William Z Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism - Book Report/Review Example

William Z Foster William Z Foster was a major figure in the American Communist party which he joined in 1921 and presided over the Party until itsdecline after the IInd World War. He was also the acknowledged leader of the Great Steel Strike of 1919 and an important figure in the American labor movement. However. According to Fraser (1995), while in 1919, Foster’s role as the American Federation of Labor in attempting to unionize the United States Steel Corporation threw him into the national spotlight and even garnered the attention of President Woodrow Wilson, who granted him an audience, this role however fizzled down in 1950 as a leader of a sectarian, highly demoralized and decimated American Communist Party that had a very weak connection with the working class. The life of William Zoster is therefore a tragedy, not only a personal tragedy in the diminishing importance that was accorded to his views but also an American tragedy in that Foster’s commitment to the working class deviated during his life towards the embracing of power and the elitist movement in Communism.(Barrett, 1999) William Z Foster, the son of a poor Irish immigrant father and a Catholic mother, was born in 1881 in Taunton, Massachusetts. Foster began as a regular worker at the young age of ten and by the time his twenties were over, he had been a metal workers, worked in a foundry and in fertilizer plants, had driven a streetcar and had also held a variety of railroad jobs, shipping out to various countries like Australia, England, South Africa and Chile.(Freeman, 1995). When he was a young man, he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and was the leader of a very successful organizing drive in the Chicago stockyards in the signing up of immigrant, unskilled workers. This was later expanded on a national scale and culminated in the 1919 steel strike. He secretly joined the Communist Party, however as a result of the growing sectarianism within the Party and conservatism of the union movement, he began to feel increasingly isolated. According to Johanningsmeier, Foster’s “…physical and political powers were diminished…..when his dream of a powerful movement for industrial unionism arising from within the AFL was reaching fruition.” (Johanningsmeier 276). After a trip to Europe, Foster became convinced that an overthrow of capitalism could be achieved by a strong and militant minority working within the reformist trade unions. According to Barrett (1999), Foster’s radical beliefs during his youth became informed by syndicalism rather than labor republicanism. After he visited France in 1910-11, Foster began to believe that competing left wing unions like the Wobblies only succeeded in isolating the revolutionaries from the majority of the workers. This led to his pitch for a militant minority within the conventional trade unions, who could push for industrial organization. As a result of these beliefs however, his vision of trade unionism was narrowed to such an extent that he supported World War I in an effort to consolidate his position within the American Federation of Labor. Foster had a strong belief in the power of the working class and its organizations at the point of production, as opposed to the use of political parties to achieve emancipation of the working class. As a result, some of his factional opponents within the Communist party contended that “he has never understood Marxism”, because he demonstrated such a tendency towards being a syndicalist throughout his political life. (Johanningsmeier, 293). Once Foster had become more closely aligned with Communism, his connection to the working class became tenous, as he began to support the hard line tactics adopted by Stalin during his purges as being representative of the democratic nature of the Soviet system.(Barrett, 1995). At the root of Foster’s beliefs was the notion that the masses would achieve the revolution, led by specialists like himself, however once the goals of the revolution were achieved, the experts would take over. Johanningsmeier points out Foster’s sparse respect for the working class as evidenced during a trip to Russia where he commented, “I am not astonished or discouraged that the workers are making a poor job establishing the new society in Russia …..I have had too much practical experience with the masses to expect anything else.” (Johanningsmeier 171). In effect, he appeared to view the masses as a pitiable lot, referring to them as “ignorant” and as “wretches” (Johanningsmeier 43). The kind of future society that he visualized did not really view the workers as taking control of things, rather he believed that “expertise would everywhere take precedence over majority preference.” (Johanningsmeier 61). Foster was therefore more of a true Syndicalist rather than a true Communist and as a result, would find Leninism more compatible with his own elitist views that were not strictly democratic. Foster came from a working class background and his poverty in youth had embittered him, so that when he came of age, he was estranged from the Catholicism of his younger days. According to Fraser (1995), this resulted in Foster’s embrace of power in his later years, as deployed through the neutral apparatus of the corporation and the administrative State, because ultimately, his fight for the rights of the working class was not based in ideological beliefs, rather it was a drive for power that originated in his alienation from the social order. In comparing Foster to another notable spokesman for socialism in the United States – Eugene V Debs, Johanningsmeier points out that Debs had strong roots in the American heartland and viewed Socialism as the expression of the nation’s Christian ideals, but in the case of Foster who was born our of a bitter working class experience, “America was a set of conditions to be transcended.” (Johanningsmeier 46). The difference between the two advocates of the rights of the working class was that while Debsian socialism was rooted in a need to restore the egalitarian base of American society, Foster’s radicalism was “informed by a kind of….system thinking, that denigrated the complex ontology of faith, custom and political symbolism in workers’ lives.” (Johanningsmeier 1819). Freeman (1995) argues that despite Foster’s well known persona as the leader of the Communist party, when he died in a Moscow sanitarium in 1961, he had few ties left with labor but this does not detract from the fact that of all the American radical leaders, there was no one whose proletarian roots were more genuine or who had a deeper commitment to unionism. Barrett (1995) views Foster’s story not only as a personal tragedy, but also an American one, with Foster and his Party perishing far away from the American homeland in Russia, far displaced from the lives and concerns of American workers. While his working class origins and the economic misery of his youth fuelled Foster’s efforts to promote unionism, his later belief in the power of experts and his dismissal of the working class undermined his fight for the emancipation of the working classes of America. References: * Barrett, James R, 1999. “William Z Foster and the tragedy of American radicalism.” University of Illinois Press * Fraser, Steve, 1995. “Book Reviews: Forging American Communism: The life of William Z Foster by Edward P Johanningsmeier”, The Journal of American History, 82(2):797 * Freeman, Joshua B, 1995. “Historical studies: Forging American communism: The Life of William Z Foster by Edward P Johanningsmeier” Industrial and Labor relations Review, 49(1): 187 * Johanningsmeier, Edward P, 1994. “Forging American Communism: The life of William Z Foster.” Princeton: Princeton University Press Read More