>> I don't know of any tendency on the left in the 30s which opposed
>> passage of
>> the Wagner Act, do you?
>
> The only people I can find who regarded it as a set back were the right
> wing and some sections of big business who now found themselves having
> to deal in a legal way with workers whom they had nothing but contempt
> for.
>
> Joel Wendland
How about the Council Communists? Korsch was an editor of, "Living
Marxism, " one of the titles reprinted in the Greenwood Press series,
"Radical Periodicals in the U.S."
http://www.geocities.com/cordobakaf/bonacchi.html
THE COUNCIL 'COMMUNISTS BETWEEN THE NEW DEAL AND FASCISM
> ...In the meantime, New Deal legislation was being passed. Modeled after
> the early 1932 Norris-La Guardia Act which had dealt a heavy blow to
> industrial feudalism, Section 7(a) of NIRA extended the right of
> collective bargaining-until then the privilege of only a few labor
> unions-and fixed both the maximum number of working hours and the
> minimum wage. This law had a far greater impact than did all the public
> works programs scheduled by the 1932 Emergency Relief and Construction
> Act. It opened new possibilities far beyond the closed circle of
> alternatives envisaged by business-sponsored anti-crisis projects based
> on the theory of self-regulation and by those of AFL unionists that
> emphasized the 30-hour work-week demand (Black bill).
Actually, only the labor struggles that began in the rubber factories of Firestone and Goodyear (the sit-down strikes of 1936-37) and culminated in General Motor's capitulation to the United Automobile Works's, succeeded in legitimizing collective bargaining. Even though it was constantly boycotted by the appeals of Big Business and NAM to the Supreme Court, this law was eventually reasserted by the Wagner Act of 1935.W Still, Roosevelt's initiative gave a "constructive" imprint to tendencies that were 'already objectively present in the new working class created by Fordism. As such, it constituted an actual capitalist anticipation of the class adversary, which had appeared on the verge of developing a revolutionary solution to the crisis.
But corresponding to this apparently "anomalous" behavior of the State, there was a similar anomaly in the union movement. Instead of the decadence and repression that marked its European counterpart the American labor movement seemed to enjoy one of its brightest moments in the constitution of the do (i.e., with the triumph of the long-sought "industrial unionism"). The impressive and radical nature of the sit-down strikes that quickly overran citadels of industrial feudalism such as GM, Chrysler, and U.S. Steel, marked the overwhelming victory of the CIO, whose membership grew, in only one year, from 800,000 to over three million. What this ultimately meant, however, was the complete acceptance of the capitalist laws of exchange by men who, like John Lewis, had directed the great 1937 labor offensive.
In order to locate the subjective limits of the "objective" radicalism of the 1930 labor offensive, it is important to recall that Lewis was not only one of the major CIO promoters (whose penetration into heavy industry had been financed from the miners' union treasury), but he was also the only labor leader who broke the social pact upon which the New Deal was based by unleashing "his" miners against the American war machine in the middle of WWII It was this turn of events that led the council communists (through Mattick) to reassert their complete distrust in the emancipatory abilities of unionism, even in its new "industrial" mass guise.
The council communists regarded the American situation as different than the European one precisely because of the persistent vigor of U.S. private capitalism. Although it was not able to initiate an economic recovery along traditional lines, private capital could still obstruct the transfer of the accumulation process to state capitalist foundations, as shown, for example, in the resistance of Ford, Little Steel, and Swift & Co., to unionization. Roosevelt saw the task of labor organizations to lie precisely in overcoming this opposition. Thus, the council communists' task was the reconstitution of the theoretical framework for analyzing the capitalist crisis in view of the structural modifications created by massive state intervention. This entailed a careful re-examination of the "classical" (underconsumptionist) Luxemburgian theory of the collapse.
The syndical, and, within the framework of the New Deal, statist outcome of American labor struggles was evident in their inability to transpose their attacks against the despotic power of "old" private capital in the factories to civil society, now subsumed directly under the accumulation process. This, taken together with the passive resistance of the European masses (with the exception of Spain) to fascism and Nazism, led the council communists to seek within the logic of capital and the new epoch-making developments it had brought about, an understanding of the new realities rising from the ruins of 1929. Within capital meant within the crisis. Only one attempt had been able to go beyond the Luxemburgian approach to the problem of capitalist accumulation as the "materialist" condition for socialism: namely, Henryk Grossmann's book on the law of accumulation and the collapse of the capitalist system .
By taking up the polemic between Rosa Luxemburg and Otto Bauer concerning the Marxist production schemes, Grossmann had attempted to faithfully reconstruct the Marxian law of accumulation in order to clarify the necessity of collapse inherent in the very mechanisms of capitalist production. By rejecting all "exogenous" explanations of the crisis-from those which, following Tugan-Baranowski's Studien zur Theorie und Geschichte der Handelshrisen in England saw in the anarchy of the capitalist market the origin of crises of "disproportionality" to those based on the hypotheses of insufficient consumption - Grossmann developed a rigorous critique of Luxemburg's Accumulation of Capital. Beginning with Bauer's scheme concerning the infinite endogenous possibilities for capitalist development and the exogenous character of the limits on this development - i.e., "working class rebellion" - Grossmann sought to show how the crisis and the collapse both sprang necessarily from a system "theoretically" void of the difficulties of "realization" that beset Luxemburg's theory of accumulation and imperialism. According to Grossmann, Luxemburg came to her famous "correction" of the Marxist reproduction schemes as a result of a misunderstanding of Marx's own approach. Having failed to keep in mind both the basic distinction between the mode of research and the mode of exposition explicitly established by Marx in the postscript to the second edition of Capital, and the complex relation between essence and phenomenon (and at another level, theory and praxis) implied in the critique of political economy, Luxemburg had committed a fundamental error: chat of attributing to bjective social existence" to the reproduction schemes. The relations with which Marx had "simply wished to express" (Mactick) the proportion (also manifest at the level of the "two spheres of production and their relations of exchange") between surplus-labor and labor (surplus-value and value) had been seen by Luxemburg as the numerical "representation" of the capitalist reproductive process. Hence, Luxemburg had not understood the theoretical and cognitive implications of the level on which Marx was operating (the level of total capital [Gesamtkapital]), even though she had already stressed that it did not coincide with the "multiplicity of concrete capitals." Total capital, as that level where commodities are exchanged on the basis of their value and not - as Luxemburg assumed - also on the basis of market prices, presupposed in Marx's account that the realization of surplus-value had already been achieved. In this reproduction scheme, Marx had hoped to express commodity exchange as a necessary presupposition of the capitalist mode of production. <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese