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The 1946 Oakland General Strike

An Eyewitness Account by Stan Weir

By Cal Winslow

The 1946 Oakland general strike began with a dispute at two downtown department
stores, Hastings� and Kahn�s, where 425 clerks (mostly women) were on strike for
union recognition.

The strike, a landmark event in Northern California labor history, was also a
significant, though misunderstood, episode in the strike wave of 1945-1946, the
greatest strike wave in numbers in U.S. history at the point.

The Oakland strike was very much in the spirit of the strike wave but it wasn�t a
�called strike.� At the time Stan Weir was employed on the assembly line at
Chevrolet�s East Oakland plant, a member of UAW local 76. He was riding a
streetcar, on his way to work on Monday morning, December 3, the day Oakland was
shut down.

�Shortly before 5:00 A.M., Monday, December 3, 1946, hundreds of workers passing
through downtown Oakland… became witness to the police herding a fleet of scab
trucks through the downtown area. The trucks contained commodities to fill the
shelves of two major department stores whose clerks had long been on strike.

�The witnesses, that is, truck drivers, bus and streetcar operators and passengers,
got off their vehicles and did not return. The city was filled with workers, they
milled about the city�s core for several hours and then organized themselves.�

World War II ended August 14, 1945. V-J Day marked the end of war abroad and the
beginning of rebellion at home. There had been strikes throughout the war years,
often wildcat strikes in defiance of the no-strike pledge�policy demanded by the
government from above, and supported by not only the unions but also radical
organizations including the Communist Party.

So one result was pent-up demands. There were frustrated expectations�plus the
widely held conviction that the time for sacrifice�both overseas and at home�was
over. There was the belief that there had been sacrifice enough. By the end of
September the number of days �lost� (won) to strikes had doubled, by the end of
October it had doubled again. 200,000 coal miners struck in September; 44,000
Northwest lumber workers followed; as did 70,000 Midwest truck drivers, 40,000
machinists in San Francisco and Oakland, East Coast longshoremen, and many more,
and this despite the statement from Philip Murray, president of the Congress of
Industrial Organizations (CIO), that �no change will be made in the CIO�s no-strike
policy…� and the similar pledge by American Federation of Labor (AFL) President
William Green: �V-J Day will not mean an automatic ending of the restraint on
strikes.�

1945 was just the prelude and U.S. workers were not to be contained. There were
more than 5000 major strikes in 1946, the largest and most sustained strike wave in
U.S. history, surpassing the strike years of 1919 and 1934. These strikes included
the autoworkers who closed eighty General Motors plants in 50 cities. The
steelworkers struck for 25 days, 750,000 strong, at that point the single largest
strike in U.S. history (to be surpassed by Latino May Day strikers in 2006).
400,000 coal miners struck. President Truman threatened to draft striking railroad
workers.

At one point, there were 1,600,000 workers on strike. By the end of the year 4.6
million workers had been on strike. 28,500,000 workdays had been lost to the
employers. It was a magnificent display of working class power�it was �too big,�
also too popular, to be defeated.

The trade union leadership was divided at the top�the AFL still competed with the
CIO, though not for long, as they soon united to purge the left. Rank-and-file
solidarity, however, was widespread. Just as in 1919 and 1934, the strike wave
increased workers appetites; in 1919 there was the general strike in Seattle and in
1934 the general strikes in Minneapolis and San Francisco.

In 1946 there were general strikes in Rochester, NY; Stamford, CT; Lancaster and
Pittsburgh, PA and, of course, Oakland, CA.

�By nightfall, on the 3rd, the strikers had instructed all stores except pharmacies
and food markets to shut down, Bars were allowed to stay open, but they could serve
only beer and had to put their juke boxes out on the sidewalk to play at full
volume and no charge. �Pistol Packin� Mama, Lay That Pistol Down�, the number one
hit, echoed off all the buildings. That first 24-hour period of the 54-hour strike
had a carnival spirit. A mass of couples danced in the streets. The participants
were making history, knew it, and were having fun. By Tuesday morning they had
cordoned off the central city and were directing traffic. Anyone could leave, but
only those with passports (union cards) could get in.

�The comment made by a prominent national network newscaster, that �Oakland is a


ghost town tonight,� was a contribution to ignorance. Never before or since had
Oakland been so alive and happy for the majority of the population. It was a town
of law and order. In that city of over a quarter million, strangers passed each
other on the street and did not have fear, but the opposite.�

The Oakland Strike spread from the bottom up. There was never much evidence of
official union leadership in the streets. But there were streetcar operators and
bus drivers and truck drivers who refused to honor police cordons, demanded an end
to �scab� labor, and denounced the city administration and the police.

�Before the second day of the strike was half over a large group of war veterans
among the strikers formed their own squads and went through close-order drills.
They then marched on the Tribune Tower, offices of the anti-labor Oakland Tribune,
and from there marched on City Hall demanding the resignation of the mayor and city
council. Sailor�s Union of the Pacific (SUP) crews walked off the three ships at
the Oakland Army base loaded with military supplies for troops in Japan. By that
night the strikers closed some grocery stores in order to conserve dwindling food
supplies.

�In all general strikes the participants are very soon forced by the very nature of
events to themselves run the society they have just stopped. The process in the
Oakland experiment was beginning to deepen…

�The top local Teamster officials, except one, were not to be found; the exception
would be fired five months later for his strike activity. International Teamster
President Dave Beck wired orders �to break the strike� because it was a
revolutionary attempt �to overthrow the government�. He ordered all Teamsters who
had left their jobs to return to work.�

At last, the unions acted. 142 unions affiliated with the Alameda County AFL
declared a �work holiday� and 100,000 workers walked off their jobs. The business
of Oakland effectively came to a halt.

�A number of the secondary Oakland and Alameda County union leaders did what they
could to create a semblance of straight trade-union organization. The ranks, unused
to leading themselves and having no precedent for this sort of strike in their own
experience, wanted the well-known labor leaders in the Bay Area to step forward
with expertise, aid, and public legitimization.

�The man who was always billed as leader of the 1934 San Francisco General Strike,
ILWU President Harry Bridges, who was then also State CIO President, refused to
become involved, just as he did 18 years later during the Berkeley Free Speech
Movement struggles. The rank-and-file longshoremen and warehousemen who had been
drawn to the street strike were out there on their own.

�No organized contingents from the hundreds available in the warehouse and
longshore hiring halls were sent to help, No CIO shops were given the nod to walk
out or �sick-out.� Only through CIO participation could significant numbers of
blacks have been drawn into this mainly white strike. The ILWU and other CIO unions
would honor picket lines like those around the Tribune Tower or at the Oakland Army
Base, but otherwise they minded their own business.

�Bridges had recently committed himself to a nine-year extension of the wartime no-
strike pledge.�

The strike ended two days later. It was �… 54 hours old at 11:00 A,M, on December
5. The people on the street learned of the decision from a sound truck put on the
Street by the AFL Central Labor Council. It was the officials� first really
decisive act of leadership. They had consulted among themselves and decided to end
the strike on the basis of the Oakland City Manager�s promise that police would not
again be used to bring in scabs.

�No concessions were gained for the women retail clerks at Kahn�s and Hastings
Department Stores whose strikes had triggered the General Strike; they were left
free to negotiate any settlement they could get on their own. Those women and many
other strikers heard the sound truck�s message with the form of anger that was
close to heartbreak.

�Numbers of truckers and other workers continued to picket with the women, yelling
protests at the trucks and appealing to all who could hear that they should stay
out. But all strikers other than the clerks had been ordered back to work and no
longer had any protection against the disciplinary actions that might be brought
against them for strike-caused absences. By noon only a few score of workers were
left, wandering disconsolately around the now-barren city. The CIO mass meeting
that had been called for that night to discuss strike �unity� was never held.�

Historians tend to argue that 1946 strikes were mostly about wages, a �wage
offensive� writes one. And this was true to a degree and in this the strikes were
often successful, in the short term, in two ways; first in today�s terms, workers�
average gains were about $2 an hour and, because of the way demands were
formulated, low page workers benefited most�hence the idea at the time of a
�solidarity wage.� But they were also about lives and beliefs, workers aspirations
and they were a rebellion against control from above.

So the 1946 strikes also reflected the legacy of the 1930s, the inheritance of
confidence U.S. workers felt along with their capacity to organize and fight, but
there would not be another such uprising until the strike wave of the 1970s (1967-
1981).

In a sense the Oakland strike was both an end and a beginning. The victories of the
1930s were consolidated but from on high�by the �new men of power� (Mills). There
were no women on labor�s first team. These men collaborated with management and
government officials to institute a corporate compact, an unwritten agreement, the
so-called �The New Deal Formula of Industrial Relations.� The unions would �deliver
the goods,� but this and post-war prosperity compromised, and sometimes eliminated
rank-and-file participation and undermined shop floor power�wages could be
increased, benefits won (for union members) by making deals at the top. McCarthyism
drove the rebels to the margins. In addition, wartime patriotism, both as the
result of service, but also reflecting wartime no-strike pledges and war
productivity drives dampened militancy and deradicalized American workers. At the
same time, the Cold War had already begun on the shop floor.

�The Oakland General Strike was related to the 1946 Strike Wave in time and spirit,
and revealed an aspect of the temper of the nation�s industrial-working-class mood
at war�s end. Labor historians of the immediate post-war period have failed to
examine the Oakland Strike, and thus have failed to consider a major event of the
period and what it reveals about the mood of that time. In developing their
analyses they have focused almost entirely on the economic demands made by the
unions that participated in the Strike Wave. These demands were not unimportant.
But economic oppression was not the primary wound that had been experienced daily
during the war years.�

One last point: overwhelmingly, the strike wave was regional in character. It was a
wave of strikes in the Northeast, the Great Lakes Region (plus West Virginia) and
to a lesser degree, California. The rest, the South in particular, remained non-
union. The demand that the CIO �organize the segregated south� had been abandoned.
These regions, not surprisingly, led the Republicans in recapturing Congress in
1946, and to the Taft-Hartley in 1947��the slave labor act� according to the
American Federation of Labor).

Organizing the unorganized, black workers, women workers, farm workers, would have
to wait.

See Stan Weir, Singlejack Solidarity, George Lipsitz, ed., (Minneapolis: University
of Minneapolis Press, 2004)

And

Stan Weir, The 1946 Oakland General Strike, libcom library, Nov 22, 2005.
Downloaded, October 21. 2011.

Cal Winslow is the author of Labor�s Civil War in California, PM Press and an
editor of Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt From Below during the
Long Seventies (Verso, 2010). He is a Fellow at UC Berkeley, Director of the
Mendocino Institute and associated with the Bay Area collective, Retort. He can be
reached at cwinslow@berkeley.edu

�Counterpunch, November 1, 2011

To the Editors,

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students organized themselves into a national
movement for effective gun control. These students made it clear that living in
fear, drilling, and bringing more armed personnel into schools, prepping for the
next massacre, shouldn't be part of the U.S. educational experience. Instead,
rallies marches and meetings linked up with African-Americans who endure killings
of their men, women and children by armed racist police were organized.

A slogan came out defining this movement-"Your right to own a gun does not outweigh
my right to live." Who in their right mind would deny a child the right to live
without the threat of gun death in their classroom? The NRA and legions of weapons
owners and their media talking heads, pilloried these brave students with slander.
Ted Nugent called Marjory Stoneman students "soulless." Thanks to sharp Parkland
students, Emma Gonzales and David Hogg, a lot of these accusations and slanders
were turned right around and these pro-gun forces were exposed as liars and
fanatics who would put an individual's right to own weapons with high capacity
magazines over the lives of millions of U.S. school children.

After these school massacres, we are Second Amendmentized into a fatalistic silence
by firearms owners and traders who take joy in collecting personal arsenals stocked
with high capacity magazine rifles and pistols that grossly exceeds what a normal
person would need for home protection and hunting. Unfortunately, responsible
weapons owners and traders are unable to keep their exotic firearms out of the
hands of their deranged loved ones and customers. What a colossal farce this is.
The youth of this country, not impeded by lock step conformity, know that their
rights to a safe classroom are compromised by an over-armed society.

Our dirty Second Amendment is enshrouded by an eternal covenant ideology. Noah


Webster, a founding father and America's foremost scholar of Webster's Dictionary
fame speaks:

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed as they are in almost
every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by
the sword because the whole people are armed."

The American ruling class has had the ability to carry out as much injustice as it
needed to maintain their rule over this armed-to-the-teeth American populace.

The 1877 railway labor strikes were violently put down when American workingmen
wanted to be paid a living wage for their long and dangerous hours full of work.
Thomas Alexander Scott, of the Pennsylvania Rail Road, mocked striker hunger,
smugly declaring that strikers "should be given a rifle diet for a few days and see
how they like that kind of bread." President Rutherford B. Hayes sent in the Army
and Marines to shoot down the strikers and their sympathizers until they were
pacified-Noah Webster's vision crushed by reality.

Nothing creates more freedom than that most precious commodity-time. An eight-hour
day was denied the American working class until the U.S. ruling class could not
stem the tidal movement stirred by the working class. In 1886, four innocent
Chicago Anarchist leaders were executed by the state of Illinois.

An armed free people could not get the eight-hour day. Instead, the weapons-issue
was used by the ruling class to temporarily derail the eight-hour movement. The
bomb that went off at the Haymarket Meeting worked to the ruling class's advantage.
The eight-hour day movement wasn't won by an armed working class; but by a
mobilized working class that, by sheer numbers of assembly, intimidated the ruling
class and their Democratic and Republican politicians into surrender.

Whenever firearms have been introduced into the class struggle, the American
working class has taken a profound beating. In Centralia, the IWW attempted to
defend their union hall from being attacked by the American Legion during an
Armistice Day Parade in 1919. Gunfire was exchanged and the IWW lost a member to a
lynching while the other Wobblies served atrociously long years in prison until the
commutation of their sentences during the '30s.

For the American working class, it will take a fighting anti-capitalist party and
huge numbers to defend the party and its program by an uncompromising mobilization
of our class in the street, intent on guarding the inviolable principle of class
independence along with the ability to alter tactics, defending ever-increasing
working class power.

Native Americans had to use weapons to defend themselves at Wounded Knee from the
FBI and Tribal Chairman Dick Wilson and his "GOONS" in the early seventies. Dick
Wilson's paramilitaries embraced the insult adopting it as an acronym for
"Guardians Of the Ogalala Nation." Once again, the Second Amendment didn't
guarantee Native Americans the right to defend themselves against government over-
reach. Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement (AIM) activist, lives out his
life deprived of decent food, adequate healthcare and mobility in federal prison in
Florida.

The working classes and Native Americans have been forced to use arms because this
American ruling class was hell-bent on depriving life and liberty. The wellspring
of violence of any democratic and economic struggle since the United State's
founding has been this ruling class that Noah Webster hoped would be kept at bay by
an armed American populace.

Any hope that African-Americans could achieve economic parity and civil equality
with Caucasian America by working within the system was violently dashed when the
FBI encouraged police forces across the United States to take extra-legal measures
to smash the Black Panther Party. Fred Hampton's bullet ridden body was the
proverbial stone tossed to African Americans when they asked for bread. Fred
Hampton was a dynamic leader within the Black Panther Party.

Then Governor Ronald Reagan, with support of the NRA, signed the "Mulford Act" in
1967, preventing the public carrying of weapons. This was in direct response to the
Black Panthers following police around with their weapons with intent to protect
African-American neighborhoods from police brutality. Carrying weapons by the Black
Panthers was a stand taken against systemic racism and economic deprivation.

After the smashing of the Black Panthers, living conditions have deteriorated to
intolerable levels in the inner city. African-American schools are closed down or
maliciously under-funded. Michelle Alexander's eye-opening book, The New Jim Crow-
Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Color Blindness, along with Bryan Stevenson's,
Just Mercy, and Mumia Abu Jamal's, Have Black Lives Ever Mattered, exposes the U.S.
government's use of the police, judicial system and private prisons to warehouse
African-Americans rather than give in to their demands of economic and civil parity
with whites.

The Black Panthers laid down their lives trying to break out of the deplorable
conditions of economic segregation and arbitrary killings by U.S. law enforcement
still so rampant today. Mumia Abu Jamal endures immeasurable cruelty in the
"Incarceration Nation." Malcolm X's quote, "By Any Means Necessary" applies here as
African Americans do whatever it takes to protect themselves and break out of the
sordid conditions and violence this American ruling class has placed them in.

Since the 1980s public schools have been singled out for attacks by the American
ruling class. Teachers have been slandered as lazy, underworked and over paid. The
program, "No Child Left Behind," is a sordid title for a long-term assault on
public education leaving children behind in the claws of for-profit charter
schools. Standardized testing has sapped the creative ways teachers had for making
their classes fun and inspiring places to learn.

Coinciding with the assault on public schools has been the driving down of working
middle-class wages and benefits, requiring both parents to work. Now add to the mix
the neurotic fascination with weapons and violence-Hollywood making millions off
these frenetic films blazing with gunfire. A youth becomes a loner-loser acquiring
an accessible weapon in which he can exact revenge on his hated school and peers-
the deranged view of the school as a target of weaklings worthy of massacre.

When students mobilize in large numbers and gain victories in popular opinion and
dignity on the street, they will stand as a force and not be sitting ducks. Perhaps
the mentally ill will not see them as such an easy target to vent their rage.
Marjory Stoneman students' mobilization for gun control is a fight waged against
social decay. The students don't want schools to be turned into prisons with armed
guards and teachers. They resisted the transparent plastic backpack decree as both
genders stuffed their packs with feminine sanitary products. Without compromise or
hesitation we need to support the American student mobilization against high
capacity magazine pistols and rifles.

The Democrats and Republicans will betray these youth with bad compromises and urge
them to accept this violent status quo. As students mobilize for their survival,
they will set out on bold paths. They will listen to long buried radical points of
view, long smothered by seemingly invincible American capitalist prosperity. This
movement could also wither and die since mass movement energy can get diverted or
burn out.

The bloody Second Amendment unified the original 13 colonies, whose very existence
depended on paramilitary formations of men to seize Native lands and keep the
slaves from rising up. Conquest and slavery is what inspired the Second Amendment.
This nation is built upon the extermination of the Native peoples. Much of U.S.
wealth was accumulated by the unpaid labor stolen from Black slaves by Southern
planters. As Zionist Israel seized rolling stock and lands, driving the inhabitants
from their homes into refugee camps, the United States, desensitized by the
protestant teachings of John Calvin, was founded by violent colonists who believed
they were God's chosen to vanquish the Indians, predestined for eternal damnation.

Supporting the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas students' fight for an end to high
capacity magazines and rifles vs. the Second Amendment fanatics, really shouldn't
present a difficult choice. Let's take a class struggle analysis of individuals
attracted to gun activism.

When the Second Amendment partisans assemble, what are their points of contention?
We have read where armed groups of self-appointed militia have gone into the U.S.
Southwest desert to harass migrants with their arms. In 2009 you had a spate of
armed demonstrators showing up around rallies where Obama was speaking. Second
Amendment partisans will rally with weapons in hand when it is time to put away a
Confederate General's statue. A take away I got from reading Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's
book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, is that gun liberty
takes the place of lost economic opportunities. Rather than focusing on the
accumulation of huge concentrations of wealth in the hands of the few-refuge is
taken in the Second Amendment and gun ownership. With the embracing of gun liberty
people make common cause with the Koch Brothers, the very capitalists driving down
living standards for the majority of U.S. Citizens.

An anti-capitalist movement uniting people into what would eventually be a labor-


lead socialist party is the only way we can combat the civil decay imposed on us by
this capitalist economy.

The American ruling class uses the Democratic and Republican Parties to pacify the
people and most importantly to have their interests protected. The two-party system
is coming to an end. There is, once again, a prevailing need for people to mobilize
for their very survival. We can't let the Democratic Party make a comeback as some
kind of way to restore a balance. It shares as much if not more to blame for the
way things are today.

Street mobilizations, committed to keeping their independence from the two-party


system will be our best chance to weather these manifestations of social rot until
we win a majority to our side. As the economy tumbles, our environment is
destroyed, our civil rights curtailed and when the economy collapses to the point
we can't feed ourselves, an assembled, uncompromising, educated American citizenry
pining for civility and economic equality will be an awesome power for this ruling
class to contend with.

I am convinced that Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school students kicked off the
renewed struggle for a just society. Their aspirations will be realized in small
victories until the U.S. working class and their allies begin the revolutionary
struggle of building a better society based on peace and equality in all aspects of
a good life.

-Brian Schwartz
February 2002 � Vol 2, No. 2 �

From the Arsenal of Marxism:

Theses on the American Revolution


(October 1946)

By James P. Cannon

Introduction

Unlike his two most influential Marxist teachers and comrades�V. I. Lenin and Leon
Trotsky�James Patrick Cannon�s name is recognized by few among the general
population. But he is well known and even more highly respected by some of the most
serious participants in the historic workers� struggle for world socialism. Cannon
stands out ahead of all other American Marxists because of the contributions he
made to the revolutionary workers� movement. The most important of which was his
role in helping to apply the organizational principles that served the Russian
Bolsheviks so well in their revolution, to the building of a section of a world
revolutionary workers� party under American conditions.

Born on February 11, 1890 to an Irish working class family in Rosedale, Kansas,
Cannon was won to socialism by his father, an Irish Republican who had embraced
socialism soon after Eugene V. Debs, a highly respected railroad union leader, had
joined the Socialist Party.

James P. Cannon joined the Socialist Party in 1908 at the age of 18. He joined the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1911 when he was 21. He went on to become
a founding leader of the American Communist Party until his expulsion in 1928.

Sent by the American section of the Third, or Communist, International to serve as


a delegate to its World Congress that year, Cannon came into possession of a
document, �The Draft Program of the Communist International: A criticism of
Fundamentals,� introduced by Leon Trotsky who was at the time the leader of the
Left Opposition. This document represented the critical views of a faction in the
Soviet Communist party formed to fight against the Stalin-led majority faction�s
break from the fundamental principles that had been advanced and defended by Lenin
and Trotsky. (The two together had been the main leaders of the Bolshevik Party and
the Russian Socialist Revolution of October 1917.)

But a short time after Lenin died in January 1924, Stalin abandoned the struggle
for a world socialist society and sought, instead, an accommodation with world
imperialism based on the capitalist status quo. Trotsky explained that Stalin�s
theory of �Socialism in one Country,� was really a rationalization for putting the
interests of the Soviet bureaucracy ahead of the world revolution.

Why Cannon wrote the Theses

This month�s selection for the Arsenal of Marxism is Cannon�s �Theses on the
American Revolution.� It should be obvious from the title that this resolution
which had been adopted by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at its 1946 National
Convention was not written to serve as a conjunctural document analyzing past
policies and outlining the line of march for the two year period following that
convention. Rather it was intended to reaffirm the fundamental principles of the
SWP and of revolutionary Marxism. Such a restatement of its basic program was made
necessary because the relative �prosperity� that was a product of the war
economy�which actually began with the outbreak of World War II in September
1939�had begun to adversely affect the consciousness of the workers� vanguard.

In a subsequent speech to the party, Cannon had noted that by 1941 the working-
class militants that had been in the vanguard of the fighting union movement of the
1930s was being conservatized by the combined effects of two big changes in the
objective world. First and most important was the effect of living standards they
had won in battle that were higher than they had been before the Great Depression
brought mass living standards crashing down after the stock market collapsed in
1929. Thus, to put a complex process concisely, though somewhat over-simplified,
from hungry fighters with nothing to lose, the best militants, now with seniority
protecting their economic security, had much more to lose than their chains.

And the second big change was the McCarthyite red-baiting witch hunt instigated by
the U.S.-led world capitalist class in 1946. The opening gun of what became an
effective assault on the left wing of the American trade union movement and the
workers� movement generally was fired by Great Britain�s war-time prime minister
Winston Churchill in his infamous �Iron-Curtain� speech delivered in Fulton,
Missouri in 1946. That was also the opening gun of the not-so-cold Cold War.

But what was most destructive was the role played by the labor bureaucracy which
saw the witch hunt as an opportunity to rid themselves of the most militant wing of
the union movement. While denouncing the Taft-Hartley Act as a �slave-labor�
law�which it indeed would be, when and if it could be fully implemented�the labor
bureaucracy with few exceptions embraced its key provisions as a weapon to be
wielded against their left-wing critics inside the unions.

Cannon had also explained the impact on American workers of a similarly treasonous
role being played at the time by labor and socialist bureaucrats in Europe and
Asia. Thus, the revolutionary upsurge that began in Italy and France toward the end
of the second imperialist World War had by 1946 shown much evidence that the post
war revolutionary upsurge would most likely be defeated by the treachery of the
reformist Social Democracy and the Stalinized Communist Parties.

These developments led Cannon to the conclusion that it was necessary to reaffirm
the fundamental principles of revolutionary proletarian leadership�while the memory
of its efficacy was still fresh in the minds of the vanguard of America�s class
struggle fighters. That is, it was necessary to rearm the workers� movement for the
difficult times that had just begun for revolutionary socialism.

Neither Cannon nor anyone else had any idea, however, that the highly unfavorable
period that he and many others had anticipated would last as long as it did. There
are, of course, always solutions. But some solutions are very costly as was the one
that ended the Great Depression�World War II.

And while the unprecedented prolonged expansion of capitalism for some 60 years may
have been entirely without malignant side-effects for the capitalists in the
advanced industrial countries, it has resulted in the most severe decline in living
conditions of the long-suffering billions of human beings in the super-exploited
and oppressed nations of the colonial world.

Moreover, the price the world will be made to pay for this 60-year credit-driven,
lop-sided global false �prosperity� is a Himalayan-sized debt that will result in a
crisis that will make the Great Depression look like the good old days. This
solution, based on the freeing of capitalist economy from the dictatorship of gold
can only end with the bankruptcy of the global capitalist monetary system and
economic collapse.

� By the editors

Theses on the American Revolution

This resolution, which constituted the SWP�s basic programmatic document of the
postwar period, was completed by Cannon at the beginning of October, 1946. It was
adopted by the Twelfth National Convention of the SWP in November 1946. The text is
from the pamphlet The Coming American Revolution (New York: Pioneer Publishers,
April 1947).

The United States, the most powerful capitalist country in history, is a component
part of the world capitalist system and is subject to the same general laws. It
suffers from the same incurable diseases and is destined to share the same fate.
The overwhelming preponderance of American imperialism does not exempt it from the
decay of world capitalism, but on the contrary, acts to involve it ever more
deeply, inextricably, and hopelessly. U. S. capitalism can no more escape from the
revolutionary consequences of world capitalist decay than the older European
capitalist powers. The blind alley in which world capitalism has arrived, and the
U.S. with it, excludes a new organic era of capitalist stabilization. The dominant
world position of American imperialism now accentuates and aggravates the death
agony of capitalism as a whole.

II

American imperialism emerged victorious from the Second World War, not merely over
its German and Japanese rivals, but also over its �democratic� allies, especially
Great Britain. Today Wall Street unquestionably is the dominant world imperialist
center. Precisely because it has issued from the war vastly strengthened in
relation to all its capitalist rivals, U.S. imperialism seems indomitable. So
overpowering in all fields�diplomatic, military, commercial, financial, and
industrial�is Wall Street�s preponderance that consolidation of the world hegemony
seems to be within easy reach. Wall Street hopes to inaugurate the so-called
American Century.

In reality, the American ruling class faces more insurmountable obstacles in


�organizing the world� than confronted the German bourgeoisie in its repeated and
abortive attempts to attain a much more modest goal, namely: �organizing Europe.�

The meteoric rise of U.S. imperialism to world supremacy comes too late. Moreover,
American imperialism rests increasingly on the foundations of world economy, in
sharp contrast to the situation prevailing before the First World War, when it
rested primarily on the internal market�the source of its previous successes and
equilibrium. But the world foundation is today shot through with insoluble
contradictions; it suffers from chronic dislocations and is mined with
revolutionary powder kegs.

American capitalism, hitherto only partially involved in the death agony of


capitalism as a world system, is henceforth subject to the full and direct impact
of all the forces and contradictions that have debilitated the old capitalist
countries of Europe.
The economic prerequisites for the socialist revolution are fully matured in the
U.S. The political premises are likewise far more advanced than might appear on the
surface.

III

The U.S. emerged from the Second World War, just as it did in 1918, as the
strongest part of the capitalist world. But here ends the resemblance in the impact
and consequences of the two wars upon the country�s economic life. For in other
major aspects the situation has in the meantime drastically altered.

In 1914-18 continental Europe was the main theater of war, the rest of the world,
especially the colonial countries, was left virtually untouched by the hostilities.
Thus, not only sections of continental Europe and England but the main framework of
the world market itself remained intact. With all its European competitors
embroiled in the war, the way was left clear for American capitalist to capture
markets.

More than this, during the First World War capitalist Europe itself became a vast
market for American industry and agriculture. The American bourgeoisie drained
Europe of her accumulated wealth of centuries and supplanted their Old World rivals
in the world market. This enabled the ruling class to convert the U.S. from a
debtor into the world�s banker and creditor, and simultaneously to expand both the
heavy (capital goods) and the light (consumer goods) industries. Subsequently this
wartime expansion permitted the fullest possible development of this country�s
domestic market. Finally, not merely did the American bourgeoisie make vast profits
from the war but the country as a whole emerged much richer. The relatively cheap
price of imperialist participation in World War I (only a few-score billion
dollars) was covered many times over by the accruing economic gains.

Profoundly different in its effects is the Second World War. This time only the
Western Hemisphere has been left untouched militarily. The Far East, the main prize
of the war, has been subjected to a devastation second only to that suffered by
Germany and Eastern Europe. Continental Europe as well as England have been
bankrupted by the war. The World market has been completely disrupted. This
culminated the process of shrinking, splintering, and undermining that went on in
the interval between the two wars (the withdrawal of one-sixth of the world�the
USSR�from the capitalist orbit, the debasement of currency systems, the barter
methods of Hitlerite Germany, Japan�s inroads on Asiatic and Latin American
markets, England�s Empire Preference System2, etc., etc.).

Europe, which defaulted on all its prior war and postwar debts to the U.S., this
time served not as an exhaustible and highly profitable market, but as a gigantic
drain upon the wealth and resources of this country in the shape of lend-lease,3
overall conversion of American economy for wartime production, huge mobilization of
manpower, large-scale casualties, and so on.

With regard to the internal market, the latter, instead of expanding organically as
in 1914-18, experienced in the course of the Second World War only an artificial
revival based on war expenditures.

While the bourgeoisie has been fabulously enriched, the country as a whole has
become poorer; the astronomic costs of the war will never be recouped.

In sum, the major factors that once served to foster and fortify American
capitalism either no longer exist or are turning into their opposites.

IV
The prosperity that followed the First World War, which was hailed as a new
capitalist era refuting all Marxist prognostications, ended in an economic
catastrophe. But even this short-lived prosperity of the twenties was based on a
combination of circumstances which cannot and will not recur again. In addition to
the factors already listed, it is necessary to stress: (1) that American capitalism
had a virgin continent to exploit; (2) that up to a point it had been able to
maintain a certain balance between industry and agriculture; and (3) that the main
base of capitalist expansion had been its internal market. So long as these three
conditions existed�although they were already being undermined�it was possible for
U.S. capitalism to maintain a relative stability.

The boom in the twenties nourished the myth of the permanent stability of American
capitalism, giving rise to pompous and hollow theories of a �new capitalism,�
�American exceptionalism,� the �American dream,� and so forth and so on. The
illusions about the possibilities and future of American capitalism were spread by
the reformists and all other apologists for the ruling class not only at home but
abroad. �Americanism� was the gospel of the misleaders of the European and American
working class

What actually happened in the course of the fabulous prosperity of the twenties was
that under these most favorable conditions, all the premises for an unparalleled
economic catastrophe were prepared. Out of it came a chronic crisis of American
agriculture. Out of it came a monstrous concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer
hands. Correspondingly, the rest of the population became relatively poorer. Thus,
while in the decade of 1920-30, industrial productivity increased by 50 percent,
wages rose only 30 percent. The workers were able to buy�in
prosperity�proportionately less than before.

The relative impoverishment of the American people is likewise mirrored in national


wealth statistics. By 1928 the workers� share of the national wealth had dropped to
4.7 percent, while the farmers retained only 15.4 percent. At the same time, the
bourgeoisie�s share of the national wealth had risen to 79.9 percent, with most of
it falling into the hands of the Sixty Families4 and their retainers.

The distribution of national income likewise expressed this monstrous


disproportion. In 1929, at the peak of prosperity, 36,000 families had the same
income as 11 million �lower bracket� families.

This concentration of wealth was a cardinal factor in limiting the absorbing


capacity of the internal market. Compensating external outlets for agriculture and
industry could not be found in a constricting world market.

Moreover, the need to export raw materials and agricultural products tended to
further unbalance American foreign trade. This inescapably led to a further
dislocation of the world market, whose participants were debtor countries,
themselves in need of selling more than they bought in order to cover payments on
their debts, largely owed to the U.S.

While appearing and functioning in the role of stabilizers of capitalism, the


American imperialists were thus its greatest disrupters both at home and abroad.
The U.S. turned out to be the main source of world instability, the prime
aggravator of imperialist contradictions.

In the interim between the two wars this manifested itself most graphically in the
fact that all economic convulsions began in the Republic of the Dollar, the home of
�rugged individualism.� This was the case with the first postwar crisis of 1920-21;
this was repeated eight years later when the disproportion between agriculture and
industry reached the breaking point and when the internal market had become
saturated owing to the impoverishment of the people at one pole and the
aggrandizement of the monopolists at the other. The Great American Boom exploded in
a crisis which shattered the economic foundations of all capitalist countries.

Cont in Par

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