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William Z. Foster and the Turn Towards the Labour Movement

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William Z. Foster and the Turn Towards the Labour Movement chapter 4 William Z. Foster and the Turn Towards the Labour Movement In the lead-up to the Profintern’s founding, Cannon suggested that Browder be enlisted to find suitable American delegates. In May, Browder bragged in a letter to Trotsky that ‘it was within the realm of possibility in the immediate future for the Communists of America to take over the direction of the labor movement’. In retrospect, this appears outlandish, but at the time, it had a ring of truth. Although attempts to recruit the IWW were frustrated, Browder did convince other important labour figures to attend. One delegate was Ella Reeve ‘Mother’ Bloor, one of the party’s experienced labour organisers. But Browder’s most important catch was William Z. Foster, with whom Browder had worked before the war. Not then a Communist, Foster—at times a Socialist, dissident Wobbly, and AFL organiser—was a hero of radical labour militants, and argu- ably the period’s greatest labour leader. Foster soon joined the Communist Party, and with Browder, Cannon and Cannon’s associate William F. Dunne, was instrumental in ‘Americanising’ Communism and rooting it in the labour movement.1 Foster, who would head the Communist Party during much of the Cold War, has received much attention from scholars, including two full-length biogra- phies published after the opening of the archives in the former Soviet Union. Part of this attention is due to his varied history in the American labour move- ment, perhaps best encapsulated in the title of his 1937 autobiography, From Bryan to Stalin. He joined the Socialist Party in 1901, after becoming interested in politics by a SLP soapboxer the year before. In 1909, in Seattle, Foster split from the SP with a local leftist, Herman Franklin Titus; later that year, he joined the IWW and played an important role in the Wobblies’ fight for free speech in Spokane. Soon IWW leader Vincent St. John commissioned Foster to travel to Europe as a reporter for the Industrial Worker. There he was influenced by British and French syndicalism. From British syndicalist Tom Mann, he devel- oped his lifelong union philosophy. Unlike the IWW’s insistence of forming new revolutionary unions, Foster believed that radical workers should ‘bore 1 Earl Browder to Leon Trotsky, 9 May 1921, in Comintern archives, 515:1:39; on Bloor, see Brown 1996. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�68890_�06 william z. foster and the turn towards the labour movement 99 from within’ conservative-led unions. In this way, radicals could influence the rank and file, instead of perpetuating their own isolation.2 Upon returning from Europe, Foster struggled within the IWW to ‘give up the attempt to create a new labor movement’ and instead ‘turn itself into a propaganda league, get into the organized-labor movement, and by building up better fighting machines within the old unions than those possessed by our reactionary enemies, revolutionize these unions’. He lost the battle, which is not surprising since it would have meant renouncing the IWW’s reason for exis- tence. Foster then organised the Syndicalist League of North America, which by 1915 had become the International Trade Union Educational League.3 Foster spelled out his views at the time in a 1913 pamphlet titled Syndicalism. Many of his views were similar to the standard Wobbly perspective. He advo- cated a general strike to place society in the hands of the working class. After this, he theorised, ‘there will be no state’, since ‘the workers in each industry shall manage the affairs of their particular industry’ with ‘no need for any general supervisory body’. Like most syndicalists, he advocated industrial struggle instead of political action. He wrote that only ‘one working class organization—the labor union—is necessary’ to overthrow capitalism and denounced ‘working class political action’ as ‘even worse than useless’.4 Foster believed that the masses of workers could not be won to socialism, but that a ‘militant minority’ would lead the workers. Thus he dedicated his book to that rare ‘American worker who arouses himself from the customary state of indifference characterizing workingmen’. Since sabotage—‘all those tactics, save the boycott and the strike proper, which are used by the workers to wring concessions from their employers’—did not depend upon organising a majority of the working class, it fitted in with Foster’s perspective. It was, he wrote, ‘peculiarly a weapon of the rebel minority’.5 None of this differed greatly from the IWW’s disdain for ‘Scissor Bill’ and ‘Mr. Block’, characters in songs by Joe Hill who came to represent docile, pro- capitalist workers. What made Foster different from the standard Wobbly 2 The two biographies are Barrett 1999 and Johanningsmeier 1994. For Foster’s early years, see his own autobiography, Foster 1937, and Johanningsmeier 1993. On his political evolution, see Foster 1937, pp. 19–24, 30, and Johanningsmeier 1994, pp. 37–47. For Titus, see Schwantes 1994, pp. 95–6. In the early 1930s, Foster wrote a short autobiographical statement that is in the Comintern archives, 615:1:1. 3 Quote from Industrial Worker, 2 November 1911, reprinted in ‘Boring From Within’ 2001, p. 16; Johanningsmeier 1994, pp. 48, 79; Brody 1987, p. 140. 4 Ford and Foster 1913, pp. 3, 5, 19, 23. 5 Ford and Foster 1913, pp. 9, 12, 17..
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