A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (70 page)

Roosevelt liked the idea of the CIO campaigning for him in elections, but he was not prepared to upset capitalists who also supported him. This was shown dramatically late in 1937, when Lewis undertook the biggest organising drive yet—in the steel industry. The CIO appointed 433 full time and part time organisers, working from 35 regional offices. In the aftermath of the GM strike many steel companies recognised the steel organising committee as a union, without much participation by the new union members. But the big firms refused to do so, and in late May the organising committee called a strike involving 75,000 workers. The companies responded with all the ferocity they had shown in the 1919 steel strike. They attacked the picket lines with ‘company thugs, deputies, police and the National Guard…There were 18 strikers slaughtered, scores wounded, hundreds arrested’.
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The organising committee had not prepared workers for such an onslaught because it had put its faith in Democratic Party governors and mayors showing sympathy to the organising drive. It ‘told workers that all the “New Deal” public officials were “labour’s friends”, and that the strikers should “welcome” the National Guards, state troopers and police sent to “keep order”.’
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The workers were thoroughly demoralised when these ‘friends’ attacked them with clubs and bullets. In Pennsylvania the first Democratic governor for 44 years declared martial law in the steel town of Johnstown. State troopers reopened the factory, restricting the number of pickets to six, and herded ever-greater numbers of scabs into the plant. In Youngstown, Ohio, where there was also a Democratic governor, deputies shot two pickets dead. In Chicago police sent in by the Democratic mayor killed ten strikers. When CIO leaders looked to Roosevelt for help he declared, ‘A plague on both your houses’.
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The biggest organising drive was broken just as the economy began to plunge downwards into renewed slump.

In the following two years the CIO added just 400,000 members to those gained in its first 22 months. In 1939 the number of strikes was only half that of 1937. What is more, the union leaders increasingly reverted to collaboration with the employers and to restricting agitation by the membership. In the auto union there was an attempt to ban any publication not approved by the leadership, while there were to be no elections in the newly formed steel union for five years. The spontaneous grassroots militancy of 1934-36 gave way to tight control from above.

Many activists tried to resist this trend. But, as in France and Spain, their efforts were made much more difficult by the behaviour of the Communist Party. It had played a leading role in the militancy of 1934-37, with many of its activists taking positions as organisers in the CIO union drive, and by their courage and daring had attracted large numbers of new recruits. Until 1935 the Communist Party insisted that Roosevelt was a capitalist politician and the New Deal a fraud. Then it made a U-turn and welcomed Roosevelt and the New Deal Democrats with its own version of ‘Popular Front’ politics. The party worked with the union leaders to spread illusions about the role of these politicians and to discipline rank and file trade unionists who might disrupt cosy relations with the Democrats. This continued for the next ten years, except for a brief interlude during the Hitler-Stalin pact at the beginning of the Second World War. It helped the union leaders establish bureaucratic control over most unions—a control which they would use in the 1940s to destroy any Communist influence.

Such behaviour had important ideological consequences. Writers, artists, film-makers and musicians had suddenly found themselves in a society which was shaken to its core by the Wall Street Crash and the slump. All the old values were thrown into question as the ruling class temporarily lost its sense of direction and the mass of people, including wide sections of the middle class, lost their trust in the ruling class. From 1934 onwards a whole set of new values were thrown up by the strike movement and the upsurge of trade unionism. The impact was not only on highbrow art and literature, but also on the mass culture of popular music and the Hollywood dream factory—and just as they were beginning to exercise global dominance.

This was reflected in the work of writers such as John Dos Passos, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dashiell Hammett and John Steinbeck, of film-makers such as Charlie Chaplin, Joseph Losey, Nicholas Ray, Elia Kazan and the young Orson Welles, and of musicians like Aaron Copland, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Dizzy Gillespie and even the young Frank Sinatra. But with the New Deal there were openings for such dissident currents to return to the mainstream. It could provide jobs on federal projects, space in news magazines and radio shows, and openings in Hollywood. The ‘New Deal’ Democrats saw intellectuals, as it saw the bureaucrats running the new CIO unions, as a layer that could help impose a new pattern of exploitation on society as a whole.

Until 1936 much of the intellectual left resisted such temptations, making a clear distinction between their aims and those of Roosevelt. The stress was on ‘proletarian art’ which, for all its faults in theory and execution, meant trying to relate to working class struggle and a working class audience. This changed once the Communist Party began to back Roosevelt. It no longer tried to direct the spontaneous radicalisation of intellectuals towards the overthrow of society, but to exerting pressure within society. One aspect of this was the adoption of the language of ‘Americanism’ traditionally used by the right—the party’s slogan became ‘Communism is 20th century Americanism’. Another was encouraging sympathetic writers and film-makers to adopt a moderate stance so as to advance their careers and gain influence within the Hollywood studios. This weakened the impulse towards the left of many radicalised artists. It encouraged them to take the easy option of making concessions to mainstream Hollywood or Tin Pan Alley.

James T Farrell, one of the ablest novelists of the early 1930s, pointed out:

The Communist Party’s embrace of Roosevelt could also lead to reactions like that of the black hero of Ralph Ellison’s novel
Invisible Man
. He becomes disillusioned with socialism when the party (thinly disguised as ‘The Brotherhood’) tells him to hold back the struggle of blacks in Harlem because, ‘We are making temporary alliances with other political groups and the interests of one group of brothers must be sacrificed to that of the whole’.
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The disillusionment of writers such as Ellison and Richard Wright encouraged many subsequent black activists to think that socialists were just another group of whites out to use them. Meanwhile, white intellectuals who experienced disillusionment of their own often came to believe that socialists were as manipulative as any other political group. Some became cynical enough to flip over into supporting the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1940s and 1950s.

In any case, the growth of an ideological trend which challenged the myth of the American Dream, just as that dream was beginning to bewitch the world through popular music and film, was cut short in much the same way as the growth of the US workers’ movement.

From slump to war

The slump led to tensions between states as well as between classes. The rulers of each country sought to ease the pressure on themselves at the expense of their rivals abroad. One after another they tried to expand the sales of domestically produced goods by devaluing their currencies and raising tariff barriers. The widespread tendency was towards ‘autarchy’—the production of as many goods as possible within the boundaries of the national state.

The state was also more involved than ever before (except during the First World War) in direct economic activities—rationalising some industries by forcing the closing of inefficient firms, and establishing direct state ownership of some sectors so as to enhance the prospects of others. Even the Conservative ‘national’ government in Britain nationalised the electricity supply, the national airlines and coal mining rights.

In some of the less industrially advanced countries of Latin America and Europe the process went considerably further. ‘Populist’ governments like that of Vargas in Brazil and later Peron in Argentina established large state-owned sectors. A right wing government in Poland laid down a long term economic plan, and Mussolini in Italy set up state-run companies in an attempt to dampen the impact of the world economic crisis.

However, there was a contradiction between the use of the state to try and bolster each national group of capitalists and the desire of all capitalists for access to resources beyond the narrow boundaries of the individual state. The only way to reconcile this contradiction was to expand the area which the state controlled. Formal empires and informal ‘spheres of influence’ became all-important. The autarchy was that of ‘currency blocks’ dominated by the major powers—the dollar block, the sterling area, the gold block (centred on France and its empire), the mark block and the USSR. As the economist Alvin Hansen pointed out in 1932:

The spheres of influence were not symmetrical. The rulers of Britain, France, the US and the USSR each controlled vast areas. Germany, the most powerful industrial power in continental Europe, had no colonies and was constrained by the narrow borders imposed on it by the other powers in the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the First World War. The effect of the crisis, as we have seen, was to swing German big business to campaign vigorously to break the restraints imposed by Versailles. It wanted to recover German territory lost to Poland at the end of the war, absorb the German-speaking Austrian state and Czech border lands (the ‘Sudetenland’) and resume the drive for hegemony in south east Europe. Hitler’s victory was not only a victory of capital over workers. It was also a victory for those forces which wanted to solve the crisis of German capitalism by a policy of military expansion at the expense of the other Great Powers.

Germany’s major industrial groups agreed, more or less willingly, to coordinate their efforts and accept increasing central allocation of investment, state control of foreign trade and state rationing of raw materials. The one major capitalist who objected strongly, Thyssen—who had been one of the first to finance Hitler—was expropriated by the Nazi Party and forced to flee abroad. The others continued a highly profitable collaboration with the Nazis right through until Germany’s military collapse in 1945.

The establishment of an autarchic economy based on military state capitalism encouraged, in turn, the drive to armed expansion. The arms industries needed raw materials and resources. The Nazi regime, with recent memories of the revolutionary upsurge of 1918-20, was reluctant to pressurise German workers too much. It extended working hours and intensified workloads, but it also tried to increase the output of consumer goods so as to contain the level of discontent among workers and the lower middle classes.
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The only way to obtain the resources it needed was to grab extra territory. The agricultural output of Austria, the arms industry of the Czech lands, the iron and steel capacity of Alsace-Lorraine, the coal of Poland and the oil of Romania could fill the gaps in the German economy—as could workers from these lands, paid at much lower rates than German workers and often subject to slave-labour conditions. There was a convergence between the requirements of big business and Nazi ideology, with its concepts of
Lebensraum
(‘living space’) and non-Germans as
Untermenschen
(‘sub-humans’).

The German approach was matched in east Asia by Japan. It had already taken Taiwan and Korea as colonies, and controlled substantial concessions in northern China. In 1931 it reacted to the world economic crisis by seizing the north Chinese region of Manchuria. Then in the late 1930s the government formed after a military coup in Tokyo invaded China and began to cast its eye over bits of the Western empires in south east Asia—the Dutch East Indies, the British colonies in Malaya, Borneo and Singapore, the French colonies in Indochina, and the US-run Philippines.

On a smaller scale, Mussolini’s Italy sought to expand its colonial empire by grabbing Ethiopia to add to Somaliland, Eritrea and Libya, and hoped for an opportunity to grab Albania and the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia.

The established imperial powers—Britain, France, Holland, Belgium and the US—were confused as to how to respond. They had divergent interests: Britain and France were jostling for hegemony in the Middle East; a section of the US ruling class was keen to displace Britain as the predominant international power and had already established a decisive influence in oil-rich Saudi Arabia; and France was mainly concerned to hold together a patchwork of allies in Eastern Europe, so as to divert Germany from any movement against its borders. There were powerful groups in all of them which regarded Nazism as a positive ally in an international onslaught on working class organisations and the left. In so far as they saw themselves as having a foreign enemy it was Russia rather than Germany, Italy or Japan. This was shown clearly during the Spanish Civil War, when the rulers of the Western ‘democracies’ were content for Hitler and Mussolini to flout a ‘non-intervention’ pact, since Franco was no danger to their empires.