians Committee for the Extension of Medical Service (NPC). This is a lobby composed of former officials of the AMA which has spent millions to fight public health insurance over the last nine years. The AMA, as a tax-exempt organization, cannot engage in direct lobbying. A large part of NPC funds comes from the big drug firms, who fear the unfavorable effect of national health insurance on their $750 million annual sale of patent medicines.
Not every physician is concerned solely with “callous ‘cash payment’.” Many doctors are, or would like to be, selfless and hard-working, devoted to alleviating suffering and raising the health standards of the people. But they too suffer from the general insecurity of the capitalist system and their ideals are swamped under the cynical philosophy of “hard-cash” that pervades capitalist society.
It is precisely under socialism, where the profit motive and “dog-eat-dog” philosophy will be eliminated, that the physicians and men of science will be able to serve society selflessly, with genuine dignity and honor, free of economic pressure and insecurity.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“Defend Our Shores”</h1>
<h3>(29 March 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_13" target="new">Vol. XII No. 13</a>, 29 March 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">We’ve been reading in the past few weeks the testimony of the military experts on how “weak” the U.S., armed forces are. True enough, the atomic bomb is in mass production. But this country is being “threatened” and where is the “trained manpower” to “defend our shores?”</p>
<p>Probably you are one of the many millions of Americans who think “our shores” or “our borders” can be located on any standard map. Defined on the north and south by treaties with Canada and Mexico; fenced in on the east and west by Acts of God, the Atlantic and Pacific.</p>
<p>But there you are in error, according to the military-experts. “Our borders” are very elastic. They stretch like a big rubber band and include about every habitable and uninhabitable portion of the globe. You can take Secretary of State Marshall’s word, for that.</p>
<p>“Our responsibilities” and “our leadership” and “our interests,” he told a Berkeley, California, audience on March 19, “are not confined to Europe.” Not even to Europe! “They exist in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in China – and we cannot ignore Latin America, or our direct responsibilities in Japan and Korea.”</p>
<p>When you take this broad view of “our borders” which we must “defend from aggression,” it becomes clear why Russia is such a grave menace. We are entirely surrounded by Russia, like the drunk who felt his way all around a tree and exclaimed, “Trapped!”</p>
<p>We are “contained” on the Danube, the Persian Gulf, the Japanese Sea and beyond the Yangzte River. We stand guard at Tierra Del Fuego and glare eye to eye with the “red hordes” across the Antarctic reaches. And let us not forget “our border” in – Indonesia – now patrolled by U. .-equipped-and-trained Netherlands troops fighting the good fight for “American democracy” against the Javanese republican “bandits.”</p>
<p>Of course, if you don’t look at “our borders” with the sternly patriotic eye of a Wall Street imperialist or militarist, you are apt to see the political map in a different perspective. You might be tempted to say, “It looks like we’ve got those Russians squeezed in a vise.”</p>
<p>You might even be led to the further conclusion, “It looks like Russia is surrounded and threatened on all sides by American imperialism. It looks like the U.S. has its hooks in most of the world – and Russia is next.”</p>
<p>You’d be right, too.</p>
<p>The next time you hear that radio propagandist or read the testimony of that brass hat before a Senate committee telling you we need UMT and the draft and more billions for arms to “defend our country” – remember he’s not talking about “from the rocky shores of Maine to the sunny strands of California.” He means the whole planet.</p>
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Art Preis
“Defend Our Shores”
(29 March 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. XII No. 13, 29 March 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
We’ve been reading in the past few weeks the testimony of the military experts on how “weak” the U.S., armed forces are. True enough, the atomic bomb is in mass production. But this country is being “threatened” and where is the “trained manpower” to “defend our shores?”
Probably you are one of the many millions of Americans who think “our shores” or “our borders” can be located on any standard map. Defined on the north and south by treaties with Canada and Mexico; fenced in on the east and west by Acts of God, the Atlantic and Pacific.
But there you are in error, according to the military-experts. “Our borders” are very elastic. They stretch like a big rubber band and include about every habitable and uninhabitable portion of the globe. You can take Secretary of State Marshall’s word, for that.
“Our responsibilities” and “our leadership” and “our interests,” he told a Berkeley, California, audience on March 19, “are not confined to Europe.” Not even to Europe! “They exist in the Middle East, in Indonesia, in China – and we cannot ignore Latin America, or our direct responsibilities in Japan and Korea.”
When you take this broad view of “our borders” which we must “defend from aggression,” it becomes clear why Russia is such a grave menace. We are entirely surrounded by Russia, like the drunk who felt his way all around a tree and exclaimed, “Trapped!”
We are “contained” on the Danube, the Persian Gulf, the Japanese Sea and beyond the Yangzte River. We stand guard at Tierra Del Fuego and glare eye to eye with the “red hordes” across the Antarctic reaches. And let us not forget “our border” in – Indonesia – now patrolled by U. .-equipped-and-trained Netherlands troops fighting the good fight for “American democracy” against the Javanese republican “bandits.”
Of course, if you don’t look at “our borders” with the sternly patriotic eye of a Wall Street imperialist or militarist, you are apt to see the political map in a different perspective. You might be tempted to say, “It looks like we’ve got those Russians squeezed in a vise.”
You might even be led to the further conclusion, “It looks like Russia is surrounded and threatened on all sides by American imperialism. It looks like the U.S. has its hooks in most of the world – and Russia is next.”
You’d be right, too.
The next time you hear that radio propagandist or read the testimony of that brass hat before a Senate committee telling you we need UMT and the draft and more billions for arms to “defend our country” – remember he’s not talking about “from the rocky shores of Maine to the sunny strands of California.” He means the whole planet.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h4>Trade Union Notes</h4>
<h1>Two UAW-CIO Specialists in Deceit</h1>
<h3>(20 January 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_03" target="new">Vol. IX No. 3</a>, 20 January 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">If the CIO auto workers need any additional arguments for discarding the policies of their top leaders, who are heading the campaign for retaining the nostrike pledge in the current referendum, let them turn to page 29 of the Wednesday, September 13, 1944 <strong>Proceedings of the Ninth Annual UAW-CIO Convention</strong>. There they will uncover an argument provided by UAW Secretary-Treasurer George Addes in the wind-up of his speech pleading with the delegates not to scrap the pledge.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“I say to this convention,” Addes exhorted, “that if we go out and do the job on November 7th we will be able to secure from this Congress all of those things that the workers are entitled to. If we fail, if we mislead the American public by revoking the No-Strike Pledge, I am convinced in my mind we will have failed to elect a friendly Congress.”</p>
<p class="fst">This statement contained two deliberate deceptions. One was that the workers would help to elect a “friendly Congress” by retaining the no-strike pledge. The other is that, if they elected a pro-Roosevelt Democratic Congress, they would secure “all of those things that the workers are entitled to.” Then, of course, the workers would not “need” the strike weapon.</p>
<p>Events since the election have made Addes’ lies – which were also those of the whole labor bureaucracy – much more transparent. That new Congress hailed by the “triumphant” CIO-PAC leaders as a “progressive Congress” has gone into action.</p>
<p>Its very first “friendly” deed was to establish a permanent anti-labor Dies Witch-Hunt Committee. Before the opening week of the new session was ended, a flood of anti-labor bills was already pouring into the legislative hoppers. This “friendly,” this “progressive” Congress looms up today as one of the most brazenly reactionary ever to convene under the Capitol dome. The pro-Roosevelt labor flunkies themselves are wailing: “Who won the election?”</p>
<p>Yet this is the very Congress the CIO-PAC. campaigned for and even boasted of electing. Addes beat the UAW convention delegates over the head with the argument that they dared to revoke the no-strike pledge only under pain of not electing this very Congress. He trumped this argument – how fantastic it must seem now to every auto worker who heard him! – with the claim that by renouncing the strike weapon and electing the Congress now in session “we will be able to secure from this Congress all of those things that the workers are entitled to.”</p>
<p><em>The UAW leaders used this now obviously false political argument as a primary reason for advocating that the auto convention continue the no-strike policy. Now these leaders must substitute other and even cruder lies for those pre-election ones which they would be grateful to have left buried and forgotten. For Addes and his henchmen would be laughed out of court if they reminded the auto workers how they were once more swindled into giving up their most powerful economic weapon, the strike, in return for receiving the present PAC-elected "friendly” Congress.</em></p>
<p>Thus, the UAW leaders perpetrated one more little fraud in the truly monstrous swindle used to put over the no-strike policy from the beginning – the promise that the War Labor Board would “impartially” protect the workers’ interests, that the corporations would “bargain in good faith” and refrain from provocations, that Roosevelt would enforce “equality of sacrifice” from the rich and “take the profits out of war.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The labor bureaucrats, who have been correctly called the “labor lieutenants of capitalism,” frequently employ “Judas goats” to help lead their memberships into policies which are against the workers’ interests. These “Judas goats” use “left” phrases in order to gain leadership over the militant ranks. At the crucial moment on every decisive issue, the “Judas goat” leaps openly into the camp of reaction, luring some of his followers with him and leaving the rest disoriented, leaderless and disorganized.</p>
<p><em>This special role of “Judas goat” in the UAW-CIO has been played traditionally by Walter Reuther, one of the two vice- presidents. Under cover of the bitter unprincipled factionalism and power politics among the leadership, Reuther has posed as a “militant.” But on every key issue in the struggle of the militant ranks against the bureaucratic officials, Reuther has always wound up in an embrace with his “opponents” and voted with them in support of sell-out policies.</em></p>
<p>The latest struggle in the UAW over the no-strike pledge proves to be no exception. Now that the referendum has posed for decision the basic question – for or against the no-strike surrender policy? – Reuther has leaped nimbly into the united front of reaction within and outside the union which is trying to browbeat the auto workers into retaining the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>As usual, Reuther waited until the very last moment before revealing fully his treachery. This was done to permit the militants he has lured behind him no time to reorient and reorganize themselves. When the ballots for the referendum finally were being sent through the mails, then Reuther was compelled to take a position. He lined up publicly with the entire top leadership and called on the auto workers to vote “Yes” on the referendum motion to reaffirm the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>Together with UAW president R.J. Thomas, Addes and Richard Frankensteen, another vice-president, Reuther last week spoke over a Michigan radio hook-up and told the auto workers to vote for the no-strike pledge. This radio program was sponsored by the Stalinist-organized and dominated UAW Committee for Retention of the No-Strike Pledge.</p>
<p>Subsequently, Reuther gave a special demonstration of hypocrisy. Having solidarized himself with the position of the Stalinists on the referendum and spoken under their auspices, Reuther self-righteously sought to disassociate himself from their committee because it contains “communists.” By descending to the sewer-level of red-baiting, he took a factional thrust at those he joined in principle, thereby still hoping to differentiate himself from more forthright reactionaries.</p>
<p><em>He added hastily, however, “I still support the no-strike pledge” even if “I won’t be associated with such people.” Reuther prefers to associate himself only with their policies of betrayal!</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
Two UAW-CIO Specialists in Deceit
(20 January 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 3, 20 January 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
If the CIO auto workers need any additional arguments for discarding the policies of their top leaders, who are heading the campaign for retaining the nostrike pledge in the current referendum, let them turn to page 29 of the Wednesday, September 13, 1944 Proceedings of the Ninth Annual UAW-CIO Convention. There they will uncover an argument provided by UAW Secretary-Treasurer George Addes in the wind-up of his speech pleading with the delegates not to scrap the pledge.
“I say to this convention,” Addes exhorted, “that if we go out and do the job on November 7th we will be able to secure from this Congress all of those things that the workers are entitled to. If we fail, if we mislead the American public by revoking the No-Strike Pledge, I am convinced in my mind we will have failed to elect a friendly Congress.”
This statement contained two deliberate deceptions. One was that the workers would help to elect a “friendly Congress” by retaining the no-strike pledge. The other is that, if they elected a pro-Roosevelt Democratic Congress, they would secure “all of those things that the workers are entitled to.” Then, of course, the workers would not “need” the strike weapon.
Events since the election have made Addes’ lies – which were also those of the whole labor bureaucracy – much more transparent. That new Congress hailed by the “triumphant” CIO-PAC leaders as a “progressive Congress” has gone into action.
Its very first “friendly” deed was to establish a permanent anti-labor Dies Witch-Hunt Committee. Before the opening week of the new session was ended, a flood of anti-labor bills was already pouring into the legislative hoppers. This “friendly,” this “progressive” Congress looms up today as one of the most brazenly reactionary ever to convene under the Capitol dome. The pro-Roosevelt labor flunkies themselves are wailing: “Who won the election?”
Yet this is the very Congress the CIO-PAC. campaigned for and even boasted of electing. Addes beat the UAW convention delegates over the head with the argument that they dared to revoke the no-strike pledge only under pain of not electing this very Congress. He trumped this argument – how fantastic it must seem now to every auto worker who heard him! – with the claim that by renouncing the strike weapon and electing the Congress now in session “we will be able to secure from this Congress all of those things that the workers are entitled to.”
The UAW leaders used this now obviously false political argument as a primary reason for advocating that the auto convention continue the no-strike policy. Now these leaders must substitute other and even cruder lies for those pre-election ones which they would be grateful to have left buried and forgotten. For Addes and his henchmen would be laughed out of court if they reminded the auto workers how they were once more swindled into giving up their most powerful economic weapon, the strike, in return for receiving the present PAC-elected "friendly” Congress.
Thus, the UAW leaders perpetrated one more little fraud in the truly monstrous swindle used to put over the no-strike policy from the beginning – the promise that the War Labor Board would “impartially” protect the workers’ interests, that the corporations would “bargain in good faith” and refrain from provocations, that Roosevelt would enforce “equality of sacrifice” from the rich and “take the profits out of war.”
* * *
The labor bureaucrats, who have been correctly called the “labor lieutenants of capitalism,” frequently employ “Judas goats” to help lead their memberships into policies which are against the workers’ interests. These “Judas goats” use “left” phrases in order to gain leadership over the militant ranks. At the crucial moment on every decisive issue, the “Judas goat” leaps openly into the camp of reaction, luring some of his followers with him and leaving the rest disoriented, leaderless and disorganized.
This special role of “Judas goat” in the UAW-CIO has been played traditionally by Walter Reuther, one of the two vice- presidents. Under cover of the bitter unprincipled factionalism and power politics among the leadership, Reuther has posed as a “militant.” But on every key issue in the struggle of the militant ranks against the bureaucratic officials, Reuther has always wound up in an embrace with his “opponents” and voted with them in support of sell-out policies.
The latest struggle in the UAW over the no-strike pledge proves to be no exception. Now that the referendum has posed for decision the basic question – for or against the no-strike surrender policy? – Reuther has leaped nimbly into the united front of reaction within and outside the union which is trying to browbeat the auto workers into retaining the no-strike pledge.
As usual, Reuther waited until the very last moment before revealing fully his treachery. This was done to permit the militants he has lured behind him no time to reorient and reorganize themselves. When the ballots for the referendum finally were being sent through the mails, then Reuther was compelled to take a position. He lined up publicly with the entire top leadership and called on the auto workers to vote “Yes” on the referendum motion to reaffirm the no-strike pledge.
Together with UAW president R.J. Thomas, Addes and Richard Frankensteen, another vice-president, Reuther last week spoke over a Michigan radio hook-up and told the auto workers to vote for the no-strike pledge. This radio program was sponsored by the Stalinist-organized and dominated UAW Committee for Retention of the No-Strike Pledge.
Subsequently, Reuther gave a special demonstration of hypocrisy. Having solidarized himself with the position of the Stalinists on the referendum and spoken under their auspices, Reuther self-righteously sought to disassociate himself from their committee because it contains “communists.” By descending to the sewer-level of red-baiting, he took a factional thrust at those he joined in principle, thereby still hoping to differentiate himself from more forthright reactionaries.
He added hastily, however, “I still support the no-strike pledge” even if “I won’t be associated with such people.” Reuther prefers to associate himself only with their policies of betrayal!
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(14 April 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_15" target="new">Vol. IX No. 15</a>, 14 April 1945, pp. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Auto Workers Fear Move to Scuttle Convention</h3>
<p class="fst">Last week this column warned the auto workers to be on the alert against a move to scuttle the CIO United Automobile Workers annual convention, scheduled for next September. That this warning was well-founded is confirmed by a report in the April 6 <strong>Toledo Union Journal</strong>, official organ of northwest Ohio’s 58,000 CIO members, mainly auto workers.</p>
<p>In a special front-page story, the <strong>Toledo Union Journal</strong> reports: “Opposition to Grand Rapids, Mich., as the 1945 UAW-CIO convention city is on the increase. Announcement of Grand Rapids which was the scene of the 1944 convention as again having been chosen for this year’s meeting was made here last week by George F. Addes, International UAW-CIO secretary-treasurer.</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“Some UAW officers see in the Addes move the preliminary to calling off the convention altogether. Application was made by the UAW-CIO secretary-treasurer to the Office of Defense Transportation for permission to hold the convention. It was felt by some union officials that the move would lead to a rejection by the ODT because of the government policy of discouraging conventions during wartime.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“One delegate from the 1944 convention speaking of the choice of Grand Rapids for the 1945 conference said, ‘I don’t imagine George Addes would care too much if the ODT refused to grant the permission for the convention. After all, it would mean that he wouldn’t have to worry about getting reelected and that in itself would make the refusal of the government to hold the meeting worth while’.”</p>
<p class="fst">Great dissatisfaction prevailed last year at Grand Rapids, because of the lack of housing and eating facilities for the delegates and visitors who usually number many thousands. First choice of available hotel accommodations went to the pals of Addes and other top UAW leaders.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Seamen Back Miners</h3>
<p class="fst">The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, West Coast section of the Seafarers’ International Union, AFL, has called for 100 per cent labor support to the coal miners in their present struggle for better wages and conditions;</p>
<p>A lead editorial by Harry Lundeberg, SUP secretary-treasurer, in the union’s official organ, <strong>West Coast Sailor</strong>, March 16, declares:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“If the leadership of the American Labor movement had any guts, they should come out NOW, 400% behind John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers in their fight for their rights! It is the duty of the American Labor movement to stand behind the mine workers in their fight. They have a JUST fight!”</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Father of Heroes – Fired!</h3>
<p class="fst">As usual, the corporation kept: press hypocritically raved about the “boys in the foxholes” when almost 5,000 Packard workers, members of UAW-CIO local 190 in Detroit, went on strike on March 28. The strike was called when the company arbitrarily discharged a union shop steward, John Krulock, for allegedly “fomenting” a brief stoppage on March 12.</p>
<p>Just two days before he was fired, Krulock and his wife had been informed that one of their sons had been wounded in action in Germany. On March 13 they had received the sad news that another son was reported missing after a bombing mission over Germany.</p>
<p><em>Krulock’s fellow-workers were so incensed when the labor-hating dollar-patriots fired him that they protested by an almost solid walkout. A hell of a lot the bosses care about the “boys in the foxholes” – about their working fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, either!</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Annual Wage “Study”</h3>
<p class="fst">When Roosevelt wanted to sidetrack union pressure for increased wages, he suddenly announced that he was assigning the chore of “studying” the guaranteed annual wage plan to a subcommittee of the advisory board of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.</p>
<p>The head of this subcommittee is Eric Johnston, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who last week signed a labor-capital “peace charter” with Philip Murray and William Green, heads of the CIO and AFL.</p>
<p>It is interesting, theretore, to note what this capitalist dove of peace, Eric Johnston, thinks of the annual wage idea which Roosevelt has assigned his committee to “study.” Last December 6, in a speech before the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce, Johnston declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“I hope we can avoid learning the hard way. It is a mistake to force annual wages down the throats of management by government order ... By forcing business into a straitjacket the job regularity attained might be more than offset by the loss of our freedom. If everyone must pay an annual wage many will hesitate to engage in business. Then the government would be tempted to step in and become the employer, as is the case in Russia today.”</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p5"></a>
<h3>Severance Pay</h3>
<p class="fst">One of the important union demands these days is for severance pay in anticipation of mass unemployment during the coming period of extensive production cutbacks. The War Labor Board two weeks ago, in a decision involving American Type Founders, Inc., Elizabeth, N.J., set the pattern for what it considers “reasonable” severance pay.</p>
<p>The American Type plan, approved by the WLB, calls for one week’s wages for employees who have worked for six months to one year; two weeks after one year, three weeks after two years, and four weeks after three to five years. Under this plan, a high percentage of the present war industry workers would receive not more than two weeks wages as severance pay to meet months of unemployment.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p6"></a>
<h3>Peacetime Militarism</h3>
<p class="fst">Condemning plans for peacetime military conscription as “a severe threat to the free activity of labor, because it can be used to break strikes,” the March <strong>Joint Board News</strong>, organ of the Greater New York Board of the CIO Textile Workers, declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The smart boys who argue that a little exercise and military discipline will make our young men healthy sound amazingly like Hitler did, ten years ago. In case our political friends don’t know it, America’s youth could become strong and healthy if they were paid decent wages for decent hours, lived in homes instead of slums, and given access to recreational centers ... Peace-time conscription is the slick way of getting out of the problem of providing 60 million jobs, because we can stick our surplus labor into army camps and forget about them. But it is the dangerous way, the fascist way ...”</em></p>
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Art Preis Archive | Trotskyist Writers Index | ETOL Main Page
Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(14 April 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 15, 14 April 1945, pp. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Auto Workers Fear Move to Scuttle Convention
Last week this column warned the auto workers to be on the alert against a move to scuttle the CIO United Automobile Workers annual convention, scheduled for next September. That this warning was well-founded is confirmed by a report in the April 6 Toledo Union Journal, official organ of northwest Ohio’s 58,000 CIO members, mainly auto workers.
In a special front-page story, the Toledo Union Journal reports: “Opposition to Grand Rapids, Mich., as the 1945 UAW-CIO convention city is on the increase. Announcement of Grand Rapids which was the scene of the 1944 convention as again having been chosen for this year’s meeting was made here last week by George F. Addes, International UAW-CIO secretary-treasurer.
“Some UAW officers see in the Addes move the preliminary to calling off the convention altogether. Application was made by the UAW-CIO secretary-treasurer to the Office of Defense Transportation for permission to hold the convention. It was felt by some union officials that the move would lead to a rejection by the ODT because of the government policy of discouraging conventions during wartime.
“One delegate from the 1944 convention speaking of the choice of Grand Rapids for the 1945 conference said, ‘I don’t imagine George Addes would care too much if the ODT refused to grant the permission for the convention. After all, it would mean that he wouldn’t have to worry about getting reelected and that in itself would make the refusal of the government to hold the meeting worth while’.”
Great dissatisfaction prevailed last year at Grand Rapids, because of the lack of housing and eating facilities for the delegates and visitors who usually number many thousands. First choice of available hotel accommodations went to the pals of Addes and other top UAW leaders.
* * *
Seamen Back Miners
The Sailors’ Union of the Pacific, West Coast section of the Seafarers’ International Union, AFL, has called for 100 per cent labor support to the coal miners in their present struggle for better wages and conditions;
A lead editorial by Harry Lundeberg, SUP secretary-treasurer, in the union’s official organ, West Coast Sailor, March 16, declares:
“If the leadership of the American Labor movement had any guts, they should come out NOW, 400% behind John L. Lewis and the United Mine Workers in their fight for their rights! It is the duty of the American Labor movement to stand behind the mine workers in their fight. They have a JUST fight!”
* * *
Father of Heroes – Fired!
As usual, the corporation kept: press hypocritically raved about the “boys in the foxholes” when almost 5,000 Packard workers, members of UAW-CIO local 190 in Detroit, went on strike on March 28. The strike was called when the company arbitrarily discharged a union shop steward, John Krulock, for allegedly “fomenting” a brief stoppage on March 12.
Just two days before he was fired, Krulock and his wife had been informed that one of their sons had been wounded in action in Germany. On March 13 they had received the sad news that another son was reported missing after a bombing mission over Germany.
Krulock’s fellow-workers were so incensed when the labor-hating dollar-patriots fired him that they protested by an almost solid walkout. A hell of a lot the bosses care about the “boys in the foxholes” – about their working fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters, either!
* * *
Annual Wage “Study”
When Roosevelt wanted to sidetrack union pressure for increased wages, he suddenly announced that he was assigning the chore of “studying” the guaranteed annual wage plan to a subcommittee of the advisory board of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
The head of this subcommittee is Eric Johnston, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who last week signed a labor-capital “peace charter” with Philip Murray and William Green, heads of the CIO and AFL.
It is interesting, theretore, to note what this capitalist dove of peace, Eric Johnston, thinks of the annual wage idea which Roosevelt has assigned his committee to “study.” Last December 6, in a speech before the Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce, Johnston declared:
“I hope we can avoid learning the hard way. It is a mistake to force annual wages down the throats of management by government order ... By forcing business into a straitjacket the job regularity attained might be more than offset by the loss of our freedom. If everyone must pay an annual wage many will hesitate to engage in business. Then the government would be tempted to step in and become the employer, as is the case in Russia today.”
* * *
Severance Pay
One of the important union demands these days is for severance pay in anticipation of mass unemployment during the coming period of extensive production cutbacks. The War Labor Board two weeks ago, in a decision involving American Type Founders, Inc., Elizabeth, N.J., set the pattern for what it considers “reasonable” severance pay.
The American Type plan, approved by the WLB, calls for one week’s wages for employees who have worked for six months to one year; two weeks after one year, three weeks after two years, and four weeks after three to five years. Under this plan, a high percentage of the present war industry workers would receive not more than two weeks wages as severance pay to meet months of unemployment.
* * *
Peacetime Militarism
Condemning plans for peacetime military conscription as “a severe threat to the free activity of labor, because it can be used to break strikes,” the March Joint Board News, organ of the Greater New York Board of the CIO Textile Workers, declared:
“The smart boys who argue that a little exercise and military discipline will make our young men healthy sound amazingly like Hitler did, ten years ago. In case our political friends don’t know it, America’s youth could become strong and healthy if they were paid decent wages for decent hours, lived in homes instead of slums, and given access to recreational centers ... Peace-time conscription is the slick way of getting out of the problem of providing 60 million jobs, because we can stick our surplus labor into army camps and forget about them. But it is the dangerous way, the fascist way ...”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Stalinists on the Waterfront</h1>
<h3>(April 1947)</h3>
<hr>
<p class="fst"><span class="information"><span class="info">Written:</span> 1947.<br>
<span class="info">First Published:</span> April 1947.<br>
<span class="info">Source:</span> Published for the Socialist Workers Party by Pioneer Publishers.<br>
<span class="info">Transcription/HTML Markup:</span> Sean Robertson for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).</span><br>
<span class="info">Copyleft:</span> Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (marxists.org) 2010.<br>
<span class="date">Permission is granted to copy and / or distribute this document under the terms of the <a href="../../../../../../admin/legal/cc/by-sa-full.htm">Creative Commons license</a>. Please cite any editors, proofreaders and formatters noted above along with any other publishing information including the URL of this document.</span></p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<h4>FOREWORD</h4>
<p class="fst">American labor is closely watching the conflict in the CIO National Maritime Union. What is being determined in part, is the future influence of the Communist Party (Stalinist) in the American trade unions. In no other major union have the Stalinists exercised such complete control for so many years. A balance-sheet of their leadership in the NMU is therefore an accurate gauge of their record throughout the labor movement.</p>
<p>In this pamphlet we have gone into painstaking detail, with fully documented evidence, to record the specific crimes of the Stalinists against the American workers, and particularly against maritime labor.</p>
<p>Many workers observing these crimes; and repelled by them, are confused about the Stalinists’ motives. They often arrive at the false conclusion that Stalinism is Communism, and· therefore say, “If that is Communism, we want no part of it.”</p>
<p>Capitalist propagandists try to reinforce this false notion in order to discredit the very idea of Communism, by identifying it with the repressive rule of Stalin in the Soviet Union. This enables Wall Street to pose as a “defender of democracy” in its preparations for war against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>For their part, the Stalinists welcome the capitalist lies about their “revolutionary” aims. They operate under cover of the monstrous lie that they represent genuine Communism.</p>
<p><em>In order to conduct a progressive struggle against Stalinism, it is first of all necessary to expose this lie and treat the Stalinists for what they are – a reactionary current in the labor movement.</em></p>
<p>It is the aim of this pamphlet to disclose the political roots of Stalinist policy in the American trade unions and the record of their betrayals growing out of these roots.</p>
<table width="100%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="3">
<tbody><tr>
<td width="60%"><p> </p></td>
<td>
<p class="fst"><em>Art Preis</em><br>
Labor Editor of <strong>The Militant</strong></p>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody></table>
<br>
<h1>THE STALINISTS ON THE WATERFRONT</h1>
<h2>A Documented Record of Betrayal</h2>
<p class="fst">The Communist Parties are a world-wide agency of the bureaucracy which usurped power in the Soviet Union after the great Lenin’s death in 1924. This bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, represents the privileged layers of Soviet society.</p>
<img src="StalinistsWaterfront47-cover.jpg" alt="Stalinists on the Waterfront (cover)" border="1" align="right" hspace="12" vspace="20">
<p>The Soviet Union was founded by a workers’ revolution that wiped out Czarism and the rule of the capitalists and established a workers’ state based on nationalized property. It is like a giant trade union. The Stalinist regime in this workers’ state is similar to a corrupt, bureaucratic machine that takes control of a trade union, destroys its internal democracy and fattens off its treasury.</p>
<p>While the workers fight the bureaucratic machine, they do not cease to defend their union on the picket line against the bosses. <em>That is why we defend the Soviet Union from imperialist attack in spite of and against Stalin.</em></p>
<p>In the Soviet Union, the real Bolsheviks, who opposed the Stalin bureaucracy, were led by Leon Trotsky, founder of the famous Red Army and co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution. The Trotskyists are the sole heirs and continuators of Lenin’s program of world socialist revolution.<br>
</p>
<h4>ROOTS OF STALINIST POLICY</h4>
<p class="fst">The Stalin regime destroyed Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The real leaders of the Russian Revolution, and hundreds of thousands of the best revolutionary fighters, were systematically wiped out in vast bloody purges. Trotsky, who fought hardest to preserve Lenin’s program of international socialism, was driven into exile and finally assassinated by a Stalinist secret police agent in Mexico in 1940.</p>
<p>Along with the founding of the Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky had founded the Third (Communist) International to extend the workers’ revolution begun in Russia on a world scale. When Stalin usurped power in the Soviet Union, he also proceeded to convert the Third International into a mere pawn to serve his foreign policies and diplomatic maneuvers with the capitalist powers.</p>
<p>Although Stalin formally dissolved the Third International during his wartime alliance with U.S.-British imperialism, the Communist Parties of the various countries continue to function as pliable instruments of Stalin’s foreign policy.</p>
<p>These parties are used as political pressure groups to bolster Stalin’s current diplomatic moves and deals with the capitalist governments. When Stalin wants to put pressure on some other government, the Communist Party in that country starts to talk “militant:” When Stalin wants to conciliate some imperialist power and make a deal with it, the Communist Party is instructed to play ball with the capitalist rulers.</p>
<p><em>The constant shifts and somersaults in the “line” of the American Communist Party therefore directly reflect Stalin’s diplomatic zigzags. At all times the interests of the workers are sacrificed to the Kremlin’s temporary diplomatic needs.</em></p>
<p>Thus, when Stalin made his pact with Hitler in July 1939, the Communist Parties ceased their clamor for “collective security” of the “democratic” imperialists against the fascist imperialists. They yelled that the war, which Hitler launched after Stalin gave him the green light, was due only to British and French imperialism. In this country, they raised the slogan, “The Yanks are NOT coming!”</p>
<p>When Hitler turned on his ally Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Parties overnight changed their “line”. They discovered that Hitler alone was responsible for the war, while the British, French and American imperialists were waging a “non-imperialist, progressive war of liberation”<br>
</p>
<h5>Class Character of War</h5>
<p class="fst">All the great Marxists, including Lenin, had always taught that the character of a war was determined by the class character of the state conducting the war. If a monopoly capitalist state waged war, it could be only a war which pursued monopoly capitalist aims. Thus, all the capitalist powers in the Second World, War, as in the First, were engaged in an imperialist conflict for markets, colonies and spheres of influence.</p>
<p>Because Stalin had entered a military and diplomatic alliance with American and British imperialism against German imperialism, the Stalinists said that Wall Street, ruler of the richest and most powerful country on earth, was conducting a “progressive” war. They called on the workers to support Wall Street’s war and give up all their rights, in order to maintain “national unity” with the Big Business war profiteers.</p>
<p><em>The Stalinists supported the most reactionary elements against the labor militants. They placed themselves at the disposal of the American capitalist class as its most loyal and abject servants. No anti-labor crime was too foul for them to commit – including open strikebreaking – in order to further “unity” in the imperialist “war effort.”</em></p>
<p>Today it is clear to every thinking person that American and British capitalism didn’t fight a war for the “Four Freedoms” and “liberation” of oppressed peoples.</p>
<p>The people of Germany and Japan, who suffered so long under fascism and military dictatorship, are ruled by conquering armies. The German capitalists who put Hitler in power still remain, protected by Wall Street and London. In Japan, U.S. imperialism upholds the hated Emperor Hirohito on American bayonets. In Greece, the British, armed with American lend-lease weapons, have restored to power the bloody Greek monarch. I n China, the butcher Chiang Kai-shek, murderer of millions of Chinese peasants and workers, has been kept in power by U.S.-trained and equipped armies.<br>
</p>
<h5>What World War II Brought</h5>
<p class="fst">More than half a million American troops are stationed in 55 lands all over the globe. Wall Street has become the great treasury and arsenal for the suppression of colonial peoples fighting for their independence. American arms in the hands of French, Dutch and British troops are slaughtering the people of Indo-China, Indonesia and India. United States loans are financing reactionary regimes and wars of colonial suppression. Nowhere did the war bring the “Four Freedoms” – only repression, starvation, ruin and death.</p>
<p>Here at home, the first fruits of “victory” have been a ferocious anti-labor drive; a wave of lynch-terror against the Negro people; a terrible housing crisis affecting millions of veterans and workers; monumental government debt, mounting taxes and inflation; the looming shadow of another depression; and the growing threat of military regimentation. Over all hangs the threat of another World War in the not distant future – a war of atomic annihilation.</p>
<p><em>This is what World War II has brought – not the “liberation” promised by the Stalinists. Their betrayal of the workers to the imperialists in the war constitutes their greatest and most monstrous crime.</em></p>
<p>It is only in the light of this real understanding of Stalinism, what it is and how it operates, that the specific record of Stalinist crimes presented in this pamphlet takes on full and clear meaning. It is only with this understanding that the maritime workers, as well as all other sections of American labor, can conduct a progressive and effective fight against the sinister influence of Stalinism.<br>
</p>
<h4>MARITIME UNIONISM’S GREAT TRADITION</h4>
<p class="fst">American seamen have a great and honorable tradition in the struggle for labor’s emancipation. Maritime workers for the past century have fought and sacrificed and died to build unionism.</p>
<p>The twelve years between 1934 and today, when American labor rose to mighty organized stature, found the maritime workers in the front ranks of union struggle.</p>
<p>These twelve years began with the historic 1934 West Coast waterfront strike that gave a great impetus to maritime unionism. They reached a magnificent climax in 1946 with the greatest maritime strike in history.</p>
<p>These twelve years have seen the maritime workers solidly organized. They have raised their wages far above what they dared even dream of in the old days. They have eliminated some of the worst conditions that once made the industry a living hell.</p>
<p><em>From a virtual slave without any rights, the American seaman has become a union man, standing on his own feet and fighting back against his enemies.</em></p>
<p>It is a tribute to the militancy, union loyalty and self-sacrifice of the seamen that they have made these giant gains despite especially difficult conditions.</p>
<p>They are confronted by a ruthless and powerful combine of shipowners at whose side has stood the capitalist government. And an industry where workers are scattered in small groups always on the move, is a lot tougher to organize than one where workers are concentrated in large plants.</p>
<p>To these, great obstacles was added another – the enemy within. Prior to 1934 the maritime unions were cursed with the weight of a reactionary union bureaucracy. The workers had to advance every step of the way in spite of and against the phonies and bureaucrats. These bureaucrats kept the maritime workers separated into many unions and craft divisions. They stifled the voice of the rank and file. They opposed militant policies and collaborated with the employers and their government agents.<br>
</p>
<h5>Rise of the NMU</h5>
<p class="fst">The CIO National Maritime Union arose out of the seamen’s struggle to establish a fighting union free of the bureaucratic machine that dominated the old AFL International Seamen’s Union. Following the lead of the insurgent seamen on the West Coast, a section of the East Coast seamen fought against the sell-out policies of the ISU-AFL bureaucrats and broke from the grip of these bureaucrats after the 1936-1937 strike. In May 1937, they founded the NMU and joined the main stream of industrial unionism, the CIO.</p>
<p>The NMU’s birth coincided with the government’s policy of direct intervention against the seamen on behalf of the shipowners, who had proved unable to push back the tide of unionism. It was the beginning of the government’s legislative attack on the seamen and the attempt to put over the Copeland Fink Book.</p>
<p>Thus, the NMU was originally founded on a policy of struggle against the ship operators, the government and the labor bureaucrats.</p>
<p>Despite the policies that inspired the founding of the NMU, the seamen did not achieve their desire to be rid of a strangling bureaucracy. In the course of an internal struggle during the formative stages of the NMU, another bureaucratic clique came to power.<br>
</p>
<h5>The Stalinist Clique</h5>
<p class="fst">This ruthless, anti-democratic clique was the waterfront section of the Communist Party (Stalinist). From 1939 on, the Stalinists held iron control over the N M U. Only in the past year has there emerged any serious challenge to their rule.</p>
<p>Thus, for seven years the Stalinists have had a truly enviable opportunity in the NMU to prove in practice their claim to be the “vanguard of the working class.”</p>
<p>Instead of uniting the seamen around a fighting program, they have been vicious opponents of a militant policy. They have been shameless collaborators with the employers and reactionary government agents. They have been disrupters of maritime unity. They have been corrupt bureaucrats, crushing any seaman who dared to speak for a progressive policy.</p>
<p><em>Their crowning treachery came during the war. Because they supported the imperialist war, they sold themselves body and soul to Wall Street and its government. As volunteer scabs and strike-breakers throughout the labor movement, they earned the workers’ contempt.</em></p>
<p>But Big Business paid tribute to the Stalinists’ fink role. The Wall Street organ, <em>Business Week</em>, on March 18, 1944, observed that the unions “identified as Communist-dominated” have “moved to the extreme right-wing position in the American labor movement”.</p>
<p>The Stalinist union leaders, said <em>Business Week</em>, have “the best no-strike record”, are “the most serious proponents of labor-management cooperation”, the “only serious advocates of incentive wages”, the “last to call for smashing the Little Steel Formula”, and their unions “are the only unions which support the President’s call for a national service act (labor conscription)”.</p>
<p>One working-class voice alone spoke out boldly and truthfully about the real role of the Stalinists – the <em>Socialist Workers Party</em> (Trotskyist) and its weekly paper, <strong>The Militant</strong>. The Trotskyists opposed the profiteers’ war and militantly continued to defend labor’s interests.</p>
<p>The Stalinists made the Trotskyists their special target for slander and physical terrorism. The Communist Party spread up and down the waterfront tens of thousands of books and pamphlets smearing the Trotskyists.<br>
</p>
<h5>Trotskyists’ Wartime Defense of Labor</h5>
<p class="fst">The <em>Socialist Workers Party</em> opposed playing ball with the employers and their government. <em>We
fought the no-strike pledge, and called for labor to get off the employer-dominated War Labor Board. In maritime, we opposed establishment of the Recruitment and Manning Office and every attempt of the government to undermine the union hiring hall. We assailed the attempt to impose Coast Guard rule over merchant seamen.</em></p>
<p>Because we defended the rights of labor during the war, the Stalinists slandered the Trotskyists and all union militants as “fascists” and “Hitlerite-agents”. The CP issued a pamphlet, <strong>The Trotskyite Fifth Column in the Labor Movement</strong> by the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>’s poison-pen specialist, George Morns. This, pamphlet has been withdrawn, because today it serves as a confession of Stalinist crimes.</p>
<p>According to this pamphlet, our greatest “crime” was to oppose labor’s surrender of its rights during the war. The Trotskyists, lamented Morris, “oppose national unity and all common labor-employer government action”. They “ridicule a postwar outlook of national unity and full employment and pin their hopes on a sharp crisis”. They “oppose labor’s wartime no-strike pledge” and “sneer at joint labor-management committees as ‘speed-up’ instruments”. They “shout loudly that management and labor cannot possibly have a joint interest.” And, horror of horrors, the Trotskyists have a “feverish interest in a ‘labor party’”.</p>
<p>Morris further complains that “the Trotskyites know that they can be effective only if they exploit real dissatisfaction and grievances”. He does not explain what the Stalinist union leaders were doing about “real dissatisfaction and grievances”. For the Stalinists would like their ‘wartime’ union record – and postwar record – kept as a book sealed with seven seals. Their whole strikebreaking record constitutes one of the most shameful chapters in the history of labor betrayals.<br>
</p>
<h4>“COMMUNISTS ON THE WATERFRONT”</h4>
<p class="fst">In the January 3, 1947 NMU <strong>Pilot</strong>, President Curran states that the Stalinist clique “propose to use the same tactics which have been used in our Union for the past two years, when they attempted to jam down our throats collaboration policy, with the shipowners and anybody who voted against it was slandered and smeared”.</p>
<p>This statement is true – except for the time element. <em>The Stalinists have been practicing their treachery not just for “the past two years” but throughout the NMU’s history.</em> That treachery is but a small part of their crimes against all labor. For the real record, we must go back to the war years themselves.</p>
<p>Let us study the wartime record of Stalinism by starting with a 112-page pamphlet the Communist Party published in May 1946, and distributed all over the waterfront. This document is misnamed <strong>Communists on the Waterfront</strong>. Every line contains a lie, and sometimes two.</p>
<p>Only four of the pamphlet’s 112 pages deal with, the Stalinist role on the waterfront after July 1939 – when the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed. From July 1939 to December 7, 1941, the pamphlet is a complete blank. The Stalinists don’t want the seamen to be reminded of that period.</p>
<p>After skipping the Stalin-Hitler pact period completely, the pamphlet’s author, Herb Tank, hurriedly rushes over the period from December 7, 1941. He boasts how the super-patriotic Stalinists urged the seamen to “keep ‘em sailing” for the benefit of Wall Street’s war and profits. He complains only that “when the seamen turned their energies toward fighting Hitler the shipowners began breaking down conditions”.</p>
<p>What, did the Stalinists do about this? Tank tells in two sentences: “DON’T LET THE SHIPOWNERS PROVOKE A STRIKE! The Communists [read Stalinists] fought for a no-strike policy in the marine industry”. <em>That is, the Stalinists held the seamen’s arms, while the bosses socked them!</em></p>
<p>In these same four pages, Tank is compelled to admit the Stalinists “made serious errors” under “the leadership of Earl Browder”, who “claimed American capitalism was progressive – that the workers could solve their problems by collaborating with the bosses”.</p>
<p>But all that, we are assured, has been “corrected”. Browder was expelled for “opportunism” and the Communist Party is now led by William Z. Foster. We are told that Foster had always held that “the basic nature of capitalism and imperialism had not been changed by the war”.</p>
<p>But all through the war, when he was National Chairman of the Communist Party, when he went around attacking strikes and calling for collaboration between the workers and the bosses, Foster was silent about Wall Street imperialism. His mouth was opened, as Tank admits, only after “the American Communists came in for severe criticism from leading European Communists.</p>
<p>Only then did the American Stalinists suddenly discover that their leader for 16 years was an “opportunist” and “revisionist”. In the Communist Party, it seems, one man could keep the whole party, including Foster, meekly chained to an “opportunist” policy for years. That speaks volumes for the kind of party it really is.</p>
<p>But Browder’s “opportunism” and “revisionism” expressed themselves not only in the realm of theory. They led to specific acts, carried out by the whole present Communist Party leadership.</p>
<p>These acts stand as crimes in the eyes of every honest trade unionist. The Stalinist crimes were the most despicable of all – scabbing and strikebreaking.<br>
</p>
<h5>Strikebreaking Record</h5>
<p class="fst">To fully understand the role of the Stalinists in wartime, it is first necessary to review their record on the general labor front during the past years. Their actions in the NMU are but one reflection of a national and international policy.</p>
<p>During the war more than 2,000,000 American workers were forced to go on strike to defend themselves from employer attacks, protect their unions and maintain their living standards against wartime inflation.</p>
<p><em>The Stalinists, in the name of “national unity”, placed themselves at the disposal of the anti-labor forces as direct streak-breakers.</em></p>
<p>They tried to break the miners’ strikes and the West Coast machinists’ strike, and earned the condemnation of the whole labor movement for their scandalous conduct in the Montgomery Ward strikes. In every instance where the workers fought for their rights, the Stalinists intervened on the side of the employers.</p>
<p>The actions of the Communist Party during the 1943 coal miners’ strikes are remembered with hatred by every miner. The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> ran columns of abuse against the miners and John L. Lewis, The Communist Party held public meetings in every large city, including the Yankee Stadium in New York, to mobilize strikebreaking sentiment. Communist Party leaders toured the mine districts urging the miners to go back to work without a contract.</p>
<p>William Z. Foster, on April 29, 1943, wrote a front-page article in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> attacking the impending mine strike on May 1. He spoke on May 2 in Town Hall, Philadelphia, calling on the miners to submit to the War Labor Board.</p>
<p>When the first strike was halted for a two-week truce, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> gloated that the “Lewis line” had been “utterly defeated”. But when the second strike began in June, the June 11 <strong>Daily Worker</strong> demanded that “under no circumstances should the government give way to the Lewis conspiracy”.</p>
<p>A minor but very revealing incident happened near Pittsburgh. Two officials of the Communist Party were picked up by police outside Washington, Pa., and charged with illegal use of gas coupons for pleasure driving. Michael Saunders, Pennsylvania state CP organizer, pleaded that it was a business trip “to see some of our members and do everything we could to start a back-to-work movement”. The OPA ration attorney Richard L. Nassau ruled that use of gas coupons for strikebreaking was “legitimate”.</p>
<p>Two years later, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> was again screaming in headlines: “Not An Hour’s Stoppage! The Mines Must Be Seized!” (<strong>Daily Worker</strong>, March 30, 1945).</p>
<p>In <strong>The Militant</strong> of November 18, 1944, we read an editorial denouncing Stalinist strikebreaking in another labor struggle. “During the recent strike of 2,500 San Francisco machinists, the traitorous West Coast Stalinist CIO leaders called on the capitalist government to use ‘armed forces and the appropriate government agencies ... in any action necessary to halt this or any other strike’”.</p>
<p>Turn the guns on workingmen – that was the Stalinist line!<br>
</p>
<h5>Bridges Scabs on Ward Strike</h5>
<p class="fst">You will find no CP publication circulated today that mentions the Montgomery Ward strikes. And for good reason.</p>
<p>The Montgomery Ward strike in April–May 1944, evoked the support of the whole labor movement, with but one exception – the Communist Party. Everybody knew that the Ward workers were forced to strike or see their union smashed by America’s No. 1 Open-Shopper, Sewell Avery.</p>
<p>But Harry Bridges saw nothing wrong with scabbing against 40-cent-an-hour workers. When the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union appealed to Bridges to halt CIO warehousemen in Ward’s St. Paul unit from handling scab goods from Chicago, the answer was: “We will handle Chicago orders eight hours a day, call it scabbing if you
want to”.</p>
<p>The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> launched a red-baiting attack on the Montgomery Ward strike leaders and slanderously linked them with their most hated enemy, Avery. “Mr. Avery owes his success in provoking the strike in large measure to a group of Trotskyites who, are in the leadership of the striking local”, said the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, April 17, 1944.</p>
<p>When union after union passed indignant resolutions demanding the ouster of Bridges for his scabbing in the Ward strike, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, June 19, 1944, turned the charge of “scab” against the STRIKERS!</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Those who violate the no-strike pledge are scabs and should be so treated. Scabs were never handled with kid-gloves.”</p>
<p class="fst">How pleased every rat who ever crossed a picket line must have felt to hear militant strikers fighting the bosses called “scabs.”<br>
</p>
<h5>Stalinists Back “Slave Labor” Scheme</h5>
<p class="fst"><em>The direct strikebreaking of the Stalinists was coupled with their eager endorsement of every government move to shackle and cripple the unions. This reached its low point when the Communist Party rushed to embrace Roosevelt’s proposal for universal labor conscription – a proposal that was denounced by the leaders of every national labor organization as a “slave labor” scheme.</em></p>
<p>But that didn’t stop the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, January 22, 1944, from lying that, “One fact stands out beyond a shadow of a doubt when we talk of labor’s sentiments on the President’s message to Congress, ALL LABOR (original emphasis) is behind it.”</p>
<p>“All Labor” turned out to be the Stalinists’ chief union spokesman Harry Bridges, and the Stalinist leadership of the NMU. The February 5, 1944 <em>New Leader</em> revealed the inside story, never denied by Bridges or the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, about what happened when CIO President Murray and AFL President Green went to the White House to protest Roosevelt’s slave labor scheme.</p>
<p>“Roosevelt’s reply was to tell Murray scornfully that he could not speak for the CIO on that view ... and in proof showed Murray a telegram from Harry Bridges endorsing a labor conscription act”.</p>
<p>Stalinist Howard McKenzie sought to whitewash Roosevelt’s draft-labor scheme at a meeting of 2,500 NMU members in New York City. As reported in <strong>The Pilot</strong>, January 14. 1944, page 1, McKenzie said: “The President didn’t say draft labor, he said ‘every adult.’ ... What the President did was to say we’re going’ to draft both capital and labor”.</p>
<p>The climax of Stalinist betrayal during the war was their proposal to put American labor in no-strike handcuffs permanently. Here again it was Bridges who first offered to deliver labor hog-tied on a platter to the bosses after the war.</p>
<p>Addressing a meeting of CIO Warehousemen’s Local 6 in San Francisco on May 25, 1944, Bridges said that the “strike weapon is overboard, not only for the duration of the war, but after the war”. At the same meeting the Stalinists jammed through a resolution that called strikes “treason”, offered to back the government “in any actions to prevent strikes”, and urged employers to “refuse to give consideration to the demands of any section of labor” that went on strike, not merely during the war but “indefinitely thereafter”.</p>
<p>The Stalinist clique in the NMU spilled the same kind of bilge in the pages of <strong>The Pilot</strong>. A typical example was the following statement in the February 18, 1944 issue: “Among the great industrialists there are many who believe in and will fight just as sincerely and effectively as ourselves, for enduring peace. These are our allies and we must learn to work with them honestly and wholeheartedly”.</p>
<p>The first thing these “allies” did as the war approached its close was to launch the most savage anti-union drive in modern American labor history – a drive that has steadily increased in ferocity.<br>
</p>
<h4>POSTWAR SCABBERY</h4>
<p class="fst">Now the finky Stalinist defenders of Wall Street’s imperialist plan of plunder tell us that maybe they made “some errors” during the war, but when Foster took the CP helm, everything changed overnight. Actually, the only thing that changed was the phrases. Fake-militant words were used to cover up continuing Stalinist betrayals.</p>
<p>Two classic examples of Stalinist <em>postwar</em> scabbery – under Foster’s leadership – were the General Motors strike and the AFL-CIO joint machinists’ strike in San Francisco and Oakland.</p>
<p>When the CIO United Automobile Workers struck General Motors in November 1945, the UAW General Motors Conference appealed to the Stalinist leaders of the CIO United Electrical Workers to pull out some 30,000 workers in GM’s Electrical Division.</p>
<p>For more than two months the Stalinists ignored the desperate plea of the GM auto workers who were fighting against the world’s greatest industrial corporation. When the GM electrical workers themselves voted to strike and finally walked out, the UE leaders hastened to conclude an agreement with General Motors in the midst of the UAW negotiations and undercut the wage demands of the GM auto workers. That is how these professional “unity shouters” practice labor solidarity.<br>
</p>
<h5>What CP Members Revealed</h5>
<p class="fst">But now we come to the evidence of a group of former Communist Party members from the “liquidated” CP machinists’ club in San Francisco. They were expelled for refusing to organize a strike-breaking back-to-work movement in the November 1945 AFL-CIO machinists’ joint strike.</p>
<p>Their statement, published in the October 28, 1945 <strong>NCP Report</strong>, organ of a group of CP dissidents, speaks for itself:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“After issuing perfunctory approval of the machinists’ strike demands as ‘just’, CP began to break the strike. It issued leaflets and had articles published in <em>People’s World</em> openly advising machinists that they couldn’t win the strike and urging them to go back to work.</p>
<p class="quote">“The best CP branch here, made up of machinists and having the best reputation in the whole country, was directed by CP to attack the strike leaders as Trotskyite (which was a damned lie, as usual) and to demand a rank-and-file committee to lead a back-to-work movement.</p>
<p class="quote">“Naturally, the machinists’ branch would not go along with CP policy, and so the branch was liquidated in the usual smart way; at the end of a meeting called for another purpose, the liquidation of the branch was announced, with a ruling: ‘There will be no discussion of this’. Expulsions came thick and fast”.</p>
<p class="fst">Here is the real picture of Stalinism in action under Foster, as under Browder.<br>
</p>
<h4>BETRAYAL IN MARITIME</h4>
<p class="fst">The wartime record of the Stalinists in maritime equals their record of treachery against all other workers.</p>
<p>If American merchant seamen today face the threat of militarization, government regimentation, coast guard “discipline”, destruction of the union hiring hall, let them remember that it was the Stalinist union leaders who not only welcomed but invited government intervention during the war.</p>
<p><em>It was the Stalinist leaders in the CIO waterfront unions who called for the establishment of government boards to rule the maritime industry.</em> In a speech to the Industrial Relations Section of the Commonwealth Club, April 8, 1942, at San Francisco, Harry Bridges boasted:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union ... proposed to its employers and to the government a plan to have the entire longshore industry on the Pacific Coast operated exclusively under the control of a joint management-labor-government board. <em>We devised the plan and we pushed for its adoption”.</em></p>
<p class="fst">Bridges further admitted that he was prepared to surrender any and every provision of the union contract at the behest of such a board. “In proposing the establishment of such a board, the union agreed to set aside any and all provisions of its entire collective bargaining contract if any such provisions of the contract in any way blocked an all-out war effort”.</p>
<p>Bridges glorified the War Labor Board, and at the 1942 California CIO convention he declared: “One agency in the U. S. Government today that is doing a good job is the National War Labor Board”.</p>
<p>The WLB was doing a good job – for the bosses! It froze all wages with the infamous “Little Steel Formula”.<br>
</p>
<h5>Treachery in the NMU</h5>
<p class="fst">Bridges’ actions and statements were duplicated, with minor variations, by the Stalinist clique in the NMU.</p>
<p>Right after Pearl Harbor, the Stalinist leaders in the NMU rushed to Washington with proposals for shackling the union and placing the seamen at the mercy of employer-dominated government boards.</p>
<p>At a government-sponsored conference or maritime union leaders and ship operators, Frederick Myers, then a chief Communist Party spokesman in the NMU, presented a memorandum for “insuring uninterrupted shipping facilities to guarantee the success of our war effort”.</p>
<p>It called for the “establishment of a board consisting of representatives of all the labor organizations, the shipowners and the interested government agencies”. On this board, “the shipowners and the labor organizations shall have an equal vote, with the appropriate government agency casting the deciding vote”. That is, the deciding
vote would go to a government stooge of the ship operators.</p>
<p>At a follow-up conference in Washington (see <strong>The Pilot</strong>, April 10, 1942) the Stalinists introduced a further proposal on “the problems of recruitment, discipline and the maintenance of efficiency” for merchant marine personnel. This covered:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“a) Availability of personnel, including manning, training and promotion; b) Discipline, on board ship and in domestic and foreign ports; c) The systematic elimination of disloyal elements; d) The waiving by mutual agreement of such collective bargaining provisions as may be found to interfere with the war effort”.</p>
<p class="fst">This was to be done not through a union agency, but “by definite fixing of responsibility as well as authority” for handling personnel problems in a Maritime Personnel Board to be set up by the government under the shipowner-controlled War Shipping Administration. <em>On this hand-picked government board of 10 members, the Stalinists proposed to put exactly</em> one <em>representative of rank-and-file seamen.</em></p>
<p>With this go-ahead sign from the Stalinist union leaders, the government proceeded to tighten its bureaucratic grip on the seamen through special agencies: the Maritime War Emergency Board; the Coast Guard; the Recruitment and Manning Office; etc.</p>
<p>The Coast Guard became, and remains to this day; the instrument for regimenting the seamen under military discipline. Through the MWEB the wages of seamen were frozen and the war risk bonuses were arbitrarily slashed and finally eliminated. The RMO shipping pool provided a reservoir of non-union personnel to man unorganized ships and was held as a constant threat over the union hiring hall.<br>
</p>
<h5>Stalinists Supported Regimentation</h5>
<p class="fst">Every one of these anti-union agencies was supported by the Stalinist clique heading the NMU. They went out of their way to cooperate with these agencies and enforce their decisions against the seamen.</p>
<p>Militant NMU members must feel sick at their stomachs when they recall the wartime issues of The Pilot. Look at a typical issue, like that of Jan. 21, 1944 (pages 3 and 14), reporting how anti-labor officials of the Maritime Commission, RMO and Coast Guard attended a meeting of the NMU National Council and “received a standing ovation”.</p>
<p>Read how Admiral Waesche of the Coast Guard at this meeting defended the Hearing Units (Coast Guard kangaroo courts for seamen) and how <em>“several of the agents (NMU) came forward to commend the Coast Guard for the fair, impartial job it was doing”.</em></p>
<p>Read in the same column how <strong>The Pilot</strong> editors glow over praise from Admiral Land, head of the crooked Maritime Commission and author of the slogan, “Union organizers should be shot at sunrise”.</p>
<p>It took an unsurpassed record of labor betrayal to win such commendation from a union-hater like Admiral Land.</p>
<p>Instead of opposing Coast Guard “discipline” for merchant seamen, the Stalinist NMU leaders welcomed it. They acted as fingermen against union militants who opposed their sell-out policy.</p>
<p>At the July 1943 NMU convention, Captain Edward Macauley, deputy administrator of the WSA, spoke of “a minority in the union who constitute a potential powder keg” and threatened the maritime unions with “loss of many of their present rights unless these elements are weeded out”.<br>
</p>
<h5>Fingermen Against Seamen</h5>
<p class="fst"><em>Instead of denouncing this vicious ultimatum, the NMU leaders promptly pushed through a resolution endorsing the Coast Guard Hearing Units and pledging to aid the Coast Guard in “weeding out the undesirable elements”. They also promised the RMO full cooperation in ferreting out seamen employed in shoreside industries and forcing them back to sea.</em></p>
<p>The Stalinist-dominated NMU National Council went so far as to endorse the scheme to give the Coast Guard permanent control over the merchant seamen. In July 1944, they adopted a special resolution offering “high commendation” to the Coast Guard and praising the Hearing Units as “unbiased, nondiscriminatory and unprejudiced”. This resolution, published in <strong>The Pilot</strong>, July 28, 1944, page 13, stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The National Council is in favor of the <em>continued</em> jurisdiction of an impartial agency <em>such as the Coast Guard</em>, over the questions of safety, navigation and inspection in peacetime as well as in war.” (Our emphasis).</p>
<p class="fst">The Stalinist clique jettisoned union shipping rules in favor of onerous government shipping regulations. They spied out alleged violators and turned them over to the draft boards.</p>
<p>Most NMU members well recall the <em>Principal Wartime Shipping Rules of the National Maritime Union</em>, which read in part:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“All men between the years of 18 and 30 who persist in turning down ships, or continually overstay their time on the beach, will have their names turned over to Draft Board as provided for under Selective Service law.</p>
<p class="quote">“All men over 30 years of age who persist in turning down ships, or continually overstay their time on the beach, <em>will have their names turned over to War Manpower Commission as not being <strong>bona-fide</strong> seamen”.</em></p>
<p class="fst">This meant that seamen torpedoed or bombed on repeated dangerous runs were forced back on the ships before they had recuperated, under threat of being drafted. Older seamen were turned over to the War Manpower Commission, deprived of certificates of availability and virtually blacklisted in the industry.</p>
<p>Seamen whom the Stalinists charged with violating government rules were driven to ship on non-union lines. Frederick Myers, then NMU vice-president, complained in a letter to the WSA about the increase in shipping crimps and company “hiring halls”:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The union has even gone so far as to taking drastic action against men who violate our shipping rules ... After the Union takes this action, however, its hands are tied because the individual penalized for violating these rules is free to go to anyone of the few unorganized companies”. (<strong>The Pilot</strong>, May 5, 1944, page 3).</p>
<p class="fst">Commenting on the stoolpigeon role of the Stalinists, <strong>The Militant</strong>, organ of the Socialist Workers Party, said on July 8, 1944: “The policies of NMU leaders in supporting the government and its bureaus have become so oppressive that seamen are driven away from the Union hall to the protection of – the shipowners and their crimps. This is virtually what <strong>The Pilot</strong> itself says”.</p>
<p>While the Stalinist NMU leaders were acting as cops and stoolpigeons against the seamen, union conditions won in years of bitter struggle rapidly deteriorated.<br>
</p>
<h5>“Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’”</h5>
<p class="fst">When it came to enforcing government restrictions, the Stalinists were tigers. When it came to defending seamen’s rights and conditions, the Stalinists crawled like worms. Their role was summarized by a leading reactionary magazine, <strong>Collier’s</strong>, in an article that scandalized the American labor movement.</p>
<p>Loyal, progressive NMU members must burn with rage at the thought of the ridicule and contempt brought on their union by the Stalinists when the April 21, 1945 <strong>Collier’s</strong> published <em>Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’</em>.</p>
<p><em>This article recorded the depth of Stalinist-shipowner collaboration. Stalinists in the NMU should be made to read this article out loud every time they take the floor to slander an opponent or boast of their union “victories”.</em></p>
<p>The authors of the <strong>Collier’s</strong> article expressed amazement at the degree of collaboration between the NMU officials and ship operators.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We had to be shown”, they begin, “when we heard that the shipping industry and the National Maritime Union, which only a few years ago were constantly at each other’s throats, were now as cooperative as a brace of lovebirds. <em>So friendly are they that some of the larger companies have agreed to send their port captains and agents to a ‘leadership’ school run by the union”.</em> (Our emphasis)</p>
<p class="fst">The title, <em>Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’</em>, was derived from the fact, reported by the authors, that the NMU was “the first and one of the very few unions which has already made a postwar no-strike pledge”.</p>
<p>The Stalinist permanent no-strike program was the main subject taught by the “professor” Danny Boano. One of the union students, after listening to Boano, declared indignantly, “What the hell is this? Are you working for us or the shipowners?”</p>
<p>Boano, reports the article, rose to defend the poor, misunderstood and abused shipping magnate who, after the war, find he</p>
<p class="quoteb">“has invested all his money in the ships, got contracts with these foreign countries to deliver the goods they need, and, just when he’s all set, the seamen, like the impatient brother back there, go on strike; they pull the pin.</p>
<p class="quote">“Where’s the shipowner going to find himself? His money is all tied up, his ships are tied up and the foreign governments are screaming for goods. And if we don’t deliver the goods, foreign seamen will. Then where are we? We’re on a picket line. The shipowner loses his contracts, his dough is all tied up. And then where will we ever get the $200 a month we want for A.B.’s?”</p>
<p class="fst">We are not surprised to read that while this was going on, “Mr. Basil Harris, the country’s largest shipowner, walked in and sat down among the students”. Upon the special invitation at the Stalinist teaching staff, Basil Harris, head of the union-hating United States Lines, addressed the class. When he finished his talk, dripping with honeyed protestations of shipowner love for the seamen, one deluded student was heard to remark; “He’s a real union capitalist, a regular union man”.<br>
</p>
<h4>TROTSKYIST RECORD IN MARITIME</h4>
<p class="fst">While the Stalinists were helping to put handcuffs on the seamen, the Trotskyists told the truth about the dangers facing the seamen during the war and postwar periods.</p>
<p>The full position of the Socialist Workers Party is contained in Frederick J. Lang’s <strong>Maritime</strong>, first published in March 1943, and re-issued in October 1945, by Pioneer Publishers, 116 University Place, New York City.</p>
<p><strong>Maritime</strong> is a conclusive answer to the Stalinist slanders about the Trotskyists on the waterfront. Published in the very midst of the war, <strong>Maritime</strong> exposed and attacked the ship operators and their government stooges and called for a militant union defense of the seamen’s rights.</p>
<img src="StalinistsWaterfront47-back.jpg" alt="Stalinists on the Waterfront (back)" border="1" align="right" hspace="12" vspace="20">
<p>Against the retreats and betrayals of the union leaders and the government-shipowner plot to shackle the seamen under military rule, <strong>Maritime</strong> called on the seamen’s unions to fight militantly for their independence. The Trotskyist slogans were:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>“Let the unions maintain discipline! Hands off union affairs!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“One book for all seamen – the Union Book! No Fink Books for American seamen!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“Defend the union hiring hall! No pool! No government halls!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“Defend union independence by maintaining the right to strike!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“No union hostages in government war boards!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“Train new seamen at government expense under trade-union control! No fink ships!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“Workers’ control! Open the shipowners’ books! All maritime subsidies controlled by union committees!</em><br>
</li>
<li><em>“Stop the mismanagement of the ship-‘owner’ parasites! Let the men who man the ships control the industry!”</em></li>
</ul>
<p class="fst">That’s the program the Stalinists slandered as a “Hitlerite” program. That’s the working-class program the Trotskyists fought for while the Stalinists turned militant union seamen over to the Coast Guard and Draft Board; broke strikes; hob-nobbed with the shipowners; enforced the RMO rules; supported the wage-freezing government boards; told the seamen not to strike even after the war; and urged postwar “labor-management” collaboration so that “we would not be giving up our system of private profit but would be, in fact, bolstering it up”. (<strong>The Pilot</strong>, December 24, 1943, page 2)<br>
</p>
<h4>FRUITS OF STALINIST SELL-OUT</h4>
<p class="fst">The fruits of the Stalinist sell-out policy were harvested by the seamen in 1945 when they were caught in the squeeze of soaring wartime inflation and drastic reduction of take-home pay.</p>
<p>In April 1945 the MWEB set in motion its program for quickly reducing and finally totally wiping out the war-risk bonus. Faced by the threat of a bonus cut on July 15 for seamen on the North Atlantic and Mediterranean runs, the NMU leaders could only whine to the MWEB that “the NMU has asked the Maritime War Emergency Board for time to prepare the membership for a $40 bonus cut proposed by the Board. We knew that a slash was coming as the end of the war neared, but we think the proposal was badly timed”.</p>
<p>The proposal was badly timed! That’s what <strong>The Pilot</strong> wrote editorially on May 4, 1945.</p>
<p>They also argued with great indignation that “the Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods Plans calls for higher standards of living – not wage cuts”.</p>
<p>Since the NMU seamen didn’t put much faith in “Dumbarton Oaks” and “Bretton Woods”, the Stalinists also put forward a <em>$200 Wage Program</em> to make up for the bonus cut. This turned out to be a plea to the War Labor Board for a 55-cent an hour minimum wage that would bring A.B.’s wages up to $144.50 a month – not $200. The extra $65.50, the Stalinists claimed, would come from “political action” to pass the Pepper 65-cent Minimum Wage Bill that had been defeated in Congress only a few months before, and other unenumerated benefits.</p>
<p>Exposing the demagogy of the Stalinist <em>$200 Wage Program</em>, <strong>The Militant</strong>, April 28, 1945, wrote:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The wage program of the NMU is nothing more than an empty gesture, because it is backed up by no policy of militant action. Point Number One in a serious program to get wage increases would be to revoke the ‘no-strike pledge’. Point Number Two would be the preparation of the union for militant action”.</p>
<p class="fst">This statement – completely confirmed by the experiences of the 1946 general maritime strike – became the subject of one of the most fantastic union meetings ever held. At the April 26, 1945 NMU membership meeting in New York, the Stalinist leaders staged a three-hour orgy of “Trotskyite”-baiting.</p>
<p>Stalinist Howard McKenzie led the pack, howling: “The workers are being given the impression that the way to win things is through strike action. But these Trotskyites don’t tell you what is going to happen to you after you strike. The fascists would move in and put you back to work at the point of a gun, and you would be forced to work for $30 a month”.</p>
<p>A year later – after the seamen had lost millions in wages – the NMU did call a strike, and Truman did threaten to put them to work at the point of a gun. But it was Truman who backed down!<br>
</p>
<h5>A Crack in the Bureaucratic Crust</h5>
<p class="fst">In all the years of Stalinist treachery and betrayal, didn’t the NMU members realize what was going on? Many of them did. But any member who dared to “talk out of turn” was immediately attacked, slandered and victimized by the ruthless Stalinist machine. Resentment was gradually boiling up among the NMU militants. But it found no outlet, until a crack opened in the bureaucratic crust.</p>
<p>The NMU members discovered that a conflict over basic policy had been in progress for a year and a half only when the NMU National Council was forced to print in the November 23, 1945 <strong>Pilot</strong> the letter of resignation of National Director Ralph Rogers.</p>
<p>Rogers revealed that in July 1944 a conflict arose in the NMU national leadership over acceptance of the July 15, 1944 WLB decision on wages. The headlines of the July 14, 1944 <strong>Pilot</strong> proclaimed: “Council, Membership Hail ‘Best’ Agreement.” Howard McKenzie was quoted as saying “This is the best contract ever negotiated by the NMU”.</p>
<p>Rogers’ letter declared however, that he and several other Council members took the position that in fact the WLB decision “contained practically no gains whatsoever for our membership. It did not contain an actual increase in wages, increased overtime rates, standby pay, increased scales, or many of the other demands that we felt could have been won by a real mobilization of the membership behind a fighting policy increased overtime.</p>
<p>The Stalinists smeared all who suggested that this sell-out agreement wasn’t the “greatest ever achieved”, Rogers reported. Myers, McKenzie, Smith, Stack & Co. began to “assassinate the character and integrity of all those who opposed the decision”. They spread the word that Rogers himself “was a phony, that I had sold out to Lundberg and that I was a Trotskyite”.</p>
<p>Once Rogers’ letter was published, more and more facts came out. They were supplied, significantly, by top NMU leaders who had themselves been members or close associates of the CP.<br>
</p>
<h5>Rift in NMU Leadership</h5>
<p class="fst">Finally, the NMU members got a first-hand revelation from NMU President Joseph Curran at the February 18, 1946 New York membership meeting. Curran openly charged that “the union is in the hands of a machine ... a machine that is going to tell you are going to work or else ... The machine tells you who is a phony in the union, the machine tells you who elect, who to fire. The machine tells you who to bring on charges.” Anyone who uttered a word of criticism, he said, was subjected to a vile slander campaign and hounded from the union and forced to resign from office.</p>
<p><em>This rift in the top leadership coincided with a developing internal conflict inside the Communist Party. A wave of expulsions had begun against CP workers for criticizing the Foster leadership.</em></p>
<p>Foster stated at a CP National Committee meeting of February 5, 1946, that</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We have a very dangerous situation in the NMU. We have done our best to try to adjust the situation and have been unable to accomplish it. The principal reason is our own comrades in the NMU. They are not carrying out the party line or we would have a different situation in the NMU. There has been a little surgery in the NMU, but apparently not enough. If these comrades continue to defy the party line, we will have to do some more surgery”.</p>
<p class="fst">Foster’s lieutenants in the NMU tried to carry out this “surgery” with the greasy knife of slander and bureaucratic repression but were stymied by a rising tide of revolt against their misrule.<br>
</p>
<h5>The Fake “Unity” Maneuver</h5>
<p class="fst">It was under the circumstances of this challenge to their hitherto tight control, that the Stalinists conceived one of their most sly maneuvers. That was the formation of the Committee for Maritime Unity – more appropriately known as the “Committee for Maritime Disunity”.</p>
<p>Through the CMU, the Stalinists planned to strengthen their slipping grip on the NMU and consolidate their machine on the waterfront. The Stalinists misused the seamen’s genuine desire for unity. Not only a large section of the members, but a number of non-Stalinist maritime union leaders, were taken in by this fake “unity” maneuver.</p>
<p>From the very beginning, the Trotskyists exposed the scheme. Just prior to the CMU founding convention, the April 27, 1946 issue of <strong>The Militant</strong> declared:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The Stalinists are motivated primarily by their desire to strengthen their stranglehold over the unions now under their domination and to consolidate their forces for a jurisdictional struggle against rival AFL unions”.</p>
<p class="fst">The immediate result of the CMU Conference was not unity, but further disunity. The conference, as <strong>The Militant</strong>
reported, “is regarded by the AFL unions as a hostile move directed against them, They, in turn, are talking of organizing an AFL maritime council for protection and mutual aid against any CIO invasion of their jurisdiction ... The Stalinist moves have strengthened the hand of the elements within the AFL unions who welcome a jurisdiction fight as an opportunity to expand at the expense of the CIO”.</p>
<p><strong>The Militant</strong> called instead for <em>“unity of the maritime workers in agreed-upon joint actions” as the “only honest and realistic approach. Such joint action is the indicated elementary step in any program looking toward eventual and genuine unification of the waterfront unions”.</em></p>
<p>Events and experience since have confirmed to the hilt the Trotskyist appraisal of CMU, The disruptive activities of CMU became so scandalous that its national co-chairman, Joseph Curran, felt impelled to resign and denounce the CMU.</p>
<p>In a statement to the NMU Council, Curran affirmed that the “CMU has been used for the purpose, number one, of controlling our union, and number two, for promoting warfare on the waterfront with the American Federation of Labor and the independent unions”.</p>
<p>The fake “unity” maneuver of the Stalinists reached its lowest point when the CMU Port Committee in San Francisco “gave to the Masters, Mates and Pilots, who were on strike, a 24-hour ultimatum to pull their pickets off the dock or have them smashed”, as Curran reported to the NMU membership meeting in New York on December 30, 1946.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“My name was attached to that ultimatum, and I did not approve of it”, he said with justified indignation, “and the NMU does not approve of strikebreaking or smashing picket lines”.</p>
<p class="fst">In the light of these facts Curran demanded that the question of continued affiliation to the CMU be submitted to a referendum vote of the NMU membership. This demand for a democratic solution of the dispute was rejected by the Stalinist majority on the NMU National Council. A mud-slinging campaign was unleashed against the opponents of CMU. Dire prophecies were circulated in the ranks of imminent disaster that would befall the NMU if it withdrew from CMU.</p>
<p><em>But the Stalinist campaign backfired. The NMU membership was aroused over the bureaucratic rejection of their right to decide the question by referendum vote. The tide of opposition mounted into a mighty wave of rebellion against the Stalinist clique.</em></p>
<p>Executing a sudden tactical shift the Stalinist executive committee of the CMU met in secret session and voted to dissolve the organization. For the Stalinists the question was no longer one of utilizing CMU to tighten their grip on the NMU but of preserving their machine in the National Maritime Union. Faced with sure defeat they executed a strategic retreat, proclaiming it was all done in the name of “unity”.<br>
</p>
<h4>HOW STALINISM RETAINS ITS INFLUENCE</h4>
<p class="fst">This documented record of Stalinist crimes against American labor, and the maritime workers in particular, is a vivid example of how Stalinism has disoriented and disarmed the workers and led them to tragic defeats in country after country.</p>
<p>Why then does Stalinism still retain such powerful influence in the world labor movement?</p>
<p>Stalinism has appropriated to itself the glorious tradition of the Russian Revolution and the prestige of the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state. This state, despite its degeneration under Stalin, remains a symbol of revolutionary hope for hundreds of millions throughout the world. Stalin exploits this sentiment for his own reactionary ends.</p>
<p>At the same time, he has used the resources of a great state to conduct an unparalleled campaign of slander, falsification and terror against the real communists. As part of this campaign, Stalin has perverted the whole meaning of communism and misrepresented the program of the real Leninists as its opposite.<br>
</p>
<h5>School of Falsification</h5>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists are masters of distortion. That is the core of their method. They call black white, and white black. Here are a few examples.</p>
<p>We told earlier how during the war the Stalinists tried to twist the word “scab,” which was correctly applied to them, to mean not a fink who goes through picket lines, but a militant worker on the picket lines.</p>
<p>Right now they are reversing the meaning of “red-baiting”. Those who attack the Stalinists for serving the shipowners are being labeled “red-baiters.” We read in the November 1946 issue of <strong>The Maritime Worker</strong>, issued by the “Waterfront Committee of the Communist Party” in San Francisco, that workers expelled from the Communist Party are conducting “a new kind of red-baiting campaign”.</p>
<p>The Stalinist sheet explains:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Of course their red-baiting sounds different than that used by the shipowners ... They say the Communist Party isn’t ‘radical’ enough for them ... They say that the Party is ‘too conservative’. They say that we are ‘reformist’ ...”</p>
<p class="fst">According to this logic, anyone who attacks labor traitors is a “red-baiter”.</p>
<p>During the war, Harry Bridges gave a classic demonstration of this Stalinist method in a statement on former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, who was trying to railroad Bridges out of the country. Bridges, in the August 11, 1944 <strong>Dispatcher</strong>, called Biddle “Number One on the list” of “people who pal around with the Trotskyites and go a long way to protect them”.</p>
<p><em>At that very moment, 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis CIO truckdrivers were in Federal prison. They were railroaded by Biddle and his Department of Justice in the famous Minneapolis Labor Trial. Prosecuted under the infamous Smith “Gag” Act for opposing imperialist war and advocating international socialism, the Trotskyists were charged, among other “crimes”, with circulating the</em> <strong>Communist Manifesto</strong> <em>of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.</em></p>
<p>Scores of CIO and AFL unions, representing nearly six million members, sent resolutions to President Roosevelt demanding the freedom of the SWP leaders.</p>
<p>The only elements in the labor movement who supported the imprisonment of the Trotskyists were the Communist Party and AFL Teamsters Czar Daniel J. Tobin, who helped engineer the frameup.<br>
</p>
<h4>THE GREATEST FRAMEUP OF ALL</h4>
<p class="fst">The fountainhead of all the Stalinist slander about the Trotskyists being “agents of Hitler” was the Moscow Frameup Trials. These trials were staged by Stalin to besmirch the real Bolsheviks, particularly the incorruptible Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917.</p>
<p>In these “trials” from 1935 to 1938, a number of Lenin’s leading co-workers were forced under physical and psychological torture to “confess” fantastic plots to overthrow the Soviet Union in alliance with the Nazis. The chief target of this frameup was the exiled Trotsky, who warned that Stalin was framing and murdering his political opponents as a cover for his own behind-the-scenes preparations for a pact with Hitler. That pact was signed in 1939.<br>
</p>
<h5>Moscow Trials Exposed</h5>
<p class="fst">The Moscow Trials “confessions” invented by the Stalin secret police were completely exploded by the exhaustive investigation of the Dewey Commission, headed by Professor John Dewey. Its findings that the Moscow Trials were frameups are contained in a monumental report, <em>Not Guilty</em>, published by Harper & Bros.</p>
<p>The conclusions of the Dewey Commission were confirmed by the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders last year. Every living Nazi leader was in Soviet and Allied hands. Tons of Nazi confidential documents had been seized. Yet the Soviet prosecutors could not find ONE THING to back their frameup accusations against Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin had murdered.</p>
<p>One of the Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trial was Rudolf Hess, who had been named in the Moscow Trials as the “direct link” with Trotsky. Trotsky’s widow, Natalia, demanded that her attorney be given the right to cross-examine Hess. This demand was ignored, for the Stalinist prosecutors knew this would expose the frameup nature of the Moscow Trials before the whole word.</p>
<p>It is on the basis of these proven frameups that Stalinists for years have tried to discredit and smear the Trotskyists. These same methods of slander and frameup are used against every honest working-class opponent of Stalinism in the labor movement. They are the methods used by the treacherous Stalinist leaders in the NMU today.</p>
<p>In their fight against the reactionary and disruptive role of the Stalinists, the progressive NMU rank and file are helping to cleanse the labor movement of the sinister methods of slander; vilification and frameup.<br>
</p>
<h4>HOW TO FIGHT STALINISM</h4>
<p class="fst">The documented facts in this pamphlet show that the roots of the NMU’s internal conflict grow deep in the sub-soil of basic union policy and program.</p>
<p>For years the Stalinist bureaucratic clique has ruthlessly trampled underfoot the elementary rights of the rank-and-file and collaborated with the employers and their government.</p>
<p>Thus, the basic issues are the defense of union democracy and the fight for a militant class-struggle program against the seamen’s main enemy, the shipowner-government combine.</p>
<p>These are the issues the Stalinists want to bury. They want to drag the discussion into a blind alley of petty personalities and side issues. They seek to poison the atmosphere, and prevent a discussion of the real issues. They thereby give an opening to the reactionaries to launch a red-baiting drive.</p>
<p>Nothing would help the Stalinists – and the employers – more than to have the discussion derailed from basic issues by any form of red-baiting.</p>
<p><em>Today the danger of red-baiting is especially acute. The employers and their press are trying to inspire an “anti-red” campaign inside the union movement to divide and disrupt it. Their ultimate victims are the real union militants.</em></p>
<p>The employers are anxious to divert the progressive struggle of the NMU members against the Stalinists into reactionary red-baiting channels. They fear that a fight for union democracy and a militant class-struggle program will strengthen the union against the shipowners and government. They would like to see the reactionary, but discredited, Stalinists replaced merely by another reactionary clique who will serve Wall Street with undivided loyalty.<br>
</p>
<h5>Red baiting Serves the Bosses</h5>
<p class="fst">Red-baiting serves Wall Street imperialism in its war preparations against the Soviet Union. During the war the Stalinists spread the myth that the alliance of the Kremlin with Allied imperialism provided the basis of permanent peace and universal prosperity. The end of the war found a speedy realignment of Stalin’s erstwhile “allies”, who immediately began to lay the foundations for World War III against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>For this reason, the employers do not consider the Stalinists to be sufficiently reliable today as labor lieutenants of American capitalism.</p>
<p>To defeat the Stalinists AND the bosses, the NMU ranks must fight for a real progressive, militant union policy and program.<br>
</p>
<h4>FOR A CLASS-STRUGGLE PROGRAM</h4>
<p class="fst">An effective program must answer the basic problems that have always faced the seamen. These problems are internal division, economic insecurity, shipowner parasitism and government regimentation.</p>
<p>The maritime workers are divided among more than a score of unions, separated along both craft and jurisdictional lines. In addition, a number of the unions practice racial discrimination against Negroes, thus dividing the workers on color lines.</p>
<p>While the maritime workers are divided, their enemies are united. The shipowners and their government agents are conducting a concerted offensive to smash all maritime unionism.</p>
<p>The great maritime strikes of 1946 again demonstrated the burning need for maritime labor unity. Unfortunately, inter-union hostility and suspicion have been sharpened by long years of jurisdictional strife. The problem of unifying the maritime workers cannot be solved overnight or by some slick “unity” maneuver like the Stalinist CMU, which only created further disruption and division.<br>
</p>
<h5>Establish a Solid Maritime Front!</h5>
<p class="fst"><em>The first step toward real and lasting unity is to dispel the atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. Without being called upon to give up their present affiliations, the maritime workers must establish a solid front against their common enemy.</em></p>
<p>This can be achieved through carefully worked out, agreed-upon joint actions of all unions in defense of their mutual interests – against the shipowner-government forces. In the course of such joint actions the existing mutual distrust and suspicion will be broken down and a firm foundation laid for genuine unity.</p>
<p>The ultimate objective of the maritime workers is organic unity, the fusion of the separate unions into one. One of the most serious obstacles to the achievement of this objective is the policy of race discrimination particularly in the AFL seafaring unions and the independent Marine Firemen’s union.</p>
<p>While this is a barrier to organic unity with the non-discriminating NMU, it should not prevent joint actions. The Stalinists, however, seized upon AFL Jim Crow practices as an excuse to bolster their policy of sharpening jurisdictional division on the waterfront. The Stalinists use this seemingly plausible argument to oppose even joint actions, falsely claiming that these by themselves will lead to the imposition of Jim Crow policies on the CIO unions.</p>
<p><em>But it is precisely joint action of all seamen in struggle against the common enemy that offers the best means to break down racial prejudice. When seamen of all races and all affiliations join together in common action, racial and organizational prejudices will be dispelled in the heat of the struggle against the real enemies of all the workers, the capitalist exploiters.</em></p>
<p>Immediately after V-J Day the old problem of economic insecurity again loomed large before the seamen. Unemployment and reduced wages struck double blows. Soaring prices further slashed living standards.</p>
<p>Under the so-called “free enterprise system” or capitalist anarchy, the maritime industry is unstable, disorganized and chaotic. Once the artificial war boom was over, thousands of seamen were tossed on the beach as the government put hundreds of ships in “cold storage”.</p>
<p>The immediate answer to the growing unemployment in the maritime industry is the demand<br>
</p>
<h4>FOR A FOUR-WATCH SYSTEM!</h4>
<p class="fst">It is necessary to create more jobs by reducing the number of hours worked with no reduction in pay.</p>
<p>The elimination of the war bonuses and skyrocketing prices forced the seamen into strike action to regain a portion of their lost take-home pay. But within three months after the strike, inflation had already wiped out wage increases. By January 1947, the seamen were forced to demand new increases under less favorable conditions. These demands were placed in arbitration.</p>
<p>The seamen must defend their living standards and wage gains against the menace of inflation. If they are not to be forced out on strike every few months trying to keep up with rising prices, they must demand<br>
</p>
<h4>A SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES!</h4>
<p class="fst">This is a demand for an escalator clause in the contract providing that wage rates shall rise automatically with every rise in the cost of living. Under such a clause the basic wage scale stands as the guaranteed minimum. But the real wage at the start of the contract is safeguarded by automatic increases when prices rise.</p>
<p>The economic insecurity of the seamen is particularly acute because the industry is controlled by and run solely in the interests of a completely parasitic group of capitalist racketeers.</p>
<p>Most of the wartime ships were government-built and government-owned. The so-called ship-“owners” were merely operators who fattened off huge subsidies paid out of the public treasury.</p>
<p>Now thousands of government merchant ships, built and paid for by the American people, have been turned over to the profiteer-parasites for a song. While the capitalist government uses every means to keep seamen’s wages down, it continues to pay tremendous subsidies to the ship-“owners.”</p>
<p>If the government ceased feeding these parasites, then the added costs of the four-watch system and a sliding scale of wages could easily be met by demanding<br>
</p>
<h4>ALL GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES FOR THE SEAMEN! NOT A PENNY OF PUBLIC FUNDS TO THE SHIP-“OWNER” PARASITES!</h4>
<p class="fst">To ensure permanent security and decent conditions, the stranglehold of the tiny group of ship-“owners” must be completely broken. These useless and greedy blood-suckers must be eliminated from the industry by<br>
</p>
<h4>NATIONALIZATION OF THE MERCHANT MARINE UNDER WORKERS CONTROL!</h4>
<p class="fst">The men who run the ships, who do the work, must control the ships and the industry.</p>
<p>The greatest immediate threat to the seamen is government regimentation. Under the pretext of codifying the numerous maritime laws, the ship-“owners” seek to tighten the restraints upon the seamen and further restrict their freedom of action. The Coast Guard, which was imposed on the seamen under the pretext of “wartime necessity”, has become a permanent adjunct of the government’s program for militarizing the merchant marine.</p>
<p>At the same time, Congress is preparing a host of anti-labor laws to outlaw the closed shop union hiring hall, limit the right to strike and impose compulsory arbitration.</p>
<p>Against this conspiracy to put the seamen in a government straitjacket, the maritime workers must fight<br>
</p>
<h4>FOR THE COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNIONS FROM GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION, REGIMENTATION AND CONTROL! DEFEND THE RIGHT TO STRIKE! NO COMPULSORY ARBITRATION!</h4>
<p class="fst">The vicious scheme to place the seamen under military discipline must be smashed. Joint action of all unions must be launched to break the grip of militarist control exercised over the seamen by the Coast Guard. The seamen must stand four-square on the demand<br>
</p>
<h4>FOR UNION CONTROL OF ALL DISCIPLINE ABOARD SHIP!</h4>
<p class="fst">The whole history of the American seamen has been a continual struggle for their rights against the capitalist government. To this very day seamen are denied elementary civil rights accorded to citizens ashore. Under every Administration, Republican or Democratic, the government has intervened on the side of the bosses against the maritime workers.</p>
<p>The struggle of the seamen for emancipation and permanent security is above all a political struggle. This fact was again demonstrated and underscored when Truman threatened to use the Navy against the impending CIO maritime strike in June 1946.</p>
<p>Labor has no voice whatsoever in this government. The policy of supporting so-called “friends of labor” from the Republican and Democratic parties of Wall Street has left labor politically helpless today. If the government attacks on the seamen and all labor are to be stopped, company-unionism in politics must end. Seamen must call<br>
</p>
<h4>FOR AN INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY!</h4>
<p class="fst">An independent party of labor, based on the trade unions, can mobilize the workers, oppressed minorities and impoverished lower-middle class. Such a party will represent the overwhelming majority of the people. With a militant program, it could lead a victorious struggle against the rule of the tiny minority or capitalists who· dominate this country and exploit the people for their own profit and privilege.</p>
<p>Once the power of the capitalists is destroyed, the working majority can establish a government in their own interests, a real government of, by and for the people<br>
</p>
<h4>A WORKERS’ AND FARMERS’ GOVERNMENT!</h4>
<p class="fst">The Socialist Workers Party advances this program as a solution to the problems confronting the seamen: We have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class. The struggle of the seamen is part of the general struggle of the American working class for emancipation from capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. Our goal is the final victory of the working class and the establishment of a socialist society which will bring lasting peace, plenty and security for all.<br>
</p>
<h4>JOIN IN THE FIGHT FOR THIS GREAT GOAL – JOIN THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY!</h4>
<h5> <br>
<a href="#top">Top of page</a></h5>
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Art Preis
Stalinists on the Waterfront
(April 1947)
Written: 1947.
First Published: April 1947.
Source: Published for the Socialist Workers Party by Pioneer Publishers.
Transcription/HTML Markup: Sean Robertson for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Copyleft: Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (marxists.org) 2010.
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FOREWORD
American labor is closely watching the conflict in the CIO National Maritime Union. What is being determined in part, is the future influence of the Communist Party (Stalinist) in the American trade unions. In no other major union have the Stalinists exercised such complete control for so many years. A balance-sheet of their leadership in the NMU is therefore an accurate gauge of their record throughout the labor movement.
In this pamphlet we have gone into painstaking detail, with fully documented evidence, to record the specific crimes of the Stalinists against the American workers, and particularly against maritime labor.
Many workers observing these crimes; and repelled by them, are confused about the Stalinists’ motives. They often arrive at the false conclusion that Stalinism is Communism, and· therefore say, “If that is Communism, we want no part of it.”
Capitalist propagandists try to reinforce this false notion in order to discredit the very idea of Communism, by identifying it with the repressive rule of Stalin in the Soviet Union. This enables Wall Street to pose as a “defender of democracy” in its preparations for war against the Soviet Union.
For their part, the Stalinists welcome the capitalist lies about their “revolutionary” aims. They operate under cover of the monstrous lie that they represent genuine Communism.
In order to conduct a progressive struggle against Stalinism, it is first of all necessary to expose this lie and treat the Stalinists for what they are – a reactionary current in the labor movement.
It is the aim of this pamphlet to disclose the political roots of Stalinist policy in the American trade unions and the record of their betrayals growing out of these roots.
Art Preis
Labor Editor of The Militant
THE STALINISTS ON THE WATERFRONT
A Documented Record of Betrayal
The Communist Parties are a world-wide agency of the bureaucracy which usurped power in the Soviet Union after the great Lenin’s death in 1924. This bureaucracy, headed by Stalin, represents the privileged layers of Soviet society.
The Soviet Union was founded by a workers’ revolution that wiped out Czarism and the rule of the capitalists and established a workers’ state based on nationalized property. It is like a giant trade union. The Stalinist regime in this workers’ state is similar to a corrupt, bureaucratic machine that takes control of a trade union, destroys its internal democracy and fattens off its treasury.
While the workers fight the bureaucratic machine, they do not cease to defend their union on the picket line against the bosses. That is why we defend the Soviet Union from imperialist attack in spite of and against Stalin.
In the Soviet Union, the real Bolsheviks, who opposed the Stalin bureaucracy, were led by Leon Trotsky, founder of the famous Red Army and co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution. The Trotskyists are the sole heirs and continuators of Lenin’s program of world socialist revolution.
ROOTS OF STALINIST POLICY
The Stalin regime destroyed Lenin’s Bolshevik Party. The real leaders of the Russian Revolution, and hundreds of thousands of the best revolutionary fighters, were systematically wiped out in vast bloody purges. Trotsky, who fought hardest to preserve Lenin’s program of international socialism, was driven into exile and finally assassinated by a Stalinist secret police agent in Mexico in 1940.
Along with the founding of the Soviet Union, Lenin and Trotsky had founded the Third (Communist) International to extend the workers’ revolution begun in Russia on a world scale. When Stalin usurped power in the Soviet Union, he also proceeded to convert the Third International into a mere pawn to serve his foreign policies and diplomatic maneuvers with the capitalist powers.
Although Stalin formally dissolved the Third International during his wartime alliance with U.S.-British imperialism, the Communist Parties of the various countries continue to function as pliable instruments of Stalin’s foreign policy.
These parties are used as political pressure groups to bolster Stalin’s current diplomatic moves and deals with the capitalist governments. When Stalin wants to put pressure on some other government, the Communist Party in that country starts to talk “militant:” When Stalin wants to conciliate some imperialist power and make a deal with it, the Communist Party is instructed to play ball with the capitalist rulers.
The constant shifts and somersaults in the “line” of the American Communist Party therefore directly reflect Stalin’s diplomatic zigzags. At all times the interests of the workers are sacrificed to the Kremlin’s temporary diplomatic needs.
Thus, when Stalin made his pact with Hitler in July 1939, the Communist Parties ceased their clamor for “collective security” of the “democratic” imperialists against the fascist imperialists. They yelled that the war, which Hitler launched after Stalin gave him the green light, was due only to British and French imperialism. In this country, they raised the slogan, “The Yanks are NOT coming!”
When Hitler turned on his ally Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, the Communist Parties overnight changed their “line”. They discovered that Hitler alone was responsible for the war, while the British, French and American imperialists were waging a “non-imperialist, progressive war of liberation”
Class Character of War
All the great Marxists, including Lenin, had always taught that the character of a war was determined by the class character of the state conducting the war. If a monopoly capitalist state waged war, it could be only a war which pursued monopoly capitalist aims. Thus, all the capitalist powers in the Second World, War, as in the First, were engaged in an imperialist conflict for markets, colonies and spheres of influence.
Because Stalin had entered a military and diplomatic alliance with American and British imperialism against German imperialism, the Stalinists said that Wall Street, ruler of the richest and most powerful country on earth, was conducting a “progressive” war. They called on the workers to support Wall Street’s war and give up all their rights, in order to maintain “national unity” with the Big Business war profiteers.
The Stalinists supported the most reactionary elements against the labor militants. They placed themselves at the disposal of the American capitalist class as its most loyal and abject servants. No anti-labor crime was too foul for them to commit – including open strikebreaking – in order to further “unity” in the imperialist “war effort.”
Today it is clear to every thinking person that American and British capitalism didn’t fight a war for the “Four Freedoms” and “liberation” of oppressed peoples.
The people of Germany and Japan, who suffered so long under fascism and military dictatorship, are ruled by conquering armies. The German capitalists who put Hitler in power still remain, protected by Wall Street and London. In Japan, U.S. imperialism upholds the hated Emperor Hirohito on American bayonets. In Greece, the British, armed with American lend-lease weapons, have restored to power the bloody Greek monarch. I n China, the butcher Chiang Kai-shek, murderer of millions of Chinese peasants and workers, has been kept in power by U.S.-trained and equipped armies.
What World War II Brought
More than half a million American troops are stationed in 55 lands all over the globe. Wall Street has become the great treasury and arsenal for the suppression of colonial peoples fighting for their independence. American arms in the hands of French, Dutch and British troops are slaughtering the people of Indo-China, Indonesia and India. United States loans are financing reactionary regimes and wars of colonial suppression. Nowhere did the war bring the “Four Freedoms” – only repression, starvation, ruin and death.
Here at home, the first fruits of “victory” have been a ferocious anti-labor drive; a wave of lynch-terror against the Negro people; a terrible housing crisis affecting millions of veterans and workers; monumental government debt, mounting taxes and inflation; the looming shadow of another depression; and the growing threat of military regimentation. Over all hangs the threat of another World War in the not distant future – a war of atomic annihilation.
This is what World War II has brought – not the “liberation” promised by the Stalinists. Their betrayal of the workers to the imperialists in the war constitutes their greatest and most monstrous crime.
It is only in the light of this real understanding of Stalinism, what it is and how it operates, that the specific record of Stalinist crimes presented in this pamphlet takes on full and clear meaning. It is only with this understanding that the maritime workers, as well as all other sections of American labor, can conduct a progressive and effective fight against the sinister influence of Stalinism.
MARITIME UNIONISM’S GREAT TRADITION
American seamen have a great and honorable tradition in the struggle for labor’s emancipation. Maritime workers for the past century have fought and sacrificed and died to build unionism.
The twelve years between 1934 and today, when American labor rose to mighty organized stature, found the maritime workers in the front ranks of union struggle.
These twelve years began with the historic 1934 West Coast waterfront strike that gave a great impetus to maritime unionism. They reached a magnificent climax in 1946 with the greatest maritime strike in history.
These twelve years have seen the maritime workers solidly organized. They have raised their wages far above what they dared even dream of in the old days. They have eliminated some of the worst conditions that once made the industry a living hell.
From a virtual slave without any rights, the American seaman has become a union man, standing on his own feet and fighting back against his enemies.
It is a tribute to the militancy, union loyalty and self-sacrifice of the seamen that they have made these giant gains despite especially difficult conditions.
They are confronted by a ruthless and powerful combine of shipowners at whose side has stood the capitalist government. And an industry where workers are scattered in small groups always on the move, is a lot tougher to organize than one where workers are concentrated in large plants.
To these, great obstacles was added another – the enemy within. Prior to 1934 the maritime unions were cursed with the weight of a reactionary union bureaucracy. The workers had to advance every step of the way in spite of and against the phonies and bureaucrats. These bureaucrats kept the maritime workers separated into many unions and craft divisions. They stifled the voice of the rank and file. They opposed militant policies and collaborated with the employers and their government agents.
Rise of the NMU
The CIO National Maritime Union arose out of the seamen’s struggle to establish a fighting union free of the bureaucratic machine that dominated the old AFL International Seamen’s Union. Following the lead of the insurgent seamen on the West Coast, a section of the East Coast seamen fought against the sell-out policies of the ISU-AFL bureaucrats and broke from the grip of these bureaucrats after the 1936-1937 strike. In May 1937, they founded the NMU and joined the main stream of industrial unionism, the CIO.
The NMU’s birth coincided with the government’s policy of direct intervention against the seamen on behalf of the shipowners, who had proved unable to push back the tide of unionism. It was the beginning of the government’s legislative attack on the seamen and the attempt to put over the Copeland Fink Book.
Thus, the NMU was originally founded on a policy of struggle against the ship operators, the government and the labor bureaucrats.
Despite the policies that inspired the founding of the NMU, the seamen did not achieve their desire to be rid of a strangling bureaucracy. In the course of an internal struggle during the formative stages of the NMU, another bureaucratic clique came to power.
The Stalinist Clique
This ruthless, anti-democratic clique was the waterfront section of the Communist Party (Stalinist). From 1939 on, the Stalinists held iron control over the N M U. Only in the past year has there emerged any serious challenge to their rule.
Thus, for seven years the Stalinists have had a truly enviable opportunity in the NMU to prove in practice their claim to be the “vanguard of the working class.”
Instead of uniting the seamen around a fighting program, they have been vicious opponents of a militant policy. They have been shameless collaborators with the employers and reactionary government agents. They have been disrupters of maritime unity. They have been corrupt bureaucrats, crushing any seaman who dared to speak for a progressive policy.
Their crowning treachery came during the war. Because they supported the imperialist war, they sold themselves body and soul to Wall Street and its government. As volunteer scabs and strike-breakers throughout the labor movement, they earned the workers’ contempt.
But Big Business paid tribute to the Stalinists’ fink role. The Wall Street organ, Business Week, on March 18, 1944, observed that the unions “identified as Communist-dominated” have “moved to the extreme right-wing position in the American labor movement”.
The Stalinist union leaders, said Business Week, have “the best no-strike record”, are “the most serious proponents of labor-management cooperation”, the “only serious advocates of incentive wages”, the “last to call for smashing the Little Steel Formula”, and their unions “are the only unions which support the President’s call for a national service act (labor conscription)”.
One working-class voice alone spoke out boldly and truthfully about the real role of the Stalinists – the Socialist Workers Party (Trotskyist) and its weekly paper, The Militant. The Trotskyists opposed the profiteers’ war and militantly continued to defend labor’s interests.
The Stalinists made the Trotskyists their special target for slander and physical terrorism. The Communist Party spread up and down the waterfront tens of thousands of books and pamphlets smearing the Trotskyists.
Trotskyists’ Wartime Defense of Labor
The Socialist Workers Party opposed playing ball with the employers and their government. We
fought the no-strike pledge, and called for labor to get off the employer-dominated War Labor Board. In maritime, we opposed establishment of the Recruitment and Manning Office and every attempt of the government to undermine the union hiring hall. We assailed the attempt to impose Coast Guard rule over merchant seamen.
Because we defended the rights of labor during the war, the Stalinists slandered the Trotskyists and all union militants as “fascists” and “Hitlerite-agents”. The CP issued a pamphlet, The Trotskyite Fifth Column in the Labor Movement by the Daily Worker’s poison-pen specialist, George Morns. This, pamphlet has been withdrawn, because today it serves as a confession of Stalinist crimes.
According to this pamphlet, our greatest “crime” was to oppose labor’s surrender of its rights during the war. The Trotskyists, lamented Morris, “oppose national unity and all common labor-employer government action”. They “ridicule a postwar outlook of national unity and full employment and pin their hopes on a sharp crisis”. They “oppose labor’s wartime no-strike pledge” and “sneer at joint labor-management committees as ‘speed-up’ instruments”. They “shout loudly that management and labor cannot possibly have a joint interest.” And, horror of horrors, the Trotskyists have a “feverish interest in a ‘labor party’”.
Morris further complains that “the Trotskyites know that they can be effective only if they exploit real dissatisfaction and grievances”. He does not explain what the Stalinist union leaders were doing about “real dissatisfaction and grievances”. For the Stalinists would like their ‘wartime’ union record – and postwar record – kept as a book sealed with seven seals. Their whole strikebreaking record constitutes one of the most shameful chapters in the history of labor betrayals.
“COMMUNISTS ON THE WATERFRONT”
In the January 3, 1947 NMU Pilot, President Curran states that the Stalinist clique “propose to use the same tactics which have been used in our Union for the past two years, when they attempted to jam down our throats collaboration policy, with the shipowners and anybody who voted against it was slandered and smeared”.
This statement is true – except for the time element. The Stalinists have been practicing their treachery not just for “the past two years” but throughout the NMU’s history. That treachery is but a small part of their crimes against all labor. For the real record, we must go back to the war years themselves.
Let us study the wartime record of Stalinism by starting with a 112-page pamphlet the Communist Party published in May 1946, and distributed all over the waterfront. This document is misnamed Communists on the Waterfront. Every line contains a lie, and sometimes two.
Only four of the pamphlet’s 112 pages deal with, the Stalinist role on the waterfront after July 1939 – when the Stalin-Hitler pact was signed. From July 1939 to December 7, 1941, the pamphlet is a complete blank. The Stalinists don’t want the seamen to be reminded of that period.
After skipping the Stalin-Hitler pact period completely, the pamphlet’s author, Herb Tank, hurriedly rushes over the period from December 7, 1941. He boasts how the super-patriotic Stalinists urged the seamen to “keep ‘em sailing” for the benefit of Wall Street’s war and profits. He complains only that “when the seamen turned their energies toward fighting Hitler the shipowners began breaking down conditions”.
What, did the Stalinists do about this? Tank tells in two sentences: “DON’T LET THE SHIPOWNERS PROVOKE A STRIKE! The Communists [read Stalinists] fought for a no-strike policy in the marine industry”. That is, the Stalinists held the seamen’s arms, while the bosses socked them!
In these same four pages, Tank is compelled to admit the Stalinists “made serious errors” under “the leadership of Earl Browder”, who “claimed American capitalism was progressive – that the workers could solve their problems by collaborating with the bosses”.
But all that, we are assured, has been “corrected”. Browder was expelled for “opportunism” and the Communist Party is now led by William Z. Foster. We are told that Foster had always held that “the basic nature of capitalism and imperialism had not been changed by the war”.
But all through the war, when he was National Chairman of the Communist Party, when he went around attacking strikes and calling for collaboration between the workers and the bosses, Foster was silent about Wall Street imperialism. His mouth was opened, as Tank admits, only after “the American Communists came in for severe criticism from leading European Communists.
Only then did the American Stalinists suddenly discover that their leader for 16 years was an “opportunist” and “revisionist”. In the Communist Party, it seems, one man could keep the whole party, including Foster, meekly chained to an “opportunist” policy for years. That speaks volumes for the kind of party it really is.
But Browder’s “opportunism” and “revisionism” expressed themselves not only in the realm of theory. They led to specific acts, carried out by the whole present Communist Party leadership.
These acts stand as crimes in the eyes of every honest trade unionist. The Stalinist crimes were the most despicable of all – scabbing and strikebreaking.
Strikebreaking Record
To fully understand the role of the Stalinists in wartime, it is first necessary to review their record on the general labor front during the past years. Their actions in the NMU are but one reflection of a national and international policy.
During the war more than 2,000,000 American workers were forced to go on strike to defend themselves from employer attacks, protect their unions and maintain their living standards against wartime inflation.
The Stalinists, in the name of “national unity”, placed themselves at the disposal of the anti-labor forces as direct streak-breakers.
They tried to break the miners’ strikes and the West Coast machinists’ strike, and earned the condemnation of the whole labor movement for their scandalous conduct in the Montgomery Ward strikes. In every instance where the workers fought for their rights, the Stalinists intervened on the side of the employers.
The actions of the Communist Party during the 1943 coal miners’ strikes are remembered with hatred by every miner. The Daily Worker ran columns of abuse against the miners and John L. Lewis, The Communist Party held public meetings in every large city, including the Yankee Stadium in New York, to mobilize strikebreaking sentiment. Communist Party leaders toured the mine districts urging the miners to go back to work without a contract.
William Z. Foster, on April 29, 1943, wrote a front-page article in the Daily Worker attacking the impending mine strike on May 1. He spoke on May 2 in Town Hall, Philadelphia, calling on the miners to submit to the War Labor Board.
When the first strike was halted for a two-week truce, the Daily Worker gloated that the “Lewis line” had been “utterly defeated”. But when the second strike began in June, the June 11 Daily Worker demanded that “under no circumstances should the government give way to the Lewis conspiracy”.
A minor but very revealing incident happened near Pittsburgh. Two officials of the Communist Party were picked up by police outside Washington, Pa., and charged with illegal use of gas coupons for pleasure driving. Michael Saunders, Pennsylvania state CP organizer, pleaded that it was a business trip “to see some of our members and do everything we could to start a back-to-work movement”. The OPA ration attorney Richard L. Nassau ruled that use of gas coupons for strikebreaking was “legitimate”.
Two years later, the Daily Worker was again screaming in headlines: “Not An Hour’s Stoppage! The Mines Must Be Seized!” (Daily Worker, March 30, 1945).
In The Militant of November 18, 1944, we read an editorial denouncing Stalinist strikebreaking in another labor struggle. “During the recent strike of 2,500 San Francisco machinists, the traitorous West Coast Stalinist CIO leaders called on the capitalist government to use ‘armed forces and the appropriate government agencies ... in any action necessary to halt this or any other strike’”.
Turn the guns on workingmen – that was the Stalinist line!
Bridges Scabs on Ward Strike
You will find no CP publication circulated today that mentions the Montgomery Ward strikes. And for good reason.
The Montgomery Ward strike in April–May 1944, evoked the support of the whole labor movement, with but one exception – the Communist Party. Everybody knew that the Ward workers were forced to strike or see their union smashed by America’s No. 1 Open-Shopper, Sewell Avery.
But Harry Bridges saw nothing wrong with scabbing against 40-cent-an-hour workers. When the CIO Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union appealed to Bridges to halt CIO warehousemen in Ward’s St. Paul unit from handling scab goods from Chicago, the answer was: “We will handle Chicago orders eight hours a day, call it scabbing if you
want to”.
The Daily Worker launched a red-baiting attack on the Montgomery Ward strike leaders and slanderously linked them with their most hated enemy, Avery. “Mr. Avery owes his success in provoking the strike in large measure to a group of Trotskyites who, are in the leadership of the striking local”, said the Daily Worker, April 17, 1944.
When union after union passed indignant resolutions demanding the ouster of Bridges for his scabbing in the Ward strike, the Daily Worker, June 19, 1944, turned the charge of “scab” against the STRIKERS!
“Those who violate the no-strike pledge are scabs and should be so treated. Scabs were never handled with kid-gloves.”
How pleased every rat who ever crossed a picket line must have felt to hear militant strikers fighting the bosses called “scabs.”
Stalinists Back “Slave Labor” Scheme
The direct strikebreaking of the Stalinists was coupled with their eager endorsement of every government move to shackle and cripple the unions. This reached its low point when the Communist Party rushed to embrace Roosevelt’s proposal for universal labor conscription – a proposal that was denounced by the leaders of every national labor organization as a “slave labor” scheme.
But that didn’t stop the Daily Worker, January 22, 1944, from lying that, “One fact stands out beyond a shadow of a doubt when we talk of labor’s sentiments on the President’s message to Congress, ALL LABOR (original emphasis) is behind it.”
“All Labor” turned out to be the Stalinists’ chief union spokesman Harry Bridges, and the Stalinist leadership of the NMU. The February 5, 1944 New Leader revealed the inside story, never denied by Bridges or the Daily Worker, about what happened when CIO President Murray and AFL President Green went to the White House to protest Roosevelt’s slave labor scheme.
“Roosevelt’s reply was to tell Murray scornfully that he could not speak for the CIO on that view ... and in proof showed Murray a telegram from Harry Bridges endorsing a labor conscription act”.
Stalinist Howard McKenzie sought to whitewash Roosevelt’s draft-labor scheme at a meeting of 2,500 NMU members in New York City. As reported in The Pilot, January 14. 1944, page 1, McKenzie said: “The President didn’t say draft labor, he said ‘every adult.’ ... What the President did was to say we’re going’ to draft both capital and labor”.
The climax of Stalinist betrayal during the war was their proposal to put American labor in no-strike handcuffs permanently. Here again it was Bridges who first offered to deliver labor hog-tied on a platter to the bosses after the war.
Addressing a meeting of CIO Warehousemen’s Local 6 in San Francisco on May 25, 1944, Bridges said that the “strike weapon is overboard, not only for the duration of the war, but after the war”. At the same meeting the Stalinists jammed through a resolution that called strikes “treason”, offered to back the government “in any actions to prevent strikes”, and urged employers to “refuse to give consideration to the demands of any section of labor” that went on strike, not merely during the war but “indefinitely thereafter”.
The Stalinist clique in the NMU spilled the same kind of bilge in the pages of The Pilot. A typical example was the following statement in the February 18, 1944 issue: “Among the great industrialists there are many who believe in and will fight just as sincerely and effectively as ourselves, for enduring peace. These are our allies and we must learn to work with them honestly and wholeheartedly”.
The first thing these “allies” did as the war approached its close was to launch the most savage anti-union drive in modern American labor history – a drive that has steadily increased in ferocity.
POSTWAR SCABBERY
Now the finky Stalinist defenders of Wall Street’s imperialist plan of plunder tell us that maybe they made “some errors” during the war, but when Foster took the CP helm, everything changed overnight. Actually, the only thing that changed was the phrases. Fake-militant words were used to cover up continuing Stalinist betrayals.
Two classic examples of Stalinist postwar scabbery – under Foster’s leadership – were the General Motors strike and the AFL-CIO joint machinists’ strike in San Francisco and Oakland.
When the CIO United Automobile Workers struck General Motors in November 1945, the UAW General Motors Conference appealed to the Stalinist leaders of the CIO United Electrical Workers to pull out some 30,000 workers in GM’s Electrical Division.
For more than two months the Stalinists ignored the desperate plea of the GM auto workers who were fighting against the world’s greatest industrial corporation. When the GM electrical workers themselves voted to strike and finally walked out, the UE leaders hastened to conclude an agreement with General Motors in the midst of the UAW negotiations and undercut the wage demands of the GM auto workers. That is how these professional “unity shouters” practice labor solidarity.
What CP Members Revealed
But now we come to the evidence of a group of former Communist Party members from the “liquidated” CP machinists’ club in San Francisco. They were expelled for refusing to organize a strike-breaking back-to-work movement in the November 1945 AFL-CIO machinists’ joint strike.
Their statement, published in the October 28, 1945 NCP Report, organ of a group of CP dissidents, speaks for itself:
“After issuing perfunctory approval of the machinists’ strike demands as ‘just’, CP began to break the strike. It issued leaflets and had articles published in People’s World openly advising machinists that they couldn’t win the strike and urging them to go back to work.
“The best CP branch here, made up of machinists and having the best reputation in the whole country, was directed by CP to attack the strike leaders as Trotskyite (which was a damned lie, as usual) and to demand a rank-and-file committee to lead a back-to-work movement.
“Naturally, the machinists’ branch would not go along with CP policy, and so the branch was liquidated in the usual smart way; at the end of a meeting called for another purpose, the liquidation of the branch was announced, with a ruling: ‘There will be no discussion of this’. Expulsions came thick and fast”.
Here is the real picture of Stalinism in action under Foster, as under Browder.
BETRAYAL IN MARITIME
The wartime record of the Stalinists in maritime equals their record of treachery against all other workers.
If American merchant seamen today face the threat of militarization, government regimentation, coast guard “discipline”, destruction of the union hiring hall, let them remember that it was the Stalinist union leaders who not only welcomed but invited government intervention during the war.
It was the Stalinist leaders in the CIO waterfront unions who called for the establishment of government boards to rule the maritime industry. In a speech to the Industrial Relations Section of the Commonwealth Club, April 8, 1942, at San Francisco, Harry Bridges boasted:
“The International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union ... proposed to its employers and to the government a plan to have the entire longshore industry on the Pacific Coast operated exclusively under the control of a joint management-labor-government board. We devised the plan and we pushed for its adoption”.
Bridges further admitted that he was prepared to surrender any and every provision of the union contract at the behest of such a board. “In proposing the establishment of such a board, the union agreed to set aside any and all provisions of its entire collective bargaining contract if any such provisions of the contract in any way blocked an all-out war effort”.
Bridges glorified the War Labor Board, and at the 1942 California CIO convention he declared: “One agency in the U. S. Government today that is doing a good job is the National War Labor Board”.
The WLB was doing a good job – for the bosses! It froze all wages with the infamous “Little Steel Formula”.
Treachery in the NMU
Bridges’ actions and statements were duplicated, with minor variations, by the Stalinist clique in the NMU.
Right after Pearl Harbor, the Stalinist leaders in the NMU rushed to Washington with proposals for shackling the union and placing the seamen at the mercy of employer-dominated government boards.
At a government-sponsored conference or maritime union leaders and ship operators, Frederick Myers, then a chief Communist Party spokesman in the NMU, presented a memorandum for “insuring uninterrupted shipping facilities to guarantee the success of our war effort”.
It called for the “establishment of a board consisting of representatives of all the labor organizations, the shipowners and the interested government agencies”. On this board, “the shipowners and the labor organizations shall have an equal vote, with the appropriate government agency casting the deciding vote”. That is, the deciding
vote would go to a government stooge of the ship operators.
At a follow-up conference in Washington (see The Pilot, April 10, 1942) the Stalinists introduced a further proposal on “the problems of recruitment, discipline and the maintenance of efficiency” for merchant marine personnel. This covered:
“a) Availability of personnel, including manning, training and promotion; b) Discipline, on board ship and in domestic and foreign ports; c) The systematic elimination of disloyal elements; d) The waiving by mutual agreement of such collective bargaining provisions as may be found to interfere with the war effort”.
This was to be done not through a union agency, but “by definite fixing of responsibility as well as authority” for handling personnel problems in a Maritime Personnel Board to be set up by the government under the shipowner-controlled War Shipping Administration. On this hand-picked government board of 10 members, the Stalinists proposed to put exactly one representative of rank-and-file seamen.
With this go-ahead sign from the Stalinist union leaders, the government proceeded to tighten its bureaucratic grip on the seamen through special agencies: the Maritime War Emergency Board; the Coast Guard; the Recruitment and Manning Office; etc.
The Coast Guard became, and remains to this day; the instrument for regimenting the seamen under military discipline. Through the MWEB the wages of seamen were frozen and the war risk bonuses were arbitrarily slashed and finally eliminated. The RMO shipping pool provided a reservoir of non-union personnel to man unorganized ships and was held as a constant threat over the union hiring hall.
Stalinists Supported Regimentation
Every one of these anti-union agencies was supported by the Stalinist clique heading the NMU. They went out of their way to cooperate with these agencies and enforce their decisions against the seamen.
Militant NMU members must feel sick at their stomachs when they recall the wartime issues of The Pilot. Look at a typical issue, like that of Jan. 21, 1944 (pages 3 and 14), reporting how anti-labor officials of the Maritime Commission, RMO and Coast Guard attended a meeting of the NMU National Council and “received a standing ovation”.
Read how Admiral Waesche of the Coast Guard at this meeting defended the Hearing Units (Coast Guard kangaroo courts for seamen) and how “several of the agents (NMU) came forward to commend the Coast Guard for the fair, impartial job it was doing”.
Read in the same column how The Pilot editors glow over praise from Admiral Land, head of the crooked Maritime Commission and author of the slogan, “Union organizers should be shot at sunrise”.
It took an unsurpassed record of labor betrayal to win such commendation from a union-hater like Admiral Land.
Instead of opposing Coast Guard “discipline” for merchant seamen, the Stalinist NMU leaders welcomed it. They acted as fingermen against union militants who opposed their sell-out policy.
At the July 1943 NMU convention, Captain Edward Macauley, deputy administrator of the WSA, spoke of “a minority in the union who constitute a potential powder keg” and threatened the maritime unions with “loss of many of their present rights unless these elements are weeded out”.
Fingermen Against Seamen
Instead of denouncing this vicious ultimatum, the NMU leaders promptly pushed through a resolution endorsing the Coast Guard Hearing Units and pledging to aid the Coast Guard in “weeding out the undesirable elements”. They also promised the RMO full cooperation in ferreting out seamen employed in shoreside industries and forcing them back to sea.
The Stalinist-dominated NMU National Council went so far as to endorse the scheme to give the Coast Guard permanent control over the merchant seamen. In July 1944, they adopted a special resolution offering “high commendation” to the Coast Guard and praising the Hearing Units as “unbiased, nondiscriminatory and unprejudiced”. This resolution, published in The Pilot, July 28, 1944, page 13, stated:
“The National Council is in favor of the continued jurisdiction of an impartial agency such as the Coast Guard, over the questions of safety, navigation and inspection in peacetime as well as in war.” (Our emphasis).
The Stalinist clique jettisoned union shipping rules in favor of onerous government shipping regulations. They spied out alleged violators and turned them over to the draft boards.
Most NMU members well recall the Principal Wartime Shipping Rules of the National Maritime Union, which read in part:
“All men between the years of 18 and 30 who persist in turning down ships, or continually overstay their time on the beach, will have their names turned over to Draft Board as provided for under Selective Service law.
“All men over 30 years of age who persist in turning down ships, or continually overstay their time on the beach, will have their names turned over to War Manpower Commission as not being bona-fide seamen”.
This meant that seamen torpedoed or bombed on repeated dangerous runs were forced back on the ships before they had recuperated, under threat of being drafted. Older seamen were turned over to the War Manpower Commission, deprived of certificates of availability and virtually blacklisted in the industry.
Seamen whom the Stalinists charged with violating government rules were driven to ship on non-union lines. Frederick Myers, then NMU vice-president, complained in a letter to the WSA about the increase in shipping crimps and company “hiring halls”:
“The union has even gone so far as to taking drastic action against men who violate our shipping rules ... After the Union takes this action, however, its hands are tied because the individual penalized for violating these rules is free to go to anyone of the few unorganized companies”. (The Pilot, May 5, 1944, page 3).
Commenting on the stoolpigeon role of the Stalinists, The Militant, organ of the Socialist Workers Party, said on July 8, 1944: “The policies of NMU leaders in supporting the government and its bureaus have become so oppressive that seamen are driven away from the Union hall to the protection of – the shipowners and their crimps. This is virtually what The Pilot itself says”.
While the Stalinist NMU leaders were acting as cops and stoolpigeons against the seamen, union conditions won in years of bitter struggle rapidly deteriorated.
“Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’”
When it came to enforcing government restrictions, the Stalinists were tigers. When it came to defending seamen’s rights and conditions, the Stalinists crawled like worms. Their role was summarized by a leading reactionary magazine, Collier’s, in an article that scandalized the American labor movement.
Loyal, progressive NMU members must burn with rage at the thought of the ridicule and contempt brought on their union by the Stalinists when the April 21, 1945 Collier’s published Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’.
This article recorded the depth of Stalinist-shipowner collaboration. Stalinists in the NMU should be made to read this article out loud every time they take the floor to slander an opponent or boast of their union “victories”.
The authors of the Collier’s article expressed amazement at the degree of collaboration between the NMU officials and ship operators.
“We had to be shown”, they begin, “when we heard that the shipping industry and the National Maritime Union, which only a few years ago were constantly at each other’s throats, were now as cooperative as a brace of lovebirds. So friendly are they that some of the larger companies have agreed to send their port captains and agents to a ‘leadership’ school run by the union”. (Our emphasis)
The title, Readin’, Writin’ and No Strikin’, was derived from the fact, reported by the authors, that the NMU was “the first and one of the very few unions which has already made a postwar no-strike pledge”.
The Stalinist permanent no-strike program was the main subject taught by the “professor” Danny Boano. One of the union students, after listening to Boano, declared indignantly, “What the hell is this? Are you working for us or the shipowners?”
Boano, reports the article, rose to defend the poor, misunderstood and abused shipping magnate who, after the war, find he
“has invested all his money in the ships, got contracts with these foreign countries to deliver the goods they need, and, just when he’s all set, the seamen, like the impatient brother back there, go on strike; they pull the pin.
“Where’s the shipowner going to find himself? His money is all tied up, his ships are tied up and the foreign governments are screaming for goods. And if we don’t deliver the goods, foreign seamen will. Then where are we? We’re on a picket line. The shipowner loses his contracts, his dough is all tied up. And then where will we ever get the $200 a month we want for A.B.’s?”
We are not surprised to read that while this was going on, “Mr. Basil Harris, the country’s largest shipowner, walked in and sat down among the students”. Upon the special invitation at the Stalinist teaching staff, Basil Harris, head of the union-hating United States Lines, addressed the class. When he finished his talk, dripping with honeyed protestations of shipowner love for the seamen, one deluded student was heard to remark; “He’s a real union capitalist, a regular union man”.
TROTSKYIST RECORD IN MARITIME
While the Stalinists were helping to put handcuffs on the seamen, the Trotskyists told the truth about the dangers facing the seamen during the war and postwar periods.
The full position of the Socialist Workers Party is contained in Frederick J. Lang’s Maritime, first published in March 1943, and re-issued in October 1945, by Pioneer Publishers, 116 University Place, New York City.
Maritime is a conclusive answer to the Stalinist slanders about the Trotskyists on the waterfront. Published in the very midst of the war, Maritime exposed and attacked the ship operators and their government stooges and called for a militant union defense of the seamen’s rights.
Against the retreats and betrayals of the union leaders and the government-shipowner plot to shackle the seamen under military rule, Maritime called on the seamen’s unions to fight militantly for their independence. The Trotskyist slogans were:
“Let the unions maintain discipline! Hands off union affairs!
“One book for all seamen – the Union Book! No Fink Books for American seamen!
“Defend the union hiring hall! No pool! No government halls!
“Defend union independence by maintaining the right to strike!
“No union hostages in government war boards!
“Train new seamen at government expense under trade-union control! No fink ships!
“Workers’ control! Open the shipowners’ books! All maritime subsidies controlled by union committees!
“Stop the mismanagement of the ship-‘owner’ parasites! Let the men who man the ships control the industry!”
That’s the program the Stalinists slandered as a “Hitlerite” program. That’s the working-class program the Trotskyists fought for while the Stalinists turned militant union seamen over to the Coast Guard and Draft Board; broke strikes; hob-nobbed with the shipowners; enforced the RMO rules; supported the wage-freezing government boards; told the seamen not to strike even after the war; and urged postwar “labor-management” collaboration so that “we would not be giving up our system of private profit but would be, in fact, bolstering it up”. (The Pilot, December 24, 1943, page 2)
FRUITS OF STALINIST SELL-OUT
The fruits of the Stalinist sell-out policy were harvested by the seamen in 1945 when they were caught in the squeeze of soaring wartime inflation and drastic reduction of take-home pay.
In April 1945 the MWEB set in motion its program for quickly reducing and finally totally wiping out the war-risk bonus. Faced by the threat of a bonus cut on July 15 for seamen on the North Atlantic and Mediterranean runs, the NMU leaders could only whine to the MWEB that “the NMU has asked the Maritime War Emergency Board for time to prepare the membership for a $40 bonus cut proposed by the Board. We knew that a slash was coming as the end of the war neared, but we think the proposal was badly timed”.
The proposal was badly timed! That’s what The Pilot wrote editorially on May 4, 1945.
They also argued with great indignation that “the Dumbarton Oaks and Bretton Woods Plans calls for higher standards of living – not wage cuts”.
Since the NMU seamen didn’t put much faith in “Dumbarton Oaks” and “Bretton Woods”, the Stalinists also put forward a $200 Wage Program to make up for the bonus cut. This turned out to be a plea to the War Labor Board for a 55-cent an hour minimum wage that would bring A.B.’s wages up to $144.50 a month – not $200. The extra $65.50, the Stalinists claimed, would come from “political action” to pass the Pepper 65-cent Minimum Wage Bill that had been defeated in Congress only a few months before, and other unenumerated benefits.
Exposing the demagogy of the Stalinist $200 Wage Program, The Militant, April 28, 1945, wrote:
“The wage program of the NMU is nothing more than an empty gesture, because it is backed up by no policy of militant action. Point Number One in a serious program to get wage increases would be to revoke the ‘no-strike pledge’. Point Number Two would be the preparation of the union for militant action”.
This statement – completely confirmed by the experiences of the 1946 general maritime strike – became the subject of one of the most fantastic union meetings ever held. At the April 26, 1945 NMU membership meeting in New York, the Stalinist leaders staged a three-hour orgy of “Trotskyite”-baiting.
Stalinist Howard McKenzie led the pack, howling: “The workers are being given the impression that the way to win things is through strike action. But these Trotskyites don’t tell you what is going to happen to you after you strike. The fascists would move in and put you back to work at the point of a gun, and you would be forced to work for $30 a month”.
A year later – after the seamen had lost millions in wages – the NMU did call a strike, and Truman did threaten to put them to work at the point of a gun. But it was Truman who backed down!
A Crack in the Bureaucratic Crust
In all the years of Stalinist treachery and betrayal, didn’t the NMU members realize what was going on? Many of them did. But any member who dared to “talk out of turn” was immediately attacked, slandered and victimized by the ruthless Stalinist machine. Resentment was gradually boiling up among the NMU militants. But it found no outlet, until a crack opened in the bureaucratic crust.
The NMU members discovered that a conflict over basic policy had been in progress for a year and a half only when the NMU National Council was forced to print in the November 23, 1945 Pilot the letter of resignation of National Director Ralph Rogers.
Rogers revealed that in July 1944 a conflict arose in the NMU national leadership over acceptance of the July 15, 1944 WLB decision on wages. The headlines of the July 14, 1944 Pilot proclaimed: “Council, Membership Hail ‘Best’ Agreement.” Howard McKenzie was quoted as saying “This is the best contract ever negotiated by the NMU”.
Rogers’ letter declared however, that he and several other Council members took the position that in fact the WLB decision “contained practically no gains whatsoever for our membership. It did not contain an actual increase in wages, increased overtime rates, standby pay, increased scales, or many of the other demands that we felt could have been won by a real mobilization of the membership behind a fighting policy increased overtime.
The Stalinists smeared all who suggested that this sell-out agreement wasn’t the “greatest ever achieved”, Rogers reported. Myers, McKenzie, Smith, Stack & Co. began to “assassinate the character and integrity of all those who opposed the decision”. They spread the word that Rogers himself “was a phony, that I had sold out to Lundberg and that I was a Trotskyite”.
Once Rogers’ letter was published, more and more facts came out. They were supplied, significantly, by top NMU leaders who had themselves been members or close associates of the CP.
Rift in NMU Leadership
Finally, the NMU members got a first-hand revelation from NMU President Joseph Curran at the February 18, 1946 New York membership meeting. Curran openly charged that “the union is in the hands of a machine ... a machine that is going to tell you are going to work or else ... The machine tells you who is a phony in the union, the machine tells you who elect, who to fire. The machine tells you who to bring on charges.” Anyone who uttered a word of criticism, he said, was subjected to a vile slander campaign and hounded from the union and forced to resign from office.
This rift in the top leadership coincided with a developing internal conflict inside the Communist Party. A wave of expulsions had begun against CP workers for criticizing the Foster leadership.
Foster stated at a CP National Committee meeting of February 5, 1946, that
“We have a very dangerous situation in the NMU. We have done our best to try to adjust the situation and have been unable to accomplish it. The principal reason is our own comrades in the NMU. They are not carrying out the party line or we would have a different situation in the NMU. There has been a little surgery in the NMU, but apparently not enough. If these comrades continue to defy the party line, we will have to do some more surgery”.
Foster’s lieutenants in the NMU tried to carry out this “surgery” with the greasy knife of slander and bureaucratic repression but were stymied by a rising tide of revolt against their misrule.
The Fake “Unity” Maneuver
It was under the circumstances of this challenge to their hitherto tight control, that the Stalinists conceived one of their most sly maneuvers. That was the formation of the Committee for Maritime Unity – more appropriately known as the “Committee for Maritime Disunity”.
Through the CMU, the Stalinists planned to strengthen their slipping grip on the NMU and consolidate their machine on the waterfront. The Stalinists misused the seamen’s genuine desire for unity. Not only a large section of the members, but a number of non-Stalinist maritime union leaders, were taken in by this fake “unity” maneuver.
From the very beginning, the Trotskyists exposed the scheme. Just prior to the CMU founding convention, the April 27, 1946 issue of The Militant declared:
“The Stalinists are motivated primarily by their desire to strengthen their stranglehold over the unions now under their domination and to consolidate their forces for a jurisdictional struggle against rival AFL unions”.
The immediate result of the CMU Conference was not unity, but further disunity. The conference, as The Militant
reported, “is regarded by the AFL unions as a hostile move directed against them, They, in turn, are talking of organizing an AFL maritime council for protection and mutual aid against any CIO invasion of their jurisdiction ... The Stalinist moves have strengthened the hand of the elements within the AFL unions who welcome a jurisdiction fight as an opportunity to expand at the expense of the CIO”.
The Militant called instead for “unity of the maritime workers in agreed-upon joint actions” as the “only honest and realistic approach. Such joint action is the indicated elementary step in any program looking toward eventual and genuine unification of the waterfront unions”.
Events and experience since have confirmed to the hilt the Trotskyist appraisal of CMU, The disruptive activities of CMU became so scandalous that its national co-chairman, Joseph Curran, felt impelled to resign and denounce the CMU.
In a statement to the NMU Council, Curran affirmed that the “CMU has been used for the purpose, number one, of controlling our union, and number two, for promoting warfare on the waterfront with the American Federation of Labor and the independent unions”.
The fake “unity” maneuver of the Stalinists reached its lowest point when the CMU Port Committee in San Francisco “gave to the Masters, Mates and Pilots, who were on strike, a 24-hour ultimatum to pull their pickets off the dock or have them smashed”, as Curran reported to the NMU membership meeting in New York on December 30, 1946.
“My name was attached to that ultimatum, and I did not approve of it”, he said with justified indignation, “and the NMU does not approve of strikebreaking or smashing picket lines”.
In the light of these facts Curran demanded that the question of continued affiliation to the CMU be submitted to a referendum vote of the NMU membership. This demand for a democratic solution of the dispute was rejected by the Stalinist majority on the NMU National Council. A mud-slinging campaign was unleashed against the opponents of CMU. Dire prophecies were circulated in the ranks of imminent disaster that would befall the NMU if it withdrew from CMU.
But the Stalinist campaign backfired. The NMU membership was aroused over the bureaucratic rejection of their right to decide the question by referendum vote. The tide of opposition mounted into a mighty wave of rebellion against the Stalinist clique.
Executing a sudden tactical shift the Stalinist executive committee of the CMU met in secret session and voted to dissolve the organization. For the Stalinists the question was no longer one of utilizing CMU to tighten their grip on the NMU but of preserving their machine in the National Maritime Union. Faced with sure defeat they executed a strategic retreat, proclaiming it was all done in the name of “unity”.
HOW STALINISM RETAINS ITS INFLUENCE
This documented record of Stalinist crimes against American labor, and the maritime workers in particular, is a vivid example of how Stalinism has disoriented and disarmed the workers and led them to tragic defeats in country after country.
Why then does Stalinism still retain such powerful influence in the world labor movement?
Stalinism has appropriated to itself the glorious tradition of the Russian Revolution and the prestige of the Soviet Union, the first workers’ state. This state, despite its degeneration under Stalin, remains a symbol of revolutionary hope for hundreds of millions throughout the world. Stalin exploits this sentiment for his own reactionary ends.
At the same time, he has used the resources of a great state to conduct an unparalleled campaign of slander, falsification and terror against the real communists. As part of this campaign, Stalin has perverted the whole meaning of communism and misrepresented the program of the real Leninists as its opposite.
School of Falsification
The Stalinists are masters of distortion. That is the core of their method. They call black white, and white black. Here are a few examples.
We told earlier how during the war the Stalinists tried to twist the word “scab,” which was correctly applied to them, to mean not a fink who goes through picket lines, but a militant worker on the picket lines.
Right now they are reversing the meaning of “red-baiting”. Those who attack the Stalinists for serving the shipowners are being labeled “red-baiters.” We read in the November 1946 issue of The Maritime Worker, issued by the “Waterfront Committee of the Communist Party” in San Francisco, that workers expelled from the Communist Party are conducting “a new kind of red-baiting campaign”.
The Stalinist sheet explains:
“Of course their red-baiting sounds different than that used by the shipowners ... They say the Communist Party isn’t ‘radical’ enough for them ... They say that the Party is ‘too conservative’. They say that we are ‘reformist’ ...”
According to this logic, anyone who attacks labor traitors is a “red-baiter”.
During the war, Harry Bridges gave a classic demonstration of this Stalinist method in a statement on former U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, who was trying to railroad Bridges out of the country. Bridges, in the August 11, 1944 Dispatcher, called Biddle “Number One on the list” of “people who pal around with the Trotskyites and go a long way to protect them”.
At that very moment, 18 leaders of the Socialist Workers Party and the Minneapolis CIO truckdrivers were in Federal prison. They were railroaded by Biddle and his Department of Justice in the famous Minneapolis Labor Trial. Prosecuted under the infamous Smith “Gag” Act for opposing imperialist war and advocating international socialism, the Trotskyists were charged, among other “crimes”, with circulating the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Scores of CIO and AFL unions, representing nearly six million members, sent resolutions to President Roosevelt demanding the freedom of the SWP leaders.
The only elements in the labor movement who supported the imprisonment of the Trotskyists were the Communist Party and AFL Teamsters Czar Daniel J. Tobin, who helped engineer the frameup.
THE GREATEST FRAMEUP OF ALL
The fountainhead of all the Stalinist slander about the Trotskyists being “agents of Hitler” was the Moscow Frameup Trials. These trials were staged by Stalin to besmirch the real Bolsheviks, particularly the incorruptible Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and co-leader with Lenin of the Russian Revolution of 1917.
In these “trials” from 1935 to 1938, a number of Lenin’s leading co-workers were forced under physical and psychological torture to “confess” fantastic plots to overthrow the Soviet Union in alliance with the Nazis. The chief target of this frameup was the exiled Trotsky, who warned that Stalin was framing and murdering his political opponents as a cover for his own behind-the-scenes preparations for a pact with Hitler. That pact was signed in 1939.
Moscow Trials Exposed
The Moscow Trials “confessions” invented by the Stalin secret police were completely exploded by the exhaustive investigation of the Dewey Commission, headed by Professor John Dewey. Its findings that the Moscow Trials were frameups are contained in a monumental report, Not Guilty, published by Harper & Bros.
The conclusions of the Dewey Commission were confirmed by the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leaders last year. Every living Nazi leader was in Soviet and Allied hands. Tons of Nazi confidential documents had been seized. Yet the Soviet prosecutors could not find ONE THING to back their frameup accusations against Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders whom Stalin had murdered.
One of the Nazi defendants in the Nuremberg trial was Rudolf Hess, who had been named in the Moscow Trials as the “direct link” with Trotsky. Trotsky’s widow, Natalia, demanded that her attorney be given the right to cross-examine Hess. This demand was ignored, for the Stalinist prosecutors knew this would expose the frameup nature of the Moscow Trials before the whole word.
It is on the basis of these proven frameups that Stalinists for years have tried to discredit and smear the Trotskyists. These same methods of slander and frameup are used against every honest working-class opponent of Stalinism in the labor movement. They are the methods used by the treacherous Stalinist leaders in the NMU today.
In their fight against the reactionary and disruptive role of the Stalinists, the progressive NMU rank and file are helping to cleanse the labor movement of the sinister methods of slander; vilification and frameup.
HOW TO FIGHT STALINISM
The documented facts in this pamphlet show that the roots of the NMU’s internal conflict grow deep in the sub-soil of basic union policy and program.
For years the Stalinist bureaucratic clique has ruthlessly trampled underfoot the elementary rights of the rank-and-file and collaborated with the employers and their government.
Thus, the basic issues are the defense of union democracy and the fight for a militant class-struggle program against the seamen’s main enemy, the shipowner-government combine.
These are the issues the Stalinists want to bury. They want to drag the discussion into a blind alley of petty personalities and side issues. They seek to poison the atmosphere, and prevent a discussion of the real issues. They thereby give an opening to the reactionaries to launch a red-baiting drive.
Nothing would help the Stalinists – and the employers – more than to have the discussion derailed from basic issues by any form of red-baiting.
Today the danger of red-baiting is especially acute. The employers and their press are trying to inspire an “anti-red” campaign inside the union movement to divide and disrupt it. Their ultimate victims are the real union militants.
The employers are anxious to divert the progressive struggle of the NMU members against the Stalinists into reactionary red-baiting channels. They fear that a fight for union democracy and a militant class-struggle program will strengthen the union against the shipowners and government. They would like to see the reactionary, but discredited, Stalinists replaced merely by another reactionary clique who will serve Wall Street with undivided loyalty.
Red baiting Serves the Bosses
Red-baiting serves Wall Street imperialism in its war preparations against the Soviet Union. During the war the Stalinists spread the myth that the alliance of the Kremlin with Allied imperialism provided the basis of permanent peace and universal prosperity. The end of the war found a speedy realignment of Stalin’s erstwhile “allies”, who immediately began to lay the foundations for World War III against the Soviet Union.
For this reason, the employers do not consider the Stalinists to be sufficiently reliable today as labor lieutenants of American capitalism.
To defeat the Stalinists AND the bosses, the NMU ranks must fight for a real progressive, militant union policy and program.
FOR A CLASS-STRUGGLE PROGRAM
An effective program must answer the basic problems that have always faced the seamen. These problems are internal division, economic insecurity, shipowner parasitism and government regimentation.
The maritime workers are divided among more than a score of unions, separated along both craft and jurisdictional lines. In addition, a number of the unions practice racial discrimination against Negroes, thus dividing the workers on color lines.
While the maritime workers are divided, their enemies are united. The shipowners and their government agents are conducting a concerted offensive to smash all maritime unionism.
The great maritime strikes of 1946 again demonstrated the burning need for maritime labor unity. Unfortunately, inter-union hostility and suspicion have been sharpened by long years of jurisdictional strife. The problem of unifying the maritime workers cannot be solved overnight or by some slick “unity” maneuver like the Stalinist CMU, which only created further disruption and division.
Establish a Solid Maritime Front!
The first step toward real and lasting unity is to dispel the atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. Without being called upon to give up their present affiliations, the maritime workers must establish a solid front against their common enemy.
This can be achieved through carefully worked out, agreed-upon joint actions of all unions in defense of their mutual interests – against the shipowner-government forces. In the course of such joint actions the existing mutual distrust and suspicion will be broken down and a firm foundation laid for genuine unity.
The ultimate objective of the maritime workers is organic unity, the fusion of the separate unions into one. One of the most serious obstacles to the achievement of this objective is the policy of race discrimination particularly in the AFL seafaring unions and the independent Marine Firemen’s union.
While this is a barrier to organic unity with the non-discriminating NMU, it should not prevent joint actions. The Stalinists, however, seized upon AFL Jim Crow practices as an excuse to bolster their policy of sharpening jurisdictional division on the waterfront. The Stalinists use this seemingly plausible argument to oppose even joint actions, falsely claiming that these by themselves will lead to the imposition of Jim Crow policies on the CIO unions.
But it is precisely joint action of all seamen in struggle against the common enemy that offers the best means to break down racial prejudice. When seamen of all races and all affiliations join together in common action, racial and organizational prejudices will be dispelled in the heat of the struggle against the real enemies of all the workers, the capitalist exploiters.
Immediately after V-J Day the old problem of economic insecurity again loomed large before the seamen. Unemployment and reduced wages struck double blows. Soaring prices further slashed living standards.
Under the so-called “free enterprise system” or capitalist anarchy, the maritime industry is unstable, disorganized and chaotic. Once the artificial war boom was over, thousands of seamen were tossed on the beach as the government put hundreds of ships in “cold storage”.
The immediate answer to the growing unemployment in the maritime industry is the demand
FOR A FOUR-WATCH SYSTEM!
It is necessary to create more jobs by reducing the number of hours worked with no reduction in pay.
The elimination of the war bonuses and skyrocketing prices forced the seamen into strike action to regain a portion of their lost take-home pay. But within three months after the strike, inflation had already wiped out wage increases. By January 1947, the seamen were forced to demand new increases under less favorable conditions. These demands were placed in arbitration.
The seamen must defend their living standards and wage gains against the menace of inflation. If they are not to be forced out on strike every few months trying to keep up with rising prices, they must demand
A SLIDING SCALE OF WAGES!
This is a demand for an escalator clause in the contract providing that wage rates shall rise automatically with every rise in the cost of living. Under such a clause the basic wage scale stands as the guaranteed minimum. But the real wage at the start of the contract is safeguarded by automatic increases when prices rise.
The economic insecurity of the seamen is particularly acute because the industry is controlled by and run solely in the interests of a completely parasitic group of capitalist racketeers.
Most of the wartime ships were government-built and government-owned. The so-called ship-“owners” were merely operators who fattened off huge subsidies paid out of the public treasury.
Now thousands of government merchant ships, built and paid for by the American people, have been turned over to the profiteer-parasites for a song. While the capitalist government uses every means to keep seamen’s wages down, it continues to pay tremendous subsidies to the ship-“owners.”
If the government ceased feeding these parasites, then the added costs of the four-watch system and a sliding scale of wages could easily be met by demanding
ALL GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIES FOR THE SEAMEN! NOT A PENNY OF PUBLIC FUNDS TO THE SHIP-“OWNER” PARASITES!
To ensure permanent security and decent conditions, the stranglehold of the tiny group of ship-“owners” must be completely broken. These useless and greedy blood-suckers must be eliminated from the industry by
NATIONALIZATION OF THE MERCHANT MARINE UNDER WORKERS CONTROL!
The men who run the ships, who do the work, must control the ships and the industry.
The greatest immediate threat to the seamen is government regimentation. Under the pretext of codifying the numerous maritime laws, the ship-“owners” seek to tighten the restraints upon the seamen and further restrict their freedom of action. The Coast Guard, which was imposed on the seamen under the pretext of “wartime necessity”, has become a permanent adjunct of the government’s program for militarizing the merchant marine.
At the same time, Congress is preparing a host of anti-labor laws to outlaw the closed shop union hiring hall, limit the right to strike and impose compulsory arbitration.
Against this conspiracy to put the seamen in a government straitjacket, the maritime workers must fight
FOR THE COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE OF THE UNIONS FROM GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION, REGIMENTATION AND CONTROL! DEFEND THE RIGHT TO STRIKE! NO COMPULSORY ARBITRATION!
The vicious scheme to place the seamen under military discipline must be smashed. Joint action of all unions must be launched to break the grip of militarist control exercised over the seamen by the Coast Guard. The seamen must stand four-square on the demand
FOR UNION CONTROL OF ALL DISCIPLINE ABOARD SHIP!
The whole history of the American seamen has been a continual struggle for their rights against the capitalist government. To this very day seamen are denied elementary civil rights accorded to citizens ashore. Under every Administration, Republican or Democratic, the government has intervened on the side of the bosses against the maritime workers.
The struggle of the seamen for emancipation and permanent security is above all a political struggle. This fact was again demonstrated and underscored when Truman threatened to use the Navy against the impending CIO maritime strike in June 1946.
Labor has no voice whatsoever in this government. The policy of supporting so-called “friends of labor” from the Republican and Democratic parties of Wall Street has left labor politically helpless today. If the government attacks on the seamen and all labor are to be stopped, company-unionism in politics must end. Seamen must call
FOR AN INDEPENDENT LABOR PARTY!
An independent party of labor, based on the trade unions, can mobilize the workers, oppressed minorities and impoverished lower-middle class. Such a party will represent the overwhelming majority of the people. With a militant program, it could lead a victorious struggle against the rule of the tiny minority or capitalists who· dominate this country and exploit the people for their own profit and privilege.
Once the power of the capitalists is destroyed, the working majority can establish a government in their own interests, a real government of, by and for the people
A WORKERS’ AND FARMERS’ GOVERNMENT!
The Socialist Workers Party advances this program as a solution to the problems confronting the seamen: We have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class. The struggle of the seamen is part of the general struggle of the American working class for emancipation from capitalist exploitation and wage slavery. Our goal is the final victory of the working class and the establishment of a socialist society which will bring lasting peace, plenty and security for all.
JOIN IN THE FIGHT FOR THIS GREAT GOAL – JOIN THE SOCIALIST WORKERS PARTY!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Kremlin Conceals Real Reasons for Defeats</h1>
<h4>Exaggerates Moscow Conference Results to Hide Lack of<br>
Competent Army Leaders, Failure to Inspire Revolutionary Struggle</h4>
<h3>(11 October 1941)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_41" target="new">Vol. V No. 41</a>, 11 October 1941, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The Kremlin is making fantastic claims for the results of the Moscow three-power conference on aid to the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>Thanking the representatives of the imperialist democracies for the “bountiful supplies” already sent to the USSR, Stalin on October 1 put forth the claim that the promised aid will enable the Soviet forces “forthwith to strengthen their relentless defense and. develop vigorous attacks against the invading army.” Lozovsky, chief or the Soviet Information Bureau, stated that the Moscow agreement has colossal explosive powers” and “will have a deadly practical nature for the Germans.”</p>
<p>A Moscow dispatch in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, October 4, declares:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“The pooling of the vast resources of the U.S.A., Great Britain and the USSR <em>are guarantees that Hitler will meet his doom,</em> the <strong>Izvestia</strong> stated.”</p>
<p class="fst">The <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, October 6, calls the conference results a “deadly blow to Hitler.”</p>
<p>These claims about the extent and importance of the forthcoming material aid from the Allies are in sharp contrast to the attitude of the Stalinists and their press in the days immediately preceding the conference.</p>
<p><em>Harry Pollitt</em>, leading British Stalinist, publicly declared on September 21:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Churchill’s policy announced on September 9, completely failed to satisfy public disquiet ... Taken in conjunction with statements by Lords Moyne and Clement Attlee in behalf of the government, we have a declaration of definite policy which can be summed up as limited assistance to Russia, rejection of military action and ‘ceaseless study of the problem’.” (<strong>Daily Worker</strong>, Sept. 22)</p>
<p class="fst">On the very day of the conclusion of the conference, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, October 2, still said editorially:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Some materials have reached the Soviet Union from America, but thus far it has been only a token. Neither the vast quantity nor the full range of materials necessary for effective aid to the Soviet Union has been sent.”</p>
<p class="fst">But even material aid is not sufficient in itself to save the situation, added the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, stating:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Not only is much larger and speedier aid necessary for the Soviet Union, but our country ... <em>must undertake equal responsibility for the military destruction of Hitler.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">That is, open up a western front.<br>
</p>
<h4>Situation Not Changed</h4>
<p class="fst">Has the attitude of the Churchill government, as described by Pollitt, now changed overnight? Has the Soviet Union’s military situation, for which the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> says more help is needed than mere material aid, now taken a magical turn for the better?</p>
<p>Not at all. These fulsome claims for the results of the Moscow conference are made in order to stifle the doubts and serious concern of the Stalinist ranks everywhere, about the causes for the disastrous defeats continuously suffered by the Red Army since the inception of the war.</p>
<p>This agitation about the significance of the “aid” promised by Churchill and Roosevelt is only a Stalinist smoke-screen to hide the real question: Why has the Red Army suffered only defeats since the first days of the war?</p>
<p>The Red Army, at the outset of the war, was numerically superior to the Nazi army. It possessed arms and material equal in quantity and quality to what the Nazis could immediately utilize against it. The morale of the Soviet soldiers was superior to that of Hitler’s soldiers. The Red Army had the advantage of a defensive position, behind prepared and natural defenses, and could maneuver on familiar terrain. Why, then, the defeats?<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinist Ranks Asking Questions</h4>
<p class="fst">The Stalinist leaders are being compelled to explain away questions along this line which events have aroused in the minds of the Stalinist ranks.</p>
<p>Such are the questions which “A Veteran Commander”, Stalinist military commentator, vainly tries to answer in the <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>, October 5:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Question 1: How were the Nazis able to cross the Dnieper in view of the following: (a) The Soviets had the advantage of the Dnieper; (b) About equal forces numerically; (c) Sufficient military equipment?”</p>
<p class="quote">“Question 2: In quite a number of Soviet military reports I have read that Soviet troops have met with numerically superior forces ... In view of the assertion that the Soviets have a larger military manpower than the Nazis, how can we account for the Nazi superiority admitted in so many reports?”</p>
<p class="fst">“A Veteran Commander’s” reply to the question on the Dnieper defeat simply evades the issue by raising all sorts of new speculations. The level of his answer is indicated by this:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Militarily speaking, no equipment is ever ‘sufficient.’ But this is a fine point, and we better drop it for a moment.”</p>
<p class="fst">These Stalinist evasions cannot, however, silence the insistent questions. Why the defeats of the Red Army despite its superiority in manpower, equality in <em>materiel</em>, etc.?<br>
</p>
<h4>The Lack of Leadership</h4>
<p class="fst">No amount of Stalinist smoke screens can hide the fact that the Red Army command is hopelessly inferior in leadership and staff work to the Nazi officers’ staff.</p>
<p>In these defeats are revealed the consequences of Stalin’s beheading of the armed forces of the USSR in 1937 and 1938.</p>
<p>During the frameup purges of those years, no less than 40,000 Red Army officers, including almost the entire general staff of experienced and trained generals, were executed or imprisoned by Stalin.</p>
<p>The Red Army, with its officers corps depleted by Stalin’s purges, lacks qualified leadership. This accounts in great part for the unending defeats.</p>
<p>While the Red Army goes on from one debacle to another, Stalin continues to hold in his prisons and concentration camps thousands of trained officers and industrial experts, loyal elements who can provide the type of leadership so sadly lacking.</p>
<p>That is why all those who have at heart the true interests of the Soviet Union must raise the insistent demand that the Soviet Government immediately release all pro-Soviet political prisoners and restore them to their rightful place in industry and the Red Army. At the same time, the government must revive the democratically-elected Soviets and legalize all pro-Soviet political parties.</p>
<p>The release of the tens of thousands of loyal revolutionists and experienced officers – men who proved their worth in the Civil War of 1918-20 and in the building of Soviet industry and the army – will provide much of the needed leadership for the military and industrial machine of the Soviet Union. The mobilization of the masses, through the democratically-elected Soviets, will reinvigorate the morale of the Soviet masses, organize them for a total defense, and strengthen their resolve to fight on to victory.</p>
<p>These measures will enable the Soviet forces to hold their ground and beat back the Nazi army. But that alone, however, will not assure ultimate victory.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Economic Factor</h4>
<p class="fst">For victory cannot be assured on the basis of military factors alone. In the last analysis, the military superiority of the Nazis is a measure of the superior economic resources which Hitler commands.</p>
<p>The industrial productivity of Germany alone is greater than that of the Soviet Union. Added to this initial Nazi economic advantage, is the productivity and resources of all the occupied countries.</p>
<p>This is a factor which even the Stalinists are forced to recognize.</p>
<p>In answering the question why the Red Army with an initial superiority of manpower is reported to be meeting numerically superior forces, “A Veteran Commander” states:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“In evaluating the strength of both sides on the Eastern Front one should not think in terms of pre-war populations, but definitely admit that the 170,000,000 (it is not more than that now) of the Soviet Union are now facing a combination of 400,000,000 people, either <em>fighting, producing for war or threatening war</em>. Now all the answers become clear.”</p>
<p class="fst">In a word, Hitler’s admitted superiority now flows, according to this Stalinist, from the peoples of the occupied territories – those people who, under a revolutionary leadership, might be a dagger in Hitler’s back.</p>
<p>This Stalinist “expert”, of course, fails to mention the decisive source of Hitler’s strength, the German people.<br>
</p>
<h4>The German Workers</h4>
<p class="fst">Hitler’s strength lies, above all, in the fear of the German workers of another Versailles “peace”, the yoke of a foreign conqueror.</p>
<p>By his complete political identification with the “democratic” imperialists, Stalin alienates the German workers from the Soviet Union. The German people are led by Stalin’s policies to associate the Soviet Union with his imperialist “allies”, who, if victorious, would impose a new oppressive Versailles “peace”.</p>
<p>A pledge from the Soviet Union that it is fighting to defeat Hitler in order to aid in the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe, and that the Soviet Union will fight against a Versailles “peace”, will do more than any other thing to undermine Hitler’s influence in Germany.</p>
<p>The masses of the occupied countries are already seething with revolt. Far from desiring to aid Hitler, they are seeking that program and leadership which will organize and lead them in the revolutionary overthrow of Hitlerism. If Hitler still can utilize the resources of the conquered countries against the Soviet Union, it is only because the peoples of the occupied territories as yet lack the program, organization and leadership to destroy the invader.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalin’s “Appeal”</h4>
<p class="fst">How does Stalin appeal to these subjugated peoples? He asks them, in effect, to fight for a restoration of the old traitorous capitalist regimes and appeals to them in terms of the reactionary ideas fostered by the capitalist classes.</p>
<p>Daniel T. Brigham, in a dispatch from Berne, Switzerland to the <strong>New York Times</strong>, October 5, describes how the Moscow radio addresses the populations of the Axis and occupied countries.</p>
<p class="quoteb">“To stress the righteousness of the Soviet cause against fascism today,” reports Brigham, “the Moscow radio propaganda cites for its hearers’ benefit, with regional incidents, how, although the Communist regime has changed and no longer ‘resists God,’ the Fascist and National Socialist regimes continue those reprehensible persecutions that they originated in the early Nineteen Thirties.”</p>
<p class="fst">The masses are not primarily concerned with the fate of religion and the churches. The churches have not been able to save the masses from fascist oppression. They have not shown any ability or willingness to fight for a new social order without classes and exploitation.</p>
<p>The religious leaders, who have sided largely with reaction and supported the ruling regimes, appear to most of the workers as part of the oppressor class.<br>
</p>
<h4>Road to Victory</h4>
<p class="fst">The masses want socialism, peace, bread, freedom from exploitation. But Stalin appeals to them only in the language of a church father, without reference to their material needs and aspirations. Such an appeal can only repel the masses.</p>
<p>Instead of this reactionary claptrap, it is necessary for the Soviet government to issue a direct, revolutionary appeal to the masses of occupied Europe, and to the workers of Germany, calling on them to join hands with the Soviet Union for the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe.</p>
<p>This is the only road to final victory for the Soviet Union. This is the only hope for the free future of the oppressed peoples of Europe.</p>
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Art Preis
Kremlin Conceals Real Reasons for Defeats
Exaggerates Moscow Conference Results to Hide Lack of
Competent Army Leaders, Failure to Inspire Revolutionary Struggle
(11 October 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 41, 11 October 1941, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Kremlin is making fantastic claims for the results of the Moscow three-power conference on aid to the Soviet Union.
Thanking the representatives of the imperialist democracies for the “bountiful supplies” already sent to the USSR, Stalin on October 1 put forth the claim that the promised aid will enable the Soviet forces “forthwith to strengthen their relentless defense and. develop vigorous attacks against the invading army.” Lozovsky, chief or the Soviet Information Bureau, stated that the Moscow agreement has colossal explosive powers” and “will have a deadly practical nature for the Germans.”
A Moscow dispatch in the Daily Worker, October 4, declares:
“The pooling of the vast resources of the U.S.A., Great Britain and the USSR are guarantees that Hitler will meet his doom, the Izvestia stated.”
The Daily Worker, October 6, calls the conference results a “deadly blow to Hitler.”
These claims about the extent and importance of the forthcoming material aid from the Allies are in sharp contrast to the attitude of the Stalinists and their press in the days immediately preceding the conference.
Harry Pollitt, leading British Stalinist, publicly declared on September 21:
“Churchill’s policy announced on September 9, completely failed to satisfy public disquiet ... Taken in conjunction with statements by Lords Moyne and Clement Attlee in behalf of the government, we have a declaration of definite policy which can be summed up as limited assistance to Russia, rejection of military action and ‘ceaseless study of the problem’.” (Daily Worker, Sept. 22)
On the very day of the conclusion of the conference, the Daily Worker, October 2, still said editorially:
“Some materials have reached the Soviet Union from America, but thus far it has been only a token. Neither the vast quantity nor the full range of materials necessary for effective aid to the Soviet Union has been sent.”
But even material aid is not sufficient in itself to save the situation, added the Daily Worker, stating:
“Not only is much larger and speedier aid necessary for the Soviet Union, but our country ... must undertake equal responsibility for the military destruction of Hitler.”
That is, open up a western front.
Situation Not Changed
Has the attitude of the Churchill government, as described by Pollitt, now changed overnight? Has the Soviet Union’s military situation, for which the Daily Worker says more help is needed than mere material aid, now taken a magical turn for the better?
Not at all. These fulsome claims for the results of the Moscow conference are made in order to stifle the doubts and serious concern of the Stalinist ranks everywhere, about the causes for the disastrous defeats continuously suffered by the Red Army since the inception of the war.
This agitation about the significance of the “aid” promised by Churchill and Roosevelt is only a Stalinist smoke-screen to hide the real question: Why has the Red Army suffered only defeats since the first days of the war?
The Red Army, at the outset of the war, was numerically superior to the Nazi army. It possessed arms and material equal in quantity and quality to what the Nazis could immediately utilize against it. The morale of the Soviet soldiers was superior to that of Hitler’s soldiers. The Red Army had the advantage of a defensive position, behind prepared and natural defenses, and could maneuver on familiar terrain. Why, then, the defeats?
Stalinist Ranks Asking Questions
The Stalinist leaders are being compelled to explain away questions along this line which events have aroused in the minds of the Stalinist ranks.
Such are the questions which “A Veteran Commander”, Stalinist military commentator, vainly tries to answer in the Sunday Worker, October 5:
“Question 1: How were the Nazis able to cross the Dnieper in view of the following: (a) The Soviets had the advantage of the Dnieper; (b) About equal forces numerically; (c) Sufficient military equipment?”
“Question 2: In quite a number of Soviet military reports I have read that Soviet troops have met with numerically superior forces ... In view of the assertion that the Soviets have a larger military manpower than the Nazis, how can we account for the Nazi superiority admitted in so many reports?”
“A Veteran Commander’s” reply to the question on the Dnieper defeat simply evades the issue by raising all sorts of new speculations. The level of his answer is indicated by this:
“Militarily speaking, no equipment is ever ‘sufficient.’ But this is a fine point, and we better drop it for a moment.”
These Stalinist evasions cannot, however, silence the insistent questions. Why the defeats of the Red Army despite its superiority in manpower, equality in materiel, etc.?
The Lack of Leadership
No amount of Stalinist smoke screens can hide the fact that the Red Army command is hopelessly inferior in leadership and staff work to the Nazi officers’ staff.
In these defeats are revealed the consequences of Stalin’s beheading of the armed forces of the USSR in 1937 and 1938.
During the frameup purges of those years, no less than 40,000 Red Army officers, including almost the entire general staff of experienced and trained generals, were executed or imprisoned by Stalin.
The Red Army, with its officers corps depleted by Stalin’s purges, lacks qualified leadership. This accounts in great part for the unending defeats.
While the Red Army goes on from one debacle to another, Stalin continues to hold in his prisons and concentration camps thousands of trained officers and industrial experts, loyal elements who can provide the type of leadership so sadly lacking.
That is why all those who have at heart the true interests of the Soviet Union must raise the insistent demand that the Soviet Government immediately release all pro-Soviet political prisoners and restore them to their rightful place in industry and the Red Army. At the same time, the government must revive the democratically-elected Soviets and legalize all pro-Soviet political parties.
The release of the tens of thousands of loyal revolutionists and experienced officers – men who proved their worth in the Civil War of 1918-20 and in the building of Soviet industry and the army – will provide much of the needed leadership for the military and industrial machine of the Soviet Union. The mobilization of the masses, through the democratically-elected Soviets, will reinvigorate the morale of the Soviet masses, organize them for a total defense, and strengthen their resolve to fight on to victory.
These measures will enable the Soviet forces to hold their ground and beat back the Nazi army. But that alone, however, will not assure ultimate victory.
The Economic Factor
For victory cannot be assured on the basis of military factors alone. In the last analysis, the military superiority of the Nazis is a measure of the superior economic resources which Hitler commands.
The industrial productivity of Germany alone is greater than that of the Soviet Union. Added to this initial Nazi economic advantage, is the productivity and resources of all the occupied countries.
This is a factor which even the Stalinists are forced to recognize.
In answering the question why the Red Army with an initial superiority of manpower is reported to be meeting numerically superior forces, “A Veteran Commander” states:
“In evaluating the strength of both sides on the Eastern Front one should not think in terms of pre-war populations, but definitely admit that the 170,000,000 (it is not more than that now) of the Soviet Union are now facing a combination of 400,000,000 people, either fighting, producing for war or threatening war. Now all the answers become clear.”
In a word, Hitler’s admitted superiority now flows, according to this Stalinist, from the peoples of the occupied territories – those people who, under a revolutionary leadership, might be a dagger in Hitler’s back.
This Stalinist “expert”, of course, fails to mention the decisive source of Hitler’s strength, the German people.
The German Workers
Hitler’s strength lies, above all, in the fear of the German workers of another Versailles “peace”, the yoke of a foreign conqueror.
By his complete political identification with the “democratic” imperialists, Stalin alienates the German workers from the Soviet Union. The German people are led by Stalin’s policies to associate the Soviet Union with his imperialist “allies”, who, if victorious, would impose a new oppressive Versailles “peace”.
A pledge from the Soviet Union that it is fighting to defeat Hitler in order to aid in the establishment of a Socialist United States of Europe, and that the Soviet Union will fight against a Versailles “peace”, will do more than any other thing to undermine Hitler’s influence in Germany.
The masses of the occupied countries are already seething with revolt. Far from desiring to aid Hitler, they are seeking that program and leadership which will organize and lead them in the revolutionary overthrow of Hitlerism. If Hitler still can utilize the resources of the conquered countries against the Soviet Union, it is only because the peoples of the occupied territories as yet lack the program, organization and leadership to destroy the invader.
Stalin’s “Appeal”
How does Stalin appeal to these subjugated peoples? He asks them, in effect, to fight for a restoration of the old traitorous capitalist regimes and appeals to them in terms of the reactionary ideas fostered by the capitalist classes.
Daniel T. Brigham, in a dispatch from Berne, Switzerland to the New York Times, October 5, describes how the Moscow radio addresses the populations of the Axis and occupied countries.
“To stress the righteousness of the Soviet cause against fascism today,” reports Brigham, “the Moscow radio propaganda cites for its hearers’ benefit, with regional incidents, how, although the Communist regime has changed and no longer ‘resists God,’ the Fascist and National Socialist regimes continue those reprehensible persecutions that they originated in the early Nineteen Thirties.”
The masses are not primarily concerned with the fate of religion and the churches. The churches have not been able to save the masses from fascist oppression. They have not shown any ability or willingness to fight for a new social order without classes and exploitation.
The religious leaders, who have sided largely with reaction and supported the ruling regimes, appear to most of the workers as part of the oppressor class.
Road to Victory
The masses want socialism, peace, bread, freedom from exploitation. But Stalin appeals to them only in the language of a church father, without reference to their material needs and aspirations. Such an appeal can only repel the masses.
Instead of this reactionary claptrap, it is necessary for the Soviet government to issue a direct, revolutionary appeal to the masses of occupied Europe, and to the workers of Germany, calling on them to join hands with the Soviet Union for the creation of the Socialist United States of Europe.
This is the only road to final victory for the Soviet Union. This is the only hope for the free future of the oppressed peoples of Europe.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Government Uses Ward Case<br>
to Aid Anti-Strike Power</h1>
<h3>(13 January 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_02" target="new">Vol. IX No. 2</a>, 13 January 1945, pp. 1 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">In the guise of a federal court action ostensibly directed against a recalcitrant employer in the Montgomery Ward case, the Roosevelt administration is attempting to fortify its legal powers for government strikebreaking through plant "seizures.”</p>
<p>That was the clear meaning of administration arguments before federal court hearings which opened in Chicago last Monday. The government is seeking an injunction to bar company “interference” with government operation of 16 Ward properties “seized” in order to halt strikes in Detroit, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., as well as a threatened CIO “labor holiday” in the auto center.</p>
<p><em>In presenting the government’s brief Hugh Cox, Assistant Solicitor General, stated flatly that “the real question here is whether the United States has the power in time of war to take possession wherein a labor controversy threatens to interfere with the successful prosecution of the war.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Not for Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">“We are not here to argue the merits of the labor controversy,” he admitted, “because we are not here to assist labor or to vindicate the War Labor Board.” The main issue, he contended, was the threat to the “structure and organization of the War Labor Board,” that is, the government’s apparatus for preventing strikes through compulsory arbitration and for maintaining Roosevelt’s wage-freezing “wage-stabilization” program.</p>
<p>Cox argued the right of government “seizure” in the Ward case, where the government had failed previously to enforce longstanding orders against the company, specifically because of the strikes. He stressed particularly need for government action in the Ward strikes because of their “adverse effect” on the CIO United Automobile Workers referendum on the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>Thus, Cox indicated, that non- compliance with a WLB order by an employer is not in itself a matter for government action. The government acts only where a “labor controversy” leading to a strike or threat of strike, to “interference with production,” occurs. This supported Attorney General Biddle’s previous admission that WLB orders, are only “recommendations.”</p>
<p>In reality, they are only “recommendations” so far as the employers are concerned. So long as the workers do not strike, the government admits in effect, the employer can disregard WLB directives when he doesn’t like them, or stall them with delaying court actions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Aimed at Strikes</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>But the workers – against whom most of the corporation-dominated WLB’s decisions are directed – are compelled to accept WLB orders automatically. For the employers, who control wages, hours, working conditions, contractual relations, enforce these orders – except when workers go on strike. Whichever way the workers turn, their only recourse for self-protection is strike action. WLB orders against employers cannot be enforced without strikes – as the four-year old Ward case amply proves. Anti-labor decrees of the WLB cannot be resisted without strikes.</em></p>
<p>But it is precisely against strikes, under any and all circumstances, that the Roosevelt administration is directing its real attack. Strikes were the real motivation for these latest Ward “seizures.” It is the argument of strike prevention that the government is using in court to. justify these “seizures.” The net effect, regardless of the immediate outcome of the Ward case, is to reinforce the power of government “seizure” as a strikebreaking weapon.</p>
<p>This power will be all the more potent precisely because the “seizure” was demanded by the unions and directed, ostensibly, against an anti-labor employer. The most important instances of such “seizures” previously, particularly of the railroads and coal mines, were openly directed against the workers. This will be just as true in the future – with this addition: The government will be able to point to the Ward case in order to claim “impartiality” in its strikebreaking.</p>
<p><em>What is basically involved is the administration’s endeavor to reinforce WLB authority, challenged by Avery. But that authority is not needed because of the employers. Fundamentally, it is needed against the workers, because the very purpose of the board is anti-labor – to impose compulsory arbitration, bury labor grievances in red tape, and, above all, to enforce the wage freeze. That has been conclusively demonstrated in all the decisive wage cases, coal, railway, steel, auto, packinghouse, rubber, textiles. etc.</em></p>
<p>Avery, by his actions, was tossing a monkey-wrench into the very machinery for controlling labor that the employers as a class themselves require. Hence, the big business government was finally compelled to act – although “reluctantly,” as it admitted – against an employer who broke the discipline of his own capitalist class.</p>
<p><em>But only to be in better position ultimately to squeeze the vise tighter on labor!</em></p>
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Art Preis
Government Uses Ward Case
to Aid Anti-Strike Power
(13 January 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 2, 13 January 1945, pp. 1 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
In the guise of a federal court action ostensibly directed against a recalcitrant employer in the Montgomery Ward case, the Roosevelt administration is attempting to fortify its legal powers for government strikebreaking through plant "seizures.”
That was the clear meaning of administration arguments before federal court hearings which opened in Chicago last Monday. The government is seeking an injunction to bar company “interference” with government operation of 16 Ward properties “seized” in order to halt strikes in Detroit, Chicago and Kansas City, Mo., as well as a threatened CIO “labor holiday” in the auto center.
In presenting the government’s brief Hugh Cox, Assistant Solicitor General, stated flatly that “the real question here is whether the United States has the power in time of war to take possession wherein a labor controversy threatens to interfere with the successful prosecution of the war.”
Not for Labor
“We are not here to argue the merits of the labor controversy,” he admitted, “because we are not here to assist labor or to vindicate the War Labor Board.” The main issue, he contended, was the threat to the “structure and organization of the War Labor Board,” that is, the government’s apparatus for preventing strikes through compulsory arbitration and for maintaining Roosevelt’s wage-freezing “wage-stabilization” program.
Cox argued the right of government “seizure” in the Ward case, where the government had failed previously to enforce longstanding orders against the company, specifically because of the strikes. He stressed particularly need for government action in the Ward strikes because of their “adverse effect” on the CIO United Automobile Workers referendum on the no-strike pledge.
Thus, Cox indicated, that non- compliance with a WLB order by an employer is not in itself a matter for government action. The government acts only where a “labor controversy” leading to a strike or threat of strike, to “interference with production,” occurs. This supported Attorney General Biddle’s previous admission that WLB orders, are only “recommendations.”
In reality, they are only “recommendations” so far as the employers are concerned. So long as the workers do not strike, the government admits in effect, the employer can disregard WLB directives when he doesn’t like them, or stall them with delaying court actions.
Aimed at Strikes
But the workers – against whom most of the corporation-dominated WLB’s decisions are directed – are compelled to accept WLB orders automatically. For the employers, who control wages, hours, working conditions, contractual relations, enforce these orders – except when workers go on strike. Whichever way the workers turn, their only recourse for self-protection is strike action. WLB orders against employers cannot be enforced without strikes – as the four-year old Ward case amply proves. Anti-labor decrees of the WLB cannot be resisted without strikes.
But it is precisely against strikes, under any and all circumstances, that the Roosevelt administration is directing its real attack. Strikes were the real motivation for these latest Ward “seizures.” It is the argument of strike prevention that the government is using in court to. justify these “seizures.” The net effect, regardless of the immediate outcome of the Ward case, is to reinforce the power of government “seizure” as a strikebreaking weapon.
This power will be all the more potent precisely because the “seizure” was demanded by the unions and directed, ostensibly, against an anti-labor employer. The most important instances of such “seizures” previously, particularly of the railroads and coal mines, were openly directed against the workers. This will be just as true in the future – with this addition: The government will be able to point to the Ward case in order to claim “impartiality” in its strikebreaking.
What is basically involved is the administration’s endeavor to reinforce WLB authority, challenged by Avery. But that authority is not needed because of the employers. Fundamentally, it is needed against the workers, because the very purpose of the board is anti-labor – to impose compulsory arbitration, bury labor grievances in red tape, and, above all, to enforce the wage freeze. That has been conclusively demonstrated in all the decisive wage cases, coal, railway, steel, auto, packinghouse, rubber, textiles. etc.
Avery, by his actions, was tossing a monkey-wrench into the very machinery for controlling labor that the employers as a class themselves require. Hence, the big business government was finally compelled to act – although “reluctantly,” as it admitted – against an employer who broke the discipline of his own capitalist class.
But only to be in better position ultimately to squeeze the vise tighter on labor!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>CP, Hillman Form Anti-Lewis Bloc</h1>
<h4>War-Mongers Unite at UE Convention; Stalinists Lead Drive Against Lewis</h4>
<h3>(September 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_36" target="new">Vol. V No. 36</a>, 6 September 1941, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">The Stalinist and Hillmanite forces at the CIO United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers’ Seventh Annual Convention at Camden, New Jersey, have joined together in a move to place the union, fifth largest in the CIO, behind all-out support of the imperialist war.</p>
<p>The first formal action of this new unholy alliance of Stalinists and Hillmanites on the General Executive Board was a statement on August 31 calling for full support to Roosevelt’s war policies and criticising John L. Lewis as an “appeaser.”</p>
<p class="quoteb">“Inasmuch as this is the first major CIO meeting since John L. Lewis signed the appeasement statement with fourteen leading Republican isolationists, the U.E.R.M.W.’s stand on the Administration’s foreign policy is expected to be watched carefully,” the statement declared.</p>
<p class="fst">This direct reference to Lewis, – taken together with other recent actions and statements of the Stalinists – indicates that the Stalinists are seeking a joint onslaught of the Stalinist-Hillmanite forces against John L. Lewis and the progressive sectors of the CIO, who have thus far successfully resisted the efforts of the Hillmanites to place the industrial union movement under the thumb of the government’s war machine.</p>
<p>Undoubtedly the Stalinists have been the prime movers behind this new united reactionary labor front.</p>
<p>Prior to the UERMW convention, the Stalinist and the Hillmanite factions had fought each other in an effort to gain control of the union apparatus. Whatever bureaucratic differences may have divided them in the past, it is the political issues which have finally decided the line-ups – as they always do. Both the Stalinists and the Hillmanites are in basic agreement on unconditional support of the government and the war, and this is rapidly forging them together into a common reactionary front.</p>
<p><em>The joint action of the Stalinists and Hillmanites in this important convention is only the latest and most dramatic example of the Stalinist efforts to align themselves with the Hillmanites and the most reactionary elements of the AFL on a program of “unity” against the anti-war forces in the unions.</em></p>
<p>The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> has been giving increasing and favorable recognition and publicity to the activities and statements of the AFL leaders who have given guarantees to Roosevelt of their willingness to sacrifice every right of organized labor for Roosevelt’s war program.<br>
</p>
<h4>Labor Unity on the AFL’s Basis</h4>
<p class="fst">On August 20, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> featured on its front page the address of William Green, AFL head, at the New York State Federation of Labor Convention, in which Green proclaimed his full and unconditional support of Roosevelt and his “war aims.” The <strong>Daily Worker</strong> described as a “high point of this morning’s session ...the speech of President William Green of the AFL ... declaring the AFL’s full support of the eight point Roosevelt-Churchill declaration ...” What the Stalinists are driving toward by this playing up of the AFL leaders was disclosed more openly in a <strong>Daily Worker</strong> editorial, August 24, on the New York State AFL convention, which stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“The progressive position of the convention of the State AFL – the largest State AFL organization in the country – is especially encouraging because it shows the great possibilities for labor unity of AFL and CIO behind a program for defeat of Hitlerism.</em></p>
<p class="quote">“In the past, the established policies of the AFL did not provide a basis for unity. Now with the AFL offtcially taking a progressive stand on the most important issue before the country – the defeat of Hitler – a good basis exists for joint AFL-CIO activity ...</p>
<p class="quote">“The position of the CIO members on the international situation is well known. They are speaking out more and more, <em>in spite of the general silence of the CIO nationally</em>.”</p>
<p class="fst">This is Hillman’s full-blown line on AFL-CIO “unity,” which he projected at the last CIO national convention.</p>
<p>Like Hillman, the Stalinists are now prepared to thrust the industrial union movement of this country back into the hands of the Greens, Wolls, Freys and Tobins, under any terms and conditions. By their wholehearted support of the war, these labor skates have become “progressives” to the Stalinists. The strikebreaking, no-strike, government-collaboration, anti-industrial union policies of the AFL leaders no longer matter to the Stalinists.</p>
<p>It was this brand of AFL-CIO “unity” which Lewis successfully defeated at the last CIO convention. When the CIO is strong enough to crush every attempt of the AFL craft-union leadership to strangle the industrial unions in their “unity” embrace, only then can the CIO unite once more with the AFL, Lewis pointed out.</p>
<p>Lewis today stands in firm opposition to the Stalinist-Hillmanite plan to corral the industrial union movement into the camp of the reactionary AFL under any terms, provided “unity” of organized labor behind the war program is achieved.<br>
</p>
<h4>Open Attacks on Lewis Increasing</h4>
<p class="fst">That is why the Stalinist campaign to undermine Lewis is becoming more open and bold.</p>
<p>Already, unions under Stalinist control are passing resolutions “censuring” Lewis and attacking him for his “appeasement” stand. The <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, September 1, reports on its front page such an action by the Chicago Fur Workers Union. This is but the first trickle of a flood of similar resolutions which are bound to follow every union local that the Stalinists control.</p>
<p><em>The tone of the Stalinist attacks on Lewis and the progressive elements of the CIO Will undoubtedly take on heightened virulence in the coming weeks. Lewis will be condemned as a “Fifth Columnist,” etc. ...</em></p>
<p>This was indicated in Roy Hudson’s article, <em>Some Lessons of the Auto Convention</em>, in the <strong>Sunday Worker</strong>, August 31, which speaks of the “desertion of John L. Lewis from the cause of anti-fascism, to the camp of ... the Lindberghs, Wheelers, Coughlins, Hearsts ...”</p>
<p>The Stalinists show by their new alignment with Hillman and their attempts to push Hillman’s program of “unity” with the AFL, that their intentions are to sacrifice every condition and right of labor for the sole end of getting labor to support an immediate AEF. They are ready to go to any length in support of the imperialist government of Wall Street and Roosevelt.</p>
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Art Preis
CP, Hillman Form Anti-Lewis Bloc
War-Mongers Unite at UE Convention; Stalinists Lead Drive Against Lewis
(September 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 36, 6 September 1941, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Stalinist and Hillmanite forces at the CIO United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers’ Seventh Annual Convention at Camden, New Jersey, have joined together in a move to place the union, fifth largest in the CIO, behind all-out support of the imperialist war.
The first formal action of this new unholy alliance of Stalinists and Hillmanites on the General Executive Board was a statement on August 31 calling for full support to Roosevelt’s war policies and criticising John L. Lewis as an “appeaser.”
“Inasmuch as this is the first major CIO meeting since John L. Lewis signed the appeasement statement with fourteen leading Republican isolationists, the U.E.R.M.W.’s stand on the Administration’s foreign policy is expected to be watched carefully,” the statement declared.
This direct reference to Lewis, – taken together with other recent actions and statements of the Stalinists – indicates that the Stalinists are seeking a joint onslaught of the Stalinist-Hillmanite forces against John L. Lewis and the progressive sectors of the CIO, who have thus far successfully resisted the efforts of the Hillmanites to place the industrial union movement under the thumb of the government’s war machine.
Undoubtedly the Stalinists have been the prime movers behind this new united reactionary labor front.
Prior to the UERMW convention, the Stalinist and the Hillmanite factions had fought each other in an effort to gain control of the union apparatus. Whatever bureaucratic differences may have divided them in the past, it is the political issues which have finally decided the line-ups – as they always do. Both the Stalinists and the Hillmanites are in basic agreement on unconditional support of the government and the war, and this is rapidly forging them together into a common reactionary front.
The joint action of the Stalinists and Hillmanites in this important convention is only the latest and most dramatic example of the Stalinist efforts to align themselves with the Hillmanites and the most reactionary elements of the AFL on a program of “unity” against the anti-war forces in the unions.
The Daily Worker has been giving increasing and favorable recognition and publicity to the activities and statements of the AFL leaders who have given guarantees to Roosevelt of their willingness to sacrifice every right of organized labor for Roosevelt’s war program.
Labor Unity on the AFL’s Basis
On August 20, the Daily Worker featured on its front page the address of William Green, AFL head, at the New York State Federation of Labor Convention, in which Green proclaimed his full and unconditional support of Roosevelt and his “war aims.” The Daily Worker described as a “high point of this morning’s session ...the speech of President William Green of the AFL ... declaring the AFL’s full support of the eight point Roosevelt-Churchill declaration ...” What the Stalinists are driving toward by this playing up of the AFL leaders was disclosed more openly in a Daily Worker editorial, August 24, on the New York State AFL convention, which stated:
“The progressive position of the convention of the State AFL – the largest State AFL organization in the country – is especially encouraging because it shows the great possibilities for labor unity of AFL and CIO behind a program for defeat of Hitlerism.
“In the past, the established policies of the AFL did not provide a basis for unity. Now with the AFL offtcially taking a progressive stand on the most important issue before the country – the defeat of Hitler – a good basis exists for joint AFL-CIO activity ...
“The position of the CIO members on the international situation is well known. They are speaking out more and more, in spite of the general silence of the CIO nationally.”
This is Hillman’s full-blown line on AFL-CIO “unity,” which he projected at the last CIO national convention.
Like Hillman, the Stalinists are now prepared to thrust the industrial union movement of this country back into the hands of the Greens, Wolls, Freys and Tobins, under any terms and conditions. By their wholehearted support of the war, these labor skates have become “progressives” to the Stalinists. The strikebreaking, no-strike, government-collaboration, anti-industrial union policies of the AFL leaders no longer matter to the Stalinists.
It was this brand of AFL-CIO “unity” which Lewis successfully defeated at the last CIO convention. When the CIO is strong enough to crush every attempt of the AFL craft-union leadership to strangle the industrial unions in their “unity” embrace, only then can the CIO unite once more with the AFL, Lewis pointed out.
Lewis today stands in firm opposition to the Stalinist-Hillmanite plan to corral the industrial union movement into the camp of the reactionary AFL under any terms, provided “unity” of organized labor behind the war program is achieved.
Open Attacks on Lewis Increasing
That is why the Stalinist campaign to undermine Lewis is becoming more open and bold.
Already, unions under Stalinist control are passing resolutions “censuring” Lewis and attacking him for his “appeasement” stand. The Daily Worker, September 1, reports on its front page such an action by the Chicago Fur Workers Union. This is but the first trickle of a flood of similar resolutions which are bound to follow every union local that the Stalinists control.
The tone of the Stalinist attacks on Lewis and the progressive elements of the CIO Will undoubtedly take on heightened virulence in the coming weeks. Lewis will be condemned as a “Fifth Columnist,” etc. ...
This was indicated in Roy Hudson’s article, Some Lessons of the Auto Convention, in the Sunday Worker, August 31, which speaks of the “desertion of John L. Lewis from the cause of anti-fascism, to the camp of ... the Lindberghs, Wheelers, Coughlins, Hearsts ...”
The Stalinists show by their new alignment with Hillman and their attempts to push Hillman’s program of “unity” with the AFL, that their intentions are to sacrifice every condition and right of labor for the sole end of getting labor to support an immediate AEF. They are ready to go to any length in support of the imperialist government of Wall Street and Roosevelt.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Stands Pat on War Policy</h1>
<h4>Old-Line Reactionaries Rule Democratic Party, Congress</h4>
<h3>(22 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_36" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 47</a>, 22 November 1948, p. 1.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>The Truman Administration and ruling Democratic Party are now getting down to “business as usual” at the same old stand. Talk of “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries” is already stored away with the forgotten ballyhoo of bygone election campaigns.</strong></p>
<p>Nothing is basically altered. The Democratic Party, of which Truman is now the acknowledged head, is still run by the same big city bosses and Southern white supremacists. On foreign policy, Truman has hastened to make clear he has not moderated his drive toward militarism and war. And on domestic policy, his demagogic election promises are already being diluted, particularly his key pledge about unconditional repeal or the Taft-Hartley act.</p>
<p>One of Truman’s first moves has been to seek reconciliation with the reactionary Southern Democrats, who retain the balance of power in Congress. While Truman may attempt to purge the Democratic Party of a handful disloyal to him personally, such as the irreconcilable Dixiecrats, he is extending “peace feelers” to the bulk of the Southern dissidents.</p>
<p>That is the meaning of his declaration that he is “not mad” at anybody and of Senator McGrath's assurance that his chief is inclined to “forgiving” Democratic regulars guilty of only minor offenses.<br>
</p>
<h4>Old-Line Control</h4>
<p class="fst">Although the labor vote was decisive in the Democratic victory, the union leaders remain frozen out of the inner councils of the party, which is controlled from top to bottom by the old-line politicians, reactionary to the core, it is the latter who call the tune in congress, composed in its majority of boss-ruled machine Democrats from the North, Southern Bourbons and Taft-Hartley Republicans. All important House and senate committees, which exercise a powerful influence on legislation and can sabotage any progressive bill, will be headed by reactionary old time-servers, including a sizeable number of official and unofficial Dixiecrats.</p>
<p><em>Truman is in position to resume his “hard cop-soft cop” tactics – of threatening labor with something worse” from Congress if it does not take less than he promised in his election campaign or than labor demands.</em></p>
<p>The reactionary character of Truman’s main line is most immediately and sharply expressed in foreign policy.</p>
<p>Some people were taken in by Truman’s election campaign gesture toward, “man-to-man” dealings with Stalin. They took this as a strong hint, at least, of a slowing down of Truman’s war drive. On Nov. 17, Truman squelched that illusion.<br>
</p>
<h4>Truman Doctrine</h4>
<p class="fst">In his first formal press conference on his future policies, he spoke once more in the familiar bellicose tones of the Truman-Marshall Doctrine. He announced emphatically that he stood pat on the provocative and truculent policy being pursued toward Russia. He praised Marshall to the skies, “emphasizing that he and Secretary Marshall were and had always been in complete agreement.” (<strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, Nov. 17) In short, so far as Truman is concerned, the question of war or peace remains in the hands of the tiny clique of Wall Street bankers and Big Brass who have been deciding and conducting U.S. foreign policy.</p>
<p>Truman’s basic program – the Wall Street bi-partisan war program – stands as an absolute guarantee against any fundamental social reforms, all his demagogic election promises notwithstanding. Truman cannot reduce prices and taxes while fueling inflation with his vast arms budget. He cannot and will not provide more than miserable sops by way of social benefits.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Some Rewriting”</h4>
<p class="fst">This is the real reason – more than any explicit statement he and his spokesmen have made – why Truman intends to hedge as far as possible on his promise of unqualified repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. When asked by reporters whether he now stood for outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act or even blanket restoration of the Wagner Act, Truman said that he stood for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law, but that in the legislative process some rewriting or the Wagner Act might be necessary.</p>
<p><em>Administration spokesmen have already indicated that included in this “rewriting” may be many of previous Truman proposals for government injunctions against strikes directing “public welfare”; “fact-finding” commissions with binding authority; “cooling off” periods before strikes; continuation of the “non-communist” oaths; outlawing of certain types of strikes involving secondary boycotts, etc.</em></p>
<p>If the shadow of all these developments hang darkly over the “victory” celebrations of the pro-Truman union leaders, they give no hint of any awareness.</p>
<p>At the AFL convention this past week, the top moguls talked about a “modified” Wagner Act in place of the Taft-Hartley Act – modified, that is, in the direction of more restraints on the unions, particularly in halting large-scale strikes. They even propose to go beyond the Taft-Hartley Act itself with an even more vicious requirement for yellow-dog “non-communist” oaths, imposed not only on officers but every paid employee of a union.</p>
<p>Charles J. MacGowan, head of the AFL Boilermakers and member of the AFL Executive Council, went so far as to advocate the outlawing of industry-wide strikes and the. imposition on all labor of a law like the Railway Labor Act, under which the railroad workers have been driven down from first to twenty-third position in comparative wages with other industries.</p>
<p><em>It is a true measure of the cowardice and downright reactionary character of many of the union leaders that they are ready to hand away labor’s rights not under the hammer-blows of a powerful reaction, but right after a tremendous demonstration of popular resistance to this reaction. They are offering “concessions” at the very moment labor is in position to make the greatest demands.</em></p>
<p><em>One thing that is going to become clear very shortly to the workers is that if they “wait for Harry,” they are going to have a long disappointing wait. Truman and the reactionary Democrats, now that they are safely back in control, are going to hedge all along the line on their promises, trying to settle for “substitutes” and minor sops.</em></p>
<p>Labor is going to have to fight for every real concession. If the Taft-Hartley Act is to be repealed without any “substitutes,” if an effective civil rights program is to be achieved, if adequate housing is to be secured, labor will have to be mobilized in a program of united action.</p>
<p><em>Right now the call should go forth for a National Congress of Labor to convene in Washington, D.C. This Congress of Labor, with representation from the rank and file of all unions, should confront Truman and the 81st congress on the day the new session opens. No dependence on the capitalist government of Truman and the Democrats! Labor’s own independent, united, militant action is the one and only assurance of victory against Big Business reaction.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Truman Stands Pat on War Policy
Old-Line Reactionaries Rule Democratic Party, Congress
(22 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 47, 22 November 1948, p. 1.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The Truman Administration and ruling Democratic Party are now getting down to “business as usual” at the same old stand. Talk of “gluttons of privilege” and “Wall Street reactionaries” is already stored away with the forgotten ballyhoo of bygone election campaigns.
Nothing is basically altered. The Democratic Party, of which Truman is now the acknowledged head, is still run by the same big city bosses and Southern white supremacists. On foreign policy, Truman has hastened to make clear he has not moderated his drive toward militarism and war. And on domestic policy, his demagogic election promises are already being diluted, particularly his key pledge about unconditional repeal or the Taft-Hartley act.
One of Truman’s first moves has been to seek reconciliation with the reactionary Southern Democrats, who retain the balance of power in Congress. While Truman may attempt to purge the Democratic Party of a handful disloyal to him personally, such as the irreconcilable Dixiecrats, he is extending “peace feelers” to the bulk of the Southern dissidents.
That is the meaning of his declaration that he is “not mad” at anybody and of Senator McGrath's assurance that his chief is inclined to “forgiving” Democratic regulars guilty of only minor offenses.
Old-Line Control
Although the labor vote was decisive in the Democratic victory, the union leaders remain frozen out of the inner councils of the party, which is controlled from top to bottom by the old-line politicians, reactionary to the core, it is the latter who call the tune in congress, composed in its majority of boss-ruled machine Democrats from the North, Southern Bourbons and Taft-Hartley Republicans. All important House and senate committees, which exercise a powerful influence on legislation and can sabotage any progressive bill, will be headed by reactionary old time-servers, including a sizeable number of official and unofficial Dixiecrats.
Truman is in position to resume his “hard cop-soft cop” tactics – of threatening labor with something worse” from Congress if it does not take less than he promised in his election campaign or than labor demands.
The reactionary character of Truman’s main line is most immediately and sharply expressed in foreign policy.
Some people were taken in by Truman’s election campaign gesture toward, “man-to-man” dealings with Stalin. They took this as a strong hint, at least, of a slowing down of Truman’s war drive. On Nov. 17, Truman squelched that illusion.
Truman Doctrine
In his first formal press conference on his future policies, he spoke once more in the familiar bellicose tones of the Truman-Marshall Doctrine. He announced emphatically that he stood pat on the provocative and truculent policy being pursued toward Russia. He praised Marshall to the skies, “emphasizing that he and Secretary Marshall were and had always been in complete agreement.” (N.Y. Times, Nov. 17) In short, so far as Truman is concerned, the question of war or peace remains in the hands of the tiny clique of Wall Street bankers and Big Brass who have been deciding and conducting U.S. foreign policy.
Truman’s basic program – the Wall Street bi-partisan war program – stands as an absolute guarantee against any fundamental social reforms, all his demagogic election promises notwithstanding. Truman cannot reduce prices and taxes while fueling inflation with his vast arms budget. He cannot and will not provide more than miserable sops by way of social benefits.
“Some Rewriting”
This is the real reason – more than any explicit statement he and his spokesmen have made – why Truman intends to hedge as far as possible on his promise of unqualified repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act. When asked by reporters whether he now stood for outright repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act or even blanket restoration of the Wagner Act, Truman said that he stood for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Law, but that in the legislative process some rewriting or the Wagner Act might be necessary.
Administration spokesmen have already indicated that included in this “rewriting” may be many of previous Truman proposals for government injunctions against strikes directing “public welfare”; “fact-finding” commissions with binding authority; “cooling off” periods before strikes; continuation of the “non-communist” oaths; outlawing of certain types of strikes involving secondary boycotts, etc.
If the shadow of all these developments hang darkly over the “victory” celebrations of the pro-Truman union leaders, they give no hint of any awareness.
At the AFL convention this past week, the top moguls talked about a “modified” Wagner Act in place of the Taft-Hartley Act – modified, that is, in the direction of more restraints on the unions, particularly in halting large-scale strikes. They even propose to go beyond the Taft-Hartley Act itself with an even more vicious requirement for yellow-dog “non-communist” oaths, imposed not only on officers but every paid employee of a union.
Charles J. MacGowan, head of the AFL Boilermakers and member of the AFL Executive Council, went so far as to advocate the outlawing of industry-wide strikes and the. imposition on all labor of a law like the Railway Labor Act, under which the railroad workers have been driven down from first to twenty-third position in comparative wages with other industries.
It is a true measure of the cowardice and downright reactionary character of many of the union leaders that they are ready to hand away labor’s rights not under the hammer-blows of a powerful reaction, but right after a tremendous demonstration of popular resistance to this reaction. They are offering “concessions” at the very moment labor is in position to make the greatest demands.
One thing that is going to become clear very shortly to the workers is that if they “wait for Harry,” they are going to have a long disappointing wait. Truman and the reactionary Democrats, now that they are safely back in control, are going to hedge all along the line on their promises, trying to settle for “substitutes” and minor sops.
Labor is going to have to fight for every real concession. If the Taft-Hartley Act is to be repealed without any “substitutes,” if an effective civil rights program is to be achieved, if adequate housing is to be secured, labor will have to be mobilized in a program of united action.
Right now the call should go forth for a National Congress of Labor to convene in Washington, D.C. This Congress of Labor, with representation from the rank and file of all unions, should confront Truman and the 81st congress on the day the new session opens. No dependence on the capitalist government of Truman and the Democrats! Labor’s own independent, united, militant action is the one and only assurance of victory against Big Business reaction.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Steel Convention Upholds Union Democracy</h1>
<h3>(18 May 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_21" target="new">Vol. X No. 21</a>, 25 May 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., May 18 – Striking a powerful blow for trade union democracy, the rank and file delegates at the Third International Convention of the CIO Steelworkers of America climaxed their five-day sessions here this week by successfully defying USA-CIO President Philip Murray for the first time in the union’s 10-year history.</p>
<p>This unprecedented defiance of Murray, who hitherto had been able to whip the steel workers into line for anything he proposed, came late in yesterday afternoon’s session, when the convention rose in tumultuous revolt against Murray’s proposal to drastically reduce rank and file representation at future conventions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Dramatic Protest</h4>
<p class="fst">This dramatic and uproarious protest against Murray’s attempt to cut the number of convention delegates reflected a far more profound issue than the immediate question in dispute. By their action in voting down this proposal, the steelworkers for the first time crashed their mighty fist through the bureaucratic crust of the Murray machine. They demonstrated the growing resistance of the steel militants to the iron rule which Murray has always exercised over the union in order to stifle any opposition to his conservative and timid policies.</p>
<p>At this convention, Murray was not confronted by the largely inexperienced workers he had been able to dominate and intimidate at prior conventions. The 2,626 delegates, although they included hundreds of staff members on Murray’s pay-roll, were nevertheless overwhelmingly composed of rank and filers who recently had gone through the test of a great national strike. They were more experienced and self-confident. They were imbued with the consciousness that they had fought and sacrificed for the union and that control over its policies was rightfully theirs.<br>
</p>
<h4>Murray Fearful</h4>
<p class="fst">Thus, the climactic outbreak on the fourth day of the convention was no accidental event. It had been brewing throughout the three and a half days preceding the major conflict. The question of convention representation merely crystallized the resentment against the top leadership’s bureaucratic methods.</p>
<p>Murray had himself indicated his fear of such a development when he unexpectedly eliminated at the start of the convention certain issues which he obviously feared might precipitate heated discussion and possibly strong opposition.</p>
<p>As the convention progressed, there was expressed bolder and sharper criticism of the conduct of Murray’s district directors and international staff members. A strong sentiment was openly voiced against the undemocratic manner in which Murray had jammed through contracts without ratification by the membership. Further protest was provoked by Murray’s obvious attempt to limit discussion and railroad through his proposals without proper consideration by the delegates.</p>
<p>Prior to the convention, the Murray machine had been preparing for a red-baiting witchhunt against “communists” and “reds” at the convention. On Murray’s instructions, his lieutenants had been touring the steel locals in a big campaign to line up resolutions for repressive actions against anyone in opposition to Murray. Nearly 300 resolutions were jammed through local unions calling for constitutional amendments providing for various forms of special restrictions on “communists and socialists.” Most of these resolutions called for prohibiting the right to hold any office by “communists and socialists” and some sought to bar radicals from union membership.</p>
<p>On the very eve of the convention, Murray had hastily called together his executive board, which at his order had been working diligently to build up a red-baiting drive, and instructed them to call the whole thing off. The highly-publicized campaign of red-baiting was for the time being shuffled off the stage on the first day of the convention, when Murray introduced a “Statement of Policy” on the question.</p>
<p>This “Statement of Policy,” which was adopted without discussion by the convention, proposed no constitutional restrictions on radicals. It merely asserted that “this union will not tolerate efforts by outsiders – individuals, organizations, or groups – whether they be Communist, Socialist, or any other group, to infiltrate, dictate or meddle in our affairs.”</p>
<p>At the same time, the statement insisted that “however, we will not permit any limitation on the free and democratic right of full discussion of trade union problems in our own ranks. We must not and do not seek interference with the free and democratic right of each member to ... harbor such views as he chooses, in his private life as a citizen. Our union has not been and will not be an instrument of repression ... As a democratic institution, we engage in no purges, no witch-hunts. We do not dictate a man’s thoughts or beliefs.”</p>
<p>Murray’s statement was not motivated by any genuine devotion to union democracy. He has carried through numerous bureaucratic expulsions of those who opposed him. His chief lieutenants Van Bittner and McDonald had personally helped put over a constitutional provision barring “communists” at the recent founding convention of the CIO Utilities Workers Union.</p>
<p>It was obvious that this statement was introduced to allay the fears of the steel workers that a purge of militants was being contemplated at this time. Although the original campaign of red-baiting resolutions had been designed as a weapon primarily against the Stalinists, there was all indications that the repression would be directed against the genuine militants as well. Murray’s retreat was dictated in large part by his desire to maintain the appearance of “peace and harmony” at the convention.<br>
</p>
<h4>Seeks to Appease</h4>
<p class="fst">This was revealed in connection with other issues. There had been protest, for instance, against the failure of the union’s policy to provide for district conferences of the steel locals for mutual discussion of policies and the refusal in some instances of district directors to permit such conferences. Murray sought to appease the locals on this question with a special resolution introduced by his resolution committee providing for regular annual district conferences.</p>
<p>Also, there had been a move on foot before the convention to extend the terms of officers and district directors from two to four years. The opposition to this proposal to entrench the bureaucracy more firmly was obviously so great among the ranks that Murray wisely chose not to press it at the convention. To the surprise of everyone, when the Committee on Constitution came to the section of its report dealing with terms of office, it recommended no change in the present two- year terms.</p>
<p>But these concessions to alleviate the discontent with the top leadership’s methods did not alter in any real essentials the undemocratic policies pursued by the Murray machine.</p>
<p>These were revealed in his conduct of the convention itself. Murray kept pressing the convention for “speed” and urging that discussion be cut short. His pay-roll stooges on the convention floor, tried to block discussion by howling “Question!” almost as soon as any resolution or motion was presented. This brought sharp protest at several points from rank and file delegates.</p>
<p>At the same time, Murray consumed an enormous portion of the convention’s available time with long-winded speeches on every possible occasion by himself, his chosen lieutenants and guest speakers. Not a single issue hit the floor without Murray quickly intervening with lengthy orations from the chair to “clarify” the question. In this manner, Murray personally consumed not less than 50 per cent of the convention’s time – while he repeatedly urged the delegates to “expedite the proceedings.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Underlying Discontent</h4>
<p class="fst">The first open expression of the underlying discontent existing among the steel workers and the fact they are no longer meek “hand-raisers” for everything Murray says, came on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of the convention. A heated debate developed over the issue of arbitration of grievances.</p>
<p>Resolutions had been introduced by several locals, asking that the International Union share the heavy expenses connected with the arbitration procedure under the contract. These expenses are borne entirely by the local treasuries. Piled-up grievances, most of them accumulated during the war under the no-strike policy, confronted many locals with the danger of bankruptcy.</p>
<p>When a voice vote was taken after Murray had spoken lengthily on the question, there was a very close division. Murray was forced to call for a show of hands, and the resolutions committee’s report to reject the local resolutions on the question was finally carried, but with hundreds of hands raised in opposition. Up to that moment, it was the largest opposition ever displayed toward anything Murray had ever supported.</p>
<p>The next serious expression of opposition occurred at the beginning of the Friday morning session, when the resolutions committee introduced a resolution referring to the International Executive Board proposals by local unions for securing more rank and file representation on the Wage and Policy Committee and for ratification of contracts by the membership. A large section of the union, particularly from the smaller fabricating plants, was very dissatisfied with the provisions of the contracts foisted on them after their prolonged strike, which lasted many weeks after the settlement in basic steel.</p>
<p>Delegate Harvey, Local Union 1206, got a big hand when he opened the discussion by opposing the committee’s resolution and called for wider representation of the local unions on the Wage and Policy Committee, advocating that this committee be composed of local union presidents. Murray immediately delivered a long speech “to correct the delegate.”<br>
</p>
<h4>“Correct Murray”</h4>
<p class="fst">Several other delegates then took the floor “to correct Brother Murray.” Delegate Kelly, Local Union 1833, introduced a new note which got a big hand from the convention when he demanded that the rank and file have a voice in approving all contracts. “You take the United Auto Workers, for instance,” he stated. “They have the rank and file OK the contract. We should have that too. I appeal to the delegates that what the auto workers have, we should have.”</p>
<p>This sentiment was a serious challenge to Murray’s undemocratic policy on contracts. Assistant to the President Clinton Golden, then Murray, gave long speeches designed to beat down the opposition. In the course of Murray’s talk, he took occasion to indirectly denigrate the leading role of the General Motors workers in spearheading the wage fight and claimed for his own policies the chief responsibility for “setting the wage pattern” won by the CIO in its strikes. What Murray did was to give away 40 per cent of the union’s original wage demands even before the steel strike, while the GM workers were battling for a 30 per cent increase. He finally settled for an 18½ cent an hour increase while the GM workers were still battling to secure a government recommendation of 19 cents.</p>
<p>Murray sought to halt further debate by reminding the delegates that “you have occupied exactly one hour in the discussion on this resolution” – although he himself had used most of the time. So strong was the voice vote opposition to the resolution committee’s recommendation against changes in the Wage and Policy Committee setup that a hand vote was called for. The vote was about three to two in favor of the recommendation. The opposition was even larger than on the previously disputed arbitration issue.</p>
<p>The report of the Constitution Committee was not presented until late Friday, with the convention scheduled for but one more day. This served as a pretext for a “speed-up” drive by Murray, in the chair, and Committee Secretary Doherty. The delegates had received no copies of proposed amendments in advance, despite Murray’s assurances to the contrary on the previous day.<br>
</p>
<h4>Heated Outburst</h4>
<p class="fst">So rapidly were proposed amendments read, that it was impossible for delegates to grasp what was proposed. Time and again, delegates shouted out, “Slow down, slow down.” At one point, a delegate in uniform secured the floor and heatedly denounced the fact that hundreds of paid staff members were sitting on the convention floor who were trying to prevent rank and file delegates from speaking by continuously shouting “Question!”</p>
<p>It was immediately following this outburst that the convention representation question was introduced. The Constitution Committee first reported its non-concurrence in a number of resolutions to reduce the votes of officers and staff members at conventions. It proposed instead that the existing basis of representation, one vote for every 100 members, be changed to one vote for every 500 members.</p>
<p>As soon as this proposal to drastically reduce the number of rank and file delegates was read, there were groans and shouts of “No!” from all over the hall. Scores of delegates were on their feet, frantically waving their hands for recognition and crowding around the “mike” in the middle of the center aisle. Such a scene was without precedent in the history of CIO Steelworker conventions.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fiery Denunciation</h4>
<p class="fst">The first delegate to get the floor was Higgins of Local 3159. Indignantly he asserted, “It seems to me that the committee must have been out last night, when it brought up this propostion.” A big shout of “Yeah!” came from the delegates.</p>
<p>The next speaker, a Negro delegate from Youngstown, Dillard of Local Union 1462, brought the convention to its feet with a fiery denunciation of this obvious move to curb the voice of the rank and file by curtailing the number of rank and file delegates. “Talk about democracy!” he said sarcastically, “I’m speaking against this resolution and call on the convention to vote it down.” His concluding words were met with a tremendous ovation and thunderous cheers.</p>
<p>Murray, red faced and visibly shaken by this revolt, hastened to try to put it down. He first tried to assure the delegates that “it makes no difference to me how you vote on this question.” But he then proceeded to talk at length on why smaller conventions would be a good thing, that big conventions cost a lot of money, that they wouldn’t be able to find big enough convention halls, that anyway conventions should be “compact bodies.” He received only a flurry of applause.</p>
<p>Immediately the floor was flooded with arm-waving delegates. Delegates Hahn, Local Union 227, and Czelen, Local Union 1229, secured the “mike.” Just after Murray had spoken, there had been a lull. Every delegate was wondering if the others had again wilted under Murray’s oratory and prestige. But the succeeding remarks of delegates brought such cheers that the ranks became fully confident. Hahn charged the proposal was designed “to concentrate the control of the conventions by a small minority.” Czelen declared that the proposal would mean “we would have the same amount of staff members as delegates, but the rank and file will not be here.”</p>
<p>After this speech, there was such a clamor for the question – this time by the rank and file majority – that Murray put the vote. A feeble “aye” sounded for the proposed change. Then the loudest “No!” ever heard in the convention hall – where the CIO auto workers had met recently too – shook the rafters. The steel workers had come of age. They had decisively asserted themselves for the first time against Murray and his machine.</p>
<p>The struggle over organizational policies and democratic practices was the dominant theme of the convention. It was primarily in this form that the dissatisfaction with Murray’s general policies was expressed. On the broader questions of economic and political program, the convention went along generally with the major resolutions put forward by Murray.</p>
<p>At the same time, there were talks by various individual delegates on a number of resolutions that clearly demonstrated the spread of progressive and militant ideas among the steel workers. Many of the policy resolutions put forward by Murray revealed the pressure of these advanced ideas.<br>
</p>
<h4>“Political Action”</h4>
<p class="fst">Obviously couched in terms intended to appease the growing sentiment for genuine independent labor political action, the important resolution on “Political Action” called for support of the CIO Political Action Committee by stressing its “independent political activity” and its character as “an independent force, without commitment to any major party.”</p>
<p>The resolution wound up, however by repeating the bankrupt formula about giving “our support to the progressives of either major political party.” In short. Murray proposed to repeat the previous fiascos of backing capitalist “friends of labor,” rather than fighting to build an independent labor party which could provide an effective political instrument that could really combat Big Business reaction.</p>
<p>An important resolution was passed unanimously expressing opposition to peace-time military conscription. This brought forth several excellent statements from the floor. Tom Hood of Local 1330, a Youngstown delegate, who had spent 12 years in the Marines and been an aerial gunner in World War II, received big applause when he condemned peacetime conscription and asserted that building a big army was “like giving a man a machine, he will want to try it out and see how fast it will go, no matter who he knocks down. There are always generals who want to try out their machine.”</p>
<p>He stated that conscription was intended to give the children of steel workers “training in a system that only breeds wars.” He told how while he was in the air corps “we were forced to take part in the suppression of the people of Italy who were fighting for a little more bread.”</p>
<p>Another delegate, Hirsh of Local Union 1206, still a member of the armed forces and in uniform, declared his opposition to peacetime conscription and charged that the army was based on a bureaucratic caste system that degraded the enlisted men and gave the officers outrageous privileges.<br>
</p>
<h4>Foreign Policy</h4>
<p class="fst">One of the most spontaneous ovations was accorded Delegate Trbovich, of Local 1010 in East Chicago, Indiana, when he spoke on one section of the foreign policy resolution. Emphasizing that he was speaking only on the last section of the resolution calling for “encouragement and assistance to the people of the liberated countries and colonial peoples to exercise the right for self determination and to build their own democracy,” Trbovich stated:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“It is the duty of the trade unions to see that our own country is brought into line on this question. In Indonesia, for instance, British troops with American weapons are shooting down the people fighting for their own government.”</p>
<p class="fst">A sharp volley of applause greeted his statement:</p>
<p class="quoteb">“We did not work to produce weapons of war to be used for shooting down other peoples fighting for their rights. If we are really sincere about fighting for oppressed people, we must see that our boys are not used for imperialistic purposes to put down people fighting for liberty in the colonies.”</p>
<p class="fst">On the key issue of the mounting inflation which is robbing the steel and other workers of their recent wage gains, Murray offered no program other than begging the government to “save OPA” and dependence on the capitalist political agencies to “control prices.” There was no proposal to combat inflation by fighting for higher wages.</p>
<p>On the contrary, the day before the convention opened, Murray issued a public statement that the union would “observe its wage commitments” in the present contracts even if the OPA was smashed and regardless of inflation.</p>
<p>But, there can be no doubt that the steel workers along with the more advanced industrial workers generally, will come to realize that the most effective method to fight the consequences of price rises is by demanding in their contracts a sliding scale of wages, under a fixed minimum, that provides for the automatic increase of wages to keep pace with every rise in the cost of living.</p>
<p>In this spirit, a Youngstown delegate, Ted Dostal of Local 1330, voiced the sentiment of many militants during his well-received talk on the resolution calling for unemployment compensation to strikers. After pointing out that the unemployment insurance funds come out of the “unpaid wages of the workers,” he asserted that the “OPA is full of loopholes and prices are bound to rise. We will have to fight for higher wages. We must prepare for real struggles in the coming days ahead. That is why we must see to it that the laws are amended to provide for compensation when workers are again forced out on strike.”</p>
<p>Among the most gratifying features of the convention, was the large number of Negro delegates. They were among the most articulate and militant participants in all debates. They played a truly significant role in the deliberations and repeatedly evoked enthusiastic response from the overwhelmingly white audience. However, the Negro steel workers, a large section of the union, still have no representation on the union’s leading bodies.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinist Role</h4>
<p class="fst">The Stalinists played a miserable role at the convention. On every possible occasion they cottoned up to Murray – who shortly before the convention had been prepared to open a red-baiting drive against them.</p>
<p>This morning, shortly before the closing of the convention, the Stalinists precipitated a scandalous brawl on the convention floor that nearly broke up the convention in a riot. In an effort to capture undisputed control of a section of the union, they brought forth a proposal to divide the largest district of the union, the Chicago-Calumet District 31, into two districts, one of which they hoped to seize.</p>
<p>In the midst of the controversy that followed, the Stalinists and Districts 31 representatives got into a physical scrap that threw the convention into an uproar for 15 minutes, and was only quelled with difficulty.</p>
<p>This convention will be recorded as an historic one. It has marked a great advance for the steel workers. While they have a long way to go yet in fully asserting democratic control over their union and in elaborating a militant, progressive program, the steel workers showed in this convention that they are on the road to big contributions to the future progress of American labor.</p>
<p>Having once demonstrated their determination to fight for democratic unionism, they will continue to hammer away for membership control over the steel union’s policies. Their first victory over the Murray machine will encourage them to continue the struggle against the bureaucrats. With the increased militancy and self-confidence born of their recent great strike struggles and confronted with the continued attacks from the bosses and government, they will press forward for a fighting policy.</p>
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Steel Convention Upholds Union Democracy
(18 May 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 21, 25 May 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., May 18 – Striking a powerful blow for trade union democracy, the rank and file delegates at the Third International Convention of the CIO Steelworkers of America climaxed their five-day sessions here this week by successfully defying USA-CIO President Philip Murray for the first time in the union’s 10-year history.
This unprecedented defiance of Murray, who hitherto had been able to whip the steel workers into line for anything he proposed, came late in yesterday afternoon’s session, when the convention rose in tumultuous revolt against Murray’s proposal to drastically reduce rank and file representation at future conventions.
Dramatic Protest
This dramatic and uproarious protest against Murray’s attempt to cut the number of convention delegates reflected a far more profound issue than the immediate question in dispute. By their action in voting down this proposal, the steelworkers for the first time crashed their mighty fist through the bureaucratic crust of the Murray machine. They demonstrated the growing resistance of the steel militants to the iron rule which Murray has always exercised over the union in order to stifle any opposition to his conservative and timid policies.
At this convention, Murray was not confronted by the largely inexperienced workers he had been able to dominate and intimidate at prior conventions. The 2,626 delegates, although they included hundreds of staff members on Murray’s pay-roll, were nevertheless overwhelmingly composed of rank and filers who recently had gone through the test of a great national strike. They were more experienced and self-confident. They were imbued with the consciousness that they had fought and sacrificed for the union and that control over its policies was rightfully theirs.
Murray Fearful
Thus, the climactic outbreak on the fourth day of the convention was no accidental event. It had been brewing throughout the three and a half days preceding the major conflict. The question of convention representation merely crystallized the resentment against the top leadership’s bureaucratic methods.
Murray had himself indicated his fear of such a development when he unexpectedly eliminated at the start of the convention certain issues which he obviously feared might precipitate heated discussion and possibly strong opposition.
As the convention progressed, there was expressed bolder and sharper criticism of the conduct of Murray’s district directors and international staff members. A strong sentiment was openly voiced against the undemocratic manner in which Murray had jammed through contracts without ratification by the membership. Further protest was provoked by Murray’s obvious attempt to limit discussion and railroad through his proposals without proper consideration by the delegates.
Prior to the convention, the Murray machine had been preparing for a red-baiting witchhunt against “communists” and “reds” at the convention. On Murray’s instructions, his lieutenants had been touring the steel locals in a big campaign to line up resolutions for repressive actions against anyone in opposition to Murray. Nearly 300 resolutions were jammed through local unions calling for constitutional amendments providing for various forms of special restrictions on “communists and socialists.” Most of these resolutions called for prohibiting the right to hold any office by “communists and socialists” and some sought to bar radicals from union membership.
On the very eve of the convention, Murray had hastily called together his executive board, which at his order had been working diligently to build up a red-baiting drive, and instructed them to call the whole thing off. The highly-publicized campaign of red-baiting was for the time being shuffled off the stage on the first day of the convention, when Murray introduced a “Statement of Policy” on the question.
This “Statement of Policy,” which was adopted without discussion by the convention, proposed no constitutional restrictions on radicals. It merely asserted that “this union will not tolerate efforts by outsiders – individuals, organizations, or groups – whether they be Communist, Socialist, or any other group, to infiltrate, dictate or meddle in our affairs.”
At the same time, the statement insisted that “however, we will not permit any limitation on the free and democratic right of full discussion of trade union problems in our own ranks. We must not and do not seek interference with the free and democratic right of each member to ... harbor such views as he chooses, in his private life as a citizen. Our union has not been and will not be an instrument of repression ... As a democratic institution, we engage in no purges, no witch-hunts. We do not dictate a man’s thoughts or beliefs.”
Murray’s statement was not motivated by any genuine devotion to union democracy. He has carried through numerous bureaucratic expulsions of those who opposed him. His chief lieutenants Van Bittner and McDonald had personally helped put over a constitutional provision barring “communists” at the recent founding convention of the CIO Utilities Workers Union.
It was obvious that this statement was introduced to allay the fears of the steel workers that a purge of militants was being contemplated at this time. Although the original campaign of red-baiting resolutions had been designed as a weapon primarily against the Stalinists, there was all indications that the repression would be directed against the genuine militants as well. Murray’s retreat was dictated in large part by his desire to maintain the appearance of “peace and harmony” at the convention.
Seeks to Appease
This was revealed in connection with other issues. There had been protest, for instance, against the failure of the union’s policy to provide for district conferences of the steel locals for mutual discussion of policies and the refusal in some instances of district directors to permit such conferences. Murray sought to appease the locals on this question with a special resolution introduced by his resolution committee providing for regular annual district conferences.
Also, there had been a move on foot before the convention to extend the terms of officers and district directors from two to four years. The opposition to this proposal to entrench the bureaucracy more firmly was obviously so great among the ranks that Murray wisely chose not to press it at the convention. To the surprise of everyone, when the Committee on Constitution came to the section of its report dealing with terms of office, it recommended no change in the present two- year terms.
But these concessions to alleviate the discontent with the top leadership’s methods did not alter in any real essentials the undemocratic policies pursued by the Murray machine.
These were revealed in his conduct of the convention itself. Murray kept pressing the convention for “speed” and urging that discussion be cut short. His pay-roll stooges on the convention floor, tried to block discussion by howling “Question!” almost as soon as any resolution or motion was presented. This brought sharp protest at several points from rank and file delegates.
At the same time, Murray consumed an enormous portion of the convention’s available time with long-winded speeches on every possible occasion by himself, his chosen lieutenants and guest speakers. Not a single issue hit the floor without Murray quickly intervening with lengthy orations from the chair to “clarify” the question. In this manner, Murray personally consumed not less than 50 per cent of the convention’s time – while he repeatedly urged the delegates to “expedite the proceedings.”
Underlying Discontent
The first open expression of the underlying discontent existing among the steel workers and the fact they are no longer meek “hand-raisers” for everything Murray says, came on Wednesday afternoon, the second day of the convention. A heated debate developed over the issue of arbitration of grievances.
Resolutions had been introduced by several locals, asking that the International Union share the heavy expenses connected with the arbitration procedure under the contract. These expenses are borne entirely by the local treasuries. Piled-up grievances, most of them accumulated during the war under the no-strike policy, confronted many locals with the danger of bankruptcy.
When a voice vote was taken after Murray had spoken lengthily on the question, there was a very close division. Murray was forced to call for a show of hands, and the resolutions committee’s report to reject the local resolutions on the question was finally carried, but with hundreds of hands raised in opposition. Up to that moment, it was the largest opposition ever displayed toward anything Murray had ever supported.
The next serious expression of opposition occurred at the beginning of the Friday morning session, when the resolutions committee introduced a resolution referring to the International Executive Board proposals by local unions for securing more rank and file representation on the Wage and Policy Committee and for ratification of contracts by the membership. A large section of the union, particularly from the smaller fabricating plants, was very dissatisfied with the provisions of the contracts foisted on them after their prolonged strike, which lasted many weeks after the settlement in basic steel.
Delegate Harvey, Local Union 1206, got a big hand when he opened the discussion by opposing the committee’s resolution and called for wider representation of the local unions on the Wage and Policy Committee, advocating that this committee be composed of local union presidents. Murray immediately delivered a long speech “to correct the delegate.”
“Correct Murray”
Several other delegates then took the floor “to correct Brother Murray.” Delegate Kelly, Local Union 1833, introduced a new note which got a big hand from the convention when he demanded that the rank and file have a voice in approving all contracts. “You take the United Auto Workers, for instance,” he stated. “They have the rank and file OK the contract. We should have that too. I appeal to the delegates that what the auto workers have, we should have.”
This sentiment was a serious challenge to Murray’s undemocratic policy on contracts. Assistant to the President Clinton Golden, then Murray, gave long speeches designed to beat down the opposition. In the course of Murray’s talk, he took occasion to indirectly denigrate the leading role of the General Motors workers in spearheading the wage fight and claimed for his own policies the chief responsibility for “setting the wage pattern” won by the CIO in its strikes. What Murray did was to give away 40 per cent of the union’s original wage demands even before the steel strike, while the GM workers were battling for a 30 per cent increase. He finally settled for an 18½ cent an hour increase while the GM workers were still battling to secure a government recommendation of 19 cents.
Murray sought to halt further debate by reminding the delegates that “you have occupied exactly one hour in the discussion on this resolution” – although he himself had used most of the time. So strong was the voice vote opposition to the resolution committee’s recommendation against changes in the Wage and Policy Committee setup that a hand vote was called for. The vote was about three to two in favor of the recommendation. The opposition was even larger than on the previously disputed arbitration issue.
The report of the Constitution Committee was not presented until late Friday, with the convention scheduled for but one more day. This served as a pretext for a “speed-up” drive by Murray, in the chair, and Committee Secretary Doherty. The delegates had received no copies of proposed amendments in advance, despite Murray’s assurances to the contrary on the previous day.
Heated Outburst
So rapidly were proposed amendments read, that it was impossible for delegates to grasp what was proposed. Time and again, delegates shouted out, “Slow down, slow down.” At one point, a delegate in uniform secured the floor and heatedly denounced the fact that hundreds of paid staff members were sitting on the convention floor who were trying to prevent rank and file delegates from speaking by continuously shouting “Question!”
It was immediately following this outburst that the convention representation question was introduced. The Constitution Committee first reported its non-concurrence in a number of resolutions to reduce the votes of officers and staff members at conventions. It proposed instead that the existing basis of representation, one vote for every 100 members, be changed to one vote for every 500 members.
As soon as this proposal to drastically reduce the number of rank and file delegates was read, there were groans and shouts of “No!” from all over the hall. Scores of delegates were on their feet, frantically waving their hands for recognition and crowding around the “mike” in the middle of the center aisle. Such a scene was without precedent in the history of CIO Steelworker conventions.
Fiery Denunciation
The first delegate to get the floor was Higgins of Local 3159. Indignantly he asserted, “It seems to me that the committee must have been out last night, when it brought up this propostion.” A big shout of “Yeah!” came from the delegates.
The next speaker, a Negro delegate from Youngstown, Dillard of Local Union 1462, brought the convention to its feet with a fiery denunciation of this obvious move to curb the voice of the rank and file by curtailing the number of rank and file delegates. “Talk about democracy!” he said sarcastically, “I’m speaking against this resolution and call on the convention to vote it down.” His concluding words were met with a tremendous ovation and thunderous cheers.
Murray, red faced and visibly shaken by this revolt, hastened to try to put it down. He first tried to assure the delegates that “it makes no difference to me how you vote on this question.” But he then proceeded to talk at length on why smaller conventions would be a good thing, that big conventions cost a lot of money, that they wouldn’t be able to find big enough convention halls, that anyway conventions should be “compact bodies.” He received only a flurry of applause.
Immediately the floor was flooded with arm-waving delegates. Delegates Hahn, Local Union 227, and Czelen, Local Union 1229, secured the “mike.” Just after Murray had spoken, there had been a lull. Every delegate was wondering if the others had again wilted under Murray’s oratory and prestige. But the succeeding remarks of delegates brought such cheers that the ranks became fully confident. Hahn charged the proposal was designed “to concentrate the control of the conventions by a small minority.” Czelen declared that the proposal would mean “we would have the same amount of staff members as delegates, but the rank and file will not be here.”
After this speech, there was such a clamor for the question – this time by the rank and file majority – that Murray put the vote. A feeble “aye” sounded for the proposed change. Then the loudest “No!” ever heard in the convention hall – where the CIO auto workers had met recently too – shook the rafters. The steel workers had come of age. They had decisively asserted themselves for the first time against Murray and his machine.
The struggle over organizational policies and democratic practices was the dominant theme of the convention. It was primarily in this form that the dissatisfaction with Murray’s general policies was expressed. On the broader questions of economic and political program, the convention went along generally with the major resolutions put forward by Murray.
At the same time, there were talks by various individual delegates on a number of resolutions that clearly demonstrated the spread of progressive and militant ideas among the steel workers. Many of the policy resolutions put forward by Murray revealed the pressure of these advanced ideas.
“Political Action”
Obviously couched in terms intended to appease the growing sentiment for genuine independent labor political action, the important resolution on “Political Action” called for support of the CIO Political Action Committee by stressing its “independent political activity” and its character as “an independent force, without commitment to any major party.”
The resolution wound up, however by repeating the bankrupt formula about giving “our support to the progressives of either major political party.” In short. Murray proposed to repeat the previous fiascos of backing capitalist “friends of labor,” rather than fighting to build an independent labor party which could provide an effective political instrument that could really combat Big Business reaction.
An important resolution was passed unanimously expressing opposition to peace-time military conscription. This brought forth several excellent statements from the floor. Tom Hood of Local 1330, a Youngstown delegate, who had spent 12 years in the Marines and been an aerial gunner in World War II, received big applause when he condemned peacetime conscription and asserted that building a big army was “like giving a man a machine, he will want to try it out and see how fast it will go, no matter who he knocks down. There are always generals who want to try out their machine.”
He stated that conscription was intended to give the children of steel workers “training in a system that only breeds wars.” He told how while he was in the air corps “we were forced to take part in the suppression of the people of Italy who were fighting for a little more bread.”
Another delegate, Hirsh of Local Union 1206, still a member of the armed forces and in uniform, declared his opposition to peacetime conscription and charged that the army was based on a bureaucratic caste system that degraded the enlisted men and gave the officers outrageous privileges.
Foreign Policy
One of the most spontaneous ovations was accorded Delegate Trbovich, of Local 1010 in East Chicago, Indiana, when he spoke on one section of the foreign policy resolution. Emphasizing that he was speaking only on the last section of the resolution calling for “encouragement and assistance to the people of the liberated countries and colonial peoples to exercise the right for self determination and to build their own democracy,” Trbovich stated:
“It is the duty of the trade unions to see that our own country is brought into line on this question. In Indonesia, for instance, British troops with American weapons are shooting down the people fighting for their own government.”
A sharp volley of applause greeted his statement:
“We did not work to produce weapons of war to be used for shooting down other peoples fighting for their rights. If we are really sincere about fighting for oppressed people, we must see that our boys are not used for imperialistic purposes to put down people fighting for liberty in the colonies.”
On the key issue of the mounting inflation which is robbing the steel and other workers of their recent wage gains, Murray offered no program other than begging the government to “save OPA” and dependence on the capitalist political agencies to “control prices.” There was no proposal to combat inflation by fighting for higher wages.
On the contrary, the day before the convention opened, Murray issued a public statement that the union would “observe its wage commitments” in the present contracts even if the OPA was smashed and regardless of inflation.
But, there can be no doubt that the steel workers along with the more advanced industrial workers generally, will come to realize that the most effective method to fight the consequences of price rises is by demanding in their contracts a sliding scale of wages, under a fixed minimum, that provides for the automatic increase of wages to keep pace with every rise in the cost of living.
In this spirit, a Youngstown delegate, Ted Dostal of Local 1330, voiced the sentiment of many militants during his well-received talk on the resolution calling for unemployment compensation to strikers. After pointing out that the unemployment insurance funds come out of the “unpaid wages of the workers,” he asserted that the “OPA is full of loopholes and prices are bound to rise. We will have to fight for higher wages. We must prepare for real struggles in the coming days ahead. That is why we must see to it that the laws are amended to provide for compensation when workers are again forced out on strike.”
Among the most gratifying features of the convention, was the large number of Negro delegates. They were among the most articulate and militant participants in all debates. They played a truly significant role in the deliberations and repeatedly evoked enthusiastic response from the overwhelmingly white audience. However, the Negro steel workers, a large section of the union, still have no representation on the union’s leading bodies.
Stalinist Role
The Stalinists played a miserable role at the convention. On every possible occasion they cottoned up to Murray – who shortly before the convention had been prepared to open a red-baiting drive against them.
This morning, shortly before the closing of the convention, the Stalinists precipitated a scandalous brawl on the convention floor that nearly broke up the convention in a riot. In an effort to capture undisputed control of a section of the union, they brought forth a proposal to divide the largest district of the union, the Chicago-Calumet District 31, into two districts, one of which they hoped to seize.
In the midst of the controversy that followed, the Stalinists and Districts 31 representatives got into a physical scrap that threw the convention into an uproar for 15 minutes, and was only quelled with difficulty.
This convention will be recorded as an historic one. It has marked a great advance for the steel workers. While they have a long way to go yet in fully asserting democratic control over their union and in elaborating a militant, progressive program, the steel workers showed in this convention that they are on the road to big contributions to the future progress of American labor.
Having once demonstrated their determination to fight for democratic unionism, they will continue to hammer away for membership control over the steel union’s policies. Their first victory over the Murray machine will encourage them to continue the struggle against the bureaucrats. With the increased militancy and self-confidence born of their recent great strike struggles and confronted with the continued attacks from the bosses and government, they will press forward for a fighting policy.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Roosevelt’s “Seizure” Order Halts<br>
Spreading Ward Strikes</h1>
<h3>(6 January 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_01" target="new">Vol. IX No. 1</a>, 6 January 1945, pp. 1 & 5.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">President Roosevelt last Thursday intervened to halt the Montgomery Ward strikes by ordering War Department “seizure” of company properties in seven cities where the administration previously had failed to enforce long-standing WLB directives against Open Shopper No. 1, Sewell L. Avery.</p>
<p>The administration’s action, similar to the one which broke the Chicago Ward strike eight months ago, was taken after nearly three weeks of the bitter Detroit walkout, which spread to Chicago and Kansas City and inspired the threat of a CIO “labor holiday” in the Detroit citadel of the mighty auto workers union.</p>
<p>Roosevelt’s statement made it clear that his “seizure” was dictated by his desire to prevent the spread of such strikes to the war industries and by the need to bolster up his wage-freezing War Labor Board’s authority, seriously undermined by Avery’s long and contemptuous defiance of WLB directives.</p>
<p>While admitting that Montgomery Ward “has waged a bitter fight against the <em>bona fide</em> unions of its employees throughout the war,” and “for more than a year” has successfully defied WLB directives affecting the “seized” establishments, Roosevelt did not motivate his “seizure” order on the fact of Avery’s non-compliance in itself. In fact, the administration has tolerated this for over four years.</p>
<p>Roosevelt complains only because Avery’s anti-labor recalcitrance has “threatened” the “confidence” of the workers in the government’s “structure for the impartial adjudication of disputes” and has led to the “distinct threat” of sympathetic walkouts of war industry workers in support of the Ward strikers. Roosevelt released a letter from WLB Chairman Davis, who gave as his first and main reason for advising government seizure the fact that Avery’s “persistent non-compliance” threatens the maintenance of the “no-strike pledge in Detroit” in the forthcoming UAW-CIO referendum.<br>
</p>
<h4>Easy on Avery</h4>
<p class="fst">It is already apparent that the latest Ward “seizure” will yield the Ward workers only the barest minimum of the WLB concessions originally granted. They will receive a raise from 39 cents an hour to 46 cents – which Avery himself had already agreed to pay as a result of the strike. But since Roosevelt’s order permits wage payments only out of current revenue there is admittedly little likelihood that the Detroit Ward workers will receive some $500,000 due them in retroactive wages. Nor is there any assurance that Roosevelt, as he did after breaking the Chicago Ward strike, will not restore control of the seized properties to Avery without the signing of a union contract.</p>
<p>The administration is carrying out the “seizure” order very <em>gingerly, observing all legal precautions and making no move which might infringe on Avery’s “property rights” or further antagonize the big business open- shoppers. The boldness and ruthlessness which has characterized Roosevelt’s assaults on striking workers is completely lacking in his treatment of the union-busting plutocrat Avery.</em></p>
<p>There has been no spectacular removal of Avery from his Chicago offices, such as occurred eight months ago. Avery has not budged an inch, issuing the defiant statement that “I’m still in charge.” Avery’s underlings have refused to cooperate with Army officials in the operation of the business. Moreover, Montgomery Ward’s profits are fully safeguarded by the government and Avery is assured ultimate restoration intact of his property. Meanwhile, he is still free to operate his other 800-odd open-shop establishments and to continue his fight against the unions. So patently timid have been the government’s moves, that Attorney General Biddle tried to pass off the government’s obviously pussyfooting “caution” by facetiously claiming that Avery is “perfectly harmless.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Tough Toward Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">But the administration has never exercised similar “caution” in its attacks on labor. Roosevelt had no hesitancy or legal scruples when, six months before Pearl Harbor, he ordered Army occupation of the North American Aviation plant and drove strikers back to work at the bayonet point. He observed no legal fine points when he “seized” the railroads last December to head off a threatened strike. In his attempts to break last year’s mine strikes, he repeatedly took over the coal mines with no apparent reluctance.</p>
<p>Attorney General Biddle has conceded to Avery that the WLB directives are only “recommendations,” defending the “seizures” solely as a strikebreaking requisite. But the administration has never treated WLB directives to workers as mere “recommendations.” Such directives have been enforced promptly and firmly, and the WLB itself has been armed with punitive powers. In addition to siding with the employers 99 times out of a hundred, the WLB has penalized strikers by delaying concessions, withholding union security clauses, reducing retroactive pay grants, etc.</p>
<p><em>The workers can be certain that, whatever the ‘immediate consequences of the latest Ward “seizures,” they will operate in the long run only to reinforce Roosevelt’s fundamentally anti-labor policy, his kid-glove treatment of the labor-hating open-shoppers, and his club-wielding against workers defending their elementary rights.</em></p>
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Art Preis
Roosevelt’s “Seizure” Order Halts
Spreading Ward Strikes
(6 January 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 1, 6 January 1945, pp. 1 & 5.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
President Roosevelt last Thursday intervened to halt the Montgomery Ward strikes by ordering War Department “seizure” of company properties in seven cities where the administration previously had failed to enforce long-standing WLB directives against Open Shopper No. 1, Sewell L. Avery.
The administration’s action, similar to the one which broke the Chicago Ward strike eight months ago, was taken after nearly three weeks of the bitter Detroit walkout, which spread to Chicago and Kansas City and inspired the threat of a CIO “labor holiday” in the Detroit citadel of the mighty auto workers union.
Roosevelt’s statement made it clear that his “seizure” was dictated by his desire to prevent the spread of such strikes to the war industries and by the need to bolster up his wage-freezing War Labor Board’s authority, seriously undermined by Avery’s long and contemptuous defiance of WLB directives.
While admitting that Montgomery Ward “has waged a bitter fight against the bona fide unions of its employees throughout the war,” and “for more than a year” has successfully defied WLB directives affecting the “seized” establishments, Roosevelt did not motivate his “seizure” order on the fact of Avery’s non-compliance in itself. In fact, the administration has tolerated this for over four years.
Roosevelt complains only because Avery’s anti-labor recalcitrance has “threatened” the “confidence” of the workers in the government’s “structure for the impartial adjudication of disputes” and has led to the “distinct threat” of sympathetic walkouts of war industry workers in support of the Ward strikers. Roosevelt released a letter from WLB Chairman Davis, who gave as his first and main reason for advising government seizure the fact that Avery’s “persistent non-compliance” threatens the maintenance of the “no-strike pledge in Detroit” in the forthcoming UAW-CIO referendum.
Easy on Avery
It is already apparent that the latest Ward “seizure” will yield the Ward workers only the barest minimum of the WLB concessions originally granted. They will receive a raise from 39 cents an hour to 46 cents – which Avery himself had already agreed to pay as a result of the strike. But since Roosevelt’s order permits wage payments only out of current revenue there is admittedly little likelihood that the Detroit Ward workers will receive some $500,000 due them in retroactive wages. Nor is there any assurance that Roosevelt, as he did after breaking the Chicago Ward strike, will not restore control of the seized properties to Avery without the signing of a union contract.
The administration is carrying out the “seizure” order very gingerly, observing all legal precautions and making no move which might infringe on Avery’s “property rights” or further antagonize the big business open- shoppers. The boldness and ruthlessness which has characterized Roosevelt’s assaults on striking workers is completely lacking in his treatment of the union-busting plutocrat Avery.
There has been no spectacular removal of Avery from his Chicago offices, such as occurred eight months ago. Avery has not budged an inch, issuing the defiant statement that “I’m still in charge.” Avery’s underlings have refused to cooperate with Army officials in the operation of the business. Moreover, Montgomery Ward’s profits are fully safeguarded by the government and Avery is assured ultimate restoration intact of his property. Meanwhile, he is still free to operate his other 800-odd open-shop establishments and to continue his fight against the unions. So patently timid have been the government’s moves, that Attorney General Biddle tried to pass off the government’s obviously pussyfooting “caution” by facetiously claiming that Avery is “perfectly harmless.”
Tough Toward Labor
But the administration has never exercised similar “caution” in its attacks on labor. Roosevelt had no hesitancy or legal scruples when, six months before Pearl Harbor, he ordered Army occupation of the North American Aviation plant and drove strikers back to work at the bayonet point. He observed no legal fine points when he “seized” the railroads last December to head off a threatened strike. In his attempts to break last year’s mine strikes, he repeatedly took over the coal mines with no apparent reluctance.
Attorney General Biddle has conceded to Avery that the WLB directives are only “recommendations,” defending the “seizures” solely as a strikebreaking requisite. But the administration has never treated WLB directives to workers as mere “recommendations.” Such directives have been enforced promptly and firmly, and the WLB itself has been armed with punitive powers. In addition to siding with the employers 99 times out of a hundred, the WLB has penalized strikers by delaying concessions, withholding union security clauses, reducing retroactive pay grants, etc.
The workers can be certain that, whatever the ‘immediate consequences of the latest Ward “seizures,” they will operate in the long run only to reinforce Roosevelt’s fundamentally anti-labor policy, his kid-glove treatment of the labor-hating open-shoppers, and his club-wielding against workers defending their elementary rights.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Debacle of Wallace’s Third Capitalist Party</h1>
<h3>(15 November 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_46" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 46</a>, 15 November 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">The unexpectedly small vote for Henry Wallace has dealt a devastating blow to the pretensions; of his new Progressive Party. It had entered the 1948 election campaign with the avowed.: aim of emerging as a major party, at the very least holding the balance of power between the Democrats and Republicans. It fell far short of its goal.</p>
<p>Wallace, in one elated mood, went so far as to foresee for himself the possibility of a 20-million vote. “Over 10 million” was the more cautious estimate of the Wallaceites. The pollsters, with what they thought was extreme conservatism, gave Wallace in advance from 2½ million to 4 million votes. He received less than 1,200,000 votes, more than half of them in New York state.</p>
<p>Even the Nov. 4 <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, Stalinist mouthpiece, confesses: “<em>The vote for Wallace, it must be admitted, fell below not only the unrealistic quotas assigned to him by certain forces, but even below what his most sober supporters, including this paper, had suspected.”</em><br>
</p>
<h4>Popular Figure</h4>
<p class="fst">In the past, Wallace had been a very popular figure among the workers, and was hailed in most labor circles as Roosevelt’s “Crown Prince.” He is certainly more impressive as a personality than the colorless Truman. And the results of the election, insofar as they show a smashing repudiation of the 80th Congress and all its works, demonstrate that the American working people are moving leftward and are receptive to progressive ideas. The debacle of the Wallace party cannot be attributed, therefore, to lack of a popular leader or a reactionary trend in the masses.</p>
<p>The fatal weakness of the Wallace movement was its attempt to by-pass the official labor movement, If this election proved anything at all, it proved that no new mass progressive political party in this country can get to first base without the solid support of organized labor.</p>
<p>Wallace and his backers tried to build a party by circumventing the unions. The workers, in their overwhelming number, refused the bait. Although millions of them are ready to break with the two-party monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, they want to build a new party through their own organizations, the unions. They are loyal to their unions and seek an answer to their problems, in the political as well as the economic field, through their own class organizations.</p>
<p>Wallace and his lieutenants thought they could brush aside the official organizations of the workers and win the workers simply through social demagogy. But the major capitalist parties are no less adept at demagogy than Wallace – and they have far more facilities and resources for disseminating this demagogy.</p>
<p>Indeed, in its post-mortem on <em>The Meaning of Truman’s Election</em>, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> complains that “Truman won the election by a hypocritical copying of the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and by imitating as much as he dared the charges of the Progressive Party and Henrv Wallace.” He even “stole” Wallace’s “peace” program, laments the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> for “Truman won support when he announced – even though he did not carry out – the Vinson peace mission to Moscow.”</p>
<p><em>This is also saying that Truman is a more effective demagogue than Wallace – which is doubtful. Truman had one thing especially that Wallace lacked – the support of the unions.</em></p>
<p>Now that their adventure has ended so discreditably, the Stalinists are attempting to shift the blame to others in the Wallace coalition. Thus, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> discovers “that the pro-Wallace labor forces did not sufficiently combat the ‘lesser evil’ illusion” and that this “undoubtedly had its influence in their ranks and weakened their practical work.”<br>
</p>
<h4>CP Hypocrisy</h4>
<p class="fst">This is a prime sample of the unbounded Stalinist hypocrisy. No one has propagated the fallacious and pernicious theory of the “lesser evil” more vigorously than the Stalinists. Since 1935 in this country they have preached the choice of the “good” capitalist politician as the “lesser evil” to the “bad” capitalist politician.</p>
<p>The Stalinists were among the most loyal and uncritical supporters of Roosevelt. And they continue to peddle the doctrine of the “lesser evil” to this day – that is the very essence of their support of Wallace.</p>
<p>For what is Wallace but a capitalist politician seeking to build a third liberal capitalist party? And what have the Stalinists been preaching throughout this election campaign but support of the “progressive” capitalist politician Wallace as a “lesser evil” to the “reactionary” Truman?</p>
<p>At this writing, the leaders of the Wallace party are meeting in Chicago to consider their “next step.” But in whatever direction they turn, the future of the Wallace movement is dubious, indeed.<br>
</p>
<h4>Bleak Future</h4>
<p class="fst">Without a labor base, with nothing but a program of social demagogy that Truman has already “stolen,” the Wallace movement rests on foundations of sand. The first momentum and enthusiasm of the Wallace movement have been cut short by a demoralizing set-back at the polls. Now its internal conflicts, muffled before the elections, will come to the fore. The uneasy coalition between its ex-Democratic liberals and the Stalinist wing is not likely to survive intact during the hard and bleak existence ahead.</p>
<p><em>The Wallace debacle is likewise the debacle of the Stalinist attempt to, build a significant Peoples Front movement in the United States.</em></p>
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Art Preis
The Debacle of Wallace’s Third Capitalist Party
(15 November 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 46, 15 November 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The unexpectedly small vote for Henry Wallace has dealt a devastating blow to the pretensions; of his new Progressive Party. It had entered the 1948 election campaign with the avowed.: aim of emerging as a major party, at the very least holding the balance of power between the Democrats and Republicans. It fell far short of its goal.
Wallace, in one elated mood, went so far as to foresee for himself the possibility of a 20-million vote. “Over 10 million” was the more cautious estimate of the Wallaceites. The pollsters, with what they thought was extreme conservatism, gave Wallace in advance from 2½ million to 4 million votes. He received less than 1,200,000 votes, more than half of them in New York state.
Even the Nov. 4 Daily Worker, Stalinist mouthpiece, confesses: “The vote for Wallace, it must be admitted, fell below not only the unrealistic quotas assigned to him by certain forces, but even below what his most sober supporters, including this paper, had suspected.”
Popular Figure
In the past, Wallace had been a very popular figure among the workers, and was hailed in most labor circles as Roosevelt’s “Crown Prince.” He is certainly more impressive as a personality than the colorless Truman. And the results of the election, insofar as they show a smashing repudiation of the 80th Congress and all its works, demonstrate that the American working people are moving leftward and are receptive to progressive ideas. The debacle of the Wallace party cannot be attributed, therefore, to lack of a popular leader or a reactionary trend in the masses.
The fatal weakness of the Wallace movement was its attempt to by-pass the official labor movement, If this election proved anything at all, it proved that no new mass progressive political party in this country can get to first base without the solid support of organized labor.
Wallace and his backers tried to build a party by circumventing the unions. The workers, in their overwhelming number, refused the bait. Although millions of them are ready to break with the two-party monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, they want to build a new party through their own organizations, the unions. They are loyal to their unions and seek an answer to their problems, in the political as well as the economic field, through their own class organizations.
Wallace and his lieutenants thought they could brush aside the official organizations of the workers and win the workers simply through social demagogy. But the major capitalist parties are no less adept at demagogy than Wallace – and they have far more facilities and resources for disseminating this demagogy.
Indeed, in its post-mortem on The Meaning of Truman’s Election, the Daily Worker complains that “Truman won the election by a hypocritical copying of the speeches of Franklin Roosevelt and by imitating as much as he dared the charges of the Progressive Party and Henrv Wallace.” He even “stole” Wallace’s “peace” program, laments the Daily Worker for “Truman won support when he announced – even though he did not carry out – the Vinson peace mission to Moscow.”
This is also saying that Truman is a more effective demagogue than Wallace – which is doubtful. Truman had one thing especially that Wallace lacked – the support of the unions.
Now that their adventure has ended so discreditably, the Stalinists are attempting to shift the blame to others in the Wallace coalition. Thus, the Daily Worker discovers “that the pro-Wallace labor forces did not sufficiently combat the ‘lesser evil’ illusion” and that this “undoubtedly had its influence in their ranks and weakened their practical work.”
CP Hypocrisy
This is a prime sample of the unbounded Stalinist hypocrisy. No one has propagated the fallacious and pernicious theory of the “lesser evil” more vigorously than the Stalinists. Since 1935 in this country they have preached the choice of the “good” capitalist politician as the “lesser evil” to the “bad” capitalist politician.
The Stalinists were among the most loyal and uncritical supporters of Roosevelt. And they continue to peddle the doctrine of the “lesser evil” to this day – that is the very essence of their support of Wallace.
For what is Wallace but a capitalist politician seeking to build a third liberal capitalist party? And what have the Stalinists been preaching throughout this election campaign but support of the “progressive” capitalist politician Wallace as a “lesser evil” to the “reactionary” Truman?
At this writing, the leaders of the Wallace party are meeting in Chicago to consider their “next step.” But in whatever direction they turn, the future of the Wallace movement is dubious, indeed.
Bleak Future
Without a labor base, with nothing but a program of social demagogy that Truman has already “stolen,” the Wallace movement rests on foundations of sand. The first momentum and enthusiasm of the Wallace movement have been cut short by a demoralizing set-back at the polls. Now its internal conflicts, muffled before the elections, will come to the fore. The uneasy coalition between its ex-Democratic liberals and the Stalinist wing is not likely to survive intact during the hard and bleak existence ahead.
The Wallace debacle is likewise the debacle of the Stalinist attempt to, build a significant Peoples Front movement in the United States.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Urges Militarist Policy</h1>
<h4>Seeks Extension of Draft, Universal Training for War</h4>
<h3>(13 April 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_15" target="new">Vol. X No. 15</a>, 13 April 1946, pp. 1 & 6.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>President Truman’s Army Day speech in Chicago on April 6 served notice that American imperialism is pushing the mightiest and most ruthless program of militarism ever conceived. Behind the thin screen of Truman’s diplomatic phrases could be heard the rattle of the saber.</strong></p>
<p><strong>His speech and program were a bellicose proclamation that Wall Street imperialism intends to impose its rule on the whole globe by force and threat of force.</strong></p>
<p>The swaggering arrogance of American capitalism flaunted itself in Truman’s pointed assertion: “The United States today is a strong nation; there is none stronger. This is not a boast. It is a fact ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>Grandiose Program</h4>
<p class="fst">To assure this position of supreme might, Truman made plain that the whole American people are to be regimented and Prussianized through a grandiose militarization program.</p>
<p>The heart of Truman’s speech was his three-point program for the maintenance of a military machine capable of sweeping any opponent or combination of opponents from American imperialism’s path.</p>
<p>Truman demanded: “First, unification of all our armed services in a single department; second, temporary extension of the Selective Service Act; third, universal training.”</p>
<p>Truman proposes the complete streamlining of the armed forces in keeping with technical, advances, particularly atomic warfare, which have outmoded the previous military structure. Wall Street wants a military organization designed to inflict atomic destruction to the maximum.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, it wants the extension of the draft – originally passed as a “temporary” wartime measure. This is but a stepping stone to permanent conscription of America’s youth into the bloody services of American imperialism.</p>
<p>This demand is brazenly proclaimed after millions of GIs abroad, now forced to serve as tools for tyrannizing over conquered and colonial peoples, have asserted demonstratively their desire to come home at once.<br>
</p>
<h4>Hypocritical Assertion</h4>
<p class="fst">On top of this, Truman wants to impose universal military training – “not conscription,” he blandly assures, “unless Congress declares an emergency and calls upon them to serve in the armed forces ...” That is, whenever Wall Street’s political agents decide to make war.</p>
<p>Just a few months ago the tide of popular protest and indignation against such proposals for universal militarization and regimentation was so strong that only the most outspoken militarists and reactionaries were openly calling for such measures.</p>
<p>Since then a monumental propaganda drive has been unleashed to ready public opinion for a new bloodbath, a third World War. The Army Day proclamation of American imperialism’s leading political representative was timed to take advantage of the terrific warmongering campaign and diplomatic offensive’ against the Soviet Union.</p>
<p>What is the purpose of this gigantic militarization that Truman demands? Truman asserted first that “victorious nations cannot, on the surrender of a vicious and dangerous enemy, turn their backs and go home.” But no one will believe that American imperialism fears shattered and prostrate Germany and Japan. Clearly, it is against revolting peoples of conquered and colonial countries that mighty occupation armies are to be used.<br>
</p>
<h4>Worldwide Preserve</h4>
<p class="fst">But Truman’s main threats are reserved for his “allies”, above all the Soviet Union. Hypocritical American imperialism, which is maintaining vast military forces throughout the world, is shaking its mailed fist at the Soviet Union. “We expect recognition,” Truman sharply warned, “that we also have an interest in maintaining peace and security” in the Far East and “insist that the sovereignty and integrity of the Near East and Middle East must not be threatened ...” American imperialism, he thus proclaims, has staked out worldwide preserves.</p>
<p>Though the greatest slaughter in human history ended only a few short months ago, Truman is already warning that “on short notice, each man must be ready to take his place and go forward – not at the end of a few months, or a few days, but immediately.”</p>
<p>Truman has thus spoken for a new war, for American imperialist domination of the globe and for military regimentation and repression at home.</p>
<p>That program of Wall Street can be halted only if the American people rise in their wrath and mobilize their full powers of organized resistance against it.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman Urges Militarist Policy
Seeks Extension of Draft, Universal Training for War
(13 April 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 15, 13 April 1946, pp. 1 & 6.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
President Truman’s Army Day speech in Chicago on April 6 served notice that American imperialism is pushing the mightiest and most ruthless program of militarism ever conceived. Behind the thin screen of Truman’s diplomatic phrases could be heard the rattle of the saber.
His speech and program were a bellicose proclamation that Wall Street imperialism intends to impose its rule on the whole globe by force and threat of force.
The swaggering arrogance of American capitalism flaunted itself in Truman’s pointed assertion: “The United States today is a strong nation; there is none stronger. This is not a boast. It is a fact ...”
Grandiose Program
To assure this position of supreme might, Truman made plain that the whole American people are to be regimented and Prussianized through a grandiose militarization program.
The heart of Truman’s speech was his three-point program for the maintenance of a military machine capable of sweeping any opponent or combination of opponents from American imperialism’s path.
Truman demanded: “First, unification of all our armed services in a single department; second, temporary extension of the Selective Service Act; third, universal training.”
Truman proposes the complete streamlining of the armed forces in keeping with technical, advances, particularly atomic warfare, which have outmoded the previous military structure. Wall Street wants a military organization designed to inflict atomic destruction to the maximum.
Simultaneously, it wants the extension of the draft – originally passed as a “temporary” wartime measure. This is but a stepping stone to permanent conscription of America’s youth into the bloody services of American imperialism.
This demand is brazenly proclaimed after millions of GIs abroad, now forced to serve as tools for tyrannizing over conquered and colonial peoples, have asserted demonstratively their desire to come home at once.
Hypocritical Assertion
On top of this, Truman wants to impose universal military training – “not conscription,” he blandly assures, “unless Congress declares an emergency and calls upon them to serve in the armed forces ...” That is, whenever Wall Street’s political agents decide to make war.
Just a few months ago the tide of popular protest and indignation against such proposals for universal militarization and regimentation was so strong that only the most outspoken militarists and reactionaries were openly calling for such measures.
Since then a monumental propaganda drive has been unleashed to ready public opinion for a new bloodbath, a third World War. The Army Day proclamation of American imperialism’s leading political representative was timed to take advantage of the terrific warmongering campaign and diplomatic offensive’ against the Soviet Union.
What is the purpose of this gigantic militarization that Truman demands? Truman asserted first that “victorious nations cannot, on the surrender of a vicious and dangerous enemy, turn their backs and go home.” But no one will believe that American imperialism fears shattered and prostrate Germany and Japan. Clearly, it is against revolting peoples of conquered and colonial countries that mighty occupation armies are to be used.
Worldwide Preserve
But Truman’s main threats are reserved for his “allies”, above all the Soviet Union. Hypocritical American imperialism, which is maintaining vast military forces throughout the world, is shaking its mailed fist at the Soviet Union. “We expect recognition,” Truman sharply warned, “that we also have an interest in maintaining peace and security” in the Far East and “insist that the sovereignty and integrity of the Near East and Middle East must not be threatened ...” American imperialism, he thus proclaims, has staked out worldwide preserves.
Though the greatest slaughter in human history ended only a few short months ago, Truman is already warning that “on short notice, each man must be ready to take his place and go forward – not at the end of a few months, or a few days, but immediately.”
Truman has thus spoken for a new war, for American imperialist domination of the globe and for military regimentation and repression at home.
That program of Wall Street can be halted only if the American people rise in their wrath and mobilize their full powers of organized resistance against it.
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(5 May 1945)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_18" target="new">Vol. IX No. 18</a>, 5 May 1945, p. 2.<br> Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Phone Girls OK Contract</h3>
<p class="fst">Meetings of New York Local 101, Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers, on April 24 ratified a wage contract, approved by the WLB, which grants average wage increases of $3.88 per week, plus retroactive pay amounting to $2,500,000. It will also give maximum pay of $37 weekly after 8 years service, instead of the former $34 peak after 12 years.</p>
<p>The new agreement, which is also being acted upon by the local operators in the Traffic Employees Association, was won after both unions voted overwhelmingly to strike against the flat $3 a week raise originally granted by the WLB. The unions had demanded $5; a special WLB panel had also recommended $5. The company had finally agreed to $4, but the national WLB pared it to $3.</p>
<p>A new schedule of wages gives beginners $23, plus certain fringe concessions, instead of $20 weekly. This increase is raised to $4 after 15 months, $5 after 35 months and $6 after 48 months.</p>
<p><em>The militancy of the telephone girls, who were just about to go on strike when the final contract was signed, forced the WLB to accede to the higher awards.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Less Take-Home Pay</h3>
<p class="fst">Over 100,000 shipyard and ship repair workers in the New York area face large cuts in their weekly take-home pay as the result of an order by the War Shipping Administration directing operators to reduce hours and eliminate overtime and premium pay. The order was announced on April 24.</p>
<p>It was also revealed that there have been “moderate layoffs in recent weeks” although “no mass dismissals,” says the April 25 <strong>N.Y. Times</strong>, “are expected before three or four months.” That’s a way of breaking the news “gently” that there are huge layoffs pending during the summer.</p>
<p><em>All Sunday work at double-time is eliminated, except by special WSA order. This is a terrific sock at the workers’ weekly income. The shipyard workers depend upon this overtime to carry them through because of high prices, taxes and other war expenses. They will be permitted only one hour of daily overtime instead of two, which most of them worked before. This in itself means a loss of from $9 to $12 pay a week.</em></p>
<p>The CIO Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers is planning to demand wage increases in June when the present contract expires.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>Six-to-One for Strike</h3>
<p class="fst">Now that the War Labor Board has been compelled to approve the soft coal miners’ contract granting increases of around $1.25 per day, the hard coal miners, centered in Pennsylvania, are going after substantial raises when their contract expires at the end of April.</p>
<p>Like their brothers in the soft coal mines, the anthracite workers on April 27 showed they mean business by voting six-to- one in favor of strike action if the operators and government don’t agree to an acceptable contract. The United Mine Workers has demanded a 25 per cent wage increase.</p>
<p>The National Labor Relations Board reported the complete returns of the strike poll as follows: For strike, 41,952, against, 6,697.</p>
<p><em>When the coal miners take a strike vote, it’s no mere gesture or empty threat. That’s what the boss press said about the previous vote of the .bituminous miners – until they walked out by the scores of thousands even after the old contract was extended for a month. A lot of miners figured an old contract is no contract – and no contract, no work! Then the operators and government acted fast.</em></p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p4"></a>
<h3>Textile Local Sued</h3>
<p class="fst">A suit for damages of $259,680 from the United Textile Workers, AFL, has been filed by the American Enka Corporation, Ashville, North Carolina, in the Buncombe County N.C., Superior Court. The company is trying to knock down this huge sum from the union for alleged losses it claims it sustained during a strike of 3,000 workers last February. The company claims the strike, which ended in a government “seizure” on February 18, violated a no-strike clause in the contract.</p>
<p><em>The real intent of this suit is to smash the union. Since August 18, 1944, the company has been defying a regional WLB order directing it to arbitrate the union’s demand for shift differentials and paid lunch periods. The company refused, raising the pretext that by opening the contract for renegotiation of these issues it was reopening the whole contract. A second WLB order was likewise rejected. But it wasn’t until the workers struck, months later, that the WLB “got tough” – not against the company, but against the workers by initiating a strikebreaking plant “seizure.”</em></p>
<p>If this suit is successful, it may set loose a whole wave of attempts to bust unions by collecting strike “damages” through the help of pro-corporation courts.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p5"></a>
<h3>What – No Peace Pact?</h3>
<p class="fst">The April 6 <strong>Toledo Union Journal</strong>, organ of the Northwest Ohio CIO says editorially:</p>
<p class="fst">“Obviously if management does not have the intelligence, the tact and willingness to settle its unimportant differences with labor during these war years when the welfare of the country hinges upon unity and cooperation, how can we expect it to show a sudden birth of reason once the emergency has passed?”</p>
<p class="fst">We don’t know about those “unimportant differences.” That’s what the union leaders called them – but not the bosses, who have fought labor bitterly on every point during the war. But it’s a cinch, as the Toledo union paper states, that the corporations aren’t going to take it easier against labor with the war drawing to a close.</p>
<p><em>Philip Murray and William Green may sign their capital-labor “peace-charter” – but to the bosses that’s just a way to get labor to lower its guard and stick out its neck for a rabbit punch.</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(5 May 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 18, 5 May 1945, p. 2. Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Phone Girls OK Contract
Meetings of New York Local 101, Federation of Long Lines Telephone Workers, on April 24 ratified a wage contract, approved by the WLB, which grants average wage increases of $3.88 per week, plus retroactive pay amounting to $2,500,000. It will also give maximum pay of $37 weekly after 8 years service, instead of the former $34 peak after 12 years.
The new agreement, which is also being acted upon by the local operators in the Traffic Employees Association, was won after both unions voted overwhelmingly to strike against the flat $3 a week raise originally granted by the WLB. The unions had demanded $5; a special WLB panel had also recommended $5. The company had finally agreed to $4, but the national WLB pared it to $3.
A new schedule of wages gives beginners $23, plus certain fringe concessions, instead of $20 weekly. This increase is raised to $4 after 15 months, $5 after 35 months and $6 after 48 months.
The militancy of the telephone girls, who were just about to go on strike when the final contract was signed, forced the WLB to accede to the higher awards.
* * *
Less Take-Home Pay
Over 100,000 shipyard and ship repair workers in the New York area face large cuts in their weekly take-home pay as the result of an order by the War Shipping Administration directing operators to reduce hours and eliminate overtime and premium pay. The order was announced on April 24.
It was also revealed that there have been “moderate layoffs in recent weeks” although “no mass dismissals,” says the April 25 N.Y. Times, “are expected before three or four months.” That’s a way of breaking the news “gently” that there are huge layoffs pending during the summer.
All Sunday work at double-time is eliminated, except by special WSA order. This is a terrific sock at the workers’ weekly income. The shipyard workers depend upon this overtime to carry them through because of high prices, taxes and other war expenses. They will be permitted only one hour of daily overtime instead of two, which most of them worked before. This in itself means a loss of from $9 to $12 pay a week.
The CIO Industrial Union of Marine and Shipbuilding Workers is planning to demand wage increases in June when the present contract expires.
* * *
Six-to-One for Strike
Now that the War Labor Board has been compelled to approve the soft coal miners’ contract granting increases of around $1.25 per day, the hard coal miners, centered in Pennsylvania, are going after substantial raises when their contract expires at the end of April.
Like their brothers in the soft coal mines, the anthracite workers on April 27 showed they mean business by voting six-to- one in favor of strike action if the operators and government don’t agree to an acceptable contract. The United Mine Workers has demanded a 25 per cent wage increase.
The National Labor Relations Board reported the complete returns of the strike poll as follows: For strike, 41,952, against, 6,697.
When the coal miners take a strike vote, it’s no mere gesture or empty threat. That’s what the boss press said about the previous vote of the .bituminous miners – until they walked out by the scores of thousands even after the old contract was extended for a month. A lot of miners figured an old contract is no contract – and no contract, no work! Then the operators and government acted fast.
* * *
Textile Local Sued
A suit for damages of $259,680 from the United Textile Workers, AFL, has been filed by the American Enka Corporation, Ashville, North Carolina, in the Buncombe County N.C., Superior Court. The company is trying to knock down this huge sum from the union for alleged losses it claims it sustained during a strike of 3,000 workers last February. The company claims the strike, which ended in a government “seizure” on February 18, violated a no-strike clause in the contract.
The real intent of this suit is to smash the union. Since August 18, 1944, the company has been defying a regional WLB order directing it to arbitrate the union’s demand for shift differentials and paid lunch periods. The company refused, raising the pretext that by opening the contract for renegotiation of these issues it was reopening the whole contract. A second WLB order was likewise rejected. But it wasn’t until the workers struck, months later, that the WLB “got tough” – not against the company, but against the workers by initiating a strikebreaking plant “seizure.”
If this suit is successful, it may set loose a whole wave of attempts to bust unions by collecting strike “damages” through the help of pro-corporation courts.
* * *
What – No Peace Pact?
The April 6 Toledo Union Journal, organ of the Northwest Ohio CIO says editorially:
“Obviously if management does not have the intelligence, the tact and willingness to settle its unimportant differences with labor during these war years when the welfare of the country hinges upon unity and cooperation, how can we expect it to show a sudden birth of reason once the emergency has passed?”
We don’t know about those “unimportant differences.” That’s what the union leaders called them – but not the bosses, who have fought labor bitterly on every point during the war. But it’s a cinch, as the Toledo union paper states, that the corporations aren’t going to take it easier against labor with the war drawing to a close.
Philip Murray and William Green may sign their capital-labor “peace-charter” – but to the bosses that’s just a way to get labor to lower its guard and stick out its neck for a rabbit punch.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>War Bloc Runs UE Convention</h1>
<h4>Stalinists and Hillmanite Red Baiters<br>
Join Hands in Putting Over Pro-War Line</h4>
<h3>(September 1941)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1941/index.htm#m41_37" target="new">Vol. V No. 37</a>, 13 September 1941, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst">CAMDEN, New Jersey, Sept. 5. – The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, fourth largest union in the CIO, today ended its five day convention here with its Stalinist and Hillmanite leaders demonstratively joining hands in calling for unity on a program of all-out support of the war policies of the Roosevelt administration and opposition to John L. Lewis leadership in the CIO.</p>
<p>James B. Carey, outgoing Hillmanite president of the UE, sounded the final note of Stalinist-Hillmanite harmony in a speech at the closing convention session this afternoon.</p>
<p>Carey called on the UE members to give full support to the new president, Albert J. Fitzgerald, of Lynn, Massachusetts, the Hillmanite who gained Stalinist backing for the president’s post by agreeing to “compromise” on the red-baiting issue.</p>
<p>Carey, like the Stalinists, pleaded for “unity” on the fundamental issue of support of the imperialist war.</p>
<p>That Carey is not still president of the UE is no fault of the Stalinists. Throughout the convention, the Stalinists made desperate and determined overtures to Carey in an effort to achieve complete organizational, as well as political, accord with him. It was an open secret at the convention that the Stalinist and “compromise” Hillmanite leaders had spent hours with Carey on the Tuesday evening prior to the elections, trying to persuade him to abandon his anti-communist resolution in return for support for his re-election as union president.<br>
</p>
<h4>Carey Insists on Red-Baiting Stand</h4>
<p class="fst">Carey would not agree to this. He had built up his following on the promise of an “uncompromising” fight tp eliminate the “communists” from the union, and was under pressure from the bulk of his followers to carry out this program. For months prior to the convention Carey had led a campaign to secure the adoption or resolutions by the locals asking the convention to bar communists from union office.</p>
<p><em>Carey was confronted with the choice of risking the loss of the union presidency and retaining his personal following among the membership, or yielding to the Stalinists’ conditions and remaining president as the captive of the Stalinists, He chose to risk losing the presidency.</em></p>
<p>Carey no doubt made his choice in the belief that he could win on the red-baiting issue and gain the presidency as well. The approach of the forthcoming CIO national convention has tended to sharpen the fight for union posts and control, as each group in the Stalinist-Hillmanite camp would like to hold the dominant power at the CIO convention.</p>
<p>Thus, much of the convention time was occupied with the dispute over the “red” issue, a dispute which gave the false impression that them was a fundamental cleavage of “leftists” and “rightists” and which served to conceal somewhat the actual Stalinist-Hillmanite unity that prevailed on the basic political and programmatic issues.<br>
</p>
<h4>Joint Report Keynotes “Unity” for the War</h4>
<p class="fst">The keynote of this unity was struck at the very start of the convention in the joint report of the general officers – Stalinists and Hillmanites combined – which projected the program adopted by the convention.</p>
<p>This report stressed, above all, unity around the program of full support to the war policies of the Roosevelt administration and it set the tone of the entire contention. It contained not a single reference to the need for labor militancy, Roosevelt’s use of troops against strikers, the Administration’s support of anti-labor legislation, the strikebreaking role of the National Defense Mediation Board, or the growing Administration drive against workers’ rights.</p>
<p><em>Instead the report asserted that the UE made its advances “with very little recourse to labor’s traditional weapon – strikes and stoppages of work.”</em></p>
<p><em>This theme was repeated by the convention leaders, Stalinists and Hillmanites alike, throughout the convention. Not once, during the entire convention, did a speaker strike a note of militant labor struggle.</em></p>
<p>The first two days of the convention produced little beyond the adoption, at the Tuesday session, of a resolution, supported by the entire leadership of the union, approving the government’s war policies and urging the Administration to put its policies into affect “with all possible speed and energy.”</p>
<p>There was no discussion on the resolution. Carey put it to a standing vote. Only five delegates dared to rise in opposition.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinists Hide Carey’s Anti-Labor Role</h4>
<p class="fst">The fight over the anti-communist issue did not come on the convention floor until Wednesday. This fight, which at no time took on the character of a struggle over fundamental issues, at first arose as a “jurisdictional” dispute, with the Stalinists insisting that the resolutions committee, which they controlled, had jurisdiction over the issue, and the Careyites claiming that it properly belonged in the hands of the constitution committee, controlled by. the Hillmanites.</p>
<p>On Wednesday morning, the resolutions committee presented a resolution, inflated by the Stalinists, which offered a compromise to the openly red-baiting Carey proposal.</p>
<p>The Stalinist resolution excluded specific reference to communists and communism, but laid the basis for persecution of genuine union militants.</p>
<p>This resolution declared that the union “has in the past made substantial contributions to the defense of this country” and is “today called on to do still more toward this defense.”</p>
<p>Therefore, the resolution concluded “that this union, firm in its loyalty to this country, to its democratic institutions and constitution, reiterates its vigorous opposition to any person who acts or works against the interests of the United States or of this union ... That any person guilty of such acts can have no place whatever either as member or officer in this union ... That any good-standing member of the union is entitled to all rights and privileges without discrimination, unless such member be proved guilty of acts against the nation or against the union in accord with the procedure set forth in our constitution ...”<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinist “Compromise” Resolution Dangerous</h4>
<p class="fst">This resolution is so worded that while it can be used against genuine anti-war elements and union militants who might conduct strikes pr other labor “acts against the nation,” it can not so easily be turned against the Stalinists, who now proclaim their “loyalty to the United States of America and its Constitution.”</p>
<p><em>The reactionary red-baiting Carey could subscribe to every word of this resolution. He wanted, however, to have “communists” and “communism” specifically mentioned. He was forced, therefore, to oppose the Stalinist resolution on purely technical grounds, arguing that the single section dealing with the rights and privileges of members belonged to the jurisdiction of the Hillmanite-controlled constitution committee.</em> Carey, as chairman, therefore ruled this section of the resolution out of order.</p>
<p>An appeal against this .ruling was made, and the appeal was won by a roll-call of 714 to 450. This vote was the first real test of strength between the Stalinists and Careyites.<br>
</p>
<h4>Carey and Stalinists Pull Their Punches</h4>
<p class="fst">During the ensuing several hours debate on the resolution itself, it became clear that neither the Stalinists nor Carey cared to attack each other in a forthright manner.</p>
<p>The Stalinists correctly argued that the anti-communist issue was supported by the anti-labor press, the employers and reactionary politicians.</p>
<p><em>But they deliberately avoided any direct attack on the Hillmanites, Carey or the Roosevelt Administration as being the actual sponsors of this move in the UE and other CIO unions. The fire of the Stalinists was directed at the “Inter-Local Committee of Progressive Trade Unionists,” an organization of Carey supporters, but never at Carey himself.</em></p>
<p>The Stalinists correctly charged that the proposal to discriminate against persons because of their political beliefs was a violation of the fundamental principles of trade union democracy.</p>
<p>But they did not show <em>why</em> Carey wished to put over this red-baiting proposal. They did not, for instance, point out that Carey’s attack was directed, in reality, at those who were for militant labor action against the bosses, who were opposed to collaboration with the employers and government and who fought against the Roosevelt war program. The Stalinists did not seek to discredit the real purposes of the red-baiters, but to smooth over the differences in order to unite with them.</p>
<p>Carey and his followers, for their part, could not point to anything in the present Stalinist program with which they disagreed. All their real differences had ceased to exist on June 22, when the Kremlin decreed full and unconditional support of the Allied imperialists.<br>
</p>
<h4>CP “Democracy” Not for Trotskyists</h4>
<p class="fst">The Careyites, through Clifford Haley, Local 1227, Long Island City, New York, resorted to a stupid expedient in an effort to win support for their position.</p>
<p>Haley “dramatically” confronted the convention with a photostatic copy of a pledge signed by several UE members who had attended a Communist Party training school in 1937. Haley did not attack the nature of the pledge, but merely used the document as evidence that certain UE members had been members of the Communist Party.</p>
<p>This pledge included agreement to build the Communist Party and “to drive the Trotskyists out of the labor movement.”</p>
<p><em>The only thing which the document proved was not that members of the Communist Party should be excluded by constitutional ruling from the union or union posts, but that the Stalinist plea for “democracy” in the union was a fake, as evidenced by their program to drive the Trotskyists out of the unions.</em></p>
<p>The Stalinist-sponsored resolution was finally voted on by a show of hands, and was adopted by two-to-one majority.</p>
<p>So far as most of the delegates were concerned, this vote expressed an honest opposition to red-baiting policies. From that standpoint, the vote was a blow to the Hillmanite red-baiters and reactionaries and an affirmation of the progressive and democratic sentiments of the UE rank-and-file.<br>
</p>
<h4>“What About Jackson?”</h4>
<p class="fst">Nevertheless, the Stalinist “compromise” contained certain dangerous implications, as one delegate, Edward Lopez of Bayonne, New Jersey, pointed out. Lopez called attention to the phrase “acts against the nation”, and asked Fitzgerald, the chairman of the resolutions committee:</p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“What about Jackson? He’s been thrown into a Canadian concentration camp. If he’s found guilty, will he be thrown out of the UE because he’s against the interests of his country?”</em></p>
<p class="fst">This question referred to C.S Jackson, president of UE District Council No. 5 in Canada, who was thrown into a Canadian concentration camp several months ago after he returned from a UE conference in the United States. He has been interned for month without trial, and the UE is conducting a fight for his release. <em>Fitzgerald “answered” Lopez’s question with the single statement:</em></p>
<p class="quoteb"><em>“That’s Canada. This is the United States we’re in.”</em></p>
<p class="fst">The Roosevelt Administration Hillman, and all the bosses have already termed strikes and militant labor actions in the war industries to be “acts against the nation.” And now they will be so termed by the Stalinists an Hillmanites n the UE.</p>
<p>The defeat of Carey on the red-baiting issue led to his defeat for re-election at the afternoon session Wednesday. The Stalinist backed the Massachusetts, Hillmanite, Fitzgerald, against Carey The combination of Stalinists and “independent” Hillmanites was sufficient to elect Fitzgerald. The vote was 635 to 539. Carey received considerably more votes for president than for his position on the anti-communist issue. This indicated that many delegates, as a result or the Stalinist cover-up of the anti-labor character of Carey’s red-baiting, did not think his red-baiting of enough moment to warrant opposition to his holding the highest office in the union.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinists Support Carey for CIO Post</h4>
<p class="fst">Immediately after Carey’s defeat, Organization Director James Matles, one of the Stalinist leaders, proposed that the UE support Carey for re-election as CIO National Secretary at the coming CIO convention. Such a motion was passed on Thursday morning. Carey, on his part, revealed how shallow was his cleavage with the Stalinists, when he seconded the nomination of the leading Stalinist in the union, Julius Emspak, for UE secretary-treasurer. Carey called for a unanimous vote for Emspak in the interests of “unity”.</p>
<p>Carey made one final move to get his anti-communist .program adopted, when he proposed that union locals be permitted to set up their own qualifications for union officers. This was calculated to permit local unions to put anti-communist clauses in their local constitution. The convention supported a counter-proposal to this, brought in by the constitution committee, by a vote of 789 to 377. The constitution committee, Carey’s own, abandoned his line at the Stalinists’ “unity” plea.</p>
<p>It might be assumed that with the scores of vital issues and problems confronting labor in this war period, the convention would have seen enlivened by much discussion and debate. This, unfortunately, was not the case.<br>
</p>
<h4>Vital Issues Are Not Discussed</h4>
<p class="fst">The dead-weight of the Stalinist-Hillmanite leadership simply smothered any possible real discussion on the war, the role of the Mediation Board, the right to strike, government strikebreaking, labor participation on government agencies, priorities unemployment, organization of the unorganized, etc</p>
<p>Such of these questions as were dealt with at all merely received passing reference in speeches on other questions or in resolutions hastily passed with little or no discussion, most of them jammed through at the very end of the convention.</p>
<p><em>The vital problems of priorities unemployment and the organization of the competitive shops, problems of extreme moment to the UE members, were passed off hastily in inadequate and undiscussed resolutions.</em></p>
<p><em>Every question, every problem was subordinated to the one reactionary aim: to line up the union behind Roosevelt’s war program.</em></p>
<p>This convention has established definitely the fact that the Stalinists and Hillmanites, drawn together by fundamental agreement on the war, are in the process of establishing an alliance against the forces of John L. Lewis and all those anti-war elements and militants in the CIO who have thus far prevented the pro-war reactionaries from making the industrial union movement an appendage of the government’s war machine.</p>
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Art Preis
War Bloc Runs UE Convention
Stalinists and Hillmanite Red Baiters
Join Hands in Putting Over Pro-War Line
(September 1941)
From The Militant, Vol. V No. 37, 13 September 1941, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
CAMDEN, New Jersey, Sept. 5. – The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America, fourth largest union in the CIO, today ended its five day convention here with its Stalinist and Hillmanite leaders demonstratively joining hands in calling for unity on a program of all-out support of the war policies of the Roosevelt administration and opposition to John L. Lewis leadership in the CIO.
James B. Carey, outgoing Hillmanite president of the UE, sounded the final note of Stalinist-Hillmanite harmony in a speech at the closing convention session this afternoon.
Carey called on the UE members to give full support to the new president, Albert J. Fitzgerald, of Lynn, Massachusetts, the Hillmanite who gained Stalinist backing for the president’s post by agreeing to “compromise” on the red-baiting issue.
Carey, like the Stalinists, pleaded for “unity” on the fundamental issue of support of the imperialist war.
That Carey is not still president of the UE is no fault of the Stalinists. Throughout the convention, the Stalinists made desperate and determined overtures to Carey in an effort to achieve complete organizational, as well as political, accord with him. It was an open secret at the convention that the Stalinist and “compromise” Hillmanite leaders had spent hours with Carey on the Tuesday evening prior to the elections, trying to persuade him to abandon his anti-communist resolution in return for support for his re-election as union president.
Carey Insists on Red-Baiting Stand
Carey would not agree to this. He had built up his following on the promise of an “uncompromising” fight tp eliminate the “communists” from the union, and was under pressure from the bulk of his followers to carry out this program. For months prior to the convention Carey had led a campaign to secure the adoption or resolutions by the locals asking the convention to bar communists from union office.
Carey was confronted with the choice of risking the loss of the union presidency and retaining his personal following among the membership, or yielding to the Stalinists’ conditions and remaining president as the captive of the Stalinists, He chose to risk losing the presidency.
Carey no doubt made his choice in the belief that he could win on the red-baiting issue and gain the presidency as well. The approach of the forthcoming CIO national convention has tended to sharpen the fight for union posts and control, as each group in the Stalinist-Hillmanite camp would like to hold the dominant power at the CIO convention.
Thus, much of the convention time was occupied with the dispute over the “red” issue, a dispute which gave the false impression that them was a fundamental cleavage of “leftists” and “rightists” and which served to conceal somewhat the actual Stalinist-Hillmanite unity that prevailed on the basic political and programmatic issues.
Joint Report Keynotes “Unity” for the War
The keynote of this unity was struck at the very start of the convention in the joint report of the general officers – Stalinists and Hillmanites combined – which projected the program adopted by the convention.
This report stressed, above all, unity around the program of full support to the war policies of the Roosevelt administration and it set the tone of the entire contention. It contained not a single reference to the need for labor militancy, Roosevelt’s use of troops against strikers, the Administration’s support of anti-labor legislation, the strikebreaking role of the National Defense Mediation Board, or the growing Administration drive against workers’ rights.
Instead the report asserted that the UE made its advances “with very little recourse to labor’s traditional weapon – strikes and stoppages of work.”
This theme was repeated by the convention leaders, Stalinists and Hillmanites alike, throughout the convention. Not once, during the entire convention, did a speaker strike a note of militant labor struggle.
The first two days of the convention produced little beyond the adoption, at the Tuesday session, of a resolution, supported by the entire leadership of the union, approving the government’s war policies and urging the Administration to put its policies into affect “with all possible speed and energy.”
There was no discussion on the resolution. Carey put it to a standing vote. Only five delegates dared to rise in opposition.
Stalinists Hide Carey’s Anti-Labor Role
The fight over the anti-communist issue did not come on the convention floor until Wednesday. This fight, which at no time took on the character of a struggle over fundamental issues, at first arose as a “jurisdictional” dispute, with the Stalinists insisting that the resolutions committee, which they controlled, had jurisdiction over the issue, and the Careyites claiming that it properly belonged in the hands of the constitution committee, controlled by. the Hillmanites.
On Wednesday morning, the resolutions committee presented a resolution, inflated by the Stalinists, which offered a compromise to the openly red-baiting Carey proposal.
The Stalinist resolution excluded specific reference to communists and communism, but laid the basis for persecution of genuine union militants.
This resolution declared that the union “has in the past made substantial contributions to the defense of this country” and is “today called on to do still more toward this defense.”
Therefore, the resolution concluded “that this union, firm in its loyalty to this country, to its democratic institutions and constitution, reiterates its vigorous opposition to any person who acts or works against the interests of the United States or of this union ... That any person guilty of such acts can have no place whatever either as member or officer in this union ... That any good-standing member of the union is entitled to all rights and privileges without discrimination, unless such member be proved guilty of acts against the nation or against the union in accord with the procedure set forth in our constitution ...”
Stalinist “Compromise” Resolution Dangerous
This resolution is so worded that while it can be used against genuine anti-war elements and union militants who might conduct strikes pr other labor “acts against the nation,” it can not so easily be turned against the Stalinists, who now proclaim their “loyalty to the United States of America and its Constitution.”
The reactionary red-baiting Carey could subscribe to every word of this resolution. He wanted, however, to have “communists” and “communism” specifically mentioned. He was forced, therefore, to oppose the Stalinist resolution on purely technical grounds, arguing that the single section dealing with the rights and privileges of members belonged to the jurisdiction of the Hillmanite-controlled constitution committee. Carey, as chairman, therefore ruled this section of the resolution out of order.
An appeal against this .ruling was made, and the appeal was won by a roll-call of 714 to 450. This vote was the first real test of strength between the Stalinists and Careyites.
Carey and Stalinists Pull Their Punches
During the ensuing several hours debate on the resolution itself, it became clear that neither the Stalinists nor Carey cared to attack each other in a forthright manner.
The Stalinists correctly argued that the anti-communist issue was supported by the anti-labor press, the employers and reactionary politicians.
But they deliberately avoided any direct attack on the Hillmanites, Carey or the Roosevelt Administration as being the actual sponsors of this move in the UE and other CIO unions. The fire of the Stalinists was directed at the “Inter-Local Committee of Progressive Trade Unionists,” an organization of Carey supporters, but never at Carey himself.
The Stalinists correctly charged that the proposal to discriminate against persons because of their political beliefs was a violation of the fundamental principles of trade union democracy.
But they did not show why Carey wished to put over this red-baiting proposal. They did not, for instance, point out that Carey’s attack was directed, in reality, at those who were for militant labor action against the bosses, who were opposed to collaboration with the employers and government and who fought against the Roosevelt war program. The Stalinists did not seek to discredit the real purposes of the red-baiters, but to smooth over the differences in order to unite with them.
Carey and his followers, for their part, could not point to anything in the present Stalinist program with which they disagreed. All their real differences had ceased to exist on June 22, when the Kremlin decreed full and unconditional support of the Allied imperialists.
CP “Democracy” Not for Trotskyists
The Careyites, through Clifford Haley, Local 1227, Long Island City, New York, resorted to a stupid expedient in an effort to win support for their position.
Haley “dramatically” confronted the convention with a photostatic copy of a pledge signed by several UE members who had attended a Communist Party training school in 1937. Haley did not attack the nature of the pledge, but merely used the document as evidence that certain UE members had been members of the Communist Party.
This pledge included agreement to build the Communist Party and “to drive the Trotskyists out of the labor movement.”
The only thing which the document proved was not that members of the Communist Party should be excluded by constitutional ruling from the union or union posts, but that the Stalinist plea for “democracy” in the union was a fake, as evidenced by their program to drive the Trotskyists out of the unions.
The Stalinist-sponsored resolution was finally voted on by a show of hands, and was adopted by two-to-one majority.
So far as most of the delegates were concerned, this vote expressed an honest opposition to red-baiting policies. From that standpoint, the vote was a blow to the Hillmanite red-baiters and reactionaries and an affirmation of the progressive and democratic sentiments of the UE rank-and-file.
“What About Jackson?”
Nevertheless, the Stalinist “compromise” contained certain dangerous implications, as one delegate, Edward Lopez of Bayonne, New Jersey, pointed out. Lopez called attention to the phrase “acts against the nation”, and asked Fitzgerald, the chairman of the resolutions committee:
“What about Jackson? He’s been thrown into a Canadian concentration camp. If he’s found guilty, will he be thrown out of the UE because he’s against the interests of his country?”
This question referred to C.S Jackson, president of UE District Council No. 5 in Canada, who was thrown into a Canadian concentration camp several months ago after he returned from a UE conference in the United States. He has been interned for month without trial, and the UE is conducting a fight for his release. Fitzgerald “answered” Lopez’s question with the single statement:
“That’s Canada. This is the United States we’re in.”
The Roosevelt Administration Hillman, and all the bosses have already termed strikes and militant labor actions in the war industries to be “acts against the nation.” And now they will be so termed by the Stalinists an Hillmanites n the UE.
The defeat of Carey on the red-baiting issue led to his defeat for re-election at the afternoon session Wednesday. The Stalinist backed the Massachusetts, Hillmanite, Fitzgerald, against Carey The combination of Stalinists and “independent” Hillmanites was sufficient to elect Fitzgerald. The vote was 635 to 539. Carey received considerably more votes for president than for his position on the anti-communist issue. This indicated that many delegates, as a result or the Stalinist cover-up of the anti-labor character of Carey’s red-baiting, did not think his red-baiting of enough moment to warrant opposition to his holding the highest office in the union.
Stalinists Support Carey for CIO Post
Immediately after Carey’s defeat, Organization Director James Matles, one of the Stalinist leaders, proposed that the UE support Carey for re-election as CIO National Secretary at the coming CIO convention. Such a motion was passed on Thursday morning. Carey, on his part, revealed how shallow was his cleavage with the Stalinists, when he seconded the nomination of the leading Stalinist in the union, Julius Emspak, for UE secretary-treasurer. Carey called for a unanimous vote for Emspak in the interests of “unity”.
Carey made one final move to get his anti-communist .program adopted, when he proposed that union locals be permitted to set up their own qualifications for union officers. This was calculated to permit local unions to put anti-communist clauses in their local constitution. The convention supported a counter-proposal to this, brought in by the constitution committee, by a vote of 789 to 377. The constitution committee, Carey’s own, abandoned his line at the Stalinists’ “unity” plea.
It might be assumed that with the scores of vital issues and problems confronting labor in this war period, the convention would have seen enlivened by much discussion and debate. This, unfortunately, was not the case.
Vital Issues Are Not Discussed
The dead-weight of the Stalinist-Hillmanite leadership simply smothered any possible real discussion on the war, the role of the Mediation Board, the right to strike, government strikebreaking, labor participation on government agencies, priorities unemployment, organization of the unorganized, etc
Such of these questions as were dealt with at all merely received passing reference in speeches on other questions or in resolutions hastily passed with little or no discussion, most of them jammed through at the very end of the convention.
The vital problems of priorities unemployment and the organization of the competitive shops, problems of extreme moment to the UE members, were passed off hastily in inadequate and undiscussed resolutions.
Every question, every problem was subordinated to the one reactionary aim: to line up the union behind Roosevelt’s war program.
This convention has established definitely the fact that the Stalinists and Hillmanites, drawn together by fundamental agreement on the war, are in the process of establishing an alliance against the forces of John L. Lewis and all those anti-war elements and militants in the CIO who have thus far prevented the pro-war reactionaries from making the industrial union movement an appendage of the government’s war machine.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h4>1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949</h4>
<h1>Unions Faced 2-Pronged Attack<br>
of Taft-Hartley Act, Inflation</h1>
<h3>(27 December 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_52" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 52</a>, 27 December 1948, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">American labor in 1948 suffered a government-employer pincers attack – rising prices that slashed real wages and the Taft-Hartley Act that crippled the ability of the unions to fight back.</p>
<p>In the spring, the CIO campaigned for third-round wage increases. This drive was seriously weakened at the start by Philip Murray’s declaration that under no circumstances would his steel union strike. No coordinated CIO wage fight was organized.</p>
<p><em>The CIO Packinghouse Workers lost a bitter two-month strike against the “Big Four” meatpackers. Local police and national guards assaulted picket lines. Three pickets were killed by strikebreakers.</em> Local judges handed out anti-picketing injunctions left and right. On May 24, after Truman’s “fact-finding” commission backed the employers’ offer, the packinghouse workers voted to accept employer terms.</p>
<p>The Chrysler workers, in a determined strike, broke the wage log-jam in May with a 13-cent increase. This was followed by settlements in Ford, GM, electrical equipment, rubber and steel. Five presidents of Flint GM locals, who initiated the auto wage campaign, proposed the cost-of-living- sliding wage scale. <em>A sliding-scale clause was included in the new GM contract. While this clause had serious flaws, it did boost GM wages 14-cents an hour by July.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>T-H Act Enforcement</h4>
<p class="fst">Truman and his National Labor Relations Board zealously enforced the Taft-Hartley Act. In May, Truman blocked a scheduled railroad strike by injunction and army seizure. Injunctions were slapped on CIO maritime workers, AFL atomic workers and AFL longshoremen.</p>
<p><em>The AFL International Typographical Union and the United Mine Workers spearheaded the fight against the Taft-Hartley Act.</em> The ITU was hit by a far- reaching NLRB-sponsored injunction in February, aimed principally at its strike against all Chicago daily papers, now in its second year. In April 350,000 soft coal miners, defying an injunction, won their demand for wage increases and retirement pension. Their threat to shut the mines indefinitely prevented imprisonment of John L. Lewis, but Federal Judge Goldsborough extorted a $1,420,000 “contempt” fine.</p>
<p><em>The Taft-Hartley Act inspired fratricidal warfare inside the union movement. Some union leaders, taking advantage of the “non-communist” oath clause, raided non-complying unions and sent scabs through picketlines. Daniel J. Tobin and his lieutenant, David Beck, used AFL teamsters to help smash the 144-day IAM strike at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle.</em></p>
<p>In November East and West Coast shipping was tied up. The CIO maritime strike on the west coast defeated a union-smashing drive. On the Atlantic coast, the first general AFL longshore strike, which began as a revolt against a contract sell-out by ILA President Joseph Ryan, won substantial gains.<br>
</p>
<h4>CP Driven Back</h4>
<p class="fst">It was a year of disaster for the Stalinists in the CIO. The Murray machine waged a smashing offensive against the Stalinists, climaxed at the CIO convention last month when the CIO Executive Board yanked the charter of the Stalinist-controlled Greater New York CIO Council and took authority to intervene in Stalinist-dominated unions. The Stalinists were voted out of power in two of their key bases, the National Maritime Union and Transport Workers Union.</p>
<p>The AFL and CIO post-election conventions were turned into redbaiting demonstrations for U.S. imperialism’s war program. The AFL leaders endorsed anti-labor revision of the Wagner Act. The CIO, leaders strengthened their bureaucratic powers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Congress of Labor</h4>
<p class="fst">Genuine progressive groupings, anti-Stalinist in program and leadership, are developing to challenge the old-line conservative bureaucrats. Such groups have made considerable progress in both the auto and rubber unions.</p>
<p>The outstanding progressive union proposal of the year was the ITU convention’s resolution calling for a National Emergency Congress of Labor, representing all unions, to forge a united labor front to smash the Taft-Hartley Act. This proposal remains the key to successful labor struggle in the coming year for unconditional repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, housing, civil rights, and other legislation.</p>
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Art Preis
1948 in Review – What’s Ahead for 1949
Unions Faced 2-Pronged Attack
of Taft-Hartley Act, Inflation
(27 December 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 52, 27 December 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
American labor in 1948 suffered a government-employer pincers attack – rising prices that slashed real wages and the Taft-Hartley Act that crippled the ability of the unions to fight back.
In the spring, the CIO campaigned for third-round wage increases. This drive was seriously weakened at the start by Philip Murray’s declaration that under no circumstances would his steel union strike. No coordinated CIO wage fight was organized.
The CIO Packinghouse Workers lost a bitter two-month strike against the “Big Four” meatpackers. Local police and national guards assaulted picket lines. Three pickets were killed by strikebreakers. Local judges handed out anti-picketing injunctions left and right. On May 24, after Truman’s “fact-finding” commission backed the employers’ offer, the packinghouse workers voted to accept employer terms.
The Chrysler workers, in a determined strike, broke the wage log-jam in May with a 13-cent increase. This was followed by settlements in Ford, GM, electrical equipment, rubber and steel. Five presidents of Flint GM locals, who initiated the auto wage campaign, proposed the cost-of-living- sliding wage scale. A sliding-scale clause was included in the new GM contract. While this clause had serious flaws, it did boost GM wages 14-cents an hour by July.
T-H Act Enforcement
Truman and his National Labor Relations Board zealously enforced the Taft-Hartley Act. In May, Truman blocked a scheduled railroad strike by injunction and army seizure. Injunctions were slapped on CIO maritime workers, AFL atomic workers and AFL longshoremen.
The AFL International Typographical Union and the United Mine Workers spearheaded the fight against the Taft-Hartley Act. The ITU was hit by a far- reaching NLRB-sponsored injunction in February, aimed principally at its strike against all Chicago daily papers, now in its second year. In April 350,000 soft coal miners, defying an injunction, won their demand for wage increases and retirement pension. Their threat to shut the mines indefinitely prevented imprisonment of John L. Lewis, but Federal Judge Goldsborough extorted a $1,420,000 “contempt” fine.
The Taft-Hartley Act inspired fratricidal warfare inside the union movement. Some union leaders, taking advantage of the “non-communist” oath clause, raided non-complying unions and sent scabs through picketlines. Daniel J. Tobin and his lieutenant, David Beck, used AFL teamsters to help smash the 144-day IAM strike at Boeing Aircraft in Seattle.
In November East and West Coast shipping was tied up. The CIO maritime strike on the west coast defeated a union-smashing drive. On the Atlantic coast, the first general AFL longshore strike, which began as a revolt against a contract sell-out by ILA President Joseph Ryan, won substantial gains.
CP Driven Back
It was a year of disaster for the Stalinists in the CIO. The Murray machine waged a smashing offensive against the Stalinists, climaxed at the CIO convention last month when the CIO Executive Board yanked the charter of the Stalinist-controlled Greater New York CIO Council and took authority to intervene in Stalinist-dominated unions. The Stalinists were voted out of power in two of their key bases, the National Maritime Union and Transport Workers Union.
The AFL and CIO post-election conventions were turned into redbaiting demonstrations for U.S. imperialism’s war program. The AFL leaders endorsed anti-labor revision of the Wagner Act. The CIO, leaders strengthened their bureaucratic powers.
Congress of Labor
Genuine progressive groupings, anti-Stalinist in program and leadership, are developing to challenge the old-line conservative bureaucrats. Such groups have made considerable progress in both the auto and rubber unions.
The outstanding progressive union proposal of the year was the ITU convention’s resolution calling for a National Emergency Congress of Labor, representing all unions, to forge a united labor front to smash the Taft-Hartley Act. This proposal remains the key to successful labor struggle in the coming year for unconditional repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, housing, civil rights, and other legislation.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“Unity” at Last!</h1>
<h3>(30 August 1948)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_35" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 35</a>, 30 August 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">We have just read the news that leading representatives of the American unions have recently met and approved “a common proposal ... in the name of united American labor.” But don’t cheer yet.</p>
<p>This announcement appears in the AFL International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union paper, <b>Justice</b>, of August 15, in an article by Jay Lovestone, renegade from communism and chore-boy for David Dubinsky.</p>
<p>The “common proposal” he speaks of has nothing to do with joint labor action in America to fight the Taft-Hartley Act, halt the current, jurisdictional civil war in the unions or build a Labor Party.</p>
<p>His “united American labor” refers to the delegation of U.S. union big-shots sent over to Western Europe and England as unofficial agents of the U.S. State Department to help sell the imperialist Marshall Plan.</p>
<p>“Breakfast in Rome – afternoon tea in London” keeps the U.S. delegation at a “driving pace” writes Lovestone. These harassed U. S. union officials – including Dubinsky of the AFL, George Harrison of the Railway Labor Clerks, Victor Reuther of the CIO auto workers, David MacDonald and Elmer Cope of the CIO Steelworkers, and a spokesman of the United Mine Workers – hardly had time to “unpack” before they went into “caucus” and “hammered out an agreement on fundamental policy.”</p>
<p>Unity at last! But on how to force the British Trade Union Congress executives, then in session, to agree to “the proposal made by Paul G. Hoffman, Economic Cooperation Administrator, for setting up consultative Anglo-American Committees to stimulate and lift production in Britain.”</p>
<p>It seems the British labor leaders were balking. The British workers consider Hoffman’s proposal as nothing but a Marshall Plan export of American-style speed-up. The U.S. union bosses were over there to “put on the heat.” They made “off-the-record” statements in the British capitalist press that “American labor” is demanding “action” from the English workers; that British union leaders are “too slow and timid” in implementing “European recovery”; that “all barriers to increased production” must be broken; and, above all, that the “restrictive practices” of the British unions – that is, the union rules safeguarding working conditions – must be abolished.</p>
<p>How little the British workers welcome this Marshall Plan “aid” – the speed-up demanded by the Dubinskys, Lovestones, Reuthers, etc. – is shown by the strike last week of 17,000 Austin auto workers in Birmingham, England, against what they called “American mass production methods” – the attempt of the company to get a gear-box cutter to finish 360 boxes instead of 280 a day.</p>
<p>Lovestone glowingly reports that in putting the heat on the British union officials, “Averill Harriman, chief of the OEEC, pointed out that it was the tradition of international labor to go across national lines.”</p>
<p>American labor, like the General Motors workers who have been striking against speed-up, will certainly be delighted to learn that American union officials like Walter Reuther’s brother Victor are trying to get workers in other countries to accept the speed-up “in the name of united American labor” and “international labor solidarity.”</p>
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Art Preis
“Unity” at Last!
(30 August 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 35, 30 August 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
We have just read the news that leading representatives of the American unions have recently met and approved “a common proposal ... in the name of united American labor.” But don’t cheer yet.
This announcement appears in the AFL International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union paper, Justice, of August 15, in an article by Jay Lovestone, renegade from communism and chore-boy for David Dubinsky.
The “common proposal” he speaks of has nothing to do with joint labor action in America to fight the Taft-Hartley Act, halt the current, jurisdictional civil war in the unions or build a Labor Party.
His “united American labor” refers to the delegation of U.S. union big-shots sent over to Western Europe and England as unofficial agents of the U.S. State Department to help sell the imperialist Marshall Plan.
“Breakfast in Rome – afternoon tea in London” keeps the U.S. delegation at a “driving pace” writes Lovestone. These harassed U. S. union officials – including Dubinsky of the AFL, George Harrison of the Railway Labor Clerks, Victor Reuther of the CIO auto workers, David MacDonald and Elmer Cope of the CIO Steelworkers, and a spokesman of the United Mine Workers – hardly had time to “unpack” before they went into “caucus” and “hammered out an agreement on fundamental policy.”
Unity at last! But on how to force the British Trade Union Congress executives, then in session, to agree to “the proposal made by Paul G. Hoffman, Economic Cooperation Administrator, for setting up consultative Anglo-American Committees to stimulate and lift production in Britain.”
It seems the British labor leaders were balking. The British workers consider Hoffman’s proposal as nothing but a Marshall Plan export of American-style speed-up. The U.S. union bosses were over there to “put on the heat.” They made “off-the-record” statements in the British capitalist press that “American labor” is demanding “action” from the English workers; that British union leaders are “too slow and timid” in implementing “European recovery”; that “all barriers to increased production” must be broken; and, above all, that the “restrictive practices” of the British unions – that is, the union rules safeguarding working conditions – must be abolished.
How little the British workers welcome this Marshall Plan “aid” – the speed-up demanded by the Dubinskys, Lovestones, Reuthers, etc. – is shown by the strike last week of 17,000 Austin auto workers in Birmingham, England, against what they called “American mass production methods” – the attempt of the company to get a gear-box cutter to finish 360 boxes instead of 280 a day.
Lovestone glowingly reports that in putting the heat on the British union officials, “Averill Harriman, chief of the OEEC, pointed out that it was the tradition of international labor to go across national lines.”
American labor, like the General Motors workers who have been striking against speed-up, will certainly be delighted to learn that American union officials like Walter Reuther’s brother Victor are trying to get workers in other countries to accept the speed-up “in the name of united American labor” and “international labor solidarity.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>AFL Convention Blocks Labor Unity<br>
by Hostility to Industrial Unions</h1>
<h4>Dubinsky Is a Sorry-Looking Figure<br>
as Craft Moguls Push Him Around</h4>
<h3>(7 December 1940)</h3>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Socialist Appeal</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/socialist-appeal-1940/index.htm#sa04_49" target="new">Vol. 4 No. 49</a>, 7 December 1940, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<br>
<p class="fst"><b>The American Federation of Labor craft chiefs intend to ride to labor “unity” over the broken bones of industrial unionism.</b></p>
<p><b>That was made clear by the just adjourned sixtieth annual convention of the AFL in New Orleans.</b></p>
<p><i>Despite William Green’s reiterated pious prayers for “peace and harmony” and his self-righteous denunciation of John L. Lewis as standing in the way of unity, the AFL head and his lieutenants failed to make the one simple declaration which might have given substance to their charges against Lewis. All Green had to say in order to clear the, path to unity was:</i></p>
<p class="quoteb"><i>“I deny that we intend to obstruct industrial organization or to dismember the mass unions of the CIO in the interests of the craft organizations. The AFL is ready to aid in the building and extension of industrial unions in the mass production industries.”</i></p>
<p class="fst">The deliberate silence of the AFL spokesmen on this one crucial point speaks more loudly than all the flowery “unity” talk unloosed on the delegates. The AFL chiefs are ready to “unite” with the CIO only around the funeral pyre of industrial unionism.</p>
<p>The resolutions and proceedings of the convention merely underline the real meaning of this silence.</p>
<p>One of the first acts of the convention, on November 22, was the endorsement of a proposal contained in the report of the committee on local and federal organization, to deny local AFL councils’ the right to receive communications from any organization not, affiliated with the AFL – a measure aimed at preventing any possibility of united action against the employers by local AFL and CIO bodies. This resolution assumes a particularly vicious character in the light of the inspiring example of labor solidarity given by the various AFL locals in their support of the CIO workers on strike at the Vultee Aircraft plant in Downey, California.</p>
<p>A choice example of how the AFL craft moguls are setting traps for the industrial unions, in the event of unity, is the resolution passed by the convention, on the endorsement of the Executive Council, giving the Council power to suspend international Unions “in cases where 2 or more national and international unions unite and conspire to create and launch ail organization for any purpose dual to the American Federation of Labor.”</p>
<p>David Dubinsky, head of the Intern’al Ladies Garment Workers who deserted the CIO industrial unions [<i>line of text missing</i>] ed would be greener pastures inside the AFL. attempted to oppose this resolution. Dubinsky complained that this resolution was an effort to skirt around a promise which he alleges the Executive Council made to him as a condition for his return to the AFL fold, that no international union would be suspended from the AFL without the majority approval of a convention.</p>
<p>One indication of how the industrial unions would be cut to ribbons if the CIO unions should return to the AFL was given during the session of November 26. Representatives of several local “federal” unions, which have a semi-industrial character, caused a minor storm in the convention by charging the craft unions with raiding their membership.<br>
</p>
<h4>Craft Raids Protested</h4>
<p class="fst">Michael O’Gorman, representing a federal union of 2,800 members at the Midvale Steel Co. in Philadelphia, attacked the craft unions on this score and pleaded with the craft internationals “to leave us alone.” Morris Pratt, speaking for the Refinery Workers federal union of East St. Louis, charged that the Operating Engineers Union was trying to “take over” his organization. Other delegates from federal unions made the same plaint.</p>
<p>Even Dubinsky, making a violent denunciation of the CIO and Lewis on the question of unity negotiations, was forced to call attention – in his own cowardly and feeble way to be sure – to the real hostility toward industrial organization still burning fiercely among the AFL tops. During the session of November 28, Dubinsky pleaded with the craft chiefs, declaring, “There is no need for differences between labor. But there, must be a broader attitude toward those who favor industrial organization.” He admitted sadly that he would prefer a “more progressive” attitude in the AFL toward the problem of organizing the unorganized and the industrial form of union.<br>
</p>
<h4>Jim Crow Continues</h4>
<p class="fst">In striking contrast with the brotherhood with which the many Negro delegates were treated at the CIO convention, and the various progressive steps taken by the CIO to unite the Negro and white workers, the AFL convention reaffirmed its traditional Jim-Crow policy. The modest proposal of A. Philip Randolph, President of the Sleeping Car Porters, for the setting up of an inter-racial committee within the Federation to remedy discrimination by unions against Negro workers, was rejected. The convention merely repeated the hands-off formula it has used so often before, merely asking the international unions “to give most sincere consideration” to the problem – carefully avoiding the setting up of any machinery which might actually do something on the matter. The action of the convention brought a bitter and merited rebuke from Randolph who year after year has vainly sought justice for his people from the craft-moguls.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fawning Upon Roosevelt</h4>
<p class="fst">One of the most disgusting aspects of the convention was the manner in which Green and Co. fawned and scraped before the government and its representatives. While graciously accepting an $8,000 increase, bringing his yearly salary to $20,000, Green was eager to offer the “sacrifices” of the workers for the sake of “national defense.”</p>
<p>Green went so far as to state: “There are a number of ways in which we (!) can sacrifice – by giving service of the highest order and by preventing the interruption of production through stoppages for any trivial reason – or <i>for any reason</i>.”</p>
<p>The next day, it is true, Green back-watered on this extreme assertion by excitedly informing them press, “I meant no such thing as giving up the right to strike. I was referring to the need of setting up tribunals or other machinery to safeguard against the necessity for strikes.” No doubt a lot of heat had been turned on Green by some of the delegates between the two statements.<br>
</p>
<h4>The “Racketeering” Issue</h4>
<p class="fst">The sorriest spectacle at the convention was Dubinsky.</p>
<p>He introduced a resolution to give the AFL executive council power to oust any union official found guilty of “any offense involving moral turpitude.”</p>
<p>All Dubinsky received for his efforts was a good sock in the mouth and the enmity of all his “friends” among the AFL officialdom.</p>
<p>The officialdom, in turn, presented a cowardly front on the whole matter. Instead of telling the bosses to go to hell and keep their snouts out of the internal affairs of the unions; denouncing the smear campaign “to help Labor for its own good” as nothing but an attempt by the bosses to get their fingers into the union affairs; and instructing the bankers and industrialists to have a mind for their own racketeering which takes billions for the thousands taken by the relatively few labor racketeers; the AFL leaders passed a feeble resolution condemning racketeering in general as a concession to this boss pressure.</p>
<p>Nothing is more condemnatory of the entire conduct of this convention than the fact that a major share of its time was spent in fighting and fumbling over the Issue of’ “racketeering.”</p>
<p>To add spice to the mess concocted at the convention by the craft chiefs, Madame Perkins, Milo Warner, head of the American Legion, and Sir Walter Citrine, and a whole parade of similar types, whooped it up for war, unlimited support to the Roosevelt administration and its anti-labor pro-war program, and for more “sacrifices” from the workers. Citrine, who was knighted by the British monarchy and not Without cause, described “with pride” the “voluntary” surrender by British labor of the right to ‘strike and the acceptance of “practically unlimited” working hours in the interests of British imperialism.</p>
<p>In every respect this AFL convention demonstrated that the CIO is still the basic and progressive union organization of American labor.</p>
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Art Preis
AFL Convention Blocks Labor Unity
by Hostility to Industrial Unions
Dubinsky Is a Sorry-Looking Figure
as Craft Moguls Push Him Around
(7 December 1940)
From Socialist Appeal, Vol. 4 No. 49, 7 December 1940, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The American Federation of Labor craft chiefs intend to ride to labor “unity” over the broken bones of industrial unionism.
That was made clear by the just adjourned sixtieth annual convention of the AFL in New Orleans.
Despite William Green’s reiterated pious prayers for “peace and harmony” and his self-righteous denunciation of John L. Lewis as standing in the way of unity, the AFL head and his lieutenants failed to make the one simple declaration which might have given substance to their charges against Lewis. All Green had to say in order to clear the, path to unity was:
“I deny that we intend to obstruct industrial organization or to dismember the mass unions of the CIO in the interests of the craft organizations. The AFL is ready to aid in the building and extension of industrial unions in the mass production industries.”
The deliberate silence of the AFL spokesmen on this one crucial point speaks more loudly than all the flowery “unity” talk unloosed on the delegates. The AFL chiefs are ready to “unite” with the CIO only around the funeral pyre of industrial unionism.
The resolutions and proceedings of the convention merely underline the real meaning of this silence.
One of the first acts of the convention, on November 22, was the endorsement of a proposal contained in the report of the committee on local and federal organization, to deny local AFL councils’ the right to receive communications from any organization not, affiliated with the AFL – a measure aimed at preventing any possibility of united action against the employers by local AFL and CIO bodies. This resolution assumes a particularly vicious character in the light of the inspiring example of labor solidarity given by the various AFL locals in their support of the CIO workers on strike at the Vultee Aircraft plant in Downey, California.
A choice example of how the AFL craft moguls are setting traps for the industrial unions, in the event of unity, is the resolution passed by the convention, on the endorsement of the Executive Council, giving the Council power to suspend international Unions “in cases where 2 or more national and international unions unite and conspire to create and launch ail organization for any purpose dual to the American Federation of Labor.”
David Dubinsky, head of the Intern’al Ladies Garment Workers who deserted the CIO industrial unions [line of text missing] ed would be greener pastures inside the AFL. attempted to oppose this resolution. Dubinsky complained that this resolution was an effort to skirt around a promise which he alleges the Executive Council made to him as a condition for his return to the AFL fold, that no international union would be suspended from the AFL without the majority approval of a convention.
One indication of how the industrial unions would be cut to ribbons if the CIO unions should return to the AFL was given during the session of November 26. Representatives of several local “federal” unions, which have a semi-industrial character, caused a minor storm in the convention by charging the craft unions with raiding their membership.
Craft Raids Protested
Michael O’Gorman, representing a federal union of 2,800 members at the Midvale Steel Co. in Philadelphia, attacked the craft unions on this score and pleaded with the craft internationals “to leave us alone.” Morris Pratt, speaking for the Refinery Workers federal union of East St. Louis, charged that the Operating Engineers Union was trying to “take over” his organization. Other delegates from federal unions made the same plaint.
Even Dubinsky, making a violent denunciation of the CIO and Lewis on the question of unity negotiations, was forced to call attention – in his own cowardly and feeble way to be sure – to the real hostility toward industrial organization still burning fiercely among the AFL tops. During the session of November 28, Dubinsky pleaded with the craft chiefs, declaring, “There is no need for differences between labor. But there, must be a broader attitude toward those who favor industrial organization.” He admitted sadly that he would prefer a “more progressive” attitude in the AFL toward the problem of organizing the unorganized and the industrial form of union.
Jim Crow Continues
In striking contrast with the brotherhood with which the many Negro delegates were treated at the CIO convention, and the various progressive steps taken by the CIO to unite the Negro and white workers, the AFL convention reaffirmed its traditional Jim-Crow policy. The modest proposal of A. Philip Randolph, President of the Sleeping Car Porters, for the setting up of an inter-racial committee within the Federation to remedy discrimination by unions against Negro workers, was rejected. The convention merely repeated the hands-off formula it has used so often before, merely asking the international unions “to give most sincere consideration” to the problem – carefully avoiding the setting up of any machinery which might actually do something on the matter. The action of the convention brought a bitter and merited rebuke from Randolph who year after year has vainly sought justice for his people from the craft-moguls.
Fawning Upon Roosevelt
One of the most disgusting aspects of the convention was the manner in which Green and Co. fawned and scraped before the government and its representatives. While graciously accepting an $8,000 increase, bringing his yearly salary to $20,000, Green was eager to offer the “sacrifices” of the workers for the sake of “national defense.”
Green went so far as to state: “There are a number of ways in which we (!) can sacrifice – by giving service of the highest order and by preventing the interruption of production through stoppages for any trivial reason – or for any reason.”
The next day, it is true, Green back-watered on this extreme assertion by excitedly informing them press, “I meant no such thing as giving up the right to strike. I was referring to the need of setting up tribunals or other machinery to safeguard against the necessity for strikes.” No doubt a lot of heat had been turned on Green by some of the delegates between the two statements.
The “Racketeering” Issue
The sorriest spectacle at the convention was Dubinsky.
He introduced a resolution to give the AFL executive council power to oust any union official found guilty of “any offense involving moral turpitude.”
All Dubinsky received for his efforts was a good sock in the mouth and the enmity of all his “friends” among the AFL officialdom.
The officialdom, in turn, presented a cowardly front on the whole matter. Instead of telling the bosses to go to hell and keep their snouts out of the internal affairs of the unions; denouncing the smear campaign “to help Labor for its own good” as nothing but an attempt by the bosses to get their fingers into the union affairs; and instructing the bankers and industrialists to have a mind for their own racketeering which takes billions for the thousands taken by the relatively few labor racketeers; the AFL leaders passed a feeble resolution condemning racketeering in general as a concession to this boss pressure.
Nothing is more condemnatory of the entire conduct of this convention than the fact that a major share of its time was spent in fighting and fumbling over the Issue of’ “racketeering.”
To add spice to the mess concocted at the convention by the craft chiefs, Madame Perkins, Milo Warner, head of the American Legion, and Sir Walter Citrine, and a whole parade of similar types, whooped it up for war, unlimited support to the Roosevelt administration and its anti-labor pro-war program, and for more “sacrifices” from the workers. Citrine, who was knighted by the British monarchy and not Without cause, described “with pride” the “voluntary” surrender by British labor of the right to ‘strike and the acceptance of “practically unlimited” working hours in the interests of British imperialism.
In every respect this AFL convention demonstrated that the CIO is still the basic and progressive union organization of American labor.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Atlantic City Auto Union Convention</h1>
<h3>(May 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>Fourth International</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/fi/index2.htm#fi46_05" target="new">Vol. 7 No. 5</a>, May 1946, pp. 149–152.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p> <hr noshade="noshade" size="1" width="100%">
<p class="fst">It is unfortunate that the central issue before the CIO United Automobile Workers convention, held March 23–30 in Atlantic City, found expression only indirectly through the struggle among the top leaders for posts.</p>
<p>Most of the basic questions were not discussed openly on the convention floor. This obscured the vital differences on program and policy which underlay and gave so bitter a character to the fight for the UAW presidency between General Motors strike leader Walter P. Reuther and the incumbent president, R.J. Thomas.</p>
<p>That more was involved than a mere conflict of personalities was indicated in part by the capitalist press, which paid extraordinary attention to the convention’s daily proceedings. Leading newspapers reported edition by edition the progress of the hours-long roll call vote for the UAW presidency and half-hour radio bulletins were flashed all over the country.</p>
<p>In the minds of the majority of delegates, the basic issue, though never clearly expressed, was the program and policies of the GM strike. By their majority vote for Reuther as UAW president, the delegates vindicated the GM strike and intimated their desire for the continuation and development of the program and policies implicit in that strike. In this sense, the underlying conflict at the 1946 UAW convention was a continuation and extension of the struggle that dominated the previous convention in September 1944. The 1944 convention, held at the height of the war, was wracked by the fight over the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>For nearly three years the auto workers, like the rest of labor, had been caught in the vise of the wage freeze and wartime inflation. Their accumulated grievances had been buried under mountains of War Labor Board red tape. The corporations were violating contracts and committing provocations with impunity. The whole struggle of the auto militants was centered on breaking the shackles of the no-strike policy forged by their leaders.</p>
<p>Although the UAW top leadership had always been torn by factional differences, it nevertheless united against the ranks in defense of the no-strike policy. Reuther, it is true, attempted to cater to the militant sentiments by presenting a “compromise” proposal. But unable to straddle the fence on the issue, in the end he went down the line with the rest of the leadership.</p>
<p>Although the opponents of the no-strike pledge mustered some 35 percent of the convention votes, they could not swing a majority. Their chief obstacle, and one they were not ready to confront, was the fact that the auto workers in the main supported the war and Roosevelt’s war program. The convention delegates knew, and the leadership pounded home the fact, that to scrap the no-strike policy meant an open, bitter fight against Roosevelt and the government.</p>
<p>The majority were not prepared to make that fight. But neither were they prepared to accept the consequences of the no-strike pledge, which meant unconditional surrender to the arrogant corporations. They therefore left the decision inconclusive and finally voted to refer the issue to a membership referendum.</p>
<p>This referendum, however, in turn proved inconclusive. When the results were announced in March 1945, it was revealed that less than 20 percent of the membership had cast ballots. A significant third of the votes were for rejecting the no-strike pledge, but the majority of the relatively small number voting endorsed it.</p>
<p>Armed with this mandate, the UAW leaders proceeded to crack down on the union militants. The latter, having no officially recognized and effective means to resist the mounting corporation provocations, were goaded into one desperate and isolated “wild cat” strike after another. The leadership merely redoubled its strikebreaking efforts and retaliated with new threats and increasingly harsh “disciplinary” measures against leading local militants. The emboldened corporations, with the sanction of the International union leaders, fired not a few good union men and began a systematic campaign of provocations.</p>
<p>By the summer of 1945, prior to V-J Day, the UAW was blazing from one end to the other with “wild-cat” strikes. Like volunteer firemen in a dry summer, the UAW leaders were racing from one strike to the next trying to smother the flames. At one point, as Reuther admitted during one of his caucus rallies in Atlantic City, the UAW Executive Board confronted no less than 67 simultaneous unauthorized strikes.</p>
<p>The union was rent by an increasingly fierce conflict between the ranks and the leadership. The latter met the demands of the members for militant resistance to the corporations only by new bureaucratic expulsions, removal of local leaderships and similar suppressive measures.</p>
<p>This policy was climaxed during the bitter Kelsey-Hayes strike which lasted six weeks. This strike occurred in September and October 1945, following V-J Day, after the UAW Executive Board had formally renounced the no-strike pledge, already scrapped in practice by the membership.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, headed by R J. Thomas, the UAW leaders sought by every means of deception and intimidation to break the Kelsey-Hayes strike. In the end, the workers were forced back to work with several local leaders remaining fired. The local union was placed in the hands of an appointed dictator-receivership. This outstanding act of strikebreaking and bureaucratic practice cost the leadership a further tremendous loss of prestige.</p>
<p>Thus, during the period following the no-strike referendum, the UAW presented a disorganized and chaotic appearance. It had no leadership nor effective program. “Wild-cat” strikes, while reflecting the just indignation of the workers and their will to struggle, were an isolated and sporadic form of resistance and therefore ineffective. This was appreciated by the most advanced militants in the UAW.</p>
<p>In Detroit, 40 local union presidents came together in the middle of May, 1945 and formulated a program for the union. Already, the UAW was beset by cutbacks and increasing unemployment. The auto workers were feeling the pinch of the loss of overtime pay through the return to the 40-hour week. The demand was raised for a fight against reduction of take-home pay, concretized in the slogan “52 hours pay for 40 hours work.”<br>
</p>
<h4>The June Regional Conferences</h4>
<p class="fst">Then at a conference of 400 local union officers of the two largest UAW regions, 1 and 1A of Detroit, held June 14, 1945, against the opposition of the UAW top leaders, headed by R.J. Thomas, the delegates approved with only 20 dissenting votes a resolution calling on the UAW Executive Board to initiate an industry-wide strike vote “to guarantee success of their negotiations” for a “30 percent hourly pay increase.”</p>
<p>This resolution was in opposition to an official resolution, introduced by a hand-picked Resolutions Committee majority. The latter was virtually identical with the minority resolution – with the omission of the call for strike action. Thomas spoke heatedly against the minority resolution and against the union being “rabble-roused into a strike.” Richard T. Leonard, Director of the UAW’s Ford Department and later author of the notorious “company security” clause, was chairman of the meeting. He tried to call the minority resolution “out of order,” but was overruled by the conference. The well-known Stalinist John Anderson, of Detroit Amalgamated Local 155, was the only local union officer who opposed the strike recommendation from the floor.</p>
<p>Reuther alone among the top UAW officers appreciated the powerful sentiment for militant action. And he began to ride with the tide. In an evasive, but militant-sounding speech, he spoke of the need for “reevaluating the basic policy of the union.”</p>
<p>Two months after the Detroit Regional Conference, with the surrender of Japan, Thomas was forced to announce the formal end of the UAW’s no-strike pledge. But he accompanied it with a fearful admonition against any “rash of strikes” and threats against strikes “without authorization of the International President and Executive Board.”</p>
<p>Thus, even after the war had ended and on the eve of the greatest strike wave in American history, the Thomas-Addes leadership represented a conservative, weak and timid policy. They wanted to continue the policy of class collaboration, of reliance upon the capitalist government, which had reached its most disastrous point during the war years.</p>
<p>Reuther, on the other hand, seized hold of the situation. He began to give more and more positive leadership to the militant trend. At the General Motors Delegates Conference on September 15 he supported the decision for a corporation-wide strike “to take place within two months.” That titanic strike began on schedule, November 21, 1945.</p>
<p>The Thomas-Addes-Leonard faction never really supported the GM strike. They merely “went along” with it insofar as they could not prevent or derail it. What they subscribed to most readily was the weakest part of Reuther’s program, his “one-at-a-time” strategy. The major concern of the Thomas-Addes group throughout the GM strike was to prevent its spread to Ford, Chrysler and other companies.</p>
<p>It was the merit of Reuther that, by and large, he gave the GM strike aggressive leadership. He certainly weakened along the road, as when he yielded to Truman’s pressure and appeared before the administration’s “fact-finding” board after having condemned it. But he was a model of resoluteness compared to the conservative and timid conduct of Thomas.</p>
<p>The GM strike became the spearhead of the whole American labor struggle for higher wages. It inspired and set the pattern for the gigantic strike wave in January–February 1946 when nearly two million workers of entire basic industries, such as steel, electrical equipment, meat packing, fought simultaneously on the picket lines.</p>
<p>Above all, the GM strike set the example for a policy of militant class struggle as against class collaboration with the employers and their government. It showed the industrial workers the road to victory through fighting action.<br>
</p>
<h4>Unique Program of GM Strike</h4>
<p class="fst">Moreover, the GM strike was unique in other respects. Its program went beyond the question of immediate wage increases. The GM workers advanced new and important demands affecting the broadest economic and political issues. They posed the question of prices, profits and the control of production – matters which the capitalist owners of industry have always insisted are the exclusive “prerogatives of management.”</p>
<p>By contrast with the militant policies and advanced program of the GM strike, the Thomas-Addes-Leonard group pursued a conservative course, best exemplified in the negotiations with the Ford Motor Company.</p>
<p>They wanted to demonstrate the superior effectiveness of “labor statesmenship,” that is, a policy of collaboration with the corporations, as against strike action.</p>
<p>The “labor statesmen” finally came out with an agreement for an 18-cent an hour raise. This raise was actually won for the Ford workers by the GM strikers. But in hastening to accept Ford’s 18-cent offer, the UAW Ford negotiators headed by Leonard, seriously undercut the 30 cents-an-hour wage demand of the GM workers, not to speak of the 19% cents they might have won on the basis of the government’s own recommendation.</p>
<p>Moreover, the UAW Ford representatives acceded to the Ford Company’s demand for “company security,” that is, the right of the company to fine and fire workers for so-called unauthorized strike action. Only widespread membership opposition forced modification of the “company security” clause in the final contract. But it was retained in principle.</p>
<p>This unprecedented concession to the corporation was designed, both from the standpoint of the company and the union officials, to lay the basis for eliminating the best union militants from the plants. Remembering the “wildcat” strikes for which they themselves were responsible, the Thomas-Leonard-Addes group determined, in collaboration with the employers to establish a method of curbing the militants through empowering the companies to victimize strikers.</p>
<p>At the same time, they sought to hasten the end of the GM strike through proposals for impermissible concessions. Such was Thomas’s proposal to reopen the GM parts plants during the strike. Later, he wanted to end the strike without settlement of the extremely important local plant grievances.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the Thomas-Addes-Leonard group sought the intervention of CIO president Philip Murray in order to take the negotiations out of the hands of Reuther and the elected nine-man GM negotiations committee. They directed a persistent underhanded attack at Reuther and his aggressive methods in an effort to destroy his prestige with the GM workers. This attempt to undermine the GM strike and discredit Reuther largely failed, as the recent UAW convention proved.</p>
<p>Thus, what was on the order of the day for the convention was the question of endorsement or repudiation of the General Motors strike, its general policies and program. And with the examination of the GM strike, should have come a thorough consideration of those key issues which arose out of the whole auto negotiations and struggle. Two of these key issues were “company security” and the “fact-finding” procedure of semi-compulsory arbitration.</p>
<p>But the delegates were denied the opportunity to discuss” the GM strike and the related issues. Certainly the Thomas-Addes-Leonard-Stalinist caucus was anxious to avoid any open discussion. This was made abundantly clear when they wiggled out of a proposed debate between Reuther and Thomas through slick parliamentary maneuvering in spite of the majority demand of the convention.</p>
<p>As for Reuther, aside from his demonstrative challenge for a debate, he made no real effort to bring the issues on the floor.</p>
<p>In this sense, the leadership of the Reuther caucus were as much responsible for the muddled and inconclusive character of the UAW convention as their factional opponents. They fixed their eyes mainly on posts and played narrow, so-called “straight” politics. In order to win votes they catered to the more backward and conservative elements, made “deals” with unsavory individuals and skirted the questions of principle.<br>
</p>
<h4>Responsibility of Both Caucuses</h4>
<p class="fst">The issue was boiled down to the question of “For Reuther” or “For Thomas” – for the endorsement of the GM strike or against it. The delegates could not go beyond this point into the elaboration of a program based on their decision. There was no movement in the ranks prepared to push a third alternative to the two presented by the main divisions of the convention.</p>
<p>Reuther played conservative at the convention. He concentrated on the “backwoods” vote by stressing matters of organizational procedure and policy, as well as emphasizing his desire for “responsible” leadership in contrast to his alleged “radicalism.” While the main base of the Reuther caucus consisted of the most progressive militants, Reuther’s intimate machine included many questionable and reactionary elements. Reuther, hell-bent on election, decided he could not alienate any votes. That accounts for the conservative, “statesmanlike” nature of his convention campaign.</p>
<p>A typical example of Reuther’s unprincipled deals with unsavory elements was his support of Melvin Bishop, discredited director of Region 1, Detroit, for first vice-president running against R.J. Thomas. Bishop was thoroughly despised by the workers in his region. He had played ball with the corporations during the war to the extent of going to the managements and having them fire militant workers. He had done this against popular militants at both Hudson and Briggs, two of the principle locals in his region.</p>
<p>When it came to a choice between Bishop, whose name symbolized conspiracy with the corporations, and Thomas, the entire Briggs delegation with one of the largest blocks of votes reluctantly determined to vote for Thomas. Their vote swung many others, and Thomas was elected by a sizable majority.</p>
<p>An especially bad aspect of Reuther’s policy was his catering to Jim-Crow elements. Most notorious was his alliance with Richard Gosser, regional director from the Toledo, O., area, who had been repeatedly condemned for his policy of discrimination against Negroes. Richard Gosser, regional director from the Toledo area, still maintained backward prejudices against Negroes inclined toward support of Reuther. But the very important, influential and militant section of Negro delegates, who should have been with the main stream of militants in Reuther’s caucus, largely supported the conservative wing.</p>
<p>The Stalinists, who were allied with the anti-GM strike, “company security” faction of Thomas-Addes-Leonard, were principally responsible for keeping the support of the Negro delegates for the conservative caucus.</p>
<p>The Stalinists were able demagogically to exploit Reuther’s weakness on the Negro question. They took the lead in proposing the establishment of a post on the Executive Board for a Negro representative.</p>
<p>Both the Reuther and Thomas-Addes-Leonard caucus leaders opposed this proposal. Indeed, the most vicious speech against it was made by Ben Garrison, of Ford Highland Park Local 400, the man who made the presidential nominating speech for Thomas. But the fact that the Stalinists, who conspicuously and vigorously supported Thomas, initiated the fight for a Negro Board member played an important part in cementing the support of many Negro delegates for the Thomas-Addes-Leonard clique.</p>
<p>A small section of the most progressive elements in the Reuther caucus also backed the proposal for a Negro board member. These militants, however, pointed out the failure of both caucuses to nominate any of the well-qualified Negro delegates for a top UAW post.<br>
</p>
<h4>The Outstanding Event</h4>
<p class="fst">The positive aspect of the outstanding event of the UAW convention, the election of Reuther over R.J. Thomas, was its implicit endorsement of the GM strike. This fact stands out above all others and remains as the unique achievement of the convention.</p>
<p>The majority of delegates voted in favor of precisely those policies which the capitalist press, and the conservative UAW and CIO leaders, so vigorously condemned. These are the policies which Thomas called in one caucus meeting “socialistic experimentation.”</p>
<p>They are, in truth, far from “socialistic.” But they 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.” That, at least, is what the majority voted for in voting for Reuther.</p>
<p>At the same time, they were voting against something. They were voting against timidity and conservatism and bureaucratism.</p>
<p>To the superficial observer, it might appear that the net outcome of the UAW convention has been, with the exception of the change of presidents, to maintain a continuation of conservative leadership. That is what seems to be the case since the top officers and executive board are composed of a conservative majority.</p>
<p>But it would be incorrect to conceive of this leadership as fixed and unchanging in its policies and line-ups. More than once in the history of the dynamic, democratic and militant UAW, the pressure and movement of the ranks have forced significant shifts and changes on the top.</p>
<p>It need only be recalled that Reuther himself, the most progressive of the UAW leaders in 1946, was the chief spokesman in 1941 for the right wing tendency which sought to bar “communists” and which advanced a pro-war policy.</p>
<p>In evaluating the role of the various top leaders and tendencies in the coming period, the militants will have to keep in mind the possibilities of shifts and changes. The tactics of the most advanced and progressive elements must be based not on preconceived evaluations, but rather on an exact analysis and appreciation of the new factors that are almost certain to arise.</p>
<p>All the issues left unresolved by the past convention, will recur in sharpened form. New issues will break to the surface.</p>
<p>The auto workers in particular, and the labor movement in general, will not face a quiet, placid existence in the next period. In their drive to organize the unorganized, particularly in the South, the CIO and UAW will confront a tremendous reactionary opposition. The question of “company security,” of collaboration with the government “fact-finding” procedure, of militant struggle versus dependence on government agencies, will arise repeatedly.</p>
<p>The political aspect of the labor struggle will come to the fore. Political issues, which have played so important a factor in the great strike struggles, will take on an ever more compelling character.</p>
<p>Big Business is conducting a tremendous inflationary drive to wipe out wage gains and augment huge profits. A new period of intensified reaction is being prepared as part of American imperialism’s program for another World War to destroy the Soviet Union and to achieve undisputed rule of the world.</p>
<p>A crucial period of political crisis is imminent. It will pose sharply before American labor the key question of a break with the policy of political collaboration with the capitalist class and its government.</p>
<p>Already one notes a significant and growing sentiment for the formation of a party of labor independent of the Democratic and Republican parties of Wall Street. There were reflections of this growing sentiment in the vague expressions of both Reuther and Thomas during the course of the UAW convention for a possible “progressive third party.”</p>
<p>The abysmal and shameful weakness of American labor on the political arena was borne out repeatedly during the strike wave. Time and time again the mighty organized power of labor on the economic arena has been nullified on the political field. Experience has been hammering that fact home to the American workers.</p>
<p>It is safe to assume the likelihood that the September 1947 convention of the UAW will see many of the unresolved issues of the past convention express themselves in dominant form. And these issues will extend in no small degree on to the decisive political plane.</p> <p class="link"><a href="#top">Top of page</a></p>
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The Atlantic City Auto Union Convention
(May 1946)
From Fourth International, Vol. 7 No. 5, May 1946, pp. 149–152.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
It is unfortunate that the central issue before the CIO United Automobile Workers convention, held March 23–30 in Atlantic City, found expression only indirectly through the struggle among the top leaders for posts.
Most of the basic questions were not discussed openly on the convention floor. This obscured the vital differences on program and policy which underlay and gave so bitter a character to the fight for the UAW presidency between General Motors strike leader Walter P. Reuther and the incumbent president, R.J. Thomas.
That more was involved than a mere conflict of personalities was indicated in part by the capitalist press, which paid extraordinary attention to the convention’s daily proceedings. Leading newspapers reported edition by edition the progress of the hours-long roll call vote for the UAW presidency and half-hour radio bulletins were flashed all over the country.
In the minds of the majority of delegates, the basic issue, though never clearly expressed, was the program and policies of the GM strike. By their majority vote for Reuther as UAW president, the delegates vindicated the GM strike and intimated their desire for the continuation and development of the program and policies implicit in that strike. In this sense, the underlying conflict at the 1946 UAW convention was a continuation and extension of the struggle that dominated the previous convention in September 1944. The 1944 convention, held at the height of the war, was wracked by the fight over the no-strike pledge.
For nearly three years the auto workers, like the rest of labor, had been caught in the vise of the wage freeze and wartime inflation. Their accumulated grievances had been buried under mountains of War Labor Board red tape. The corporations were violating contracts and committing provocations with impunity. The whole struggle of the auto militants was centered on breaking the shackles of the no-strike policy forged by their leaders.
Although the UAW top leadership had always been torn by factional differences, it nevertheless united against the ranks in defense of the no-strike policy. Reuther, it is true, attempted to cater to the militant sentiments by presenting a “compromise” proposal. But unable to straddle the fence on the issue, in the end he went down the line with the rest of the leadership.
Although the opponents of the no-strike pledge mustered some 35 percent of the convention votes, they could not swing a majority. Their chief obstacle, and one they were not ready to confront, was the fact that the auto workers in the main supported the war and Roosevelt’s war program. The convention delegates knew, and the leadership pounded home the fact, that to scrap the no-strike policy meant an open, bitter fight against Roosevelt and the government.
The majority were not prepared to make that fight. But neither were they prepared to accept the consequences of the no-strike pledge, which meant unconditional surrender to the arrogant corporations. They therefore left the decision inconclusive and finally voted to refer the issue to a membership referendum.
This referendum, however, in turn proved inconclusive. When the results were announced in March 1945, it was revealed that less than 20 percent of the membership had cast ballots. A significant third of the votes were for rejecting the no-strike pledge, but the majority of the relatively small number voting endorsed it.
Armed with this mandate, the UAW leaders proceeded to crack down on the union militants. The latter, having no officially recognized and effective means to resist the mounting corporation provocations, were goaded into one desperate and isolated “wild cat” strike after another. The leadership merely redoubled its strikebreaking efforts and retaliated with new threats and increasingly harsh “disciplinary” measures against leading local militants. The emboldened corporations, with the sanction of the International union leaders, fired not a few good union men and began a systematic campaign of provocations.
By the summer of 1945, prior to V-J Day, the UAW was blazing from one end to the other with “wild-cat” strikes. Like volunteer firemen in a dry summer, the UAW leaders were racing from one strike to the next trying to smother the flames. At one point, as Reuther admitted during one of his caucus rallies in Atlantic City, the UAW Executive Board confronted no less than 67 simultaneous unauthorized strikes.
The union was rent by an increasingly fierce conflict between the ranks and the leadership. The latter met the demands of the members for militant resistance to the corporations only by new bureaucratic expulsions, removal of local leaderships and similar suppressive measures.
This policy was climaxed during the bitter Kelsey-Hayes strike which lasted six weeks. This strike occurred in September and October 1945, following V-J Day, after the UAW Executive Board had formally renounced the no-strike pledge, already scrapped in practice by the membership.
Nevertheless, headed by R J. Thomas, the UAW leaders sought by every means of deception and intimidation to break the Kelsey-Hayes strike. In the end, the workers were forced back to work with several local leaders remaining fired. The local union was placed in the hands of an appointed dictator-receivership. This outstanding act of strikebreaking and bureaucratic practice cost the leadership a further tremendous loss of prestige.
Thus, during the period following the no-strike referendum, the UAW presented a disorganized and chaotic appearance. It had no leadership nor effective program. “Wild-cat” strikes, while reflecting the just indignation of the workers and their will to struggle, were an isolated and sporadic form of resistance and therefore ineffective. This was appreciated by the most advanced militants in the UAW.
In Detroit, 40 local union presidents came together in the middle of May, 1945 and formulated a program for the union. Already, the UAW was beset by cutbacks and increasing unemployment. The auto workers were feeling the pinch of the loss of overtime pay through the return to the 40-hour week. The demand was raised for a fight against reduction of take-home pay, concretized in the slogan “52 hours pay for 40 hours work.”
The June Regional Conferences
Then at a conference of 400 local union officers of the two largest UAW regions, 1 and 1A of Detroit, held June 14, 1945, against the opposition of the UAW top leaders, headed by R.J. Thomas, the delegates approved with only 20 dissenting votes a resolution calling on the UAW Executive Board to initiate an industry-wide strike vote “to guarantee success of their negotiations” for a “30 percent hourly pay increase.”
This resolution was in opposition to an official resolution, introduced by a hand-picked Resolutions Committee majority. The latter was virtually identical with the minority resolution – with the omission of the call for strike action. Thomas spoke heatedly against the minority resolution and against the union being “rabble-roused into a strike.” Richard T. Leonard, Director of the UAW’s Ford Department and later author of the notorious “company security” clause, was chairman of the meeting. He tried to call the minority resolution “out of order,” but was overruled by the conference. The well-known Stalinist John Anderson, of Detroit Amalgamated Local 155, was the only local union officer who opposed the strike recommendation from the floor.
Reuther alone among the top UAW officers appreciated the powerful sentiment for militant action. And he began to ride with the tide. In an evasive, but militant-sounding speech, he spoke of the need for “reevaluating the basic policy of the union.”
Two months after the Detroit Regional Conference, with the surrender of Japan, Thomas was forced to announce the formal end of the UAW’s no-strike pledge. But he accompanied it with a fearful admonition against any “rash of strikes” and threats against strikes “without authorization of the International President and Executive Board.”
Thus, even after the war had ended and on the eve of the greatest strike wave in American history, the Thomas-Addes leadership represented a conservative, weak and timid policy. They wanted to continue the policy of class collaboration, of reliance upon the capitalist government, which had reached its most disastrous point during the war years.
Reuther, on the other hand, seized hold of the situation. He began to give more and more positive leadership to the militant trend. At the General Motors Delegates Conference on September 15 he supported the decision for a corporation-wide strike “to take place within two months.” That titanic strike began on schedule, November 21, 1945.
The Thomas-Addes-Leonard faction never really supported the GM strike. They merely “went along” with it insofar as they could not prevent or derail it. What they subscribed to most readily was the weakest part of Reuther’s program, his “one-at-a-time” strategy. The major concern of the Thomas-Addes group throughout the GM strike was to prevent its spread to Ford, Chrysler and other companies.
It was the merit of Reuther that, by and large, he gave the GM strike aggressive leadership. He certainly weakened along the road, as when he yielded to Truman’s pressure and appeared before the administration’s “fact-finding” board after having condemned it. But he was a model of resoluteness compared to the conservative and timid conduct of Thomas.
The GM strike became the spearhead of the whole American labor struggle for higher wages. It inspired and set the pattern for the gigantic strike wave in January–February 1946 when nearly two million workers of entire basic industries, such as steel, electrical equipment, meat packing, fought simultaneously on the picket lines.
Above all, the GM strike set the example for a policy of militant class struggle as against class collaboration with the employers and their government. It showed the industrial workers the road to victory through fighting action.
Unique Program of GM Strike
Moreover, the GM strike was unique in other respects. Its program went beyond the question of immediate wage increases. The GM workers advanced new and important demands affecting the broadest economic and political issues. They posed the question of prices, profits and the control of production – matters which the capitalist owners of industry have always insisted are the exclusive “prerogatives of management.”
By contrast with the militant policies and advanced program of the GM strike, the Thomas-Addes-Leonard group pursued a conservative course, best exemplified in the negotiations with the Ford Motor Company.
They wanted to demonstrate the superior effectiveness of “labor statesmenship,” that is, a policy of collaboration with the corporations, as against strike action.
The “labor statesmen” finally came out with an agreement for an 18-cent an hour raise. This raise was actually won for the Ford workers by the GM strikers. But in hastening to accept Ford’s 18-cent offer, the UAW Ford negotiators headed by Leonard, seriously undercut the 30 cents-an-hour wage demand of the GM workers, not to speak of the 19% cents they might have won on the basis of the government’s own recommendation.
Moreover, the UAW Ford representatives acceded to the Ford Company’s demand for “company security,” that is, the right of the company to fine and fire workers for so-called unauthorized strike action. Only widespread membership opposition forced modification of the “company security” clause in the final contract. But it was retained in principle.
This unprecedented concession to the corporation was designed, both from the standpoint of the company and the union officials, to lay the basis for eliminating the best union militants from the plants. Remembering the “wildcat” strikes for which they themselves were responsible, the Thomas-Leonard-Addes group determined, in collaboration with the employers to establish a method of curbing the militants through empowering the companies to victimize strikers.
At the same time, they sought to hasten the end of the GM strike through proposals for impermissible concessions. Such was Thomas’s proposal to reopen the GM parts plants during the strike. Later, he wanted to end the strike without settlement of the extremely important local plant grievances.
Furthermore, the Thomas-Addes-Leonard group sought the intervention of CIO president Philip Murray in order to take the negotiations out of the hands of Reuther and the elected nine-man GM negotiations committee. They directed a persistent underhanded attack at Reuther and his aggressive methods in an effort to destroy his prestige with the GM workers. This attempt to undermine the GM strike and discredit Reuther largely failed, as the recent UAW convention proved.
Thus, what was on the order of the day for the convention was the question of endorsement or repudiation of the General Motors strike, its general policies and program. And with the examination of the GM strike, should have come a thorough consideration of those key issues which arose out of the whole auto negotiations and struggle. Two of these key issues were “company security” and the “fact-finding” procedure of semi-compulsory arbitration.
But the delegates were denied the opportunity to discuss” the GM strike and the related issues. Certainly the Thomas-Addes-Leonard-Stalinist caucus was anxious to avoid any open discussion. This was made abundantly clear when they wiggled out of a proposed debate between Reuther and Thomas through slick parliamentary maneuvering in spite of the majority demand of the convention.
As for Reuther, aside from his demonstrative challenge for a debate, he made no real effort to bring the issues on the floor.
In this sense, the leadership of the Reuther caucus were as much responsible for the muddled and inconclusive character of the UAW convention as their factional opponents. They fixed their eyes mainly on posts and played narrow, so-called “straight” politics. In order to win votes they catered to the more backward and conservative elements, made “deals” with unsavory individuals and skirted the questions of principle.
Responsibility of Both Caucuses
The issue was boiled down to the question of “For Reuther” or “For Thomas” – for the endorsement of the GM strike or against it. The delegates could not go beyond this point into the elaboration of a program based on their decision. There was no movement in the ranks prepared to push a third alternative to the two presented by the main divisions of the convention.
Reuther played conservative at the convention. He concentrated on the “backwoods” vote by stressing matters of organizational procedure and policy, as well as emphasizing his desire for “responsible” leadership in contrast to his alleged “radicalism.” While the main base of the Reuther caucus consisted of the most progressive militants, Reuther’s intimate machine included many questionable and reactionary elements. Reuther, hell-bent on election, decided he could not alienate any votes. That accounts for the conservative, “statesmanlike” nature of his convention campaign.
A typical example of Reuther’s unprincipled deals with unsavory elements was his support of Melvin Bishop, discredited director of Region 1, Detroit, for first vice-president running against R.J. Thomas. Bishop was thoroughly despised by the workers in his region. He had played ball with the corporations during the war to the extent of going to the managements and having them fire militant workers. He had done this against popular militants at both Hudson and Briggs, two of the principle locals in his region.
When it came to a choice between Bishop, whose name symbolized conspiracy with the corporations, and Thomas, the entire Briggs delegation with one of the largest blocks of votes reluctantly determined to vote for Thomas. Their vote swung many others, and Thomas was elected by a sizable majority.
An especially bad aspect of Reuther’s policy was his catering to Jim-Crow elements. Most notorious was his alliance with Richard Gosser, regional director from the Toledo, O., area, who had been repeatedly condemned for his policy of discrimination against Negroes. Richard Gosser, regional director from the Toledo area, still maintained backward prejudices against Negroes inclined toward support of Reuther. But the very important, influential and militant section of Negro delegates, who should have been with the main stream of militants in Reuther’s caucus, largely supported the conservative wing.
The Stalinists, who were allied with the anti-GM strike, “company security” faction of Thomas-Addes-Leonard, were principally responsible for keeping the support of the Negro delegates for the conservative caucus.
The Stalinists were able demagogically to exploit Reuther’s weakness on the Negro question. They took the lead in proposing the establishment of a post on the Executive Board for a Negro representative.
Both the Reuther and Thomas-Addes-Leonard caucus leaders opposed this proposal. Indeed, the most vicious speech against it was made by Ben Garrison, of Ford Highland Park Local 400, the man who made the presidential nominating speech for Thomas. But the fact that the Stalinists, who conspicuously and vigorously supported Thomas, initiated the fight for a Negro Board member played an important part in cementing the support of many Negro delegates for the Thomas-Addes-Leonard clique.
A small section of the most progressive elements in the Reuther caucus also backed the proposal for a Negro board member. These militants, however, pointed out the failure of both caucuses to nominate any of the well-qualified Negro delegates for a top UAW post.
The Outstanding Event
The positive aspect of the outstanding event of the UAW convention, the election of Reuther over R.J. Thomas, was its implicit endorsement of the GM strike. This fact stands out above all others and remains as the unique achievement of the convention.
The majority of delegates voted in favor of precisely those policies which the capitalist press, and the conservative UAW and CIO leaders, so vigorously condemned. These are the policies which Thomas called in one caucus meeting “socialistic experimentation.”
They are, in truth, far from “socialistic.” But they 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.” That, at least, is what the majority voted for in voting for Reuther.
At the same time, they were voting against something. They were voting against timidity and conservatism and bureaucratism.
To the superficial observer, it might appear that the net outcome of the UAW convention has been, with the exception of the change of presidents, to maintain a continuation of conservative leadership. That is what seems to be the case since the top officers and executive board are composed of a conservative majority.
But it would be incorrect to conceive of this leadership as fixed and unchanging in its policies and line-ups. More than once in the history of the dynamic, democratic and militant UAW, the pressure and movement of the ranks have forced significant shifts and changes on the top.
It need only be recalled that Reuther himself, the most progressive of the UAW leaders in 1946, was the chief spokesman in 1941 for the right wing tendency which sought to bar “communists” and which advanced a pro-war policy.
In evaluating the role of the various top leaders and tendencies in the coming period, the militants will have to keep in mind the possibilities of shifts and changes. The tactics of the most advanced and progressive elements must be based not on preconceived evaluations, but rather on an exact analysis and appreciation of the new factors that are almost certain to arise.
All the issues left unresolved by the past convention, will recur in sharpened form. New issues will break to the surface.
The auto workers in particular, and the labor movement in general, will not face a quiet, placid existence in the next period. In their drive to organize the unorganized, particularly in the South, the CIO and UAW will confront a tremendous reactionary opposition. The question of “company security,” of collaboration with the government “fact-finding” procedure, of militant struggle versus dependence on government agencies, will arise repeatedly.
The political aspect of the labor struggle will come to the fore. Political issues, which have played so important a factor in the great strike struggles, will take on an ever more compelling character.
Big Business is conducting a tremendous inflationary drive to wipe out wage gains and augment huge profits. A new period of intensified reaction is being prepared as part of American imperialism’s program for another World War to destroy the Soviet Union and to achieve undisputed rule of the world.
A crucial period of political crisis is imminent. It will pose sharply before American labor the key question of a break with the policy of political collaboration with the capitalist class and its government.
Already one notes a significant and growing sentiment for the formation of a party of labor independent of the Democratic and Republican parties of Wall Street. There were reflections of this growing sentiment in the vague expressions of both Reuther and Thomas during the course of the UAW convention for a possible “progressive third party.”
The abysmal and shameful weakness of American labor on the political arena was borne out repeatedly during the strike wave. Time and time again the mighty organized power of labor on the economic arena has been nullified on the political field. Experience has been hammering that fact home to the American workers.
It is safe to assume the likelihood that the September 1947 convention of the UAW will see many of the unresolved issues of the past convention express themselves in dominant form. And these issues will extend in no small degree on to the decisive political plane. Top of page
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h4>Trade Union Notes</h4>
<h1>Battlelines Form in UAW Referendum</h1>
<h3>(13 January 1945)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1945/index.htm#m45_02" target="new">Vol. IX No. 2</a>, 13 January 1945, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">The CIO United Automobile Workers’ national referendum on, the no-strike pledge is an extraordinary event in the American trade union movement. This referendum, for which the mailing of ballots began January 4, involves the vote of over 1,200,000 workers on the most immediate and vital issue confronting the labor movement, the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>Membership referendums are not unique in the unions. But almost invariably they have dealt with problems which are largely organizational, such as affiliations, dues increases or elections of officers. In this instance an entire union membership – of the most powerful and dynamic union in the country – is being polled on a basic policy affecting the entire organized labor movement.</p>
<p><em>Today, the UAW-CIO is a battleground of contending forces. On one side, fighting for revocation of the no-strike pledge, are the militant men and women in the ranks, local officers and committeemen, who daily feel the whiplash of corporation provocations. Against them stand the top bureaucrats, drawing down comfortable salaries, more at home in the waiting-room of the employers and capitalist government officials than among the workers and their struggles in the shops. Around these bureaucrats are lined up the most treacherous agents of capitalism within the union, notably the Stalinists.</em></p>
<p>Within the past four weeks these opposing forces have been increasing the tempo of their struggle. The Detroit Ward strike gave an unexpected impetus to this struggle. Reports from the center of the auto industry disclose that the Ward strike inspired a wave of labor militancy, reminiscent of the days of the great auto strikes. This response of the ranks in support of the Ward strike in turn aroused frantic fear among the UAW tops and their Stalinist henchmen. Both forces have geared up their propaganda campaigns, utilizing every means at their command to reach and influence the membership. The referendum fight over the no-strike pledge in the UAW appears to be developing into a momentous struggle.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The Rank and File Caucus, which organized the magnificent four-day battle against the no-strike pledge at the last UAW convention, has become the rallying center for the militants in the referendum campaign. It has established a large and powerful committee in Wayne County (Detroit) and initiated an increasingly aggressive drive to mobilize the votes against the no- strike surrender policy.</p>
<p><em>Last week, the Rank and File steering committee issued a strongly-worded pamphlet for circulation to the auto workers throughout the country. The pamphlet called on the auto workers to “restore the fighting strength” of their union by rescinding the no-strike pledge for which “labor sacrificed everything and gained nothing.”</em></p>
<p>The imposition of the no-strike policy on the workers, states the pamphlet, meant the sacrifice of labor’s most powerful weapon “in the fight against the big monopolists who always seek to lower living standards and crush our organization.” At the same time, the employers’ “no lock-out pledge” was a “cruel joke played on us ... Companies needed labor to maintain the highest salaries in the history of corporation executives, and the largest, fattest, bloodiest profits the world has ever known.”</p>
<p>The pamphlet effectively answers the flag-waving propaganda of the labor-haters that militant defense of labor’s rights is “against the interests” of the the “boys in the foxholes.” “The boys in the foxholes are our relatives ... When we fight to make our union strong and effective, we also are fighting for them.”</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">While the militant rank and file must depend solely on their own resources and strength to spread the message of their opposition to the no-strike pledge, the UAW heads have found powerful allies outside their own union to aid their attempt to rivet the no-strike shackles more securely on the membership.</p>
<p>The Murray-Hillman machine in the national CIO has thrown its influence behind the UAW top leadership, Thomas-Addes-Frankensteen-Reuther. The capitalist press from coast to coast has opened its columns generously to the no-strike rantings and down-right slanders against the militants issuing from the bull-frog throat of R.J. Thomas, UAW President.</p>
<p><em>The radio monopoly has placed a state-wide Michigan hook-up at the disposal of Thomas, Addes, Frankensteen and Reuther, according to the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong>. They are scheduled to speak in favor of the no-strike policy next week over station WXYZ. Walter Reuther, whose game of “left cover” for the top bureaucrats is rapidly playing itself out, is no longer able to straddle the fence. He is lining himself up openly with the camp he has always really served, the servile leadership against the militant ranks.</em></p>
<p>The main organizers and campaigners for the leadership’s reactionary policy are the Stalinists. Whole pages of the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> are being devoted every day to slandering the UAW militants, publicizing the anti-strike statements of the UAW officials, and clamoring for continuation of the no-strike pledge.</p>
<p>Inside the UAW, the Stalinists initiated the Committee to Uphold the No-Strike Pledge, which they and their front-men control and activate. This has become the principal machinery for whipping up support for the no-strike policy. Thus, the Stalinists are spearheading the no-strike drive and have thrown their tremendous material resources behind the UAW tops.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<p class="fst">The UAW leaders find themselves dependent in the referendum battle on shameless finks and strikebreakers. For alone in the entire labor movement, the Stalinists openly attacked the Montgomery Ward strikes.</p>
<p>The <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, January 6, publishes a letter from Nat Canley, Stalinist business agent of UAW Local 155, to John W. Gibson, President of the Michigan CIO Council, assailing the latter’s support of the Ward strike.</p>
<p><em>Every worker knows that Roosevelt stalled for over four years on the issue of Avery’s repeated defiance of WLB directives. The only time he acted was after the workers went on strike. Yet Ganley dishes out the astounding argument that “the strike did not compel President Roosevelt to act, but made it harder for him to act.” That’s the stuff the Stalinists are trying to peddle to the auto workers!</em></p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
Battlelines Form in UAW Referendum
(13 January 1945)
From The Militant, Vol. IX No. 2, 13 January 1945, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
The CIO United Automobile Workers’ national referendum on, the no-strike pledge is an extraordinary event in the American trade union movement. This referendum, for which the mailing of ballots began January 4, involves the vote of over 1,200,000 workers on the most immediate and vital issue confronting the labor movement, the no-strike pledge.
Membership referendums are not unique in the unions. But almost invariably they have dealt with problems which are largely organizational, such as affiliations, dues increases or elections of officers. In this instance an entire union membership – of the most powerful and dynamic union in the country – is being polled on a basic policy affecting the entire organized labor movement.
Today, the UAW-CIO is a battleground of contending forces. On one side, fighting for revocation of the no-strike pledge, are the militant men and women in the ranks, local officers and committeemen, who daily feel the whiplash of corporation provocations. Against them stand the top bureaucrats, drawing down comfortable salaries, more at home in the waiting-room of the employers and capitalist government officials than among the workers and their struggles in the shops. Around these bureaucrats are lined up the most treacherous agents of capitalism within the union, notably the Stalinists.
Within the past four weeks these opposing forces have been increasing the tempo of their struggle. The Detroit Ward strike gave an unexpected impetus to this struggle. Reports from the center of the auto industry disclose that the Ward strike inspired a wave of labor militancy, reminiscent of the days of the great auto strikes. This response of the ranks in support of the Ward strike in turn aroused frantic fear among the UAW tops and their Stalinist henchmen. Both forces have geared up their propaganda campaigns, utilizing every means at their command to reach and influence the membership. The referendum fight over the no-strike pledge in the UAW appears to be developing into a momentous struggle.
* * *
The Rank and File Caucus, which organized the magnificent four-day battle against the no-strike pledge at the last UAW convention, has become the rallying center for the militants in the referendum campaign. It has established a large and powerful committee in Wayne County (Detroit) and initiated an increasingly aggressive drive to mobilize the votes against the no- strike surrender policy.
Last week, the Rank and File steering committee issued a strongly-worded pamphlet for circulation to the auto workers throughout the country. The pamphlet called on the auto workers to “restore the fighting strength” of their union by rescinding the no-strike pledge for which “labor sacrificed everything and gained nothing.”
The imposition of the no-strike policy on the workers, states the pamphlet, meant the sacrifice of labor’s most powerful weapon “in the fight against the big monopolists who always seek to lower living standards and crush our organization.” At the same time, the employers’ “no lock-out pledge” was a “cruel joke played on us ... Companies needed labor to maintain the highest salaries in the history of corporation executives, and the largest, fattest, bloodiest profits the world has ever known.”
The pamphlet effectively answers the flag-waving propaganda of the labor-haters that militant defense of labor’s rights is “against the interests” of the the “boys in the foxholes.” “The boys in the foxholes are our relatives ... When we fight to make our union strong and effective, we also are fighting for them.”
* * *
While the militant rank and file must depend solely on their own resources and strength to spread the message of their opposition to the no-strike pledge, the UAW heads have found powerful allies outside their own union to aid their attempt to rivet the no-strike shackles more securely on the membership.
The Murray-Hillman machine in the national CIO has thrown its influence behind the UAW top leadership, Thomas-Addes-Frankensteen-Reuther. The capitalist press from coast to coast has opened its columns generously to the no-strike rantings and down-right slanders against the militants issuing from the bull-frog throat of R.J. Thomas, UAW President.
The radio monopoly has placed a state-wide Michigan hook-up at the disposal of Thomas, Addes, Frankensteen and Reuther, according to the Stalinist Daily Worker. They are scheduled to speak in favor of the no-strike policy next week over station WXYZ. Walter Reuther, whose game of “left cover” for the top bureaucrats is rapidly playing itself out, is no longer able to straddle the fence. He is lining himself up openly with the camp he has always really served, the servile leadership against the militant ranks.
The main organizers and campaigners for the leadership’s reactionary policy are the Stalinists. Whole pages of the Daily Worker are being devoted every day to slandering the UAW militants, publicizing the anti-strike statements of the UAW officials, and clamoring for continuation of the no-strike pledge.
Inside the UAW, the Stalinists initiated the Committee to Uphold the No-Strike Pledge, which they and their front-men control and activate. This has become the principal machinery for whipping up support for the no-strike policy. Thus, the Stalinists are spearheading the no-strike drive and have thrown their tremendous material resources behind the UAW tops.
* * *
The UAW leaders find themselves dependent in the referendum battle on shameless finks and strikebreakers. For alone in the entire labor movement, the Stalinists openly attacked the Montgomery Ward strikes.
The Daily Worker, January 6, publishes a letter from Nat Canley, Stalinist business agent of UAW Local 155, to John W. Gibson, President of the Michigan CIO Council, assailing the latter’s support of the Ward strike.
Every worker knows that Roosevelt stalled for over four years on the issue of Avery’s repeated defiance of WLB directives. The only time he acted was after the workers went on strike. Yet Ganley dishes out the astounding argument that “the strike did not compel President Roosevelt to act, but made it harder for him to act.” That’s the stuff the Stalinists are trying to peddle to the auto workers!
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>GM Profiteers Defy Investigation</h1>
<h4>Fact-Finding Board Plays Attorney for Corporation</h4>
<h3>(5 January 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_01" target="new">Vol. X No. 1</a>, 5 January 1946, pp. 1 & 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>General Motors Corporation, arrogant as ever, on December 28 walked out of Truman’s Fact-Finding Board hearings on the GM strike. The corporation categorically refused to permit its books and records to be made subject to examination even by friendly government officials.</strong></p>
<p>Insisting that its monumental profits and ability to pay the 30 per cent wage increase demanded by 225,000 GM strikers was nobody’s business but its own, the corporation withdrew its spokesmen from the hearings.</p>
<p>The Fact-Finding Board, a hand-picked creation of Truman’s, had not called for GM’s books. It had merely claimed its right to investigate them “if necessary,” but that all information would be kept “confidential” from both the union and the general public.<br>
</p>
<h4>GM’s “Attorneys”</h4>
<p class="fst">When the Board members at the December 28 session, in opposition to GM’s ultimatum, reiterated its intention to consider profits and prices in connection with the wage issue, Walter Gordon Merritt, GM attorney, announced: “Our chairs will be vacant.”</p>
<p>But the next and final session of the Board, on Saturday, December 29, revealed that GM’s chairs were “vacant” only in the direct and formal sense.</p>
<p>In the absence of the paid GM spokesmen, the members of the Fact-Finding Board themselves proceeded to act as attorneys for the multi-billion dollar corporation which only the day before had thumbed its nose at the Board.</p>
<p>This “impartial” body grilled and cross-examined Walter Reuther, the UAW spokesman, and other union representatives, in a savage and heated fashion. The Board members put forward all the arguments the corporation itself has flung at the union.</p>
<p>The tenor of the Board’s attack on the union’s case was clearly revealed by its persistent prodding of the union spokesmen on GM’s insulting counter-proposal to institute a straight-time 45 hour week.<br>
</p>
<h4>Laying a Trap</h4>
<p class="fst">It is becoming increasingly apparent that the government is laying a trap for the auto workers through the Fact-Finding Board stratagem.</p>
<p>The participation of the UAW leaders in the farcical proceedings of this body, which has no power to enforce its decisions on the corporation, is further and further committing the union to the government’s eventual decision.</p>
<p>That decision, all the developments indicate, is largely formulated and is in no way related to the facts presented by the union before the Fact-Finding Body. Persistent reports emanate from Washington that the government is planning to propose a wage increase somewhere in the neighborhood of what the corporation itself proposed, between ten and fifteen per cent.</p>
<p>The function of the Fact-Finding Board, which has been given labor sanction by the very presence and participation of the UAW leaders, will be to present this wage proposal in the form of an “impartial” recommendation allegedly based on the “facts.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Violate Mandate</h4>
<p class="fst">Reuther and the other UAW leaders are being sucked into a position where they will be impelled, under terrific government pressure and manufactured “public opinion,” to accept some miserable “compromise” proposed by the Fact-Finding Board – a Board which the UAW leaders have, In effect, endorsed.</p>
<p>From the outset, the GM workers realized that Truman’s Fact- Finding Board order was a trap and the GM Delegates Conference on December 8 rejected this slick method for settling the strike by government intervention.</p>
<p>Thus, the UAW leaders have participated in the Fact-Finding procedure in outright violation of the clear-cut mandate of the GM strikers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Serious Danger</h4>
<p class="fst">When General Motors blandly walked out of the Fact-Finding hearings it was but a further warning to the auto workers that the whole set-up was phony, and that the union was being maneuvered into accepting sole responsibility for any “impartial” decision of the government.</p>
<p>This constitutes one of the most serious dangers to the GM strikers and their just demand for 30 per cent.</p>
<p>The intervention of the government, Truman’s arbitrary establishment of the Fact-Finding panel together with his demand that the GM workers end their strike, conclusively demonstrated that the administration is fronting for General Motors.</p>
<p>Let the GM workers stand by their position on the treacherous Fact-Finding Boards! Let the GM workers call on their leaders to immediately withdraw from these semi-compulsory arbitration boards! Stick by the 30 per cent demand and fight it out! There is nothing to gain from Washington – except a miserable sell-out.</p>
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Art Preis
GM Profiteers Defy Investigation
Fact-Finding Board Plays Attorney for Corporation
(5 January 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 1, 5 January 1946, pp. 1 & 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
General Motors Corporation, arrogant as ever, on December 28 walked out of Truman’s Fact-Finding Board hearings on the GM strike. The corporation categorically refused to permit its books and records to be made subject to examination even by friendly government officials.
Insisting that its monumental profits and ability to pay the 30 per cent wage increase demanded by 225,000 GM strikers was nobody’s business but its own, the corporation withdrew its spokesmen from the hearings.
The Fact-Finding Board, a hand-picked creation of Truman’s, had not called for GM’s books. It had merely claimed its right to investigate them “if necessary,” but that all information would be kept “confidential” from both the union and the general public.
GM’s “Attorneys”
When the Board members at the December 28 session, in opposition to GM’s ultimatum, reiterated its intention to consider profits and prices in connection with the wage issue, Walter Gordon Merritt, GM attorney, announced: “Our chairs will be vacant.”
But the next and final session of the Board, on Saturday, December 29, revealed that GM’s chairs were “vacant” only in the direct and formal sense.
In the absence of the paid GM spokesmen, the members of the Fact-Finding Board themselves proceeded to act as attorneys for the multi-billion dollar corporation which only the day before had thumbed its nose at the Board.
This “impartial” body grilled and cross-examined Walter Reuther, the UAW spokesman, and other union representatives, in a savage and heated fashion. The Board members put forward all the arguments the corporation itself has flung at the union.
The tenor of the Board’s attack on the union’s case was clearly revealed by its persistent prodding of the union spokesmen on GM’s insulting counter-proposal to institute a straight-time 45 hour week.
Laying a Trap
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the government is laying a trap for the auto workers through the Fact-Finding Board stratagem.
The participation of the UAW leaders in the farcical proceedings of this body, which has no power to enforce its decisions on the corporation, is further and further committing the union to the government’s eventual decision.
That decision, all the developments indicate, is largely formulated and is in no way related to the facts presented by the union before the Fact-Finding Body. Persistent reports emanate from Washington that the government is planning to propose a wage increase somewhere in the neighborhood of what the corporation itself proposed, between ten and fifteen per cent.
The function of the Fact-Finding Board, which has been given labor sanction by the very presence and participation of the UAW leaders, will be to present this wage proposal in the form of an “impartial” recommendation allegedly based on the “facts.”
Violate Mandate
Reuther and the other UAW leaders are being sucked into a position where they will be impelled, under terrific government pressure and manufactured “public opinion,” to accept some miserable “compromise” proposed by the Fact-Finding Board – a Board which the UAW leaders have, In effect, endorsed.
From the outset, the GM workers realized that Truman’s Fact- Finding Board order was a trap and the GM Delegates Conference on December 8 rejected this slick method for settling the strike by government intervention.
Thus, the UAW leaders have participated in the Fact-Finding procedure in outright violation of the clear-cut mandate of the GM strikers.
Serious Danger
When General Motors blandly walked out of the Fact-Finding hearings it was but a further warning to the auto workers that the whole set-up was phony, and that the union was being maneuvered into accepting sole responsibility for any “impartial” decision of the government.
This constitutes one of the most serious dangers to the GM strikers and their just demand for 30 per cent.
The intervention of the government, Truman’s arbitrary establishment of the Fact-Finding panel together with his demand that the GM workers end their strike, conclusively demonstrated that the administration is fronting for General Motors.
Let the GM workers stand by their position on the treacherous Fact-Finding Boards! Let the GM workers call on their leaders to immediately withdraw from these semi-compulsory arbitration boards! Stick by the 30 per cent demand and fight it out! There is nothing to gain from Washington – except a miserable sell-out.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Truman Leads Vicious Drive Against UMW</h1>
<h3>(11 May 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_19" target="new">Vol. X No. 19</a>, 11 May 1946, p. 3.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">As the power of the 400,000 soft coal miners in the fifth week of their national strike made itself increasingly felt throughout American industry, the Big-Business government last week launched an open drive to intimidate the miners. It aims to force them back to work without securing their demands for safety conditions and a union health and welfare fund.</p>
<p>President Truman on May 4 took the lead in an intensified strikebreaking pressure campaign when he issued a statement which claimed that the mine strike constitutes a “national disaster.” The statement embodied a report of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.</p>
<p>This scare-head report was clearly designed to throw responsibility for the strike and its economic consequences on the miners. Truman has remained silent, however, about the criminal disregard of safety rules and measures by the coal operators. He has tacitly upheld their arrogant refusal to consider the just demands of the miners.</p>
<p>Among other vital demands, the miners are asking the operators to include in the new contract a specific agreement to put into effect promptly all safety recommendations of the U.S. Bureau of Mines and the various state mine inspection agencies.<br>
</p>
<h4>Fear “Insurrection”</h4>
<p class="fst">On the same day as Truman’s statement, a group of Senators representing the wealthy mining interests launched a savage attack on the mine union and its leaders. Headed by Senator Lucas, the senatorial reactionaries frothed at the mouth about the strike being a movement that could “easily become an insurrection against the government.”</p>
<p>Every hypocritical argument is being used to smear the militant miners. The leading spokesmen for the Southern soft-coal operators, former Senator Edward R. Burke, even said over the, radio that “the Lewis strike means continued misery for millions of unhappy men, women and little children in foreign lands whom he has deprived of the coal we promised ...”</p>
<p>Of course, that misery was created by the imperialist war in whose blood-profits the mine owners shared. Moreover, promised shipments of relief coal have been curtailed for months by the Wall Street government.</p>
<p>Neither Truman, the Senators nor any coal operators have yet shed a public tear, for instance, about the 12 new widows and 55 orphans left in misery and destitution by the hard coal mine explosion in McCoy, Va., two weeks ago.</p>
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Art Preis
Truman Leads Vicious Drive Against UMW
(11 May 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 19, 11 May 1946, p. 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
As the power of the 400,000 soft coal miners in the fifth week of their national strike made itself increasingly felt throughout American industry, the Big-Business government last week launched an open drive to intimidate the miners. It aims to force them back to work without securing their demands for safety conditions and a union health and welfare fund.
President Truman on May 4 took the lead in an intensified strikebreaking pressure campaign when he issued a statement which claimed that the mine strike constitutes a “national disaster.” The statement embodied a report of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion.
This scare-head report was clearly designed to throw responsibility for the strike and its economic consequences on the miners. Truman has remained silent, however, about the criminal disregard of safety rules and measures by the coal operators. He has tacitly upheld their arrogant refusal to consider the just demands of the miners.
Among other vital demands, the miners are asking the operators to include in the new contract a specific agreement to put into effect promptly all safety recommendations of the U.S. Bureau of Mines and the various state mine inspection agencies.
Fear “Insurrection”
On the same day as Truman’s statement, a group of Senators representing the wealthy mining interests launched a savage attack on the mine union and its leaders. Headed by Senator Lucas, the senatorial reactionaries frothed at the mouth about the strike being a movement that could “easily become an insurrection against the government.”
Every hypocritical argument is being used to smear the militant miners. The leading spokesmen for the Southern soft-coal operators, former Senator Edward R. Burke, even said over the, radio that “the Lewis strike means continued misery for millions of unhappy men, women and little children in foreign lands whom he has deprived of the coal we promised ...”
Of course, that misery was created by the imperialist war in whose blood-profits the mine owners shared. Moreover, promised shipments of relief coal have been curtailed for months by the Wall Street government.
Neither Truman, the Senators nor any coal operators have yet shed a public tear, for instance, about the 12 new widows and 55 orphans left in misery and destitution by the hard coal mine explosion in McCoy, Va., two weeks ago.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>“Freedom of the Seas”</h1>
<h3>(5 April 1948)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1948/index.htm#m48_14" target="new">Vol. 12 No. 14</a>, 5 April 1948, p. 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">Don’t look now, but there’s a red periscope peeping above the waterline in your bathtub. Russian submarines, equipped with schnorkels too, are being sighted faster than flying saucers these days.</p>
<p>It all began at the hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee on March 25. The Big Brass and Gold Braid were basking in the spotlights and smiling at the senators. The senators were nodding and smiling back. It was a wonderful spring day – just right for another big raid on the U.S. Treasury by the military.</p>
<p>Into this idyllic scene burst the submarine scare. Secretary of Navy Sullivan made the sensational announcement that underseas craft “not belonging to any nation west of the Iron Curtain have been sighted off our shores.”</p>
<p>The panic was on. Two august senators fell off their chairs simultaneously. A stenographer swallowed her gum and nearly choked to death. One reporter required emergency hospital treatment after being trampled in the rush of newspapermen to the nearest telephone.</p>
<p>Not another word would Sullivan speak – for “security reasons,” of course. But it didn’t take the kept press more than two hours to dig up the details. By mid-afternoon disaster-type headlines trumpeted the red sub menace and why we need UMT and the peacetime draft.</p>
<p>Th usual “informed sources” and “anonymous naval officers” supplied the usual “reliable information.” In all, seven “purported” Russian Submarines had been spotted “recently.” Five of the seven lurking “off our shores” were vaguely placed as “off the Aleutians” – about 9,000 miles from Seattle and less than 400 miles from Siberia. Two of the reports came from unnamed merchant ships. One saw a “periscope” just “200 miles from San Francisco” – “at night.”</p>
<p>Immediately after Sullivan’s “revelations,” Admiral Louis E. Denfield, Chief of Naval Operations, blandly admitted the U.S. has 35 submarines in the Pacific and 41 in the Atlantic. Four are <em>en route</em> to Turkey as part of the “European aid” program. 12 U.S. destroyers and three aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific are guarding “our shores” a few hundred miles from Siberia. American warships are at Trieste; 17 are in Greek waters.</p>
<p>But as Admiral Halsey said, “We’ll send our ships any damn place in the world we please.” And Air Forces Secretary Symington, following Sullivan at the Senate hearing, boasted that American bombers from Alaska “‘could bomb any part of Russia and return to American bases.”</p>
<p>So you see why we need universal military training, peacetime conscription and more tens of billions for the Army, Navy and Air Forces, not to speak of the atomic bomb development. By God, these Russians are going too far. What do they mean operating submarines in “our” Pacific Ocean? Don’t they know we’ve already fought two world wars for “freedom of the seas”?</p>
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Art Preis
“Freedom of the Seas”
(5 April 1948)
From The Militant, Vol. 12 No. 14, 5 April 1948, p. 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Don’t look now, but there’s a red periscope peeping above the waterline in your bathtub. Russian submarines, equipped with schnorkels too, are being sighted faster than flying saucers these days.
It all began at the hearing of the Senate Armed Service Committee on March 25. The Big Brass and Gold Braid were basking in the spotlights and smiling at the senators. The senators were nodding and smiling back. It was a wonderful spring day – just right for another big raid on the U.S. Treasury by the military.
Into this idyllic scene burst the submarine scare. Secretary of Navy Sullivan made the sensational announcement that underseas craft “not belonging to any nation west of the Iron Curtain have been sighted off our shores.”
The panic was on. Two august senators fell off their chairs simultaneously. A stenographer swallowed her gum and nearly choked to death. One reporter required emergency hospital treatment after being trampled in the rush of newspapermen to the nearest telephone.
Not another word would Sullivan speak – for “security reasons,” of course. But it didn’t take the kept press more than two hours to dig up the details. By mid-afternoon disaster-type headlines trumpeted the red sub menace and why we need UMT and the peacetime draft.
Th usual “informed sources” and “anonymous naval officers” supplied the usual “reliable information.” In all, seven “purported” Russian Submarines had been spotted “recently.” Five of the seven lurking “off our shores” were vaguely placed as “off the Aleutians” – about 9,000 miles from Seattle and less than 400 miles from Siberia. Two of the reports came from unnamed merchant ships. One saw a “periscope” just “200 miles from San Francisco” – “at night.”
Immediately after Sullivan’s “revelations,” Admiral Louis E. Denfield, Chief of Naval Operations, blandly admitted the U.S. has 35 submarines in the Pacific and 41 in the Atlantic. Four are en route to Turkey as part of the “European aid” program. 12 U.S. destroyers and three aircraft carriers in the Western Pacific are guarding “our shores” a few hundred miles from Siberia. American warships are at Trieste; 17 are in Greek waters.
But as Admiral Halsey said, “We’ll send our ships any damn place in the world we please.” And Air Forces Secretary Symington, following Sullivan at the Senate hearing, boasted that American bombers from Alaska “‘could bomb any part of Russia and return to American bases.”
So you see why we need universal military training, peacetime conscription and more tens of billions for the Army, Navy and Air Forces, not to speak of the atomic bomb development. By God, these Russians are going too far. What do they mean operating submarines in “our” Pacific Ocean? Don’t they know we’ve already fought two world wars for “freedom of the seas”?
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<h2>Joseph Keller</h2>
<h1>Trade Union Notes</h1>
<h3>(1 June 1946)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_22" target="new">Vol. X No. 22</a>, 1 June 1946, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<a name="p1"></a>
<h3>Murray’s Complaints About Congress</h3>
<p class="fst">In his concluding speech at the recent CIO Steelworkers convention, Philip Murray, the union’s president, complained that Congress “has hot adopted a single piece of constructive legislation since the year 1937.” For the last nine years, he said, “labor has been fighting with its back to the wall.”</p>
<p>Without realizing it perhaps, Murray in these words voiced a terrible indictment against the traditional policies on political action pursued by himself and the rest of the present trade union leadership.</p>
<p>Since 1933, the Congress majority has been Democratic. In general, this majority was sustained through the influence of the late President Roosevelt. Every national election, the union leaders told the workers to go out and vote for “friends of labor” from the Democratic Party.</p>
<p>Now we have the admission from Murray that the results of this policy of supporting capitalist “friends of labor” through five national elections has been to maintain a Congress that has done not one thing for labor In nine years – and done everything possible for Big Business.</p>
<p>Murray again proposes campaigning for “substantial, progressive, liberal-minded officers in the elections coming up this year” – so long as they are Democrats or Republicans. Against this bankrupt policy, the trade union militants must counterpose effective labor political action – the formation of a genuine independent labor party which will fight to put real labor candidates in Congress.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p2"></a>
<h3>Big Ford Local 600 Backs Miners’ Fight</h3>
<p class="fst">CIO United Auto Workers Local 600, representing 65,000 workers in the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant, on May 19 issued a resolution through its executive board calling for support of the coal miners and their wage and welfare demands.</p>
<p>The resolution states that “the real issues of the coal strike are being obscured by the press of the country – namely, that coal miners need a wage increase, health security and that all labor must support them.” It calls on the government “to make the coal operators grant a health and welfare fund to the miners.”</p>
<p>This pledge of solidarity, which undoubtedly reflects the sentiments of all the auto workers, should be emulated by every Section of the CIO. The unprecedentedly savage drive of Big Business and the government against the miners and rail workers is aimed in reality against the entire labor movement.</p>
<h4>* * *</h4>
<a name="p3"></a>
<h3>CIO Organizing Atom-Bomb Plant</h3>
<p class="fst">The great atom bomb plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “is now the first major concentration point in the CIO’s southern organizing campaign,” reports the May <b>CIO News</b>.</p>
<p>“A corps of CIO organisers, veterans of both World War II and other CIO organizing drives are already in the city,” the <b>CIO News</b> reveals. There are 40,000 workers in the massive plants. These workers, who produced the most destructive weapon of all time, work under abominable conditions. They are fired without cause and without regard to seniority. Wage rates vary, from worker to worker, from 12 cents to $1.02 an hour for those in the same building doing the same work.</p>
<p>When World War II ended, says <b>CIO News</b>, “it also became apparent to the workers that their rights within the giant plants were being reduced almost as swiftly as the atomic bomb had reduced the two Japanese cities.”</p>
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Joseph Keller
Trade Union Notes
(1 June 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 22, 1 June 1946, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Murray’s Complaints About Congress
In his concluding speech at the recent CIO Steelworkers convention, Philip Murray, the union’s president, complained that Congress “has hot adopted a single piece of constructive legislation since the year 1937.” For the last nine years, he said, “labor has been fighting with its back to the wall.”
Without realizing it perhaps, Murray in these words voiced a terrible indictment against the traditional policies on political action pursued by himself and the rest of the present trade union leadership.
Since 1933, the Congress majority has been Democratic. In general, this majority was sustained through the influence of the late President Roosevelt. Every national election, the union leaders told the workers to go out and vote for “friends of labor” from the Democratic Party.
Now we have the admission from Murray that the results of this policy of supporting capitalist “friends of labor” through five national elections has been to maintain a Congress that has done not one thing for labor In nine years – and done everything possible for Big Business.
Murray again proposes campaigning for “substantial, progressive, liberal-minded officers in the elections coming up this year” – so long as they are Democrats or Republicans. Against this bankrupt policy, the trade union militants must counterpose effective labor political action – the formation of a genuine independent labor party which will fight to put real labor candidates in Congress.
* * *
Big Ford Local 600 Backs Miners’ Fight
CIO United Auto Workers Local 600, representing 65,000 workers in the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant, on May 19 issued a resolution through its executive board calling for support of the coal miners and their wage and welfare demands.
The resolution states that “the real issues of the coal strike are being obscured by the press of the country – namely, that coal miners need a wage increase, health security and that all labor must support them.” It calls on the government “to make the coal operators grant a health and welfare fund to the miners.”
This pledge of solidarity, which undoubtedly reflects the sentiments of all the auto workers, should be emulated by every Section of the CIO. The unprecedentedly savage drive of Big Business and the government against the miners and rail workers is aimed in reality against the entire labor movement.
* * *
CIO Organizing Atom-Bomb Plant
The great atom bomb plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, “is now the first major concentration point in the CIO’s southern organizing campaign,” reports the May CIO News.
“A corps of CIO organisers, veterans of both World War II and other CIO organizing drives are already in the city,” the CIO News reveals. There are 40,000 workers in the massive plants. These workers, who produced the most destructive weapon of all time, work under abominable conditions. They are fired without cause and without regard to seniority. Wage rates vary, from worker to worker, from 12 cents to $1.02 an hour for those in the same building doing the same work.
When World War II ended, says CIO News, “it also became apparent to the workers that their rights within the giant plants were being reduced almost as swiftly as the atomic bomb had reduced the two Japanese cities.”
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>Raw Deal Put Over in Akron</h1>
<h4>Green & Co. Surpass All Records For Treachery</h4>
<h3>(April 1935)</h3>
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<p class="info">From <strong>The New Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1935/index.htm#nm35_18" target="new">Vol. I No. 18</a>, 20 April 1935, pp. 1 & 4.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’ Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
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<p class="fst">AKRON, O., April 14. – The great strike involving 35,000 Akron rubber workers, which was to set the spark to the 1935 wave of strike struggles in America, is over before it began – the latest and most sinister betrayal of organized labor by William Green and his lieutenants.</p>
<p>A group of militant progressives, which has been growing in the last few weeks, led the opposition battle and, only after hours of desperate lighting, was defeated by the better organized official machine, which finally shoved through the agreement by a series of deceptive maneuvers and outright railroading. This progressive tendency, which has been greatly strengthened and clarified by the events of the last 4 hours, will find a clear public expression in a mass meeting to be held by the Akron branch of the W.P. April 17, at which James P. Cannon will analyze the betrayal and outline the next steps in the fight to build an effective union. The Game of Delays</p>
<p>The imposing of the treacherous agreement upon the rubber workers and the breaking of the strike by the A.F. of L. officialdom followed a carefully designed course. The strike, which has been looming for eighteen months past, was delayed month after month on the urging of the A.F. of L. officials, even after the rubber companies brazenly defined the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board that an election be held on the matter of representation for collective bargaining. When the government further demonstrated its unwillingness or inability to enforce its own ruling, these officials continued to point to the government as the agency from which union recognition might be secured instead of to the mass strength and militant action of the workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Last Minute Promises</h4>
<p class="fst">Following an overwhelming vote by the unions last week in favor of strike, a last-hour course of delay was pursued by the A.F. of L. leaders in order to give the forces of the national government and local press a chance to get into full play. Every effort to set a definite strike date was deliberately brushed aside. While still urging the workers to prepare for action, the officials implanted in the minds of the inexperienced union members the belief that a strike might still be averted and that the demands for union recognition might be secured through the intervention of Francis Perkins and the pressure of the government.</p>
<p>As late as twelve hours before the signing of the actual agreement, Claherty and other organizers boldly proclaimed through the press that they would agree to nothing less than an election conducted by the Department of Labor off the companies’ properties, in which the companies would unconditionally recognize the group securing the majority vote. It cannot be doubted that the terms of the final settlement were well known to Green, Claherty and Co. even while these misleading statements were being made to disarm the workers and leave them unprepared for the last crushing blow.<br>
</p>
<h4>C.P. Plays Claherty’s Game</h4>
<p class="fst">A new angle was the role of the Communist Party in the Akron betrayal. During the last and most critical days leading up to the debacle, the C.P. in effect collaborated with the A.F. of L. officials, and in return for an indirect endorsement from the A.F. of L. leaders withheld all criticism of the obvious step-by-step course of treachery. The “non-aggression pact” with a vengeance!</p>
<p>Claherty, Bill Green’s personal agent and chief figure in the betrayal, was several times played up in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> during the past week in militant role. His statement that “he was not going to fight the communists, etc.” was given prominence in a first page story. Day by day. as progressives looked to the one-time denouncers of the A.F. of L. as a “company union” and its bureaucratic officials as “fascists” to point out in uncompromising words the openly apparent moves toward the betrayal, the C.P., instead of uttering any warning or denunciation of the betrayers, imparted an air of radicalism to these leaders in return for the right to trail in their company and gain “respectability” in the eyes of the workers.<br>
</p>
<h4>Browder Swallows His Tongue</h4>
<p class="fst">Earl Browder, national secretary of the C.P., spoke Friday night to over nine hundred workers in Akron and deliberately refrained from even mentioning Green, Claherty and Co. In last Saturday’s <strong>Daily Worker</strong>, at the very moment when the entire scheme to break the strike should have been clear to anyone with even a pretense of class-conscious judgment, Browder issued a statement on the Akron situation in which he warns the workers against the government but not against their own treacherous leaders with whom he was in alliance. These he addresses in the <strong>Daily Worker</strong> with “comradely words”! So capitulating to the bureaucrats was Browder, that Wilber Tate, an official A.F. of L. organizer, who spoke from the same platform, was reported in the Akron daily press as being more militant than Browder!</p>
<p>Akron press reports on the morning following the signing of the agreement fully indicated the extent of the rubber bosses’ victory. Officials of the Big Three plants and heads of the company unions were described as “jubilant.” One rubber official declared, “We don’t see what all the fuss was about. We have always given our employees precisely what the terms of this agreement call for.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Dragging Through the Courts</h4>
<p class="fst">The terms of the agreement place company unions on an equal status with real unions, contains no guarantee of recognition to the genuine union, prevents the calling of a strike while the injunction cases against the companies are tried in the Appeals Courts and through the U.S. Supreme Court, which may drag on for endless months, and forbids the holding even of an election until the court decisions are handed down.</p>
<p>The unions must now prepare to fight an attempt to discharge and black-list the outstanding militants and progressive local leaders and to withstand a reign of intimidation and terror which may be launched against union men in the plants as the companies continue their counter-drives to smash the union.</p>
<p>Workers Party members in Akron will continue to assist in organizing the progressive unionists to fight the reactionary A.F. of L. officialdom, and help renew the courage of the union men to continue to fight for their union and build it to greater strength by more correct and militant leadership and policies.</p>
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Art Preis
Raw Deal Put Over in Akron
Green & Co. Surpass All Records For Treachery
(April 1935)
From The New Militant, Vol. I No. 18, 20 April 1935, pp. 1 & 4.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
AKRON, O., April 14. – The great strike involving 35,000 Akron rubber workers, which was to set the spark to the 1935 wave of strike struggles in America, is over before it began – the latest and most sinister betrayal of organized labor by William Green and his lieutenants.
A group of militant progressives, which has been growing in the last few weeks, led the opposition battle and, only after hours of desperate lighting, was defeated by the better organized official machine, which finally shoved through the agreement by a series of deceptive maneuvers and outright railroading. This progressive tendency, which has been greatly strengthened and clarified by the events of the last 4 hours, will find a clear public expression in a mass meeting to be held by the Akron branch of the W.P. April 17, at which James P. Cannon will analyze the betrayal and outline the next steps in the fight to build an effective union. The Game of Delays
The imposing of the treacherous agreement upon the rubber workers and the breaking of the strike by the A.F. of L. officialdom followed a carefully designed course. The strike, which has been looming for eighteen months past, was delayed month after month on the urging of the A.F. of L. officials, even after the rubber companies brazenly defined the rulings of the National Labor Relations Board that an election be held on the matter of representation for collective bargaining. When the government further demonstrated its unwillingness or inability to enforce its own ruling, these officials continued to point to the government as the agency from which union recognition might be secured instead of to the mass strength and militant action of the workers.
Last Minute Promises
Following an overwhelming vote by the unions last week in favor of strike, a last-hour course of delay was pursued by the A.F. of L. leaders in order to give the forces of the national government and local press a chance to get into full play. Every effort to set a definite strike date was deliberately brushed aside. While still urging the workers to prepare for action, the officials implanted in the minds of the inexperienced union members the belief that a strike might still be averted and that the demands for union recognition might be secured through the intervention of Francis Perkins and the pressure of the government.
As late as twelve hours before the signing of the actual agreement, Claherty and other organizers boldly proclaimed through the press that they would agree to nothing less than an election conducted by the Department of Labor off the companies’ properties, in which the companies would unconditionally recognize the group securing the majority vote. It cannot be doubted that the terms of the final settlement were well known to Green, Claherty and Co. even while these misleading statements were being made to disarm the workers and leave them unprepared for the last crushing blow.
C.P. Plays Claherty’s Game
A new angle was the role of the Communist Party in the Akron betrayal. During the last and most critical days leading up to the debacle, the C.P. in effect collaborated with the A.F. of L. officials, and in return for an indirect endorsement from the A.F. of L. leaders withheld all criticism of the obvious step-by-step course of treachery. The “non-aggression pact” with a vengeance!
Claherty, Bill Green’s personal agent and chief figure in the betrayal, was several times played up in the Daily Worker during the past week in militant role. His statement that “he was not going to fight the communists, etc.” was given prominence in a first page story. Day by day. as progressives looked to the one-time denouncers of the A.F. of L. as a “company union” and its bureaucratic officials as “fascists” to point out in uncompromising words the openly apparent moves toward the betrayal, the C.P., instead of uttering any warning or denunciation of the betrayers, imparted an air of radicalism to these leaders in return for the right to trail in their company and gain “respectability” in the eyes of the workers.
Browder Swallows His Tongue
Earl Browder, national secretary of the C.P., spoke Friday night to over nine hundred workers in Akron and deliberately refrained from even mentioning Green, Claherty and Co. In last Saturday’s Daily Worker, at the very moment when the entire scheme to break the strike should have been clear to anyone with even a pretense of class-conscious judgment, Browder issued a statement on the Akron situation in which he warns the workers against the government but not against their own treacherous leaders with whom he was in alliance. These he addresses in the Daily Worker with “comradely words”! So capitulating to the bureaucrats was Browder, that Wilber Tate, an official A.F. of L. organizer, who spoke from the same platform, was reported in the Akron daily press as being more militant than Browder!
Akron press reports on the morning following the signing of the agreement fully indicated the extent of the rubber bosses’ victory. Officials of the Big Three plants and heads of the company unions were described as “jubilant.” One rubber official declared, “We don’t see what all the fuss was about. We have always given our employees precisely what the terms of this agreement call for.”
Dragging Through the Courts
The terms of the agreement place company unions on an equal status with real unions, contains no guarantee of recognition to the genuine union, prevents the calling of a strike while the injunction cases against the companies are tried in the Appeals Courts and through the U.S. Supreme Court, which may drag on for endless months, and forbids the holding even of an election until the court decisions are handed down.
The unions must now prepare to fight an attempt to discharge and black-list the outstanding militants and progressive local leaders and to withstand a reign of intimidation and terror which may be launched against union men in the plants as the companies continue their counter-drives to smash the union.
Workers Party members in Akron will continue to assist in organizing the progressive unionists to fight the reactionary A.F. of L. officialdom, and help renew the courage of the union men to continue to fight for their union and build it to greater strength by more correct and militant leadership and policies.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>The Defense of Labor’s Living Standards</h1>
<h3>(28 February 1949)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1949/index.htm#m49_09" target="new">Vol. 13 No. 9</a>, 28 February 1949, p. 2.<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst">An outstanding feature of the capitalist system today is its instability. It staggers drunkenly between boom and bust, inflation and depression. This imposes on the labor movement the need for utmost flexibility and alertness in defending the workers’ living standards. For each spasmodic lurch of the profit system threatens the workers in a special and specific way.</p>
<p>Because of its Marxist understanding of this extreme instability of capitalism in its decline and decay, the Socialist Workers Party since 1938 has put forward a program that anticipates the shifts and fluctuations of the capitalist economy. This program is designed to arm the American labor movement in advance to defend living standards from every capitalist attack, whether through inflation or depression.<br>
</p>
<h4>Two Key Planks</h4>
<p class="fst">Two key planks of this program are the sliding scale of wages and the sliding scale of hours. In the “boom” period of skyrocketing prices, the SWP emphasizes the sliding scale of wages to provide automatic wage increases, above the basic union wage scale, for all rises in the cost of living. When the signs of “bust” appear and lay-offs begin, the SWP advances the sliding scale of hours to provide automatic reductions in the work week with no cuts in take-home pay so that available work is divided equally among the workers without loss of weekly income. This is embodied today in the demand for the 30-hour week at 40-hours’ pay.</p>
<p><em>Against this realistic and realizable program, the pro-capitalist union leaders seek to answer the assaults on living standards with programs based on the myth of capitalist stability, or its possibility.</em> They are constantly caught off-guard by the extreme and rapid gyrations of the capitalist economy. When their own solutions prove obviously inadequate, they sometimes are forced by the pressure of the union ranks to borrow from the arsenal of the class-conscious militants and Marxists. But almost invariably they grasp these Weapons too late or misuse them. Like gun-shy men, they fear these Unaccustomed weapons and don’t know how or when to use them.<br>
</p>
<h4>Striking Example</h4>
<p class="fst"><em>We see a striking example of this in the case of Walter Reuther, CIO United Auto Workers President, and the sliding scale of wages contract he signed with General Motors last May. This contract is now being widely discussed in labor circles because under its terms the GM workers in March are expected to get a two or three-cent pay reduction based on a decline in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ cost-of-living index.</em></p>
<p>Throughout the war and with renewed urgency at the end of the war, the SWP and increasing numbers of UAW militants urged the adoption of the sliding scale of wages program. Reuther opposed this program bitterly right up to the moment he handed the GM workers his own version of a sliding scale program.</p>
<p>During the previous years of inflation he and the rest of the CIO leaders, as well as-the Stalinists who supplied the “theoretical” arguments against the sliding wage scale, all stressed the false program of the roll-back of prices by the government.</p>
<p>This utopian idea led only to frozen wages on the one hand and ever-rising prices on the other. When the war ended, the union leaders could not hold back the upsurge of the workers, who tossed the price-rollback myth into the ashcan and hit the picket lines for wage gains. Then was the most favorable time, at the very start of the post-war wage fight, that the UAW and the other unions should have fought for the sliding scale of wages.</p>
<p>But the only concern of the union leaders was to get the strikes over with as fast as possible by settling for skimpy flat wage increases. Had they fought for and won an adequate sliding wage scale, the present hourly wage scales would be far higher and higher wages would have prevailed automatically with each rise in the prices over the past three years. Even on the. basis of figures furnished by Reuther’s own research directors, this failure to fight for the sliding wage scale at the <em>most favorable time</em> has cost each and every auto worker alone over $1,000.</p>
<p><em>Reuther’s faith in the roll-back program – that is, his faith in the capitalist government to stabilize prices quickly at a lower level – meant that each year the auto workers found their real wages, in spite of the bitterly-won wage increase of the previous year, lagging more and more behind prices.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The 1948 GM Contract</h4>
<p class="fst">It was not until May 1948, late in the inflationary cycle and with signs already pointing to a break in the economy, that General Motors proposed and Reuther accepted a contract containing a sliding wage scale clause, the first of its kind adopted by any major union. Immediately thereafter, the Stalinist-controlled CIO United Elecrical Workers signed a similar contract for its members in the GM Electrical Division.</p>
<p><em>But, as the May 31, 1948, </em><em><strong>Militant</strong></em>
<em>immediately pointed out, Reuther had picked up the sliding scale program merely to distort and misuse it in reaching an easy deal with General Motors. We wrote, he “accepted the sliding scale program not as a fortification of, but as a substitute for, the needed increase in real basic wages, welfare benefits and grievance improvements.”</em></p>
<p>In return for the sliding wage scale, Reuther sacrificed the auto workers’ demand for a 25-cent hourly wage increase and took instead a mere six cents raise in the basic scale, plus five cents more for cost-of-living increases during the previous year. Thus, the GM basic wage scale was fixed at least 7-cents below that of Ford and Chrysler workers, which in turn was about 20 cents short of the real wage right after the war. The basic weakness of the GM contract was that it started from a base wage far below what the real wage should have been.</p>
<p>In addition, it provided for the possibility of a cut-back in wages of up to five cents an hour if prices declined instead of rising. This meant that the GM workers took the risk of losing the additional five-cent “cost-of-living” increase that had brought their net increase to 11 cents. This risk was further increased because the upward or downward revisions were to be based on the index of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which notoriously underestimates rises in living, costs, instead of on an index compiled by a union-farmer-consumer agency. Moreover, the hands of the GM workers were tied by a two-year contract, instead of the customary one-year clause, leaving them helpless to revise the wage clause in the event of a sharp change in the economic trend before expiration of the contract.</p>
<p><em>In spite of its obvious defects, the GM sliding scale contract did partially demonstrate the advantages of the principle of the sliding scale of wages if properly applied. Within three months of the contract’s adoption and for the past six months, the GM workers have enjoyed an additional raise of three cents an hour, bringing their total wage increase to 14 cents, one cent higher than the Ford and Chrysler increase.</em></p>
<p>It is at this point, however, that the weaknesses of Reuther’s version of the sliding wage scale are becoming apparent. The instability of the capitalist system is beginning to make itself felt again by a lurch in the direction of deflation and economic decline. Prices have begun to sag a bit and mass unemployment is starting to loom as a prospect for the coming period. The GM workers face a wage cut, due – we repeat – not to the sliding scale principle but to Reuther’s false application of it.<br>
</p>
<h4>Stalinist Demagogy</h4>
<p class="fst">This has offered the enemies of the principle of the sliding scale of wages, particularly the Stalinists, an opportunity to renew their assault upon the sliding scale program as such. George Morris, the <strong>Daily Worker</strong>’s anti-Trotskyist hatchet-man, repeatedly attacks the obvious defects of the Reuther sliding scale program in the light of the pending GM wage cut. Morris falsely attributes these defects to the correct principle of the sliding scale of wages.</p>
<p>Morris, of course, doesn’t remind the workers of the bankruptcy of the roll-back program that the Stalinists, along with Reuther and the CIO bureaucracy generally, counterposed for six years to the sliding wage scale program of the genuine CIO militants. Above all, he skips over the Stalinist war-time “incentive wages” program – that is, the program of fixing wages according to production speed-up as opposed to wage increases based on the needs of the workers.</p>
<p>But the Stalinist arguments, with their typical falsifications and distortions, are suspect from the outset because they omit any reference to the Stalinists’ own use of the sliding scale of wages program. Why doesn’t Morris attack the Stalinist leaders of the UE who borrowed Reuther’s version of the sliding wage scale and incorporated it intact into their contract with the GM Electrical Division last June? Why doesn’t Morris attack the French and Italian Stalinist union leaders who, under pressure of the workers, have made the sliding wage scale a major demand of the recent strikes? <em>The failure of Morris to condemn these Stalinist applications of the sliding scale principle shows that his attacks on the sliding scale program are nothing but hypocritical lies.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>New Trend Appearing</h4>
<p class="fst">We Trotskyists are not fetishists on slogans. Our program is rounded and takes into account different aspects. Each aspect of our program is designed to defend the workers from capitalist attack under specific conditions. Thus, the present period is giving indications of a shift in the American economy that necessitates a corresponding change in emphasis in the program to defend labor’s standard of living.</p>
<p><em>The ominous increase of unemployment and part-time employment is one significant sign of a possible depression, which now indicates the need for a program to combat lay-offs and wage cuts. That is the program of the sliding scale of hours.</em><br>
</p>
<h4>The Next Steps</h4>
<p class="fst">First of all, we urge the labor unions to mobilize immediately for a nationwide struggle to achieve the 30-hour week, six-hour day with no reduction in weekly wages. The unions must intensify their fight for an increase in mass purchasing power by a substantial fourth-round wage raise and at the same time demand in every contract a clause providing for an automatic reduction in hours with no loss of take-home pay whenever the employers claim they have insufficient work to keep everyone employed.</p>
<p>It is instructive to note that Walter Reuther, who opposed the sliding scale of wages when it was most timely, now fails to offer any program to safeguard the auto workers against layoffs. When questioned on Feb. 20 about a program on lay-offs, he is reported to have said that the 30-hour week at 40 hours pay is “<em>idealistic and a dream at this time.”</em></p>
<p>That is the typical answer of a pro-capitalist union bureaucrat who fears every new prospect for labor struggle and who is hoping against hope that capitalism will stabilize itself in time and reduce the necessity for renewed class battle. The thousands of auto workers who have already been laid off, however, and the thousands more who see in these layoffs the image of their own future don’t think the fight for the shorter work-week “idealistic.” They think it far more “idealistic” to wait for capitalism to “stabilize” itself. From this point of view, the SWP program of the sliding scale of hours is realism personified.</p>
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Art Preis
The Defense of Labor’s Living Standards
(28 February 1949)
From The Militant, Vol. 13 No. 9, 28 February 1949, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
An outstanding feature of the capitalist system today is its instability. It staggers drunkenly between boom and bust, inflation and depression. This imposes on the labor movement the need for utmost flexibility and alertness in defending the workers’ living standards. For each spasmodic lurch of the profit system threatens the workers in a special and specific way.
Because of its Marxist understanding of this extreme instability of capitalism in its decline and decay, the Socialist Workers Party since 1938 has put forward a program that anticipates the shifts and fluctuations of the capitalist economy. This program is designed to arm the American labor movement in advance to defend living standards from every capitalist attack, whether through inflation or depression.
Two Key Planks
Two key planks of this program are the sliding scale of wages and the sliding scale of hours. In the “boom” period of skyrocketing prices, the SWP emphasizes the sliding scale of wages to provide automatic wage increases, above the basic union wage scale, for all rises in the cost of living. When the signs of “bust” appear and lay-offs begin, the SWP advances the sliding scale of hours to provide automatic reductions in the work week with no cuts in take-home pay so that available work is divided equally among the workers without loss of weekly income. This is embodied today in the demand for the 30-hour week at 40-hours’ pay.
Against this realistic and realizable program, the pro-capitalist union leaders seek to answer the assaults on living standards with programs based on the myth of capitalist stability, or its possibility. They are constantly caught off-guard by the extreme and rapid gyrations of the capitalist economy. When their own solutions prove obviously inadequate, they sometimes are forced by the pressure of the union ranks to borrow from the arsenal of the class-conscious militants and Marxists. But almost invariably they grasp these Weapons too late or misuse them. Like gun-shy men, they fear these Unaccustomed weapons and don’t know how or when to use them.
Striking Example
We see a striking example of this in the case of Walter Reuther, CIO United Auto Workers President, and the sliding scale of wages contract he signed with General Motors last May. This contract is now being widely discussed in labor circles because under its terms the GM workers in March are expected to get a two or three-cent pay reduction based on a decline in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ cost-of-living index.
Throughout the war and with renewed urgency at the end of the war, the SWP and increasing numbers of UAW militants urged the adoption of the sliding scale of wages program. Reuther opposed this program bitterly right up to the moment he handed the GM workers his own version of a sliding scale program.
During the previous years of inflation he and the rest of the CIO leaders, as well as-the Stalinists who supplied the “theoretical” arguments against the sliding wage scale, all stressed the false program of the roll-back of prices by the government.
This utopian idea led only to frozen wages on the one hand and ever-rising prices on the other. When the war ended, the union leaders could not hold back the upsurge of the workers, who tossed the price-rollback myth into the ashcan and hit the picket lines for wage gains. Then was the most favorable time, at the very start of the post-war wage fight, that the UAW and the other unions should have fought for the sliding scale of wages.
But the only concern of the union leaders was to get the strikes over with as fast as possible by settling for skimpy flat wage increases. Had they fought for and won an adequate sliding wage scale, the present hourly wage scales would be far higher and higher wages would have prevailed automatically with each rise in the prices over the past three years. Even on the. basis of figures furnished by Reuther’s own research directors, this failure to fight for the sliding wage scale at the most favorable time has cost each and every auto worker alone over $1,000.
Reuther’s faith in the roll-back program – that is, his faith in the capitalist government to stabilize prices quickly at a lower level – meant that each year the auto workers found their real wages, in spite of the bitterly-won wage increase of the previous year, lagging more and more behind prices.
The 1948 GM Contract
It was not until May 1948, late in the inflationary cycle and with signs already pointing to a break in the economy, that General Motors proposed and Reuther accepted a contract containing a sliding wage scale clause, the first of its kind adopted by any major union. Immediately thereafter, the Stalinist-controlled CIO United Elecrical Workers signed a similar contract for its members in the GM Electrical Division.
But, as the May 31, 1948, Militant
immediately pointed out, Reuther had picked up the sliding scale program merely to distort and misuse it in reaching an easy deal with General Motors. We wrote, he “accepted the sliding scale program not as a fortification of, but as a substitute for, the needed increase in real basic wages, welfare benefits and grievance improvements.”
In return for the sliding wage scale, Reuther sacrificed the auto workers’ demand for a 25-cent hourly wage increase and took instead a mere six cents raise in the basic scale, plus five cents more for cost-of-living increases during the previous year. Thus, the GM basic wage scale was fixed at least 7-cents below that of Ford and Chrysler workers, which in turn was about 20 cents short of the real wage right after the war. The basic weakness of the GM contract was that it started from a base wage far below what the real wage should have been.
In addition, it provided for the possibility of a cut-back in wages of up to five cents an hour if prices declined instead of rising. This meant that the GM workers took the risk of losing the additional five-cent “cost-of-living” increase that had brought their net increase to 11 cents. This risk was further increased because the upward or downward revisions were to be based on the index of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which notoriously underestimates rises in living, costs, instead of on an index compiled by a union-farmer-consumer agency. Moreover, the hands of the GM workers were tied by a two-year contract, instead of the customary one-year clause, leaving them helpless to revise the wage clause in the event of a sharp change in the economic trend before expiration of the contract.
In spite of its obvious defects, the GM sliding scale contract did partially demonstrate the advantages of the principle of the sliding scale of wages if properly applied. Within three months of the contract’s adoption and for the past six months, the GM workers have enjoyed an additional raise of three cents an hour, bringing their total wage increase to 14 cents, one cent higher than the Ford and Chrysler increase.
It is at this point, however, that the weaknesses of Reuther’s version of the sliding wage scale are becoming apparent. The instability of the capitalist system is beginning to make itself felt again by a lurch in the direction of deflation and economic decline. Prices have begun to sag a bit and mass unemployment is starting to loom as a prospect for the coming period. The GM workers face a wage cut, due – we repeat – not to the sliding scale principle but to Reuther’s false application of it.
Stalinist Demagogy
This has offered the enemies of the principle of the sliding scale of wages, particularly the Stalinists, an opportunity to renew their assault upon the sliding scale program as such. George Morris, the Daily Worker’s anti-Trotskyist hatchet-man, repeatedly attacks the obvious defects of the Reuther sliding scale program in the light of the pending GM wage cut. Morris falsely attributes these defects to the correct principle of the sliding scale of wages.
Morris, of course, doesn’t remind the workers of the bankruptcy of the roll-back program that the Stalinists, along with Reuther and the CIO bureaucracy generally, counterposed for six years to the sliding wage scale program of the genuine CIO militants. Above all, he skips over the Stalinist war-time “incentive wages” program – that is, the program of fixing wages according to production speed-up as opposed to wage increases based on the needs of the workers.
But the Stalinist arguments, with their typical falsifications and distortions, are suspect from the outset because they omit any reference to the Stalinists’ own use of the sliding scale of wages program. Why doesn’t Morris attack the Stalinist leaders of the UE who borrowed Reuther’s version of the sliding wage scale and incorporated it intact into their contract with the GM Electrical Division last June? Why doesn’t Morris attack the French and Italian Stalinist union leaders who, under pressure of the workers, have made the sliding wage scale a major demand of the recent strikes? The failure of Morris to condemn these Stalinist applications of the sliding scale principle shows that his attacks on the sliding scale program are nothing but hypocritical lies.
New Trend Appearing
We Trotskyists are not fetishists on slogans. Our program is rounded and takes into account different aspects. Each aspect of our program is designed to defend the workers from capitalist attack under specific conditions. Thus, the present period is giving indications of a shift in the American economy that necessitates a corresponding change in emphasis in the program to defend labor’s standard of living.
The ominous increase of unemployment and part-time employment is one significant sign of a possible depression, which now indicates the need for a program to combat lay-offs and wage cuts. That is the program of the sliding scale of hours.
The Next Steps
First of all, we urge the labor unions to mobilize immediately for a nationwide struggle to achieve the 30-hour week, six-hour day with no reduction in weekly wages. The unions must intensify their fight for an increase in mass purchasing power by a substantial fourth-round wage raise and at the same time demand in every contract a clause providing for an automatic reduction in hours with no loss of take-home pay whenever the employers claim they have insufficient work to keep everyone employed.
It is instructive to note that Walter Reuther, who opposed the sliding scale of wages when it was most timely, now fails to offer any program to safeguard the auto workers against layoffs. When questioned on Feb. 20 about a program on lay-offs, he is reported to have said that the 30-hour week at 40 hours pay is “idealistic and a dream at this time.”
That is the typical answer of a pro-capitalist union bureaucrat who fears every new prospect for labor struggle and who is hoping against hope that capitalism will stabilize itself in time and reduce the necessity for renewed class battle. The thousands of auto workers who have already been laid off, however, and the thousands more who see in these layoffs the image of their own future don’t think the fight for the shorter work-week “idealistic.” They think it far more “idealistic” to wait for capitalism to “stabilize” itself. From this point of view, the SWP program of the sliding scale of hours is realism personified.
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<h2>Art Preis</h2>
<h1>UAW Delegates Face Key Issues</h1>
<h4>Uphold Democratic Unionism<br>
in First Two Sharp Debates</h4>
<h3>(24 March 1946)</h3>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="info">From <strong>The Militant</strong>, <a href="../../../../newspape/themilitant/1946/index.htm#m46_13" target="new">Vol. X No. 13</a>, 30 March 1946, pp. 1 & 2<br>
Transcribed & marked up by <a href="../../../../../../admin/volunteers/biographies/eocallaghan.htm" target="new">Einde O’Callaghan</a> for the <strong>Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL)</strong>.</p>
<hr width="100%" noshade="noshade" size="1">
<p class="fst"><strong>ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., Mar. 24. – Hot from the battlefronts of the greatest labor upsurge in American history, some 2,000 delegates of the mighty CIO United Automobile Workers have been meeting here at the Civic Auditorium since yesterday in their scheduled week-long 10th National Convention.</strong></p>
<p>Dispensing with the usual practice at most union conventions, including the CIO, of wasting the delegates’ time with numerous wind-bag guest speakers and elaborate ceremonies, the convention got down to business quickly yesterday afternoon. Before the first recess it had acted on a number of important resolutions, including the plan for a big “Organize the Unorganized” campaign.<br>
</p>
<h4>Key Issues</h4>
<p class="fst">However, many of the key issues that developed out of the great strike wave, which was spearheaded by the General Motors workers, have not yet hit the convention floor. These include such questions as “company security,” government “fact-finding” boards and the launching of an independent labor party.</p>
<p>Much of the interest and attention of the delegates is being centered on the struggle for the presidency of the union, between Walter Reuther, UAW vice-president and GM strike leader, and UAW President R.J. Thomas. This issue will come to a head Wednesday, when the election of officers is scheduled.</p>
<p>This afternoon saw the first real outbursts of debate and controversy on vital questions.</p>
<p>The delegates vociferously and overwhelmingly voted down the unanimous proposal of the Constitution Committee to amend the UAW constitution to provide for the election of national officers every two years instead of annually.</p>
<p>The convention also referred back to the Constitution Committee a proposal to establish a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department after delegates insisted the proposal be strengthened to include provisions for greater representation for the Negro members in the top councils of the union.<br>
</p>
<h4>Storm of Boos</h4>
<p class="fst">As in previous conventions, the proposal to extend the terms of the top officers beyond one year was immediately greeted with a storm of boos and other strong expressions of disapproval. Shouts of “sit down” met the spokesman of the Constitution Committee, Ben Garrison of Ford Highland Park Local 400, when he tried to sell the convention the top leadership’s unpopular proposal – which none of the latter had the guts to openly and personally advocate.</p>
<p>After the chairman, Thomas, pleaded to “give the speaker a chance,” Garrison made a demagogic plea for the longer term in order to “limit politics” and because, he claimed, “if we permit continuation of internal politics we are not going to have a union.” Shelton Tappes of Ford Local 600, another member of the committee, who has been known as a close follower of Stalinist policies, also spoke for two-year terms in order to “eliminate politics from the union.”</p>
<p>Although the floor was flooded with the upraised hands of delegates, principally those who opposed the proposal, Thomas managed to give the floor mainly to those who favored the proposal. This brought loud and strident objections.<br>
</p>
<h4>Voice of Ranks</h4>
<p class="fst">One delegate, from Local 365, who clearly voiced the true sentiments of the ranks, pointed out that “if the officers do a good job they will be elected again without politicking. But if they don’t do their job we want to be in a position to eliminate them as quickly as possible.”</p>
<p>The call for the vote was soon made from the floor. The proposition was then voted down almost unanimously to the accompaniment of a great outburst of applause and cheers. This action reflected the mistrust of the auto militants, steeped in the tradition of union democracy, of any move that might help the top leaders to entrench themselves in a bureaucratic position over the union ranks.</p>
<p>The very next proposal of the Constitution Committee brought forward the question of providing representation for the Negro members, who constitute a sizable and very active portion of the union, on the top bodies of the UAW. This proposal has repeatedly been supported by most Negro delegates. They wish to protect the interests of the especially oppressed Negro workers, and to secure a demonstration by the union of its earnest desire to show the world it takes its no-discrimination policy seriously.</p>
<p>The debate arose after the Constitution Committee reported out its proposal for the establishment of a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department to be headed by the International President.</p>
<p>A proposal was made from the floor by Nat Ganley, Local 155, that an additional amendment be added to provide for the election of a Negro to the International Executive Board. This idea was supported by several representative Negro delegates, as well as several white members.<br>
</p>
<h4>Examples Cited</h4>
<p class="fst">Opposition was voiced to the representation proposal giving the stock argument that officers should be elected strictly on the basis of “qualifications” and that if you start with guaranteeing Negroes representation, then “every other group” will want special provisions. This argument evaded the significant factor that it is only the Negroes who lack, even in the democratic UAW, full and equal opportunity to gain key offices because of still remaining, underlying currents of discrimination.</p>
<p>Examples of this discrimination, as well as the failure of both factions of the top leadership to seriously implement the fine anti-discrimination resolutions passed at previous conventions, were cited by several Negro delegates, including Hodges Mason, of Local 208.</p>
<p>The Stalinists, whose spokesmen were Ganley and Hodges, had at previous conventions introduced this proposal. Their purpose has always been demagogically to exploit the sentiments of the Negro delegates in a factional maneuver against Reuther. They did this in 1943 when Reuther opposed their speed-up “incentive pay” plan. This maneuver was made possible because of Reuther’s incorrect position on this question and his catering to certain Jim Crow elements in his caucus.</p>
<p>Erwin Baur, Detroit Budd Local delegate, summed up the issue most clearly when he stated: “It is quite obvious from observing the action of the Negro delegates that they want to have more than what the Constitutional Committee proposes. This question can be solved here only in one of two ways. Either the two caucuses, neither of which has nominated a Negro candidate, must combine to elect a Negro to the top committee, or we must adopt an article to the constitution which will provide a post for a Negro representative.”<br>
</p>
<h4>Real Situation</h4>
<p class="fst">This statement brought out into the open the real situation. Neither the Thomas-Addes group nor the Reuther group has nominated and fought to elect some of the unquestionably qualified Negro members. In this respect both groups are catering to the more backward and prejudiced minority of delegates.</p>
<p>The convention voted to refer the committee’s recommendation back to the committee for further consideration and to bring back a proposal with “more teeth” and greater assurances of a sincere desire to give the Negro members proper representation.</p>
<p>The “keynote” speech of the convention was delivered by President R.J. Thomas yesterday afternoon.</p>
<p>His remarks created scarcely a ripple in the convention. He spoke in broad generalities about the problems facing the workers, briefly outlining the numerous attacks which the employers and their agents are aiming at the workers. His one positive point, which no one could possibly contest, was his plea for the organization of the unorganized in line with the big campaign being mapped by the CIO.<br>
</p>
<h4>Thomas Skirts Issues</h4>
<p class="fst">He skirted all the key issues, however, such as “company security” and government boards. Although he attacked Truman as “weak and spineless” and asserted “we must strengthen our political action,” he wound up by proposing the same old bankrupt policy of tying labor to the political parties of Big Business, simply pleading that “we must demand that both major political parties in this country have more progressive candidates.” The present reactionary Congress is made up of many of those “progressive” capitalist candidates whose election was hailed by CIO-PAC leaders as a “great progressive victory” in November 1944.</p>
<p>The real intent of the speech was factional, as was revealed when Thomas made an underhanded and concealed attack on Reuther, whom he tried by implication to link to a “plot” allegedly being engineered by AFL Ladies Garment Workers’ President David Dubinsky to swing the UAW into the AFL.</p>
<p>Thomas took a slanderous attack directly from the Stalinist <strong>Daily Worker</strong> and tried, without naming him, to smear Reuther. He sought to throw suspicion on the splendid contribution of $86,000 which the ILG made to aid the GM strike. Thomas referred back to the time in 1939 when Dubinsky is reported to have aided Homer Martin with $25,000 when Martin tried to split the UAW into the AFL. He said he “was worried about the situation” and by innuendo tried to cast doubts on Reuther’s CIO loyalty because the ILG, like many AFL unions, contributed to the General Labor Committee to Aid the GM Strikers, which was supported by both AFL and CIO leaders including CIO President Philip Murray.</p>
<p>Thomas’ speech was met by only a brief flurry of polite applause and widespread boos.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reuther Rally</h4>
<p class="fst">Reuther has the support, it is quite apparent, of most of the more militant and progressive elements. Last night his caucus held a “Reuther for President” rally, which attracted about 800 delegates.</p>
<p>Reuther, at this rally, spoke generally in defense of his leadership of the GM strike, which is the main reason for the support he is now receiving for the union presidency.</p>
<p>Although there is a tendency among a section of his followers to resort to red-baiting against the Stalinists, Reuther in his speech avoided red-baiting. He sharply assailed the underhanded secret deal of the Stalinist leaders of the CIO United Electrical Workers who violated an agreement with the UAW and settled the strike of 30,000 UE members in GM Electrical Division for less than the GM auto workers were demanding.</p>
<p>Reuther correctly attacked Thomas for his conduct during the GM strike, such as Thomas’ proposition to reopen GM parts plants during the strike, his attempts to settle the strike on less favorable terms, etc. Reuther went back to the wartime period of “wild-cat” strikes before V-J Day and accused Thomas of not having “the guts to take a stand” in support of the Kelsey-Hayes and other strikers.</p>
<p>Reuther admitted that the responsibility for so-called unauthorized strikes lay with the leadership for its failure to defend the interests of the workers. He also admitted that the huge pile-up of local grievances whose settlement has prolonged the GM strike came during the period of the no-strike pledge.<br>
</p>
<h4>Reuther’s Own Past</h4>
<p class="fst">Reuther, however, failed to recall his own support of the no-strike pledge and how he helped to enforce it. Reuther avoided discussion of many of the main issues growing out of the GM strike, such as the now-clearly false “one-at-a-time” strategy which he authorized and which the entire UAW Board voted to follow.</p>
<p>He also neglected to explain his capitulation on the issue of Truman’s “fact-finding” boards, in whose proceedings he participated, although he had previously denounced the “fact-finding” procedure as aimed to whittle down the union demands – which it did.</p>
<p>He referred pointedly to the fact that the GM contract contained no “company security” clause, a positive achievement of the GM strike, But he did not mention the fact that the UAW Board, with his participation, approved unanimously the original and worst proposal for “company security” offered by the UAW leaders to Ford Motor Company.</p>
<p>Reuther in his talk avoided the question of program. Because the meeting was conducted solely as a “hurrah” rally, members of the Reuther caucus who desired to, did not have the opportunity to make proposals on program. But, aware that this question was foremost in the minds of a number of those present, Reuther concluded by saying he would “discuss the question of program at another meeting.”</p>
<p>However, his program was released in a convention paper issued by his group following the meeting. Except for language and phraseology, it scarcely differs from the program of Thomas- Addes. It contains no proposals for action on such vital questions as “company security” and the withdrawal of union support from government wage-freezing and wage-fixing bodies like the “fact-finding” boards and Wage Stabilization Board.</p>
<p>On the question of labor political action, the key to labor’s most crucial problems, Reuther proposes “an aggressive program of political action to elect candidates pledged to this program within the existing party structure.” This means to back capitalist vote-catchers of the Democratic or Republican machines who give cheap pre-election promises to “support labor’s program.”</p>
<p>The need for a real political instrument of labor, a labor party, is recognized in a number of resolutions submitted by important locals to the convention. But Reuther does not propose any concrete steps whereby the UAW might advance the formation of a labor party now. He merely asks labor to “join hands with farmers, professionals, small business and other functional groups” to “build the base” for what he vaguely describes as a “new progressive party.”</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether the convention will have the opportunity to come to grips with the major questions or whether, as has happened in previous conventions, the delegates will be sidetracked into preoccupation with a narrower factional struggle around posts.</p>
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UAW Delegates Face Key Issues
Uphold Democratic Unionism
in First Two Sharp Debates
(24 March 1946)
From The Militant, Vol. X No. 13, 30 March 1946, pp. 1 & 2
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
ATLANTIC CITY, N.J., Mar. 24. – Hot from the battlefronts of the greatest labor upsurge in American history, some 2,000 delegates of the mighty CIO United Automobile Workers have been meeting here at the Civic Auditorium since yesterday in their scheduled week-long 10th National Convention.
Dispensing with the usual practice at most union conventions, including the CIO, of wasting the delegates’ time with numerous wind-bag guest speakers and elaborate ceremonies, the convention got down to business quickly yesterday afternoon. Before the first recess it had acted on a number of important resolutions, including the plan for a big “Organize the Unorganized” campaign.
Key Issues
However, many of the key issues that developed out of the great strike wave, which was spearheaded by the General Motors workers, have not yet hit the convention floor. These include such questions as “company security,” government “fact-finding” boards and the launching of an independent labor party.
Much of the interest and attention of the delegates is being centered on the struggle for the presidency of the union, between Walter Reuther, UAW vice-president and GM strike leader, and UAW President R.J. Thomas. This issue will come to a head Wednesday, when the election of officers is scheduled.
This afternoon saw the first real outbursts of debate and controversy on vital questions.
The delegates vociferously and overwhelmingly voted down the unanimous proposal of the Constitution Committee to amend the UAW constitution to provide for the election of national officers every two years instead of annually.
The convention also referred back to the Constitution Committee a proposal to establish a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department after delegates insisted the proposal be strengthened to include provisions for greater representation for the Negro members in the top councils of the union.
Storm of Boos
As in previous conventions, the proposal to extend the terms of the top officers beyond one year was immediately greeted with a storm of boos and other strong expressions of disapproval. Shouts of “sit down” met the spokesman of the Constitution Committee, Ben Garrison of Ford Highland Park Local 400, when he tried to sell the convention the top leadership’s unpopular proposal – which none of the latter had the guts to openly and personally advocate.
After the chairman, Thomas, pleaded to “give the speaker a chance,” Garrison made a demagogic plea for the longer term in order to “limit politics” and because, he claimed, “if we permit continuation of internal politics we are not going to have a union.” Shelton Tappes of Ford Local 600, another member of the committee, who has been known as a close follower of Stalinist policies, also spoke for two-year terms in order to “eliminate politics from the union.”
Although the floor was flooded with the upraised hands of delegates, principally those who opposed the proposal, Thomas managed to give the floor mainly to those who favored the proposal. This brought loud and strident objections.
Voice of Ranks
One delegate, from Local 365, who clearly voiced the true sentiments of the ranks, pointed out that “if the officers do a good job they will be elected again without politicking. But if they don’t do their job we want to be in a position to eliminate them as quickly as possible.”
The call for the vote was soon made from the floor. The proposition was then voted down almost unanimously to the accompaniment of a great outburst of applause and cheers. This action reflected the mistrust of the auto militants, steeped in the tradition of union democracy, of any move that might help the top leaders to entrench themselves in a bureaucratic position over the union ranks.
The very next proposal of the Constitution Committee brought forward the question of providing representation for the Negro members, who constitute a sizable and very active portion of the union, on the top bodies of the UAW. This proposal has repeatedly been supported by most Negro delegates. They wish to protect the interests of the especially oppressed Negro workers, and to secure a demonstration by the union of its earnest desire to show the world it takes its no-discrimination policy seriously.
The debate arose after the Constitution Committee reported out its proposal for the establishment of a Fair Practices and Anti-Discrimination Department to be headed by the International President.
A proposal was made from the floor by Nat Ganley, Local 155, that an additional amendment be added to provide for the election of a Negro to the International Executive Board. This idea was supported by several representative Negro delegates, as well as several white members.
Examples Cited
Opposition was voiced to the representation proposal giving the stock argument that officers should be elected strictly on the basis of “qualifications” and that if you start with guaranteeing Negroes representation, then “every other group” will want special provisions. This argument evaded the significant factor that it is only the Negroes who lack, even in the democratic UAW, full and equal opportunity to gain key offices because of still remaining, underlying currents of discrimination.
Examples of this discrimination, as well as the failure of both factions of the top leadership to seriously implement the fine anti-discrimination resolutions passed at previous conventions, were cited by several Negro delegates, including Hodges Mason, of Local 208.
The Stalinists, whose spokesmen were Ganley and Hodges, had at previous conventions introduced this proposal. Their purpose has always been demagogically to exploit the sentiments of the Negro delegates in a factional maneuver against Reuther. They did this in 1943 when Reuther opposed their speed-up “incentive pay” plan. This maneuver was made possible because of Reuther’s incorrect position on this question and his catering to certain Jim Crow elements in his caucus.
Erwin Baur, Detroit Budd Local delegate, summed up the issue most clearly when he stated: “It is quite obvious from observing the action of the Negro delegates that they want to have more than what the Constitutional Committee proposes. This question can be solved here only in one of two ways. Either the two caucuses, neither of which has nominated a Negro candidate, must combine to elect a Negro to the top committee, or we must adopt an article to the constitution which will provide a post for a Negro representative.”
Real Situation
This statement brought out into the open the real situation. Neither the Thomas-Addes group nor the Reuther group has nominated and fought to elect some of the unquestionably qualified Negro members. In this respect both groups are catering to the more backward and prejudiced minority of delegates.
The convention voted to refer the committee’s recommendation back to the committee for further consideration and to bring back a proposal with “more teeth” and greater assurances of a sincere desire to give the Negro members proper representation.
The “keynote” speech of the convention was delivered by President R.J. Thomas yesterday afternoon.
His remarks created scarcely a ripple in the convention. He spoke in broad generalities about the problems facing the workers, briefly outlining the numerous attacks which the employers and their agents are aiming at the workers. His one positive point, which no one could possibly contest, was his plea for the organization of the unorganized in line with the big campaign being mapped by the CIO.
Thomas Skirts Issues
He skirted all the key issues, however, such as “company security” and government boards. Although he attacked Truman as “weak and spineless” and asserted “we must strengthen our political action,” he wound up by proposing the same old bankrupt policy of tying labor to the political parties of Big Business, simply pleading that “we must demand that both major political parties in this country have more progressive candidates.” The present reactionary Congress is made up of many of those “progressive” capitalist candidates whose election was hailed by CIO-PAC leaders as a “great progressive victory” in November 1944.
The real intent of the speech was factional, as was revealed when Thomas made an underhanded and concealed attack on Reuther, whom he tried by implication to link to a “plot” allegedly being engineered by AFL Ladies Garment Workers’ President David Dubinsky to swing the UAW into the AFL.
Thomas took a slanderous attack directly from the Stalinist Daily Worker and tried, without naming him, to smear Reuther. He sought to throw suspicion on the splendid contribution of $86,000 which the ILG made to aid the GM strike. Thomas referred back to the time in 1939 when Dubinsky is reported to have aided Homer Martin with $25,000 when Martin tried to split the UAW into the AFL. He said he “was worried about the situation” and by innuendo tried to cast doubts on Reuther’s CIO loyalty because the ILG, like many AFL unions, contributed to the General Labor Committee to Aid the GM Strikers, which was supported by both AFL and CIO leaders including CIO President Philip Murray.
Thomas’ speech was met by only a brief flurry of polite applause and widespread boos.
Reuther Rally
Reuther has the support, it is quite apparent, of most of the more militant and progressive elements. Last night his caucus held a “Reuther for President” rally, which attracted about 800 delegates.
Reuther, at this rally, spoke generally in defense of his leadership of the GM strike, which is the main reason for the support he is now receiving for the union presidency.
Although there is a tendency among a section of his followers to resort to red-baiting against the Stalinists, Reuther in his speech avoided red-baiting. He sharply assailed the underhanded secret deal of the Stalinist leaders of the CIO United Electrical Workers who violated an agreement with the UAW and settled the strike of 30,000 UE members in GM Electrical Division for less than the GM auto workers were demanding.
Reuther correctly attacked Thomas for his conduct during the GM strike, such as Thomas’ proposition to reopen GM parts plants during the strike, his attempts to settle the strike on less favorable terms, etc. Reuther went back to the wartime period of “wild-cat” strikes before V-J Day and accused Thomas of not having “the guts to take a stand” in support of the Kelsey-Hayes and other strikers.
Reuther admitted that the responsibility for so-called unauthorized strikes lay with the leadership for its failure to defend the interests of the workers. He also admitted that the huge pile-up of local grievances whose settlement has prolonged the GM strike came during the period of the no-strike pledge.
Reuther’s Own Past
Reuther, however, failed to recall his own support of the no-strike pledge and how he helped to enforce it. Reuther avoided discussion of many of the main issues growing out of the GM strike, such as the now-clearly false “one-at-a-time” strategy which he authorized and which the entire UAW Board voted to follow.
He also neglected to explain his capitulation on the issue of Truman’s “fact-finding” boards, in whose proceedings he participated, although he had previously denounced the “fact-finding” procedure as aimed to whittle down the union demands – which it did.
He referred pointedly to the fact that the GM contract contained no “company security” clause, a positive achievement of the GM strike, But he did not mention the fact that the UAW Board, with his participation, approved unanimously the original and worst proposal for “company security” offered by the UAW leaders to Ford Motor Company.
Reuther in his talk avoided the question of program. Because the meeting was conducted solely as a “hurrah” rally, members of the Reuther caucus who desired to, did not have the opportunity to make proposals on program. But, aware that this question was foremost in the minds of a number of those present, Reuther concluded by saying he would “discuss the question of program at another meeting.”
However, his program was released in a convention paper issued by his group following the meeting. Except for language and phraseology, it scarcely differs from the program of Thomas- Addes. It contains no proposals for action on such vital questions as “company security” and the withdrawal of union support from government wage-freezing and wage-fixing bodies like the “fact-finding” boards and Wage Stabilization Board.
On the question of labor political action, the key to labor’s most crucial problems, Reuther proposes “an aggressive program of political action to elect candidates pledged to this program within the existing party structure.” This means to back capitalist vote-catchers of the Democratic or Republican machines who give cheap pre-election promises to “support labor’s program.”
The need for a real political instrument of labor, a labor party, is recognized in a number of resolutions submitted by important locals to the convention. But Reuther does not propose any concrete steps whereby the UAW might advance the formation of a labor party now. He merely asks labor to “join hands with farmers, professionals, small business and other functional groups” to “build the base” for what he vaguely describes as a “new progressive party.”
It remains to be seen whether the convention will have the opportunity to come to grips with the major questions or whether, as has happened in previous conventions, the delegates will be sidetracked into preoccupation with a narrower factional struggle around posts.
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