Trade Union Internationalism and the Supra-National State

Abstract

This note is a comment on an article in a previous issue. It argues that international trade unionism is at bottom a product of workers and their aspirations; its development clearly involves responses to the internation-alisation of capital, among many other features of capitalist development, but it is not governed solely by this. In actual fact, however, international trade unionism has been penetrated and moulded by U.S. corporations and the CIA, through U.S. union leaders, in order to make it a tool for breaking down barriers to the expansion of U.S. multinationals.