DATE: 29–31 July 1936 (Conference) ISSUING BODY: Conference for the Fourth International, Geneva
THE SITUATION IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA (STUDY)
Endowed with great natural riches and highly developed productive equipment, the United States rose in the course of the war to the rank of the world's leading imperialist power. It assumed this role, however, at a time when capitalism was already everywhere in decline and when conflicts between the great powers were ceaselessly sharpening. American imperialism cannot extend itself further, or even maintain its present position in the world, without making a wide breach in the share of world power currently held by other imperialist nations, without attacking the living standards of the masses of the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia whom it exploits directly or from whom it draws profit indirectly. So that in extending its power throughout the world, United States capitalism introduces into its own foundations the instability of the world capitalist system. The economy and politics of the United States depend on the crises, wars and revolutions in every part of the world. The very scale of American capitalism and its resources, its relatively late appearance on the world stage, together with the general decline and upheavals characteristic of this epoch of world capitalism, combine to ensure a rapid tempo to America's economic evolution and consequently also to the political development of the bourgeoisie and of the working class of the United States.
The crisis of 1929-1933 and its subsequent development have furnished abundant confirmation of the soundness of this appreciation. In the richest country in the world, the income of industrial and agricultural workers taken together was literally cut in half between 1929 and 1932. From 2 million, the number of unemployed rose to 18 or 20 million. Steel production fell to less than 20% of capacity. Exports, which had exceeded 5 billion dollars, fell to barely 1 and a half billion; imports fell from about 4 and a half billion to a little over 1 billion. After 4,600 bank failures in three years, every bank in the country closed its doors in March 1933, at the height of the financial crisis.
The role of the Roosevelt regime was to "save" capitalism temporarily. To this end it abandoned completely, and without the slightest attempt at concealment, the traditional "laissez-faire" doctrine of the United States and, in particular, of Roosevelt's own Democratic Party, as well as that instrument peculiar to America: the doctrine of "states' rights."
It made use of the financial resources of the state to rescue banking and commercial enterprises and had laws passed restricting competition, permitting price increases, etc.—that is, laws favouring monopoly capitalism. At the same time the Roosevelt administration was effectively serving capitalist interests, although not all capitalists realized this, by keeping the discontent of the urban and rural labouring masses bound within a policy consisting partly of small concessions, often illusory, and chiefly of demagogic promises. Thus an old-age pension and unemployment insurance system under government control was eventually brought into force, but its rates are ridiculously low. The employer has the possibility of passing the burden on to consumers, that is, to the workers, and the unions have no part whatever in administering the system. Formally the "right" of workers to organize is recognized, and the government cultivates the friendship of the trade-union leaders. At present strike movements are broken, subtly, by the government's officially sanctioned mediators, or brutally, by private gangsters, the police or the militia, without effective protest from this "liberal" administration.
Thus the vitality and resources of American capitalism, opportunely aided by the democratic state, have, for the time being, relieved it of the crisis to the extent that production has risen markedly above the 1932 level, that profits can once again be made in certain lines of business, etc. But this does not mean, even for the mighty capitalism of the United States, that the crisis is resolved in the sense in which past crises were resolved—that is, opening onto a new cycle of expansion during which the living conditions of the workers also rise. All the facts now indicate that the crisis is permanent, though momentarily less acute.
Farm income, which stood at 15 and a half billion dollars in 1920, fell to about 5 billion in 1932. It rose appreciably last year, but only to 8 billion, that is, 40% below the 1920 level. The volume of production of consumer goods in 1935 almost equalled the 1929 level, but the volume of building materials was only half what it had been in 1929, and the producer-goods industries were, generally speaking, only slightly better. Even this recovery is due in large measure to government expenditure rather than to any real (capitalist) recovery of private industry, as may be deduced from the fact that new investment, which stood at 10 billion dollars in 1929, fell to less than 1 billion in 1933 and reached only the figure of 1 and a half billion last year. Rationalization made progress during the period of restriction. As a result, the increase in production has had no proportional effect on unemployment. The number of unemployed remains at 10 to 12 million and has not diminished appreciably at all in the last year. The number of persons on relief rose from 22 to 25 million between 1935 and 1936. This is a vivid illustration of the way in which capitalism throws onto the backs of the workers the costs both of the "recovery" and of the crisis.
Other aspects of the present situation in America lead to the same conclusions. Foreign trade remains below half the 1929 level. The federal government's debt stands at 31 billion dollars, an increase of 50% in three years. The abundance of gold—whose stock stood at 4 billion in 1932 and stands today at 10 billion—continues to be an obstacle to the revival of foreign trade, to currency stabilization, etc., and a threat of inflation. The struggle for markets, particularly in Latin America and Asia, against Great Britain and Japan, is intensifying.
Manifestly, capitalism sees no way out of such an impasse other than the use of force, on the one hand against the labouring masses, and on the other against other capitalist groups and powers. Thus we observe simultaneously an increase in repressive laws and attacks on civil liberties—though this can be attributed chiefly to the states and municipalities, leaving to the national president the privilege of posing as a "liberal"—and an annual expenditure, this time under Roosevelt's direct inspiration, of more than a billion dollars for military and naval preparation, a sum far exceeding that of any previous period. For the moment, this expenditure serves to stimulate the "recovery" and will soon allow American capitalism, on the occasion of a war, to strike a vigorous blow at its competitors.
During the deepest part of the crisis, the American working class remained essentially passive. This was the result, on the one hand, of the sheer objective violence of the blows to which it was exposed after a long period of prosperity, and, on the other, of the subjective factor that, owing to the particular conditions of American development, it entered the crisis with organizations that were small and weak both in the political and in the economic field.
Since 1933, however, the history of the American working class has been marked by almost uninterrupted activity and combativity. Persistent, tenacious attempts at organization, often culminating in strike struggles of the most heroic character, have been undertaken by the workers, including those in key industries such as steel, automobiles, rubber, public utilities and shipping, where in the past the trade-union movement had never been able to take root. The strikes of recent years are marked by a powerful upsurge of solidarity and class consciousness; they embrace tens of thousands of workers belonging to different industries, and often sections of the lower petty bourgeoisie as well, who supported the struggle of the striking workers against strikebreakers, private gangsters, the police, and even the militia.
The effects of this new stage in the development of American capitalism, and of mass pressure, are reflected in the controversy currently unfolding within the American Federation of Labor (AFL)—the deepest and most bitter controversy in the entire history of that conservative institution. The leaderships of some of the largest affiliated unions—such as John L. Lewis of the miners—are attacking head-on the traditional craft-union policy of the federation and are demanding that workers in mass-production industries be granted the right to organize in industrial unions, and be invited to do so. Within the AFL they have founded a committee for the organization of industrial unions (Committee for Industrial Organisation) to help the workers of the most important industries organize on an industrial basis. They have not complied with the demand of the AFL Executive that the Committee for Industrial Organisation be dissolved, and they are now making preparations for an organizing campaign in heavy industry. There is no doubt, however, that a broad organizing and strike movement in a key industry can no longer be regarded today in the United States as a purely trade-union question. It necessarily leads to conflict with the bourgeois class as a whole and with the governmental apparatus, entailing the most far-reaching social consequences.
Although union membership has grown by about one million since 1932, the workers in the key industries remain for the most part unorganized. Every wave of organization in these industries has been broken by the collaboration of employers, government arbitration bodies and treacherous union bureaucrats, often before a strike has reached its culminating point. But the most important thing is that these betrayals have not diminished the workers' will to organize nor their combativity. Wherever, moreover, the weak forces of the Marxist revolutionaries were able to take part in these struggles, the workers followed their lead and made light of the attempts of the union bureaucrats to warn them against the "red menace."
The policy of betrayal pursued by the Stalinists is the fundamental reason for the absence of a genuine revolutionary party capable of giving the workers the leadership they increasingly aspire to, and of completely breaking the hold of the class-collaborationist trade-union bureaucracy. In violent reaction against the adventurist excesses of the "Third Period," the Stalinist Communist Party of the United States today pursues a policy of the crudest opportunism. Not only does it uncritically support the "progressive" union bureaucrats, it often collaborates with the most reactionary elements within the unions. It devotes its essential forces to supporting a reformist movement, the Farmer Labor Party—the American version of the Popular Front—and even inaugurates a dubious collaboration with certain politicians of the capitalist parties who affect "progressive" airs and who, in order to attain their own ends, are prepared to enter the Farmer Labor Party should that party come to acquire real strength. Although in presidential elections the CP of the United States puts up its own candidates, and thus maintains the illusion of autonomy along with revolutionary phraseology, in reality, through its support of the union leaders who wish to draw the workers over to Roosevelt's side, and through its attacks on the Republican Party as the sole "true and immediate" agency of "fascism and war," it aids Roosevelt, who, under the cloak of a demagogic liberalism (in the peculiar and rather confused American sense of that term), is the agent of American imperialism and of its gigantic preparations for war.
The American Socialist Party numbers scarcely more than 16,000 members, about half the membership of the Communist Party of the United States, although in elections it has obtained a larger number of votes than the CP. For many years it was dominated by the ultra-rightist Old Guard of Hillquit and his successors. The crisis, however, brought promising young elements into the SP, and with them new tendencies developed, produced both by conditions in the United States and by observation of the defeats of the working class in Germany, Austria, etc., under the old Internationals. Thus began a process of differentiation and an internal struggle within the SP that has not yet found clear and definitive political expression. Nonetheless the most corrupt section of the Old Guard (New York) had, in practice, already broken away from the national organization by December 1935, and was definitively expelled at the party's congress in May 1936. This split shifted the balance of forces within the SP in a progressive direction and opened up, in the estimation of the Workers Party of the United States, important possibilities for the construction of the Party of the social revolution. In a similar way the balance of forces within the SP has been further significantly shifted by the recent entry of several hundred revolutionary internationalists of the Workers Party and of the Young Spartacus League into the SP and into the Young Socialists—the Workers Party, for its part, being the result of the fusion, effected in December 1934, between the former Communist League of America and revolutionary trade-union elements of the former American Workers Party, which had also arrived at an internationalist Marxist position. It remains to be seen what the results of this course will be and how the further development of the Socialist Party will proceed. It goes without saying that the members of the former Workers Party who entered the SP, while submitting to the discipline of that party, have declared clearly and unambiguously that they firmly and unwaveringly maintain their own traditions and principles.
The crisis of American capitalism continues. Despite a favourable conjuncture here and there, it will soon become acute again. Likewise the struggle of the victims of American imperialism—the enslaved masses of the United States, of Latin America and of other countries—is becoming ever broader and more intense. The most important and most urgent task consists in pursuing, with iron energy, the work already begun of unifying the vanguard elements into a strong and disciplined revolutionary party of the Fourth International, and of building this party on the granite foundations of Marxist-Leninist internationalism, alone capable of concentrating the struggles of the masses and leading them to victory. When this task has been accomplished, it may be foreseen that the young and vigorous American working class, which has so often proved its will and capacity for bold and courageous struggle, will march rapidly toward the conquest of power and will make its full contribution to the establishment of world socialism.