Far from any natural conservatism, ordinary people in the US have a history of bitter and explosive struggles against exploitation and racism, writes Jacob Starling
Trump’s victory in the US election has seen many people conclude that the US population is fundamentally right-wing—comfortable with his appalling sexism, racism and contempt for democracy.
This echoes the response to Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 election, when many on the left claimed that the American people were simply too conservative to support a woman as president. This time some are saying the same thing about Kamala Harris.
Yet the Democrats’ overwhelmingly pro-business campaign presented no real alternative for a population ravaged by neoliberalism and the soaring cost of living.
Kamala Harris ran as the defender of the political system, aiming to peel off so-called “moderate” Republicans from Trump’s coalition. She flaunted endorsements from Republicans like Liz Cheney, pledged to include Republicans in her cabinet, and adopted Trump’s anti-immigration policies.
Yet large numbers of Americans are simply fed up with the political system—with 62 per cent saying the government mostly works to benefit itself and elites and just under six in ten calling for major changes or the tearing down of the whole political and economic system, in a New York Times poll ahead of the election.
Most elections around 40 per cent of the population do not bother to vote at all.
Many on the left think that the American worker has been bought off by the creature comforts of consumer capitalism and is no longer capable of resisting exploitation.
However, these assumptions ignore the radical history of the US working class, which at times has led the world in strikes and workers’ revolt.
While the past few decades of the neoliberal era have seen the working class suffer a series of defeats, there is no reason why this radical tradition cannot reemerge.
The Early 20th Century
At the turn of the 20th century, the working class in the US was divided between skilled, mostly native-born, and unskilled, mostly immigrant, workers. Unions, organised in the American Federation of Labour (AFL), refused to admit anyone but skilled workers. They were led by the reactionary Samuel Gompers, who actively discriminated against Black and women workers and argued that immigrant workers were an unorganisable rabble.
This was a disastrous policy, reinforcing divisions within the working class and actively impeding labour organisation and class consciousness. Native workers were encouraged to see immigrants as their primary enemy, driving down wages and conditions, rather than uniting with them to fight the bosses.
However, the AFL was proven wrong by the outbreak of a massive wave of strikes among immigrant workers. In 1909, 60,000 women garment workers in New York, dominated by immigrants, struck against sweatshop conditions and pervasive sexual harassment from foremen.
This strike would become the inspiration for International Women’s Day. The success of the strike inspired further industrial action across America, often under the leadership of revolutionaries in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the Socialist Party.
In 1912, 25,000 textile workers from 25 different nationalities struck against wage cuts in Lawrence, Massachusetts. For ten weeks, workers resisted state violence. When the state militia were called in to attack the children of the striking workers, a nationwide protest movement erupted, forcing the bosses to raise wages across the textile industry.
Alongside these struggles the Socialist Party grew dramatically, reaching a peak of 120,000 members. In the 1920 election, their presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, ran from prison and won just under a million votes.
During the First World War, hundreds of thousands of workers built a grassroots movement against the war, in defiance of the Espionage Act and repression from the AFL bureaucracy. However, the wave of radical working class action faced a vicious counter-attack from the employers and the government.
In September 1919, when 400,000 steel workers across ten states walked out of the mills, the government responded with devastating violence. Meetings were outlawed, martial law was declared in Gary, Indiana, and the police murdered 26 unionists in Pennsylvania.
By January 1920, after holding out courageously through months of struggle, the strike finally collapsed. What followed was a coordinated employers’ offensive and a government-sponsored Red Scare campaign, rolling back the rights of all workers, skilled and unskilled. The result was a decade in the wilderness for the labour movement, as the US economy boomed.
Workers in the 1930s
The Great Depression that began in 1929 savaged workers in the US, with a quarter of the workforce unemployed. Those who kept their jobs faced massive pay cuts.
In the face of economic catastrophe, a section of the ruling class argued that state intervention in the economy was necessary to preserve capitalism. Franklin Roosevelt was elected President in 1932 and introduced the New Deal, providing unemployment benefits and relief work constructing government projects. However, these were minor measures given the scale of the ruination of the Depression years.
Importantly, Roosevelt’s package also included a law that appeared to guarantee workers the right to join a union. This was not intended to have much effect. But it triggered “a virtual uprising of workers for union membership”, according to the AFL.
Hundreds of strikes broke out. However, it was not until the following year that workers made a decisive breakthrough. In 1934, massive strikes erupted across the country. In three decisive strike campaigns, in Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco, socialist leadership played a crucial role in securing victory.
In Minneapolis, a handful of union militants set out to unionise the trucking industry, with Trotskyists playing a central role in the organisation of the struggle. In a series of well-prepared strikes, workers organised the distribution of food and medical supplies to sustain strikers.
The “teamster rebellion” saw the union forced into a situation of virtual civil war across the city. When the employers organised violent attacks on picketlines, union members formed their own militia armed with clubs to defend them.
Workers defeated 1500 police and special deputies in a pitched battle, who were driven off in an episode that became known as the Battle of Deputies Run.
The strikes of 1934 led to union recognition and collective bargaining rights across the board but were only won through defying the conservative AFL leadership. The failure of the AFL bureaucrats led to a split, and the formation of the Congress of Industrial Unions (CIO), dedicated to unionising workers into single unions across each industry.
The strike wave reached a high point in 1936-37, as auto workers led a wave of factory occupations, called “sit-down strikes”. In 1937 alone there were 477 sit-down strikes that involved half a million workers. One such sit-down in Flint, Michigan spread across General Motors plants nationwide, involving 40,000 strikers and winning union recognition across the company.
By 1941, a third of the US workforce was unionised. However, the momentum was broken by vicious repression from the employers that inflicted a series of defeats. The AFL also collaborated with employers to denounce the CIO as Communist-controlled.
During the Second World War, the CIO and the AFL both shamefully agreed to a no-strike pledge. This capitulation left the labour movement exposed to the systematic purging of radicals during the years of McCarthyism and Cold War anti-Communism. By the advent of the 1960s, socialist politics had been forcibly dispelled from the unions.
The 1960s revolt
In the 1960s, massive social movements again shook the US ruling class, the biggest of which were the campaigns for Black civil rights, and the campaign against the Vietnam War.
The civil rights movement, initially dominated by moderate leaders like Martin Luther King, gave rise to an explicitly anti-capitalist struggle as it ran up against the grim reality of state repression and began to confront the need for economic justice.
As the Black Power movement spread its roots across the cities of the US, the ghettos rose up in rebellion. After the assassination of Martin Luther King, rioting broke out in 100 cities as residents clashed with the police.
The Black Panther Party, founded in 1966, advocated for armed resistance against the racist violence of the police. It quickly developed mass support among young Black people.
In Detroit, one group of Black revolutionaries began organising workers in the car factories, staging successful wildcat strikes against speeds ups and discrimination, until an increase in unemployment during recession strengthened the employers’ hands.
By the end of the 1960s, the campuses had become a battleground in the anti-war campaign. When Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in 1961, it had about 300 dues-paying members. By the end of the decade, it had anywhere between 30,000 and 100,000. The teach-in movement on campuses sparked fierce debate about the justification of the Vietnam War, radicalising thousands of students. The biggest, at UC Berkeley in 1965, had 30,000 students in attendance.
Waves of mass demonstrations followed. In the face of violent state repression, the movement only grew more militant and spread further.
In 1970, the Ohio National Guard shot dead four student protesters at Kent State University, prompting an immediate and overwhelming groundswell of protest nationwide. Four million students, from 350 universities, went on strike within days. Such massive defiance ultimately made the Vietnam War unsustainable for the government.
The neoliberal era has seen a sustained attack on wages and the erosion of trade union power. This has produced ballooning inequality and deep bitterness within the working class.
But there is a strong tradition of resistance from below in the US. By studying the successes and failures of this tradition, we can learn lessons for the rebuilding of working class strength today.
It is a mistake to write off the US working class as reactionary and assume that struggle cannot erupt again. The tasks of socialists must be to rebuild this radical tradition.
