Looked Good for a Moment: the Story of the Red Labor International

The Founding of the Red Trade Union International: Proceedings and Resolutions of the First Congress is another remarkable volume in a series of remarkable documentary works. Edited ably by historian-archivist Mike Taber, this one is especially poignant because the “founding,” in the flush of the Russian Revolution still recent, proved to be very nearly the final note. The grand idea of a global unitary body bringing together revolutionary workers could not be achieved. Not that the failed or aborted founding of an international women’s communist movement, documented in a previous volume of the series, could be less poignant. But the failure of global labor support would prove determinant to the trajectory of the contemporary Left of a century ago. Despite the vital appeal to the people of the Global South, the Russian Revolution could only fall back upon itself.

But I am beginning in the wrong place. Like the other volumes in the series tracing the rise and early fall of revolutionary internationalism during the 1920s, this has been put together by a distinguished team of scholars behind Taber,  in the Historical Materialism group or collective. The process of locating, compiling, translating and annotating these proceedings is obviously staggering. The Glossary at the end offers a sort of history in itself because so many events and personalities are identified and explained over the course of forty or so pages. Not to mention the Bibliography!

The Introduction is another story because It is, despite the editor’s effort to be strictly objective, a narrative of declension pretty clearly in the Trotskyist tradition. This is not a flaw, but it is a feature. Things might have gone differently, perhaps, but the drift in the direction of Stalin and Stalinism can be seen as the underlying, tragic saga. More syndicalistic or even social democratic scholars would frame the story differently.

And so what. To take a case in point, consider Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky (1878-1952). A Bolshevik so skeptical or critical of Bolshevism that he had been expelled, he was accepted reluctantly as leader of the Red Labor International because no one else had the administrative skills and determination. Lozovsky had by this time become a loyalist. And remained so until he became a liaison with Yiddish writers after the Second World War and, with them, was shot dead in 1952.

Doom might have been written in the years that had passed since, say, 1920, when the anticipated world revolution had already begun to recede. By 1921, bourgeois law and order had been re-established in Hungary and in the section of Germany where a Red Republic had briefly been proclaimed. Mussolini’s victory lay just ahead. The Seattle General Strike of 1919 was already slipping from memory and the Communist factions engaged mainly in fighting each other—a serious matter because the US was not only the new center of the bourgeoisie but also because a leftwing challenge to capitalism there had been counted upon by revolutionaries around the globe.

The Russians and their allies who expected so much from the RTUI had also miscalculated in the most painful way. Many pages of this debate-rich volume document the conflict with syndicalism, a prevailing radical workerism in many parts of Europe and the US philosophically at odds with the centralization of authority that Bolshevism required. The day of anarchism had passed nearly everywhere by 1920, but the sense that something else, some revolutionary devolution of power to workers themselves sansrevolutionary party, remained strong in many places. In a word, nothing could replace the spirit, the culture and sensibility of the Industrial Workers of the World aka Wobblies. The moment that fled would not be regained.

Many other pages capture an alternative horn of the dilemma. The Russian Revolution’s effect upon workers in various European decisive locations prompted thousands of newly loyal communists to leave mainstream aka “bourgeois” union bodies. The new Russian leadership firmly rejected this solution. As the great British workers’ leader Tom Mann sought to explain to the puzzled delegates, it had never been the aim of labor revolutionaries in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland to abandon the majority of workers by leaving unions created with so much effort and sacrifice. “It is a serious mistake to build up a lot of smaller organizations, with a view to drawing members from the older ones.” (p.110).

With this proposition, the Russian leaders more than agreed. But their agreement could not smooth out the many contradictions. In some places, the mainstream union leaders simply expelled unions led by Communists.

The presence of a partially recuperated Second International was also troubling to the delegates. It was non-revolutionary! And yet it offered some syndicalist-minded unions a legitimate place to connect with workers of various countries. The Third International, soon to become the Comintern, had no such space available.

And this is the other most remarkable feature of the volume. Lozovsky was certainly not alone in his dogmatic insistence that all who disagreed with the Russian line had to be mistaken. But he was the most forceful and of course, the most authoritative. If the “inevitable capitalist breakdown” (p.129), arriving at a different speeds, would be certain to set the ground for Communist union advance, then the recovery of capitalism, above all in the USA, spelled trouble and worse.

The details of the discussions in this volume are too rich to be summarized and too various for quotations to do them credit. Perhaps it is best for the interested reader to look for the countries and movements that seem the most intriguing. Losovsky, in his frustration, quotes what Goethe put into the mouth of Mephistopheles: “When one lacks thoughts, words replace them. Debates are led by words and out of words, systems are constructed.” (p.429). But the words also belong to Losovsky, of course.

There is another issue just below the surface and often not below the surface. The Second International had perished in wartime as it deserved to perish. It could not be reconstituted as a fighting body by leaders who had sent their socialist comrades to kill each other. Leftish social democrats formed a new body in hostile response to the Communists, but no social democratic body could escape its own European limitations. Most of all, it could not come to an agreement on colonialism. Even leftwing social democrats, for the most part, considered the liberation of the Global South as a step too far.

The International Federation of Trade Unions, sometimes known as the “Amsterdam International,” was a worse than poor substitute for the RTUI, likewise limited almost entirely to Europe. Even so, US labor leaders pulled back, by this time renouncing even the vision of a post-capitalist society.

Anticipating all this, the debaters at the creation of the RTUI struggled in vain. As Taber explains in the Editorial Introduction, a United Front policy adopted in 1922 lifted the prospects of the RTUI from sectarian isolation. During 1922-23, Communists (that is, represented by the Russian unions) and Socialists met at the World Peace Congress in the Hague and further gatherings. Taber insists that the increasing isolation after 1923 can be traced to events after Lenin’s death. RUTI leaders wavered left and right, with many unions leaning toward Amsterdam.

Perhaps the founding of the RTUI, in 1921, had come too late, gaining tactical bearings too tardily to become successful. As a weapon in the hands of the emerging Russian bureaucracy, it survived for no good reasons, held no consistent positions, and folded formally in 1937.  Was there ever a real chance for revolution-minded class-conscious workers across the world to coordinate their actions? It’s a question that remains open.

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