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We do not recommend this book except to those most dedicated to reading background material, so we will summarize what we would like to talk about instead.
Overall, there is something very uncanny and vexing about Foster for MIM, both his persynality and his showing on major political issues. Most of what is vexing about Foster is his politics in a time of rapid transitions. The United $tates was not only becoming an exporter of capital in Foster's lifetime, but the top one. Foster himself pointed out that the united $tates went through two world wars and a depression in a single generation. Today when MIM is in a relatively stable class structure, it can be hard to adjust to reading about a time when millions of proletarians arrived on u.$. shores each year and then arranged the transition to white petty-bourgeois life.
What no one has suggested, but appears as possibility after consideration of this book is that Foster influenced Lenin and the early Comintern, perhaps more than he knew.(p. 162) The appearance of Marxism-Leninism as something new and the transitions going on in the united $tates created a confused appearance, but John Reed, Foster and Harry Haywood were the interesting Amerikans of the day. Later came Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois.
Johanningsmeier tells us that Lenin won Foster over with "Left- Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder," (p. 161) because Foster was also for working inside the trade unions, and not forming new ones like the IWW. Foster could have stayed in the united $tates and made himself a trade union career, but he took up following Lenin.
Foster was not actually a central actor in the initial disputes over Comintern line for England and the united $tates; even though he received the title of leader. That is why Foster's influence via Lenin may be underestimated, because against the IWW and others, Foster's line on trade unions prevailed while Lenin was alive. Foster had had the experience of organizing the huge 1919 steel strike. It seems to this reviewer that the comrades in the Comintern used Foster as an important piece of information about the world. The Comintern saw Foster probably as an unreliably Marxist loner, a major faction as "rightist" and the other major faction of Amerikan communists as worse than rightist. (For example, in 1929, the majority faction that won party elections ended up getting expelled and its leaders becoming active anti-communists.) In that context, un-Marxist Foster was the best. The original Communist Party of America wrote off the AFL unions entirely as "enemy" and endorsed the IWW.(p. 158) It was Foster who provided the Comintern a case of someone more in line with Lenin's thinking. Foster won battles in the Comintern on work in the trade unions, recalling Pepper to the Comintern (p. 209) and denouncing Browderism.
The teens and early 1920s were a period of flux though, which is another vexing part of Foster who came from diverse ideological roots including Irish rebellion, bohemianism and the IWW. Prior to that and in support of J. Sakai's thesis, Foster even owned a 320 acre farm at one point.(p. 32)
The two great surprises in the book both concerned Dimitroff. Although Foster ended up on the winning side of Comintern battles, in 1938 Dimitroff criticized Foster for not reaching out to the "petty-bourgeois masses," as Dimitroff called them.(p. xvi) We can almost see Dimitroff denouncing MIM and previous Comintern spokespersyn Dutt with that. Browder was Dimitroff's favorite. In 1938, Browder returned the favor by calling Dimitroff's interventions in u.$. politics as valuable as the "air we breathe" (p. xvi) in the united $tates. In defense of Dimitroff, we will point out that in the World War II period the French, British and Amerikan petty- bourgeoisie saw their share of super-profits under threat from Japanese and German imperialism--to the point of occupation. That's a special inter-imperialist war-time consideration and to a lesser extent it explains why European Union public opinion is mildly opposed to the u.$. global rampage at the moment. Again, the European petty-bourgeoisie knows that their imperialist partners are in competition with the u.$. imperialists. Today there is no socialist bloc to defend, so the most we can do is take advantage of the European petty-bourgeois support for the anti-war movement. There is not a terribly solid reason to lean on the European petty-bourgeoisie except tactically and there is absolutely no reason to lean to one side of intra-bourgeois conflict inside u.$. borders.
The next shocking fact that this reviewer had forgotten is that after Stalin dissolved the Comintern, Browder and Foster cabled Dimitroff one last time in 1944 regarding their internal conflicts. Dimitroff took Browder's side in dissolving the Communist Party and predicting an end to class struggle in the united $tates.(p. 300) A year later, the Soviet Union reversed course and the Amerikans themselves purged Browder for revisionism in 1946.(p. 306) On the other hand, the Soviets allowed Browder to visit after being purged.(p. 307) It was a few years before Browder ceased being any use to the Soviet Union. Perhaps Soviet leaders were thinking that if the Amerikan imperialists changed course toward a more friendly policy, they would have supported putting Browder back in the party leadership. In any case, the Duclos criticism of Browderism either implicates Dimitroff or we have to adopt a very cynical view of anti-revisionist campaigns as highly tied up with Soviet diplomacy. MIM sees an implication of Dimitroff as a revisionist and not diplomacy, because the reasons that Browder gave were so thorough and worked out. They could have dissolved the Communist Party and helped out in some New Deal aspects without going to the extent that Browder did. In other words, they could have impressed FDR diplomatically with a lot less.
The most pleasant surprise of the book was to hear that Foster's last political act before dying was to praise Mao to Khruschev's face after conflicts had already broken out over Stalin.(p. 350) Had Foster lived just another two years and managed to write a few more articles, the history of the CPU$A might have been a lot different the last 40 years. Mao and Foster exchanged letters and after Foster died, the Chinese called on Amerikans to adopt his anti-revisionist course.
While the party was receiving its funding from the Soviet Union, Foster was saying that it was not healthy to follow the Soviet Union blindly. Yet that is what the people of the CPU$A did. To a man, the executive branch of the CP supported Browder on his Tehran theses dissolving the struggle and spreading class conciliation globally. Though the party knew that Browder did not necessarily have Moscow's support on his Tehran-related revisionism, the party backed him almost unanimously. There was only Sam Darcy against him. They even threatened Foster. Then to a man, they all abandoned Browder after criticism via Duclos.
On the one hand, as Almond pointed out, in that atmosphere of the Amerikan CP at that time, the great attraction to people was that comrades did not have to know theory, just work hard for the party and draw a salary and benefits. The highest ranking leaders read the classic works of Marxism-Leninism, but they did not have to claim to be able to apply it creatively. After Browderism took over the party and Foster then reversed its course, Foster took to emphasizing theory above everything else as a weak point of the party historically.
So we have a chicken and egg problem: was the party weak in theory because it was a bought and paid for bureaucracy working on anything but theory or was it incapable of theory by nature and thereby needing help from abroad? Ironically, a group of Bay Area trade unionists who wrote the longest book on this subject titled Roots of Revisionism admit that the party had no theoretical capability and yet they wanted an increase in the struggle against non-proletarian backgrounds in the party, something Foster was always doing as well.
From time to time, we hear Euro-Amerikan demagogues saying the uneducated white worker is the road forward for party leadership. The problem with that is that the party becomes something of a labor bureaucracy itself and no one knows what direction it should go in. The professional aspect of the party paid for by Moscow became tangled up with the need to have a theory-producing party.
Browderism was a kind of experiment that proved that the Amerikan proletariat had no revolutionary thrust of its own. Browder was right that he finally achieved being able to come up with his own theory, but the question is what kind of theory and why everyone in the party supported it. When 38 out of 40 supported Browder to dissolve the party, preach peace with imperialism, go through New Dealist procedures for resolving class conflict and purge one dissenter, we learned how an Amerikan labor bureaucracy would behave under the best possible circumstances.
The Bay Area trade unionists who wrote Roots of Revisionism published by Revolutionary Road Publications in 1979 correctly targeted Dimitroff and they knew that Dimitroff signed off on the worst features of Browderism in 1944 just as Amerikans were finally preparing to fight in Europe. (See page 409 of that book.) This reviewer had forgotten that bit of history.
At the same time, the Bay Area trade unionists backed Dimitroff's distinction between fascism and bourgeois democracy, not just for the time period of the 7th Congress, but in principle and for 1979. Here, MIM gets off the boat, because the concrete situation has changed. As the vote on the EU in France just proved, the "social-fascism" thesis is entirely justified today even more than in the early 1930s. There is a white nationalist movement with a right-wing and a left-wing, with both wings clamoring for parasitism. When there is a genuinely exploited proletariat, it may come under social-democratic illusions debating how to accomplish change, and in that circumstance we should not confuse social-democratic rank-and-file workers with fascists. Where there is no exploited proletariat, there is only social-democratic parasitism and fascist parasitism united in a white nationalist movement.
Bukharin derided the Amerikans across-the-board. Trotsky also said he could not see any direction even to Foster.(p. 272) So maybe Marxism-Leninism was as foreign to the united $tates as it was to China. Just as Mao was considering himself his own theorist not needing the Comintern, Browder also came to believe that he could come up with line independently of Moscow--but what a difference. The Comintern documents are full of records which say Foster has no knowledge of Marxism. On the other hand, the Comintern never found anyone consistently better than Foster. The Comintern tried Ruthenberg, Lovestone, Pepper and Browder. It's always relative to other people around that Foster looks good. So despite whatever misgivings the Comintern had, Foster was always there at crucial moments.
In 1925, Foster lost a fight with the Comintern over supporting a Labor Party instead of just trade unionism.(p. 221) Shortly after, the Comintern briefly supported the Ruthenberg group over Foster for leadership.(p. 222) Later during the FDR period, Foster supported an independent party, but the Comintern then wanted support for FDR.(p. 279) It's an example of the many twists and turns.
The one big issue that Foster brought to the Comintern and lost on was called "American exceptionalism." (p. 5) In that argument, Amerikan imperialism was seen as totally unique among imperialisms. Concretely, Foster observed that the French worker struggle was light-years ahead of the Amerikan one and this prompted his Amerikan exceptionalism. On the other hand, Foster was going to turn out to be correct about imperialism in general, not the united $tates: the most advanced countries do not have the most advanced labor movements.(p. 178) So while his reasons were wrong, Foster ended up being correct before the Comintern realized its own errors of Eurocentrism.
Some aspects of Foster's persynality:
*was a social loner (p.
244) who contrary to Lenin saw children and family as a
distraction from duty (p. 76)
*lived near Yankee stadium and went
to games (p. 322)
*lived with his closest and life-long friend
Esther Abramowitz who appeared to believe in "free love" when they met in a
"free love" friendly community in Washington state.
(Johanningsmeier claims Foster managed a triangle with Esther and
a friend of his, though we're not convinced that Johanningsmeier
knew the truth about that.)
*deferred on whether he should be the
leader of the party.(p. 230)
The greatest defect in Foster's career that Johanningsmeier knew of was that he sold U.S. Government "Liberty Bonds" during World War I. Johanningsmeier does not tell us this was witnessed by anyone. Foster made the claim while on criminal trial and in front of a Senate investigation.(p. 84) Foster also wrote off the anti-war struggle in order to push forward trade union demands during World War I, with the justification that the federal government was imprisoning everyone suspected of anti-war activism. At the same time, Foster was active especially in his early years in defending alleged bombers and putting forward a theory of sabotage for worker struggle.
Foster represented a kind of unionism that has long since disappeared inside u.$. borders. It centered on the white male; although Foster was open to Blacks, migrants and wimmin compared with others of his day. The difference with today is that the union struggle was more popular and had much more violent backing, because the employers reacted with violence including assassinations.(p. 128) The 1919 strikes have earned the label "warfare," because they really were class warfare, not just figuratively: "22 percent of the nation's work force, had fought their employers in thousands of strikes and lockouts."(p. 112)
In Foster's day, there was a large influence of the productive sector even among whites. So although Foster himself had 320 acres of land at one point, it is not the slam dunk it is today to say there was no white proletariat. According to Johanningsmeier, even on his farm, Foster was doing physical labor as he did much of his life. On the other hand, if we exclude the immigrant white worker of the first generation from Europe and count only Amerikan-born-and-raised workers, even in the steel strike of 1919 there was already evidence that these were the people who dishonored the strike. Naturally the employers and government took advantage of the foreign-born nature of much of radicalism in Foster's heyday.
The standard history runs that when the CPU$A had the highest level of discipline and based itself in the foreign language associations, it was "left sectarian." Let's just say there was a lack of concrete proof at that time that Sakai and Edwards were going to be correct. Foster was convinced that the trade union struggle was inherently revolutionary. We have to admit that Lenin was too. Had they managed to win over enough people early enough, there was a basis for a revolutionary struggle among Blacks, other oppressed nationalities and immigrant whites. However, time was against them and the very success of the trade union struggle actually helped U.$. imperialism to adjust to its new top-dog status. In other words, Foster's central strategic belief was wrong: there was an opening for revolutionary trade unionism only for a brief time. Had the United $tates lost World War I and then gone on to a depression, then Foster's window would have been open wider.
At the end of his career Foster had to stress over and over again that workers were much richer as a reason for the CPU$A's loss of support. Others blamed his leadership. Foster also came up with his Amerikan exceptionalist arguments again, thus proving he still did not reason on an international plane. Nonetheless, once again, it is absolutely vital to choose what portion of blame should go on Foster/Stalin and what portion on the incorrect strategic belief regarding the labor aristocracy. The proof of MIM's line is that the dissidents opposing Foster's line and Stalin ended up being trash, including active anti-communists, not just red-friendly social-democrats. Had MIM's line been wrong and had there been a real material basis for the common trade unionist line, then some opposition to Foster should have been correct in the CPU$A.
We should note that within that, somehow New York City produced the bulk of Liberal rot. Foster faced New York dissidents at two turning points (1920s, p. 235, 1950s, p. 343) and later, Gus Hall managed to reproduce the same state of affairs when New Yorkers ran off to form the Committees of Correspondence. We can only guess that New York City's superficial success in integrating the "races" in empire and its status as having the most advanced welfare-state is the underlying social reason in addition to New York City's being the favorite spot of artists. These people do not understand the sources of surplus-value holding New York City together and how it is that the New York welfare state has influenced their politics.
Johanningsmeier gives short shrift to two campaigns against white chauvinism in the party. These again are seen as just left sectarian hysteria.(p. 328) Johanningsmeier claims Foster did not really support the second campaign. Johanningsmeier loses a lot of credibility with us considering that at the time Jim Crow laws and attitudes were common.
We have to agree with Sakai that most of the attention to Foster is wrapped up with the left-wing of white nationalism. His good points have been lost and his bad ones made into line. Johanningsmeier leaves out the racial context of strike-breaking and Foster's call to "exterminate" strike-breakers. Surely from Foster's point of view, he was always ruthlessly tactical, and not a man of the overall picture and theory until late in life. Later he also developed how the unproductive sector would be "'exterminated'" as "'socially useless elements'"--including "'wholesalers, jobbers. . . the entire crew of 'middlemen,' real estate sharks, stock brokers, prohibition agents, bootleggers, advertising specialists, traveling salesmen, lawyers, who rafts of government bureaucrats, police, clericals'" and more.(p. 264) He also took the correct line as "art as a weapon,"(p. 283) with there being no apolitical art. Throughout his life he also took a strong stand against utopianism, sentimental socialism, delusions about the power of their position as communists and destructive criticism by people with no plans of their own,nihilism.(p. 146) He did not want an amorphous party in the name of numbers and he criticized those "in a dream world" who thought it possible.(p. 342)
Given his youth in the productive sector it was probably too much to ask that Foster connect his own defense of his own line on how Amerikans were getting richer to a line saying that his old line was now serving a labor aristocracy. In the 1950s he came out with the rationale of working inside the Democratic Party, because the "workers" were there.(p. 334) That's an example of something the CPU$A kept while it threw out his support for Mao.
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