Henry De Groot reviews Jeff Schuhrke’s new book ‘Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade’ and argues that, although Schuhrke has produced a solid introduction to the topic, the work is missing key context.
Over the last year, historian and labor commentator Jeff Schuhrke, a professor at SUNY Empire State, has been carving out a following at the intersection of foreign policy and the labor movement with his contributions on labor’s response to the Israeli war on Hamas and ongoing genocide of Palestinians.1
This week, Schuhrke debuts his first full-length book, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade. As left-wing energy within the labor movement continues to be largely focused on developing organizational militancy against Israel’s genocide, the work is a timely investigation into the foreign policy of the AFL-CIO, with many lessons for activists today. Simultaneously accessible and a wealth of information, the book is a must-read for all labor activists and socialists, as well as students of intelligence studies, who wish to better understand the relationship between organized labor and US imperialism.
However, although the book is packed with information, in some ways it lacks a comprehensive approach which situates the AFL-CIA relationship within the larger framework of the Cold War network. Furthermore, it fails to draw out the generalizations and theories which are necessary for revolutionaries to confront counter-revolutionary influence within the labor movement today.
A Comprehensive Survey of the AFL-CIA
Despite Schuhrke’s subtitle suggesting that the AFL-CIO’s participation in the Cold War—often known under the moniker “AFL-CIA”—is an “untold story,” the AFL-CIA has actually received moderate, if insufficient, coverage over the last half century.
Communist Party labor publicist George Morris’ 1967 CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy is perhaps the most comprehensive of the writings which followed shortly after Victor Reuther outed the AFL-CIO’s relationship with the CIA in Ramparts in 1966.2 And perhaps the most up-to-date comprehensive treatment is by Thomas Griffin, whose PhD thesis “Offensive Intelligence: An Epistemic Community in the Transition from Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism” investigates the AFL-CIA relationship rather thoroughly as one part of the Cold War “political-warfare community.”3 The relationship is touched on in a sizable number of other sources,4 and a search of the CIA’s own archives reveals that the CIA itself tracked coverage on the relationship quite closely.5
Still, although the subject is hardly as ‘untold’ as Schuhrke’s subtitle suggests, his work is nonetheless perhaps the most comprehensive survey of the AFL-CIA in terms of the specifics of labor’s participation in the relationship, covering a later period than Morris and with a more precise focus on actions taken by the AFL-CIO than Griffin.
Overall, Schuhrke explores the counter-intuitive alignment of interests between union leaders and the state, laying out their division of labor and financial relationship. His narrative follows the influence of hawkish labor leaders like George Meaney, as well as wayward ex-communists (most notably Jay Lovestone and Irving Brown) as they carve out careers between the AFL officialdom and the Cold War efforts centered on the CIA and State Department. He explores their strategy for relating to the various political tendencies within foreign labor movements and chronicles the specific tactics which are used to achieve these foreign policy goals in each country.
On the level of strategy, Schuhrke explores how the AFL-CIA employed a divide-and-conquer strategy which included intense support for right-wing forces in order to marginalize left wing forces. This strategy, at the level of organization, meant counter-posing “free trade union forces” like the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions to the communist led World Federation of Trade Unions and its affiliates around the world. The AFL-CIA heavily subsidized these anti-communist union affiliates.
Schuhrke follows the AFL and later AFL-CIO’s establishment of another layer of international labor organizations of the “free trade union” movement, beginning with the Free Trade Union Committee and later the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), African American Labor Center, and the Asian American Free Labor Institute. As separate but overlapping from the anti-communist unions and union internationals, these organizations, with most of their budget actually coming from the US government, operated as cadre schools for training, funding, and managing anti-communist trade union organizers. Schuhrke reviews the role of these schools in specific movements, showing with precision the central role that the programs, and their graduates, played in multiple coups including Chile, British Guyana, and Brazil, as well as the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
Schuhrke explores data which helps to contextualize with quantitative precision the extent and development of the AFL-CIA relationship. By 1978, AIFLD claimed to have 338,000 graduates from its local schools, as well as some 2550 from its advanced cadre school hosted in the United States and an additional 205 from its specialized economics program at Georgetown University.6 He also shows how specific country programs were expanded in the run-up to a coup, including in Chile and Brazil.7
He also explores financial data, showing that, through the 1960s, some 20-25 percent of the AFL-CIO’s budget was spent on foreign policy, money which could have been better spent elsewhere, for example in support of organizing the South.8 He also shows how the Kennedy administration expanded the CIA subsidy to AFL-CIA projects by a factor of ten, growing to 100x the funding levels before Kennedy by 1964 under Johnson.9 And between 1962 and 1975, AIFLD received some $52 million from USAID compared to $2.6 million from the AFL-CIO, which shows how AFL-CIO officials were able to get influence over some 20x their investment by partnering with imperialism.10
Perhaps most interesting are the episodes in which Schuhrke demonstrates how far the AFL-CIA programs were willing to go–occasionally playing an almost social-revolutionary role and employing tactics which seemed totally at odds with capitalist imperialism. For example, he follows how AFL-CIA supported unions in Vietnam, launched rural tenant unions during the Vietnam war in order to marginalize the Viet Cong, and in El Salvador similarly organized for land reform, bringing them into conflict with local land-owners.
Also enlightening is Schuhrke’s investigations into the internal conflicts within the AFL-CIO’s participation in the AFL-CIA project. Schuhrke explores how Walter Reuther and his brother Victor, among others, criticized the class-collaborationist program of AIFLD.9 They fought for a different approach to labor foreign policy which, without fundamentally challenging imperialism, offered a less hawkish approach and sought a closer alignment with European social democratic parties and their affiliated unions.
Schuhrke’s history dove-tails with the history of the socialist movement, as he follows how other wayward socialists joined the Lovestoneites in the AFL-CIA camp, including those around Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party of America, and later Max Schactman and his Social Democrats, USA continuation. Schuhrke briefly explores how Schactman’s imperialist turn and the larger dispute over the AFL-CIA in the late-1960s led to the founding both of Hal Draper’s Independent Socialist Club, as well as DSA, as Michael Harrington moved in the opposite direction to Schactman to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (which also counted Victor Reuther as a member).
One of the most interesting episodes which Schuhrke explores is the US invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965, which reveals a growing divide between the most hawkish forces of anti-communism and their previous allies in the anti-communist left, including the Socialist Party.
Perhaps the most inspiring aspect of Schuhrke’s work is when he relays stories of successful resistance to AFL-CIA plots. Studying the full scope of US imperialism is overwhelming, but episodes like the successful resistance to US intervention in the Filipino labor movement show that anti-imperialists still have the agency to resist.
The Origins of the AFL-CIA: The Popular Front and The AFL-OSS
Although Schuhrke’s work is an invaluable contribution to the field, essential for curious novices and specialists alike, it is marked by several profound limitations.
The first limitation stems from the chronological structure of Schuhrke’s book. Schuhrke begins his history of the relationship between organized labor and the US intelligence community after the second World War. This passes over the formative phase of this relationship in its modern form, which was the collaboration of labor and the state just before and during WWII. This relationship manifested politically in the popular front, and organizationally in the FDR administration, especially within the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA. Although in several chapters Schuhrke does refer back to the popular front and the OSS, these references are made in passing, and in regards to the OSS largely focus only on the role of Irving Brown. Without a direct analysis of the front and of socialists and trade unionists’ OSS participation, it is impossible to fully comprehend the rise of the “AFL-CIA” relationship.
Beginning politically with an exploration that grounds the post-war “Corporate-Liberal Synthesis” (of which the AFL-CIA relationship is just the external spearhead) in the popular front of the New Deal would help to ground the various alignments, realignments, infighting within labor, and the eventual pivot to neoliberalism as a series of challenges to this original alliance which stem from its internal contradictions.
This alliance, which was at its widest during the Communist Party’s support for FDR, was continually chipped away at as the capitalist forces turned on allies, first the communists through McCarthyistm and Taft-Hartley, and then eventually the socialists and much of the labor movement through the neoliberal turn. This process of the expansion or contraction of a hegemonic coalition through its internal contradictions is one of the general processes of all revolutionary or counter-revolutionary episodes.
Beginning organizationally with the OSS would help to demonstrate how virtually the entire AFL-CIA relationship grew out of and continued to be managed from its inception through the Reagan administration by a handful of political actors who first began their collaboration at the OSS. The centrality of the “alumni” of the OSS, especially William Casey and Irving Brown, but also Serafino Romualdi, Arthur Goldberg, and others, also aids in connecting the AFL-CIA relationship to a larger political project.
It is not possible here to fully summarize the throughline of the OSS from the beginning of the AFL-CIA relationship through the Reagan administration, but a brief sketch will help to show that this dimension is profoundly important, most prominently through the role of William Casey.
The OSS was formed and led by William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan. Donovan’s background was as a pioneer of global anti-communism. Donovan had earlier served in the Justice Department, briefly overseeing his rival J. Edgar Hoover during the Palmer Raids. During the First World War, he was the single most decorated soldier.11 After the war, he traveled on a delegation to Russia to observe the White Army, worked for JP Morgan traveling to Germany to judge the threat of socialist takeover of European investments, and ran unsuccessfully as the Republican nominee for Governor of New York.12
William Casey was a working-class Catholic lawyer who became radicalized by his support for Franco’s Catholic-Fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War.13 Before the war, he worked both as a company-side labor lawyer and as a legal writer informing businesses on how to accommodate themselves to the regulations of the New Deal, positioning himself as a voice of the class interest of US business. In the lead-up to the war, he edited a special newsletter, “The Business and Defense Coordinator,” advising businesses on how to profit on the military buildup.14
During the war Casey took his business talents to the Bureau of Economic Warfare, but eventually he secured a transfer to the OSS.15 An able administrator, Donovan took the young Casey under his wing, eventually elevating him to head of Secret Intelligence for Europe.
One of the key tasks of the OSS was helping to support the resistance forces within Nazi-occupied Europe. Allen Dulles recommended formation of a labor division at OSS to Donovan, and also shared it with Goldberg.16 George Bowden recruited Goldberg, Bowden having been organizer for the IWW.17
According to one OSS memo, labor was
‘the most important factor in the psychological warfare situation in Western Europe.’ He argued that ‘In Occupied France, Czecchia [sic], the Lowlands [Low Countries], etc., it is the factory workers, railwaymen, miners, etc, whose activities against the enemy have been important. In many areas they keep their unions intact or maintain underground their union habits and connections. It is their principle form of cohesion. Their unions moreover had accustomed them to international labor relationships, to which they still look, especially to affiliated types such as the American and British union federations’18
Casey was initially resistant to the idea of tapping communists, but followed Donovan’s orders. One source for recruiting was German POWs who showed hostility to Hitler.19 From the OSS’s London headquarters, Goldberg, Brown, and others at the labor desk pulled invaluable information about the workings of the Nazi economy from exiled unionists who knew about things like chemical production and freight haulage first-hand.20 And more dramatically, Casey oversaw the teams that trained and dispatched trade unionist and socialist teams into Western Europe and eventually Germany, often dropped by parachute. Schuhrke’s treatment of the labor desk at the OSS is basically limited to noting that Lovestone and Brown assisted Goldberg in his work.21 Schuhrke’s does mention Lovestone and Brown’s instrumental roles in this work, but only as character background for their later activities.
In some sense, the direct utilization of communists by the OSS represents the operational high-water-mark of the Popular Front, each red parachuted by the US government a personification of the alliance between Atlantic capitalism and communism in the fight against fascism. One OSS mission to drop a communist team near Berlin was even termed Hammer and Sickle.22
But at the very same time Donovan, Casey, and others at the OSS were launching the fight against Soviet influence, in some sense the first maneuvers of the Cold War. According to Griffin, Casey and Brown sent Serafino Romualdi to the Franco-Swiss border on a mission to smuggle Italian socialist writer Ignazio Silone into Italy to “combat communist influence.”23
OSS Veterans Throughout the AFL-CIA
After the war, and with his political patron FDR dead, Donovan was sidelined to lead the successor efforts to the OSS, which eventually crystallized as the CIA in 1947.24 In the immediate post-war period Casey mostly returned to private practice, although he did serve as associate counsel for the Marshall Plan with a remit to encourage US business investment in Europe.25
But despite their return to private life, Donovan and his protege Casey continued their participation in spearheading anti-communist foreign policy, including through their early lobbying to protect the intelligence apparatus they had built from being dismantled by isolationists.26 In addition to establishing the Veterans of the OSS (VOSS), Casey in particular cultivated close relationships with a number of key right-wing actors, including Roy Cohn and William F. Buckley. Cohn, a close friend of Casey, rose to prominence as a prosecutor of alleged Soviet spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and then served as Senator McCarthy’s chief counsel, largely overseeing the hearings which would carry his bosses name. Casey helped Buckley secure funding for his nascent National Review, providing Buckley with invaluable legal support as he launched what would become a leading intellectual force of the US conservative movement.27
But perhaps the most important of Donovan and Casey’s associates was the little-known man Frank Barnett. Barnett had served as a Russian translator during WWII, but began circulating Cold War strategy proposals in the aftermath of the war which rose to the attention of higher-ups, including Donovan. In 1951, Donovan, Casey, and Barnett worked together in the American Friends of Russian Freedom.28 Through the 50s, Barnett was funded by right-wing billionaires to develop strategies for pursuing the Cold War, advocating for these strategies as a leader of the National Military Industry Conference (NMIC). Having studied Lenin while learning Russian, Barnett argued at the 1959 NMIC conference that US capitalist-imperialist forces needed to copy the Leninist model in order to compete with the Soviet Union in the Cold War.29
At the conference, Barnett shared the stage at the conference with AFL-CIO president George Meany, as well as the public relations director of United Fruit, and many members of the military brass. Barnett later laid out his ideas in writing in his article “What Is To Be Done?,”30 and convinced the Joint Chiefs of Staff of their merit, helping them to host annual National Strategy Seminars from 1959 to 1962, which were a ‘Cold War university’ for training the vanguard Barnett envisioned. Guest lecturers included Dulles, Henry Kissinger, and J Edgar Hoover.31 Barnett also advised Dulles on how the CIA could conduct anti-Communist “education” in the US public school system.32
Driven out of official military circles after Democratic protest, Barnett, Casey, and others involved in the NMIC and National Strategy Seminars continued their “Leninist” work through private endeavor. They established the secretive League To Save Carthage in 1962, as well as a series of public front groups that same year including the National Strategy Information Center, the Center for Strategic and Information Studies, and the American Bar Association’s standing committee on communism.33 Participants in the initial 1962 organizing efforts included Admiral Arleigh Burke, Prescott Bush Jr, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Richard Mellon Scaife, and Joseph Coors,34 many of whom would eventually go on to form the Heritage Foundation.35
A document from Casey’s archives of attendance at a meeting of the League To Save Carthage in 1970 provides further evidence that it was a site of coordination for “both sides” of the forces involved in the AFL-CIA relationship.36 On the attendance list among Cold War military leaders, Republican operatives, and industry representatives is Frank Trager, the former Labor Secretary of the Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party, who was later involved in anti-communist and Zionist efforts.37 Also in attendance was Roy Godson, another key bridge between intelligence and labor (see following section).
It was likely that this meeting in 1970 included discussion on a strategic shift for the League, which would be expressed by League member Powell in his infamous Powell Memo that same year, which reads as a clear redux of Barnett’s earlier work and was leaked one year after Nixon appointed Powell to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile Nixon appointed Casey as Undersecretary of State for Economics to “get the softies out” of the State Department, where he likely oversaw the campaign to “make Chile scream”38 by orchestrating the AIFLD strikes which Schuhrke explores in his work.39
Finally, Casey would go on to run Reagan’s campaign and then serve as Reagan’s CIA director, where he obviously had the power to control the AFL-CIA relationship.
It is less clear whether OSS veteran Goldberg was involved in spaces like the League To Save Carthage, but certainly he continued to play a role in the AFL-CIA. Goldberg was first as US Labor Secretary before eventually being appointed to the Supreme Court by Kennedy. As Schuhrke explores, Goldberg helped to negotiate the AFL-CIO merger, and then to encourage AFL-CIO collaboration in Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.40
Schuhrke absolutely does mention the OSS as a site of early collaboration and the continued prominence of OSS veterans in the AFL-CIA relationship. But his narrative does not give nearly enough weight to the formative period of the relationship or to the continued relevance of OSS veterans at least through the Reagan administration.
Limitations of the Labor Perspective
Schuhrke’s study of the AFL-CIA relationship is perhaps the most in-depth in terms of following the specific activities of the AFL-CIO. But this angle of investigation also becomes a limitation as Schuhrke almost exclusively follows the perspective of organized labor. The more overarching forces of the AFL-CIA are actually US imperialism and anti-communism during the Cold War, in which organized labor is just a junior partner. So it is not possible to understand labor’s relationship with the CIA without understanding the CIA itself.
Unfortunately, Schuhrke’s investigation does not draw on virtually any critical theory of intelligence studies (the studies of intelligence agencies and espionage), leading to a large number of understatements and errors.
For example, Schuhrke points out connections between the CIA and various entities like the FTUC and USAID or the State Department, but also softly reiterates the CIA talking point that these are separate entities from the CIA; so, he draws weaker conclusions than can be obviously put forward with a basic understanding of how the CIA operates: through front groups, cut-outs and paid CIA agents (not to be confused with direct CIA employees, known as CIA officers), and funding from other government agencies, even though these strategies are obvious to all and spelled out plainly by intelligence insiders themselves.41 This leads to naive, almost ridiculous suggestions–for example, that we cannot affirmatively conclude that USAID is a conduit for CIA money, or that Irving Brown or his underlings were CIA agents.42 Schuhrke’s mistakes here are less about missing smoking-gun evidence and rather a more general misunderstanding of how the CIA carries out operations.
Critical theory is especially important in intelligence studies. By their nature, intelligence agencies seek to conceal their intentions and activities. This means that researchers will have a lack of sufficient empirical data and unavailable or intentionally misleading statements of intent; to fill the gaps, it is necessary to develop examples and patterns into theories, which can then be applied in a general way in order to avoid massively understating the extent of intelligence activities. The closer a researcher comes to the present, the more important this becomes, for the data available becomes more and more scarce.
Schuhrke’s over-focus on the perspective of the AFL and AFL-CIO leads to a limited profile of one of his books main characters, Irving Brown. He mentions that Irving Brown was also the CIA’s main conduit for funding the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), but gives only two paragraphs on this important organization. In fact, the CCF was a crucial tool of US imperialism which, while less focused directly on the trade unions, was highly active in supporting labor and social democratic parties in order to marginalize the communists, the very same tactics which the AFL-CIA used to split the labor movement.43 That Brown also played a leading role in the CCF, which had little to do directly with trade unions, also suggests that he was less a labor man with CIA connections and more so the CIA’s man in labor.
Schuhrke also totally ignores the role of US labor attache Joseph Godson, another Lovestoneite, in backing the right wing of the British Labour Party, with the support of the CCF. According to Griffin, Joseph Godson’s London salon was the center of a spirited campaign by the right-wing Gaitskelites to expel the left-wing Bevanites from the Labour Party.44 Presumably this is passed over because the US government did not rely on the AFL-CIO to carry out this effort. But for anyone trying to understand the divide-and-conquer role of US imperialism in the global labor and socialist movements, it is a major omission.
Joseph’s son Roy Godson, a close associate of Frank Barnett and fellow Leaguer, would go on to head the International Labor Institute at Georgetown University. The institute was set up as a collaboration between the AFL-CIO and Barnett’s National Strategy Information Center (NSIC), which Godson later headed.45 Godson was also a leading theorist on intelligence studies and political warfare, including as head of the NSIC, through his involvement in the Consortium for the Study of Intelligence and as a consultant for the National Security Council.46 Godson would go on to serve as Executive Secretary of the Coalition for a Democratic Majority,47 and was later implicated by the FBI in the Iran-Contra scandal for helping Ollie North raise money from private donors while working at the Heritage Foundation.48 Godson still serves as a professor emeritus at New York University.
Schuhrke’s lack of reliance on any critical theory of intelligence studies leads him to treat the intelligence community as simply a public entity, rather than one which is controlled at the top layers by a small set of capitalist-imperialist elites with a clear strategy for waging counter-revolution (as explored in the previous section), which at the top layers is predominated by personal relationships and which works in collaboration with various other interest groups.
As part of this, Schuhrke does not sufficiently identify how organized crime, the billionaire right, and the Zionist movement also intersect with the AFL-CIA nexus. Schuhrke does mention, for example, the role of Brown and others in the AFL-CIA in partnering with organized crime to secure European dockyards from communist influence,49 and that Israeli intelligence was instrumental in facilitating CIA support for Solidarnosc,50 but these forces are mentioned as almost accidental rather than integral and consistent factors of the development of the AFL-CIA.
Two unions which were key in the AFL-CIA and whose leaders are mentioned frequently in Blue Collar Empire are the International Ladies Garment Workers Union and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union. But Schuhrke does not mention that both unions were closely tied with organized crime, and that David Dubinksy and Sidney Hillman, the unions’ respective leaders, leaned on organized crime in their fight against communist elements.51
Dubinksy, Cohn, Trager, Casey, and other key players in the AFL-CIA were also heavily involved together in the Zionist movement, with their collaboration likely beginning in the International Rescue Committee,52 and continued through organizations including B’Nai Brith.53 Individual Zionists and later the state of Israel were involved in various anti-communist operations including supporting the interest of United Fruit and helping to fund the Contras.54
The Zionist movement and organized crime were themselves tied to one another. Prominent Jewish members of organized crime were key players in the National Crime Syndicate, for example Meyer Lansky helped to move arms to Haganah, the predecessor of the IDF, through his influence at the dockworkers union.55 And Roy Cohn, whose father was the head of B’nai Brith New York, was the lawyer of choice for organized crime, including those involved in labor racketeering.56 Cohn was also the lawyer of Rupert Murdoch, as they built a friendship over their shared support for Israel.57
Jackie Presser is perhaps the most stark example of the quadruple overlap of organized crime, Zionism, labor, and the AFL-CIA. Presser, a Jewish Teamster connected to the Cleveland Mob, rose to power in the Teamsters by betraying Hoffa to the Feds in exchange for his own immunity, eventually taking the top job with the blessing of organized crime at the national level. Presser led the Teamsters’ program for buying Israeli bonds,58 and was recruited to the Reagan campaign which was run by Casey. Casey also represented SCA waste management systems just before his involvement in the Reagan administration, which was owned in part by organized crime elements who were also involved in the Teamsters union.59 Webb points out that even Reagan himself is in some ways an example of this overlap, having come out of the mobbed-up MCA studios, a fierce anti-communist labor leader at the Screen Actors Guild, as well as a spokesperson for one of the core imperialist industrial corporations, General Electric.60
The above examples are not cherry-picked exceptions but actually instead a vast under-representation of the extent of the enmeshment between the forces of intelligence, organized crime, Zionism, labor, and the billionaire right. Setting the work of labor leaders in anti-communism within this larger nexus creates a far more complicated and also more fascinating web of interests, actors, and power. This combined nexus continued at least up to the Reagan administration, most especially through Casey himself. And of course, Roy Cohn was Donald Trump’s mentor.
Labor-Imperialism As A Historic Force
Not only does Schuhrke fail to draw sufficiently on a theory of intelligence studies, but his work overall is undertheorized. He not only does little to express his own findings as more general theories, but fails to draw on other important theories to inform and situate his findings.
Schuhrke makes no mention of Lenin’s theory of the relationship between imperialism and the labor aristocracy,61 despite the fact that his work provides tremendous evidence to support this theory. Without this, the AFL-CIA alliance seems like an accident or the result of personal choices rather than the expression of larger historical forces rooted in the development of capitalism. Instead, throughout the text, Schuhrke consistently explains the actions of labor officials with rather naive notions about genuinely-held beliefs or the desire to deliver economic benefits for members.62 In other words, he takes the greatest scoundrels of the labor movement at their word, rather than drawing out the relationship between their own careerist self-interest and the interests of US imperialism.
And despite giving countless examples of CIA plots, Schuhrke dramatically understates the conspiratorial and manipulative nature of the intelligence community. When combined, these two theoretical oversights allow for an over-statement of the independent agency of labor and socialist leaders in their collaboration with US imperialism.
Instead, armed with these two factors and drawing on the Marxist view of the relationship between classes, class interests, organizations, leadership, and ideology (developed in Marx’s 18th Brumaire, Plekhanov’s The Role Of The Individual In History, and elsewhere), the Marxist scholar can simultaneously affirm a degree of agency for labor actors, and also explain how they play a role which expresses and is bound by larger historical forces, is then mediated by larger political-organizational forces (which sometimes act in a conspiratorial manner), and generally overlaps with their direct career or financial interests, including direct bribes, support in keeping leftist rivals at bay, protection from government prosecution, opportunities for raiding, access to government subsidies, or simply proximity to power.
Instead of drawing on theories of intelligence studies, counter-revolution, or imperialism, the only intellectual theory which Schuhrke draws on is modernization theory. Schuhrke not only discusses how various administrations draw on modernization theory,63 but at some points comes close to adopting an idealist approach to history, where the international class struggle is waged through various criticisms of modernization theory.64 Schuhrke’s simultaneous focus on modernization theory and his failure to take up the far more comprehensive and penetrating theories of the Marxist canon reveal his limitation as a radical scholar who has yet to break fully with the weaknesses of left-lite academic scholarship.
The Role of the AFL-CIA Today
Schuhrke is right to point out that there is no evidence that the AFL-CIA relationship was ever truly and fully deconstructed. He points out that AIFLD was simply replaced by the Solidarity Center, which continues to get funding from NED; he also cites a revelation from Chris Townsend that the director of the Solidarity Center openly admitted that the State Department ran Solidarity Center projects in critical countries.65
But in his conclusion Schuhrke only weakly states that “US unionists today should, at the very least, take an active interest in the Solidarity Center’s activities.” This anemic conclusion cannot arm the left wing of the labor movement to confront the overwhelming likelihood that US intelligence continues to play a role in the AFL-CIO; that the AFL-CIA relationship evolved, but never died.
Now, the war in Gaza is both revealing the proximity of some labor leaders to US imperialism and spurring labor activists to push for changes in their union’s approach to foreign policy. But to take on labor imperialism and win, we first need to understand it. Schuhrke’s work constitutes a key part of the puzzle, but we need many more pieces to complete it.
- Jeff Schuhrke and Bill Fletcher, “Labor & Palestine: Jeff Schuhrke & Bill Fletcher on How U.S. Unions Are Responding to War in Gaza,” interview by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now, December 26 2023, audio, https://www.democracynow.org/2023/12/26/us_labor_israel_palestine_part2; Jeff Schuhrke, “News Brief: Unions, Gaza, and Labor’s Checkered Relationship with US Militarism,” interview with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson, Citations Needed, June 19 2024, https://citationsneeded.medium.com/news-brief-unions-gaza-and-labors-checkered-relationship-with-us-militarism-8ee2e32a0296.
- George Morris, CIA and American Labor: The Subversion of the AFL-CIO’s Foreign Policy (International Publishers, 1967), 28-31, https://archive.org/details/CIAAndAmericanLabor/page/n13/mode/2up.
- Thomas Griffin, “Offensive Intelligence: An Epistemic Community in the Transition from Cold War Liberalism to Neoconservatism” (PhD Diss., University of Bath, 2017), https://purehost.bath.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/187940981/GRIFFIN_Thomas_PhD_Thesis_FINAL.pdf; this was later developed into: Thomas Griffin, State-Private Networks and Intelligence Theory (Routledge, 2022).
- See: Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Kees van der Pij, The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class (Verso Books, 1984), Chapter 6, Chapter 7.
- https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/search/site/afl-cia.
- Jeff Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire: The Untold Story of US Labor’s Global Anticommunist Crusade (Verso Books, 2024), 208.
- Ibid, 210, 139.
- Ibid, 133.
- Ibid, 125.
- Ibid, 127.
- Joseph Perisco, Casey: The Lives and Secrets of William P. Casey: From The OSS To the CIA. (Penguin Books, 1990), 53.
- Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail (Trine Day, 2024), 6.
- Perisco, Casey, 42.
- Ibid, 46.
- Ibid, 50.
- Griffin, “Offensive Intelligence,” 48.
- Ibid, 49; Perisco, Casey, 70.
- Cited in Griffin, “Offensive Intelligence,” 48.
- Perisco, Casey, 73.
- Ibid, 70.
- Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire, 33.
- Perisco, Casey, 77.
- Griffin, “Offensive Intelligence,” 50.
- Perisco, Casey, 81.
- Ibid, 88.
- Ibid, 97.
- Ibid, 93.
- Ibid, 128.
- The Soviet Economic Challenge, Fifth Proceeding of National Military Industry Conference – 1959, CIA Archives, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP88-01315R000300160040-1.pdf.
- Frank Barnett, American Strategy In The Nuclear Age (Double Day Anchor/Institute for American Strategy, 1960), “Chapter 33: What Is To Be Done,” https://archive.org/stream/americanstrategy00hahn/americanstrategy00hahn_djvu.txt.
- Jeffrey H. Michaels, “Waging ‘Protracted Conflict’ Behind the Scenes: The Cold War Activism of Frank R. Barnett,” Journal of Cold War Studies 19, no. 1 (2017): 82; “FORMER AMERICA FIRST LEADER NOW PROMOTER WITH BIG BUSINESS, MILITARY TIES,” The Worker, May 21 1961, CIA Archives, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP75-00001R000200200015-8.pdf.
- “LETTER TO FRANK R. BARNETT FROM ALLEN W. DULLES,” Sep 21, 1960, CIA Archives, https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R000400520003-2.pdf.
- Michaels, “Waging ‘Protracted Conflict’,” 82, 86-87.
- “National Strategy Information Center,” https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/national_strategy_information_center/#_edn2.
- Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Penguin Random House, 2016), 77-78.
- Archives of William Casey. Hoover Institute. Box 95, Folder 6. “League to Save Carthage.”
- Robert D. McFadden, “Frank N. Trager, 78, an Expert on Asia, dies,” The New York Times, August 31 1984, https://www.nytimes.com/1984/08/31/obituaries/frank-n-trager-78-an-expert-on-asia-dies.html; https://powerbase.info/index.php/Frank_N._Trager.
- Perisco, Casey, 153, 157.
- Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire, 211.
- Ibid, 124.
- See: Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Frank Barnett, “What Is To Be Done?”
- Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire, 153.
- Griffin, “Offensive Intelligence,” 72.
- Ibid, 79.
- Ibid, 101.
- Ibid, 29.
- Ibid, 96.
- Ibid, 129.
- Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire, 76.
- Ibid, 234.
- Paul Kavieff, The Life and Times of Lepke Buchalter: America’s Most Ruthless Labor Racketeer (Barricade Books, 2006), 54.
- Perisco, Casey, 138.
- Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, 493.
- Ibid, 74, 209, 283.
- Ibid, 69, 72.
- Ibid, 302, 434, 439.
- Ibid, 292.
- Joe Allen, “The Teamster Connection: Apartheid Israel and the IBT,” Medium.com, December 26 2023, https://joeallen-60224.medium.com/the-teamster-connection-apartheid-israel-and-the-ibt-by-joe-allen-b2129d4b5129.
- Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, 248-249.
- Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, 28, 29.
- V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism and the Split in Socialism,” from Lenin’s Collected Works, Vol 23 (Progress Publishers, 1964), 105-120, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm.
- Schuhrke, Blue Collar Empire, 11, 16, 17, 72, 284.
- Ibid, 119, 122.
- Ibid, 153, 207.
- Ibid, 288.