"In the United States, radical labor education had great vitality from the heyday of the Socialist Party and the IWW before the First World War until the end of the Second World War. In fact, much of the impetus for labor education came from the left, and a good deal of what was taught had an explicit or implicit anti-capitalist bias. This reflected the fact that there were strong progressive currents within the labor movement throughout this time. Even the conservative American Federation of Labor, which was usually strongly opposed to any critical labor education, sometimes supported schools with a radical focus. Socialists and communists found havens in the left-wing political parties and the industrial union movement, and their students did the same.
Of course, there were many problems that confronted radical labor education in addition to AFL antagonism. The independent colleges were perennially short of funds and were often at odds with the labor unions. The same was true for the party-based schools. Some of the energy and independence of the labor movement was coopted by the New Deal. And even in the left-wing unions, there was conflict between their immediate needs and the more long-term goals of the educators. But, all in all, radical labor education had achieved much and was poised to achieve more at the end of the Second World War. Union membership was at an all-time high, and the rank-and-file were ready for action.
Unfortunately, the postwar period brought the ferocious Cold War assault on the labor left, the result of which was that the radicals, including the educators, were defeated by the corporations and the state, with help from the AFL and liberal opportunists in the CIO like Walter Reuther. This assault has been well-documented and needs little further comment, except to say that the withdrawal or expulsion of the CIO's left-led unions foreshadowed the collapse of an independent labor movement. Not long after the merger of the AFL and the CIO in 1955, union density began its long decline. Even the economic gains that labor won as a part of the "deal" it made with capital—in which organized workers got regular wage increases and a package of fringe benefits in return for unilateral management control of the capital and union discipline of rank-and-file dissidents—could not withstand the end of the long period of postwar prosperity that began in the mid-1970s. By the time Reagan became president and broke the Air Traffic Controllers Union, the labor movement was, for all practical purposes, already dead."
To be continued . . .