Today the IWW has been resurfacing as a labor organization and as a scholarly interest in progressive academia. There is no doubt of a tension between the two. The IWW vision of working-class counterculture and organization is not reconcilable to the existence of a union bureaucracy and the welfare state—two hallmarks of the progressive state enshrined by the radical academic establishment. A renewed interest in the IWW by intellectuals as a cultural project should put us on our guard against the other dogma of progressive academia: the restriction of politics to aesthetics.

Culture and an American Social Democracy

If Rosemont has chronicled the culture of a major political movement of 20th century America, Michael Denning examines another one with very different results. The Cultural Front is a massive book of impressive research that examines the work of novelists, intellectuals, musicians, journalists, artists, trade unionists, the Communist Party and government administrators during, in the words of Denning, “the age of the CIO”, or the Popular Front era.

Denning describes how the CIO labor movement inspired a cultural movement consisting of fellow traveler artists and intellectuals, as well as government cultural programs. These forces united in building ideological support for the New Deal by elaborating cultural visions and motifs of the “people” that would underpin the creation of an American social democracy. Denning argues, “The culture and the politics of the (Communist Party’s) Popular Front were not simply New Deal liberalism and populism. They were a social democratic culture and politics of ‘industrial democracy’ and ‘industrial unionism’. In England, the culture and politics of social democracy and the post-World War II Labour Party are often called ‘labourism’; the Popular Front was in this sense ‘laborist,’ and fought for the laboring—the social democratization—of American culture” (xvii).

According to Denning this movement appeared as a result of a cross-class alliance represented by the CIO organizing drives of the 1930s and the emergence of a new middle class of “cultural workers”, who staffed the emerging culture industry (like Hollywood) and the cultural apparatus of big business and the state. Denning calls this movement—borrowing the language of the Communist Party—the Popular Front. The cultural front was “the result of the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement—the Popular Front—and the modern cultural apparatuses of mass entertainment and education” (xviii). The book argues that this movement for American social democracy ultimately lost out to the “corporate” politics of the “American Century”. However, the cultural front succeeded in creating an “American Renaissance” by permanently proletarianizing American culture, collapsing the distinction between high and low, and leaving a libratory legacy in popular culture. The cultural front “labored” American culture by creating representations or themes of people’s emancipation in American society.

For those who want to come to grips with the intersection of popular culture and politics the unearthing of valuable material and debates from this period are of interest in their own right. However, it is necessary to question Denning’s fundamental assumptions about this period in American history. His book is a profoundly ahistorical account that obscures the dynamics of class struggle against the CIO bureaucracy and the emerging welfare state.

Denning argues that the purpose of the resurgent labor movement and the growing anti-fascist struggles of the 1930s and 40s was to achieve state power. As a consequence, Denning is uncritical of the rise of a labor bureaucracy and of the American welfare state and fails to recognize the ways in which they acted as the savior of capitalist social relations in a time of acute crisis and challenge. Denning believes these new institutions were a fulfillment of the labor movement of the 1930s and 40s rather than its defeat.

This oversight is directly related to Denning’s special attention to the activity of what he terms “cultural workers”. This focus underscores a theory of cultural politics that institutionalizes the division between mental and manual labor, with its parallel in the administrative ideology of social democracy itself.

Much like the Popular Front intellectuals celebrated in The Cultural Front, Denning presents this period as an alternative and progressive outcome of American history that was subsequently lost with the birth of the Cold War at the end of Second World War. This obscures the ways in which the ideology of this “cultural front” helped prepare the ground for Cold War American politics with its incorporation of labor’s “representatives” fully within capitalist production, the projection of imperialism and the maintenance of white supremacy.

The strike wave of the 1930s, from the historic general strikes in places like Toledo, Ohio, to the sit-down strikes of 1936-1937 in places like Flint, Michigan, was to become a crossroads in American history. Mine, rubber, steel, textile, coal and auto workers, like in the heyday of the IWW, began to collectively organize in the economic and growing political crisis of the Depression era. Increasingly, violent confrontations between workers on the one hand and employers and police on the other only highlighted the potential for serious political problems for the state and middle class official society. Understanding the profound nature of this crisis, significant elements of the ruling class and the middle class realized that there had to be a political solution. This solution came in the form of state intervention in order to help centrally plan the economy. The regulation of labor-capital peace was their utmost priority.

Under Roosevelt’s leadership, and supported by the Communist Party, a labor management regime emerged that included workers’ “representatives” like United Mine Workers president John Lewis—first president of the CIO—and a host of federal regulatory agencies. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1934 stipulated that workers had the right to union representation and contracts. The National Labor Relations Act, or the Wagner Act, bound unions to negotiation with employers through the intervention of the state. The sovereignty of workers that built the resurgent labor movement of the 1930s was directly attacked in its ability to carry-out strikes and other collective action and organization which remained illegal unless it was legitimately regulated by a “leadership” of union officials committed to contractualism and the state.

In opposition to this bureaucratization of labor, rank-and-file committees sprang up in key industries and spread quickly, utilizing the strike with effectiveness. This explosion of rank-and-file organization faced three problems. There was a lack of preparation in terms of national organization, a shortage of funds, and the determination of union officials and New Deal Democratic Party politicians to prevent this power from spreading. They sought to prevent strikes from spreading and used national organization and money to crush locals. The Communist Party after 1935 supported this, having abandoned its policy of dual unionism and now launching their Popular Front support for Roosevelt, union officials and U.S. imperialism. Denning obscures the class antagonism of this period by identifying it as a cross-class historic bloc that created progressive change in American history.

This has important implications for the theory of culture and politics that he hopes to advance. He notes, “workers found economic representatives in the mass CIO unions and political representatives in Roosevelt’s New Deal Democratic Party, Earl Browder’s Communist Party, and the state labor parties. But these second-generation workers who created the CIO also found cultural representatives, as a host of organic intellectuals ranging from actors to novelists, popular singers to Marxist theorists, began to reshape American culture” (7). These “cultural representatives” made working class themes and attitudes respectable in American official society and the growing entertainment industry. These mental “laborers” and their cultural front—as Denning designates them—would be vital to giving ideological justification for the development of the new regime.

Denning uses two concepts to explain the theoretical dimensions of the cultural front. The first is Antonio Gramsci’s idea of hegemony and the second is C. Wright Mills’ idea of the cultural apparatus. Gramsci developed the idea of hegemony to help explain the need for a movement to battle with the ruling class over the creation and meaning of the national and international narrative on the purposes of civilization. In this sense the cultural front created worker-centered and multi-racial representations of American history and international relations. But these themes were used to justify the new regime and the new international order of states led by U.S. imperialism and idealized in the United Nations. Thus Gramsci’s idea can be correctly interpreted as either an insight into how an autonomous working-class movement emerges to govern society through and held together by newly created or interpreted cultural signification, or falsely as a justification for a permanent class of intellectuals that manage everyday people on their own behalf, culturally democratizing the state and ruling class in their name.

The idea of the “cultural apparatus” theorized by C. Wright Mills enshrines intellectuals and the new middle class more broadly that staffed the bureaucratic apparatuses of industry and the state that emerged with state-capitalism as the central agents of history. This idea was to have an important influence in the universities and on the middle class. Beginning in the 1950s, Mills argued that working-class consciousness was completely self-identified with capitalist social relations. The only resistance would come from intellectuals and the professional “cultural workers”. In reality, Mills simply flipped over vulgar Marxism. No longer did the “base” determine the “superstructure”, but now the reverse was held to be true. Both vulgar theories replace revolutionary theory with simple sociology where only the “system” and its managers have agency.

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