What is Reddit's opinion of AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage??

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The amount of awful things the AFL-CIO has supported over the years is too long to list. It would require a book like Kim Scipes' AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage? to list them all, and even then, that only scratches the surface of of their international operations.

I am going to get a copy of this book, and compare it to AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?. Hopefully we can use this book to help discover when the LGBTQ movement entered in the American Labor Aristocracy.

This book looks interesting as a sort of First-Worldist understanding of the global labor movement. It is clear, at least from this summary, that the author denies the labor aristocracy thesis. To quote the summary:

>One reason lies in the withering of labor movements across the North, and a belief in some circles, flowing from that withering, that the working class is shrinking and perhaps ceasing to be an instrument of social change. In part such viewpoints are due to a failure to see office workers in “white-collar” professions to be part of the working class. (Surplus value is extracted from them just the same.)

The summary here is clear: people working in New York office buildings for $15 an hour are being exploited. Not just exploited, but having "Surplus value...extracted from them just the same." An extraordinary statement, that basically completely ignores Marx's own comments on productive and unproductive labor in the Gundrisse:

>A. Smith was essentially correct with his productive and unproductive labour, correct from the standpoint of bourgeois economy. [45] What the other economists advance against it is either horse-piss (for instance Storch, Senior even lousier etc.), [46] namely that every action after all acts upon something, thus confusion of the product in its natural and in its economic sense; so that the pickpocket becomes a productive worker too, since he indirectly produces books on criminal law (this reasoning at least as correct as calling a judge a productive worker because he protects from theft). Or the modern economists have turned themselves into such sycophants of the bourgeois that they want to demonstrate to the latter that it is productive labour when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because for example the latter activity will make his fat head – blockhead – clearer the next day in the office.

Marx is clear: people hired to pick the lice out of the fat blockheads of the capitalist class do not produce surplus value. Any argument put forth to substantiate this idea is "horse-piss," in Marx's own words.

But enough about that. This work, written by New York professor Immanuel Ness, is basically a First-Worldist attempt to atleast grapple with the state of the global labor movement in some fashion. It is interesting then, that instead of attacking the imperialist institutions of the AFL-CIO and the ITUC, the author instead chooses as his target the Chinese, Indian, and South African labor movements.

After having read works like Kim Scipes' AFL-CIO's Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?, Don Thompson and Rodney Larson's Where were you, brother? An account of trade union imperialism, and Beth Sims' Workers of the World Undermined: American Labor's Role in U.S. Foreign Policy (among others), it is clear to me that this is not only a wrongheaded approach, but that the institutions professor Ness sets his targets on are actually the only forces opposing the imperialist trade unions of the West.

For instance, the leaders of the COSATU themselves understand the nature of the imperialist trade unions of the West, whereas professor Immanuel Ness seems to implicitly deny it. To quote from Divided World Divided Class:

>According to Thomson and Larson, the recipients of ICFTU funding demonstrate “an increasingly visible identity of interest between the international work of western trade union centres and the foreign policies of their governments.” Thus, for over half a century, the ICFTU has committed itself to maintaining the imperialist status quo*: from the 1950s, **when the ICFTU supported US aggression against Korea, to more recently, when, alongside the International Labor Organisation and the AFL-CIO and through ORIT, it facilitated a destabilization campaign against the elected Haitian government and, subsequent to the latters overthrow, ignored massive persecution against public sector workers between 2004 and 2006.

>Cognisant of this fact, in 2010, COSATU (the Congress of South African Trade Unions, representing the coun­try’s biggest trade unions) issued a statement directly criticising the Northern constituents of the ICFTU for their complicity with im­perialisms oppression of the Third World:

>It is now even clearer that the designs of the global politi­cal economy are such that all structures and institutions in the north serve and reinforce the agenda of the global ruling class. In this regard, even trade unions see their main responsibility as, first and foremost, about the protection of the capitalist system, except questioning its excesses. They scorn every attempt to question its legitimacy and call for its challenge. It was deliberately designed by imperialism that they must see their future as tied to the existence and success of the system. This is why they defend with passion all that is seen to threaten the core elements of the system. The defence of the global markets and trade system that furthers our underdevelopment, the interests of their rul­ing classes in the Middle East, and their unfettered con­trol over the international trade union movement and its related systems, all help to sustain the dominant system and protect it from those who are its victims and would want to see it removed. This is the basis for the ideological and political choices made by our comrades in the north in pursuing the trade union struggle.

So a First-World labor scholar writes a book which implicitly denies the labor aristocracy thesis, in order to attack actually revolutionary trade union movements around the globe.

That this thing could be published just shows the depths of the utter and complete bankruptcy of First-Worldism.

Again, what is the purpose of the independent union? They don't have any demands, so it would appear they don't have any qualms with the current union

China has very strong reason to be concerned about so-called 'independent' trade unions. One of the most effective strategies of the Imperialists is to use 'independent' trade unions, NGO's and other organizations to attack Marxist states and movements 'from the left'.

For anyone that knows their cold war history, we have the case of Solidarity in Poland, which was instrumental in bringing down the Communist Government there, with key support from the CIA, the Catholic Church and U.S. trade union bodies such as the AFL-CIO (again, heavily connected to the CIA through their Solidarity Center, which has been active in the regime change attempts against Nicaragua and Venezuela).

see: http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/CIO_without_CIA.html

also here's a good book if you have the time - https://www.amazon.com/Afl-Cios-against-Developing-Country-Workers/dp/0739135023

Likewise, in Nicaragua, a key constituency in the attempted overthrow of the Government was the MRS, the "Movement for the Renovation of the Sandinistas"

see: https://mronline.org/2018/08/18/how-nicaraguas-left-wing-opposition-mrs-are-ngo-opportunists-lobbying-the-west-for-regime-change/