The Responsible Socialism of Adolph Germer
Adolph Germer was a mineworker, socialist, and lifelong labor organizer who believed that organizing strategy must be both ambitious and practical. He adopted this orientation because he knew first hand both how difficult it was to win and how devastating it could be for workers when they lost.
In youth, one can be irresponsible. It’s one of the great things about youth. A lack of responsibility allows one to be bold, to speak and act with an eye toward truth, levity, and dramatic expression rather than consequences and communication. It’s fun, basically, and so it’s no real mystery why we all seek it out in some form or another, even well past the time when it’s appropriate to.
In many ways, however, youth is a state we never leave, and I’m not just affirming the old psychoanalytic lesson that we never escape from the psychic confines of the formative period of our early years. All sorts of exceptions are made in everyday life for some reprieve from adulthood. In intimate relationships, we are often coddled and tolerated by our partners in ways that would never fly in the outside world. In our cultural consumption, especially as of late, we can indulge in fantasies of heroism and villainy that only children could really believe in. Sadly, left-wing politics is also an arena within which youthful fancy can be extended into adulthood. Lenin famously castigated certain “childish” left-wingers who, by opposing absolutely proletarian rule with rule by leaders of a party, pathetically acted out their oedipal fantasies on party leadership.
Though Adolph Germer, the first field organizer of the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO), hated the Leninists in his midst, he would likely have found much to agree with in Lenin’s diatribe against the irresponsible factions of disgruntled leftists who had not reckoned with the reality of power. Within six years of its birth in 1935, the CIO was responsible for more or less completely organizing the basic industries in the US. Prior to 1935, auto, steel, rubber, electrical manufacturing, and meatpacking were all unorganized. By 1941, they were all unionized industries.
In the CIO, Germer found what he had been looking for his entire life: a responsible organization. Responsibility is not much of a left-wing value, but for Germer, it was what distinguished playacting revolution from actually building power for the working class. When it comes to transforming the world into a freer and more equal place, many people can launch into beautiful flights of fancy on behalf of the cause, with inspiring rhetoric and dramatic gestures to match. Far fewer can say they’re going to do something both concrete and ambitious, and then actually do it.
