‘The Kind of Unionism That Will Organize the Basic Industries’ by A.J. Muste from Labor Age. Vol. 16 No. 5. May, 1927.

AGAIN I venture to lay down six propositions as briefly and directly as possible.

1. The basic industries will be organized by a movement that sets itself deliberately to study and to use the most efficient methods of promotion, publicity, organization and administration. Much information along this line is in the records of various labor bodies. Still more is in the heads of the men and women who have been doing the practical work of the movement. Somehow all this material must be gotten out and put into such shape that it can be passed on to others. Also, we have to test carefully the various methods we use, so that we may be able to say confidently that they work or do not, that they are expensive or inexpensive in money, in victimized workers and in other ways.

There is also valuable information along all these lines that has been worked up by various businesses and by charitable, educational and other enterprises. Doubtless it would be dangerous to attempt to apply their methods in the labor movement in a mechanical fashion, to attempt to apply the methods of selling insurance mechanically to the problem of “selling” (dreadful word) trade unionism, the technique of a Billy Sunday revival to the job of organizing steel workers, the way in which a textile mill handles its workers to the problem of handling these same workers in a textile union. Nevertheless, there is much of value here if it is rightly adapted to our uses. There are effective ways of approaching human beings and effective ways of making them “sore”, and there’s no great mystery about them for those who honestly want to learn. If everything under the sun, including millions of dollars worth of worthless and harmful stuff can be sold to American workers, ought we not to be ashamed that we have not learned to win them more effectively to something they need so much as they do the union?

If efficiency in all these matters is not a God Almighty to save American workers from all their woes, neither is it a devil to be shunned at all costs. The haphazard methods of the past won’t do in the field of labor any more than in industry itself.

2. The basic industries will be organized by a labor movement that takes seriously the A. F. of L. declaration on the need for increasing wages and shortening hours. The demand is a sound one from every point of view. It appeals to the worker. He is willing to fight for the better standard of living implied here if he is helped to organize his effort effectively. It can be proved to him that most of what employers pretend to give him “voluntarily” is a sham. The demand is sound from a “social” viewpoint. The economists all tell us we produce too much in proportion to what we consume. We must have a higher standard of living and more leisure, or we become liable to either of two evils, possibly both: either “over-production” brings on serious business depression, or financial interests invest the surplus abroad and presently plunge us into war with other imperialists or with so-called backward peoples, or both these things overwhelm us. To demand decidedly higher real wages and shorter hours is both intelligently selfish and decently unselfish. It is also a straight trade union issue.

Organizing campaigns based on this issue would have to go to them. If we do not act soon and venturesomely, we shall deserve—well, all that we’ll get!

3. The basic industries will be organized by trade unions that regard their members and their families as human beings and that seek to serve all their varied human needs. Such unions, or enterprises in more or less direct connection with them, will deal with life insurance, banking, housing, cooperative purchasing of supplies, workers’ education both intellectual and inspirational, various forms of social insurance, recreation and so on. Of course there are evils to be guarded against, so are there in the purest and simplest trade union activities or in the purest and simplest revolutionary enterprises. You may put the label “class-collaboration” on these welfare activities, if you get any fun out of that. It won’t change the facts and requirements of the situation in the slightest. The labor movement must engage in these activities and meet the problems and risks involved as they arise, firstly because if we do not use these means to hold the worker to his union and so build up labor morale, the boss will use them to build up company union morale; secondly, because it is socially fundamentally bad to have these services handed to the workers from without or above, and it is sound and: necessary that the workers should provide those services for themselves by active cooperation. In the one case you get, at best, well kept slaves, in the other case you get alert, intelligent, socially minded freemen.

Perhaps this is as good a place as any to remark that I am not attempting in these articles to deal further with labor political action, partly because it cannot be done satisfactorily in the small space at my disposal, partly because I believe the building of the movement on the economic field is the basic job, the honest attempt ot tackle which must lead to sound dealing with the problem of political action.

4. The basic industries will be organized by a labor movement that gives its young and rebel spirits a chance and uses them. In view of the fact that our tempers are apt to be frayed and our judgment hasty in these days, I ought, perhaps, to guard myself against misinterpretation by some readers by observing that I have never been a Communist, and that I am on record in previous issues of Labor AGE and in plenty of other places as critical of Communist or Left Wing methods and policies. But no movement or institution will last for any length of time that does not have young people coming along and make use of their vitality. Of course, young people are inexperienced, often hasty, unorthodox, critical, rebellious, great nuisances. The good God or Nature, something at any rate that we have no control over, has fixed that. It’s no good whining about it. We have simply to accept the situation and deal with it. A movement that does not know how to use its youth and constantly ignores or represses them deserves to have them turn upon it and rend it in pieces, as always happens in some form.

The point is of special importance in connection with our problem of organizing the masses of the unorganized. Experience of the movement in this and other lands, as well as reflection, makes it clear that many of these unorganized are not going to be brought in by the efforts of the existing unions (in some cases there are really no unions having jurisdiction, in others the problem of jurisdiction is hopelessly confused) or at least not by the present officers and leaders of these unions. This can be said without in any way implying that the latter are fakirs. One need simply remember that the present staffs of unions for the most part have their hands full now (this remains true despite the fact that there are lazy exceptions), that their experience and training have not equipped them for many of the tasks now before the movement, and to a great extent organization must be achieved now as in the past from the inside. In an important sense the labor movement cannot organize the unorganized, they must organize themselves.

It follows that there is much work to be done by foot-loose, courageous, adventuresome, quick-witted young people who are not burdened with heavy responsibilities, and who are not a great expense to any organization. It follows also that organization in many instances will come largely out of a mass movement of workers in some crisis of which advantage is taken by such ardent spirits as we have described. Certainly this has often been the case in the past. Now if young rebels will often be too sure of themselves in such situations, disregard the lessons of the past, be too critical and impatient toward the labor movement or some branch of it, it is equally true that the labor movement and its branches will be tempted to apply too arbitrary standards to these situations, will be too cautious, will discourage or alienate active youngsters rather than encourage, use them, give them the support of the movement as they wrestle in the frontline trenches, guide their work into constructive paths, accept the organizations they build and in a statesmanlike manner make them part of the labor movement as a whole. From this point of view, the problem is not so much what the unions will do to organize the basic industries as what they will do to organization that gets under way—welcome it or freeze it out.

5. The basic industries will be organized by a labor movement that rightly meets the issue that underlies the controversy that is raging about union-management cooperation, class-collaboration, etc. For the union to “assume responsibility for production, efficiency, elimination of waste”, and so on, is not, I submit, a fundamentally new departure either in a conservative or in a radical direction. It is just our old friend Collective Bargaining| Through the union the worker has said to management: “You give me such and such wages, hours, conditions, control over my job and in return I will give you so much of my time, energy, skill.” So he “cooperated”, produced goods, built industries, made a living. The method is not so simple and direct when applied to big, mechanized industries under modern conditions as the union-management cooperation plan tries to do, but there is no fundamental difference, the same sort of bargain is struck.

There is no use fighting against it, kicking about it in bull-headed fashion. Lefts kicked in the same way in other days against introduction of machinery, against efficiency schemes, against collective agreements. They are all still with us. Whatever may be the policy indicated in a specific situation, you cannot go to the workers in general and over a long period of time with a program for making industry inefficient. The workers do not want to tear down their own house about their ears, not as long as it is livable.

That’s one side of the picture. There is another. In the first place, we need to pray to be delivered from the sentimentalists and from those who stumble over words. They are found in the camp of the collaborationists and also in the camp of their foes. To some workers the word cooperation is like the proverbial red rag to the bull, and to others the word class-struggle is the same. They are both good enough words and they stand for real things when rightly used, things that are there in the labor world and that we don’t get rid of because we don’t like certain words. The trouble is that we pack emotions into the words instead of ideas, and then we passionately love or passionately hate these words, which, of course, in our sober moments we should not attempt to love or hate at all, but only to analyze and to use in signaling to other folks. And again, waging the class struggle does not mean indulging a glorious emotion and being insulting to the boss; nor does cooperation in industry mean indulging a glorious emotion and pressing the boss to one’s bosom. And yet again, there is nothing treasonable about getting something for workers without a strike if you can do it; nor is there anything to be ashamed of in going on strike if need be.

In the second place, it is one thing for workers to cooperate with technical men in order to produce goods more abundantly and at less cost, and quite another thing for workers to cooperate with those whose relation to an industry is that of profit-takers. The former is good unionism in the main, the latter is in the long run impossible. One may believe that the capitalist system was made in heaven and will endure forever, but if he can see straight he will recognize that even so the relation between the man who takes wages out of an industry and the man who takes profits out of it is a competitive, not a cooperative one. At this point, a certain militancy is indispensable. No amount of words will change that in the least. Samuel Gompers, at any rate, did not see any end to the worker’s demand for “more and more and more.” For steering a straight course it is essential that the movement distinguish between cooperation with the technician and cooperation with the profit-takers, the lords of finance. The worker is not against industry, but that does not necessarily mean that he is for those who control it.

In the third place, in working out union-management cooperation plans we must be true to the fundamentals of collective bargaining. The union in the past demanded certain things in lieu of the worker’s “cooperation”— a better standard of living for him, a more secure and honorable status, and for the union more power, more share in control. Today the worker cooperates often under more difficult conditions, he gives finer skill or endures more unnatural strain. He and his union must get decidedly more in return than in the past, or the whole thing is unreal and a tragic sham. If it is a nice tea-party between capital and labor that is wanted the company union can supply that.

But is it impossible to be both cooperative and militant? If you help to keep industry going are you not helping the boss to get his profits, more profit as likely as not? Paradoxical as it may sound, being both cooperative and militant is the only thing the union can be at least for the present. Beyond certain limits it cannot go either in the direction of withholding its cooperation or in the direction of toning down its militancy, without becoming either a mere propaganda club or a tea-party and losing the mass of workers. It is not certain that given a militant union the boss would continue to take as large a percentage of profit, but doubtless when it comes to ultimate control of money-power there arise problems of taxation, valuation, use of nation’s credit, disposition of basic natural resources, with which the union as such is not built to deal. Political action is called for. In the meantime the union is doing its share if it defends the worker from attack, improves his living and his status, develops a complete knowledge of the processes of industry, strengthens its own morale, power and prestige.

6. Finally, the basic industries will be organized by a labor movement that challenges the American worker, appeals to the soul of him, to his courage, his self-respect, his pride and independence. After all, it is the ancient American fight for freedom that we are carrying on, freedom under the conditions of this machine age. Today the worker is not free, whatever else he may be. Partly with the opiate of “prosperity”, partly by being chained to a monotonous task, partly by a huge machinery of propaganda, partly because life has become vast and complex and he has not been educated to cope with it adequately and fearlessly, he is made passive, apathetic, superficial, sometimes cynical. His elections, his natural resources, his civil rights, are stolen from him, and he lets it all pass. We may quote Father Ryan at this point: “After more than three centuries, there approaches a return to feudalism. The new feudalism is political and industrial. Not improbably it will be more or less benevolent. The lords of industry will realize, at least for a considerable number of years, that their position and profits will be more secure if they refrain from the cruder and coarser forms of injustice, and permit the dependent classes, both urban and rural, to obtain a moderate share of the products of industry. The masses will probably enjoy a slightly higher degree of economic welfare than has ever been within their reach before. But they will enjoy it at the expense of genuine freedom. The mind of the masses will have become a slave mind. Possibly this is the kind of society that we want in this country, but it is not the ‘kind that made and kept American free. It is emphatically not the kind of society that committed the destinies of the country to the custody of Abraham Lincoln.”

It is absurd to think that American workers are deeply satisfied with this role of serfdom under the greatest imperialism of history. It is certain that there is that in millions of American workers which might be stirred to revolt against such a condition. Under modern conditions men can be free only by organization, cooperatively. They can be free only if all are free. If the labor movement is crushed, freedom and democracy are indeed gone, and no means remain for restoring them. A labor movement with idealism, with a passion that would challenge American workers, with a vision of the serfdom into which they are falling and with the role they might play on earth if they were free, that would dare them not to be lackeys, even for six dollars per an eight-hour day— might organize the basic industries.

Labor Age was a left-labor monthly magazine with origins in Socialist Review, journal of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. Published by the Labor Publication Society from 1921-1933 aligned with the League for Industrial Democracy of left-wing trade unionists across industries. During 1929-33 the magazine was affiliated with the Conference for Progressive Labor Action (CPLA) led by A. J. Muste. James Maurer, Harry W. Laidler, and Louis Budenz were also writers. The orientation of the magazine was industrial unionism, planning, nationalization, and was illustrated with photos and cartoons. With its stress on worker education, social unionism and rank and file activism, it is one of the essential journals of the radical US labor socialist movement of its time.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/laborage/v16n05-may-1927-LA.pdf