On the AFL-CIO, Its Role Nationally and Internationally, the Present Crisis with respect to Working Class Interests

June 2005

The extraordinary development of English capitalism, the most advanced of its time, found in the colonization of the Americas the circumstances allowing the creation of conditions which, in the future U.S. especially, fomented great leaps ahead prefiguring, through its own laws of internal evolution, the present’s global imperialism.

It is no accident if these were the first colonialists to obtain independence from their “old world”. No accident either if this forceful transforming gust managed to concentrate its military, political and economic spheres into the most powerful in the world.

However, this development was of course accompanied by the fierce resistance of the working class, its antagonistic opposite. Indeed, during the 19th century, the American working classes struggles were amongst the most constant, fierce, combative: exemplary. The Haymarket martyrs left us the May First celebration, of the highest emotional level for all conscious workers today. From them, the working class in the whole world benefits of the 8-hour workday and so many other extremely important social conquests and, most importantly: the battle itself as the working class’ means of expression of struggle to wrest its rights.

In light of this battle, the ruling classes not only employed all the State apparatus to repress the struggle movements and physically eliminate the worker combatants, not only sought to corrupt certain lackeys, but more profoundly, deviated, took the direction of certain tendencies in this movement, even establishing their own yellow unions at their beck and call. This would mark the historic evolution of the working class organizational movement in the U.S.A.

II.

The AFL-CIO, an outcome of this history, is completely submerged in this problem. Worldwide, critics have denounced this organization’s corruption, its subservience to the ruling classes and its active participation in dominating projects, both products of the position and practices of capitalism and imperialism within the working class. Internationally, denunciations have flowed readily, with reason, on this federation role in Latin America and the entire world, where it has directly and openly assumed imperialistic stances. Critics have highlighted its links with the CIA.

All of these practices have quite precise characteristics and illustrations.

- Within the apparatus itself, a flagrant antidemocratic aspect appears, in which main orientations are uniquely taken from above

- Which results in an extremely bureaucratic and elitist functioning

- Explaining, therefore, the predominance of paid bureaucrats, often never having had the slightest contact with the working class; in this sense, the composition of the apparatus is fixed, without the possibility of a foreseeable change. Even when working class origin employees attain this employment, they are cut from their roots and have no possibility of organically articulating this origin.

- This orientation is also passed on to the establishment of the unions through sector federations also reproducing the same practices

- Reaching finally the grassroots organizations, set up through recruitment, home visits and signatures in which the workers, in order to be a part of the union, surrender to the union leaders’ negotiations.

The AFL-CIO’S bureaucratic functioning blocks the workers organizations’ real construction, it impedes the workers from being truly responsible for themselves, it eliminates all laborers’ mass struggles, all active and conscious mobilizations, and, additionally, cancels - from the start - the workers’ movement qualitative accumulation: it weakens and gangrenes it. This appears clearly.

Batay Ouvriye, in a text we circulated called “On Unions”, opposed this orientation firmly and sought to play a role in denouncing it and transforming it, all the while remaining quite aware that this is not where our main action to counteract such practices in the field should be concentrated.

The infiltration of ruling class positions within the AFL-CIO and the nature it has thus developed explains that, nationally still, it maintains the same sort of practices:

- By the simple and permanent practice of negotiations through bureaucratic leaders, the field is open, finally, for an inevitable class collaboration, and, from there, decisions that the working class, unrepresented, doesn’t control (and is often ready to denounce);

- Since there are no permanent, on-going assemblies or structured working class organization allowing space for the working class force to recognize itself and its capacities, since there isn’t mobilization as a principal and permanent method of struggle, even the demands are themselves, at the start, minimal and flat, isolated, and especially thwarted from the start of the energy necessary to rise towards social and political demands.

This absence of life thus causes the reduction of the workers’ movement, explains its static and sterile nature. Two important characteristics follow:

- The constant practice by the leader-bureaucrats of fighting and turning away from all contrary dispositions, i.e. those holding independent organization, permanent mobilization and struggle as main mechanisms, to attain, finally, the development of higher political and systematic consciousness. These leaders even reach the point, in situations of struggle, of expelling comrades conveying this consciousness and level of organization in struggles;

- All of this translates into their inevitable junction with the bourgeois apparatus, especially the political parties, particularly the Democratic Party. Even when leaders assert that they are aware of this party being a bourgeois one, that they are support the lesser of two evils, they still back it. Yet, the vast amounts of funds and energy necessary for this support, and, especially, their own bureaucratic form and nature, as illustrated above, causes them to reproduce these parties’ ideology, the bureaucratic bourgeois functioning and, finally, the mystifying ideology that has one believe that workers should engage behind parties which, in the context of the lesser evil, should impart betters chances of struggle.

On the international level, the AFL-CIO’s functioning, also existing in its organ destined for its foreign extensions, the Solidarity Center, causes the extension of such negative forms:

- Its employees have a basic will for all organizations they contact, to organize training and thus convey the same devious mind frames

- The bureaucratic nature they naturally embody structurally greatly facilitates the transmission of this very deviation with all the characteristics mentioned above: elitist leader functioning, negotiations behind closed doors and uniquely at the highest level as a main practice, lack of interest in mobilization and even occasionally causing local levels with who they are in contact to disavow grassroots mobilizations

- Forced at times to support very difficult struggles in dominated countries, decision levels often aim to recuperate them in order to, internationally, coordinate them themselves, instead of establishing grassroots working class organizations

- Organizationally, a view predominates in which unions exist to defend their members, instead of to develop the international working classes’ interests as such

- The structure’s relationship with bourgeois political parties in the United States and, in fact, the State Department, explains that they seek to hinder the union movement from being in charge and taking in hand the working classes’ political organization

- When entering in action with unions or federations involved in political situations, it’s relationship with parties in the U.S. and the State Department cause them to support, help organize, and even enter into struggle alongside completely reactionary currents or federations. The most flagrant example is the Solidarity Center’s involvement in highly financing and supporting the bourgeois union federations in Venezuela against the Chavez government.

- Presently, the AFL-CIO has a policy of supporting US mainstream politics with regard to governments critical of the United States or those having a nationalist character or popular, such as Cuba, or, again, Venezuela. In these cases, the CIA is naturally involved.

- When the State Department decides to dump governments it previously associated with (even if the latter were disguised as “populist”) but having evolved as impediments to imperialism’s advance (for reasons of technical or historical incapacity), the AFL-CIO assumes the function of contacting fake union federations, linking them with (and especially under) bourgeois opposition and, under this orientation, spearheading the mobilization against them.

It is therefore evident for us that the AFL-CIO is an apparatus integrated within the United States establishment, and continuing, in this regard, to pursue objectives against peoples’ struggles worldwide.

III.

US capitalism’s offensive, nationally and internationally, in the recent phase in which they seek to establish their global hegemony, has caused the working class’ loss, in the US as in the rest of the world, of many conquests it had managed to wrestle through dire struggle during the past centuries. This has caused numerous workers to rebel and request to leave the AFL-CIO; record lows in membership have been attained, manifesting quite clearly a general disagreement with present policies. At the last congress, many criticisms concerned the bureaucratic centralism and the problems grassroots organizations have in disagreeing and recording these disagreements. Furthermore, minority groups and Blacks in particular showed their increasing marginalization within the organization. Others yet expressed the lack of articulation with neighborhoods. Finally, certain critics advanced the fact that engaging in the Democratic Party process was totally negative for the American working class, that it would lead them to their loss and that, consequently, an independent workers party was needed. In all of this, certain important branches that were a part of this movement, such as UNITE-HERE and the Teamsters, chose to defect.

Even if the present open debates reveal the various currents operating within the AFL-CIO, even if, at present, these internal struggles show clearly the negative aspects of this prevailing bourgeois orientation, at the same time, they have generally been unable to go beyond the general anti-worker / collaborationism problematic. Worse, the imperialist role played by the AFL-CIO has never been truly debated and it is no accident that the Solidarity Center hasn’t formulated its stand on this international role.

Capitalism’s globalization, and in particular the delocalization of the textile industry (from North America and Europe towards the South and Asia) explains that imperialist countries’ large federations have objective interest in participating in the dominated countries’ struggles, to convey an increasingly balanced resistance, to reinforce the working class’ internationalism, which in turn corresponds with industrialized countries workers’ real interests. Despite all, however, we continue to believe this apparatus is at the service of imperialism, generally. Because of its need for more vigorous struggles in the dominated countries, it has changed orientation from its past support to federations at the service of the feudal oligarchies; now it must support organizations truly in struggle.

IV.

We have, at Batay Ouvriye, a clear position with regard to these forms of “solidarity” (see our Statement on this subject). Succinctly: in order to be able to accept solidarity coming from anywhere in punctual struggles, we need to pursue and consolidate the line of workers’ independent struggle as a basic principle, assemblies and the structuring of the workers as a main mechanism and the representation of the interests of the working class generally and historically as a unique guide. In this sense, in the field, we’ve always opposed (as we are doing it in this precise case) the elitist, collaborationist and / or anti-popular line of any organization wishing to engage in a practice with us.

Internationally, we still have to face major contradictions. They are ever more complex. The struggle against all AFL-CIO deviations and implications must continue and the structure’s real role in the establishment, in the fundamental defense of capitalism and imperialism should be denounced everywhere and always. A true condemnation must occur nationally within the context of the struggle itself and internationally at all possible levels and instances of debate. However, this denunciation shouldn’t be superficial, mystifying and precisely dissimulating the critic’s lack of practices and/or linkage with basic principles of defense of true working class interests.

Concretely, we need to be clearly realize that the relation between the practices of various AFL-CIO, particularly with respect to international solidarity, is of a contradictory nature, given the very internal crisis occurring and the imperative of an objectively necessary struggles’ globalization. We have to take these contradictions into account in the working class’ interest and at all levels. But we should also be very clear that this apparatus is controlled, in the final analysis, by the ruling classes in the United States. Its solidarity will assume – and assumes – specific forms. Since its “solidarity” practices have reached the point of developing relations with grassroots workers organizations, we are faced with the obligation of managing them, while it inevitably attempts to manipulate these relations variously in order to recuperate them. So, we need to correctly manage these relations in the working class’ interest and on a permanent basis.

The U.S. working class, given its position in the present-day process of globalization, has an important role to play in the workers international struggles. It is of fundamental importance to wage, there, a struggle against all currents conveying deviation and recuperation in the interest of the ruling class. Battle must be waged outside and inside of all organizations to attain the necessary independent, international working class organization based solely on its interests. In this sense, our positions form a whole, a totality that is mainly based on our independent practices and our open criticisms in the interest of the working class.