[lbo-talk] Jobless Workers Look to Shift Elections

Marv Gandall marvgand at gmail.com
Thu Jul 29 17:40:57 PDT 2010


On 2010-07-29, at 5:29 PM, SA wrote:


> I don't think I properly communicated my point. You're talking about "the 30's." But I was talking specifically about 1929-32. (That's why I said the CP's efforts didn't appear to amount to much "until around 1933.") My point was that if something significant were to end up coming out of today's "scattered actions," those actions will one day have great importance attached to them by future historians (and readers of history), even though nobody is paying much attention to them now while they're happening. That's why I pointed to how scattered/anomalous Communist actions seemed in 1929-32 (relative to what came later).
============================ I hope today's scattered actions develop into something much larger and coherent, as you are suggesting they might.

And I agree the early movements against unemployment and evictions between 1929-32 were dwarfed by the great wave of industrial unrest which later accompanied the advent of the New Deal and the subsequent modest recovery, making the earlier period appear relatively inconsequential by comparison.

But the early protests were nevertheless more widespread and militant than you suppose and than we have witnessed to date, and it is important to understand why they were in order to make sense of the current period and the state of the contemporary left.

As early as March, 1930, for example, 500,000 people in 25 cities demonstrated against the Hoover administration's refusal to extend unemployment relief, with protest activity continuing to mount with the deepening Depression, culminating in the Bonus Army March on Washington and the establishment of Hoovervilles at the end of the period, on the eve of the New Deal. If today's protests are many times fewer and smaller than the comparable period of the Depression, it is because output, joblessness, and other indicators of economic collapse and social misery have not, at least as yet, approached the catastrophic depths of that earlier time.

The other decisive factor was the CP, which even in 1929-32 was not a negligible force, having entered the period with an estimated 28,000 members. I don't doubt the party's numbers declined as its industrial base abruptly shrunk and workers scrambled to feed their families, although I haven't investigated if the decline was as precipitous as you suggest. In any case, it's clear that the party, prior to the New Deal and through its network of cadres across the country, still retained the capacity to to initiate and support sizeable marches and demonstrations, to provide direction and assistance to rent strikers as well as to tenants and farmers resisting evictions, and to begin building an impressive national network of Unemployed Councils from 1929, in the immediate aftermath of the crash.



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