The daily worker. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1924-1958, 1930-05-21
PRE-CONVENTION DISCUSSION
How Shall We Organize the
Unorganized?

we find a testing of our policy. Is it correct
that to the Southern textile workers we brought
the National Textile Workers Union, and not
the United Textile of the A. F. of L.? Comrade
Stahl should answer this question quite def
initely, for upon it hinges mighty conse-
quences. If he does not agree with the es-
tablished policy, then he must agree with the
Trotskytes and Lovestoneites that we should
have made a united front with the Music
group, and helped them round up the South
ern textile workers under Mcmahon and Green.
Gastonia should have been carried out on the
lines of Marion perhaps, where the workers
were abandoned to slaughter and then dis
owned by the union? We should, perhaps, have
placed the treacherous Hoffman in charge of
the strike to do with as he did in Elizabeth
town? We should go into the South to tell
the workers that while William Green has
pledged the bosses not to demand higher wages,
still they should join the union controlled by
Green, in the hopes that some day Green may
be removed from leadership?
Or Consider the Steel Workers.
Comrade Stahl considers it political
crime" that are founding new unions in the
South, and leaving the fighting front in the
reactionary unions" The Party must tell the
comrade, and all who have similar ideas, that
they misread their Lenin. Comrade Lenin in
sisted upon work in the reactionary unions, in
order to win the masses away from the bu-
reaucracy, but he never told us that we should
bring the unorganized under the control of
the bureaucracy in order that later we could
win them away from its influence!
Comrade Stah is himself metal WORKER,
and is especially indignant against the organ
ization of the Metal Workers Industrial League
He says: Ninety per cent of the metal work
ers organized in the A. F. of L. know nothing
about such new organization" which "has
not conducted the slightest propaganda inside
the A. F. of L. Metal Workers Union"
Here two basic errors: First, Comrade
Stahl speaks of an ga F. of L. Metal Work
ers Union," when there is no such thing. The
metal workers in the A. F. of L. are split I'D
among "a different international" unions. and
precisely for this reason it has been found i'm
possible hitherto to organize such industries as
steel and automobiles (the center of the metal
Industry. Second, he speaks of the 80 per
cent of those in the A. F. of L. as though
these are the decisive sections of the metal
workers But they comprise less than 10 per
cent of all metal workers, and they are pre-
clsely those workers who separated from
the main mass of metal workers, either by be-
ing in small shops, or by their privileged po-
sition account of skill or for other reasons.
For example, the Iron, Steel and Tin Workers
Union GA. f. of L., is closed corporation of
highly skilled workers, who for more than a
generation have been working under a con-
tract with the steel trust that they will pre-
vent the organization of the unskilled and
semi-skilled And in the automobile section of
the metal industry, the A. F. of L. has nothing
at all.
1t is clear that Comrade Stahl, and all who
bewail the abandonment of the united 'front.'
in the A. F. of L. by the founding of the new
unions, have their eyes fixed not upon the
decisive masses of the working class in the
basic industries, but solely, exclusively upon
that small section already organized in the
A. F. of J.. Which means that they reject the
organization of the unorganized as our decisive
task.
Ito Be Continued.)