Essay
January-February 2000

50 years after first strike against automation-'What kind of labor should humanity do?'

by Olga Domanski

While the passage of 1999 to 2000 invoked all kinds of retrospectives on the passing century and millennium, what received virtually no attention was that it marked the 50th anniversary of a critical moment both in American labor history and in revolutionary thought. What brought these together as one was the U.S. Miners' General Strike of 1949-50, the first-ever strike against automation. What demands a retrospective/perspective examination of that moment today is that the question the miners raised during the strike-"What kind of labor should a hu man being do?"-remains the crucial question humanity is still seeking to answer 50 years later.

Nothing shows this more than the events in Seattle that erupted at the end of 1999 against the globalization of capital. (See lead article, p. 1.) Whether or not Seattle marks a new stage of revolt that can move us forward, however, depends on whether a new stage of cognition arises out of it.

I. WHAT WAS NEW IN THE 1949-50 STRIKE?

The coal miners were long considered the "shock troops" of American labor. They had even gone out on strike during World War II, telling the government to "let the soldiers dig coal with their bayonets." And after the war the militancy of all of labor brought the country closer to a general strike than it had ever been or has been since. What made the 1949-50 strike historic, however, was not the miners' militancy, but the new question they raised in the face of automation-"What kind of labor should a human being do?"

The word "automation" had not yet been coined in 1949; what the miners confronted was called the "continuous miner." They understood the disastrous unemployment it would bring as soon as they learned it would require only one-third as many miners. But that was not the greatest disaster they faced. The continuous miner ripped coal from the face without stopping for a moment's break, while the intolerable heat and deadly dust generated by it could set off an explosion at any moment. It was for good reasons called the "man-killer."

During this period, the government and the coal operators were working together for laws to curb the militancy and power of organized labor, while United Mine Workers union President John L. Lewis was forced to spar with them as he tried to work out a strategy for a new contract. It soon became clear that the miners had more than better wages and fringe benefits on their minds. For months Lewis had been calling the miners out and then sending them back to work three days a week as a way to deplete the coal supply while steering clear of the government's anti-labor laws. Finally, on Sept. l9, 1949, the miners in northern West Virginia refused to follow Lewis' orders; his word had been law until that moment. They sent roving pickets out to shut down every mine in the area, even including the non-union mines. The strike spread quickly throughout all of Appalachia with the rank-and-file miners in control.

When you read the detailed story of the strike in THE COAL MINERS' GENERAL STRIKE OF 1949-50 AND THE BIRTH OF MARXIST-HUMANISM IN THE U.S. (MGS) you see that what the miners did truly signal a new way of THINKING in refusing to limit the question to one of wages and benefits and asking instead, "What kind of labor should a human being do?"

It brought forth a new form of mass meetings where the miners made their own decisions about the way the strike was to be conducted. It even brought forth a new kind of worker-to-worker relief committee when miners traveled around the country to get food and clothing and begin correspondence with workers in other industries. It enabled them to hold out until the operators finally capitulated.

It is true that what Lewis settled for was not what the miners wanted. Their fears came true in the unemployment and economic devastation that describes Appalachia now. But the strike still has many lessons for today.

II. THEORY AND PRACTICE

The history of the 1949-50 events is interwoven with how the miners' questions were heard by Raya Dunayevskaya, who later founded the body of ideas of Marxist-Humanism. She saw the miners as demanding nothing less than the reuniting of mental and manual labor, which is precisely what Marx said is needed to achieve a new, truly human society. She saw this not because the miners used any such words, but because she had been working for several years on a book on Marxism for the Johnson-Forest Tendency (JFT), of which she was the co-founder. (Forest was her pseudonym in the Trotskyist movement.) The Johnson-Forest Tendency was a unique minority grouping in the Trotskyist movement which was known for its analysis of Russia as a state-capitalist society. It analyzed state-capitalism as the new stage of world capitalism, and its economic analysis was never separated from new forms of revolt.

Dunayevskaya had moved to Pittsburgh in 1948 to work both with steel workers and with miners in West Virginia. She was studying how Marx had developed the ideas of his greatest work, CAPITAL, and as the strike developed she felt that what the workers were doing and thinking brought to life many of its categories.

At the same time, she had been studying Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS on Hegel from 1914-15, together with the two other leaders of the JFT-C.L.R. James (who used the name of Johnson) and Grace Lee. As it happened, only a few months before the miners' strike began, Dunayevskaya completed a translation of these NOTEBOOKS for James and Lee and had begun a three-way correspondence with them about it. As the new features of the strike developed, "what had been a discussion of ideas assumed, to me, concreteness and urgency," she wrote as she looked back later (MGS, p. 34). This interaction of ideas and concrete objective events can be seen in two very different events that happened to occur within a day of each other. One was the way Dunayevskaya's suggestion for a worker-to-worker relief committee was put into action by the miners and became a turning point in their strike. The second was the way it was decided to invite a worker (John Zupan) to participate with the three JFT theoreticians in their next meeting to discuss the book on Marxism. "The struggle of the miners...gave me the impulse to go into the essential dialectical development of Marx himself," as Dunayevskaya put it when the meeting began. The worker's contribution was not confined to "class questions" but illuminated the whole discussion of dialectical philosophy.

The strike activity and the simultaneous philosophic activity led Dunayevskaya to decide on two critical new vantage points for the book on Marxism: one was the American proletariat; the second was Lenin's study of Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC. The book, which up to then had been called "State-Capitalism and Marxism," eventually became MARXISM AND FREEDOM. That work laid the ground for a totally new Marxist-Humanist organization-but it took a break between Dunayevskaya and James before that could become real.(1)

What is important for our story here is that, although that break did not take place until 1955, their divergence emerged unmistakably as early as 1951 and came out directly in relation to the very different attitudes of Dunayevskaya and James to the miners, to philosophy, and to organization. The three-way correspondence ended as the JFT submitted their document, STATE-CAPITALISM AND WORLD REVOLUTION, to the Socialist Workers Party in August 1950, left Trotskyism the next year, and attempted an independent existence that aimed to publish a workers' paper, later called CORRESPONDENCE. When Dunayevskaya proposed that its first issue be devoted to the new miners' seniority strike that had erupted-and to "the miners talking of their problems in their own words"-James objected. "If a mighty bubble broke out," he wrote, "with 500,000 miners vs. John L. Lewis and shook the minefields, I would not budge an inch from our program."(2) The question we have to ask is, what could explain such a divergence of attitude, such a failure by James to grasp the importance of what the miners were saying and doing?

III. DIVERGENCE OF JAMES AND DUNAYEVSKAYA

It demands looking more carefully at where, with hindsight, Dunayevskaya recognized that she had first spotted the philosophic divergence in her letters accompanying her translation of Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS. She kept contrasting Lenin's emphasis to what James had concentrated on in his own attempt to study Hegel's SCIENCE OF LOGIC in the 1948 manuscript he called "Notes on Dialectics."(3) Most crucial was James' concentration on the Law of Contradiction in the LOGIC'S Doctrine of Essence as against Lenin's concentration on Hegel's section on the Idea in the more highly developed Doctrine of the Notion.

While Dunayevskaya's critique of James' NOTES ON DIALECTICS deepened as soon as she plunged into Hegel for herself, she never denied that she had considered them "great" when she read them in 1948. Whatever has been critiqued in subsequent years, they served as the stimulus for the Tendency to get down seriously to the task of digging into the meaning of Hegel's Absolute Idea for our age. THAT WORK BY A TINY GROUP OF REVOLUTIONARIES REPRESENTED THE HIGHEST POINT THAT HAD BEEN REACHED UP TO THAT MOMENT IN THE SEARCH FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF REVOLUTION FOR OUR AGE. James' NOTES was the first of three crucial steps in that search. The second was when Dunayevskaya got down to a written translation of Lenin's PHILOSOPHIC NOTEBOOKS; the third was the three-way correspondence as the Miners' General Strike was underway.

Although it would be important to look at the full history of the JFT at another time, it is not that "history" but the new questions we are confronting today that demand looking again here at the difference between the direction James took in his NOTES and the direction Dunayevskaya headed out of the '49-'50 experience.

In his NOTES James does remind himself of the task his study was supposed to be undertaking: "We have to get hold of the Notion, of the Absolute Idea, before we can see this relation between organization and spontaneity in its concrete truth" (NOTES, p. 119). The "relation" he is referring to is what he had singled out and italicized for emphasis a few pages earlier in his section on "Marxism Today" (NOTES , p.115): "Organization. YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT ORGANIZATION UNLESS AT EVERY STEP YOU RELATE IT TO ITS OPPOSITE, SPONTANEITY.

Nearly 40 years later at the end of her life-as Dunayevskaya was working out a new book she had tentatively called "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy" -she reread James' NOTES and circled that sentence, writing: "A key to 'dialectics of organization'-the wrong key-is when the opposite stops at spontaneity and omits philosophy." It is not, she stressed, that organization and spontaneity are not opposites, but that they are not ABSOLUTE opposites. James' NOTES and his practice thereafter show that he had reduced the Absolute Idea to an ABSOLUTE opposition between spontaneity and organization.

One of the many recent books on James, Anthony Bogues' CALIBAN'S FREEDOM (Pluto Press, 1997), has attempted to look seriously at James' NOTES. Although Bogues does not critique James for reducing Hegel's Absolute Idea to an absolute opposition between spontaneity and organization, what does come through loud and clear is that James' work is really a political study of Leninism and that his concern throughout is with the question of "the Party." He quotes James: "If the party is the knowing of the proletariat, then the coming of age of the proletariat means the abolition of the party. That is our new universal" (Bogues, p. 175). What is important for us to see is that James' politicized reduction of the Absolute Idea means that he never poses a three-way relationship between spontaneity, organization and philosophy.

Martin Glaberman's new book, MARXISM FOR OUR TIMES (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1999), illuminates the question even more by revealing James' concept of Organization in James' own words. As he looks back in his 1962-63 letters to "Marty," James regrets, sometimes with bitterness, that his attempts to build a viable organization had been a "complete failure" (Glaberman, p. 72). In light of the 1949-50 Miners' Strike, it is startling to see that what he critiques most bitterly is what went on in the "years that preceded our downfall. A lot of babbling about automation, speculations as to the condition of the working class, a quite hopeless treatment of what should have been the very essence of our Marxist approach" (Ibid., p. 74).

As he looks at the "personnel" he had, he takes up Dunayevskaya first, charging that her "personal disaster" took "the form of developing the ideas of Marxism, an absolutely valueless concern with theory, running around and babbling about (what) has been picked up in books which the general public does not read." He continues to rage against such conduct: "Over and over again through the years that I worked with them I had to tell Grace and Rae, 'you both will spend hours, days and weeks on a section of Hegel or a chapter of Marx, but I can never get you to pay the same attention to the problems of organization, as an organization.'" He demands, "It is that we have to break" (Ibid., p. 86).

James gives the clearest expression of his concept of organization when he writes: "It is absolutely clear to me now, the socialism that exists in the population, the resentment, the desire to overturn and get rid of the tremendous burdens by which capitalism is crushing the people. That is what the Marxist movement has to learn... The masses don't need any education at all, absolutely none. The Marxist organization and the rest of them have to educate themselves" (Ibid., p. 169).

This may explain James' startling attitude when the miners were on strike and why he fought Dunayevskaya's suggestion to come out with a special issue on the miners. That story has perplexed many, knowing James' love, for "spontaneity." We can see that James didn't "hear" anything new in the miners' attitude to automation because he didn't see any need to work out a new stage of cognition to get to the new society. Socialism was all there in mass struggles and had only to be "recorded."

Dunayevskaya heard what was embedded in the 1949-50 strike and made it her point of departure to the future because she sensed that a relationship needs to be worked out between spontaneity, organization and philosophy. Although it cannot be further discussed here, the path that she subsequently took in developing Marxist-Humanism can be seen in embryo in the invitation to a worker to participate in working out what, after the break, became MARXISM AND FREEDOM. This year marks the 50th anniversary of that historic meeting on Feb. 15, 1950.

The three-way relationship between spontaneity, organization and philosophy is what is needed now to hear the new questions being raised and to work out the "Dialectics of Organization and Philosophy."

NOTES 1. For the full story of the Johnson-Forest Tendency, consult THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION (RDC). 2. See the RDC, 9313-15. 3. Published in 1980 as NOTES ON DIALECTICS: HEGEL, MARX, LENIN (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill); hereafter references will be to "Notes" with page citations in the text.