Page:William Zebulon Foster - The Bankruptcy of the American Labor Movement (1922).djvu/22

 Rh More than simply failing to initiate progressive movements, Mr. Gompers is actually a valiant fighter for things as they are in the labor movement. A curious twist of this policy makes him play the role of a sort of weak king among powerful nobles. The international union presidents are the nobles. Things have conspired to make them into petty despots in their respective spheres. They are little nabobs. With unlimited autonomy and points of view to correspond with their narrow craft interests, they naturally carry on a wrangling, unsolidaric movement fatal to the interests of the working class as a whole. The great need of the labor movement is that the power of these nabobs be clipped, and that it be absorbed by the general organization, the A. F. of L. The national movement, as such, must be strengthened. But it is exactly this that Mr. Gompers fails to do. On the contrary, he defends the vicious nabob system even more militantly than the nabobs themselves. He fights every attempt to strengthen the A. F. of L. or to make it function as an effective central organization. He battles to preserve all the privileges of the nabob international presidents, disastrous though these may be to class solidarity and progress. This has given him wonderful prestige with the nabobs as a "safe" man, Thus, strangely enough, by keeping his own organization—the A. F. of L. proper—weak and functionless he personally waxes great and powerful. And again, for his advancement, the labor movement pays a bitter price. The labor politician, of which Mr. Gompers is the shining example, is the old man of the sea of American Labor.

Severe though many of the foregoing criticisms of American Labor may be, no truth-seeking worker, free from chauvinistic bias, can deny their correctness. Although the American labor movement has some admirable qualities (which will be indicated as this pamphlet progresses), nevertheless, in the main, it is miles and miles behind the labor movements of other important capitalist countries. Our labor movement’s non-revolutionary outlook, its lack of social vision, is unique in the international labor world; likewise its want of an organized, mass working class political party. Our trade unions are primitive to a degree in their structure and they cling tenaciously to the antiquated craft form, discarded by workers in other countries; they are exceedingly weak in numbers, encompassing only a small body of workers, instead of the great mass, as in Germany, England and elsewhere; they have not succeeded, as compared with European