From the U.S. to Australia, Let’s Fight for
Revolutionary, Internationalist Leadership of our Trade Unions
Oppose the Right-Wing, Bureaucratic Attack on
the Vermont AFL-CIO Union Federation
18 June 2021: In the latter part of 2019, a new slate was elected to the local leadership of the AFL-CIO (the biggest U.S. union federation – a U.S. equivalent of the ACTU) in the USA’s northeastern state of Vermont. Alongside vowing to make the union’s operations more transparent to its 10,000 rank and file members, the new leadership promised more independence from the Democrat Party, a focus on standing by migrant workers, more active support for the Black Lives Matter struggle and a greater willingness to use strikes to defend workers rights. The national leadership of the AFL-CIO, which is protectionist and conservative in its outlook and which subordinates the union movement to the capitalist Democrat Party (one of the two parties that alternately run American capitalism alongside the right-wing Republicans), met the election of the new slate in Vermont with suspicion and alarm. Before long, the national AFL-CIO leadership, headed by the federation’s president Richard Trumka, began bureaucratic manoeuvres against its Vermont branch.
Tensions between AFL-CIO national Executive Committee (henceforth referred to as National EC) and its Vermont branch (henceforth referred to as VT AFL CIO) have now reached breaking point. This follows an overwhelming vote on November 18 by delegates of the VT AFL-CIO to authorise the branch leadership to “call for a general strike of all working people in our state” should Donald Trump and his supporters seek to launch a coup for Trump to remain in the presidency despite his losing the election. After trying to stop the Vermont strike resolution at the time, four months later, Trumka went further and announced that the National EC would be investigating the “recent conduct” of the VT AFL-CIO, threatening “further action.” These are steps towards removing the elected Vermont leaders and putting the branch under the direct administration of the federation’s National EC. This bureaucratic campaign to suppress and punish class-struggle mobilisation must be defeated!
That the threat of a far-right coup in the U.S. was real was seen just a month and a half after the Vermont resolution when fascist white-supremacists and other rabid right-wingers stormed the U.S. Congress building on January 6 with the aim of restoring Trump to the presidency. The workers movement has a real interest in opposing such a far-right coup. However, opposing such a coup does not mean that one should give any support, however critical, to new president Joe Biden. Biden must be 100% opposed! The correct stance to have taken at last November’s presidential election was to oppose a vote to both Trump and Biden. Today Biden and his war-mongering secretary of state, Antony Blinken have taken off from where Trump and Mike Pompeo left off in ratcheting up the imperialist Cold War drive against socialistic China. Biden has even resuscitated a thoroughly discredited Trump-era conspiracy theory that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab, a despicable suggestion that is being used to not only whip up mass hostility to China but which is helping to incite yet more racist violence against people of Chinese and other East Asian backgrounds in the U.S., Canada and Australia. Meanwhile, under the reign of Biden and his new vice-president Kamala Harris, racist cops continue to murder black people and other people of colour throughout the USA. And Biden and Harris are overseeing the brutal incarceration of thousands of child refugees in over-crowded detention camps near the U.S.’s border with Mexico. However, should a coup to restore hard-right Trump to the presidency have succeeded, it would have necessarily been accompanied by further attacks on the democratic rights to organise of unions, black rights activists and other leftists and would have greatly emboldened violent far-right, that is fascist, forces. To prepare working class industrial action against the prospect of such a coup was a very supportable and necessary step. However, Trumka and Co. want workers to rely only on the capitalist Democratic Party to oppose the threat of far-right forces. This is a losing strategy! January 6 proved to the whole world the half-heartedness of U.S. repressive organs for opposing the threat of violent far-right groups. It also showed the downright collusion of some elements of these state organs with fascistic forces.
Neither the capitalist parties, like the Democrats, nor the organs of the capitalist state can be a force against far-right threats. This is because the mainstream capitalist parties and the U.S. state institutions both serve the same capitalist class as far-right forces. By seeking to suppress working class mobilisation against a right-wing coup, Trumka and Co. are tying the hands of the one social force with the power and consistent interest to lead resistance against far-right coups and attacks on remaining democratic rights. Therefore, Trotskyist Platform adds our voice to that of the many trade unionists and anti-fascists in the U.S. and around the world who are opposing the campaign of the national AFL-CIO Executive Committee bureaucrats against the Vermont AFL-CIO branch. We have signed on to an open protest letter to national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, defending “the right of the VT AFL-CIO to have passed a motion authorising a General Strike if the 2020 election results had been overturned in a coup” and demanding that Trumka, “immediately drop the vindictive and retaliatory `misconduct’ investigation into the VT AFL-CIO.”
The Open Letter was initiated by the circle associated with the Australian far-left website, Class Conscious. We congratulate them on taking the initiative on this issue. Thus far, nine pro-working class organisations around the world have signed onto the Open Letter. So have dozens of individuals, many of whom are union activists. Alongside Trotskyist Platform, one other Australian group has signed onto the Open Letter, which is the leftist, anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian, Melbourne-based group, Jews Against Fascism. Trotskyist Platform calls on all trade union activists and officials who believe in class struggle and the centrality of the working class to the fight against right-wing repression, as well as all staunchly anti-fascist groups, to also sign the Open Letter to AFL-CIO national president Richard Trumka. To sign the letter use this link to go to the relevant page on the Class Conscious website: https://classconscious.org/2021/05/17/sign-open-letter-to-richard-trumka-againt-themisconduct-investigation-into-vermont-afl-cio-defend-labors-right-to-fight-against-fascism-and-dictatorship/ . Note that those who sign on through this link will only be endorsing the actual four-sentence Open Letter and not necessarily the preamble by Class Conscious (while this preamble makes many very good points there are aspects of its analysis that we do not fully endorse).
See this link for a list of signees of the above Open Letter as of 30 May 2021:
https://www.facebook.com/vtworkers/posts/2886823191539923
AFL-CIO Bureaucrats Sorry History of Supporting
Counterrevolutionary Forces and Right-Wing Coups
Although we were very happy to take a stand against the bureaucratic attack on the VT AFL-CIO branch by signing the Open Letter, there was a sentence in the letter that we felt uneasy about. It said that the VT AFL-CIO motion authorising a general strike if Trump’s election defeat had been overturned in a coup, “was in the proud tradition of labor fighting together against the threat of fascism and dictatorship.” Unfortunately, the tradition of the AFL-CIO includes, under the pre-text of fighting for “democracy” and “against dictatorship,” intervening abroad to support U.S. imperialist machinations against both socialistic workers states and independent-minded governments in the “Third World”.
It was in Latin America where top AFL-CIO bureaucrats conducted their most notorious work. Their methods included training local anti-communists to gain influence within Latin American trade unions to combat the influence of leftists within the unions. These local allies would then seek to split leftist-led unions in order to build business-loyal unions that would help U.S. multinationals operating within Latin America to maximize profits by keeping wages poor. Meanwhile, working closely with some of the USA’s biggest and most notoriously anti-union mining corporations, agricultural giants, oil companies and banks, the AFL-CIO’s “American Institute for Free Labor Development” (AIFLD) would help disburse CIA and U.S. State Department funds to help the political work of anti-communist union officials, to bribe union leaders into joining the “democratic camp” and to grant affordable housing to workers who switched over to membership of anti-communist-led unions. Then, if leftist governments gained the ascendancy in Latin America, even when democratically-elected within capitalist state structures, AIFLD-backed labour groups would foment unrest and use U.S. government funds to sustain strikers. This would then help pave the way for bloody, U.S.-backed right-wing coups, which AFL-CIO local allies would then work to suppress any labour resistance to. In this way, in the name of “democracy” and stopping “communist dictatorship”, the AFL-CIO tops worked hand in glove with the CIA to bring down elected, left-leaning, or otherwise anti-colonial-minded, governments in Guatamela in 1954, Guyana, Brazil and the Dominican Republic in the early-mid 1960s and Chile in 1973. In all these cases, except to a partial degree in Guyana, the AFL-CIO aided, CIA-orchestrated overthrow of elected governments was through bloody coups that resulted in right-wing dictatorships that committed murderous terror against leftists and workers rights activists on a massive scale. Meanwhile, in Indonesia, AFL-CIO bureaucrats helped the CIA and Australia’s ASIS overseas spy agency to orchestrate a coup in 1965 that led to one of the worst slaughters in human history. The CIA/ASIS/AFL-CIO backed coup forces led by General Suharto massacred between one and two million Indonesian communists, trade unionists, women’s rights activists and ethnic Chinese people in the process of consolidating their horrific right-wing dictatorship.
The AFL-CIO bureaucrats’ most important service to U.S. imperialism was in their support for the capitalist rulers’ drive to overthrow workers states. They collaborated closely with the CIA to stir up worker unrest in state-owned enterprises in Red China, in the former Soviet Union and in the other former deformed workers states in Eastern Europe. Their operations were most successful in Poland. There, with the open backing of the Vatican and rabidly anti-union U.S. and British heads Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and with support from the pro-ALP leadership of Australia’s ACTU, the AFL-CIO tops and CIA propped up a large anti-communist “union” called Solidarnosc. In 1989-90, Solidarnosc would lead a capitalist counterrevolution in Poland that would open the door to the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union and all the Eastern European socialistic states within the following two years.
Much of this despicable counterrevolutionary work was conducted by the AFL-CIO heads behind the backs of their membership. More recently, national AFL-CIO leaders in the post-Soviet period, including Trumka, have sought to distance themselves from the federation’s role during the anti-Soviet Cold War. In 1997, the AFL-CIO shutdown its discredited AIFLD. However, today the AFL-CIO’s National EC are back at it again! They replaced the AIFLD with a new organization called Solidarity Center that conducts much of the same work as the AIFLD. Solidarity Center is funded by USAID, the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the U.S. government’s main vehicle for open funding of counterrevolutionary and pro-imperialist movements that goes alongside their covert funding through the CIA. The NED is notorious around the world for spearheading pro-imperialist “color revolutions” and right-wing coups. In 2002, Solidarity Center-backed right-wing forces in Venezuela tried to carry out a coup to overthrow the elected, leftist Chavez government. Since then Solidarity Center has continued to nurture, train and encourage pro-imperialist opponents of the anti-colonial Venezuelan government.
Today, a main international focus of the National EC is to, under the guise of supporting “democracy,” back forces within China seeking to emulate Polish Solidarnosc – that is forces seeking to use legitimate worker grievances within China not to improve workers social position by crushing capitalist influence or by strengthening the socialist character of the workers state but to restore capitalist rule. The main organised force seeking to build such a Chinese version of Solidarnosc is the China Labour Bulletin (CLB) led by Han Dongfang. And the AFL-CIO’s National EC is right behind the CLB, even presenting Han Dongfang with its highest “human rights award.” Last year, Trumka presented this same award to Hong Kong’s Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), the principal force in the violent, pro-colonial, anti-Beijing movement in Hong Kong. The CHRF is funded by the NED and by right-wing, Hong Kong media billionaire, Jimmy Lai, who is aptly known as “Hong Kong’s Rupert Murdoch”. The CHRF represents rabidly anti-communist members of Hong Kong’s upper-middle class and large chunks of her capitalist upper class, both of whom are nervous about losing their privilege should Beijing start to bring socialism to Hong Kong. Among the affiliates of the CHRF is the mainly (but not exclusively) white-collar, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions (HKCTU), the smaller of Hong Kong’s two main union federations. The HKCTU, whose leaders want it to become Hong Kong’s Solidarnosc, is not only backed by the NED and the AFL-CIO tops but by the Laborite bureaucrats heading Australia’s ACTU. Today, as Biden emulates Trump in escalating Washington’s new Cold War drive against socialistic China and Australian imperialism enthusiastically eggs him on, we can expect the AFL-CIO and ACTU heads to step up their support for capitalist counterrevolutionary labour groups within mainland China and Hong Kong unless revolutionary activists within these union federations are able to change the agenda leading our unions.
However, despite our concerns about the possible implications of that sentence in the Open Letter to AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka that lauds labor’s “tradition” of fighting against the threat of “dictatorship,” we note that this formulation did not specify or allude to any particular counterrevolutionary or pro-imperialist act by the AFL-CIO and indeed does not actually even specifically mention the AFL-CIO. Therefore, the chance that endorsement of this Open Letter would be understood as also giving support for the AFL-CIO’s continued backing of anti-communist and pro-colonial movements is small. Hence, given the importance of opposing the National EC’s right-wing bureaucratic attack on the VT AFL-CIO, we on balance decided to sign the Open Letter and are urging others within the Left and workers movement to do so as well.
In doing so we point out that, the national AFL-CIO leadership’s attempts to quash class struggle resistance to far-right attacks on democratic rights within the U.S. is the domestic equivalent of their support abroad for right-wing forces seeking to use the guise of “fighting for democracy” to undermine socialistic states and anti-colonial governments.
Right-Wing Coups and the Threat of Fascism
Should the fascist forces, that formed a key component of the January 6 rioters, been sufficiently large, united, disciplined and armed, then if they and their allies had been able to stage a successful overturn of the election result on January 6, this could have opened the road to the fascists making a bid to impose the fascist form of capitalist rule in the short term. Fascism is a form of capitalist rule created through the complete physical smashing of all leftist parties and independent workers organisations through right-wing terror. Such a catastrophe is possible in periods of acute capitalist economic and social crisis, when in the absence of a powerful working class struggle for socialist revolution, right-wing demagogues, backed by decisive sections of the capitalist class, are able to mobilise large chunks of the insecure and embittered middle class – alongside portions of the unemployed poor – into squads dedicated to unleashing reactionary violence.
History however proved that in early 2021, the fascists and the right-wing conservatives that then allied with them did not yet have the clout to even overturn the election result. This is because right now the bulk of the U.S. capitalist class feels that the benefits of ruling through “democratic” means, in terms of fooling the masses into believing that they have a decisive say, combined with the risk of resistance of the sort indicated by the Vermont general strike resolution should they try to impose fascist rule, outweigh the potential benefits of physically crushing the workers movement. To be sure, their deep concern about the decay of their own system, their terror over the bitter grievances of their own population, their fright about the emergence of a socialistic power in the Peoples Republic of China and their skepticism about their ability to maintain super-profits without exploiting their workforce at an even more intense level, mean that even now some sections of the American capitalist class are supporting fascist forces. Another larger section of the capitalist class, typified by Trump, have not yet definitely decided to go down the road of fascism but are ensuring that they have the option to go down that road in the future by today nurturing violent far-right forces.
Given the current balance of forces between rival sections of the American capitalist class, a more realistic possibility on January 6 than a full-blooded coup that opened the road to a short-term bid for power by fascists was the overturn of the election result in the form of some sort of compromise power-sharing arrangement between the rival bourgeois camps. Such a partial coup resulting from fascist and other far-right mobilisation would still have greatly emboldened the violent far-right forces and thus made resistance like the sort foreshadowed in the Vermont general strike motion absolutely crucial. A coup of this sort did occur in France in February 1934 when after a violent mobilisation by fascists and other reactionaries, the “progressive” liberal capitalist government headed by Daladier of the Radical Party was replaced by a right-wing, bonapartist government. That new government headed by Doumergue rested on the right leg with the fascists and on the left leg with the Radical Party. French workers responded to the coup with a general strike six days later. Although, the political and economic situation in France then was quite different to that in the U.S. today, it is worth leftists today reviewing Leon Trotsky’s brilliant analysis of the situation then in France. Trotsky pointed out that in the context of a deep economic crisis, France and its middle class were becoming deeply polarised. If the working class did not show that it can be a serious contender for power, the fascists and their seeming radicalism would win over the desperate middle class. Trotsky emphasised the need to build workers militias to defend the workers movement against fascist threats and to use the mobilisation of such militias to energise the advance towards workers revolution. Here are links to some of Trotsky’s key writings from that period:
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/whitherfrance/ch00.htm
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1934/340715.htm
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/06/paf.htm
Today, in the U.S., some in the Far Right will be demoralized that their coup did not succeed. On the other hand, that fascists and hard-right conservatives were able to storm into the parliament building, occupy it for several hours, intimidate many congress members inside it and all the while gain assistance from some in the state organs would have given many of them great encouragement. Meanwhile, the fact that Trump had to, eventually, somewhat distance himself from the rioters will lead to some right-wing conservatives who supported the Capitol storming dispensing with their faith in parliamentary democracy and move fully in with the fascists. That the less conservative Biden has now become president will likely only accelerate this drift. More fundamentally, while plenty of temporary swings in political mood and economic conditions will occur, the long term trend of capitalism, if it is not first overthrown, is to descend into its fascist form because ultimately this is the capitalist class’ last hope of saving its own class rule in the face of the relentless decay of its own system and the rise of a socialistic giant in the form of the Peoples Republic of China. That is why we must mobilise now to oppose the fascist threat. The general strike planned by the VT AFL-CIO is certainly a powerful form of such resistance. However, most immediately we need to oppose physical attacks by fascists on their targets. Such attacks take place every single day – even when fascists are not making an immediate bid for power. Resisting such attacks is crucial to demoralising the fascists on the one hand and on the other, helping the working class to develop the organisation, discipline and activity needed to fight the new Biden administration and the U.S. capitalist class as a whole. As we emphasised in our statement following the January 6 events in Washington (see: https://www.trotskyistplatform.com/how-to-resist-the-growing-threat-of-the-violent-far-right-in-america/):
“… it is urgently necessary for politically aware workers, black liberation activists and leftists to organise workers at multiracial workplaces together with black communities, other non-white communities and anti-racist activists into disciplined action squads to physically resist the threat of violent attack from far-right forces.
“… Especially given that the fascists are often armed with guns, the working class-based, anti-fascist defence squads that must be built should take advantage of the right to bear arms that exists in America – as granted by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution – to acquire arms.”
Indeed, any general strike mobilisation against far-right forces like the one prepared by the VT AFL-CIO would need to be defended against physical attacks by fascists through the deployment of workers defence guards and workers militias.
From the U.S. to Australia: Let’s Fight for a
Revolutionary, Internationalist Agenda to Lead Our Workers Movements
The fact that Trumka resumed his attack on the VT AFL-CIO over the general strike resolution some two months after Biden was inaugurated – and thus long after the strike resolution ceased to be potentially operational – shows that his attack is about more than the general strike resolution itself. Trumka and Co. want to bring to heel a union branch that is, in his eyes, too independent of the Democrat Party, too willing to wage strikes and too real about supporting anti-racist struggles.
However, the VT AFL-CIO leaders, while clearly more left-wing than the National EC, have a program that is still short of the revolutionary, internationalist program that the workers movement needs. Thus in their November general strike resolution, while they recognise “that democracy in the United States is hobbled by the archaic structure of the Electoral College and entrenchment of the two-party system”, they basically accept that the U.S. system is otherwise generally “democratic.” However, while any attacks on democratic rights from far-right forces, conservatives and liberals alike should be opposed, the “democracy” that exists in the U.S. is fundamentally not a democracy for all but in practice a democracy only for the capitalist exploiting class. This is because it is the capitalist class who has the means at their disposal to shape public opinion and sway elections. It is they who own the media and print houses. It is the rich capitalists who disproportionately have the money to finance political parties, pay for political advertising, set up NGOs and think tanks and hire lobbyists. In practice, “democratic elections” in the U.S. end up being a matter of different factions of the ruling class wrestling for administrative control, with the masses reduced to largely serving as voting fodder for the rival capitalist cliques. Meanwhile, no matter who wins elections, any party that wins office will be administering a state machine that has been built up and maintained for the very purpose of enforcing capitalist rule over the masses and which is controlled through thousands of strings by the capitalists. Therefore, the “democratic” form that exists in capitalist countries like the U.S, Australia, India, Brazil and South Korea masks a social order that is very much a dictatorship of the capitalist class over the working class masses.
Furthermore, while the Vermont union leaders are less willing to blindly support the Democrat Party than the National EC, they do not have a principled opposition to supporting candidates from this capitalist party. Thus the Vermont branch leadership called for support to Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential candidacy bid. But Sanders is a member of the capitalist Democrat Party, who while he wants greater social inequality accepts the sanctity of the capitalist state and thus would be incapable of achieving many of the progressive measures that he seeks. Moreover, through advocating strident trade protectionism, Sanders damages working class unity and thus undermines the class struggle resistance that could actually win gains for the working class masses. Meanwhile, like other progressive Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders fully enlists in the imperialist campaign of lies against China over Muslim Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and is a strident supporter of the anti-communist, anti-China opposition in Hong Kong.
However, it is significant that the VT AFL-CIO leaders have the determination to defend their more class-struggle, left-wing agenda against bureaucratic attacks from Trumka. Resisting this right-wing attack from the national AFL-CIO tops inevitably brings up a discussion about what else is wrong with the national AFL-CIO leadership’s program and opens the possibility of a more complete break with Trumka’s class-collaborationist, protectionist and pro-imperialist outlook. That is why revolutionaries should join the united front opposing Trumka’s attack on the AFL-CIO’s Vermont branch.
It is not just in the U.S. where there needs to be a new, revolutionary agenda to guide the working class movement. Here in Australia, the ACTU’s strategy of reliance on the Labor Party, divisive economic nationalism, subordination to anti-strike laws and support for Australian imperialism’s agenda has proved disastrous to the workers movement. Over the last three and a half decades the share of national income going to workers has dropped drastically in favour of ever greater profits for the capitalists. Meanwhile, more and more workers have been driven into insecure casual and gig jobs, social welfare has been slashed and rental accommodation and housing have become more unaffordable for working class people. The revolutionary, internationalist program that must guide the workers movement here includes:
- Rely on strikes and picket lines, including in defiance of anti-strike laws and Arbitration courts, to defend workers rights rather than the dead end of relying on the ALP and the Greens.
- Fight for permanency and all the rights of permanency for all currently casual and gig workers.
- Refuse to accept the capitalist bosses right to sack workers. Fight to ban all profitable companies from slashing jobs and force them to increase hiring at the expense of their profits. When the capitalists inevitably scream back that such measures will lead to economic collapse, then explain to workers that, since capitalists say that their system cannot survive if the measures needed to bring jobs for all are taken, this proves that the economy needs to be ripped out of the capitalists hands and brought into public ownership under workers control.
- Fight for the granting of the full rights of citizenship for all visa workers, refugees and international students.
- Oppose all protectionist demands that set local workers against our working class sisters and brother abroad. For a fighting unity of workers against the capitalist exploiters everywhere!
- Mobilise mass action of workers to defend Aboriginal rights and to oppose racist state terror against Aboriginal people.
- The workers movement must champion the fight to enable women’s full participation in social, economic and political life: Demand free, 24-hour, public-provided childcare; free, nutritious school lunches for school students and free, after-school and holiday sporting, cultural and hobby activities for children with free public-provided shuttle services to them from school/home.
- Build joint mobilisations of workers contingents, Aboriginal people, Asians, Muslims, Africans and all other people of colour together with all anti-racists to crush provocations by violent far-right forces.
- Oppose any support for any pro-imperialist labour groups and anti-communist “democratic” and “human rights” forces seeking to undermine socialistic rule in China or Red China’s sovereignty over her Hong Kong territory. Stand with the Chinese, North Korean and other workers states against the U.S./Australian Cold War drive.
By standing by a leftist branch of the U.S. union movement that is resisting a bureaucratic attack from more conservative union officials we can advance the struggle to build a class struggle leadership of the American workers movement. This can only encourage the fight to build the revolutionary, internationalist leadership of the working class that we so badly need here too in Australia.
UPDATE, 30 June 2021, 10:20am (AEST): About two hours ago, the Vermont AFL-CIO and its leader David Deusen announced that the national AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka had sent its Vermont branch a formal letter stating that although its General Strike Authorization resolution was deemed “misconduct”, he would NOT be taking disciplinary action against the Vermont branch. So victory in this struggle!
Congratulations to Vermont trade unionists and all others who took a stand in this struggle. We should also note that yesterday another Australian-based pro-union group took a stand by sending a protest letter to Richard Trumka. That group is the Australian Chinese Workers Association. Below is the letter that they E-mailed to Trumka:
