Reddit reviews AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?

This list provided by /u/marxism-feminism is pretty good, but I would argue many Third-Worldist websites and articles lack concrete details about the nature of the Western labor bureaucracy (the institutions of the labor aristocracy). That is to say, it's not simply a case of arguing things like how large the labor aristocracy in the imperialist nations is, or whether they even have a proletariat, but you have to explain the fact that the institutions of the 'working class' itself have been overtly in support of their own imperialists for over a century now.

Even those who are not Third-Worldists have understood this, they just have not been able to come up with a concrete explanation for why it is the case. In that regard, reading this material with a Third-Worldist lens is quite illuminating, and I think, profoundly important for bringing the Third-Worldist analysis out of pure theoretical abstraction and into a concrete historical materialist analysis.

AFL-CIO's Dark Past (http://www.laboreducator.org/darkpast.htm) by Harry Kelber

Organized Labor and U.S. Foreign Policy: The Solidarity Center in Historical Context (http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/752/) by George Nelson Bass

Solidarity for Sale (http://www.laborers.org/SOLIDARITYFORSALE.html) by Robert Fitch

Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism (http://snylterstaten.dk/english/unequal-exchange-and-prospects-socialism-communist-working-group) by the Communist Working Circle

Labor Aristocracy: Mass Base of Social-Democracy (http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/contemp/whitemyths/edwards/) by H.W. Edwards

Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor (http://www.amazon.com/Taking-Care-Business-Kirkland-American/dp/1583670033) by Paul Buhle

Where were you, brother? An account of trade union imperialism (http://www.amazon.com/Where-brother-account-trade-imperialism/dp/0905990048) by Don Thompson and Rodney Larson

Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor's Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (http://www.amazon.com/Workers-World-Undermined-American-Foreign/dp/0896084299/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418155072&sr=1-1&keywords=workers+of+the+world+undermined) by Beth Sims

Divided World Divided Class: Global Political Economy and the Stratification of Labour Under Capitalism (http://bookzz.org/book/2064979/b76b20) by Zak Cope

The Worker Elite: Notes on the Labor Aristocracy (http://www.amazon.com/The-Worker-Elite-Notes-Aristocracy-ebook/dp/B00KOTXSTC) by Bromma

AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? (http://www.amazon.com/AFL-CIOs-against-Developing-Country-Workers/dp/0739135023/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418155256&sr=1-1&keywords=afl-cio+secret+war) by Kim Scipes

The Influence of Organized Labor on U.S. Policy toward Israel, 1945- 1967 (https://ohiostatepress.org/Books/Complete%20PDFs/Hahn%20Empire/08.pdf) by Peter L. Hahn

Settlers: Mythology of the White Proletariat (http://bookzz.org/book/900314/deedd1) by J. Sakai

Two Pages from Roman History (https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/pdf/1902/two_pages.pdf), by Daniel De Leon.

The Labor Lieutenants of American Imperialism (https://archive.org/details/TheLaborLieutenantsOfAmericanImperialism) by Jay Lovestone

That last one is particularly interesting, because it is clear Lovestone used his understanding of the nature of the US labor bureaucracy to actually catapult himself to the top of it, after he was expelled from the CP for refusing to accept the Black Nation line.

The term "Labor Lieutenants" comes from Daniel De Leon. If the Bolsheviks had never succeeded, it would be possible to reconstruct the labor aristocracy thesis almost entirely from Daniel De Leon and his group's struggle with the US labor bureaucracy.

This is one of the documents the CPUSA often cites to excuse their total and complete opportunism. The work itself is actually quite good, but here is the passage the CPUSA quotes to justify itself:

>After the first socialist revolution of the proletariat, and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie in some country, the proletariat of that country remains for a long time weaker than the bourgeoisie, simply because of the latter’s extensive international links, and also because of the spontaneous and continuous restoration and regeneration of capitalism and the bourgeoisie by the small commodity producers of the country which has overthrown the bourgeoisie. The more powerful enemy can be vanquished only by exerting the utmost effort, and by the most thorough, careful, attentive, skilful and obligatory use of any, even the smallest, rift between the enemies, any conflict of interests among the bourgeoisie of the various countries and among the various groups or types of bourgeoisie within the various countries, and also by taking advantage of any, even the smallest, opportunity of winning a mass ally, even though this ally is temporary, vacillating, unstable, unreliable and conditional. Those who do not understand this reveal a failure to understand even the smallest grain of Marxism, of modern scientific socialism in general. Those who have not proved in practice, over a fairly considerable period of time and in fairly varied political situations, their ability to apply this truth in practice have not yet learned to help the revolutionary class in its struggle to emancipate all toiling humanity from the exploiters. And this applies equally to the period before and after the proletariat has won political power.

Opportunist quotation of this passage ignores the whole context of the work. The CPUSA will quote it to justify their completely opportunist positions in relation to the Democratic Party, ignoring literally everything else about this book. I'm sure if the CPUSA bothered to actually have study groups on this work at all, they'd just want people to read this small paragraph over and over again, and ignore everything else. Such as this passage:

>We are waging a struggle against the “labour aristocracy” in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging the struggle against the opportunist and social-chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side. It would be absurd to forget this most elementary and most self-evident truth. Yet it is this very absurdity that the German “Left” Communists perpetrate when, because of the reactionary and counter-revolutionary character of the trade union top leadership, they jump to the conclusion that . . . we must withdraw from the trade unions, refuse to work in them, and create new and artificial forms of labour organisation! This is so unpardonable a blunder that it is tantamount to the greatest service Communists could render the bourgeoisie. Like all the opportunist, social-chauvinist, and Kautskyite trade union leaders, our Mensheviks are nothing but “agents of the bourgeoisie in the working-class movement” (as we have always said the Mensheviks are), or “labour lieutenants of the capitalist class”, to use the splendid and profoundly true expression of the followers of Daniel De Leon in America. To refuse to work in the reactionary trade unions means leaving the insufficiently developed or backward masses of workers under the influence of the reactionary leaders, the agents of the bourgeoisie, the labour aristocrats, or “workers who have become completely bourgeois” (cf. Engels’s letter to Marx in 1858 about the British workers [26]).

So the CPUSA ignores the labor aristocracy thesis, put forward here by Lenin and in many other works of his, to strip one passage completely out of context in order to justify their own diligent service to the 'American' labor aristocracy, turning themselves into "labour lieutenants of the capitalist class" in the process.

The work is essentially an attempt to get "Left" communists on board a program of actually fighting the leaders of the labor aristocracy. It is not a pamphlet about how to merge yourself into them, which is how the CPUSA would prefer to read this work.

On the other side of the 'pond', this work is also read literally by 'British' Trotskyism to justify their opportunism in relation to the Labour Party, but again, the 'British' Trotskyites read this work in a completely opportunist fashion.

Lenin only opposes dual unionism in the cases were it is still possible to openly attack the opportunist leadership of the bourgeois unions. This Lenin believed was still possible at the time in the UK, which is the only reason he actually opposes dual unionism. Why make your own union when you have freedom of criticism to point out that the leadership of the unions are "labour lieutenants of the capitalist class"?

It is, in my estimation, that such a period has long since passed in the vast majority of the West. This advice is still useful to those communists on the margins of the imperialist world, or in the Third-World. Revolutionaries in India, for instance, should be able to utilize the advice contained in here to advance the struggle against the opportunists in the labor movement there.

It is also worth pointing out that virtually no communist group in America actually does anything like this. Literally almost all of them are seeking a way to merge themselves into the leadership of the labor aristocracy. A handful of Trotskyite groups, like the SEP, will make some noise here and there, but don't really produce any useful analysis that could be utilized by Third-World revolutionaries in the labor movement to use as political ammunition. Myself, I recommend people read books like Kim Scipes' AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, combined with a serious understanding of imperialism, to realize just how profoundly corrupt the Western labor movement is, to such an extent that it is basically nothing but an arm of imperialism, an arm that should be vigorously opposed by the revolutionaries in the Third-World labor movement at all costs.

This book looks interesting as a sort of First-Worldist understanding of the global labor movement. It is clear, at least from this summary, that the author denies the labor aristocracy thesis. To quote the summary:

>One reason lies in the withering of labor movements across the North, and a belief in some circles, flowing from that withering, that the working class is shrinking and perhaps ceasing to be an instrument of social change. In part such viewpoints are due to a failure to see office workers in “white-collar” professions to be part of the working class. (Surplus value is extracted from them just the same.)

The summary here is clear: people working in New York office buildings for $15 an hour are being exploited. Not just exploited, but having "Surplus value...extracted from them just the same." An extraordinary statement, that basically completely ignores Marx's own comments on productive and unproductive labor in the Gundrisse:

>A. Smith was essentially correct with his productive and unproductive labour, correct from the standpoint of bourgeois economy. [45] What the other economists advance against it is either horse-piss (for instance Storch, Senior even lousier etc.), [46] namely that every action after all acts upon something, thus confusion of the product in its natural and in its economic sense; so that the pickpocket becomes a productive worker too, since he indirectly produces books on criminal law (this reasoning at least as correct as calling a judge a productive worker because he protects from theft). Or the modern economists have turned themselves into such sycophants of the bourgeois that they want to demonstrate to the latter that it is productive labour when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because for example the latter activity will make his fat head – blockhead – clearer the next day in the office.

Marx is clear: people hired to pick the lice out of the fat blockheads of the capitalist class do not produce surplus value. Any argument put forth to substantiate this idea is "horse-piss," in Marx's own words.

But enough about that. This work, written by New York professor Immanuel Ness, is basically a First-Worldist attempt to atleast grapple with the state of the global labor movement in some fashion. It is interesting then, that instead of attacking the imperialist institutions of the AFL-CIO and the ITUC, the author instead chooses as his target the Chinese, Indian, and South African labor movements.

After having read works like Kim Scipes' AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, Don Thompson and Rodney Larson's Where were you, brother? An account of trade union imperialism, and Beth Sims' Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor's Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (among others), it is clear to me that this is not only a wrongheaded approach, but that the institutions professor Ness sets his targets on are actually the only forces opposing the imperialist trade unions of the West.

For instance, the leaders of the COSATU themselves understand the nature of the imperialist trade unions of the West, whereas professor Immanuel Ness seems to implicitly deny it. To quote from Divided World Divided Class:

>According to Thomson and Larson, the recipients of ICFTU funding demonstrate “an increasingly visible identity of interest between the international work of western trade union centres and the foreign policies of their governments.” Thus, for over half a century, *the ICFTU has committed itself to maintaining the imperialist status quo: from the 1950s, when the ICFTU supported US aggression against Korea, to more recently, when, alongside the International Labor Organisation and the AFL-CIO and through ORIT, it facilitated a destabilization campaign against the elected Haitian government and, subsequent to the latters overthrow, ignored massive persecution against public sector workers between 2004 and 2006.

>Cognisant of this fact, in 2010, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions, representing the coun­try’s biggest trade unions) issued a statement directly criticising the Northern constituents of the ICFTU for their complicity with im­perialisms oppression of the Third World:

>It is now even clearer that the designs of the global politi­cal economy are such that all structures and institutions in the north serve and reinforce the agenda of the global ruling class. In this regard, even trade unions see their main responsibility as, first and foremost, about the protection of the capitalist system, except questioning its excesses. They scorn every attempt to question its legitimacy and call for its challenge. It was deliberately designed by imperialism that they must see their future as tied to the existence and success of the system. This is why they defend with passion all that is seen to threaten the core elements of the system. The defence of the global markets and trade system that furthers our underdevelopment, the interests of their rul­ing classes in the Middle East, and their unfettered con­trol over the international trade union movement and its related systems, all help to sustain the dominant system and protect it from those who are its victims and would want to see it removed. This is the basis for the ideological and political choices made by our comrades in the north in pursuing the trade union struggle.

So a First-World labor scholar writes a book which implicitly denies the labor aristocracy thesis, in order to attack actually revolutionary trade union movements around the globe.

That this thing could be published just shows the depths of the utter and complete bankruptcy of First-Worldism.

I am going to get a copy of this book, and compare it to AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?. Hopefully we can use this book to help discover when the LGBTQ movement entered in the American Labor Aristocracy.