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This is indeed an interesting piece. Indeed, for those to whom the=20
past precedent of the radical movement is decisive, it ought to=20
settle and put an end to the discussion on the question that dominated=20
apst a few months ago and now, thankfully, seems to have sputtered to=20
a halt.
Some criticisms and comments below on *other* aspects of the piece,=20
also worth discussing, below.
On Sat, 19 Jul 2008, nada wrote:
> [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]
Golden words!
>
> 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.
Here we have where the author goes off the beam. The prime=20
"Americanizer" of the American Communist Party, the man who sought to=20
put Engels's excellent advice into practice, was not Foster but the=20
man who brought Foster into the leading bodies of the CP, his=20
then-ally James P. Cannon, who was precisely the leader who *fought*=20
the Stalinization of the American Communist Party, and went on to=20
found American Trotskyism.
The Eastern European early leaders of the American CP from Slavic and=20
Baltic foreign language federations basically played a negative role.=20
This was less the case with the Eastern European Jewish early=20
communists. But even here most early American Jewish communists who=20
later played leading roles in the movement, whether they became=20
Stalinists or Trotskyists or even Lovestonites, were also advocates of=20
"Americanization."
For more on this, read Bryan Palmer's just-published biography of=20
Cannon, a truly fine work.
>
> 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]
That is their wrong later interpretation. It is a quite accurate=20
description of the American Federation of Labor in the late 19th=20
century. That is why the IWW was founded, and that is why when the=20
American industrial working class was finally organized in the 1930s,=20
the organizers had to break with the AFL and found the CIO.
>
> 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.
And it was precisely the isolation of the early communists into=20
"Bundist" foreign language federations that crippled it, and that had=20
to be overcome.
The IWW is, well, another story, and perhaps a good subject for=20
another thread. Palmer's chapter on the IWW and Cannon is very worth=20
reading.
>...
> 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]
All true enough. But still, the failure of many of the immigrant=20
communists to learn the English language cut them off from the main=20
body of the American working class.
>
> 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.
>
Grevin is right about this.
BTW, Dave, what are his politics? Where did this piece come from?
-jh-
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