Among serious people who today are concerned about and active in the development of progressive forces fighting for change from the present war-torn, poverty-ridden social order, there can be no two opinions as to who leads on the economic, political, and cultural plane. The industrially developed countries lead the more primitive and backward ones. The city leads the countryside. Progress towards the achievement of a more scientific, freer, and fuller life commands an acceptance of this fact with a genuine respect and understanding of it.

We live in a class society which is still dominated and rigidly controlled by the capitalists, who have evolved from their former progressive role, as the leaders of the revolution which swept away the feudal system, to their present place as the exploiters and oppressors of the more numerous and progressive class, the real producers of gigantic social wealth.

Political parties, properly understood, represent the interests of special economic groups. The main economic group is composed of the workers of town and country, in other words, the agricultural worker on the farm and the industrial laborer in the city. Industrial workers are best fitted for political leadership. This powerfully numerous and socially significant class cannot be faithfully represented or served by a political party dominated by their masters. Experience has shown that the worker and the farmer can expect nothing but treachery from them.

The producers must build and control their own political party or parties. A labor party, or a farmer-labor party, in order to escape the fate of absorption or control by the bosses' parties, must be controlled by the organizations of workers, that is, by the trade unions.

The worker has been conditioned by factory and job discipline to act in an organized manner. By virtue of this fact, the trade union has become the most important and efficient economic and social organization of our time. Just as the industrially developed country dominates one less industrially developed, just as the city dominates the country-side, so the trade unions and workers' organizations must take the lead in organizing the other less stable economic groups and merge with them in a political party.

The class struggle is an inevitable outgrowth of a class society. The conflict rages over the division of wealth produced by labor, which is appropriated in the main by the financiers, industrialists, and their allies. This struggle swiftly develops into a life or death question for the millions of unemployed and miserably paid workers. They and they alone, through the medium of the trade unions, are equipped by experience, discipline, and organization to lead the fight for the emancipation of all.

The simple truth that the economic welfare of industrial workers cannot be fully protected by trade unions alone has not been appreciated in the past, and is even now, after ten years of panic and mass unemployment, only partially understood by the leadership of the American trade unions.

Due primarily to this misunderstanding, the trade unions have remained, quite generally, harnessed to the Republican and Democratic political

machines. Economic pressure, the strongest motive force in society, has in the last few years impinged sharply upon the consciousness of this leadership.

The Minnesota trade unions from the world war period to the present time have gone through a completely different course of development in the political arena than their sister unions in almost all other sections of the country.

Here the unions, not without continuous opposition from important leadership personnel, have exercised a powerful al-though inadequate influence in launching and building the Farmer-Labor Party (Shipstead's¹ election to the Senate in 1922 was the direct result of the intervention of five thousand striking railway shopmen, fully supported by all other Minnesota trade unions).² They were, however, never allowed in the pilothouse. They were not responsible for its shipwreck.

The shattering of the Farmer-Labor Party in November 1938 (it was not merely an electoral defeat) was the inevitable culmination of a course shaped by politicians, compromisers of all sorts, and outright charlatans.³ Only the smug and timid will conclude, however, that the Labor Party has been destroyed.

The idea of independent political action is based upon something much firmer and more important than the hazy whims of the campus radical or the wishes of semiskilled intellectuals who look at their belt buckles for inspiration. When the Labor Party, or Farmer-Labor Party, comes back into Minnesota, it will be as part of a nation-wide movement based on and dominated by the mass trade unions, dispossessed farmers' organizations, and unemployed sections affiliated with the trade unions. The driving force of such a political party will bring to its support the so-called middle-class elements in present-day society.

Countless thousands of excellent students, professionals, technicians, and honest intellectuals will be inspired by the program of the Labor Party. It will be brilliantly colored by their talent and culture.

That the trade unions will finally tread this path, there can be little doubt. The New Deal has evolved into a war deal. The millions who have been taken off the breadlines will not return to selling apples on the street corners. The Republicans, even as the Democrats, have only one program of "reconstruction"; cut wages, hamstring the unions, starve the unemployed, drive the farmer into bankruptcy, and give all the Coughlins free rein.⁴

The trade unions, either with the present leader-ship, or against it if necessary, will be forced to organize and lead a labor party toward conquest of state power, thereby clearing the way for the reconstruction of our world on the plane of reason, logic, and justice.

1. Henrik Shipstead, a dentist and farmer-labor political activist in west-central Minnesota, was elected to the U.S. Senate from Minnesota in 1922.

2. The six-month railway shoperaft strike, beginning in July 1922, of which Dunne's close friend and comrade, Carl Skoglund, was a central rank-and-file leader, was eventually defeated through government injunctions, massive importation of scabs by the railroads, and the failure of the railroad operating brotherhoods (engineers, conductors and train-men) to join them. In Minnesota the shoperaft workers turned massively to independent political action, mobilizing to support FLP candidate Shipstead in November.

3. By 1938 the FLP had lost its charismatic leader, Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson, to cancer. Olson 's successor, Elmer Benson, was a small town banker who facilitated the capture of the party's administrative machinery by the Communist Party, demoralizing the FLP's rank and file cadre and accelerating the abandonment of the party by conservative trade unions. In 1944 the FLP, reduced to a Stalinist-dominated shell of its former self, dissolved into the Minnesota Democratic Party, which retains the name "Democratic Farmer Labor Party."

4. Detroit-based Catholic priest Father Charles Coughlin was preaching fascist-tinged anti-Semitic and anti-labor radio sermons in the 1930s.