Page:William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon and Earl Browder - Trade Unions in America.djvu/16

 panied by collossal strikes, fought with great bitterness and militancy, was the fruit of their work. The Chicago anarchists who were hanged in 1887 were trade unionists and the real crime for which they were foully murdered was not bomb throwing, but revolutionary agitation in the labor unions. A study of their literature shows that they were much closer to the present day Communists in their outlook and methods than to the anarchists.

But after 1890, a fundamental error crept into the tactics of the revolutionaries. Revolutionary impatience, combined with a false theory of the trade union movement, gave rise to the idea that the class conscious workers should leave the old conservative trade unions and found an entirely new movement on socialistic principles. The socialist labor party adopted this policy and in 1895 sponsored the organization of the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance, a socialist trade union organization. The I. W. W., founded in 1905, into which the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance was merged, is an embodiment of the same idea. This doctrine of separatism completely dominated all branches of the radical movement until very recently.

These new unions, formed by the enthusiastic militants, did not succeed in replacing the old conservative organizations. On the contrary, their ultimate result was to isolate the class conscious workers from the main body of organized labor, and to leave the old unions to the unchallenged control of the blackest reactionaries. The fact that the trade unions of America today are dominated by men who openly declare their partnership with capitalism and who do not even pretend to stand on the platform of the class struggle can be attributed, in a large measure, to this mistaken policy of the revolutionary workers in the past.

The break with this tactic dates in reality from the latter part of the year 1921, when the Trade Union Educational League began to develop its activities on a wide