ABSTRACT
The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and later the AFL-Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) used it to crush opposition to its pro business, pro-imperialism policies. In the realm of international affairs, for instance, the AFL and later the AFL-CIO supported foreign policies that accepted United States world hegemony and overseas trade union movements that opposed the political left. Key to the complicity of most of the white working class, and most significantly its organized fraction, with United States racism and imperialism was a combination of two essential factors: (1) white racial privilege and the social bloc that it created and (2) the promise of improving living standards. In the long term, however, anti-imperialism must become the dominant view within the United States working class if any form of progressive, transformative politics such as socialism is to become hegemonic. Developing anti-imperialism as a mass current within the working class, therefore, involves a fight for a democratic United States foreign policy.
