Review by TRISTAN ADIE
ON MAY 1, 2006, millions of workers across the United States poured into the streets to march for immigrant rights. Inspired by the idea that they could show the nation what “a day without immigrants” could look like, they showed what an impact they could have on the world's largest, richest economy by withholding their labor power as a group.
These demonstrations not only marked the first time in six decades that workers had rallied in huge numbers on May Day in the United States; they were also a stunning rebuke to those who argue that workers in America will never organize and fight back.
After years of lectures from media pundits, pompous professors, and even trade union leaders that workers here “just have it too good,” the immigrant rights movement has shone a spotlight on a very different reality. The back-breaking work, long hours, and unjust treatment immigrant workers suffer just to make ends meet is common to millions of workers throughout the country-whether born here or somewhere else. Slogans that ran through the demonstrations-like “We Produce, We Demand”-also showed that it is possible for workers to stand up for better treatment.
As this movement was capturing headlines, a new book appeared that provides much-needed background to the current picture. Sharon Smith's Subterranean Fire: A History of Working-Class Radicalism in the United States is a moving chronicle of the struggles of working men and women for better wages and conditions-and a better world.
The book describes in detail not only how workers have fought back, but how they have united across racial, ethnic, national, and gender lines to do so. In one such passage, Smith relates the strike of female textile workers-composed of more than twenty-five different ethnic groups-in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912:
The strike itself began spontaneously when management handed out…smaller pay packets…and outraged workers began shutting down their machines from one mill to the next by the following day. Squads of flying pickets marched through the town with the rallying cry, “Better to starve fighting than to starve working.” By the end of the first day, ten thousand workers were out on strike. As [historian Sidney] Lens noted, “In a single day four times as many people had been unionized as in the previous six years.”
Most of the workers involved in the strike were new to the U.S., and many spoke little English. But their victory would inspire workers throughout the country. The parallels with developments today are clear.
Smith also integrates a history of how radical ideas and organization have been crucial to workers' resistance. Official history has all but erased the involvement of socialists, anarchists, communists, and Trotskyists in decisive struggles for such things as union recognition, the eight-hour day, dignity in the workplace, and against racism and sexism. Smith shows how crucial the leadership of radicals was to the success of these fights.
In a country where we are fed a steady diet of “red state/blue state” nonsense, it is exhilarating to read about the Oklahoma Socialist Party, for example, declaring on the eve of the First World War: “If War is declared, the Socialists of Oklahoma shall refuse to enlist; but if forced to enter military service to murder fellow workers, we shall choose to die fighting the enemies of humanity in our ranks than to perish fighting our fellow workers.”
Similarly, Smith's description of the efforts of socialists and communists to organize their fellow workers in Flint, Michigan, in occupying General Motors auto plants, fighting off vicious police attacks, and winning union recognition in 1936 is an amazing window into the transformative effect of struggle on ordinary people.
But Subterranean Fire is more than a recounting of exciting labor battles. Smith also takes on the key questions raised by this history: What happened to the combativity displayed among millions of workers in previous epochs? Why has the level of class struggle in the United States been so low over the past generation? Why aren't more workers flocking to socialist organizations, as they did in the earlier part of the century?
In her answers, Smith presents a picture of the ferocity with which American business owners and politicians first took aim at radical workers' organizations during the McCarthy era, and then targeted unions over subsequent decades. She reveals how thorough and devastating the witch-hunts of communists and other radicals were in the 1950s, in “excising the socialist tradition from inside the U.S. working-class movement.” The witch-hunts, Smith demonstrates, were a bipartisan project aimed at crushing the fighting spirit of workers that had erupted in the 1930s, not merely the pet project of the lunatic Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Subterranean Fire also details the “employers' offensive” against workers, begun after the social movements of the 1960s had succeeded in winning a number of concessions from business and the government. Under this offensive, wages have been steadily eroded since the 1970s, health care and pensions have been taken away from millions, and workers have been subjected to ever-increasing speed-ups.
This offensive has also been a bipartisan project-beginning under Gerald Ford and continuing under “liberal” Jimmy Carter. In fact, Smith argues, it was Carter who “set the stage for Reagan's more draconian measures,” using the viciously anti-labor Taft-Hartley law against striking coal miners in 1978, and setting off the deregulation binge continued by Reagan in the 1980s.
Smith also lays out a damning account of the Clinton years, when the employers' offensive accelerated under a president who cried crocodile tears about “feeling our pain” while attacking social programs. Through this approach, Clinton did what Reagan had not been able to-he set lifetime time limits on welfare and imposed work requirements that were unmeetable for many people and undermined union labor. Thanks to these and other policy moves, millions of people were thrown off the welfare rolls, and the gap between rich and poor grew under Clinton at a faster pace than at any time since the 1960s.
Much of Subterranean Fire is devoted to detailing Clinton's record in order to point toward the task for radicals today-to build an independent, working-class alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. The book sets up a very clear contrast: In the first half of Subterranean Fire, we read how the colossal fights of millions of rank-and-file workers in the earlier part of the twentieth century won real gains in wages, benefits, and living standards. The role of working-class radicals in building on the confidence of their coworkers was decisive in these struggles.
In the second half of the book, however, we read how overpaid trade union officials have thrown millions of dollars at Democratic politicians in the hope of preserving those gains, only to be subjected to further attacks. These officials have faced little pressure from their own membership to change this disastrous course since radicals were purged from their ranks. By going back through the details of how workers have won in the past, Subterranean Fire shows how we can rebuild such struggles today.
The title of the book is also terribly relevant today. It's from a speech by August Spies, an anarchist who was hanged in the 1880s on trumped-up charges of inciting a working-class crowd to murder police officers. As he faced execution, Spies famously said:
If you think that by hanging us you can stamp out the labor movement, then hang us. Here you will tread upon a spark, but here, and there, and behind you, and in front of you, the flames will blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out. The ground is on fire upon which you stand.
Looking at the fire that has blazed up around the treatment of immigrant workers in the U.S., we know there are countless “subterranean fires” waiting for a spark. The task is to help ignite them.
