>CB: What was wrong about the no strike policy ? Wasn't the most important
goal for the >world's working class, including the U.S. working class, at
that moment in history, the defeat of >Nazi fascism ?
I don't want to go into the nastiness of the Hungarian and Czech invasions, since I don't think there is any room for discussion between us, since we are too far apart.
But on the no-strike clause, I think the agreement to allow the US capitalist class to fatten themselves on war-time profits, even as workers impoverished themselves as wages fell below the cost of living increases, was decisive in the destruction of militant unionism in the US and the triumph of American capitalism globally after the war.
Before the war, the US capitalist class was severely weakened by the Depression and did not have the strength to result either rising union militancy or new state intervention. But due to the no-strike clause, their profits zoomed and they banked it for the expected confrontation with labor after the war. And in 1946, that confrontation came and US labor largely lost-- leading to the "management rights" compromise that would determine the essentially bread-and-butter unionism of postwar unionism in the US. And with that defeat, left forces in the unions lost power, leading to the ability of the conservative unionists to expel them.
Similarly, the new wealth of the US capitalist class was deployed globally to crush international resistance to its expansion. That left the only alternative the military bureaucratism of Stalinism, since rank-and-file democratic resistance outside the Soviet sphere was so outmatched and lacked friends in the now weakened and conservative US union movement.
I don't think the no-strike clause was necessary to defeat fascism, but it was necessary to maintaining the war time profits of the US capitalist class. In many ways, it was the decisive factor in the destruction of the US left and the bureaucratization of the union movement, since in the abscense of strikes, wartime labor relations devolved into the government-mediated arbitrations that also became the hallmark of US business unionism.
And of course the yo-yo politics of the CPUSA in diddling back and forth between "fight fascism" in much of the 30s, then "the Yanks aren't coming" when it served Soviet policy, then jumping to a rigid nostrike policy in the war, did not help left credibility either.
So I generally think the no-strike agreement was probably the single most critical debacle decision that destroyed the Left in the United States.
-- Nathan Newman