Liberals see labor unions through rose-colored glasses. Reality is somewhat different.
Last month my local newspaper, the Stamford Advocate, had a front-page article about actor-director Tim Robbins' attempt to revive public interest in his 1999 film Cradle Will Rock. Mr. Robbins, a resident of the adjoining Westchester County town of Pound Ridge, spoke to a Stamford audience the night before at the Avon Theatre Film Center on Bedford Street.
Mr. Robbins's movie, according to the Wikipedia:
. . . chronicles the process and events that surrounded the production of the original 1937 musical The Cradle Will Rock by Marc Blitzstein. Tim Robbins, in his third film as director, adapts history to create this fictionalized account of the original production, bringing in other stories of the time to produce this commentary on the role of art and power in the 1930s, particularly amidst the struggles of the 1930s labor movement and the corresponding appeal of socialism and communism among many intellectuals and working class people of that time.
Mr. Robbins's evidently identifies emotionally with labor unions of the 1930s and sees business as a source of evil.
In a speech given at an anti-war rally in New York City's Central Park on October 6, 2002, he said:
Let us find a way to resist fundamentalism that leads to violence — fundamentalism of all kinds, in Al Qaeda and within our own government. What is our fundamentalism? Cloaked in patriotism and our doctrine of spreading democracy throughout the world, our fundamentalism is business, the unfettered spread of our economic interests throughout the globe. Our resistance to this war should be our resistance to profit at the cost of human life. Because that is what these drums beating over Iraq are really about. This is about business.
Mr. Robbins' view is straight out of the Socialist International's appeal to the "workers of the world" to boycott World War I, on the theory that wars result only from capitalists struggling for monopoly market power, using the blood of the workers to achieve their goals.
In socialist doctrine, economic forces are the only factors having meaning for political societies. The essential feature of that doctrine is that all elements of society must be organized to control production of economic goods. From the very beginning of socialism as a cogent theory, Henri de Saint-Simon pictured the transition to socialism as one of conflict between capitalistic business owners and the workers.
Thus labor unions are absolutely essential to socialism as the organizing mechanism of the entire labor force. Unions are the heart of politics, which has no goal other than production by Marx's "workers of the world."
In the 1930s period of Mr. Robbins' movie, industrial unions first became major factors in our economy. The results then and now have been, on the whole, negative for the United States.
The springboard for socialistic industrial unions was the New Deal's 1935 Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act), which stacked the bargaining cards in labor's favor. Overnight, unions were able to employ almost any sort of coercive tactics against businesses, without fear of legal prosecution.
Unions could legally seize private property and prevent businesses from operating. They could prevent all workers from entering private businesses and could stop deliveries of all supplies, including food, to those businesses. Having been exempted from anti-trust prosecution, unions could organize mass boycotts and demonstrations to prevent people from buying products of companies that they targeted. And they did not hesitate to resort to violence to implement such tactics.
In 1936, business enjoyed its only significant rally under the Depression-era New Deal. That rally came as a result of the Supreme Court's declaring the National Recovery Administration (NRA) unconstitutional. The NRA had been the most onerous of President Roosevelt's agencies patterned on Mussolini's Fascist state corporatism.
The rally was shortly thereafter curtailed by the onslaught of union tactics that caused a surge of labor costs. Unable to raise prices to offset higher labor costs, major industries found production essentially unprofitable. By the end of 1936 and into 1937 industrial production turned sharply downward, precipitating a stock market crash as severe as that of 1929. Business never recovered until the nation began gearing up in 1940 for the probability of participating in the European war.
Automobile manufacturing was the union's first and main target in 1936. Then and after the end of World War II, industrial unions exacted extremely high wages and supplemental benefits for their non-skilled laborers. In the brief period before European and Japanese industry recovered from the war and began exporting to the United States, automobile production costs were pushed completely out of line with those in the rest of the industrialized world.
Japanese auto makers today gain a profit of about $2,000 per vehicle sold here (a great many of them manufactured here by non-union labor). General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, in contrast, lose about $1,200 per passenger sedan made and sold in the United States. They have roughly $2,500 more per vehicle in labor costs than Japanese auto companies manufacturing vehicles in the United States.
Despite union boasts about union labor being better than non-union labor, the public finds the Japanese products to be of higher quality than the Big Three union-made variety.
General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler are now teetering on the precipice of bankruptcy, with intransigent unions heedlessly pushing them.
Labor unions have benefited a limited portion of the American work force and they have been the principal financial and get-out-the-vote engine for their sponsors, the Democratic Party.
But it has been at tremendous cost to the rest of the nation.
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Seeing the great success of Leni Riefenstahl's movies in creating public approval for the Nazi regime in 1934 and 1935, Stalin directed that Hollywood be organized to propagandize for the Soviet Union and the Communist cause.
V. J. Jerome, the CPUSA cultural commissar at party headquarters in New York City, sent Stanley Lawrence to Hollywood for that purpose in 1935. The aim was to create a single, industry-wide union that could shut down any Hollywood studio that balked at filming scripts approved by the CPUSA.
Standing in Lawrence's way was the biggest Hollywood crafts union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IA). Roy Brewer, the IA head in 1947, was a Democrat and a self-described liberal. His letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities, dated October 28, 1947, describes the continual harassment, often violent, by Communist unionists to destroy the IA and replace it with the Communist-organized Conference of Studio Unions (CSU). Mr. Brewer wrote:
I shall present evidence which I think will conclusively establish the fact that there is and there has been a real Communist plot to capture our union in Hollywood, as part of the Communist plan to control the motion picture industry as a whole . . . With a Communist-controlled union representing all Hollywood technical labor supporting a Screen Writers Guild, through which only pro-Communist writers could get into the industry, we believe that the screen would have been effectively captured, notwithstanding the good intentions of the producers of motion pictures.
Richard Collins was an official in the Hollywood Communist Party branch and a leading member of the Screen Writers Guild. On of his best known scripts was Song of Russia, of which the Wikipedia notes:
Song of Russia is a pro-Soviet propaganda film made and distributed by MGM Studios in 1944 . . . the credited screenwriters were Paul Jarrico and Richard Collins. The film starred Robert Taylor, Susan Peters and Robert Benchley.
The picture was a major studio release, and an unabashed pro-Soviet propaganda film. The House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) would later use Song of Russia as one of the three noted examples of pro-Soviet propaganda films made by Hollywood, the other two pictures being Warner's Mission to Moscow and RKO's The North Star.
Collins later repented his years in the CPUSA. He unburdened himself in Confessions of a Red Screenwriter, published in the October 6, 1952, issue of New Leader. He wrote:
A Communist is always prepared. He, or rather his party, has an answer for everything. When I joined the party, I was handed ready-made: friends, a cause, a faith and a viewpoint on all phenomena. I also had a one-shot solution to all the world's ills and inequities . . . Suppose our Comrade keeps up with all the twists and turns of party policy, what is his reward? Why, peace of mind, of course. Since he has an answer for everything, he has a great sense of personal security; the world is safe; everything is explained – his history and the future; and everything is also simplified – into black and white . . .
The party member, on the other hand, has to make only one effort. He must be "flexible." "Flexible" means that you cheer for Earl Browder [former CPUSA head] on his birthday and the next day you despise him as a "betrayer of the working class" . . .
Although denying religion, the Communists need it and express it in zealotry in relation to the party. This charge of religiosity angers the Communists a great deal. They answer that their position is based on reason. This is similar to their constant reiteration that Marxism is a science. If it is a science, it is a science without a provable body of facts, a science which has been incapable of correctly predicting anything within its field – history – ever since the Bolshevik Revolutions. The Communists, for all their talk of reason and science, proceed on faith . . . It's the old story – a glorious end justifies despicable means.
In expression that sounds remarkably similar to the things that Tim Robbins and many other Hollywood actors have said in recent years, Richard Collins continued:
The Communists [today, liberals] insist that the United States today is like Nazi Germany of the Thirties. Many of the Communists before the House Un-American Committee see themselves as Dimitrov defying the Nazi court.
Today the Iraq war engenders liberal hysteria. In 1937, when Richard Collins joined the CPUSA, the Spanish Civil War was raging. Socialists, liberals, and Communists denounced Generalissimo Franco, whose forces received military support from Hitler's National Socialist Germany.
Mr. Collins wrote, in that regard:
The Communist party presented itself and the Soviet Union as the great enemy of Nazism and the friend of the democracies . . . Many of us had no idea that we were embracing, in whole or in part, another tyranny. And we were helped in making that mistake by a section of American liberals who unwittingly became an aid to the American Communist party because they overtrusted the Communists.
The liberals were then, and remain today, what the Soviet Communists called "useful idiots," people whose utopian theories blind them to political reality.
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For voluminous details regarding the foregoing, read Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley's Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.
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It has often amazed me that many on the left seem blind or oblivious to the consequences of their actions. As this article notes, Marxism is a religion.
Comment by Joe Lammers | April 3, 2007