unions, has not been unopposed. Long before the bureaucrats generally realized what menace the T. U. E. L. was to their comfortable swivel-chair life, the old fox Gompers had sounded the alarm. As the left-wing campaigns shook the labor movement and registered success after success in almost every legislative gathering of the working class, the officialdom took alarm and rallied every force of the union machinery, the capitalist press, and the State. The Federal Government was used in an attempt to railroad Foster to prison, along with 70 other trade union militants and Communists. The capitalist press has teemed with organized and inspired propaganda against the left-wing. The union journals have been full to overflowing with denunciation and provocation against the T. U. E. L. militants. And, direct from the Amsterdam International, headquarters of reaction in the world's labor movement, has been imported the policy of expulsions and splits against the left-wing.
Space will not permit even the briefest review of the development of the American left-wing movement in the trade unions. Those who have missed reading The Labor Herald, monthly organ of the Trade Union Educational League since March, 1922, can find the rich experience of these few years embodied therein. Back numbers and bound volumes can be obtained from the League office. Just as this book of Losovsky's is necessary to everyone who would understand the world's labor movement today, so is The Labor Herald necessary to every left-wing unionist who wishes to be an effective participant in the great revolutionary struggle now going on for the leadership of the American labor movement.
Although the American class struggle has so far developed the most primitive trade unionism, in ideology and organizational form, yet the struggle itself, in the direct clashes with the employing class, its private armed forces and the State, has been more bitter and violent than in perhaps any other country previous to the revolutionary period. The reactionary leadership and antiquated program and structure of the American labor movement could not prevent the giant forces generated by American capitalism from coming to expression in great struggles. It is enough to cite Homestead, Pullman, Ludlow, McKees Rocks, Lawrence, Mesaba, the steel strike, Herrin, West Virginia, and the whole history of the coal miners, to understand that the American working class contains within itself the' forces of proletarian revolution corresponding to the productive forces of American Capitalism, the greatest in the world. Delayed in coming to expression by the peculiar conditions of American social development, the forces of revolution in the American trade anion movement will be all the more sweeping and rapid in their development, all the more decisive and relentless, when the chains of capitalist ideology, of reformism, of Gompersism, are finally broken.
