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The Communist Party and its allies played an important role in the United States labor movement, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, but never succeeded, with rare exceptions, either in bringing the labor movement around to its agenda of fighting for socialism and full workers' control over industry, or in converting their influence in any particular union into membership gains for the Party. The CP has had only negligible influence in labor since its supporters' defeat in internal union political battles in the aftermath of World War II and the CIO's expulsion of the unions in which they held the most influence in 1950. After the expulsion of the Communists, organized labor in the United States began a steady decline. Historians disagree why the union movement never formed a labor party and why American workers have never embraced socialist parties in any numbers in the last ninety years. Some have argued that a strain of American exceptionalism made U.S. workers resistant to parties that emphasized class struggle; others have attributed the left's failure to its own successes in building strong unions, but at the cost of downplaying its own political and social agendas for the sake of unity or short-term gains. Others take just the opposite position: that the left lost its power to lead the labor movement by its ideological zig-zags. The CP's history within the labor movement can support all of these theses. ==The CPUSA's founding and early years== (詳細はSocialist Party of America when it refused to join the Comintern. The original core of the CP believed that the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia meant that the revolution was at hand in the West as well. The CP's initial attitude towards unions reflected that millenarian view. At the time of its founding, according to a leader of the party, "it would have been difficult to gather a half dozen delegates who knew anything about the trade union movement." The Party also became a largely clandestine organization during the immediate post-war years, as the Palmer Raids led to the arrest and deportation of thousands of Party members. The CP at that time looked on the American Federation of Labor as an enemy to be destroyed in order to eliminate the temptations of reformism rather than revolution. They also looked down on most trade union activities as insufficiently revolutionary: even though the labor movement was engaged in a great wave of strikes in 1919, including a general strike in Seattle, Washington, the Party's members had no role in them. Instead they urged workers to put aside their short-term economic goals and to concentrate on overthrowing the state. The Profintern, or "Red International of Labor Unions," forced the CP to change in 1921, when it directed U.S. communists to work within the AFL in order to make it a revolutionary body – what an earlier generation of SP members referred to as "boring from within." In order to accomplish this, the Profintern recognized the Trade Union Educational League, an organization founded by William Z. Foster, as its U.S. affiliate. Foster had been, prior to his agreement to bring the TUEL under the wing of the CP, a syndicalist, who believed that workers would seize power through workers' organizations, such as unions, rather than through political organizations, such as a communist party. He had led the AFL's failed 1919 strike in the steel industry and had established particularly close relations then with John Fitzpatrick, the President of the Chicago Federation of Labor. TUEL functioned within existing unions, trying to organize support for industrial unionism, a labor party, organizing the unorganized and the Soviet Union. TUEL strove to create alliances with leaders who shared some of its agenda, while trying to build a base for left unionism at the local level. After some organizational successes, however, TUEL managed to alienate Fitzpatrick, leaving them without major allies when the AFL denounced TUEL as a "dual union" and expelled TUEL members in 1924. The CPUSA lost more allies when, under orders from the Comintern, it withdrew its previous enthusiastic support for the Progressive Party candidacy of Robert La Follette, Sr. for President in 1924. The CP, on the other hand, had some short-lived successes in the labor movement without the TUEL's help. The CP had broad support in the early 1920s among the radical, largely immigrant, garment workers in New York City. A number of CP members won leadership positions in three major International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) locals in New York City in 1924 and offices in other locals in Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. They held on to those offices despite the attempts by the Socialist leadership of the ILGWU to oust them. But in 1926 the left leadership in New York forfeited everything they had when they lost a strike of 40,000 cloakmakers. The local union leadership lost the strike in large part because of the internal factionalism within the CP: when the union had the opportunity to settle on terms that were less than what the union had demanded, the union's leaders went to the CP for approval of the deal. But the Party's fraction within the union was reluctant to accept it, afraid that this would open them up to charges of softness in intra-Party factional warfare. The strike dragged on another few months, at which point the locals accepted an inferior agreement. That gave the International union the opportunity it needed: the Socialist leadership of the ILGWU took over the exhausted locals after they settled and their supporters were too dispirited to resist. While the CP retained a strong base of support in the smaller Fur Workers Union, it never recovered from its defeat in the much larger garment industry; on the contrary, the ILGWU, led by David Dubinsky for the next forty years, remained resolutely anti-communist thereafter. The TUEL itself changed for brief period into the dual union that the AFL had accused it of being. The TUEL led a strike of woolen industry workers in Passaic, New Jersey in 1926 — until, that is, the Comintern instructed the Party later that year to abandon any independent unions it had formed on the ground that these represented ultra-left adventurism. The strike, which would probably have been lost in any case, ended six months later in defeat after the AFL's United Textile Workers took over leadership of the strike. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Communists in the United States Labor Movement (1919–37)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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