World Labor Unity/Chapter 2
II. Labor Dis-unity
The labor movement is young, fragmentary, and sadly dis-united. A decade ago there were only about twelve million organized workers in the world,—most of them in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States. (See page 32.) Even today labor organizations are largely confined to the major capitalist countries and to the Soviet Union. The germs of labor unionism are scattered across the world, but most workers still are unorganized.
Dis-unity prevails inside such labor movements as exist within the great capitalist countries, where the first loyalty of the workers goes to a craft or industrial union. Since the war many of these sectional differences have been disappearing in the face of more general problems. With the exception of Britain and the Soviet Union, however, disunion is more prevalent than union among the various national labor groups.
National boundary lines throw additional barriers across the activities of the labor movement by making "enemies" of men engaged in the same trades, simply because they happen to live and work on different sides of a river or a range of mountains. So powerful is this force of nationalism that during the World War workers all over the world placed their loyalty to the nation above their loyalty to their fellow workers. Appeals to patriotism and the "defence of home and country" lined up the workers and bosses of Germany on one side and the workers and bosses of France on the other. Nationalism thus became the social expression of class collaboration.
Equally serious, as a source of labor dis-unity, is the economic gulf that lies between the workers in exploited nations and workers in exploiting nations. Imperialism necessitates the exploitation of foreign workers by the capitalists of the imperial nation. Therefore, if the workers in the imperial nation support their government, they make themselves a party to the exploitation that is taking place. The workers of the United States vote for a Republican administration and thus back the Standard Oil Company in a policy which leads to the exploitation of Mexican workers; French workers support French capitalists in their exploitation of Morocco; British workers back economic and political policies which enable British owners to exploit the workers of India; Japanese workers play the same role toward the workers in Korea. In such cases, by giving their political support to the government, the workers in a powerful imperial country assist the imperial class of that country to exploit the workers among the subject and "inferior" peoples.
There are still other divisions among the workers. Most of the organized European workers are federated in the International Federation of Trade Unions, with headquarters at Amsterdam, which claims an affiliated membership of about 16 millions. The Red International of Labor Unions, with headquarters at Moscow, claims an affiliated membership of about 8 millions. These two Internationals overtop all the rest, both as to size and importance. Many European workers, however, belong to the Federation of Christian Trade Unions. Still other workers, with anarchist-syndicalist leanings, are grouped in the International Workingmen's Association. There are, besides, many local unions that have no affiliations with any of these groups.
This is the situation in Europe. Even there little enough real unity exists among the workers.
Outside of the European continent, and, for the most part, outside of these internationals, are the American Federation of Labor, most of the trade unions in South America, the Pan-American Federation of Labor, which includes practically nothing outside of North America, and the trade unions of Asia and Australia.[1]
Edo Fimmen sums up the matter by writing: "For practical purposes, the 'international' organisations are as yet purely European in scope."[2] "The increasingly compact international capitalist alliance is faced by a working class which, both economically and industrially, both nationally and internationally, is disintegrated."[3]
- ↑ The British Labour Research Department's Labour White Paper No. 11 issued in 1925, states the position as follows: "Hardly any country, even most backward, but had its small beginnings of Trade Unionism (in 1924), while in the more developed capitalist countries the membership of the Trade Unions was numbered in millions. No single organisation, even of the loosest kind, linked up these millions of organised workers, In Europe two organisations disputed with a bitter animosity for the membership of the European Trade Unions. … In several of the European countries there were two or three rival federations of Trade Unions, some affiliated to the International Federation of Trade Unions, some to the Red International of Labour Unions. … Outside the European arena where this struggle of rival organisations was taking place to a greater or lesser degree in almost every country, there remained unconnected with the International Federation of Trade Unions, the Trade Unions of the United States of America, of Latin America, Australia and the other Pacific lands, of Africa other than the Union, of India, Japan, China, the Far East, and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics."
- ↑ Labour's Alternative, London, Labour Publishing Co., 1924, p. 120.
- ↑ Ibid., p. 98.