PSWC Education Podcast

Foster refutes common explanations blaming immigrants or working class prosperity for American labour's backwardness, identifying dual unionism—radicals abandoning mainstream unions to form separate organizations—as the true cause of the movement's weakness. Foster argues that this policy drained the vital "militant minority" from established unions, leaving them leaderless and stagnant under reactionary control while the dual unions themselves consistently failed and wasted immense revolutionary energy. The catastrophic results included destroyed unions like the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW's collapse, but by 1922, militants had abandoned dual unionism in favour of working within existing unions to revitalize the labo...

During World War I, American trade union bureaucrats embraced full class collaboration, accepting no-strike agreements and aligning with employers, which left unions ill-prepared for the post-war offensive. Following the war, strengthened American imperialism and militant employers launched a ruthless attack on labour between 1919-1922, provoking massive strikes across steel, railroad, mining, and other industries that workers were ultimately unable to win. The result was labour's most catastrophic defeat in history, with unions losing over one million members and being annihilated in key industries, while left-wing calls for industrial unionism and a labour party were systematically crushed by conservative, class-collaborationist...

Foster creates the TUEL (confusingly, replacing the ITUEL) in order to build a strong, organized vanguard of socialist militants after the strategic failure of the 1919 steel strike.

Syndicalism is best encapsulated by the early program of the IWW: build the trade union movement to a critical mass, then perform a general strike and cripple the capitalist economy in order to take power. Foster has not only found this program foolhardy on its face, but charges it with promoting the idea of “dual unionism” which fractured and broke the labour movement in the US. Moreover, Foster shows the divergence between syndicalist tendencies and Leninist ones, arguing that the lack of intellectual rigour in syndicalist theorizing will always spell its doom.

On the heels of the successful meatpacking campaign of 1917, Foster used this momentum to target one of the largest and most important wartime industries in the US: steel. But Foster and his crew of militant organizers faced a near impossible task: facing off against the steel barons while being sabotaged internally by reactionary AFL union leaders.

The packinghouse campaign of 1917 marked a huge victory in the fight for industrial unionism in the US. Although union leaders had long thought the meatpacking industry was an organizing dead end, Foster, along with other militant union leaders, proved them wrong. Using a bold tactic of “strike first, ask questions later”, Foster and his group of previous ITEUL militants organized hundreds of thousands of meatpacking workers into one of the most formidable industrial unions of the time. Foster recounts how they succeeded despite push back from industry, government and reactionary union leaders.

Foster recounts his history in the labour movement, from a teen sculptor in 1895, to his illness as a result of working in factories, to his tour of Europe, and initial work organizing various unions and organizations dedicated to building left-wing labour militancy within conservative unions. It focuses heavily on Foster’s biography, and the direction of the trade union movement in the US at the turn of the century, with a focus on internal vs external union organizing.