Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/19

 14 standpatters and reactionaries such as would not be tolerated in any other country. Mr. Gompers himself personifies the breed. He is the arch-reactionary, the idol of all the holdbacks in the labor movement. Possibly, as some allege, he was a progressive at the time the A. F. of L. was formed, but now he is the undisputed world's prize labor reactionary. In many respects he is even more reactionary than the very capitalists themselves. A case in point is his present attitude towards Russia. In that distressed country millions of people, famine stricken, are dying of starvation. The labor movement and the liberals of the world, forgetting political differences, are rallying to their support by sending food and money. Even the cold-hearted capitalistic United States Government, not to speak of various other bourgeois organizations, was moved to make a substantial contribution. But in the face of all this bitter need Mr. Gompers, a bound slave to his insane hatred for everything radical, stands unmoved. The cries of millions of starving women and children go unheard by him. Not a word has he spoken in their behalf, not a dollar has his organization raised to relieve their sufferings. Mr. Gompers would starve Soviet Russia into re-establishing capitalism. This brutal program, now frankly abandoned even by most capitalistic politicians, is on a par with that of Kolchak and Semenoff. American Labor's policy towards Russia, dictated by the blind hatred of Mr. Gompers, is a disgrace which should make every workingman bow his head in shame.

American Labor leadership has displayed crass incompetence in organizing the masses industrially. The relatively small number of trade unionists in the United States is ample proof of that. As a shining example of our movement's weakness in the organizing department let us again cite Mr. Gompers. Considered as a labor organizer he is a first class failure. Because of his incompetency much of the blame for the unorganized state of the working class attaches to him personally. Never during the long tenure of his office, at least not since the "stormy '80's," has he developed, or allowed anyone else