Dual Unionism

DUAL UNIONISM. Participation in the labor movement presented revolutionaries with a paradox. Unions were the characteristic form of organization for wage earners under capitalism, bringing workers together on the basis of shared interests and grievances and in the process contributing to a sense of working-class solidarity. To separate oneself from the unions was to cut oneself off from the heart of the working class and to abandon perhaps the most important potential base for the creation of a revolutionary movement. On the other hand, labor unions were by their nature reformist organizations. Designed specifically to win limited concessions from employers, they undercut the revolutionary potential of the working class. When such organizations were dominated by conservative business unionists, as was often the case in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), it was extremely difficult for revolutionaries to function within them. This contradiction—the vital role of the unions in working-class life and the difficulty that revolutionaries had working within them—provides the key to understanding the history of dual unionism in the United States.

During the 1880s anarchists established separate union federations in Chicago, New York, and other cities. The social basis for such federations can be explained partly in ethnic terms—they tended to be based largely on Germans, Czechs, and other nationalities with strong radical subcultures. But there was also a revolutionary principle involved—the anarchists hoped to harness the power of the unions to a movement that would destroy the capitalist state and the basis for private property.

While the impulse to establish separate revolutionary union federations is easily understood, there is little question but that the decision frequently led to splits within the revolutionary movement as well as further alienation from the mainstream unions. In the case of the Socialist Labor Party’s establishment of the Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance in 1895, for example, the move failed to win not only most trade unionists but even some of the party’s own members, who preferred to fight it out with Samuel Gompers and his allies within the AFL. The issue of dual unionism precipitated a debate within the Socialist Labor Party that helps to explain the foundation of the Socialist Party in 1901.

By far the most famous of the dual union efforts was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), an anarcho-syndicalist organization that won considerable strength among diverse groups of unorganized workers between its birth in 1905 and its virtual destruction during the 1920s. IWW activists provided brilliant leadership in a series of mass strikes by immigrant workers in textile, steel, and other industries between 1909 and 1913, but their local organizations were either destroyed in ferocious employer counterattacks or simply proved incapable of maintaining their membership.

As an alternative to dual unionism, William Z. Foster and a group of syndicalist militants developed a strategy that came to be known as “boring from within.” Foster argued that the mainstream unions could indeed be radicalized, but only through long-term agitation by a “militant minority” within the regular trade union organizations. Foster and his group developed their critique of dual unionism first within the IWW and then through a series of organizations they formed between 1911 and 1920. The boring-from-within strategy, endorsed by Lenin, had a major impact on early Communist trade union policy.

From its inception in 1919 until the end of 1928, the Communist Party firmly rejected the concept of dual unionsim, though its members were constantly at odds with the conservative leadership of the AFL. At the end of 1928, however, in response to a change in the Comintern line and mass expulsions of left-wing activists from several unions, the Party established the Trade Union Unity League, a separate federation of revolutionary industrial unions. The league was liquidated in 1935, and many of its activists went on to play important roles in the development of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, which set out to organize mass-production workers throughout American basic industry and competed with AFL organizers in several sectors of the economy.

These radical dual unions were never successful in the ultimate sense that they won the mass of workers over to a revolutionary trade union program. Their failures, however, should not obscure the important role they played in organizing groups of workers otherwise ignored by the mainstream movement, in developing new strategies and forms of organization that helped to reshape the labor movement in the long term, and in persistently arguing for a radical vision of the labor movement as an agent of social and political transformation.

Foster, William Z. American Trade Unionism. New York: International Publishers, 1947.

Saposs, David. Left Wing Unionism. New York: Russell and Russell, 1926.