Social, political conditions and party building

["Sol Dollinger" <soldoll@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Before turning our attention to party building in the United States we
should measure our efforts against the Bolsheviks in Petersburg.  The Vyborg
industrial district was the heart of Bolshevik support during the
Revolution.  The workers went through the school of the 1905 revolution.
After a lull from the defeat, it rose to oppose entrance into the war and
conducted political and union strikes up to the eve of 1917.  They carried
these heroic actions under Tsarist repression facing prison and exile to
Siberia.

Contact between the center in Switzerland and Petersburg was maintained by
underground workers like Alexander Schliapnikov, a lathe operator, who
worked on and off in the district who wrote in his book, On the Eve of 1917,
the elaborate methods he used to get revolutionary material into Russia
using the Second International members in Sweden, and Finland to assist him
in arranging routes to Petersburg.

Schliapnikov writes on primitive shop union conditions remarkably similar to
the
US auto industry of our generation but with a huge difference of the
conditions in which they conducted strike activity.   The Russians faced
jail and exile. The Russian workers were getting five roubles while others
doing the same work were getting less. From July 6-12 a general strike of
300,000 protested the murder of two Putilov munitions workers.  Workers
armed themselves and built barricades against the police and cossacks.

Schliapnikov writes of the acute need for intellectual workers after a
police sweep of Pravda office there was not a single person on the
Petersburg committee capable of writing a handbill. From the first day of
entrance into the war by Russia the agitation, political strikes and union
strikes continued until Lenin arrived at the Finland station in April 1917.

There was not a single county in the world that produced such a class
oriented organization like the Vyborg workers.  In the United States we had
great revolutionary heroes like Eugene Victor Debs, Big Bill Haywood, Carlo
Treska and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn but it is folly to compare the Socialist
party of the IWW with the Viborg workers who fought to abolish Tsarism.  In
the US the leaders advocated the end of Capitalism but the large Socialist
Party applauded the speeches but were oriented to simple reforms.  In 1912
the SP voted into office  mayors of a dozen or more Midwest communities.
Flint had a Socialist mayor and the following election the Republicans and
the Democrats united behind C. S. Mott to remove "this revolutionary
threat."  What was the program that Mayor Menton ran on for office? He
promised to improve garbage collection, pave sidewalks and the major
streets.  This segment of the Socialist party became known as sewer
Socialists.  All the cities had a crying need for improvement from the
former system of cesspools.

The Socialist movement supported immensely popular publications.  The Appeal
to Reason put out in Kansas was read by hundreds of thousands across the
country. Another popular newspaper was the American Guardian published in
the South by Oscar Ameringer, the Mark Twain of American Socialism, (My
wife, Genora, started on the road to Socialism when she read a copy of the
paper)  When it came to good writing we must list the famous Masses magazine
edited by Max Eastman.  The Magazine was radical, well written , filled with
the famous cartoons that stand the test of time.  It smacked of the American
scene.

What was wrong with our radical movement in the great depression?  It had
everything to do with the CP taking directions from Moscow.  The movement
was crippled by the Third period of Stalinism.  It took the great  1934
strike of the Minneapolis Teamster, led by the Trotskyists, and the Electric
Auto Light strike in the same year in Toledo and the San Francisco strike
led by Bridges who ditched the Third Period program that proved that
radicals could speak in the American tongue and light the way to further
union industrial policies.

The depression led to the great organizing drives of the CIO building on the
victory of 1934 strikes.  Workers had become union conscious but you cannot
compare them with the Vyborg workers in political consciousness.

During the World War 2,  the auto workers fought against the no-strike
pledge and with thousands of illegal strikes.  These strikes were to
maintain past union standards but there was only an infinitely  small layer
of leaders who wanted  the end of capitalism.

Finally on the work of writers and the mass movement.  Upton Sinclair, James
T. Farrell, Arthur Miller, Edmund Wilson and John Dos Passos were and are
great writers but the movement picked them up and elevated them to a new
level of public awareness. They didn't do it by themselves. You can write it
in the stars that a new mass socialist movement will find and help in the
creation of great papers, magazines and authors when the social condition,
and only when  they arise again in America.