William Z. Foster and the Tragedy of American Radicalism Book

Barrett examines the life of William Z. Foster, both the syndicalist boring-from-within union organizer whom was authentically a working class independent radical, and his transformation into a factional Communist who still carried his trade unionism yet accepted the party's vision of discipline and militant minorities pushing for revolutionary goals. While he had grown up navigating the American left from Socialist to Wobbly to syndicalist working within the AFL organizing the 1919 strike, but 1921 he was in deep reflection about the need to build a disciplined labor left, which brought him to the Communist Party. Foster had earlier arrived at his boring-from-within tendances through exposure to European syndicalism in England and France, and it was a trip to the Soviet Union which transformed him into a Communist. The biography challenges the history of the CPUSA as simply one of a Soviet apparatus, but instead of a genuinely American socialist organization which had Soviet influences, and the factions involved in the party reflected those battles of personality, which Foster navigated skillfully. By the end of the 1920s, after seeing the Trade Union Educational League build opposition caucuses in many unions only to see many of them smashed and swallowing the hard pill of the dual unionism of the Third Period endorsed by the CP, Foster was a committed Stalinist, falling deeper and deeper into ideological lockstep.

Because of health crisises from jailtime and his falling out of favor because of his more confrontational and non collaborative tendencies during the Popular Front, he rose back to the top of the party with the dawn of the Cold War. By that point, he brought ideological Marxist-Leninism of increasingly dogmatic, sectarian, and unbending as the party was under siege when it needed more flexibility, playing into the FBI's hands. Ever as it was halved by the 1950s, Foster saw it dwindle rapidly by internal purges and nonacceptance of reform efforts after the crimes of Stalin were revealed. He remarked he'd rather have a party of 50 pure Marxist-Leninists than 50,000 half Communists, a marked departure from his earlier demands to work within trade union structures. Barrett notes that Foster had long removed himself and was isolated from the cultural and social norms of American workers, dying far away in a Moscow hospital, enamored with the Soviet Union, a fair symbol of Foster's life. Barrett concludes that the main tragedy of Foster's life would be to conclude that building a better world is impossible because of how Foster ended up and how he contributed to the destruction of the organization he spent three decades helping build, but instead, the reader should conclude that Fosterism is a dead end and learn lessons on what not to do.