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William Zebulon Foster is an American labor organizer and activist serving as Secretary of the Totalist Section of the Combined Syndicates of America (CSA).
Born in 1881 to a poor Irish immigrant family, Foster left school at the age of ten and worked across the country in a variety of unskilled jobs. A radical union organizer since 1894, he joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901 and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in 1909. After studying the French syndicalist union Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT) during a tour of Europe, he became an outspoken advocate against the IWW's policy of dual unionism and in favor of a strategy of entryism, or "boring from within". He left the IWW and formed the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA) in September 1912, which encouraged its members to infiltrate and radicalize the mainstream American Federation of Labor (AFL).
As an organizer for the AFL, Foster gained a national reputation as militant labor activist for his work organizing in the meatpacking and steel industries. He formed another entryist organization, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in November 1920, which became the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL) in 1929. His 1932 manifesto Towards Syndicalist America serves as the guidebook for every aspiring totalist in the United States.
Biography[]
Early Life[]
William Foster was born on 25 February 1881 in Taunton, Massachusetts to Elizabeth McLoughlin, an English Catholic textile mill worker, and James Foster, an Irish republican who fled to the United States after the failed Fenian Uprising of 1867. Of the twenty-three children his mother gave birth to during his childhood, only nine survived. Raised in the impoverished Irish area of Skittereen within the Moyamensing neighborhood of South Philadelphia, Foster left school at the age of ten to work a variety of unskilled jobs. He apprenticed as a dye sinker for three years, after which he left the position to work in a white lead factory. He worked at fertilizer plants in Reading, Pennsylvania and Jacksonville, Florida; as a railroad construction worker and sawmill employee in Florida; as a streetcar motorman in New York City; as a logger and longshoreman in Portland, Oregon; and as a sailor.
Labor Activist[]
In 1901 at the age of nineteen, Foster joined the Socialist Party of America (SPA) and became a member of the party's Washington state branch, but soon left in the midst of a faction fight. In 1909 he joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and participated in a free speech fight in Spokane, Washington alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Foster toured Europe the following year, arriving in Paris to make a study of the syndicalist Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT). Impressed with how the French syndicalists had organized themselves within mainstream unions, upon his return to the US he argued that the IWW should dissolve and that its members should instead attempt to capture and radicalize the mainstream American Federation of Labor (AFL), but failed to win more than a few delegates to his cause at the September 1911 convention.
Foster and his sympathizers left the IWW and soon afterward formed their own organization, the Syndicalist League of North America (SLNA), in September 1912. Founded in Chicago, the SLNA had locals in cities and towns across the Western and Midwestern United States, with each branch setting its own dues, publishing its own paper, and working out its own policies. The organization maintained a presence within the Brotherhood of Railway Carmen of America and participated in the failed Illinois Central shopmen's strike of 1911. The SLNA also maintained links with the British Industrial Syndicalist Education League and sponsored a US speaking tour by future British chairman Tom Mann. The SLNA never became an effective force, however, and disbanded in the summer of 1914.
Undeterred, in January 1915 Foster established a new organization called the International Trade Union Educational League (ITUEL), which became an influential in the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), a subordinate branch of the AFL. Foster became a general organizer for the AFL and gained a national reputation for his work organizing in the meatpacking and steel industries. He became secretary of the Stockyards Labor Council (SLC), which attempted to create a coalition of labor unions representing all crafts related to meatpacking. Foster also organized and led the national Steel Strike of 1919, raising funds and organizing material assistance for the strikers and their families.
After the dissolution of the ITUEL in the spring of 1917, Foster founded another entryist organization, the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in November 1920. Like the ITUEL and SLNA before it, the TUEL sought to encourage the development of radical activists within established unions and to unite those already there around a platform of industrial unionism, as well as to support the militant struggle for workers' rights. Foster's study of the 1925 British Revolution led him to favor a more authoritarian form of socialism, as he viewed the British Trade Union Congress (TUC) as a more effective syndicalist organization than the French CGT. In 1929, the organization changed its name to the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), and currently exists as totalist clique within the AFL. In 1932 Foster published his manifesto, Towards Syndicalist America, which serves as the guidebook for every aspiring totalist in the United States.
Personal Life[]
Foster married Esther Abramowitz, a former member of an anarchist collective in Washington, in 1912.