Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/18

 Rh capitalist ideas might well be left for the employers to propagate. Nor are the local papers as a rule any better. Many of them are contemptible grafting sheets, the like of which cannot be found in any other country. Such parasitic papers, almost always stout defenders of Gompersism, make their living by campaigning against everything healthy in the labor movement. Their favorite method is to print vicious attacks against all progressive movements in the trade unions and then, on the strength of these, "sandbag" the employers into giving them advertising and flat donations of money. There are scores of such "rat" sheets, some operating independently and some with the endorsement of local central labor councils, pouring a flood of poison into the trade union movement. Nearly all important industrial centers are infested with them. Pittsburgh, for instance, has three, viz.: National Labor Journal, Labor World, and National Labor Tribune. All of them joined hands with the employers to defeat the great steel strike of 1919. And the worst of this journalistic shame, which could exist in no other labor movement, is that the A. F. of L. officialdom makes no effort to obliterate it. But this officialdom spares no effort to crush the revolutionary press. Characteristically just now it is engaged in a war against the Federated Press, the best labor news gathering agency in the world and one of the few institutions of which our labor movement may be really proud.

In the field of co-operative enterprise the American labor movement makes the same poor showing that it does in so many other phases of labor activity. All over Europe, in England, Germany, France, Italy, Scandinavia, “Belgium, Holland, etc., the co-operative movement is vast and vigorous and a real institution in the life of the people. It involves great armies of members and hundreds of millions of capital. But in the United States the movement is just beginning. This country has long been the despair of earnest co-operators. An apparently incurable blight, traceable to the ignorance, cupidity, and indifference of our labor leaders, has cursed and ruined their efforts. Only within the past few years, with the development of co-operative stores among the miners, the founding of the labor banks, and occasional other ventures here and there, has any real headway been made. Compared with that in Europe, the co-operative movement in the United States is still in its swaddling clothes.

The prevailing type of American labor leadership is a sore affliction upon the working class. Our higher officialdom swarms with