by Chris Harman
This point had important practical implications. The various Nazi and fascist movements which arose in the West and the Third World were dedicated to breaking working-class organisation. By contrast, the Communist movements tried to combine fighting for workers’ interests – which is what normally led people to join them – with defending the policy requirements of the rulers of the USSR. Their leaders tried to balance one against the other. Again and again this had disastrous consequences and led struggles to defeat – just as did the behaviour of social democratic leaders. But it was not the same as the systematic attempt to smash the workers’ movement which characterised Nazism.
The crisis of the American Dream
For liberals, there did seem one sign of hope in the mid-1930s. This was in the US. Elections held at the deepest point of the slump, at the end of 1932, had produced a new Democratic Party Congress and a new president, Franklin D Roosevelt. These people were certainly not revolutionaries, and were not even social democratic reformists of the European sort. The Democratic Party had been the party of the slave owners and remained a coalition of Southern segregationist whites, Northern political bosses and certain major capitalists.
But the mood of both US capitalism and the mass of people was one of desperation at the end of 1932. It was expressed in a feeling that something, however unorthodox, had to be done to get the economy moving. Congress even gave serious consideration to a bill to reduce the working week to 30 hours in a desperate attempt to create more jobs. In the end Roosevelt pushed through emergency powers which involved state controls on the operations of capitalism. These included guarantees of the funds of banks through the Federal Reserve system, use of government money to buy up and destroy crops in order to raise their price, a civil construction corps to provide work camps for 2.3 million unemployed young men, a limited form of self-regulation of industry through cartels to control price and production levels, limited amounts of direct state production through the Tennessee Valley Authority, and even measures which made it easier for workers to form unions and raise wages, so increasing consumer demand. The speed and audacity with which these measures were implemented caught the enthusiasm of those suffering from the recession, and of political liberals who wanted an alternative to fascism or socialist revolution. They seemed to stand in sharp contrast to the previous administration. Its response to mass unemployment had been to send in 25,000 troops with bayonets fixed, led by General MacArthur on a white charger, to disperse a protest by unemployed war veterans. At least Roosevelt seemed to be providing some jobs, even if at rock bottom wage rates and under appalling conditions.
However, Roosevelt’s measures were neither as innovative nor as effective as many people thought. Roosevelt remained highly orthodox in one respect – he did not use government spending to break out of the crisis. In fact he cut veterans’ pensions and public employment. As Kindelberger writes, ‘Fiscal means to expand employment remained limited, since the Democratic administration under Roosevelt remained committed to a balanced budget’. 224 He also suggests investment was bound to start rising at some point from the incredibly low level to which it had fallen (from $16 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932), and it began to do so once the level of bank failures had peaked. In any case, Roosevelt got the credit for a rise in production from 59 per cent of the level of the mid-1920s in March 1933 to 100 per cent in July, and a fall in unemployment from 13.7 million in 1933 to 12.4 million in 1934 and 12 million in 1935. Many people believed his ‘New Deal’ had worked miracles – a myth that remains prevalent today. Yet one person in seven was still jobless in 1937 when output finally reached the level of eight years earlier.
Then in August 1937 there was ‘the steepest economic decline in the history of the US’, which lost ‘half the ground gained by many indexes since 1932’. 225 Steel output fell by more than two-thirds in four months, cotton textile output by about 40 per cent, and farm prices by a quarter.
The economic recovery had been short-lived. But, combined with a mild improvement in union rights, it had one very important side-effect. It created a new feeling of confidence among sections of workers in their ability to fight. There was an upturn in recruitment to the unions, although workers who struck still faced vicious attacks from employers and the police. In the first six months of Roosevelt’s New Deal more than 15 strikers were killed, 200 injured and hundreds arrested. 226 But three strikes in 1934 showed how such confidence could fuse with the sense of bitterness created by the slump to explode into a level of militancy not known since the defeat of the steel strike in 1919. Autolite car component workers at Toledo, teamsters in Minneapolis and waterfront workers in San Francisco struck in a militant fashion, defied court injunctions, defended themselves physically against scabs and cops, and won resounding victories. Furthermore, it was militant socialists who took the lead in each of these struggles – Trotskyists in Minneapolis, Communists in San Francisco, and followers of radical ex-preacher A J Muste in Toledo. In the aftermath of the disputes, trade unionists in the increasingly important auto industry began to recruit widely and demanded a union based on the industry as whole to replace the existing craft unions organised along skill lines.
The lesson was not lost on certain mainstream union leaders. They had been losing members for years – with union membership falling from four million in 1920 to a little over two million in 1933 – and with the decline they had lost influence within government and ruling-class circles. Now some saw a way to regain influence. Led by the miners’ union leader John L Lewis, a group of them set up an organising committee, the CIO, aimed at recruiting millions of mass production workers into industrial unions.
The formation of the new organisation inspired workers in scores of places to copy the militant methods which had brought the successes of 1934. Workers at the Goodyear and Firestone rubber plants in Akron, Ohio, sat down in the plants to stop the management breaking strikes in December 1935 and January 1936. Mass pickets surrounded the Goodyear plant to stop cops bringing in strikebreakers. 227 There were more than 40 other sit-down strikes that year. The biggest and most important began in December at the General Motors (GM) plants in Flint, Michigan. By the end of the strike 140,000 of the company’s 150,000 workers were either sitting in or picketing. As in other strikes at the time, they were threatened with injunctions and had to fight off attacks by armed police. But in the end the US’s biggest manufacturing company was forced to recognise the union. As Art Preis, a union activist from the time, recalled:
The floodgates of class struggle were opened. The cry, ‘Sit-down!’ echoed from one corner of the land to the other. One month after the end of the GM strike some 193,000 workers engaged in 247 sit-downs; nearly half a million took up this weapon before 1937 ended … The sit-downs spread to every kind of industry and trade … Chrysler auto workers, store saleswomen, Western Union messengers, restaurant and hotel employees, milliners, bindery workers, garbage collectors, glass blowers and tyre builders. 228
Around 1.8 million workers were involved in strikes, backed up by support committees, ‘women’s auxiliaries’ which supplied sit-ins with food, and bands which provided entertainment. Total union membership was over seven million by the end of 1937, up five million on four years before.
The strikes had the potential to change the whole culture of US capitalism by challenging the pervading individualism – the myth of the ‘American Dream’ that anyone could get ahead – and the racism that was the other side of this. Where the unions were successful they began to create a new culture of collective action among workers – summed up by the union song ‘Solidarity Forever’, sung in the sit-ins – and began to chip away at the racism in cities like Detroit. The CIO was the only large-scale institution in US society where blacks had a chance of ‘genuine participation’ 229 alongside whites.
One central problem prevented the wholesale fulfilment of this potential – the politics which dominated as the union movement grew. The craft unionism of the years befo
re 1936 had been ‘non-political’. The great majority of its leaders accepted US capitalism as the most perfect way of organising society, and made deals with local politicians of either mainstream party. John L Lewis, for example, was ‘a Republican in politics, a follower of Adam Smith in economics and an autocrat in his own union’. 230 The new CIO leaders believed that an alliance with Roosevelt and the Democratic Party was the way to advance their cause.
Roosevelt liked the idea of the CIO campaigning for him in elections, but he was not prepared to upset capitalists who also supported him. This was shown dramatically late in 1937, when Lewis undertook the biggest organising drive yet – in the steel industry. The CIO appointed 433 full-time and part-time organisers, working from 35 regional offices. In the aftermath of the GM strike many steel companies recognised the steel organising committee as a union, without much participation by the new union members. But the big firms refused to do so, and in late May the organising committee called a strike involving 75,000 workers. The companies responded with all the ferocity they had shown in the 1919 steel strike. They attacked the picket lines with ‘company thugs, deputies, police and the National Guard … There were 18 strikers slaughtered, scores wounded, hundreds arrested’. 231 The organising committee had not prepared workers for such an onslaught because it had put its faith in Democratic Party governors and mayors showing sympathy to the organising drive. It ‘told workers that all the “New Deal” public officials were “labour’s friends”, and that the strikers should “welcome” the National Guards, state troopers and police sent to “keep order”.’ 232 The workers were thoroughly demoralised when these ‘friends’ attacked them with clubs and bullets. In Pennsylvania the first Democratic governor for 44 years declared martial law in the steel town of Johnstown. State troopers reopened the factory, restricting the number of pickets to six, and herded ever greater numbers of scabs into the plant. In Youngstown, Ohio, where there was also a Democratic governor, deputies shot two pickets dead. In Chicago police sent in by the Democratic mayor killed ten strikers. When CIO leaders looked to Roosevelt for help he declared, ‘A plague on both your houses’. 233 The biggest organising drive was broken just as the economy began to plunge downwards into renewed slump.
In the following two years the CIO added just 400,000 members to those gained in its first 22 months. In 1939 the number of strikes was only half that of 1937. What is more, the union leaders increasingly reverted to collaboration with the employers and to restricting agitation by the membership. In the auto union there was an attempt to ban any publication not approved by the leadership, while there were to be no elections in the newly formed steel union for five years. The spontaneous grassroots militancy of 1934–36 gave way to tight control from above.
Many activists tried to resist this trend. But, as in France and Spain, their efforts were made much more difficult by the behaviour of the Communist Party. It had played a leading role in the militancy of 1934–37, with many of its activists taking positions as organisers in the CIO union drive, and by their courage and daring had attracted large numbers of new recruits. Until 1935 the Communist Party insisted that Roosevelt was a capitalist politician and the New Deal a fraud. Then it made a U-turn and welcomed Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats with its own version of ‘Popular Front’ politics. The party worked with the union leaders to spread illusions about the role of these politicians and to discipline rank and file trade unionists who might disrupt cosy relations with the Democrats. This continued for the next ten years, except for a brief interlude during the Hitler–Stalin pact at the beginning of the Second World War. It helped the union leaders establish bureaucratic control over most unions – a control which they would use in the 1940s to destroy any Communist influence.
Such behaviour had important ideological consequences. Writers, artists, film-makers and musicians had suddenly found themselves in a society which was shaken to its core by the Wall Street Crash and the slump. All the old values were thrown into question as the ruling class temporarily lost its sense of direction and the mass of people, including wide sections of the middle class, lost their trust in the ruling class. From 1934 onwards a whole set of new values were thrown up by the strike movement and the upsurge of trade unionism. The impact was not only on highbrow art and literature, but also on the mass culture of popular music and the Hollywood dream factory – and just as they were beginning to exercise global dominance.
This was reflected in the work of writers such as John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dashiell Hammett and John Steinbeck, of film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan and the young Orson Welles, and of musicians like Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Dizzy Gillespie and even the young Frank Sinatra. But with the New Deal there were openings for such dissident currents to return to the mainstream. It could provide jobs on federal projects, space in news magazines and radio shows, and openings in Hollywood. The ‘New Deal’ Democrats saw intellectuals, as it saw the bureaucrats running the new CIO unions, as a layer that could help impose a new pattern of exploitation on society as a whole.
Until 1936 much of the intellectual left resisted such temptations, making a clear distinction between their aims and those of Roosevelt. The stress was on ‘proletarian art’ which, for all its faults in theory and execution, meant trying to relate to working-class struggle and a working-class audience. This changed once the Communist Party began to back Roosevelt. It no longer tried to direct the spontaneous radicalisation of intellectuals towards the overthrow of society, but to exerting pressure within society. One aspect of this was the adoption of the language of ‘Americanism’ traditionally used by the right – the party’s slogan became ‘Communism is 20th century Americanism’. Another was encouraging sympathetic writers and film-makers to adopt a moderate stance so as to advance their careers and gain influence within the Hollywood studios. This weakened the impulse towards the left of many radicalised artists. It encouraged them to take the easy option of making concessions to mainstream Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley.
James T Farrell, one of the ablest novelists of the early 1930s, pointed out:
The New Deal cultural climate which evolved in America during the 1930s, and which was patently exemplified in many motion pictures, radio plays and novels of the war period, helped to produce a pseudo-populist literature of the common man. This neo-populist art and literature emphasises the concept of Americanism as the means of unifying all races, creeds and classes. Instead of a literature which penetratingly describes class differences … this literature has generally stressed and sentimentalised the theme that the common man is human; it has also used the theme that the rich are Americans too, and that they are like the common man. 234
The Communist Party’s embrace of Roosevelt could also lead to reactions like that of the black hero of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man . He becomes disillusioned with socialism when the party (thinly disguised as ‘The Brotherhood’) tells him to hold back the struggle of blacks in Harlem because ‘We are making temporary alliances with other political groups and the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole’. 235 The disillusionment of writers such as Ellison and Richard Wright encouraged many subsequent black activists to think that socialists were just another group of whites out to use them. Meanwhile, white intellectuals who experienced disillusionment of their own often came to believe that socialists were as manipulative as any other political group. Some became cynical enough to flip over into supporting the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.
In any case, the growth of an ideological trend which challenged the myth of the American Dream, just as that dream was beginning to bewitch the world through popular music and film, was cut short in much the same way as the growth of the US workers’ movement.
From slump to war
The slump led to tensions between states as well as between classes. The rulers of each country sought to ease the pressure
on themselves at the expense of their rivals abroad. One after another they tried to expand the sales of domestically produced goods by devaluing their currencies and raising tariff barriers. The widespread tendency was towards ‘autarky’ – the production of as many goods as possible within the boundaries of the national state.
The state was also more involved than ever before (except during the First World War) in direct economic activities – rationalising some industries by forcing the closing of inefficient firms, and establishing direct state ownership of some sectors so as to enhance the prospects of others. Even the Conservative ‘national’ government in Britain nationalised the electricity supply, the national airlines and coal mining rights.
In some of the less industrially advanced countries of Latin America and Europe the process went considerably further. ‘Populist’ governments like that of Vargas in Brazil and later Perón in Argentina established large state-owned sectors. A right-wing government in Poland laid down a long-term economic plan, and Mussolini in Italy set up state-run companies in an attempt to dampen the impact of the world economic crisis.
However, there was a contradiction between the use of the state to try and bolster each national group of capitalists and the desire of all capitalists for access to resources beyond the narrow boundaries of the individual state. The only way to reconcile this contradiction was to expand the area which the state controlled. Formal empires and informal ‘spheres of influence’ became all-important. The autarky was that of ‘currency blocks’ dominated by the major powers – the dollar block, the sterling area, the gold block (centred on France and its empire), the mark block and the USSR. As the economist Alvin Hansen pointed out in 1932:
