Muste says the way to win the middle class from fascism is not to appeal to their demands, but have a militant working class movement making its demands.

‘The Middle Class’ Role’ by A.J. Muste from Labor Action (A.W.P.). Vol. 1 No. 13. December 20, 1933.

IF profiteers and the profit system are to be abolished and an economy set up under which the masses will have plenty, security and peace, the workers will have to do it. By workers the American Workers Party means all who labor for hire or independently, workers of hand or brain, in industry agriculture, trade, the professions.

Primarily we look to the industrial workers to lead the way in achieving the revolution. It is upon them above all that the revolutionary party must be built. Others must come to see that their position is the same as that of wage earners, that their fate is bound up with that of the industrial workers.

The industrial working class is something new in history. It was produced by the machine, the factory, the industrial city. The very conditions of its life and work have compelled it to organize. Trade unions, cooperatives, political parties, have been developed by it.

They all stand for the idea of solidarity rather than individualism.

Social ownership of the earth’s resources and fair distribution of goods has been a vague ideal for ages. The working class made it a practical political program. In Russia, under the leadership of the industrial working class, that program is actually being carried out for the first time in history on a large scale.

It is natural that it should be so. When the worker realizes that he is not and cannot be free because the machine on which his livelihood depends is owned and controlled by another, he cannot win freedom by owning his own factory and having every other worker do the same. They must own and manage jointly.

Furthermore, when the workers thus free themselves, mankind is freed forever. There is no other class left enslaved. By and large there is no chance for anyone to improve his lot under such a social system without also improving the lot of others.

This does not mean that workers automatically, without the leadership of a revolutionary party, are carried, as it were, into a new social order, nor does it mean that leaders may not be persons who come from other classes which they have forsworn in order to join the workers’ movement. The working class will try to gain concessions under the existing system so long as that holds out any hope. But it is forced to broader and ever more intense struggles and when it does seek a way out, when it seeks pow er, it must be along the path we have indicated.

FASCISM as in Germany, for example, has found its mass support in the middle class, or classes–farmers, small business men, professionals, and white-collar workers who have a middle class point of view. Some now argue that these groups are very numerous in the U.S., that they are the “revolutionary” or rebellious elements rather than the workers whose unions remain conservative, and that, therefore, our aim now should be to “sell” the idea of a revolution for a cooperative commonwealth to the middle class as an alternative to Fascism. Then they will do the job that we used to think devolved primarily on the industrial workers. Otherwise, we are told, the middle classes will go Fascist and the industrial workers, even if they put up a fight, will be defeated.

We believe that this is a false and very dangerous approach. It the farmers as farmers, and apart from the industrial workers, organize, it will be to raise the price of farm products, raise the value of their land–that is, maintain or improve their status as small capitalists. If the small business men as such organize–apart from the industrial workers–it will be to improve their business, fight the chain stores, make more profit–again, that is, in order to maintain and improve their status as small capitalists. Or take the teachers as we know them, and let them organize, apart from the industrial workers. It is hardly likely that it will be to establish a cooperative commonwealth!

There is no reason to think that a mass movement dominated by such elements would not be bought up, as such movements have been in Europe, by the big capitalists in order to prevent the overthrow of capitalism. The fact that such a movement used very radical talk would not prevent that.

BUT, we are asked, if the middle class elements tend in this way to go Fascist, are we not doomed to get Fascism in the U.S. also? We answer emphatically, No, not if we have a revolutionary movement that knows its business and can “talk United States.” Among those called farmers, are hired hands, share croppers, poor tenant farmers, farmers with huge debts on their land. They can be made to see, are seeing, that they are in the same boat as the industrial workers. They are striking and demonstrating. There need not be a solid front of all farmers against the workers.

Small business men are being put out of business and transformed into chain store clerks. Technicians become employes of big corporations or of government. White-collar workers become insecure, have their pay cut. They get the status of workers. Through revolutionary education and through the struggles into which they are forced, they come to think and feel as workers. They organize. They see a new social order, a scientific economy, under the control of the workers, as the one way out.

One other point must be emphasized. Many fear a revolution because they think it means that if “ignorant and untrained” workers take control chaos will result. As a matter of fact, chaos and war, wholesale slaughter, will result precisely if capitalism is not overthrown. But the workers must be conscious of the task before them. They must be in the closest contact with the technicians. They must make it clear that they alone stand for an economic order which makes full use of modern technology, and their revolutionary party must be ready to deal with the difficult technical problems involved in taking control of industry, and in keeping the machinery of production and distribution going when control has been achieved.

Thus, by working out an intelligent and realistic policy, and by uniting all the workers by hand or brain, all those who know themselves to be workers and who therefore want to get rid of all shirkers and exploiters, in a solid organization of which the fighting industrial workers are the core, the spearhead, the American Workers Party, will march to victory.

There are a number of periodicals with the name Labor Action in our history. This Labor Action was a bi-weekly newspaper published in 1933-34 by AJ Muste’s American Workers Party. The AWP grew from the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, founded in 1929, and Labor Action replaced the long-running CPLA magazine, Labor Age. Along with Muste, the AWP had activists and writers James Burnham and Art Preis. When the AWP fused with the Trotskyist Communist League of America in late 1934, their joint paper became The New Militant.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/laboraction-cpla/v1n13-dec-20-1933-LA-Muste.pdf