Historians and American Communism: An Agenda

Abstract

There have been, Roger Keeran says in the Introduction to his Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions, three broad assumptions governing the study of the Party's role in labor: Communists were not legitimate trade unionists. They were not an important influence in the labor movement. And they were not good Communists.1 These are, he might have added, also rough stages in the historical development of the political analysis which the writers brought to the subject. The hard-bitten Socialist opponents, from Benjamin Stolberg to Irving Howe, could not forgive the Communists' influence on many unions nor forget the totalitarian intent which threatened workaday unionism. Their successors, including prominent sociologists and labor and industrial relations theorists, more often tended to brush off the party influence as an incidental to a system which righted itself (after an initial phase of excitement) into corporate-style blocs of in fluence. Then came the New Left scholars of the 1960s-70s. These last affected sympathy for the ultra-revolutionary commitments of the Party in its Third Pe riod (1928-35) as against the more liberal Popular Front, for Trotskyism or Spontaneism against the Party's Center-Le ft strategy within the CIO, and in gen eral for a revolutionary alternative that the Party did not represent.2 None of these types of formulations stand up to the evidence, Keeran properly concludes. Now what?