by This is the second in a Three-part series: “Progressivism, Ultraliberalism, and Anti-Imperialism.” Read Part I: Progressivism and the Two Party System.” The third and final part, “Mass Action,” will follow.
In 1934 there were three separate general strikes, in San Francisco, Toledo, and Minneapolis. Each strike led to clashes with police in direct defiance of capitalist rule, and it seemed as if revolution was around the corner. The Great Depression scraped aside the gilded veneer of empty luxury to expose the inhumane, violent, ludicracy inherent in the capitalist ‘logic’ of the free market.
The labor movement was finally organizing based on uniting workers in entire industries, moving from the less effective craft union organizing which often only benefited skilled workers. After surviving the brutal crack-downs from the Red Scare of the Wilson era, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) was surging in membership in the midst of a labor uprising.
Yet somehow within a decade the capitalist class would have control of the labor movement, an expanded imperialist presence throughout the world, and the public support to systematically break down communist organizations. Subsequent attempts of resistance to oppression and imperialism would expand and create wide ranging coalitions, but widespread class consciousness and the organization to halt the industries that keep US war machine running would not emerge again. The coalitions would break, the radicals would be hunted down, and the state would manipulate the image of their rebellion to filter back into its hold on power. We are still living in the effects of this loss today and we can trace the turning of the tide directly back to the progressives involvement with the labor movement, and a strategy known as the Popular Front.
A Premonition
In 1926, leading labor organizer in the CPUSA and veteran of the 1919 US Steel strike William Z. Foster wrote a pamphlet titled Organize the Unorganized.
The pamphlet was part of an ongoing organizing project, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), which published its monthly newspaper The Labor Herald to inform radical labor organizing while recruiting cells of communists and militants from across the American Federation of Labor (AFL), by far the largest labor union at the time. What Foster, and others as part of the larger TUEL project, wrote and advocated for would be completely disregarded by the CPUSA after 1928 and the following two decades would unfortunately prove their discarded analysis tragically accurate.
In Organize the Unorganized, Foster put forward that the right wing of the labor movement is uninterested in organizing unorganized workers because they actually benefit from only representing small sections of the skilled labor force to keep their wages higher than the average workers. Progressives on the other hand, he argued, are not adverse to organizing campaigns but must be led by the left wing, since progressives generally shy away from militant strikes and the radical campaigning necessary for success.
Therefore, Foster advocated for a “united front between the left wing and the progressives, with the left wing functioning as the driving force.” There is a very important emphasis to be made on his distinction that the left should lead this coalition with an independent message, not the other way around.
In the next chapter, Foster warns against “the devil of dual unionism,” criticizing those who abstain from conservative labor unions to form purely radical labor organizations. Foster was not the first to make this point, the critique of dual unionism was a commonly held position in the communist movement, famously made by Lenin when he wrote Left-Wing Communism in 1920, as well as being a recurring feature in TUEL articles by Foster and others engaged with the project.
Foster warns that separating from the AFL to make independent unions would lead to “sectarianism, isolation from the broad labor movement, and eventually disintegration” and urged communists to not to separate themselves from the vast majority of organized labor located in the AFL.
CPUSA Boycotts the American Federation of Labor
In 1928, the international COMINTERN theorizes that Capitalism has entered a catastrophic decline, which they labeled as the third period. The new analysis urged communist parties to see progressives, socialists, and communists not affiliated with the party as class enemies (“social-fascists”) who cannot be worked with in coalition. Out of this came a new labor strategy for the CPUSA. After their 1929 convention the party decided to boycott the AFL and begin dual unionism under a new project, the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL). Despite his previous opposition to dual unionism, Foster began to advocate for it after stating to a colleague “the Communist Party decided that policy. As a good Communist I just have to go along.”
What followed could have been predicted directly from Foster’s prior analysis. Without the sabotage from the right wing of the labor movement and without needing to appeal to progressives, the TUUL was able to quickly organize unemployed workers, coal miners and agricultural workers and organized very militant strikes.
While the red unions were admirable attempts to organize in highly exploited and segregated industries where AFL was uninterested in getting involved, as Foster warned in 1926, these organizations and strikes were often broken under the pressure due to their isolation from the larger labor movement.
Unfortunately, liquidating the CPUSA presence within the AFL came at a heavy cost. Anti-communist progressives and “socialists” such as George Meany, David Dubinsky, and Jay Lovestone took the opportunity to present themselves as the left of labor and consolidate power. Often using undemocratic methods, these leaders secured locals to keep communists from re-entry as they labeled the communists as inherently undemocratic and therefore justified any means to keep them out.
These anti-communist progressives would collaborate creating the American Labor Party as a force to drive socialists into supporting capitalist politicians and eventually the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), which collaborated with the CIA (often through Lovestone) to control labor movements around the world as explored by Jeff Schuhrke in Blue-Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade.
There were socialist and communist groups such as the American Workers Party and the Trotskyist Communist League of America still organizing in the AFL and they engaged in important roles in the Toledo general strike and Minneapolis general strike respectively. But the CPUSA still regarded these groups as enemies and refused to collaborate. However by 1934, CPUSA quietly reassessed their dual union strategy and began to attempt a re-entry into the AFL. Chairman of CPUSA Earl Browder describes in New Development and New Tasks in the USA that the party found it necessary to put all of its efforts into rejoining the AFL in San Francisco to take part in the general strike since “the Red unions definitely passed into the background.”
In his Report to the Central Committee Meeting of the C.P.U.S.A January 15-18,1935, Browder explains they have shifted their policies over the course of 1934 and that now their main task was to work within the AFL not as critical opposition but as “the most active and responsible section.” This reflects a significant change from even the previous strategy of TUEL within the AFL back in 1926 when Foster was advocating the Left should lead workers and progressives towards militancy.
Within a year of CPUSA re-entry, progressive John Lewis led the creation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which quickly attracted the majority of AFL locals influenced by communists into its organizations with its more ambitious organizing goals. The larger AFL separated from the CIO and once again the AFL consolidated the bulk of organized labor against communist entry while communists and radical organizers worked separately from the majority of organized labor, now under the control of John Lewis.
While the CIO was a huge step forward for the labor movement, organizing explicitly by industry rather than narrow skills, it remained a progressive controlled institution overall. What separated it from the AFL was that they were willing to work with communists to grow organized labor through industrial organizing.
The progressives who weren’t willing to work with communists remained in the much larger AFL and allied with the right wing of the labor movement. David Dubinski, a founding member of the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party of New York, actually moved his union, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), out of the CIO and back into the AFL after he regained leadership of the organization. This progressive led labor coalition directly fed into a larger strategy the CPUSA adopted at the outbreak of the war, the Popular Front.
What is the Popular Front?
Despite its more widespread usage today, the Popular Front was a specific strategy of the communist party that began in 1936. It is distinguished from the previous United Front strategy accepted during the “second period” of the 1920s that Foster had referred to in his 1926 pamphlet. The differences lie in the level of political and organizational independence between the Communist Party and the progressive movements apparatuses in labor and the Democratic Party and the underlying goals of the strategy.
In the early 1920s the communist movement worked with and within progressive controlled institutions while promoting their own messaging for working and oppressed peoples as part of the United Front.
Despite working within the AFL, which consciously attempted to collaborate with the corporations and capitalists it was meant to oppose, communists in TUEL organized more radical rank and file activity and published media explaining the need for class struggle, industrial organizing, and communism for labor organizers. In doing so they maintained the political independence of the communist movement by making their different politics and strategies comprehensible to the rank and file worker and functioned as an independent organization within the AFL.
This Left independence was reversed as the CPUSA implemented its Popular Front strategy just when Progressivism reached its height of power during the New Deal era. The Popular Front was an uncritical alliance with progressive forces which supported FDR, the CIO, and the war effort without pointing towards an independent direction.
As described in Sharon Smith’s Subterranean Fire, FDR was able to co-opt the labor movement ideologically with the help of the Stalinist Popular Front leadership of the Communist Party.
Despite the real gains it helped win and the heroic role of communist workers in fighting racism and defeating fascism, the Communist Party’s Popular Front strategy completely gutted the radical pole of the labor movement in return for encouraging a temporary alliance with the USSR which quickly dissolved.
During the war, US labor was seeing the most militant period in its history, building off the three general strikes of 1934 with the most wildcat strikes in a given period organized entirely by the rank-and-file. Yet CPUSA members helped enforce the US government’s agreement with union leadership against any strikes during the war despite the militancy for class struggle.
The party did this because the US war effort was indirectly helping the USSR against Germany and, therefore, class struggle was no longer the priority. This transformed unions from institutions of the proletariat to organizations of the state to control the proletariat, stamping down any bargaining ability they had from the inside and leaving workers without organization to fight back.
The CPUSA held to this Popular Front even to the point where they chose not to immediately struggle against the Smith Act of 1940, a law designed to deport those advocating for the overthrow of the US government.
They maintained their support of progressives as the act was used to crack down on Trotskyists within the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) who participated in the Minneapolis general strike, stating in the August 16th, 1940 edition of their publication The Daily Worker that the party “today joins the fight to exterminate the Trotskyite Fifth Column from the life of our Nation.”
Origins of Ultraliberalism
The hole in radical working class leadership allowed AFL and CIO officials to declare labor’s post-war peace with management, which was shortly followed by the passage of the Taft-Hartley act by a collaboration of Truman and progressive labor leaders such as Dubinski. The Taft-Hartley act gutted labor’s ability to organize, purged communists from union ranks, and kicked the second Red Scare into overdrive. While there were calls from general strikes and militant efforts to oppose the act’s passage, no serious efforts were made. Why the lack of opposition? The CPUSA had helped the AFL and CIO officials stamped down on any working class militancy in the war years.
Despite the war ending, the CPUSA was still operating in a Popular Front with progressives. The issue was that the layer of progressives willing to work with communists was not only growing smaller, but was being forcibly separated from the bulk of the progressive coalition. In 1946, Henry Wallace was fired from his position in the Truman administration as secretary of commerce for advocating for a less antagonistic policy towards the USSR. While the majority of progressives were quickly joining with the right wing in a new crusade against communists and preparing for new wars to take global hegemony, Wallace advocated that capitalism and communism could co-exist, even suggesting a loan policy to the USSR, echoing similar loans which shackled post-war Western Europe as dependents on the US economy.
The former secretary of commerce and vice president to FDR began a new Progressive Party which captured the anti-war sentiment in the US and became the beacon of hope to the CPUSA. Rather than returning to class struggle, the CPUSA continued to prioritize “Socialism in One Country,” which held the existence of the USSR paramount over domestic workers’ interests. They therefore threw their weight behind a Wallace presidential in a nostalgic sequel to their Popular Front with FDR, in hopes of achieving a more conciliatory foreign policy with the USSR.
This was doomed to fail. As long time Trotskyist organizer and member of the SWP James Cannon wrote at the time in Henry Wallace and the Next War,
“By seizing hold of the mass sentiment against war, and diverting it from the struggle against the basic cause of war, the Wallace party sterilizes the anti-war movement and prepares it for collapse when the first shot is fired.”
Wallace even admitted in an interview featured in New York Times of Sunday, April 25 that he would fall into line if war did break out and would no longer voice opposition.
The CPUSA’s attempt to use the aesthetic of radicalism to pressure and influence the ruling class towards a less aggressive foreign policy in place of focusing on supporting the working class to take power failed abysmally. Progressives even willing to collaborate with communists like Wallace fell out of power. However, the strategy of radicals attempting to influence the ruling class will be repeated by the left again and again, over the decades emerging as an increasingly recognizable tendency, Ultraliberalism.
Progressives Tack Right
Despite the association with the Republican Party, the famously progressive Kennedy family was very involved with the purges of the post WWII Red Scare. Joe Kennedy and McCarthy had personal correspondence, RFK applied to be McCarthy’s chief counsel, and JFK was a very public advocate from his position against communism, eventually leading to attacks on Cuba and Vietnam during his presidency.
Joined by Harry Truman and organizations such as the ACLU, Progressives were able to utilize the Red Scare with the control that organized crime’s rank-and-file entry into unions was able to exert to shuffle out any remaining radical leadership within unions while dissipating the remaining radical parties.
With the new control of the labor movement’s institutions, capital began to consolidate its power with the merger of the AFL and CIO with the help of labor progressive George Meany, removing the few non-compliant locals. While the isolated Left-led unions tried to turn their attention to segregation, one of the largest pillars of reaction in the United States, southern Democratic leaders found success fomenting racial division among workers leading to race riots and strikes across the country in response to desegregation.
The AFL-CIO merger and Taft-Hartley act systematized the reliance of labor struggles to courts and legal processes, rather than militant and illegal tactics. Many unions steadily degenerated organizationally into staff-controlled advocacy groups not dissimilar from modern day non-profits, largely removing the influence the proletariat had over their own institutions and discouraging rank-and-file involvement.
Creating An Independent Movement
This leads us to today, where the progressive movement still holds power and prominence, remaining in control of the apparatuses of labor and leadership over the Left since the Popular Front and the CPUSA’s retreat from militant labor organizing.
The disillusionment of the US working class with the limited ideology of the two capitalist choices was noted both by Earl Browder in 1935, again by James Cannon in 1948, and has become a general sentiment felt today. Both Browder and Cannon outlined that a communist class struggle message could lead workers to an alternative, but this lack of independent leadership and the substitution for tailing of progressive leaders has become a recurring historical crisis.
When communists and radicals attempt to orient themselves to the representatives of the progressive movement, they have consistently traded their leverage (mass action and the radicalized organized workers) for, at best, temporary gains.
Within the progressive movement there are two different dialectical changes which simultaneously occur.
On the one end, the more conservative side of Progressivism leads progressives to fall into more of the traditional liberal apparatus and political establishment often allying with conservatives to maintain power and isolate more radical progressives and communists.
On the other, the ultraliberal tendency emerges from progressivism but fails to transcend it, focusing on becoming the dominant voice and representative of radicalism but through a less anti-capitalist lens rather than actually pointing towards a working class revolution.
We must learn from the past and not cede our movements to chosen progressive representatives and leaders even when they cloak themselves in radicalism.
In 1947, in collaboration with Raya Dunayevskaya, famous Trinidadian Trotskyiest C.L.R James wrote in The Invading Socialist Society,
“The greatest enemy of the United States is not Stalinist Russia (this is a purely bourgeois conception). Its greatest enemy is at home, the American proletariat in alliance with the world revolution.”
The elite fear the workers because we alone have the power to bring their system crashing down.
Whether it’s tailing progressive leaders or an external international actor, tailing forces outside of the working class fails to deliver for the working class. To win, we must follow through consistently expanding mass political action with an independent message, always promoting the need for the working class to take power.
We can’t afford to take a break from supporting the militancy of the working class just to chase popular figures and allow them to become our voice out of political expediency. We are in a class war whether we choose fight back or not.
Emma B is a member of Portland DSA and is currently on the Steering Committee of Reform & Revolution Caucus. She is a shop steward in her union and rank-and-file grocery worker, and served on the Steering Committee of Portland DSA from 2024-2025.
