Index
Contents: This Issue
Search CHNN
CHNN Home
W Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism
James R. Barrett, W Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism, University of Illinois Press, 1999. 357 pp. (including 10 pages of illustrations and index). ISBN 0-252-02046-4.
This biography stands as a shining example for scholars who are endeavouring to find a pathway through the battleground of communist historiography. Barrett's was the second biography of Foster to appear in the 1990s, Edward P Johanningsmeier's biography was published some five years earlier. Barrett explains with commendable tact and scholarly collegiality that his own approach differs from Johanningsmeier's 'excellent biography' and that he therefore feels the appearance of two major biographies in this short space of time to be justified. '[O]ur interpretations differ, but I have chosen not to frame my own story... as a rebuttal... Any thoughtful reader of the two works will see important differences in method as well as interpretation.' (pxi)
In fact, Barrett has approached Foster from a vantage point which is not only different from Johanningsmeier, but also some considerable distance from those, such as Theodore Draper and Harvey Klehr, who seek to explain the significance of the CPUSA leadership's political lives and the party's national trajectory as solely due to orders from Moscow. Barrett states on pages 6-7 where he stands:
I have tried to keep both the indigenous domestic and the international perspectives in mind while reconstructing and interpreting William Z. Foster's career... We ignore either at the risk of misunderstanding Foster's worldview and the constraints within which he and other Communists thought and worked. Those activists associated most closely with Foster were proletarian veterans... Many of them emerged from the IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] or the industrially oriented left wing of the Socialist Party...Their commitment to such 'practical' organizing shaped the Party, which was in this sense more the product of social conflict in the United States than most of the more conservative historians of American communism have been prepared to acknowledge. There was, of course, another dimension of American communism and Foster's own political persona... For those of us who have never experienced such a transformation [of Russia after 1917], it is difficult to understand such people as Foster. They were won over not simply to Soviet authority but also to the Soviet ideal and to a model of disciplined Bolshevik politics they believed was the key to human liberation... They were not naive. They understood that in surrendering to Party discipline, they were surrendering a degree of individual initiative and that in deferring to the Soviets, they were often subverting their own better judgements... [T]he makings of their ultimate failure also lay in this model of politics.
Some of the more partisan participants on both sides of the historiographical divide may have been tempted to conclude that Barrett was simply adopting the easy expedient of the media res. But, as far as this reviewer is concerned, such a conclusion is not only superficial, but also disingenuously misplaced. Barrett never evades the issue of the influence of the international communist movement on Foster or the CPUSA. On the contrary, he provides the reader not only with a meticulously documented account of the way in which Comintern and CPUSA personnel interacted, but also with a running commentary on the subjective, psychological impact of the Russian Revolution and the continuing existence of this self-proclaimed workers' state on US communists. He has also provided a rich account of the pre-1917 world in which Foster was formed and of the Great Steel Strike which Foster led in 1919, probably his most creative and historic contribution to the US labour movement, which took place at a time when Foster knew almost nothing concrete about bolshevism.
In two respects, there is no comparable figure to Foster in the British Communist Party. Firstly, no one in the leadership who was a serious syndicalist had developed outstanding leadership qualities in the heat of intense intellectual conflict. Tom Mann's critical experiences as a union leader had been in 1889-1911, whilst Foster's began in 1912 and continued up to 1924-5. And though Mann was an enthusiastic participant in party trade union and unemployed activity, he was never amongst the decision-taking leadership. Neither did the clutch of SLP (Socialist Labour Party) founder members, including MacManus and Murphy, have any decisive impact on communist activity. The leaders of the CPGB operating in parallel to Foster were a decade, a critical half a generation, younger, and reached political maturity in the crucible of World War I.
Secondly, unlike the CPGB, Foster's more or less continuous period in the CPUSA leadership was punctuated by periods of intense internal conflict in which he was a serious player. These were the points at which the question of Comintern influence was critical, for instance. when Foster opposed the full-blooded application of the 'dual union' strategy in 1929, but then trimmed loyally to it when its partisans won out. (Barrett provides a full account, pp160-1.) By contrast, in Britain the winners in the parallel dispute were Harry Pollitt and J R Campbell, who successfully argued the 'class unity' case for not splitting the unions. In Britain, the 'young Turks', enthusiasts for the extreme Third Period line, captured the party leadership for a mere eighteen months, and by the spring of 1930, the dismal results they had notched up, coupled with the Comintern's own more pragmatic scuttle centrewards, combined to reinforce Pollitt's and Campbell's position and enable them to retake the leadership.
Readers should draw well back, however, from drawing quick conclusions from these differences. For example, as Barrett points out, Foster's own initial anti-splitting position was inadequate to deal with the empirical realities of an institutionally rigid organised labour movement in the US. The new unionism of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), emerging in the 1930s, was a vital innovation, showing that when the old unions were outflanked for practical (rather than dogmatic political) reasons, the results could be spectacularly successful. Equally, one could plausibly interpret Ernest Bevin's moves in 1920 to create the Transport and General Workers' Union in Britain as a comparable potent challenge to the old unions. Bevin's conception of the TGWU was based to an important extent on the syndicalist visions of the 1890s, honed in the testing bed of the 1914-18 war. Bevin and Foster were both born in 1881. Arguably, Bevin was the more creative and less rigid. Or, to put it counterfactually, if Foster had not got waylaid by the intoxicating political vision of the Russian Revolution, might he have constructed the American equivalent of the TGWU, thus obviating the need for the CIO?
Foster was long-lived amongst his cohort of working class leaders, dying at aged eighty in 1961 in Moscow. Bevin had died in 1950; Pollitt, nine years younger, died in 1960. Moreover, W Z Foster remained vigorously politically active virtually to the end of his life. This record, as Barrett points out, is evidence of Foster's successful self-discipline, commitment and iron determination. Having suffered a breakdown in health, including a serious stroke, in 1932, he faced up to the need to change the pattern of his political activity. Unable to undertake the physical and psychological strain of agitation and outdoor class conflict, he turned to writing. For the rest of his life, he produced a steady stream of articles, pamphlets and books for the CPUSA. These included two autobiographical books, From Bryan to Stalin, 1937, and Pages from a Workers' Life, 1939. This is an impressive intellectual and political achievement for any person. It is particularly impressive because Foster, came to sustained writing in mid-life. He was a serious auto-didact; and his insatiable thirst for knowledge and commitment to amassing it clearly underpinned his written output. He was able to turn his hand to sustained writing because of his early habits of voracious reading; but he also had the temerity to digest, assimilate and recycle the knowledge he had gleaned in the service of his own political ends.
Barrett devotes ample space to considering Foster's contribution and the CPUSA's course after his stroke and Browder's victory in the internecine political conflict had sidelined him. Having kept the reader informed about events between 1935-45, Barrett could then pick up the threads deftly and seamlessly in 1945 when Foster resumed the leadership. The treatment and judgement of Browderism were particularly perceptive I thought, and greatly add to the book's value for scholars. His description of the changing relationship of the two men over time was fascinating.
I had three minor caveats about the biography. Firstly, it would have been useful to have had a bibliography per se. I find the task of looking for the first time a source has appeared to be both labour-intensive and boring. Secondly, it would have been very helpful for Barrett to provide the reader with a short appendix which gave an account of the other full-length biographies and shorter comments and articles written about Foster. I noticed two biographies, by Joseph North in 1955 and A Zipser in 1981 as well as what was apparently a posthumous collection of Foster's biographical comment edited by Zipser in 1979.
Thirdly, I felt the period between 1935-1939 was the least well-served about Foster's life. I wanted to know much more about what (if any) personal contact Foster maintained with the union activists in the field, many of whom were engaged in pioneering work for the CIO. Did party members come to Foster for advice? Did Foster make any attempt to keep in contact with activists who had left the party but who were nevertheless playing important roles in union work? Having made such a significant contribution to industrial conflict in the 1920s, I wondered whether this aspect of his life had indeed abruptly ceased when he was marginalised from the CPUSA leadership. Surely he maintained a close interest in industrial conflict?
I also had a further, more general observation. Though I can see the logic in Barrett's description of the fate of the US radical movement as 'a tragedy', I do not agree with his conclusion that it was a tragedy of Foster's and the CPUSA's own making (p8). It is, of course, the case that one can argue, and argue compellingly, that the CPUSA behaved in a dogmatic, sectarian fashion and by so doing damaged the forces of the US radical left and trade union movement. But whilst these factors were undoubtedly a contributory factor, they were hardly the sole factor. It seems to me that three far more important factors are: i) the behaviour of US industrial capitalists towards the organised labour movement; ii) the attitude of the US political establishment towards the organised labour movement; and iii) the failure of any social democratic movement to develop in the USA.
The CPGB leadership could adopt what I have described as a strategy of 'revolutionary pragmatism' precisely because leading British capitalists decided after 1926 that they would treat unions as equals. Moreover, their decision was taken partly as the result of pressure applied by the political establishment, who were equally anxious to avoid a repeat of the stand-off of 1926. On the union side, leaders of major unions, such as Bevin, Citrine, Horner, and Joseph Jones, correctly read the significance of this change and who adapted their own strategy accordingly. They had all recognised that the all-out 'total war' strategy espoused by the syndicalists could not be sustained in practice. Though they were also well aware that it always had to be ready in reserve as a credible deterrent.
Thus, Pollitt and Campbell were piloting the CPGB through an environment in which class accommodation and negotiation was proving both possible and also viable in terms of yielding advances for the working class. As Andrew Thorpe has pointed out, the CPGB made a significant contribution in this milieu by astutely exploiting both their position on the far left and also utilising the example of the Soviet Union to chasten, frighten and soften their ruling class. The reason that Browder and Foster were unable to do this lies not in their own conduct but rather in the very different configuration of class and political forces in the USA.
There is, of course, the example of what the CIO was able to accomplish in the late 1930s and then under the extraordinary wartime conditions. Roosevelt had successfully pulled the political establishment towards a position comparable to that taken by the European political establishment some generations earlier — that is to recognise the corporate expression of labour power and incorporate it into the system of laws and conventions over which the state presided. And I think it is here that we will find the self-inflicted elements of tragedy lie. I have been arguing elsewhere that the German revolution of 1918-19 was comparable in significance to the Russian revolution of February 1917, and also that the Weimar constitution which was its result presented the foundations of a new kind of democratic state incorporating workers' rights and limiting managerial prerogative. The magnitude of this achievement presented Lenin and the bolsheviks with a serious political threat to their claim to be leading the international socialist movement.
It is the failure of socialists and trade unionists, not only in the USA. but also in Europe, to give sufficient weight to this development which could be described as tragic. This failure had significant consequences in the post-1945 world when the AFL (American Federation of Labor) and CIO found themselves powerless to beat back the determined capitalist counter-offensive. Had the foundations of workers' rights and co-determination been laid earlier, the Taft Hartley Act might have been defeated. As it was, Roosevelt's death revealed how shallow the changes inside the political establishment had been. Equally, in Britain, the refusal to view the Weimar advances as significant led to a fatal hubris about the perpetual power of British unions. Union leaders viewed the temporary labour shortages of the 1940s and 50s as permanent and failed to incorporate the shift towards practical co-determination which had taken place at the workplace into a positive constitutional re-alignment of the British state.
But these points are hardly specific criticisms of Barrett. They are rather directed more generally towards the whole community of labour historians. I consider that we are all labouring under a strong anti-German reflex which has rendered us incapable of examining the historical significance of the 1918-19 revolution and its child, the Weimar constitution. In this connection, it is remarkable that Eduard Bernstein's seminal work on the German revolution has not been treated seriously by scholars who speak and write in German and equally has not been translated into English to be examined by the larger scholarly community. Bernstein was another auto-didact whose flexiblity and willingness to examine the world as he found it were exceptional. His contribution to the postwar world in which he found himself an old man was remarkable.
Barrett began research for William Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism in the mid 1980s, and with some diffidence explains in the preface that its publication was slowed. I think that the reader has clear gained from the work's longer gestation, though Barrett has evidently suffered the usual, nonetheless painful symptoms of carrying the scholarly late arrival. The greater time which W Z Foster spent at the back of his consciousness enabled him to produce a work of limpid clarity and well-informed, measured conclusions. The end result is not only a biography but a life and times which any serious labour historian of the twentieth century will purchase, read closely, and then utilise as a reference point from which to judge future work. We should count ourselves fortunate that Barrett has written it.
