Jay Lovestone: An international fink

"A Covert Life," a biography of Jay Lovestone who died in 1990, is the latest book about an anti-Communist "hero" to be given a favorable review by The New York Times.

In his review, Paul Berman claims that the great untold story of the century is that of leftists and "radical trade unionists" who, once members of the Communist Party, later claimed that communism was a catastrophic byproduct of that movement and worked tirelessly to "bring the Communists down."

Lovestone, a founder of the Communist Party and later its general secretary, after being expelled, did everything he could to "keep the Communists from taking over the trade unions."

I don't trust The New York Times or its book reviews so I turned to my library. Here's what I dug up about Jay Lovestone.

In the Communist Party's early years, Lovestone led a right-wing group that advocated class collaboration.

The Lovestoneites had concluded that the United States was immune from the operation of capitalist economic laws - that American capitalism operated under "exceptional circumstances." The group was expelled from the Party in 1929.

Berman spent some time discussing Lovestone's career in the post World War II period, boasting that even before the existence of the CIA, Lovestone and Irving Brown of the AFL had set up the first American effort to undermine European trade unions which were under the leadership of Communists.

According to Berman, they sought out socialist and Catholic trade unionists - and more than a few shady Marseilles gangsters - who supplied them with money to break from the Communist-led unions and organize labor federations of their own.

Although Lovestone played ball with the CIA, he kept his network of anti-Communist agents under the authority of the control of the International Department of the AFL and later, the AFL-CIO, a situation that continued until the departure of Lane Kirkland from the leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995.

In 1967 George Morris, for years the labor editor of the Daily Worker, wrote The CIA and American Labor: the Subversion of the AFL CIO Foreign Policy.

In that book, Morris quoted Victor Reuther, one of the "Reuther Boys" who became leaders of the Auto Workers union. Reuther charged that the tragedy of the AFL-CIO activities in foreign affairs was that they were "in the vest pocket of Jay Lovestone and as long as that was so there would be no changes in the Federation's foreign policy."

Reuther - himself once a recipient of CIA money - said that after the AFL-CIO had pledged unstinting support for the war in Vietnam, despite growing opposition to the war within the labor movement.

During the same week that Reuther was attacking Lovestone's role in the international labor movement, delegates from auto workers unions in 14 countries met in Detroit to launch a different approach to international labor solidarity.

The conference was one of the earliest attempts to fight the effects of globalization on industrial workers and was in direct opposition to Lovestone's undermining of international labor solidarity.

When John Sweeney assumed leadership of the AFL-CIO in 1995 one of the biggest changes he made was to cut the budget of its International Affairs Department.

Another aspect of that policy change was removal of the anti communist language in the AFL-CIO constitution.

In my opinion these actions are a commentary on Lovestone's finking on the principles of international working class solidarity.

- Roy Rydell