BOOK REVIEW---David Van Deusen’s Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO 2017–2023

Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO 2017–2023
By David Van Deusen • Foreword by Kim Kelly • Introduction by Steve Early
Series: PM Press / Working Class History
Published: 07/30/2024
Formats: Paperback and e-book
Pages: 288

David Van Deusen’s Insurgent Labor: The Vermont AFL-CIO 2017–2023 is part labor history, part memoir, and part polemic. It may also serve as a guide for union activists who are seeking to influence their regional labor councils and labor chapters and American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO)-affiliated state labor federations. Interest in transforming these bodies has been building and has become especially evident over the past twenty years. Van Deusen’s book takes up the matter of what a state labor federation might look like and argues for a particular model that he believes these bodies should adopt.

Van Deusen came out of an anarchist collective and was a local and statewide leader in a Vermont American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) local union before becoming president of the Vermont AFL-CIO. His journey has involved the usual work of representing workers in grievances and negotiating union contracts and engaging in political action, but Van Deusen has brought a particular set of guiding revolutionary principles to his work and along the way he helped found a radical union caucus that has led the transformation of the Vermont AFL-CIO. This on-going and transformative work has occasionally made national headlines. The book’s foreword and introduction by labor journalists Kim Kelly and Steve Early testify to the depth and import of Van Deusen’s work and help place it in a context that makes the book more readable. Van Deusen isn’t bragging or lying when he mentions in passing some of the key features of the union work that he has done over the years; he’s stating facts, and it’s this kind of work that builds real leader’s hard-won credibility.

We first meet Van Deusen in his book fighting the Republicans, helping to rescue Vermont’s mainstream labor movement from near oblivion, and coming into conflict with some of the leaders of Vermont’s unions and the state’s Democratic Party. There are strikes, debates, conventions, caucus-building, alliances, betrayals, and important strategic and tactical decisions made along the way that ultimately lead to union growth. The labor movement’s losses and steps forward often proceed in print as if our plot lines come from romance novels, and Insurgent Labor is no exception. Van Deusen brings a revolutionary biker’s passion to his work and it shows.

The book’s fifth and sixth chapters take up some of the all-important questions of what may happen when radicals take institutional power in the context of what has been both a top-down and horizontal institution. The AFL-CIO has had two identifying features which it inherited in large part from the American Federation of Labor. One is the Federation’s identity as a decentralized alliance of mainstream labor that has tended towards cautious liberalism and has often run behind the times. The other feature accompanying this, and sometimes contradicting it, are the tendencies in the labor movement towards centralization, inclusion, and assimilation.

The labor movement can rightfully and proudly claim to be the only movement in the United States that brings together working-class people of all identities and opinions and holds this membership in relatively stable and well-funded organizations. On the other hand, the labor movement’s institutional structures often leave much to be desired. The losses in union membership and union power have led to partial ossification. Van Deusen sees his efforts to set things in labor aright and change course as a fight against betrayals and selling out, opportunism, bureaucracy, reactionary ideas and individuals, and labor’s ties with the Democratic Party. The alternative structures and policies that Van Deusen believes must be adopted are contained in a transitional program (“The Little Green Book”), leaflets, speeches, and convention and conference resolutions that appear in the book. Having these documents at hand may give readers a good sense of what is at stake in the internal union battles that the author spends much time discussing, but these documents and the thirty-eight pages of footnotes also give the book a polemical feel. If readers can put aside the astringent lines of argument and tone that Van Deusen often relies on they will find a good argument for some commonsense steps that can be taken to make the AFL-CIO and its subordinate bodies inclusive, democratic, and more representative. Labor would probably gain a great deal of ground and power by taking up the direct election of AFL-CIO leadership and including all workers, union members and non-union workers, in regional decision-making as Van Deusen advocates.

Labor radicals who are working to change their regional labor councils and chapters and state labor federations can find in Insurgent Labor a very good introduction to how labor might break with the Democrats if that’s what they’re thinking about and trying to visualize. The book will also help radicals visualize ways to support a Green New Deal, oppose gun control, and challenge austerity in ways that are not opportunistic and are not dependent upon slogans. There are compelling arguments made in the book for national and international labor solidarity that go far beyond what the AFL-CIO and any of its constituent unions and other bodies have taken up. The author is forthright and appropriately humble when discussing Black liberation and struggles for civil rights and suggesting ways forward in these areas for labor.

The Vermont AFL-CIO made headlines in 2020 and 2021 when their state convention adopted both a revolutionary preamble and a resolution urging that a general strike be called “in the event that Donald Trump refuses to concede the office of President of the United States.” That resolution deepened and widened the chasm separating the Vermont AFL-CIO and the national AFL-CIO and led to a prolonged struggle that never quite made it to center stage in the labor movement but that nonetheless influenced labor’s national political options at the time. The effects of that resolution and the controversies that it brought to the surface are today influencing how labor supports a ceasefire in the fighting in Gaza and how United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain’s call for a national general strike in 2028 is being seen. Van Deusen spends a great deal of time explaining and defending the preamble and the resolution in the book and the fallout that they caused. Along the way he repeatedly denounces then-AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka and the Democrats and lays out some of the tactics and the strategy needed to build a defensive and politicized general strike. I imagine that many people will buy and study Insurgent Labor to read and consider what the author has to say here. I found it notable while reading the book that Van Deusen does not give in to the typical anarchistic faith in spontaneity when discussing the strategy and tactics needed to build a general strike and see it through.

The preamble and the resolution gave the national AFL-CIO reason to investigate the decision-making processes and politics at work in the Vermont AFL-CIO under the collective leadership that Van Deusen and his caucus and electoral slate had helped build. I think that even had the state organization not adopted the revolutionary preamble and resolution there would have been a collision between the state and national bodies. Less clear is why and how national and international unions did not bring greater pressure to bear on their Vermont affiliates. In the end the Vermont AFL-CIO was more or less vindicated and left to go its own way. Van Deusen gives readers some details on how the state organization has centered organizing and decentered participation in electoral politics in the aftermath of the 2020-2021 fight with the national body. This emphasis on organizing has brought needed growth.

A recent Valley Labor Report on the Vermont AFL-CIO

Readers with backgrounds in labor and the left will get the most out of Insurgent Labor because the book is very much framed in the contexts of leftism and internal union politics. We see Van Deusen acting much as any other labor leader might act under certain circumstances in the book, justifying some of his difficult and controversial actions with pragmatic logic and sometimes taking what reads like a traditional leftist-vanguardist approach while hardly missing a beat. As almost any good anarchist will have it, he carries with him the legacy of the lost Spanish Revolution of 1936-1938 and updates that with support for Rojava’s revolution. He criticizes AFL-CIO President Trumka and the Democrats, but when it looked like push was coming to shove in the fight between the Vermont AFL-CIO and the national AFL-CIO he sought support from labor leaders who were no more or less militant and democratic than Trumka was, and for some unexplained reason he considered support from Australian and European Trotskyites (see here and here) more important than winning support from Democrats and center forces in the United States. Trumka's role as a union reformer and agent of change within the AFL-CIO is either forgotten or downplayed in the book. It says much to me that allies and potential allies from within the labor movement did not come forward when needed to stand with the Vermont AFL-CIO. 

At one point in Insurgent Labor Van Deusen comments that had Trump refused to cede power and had a general strike occurred his caucus would have urged temporary unity with the Democrats and would have been prepared to pivot quickly and break that unity had the general strike gone forward. This may be something that came to Van Deusen through his readings about the Spanish Revolution, but it does not build trust between organizations and it could well lead to a disaster. Van Deusen rightfully decries outside interference in the affairs of the Vermont AFL-CIO and its affiliated unions but his movement outreaches to activists in those affiliates, in unaffiliated unions, and in labor bodies outside of Vermont. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) gets some well-deserved attention in Insurgent Labor, but there is no examination of how DSA's work and programs intersect with or run parallel to those of Van Deusen's caucus and slate.

It occured to me as I read the book that an opportunity to build solidarity may have been lost when Vermont's labor radicals opted to pursue third-party politics and not run coordinated campaigns through the Democrats and the state's two independent left political parties. For that matter, Van Deusen and many of those in his circles know how to work in hierarchical organizations and have the long-term perspective needed to do that effectively and so the questions of why they didn't dig into the Democratic Party or the state's left parties as they did into the AFL-CIO and what might have happened had they done so arises. The argument made for not working with the Democrats in Insurgent Labor is less about sharply-pointed polemics and more about real structural and institutional failures. But would Van Deusen still be so critical of the Democrats had these failures not occured or if they had been addressed? Van Deusen writes and works with two identities, outsider and insider, and it seems questionable which identity he prefers and which identity he is best at working with.

It is not my intent to argue that Van Deusen is a hypocrite---he isn’t---but it is to say that there are contradictions in the legacy of anarchism and in Van Deusen’s thinking that leave so-called “libertarian socialism” in a state of negation. Where others might see a push and pull and forward and backwards or sideways movement in a situation Van Deusen might characterize that situation as one of struggle between what is pure and what is reactionary. Instead of seeking to hold a particular united front line and move people in the center leftward from that position it seems that Van Deusen sees a need to move others ever to the left, using only temporary alliances and only rarely recognizing that change occurs in stages. He does not seem to be about building on the heritage of the progressive unions that were once at the helm of the U.S. labor movement so much as he is interested in going in another (uncharted) direction.

Vermont has a unique political landscape. The state's labor movement is relatively small, as Van Deusen points out. His reminder that union growth in the state in recent years and the revitalization of the labor movement under radical leadership in this period intersected with Vermont's exceptional political framework during the worst days of COVID and led to comparatively high union density while unions took steps backwards elsewhere should give us pause. Union leadership cannot argue that density matters and then dismiss Van Deusen when he makes his case based on union membership numbers. At some point we are entitled to ask if some in union leadership would rather rather risk further declines in union density rather than make some of the democratic and structural changes Van Deusen and his cohort are arguing for. On the other hand, their reliance upon building an alternative unionism within the mainstream of the labor movement and an alternative politics that doesn't unite the many against the few behind a common electoral program, and perhaps behind a labor party of some type, cedes space to our misleaders.      

I noted at the beginning of this review that there is much in Insurgent Labor that will be of interest to activists seeking to create fundamental change in our labor movement. Van Deusen is not the only voice for such change, but Insurgent Labor is well-written and interesting and compelling enough that it may propel Van Deusen forward as a leading national voice for change. It is fascinating to me that anarchism can attract a following within or at the margins of the labor movement. That following doesn’t have to accept the dogma of anarchism in order to be effective or gain ground for a time. But does Van Deusen’s book forecast a moment when the many different programs for change present in our labor movement might find common ground or, on the other hand, come into greater conflict with one another? At what point does Van Deusen's constructive anarchism become something else?

See here for more information on David Van Deusen

Note: A review of Insurgent Labor by Gordon Simmons can be found here, an article about David Van Deusen and the Vermont AFL-CIO by Vermont union leader Katie Maurice that appeared in Jacobin can be found here, Steve Early also wrote an article for Jacobin on how Van Deusen and his caucus and slate took over the Vermont AFL-CIO and that can piece can be found here,  and The Valley Labor Report has recently produced this important report:

Labor Video recently posted the following report arguing that conflicts betweeen the Vermont AFL-CIO and the national AFL-CIO are continuing: