The Labour Movement in the United States of America – Part 18 cont.

War: For capital, a panacea for all ills

The union as an institution: cooperation to the bitter end

As the country had been at war for some months, the bourgeoisie could not admit voices of dissent because they were often accompanied by economic struggles (which never completely ceased during the war).

The repression of any class struggle worthy of the name and the “patriotic” and anti-worker mobilisation that accompanied it were soon flanked by another initiative aimed at countering the influence of anti-war propaganda within the workers’ movement.

The development of the US economy in the second half of the nineteenth century was accompanied by a vigorous growth of presence on international markets, especially after the crisis of the 1890s. The value of exports increased fivefold in the fifty years between 1860 and 1910, from 400 to 1,919 million dollars: but in the following five years it grew by 50%, reaching 2,966 million dollars in 1915. Since the 1890s, in fact, there has been a sharp increase in the attention paid to foreign markets. Entrepreneurs, financiers, and political leaders saw in commercial expansion, in the conquest of new markets, the indispensable solution to the dilemmas posed by growth. The end of the process of internal colonisation, the so-called “closing of the frontier”, induced the ruling class to look abroad for new spaces for the placement of surplus goods and capital. On this basis, the young American imperialism took its first steps: first, by consolidating its economic and political dominance over the two Americas, and secondly by trying to extend its influence over the Pacific area and the Far East. The “open door doctrine”, enunciated by Secretary of State John Hay in 1899 with regard to China, provided this expansionist drive with a “general strategy”, based on the pursuit of economic penetration in new markets rather than on the classic colonial practice of territorial conquest. At the beginning of the new century, therefore, the United States entered decisively into the international competition between the great powers. Twenty years later, at the end of the First World War, they were already in a position of clear predominance.

While big capital led this epochal advance, a newly formed working class was amassing in the cities, whose characteristics were continually modified, and even disrupted, by the continuous waves of migration from Europe. The differences produced by the different experiences at home intersected and overlapped with religious, cultural, and ethnic divisions. The latter became particularly relevant towards the end of the century and in the first fifteen years of the 20th century. The migratory flow reached the highest peaks, touching the average of almost one million arrivals per year, in the period between 1900 and 1914. Above all in this period, the influx of emigrants of Slavic or Latin origin from the Mediterranean or eastern areas of Europe became by far predominant, while in the 19th century the immigrants were mostly of Anglo-Saxon, German or Scandinavian origin. As land became more and more expensive, and the possibility of leaving Europe with even a small amount of capital became more and more rare, there were no other possibilities open to immigrants than life in a poor quarter of the city, working in a factory, or in a remote mining village. In the urban areas all the tensions deriving from the impact between an extremely composite and differentiated working class and an industry that was growing and changing its characteristics under the pressure of mechanisation and the search for maximum efficiency were concentrated.

In the course of what was called the “Progressive Era” all social components underwent a rapid evolution. The large corporation in a position of quasi-monopoly certainly represented the antithesis of the previous ideals of American democracy of a rural kind, whose central figures, the farmer and the small independent businessman, had given life to the culture, and the myths, of individualism. The organisation of the trusts constituted, on the economic level, a mortal threat to that culture, because their ability to control the market and prices eliminated every possibility, and even semblance, of free competition. In the political field, the concentration of wealth offered the possibility of corrupting and controlling public affairs on a scale hitherto unthinkable. For this reason, the fight against trusts had already constituted, in the last decades of the 19th century, one of the battle horses of rural populist agitation. Particularly rooted in the agrarian states of the Midwest, the populist movement had demanded, and in part obtained, around 1890, public control over railroad tariffs (Interstate Commerce Act) and measures to control respect for the rules of competition (Sherman Act). But the agitation against the trusts continued to remain, at least until the beginning of the World War, one of the central themes of the American political scene. The anti-monopoly controversy became, in fact, one of the battle horses of the “progressive” reform movements.

Exponents of the old ruling elites such as Theodore Roosevelt, intellectuals, professionals, merchants, generally the most open-minded members of the middle and upper classes, reacted openly in the face of the pressing radical change of status that threatened them. While on the one hand they saw the rise of the new, arrogant power of financiers and industrialists who, at the head of great economic empires, accumulated an enormous power of conditioning on the life of the country, on the other hand they felt the threat of a growing working class that tended to the organisation of strong unions and, at least potentially, to the construction of a socialist alternative.

Faced with the social upheaval resulting from the rapid growth of an industrial economy, the agitation of a “progressive” nature chose the dual path of denunciation in front of public opinion and the political battle at local and central level. In the early years of the century became famous journalists nicknamed muckrakers (shovelers of manure): they brought to light numerous scandals, abuses, episodes of corruption in the public life of the cities. It spread with them a publicity of denunciation first, and then analysis of the social plagues produced by the boom in industry and urbanism: dilapidated neighbourhoods, poverty, child labour and women in appalling conditions, accidents at work. But while attacking monopoly big business, they never lost sight of the danger posed by the working class, whose uncontrolled union organisation and growing presence of socialism and related ideologies were feared above all.

Big business had clear objectives: stability of the financial system, predictability of market trends, elimination of the harmful effects of competition, elimination or reduction of labour conflicts.

For this reason, the major reforms, especially at federal level, ended up being supported, and often designed and managed, by the most politically “enlightened” exponents of big financial and industrial capital. Thus, the reorganisation of the banking system, implemented in 1913 with the Federal Reserve Act, was directly inspired by the bankers, who created a more elastic and efficient credit structure. Similarly, the regulation of competition in the railways, the new Clayton law on trusts, the establishment of the Federal Trade Commission (responsible for the supervision of any monopolistic activities), the modification of protective tariffs, were all reforms launched with the consent of large industrial capital. The men of the large corporations participated directly in the conception and planning of reforms that were presented as an attempt at public control over certain aspects of the economic structure. And they were the ones called upon to be part of the federal commissions charged with administering and applying the reform laws. In this way, the control of major economic interests over politics was realised, the use of political instruments to rationalise the economic system, defined as “political capitalism”. It was a question of institutionalising the guidance of politics operated by capital, which is inseparable from the capitalist system of production, but which the bourgeoisie always tries to hide, so as not to highlight the class character of the state; and which only appears in the light of day when the bourgeoisie is forced to resort to the authoritarian solution.

The reforming thrust of big capital also had as its primary objective the pursuit of a “rational” and “efficient” harmony between classes, to prevent the emergence of an aggressive and organised working class, with all the dangers that this would entail.

The State sharpens its weapons of control

On the whole, in the first phase of the war, the administration’s labour policy was quite incisive and innovative even if its major results were limited to industrial sectors directly responsible for supplying the armed forces or building the structures and machinery necessary for their operation. In all sectors where the government intervened directly to regulate working conditions, wages rose (at least nominally) to levels required by the union pay scales, even where this had not been established since the first agreements, as in the case of shipyards. This was partially due to the pressure that the union leaders in the various agencies could exert, but the main reason was undoubtedly that the workers’ struggle would have exploded and extended much further without these measures, eliminating any possibility of guaranteeing social peace and making it impossible to use unions as instruments of conciliation and workers’ “empowerment”.

As far as working hours are concerned, the maximum limit of eight hours was established everywhere as the base time, while overtime hours – 50% or even 100% more than base pay – practically became the rule given the enormous demand for production. The government’s realisation of this long-held goal of the labour movement was necessary for the conciliation of labour and capital, and if it often was the tripartite agencies granting this measure to the workers without struggle, it is equally true that it was often forced from the employers without any government intervention. The bosses as a whole accepted this government policy and only in special and sporadic cases was any opposition exercised.

From the unions’ point of view, it allowed a considerable strengthening of their organisations firstly, within the workplace, because of the greater freedom they had towards the entrepreneurs, thanks to the governmental action against anti-union discrimination, and because of their growing rank and file; and secondly, more generally, because of the power they were gaining through the integration of production into the governmental apparatus.

The counterbalance to this process was the repression and destruction of the forces of the workers’ movement, which represented the only organised alternative to the conservative unions; this also constituted a valid deterrent for all those who could think of not respecting the peace agreement by the government and the leaders of the AFL

All these factors, on the other hand, while contributing to the strengthening of the unions, also shifted their main reason for strength from the ability to successfully face the employers to the permanence of cooperative relations with the government: that is, they made the unions less and less “self-sufficient”, as they liked to call themselves, and increasingly linked to political balance and to their orientation in a liberal sense. This produced some rather important changes within the AFL organisation itself, wherein all tendencies towards bureaucratisation and transfer of power to the top management of the unions were accentuated.

In January 1918, the United States Employment Service (USES) was born: a federal employment office, it was responsible for regulating the labour market. In general, its work was aimed at planning and organising a distribution of the workforce more in line with the needs of production sectors, thus remedying the chaos of the first year of war caused by the anarchic race of entrepreneurs to hire labour. Additionally, the USES supported and often directly organised new flows of labour, which should recreate a large reserve of labour for the bosses since the reserve once constituted by European immigrants – in addition to no longer being available during the War – was no more able to be used as a means of social stabilisation, because it had revealed itself to be the main subject of the proletarian struggle.

In March 1918, President Wilson decided to transform the War Industries Board (WIB) into an autonomous agency – answerable only to the President – whose director had the immense power to prioritise certain kinds of production and the distribution of supplies among the various sectors of the administration. Additionally, within the WIB there was also a Price Fixing Committee, which had to fix and control the prices of several industrial products. Ultimately, the war had the effect of creating ideal conditions for the self-regulation of industry, clearing any controversy about trusts and realising on a large scale the interactions between state and industry – a cooperation that the bourgeoisie is only able to temporarily achieve when the survival of its class is in peril. Stalinist statism was born in Washington.

The last among a series of agencies created by the administration, the National War Labor Board (NWLB) was born in April 1918 to perform a dual function: firstly, to be the central agency for mediation of labour conflicts, coordinating the work of all the other operating mediatory agencies, acting as the ultimate authority in this regard; secondly, to set up and select new conciliatory structures for productive sectors not already under con-trol. This was, in theory, solely with the war inter-est in mind, but in reality these powers extended much further and, in this way, the NWLB became a court of appeal for disputes not resolved locally.

The right of workers to organise themselves in trade unions and to deal collectively, through their representatives, with employers was formally recognised, and it was explicitly stated that employers could not fire workers because they belonged to a trade union or because they carried out legitimate trade union activities. The experiences of various agencies were thus recognised, and in particular of the President’s Mediation Commission, which entrusted a decisive role to collective bargaining for the containment of conflicts, and which at the same time, however, confined the possibilities of organisation and trade union activity of workers within the boundaries of the “patriotic” choice of cooperation for the elevation of war production. It is clear that the term “legitimate” did not apply to all activities considered de jure legal; it was also a political judgement: the door was left open to the repression of all workers who did not respect the agreements and the social truce decided by the unions. The right to collective organisation was, therefore, once again subordinated to the condition that it had aims and methods matching the official policy of the administration and its union allies.

Throughout the war period the claim on which the industrial proletariat fought periodically everywhere was the eight hours. It was the insistence of the workers for the eight hours, and their stubbornness to organise and fight for them, that made this measure so general and widespread during the war; the attitude of the NWLB and other agencies to adopt the reduction of hours was the result of such pressures. The action of the workers in particular was decisive in making even the most reluctant bosses accept the eight-hour and other measures proposed by the tripartite agencies.

Another focal point of the NWLB were the aforementioned shop committees, having an unprecedented spread and beginning to play an important role in obtaining the settlement of disputes directly in the workplace, on the largest possible scale, through conciliation and negotiation carried out personally by the workers and managements concerned. By the end of the war, the shop committees had lost all semblance of being instruments of workers’ struggle and organisation and became company unions – yellow unions – the nucleus of the reaction of capital within what was designated the American Plan; it was essentially the confirmation of the 1915 Rockefeller plan.

On the whole, the action of the tripartite agencies in the field of wages did not produce great changes; for the workers the improvements in living standards during the war were largely illusory. Although wages had increased in monetary terms (compared with 1914) by 11.6% in 1916, by 30% in 1917, and by 63% in 1918, this was hardly enough to keep up with the pace of inflation; in fact, in real terms, wages increased (compared to 1914) by 4% in 1916, by 1% in 1917, and by 4% in 1918. The regulation of working conditions by the government had not done anything other than prevent a net devaluation of wages with respect to the increase in the cost of living, and this result was also obtained above all through the constant pressure exerted by workers with strikes or with the simple threat of struggle.

The real and important changes taking place in the wage structure were the increase in the real wages of less skilled workers and the consequent decrease in the wage differences between the highest and lowest paid sections of the proletariat; these were due to the fact that unskilled workers – generally not organised in unions – had been able to take advantage of a shortage of the reserve workforce (thanks to the concomitance between a very high production demand, the employment of a certain part of the workforce in the armed forces, and the virtual disappearance of the high migratory flow) to impose their demands on both the bosses and the government.

The bourgeois solution: patriotism–democracy–corporatism

The key feature of the last year of the war was undoubtedly the decisive entry of the government into the field of relations between the bourgeoisie and the industrial proletariat. The establishment of the National War Labor Board and the War Labor Policies Board represents the start of a labour policy aimed on the one hand at coordinating and centralising the government’s conciliatory activity and on the other hand at coordinating and – up to a certain point – planning production, mainly intervening on wage and working conditions: an intervention caused by the war contingency, first foreseen and then real, which, as indeed in other countries in similar situations, requires perfect co-ordination of resources to achieve the goal of victory. In these cases, the bourgeois state does not hesitate to strike even the capitalists who do not comply with its regulations, a characteristic that in peacetime is more typical of manifestly dictatorial regimes, but even in that case the measure is linked to some form of emergency because the bourgeoisie prefers total anarchy of production, which it calls – rather pompously and crassly – “freedom”.

It goes without saying, however, that it is the proletariat that bears the brunt of emergencies and is made to sacrifice the most, by fair means (patriotism, vague promises, propaganda) or by brutal ones (threats of enrolment, repression, anti-union laws).

Indeed, the constitutive document of the NWLB gave official character and maximum authority, to collective bargaining and its tools, strengthening the boundaries within which it could develop, and thus constituting a powerful deterrent against any temptation to break the balance that had come to exist between the bosses, government, and conservative unions.

The consolidation of cooperation between these groups, and its centralisation under the protection of the state and government, tended to rather quickly assume authoritarian and orderly connotations. The wage policy of government agencies, thus, while meeting some of the proletariat’s demands in order to eliminate the most important causes of class conflict – establishing minimum wages and tying numerical wages to the trend in the cost of living (i.e., compensating for inflation) – also traced precise boundaries beyond which workers’ demands could not go. Beyond these borders there was only head-on confrontation with the state apparatus and with the broad political and trade union alignment that supported its policy.

It is good to remember that the spread and consolidation of collective bargaining, however extensive, especially during the war, never undermined or weakened the legal systems hitherto used to fight the unions. The target of these means had simply been redirected away from unions and towards radical organisations; they were far from done away with. The use of injunctions and legislation against trusts for the persecution of workers’ organisations, including conservative unions, would quickly make a comeback in the post-war period. However, even if temporarily, a much more solid institutional framework was established in the face of workers’ struggles, capable of intervening harshly in those conflicts where some of the cardinal points of its activity were questioned; its greater compactness accelerated the integration of trade unions and, as we have seen, managed to overturn even the behaviours and choices most rooted in their tradition.

All these factors led to a decrease in strikes in 1918, although if compared to the pre-war years the figures still remained very high (in 1918 there were 3,353 strikes compared to 4,450 in 1917 and 1,593 in 1915), but above all they put the government in a position to put an end to any social unrest that contested the guidelines of its policy. The administration therefore decisively imposed itself both on those companies (a few) that rejected the decisions of the NWLB by not accepting any form of bargaining with their organised employees, and above all onto struggling workers that broke the trade union truce and made demands that the conciliation agencies refused to accept.

What actually took place with the war was the political and institutional response given to the labour movement by big business. The dual policy conceived by the NCF towards the organised labour movement, centred on integration and cooperation with conservative unions and on the simultaneous frontal battle against the anti-capitalist and radical forces, reached its maximum extension with the world conflict and its own temporary triumph. Around it a large unity of entrepreneurs and more generally of the ruling classes was formed, as well as a certain consensus of vast sectors of public opinion, favoured and nourished by the climate of emergency and national unity that the war had brought with it.

Even the consequences of the practice of trade union agreements were, or at least tended to be, of a dual nature: on the one hand, unions accentuated their bureaucratic character, escaping more and more from the control of their rank and file and thereby disposing of their character as organisations of struggle; on the other hand, radical organisations and spontaneous workers’ struggles outside “legal” bargaining were isolated, marginalised, and repressed. But above all, the AFL and the unions were seen as instruments for the maintenance of social peace in the factory and as guarantors of equilibrium and consensus on a social level. As Commons wrote: ‘American workers’ organisations, however aggressive they might have been, were found to be the first bulwark against the revolution and the strongest defenders of constitutional government.’

This betrayal did not earn the unions a safe place in the government structure, but only a temporary political position that the post-war period would cancel.

A synthesis, one hundred years later

Our Party’s research work on the American labour movement – ended so far by the entry of the United States into the First World War on 6th April, 1917 – started with the seventeenth century, when the lack of resources suited for robbing the continent forced England, a colonial power in the region, to focus on the exploitation of labour to fill the coffers of the bourgeoisie and aristocrats. This labour, necessarily, had to come from outside – from Europe and Africa – consumed and replaced by ever new waves of immigrants; this is one of the constants that characterises the development of capitalism across the Atlantic, and especially of its working class. Another constant of the class struggle in North America has been violence: the United States can boast the bloodiest history of the labour movement in the ranks of the industrialised nations.

After the war for independence from England had begun with a massacre of proletarians in Boston, it was the workers of the cities who fought and won the war while the bourgeoisie was divided into two camps, English and American; the proletarians did not obtain any advantage except the generalised economic development of the country, largely to the benefit of the bourgeoisie. This national development was mainly built off of the strong exploitation of the proletariat, including women and children, while trade union associations were struggling to take off; the political movement suffered the same fate, despite numerous attempts to create a workers’ party, a problem that continued to exist throughout the nineteenth century.

A peculiar aspect of the working class in North America was its constant renewal due to the continuous migratory flows, which brought in the country the English, Irish, Germans, in a first phase, and subsequently emigrants from southern and eastern Europe. This phenomenon – accompanied by the growing attraction exerted by the western territories, where it was easy to obtain land to cultivate – meant a continuous renewal and reshuffling of the composition of the working class, causing immense difficulty in developing class consciousness and in the formation of workers’ organisations, both economic and political. The trade unions, which existed in large numbers since before the civil war, suffered the repercussions of the frequent crises, being born and disappearing with extreme ease.

The Civil War in 1861–1865 represented a further setback for trade union formation, which was nevertheless followed by a period of considerable activism due to the influence of the militants of the First International, who imported the socialist doctrine from Europe.

In the years following the Civil War, in parallel with the tumultuous economic growth, the working class grew both in number and combativeness, and great national strikes took place. Towards the end of the 1970s, the Knights of Labor developed, which – unlike trade unions – organised all workers, including non-skilled workers, women, and children. Despite its numerous successes, however, the leadership of the Knights of Labor did not like the weapon of the strike, and this attitude in the long run led to real betrayals of the struggling workers, and therefore to the decline of the organisation in flavour of trade unions, now united in the American Federation of Labor; which, in spite of the fact that its member unions continued to keep unskilled workers away, began to rise rapidly in the late 1880s.

Unfortunately, the trade unions – narrow and often localistic, aiming for partial results for the working-class aristocracy – was not what was needed in a country where a ravenous bourgeoisie would not retreat before anything to impose its terms. Against the struggling workers, in addition to the vigilantes of the company or rented from the Pinkerton agency, the local militias were always present, while the judges, always ready to submit to the demands of the bosses, did not spare injunctions and sentenced the strikers to severe penalties, often involving imprisonment. Not infrequently, in the most important cases, when all these resources were not enough, federal troops intervened. In addition to this complex bourgeois apparatus, there were numerous cases in which the AFL unions themselves sided with the bosses, or even organised scabbing. Many struggles were characterised by armed clashes, wounding and killing many.

With the rise of the new millennium, the interest of the AFL to present itself as a bulwark for the survival of capitalist society is clear, just as the Industrial Workers of the World was born with opposing union and political aims. The latter represented an example of militancy and dedication to the cause of the working class, but it was always a minority movement due to its fusion of the party and the union form; nevertheless, this did not prevent it from conducting great and hard struggles, especially in the western side of the country.

The final part of the period treated in this work – ending with the entry of the US into the first world war in 1917 – saw a growing attention and presence of the federal state in trade union matters, with the intent to eliminate the pressures of the most extreme sectors of the bourgeoisie and to organise in a homogeneous way the conditions of exploitation of the working class, in order to minimise the conflict between capital and labour, with preparation for entry into war in mind. This was done by peaceable means if possible, by ruthless ones whenever necessary. These ruthless means were, among other things, a harsh persecution of all non-cooperative trade union agitators and the outlawing of the IWW, even with the enactment of special laws, such as the Espionage Act and the law against criminal syndicalism.

State intervention also included a strong involvement of the collaborationist trade unions – those of the AFL in particular – with regard both to social peace and to the war effort, an involvement that the trade union movement adhered to with enthusiasm, being almost integrated into the state; it was so for a time in fact, but never in a completely formal way. Nevertheless, in fact, the “responsible” trade union is accepted by the bourgeoisie in its structure of government, a historical event that will soon be imitated in all capitalist countries, either in a disguised manner (democratic regimes) or in a directly institutional manner (dictatorial regimes).

A peculiar characteristic of the class struggle in the USA, which differentiates it from that which took place in Europe in the same years, at least in the more industrialised countries, was the scarce penetration of the socialist party into the class due on the one hand to the theoretical and organisational weakness of the parties that succeeded each other and on the other hand to conditions outside the class, such as the great distances between industrial concentrations, the virulence of the reaction of the bourgeoisie, the fluidity of class composition – often multi-ethnic and multilingual, with successive migratory waves, each time of proletarians less evolved than those already present (except in the case of the migration of the Germans in the central period of the 19th century, generally socialist workers); in fact, after the civil war and especially between 1890 and the outbreak of the First World War, immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe was almost exclusively composed of former peasants, who required years of factory work to acquire class consciousness. This, combined with the prevailing individualist ideology – derived from a past of pioneers – conditioned the development of the proletariat in both a political and union sense.

But it is clear that the most important, and most feared by the workers, was the first type of injunction: it was not only issued on the basis of the opinion of the entrepreneur and his version of the facts, but also had the advantage of a very rapid procedure, so as to be a formidable instrument of intervention against a strike or other action of struggle from its very beginning. In this way, an enormous amount of power was concentrated in the hands of judges whose conservative and pro-patron positions cannot be doubted: it is enough to think, for example, that in the federal courts alone, in the period between 1901 and 1921, the magistrates granted an injunction at the request of the entrepreneur 70 times and refused it only once! So what was supposed to be an “extraordinary remedy” under common law quickly became the “usual legal measure” in the attack on workers’ struggles and their organisations, and in fact it was used on the most diverse occasions.