William Z. Foster — An Appreciation by Joseph North

Author:Joseph North
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: International Publishers
Published: 1954-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Toward Communism

The experience in steel and in packinghouse fortified certain conclusions Foster had long held. Successful work within the mass unions to win the majority for a healthy working class program required the existence within them of an organized militant minority, a factor lacking in both the great campaigns. He set about to remedy that lack by building the Trade Union Educational League. Regrettably, many honest left-wingers still wore the blinkers of dual unionism. This was not only true of old militants, it was also true of most advanced workers then founding the Communist movement in this land. The labor movements of many other lands suffered from the same malady.

At about this time a bolt flashed from the first workers' country of the world, the Soviet Republic. There the great proletarian leader named Lenin wrote his famous work that was translated throughout the world, and here, in the U.S.A., in the organ of a small left wing party. It was called Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder. Lenin referred to dual unionism as "an unpardonable blunder." Refusal to work in the reactionary trade unions abandoned the vast bulk of inexperienced workers to the influence of labor's misleaders. Lenin's writings on the matter, needless to say, delighted Foster: the principle of his ten-year struggle against dual unionism was corroborated by the foremost workingman's leader of the world. The concept of dual unionism was dealt a fatal blow.

At this time Foster received an invitation to travel to Moscow to attend the deliberations of the left labor unions of the world, meeting at a conference of the Red International of Labor Unions. He instantly accepted. There he studied the life of the Soviet workers, their trade unions, the politics and theories of the land, studied with that ardent curiosity that is one of his chief characteristics. He walked the streets, visited the factories and talked with innumerable workers.

It was a time of enormous difficulty. Seven years war, civil war, and armed intervention by fourteen foreign states in an attempt to overthrow the young Soviet Republic were just ending and had left industry in ruins. The nation suffered unimaginably from the economic blockade imperialism had thrown around it. Starvation walked the streets: typhus and cholera struck. Famine parched the farmlands. Yet wherever the American walked he discovered that the suffering workers were irrevocably attached to their new regime. It was theirs. The calamities they withstood were caused by enemies of the working class: that they knew. "It was plain as a pikestaff to me that in Soviet Russia," Foster wrote on his return, "there had occurred a truly Socialist revolution." Its triumph would inevitably redound to the benefit of the working class in his native land and in all lands. He must stand shoulder-to-shoulder with his brothers there, as he would had this revolution happened in Britain or in Germany or in France, anywhere on the globe. "The world's first free commonwealth," he said, "will live."

His intensive political study then, his first-hand observation, brought him

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.