Page:William Z. Foster, James P. Cannon and Earl Browder - Trade Unions in America.djvu/32

 illusion, which blinded the eyes of the backward workers and enabled self-seeking leaders to break up the support of the ticket elected at St. Paul, finally destroyed the farmer-labor party movement and liquidated it into the petty-bourgeois class collaborationist movement of LaFollette. The Workers (Communist) Party nominated Foster and Gitlow, and the T. U. E. L. supported the Communist campaign with all its power.

During the two years of its participation in the political struggles and education of the workers for a labor party the T. U. E. L. achieved one great thing: It learned, and it made clear to the class conscious workers, that there is only one working class party, and that is the Workers (Communist) Party.

We in America were not to be spared the experience of all left-wing movements the world over in the struggle against class collaboration—the experience of expulsions of militants from the unions by the bureaucracy in order to prevent the winning of the rank and file.

In the second year of the league these began as a systematic campaign, as a definite policy of the reactionaries. Already there had benbeen [sic] resort to this weapon, as © early as the spring of 1922, by John L. Lewis, when he expelled Howat from the Miners' Union to prevent that sturdy battler from winning the miners to a policy of struggle. The storm broke in the summer of 1923, immediately after the split with the fake progressives in the farmer-labor party convention in Chicago.

Logically enough, in spite of the seeming contradiction, the first campaign of expulsions against the left wing came in one of the more "advanced" unions, the International Ladies' Garment Workers. Dominated by yellow socialists, the union learned from the Amsterdam fakers more quickly, being also spurred on by the more active, better organized and intelligent, left wing in the union thru which that organization was rapidly being won over to the left wing policies. The reaction-