I take the liberty of reposting excerpts of it below:
Labor solidarity, lacking a strong tradition due to American heritage of individualism, was impeded further by racial, ethnic, linguistic and religious differences among workers and specially by the prejudices harbored by native-born American workers against blacks and new immigrants.
In 1865, William H. Sylvis organized the National Labor Union which claimed a membership of 600,000 by 1868, but disbanded within 4 years due external pressure and internal dispute over the correctness of pushing for political reforms without sufficient sense for realism.
A year later, in 1869, Uriah Stephens organized the Knights of Labor (KOL), with agrarian idealism and Jacksonian individualism under the slogan: "Every man his own master and employer". Membership was universal, excluding only lawyers, bankers, stockbrokers, liquor dealers, and professional gamblers. It sought to achieve its goal by organizing cooperatives and through legislation rather than conflict with the employing class. Despite being buoyant by a period of rising labor militancy, with a member up to 700,000 by 1886 under the leadership of Terence Powderly, the KOL floundered by failing to support strikes, in preference for producer's cooperatives that eventually failed as a result of mismanagement or business hostility.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) was organized in 1881 under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, with salaried professional officials, strict discipline, regular dues and strike funds and insurance.
The Sherman Act was at times used by the court to issue injunctions against strikes based on a "restraint of trade" argument. The Fourteenth Amendment was used to declare labor laws unconstitutional until the 1935 Wagner Act which legalized the right to collective bargaining.
Eugene Debs, the Railway Union leader, emerged from a 6-month prison term for contempt of court, became the leader of the Socialist Party, but received little labor support even for its mild program of peaceful and democratic methods.
The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in 1893 with one million members, known as "Wobblies", organized by William D. Haywood, a mine workers leader. It offered a radical program calling for the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalistic system. It was crushed during the wave of anti radical hysteria following WWI.
Theodore Roosevelt, defender of the principle of government supremacy over business, and charismatic politician of the Progressive Movement, began his trust-busting campaign in 1902, in preparation for his reelection in 1904. The campaign created great popular enthusiasm and matching violent reaction from corporate magnates, but it gave TR a plurality of 2.5 million votes in the 1904 election. Yet in his second term, TR's anti-trust accomplishments were less than impressive. While the trusts were compelled by court decisions to dissolve into component entities, these entities could not be transformed to different ownership, or be compelled to compete with each other. The new components in effect divided up the national market into regional sections with no real competition. The courts further stipulated that only court interpreted "undue" and "unreasonable" restraint of trade was prohibited by the Sherman Act. TR was supported by big business which understood that he was in truth its savior by forcing business to conform to a high standard in order to prevent the growth of revolutionary sentiments. TR himself declared that "we draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth."
Progressive politics was dominated by two populist foci: fight against political corruption of bosses and machines and opposition to monopolies and their exploitation of farmers and workers. It was not a revolutionary movement but a reaffirmation of traditional American ideals of democracy , individual freedom, the rule of law and the protection of private property. Progressives reject class struggle and rely on ethical, humanitarian and religious values.
American attitude toward the proper role of government shifted several times throughout its history. Progressives accept the necessity for government to assume broader regulatory responsibilities and economic functions, along Hamiltonian lines.
With the growth of big business, the emergence of a large working class, and the deterioration of the economic position of farmers, there was a shift between Jeffersonian laissez faire and Hamiltonian big government positions, with conservatives assuming the former and liberals the latter.
Among progressives, there were also two attitudes toward monopolies. One, represented by T. Roosevelt, argued that bigness was an inevitable economic trend and that government regulation over their excess was necessary, while the other, represented by Woodrow Wilson, advocated the prohibition of monopolies, protection of small businesses, and preserving competition.
Robert Marion LaFollete of Wisconsin, was responsible for introducing social science as the argument for reform, by bringing academic experts into policy marking in government. By 1929, monopolistic trends had shifted towards oligopoly in which a few corporations controlled the market by cooperating in maintaining prices through a price leader, while they competed through improvement in quality and services and through advertising.
Many causes had been identified for the crash of 1929 and the subsequent conomic collapse. Aside from the speculative bubble, one fundamental factor was that wages were rising much slower than productivity. Thus an overcapcity in production inevitably resulted. Another factor was the uneven distribution of income that prevented a general rise of consumer purchasing power amid a superficial boom limited to only a small segment of the population. This deficiency of purchasing power was masked by the growth of debt, made possible with the introduction of installment financing which led to a sever credit crunch. The imbalance of a high return on capital had a direct bearing in keeping income low and purchasing power deficient in relation to the growth of savings available for new investment. These conditions are again obvious in the current global economy.
Another factor was the rise in foreign investment from the U.S. which had shifted from a debtor nation prior to WWI to a creditor nation in 1929. America was financing its export by lending foreign buyers the money. The lack of effective government supervision allowed Wall Street bankers to collect profitable commissions by risking the savings American citizens entrusted to them in unsound investments overseas. This condition exists now except that American is a debtor nation that reinvests its debt proceeds overseas, until 1997. Since then, the flight to safety has kept the American bubble going.
Price fixing by major corporations deprived the economy of the necessary flexibility and capacity for quick adjustment in the 1930s. Instead of cutting prices to stimulate consumption and maintaining production, the corporations maintained prices and cut employment, thus further depressing consumer demand for their products. This condition also exists in the post 1997 global economy. The emphasis of the economy in 1930 toward capital goods also made the recovery agonizingly slow because capital goods tended to be the last sector to rebound. In the post 1997 economy, the economy is driven by the potential of new technological systems. Whether this potential will turn out to be real is still validated by events.
The New Deal was a continuation of the Progressive Movement. Its main purpose was to save capitalism by bringing about economic recovery caused by capitalism's inherent contradictions. It sought through government public works programs and deficit financing to stop the process of deflation and unemploymant, the Keynesian approach.
In 1935, a group of militant union leaders, including John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers, Sidlney Hillman of the amalgamated Clothing workers and David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers, noting the failure of the AFL to respond to the demand for industrial unionism, broke away and set up a Committee for industrial Organization (CIO). Under the leadership of Lewis, CIO expanded reapidly and won notable successes in steel and automobiles. By 1940, total union membership reached 9 million, although still only 25% of the work force, but unionis was strongly entrenched in all basic industries.
The New Deal failed in its primary objective of full employment through revival of production. There was no attempt to make structural changes in the pattern of ownership and control of basic economic enterprises. In fact, American corporations were bigger and more concentrated in 1940 than in 1929. It did provide an extensive social safety net program and increased government responsibility in the regulation of commerce.
After WWII, the global economy was distorted by the geopolitics of the Cold War. The militarization of the peace throughout the Cold War hid the classic relationship between low wages and over capacity, because military expenditures soaked up the excess capital. Military Keynesianism keep the economy at a high gowth rate.
Reagan economics and foreign policy essentially spent the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and piled up historic levels of debt for the U.S., deregualted the US economy at the same time decimated unionism in American industry. Now, less than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the classic factors that causes depressions: low wages and high returns on capital, are once again threatening the world's economies. The only thing different this time is that America now is the world's biggest debtor nation, but acts as if she is still the world's biggest creditor nation, with the financial resources to bail out a world mired in deep financial crisis.
Henry
Doug Henwood wrote:
> [The heroic anti-communist left, which just happened to end up with the CIA.]
>
> New York Times Book Review - March 28, 1999
>
> Under the Beds of the Reds
> Of all the liberal anti-Communists, Jay Lovestone may have been the most
> feared.
>
> By PAUL BERMAN
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> A COVERT LIFE
> Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster.
> By Ted Morgan.
> Illustrated. 402 pp. New York:
> Random House. $29.95.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The great untold story of the 20th century, even now, after so many books
> and memoirs, is the story of the heroic anti-Communist left -- the romance
> of leftists and radical trade unionists who recognized that Communism was a
> catastrophic byproduct of their own movement, and who mobilized themselves,
> before anyone else thought to do so, to bring the Communists down. And in
> that great untold tale, surely no one played a stranger or more dramatic
> role than the slightly scary Jay Lovestone, the Machiavelli of
> Machiavellis.
>
> As Ted Morgan tells us in ''A Covert Life,'' Lovestone (1897-1990) was a
> sturdy son of City College, the president of the student Socialist club,
> who abandoned Socialism after World War I to help found America's Communist
> movement. He was shrewd, confident, talented, energetic and unscrupulous,
> and by the age of 29 he was the top leader of the country's Communist
> Party. But there he made a fateful error. During the late 1920's the
> leaders of Soviet Communism were busily trying to get rid of one another in
> Moscow, and Lovestone sided with his friend Nikolai I. Bukharin, who lost
> the battle, instead of with Stalin, who won. Lovestone and his comrades
> from the United States rushed to Moscow in a heat of factional fury, and
> Stalin ordered that Lovestone, as an ally of Bukharin, be kept in Russia --
> doubtless in order to have him killed at a convenient moment.
>
> But Lovestone got hold of a passport and a plane ticket and escaped with
> his life, and when he got back to New York he tried to rally America's
> Communists to side with his own leadership against Stalin's. Naturally, he
> failed. American Communism was strictly a puppet of the Soviet Union, and
> Lovestone was duly expelled from his own party. He refused to accept the
> expulsion, though, and instead organized a tiny faction loyal to himself,
> known formally and grandiosely as the Communist Party (Majority Group), and
> informally as the Lovestonites. And he and his followers went on regarding
> themselves as the legitimate Communists, with Bukharin as their
> international guide. Lovestone's faction had some strength, too -- two or
> three brainy intellectuals, some well-placed allies among the old-fashioned
> labor Socialists and anarchists, and a solid base among the dressmakers of
> the International Ladies Garment Workers Union.
>
> The Lovestonites were backroom maneuverers. The whole of their strategy was
> to wait patiently for Bukharin to return to power in Moscow, perhaps at
> Stalin's side, in the expectation that Bukharin would restore his own
> comrades to their rightful places at the head of Communist parties around
> the world. Meanwhile, the Lovestonites did everything they could to keep
> the mainstream Communists in the United States from taking over the trade
> unions. They fought a thousand nasty battles. Then, in Moscow in 1938,
> Bukharin was shot. Lovestone and his comrades gave up on their last
> illusions about Communism. And from that moment on they devoted themselves
> to fighting the Soviet Union and Communists everywhere they could, no
> longer in the interest of achieving a better Communism but in the interest
> of securing the independence of trade unions.
>
> The battles took place among the needle trades workers of New York and the
> auto workers of Detroit, where the American Communists had some power. But
> in the 1940's, with the backing of the garment workers union and the
> American Federation of Labor, Lovestone and a handful of his followers
> brought their campaign to Europe. The political situation there was
> dangerous in the extreme. The Communist parties of Germany, France and
> Italy came out of World War II with a real strength, especially in the
> unions, and it was entirely possible that with a few lucky breaks and
> enough Russian support those parties might come to power, just as Communist
> parties were doing farther to the east. The United States Government had
> not yet decided to put up a systematic resistance. The Central Intelligence
> Agency did not yet exist. And in those circumstances, Lovestone and his
> righthand man, Irving Brown (the ''scholar pumpernickel,'' as he was
> called), set up the first effective American effort to undermine the
> European Communists.
>
> They quietly sought out Socialist and Roman Catholic trade unionists, plus
> a few shady Marseilles gangster-longshoremen, and supplied them with enough
> money from the American Federation of Labor to break away from the
> Communist unions and organize labor federations of their own. Morgan
> describes those postwar efforts as ''Lovestone's finest hour.'' Doubtless
> they were. For if Lovestone and his comrades had failed to extend a
> fraternal solidarity to the European trade unionists, how much stronger
> would the Communist parties have become? Quite a lot, possibly.
>
> In the late 40's the United States Government did gear up for the cold war,
> the C.I.A. was organized, and Lovestone's secret agency crossed over into
> the darker zones of Government conspiracy. He and his network of agents,
> now all over the world, remained under the official authority of the A.F.L.
> and then the united A.F.L.-C.I.O., and at the same time were paid on the
> sly by a probably illegal fund administered by the C.I.A.'s daffy director
> of counterintelligence, James Jesus Angleton. Exactly who controlled
> Lovestone's activities over the next decades was not always clear. At
> different times, as Morgan writes, the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the F.B.I. and even
> the C.I.A. had no idea what Lovestone was up to. Some of his undertakings
> look attractive enough, in retrospect. During the 1950's, the State
> Department tended to support the British and French imperialists in their
> last-ditch efforts to salvage the old European empires around the world.
> But Lovestone was strictly anticolonialist, notably in regard to North
> Africa, where he supported Algeria's National Liberation Front against the
> French.
>
> Then again, he kept up a pointless war against his rivals from the American
> labor movement, especially Walter Reuther's brother, Victor, who ran an
> anti-Communist international labor program of his own -- and ran it with a
> surer instinct than Lovestone for keeping labor's image and ideals intact.
> During the Vietnam war, the Reuther brothers came to recognize, after a
> while, that the United States ought to withdraw. But Lovestone was up to
> his neck in promoting the labor movement in South Vietnam and was incapable
> of noticing that the war had turned into a disaster. There was always
> something fanatical about Jay Lovestone. In his eyes, the hour was always
> late and the time for desperate measures was always at hand. His spying got
> sillier over time. Still, it's cheering to learn from Morgan that in
> Lovestone's last years before lapsing into senility, he retained enough
> independence of mind to sputter with rage when President Ronald Reagan
> broke the air traffic controller's strike.
>
> Morgan is a popular, not a scholarly, biographer, and there are moments in
> ''A Covert Life,'' in discussing the arcana of the left and the unions,
> when he gets out of his depth. He tells us nothing about Lovestonite
> meddlings in the trade unions of Latin America, where the outcome may have
> been less than pleasant; and nothing about the Lovestonites in the civil
> rights movement, where the story was rather honorable. He says almost
> nothing about the Lovestonites as an intellectual movement. Will Herberg,
> the Jewish theologian, and Bertram D. Wolfe, the historian, were
> Lovestonites during the 30's, and they and Lovestone himself gave to their
> tiny faction a touch of genuine intellectual sophistication. Sidney Hook
> once told me that Lovestone's faction may have secretly controlled Modern
> Monthly in the 30's, which preceded Partisan Review as a home for the New
> York intellectuals. It was the Lovestonites who coined the phrase
> ''American exceptionalism,'' based on a phrase of Bukharin's, to express
> their notion that America's labor movement ought to pursue its own course,
> and not follow any one else's model.
>
> Morgan does tell an amazing tale, though, filled with astounding
> characters. There is the sensational case of Louise Page Morris, a fashion
> model from a Boston Brahmin family, who spent 25 years as Lovestone's
> lover, working for him and for Angleton of the C.I.A. as a secret agent in
> Iraq and the Middle East -- a woman of real derring-do, who, ever sneaky,
> merrily two-timed Lovestone with Henry Cabot Lodge, President Dwight D.
> Eisenhower's envoy to the United Nations. And yet the most sensational of
> Morgan's characters is plainly Lovestone himself, the conspirator who,
> ''working behind the scenes and out of the limelight, in an office in the
> I.L.G.W.U. headquarters in New York,'' became, in Morgan's phrase, ''one of
> the masterminds of the Cold War.'' He was the man whom Stalin almost nabbed
> -- the man who just barely got out of Moscow and who, in the name of the
> American working class, spent the rest of his life exacting revenge, big
> time, on Stalin and the Soviet Union.
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Paul Berman is the author of ''A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey
> of the Generation of 1968.''