During the years 1910 to 1920, the American Federation of Labor (AFL), which had long adopted a pro-capitalist and conservative approach to unionism, took its first prominent role in the formulation and execution of US foreign policy with its position on the Mexican Revolution. In so doing, it furthered the interests of the American government and business and the newly emerging bourgeois elite in Mexico, at the expense of the labouring masses and radical movements that had helped to usher in the Revolution.

Mexico in revolution

In 1910, Mexico was a country defined by thirty-five years of autocratic dictatorship. By the end of Porfirio Díaz’s reign, known as the Porfirato, the population had increased by about 50% and the developing economy failed to keep up to pace in meeting its new demands. This sparked resistance to the regime in the early 1900s, led in part by Ricardo FloresMagón and his anarcho-syndicalist group, the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM). Díaz was eventually overthrown in 1911, and his successors – Francisco Madero in 1913 and General Victoriano Huerta in 1914 – shared his fate before Venustiano Carranza and his group of moderate Constitutionalists seized control.

By the end of the Revolution, the country had undergone a dramatic transformation – the bloody conflict claimed more than a million lives and a new political system was installed, along with a new constitution in 1917. The United States played a significant role in the events of 1910-20, including the occupation of Veracruz in 1914 and the 1916-17 Pershing expedition against the forces of “Pancho” Villa. The AFL assisted in the formulation of US foreign policy and its execution during the Mexican Revolution, as well as mediating between moderate revolutionary factions and US officials.

Although the Mexican Revolution did not begin until 1910, the war for the hearts and minds of Mexican workers between the AFL and the Wobblies began four years earlier. In 1906, the IWW’s Western Federation of Miners (WFM) attempted to organise Mexican workers in Arizona’s mining industry and, in the process, highlighted the difference between their inclusive and militant strategies and the AFL’s racist practices.

At the same time, radical American unionists in the IWW made contact with the Magóns and other PLM members in exile in the Southwest US. The IWW’s call to organise the “workers of the world” as a class in its 1908 constitution resonated with the downtrodden workers of Díaz’s Mexico. As the decade drew to a close, Gompers had cause for concern with militancy spreading both sides of the border, with business unionism growing increasingly unattractive to American and Mexican workers.

The American left

While many on the American Left and labour movement took up the Mexican Revolution as a cause, the leadership of the AFL remained cautious about the PLM. Although Gompers had previously approved AFL resolutions extending sympathy to Mexican socialists and anarchists facing extradition, these were solely symbolic gestures. In April 1911, Gompers refused the Magóns’ request for aid. With clear ideological differences between the AFL and the PLM, who were far closer to the IWW model of industrial unionism, this worried the AFL leadership for ideological reasons.

Gompers, the conservative patriot who sought the ear of friendly US administrations and business leaders, was concerned with the PLM’s anti-American stance. The PLM narrative for the Revolution, that the aim of struggle in Mexico was to free the country from the imperialist domination of the United States, held that the fight had to be led by the forces of labour and the peasantry.

Such calls for radical revolution were an anathema for Gompers, whose cautious accommodationist reform was nowhere to be seen among the ranks of the PLM and in the pages of their paper Regeneración. Most worryingly for Gompers and the AFL hierarchy, the Magóns and the PLM echoed IWW calls for class solidarity and internationalism, heightening fears among conservative unionists that radicalism could spill over the border.

In the years 1915-20, ‘Carrancismo’ dominated not only the Mexican Revolution, but the imagination of Gompers and his AFL inner circle. Gompers held Venustiano Carranza in the highest regard, seeing him as the leader who allowed the best possible outcome for US interests and therefore AFL interests. Carrancismo amounted to a return to Maderismo – Madero led a bourgeois revolutionary movement which Carranza inherited, making him an ideal ally for the AFL. Carranza was also a wealthy landowner, like Madero, and represented an anti-radical strain of the Revolution that Gompers admired, and thought could make him palatable to the Wilson administration. Gompers called him a “friend of labour”, but Carranza’s record disproves this.

Despite promising overtures in the early months of his leadership, by the spring of 1916 the relationship between Carranza and the Mexican labour movement – namely, ‘The House of the Workers of the World’, Casa del Obrero Mundial (Casa) – had severely deteriorated. Carranza was impatient at the Casa’s militant demands for greater workers’ control and higher wages when the resources of the state were still directed towards defeating the Villistas in the North. The deterioration in the relationship between Mexican government and labour led to general strikes from mid-1916, and then the suppression and eventual banning of the Casa by the Carranza regime, in much the same way that the Diaz had previously suppressed the PLM.

Although Gompers criticised Carranza over reports of his persecution of the Catholic Church, on issues relating to labour he remained markedly quiet. Regarding Carranza’s attack on the Casa, Gompers said he hoped to “reverse Carranza’s harsh no-strike policy”. However, this does not alter the fact Gompers did not withdraw support for Carranza or even write directly to him about his concerns, with foreign policy objectives prioritised over concerns for Mexican workers. Gompers saw Carranza as the only political figure in Mexico with the potential to both quell the radicalism he was fighting in the US and build a corporatist-style labour arrangement that would stem the tide of cross-border radicalism.

The Pan-American Federation of Labor

From 1915, Gompers incorporated Pan-Americanism into his Mexican strategy. This tactic was in part a response to the more outward looking foreign policy of the Wilson administration. Founded in 1918, the Pan-American Federation of Labor (PAFL) bought together trade unionists from the AFL and the newly founded, moderate, Mexican CROM. It was, as American labour historian Kim Scipes argues, an attempt by the AFL to “dominate other nations by controlling their labor movements”, using the guise of “international labor solidarity” to gain support among workers and the Left at home and in Mexico.

Similarly, Harvey Levenstein suggests Gompers viewed the PAFL as “a means of implementing a Monroe Doctrine for labor”. There were a number of reasons why the AFL operated in such a way, including the threat of ‘cheap labour’ from Mexico and that of revolutionary syndicalism.

The PAFL also represented the further convergence of interests of both the US government and the AFL, with PAFL securing government funds. The federal government’s American Alliance for Labor and Democracy (AALD) funded the Pan-American Labor Press, the PAFL was given a free permit for mailing, and another government organisation, the Committee on Public Information, provided the organisation with $50,000 to help set it up. This convergence and the subsequent funding was made possible by the First World War, which gave the AFL another opportunity to involve itself at the heart of American foreign policy.

The AADL was set up to combat pacifism in American labour and stir pro-war, patriotic sentiment during the First World War, and gave Gompers funds and greater autonomy to exert his influence elsewhere, especially in Mexico. With the US entry into the war progressive corporatism was accelerated, binding the federal government, business and the AFL even closer amid the climate of national political unity and jingoism.

Labour and imperialism

The American Federation of Labour’s role in the Mexican Revolution between 1910 and 1920 was primarily as an agent of American imperialism. As the AFL’s first major role in United States foreign policy, their involvement in the Mexican Revolution served as a manifestation of their domestic record in foreign affairs – that of corporatism, accommodation and reform, paying lip service to issues of workers’ rights, and attempting to undermine its more radical competitors for primacy within the labour movement. In the process, the AFL prevented radicalism in Mexico, as it did in the United States, serving as a bulwark against the IWW at home while backing the moderate forces of Madero, Carranza and the CROM in Mexico.

The headline photo is a black and white image from the Mexican Revolution

Art Book Review Books Capitalism China Climate Emergency Conservative Government Conservative Party COVID-19 Creeping Fascism Economics EcoSocialism Elections Europe Event Video Far-Right Fascism Film Film Review Fourth International France Gaza History Imperialism Israel Italy Keir Starmer Labour Party London Long Read Marxism Marxist Theory Migrants Palestine pandemic Police Protest Russia Solidarity Statement Trade Unionism Trans*Mission Ukraine United States of America War