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Syndicalism, Stalinism and the American working class

The life of William Z. Foster

Book Review:
Forging American Communism, The Life of William Z. Foster
By Edward P. Johanningsmeier, Princeton University Press,
1994, $29.95

By Fred Mazelis
12 February 1996

The subject of this recent biography was a major figure in the American workers movement, whose political activity spanned the first six decades of the twentieth century.

Although he spent the last 33 years of his life as an obedient apologist for Stalinism, that is not the totality of William Z. Foster's political career. He did not join the American Communist Party until he was 40 years old, and by then he already had years of experience in turbulent class battles. In the second and third decades of this century, Foster played a role in union organizing struggles and in the early efforts to forge a party of the American working class based on the epochal significance of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.

Edward Johanningsmeier's account is based on painstaking study, including research at the newly-opened Soviet archives in Moscow, where Foster's personal papers are held. The author provides us with 66 pages of notes and references and devotes nearly half of his story to Foster's career before 1920.

Nevertheless, the book is sadly lacking in serious insight. Exhaustive detail is no substitute for a historical assessment of Foster and the struggles in which he participated. The basic problem is that Johanningsmeier, who teaches at the University of Delaware, is writing about a subject he does not understand. Judging from his book, he is a liberal with a general sympathy for labor or, more precisely, the reformist labor movement. He looks favorably on attempts to improve the lot of workers within the capitalist system, but clearly considers a revolutionary perspective unviable.

The author makes no attempt to explain the historical significance of Stalinism and the struggle against it by the Trotskyist movement. He implicitly identifies Bolshevism with the counterrevolutionary bureaucracy which usurped power in the Soviet Union. The problem is not simply that Johanningsmeier does not agree with Marxism, but that he shows little awareness of either the Marxist analysis or the history of the socialist movement.

Growing class struggles

William Z. Foster was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1881, and grew up in Philadelphia. His parents were poor immigrants, his father from Ireland and his mother from England. Economic circumstances forced Foster to work full-time from the age of 10. This was a period of rapid industrialization, an unprecedented wave of immigration, and the growth of the working class and its economic and political struggles. The bitter Homestead steel strike of 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894 made powerful impressions on Foster. He participated in the Philadelphia street railway strike of 1895.

As Foster entered his twenties, revolutionary ideas were spreading among American workers. The Socialist Party of Eugene Debs achieved its greatest strength in the first decade of the twentieth century. Debs, Bill Haywood and Daniel DeLeon joined together in 1905 to found the Industrial Workers of the World.

The IWW rejected parliamentary reformism in favor of "direct action." It shared some of the views of the European syndicalists, who had by this time achieved substantial influence in France, Spain and Italy. The syndicalists, while correctly opposing reformism, belittled or rejected the need for the working class to wage a political struggle for state power. They believed that the economic struggle and industrial strength of the working class would be sufficient for the overthrow of capitalism.

A self-educated worker, Foster held various jobs and traveled to all corners of the country seeking work. He had a deep hatred of the existing order and was determined to find the way to destroy it. He joined the Socialist Party in 1901, but was expelled in 1909 as part of a left-wing faction in the state of Washington. Foster then joined the IWW.

"Boring from within"

A trip to Europe on behalf of the IWW in 1910 proved to be a turning point in Foster's development. He concluded from his observation of the French trade unions that a strategy of "boring from within" the reactionary American Federation of Labor was required.

For the rest of his life, except for the years of the Stalinist "Third Period,"* Foster was identified with an almost exclusive orientation to the existing trade unions and the capturing of positions within them. He left the IWW to found the short-lived Syndicalist League of North America and soon after, the International Trade Union Educational League. He also became an active member of the Chicago Federation of Labor, and attracted wide attention through his leadership of thousands of packinghouse and steel workers in AFL-sponsored organizing struggles in 1917-18 and 1919.

After the defeat of the 1919 steel strike, Foster faced a dead end in his work in the AFL. Meanwhile, the Russian Revolution had made an enormous impression on syndicalists, left-wing Socialists and other class-conscious workers. The Third International, founded in 1919, sought to win over revolutionary syndicalist elements both in Europe and America, and Foster was welcomed into the newly- founded American Communist Party, which he joined early in 1921.

How did the syndicalist agitator who had led thousands of workers in struggle become the man later dubbed William "Zig-Zag" Foster because of his ability to change his political line overnight in accordance with the orders of the Stalinist bureaucracy in Moscow?

Johanningsmeier does not attempt a coherent answer to this question. He contrasts Foster's success and prominence as an agitator and organizer with his later role as leader of the discredited and isolated American CP, but he provides primarily a description, rather than an explanation, of Foster's career.

The author praises Foster as an excellent trade union organizer and practical American radical. But what does Johanningsmeier mean by these terms? He finds most attractvive in Foster those qualities that limited his value as a political leader and rapidly led him into the Stalinist camp.

A pragmatic approach

For Johanningsmeier, Foster's great virtue was his pragmatic approach to the class struggle--in his efforts to organize workers he was not terribly concerned with their political and theoretical education. Foster believed, according to Johanningsmeier, that American workers were fundamentally nonpolitical and would remain so. The author writes as if this were a self-evident truth. He clearly indicates his agreement with Foster's view that American communists could not openly fight for leadership of the organized labor movement.

Johanningsmeier ascribes the successes of the Stalinists in the unions, particularly in the early years of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), largely to the influence of Foster's practical ideas about organizing and "boring from within." He suggests that Foster fell far short of his potential as a workers' leader, lamenting his final role as a diehard Stalinist, who presided over the decimation of the CP during the period of the Cold War.

Describing the post-World War II period, he writes, "Foster unquestionably played his most important role in the later shift toward sectarianism; without his powerful presence in the crucial period after 1945, it is quite possible that the American Communist Party would have evolved into a different organization than it is today."

Johanningsmeier apparently regrets that the Kremlin loyalists in the American CP were not replaced by the kind of reborn Social Democrats who took over the Italian CP in the 1960s and who now lead renamed Stalinist parties in many parts of the world. According to him, if Foster had only been more consistent in his views, he could have helped the Stalinists remain a political force in the US.

Focusing simply on the superficial and purely quantitative measures of success in Foster's life, Johanningsmeier ignores the deeper political questions. He says nothing about the source of Stalinist policy in the unions and elsewhere. It was based not on the needs and struggles of the working class, but on the foreign policy interests of the Soviet bureaucracy.

An instrument of Kremlin diplomacy

The Communist Party became the faithful instrument of the Moscow bureaucracy. During the period of Moscow's alliance with Roosevelt, for instance, the CP was the most slavish defender of American nationalism and class collaboration. It became notorious during the Second World War for its support for the no-strike pledge and its subordination of the interests of the working class to the war aims of US capitalism.

What were the "successes" of the Communist Party in the trade unions? The Stalinists succeeded in capturing posts, but these accomplishments were not successes for the working class. They were used by the Stalinists to serve their masters in the Soviet bureaucracy and US big business, for whom the CP played a particularly useful role in keeping the working class tied to the Democratic Party.

Millions of workers were organized into the CIO in an 18-month period of turbulent class struggle beginning with the 1936-37 Flint sit-down strike. Foster helped train a layer of CP functionaries and activists who played a major role in politically strangling this upsurge. Johanningsmeier says nothing at all about this.

The Stalinists lost their influence in the top CIO bureaucracy as the Cold War began, but not, as Johanningsmeier claims, because of a turn to sectarianism. The author has it backwards. The Stalinists were more than willing to continue their wartime role, but they were unceremoniously dumped after the US shifted its course and launched the Cold War. Socialists and class-conscious workers were purged from the unions, along with the largely discredited Stalinists.

The facts as presented by Johanningsmeier himself provide the basis for a more serious judgment of Foster. They confirm the assessment made by the Trotskyist movement of Foster's strengths and weaknesses, and of his lamentable political role from the time he cast his lot with the Soviet bureaucracy.

Foster's main strength was unquestionably his organizational skills, his ability to inspire and lead workers in struggle. His most glaring and eventually fatal weaknesses were his indifference to Marxist theory and his tendency to substitute tactical maneuvers for principled politics. These traits characterized his whole political career.

The Russian Revolution

When the Russian Revolution shook the American socialist and working class movement, Foster was already 36 years old, with a fully-formed political outlook which was very distant from Marxism. In 1913, the organ of Foster's newly-founded Syndicalist League of North America advertised a list of books for sale which reflected the theoretical outlook of its founder. The list did not include a single work by Marx. Instead, as Johanningsmeier reports, it recommended Proudhon, Nietzche and Kropotkin, among others.

The Communist International in its early years correctly fought to win over syndicalists such as Foster and IWW leaders like the legendary Big Bill Haywood. Alfred Rosmer, who became a Trotskyist, was a French revolutionary syndicalist who had opposed the First World War. James P. Cannon, who became the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, also came out of the IWW.

The patient attempt to win over the syndicalists, however, did not entail any blurring of political differences. As Trotsky later explained, revolutionary syndicalism in the period before the October Revolution was "an embryo of a revolutionary party" in its opposition to the opportunism of the Social Democracy. The syndicalists, however, had a wrong conception of the role of revolutionary leadership and how to build it. They minimized or rejected the role of the party as the means by which a revolutionary leadership was assembled and trained. Even syndicalists favorably impressed by the Russian Revolution did not at first grasp the necessity of the party as the laboratory, so to speak, in which the necessary struggle against the pressure of bourgeois ideology in the working class was conducted.

Syndicalists like Rosmer and others assimilated this fundamental Marxist conception after the October Revolution, but Foster did not. He never broke from the antitheory prejudices with which he began his political life. He simply discarded or put aside some of his old views without examining them. As he later wrote in his autobiography From Bryan to Stalin, he made the switch to the CP "without difficulty, though I had been a syndicalist for a dozen years."

Foster had a healthy hatred for the petty-bourgeois intellectual who presumed to dictate to the workers without ever participating in mass struggles. But he failed to grasp the essence of Marxism and Lenin's struggle to build the Bolshevik Party--the need to train workers, as well as a section of the intelligentsia, as Marxists.

Opportunist maneuvers

Foster never grasped the dialectical relationship between revolutionary leadership and the working class as a whole. He expressed impatience when faced with the slow political development of the proletariat. A fundamental lack of confidence in the working class underlay Foster's tendency toward opportunist maneuvers, which he often sought to counterbalance with a hollow and rigid pseudo-orthodoxy.

There is a definite connection between Foster's particular brand of syndicalism and his subsequent political degeneration. His break from the IWW in the pre-World War I period was not a healthy reaction to the IWW's tendency to ignore political questions. Foster shared the IWW's weaknesses, but not its strengths. The IWW leaders had a far clearer understanding of the role of the AFL than did Foster. He broke from the IWW to move in an opportunist direction, convinced that he had found a short-cut to influence and power through adaptation to the AFL bureaucracy.

In a pamphlet written in 1915, Foster assserted that, regardless of the degree of class consciousness of their members, the trade unions were by their "very nature driven on to the revolutionary goal." Here Foster was saying something quite different than the Marxist assertion that the working class would be forced to struggle against capitalism. Foster's position, in opposition to that of Marx and Lenin, was that organizations which based themselves on the acceptance of capitalism would inevitably gravitate toward socialism.

Foster did not even grasp the importance of industrial union organization. Instead he believed that an inevitable process of craft union amalgamation would lead to the eventual control of capitalist society by organized labor. As Johanningsmeier notes, "The logic of Foster's position implied that, since unions were moving automatically toward revolution, there would be no point in fighting reactionary leaders because these, too, would be caught up in the inevitable process."

Where this position led was clearly shown when Foster was called to testify before a Senate committee in the midst of the 1919 steel strike. When asked about the just-concluded world war, he told the Senators, "My attitude toward the war was that it must be won at all costs." This was an outright capitulation to American chauvinism. By repudiating his earlier revolutionary syndicalist writings and activities, Foster aimed to protect his working relationship with AFL President Samuel Gompers.

Early struggles within the CP

In the early factional struggles inside the American CP, Foster made some positive contributions. He fought against the sectarians who sought to prevent the party from reaching out to the broad masses of workers. He unquestionably represented an important layer of the American working class, but he also expressed the theoretical weaknesses of even its most militant sections.

In the final analysis, Foster's acceptance of Stalinism, while not inevitable, was by no means accidental. His own political problems in the 1920s were bound up with the ebb of the world revolution, the restabilization of American capitalism and the rise of Stalinism in the USSR. His reaction to these events revealed the political weaknesses which soon destroyed whatever potential he had to be a revolutionary leader.

Cannon and Foster

The career of Foster stands in stark contrast to that of James P. Cannon. The two men worked together closely in the 1920s, but Johanningsmeier makes only the briefest references to Cannon. In the faction-ridden CP of this period, Foster and Cannon were among the top party leaders, and they joined forces between 1923 and 1925, when they controlled a majority of the party leadership.

While Foster confined himself to organizational maneuvers, Cannon fought, despite difficulties, to learn from the example of Lenin and Trotsky. He came from a background in some ways similar to that of Foster and shared with him a determination to reach out to the American working class. Unlike Foster, however, Cannon grasped the need for internationalism as the fundamental axis on which a revolutionary party would be built. While Foster became a lifelong Stalinist, Cannon became the founder of American Trotskyism.

Cannon described his relations with Foster at some length in The First Ten Years of American Communism. This book, consisting largely of letters to historian Theodore Draper written 35 to 40 years ago, is far more perceptive in its assessment of Foster than Johanningsmeier's account. While crediting Foster for his organizing abilities, Cannon correctly stressed that the Foster group "followed a policy of ingratiating adaptation to the Gompers bureaucracy, not of principled struggle against it."

"Fosterism was simply a method of working in the AFL by adaptation to the official leadership," wrote Cannon. "By adaptation individuals can get a chance to work.... But adaptation is not a movement and cannot create a movement, for the question of who is serving whom always arises. Gompers, who knew Foster's past and was no fool, thought that Foster's work and adaptation could serve Gompers' aims."

"Foster was a trade union organizer without a peer," Cannon continued. "In each case, however, his work was permitted and controlled by other forces which Foster had to serve.... Foster has been condemned throughout his career, ever since he left the IWW, to serve the aims of others whom he sought to outwit by adaptation" (James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Communism, Lyle Stuart Pub., pp. 112- 13).

As Cannon explained, Foster thought he could maneuver with the Comintern for his own purposes, but he was no more able to use Stalin than he had been able to use Gompers. Because of his history in the workers movement, Foster was always distrusted by the Moscow bureaucracy. In 1929, following the expulsion of the supporters of Trotsky and then of Bukharin from the American Communist Party, the Kremlin decreed that Foster be passed over for the leadership of the party in favor of Earl Browder. Browder, Foster's former assistant, who had no independent experience or constituency, became the leader of the CP until he himself ran afoul of the foreign policy interests of the Soviet bureaucracy and was expelled in 1945.

When Foster finally inherited the top post in the American CP he was already 64 years old. He had endorsed every crime of Stalinism, from its betrayal of the working class in Germany and Spain to the physical destruction of the leaders of the October Revolution and millions of other socialists in the Soviet Union. He had long since forfeited any credibility among class-conscious workers. In the last 15 years of his life, "Fosterism" became identified as the most hidebound expression of the Stalinist party line. It was Foster who rallied the Stalinist faithful when the Hungarian Revolution and the Khrushchev revelations of 1956 led to the exodus of 80 percent of the CP's membership. He died in 1961 in a sanatorium near Moscow.

Precisely because Foster remained an American pragmatist who never fully overcame his syndicalist prejudices, it was possible for Stalinism to utilize him as it did. His legacy is not the struggle to forge a genuine Marxist leadership. He contributed instead to the miseducation and betrayal of the American and international working class.

*Note: At the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern in 1928, the Stalinists proclaimed that the period of temporary capitalist stabilization had come to an end and what they called the "Third Period" had begun. This was, they declared, a period of imminent revolution in Europe and worldwide. During this phase of its evolution, Stalinism combined the crassest opportunism with ultraleft demagogy and political adventurism. The Kremlin and its satellite parties declared the Social Democrats to be "social fascists." For several years they rejected work inside the reformist trade unions. [back]