The Crisis and the Working Class

During the war the American working class passed through a period of favourable trade conditions. Everything tends to show that the material conditions of life of the American working class had improved during that time. I have no precise data on the subject at my disposal. The immigration of unskilled workers that is to say or cheap labour force, had practically ceased; the new crisis fell more heavily on the American working class.

This crisis is revealing itself chiefly in colossal in unemployment. The number of unemployed was estimated to be four millions by the end of the year. In view of the absence of a workers insurance in the U.S. we can not obtain the precise information on this subject, as in England and Germany. At any rate unemployment in the U.S. is colossal. At the same time there is also a considerable number of proletarians working only half-time.

In connection with unemployment, American capitalism has greatly reduced wages.

All the American and English papers are full of news items concerning reductions of wages of from 10 to 40 per cent. On a par with this, piecework is being introduced in branches where labour has been hitherto remunerated on the principle of working hours, for instance in the tailoring industry. Furthermore, the capitalists are carrying on an attack against the system of “closed shop,” which compels them to receive only industrially organised workers in some of the enterprises. Finally, there is the law against the freedom of strikes. We have not got the full text of the law, which came into operation in the beginning of April. It was passed by the Senate in December of last year under the name of the “Poindexter Anti-Strike Law.” According to data of the International Bureau of Labour, it was the armaments industry that had created and defended this law. It purported to create special legal “protection” for the workers who wish to work and chiefly to ensure the normal functioning of transport. The law prescribes Draconian penalties up to ten years imprisonment.

The regulations of the law (which we do not cite here for lack of space) are such that their direct application permits the instigation of law proceedings against every leader of a strike and every striker. In other words, the American capitalists have started a war on all the fronts against the working class. And they are meeting with success.

But what is the position of the working class in this struggle?

It is necessary to remark that among the American workers one does not observe the unanimous organised resistance which the working class of England is displaying now. We are meeting daily in the American capitalist Press notices regarding the consent of the workers to the reductions of wages, and even in some cases the workers are proposing the same on their own initiative. The capitalist Press is naturally searching first of all for facts which might be useful to capitalism, but in the American papers available to us, although we do find communications regarding separate instances of acute struggle, we see no indications of an organised struggle such as has engaged the whole working class of England. Notwithstanding the greatest development of capitalism, the class consciousness of the proletariat of the United States has attained a very low level; otherwise how could it have happened for instance that millions of worker should have given their votes at the last Presidential elections to such a glaringly expressed type of a reactionary as Harding? How could it have happened that the leader of the organised workers was S. Gompers, a man whose anti-proletarian sentences are published in italics even by the capitalist Press; the same Gompers who left the Yellow International because the latter was “too revolutionary” for him; the same Gompers who publicly censured the appeal of the transport workers protesting against the sending of war materials to Poland?

“It is quite possible,” says Gompers, – “that the Polish invasion was undertaken as the only means of averting the offensive organised by the Soviet Government. Moreover, the present Polish Government is perhaps the most democratic in Europe.” (New Republic, November 15th, 1920)

How could it have happened that the hero of the American social democracy, the imprisoned E. Debs, whom the “humane philosopher,” Wilson, would not allow to leave the prison even as a candidate for the Presidency; how could Debs have asserted publicly: “if you had brought the American Socialist Party to Lenin’s programme, you would have killed the party”? How could he have been against any attempt at an armed class struggle? How could it have come to pass that in a country of the most ruthless class inconsistencies, in a country where De Leon had anticipated the most important elements of the Bolshevist doctrine – there are three Communist sects, but no Communist mass party?

What is the cause or this inconsistency between the fact of a colossal class antagonism on the one hand and such a weak class consciousness of the American proletariat on the other?

It is no easy matter to give an answer to this question which is so important to the whole course of the world revolution. We think that the answer will be given by the internal discord among the proletariat, the sharp differences between the condition of life and the ideology of the separate workers’ grades.

We shall endeavour to explain this briefly.

The American proletariat possesses a labour aristocracy. The latter consists of skilled workers organised in unions: they enjoy a monopolist position in the closed shops: by means of high initiation fees they make it difficult for new members to join their union; they despise the “unorganised lumpen-proletariat.” They consider themselves the aristocrats of the working class, leading the lives of petit bourgeoisie, fencing themselves off from the general mass of workers. The second stratum, which has become separated from the general mass of the proletariat, is the group of immigrant foreigners, who have no intention of ending their lives as American wage workers but who are striving at whatever cost to save as soon as possible enough money to buy a piece of land in the home country and to farm it as small landed proprietors. The third stratum includes the most militant elements – it is composed of acclimatised immigrants, unskilled or partly skilled workers. The coloured races occupy a special position; up to quite recent times they were not allowed to join the union on principle. The conditions of pay and of the mode of life of the above-described grades of the proletariat are so different that it is very difficult to weld these groups together on the basis of a homogeneous class policy.

The growth of class consciousness is impeded by the circumstance that it is not so difficult for the ablest representatives of the American working class to join the class of petty-bourgeoisie or to enter the circle of persons exercising the “free professions” – it is much easier than in Europe. The absence of the need of a qualification for the occupying of any official position, the great number of educational institutions, which, give the necessary instruction and training for becoming an engineer, lawyer, doctor, and the possibility of rising above the level of the working class by means of skilful speculation or some invention – all this induces the best minds of the American proletariat to seek their well-being, not in the conditions of a class struggle in the ranks of the proletariat, but in the endeavour to pass on to a higher rung in the social ladder along the individualistic road.

In conclusion it must be noted that the high level of material prosperity of the American skilled workers which has been rising ever higher during whole decades (with the exception of the first decade of the nineteenth century) has probably contributed most of all to the fact that in the United States revolutionary class consciousness has not attained the requisite development. True, there have been instances of frequent cruel and sharp collisions but there was no revolutionary proletariat as a whole class. At the present moment a fierce struggle is going on chiefly around the question of the “closed shop.” As all indication of obduracy with which the bourgeoisie is conducting the struggle, the fact may be observed that the Bethlehem Steel Co, is refusing to sign agreements with their contractors in New York and Philadelphia who do not agree to the principle of “open shops”. Capitalism is trying to destroy the hated system of “closed shop”. We wish it success because this would mean a step forward on the road to the uniting of the proletariat. But the American proletariat will become revolutionary only when the United States are drawn into the European capitalist crisis: when American capital will not be able to ensure to the proletariat the customary high level of the material conditions of existence, when it will be impossible to overcome the present crisis painlessly.