No War But Class War: a review of Louis Adamic’s Dynamite
We LOVE it when people review AK Press books. The following review by Abe Walker first appeared in the May 2009 issue of the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate.
* * *
“No War But Class War”
Book Review by Abe Walker
Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America by Louis Adamic. AK Press Edition (2008)
The contemporary US labor movement does not have a reputation for militancy. By almost any standard, American unions stack up poorly compared to their European, Asian, African and Latin American counterparts. American workers strike less often than workers almost anywhere else in the world, and the total number of days lost to work stoppage as a percentage of total days worked is embarrassingly low. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded only twenty-two major strikes in 2005. By comparison, in authoritarian China, where independent labor unions have no legal status and the strike weapon is outlawed, groups of workers walked off the job 19,000 times in 2005. When American workers do strike, they do it so quietly it rarely makes the news, and if the police get involved, it’s usually only to redirect traffic.
Given this, it’s easy to forget that 100 years ago, the American workplace was the site of perpetual, unmitigated violence. During the period extending roughly from 1886 to 1935, the conflict between labor and capital could be labeled a “class war” in more than a metaphorical sense. Labor rebellions were routinely put down by private company police, armed thugs-for-hire, state militias, the national guard, and in at least one instance, the United States Army itself. This story has been told and retold, in whole and in part, by numerous labor historians. But what’s striking about Louis Adamic’s Dynamite, originally written in 1934 and recently re-issued by AK Press, is that he stresses something the other historians know but refuse to admit: the violence was often two-sided.
This should be no surprise to any serious student of American history. The United States is a nation born of bloodshed, and there was a time when the Second Amendment had defenders others than right-wing extremists. But the other popular histories of American labor–such as Labor’s Untold Story, originally published by the Communist-led United Electrical Workers, and Jeremy Brecher’s Strike!–take the moral high ground by downplaying the violence of workers, while emphasizing the violence of the state. To be sure, in the frequent pitched battles that were waged during this period, labor casualties consistently outnumbered police and military casualties by a margin of at least ten-to-one (sometimes significantly higher). And wanton acts of cruelty, like the 1914 Ludlow Massacre where hundreds of striking miners and their families were gunned down in cold blood, were the exclusive domain of the state. Clearly, it would be wrong to suggest that workers were the primary instigators of violence. But it would be equally wrong to depict the workers as poor, defenseless victims, armed with nothing but their moral certitude and their historical prerogative. When attacked, workers readily fought back with fists, rocks, guns, incendiary devices, and organized bombing campaigns. To minimize or deny this reality is to distort the historical record.
The AK Press edition of Dynamite includes a foreword by Jon Bekken, an activist and organizer with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Bekken briefly situates the text in its historical context, but his main intellectual project is apparently to defend the legacy of his own organization. The IWW receives significant attention in the text, and Adamic’s assessment is mixed. Bekken quickly–though unconvincingly–refutes the suggestion that the IWW reciprocated the violence unleashed against them (well, except sometimes, but only in self-defense), and dismisses the assertion that sabotage was ever a major part of the IWW’s strategy. (The truth is probably more complicated. From 1912 to 1915, the union issued a series of pamphlets advocating sabotage, which it later disowned as the political climate grew more repressive. The contemporary organization distances itself from these pamphlets, which are displayed on its website alongside a bold disclaimer: “The following document is presented for historical purposes…workers who engage in some of the following forms of sabotage risk legal sanction”.)
Bekken’s defense of the IWW is clearly self-interested, but his uneasiness is consistent with the contemporary Left’s dogmatic commitment to pacifism. Today, much of the Left has a fetishistic obsession with nonviolence, filtered through a distorted version of the legacies of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. (Neither ever articulated a strategy of nonviolence as doctrine). Many contemporary political activists conclude that the only legitimate protest tactic is an unbending adherence to nonviolence, even–especially–in the face of violence. This position was bolstered by a particular strain of second-wave feminism, which claimed that violence against the state is tantamount to violence against women. Under this rubric, civil disobedience is bracketed off as acceptable, while more militant tactics are universally condemned. To offer an example, “liberal” NBC news anchor Keith Olbermann recently devoted the better part of his evening program to an extended polemic against the anti-capitalist protesters at the G20 economic summit in London, who–in the course of being tear gassed and beaten by riot police–broke some windows at the Royal Bank of Scotland. His objection was not to the protesters’ demands or to their ideology, but to the fact that they would deign to destroy private property.
There are a number of problems with this logic. First, it assumes that movement organizations freely “choose” from a grab bag of potential tactics. In reality, as Adamic’s text demonstrates, particular tactics are necessitated by particular historical conjunctures. Some situations may call for a hunger strike, while others may call for armed combat. To unequivocally denounce either of these tactics makes little sense. For example, as cited in Dynamite, a Chicago-based German language newspaper boldly proclaimed on May 1, 1886:
Bravely forward! The conflict has begun… Workers, let your watchword be: No Compromise! … Clean your guns, complete your ammunition. The hired murderers of the capitalists, the police and militia, are ready to murder.
This might sound like needless provocation. But as it turned out, the provocation turned prophetic, for two days later police opened fire on a group of locked-out workers at the McCormick Reaper Works as they tried to block scabs from entering the factory, setting into motion a chain of events that would culminate in the infamous Haymarket Riot. In the face of an employer-sanctioned state-sponsored militarized police force-cum-death squad, the locked out workers had no realistic choice but to arm themselves and fight back.
Much has changed since then. The iconic image of a picket line, repeated numerous times on television news and in the popular imagination, features workers marching in circles about the sidewalk in front of their place of business, moving constantly to allow for the free passage of pedestrians–and strikebreakers. Indeed, strikebreakers are typically permitted to cross the line unimpeded–though perhaps not without some gentle taunting. Adamic reminds us that a true picket line’s function is to physically prevent strikebreakers (“scabs”) from entering the plant by forming an impenetrable line of defense.
It must be noted that there are major inaccuracies in Adamic’s narrative, some of which undermine his argument and ultimate conclusions. By contemporary academic standards (and perhaps even by journalistic standards), the book falls short. But it’s important to keep in mind that the subfield today known as “labor history” did not yet exist in Adamic’s time, and his research is almost entirely original, based exclusively on primary sources. Not until the 1960s, with the rise of social history and the academy’s sudden interest in the lives of working-class people, did scholars begin to engage in serious study of American unions. Due to these shortcomings, it may be more useful to read Dynamite as a historical document itself–a window into a moment when the fate of American labor was still very much undecided.
Adamic’s text was written at the apex of a critical historical juncture. After fading briefly in the aftermath of the Palmer Raids and the (first) Red Scare, labor was once again on the march. In fact, 1934 saw a wave of general strikes in a number of key cities, including San Francisco, Minneapolis, and Toldeo. 1934 is probably the most important year in American labor history, rivaled only by 1919. Yet one year later, everything would change. FDR with the help of his labor secretary, Francis Perkins, proposed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which offered labor unions legitimation and provided some basic protections in exchange for more government regulation and supervision. Its chief enforcement mechanism was the contract, which for the first time gained real legal status. Once brought under the wing of paternalistic politicians, labor’s prominence would briefly increase, but its real power and autonomy soon declined. Tellingly, in the years that followed, labor would abandon its historical demand for the shortening of the working day, focusing instead on the much more moderate demand for gradual wages increases. To be sure, unions didn’t fade right away– indeed, WWII and the immediate post-war years were marked by another surge in strike activity–but these strikes were largely wildcats (“illegal” strikes initiated by rank-and-file union members without the consent of the union bureaucracy). Labor’s fate was already sealed.
In 1947, President Truman signed the Taft-Hartley act, which undermined some of the more generous provisions of the NLRA by locking many unions into no-strike clauses and outlawing the secondary boycott, a popular tactic that allowed for the generalization of local struggles. Labor seemed to briefly revive in the 1960s, but by the time the 1970s oil crisis hit, these social struggles had largely dissipated and the movement was once again quiet. The final blow came in 1980, when Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers and sparked a decade of vicious anti-union government policy. Since then, American unions have been the laughingstock of the industrialized world. Better governance along the way might have mitigated labor’s decline, but as David Montgomery argues in his classic text The Fall of the House of Labor, it was that labor’s decision to buy into the NLRA that precipitated its downfall.
Writing in 1934, could Adamic have seen any of this coming? After spending the better part of the book chronicling the movement’s glory days, Adamic’s last chapter ends on a pessimistic note. He laments the bureaucratization and professionalization of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), problems that would only grow worse in the ensuing years. His criticisms portend the rise of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which, though initially more militant than the AFL, was firmly ensconced in government bureaucracy almost from the start. Adamic offers no real analysis here, and hedges on important political questions. In the last pages of the book, he seems to endorse an uncharacteristically moderate social democratic vision, writing “society must compel business to function for the social good.” At other times, he describes labor’s prospects in terms that would make even the most unreconstructed Marxist blush: “the American working class will be violent until the workers become revolutionary in their minds and motives and organize … into unions with revolutionary aims to power.” Yet on one point, he is absolutely clear: the government is not a natural ally in labor’s struggle against capital, and any successful strategy for labor must be created not through political alliances, but through the working class’s own capacity for self-activity.
Confronting Adamic’s text seventy-five years after the fact demands that readers ask themselves a number of difficult and politically loaded questions: to what extent is our seemingly peaceful labor system already (and always) bound up in the latent violence of capital? The very notion of a post-war labor “peace” conceals the underlying violence upon which that “peace” was brokered. The illusion of labor peace is predicated upon the state’s power to unleash violence against workers should they break their end of the deal. Was the subsumption of the American labor movement under layers of government bureaucracy–in exchange for an end to violence–on the whole a victory for workers? Or has the post-war labor peace been an unequal compromise? Certainly, no unionist is nostalgic for the days when a worker could be shot dead for walking a picket line, but the alternative we have isn’t that great either.