Sean Figg reviews a recent new account of the reactionary activities of the right-wing US union leaders during the Cold War period, which revealed in extreme form the other side of the dual role of workers’ organisations under capitalism.
Blue Collar Empire by Jeff Schuhrke
Published by Verso, 2024, £25
Jeff Schuhrke’s Blue Collar Empire is a useful history of the treacherous role played by some US trade union leaders to defend capitalism and the interests of US imperialism during the Cold War. The aftermath of world war two saw the capitalist ‘West’, dominated by the US, locked into a strategic rivalry with the by-then-Stalinised Soviet Union, the Soviet-dominated countries of eastern Europe, Maoist China, and later, Cuba under Castro. In these countries capitalism and landlordism had been ended, but undemocratic national bureaucracies ruled, blocking the road to socialism. Nevertheless, these regimes were a reference point for workers’ movements around the world. They showed that an alternative to capitalism and imperialism was possible.
In collaboration with the US state, including, for example, the CIA, leaders of the American Federation of Labour (AFL), and, after 1955, the merged AFL-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) federation, were involved in “meddling in the internal processes of other countries’ unions, stoking internecine rivalries, creating and financially propping-up splinter labor organizations, grooming cadres of conservative unionists, and occasionally using the power of the strike to sabotage left-wing governments”. In a back-handed complement, the US ruling class, assisted by these labour movement allies, subverted the power of the organised working class to defend capitalism where its survival across huge swathes of the world was in question.
As expected from publishers Verso, Blue Collar Empire is a sympathetic history. Schuhrke himself is a regular contributor to the left Jacobin magazine and union activist. No doubt drawing on his own experiences, as well as historical research, he distinguishes between the leaders and unelected officials in the AFL/AFL-CIO and the rank-and-file union members throughout Blue Collar Empire, explaining that, “American labor officials usually carried out such [subversive] activities without the full knowledge or approval of the rank-and-file union members they purported to represent. In the few instances where US unionists became aware of what their national leaders were up to in foreign lands, they forcefully protested”.
What this looked like in practise is illustrated in the opening pages of the book, with Schuhrke recounting an episode in the history of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) union. In 1964, Jerry Wurf was elected president in a surprise victory, riding a growing wave of militancy in US society around the civil rights movement against racial discrimination. Under his leadership AFSCME organised hundreds of thousands of black public sector workers, including the sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee whom Martin Luther King Jnr was famously supporting on the eve of his assassination in 1968.
Upon taking office Wurf discovered a so-called ‘International Relations Department’ operating out of the union’s headquarters, staffed by men with no history in the union. They were in fact CIA operatives who had been working for years – with the full knowledge of the defeated union leadership – to organise and finance ‘anti-communist’ unions across Latin America. Wurf shut the department down and fired the operatives, provoking an intervention from the White House pressuring him to maintain the arrangement. Wurf refused but promised never to reveal the identity of who it was in the administration that had contacted him, nor the details of the operations being run out of AFSCME’s headquarters – a promise, unfortunately, that he kept.
‘Free Trade Unionism’
‘Free trade unionism’ was the banner adopted by US trade union leaders to disguise their support for US imperialism. A Free Trade Union Committee was created out of the AFL’s 1944 convention. The name was intended as a contrast to the ‘unfree’ state-controlled unions in the then-Stalinist USSR. However, the term first emerged among US unionists in the 1930s as a contrast to ‘company unions’. Workers’ genuine concern for independent and democratic unions was cynically manipulated.
Genuinely independent and democratic trade unions, however, were anathema to the real aims of ‘free’ trade unionism. Even in the US during the Cold War, communist, Marxist, socialist and other left union activists were often able to gain the confidence of rank-and-file union members, and, in turn, win internal elections. This was unacceptable to the ‘free’ trade unionists who sought to limit the danger by restricting internal democracy wherever their control was threatened. Schuhrke makes the point that ‘communist-’ or left-led unions were typically more democratic in this period than those led by the ‘free’ trade unionists and quotes another historian of the workers’ movement who pithily sums-up the real outlook of the ‘free’ trade unionists:
“Non-Communists win union elections, but Communists ‘capture’ a union. Non-Communists join unions; Communists ‘infiltrate’ or ‘invade’ them. A non-Communist states his or her position; a Communist ‘peddles the straight party line’. Non-Communists influence or lead groups; Communists dominate them”.
Worker activists will recognise this same attitude in the conservative bureaucracies that many are forced to battle against today, albeit with ‘communist’ now more likely to be swapped for some other bogeyman, including ‘Trotskyist’.
In the late 1950s, leaders of the AFL-CIO founded the American Institute for Free Labour Development (AIFLD). Its purpose was to bring Latin American workers to the US for a ‘union training program’. Schuhrke describes AIFLD as the “free trade union version of the US army’s notorious School of the Americas” that trained Latin American military personnel to combat the left guerrilla movements that then existed across the continent. The AIFLD curriculum included a course on the “dangers of communist infiltration” and its ‘graduates’ were sent home with a nine-month stipend to fund ‘self-organised’ educational projects, ie ‘anti-communist’ political organising.
Reactionary strikes
Subverting the class weapon of the strike to serve a reactionary agenda lies at the most dramatic end of ‘free’ trade union tactics. Schuhrke details how the record for the “world’s longest general strike” set in 1963 in then-British Guiana – lasting eighty days, a record which is unbroken today – would not have been possible without funding from the CIA, via AFSCME’s International Relations Department. The strike of 50,000 workers was engineered to prevent Cheddi Jagan, who described himself as a Marxist, from remaining in power as the country became the independent modern-day Guyana. To bring the strike about the CIA and their US labour movement allies stoked racial divisions between the Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese to split the workers’ movement. The strike was only sustained so long thanks to CIA ‘strike pay’ and degenerated into racial violence.
In 1970, this time in Chile, another ‘Marxist’ was elected president – the immensely popular Salvador Allende. The US ruling class moved into action to bring his government down too. Central to its “subversion campaign” were a series of strikes by truckers which paralysed distribution of essential goods. This fuelled the idea of a ‘national emergency’ used by the military as a pretext, in September 1973, to overthrow the Allende government. The US trade union leaders were pivotal in paving the way for this tragic defeat of this potential socialist revolution. (See the CWI book by Tony Saunois, Chile – How and Why the Revolution was Defeated.)
Chile
Under President Kennedy the work of AIFLD was scaled up in the early 1960s as his administration sought to wage a “smarter Cold War”. The Peace Corp was another ‘soft power’ initiative created under his presidency that is still operating today. Later, with the election of Allende in Chile there was a further expansion of AIFLD, allowing it to ‘graduate’ 2,877 ‘trade unionists’ between 1970 and 1972 alone. Absolutely incredibly in the circumstances, AIFLD’s board included board members of Anaconda Copper which had huge investments in Chile, threatened by the Allende government’s nationalisation program.
Despite all their efforts ‘free’ trade unionists failed to gain a foothold in the Chilean CUT trade union federation. The popularity of Allende and support for communist and socialist ideas was too deep-seated. Stretching the definition of ‘trade union’ AIFLD switched its focus to wooing the gremios, described by Schuhrke as “professional associations” whose members “consisted of property-owning middle-class opponents of Allende”. For example, in 1971 AIFLD funnelled $5,000 to the Professional Employees Union at the Andes Mining Company to build its members a beachside country club.
AIFLD played a crucial role in consolidating the gremios as an anti-Allende political force, helping, in 1971, to create the Confederation of Chilean Professionals (CUPROCH), a national gremio association. The truckers who later organised the anti-Allende strikes were also organised in a gremio, and the strikes themselves organised under the National Command for Gremio Defence, an alliance of CUPROCH and several employers’ organisations. Schuhrke quotes a contemporary report by a Time magazine correspondent who encountered striking truckers “enjoying a lavish meal” when much of the country were struggling to eat because of the disruption to food distribution. When asked where the meal came from they laughed and answered, “from the CIA”.
Blue Collar Empire abounds with disgraceful episodes of class collaboration and betrayal by the ‘free’ trade unionist leaders of the US labour movement. They were active on all continents undermining independent working-class organisation. Another episode that stands out is the ‘free’ trade unionists’ support for Gatsha Buthelezi in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle, a reactionary warlord responsible for the murder of CWI members in the 1980s, alongside many thousands of other left and worker activists.
Class collaboration
Schuhrke’s detailed case studies of the ‘free’ trade unionists counter-revolutionary ‘internationalism’ alone make Blue Collar Empire a worthwhile read. It raises crucial issues for trade unionists today, doubling as a ‘dirty tricks’ catalogue of the methods and tactics that the ruling class can use against the workers’ movement. Despite the end of the Cold War this danger has not gone away. Although the world situation is very different, it is absolutely guaranteed that as working-class organisation strengthens and militancy grows, the ‘dirty tricks’ catalogue honed by the US ruling class in the twentieth century will be given a twenty-first century ‘make-over’ and deployed anew. This will accelerate rapidly, especially when the working class decisively develops the class struggle onto the ideological and political plane, seeking an alternative to capitalism and forging the weapon – in the form of a party – to bring it about.
Schuhrke acknowledges that the Cold War-era history of the ‘free’ trade unionists has been told before, but justifies his new contribution as an expansion on the extent to which US workers’ leaders were willing allies of US imperialism. They were frequently the most hawkish of ‘Cold War warriors’, pro-actively inviting the CIA and other US state agencies to join or piggy-back on their independent initiatives. Sometimes this required hard lobbying to convince initially sceptical US government agencies of the potential for subversion in ‘free’ trade union initiatives.
“Understanding why and how this happened” is, Schuhrke says, why he has written Blue Collar Empire. He sees it as the “responsibility of every serious trade unionist” in the US to reckon with the history he has presented. His introduction to the book outlines the long historical roots of class collaboration in the US workers’ movement and the wrong ideas – like the earlier ‘business unionism’ – that fuelled and justified it. The ‘free’ trade unionists took this to its logical conclusion in the context of the Cold War.
However, class collaboration was hardly a uniquely US phenomenon. In every country that the ‘free’ trade unionists meddled, they found allies willing to sell the future of their class for personal gain and advancement. Similarly, the crimes of the ‘free’ trade unionists against working class internationalism were not unique either. The first world war took place with the support of the ‘Marxist’ parties of the Second International, many of whose leaders had likewise succumbed to a policy of class collaboration, justified then in the ideas of reformism.
Writing explicitly for a US audience allows a hint of US ‘exceptionalism’ to be implied in Schuhrke’s book. The danger in this is that it leads away from an examination of trade unions’ contradictory position under capitalism in general. It was not the uniqueness of the Cold War context alone that explains the ‘free’ trade unionists’ class collaboration.
There will always be an objective pressure in this direction under capitalism, felt most intensely on the officials in direct contact with the bosses, the government and other representatives of the system. The demand for full-time shop stewards, paid their normal wage by the boss, and the struggle to raise the funds to open offices, hire full-time organisers and for certain elected leadership positions to become full-time posts is all necessary for building strong trade unions.
But those elevated from the shopfloor can become isolated from the rank-and-file who are the best counter-pressure. This is why the struggle for genuinely democratic trade unions and accountable and recallable leaders is ABC for Marxists. It allows the rank-and-file to control its representatives and exert its own pressure directly on them. This is why the suppression of internal democracy was a feature wherever the ‘free’ trade unionists operated, a key lesson not clearly drawn out by Schuhrke.
In 1940, barely four years before the creation of the Free Trade Union Committee, Leon Trotsky, in his unfinished work Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay, wrote that, “in the epoch of imperialist decay the trade unions can be really independent [of the bosses and the capitalist state] only to the extent that they are conscious of being, in action, the organs of proletarian revolution”. The conscious rejection of any alternative to capitalism – or, in some cases, the belief that the only alternative was Stalinism – was fundamental in the rotten trajectory of the twentieth century US trade union leaders that Schuhrke exposes and excoriates in the pages of Blue Collar Empire. If there is no alternative, then accommodation is the only option. Accommodation becomes cooperation, which in turn becomes collaboration, until the role of ‘labour lieutenant of capital’ is consciously embraced, as in the case of the ‘free’ trade unionists – from a scratch, gangrene.
To defend and develop the trade unions as weapons in the class struggle, Marxists must wage an ideological struggle to arm the rank-and-file with a socialist programme linked to a clear perspective for how socialism can be achieved, and the role unions are required to play in this. This does not automatically solve every problem the workers’ movement will face, but it is a crucial defence against capitalism’s pressure towards class collaboration and future betrayals by would-be twenty-first century ‘free’ trade unionists.
