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Samuel Gompers: Well now, I have been looking forward to this particular conversation the way a man looks forward to finally explaining to his neighbor why his fence keeps falling down. You build something real, something that works, something that has kept standing through rain and wind and every kind of political weather you can imagine -- and along comes someone to tell you that the fence is the problem. That is where we find ourselves today. I am Samuel Gompers. I founded the American Federation of Labor. I spent forty years building the most effective labor organization in the history of this country. And the woman sitting across from me believes that is precisely my sin.
Rosa Luxemburg: You will find, Mister Gompers, that I am not here to discuss fences. I am here to discuss whether what you built was a labor movement or a labor management company -- and I believe the answer to that question is not nearly as flattering to you as your introduction suggests.
Samuel Gompers: Now there is a phrase that has a nice ring to it. A labor management company. I have been called a great many things in my time -- a traitor by the socialists, a radical by the bosses, and occasionally both by the same man on the same afternoon. But let me tell you what I actually built. In 1886, when I founded the American Federation of Labor, the average working man in this country had a twelve-hour day, a six-day week, and a life expectancy that did not stretch far enough to enjoy a Sunday. By the time I was done, we had the eight-hour day. We had child labor reforms. We had collective bargaining rights recognized by the federal government. We had an institution that could walk into the office of the President of the United States and be listened to. I want to know what philosophy did that.
Rosa Luxemburg: Survival did that. The political pressure of a restless working class forced those concessions. The institution collected the credit.
Samuel Gompers: I see we are going to have a brisk morning.
Rosa Luxemburg: We are going to have an accurate one.
Samuel Gompers: Fair enough. Now let me try something, because I am told we are supposed to be fair to each other before we get to the part where we actually disagree. So let me steelman your position. I want to make the best possible case for Rosa Luxemburg's argument -- not because I think it is right, mind you, but because the most effective way to defeat an idea is to hold it up where everyone can see it clearly, and then take it apart in the light. Her argument, made as well as I can make it, runs like this. When a revolutionary movement creates a formal organization, that organization develops its own survival instincts. It hires staff, it opens offices, it signs contracts, it cultivates donors. The staff need salaries. The offices need rent. The donors need to feel respectable. And so the organization begins, slowly and almost invisibly, to moderate itself. The demands get softer. The tactics get safer. The leadership starts making decisions based on what is good for the institution rather than what is good for the class the institution was built to serve. And one day you look up and the union has settled for a nickel-an-hour raise when the men were ready to shut down the entire industry. That is her argument. And I will admit, in the spirit of fairness, that it is not a stupid argument.
Rosa Luxemburg: I am grateful you find it not stupid. That is the most generous thing you have said since we began.
Samuel Gompers: I am warming up. Now I want to hear you do the same for me. Tell me the best case for Samuel Gompers before you explain why I wasted forty years of my life.
Rosa Luxemburg: I will make your case, though it will require me to temporarily reason like a man who has confused caution with wisdom. Your best case runs as follows. The working class cannot win on passion alone. Spontaneous uprisings are powerful and inspiring and they tend to get their leaders killed. An institution provides continuity, legal protection, accumulated resources, and the ability to deliver results across decades rather than just across moments. The eight-hour day exists because the AFL was still standing after the excitement had faded, when a purely spontaneous movement would have flared, been crushed, and left nothing. A half-victory that is sustained over time is worth more than a full victory attempted and destroyed. That is your case. I make it honestly. I make it only so that I can then demonstrate exactly where it goes wrong.
Samuel Gompers: She makes it very well. I was almost moved.
Rosa Luxemburg: The problem with your case -- and it is a fatal problem -- is that it assumes the institution remains in service of the movement. It does not. Once an institution has staff to protect and contracts to honor and relationships with the very employers it is supposed to be fighting, it begins to calculate. And the calculation always -- always -- produces the same answer: do not risk the institution. A general strike is too dangerous for the institution. A political demand is too radical for the institution. A movement that threatens the system is a movement the institution will be asked to contain. You did not build a weapon for the working class, Mister Gompers. You built a cage that the working class agreed to enter because it had padded walls.
Samuel Gompers: Now that is a vivid picture. I will give her that. A cage with padded walls. Let me respond to it the way I responded to every piece of theory that sounded beautiful and resulted in a corpse. I will ask what actually happened. You know what happened to the movements that refused to build institutions? The ones that relied on spontaneous mass action and revolutionary energy and the uncontainable power of the awakened proletariat? They got crushed. The Homestead strike. The Pullman strike. The Paris Commune. Beautiful. Inspiring. Finished. Eugene Debs went to prison. The Wobblies got their offices raided and their members deported. Your own uprising in Berlin -- the Spartacist uprising in January of 1919, the one you supported even as you knew it was premature -- ended with you shot and thrown into the Landwehr Canal. I am not making a rhetorical point. I am pointing at the historical record.
Rosa Luxemburg: And so did the movements that built institutions. Eventually. The AFL spent forty years negotiating within capitalism and produced a working class that was comfortable enough not to challenge capitalism. You won wages. You lost the war.
Samuel Gompers: I did not know we were fighting a war. I thought we were fighting for the men who had to get up before dawn and stand for twelve hours and come home with nothing to show for it. Those men did not need a war. They needed a contract.
Rosa Luxemburg: They needed both. And because you gave them the contract, they stopped needing the war. That is the mechanism I described in The Mass Strike. The trade union bureaucracy does not fight the employer. It manages the relationship with the employer. It teaches the worker to think of justice as whatever can be negotiated rather than whatever can be won. You trained an entire class to accept less than it deserved because less-than-deserved is what institutions are built to deliver.
Samuel Gompers: You know, I spent a good deal of my early life in cigar factories, rolling tobacco alongside men who had been through every kind of organizing drive you can imagine -- the Knights of Labor, the socialist unions, the industrial unions, every kind of flying-the-red-flag outfit that ever set up a meeting hall in lower Manhattan. And I noticed something. The ones who made the biggest speeches went home to the same tenement they started in. The ones who built contracts went home to a slightly better one. Now maybe that is a failure of imagination on my part. But from where I was standing, it looked very much like a victory.
Rosa Luxemburg: A slightly better tenement is not liberation, Mister Gompers. It is a bribe. A bribe paid by the employer to prevent liberation. You accepted it and called it a win. Your employer accepted it and called it cheap.
Samuel Gompers: Liberation. There is a word that has been used to justify a very great many disasters. I sat across from men who worked for John D. Rockefeller and I did not discuss liberation. I discussed wages. And the men I represented went home with more money in their pockets. I want to hear what liberation bought the men who followed you into the streets of Berlin in January of nineteen nineteen.
Rosa Luxemburg: It bought them the knowledge that they had tried. That they had not accepted the world as it was. That they had stood and said this system must end -- and meant it.
Samuel Gompers: That is a moving epitaph. I prefer mine. The eight-hour day.
Samuel Gompers: We are going to take a short pause here. And when we come back, I am going to show her exactly what this argument looks like when you apply it to the present day -- because the movements she would recognize from her own time are happening right now, and they are failing in exactly the way I have been describing for forty years. Stay with us.
Rosa Luxemburg: And when we return, I will show him that the failures he is about to describe are not failures of spontaneity. They are failures of the model he invented. Part Two.
