Introductory Essay to Toward the Working Class
by Adam Fischer

By then no longer condemned to bare economic necessity, the American working class of the 1950s had shed its disposable income on late model cars and family vacations, and was thereby said to have had also shed its revolutionary potential. Why take pains, after all, with the sacrifices of social upheaval if capitalism could then meet the material wants and needs of ordinary people? Workers bought single-family dwellings, stocked their refrigerators, and secured safe retirements. Postwar boom had, it seemed, tamed the working class and roused a new confidence in the American Way of Life.

For Daniel Bell and certain other intellectuals then coming to terms with affluent society, this signaled the “end of ideology,” the end of pronounced class struggle and the need for independent politics. A younger generation, however, was simultaneously losing faith in affluent society, in particular, its seeming dependence on the “permanent war economy” and insistence on racial oppression. For them, these social ills demanded more than redress, and to that end a new revolutionary protagonist.

In 1960, the fading youth section of the socialistic League for Industrial Democracy had reconstituted itself as Students for a Democratic Society. Its members, many well-fed, many well-educated, had escaped the factory floor and therewith contract fights and organizing drives. Still, they bore witness to Jim Crow, to a nuclear arms-race and US military adventurism, to remaining pockets of economic depression. They had come to regard their political and educational systems as tired and ineffectual, seemingly capable of only perpetuating these offenses.

So when SDS issued its Port Huron statement in 1962, it was not organized labor—the mainspring of the Old Left—to whom they pinned their greatest hopes and aspirations for the Good Society. Instead, it was the civil rights movement and the burgeoning student movement in its efforts to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy.” Accordingly, the university, “located in a permanent position of social influence,” would serve as the intellectual jump-off in the broader movement for social change.

To be sure, Port Huron included more than just a few token words of affection for organized labor, and more importantly for its rank and file. Consider, for example, this assessment of labor’s weakened postwar political strength:

This labor “recession” has been only partly due to anti-labor politicians and corporations. Blame should be laid, too, to labor itself for not mounting an adequate movement. Labor has too often seen itself as elitist, rather than mass-oriented, and as a pressure group rather than as an 18-million member body making political demands for all America. In the first instance, the labor bureaucracy tends to be cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement in the work of the Union. Resolutions passed at conventions are implemented only by high-level machinations, not by mass mobilization of the unionists. Without a significant base, labor's pressure function is materially reduced since it becomes difficult to hold political figures accountable to a movement that cannot muster a vote from a majority of its members.

It’s a testament to both the political relevance of Port Huron, and to the acute atrophy of labor, that these same sentiments hold up so well today. But then this might also suggest the New Left’s greatest failing.

The demand for a “new politics,” insisted SDS,

must include a revitalized labor movement; a movement which sees itself, and is regarded by others, as a major leader of the breakthrough to a politics of hope and vision. Labor’s role is no less unique or important in the needs of the future than it was in the past, its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American society, combine to make it the best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements.

The creation of bridges is made more difficult by the problems left over from the generation of “silence.” Middle class students, still the main actors in the embryonic upsurge, have yet to overcome their ignorance, and even vague hostility, for what they see as “middle class labor” bureaucrats. Students must open the campus to labor through publications, action programs, curricula, while labor opens its house to students through internships, requests for aid (on the picket-line, with handbills, in the public dialogue), and politics…

Although initially the above passage seems reasonable, if one looks at it closely, it contains some clues as to why the radicalism of the New Left made few inroads on the labor movement of the 1960s. First, it’s worth noting that labor, despite its “potential political strength” and its role as the “best candidate for the synthesis of the civil rights, peace, and economic reform movements,” figured only occasionally in Port Huron’s 25,000 words. This was of course a statement of Students for a Democratic Society, not the announcement of a nationwide shop-stewards network. But SDS had also called for (among other things) the reprioritizing of resources in favor of social needs over private profits, and the nurturing of public debate and participatory decision-making through newly formed institutions. What SDS proposed, in effect, was social revolution, and the union movement, with “its numbers and potential political strength, its natural interest in the abolition of exploitation, its reach to the grass roots of American society,” was offered an ancillary role, figuratively and practically.

SDS’s view was understandable given labor’s postwar conservatism. To the extent that the organized working class, which is to say the white working class, met the civil-rights and peace movements, it tended to do so with sticks and stones. Labor’s “potential political power” may ultimately lie in its numbers and “natural interest in the abolition of exploitation,” but the rank and file in the early 1960s seemed less committed to realizing this potential than to defending its material gains from the have-nots.

On paper, and even financially, many unions pledged their support to the civil rights movement. Some labor leaders—Walter Reuther of the UAW, Harry Bridges of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and David Dubinsky of the Ladies’ Garment Worker’s Union, for example—had cut their teeth in radical traditions and maintained progressive images throughout the postwar years. But they did so even as they tolerated racial exclusivism and favoritism within their ranks [1].

Still, paper and pocket commitments to peace and justice are better than genuine spats of reactionary mob violence, a matter of probable convenience for the liberal-labor coalitionists within the League of Industrial Democracy, and with whom SDS only partially fractured. For its part, LID had busied itself with instructing the various strands of the independent left to regroup around the Democratic Party. It was their belief that the Democrats, in an alliance with the “progressive” wing of the union bureaucracy, would show the way forward (and not backward).

This trace of political accommodationism may help explain why student leftists were urged to “overcome their ignorance, and even vague hostility, for what they see as ‘middle class labor’ bureaucrats.” These were the same labor bureaucrats, let us remember, who just paragraphs earlier were chastised as “cynical toward, or afraid of, rank-and-file involvement.” And it may also help to explain the proposal that labor “opens its house to students through internships, requests for aid…and politics.” In retrospect an influx of young radicals into union staff positions may have bent the ear of a few labor leaders. More probable, though, it frustrated young radical staffers who were made to bend their ideals to the realpolitik of “high-level machinations.” But in neither case can a top-down partnership with the union bureaucracy speak to the self-mobilization of ordinary workers, to their capacity to exact control over their workplaces and unions, and to the sense of solidarity and social responsibility with which only rank-and-file power can ensure. This requires instead a bottom-up, working-class orientation, and at no point during SDS’s activity did its mainstream current offer up such a perspective.

SDS’s failure to do so had more than just moral or philosophical consequences. Without a working-class orientation, entire swaths of American society, effectively the whole of the white working class, were either neglected or dismissed as potential allies in the struggle for social and economic justice. How could a left—a largely anti-capitalistic left—sustain itself if its principal actors were disconnected from the very point of capitalist exploitation—industry? What’s more: how can a left principally composed of transient students expect to retain its members for the long haul?

By 1966 SDS’s fate wasn’t yet assured. That year, three young member-socialists, Kim Moody, Fred Eppsteiner, and Mike Flug, presented to the national convention at Clear Lake, Iowa a sober and concise case for why the postwar working class, for all its conservatism, still mattered, indeed must matter, in a society divided economically into two essential classes, of which one owns the means of production and sets the rules of employment and the other bends to those rules in exchange for a paycheck:

the working class has a uniquely strategic position in American society—they are at the root of the economy. They are the root of the same economy that causes poverty and creates welfare institutions. The working class is not the only group that must struggle to revolutionize American society, but it is a group that cannot be left out of this struggle.

Among the other struggles they were referring was, of course, the civil rights movement. Toward the Working Class wasn’t a plea for subordinating the struggle for black liberation to the One and True Struggle for economic justice. That song had already played out to embarrassing and devastating effect by the Old Left, whose programs obliged blacks (and women) to sit idly by until the Proletarian Revolution rendered their problems irrelevant. Instead, theirs was a case for young radicals to enter industry—to struggle alongside, not on behalf of, working people.

The rank and file of the 1960s, as it happened, was still moving, even if not at the pace of civil rights movement. They were fighting for better contracts, greater job security, more workplace control, and greater control over their own unions. Without an independent political perspective, however, these fights were often frustrated, first by the limits imposed by capital, but more deceptively by politicians in both the Democratic and Republican camps, whose plans of austerity, racial oppression, social conservatism, and an imperial foreign policy that precluded genuine working class internationalism, were sold to ordinary people as their own. By building caucuses, forming rank-and-file networks, and organizing the unorganized, those radicals who graduated from university but chose to drive commercial trucks or punch holes in metal undertook to bring the hopes and ideals of the New Left to the workplace, to transform American society, slowly and tirelessly, from the bottom-up.

The authors of Toward the Working Class can be forgiven if the old strategy of “industrializing” was met with only limited enthusiasm by the new generation. The prospect of a lifetime of hard, thankless labor is not a pleasant one, especially to an educated audience with opportunities of its own. The real question, however, is not whether SDS should have adopted a formal policy of industrialization. Such a program would have been neither tenable nor, I think, particularly desirable. Instead it’s a matter of orientation, of aligning with the ranks of organized labor and nurturing links between the creative energy of the student movement and the social power of the shop floor. Industrialization is a means to that end—one of many.

The succeeding decades of social-spending rollbacks and company belt-tightening have proven that the material gains of working people can never be taken for granted. Their homes, their livelihoods, and their retirement plans can all be pulled out from under them. Today, young radicals who graduate from school with crushing student-loan debts, limited access to decent healthcare, and few job prospects need no longer orient toward the working class.

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Notes:
1. For a collection of considered essays on postwar labor's dismal record toward Black workers, see The Negro and the American Labor Movement, ed. Julius Jacobson, Anchor Books, Garden City, 1968.