Jennifer Luff. Commonsense Anticommunism

Jennifer Luff's book deepens our understanding of American Federation of Labor (AFL) leaders' relationship to the state. According to Luff, AFL leaders' critical attitude and aggressive actions against those who challenged their brand of union leadership brought them political benefits. AFL membership was small, its leaders resisted widening their representation among industrial workers, and over time they found mainstream support for craft unionism waning. But, Luff argues, none of this mattered when it came to their political influence, which was on the rise in the 1920s and 1930s in large part due to their “reliable antiradicalism” (p. 4). AFL anti-radicalism resulted in complex, and what Luff sees as sometimes contradictory, positions against those who challenged their leadership. Why, in some periods, did AFL leaders fight political radicalism by advocating for repressive federal legislation, and at other times by speaking out against such laws? In fleshing out AFL leaders' motivations, Luff places her subject in the growing literature on political conservatism more generally, and within the labor movement more specifically. In this book, Luff scrutinizes AFL leaders actions and documents decades of their collusion with employers and government officials, which was intended to undermine their radical opponents.

Civil liberties · Conservatism · Craft · Legislation · Mainstream · Political economy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Sociology · State (computer science) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies