Complete online text.

Part One: Fascism is International, Origins of Fascism, Fascist Trade Unions in Italy, Class Peace versus Class Struggle, Proclamation of Fascist Union Principles, Actual Class Collaboration, Composition of Monopoly of Fascist Unions, Fascist Unions and Party Co-Operate, Class Unionism and Fascist Unionism Collide, Class Struggle in Spite of Fascism.

Part Two: Fascist Trade Unionism in Germany, The Demagogic Program of German Fascism, Organization of the Trade Unions, Program of the Fascist Trade Unions, Strength of German Fascist Unionism.

Part Three: Roots of Fascism in France, Fascism in Austria and Hungary, The “Awakening Hungarians.”

Part Four: Fascism in Spain, Anarchist Tactics Fail, The Argentine Fascisti.

Part Five: How to Fight Fascist Trade Unionism, The United Front Against Fascism.

Andreu Nin, in 1923 Assistant General Secretary of the Red International of Labor Unions, gives us this valuable early survey of the post-war fascist movement and the need for a left trade union response to it. Nin also provides a probing analysis of the character of modern European fascism’s defining first years; written as it was after the waves of post-war revolution had broken with the October 1922 ‘March on Rome’ that brought Mussolini’s Blackshirts to power, and the defeat of the German Revolution in 1923 with the subsequent European-wide, decade-long tide of reaction.

Struggle of the Trade Unions Against Fascism by Andreas Nin. Labor Herald Library No. 8. Published by the Trade Union Educational League, Chicago. October, 1923.

Contents: Introduction by Earl Browder, Struggle of the Trade Unions Against Fascism, I) Fascism is International, Origins of Fascism, Fascist Trade Unions in Italy, Class Peace versus Class Struggle, Proclamation of Fascist Union Principles, Actual Class Collaboration, Composition of Monopoly of Fascist Unions, Fascist Unions and Party Co-Operate, Class Unionism and Fascist Unionism Collide, Class Struggle in Spite of Fascism, II) Fascist Trade Unionism in Germany, The Demagogic Program of German Fascism, Organization of the Trade Unions, Program of the Fascist Trade Unions, Strength of German Fascist Unionism, III) Roots of Fascism in France, IV) Fascism in Austria and Hungary, The “Awakening Hungarians,” V) Fascism in Spain, anarchist Tactics Fail, VI) The Argentine Fascisti, VII) How to Fight Fascist Trade Unionism, The United Front Against Fascism. 50 pages.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

Link to PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/tuel/08-Struggle%20of%20TU%20vs%20Fascism.pdf