Stalinism, a tool of Wall Street

Today, Stalinists can never find words scathing enough to denounce the «fascist imperialism» of the United States. They do so with the same demagoguery and virulence to those which they once hailed as «liberators.»

The fact remains that, while American overwhelming power was rooted in the Second World War, the Stalinists were precisely one of the pillars of that power. We are not referring so much to the voluntary dissolution of the party following the entry of the «Star-Spangled Republic» into the conflict—the «Communist» Party counted for very little. We are referring to the stance adopted by the Stalinists regarding labor struggles during and in the face of the war, within the trade unions where they wielded a certain influence.

In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt compelled union leaders to «voluntarily» renounce the right to strike and accept compulsory arbitration. The Stalinists not only supported this, but when—in March 1944—employees at the Montgomery Ward department store in Chicago walked off the job in solidarity, Stalinist union leader Harry Bridges telegraphed Roosevelt to state that his organized workers will not participate in the strike. In 1945, the Stalinist president of the electrical workers’ union declared: “The no-strike pledge has not been declared”; it applied only for the duration of the war when the U.S.-Soviet conflict had not yet begun.

The war is sacred. Foster, the secretary of the Stalinist party, declared in 1942: “Workers must set an example by voluntarily accepting every sacrifice necessary for the continuation of the war; they must make the defense of the nation during this crisis the supreme goal of all their activities.”

There is a need to produce more. Bridges in 1942: «I think that our unions must today become the instruments of the speed-up (intensification of work effort) of the American working class.» Within the automobile workers’ union, the Stalinists campaign in favor of piecework and wage freezes; regarding Roosevelt, they support measures for the «conscription of labor» at the very moment when all workers oppose them; even a dyed-in-the-wool reformist like Philip Murray is compelled to protest against their efforts to «excessively pacify the working class,» and a journalist in the pay of the Chamber of Commerce states that certain employers steered their workers toward a union controlled by «Communists» because the latter proved more reasonable regarding wages and working conditions and maintained «discipline» among their members (the sources are cited in full by Guérin in the work mentioned elsewhere in the paper).

In short, the Stalinists were the most active agents within the working class for the policy of «social peace» and support for the war effort—the very effort upon which the United States’ massive industrial expansion from 1940 onwards was founded. Will it be said that today, having moved into the «opposition,» they are no longer a source of support but, on the contrary, a factor eroding the US economy? Quite the contrary: by preaching collaboration, pacifism, and «coexistence between the two worlds,» they carry out the same task of lulling the proletariat into a stupor in the face of the colossus of capitalism—and they perform this task all the more effectively the more they masquerade as «opponents» and «enemies of imperialism.»

In war or in peace, Stalinism is the great instrument for preserving the capitalist regime. If the global imperialist center in Washington is crushing and suffocating the entire world today, the «credit» for this belongs in large part to the Kremlin. Refresh your memory, proletarians!