11. Who Gets the Bird? Communists and the CIO

Episode 11 of Fragile Juggernaut concerns the Communist Party and its complex role in the creation of the CIO. Andrew and Ben trace the strategic zigzags of America’s far-left, recount their pioneering role in organizing drives, and measure the Party’s own accounts of its politics against the often ambiguous, even contradictory realities of its practice.

Did Communists merely supply the shock troops for someone else’s political ambitions, or did they put their stamp on the CIO, in ways that were durable and lasting? Did their practice of unionism conform to the mainstream of the labor movement, or did it contain the germs of another kind of CIO? What, ultimately, did the CIO do to the Communist Party? We discuss this and more amongst our co-hosts, and with our special guest, the historical sociologist Judith Stepan-Norris, co-author of Left Out and Talking Union (our interview begins around 1:25:00).

Featured music: “The Bourgeois Blues” by Lead Belly; “The United Front” by New Singers; “Our Line's Been Changed Again” by Joe Glazer; “Internationale” by New Singers)

Archival audio credits: Seeing Red: Stories of American Communists (1983)

Fragile Juggernaut is a Haymarket Originals podcast exploring the history, politics, and strategic lessons of the Congress of Industrial Organizations and the rank and file insurgency that produced it. Support Fragile Juggernaut on Patreon and receive our exclusive bimonthly newsletter, full of additional insights, reading recommendations, and archival materials we’ve amassed along the way. 

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Read Gabriel Winant on the Popular Front in The London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n15/gabriel-winant/we-can-breathe