[Interesting article in defense of immigrants rights based on the
actual history--David]
The Immigration Question in the Workers=92 Movement in the US
In confronting the existence of ethnic, racial, and linguistic
differences between workers, the workers=92 movement has historically
been guided by the principle that "workers have no country." Any
compromise on this principle represents a capitulation to bourgeois
ideology.
A hundred years ago at the Stuttgart Congress of the Second
International in 1907, an attempt by the op****tunists to sup****t the
restriction of Chinese and Japanese immigration by bourgeois
governments was overwhelmingly defeated. Opposition was so great that
the op****tunists were actually forced to withdraw the resolution.
Instead the Congress adopted an anti-exclusionist position for the
workers movement in all countries. In re****ting on this Congress,
Lenin wrote, "(T)here was an attempt to defend narrow, craft
interests, to ban the immigration of workers from backward countries
(coolies from China, etc.). This is the same spirit of aristocratism
that one finds among workers in some of the "civilized" countries, who
derive certain advantages from their privileged position, and are
therefore inclined to forget the need for international solidarity.
But no one at the Congress defended this craft and petty-bourgeois
narrow-mindedness. The resolution fully meets the needs of
revolutionary Social Democracy."[1] In the US, the op****tunists
attempted at the 1908, 1910 and 1912 Socialist Party congresses to
push through resolutions to evade the decision of the Stuttgart
Congress and voiced sup****t for the American Federation of Labor=92s
opposition to immigrants. But they were beaten back every time by
comrades advocating international solidarity for all workers. One
delegate admonished the op****tunists that for the working class "there
are no foreigners." Others insisted that the workers=92 movement must
not join with capitalists against groups of workers. In a 1915 letter
to the Socialist Propaganda League (the predecessor of the leftwing of
the Socialist Party that went on to found the Communist and Communist
Labor parties in the US) Lenin wrote, "In our struggle for true
internationalism and against =91jingo-socialism=92 we always quote in our
press the example of the op****tunist leaders of the S.P. in America
who are in favor of restrictions of Chinese and Japanese workers
(especially after the Congress of Stuttgart, 1907 and against the
decisions of Stuttgart). We think that one cannot be internationalist
and at the same time in favor of such restrictions."[2]
Historically immigrants played an im****tant role in the workers=92
movement in the US. The first Marxist revolutionaries came to the US
after the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany and later
constituted vital links to the European center of the First
International. Engels introduced certain problematic conceptions
regarding immigrants into the socialist movement in the US which while
accurate in certain aspects, were erroneous in others, some of which
ultimately led to a negative impact on the organizational activities
of American revolutionary movement. Frederich Engels was concerned
about the initial slowness of the working class movement to develop in
the US. He understood that certain specificities in the American
situation were involved, including the lack of a feudal tradition with
a strong class system, and the existence of the frontier, which served
as a safety valve for the bourgeoisie, allowing discontented workers
to escape from a proletarian existence to become a farmer or
homesteader in the west. Another was the gulf between native and
immigrant workers, in terms of economic op****tunities and the
inability for radicalized immigrant workers to communicate with native
workers. For example, when he criticized the German socialist =E9migr=E9s
in America for not learning English, he wrote that, "they will have to
doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out-
and-out Americans. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them;
they the minority, and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who
are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above
all learn English."[3] It was true that the there was a tendency for
German immigrant revolutionaries to confine themselves to theoretical
work in the 1880s and to disdain mass work with native, English
speaking workers. It was also true that the immigrant-led
revolutionary movement did indeed have to open outward to English-
speaking American workers, but the emphasis on Americanization of the
movement implicit in these remarks proved to have disastrous
consequences for the workers=92 movement, as it eventually pushed the
most politically and theoretically developed and experienced workers
into secondary roles, and put leader****p in the hands of poorly formed
militants, whose primary qualification was being an English-speaking
native. After the Russian Revolution, this same policy perspective was
pursued by the Communist international with even more disastrous
consequences for the early CP. Moscow=92s insistence that native
American-born militants be placed in leader****p positions catapulted
op****tunists and careerists like William Z. Foster to leader****p
positions, cast Eastern European revolutionaries with left communist
leanings totally outside the leader****p, and accelerated the triumph
of Stalinism in the US party.
Similarly, it was also problematic when Engels remarked that the
"great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional
position of the native workers=85(The native working class) has
developed and has also to a great extent organized itself on trade
union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and
wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the
immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic
trades."[4] Though it accurately described how native and immigrant
workers were divided against each other, it implied wrongly that it
was the native workers and not the bourgeoisie that was responsible
for the gulf between different segments of the working class. Though
this comment described the segmentation in the white immigrant working
class, in the 1960=92s the new leftists interpreted it as a basis for
the "white skin privilege theory."[5]
In any case, the history of the class struggle in the US itself
disproved Engel=92s view that Americanization of immigrant workers was a
precondition for building a strong socialist movement in the US. Class
solidarity and unity across ethnic and linguistic roles was a central
characteristic of the workers=92 movement at the turn of the 20th
century. The socialist parties in the US had a foreign language press
that published dozens of daily and weekly newspapers in different
languages. In 1912, the Socialist Party published 5 English and 8
foreign language daily newspapers, 262 English and 36 foreign weekly
newspapers, and 10 English and two foreign news monthlies in the US,
and this does not include the Socialist Labor Party publications. The
Socialist Party had 31 foreign language federations within it:
Armenian, Bohemian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Estonian,
Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Hungarian, Irish, Italian,
Japanese, Jewish, Latvian, Lettish, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish,
Romanian, Russian, Scandinanvian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, South
Slavic, Spanish, Swedish, Ukranian, Yugoslav. These federations
comprised a majority of the organization. The communist and communist
labor parties founded in 1919 had immigrant majority member****ps.
Similarly the growth in Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
member****p in the period before World War I came dispro****tionately
from immigrants, and even the western IWW, which had a large "native"
member****p, had thousands of Slavs, Chicanos, and Scandinavians in
their ranks.
The most famous IWW struggle, the Lawrence textile workers strike of
1912, demonstrated the capacity for solidarity between immigrant and
non-immigrant workers. Lawrence was a mill town in Massachusetts where
workers worked under deplorable conditions. Half the workers were
teenage girls between 14-18 years of age. Skilled craft workers tended
to be English speaking workers of English, Irish, and German ancestry.
The unskilled workers included French-Canadian, Italian, Slavic,
Hungarian, ****tuguese, Syrian and Polish immigrants. A wage cut
imposed at one of the mills prompted a strike by Polish women weavers,
which quickly spread to 20,000 workers. A strike committee, organized
under the leader****p of the IWW, included two representatives from
each ethnic group and demanded a 15 percent wage increase and no
reprisals for strikers. Strike meetings were translated into twenty-
five languages. When the authorities responded with violent
repression, the strike committee dramatized the situation by sending
several hundred children of the striking workers to stay with working
class sympathizers in New York City. When a second trainload of 100
children were being sent to worker sympathizers in New Jersey, the
authorities attacked the children and their mothers, beating them and
arresting them in front of national press coverage, which resulted in
a national outpouring of solidarity.
In 1913, during the silk workers=92 strike in Paterson, NJ, the IWW used
a similar tactic, sending strikers=92 children to stay with "strike
mothers" in other cities, once again demonstrating class solidarity
across ethnic lines.
As World War I unfolded, the role of =E9migr=E9s and immigrants in the
left-wing of the socialist movement was particularly im****tant. For
example, a meeting on Jan. 14, 1917 at the Brooklyn, New York home of
Ludwig Lore, an immigrant from Germany, to plan a "program of action"
for left forces in the American socialist movement included the
participation of Trotsky, who just arrived in New York the day before;
Bukharin, who was already resident as an =E9migr=E9 working as editor for
Novy Mir, the organ of the Russian Socialist Federation; several other
Russian =E9migr=E9s; S.J. Rutgers, a Dutch revolutionary who was a
colleague of Pannenkoek; and Sen Katayama, a Japanese =E9migr=E9.
According to eyewitness accounts the discussion was dominated by the
Russians, with Bukharin arguing that the left should immediately split
from the Socialist Party and Trotsky that the left should remain
within the party for the moment but should advance its critique by
publi****ng an independent bi-monthly organ, which was the position
adopted by the meeting. Had he not returned to Russia after the
February Revolution, Trotsky would likely have served as leader of the
left-wing of the American movement.[6] The co-existence of many
languages was not an obstacle to the movement; to the contrary it was
a reflection of its strength. At one mass rally in 1917, Trotsky
addressed the crowd in Russian, and others in German, Finnish,
English, Lettish, Yiddish and Lithuanian.[7]
We must stand for the defense of the international unity of the
working class. We cannot even appear to legitimize irrational fears
and distrust of immigrant workers, or the bourgeoisie=92s attempt to use
immigrants as a scapegoat for the problems that are squarely the
responsibility of an economic mode of production that has outlived its
usefulness. As proletarian internationalists we reject as bourgeois
ideology such constructs as "cultural pollution," "linguistic
pollution," "national identity," "distrust of foreigners," or
"defense of the community or neighborhood." Our intervention cannot be
that "you are right to be concerned about the threat to American
culture, or national identity, or that it is terrible that you feel
like a stranger in your own =91country=92," which would give credence to
bourgeois ideology on the question of country, nation, culture,
national identity, etc. and strengthen the bourgeois attempt to foster
division within the class. On the contrary, our intervention must
defend the historical acquisitions of the working class movement that
workers have no country; that the defense of national culture or
language or identity is not a task or concern of the proletariat, that
we must reject the efforts of those who try to use these bourgeois
conceptions to exacerbate the differences within the working class, to
undermine working class unity. We must stress the unity of the
proletariat above all else and international proletarian solidarity in
the face of attempts to divide us against ourselves. Anything else
constitutes an abandonment of revolutionary principle. - Jerry
Grevin, 6/24/08.
[1].- Lenin, V.I. "The International Socialist Congress in Stuttgart,"
Proletary No.17, Oct. 20, 1907. In Collected Works, vol. 13, p75. (We
leave aside in this text controversies concerning the question of
"aristocracy of labor" that Lenin implies.)
[2].- Lenin, V.I., Letter to the Secretary of the Socialist Propaganda
League, Nov. 9, 1915. In Collected Works, vol. 21, p423.
[3].- Marx and Engels, Letters to Americans, p. 162-3, 290 (cited in
Draper=92s, Roots of American Communism.)
[4].-Engels, Letter to Schluter, op cit. In Collected Works, vol.49,
p392.
[5].-White skin privilege theory was an ideological concoction of the
1960s new leftists, which claimed that a supposed deal between the
ruling class and the white working class granted white workers a
higher standard of living at the expense of black workers who were
victimized by racism and discrimination.
[6].- Draper, Theodore. The Roots of American Communism. pp. 80-83
[7].- Ibid. p.79
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