NEW HAVEN, Conn. – For more than a century, as the ideas of Karl Marx began immigrating to the U.S., there has always been a connection between Marxists and the U.S. labor movement.

For some Marxists, like the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 1900s, the overthrow of capitalism should be done through revolution. Others, however, believed in taking a more Fabian approach—that is, a slower, incremental strategy focused on “evolution,” not “revolution.”

In a lengthy article published last week, the Chairman of Communist Party USA John Bachtell details his Fabian-like strategy to use the labor movement and the Democratic Party to build his ‘socialist utopia.’

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In his article, the CPUSA Chairman describes how communists are already working within today’s unions to lead a union-led movement within the Democratic Party:

…our objective is not to build the Democratic Party. At this stage we are about building the broad people’s movement led by labor that utilizes the vehicle of the Democratic Party to advance its agenda. We are about building the movements around the issues roiling wide sections of people that can help shape election contours and debates.

In this sense we are for building movements in the electoral arena and see engagement in the electoral arena and democratic governance as a vital means to further build movements. But based on the experience in the Obama campaigns and local elections, it is difficult to sustain electoral activism. It remains a huge challenge to overcome widespread voter disengagement and cynicism: Many feel that their voice and vote have no impact.

Third, we are part of building labor’s independent structures, including its electoral and political apparatus and its program to train union members to run for office. At last count, thousands of trade unionists have been elected.

Labor’s independent structures include building labor-community, grassroots-based organizations or networks where activists can work together on candidates, campaigns, civil rights and environmental issues, legislative lobbying, labor organizing and strike solidarity.

]Read the entire CPUSA article here.]

Marxism has, for the most part, flourished and waned at times within the American labor movement.

For many early union leaders, such as American Federation of Labor president Samuel Gompers, the threat from socialists within labor’s ranks was very real and he fought them continuously throughout his career.

“Socialism holds nothing but unhappiness for the human race,” Gompers said in 1918. “Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.”

Following Gompers’ death in the 1920s, socialists and even Communists infiltrated unions throughout the 1930s, primarily through the AF of L’s then-rival, the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

Following World War Two, Communists were pushed back underground during the McCarthy Era and largely stayed underground–at least in unions–until the late 1990s, when the then-newly elected leaders of the AFL-CIO, John Sweeney, Richard Trumka and Linda Chavez-Thompson, removed the ban on Communists from the AFL-CIO’s constitution.

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For Communists, the tool through which they could reshape society–then and now–has always been organized labor. Its structure and its foot soldiers are the ideal apparatus.

I want to tell you, Socialists, that I have studied your philosophy; read your works upon economics, and not the meanest of them; studied your standard works, both in English and German—have not only read, but studied them. I have heard your orators and watched the work of your movement the world over. I have kept close watch upon your doctrines for thirty years; have been closely associated with many of you, and know what you think and what you propose. I know, too, what you have up your sleeve. And I want to say that I am entirely at variance with your philosophy. I declare to you, I am not only at variance with your doctrines, but with your philosophy. Economically, you are unsound; socially, you are wrong; industrially, you are an impossibility.

Samuel Gompers, Founder of the American Federation of Labor, 1903

Unlike 100 years ago, however, today there are no leaders like Gompers and his peers fighting the takeover from within.

Originally published here

Published with permission