{"id":4563,"date":"2021-11-02T17:50:02","date_gmt":"2021-11-02T21:50:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=4563"},"modified":"2021-11-12T21:53:17","modified_gmt":"2021-11-13T02:53:17","slug":"the-contradictions-of-william-z-foster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2021\/11\/the-contradictions-of-william-z-foster\/","title":{"rendered":"The contradictions of William Z. Foster"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span>he International Socialists organized study groups on William Z. Foster\u2019s Trade Union Educational League (TUEL) in preparation for its members\u2019 early-1970s entry into the labor movement. The organizing of this small group led to the formation of multiple rank and file caucuses and ultimately to Labor Notes-a media and organizing project that nurtured left labor writing through the difficult decades that followed.\u00a0 Today green shoots of labor renewal and leftism are creating new literature.\u00a0 Jane McAlevey\u2019s 2018 book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age references Foster.\u00a0 Yet McAlevey\u2019s background and ideas differ from the traditions that spawned Labor Notes.\u00a0 Marian Swerdlow, in Against the Current<\/a>, critiqued McAlevey\u2019s use of Foster.\u00a0 She polemicized persuasively against No Shortcuts\u2019 specific organizing prescription for relying on organizer-designated \u201corganic leaders\u201d.\u00a0 Against which Swerdlow points to Foster\u2019s steelworkers\u2019 pamphlet advocating reliance on rank and file radicals instead.<\/p>\n

So did McAlevey just misread Foster?\u00a0 I have written elsewhere <\/a>of Foster\u2019s achievements as perhaps the single most original and generative figure in the history of the U.S. labor left.\u00a0 This article will focus on how contradictions in Foster\u2019s outlook make him legitimately seminal for distinct and sometimes opposing trends in the labor movement.<\/p>\n

In 1910, Foster visited France as an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) correspondent researching the world\u2019s leading syndicalist organization, the 400,000-strong Confederation General du Travail (CGT).\u00a0 He returned to the U.S. in 1911 a changed man.\u00a0 Now an anarcho-syndicalist, he sought to convince the IWW to abandon its dual-unionist opposition to the AFL and, in the words of CGT leader Leon Jouhaux, \u201cget into the labor movement\u201d.\u00a0 The CGT, Foster believed, had been won over to militancy and revolution because organized collectives of revolutionaries (\u201cnoyaux\u201d) had successfully fought for power within it\u2014\u201cboring from within\u201d\u2014instead of organizing separate IWW-style unions.\u00a0 These noyaux<\/em> embodied a concept prevalent among European syndicalists\u2014that of the \u201cmilitant minority\u201d.\u00a0 That meant those few class-conscious workers who, if they concerted their efforts, could lead the mass toward the full development of their power through confrontation with capital.<\/p>\n

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William Z. Foster in 1919, while serving as secretary-treasurer of the strike committee of 250,000 steelworkers seeking union representation. Photo<\/a> by Washington Area Spark.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Except for a brief period of Comintern-mandated dual unionism in the early Depression, Foster spent the rest of his life building militant minority groups for boring within AFL and CIO unions.\u00a0 In 1912 his Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA) split from the IWW for this purpose.\u00a0 Starting in 1917 a looser collection of his followers, nominally linked in the International Trade Union Educational League (ITUEL, distinct from the later TUEL), spearheaded massive and groundbreaking industrial union drives first in Chicago\u2019s packinghouses, then across several states in the Great Steel Strike.\u00a0 Foster brought his next formation-\u2014the TUEL\u2014with him into the Communist Party.\u00a0 From 1922 to 1928, the TUEL organized AFL-wide campaigns for a Labor Party and for the amalgamation of craft unions into industrial organizations.\u00a0 And it formed powerful rank and file opposition groups in the machinists\u2019, carpenters\u2019, ladies garment workers\u2019, mineworkers\u2019, furriers\u2019, and other unions.\u00a0 From 1935 on, the members of the Communist Party themselves became the core of this militant minority playing a decisive role in the rise of the CIO.<\/p>\n

Kim Moody, who helped found both the International Socialists and Labor Notes in the 1970s, calls the TUEL, \u201cthe first experiment in the rank and file strategy\u201d.\u00a0 But if Foster\u2019s earlier career led him to this experiment, he later veered away.\u00a0 This wasn\u2019t mainly a case of abandoning principles at the behest of Moscow.\u00a0 Rather, Foster\u2019s contradictory phases remained largely consistent with his own looser, cruder theory compared to that developed by his more recent followers.\u00a0 The difference starts with Foster\u2019s elitist reading of the militant minority concept.\u00a0 Throughout his career, he downplayed the intelligence, initiative, and courage\u2014in short, the revolutionary potential\u2014of the mass of rank and file workers.\u00a0 To make up for this he vested hope in the militant minority.\u00a0 As important, he also held a simplified vision of unions as inherently revolutionary organizations.<\/p>\n