The Hypocritical Pacifism of Trade Unions in the United States

In the face of the Gaza conflict, several anti-war appeals have emerged from the trade union movement in the USA—which has been back to expressing important struggles for about three years now. We will attempt to highlight their merits, limitations, errors and opportunist slips, and indicate what the correct communist trade union direction against the imperialist war should be.

The appeal that gained most prominence was the one drawn up on the initiative of the rather minuscule UE and a local of the United Food & Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW).

The United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) is a small union, but one with an important history. Today, it has only 35,000 members, a size on the scale of the major base unions in Italy, and therefore very small for the United States. It was established in 1936 and was one of the first affiliates of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations), the confederation of industrial unions that had been formed a year earlier, in 1935, as distinct from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which was the old confederation of craft unions, founded in 1886.

In the 1940s, UE reached 600,000 members. In 1949, due to the CIO’s refusal to take action to stop raids by other unions, which they opportunistically undertook in response to UE’s refusal to file the affidavits of non-communist leadership required by the Taft-Hartly Act to participate in the NLRA process, it left the CIO, which had by then become a regime union on par with the AFL. In 1955, the two would merge, forming today’s AFL-CIO.

Competition with the powerful CIO marked the beginning of UE’s decline. Another decisive cause was the crisis in the home appliance manufacturing sector, to which most of the members of this union belonged, which, since the 1990s, has seen a vast process of relocation of production to outside the USA to newly-industrialized countries where labor costs are lower (a process commonly referred to as “outsourcing”). Nevertheless, it has maintained a certain vitality and recognized prestige in the North American trade union movement to date, concentrated mainly in the eastern part of the country. Conflict-ridden and with a union life based on member participation, UE, however, has an opportunistic leadership. For example, in 2019 it supported the social democrat Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party primaries, ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The appeal was published on October 20, just days before the Israeli army entered the Gaza Strip, in the midst of carpet bombing in preparation for the ground operation. It was signed by more than 200 local unions and 5 national labor organizations:

• the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (IUPAT), with 100,000 members, joined on Oct. 24;
• then the National Nurses United (NNU), with 225,000 members;
• then the American Postal Workers Union (APWU), with 200,000 members;
• on Dec. 1, the United Auto Workers (UAW), with 390,000 members, joined; and,
• finally, on Dec. 28, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America (AFA-CWA), with 50,000 members.

These 5 unions, totaling nearly 1 million members, belong to the AFL-CIO, which has 55 union federations with about 12 million members. So roughly 1/10th of the AFL-CIO’s member unions, corresponding to 1/10th of the membership, have joined the roll call, which is a substantial minority of the labor movement, even given the still-low temperature of the class struggle.

However, the appeal remains in the realm of bourgeois pacifism, thus deluding the workers that peace can be achieved by appealing to governments to cease military operations, and not through a social struggle of the working class that imposes this goal by force, in the knowledge that confronting each other are not different ideas or even “good versus evil”, but enormous conflicting material interests: on the one hand, those of Capital and on the other, those of the proletariat. Thus, the goal of stopping imperialist wars can only be accomplished in an definitive and total way if the class struggle transcends into a revolution that overthrows the political power of the ruling class in all states.

The appeal therefore boils down to asking the bourgeois regime for a policy of peace: “We call on President Joe Biden and Congress to push for an immediate ceasefire and an end to the siege of Gaza… In making this appeal, US labor unions join the efforts of 13 members of Congress and others calling for an immediate cease-fire”.

This conduct conceals an enormous mystification. Militarist policy is not a free choice on behalf of governments but is an obligation for them, a vital necessity. To it all bourgeois states, whether democratic or authoritarian, right-wing or left-wing (however little these distinctions may count), must comply. Capitalism generates and needs war as its only escape from the abyss of world economic crisis and, consequently, from the revolution of the increasingly immiserated and starving proletarian masses.

On the one hand, the advancing economic crisis of overproduction brings capitalist competition, between enterprises and states, to paroxysm, making the shift from commercial to military confrontation increasingly frequent. Each bourgeois state is threatened by the others. On the other hand, all bourgeois states are threatened and attacked, together and without distinction, by the economic crisis that, by creating the material conditions favorable to social revolution, deteriorates the living conditions of the proletariat. Capitalist war, therefore, represents the at once economic and social solution to the crisis of capitalism.

This appeal by UE is fabricated in order that the UAW leadership can use the union’s base as support for President Biden in the upcoming presidential election, both by instructing its members to vote for him and by providing more or less substantial financial resources. That is, it is an appeal to a bourgeois political party, passed off as a “friend” of working people, by the UAW leadership.

Placed in these terms, the call for workers’ solidarity and unity above all national and religious divisions loses its vigor, being deprived of a practical indication of struggle: an abstract statement that does not set out to combat the bourgeois forces advocating militarism and war, but rather, seeks to dialogue, appeal and even genuflect before them.

There was then a whole series of less widely-circulated calls against the war in Gaza, for a “cease-fire”, which saw these characteristics reversed. That is, they have had the virtue of providing practical directions for struggle on how to fight against the militarism of US imperialism, but by holding the Israeli and US governments alone responsible for the conflict and avoiding any attack on the opposing bourgeois line-up constituted by Hamas and the equally bourgeois powers that support it and their equally cynical warmongering and murderous policies, they end up deploying workers on one side of the conflict, thereby giving ideal nourishment to the imperialist war, instead of its sabotage.

For example, we read from the February 28th appeal of Local 48 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO with about 820,000 members: “WHEREAS…the workers’ struggle has no boundaries…WHEREAS, working-class opposition to this US-Israel war goes hand in hand with the union motto ‘An injury to one is an injury to all’ and the appeal ‘Arabs, Jews, blacks and whites, workers of the world unite’…IBEW Local 48 supports the Palestinian trade unions’ call for workers around the world to stop the shipment of arms for the US-Israel war; we salute the dock transport workers in Barcelona, Belgium, Italy and elsewhere who have declared that they refuse to handle arms shipments for this war; and we support and encourage the actions of these workers in the US to stop arms shipments…by opposing what is in effect yet another US war, this time against the people of Gaza…” [emphasis is ours].

The call for international proletarian unity and the direction of struggle to oppose the imperialist war on practical grounds are thwarted by the mystification of the character of the ongoing war in Gaza, described as imperialist and bourgeois on one side only.

The only extenuating circumstance is that this stance goes against its own bourgeois regime, that of Washington, which has in Israel, not its only, but a crucial, ally in the Middle East.

The practical indication of sabotage through strikes, blocking the transportation of war materials, etc., is insufficient if these actions are understood in themselves as decisive. They must be seen as intermediate steps to finally arrive at a general mobilization of the working class against the militarism of their own capitalist states. Moreover, each imperialist power has often found itself simultaneously arming states at war with each other. For example, Qatar, now hosts concomitantly the largest US base in the Middle East and the political leadership of Hamas.

If “the workers’ struggle has no borders” and if “an injury to one is an injury to all”—inasmuch as the interests of the working class are unique on the international level and its struggles must be unique and coherent if they are to be victorious—it is not acceptable to limit the plan of action against the imperialist war to the national level alone, disregarding its repercussions for workers in other countries. If the practical direction of struggle in the US is right, but the definition of the nature of today’s war in Gaza is mystified, on the international level, the result is to push workers toward supporting the bourgeois front that backs Hamas.

For a country such as Italy, whose bourgeoisie, owing to material determinations, always plays on several tables and, since Mussolini’s time, has been cultivating a relationship with the Arab-Palestinian ruling classes as part of its imperialist policy in the Mediterranean area, an approach such as the one in this latest appeal means leading the working class to support one of the ruling class’s foreign policy options, instead of fighting for its own class interests.

A practical direction to place the movement squarely on the terrain of the international unity of the proletariat, and not on the terrain of bourgeois warfare (which can only destroy that unity), should:

• denounce the war as bourgeois and imperialist on both sides;
• express solidarity with the proletarians of both countries, thus also with the workers of Israel by appealing to proletarian brotherhood;
• identify and denounce both bourgeois regimes that lead workers to fratricidal slaughter;
• give the proletarians of all countries and all imperialist alignments the same practical direction of struggle against militarism and war.

In the absence of these elements, which alone make the union’s direction truly internationalist, the result is to align the proletariat with the belligerent policy of the international bourgeoisie.

Such proclamations can help align the proletarian masses with the federal government’s foreign policy. The US Congress, in a bipartisan vote, elected to fund the $95 billion rearmament of Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan. At the same time, Biden, who also pushed for and signed the military aid package, feigns a non-interventionist, negotiation-ready stance of the peacemaker in both the Middle East and Ukraine. “Isolationist” positioning was a tactical expedient to which the US resorted in the aftermath of both world wars. In this way, the US government succeeded in imposing the propaganda motif of the great power whose political clout compels it to fight for the sake of humanity, democracy, and planetary prosperity.

We must remember how unions have been used in the past by capitalist states to orient the masses and shape them ideologically with a view to intervention in capitalist wars. The collaboration of trade unions with governments has often served the function of managing social crisis in the run-up to war.

The policy of subordination of the American trade unions to the State, pursued by then-President Woodrow Wilson during World War I, was significant in this regard. It was then a matter for the bourgeoisie to cope with problems such as rising inflation and labor shortages through the granting of moderate wage increases. Wilson was re-elected to the White House in 1916 thanks to a campaign inspired by neutralism. Then, when the war was over, Wilson himself was the promoter of the League of Nations, a transnational body which was supposed to prevent new wars. Meanwhile, the United States had intervened in the final throes of World War I to sit at the victors’ table. The path of wartime interventionism also passed through the cooperation of the trade unions, while pacifist proclamations quickly turned into the calls to arms still heard ‘round the world.