Reddit reviews Where were you, brother? An account of trade union imperialism

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 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.