Report on Week 2 of Solidarity’s “Socialists in Labor” reading and discussion series, “General Strike! Social Strike! Mass Strike!”
BY IVAN DRURY ZARIN
The first “sitdown strike” wasn’t in an auto factory, where sitdowns became generalized as a form of workers’ struggle. It wasn’t even in the Akron Ohio tire factory where workers sat down, one at a time and then all together, which Jeremy Brecher records in his classic labor history, Strike!, as the first industrial use of the sitdown strike. The first sitdown strike action was, Brecher says, on a baseball field, when players from two different factory teams sat down, from the first base on around the diamond, refusing to play so-long as a hated, non-union umpire was on the field.
That historic baseball sitdown was successful. They turned that non-union ump away to get up and continue the game with a union ump in his stead. Weeks later, when a dispute broke out between a supervisor and a dozen workers in a rubber factory in Akron, one worker said, “Aw, to hell with ‘im, let’s sit down.”
Brecher cites journalist Louis Adamic, who wrote at the time, “There was much laughter through the works. Oh boy, oh boy! Just like at the ball game, no kiddin’. There the crowd had stuck with the players and they got an umpire who was a member of a labor union. Here everybody stuck with the twelve guys who first sat down, and the factory management was beside itself.”
What this episode illustrates are the irregular forms that autonomous working class organization can take. Socialist observers made sense of the action and motivated their role in future sitdowns by categorizing the Akron sitdown as “spontaneous”; a hydraulic response to the buildup of pressure excerpted on workers by the inhuman factory “speedup.” Past a certain threshold, they thought, the workers, like a piston in a chamber, must explode. This narrative misunderstands workers as a body — muscles tense and tendons taut — without a brain. In this scenario, socialist organization is to become the brain: the leadership that this body needs to act.
But workers in Akron were thinking and leading. They were also functioning under pressure, certainly. Management “speedups” were terrible on their bodies, minds, and social relations. Brecher quotes the wife of a General Motors factory worker about the effects of speedup. “You should see him come home at night, him and the rest of the men in the busses,” she said, “so tired like they was dead, and irritable. My John’s not like that. He’s a good, kind man. But the children don’t dare go near him, he’s so nervous and his temper’s bad. And then at night in bed he shakes, his whole body, he shakes.”
But their sitdown action was not an automatic reflex; it was intelligent, considered, and drew from their own organizational and social histories. The sitdown strike tactic was brilliantly learned and applied from the baseball field to the factory floor –– a novel adaptation of tactics from working class recreational and social life. Elsewhere, Brecher says the sitdown spread because it was popular, unlike sabotage, which many workers didn’t support, and could not be scabbed because workers occupied the assembly line. It worked.
And the observation that working class recreation was composite of factory life in 1934 Akron was only one example of the lessons we can draw from general strikes, mass strikes, and other militant strikes in US history. These stories are detailed in Jeremy Brecher’s inspiring work, and in Jeff Schuhrke’s concise and powerful introduction to this week’s class: “General Strike! Social Strike! Mass Strike!”
This was the second week of Solidarity’s summer class series, “125 Years of Socialist Strategy in the US Labor Movement,” and an inspiring dive into the first of the specific challenges that we’re studying throughout the 8 class series. This series is organized thematically, with each class looking at a particular challenge that the US working class has faced, and the strategies and tactics that socialists have used in the course of those struggles.
The main readings for this week’s class focused on the militant strikes of the 1920s and 1930s, with supplementary sources about the major anti-ICE strike action early this year in Minneapolis. Our discussion organically drifted to this comparison, in an effort to evaluate the present.
But Jeff Schuhrke’s introduction focused on that past legacy. You can listen to his introduction here, and watch the video of it here.
In this report on this week’s readings and discussion, I’m wanting to develop themes about leadership and organization in mass strike actions that I read out of these histories. I am arguing that socialists work best when we can crack open space for the expansion, experimentation, and generalization of workers autonomous struggles. This often requires organized socialist intervention to perfect the inchoate and emergent organizational forms that are organic products of historically produced struggles.
Throughout Schuhrke’s presentation, I was struck by the same theme, problem, and question of leadership as determinate in the power of a strike, and especially on how far it could go. There were often multiple, sometimes contesting and sometimes complementary leaderships.
There are three strike episodes that I want to take as examples in order to draw out these overall conclusions: the 1919 Seattle general strike; the 1934 mass strike of Teamsters in Minneapolis; and also in 1934, the San Francisco general strike.
Leaderships and the destiny of a general strike
Seattle 1919: Socialists in the AFL
While general strikes in the 1800s had been sponsored by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), in the 20th century, under Samuel Gompers, the AFL moved away from supporting general strikes, considering them too messy or failures, which was Gompers’ assessment of the New Orleans strike in 1892.
But, Schuhrke explained, there were exceptions. “In Seattle, in 1919, it was AFL unions that organized a general strike,” he said. While “the AFL generally opposed general strikes, in Seattle the Labor Congress was more radical.” Its officers were socialists, and, when dock workers realized the craft union organization of their workplaces was disempowering, they organized a Metal Trades Council that included different unions.
When the Metal Trades Council called a citywide general strike, thirty five thousand other workers joined the thirty three thousand dock workers, including Japanese workers, who were part of racially segregated unions, or who were not part of unions at all.
“The strike was well organized, with twenty-one strike operated kitchens to serve strikers,” Schrhrke explained. Even though it didn’t meet its demands, Seattle 1919 was the largest strike in US history and was considered a success, inspiring general strikes elsewhere.
In the case of the Seattle general strike, leadership was primarily in the official trade union and its councils. But the particularity of the Seattle union leaderships was that they were politically radical; many leaders were members of the Socialist Party, which was prominent in the left-oriented union culture of the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century.
Labor historian Mark Leier writes that the Socialist Party’s “impossibilist” politics were summed-up in their slogan “no compromise –– no political trading.” These were socialists who refused to join the Second International after it split over the question of voting for war credits at the outset of the First World War. But they were, somewhat paradoxically, also opposed to the sort of uncompromising militancy of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The idea that two distinct and competing revolutionary socialist currents existed in the west coast labor movement in the years before a Communist Party formed in the US offers a glimpse of the dynamics that gave rise to an AFL sponsored general strike in Seattle in 1919 — along with a minor general strike in Vancouver and a major general strike in Winnipeg that same year, both also underwritten by mainstream labor councils in each city.
Minneapolis 1934: Trotskyist leadership
By the time of the industrial strike wave in 1934, these political conditions inside the big labor federations had eroded significantly. In Minneapolis, a general strike developed out of a major fight of Teamsters truck drivers for union recognition. Minneapolis was known as an open shop town and hostile to unions, but a group of Trotskyist activists had taken leadership in Teamsters local 574, which organized this strike.
In the first period of the strike, Schuhrke said, the Trotskyist leadership was criticized by the CPUSA for not calling for a general strike. James Cannon, leader of the Trotskyist Communist League said they were focused on union recognition and not on a general strike. Then a working agreement with the trucking companies broke down and a group of picketers was attacked by police, killing strikers. A mass demonstration resulted and strikers shut the whole city down. What happened was a general strike in all but name.
What struck me most from the Teamsters strike was what happened after the Farmer-Labor Party governor Floyd B Olson, who had been elected claiming he was a radical, and who had donated to the Teamsters strike fund at the outset of the strike, declared martial law. His police carried out nighttime raids of the Teamsters strike headquarters and homes of leaders, dragging them out of their beds in the middle the night. But rather than breaking the strike, this “decapitation” instead revealed the dispersed and popular leadership that had grown up under the Trotskyist leadership.
Thousands of strikers responded immediately to the raids and arrests with steadfast rage, which a reporter at the time, cited by Brecher, called “demoniac fury.” One worker said, “We established ‘curb headquarters’ all over the city. We had twenty of them.” It was the sudden emergence of a fully formed, practically grounded, popular leadership of rank-and-file workers that forced the governor to back down. The governor released the captured leaders and returned the strike headquarters. The strike continued and employers capitulated.
San Francisco 1934: Communist Party leadership
Schuhrke said a similar thing happened in San Francisco during the mass longshore workers strike on the waterfront.
The move to mass strike started in opposition to the employers’ “shape-up” hiring system. Brecher says longshore workers referred to it as “the slave market.” “Every morning at 6am, everyone seeking a day’s work longshoring would crowd along the Embarcadero, where the foremen would pick out those they wanted for the day. The effect was that longshoremen could never count on steady work, had to suck up to or even bribe the foremen, and had to work to exhaustion or not be hired again.”
A rank and file movement to challenge the shape-up started when the ILA refused to take action against it. And Communist Party members played leading roles in that movement, including the notable Harry Bridges, who was immortalized in song by both Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Bridges and the Communist Party led rank and file were able to overwhelm the maneuvers of the ILA and AFL leadership and force successful votes for strike action up and down the long Pacific Coast.
After strikers had effectively shut down all but (what they determined) essential truck and boat traffic in and out of San Francisco for forty five days, a coalition of business, police, and government mobilized police to crack open the docks. On July 3rd, seven hundred police armed with tear gas and riot guns, backed by a cordon of freight cars escorted five trucks driven by strike breakers through the port. Thousands and strikers and sympathizers attacked the police lines, which held but precariously. Two days later, the crowd swelled to five thousand and police opened fire when they would not move. Two strikers and a bystander were killed.
That night, Brecher writes, “the governor of California ordered in 1,700 National Guard soldiers, who enclosed the Embarcadero with barbed wire and machine gun nests, patrolled the area with armoured cars, and were given orders to shoot to kill.” This repression sparked mass demonstrations. The Central Labor Council had opposed a general strike and dragged its feet, but were then dragged into it when Teamsters, cleaners, and others went out in support of the ILA strikers. Altogether, 130,000 workers in the Bay Area went out on strike.
The AFL leadership was able to take control of the strike, once they got out of their own way opposing this explosive and unstoppable workers’ movement. The AFL formed a “General Strike Committee” made up of conservative union officials, not including a single representative from a striking union. This AFL Committee, Brecher writes, “made no provision for meeting the needs of strikers and the city’s population; instead it issued an ever-increasing number of strike exemptions, which created the impression that the strike was dissolving.” And soon it did. Bridges concluded in a strike newspaper article, “The general strike was broken by the return of the carmen and the lifting of restrictions upon food and gasoline,” concessions organized by the AFL leadership committee, not the governor or bosses.
Why was this conservative AFL leadership able to so quickly and ably take command over the strike and then so neatly strangle it? Another labor publication speculates that it was because the mainstream, bourgeois press “built up the strength and influence of the conservative leaders and aided in splitting the conservative membership from the radicals.” The raw violence of the police and national guard must have contributed, also, to a feeling that the picketline could not be held through militancy alone, but required a big tent to win a publicity war.
But the centrality of the Stalinized Communist Party in the rank and file leadership of the strike also contributed to this capitulation. In Revolutionary Teamsters, Bryan Palmer writes:
Heavily influenced by the Communist Party, and quite possibly a clandestine member, Bridges worked closely with Sam Darcy, the Party’s District-Organiser in California. In spite of the Comintern’s Third Period insistence that Red-led unions were the proper vehicle for revolutionaries to utilise in advancing the class-struggle, Bridges, with Darcy’s backing, found himself at the head of a mass strike, inside an ostensibly ‘social-fascist’ union, the ILA. Bridges and Darcy were thus forced to rely less on their Communist Party connections in the anti-AFL, Stalinist-led Marine Workers’ Industrial Union, and, instead, engage in building solidarity among the mass of maritime workers.
This explains how the Communist Party found itself brokering militant action within an AFL union during the Third Period. It also helps explain why the rank and file leadership in San Francisco proved vulnerable to maneuver by conservative union officialdom. Palmer quotes the Trotskyist paper, The Militant‘s argument that the Third Period sectarianism of the Communists meant they were unwilling and unable to build a coalition leadership of the strike including progressive and socialist forces from outside of their own group.
In San Francisco, unlike the more organic working class rank and file leadership in Akron, the deep rooted socialists of Seattle, or the independent Marxist and Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, the rank and file leadership was bound to another sort of top-down politics. The AFL’s conservative General Strike Committee was able to maneuver to displace this leadership without dozens of “curb headquarters” popping up to continue and deepen the strike because the Bridges and the Communists had not fostered such a leadership coalition.
Social organization, socialist struggle
In the discussion after his presentation, Jeff Schuhrke summed up the social character of working class organization in the general strikes of the early twentieth century. “People were organized in cultural and religious and ethnic groups and organizations,” he said. “They came together in mass meetings rather than in demonstrations, where they interacted together through and across these different cultural/social groups. They really were mass meetings, not demonstrations. They had debates and discussions and made decisions together in these public spaces.” Out of these social-political practices grew the social relations and coalitions necessary for general strikes.
It was when socialist organizations understood and had deep relations to these cultural, social, and workplace groupings and practices that they were able to practically organize ad hoc committees, networks, and whatever other structures were necessary to fight against capitalist organization at work and on strike. This required a deeply reflexive and open, curious engagement with workers, and a revolutionary politics that seeked always for openings to expand the productive and reproductive activity of workers against and outside the dominion of capital.
Schuhrke concluded, “The general strike is not a cure all, or automatic fix, but it is a tool. And even when there’s not a victory, a general strike helps set the terms of class struggle.” That seems true, not only in the immediate aftermath, but even a century later.