The Revolt of the Cadres

The Revolt of the Cadres ​

In the four years since the Red May Revolution, the world had been turned upside down. But the compromises that had been made for the sake of expediency had left intact forces that would seek to upend the revolution.

The Central Workers’ Government had made numerous concessions in 1933. The vestiges of class property remained in petty-proprietor businesses and the cooperative sector of the economy. The economic plans, state firms and major cooperatives had turned to petty-bourgeois intelligentsia for technical assistance during the period of economic recovery and restructuring.

In attempting to follow the path of least resistance, the dynamics of market relations continued to persist, and with that came not just exploitation. Workers at the base were not blind or mystified by this process. This discontent simmered for several years before it erupted.

There had been murmurs of discontent in the lead-up to the 1936 Workers’ Party Congress. The restlessness of the party rank-and-file had heavily informed Browder’s decision to dissolve the United Democratic Front, and make major concessions towards improving the social wage, particularly in the form of urban renewal projects.

But the transition to Workers’ Party unitary government could never mollify the discontent because the problems were coming from within the Workers’ Party itself.

The Revolt of the Cadres was set into motion on 1 May 1937. Similar confluences happened in many other major industrial cities, but the centre of gravity of the revolt was Detroit, the capital of the Michigan Socialist Republic.

During the uprisings of February 1933, armed workers had arrested the lame-duck Republican government in Lansing, pre-empting any attempts to void the election results. The Detroit Soviet ordered the dissolution of the existing institutions and the transfer of power to the city of Detroit; the Workers’ Party supermajority in the rump legislature countersigned this edict and overrode the opposition from the DFLP lawmakers.

Detroit was the fourth largest city in the country, and home to one-third of the state’s population. In the transition, the tri-county area around the city was absorbed under the Detroit Soviet’s administration.

The city was also home to one of the largest African communities outside the ANFR, formed during the great labor shortages of the Great War, as well as the largest Chosunese speaking population in the country. With the revolution, the last vestiges of segregation in housing, jobs and schooling were swept away, and all opposition to the programme of working class unity had been suppressed ruthlessly, even murderously, by the Red Guards.

The transition to dictatorship of the proletariat had brought immense changes to the institutions of the state. One of the first major policies of the new government was to integrate industry and education. Michigan’s two largest educational institutions, the University of Michigan and Michigan State College, were transferred to Detroit and merged (along with the formerly private Catholic college University of Detroit Mercy) into a single institution, Detroit University.

The relocation facilitated knowledge transfer and fraternization between the student and working populations, a process heavily encouraged by the new educational curriculum. The construction of the large, modern campus brought workers, professors and students into dialogue about the nature of education, as did the frequent student excursions to the factories.

Detroit’s 1937 May Day festivities were the largest in living memory. The Saturday parade brought brightly decorated floats, marching civic groups, and columns of the newest tanks and other fighting vehicles churned out by the Detroit Arsenal down Griswold Street towards Soviet Hall (formerly the Union Trust Building). With the main coursework of the semester over, the parade was attended heavily by students as well as much of the city’s working population.

The jubilant mood turned sour when Reginald Cox*, Chairman of the Detroit Central Committee, used the event as a platform to unveil the next major public works project by the city government, the proposed Highland Park Freeway.

The proposed limited-access depressed highway would bulldoze a major section of dilapidated but serviceable housing managed by the Detroit Public Housing Authority, including some of the temporary residences for university students.

For students and workers who had campaigned heavily for Cox last year, this was a particularly heavy blow. The residents of the Motor City had lobbied extensively for improvements to the city’s urban rail services, which Cox had made a central plank in the party caucuses. Reneging on this plank was bitter.

In spite of being the center of the automobile industry, public transport remained a major concern for city-dwellers. That night, in the canteens and dining halls, the issue proved irrepressible. The old norms of solemnity had been broken decades ago, and no one felt the need to not discuss political matters in polite company.

The tradition of the May Day supper had become a sort of secularized version of the Passover Seder for the largely gentile population of America. It was not a feast to celebrate abundance; it was a simple meal whose rituals had evolved to remind the community of scarcity and the need for compassion and righteousness in the face of injustice.

These extended families and communities ate their simple meal of bread, bitter vegetables and salt, and talked about what was on everyone’s mind. This had not been the first moment of doubt. They’d been piling up; apparatchiks riding in Cadillac limousines, the accumulation of privileges with party rank and office, the slow improvement of working conditions even as the economy had moved back to full employment.

This talk translated into action. Sunday was the customary day for the meeting of party cadres, the committed revolutionaries that constituted the “infantry” of the Leninist political party, active in party work. The cadre meetings had become as much social as political, especially since the revolution, but on Sunday, 2 May, the deputies from the cells met together with a new clarity. It may not have been the first alarm bell, but it was the first that had been heard.

These meetings translated into immediate political action. Public meetings were organized in the workplace cells and in the communities that would be affected by this “urban renewal”. Student party members, with their abundance of free time during the break period, proved an effective force multiplier for organizing outside of the party’s normal hub-and-spoke organizational model, going from door-to-door to build connections.

The first protests began a week later. Students and intellectuals rubbed shoulders with welders and laundresses. Representatives of the Internationalist Fraction worked with local leaders to draw up a list of demands for the party apparatus.

Up to this point, nothing truly out of the ordinary happened. Such local political issues had resulted in similar organizing events innumerable times, in every republic of the UASR. In this case, though, the organizational demands quickly grew beyond the wards affected by the project.

By the month’s end, the movement had crystallized. Delegates to party cadres in most of the city’s wards had drafted and signed a manifesto aligning with the Internationalist Fraction and its goal to regroup the party back to the principles of proletarian internationalism. The leafleting campaign began in full force in early June. Critiques from the journal Revmira of the bureaucratic and economic deformations were widely distributed.

The list of demands grew beyond the city of Detroit. Representatives from the lake freighters of the Great Lakes made contact with the movement. Poor conditions aboard the ships, especially the iron boats that carried the iron ore from the mines in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and northern Minnesota, had not improved significantly. Increases in pay, the sailors felt, were attempts by the shipping cooperatives to buy off concerns about safety and poor livability aboard the ships, especially as the iron boats had braved the “Witch of November”, the hurricane-force winds that develop on Lake Superior, the previous fall to meet production quotas.

The burden of meeting the drive for recovery and rearmament had fallen more heavily on some workers than others. This had violated the very soul of the revolution, and could no longer be ignored. The city government paused the project for the urban freeway, and Chairman Cox made a public apology on radio on 8 June, promising to redirect efforts towards preserving and improving public housing and transit. But it was already far too late.

The same day, a major rally was held at Palmer Park. Leaders of the movement presented a bold list of demands concerning the bureaucratic privileges being accrued in city and state government, the slow pace of the refurbishment of public housing, the need to improve the livability of the city, and the working conditions in the supply chain the fed the factory complexes in the city.

Most importantly, this list of demands would be backed by action. Shop stewards from the major automotive factories had endorsed the movement. Two major petitions were presented: the first was the petition of local party members to recall the Detroit party bureau, requiring all the party’s elected officials to stand for immediate re-election. The second was a petition for the recall of the Detroit Soviet, signed by a requisite quorum of citizens. The Revolt of the Cadres had begun.

The Detroit party bureau had not been unaware of the petitions. It had, however, greatly underestimated how quickly events would unfold and had not treated the recall petition as a serious issue. When the petitions were presented at Soviet Hall that afternoon, the result was chaos.

Workers had often raced ahead of the party leadership in moments of crisis. But never since the party’s founding had there been such a thorough repudiation of the leadership by the base. Two camps quickly formed. The first, around the embattled Chairman Cox, wished to defuse the situation by accepting the results of the petitions and going through the elections, contesting where they must, and inviting representatives from the movement into party office on a case-by-case basis.

A rival camp formed around Gil Green, candidate-member of the Workers’ Party of Michigan’s central committee and current head of the Detroit Public Safety Commissariat. Green believed that the revolt constituted an ultra-left deviation from the party-line and needed to be contained. He planned to fight the petitions on legalistic grounds and prevent the implied threat of strike action through invoking union discipline and the public safety “no strike pledges” that had been implemented in key industries. When it became clear that Green did not have the votes to sack Cox and force the issue, Green went over his head to the All-Michigan Central Executive Council.

When the city government turned into an appendage of the state party and rejected the petitions on bourgeois-legalist grounds, the predictable consequences unfolded. Workers at the Dynamo collective were more resistant, having felt like the movement was still primarily about opposing measures that promoted the sale of cars. But the other factory committees proved much more amenable to the message.

The Saturday 12 June meeting of the River Rouge Plant’s council gave the floor to several representatives of the movement. Walter Reuther, a River Rouge shop steward and contact with the “Second of May Movement”, as it was loosely referred to at the time, gave a brief speech detailing the movements demands. He argued that the workers of the plant needed to stand in solidarity with the struggling workers in the iron mines, and the sailors braving the iron boats. He further argued that corruption and inequity was worming its way back into the dictatorship of the proletariat, with many of the union-busting toadies of the old robber barons now maintaining cushy positions as “managers” in cooperatives or in the city government, collecting fat paychecks and turning their departments into ersatz private property. The only choice now was to strike in solidarity. If the workers of the Arsenal went out in solidarity with the sailors, the rest of the city would surely follow.

The plant’s chairman, Robert Nowak*, had originally intended to give a rebuttal based on the plant’s critical role as a State Defense Corporation to not strike during the rearmament drive, a pledge they had all signed. But Nowak was a battle hardened communist, and he remembered bitterly the struggles in the Great War. The memory of his sons who’d died fighting in the revolution stirred, and he remembered that these convictions had been written in blood. So when the popular “father” of the factory stated his intention to go out on strike whether anyone else joined him or not, the plant’s workers listened.

The word spread to the factory floor and work stopped immediately. By noon the next day, most of the major industries and shops had joined in solidarity. The demands were now for the immediate resignation of the Detroit Central Committee as well as the for the All-Michigan Central Executive Council.

Monday the 14th began with sporadic brawls at picket lines, as the morning shift of the Packard Automotive Plant were confronted by picket lines at the streetcar and light rail stops. The transit workers had gone out in solidarity with the Revolt of the Cadres, while the workers at Packard had narrowly voted down joining the strike. When the transit workers refused to return to work, heated words and eventually fists were exchanged.

The conflict intensified throughout the city, well beyond the ability of the Detroit Militia to contain. That afternoon, Cox was forced to resign by representatives from the Michigan party central committee, and Green was installed as interim Chairman of the city government. Cox and several of his supporters met in a break room, and resolved that they were not going to leave quietly.

As Green mobilized the local contingents of the Michigan Red Guards to restore order, the dismissed party workers smuggled some incriminating documents out of the bureau offices.

In the councils of the revolt, the initial fear about the renewed specter of police violence turned into anger. The evening edition of the Detroit Daily Worker included a front-page photo of a Red Guardsman truncheoning a student member of the Internationalist Fraction, Martin Glaberman. Those still on the fence were galvanized to action.

Tuesday began with a surprise, as the former enemy of the revolt, Reginald Cox, showed up to the local offices of the Internationalist Fraction. He brought with him several communiques between Dynamo’s head office and members of Detroit party bureau, promising lucrative management positions to key figures if they would ‘consider’ the petitions being brought by the unions for increased public spending on highways both in the city as well as the rest of the republic. Other papers included the fast-track rehabilitation of many Whites in the city administration, especially in the Detroit Militia.

The documents incriminated Cox as well as a number of Green’s supporters, though not Green himself, who was a more recent transplant from Chicago. Cox opined that Green’s beliefs in the matter were genuine, and he didn’t think he was corrupt, but that made him all the more dangerous. When Reuther asked why Cox would “come to Jesus” and incriminate himself like this, Cox simply stated he came to realize that this wasn’t business as usual, that he and the others had come to betray the founding principles of the revolution.

A radio communique by the revolt’s steering committee was broadcast on WXYZ-AM in Detroit, along with a statement of endorsement read by the station’s employees. The station was a Mutual Broadcasting System affiliate. Partner stations picked up the news story, spreading a revolt-sympathetic version of the story to many other cities in the evening broadcast. Breaking the news cordon, which had been enforced by the Workers’ Party successfully on the daily broadsheets would quickly turn the city affair into a national one.

Similar organizational meetings began across the Midwest industrial cities. Party cadres met with contacts from the Internationalist Fraction, and began mulling over the messy situation. Meanwhile in Michigan, the situation further developed. With sporadic riots beginning in response to police violence, and reports of Klan/Sons of Liberty activity attempting to incite racial violence and counterrevolution filtering up the chain of command, Kazimeriz Dabrow*, Chairman of the All-Michigan Central Executive Council, declared a state of emergency beginning at 1800 on Thursday the 17th.

As part of the state of emergency, workers in critical industries such as transport and defense were now legally required to return to their duties. Additionally, the state of emergency mobilized the rest of the Michigan Red Guards, which would move to the capital to restore order. Additionally, requests for assistance were given to the headquarters of the Proletarian Guard’s 6th Regiment in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Dabrow had unwittingly touched the third rail. The conflict between the petit-bourgeois ruralites and the urban dwellers had not yet gone away. The middling farmers, shopkeepers and rural tradesmen had supported Hoover in the 1932 election, and before their suppression had been on the verge of forming a reactionary fifth column against the worker’s offensive in February 1933. The Red Guards, formed from the National Guard, still carried part of the stigma of the National Guard’s long history as a tool for strikebreaking. The urban Red Guardsmen in Detroit had been measured, even sympathetic, to the revolt, and there were numerous instances of fraternization.

This respect was not shared with the rural Red Guards. The attempts to restore order were refused; the next public communique of the Fraction rejected the order as illegal, as the recall petitions had reached quorum.

The movement rapidly developed outside of Michigan. Party cadres acted quickly to organize sympathy actions to block any attempts to bring armed violence against Detroit. The regroupment of the Workers’ Party’s base developed far more rapidly than even the supporters could have anticipated. Similar recalls began in Chicago, Toledo, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, as well as numerous smaller cities.

The situation quickly got the attention of the Central Workers’ Government. Emma Goldman, Secretary for Labor, resigned in protest, complicating the already strained cooperation between the General Union of Anarchists and the Workers’ Party. While Browder believed that the revolters were fundamentally misguided, Foster ultimately convinced him that they were precisely the kind of tool needed to be wielded against the rightists in the party.

Utilizing the embarrassment caused by Goldman’s resignation as a pretext, Foster demanded J. Edgar Hoover’s resignation to settle the debt. He countermanded the orders being delivered to assist the restoration of order in Detroit. In a public statement on Friday, Foster declared that his sympathies were with the party cadres fighting against corruption and opportunism in Detroit. He ordered a full, thorough investigation of the Michigan party apparatus.

A decree from the central government soon followed, ordering the nationalization of the iron boat and lake freighter fleet in the Great Lakes. As part of the restructuring, the major safety concerns of the sailors were to be addressed. Newer, safer vessels were to be procured, the oldest ones heading to the scrapyards as soon as possible. New scheduling was promised, to avoid transits in the periods of worst weather.

With the orders coming down from DeLeon City, the revolt could no longer be resisted. The recalls were certified, and new elections were scheduled for the first weekend in July, the 2nd through the 4th. Order was quickly restored, and the strikes ended.

In the aftermath, the insurgent Internationalist Fraction captured a supermajority in the party apparatus in Detroit, and a majority of the total delegates to the emergency party congress. Nowak was selected by cadres to serve as the new Chairman of the Detroit Central Committee and party bureau. The new regime in the republican and city governments worked quickly to restore the program of workers’ control of production, reining in the parochial interests of the cooperatives and the bureaucrats.

In the months to follow, dozens of party officials were convicted of corruption related charges or were drummed out of the party. But the renewal of the dictatorship of the proletariat had its own consequences. Michigan went from being a single party-state to a tenuous Workers’ Party majority in the republican Congress of Soviets. The DFLP and the DRP made major gains in the snap election, capturing a majority in several rural district soviets, and increasing their seat count in every district save Detroit itself.

Nationally, the Revolt of the Cadres reverberated through the party apparatus. New blood entered the organization, and the Internationalist Fraction had captured the support of the vital core of the party’s base in the great industrial cities. In spite of the complications, the affair was broadly viewed by the public as a revitalizing force in the party, and proof that the social system created by the revolution could endure against internal threats.

The other benefactors were the Democratic-Republicans and the Farmer-Laborists, who found new constituencies among those who had once been aligned to the party-state.

Internationally, though, the Revolt of the Cadres was much misinterpreted in its own time. Observers in the Canadian and British governments relied too heavily on the interpretations of the wishful thinkers in the American exile community. The British Foreign Office interpreted the events as exposing the fragility of the new regime, especially what it viewed as a capitulation by Foster (and not, as it actually was, a shrewd triangulation to dispose himself of allies he’d never viewed as fully reliable).

The British bourgeois press, particularly the Daily Mail , championed the revolt as the beginning of a liberal restoration for much of the summer before quietly forgetting it ever happened when it became apparent to their overseas editor that they’d hitched their wagon to a devoutly anti-liberal left communist movement.

The Revolt further strained relations with Stalin’s government in the USSR. The communist left was far more openly critical of the Soviet Union, and in his own view the American government had essentially capitulated to their version of the Kronstadt Mutiny. Amid the ongoing Yezhovshchina , the Soviet regime recalculated the willingness and ability of the Americans to support them in any war of imperialist encirclement. *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation