Guest Article by Lorenzo D’Ettore
The labor movement, and more broadly, the masses of workers in the United States, have faced many divisions and contradictions born of imperialism. These contradictions trace back to the development of industry and industrial agriculture at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, the United States labor movement has been embedded in a multi-faceted and rich history of struggle, marked by the rise of organized labor to protect workers’ interests. The power built by the labor movement in the early 20th century was formidable, often fighting to eradicate bourgeois oppression, sometimes with the force of the gun.
In the final analysis, tracing the history of the labor movement in the United States is the task of the Communist Party, as it demonstrates the historical necessity for the construction of socialism, and eventually Communism. Workers have been gunned down by the reactionary State, shedding their blood in the fight for improved working conditions and the right to determine the means of their labor. Though the workers’ sacrifices were not in vain and their conditions did improve, the cost was still heavy. This task is not exclusive to the Communist Party; those fighting for reconstitution must also trace this history to further their cause, without splitting over labor tactics or historical materialist analysis of US history.
The 1914 Massacre of Ludlow, Colorado is perhaps the most notable historical example of the bourgeoisie spilling the blood of the worker, but it is one among dozens of similar events targeting coal miners. The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) began a strike against the Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) on September 23rd, 1913, demanding improved wages and the right for workers to be recognized by their union. CF&I, owned by the Rockefeller family, worked diligently to displace the union, employing a series of predictable tactics that mirror those used by the contemporary bourgeoisie.
The UMWA workers demanded an approximate 10% increase in wages, an eight-hour workday, compensation for typically uncompensated required work, the election of workers to their posts, the right to shop outside of the company store, and safety regulations akin to what OSHA stands for today in protecting workers from injury or death. Remember, coal mining is an extremely dangerous job! However, unlike OSHA, which is a government organization under the bourgeois Department of Labor, the workers were fighting for proletarian control over industry, seeking to establish their own safety standards and regulations in service to the workers.
To the surprise of perhaps nobody, the boss will not comply with your demand. At least, they will not without the pressure of crippling their connections to profits. The strike is the most basic and effective non-violent tool of the worker to apply pressure against the bosses and their lackeys. The strike is almost universally successful historically, so much so that the organizers of the UMWA strike wrote in their notice: “We are guaranteed to win!”
The bosses, in an effort to combat victory, will apply pressures in return to displace the strike. Between September 23rd, 1913, and April 20th, 1914, the Rockefellers and their political lackeys in the Colorado state government formed militias of strikebreakers, scabs, and National Guardsmen. More direct pressures were complemented with directives to vacate company-owned housing, the closure of company-owned stores, and the withholding of wages.
While the strike as such is non-violent, it is not always this way at every stage, and some strikes are armed strikes or paired with armed action.
Lenin says “…Socialists call strikes ‘a school of war,’ a school in which the workers learn to make war on their enemies for the liberation of the whole people, of all who labor, from the yoke of government officials and from the yoke of capital.” Lenin continues: “‘A school of war’ is, however, not war itself. When strikes are widespread among the workers, some of the workers (including some socialists) begin to believe that the working class can confine itself to strikes, strike funds, or strike associations alone; that by strikes alone the working class can achieve a considerable improvement in its conditions or even its total emancipation.”
As the working miners and their families were forced to relocate and live in impromptu tent encampments, supported financially solely by the UMWA, they began to experience terror. Political adversaries within the union were targeted for execution, their families were kidnapped, and the encampments were ignited with kerosene. The harrowing experience of the Ludlow miners resonated across the United States and internationally.
The gross fear of the reaction by the power of the workers appeared in the April 21, 1914 edition of The Anaconda Standard, a defunct newspaper once owned by mining industrialist and so-called “Copper King” Marcus Daly. “Darkness fell within the battle raging fiercer than at any time during the day. A machine gun, brought by the reinforcements, has been implanted near the Ludlow station and is sweeping the tents of the strikers’ colony.” The authorities were prepared to deal with the strike, even to the extent of using machine gun fire against the innocent.
The deaths of the workers were a political outrage for the bourgeoisie. Organized labor utilized the experiences of the Ludlow survivors, and other examples of violent reaction by the bourgeoisie, to forge the modern labor movement. The Pacific Northwest saw an upsurge in union membership directly following the mining conflicts, with some accounts reporting increases of more than 400% in one year. The building of these unions led to the establishment of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) as “big tent” unions, which in turn helped create the International Longshoremen’s Association (ILA).
The broader “big tent” style of union politics is the establishment of opportunism in the otherwise revolutionary catalyst of the labor movement. In 1935, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) was passed, protecting workers from the influence of company politics in the union and helping to maintain the independence of the worker in their organizations. Business interests perceived the NLRA as a campaign by the unions to disrupt the capitalist economy, leading to the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) by a splitting faction of the AFL and UMWA. The NLRA was later amended by the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, which among other stipulations, required members of the CIO to “sign non-communist affidavits with the government,” a part of the decades-long intimidation of Communists (and progressives) within the labor movement.
While the intimidation by the Taft-Hartley Act to “out” Communists is gross, it is not even marginally the most important aspect. The Taft-Hartley Act was a response to waves of strikes that resulted in 27,000 work stoppages and at least 90 deaths perpetrated by the bourgeoisie against the workers. While the workers enjoyed protections offered by the NLRA and stronger unions, these gains were temporary and quickly undermined. The control of the State (including legislation by the government) by the bourgeoisie ensures that the workers will lose ground when they only conduct strikes, without armed political power.
The Taft-Hartley Act significantly undermined unions by imposing several restrictive measures. It prohibited secondary boycotts, jurisdictional strikes, and closed shops, which weakened the bargaining power of unions. The Act also allowed states to pass so-called “right-to-work” laws, which further diluted union strength by enabling workers to benefit from union negotiations without being required to join or pay dues. Additionally, the requirement for union leaders to sign non-communist affidavits created internal divisions and purged many effective leaders, thereby weakening the organizational capacity of unions. These measures collectively eroded the power and influence of unions, making it more difficult for workers to organize and struggle for their rights.
The workers being beholden to and not the bearers of the law means that the law will be weakened whenever it is necessary to ensure the continuation of the economy. The AFL has seen many historical splits, but the initial splits (which went on to form the IWW and CIO) were caused by political divisions within organized labor, separated into radicals and reformists. The 1935 formation of the CIO was caused by the expulsion of industrial unions, comprised of militant unionists who opposed the direction of the AFL. At that period, the AFL favored arbitration over strikes in an effort to support the war economy and avoid work stoppages, continuing the anti-Communist legacy of union bosses like Samuel Gompers. The CIO and the IWW largely sat on the anti-war side, supported by Communists like William Dunne, who were eventually expelled by the general secretary of the CPUSA, Earl Browder.
Browder’s line on unionism worked to implement a reversal of the revolutionary workers, a reversal of the 1924 international line struggle on class struggle versus class collaboration, and eventually led to the liquidation of the CPUSA by revisionism. Browder contradicted the line that strikes are “schools of war,” instead programming a more conciliatory approach that undermined the militant character of the labor movement. The reactionary line of Gompers and the formation of the “yellow” coalition known as the AFL-CIO, combined with Browder’s union line, carried out the work necessary to diminish the capability of workers to demonstrate their power and militancy. While the AFL-CIO, Gompers, and the Browderite revisionists were enemies on paper, their combined trifecta produced a flavor of labor unionism that was despondent and toothless.
In the present, the labor union represents the interests of the bourgeoisie by mediating and ensuring that productive relations are maintained. While the unions do provide a certain amount of protections of rights, and it is just for workers under capitalism to seek the support of those benefits, these rights are only given when it is deemed economically acceptable to the imperialists.
Today, it is evident that the contradictions between employer and worker are moving toward terminal velocity. The leadership of these labor unions offers so little to the worker that even unionized workers find dissatisfaction with the union. The General Motors 2023 strike (UAW, AFL-CIO), the 2021 Frito-Lay strike (BCTGM, AFL-CIO), the 2019 Chicago Public Schools strike (AFT, AFL-CIO), and the wave of other organized labor movement strikes in the last five years demonstrate that the goal of the union is to act slowly, to find common ground with the enemy, and to participate as fully in electoral politics as possible using the funds of PAC donors.
This is exactly the goal of the labor aristocracy. Lenin wrote on the labor aristocracy in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, remarking on a letter Engels wrote to Marx in 1858 and 1881:
“It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century—vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: ‘The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.’ Almost a quarter of a century later, in a letter dated August 11, 1881, Engels speaks of the ‘worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class.’ In a letter to Kautsky, dated September 12, 1882, Engels wrote: ‘You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers’ party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England’s monopoly of the world market and the colonies.'”
Opportunism exists in the current labor movement of the United States. It manifests itself primarily as the labor aristocracy but finds its roots in the very ideology taught by the unions themselves. In the present day, the labor unions are living on the imperialist superprofits of the United States economy. The historical necessity of the Communist movement stands in contrast with the political opportunism of the labor aristocracy, which pushes the ideology of the bourgeoisie and makes it palatable to workers who are otherwise uneducated on the historical consequences of the labor movement and subversive political elements like bourgeois media. The palatability of bourgeois ideology to the proletariat is only possible because the labor aristocracy stands in an effort to preserve the bourgeoisie, preserve imperialism, and ultimately preserve the capitalist monopoly on the world.
This opportunism shows itself in political parasitism, undermining the conditions of the workers, but it also generates contradiction. Renewed energy is brought to the United States labor movement as antagonism between the workers and the bourgeois labor aristocracy sparks new flames. As Lenin later addressed at the end of Section VIII of Imperialism:
“[The] prevalence of such economic and political conditions (divisions) are bound to increase the irreconcilability between opportunism and the general and vital interests of the working-class movement: imperialism has grown from an embryo into the predominant system; capitalist monopolies occupy first place in economics and politics; the division of the world has been completed; on the other hand, instead of the undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century. Opportunism cannot now be completely triumphant in the working-class movement of one country for decades as it was in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century; but in a number of countries it has grown ripe, overripe, and rotten, and has become completely merged with bourgeois policy in the form of social-chauvinism.”
The founding of the National Education Association (NEA) was undertaken by the merger of various local teaching organizations in the late 1850s by mostly progressive American school administrators. The early efforts of the NEA focused on the industrialization of education and the eventual integration of schools, ending race-based educational policy. By 1960, a multitude of organizations claiming to represent teachers were on the political scene. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT, eventually merged into the AFL-CIO), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, an early project of the AFL), and the NEA (which has attempted mergers with the AFL-CIO on numerous occasions) were either founded or politically transformed to counterweight the militancy of the New York Teachers Union. This union sought to upset the control of the opportunists in the labor movement but was ultimately politically suppressed by the bourgeoisie. The militancy tactic was abandoned in favor of the class collaborationist approach of Browder, forming alliances with revisionists, reformist trade unions, and other political liberals in 1935.
The history of the US labor movement from 1960 to the present day is marked by the stamp of political opportunism. The labor aristocracy has been a successful instrument by the bourgeoisie to posture against the political right of the worker to rebel. However, rebellion is the primary path forward for the workers! Rebellion against the labor aristocracy has been seen in the last decade as the imperialist crisis worsens. The daily demands of the worker are widening, and the capitalist economy is not eager to share the monopoly with the worker unless they do the work of opportunism. The labor aristocracy has worked diligently to staff themselves well with soft-handed “pragmatists,” slow-moving “reformists,” and continues to eliminate dissent. This can be seen clearly in the current NEA.
While the NEA likes to market itself as the “largest labor union in the United States,” it is simultaneously the largest “professional association” and one of the biggest (and most consistent) donors and lobbying fronts for the Democratic Party. Members of the NEA, largely suburban school teachers, are not provided much political education, and strikes are presented by the NEA leadership as a move that compromises collective bargaining, often reinforced with “No Strike” contracts. With this political opportunism in mind, it should not surprise us that the NEA is working to deny these rights to the National Education Staff Organization (NEASO), the union of staffers within the NEA, which declared a strike on Friday, July 5th, 2024.
The NEASO is correct to criticize the NEA for refusing to “uphold union values;” however, this does demonstrate their markedly idealist and fundamentally incorrect analysis of the situation. The NEASO strike is justified, but the situation demands a correct and materialist analysis of the class character of the NEA and all other “yellow” unions, which are staffed by the lieutenants of the organized labor movement, again doing the political work of the bourgeoisie. The NEA has never upheld union values, for it was never a union of the workers in the revolutionary and militant sense.
The NEASO repeatedly uses language in their announcements which indicate their surprise that the largest labor aristocratic institution in the United States would act in a manner consistent with history, often referring to the betrayal of the NEA to union values as unprecedented. However, the NEASO official website even details an account of the NEA which demands our attention. According to them, in the 1960s the NEA resisted recognizing the NEASO until “1966, a resolution was passed in support of extending the rights of professional negotiations to staff members of professional organizations in education, including those at the national level… culminating in NEASO’s first contract with the NEA in 1968.”
Furthermore, in April 1971, negotiations were stalled by the NEA, and the NEASO declared a strike on June 1st of that year. The strike was similarly retaliated by the NEA, which instituted a historic hiring freeze, lockouts, and scab work. Once again, in February of 1974, the NEASO went on strike, and the NEA responded with lockouts, scab work, and cutting NEASO members from their benefits. Again, in 1993, 2006, 2012, 2018, and 2021, the NEASO carried out informational picketing on the union-busting efforts of the NEA, including strike authorizations which were narrowly avoided.
The fact of the matter is that the work of the NEASO is repetitive precisely because the political opportunism of the anti-militant, anti-Communist, and anti-worker labor aristocracy is diametrically opposed to making concessions unless it is beneficial to their own end. The work of the NEASO is thus an attempt at rendering stability to the otherwise unstable organization, made unstable by the bourgeois ideology which it represents. While the strike is powerful, it ultimately aims to temporarily inconvenience the management. However, even the NEASO assures us that the political legacy of the NEA must continue, and so too must the rule of the labor aristocracy.
The political role of the NEASO is then similar to that of the “Democratic Socialists of America” staff union, which has also encountered similar political challenges from self-proclaimed socialists! The NEA, DSA, and the AFL-CIO have grown so large that they now necessitate the existence of unions within their heavy bureaucratic structures. This makes these bureaucratic organizations resemble NGOs or typical bourgeois workplaces more than any kind of militant organization. The development of the NEASO, in particular, was chartered to ensure the NEA could continue its work. The work of any and all labor aristocrats is rendered impossible without the existence of these internal staffing unions.
The Worker has stated in the past, “the existence of the labor aristocracy means that the working people must fight a war on two fronts: on the one hand they must form or join unions to meet their demands in the fight against the imperialists, while on the other hand they must fight against the servants of imperialism within the unions. Every working class conquest must be defended, otherwise it will be reversed.”
What the NEASO remarks as unprecedented is historically precedented. The staffers of the NEA, DSA, and all other orders of staffers will continue to cycle as the working class is currently unarmed and does not command the labor movement. In order for the NEASO to truly accomplish their goals and to end the cycle of reversal, the workers must take up the historic work of reconstituting the Communist Party. The righteous struggle against the labor aristocracy must serve the goal of reconstitution. It is only then, armed with the ideology of the proletariat, that the conquest of the working class can be defended. By learning and applying Maoism, the workers can effectively work to destroy the labor aristocracy and advance the proletariat toward Communism!
Lorenzo D’Ettore is a scientist, teacher, and labor organizer in the United States. His work has included struggles with rank-and-file members of various “yellow” labor aristocratic organizations including the NEA. Lorenzo is also involved in journalistic and theoretical reporting on the applications of dialectical materialism to the natural sciences, and the on-going wave of work-stoppages and worker rebellions. Contact: LorenzoDEttore@proton.me
