Leigh David Benin - The New Labor Radicalism and New York Citys Garment Industry: Progressive Labor Insurgents During the 1960s

edited by

STUART BRUCHEY

ALLAN NEVINS PROFESSOR EMERITUS COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

______________________

LEIGH DAVID BENIN

First published 2000 by Garland Publishing, Inc.

Published 2018 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

First issued in paperback 2018

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2000 by Leigh David Benin

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:

Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 13: 978-1-138-97710-5 (pbk)

ISBN 13: 978-0-8153-3385-2 (hbk)

Dedicated to the Memory of

Marcia Herman Benin

and

Robert Milton Benin

Lovers of Justice and Learning

This study examines how Progressive Labor, an antirevisionist offshoot of the Communist Party USA, attempted to revolutionize the labor front in New York Citys garment industry during the 1960s. An ideologically driven group, whose founders were loyal to Stalinism and attracted by Maoism, Progressive Labor set out in 1962 to become the vanguard of the American working class. However, PLmost of whose several hundred members were students, intellectuals and professionalsis primarily known for the factional role that it played in Students for a Democratic Society, the largest radical organization in the United States during the 1960s. The WorkerStudent Alliance, PLs caucus in SDS, championed the cause of working-class revolution. Although most SDSers, who identified with the New Lefts reliance on students or minorities, never embraced PLs faith in the American working class as an agency of radical social change, PL gained enough supporters for its pro-worker strategy to precipitate a disastrous split in SDS in 1969.

Progressive Labor was not only the first of the newly organized radical groups in the 1960s to advocate a working-class strategy, but the first to turn its members into workplace organizers. Thus, while PL was vociferously urging students to support working-class revolution, it also sought to validate its pro-worker stance by winning workers at the point of production to communism. Therefore, although most large-scale radical actions in the 1960s were campus based and we primarily know PL as an important player in the factional wars that led to SDSs disintegration at the end of the decade, this study focuses on PLs historical experience in the labor field, an arena in which PLs activities were not entirely insignificant, and which PL regarded as a proving ground for the theories it advanced within SDS. A historical analysis of PLs labor organizing, even in one venue, provides a useful vantage point from which we can reevaluate the theoretical debate within SDS over agency (the social basis for radical social change). To what extent did PLs experience with on-the-job organizing confirm its sanguine view of contemporary American workers revolutionary potential? To what extent did PLs practice at the point of production justify the partys enormous self-confidence as an aspiring labor vanguard? By looking at PLs attempt to revolutionize the labor front, this study illuminates the seldom examined labor agitation of 1960s radicals, as well as the little explored radical element in the labor movement of the period.

During the 1960s and 1970s, public and service sector unions were more dynamic than unions in the industrial sector, including the ILGWU, and PLs predominantly college-educated base generally played a greater role in public and service workers unions than in unions of industrial workers, where PL had few members. However, PL relied primarily on the revolutionary potential of industrial workers, especially super-exploited Blacks, Hispanics, and, in feminized industries, women. Because PL was headquartered in New York City, this study focuses on PLs organizing efforts in the citys industrial heartland, the garment industry, whose large number of minority and female workers were represented by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, the citys biggest and most influential labor union.

Progressive Labors roots were in New York City, which had a strong union and radical tradition, including a history of labor radicalism. A labor town, New York was also the headquarters of the CP, whose internal disputes in the late 1950s and early 1960s led to the creation of PL. Progressive Labors new communists partially rejected their CP training, but they also attempted to perpetuate the CP traditions that they valued, including a communist struggle to control the needle trades dating back to the 1920s. For the most part, Jewish men who were either immigrants themselves or the children of immigrants led the citys garment industry, the ILGWU and PL. Their own responses to exploitation and anti-Semitism (capitalist enterprise, socialist unionism, and communist revolution, respectively) informed their approachat a time of rising radical, labor, civil rights, and feminist fermentto the citys newest garment workers, Black and Hispanic women. Examining the PL-led insurgency in the ILGWU informs our understanding of New York City during the 1960s and the ILGWUs attempt to cope with changes in the garment workforce as the industrys decline in New York threatened to devastate the union.

Thus, this study of PLs attempt to revolutionize the labor front in New York Citys garment industry during the 1960s enhances our knowledge of Progressive Labor, contemporary student and labor radicalism, and New York City, especially its largest industry and major labor union.

Progressive Labor emerged as an antirevisionist offshoot of the Communist Party USA in 1962. Progressive Labors leaders expressed frustration with what they considered to be the CPs defensive stance during the anticommunist purge under Truman and Eisenhower, and bitterness at the partys anti-Stalinism following Khrushchevs denunciation of Stalin in 1956. They found the Communist Party of Chinas increasingly vociferous critique of Soviet revisionism persuasive. Over the course of twenty years, from 1962 to 1982, PL read international events and reflected on its own practice, and discovered what it considered to be the logical implications of antirevisionism. In attempting to progressively purify communism of revisionist errors, that is, concessions to capitalist ideology and power, it evolved a pure and simple communism that was utopian in character.