Syndicalist League of North America

SYNDICALIST LEAGUE OF NORTH AMERICA. Launched in Chicago in September 1912, the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA) represented the purest organizational form of syndicalism in American labor history. The key figure in the organization was William Z. Foster, who laid out the league’s theoretical position and strategies in the pamphlet Syndicalism (1912), which he coauthored with Earl C. Ford. Like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the league emphasized shop-floor organization and economic struggle to the exclusion of electoral politics, which it saw as an impediment to change. The new syndicalist society would not be based on industrial unions, however, as the IWW claimed, but rather on natural production units already characteristic of large-scale industry. The other major contrast between the two organizations was strategic and important. While the IWW embraced the “dual union” approach, Foster and his league adherents argued vociferously for the strategy of “boring from within” the mainstream unions, an approach Foster had observed among the French syndicalists. Once the working class was fully organized and the labor movement won over to a revolutionary perspective, the means of production would be expropriated through a massive general strike.

The league found its natural constituency among working-class anarchists and those IWW activists who rejected dual unionism. At its height, the SLNA had about a dozen branches located in western and midwestern cities and a membership of perhaps two thousand. League activists joined mainstream American Federation of Labor and Railroad Brotherhood unions and led important organizing drives and strike movements in Saint Louis, Kansas City, and in Chicago, where the league maintained its headquarters. Two lively papers, the Agitator (later the Syndicalist) and the Toiler, carried the SLNA’s message. Launched during a period of IWW activity and growth among both immigrant mass-production and lumber workers, the league never achieved a mass following, and it gradually faded out of existence in the course of 1914.

The SLNA is significant, however. It polemicized against the strategy of dual unionism and popularized the notion of boring from within, an approach the Communists and other radicals later used to win a base within the labor movement. The league’s other important legacy to the radical labor movement was a cadre of activists with considerable experience and important contacts in local midwestern labor movements. Foster, James Cannon, Jack Johnstone, and others later played important roles in building the Communist Party and providing it with roots in the trade union movement.

Barrett, James R. William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999.

Foster, William Z. From Bryan to Stalin. New York: International Publishers, 1937.

Johanningsmeier, Edward P. Forging American Communism: The Life of William Z. Foster. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

Johanningsmeier, Edward P. "William Z. Foster and the Syndicalist League of North America" in Labor History vol. 30, no. 3 (Summer 1980): 332-348.