Dan Gallin is a life-long union official so his memoirs might not seem an obviously thrilling read for revolutionary socialists. But his career has been about as different from the standard dull trajectory of union officialdom as one could imagine.
Gallin has been a stateless exile, a member of the heterodox Trotskyist movement of Max Shachtman and Hal Draper, and was expelled from the United States for subversive activities. Rising through the ranks of the International Union of Food workers, he clashed with CIA infiltrators and Soviet bloc bureaucrats, and succeeded in turning the IUF into one of the most militant and successful international union federations. His writing addresses issues ranging from Third Camp socialism to the degeneration of social democracy, from the Algerian revolution to Victor Serge.
Born in Czernowitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine), Gallin's father was a civil servant in the Romanian foreign service. This meant the family were stationed abroad when the Stalinists took control of Romania in 1947. Their citizenship was cancelled in 1949, leaving a young Dan stateless in Switzerland. He gained a scholarship to study in the US, and there he came across the Socialist Youth League, the youth branch of the ISL – the organisation of unorthodox, dissenting Trotskyists around Max Shachtman. The organisation was the successor of the group that had split from the orthodox official Trotskyist movement over its analysis of the character of the Soviet Union.
Gallin was won over to the group's distinctive brand of socialist politics, with its heavy emphasis on consistent democracy, freedom of debate, and its conception of a Third Camp. Building on the ideas of Marx and Trotsky, Third Camp socialism stressed the importance of working-class independence, of building a workers’ movement that was not beholden to the rival ruling-class forces that each sought to pull the workers in their directions. As Gallin writes: “the fundamental line of cleavage in today's world is not the vertical one separating the two blocs, it is the horizontal one separating the working class from its rulers, and that one runs across both blocs. We are not ‘East’ or ‘West’ … we are ‘below’ where the workers are”.
Throwing himself into political activity, Gallin dropped out of university and soon became a recognised face at protests and picket lines. His activity did not escape the attention, and he was summoned to New York, and granted the euphemistic 'privilege of voluntarily departure'. Effectively deported, he found himself back in Switzerland, and struggled to establish international contacts for the ISL without much success. However, he took a job at the International Union of Foodworkers, and his career in the strange world of international union federations had begun.
Although he drifted out of organised Trotskyism, Gallin retained many of the lessons of his time in the ISL. As he was elected to higher and higher office in the IUF, he was faced with the immense pressures on the federation from the contending power blocs. At one point, he discovered that the whole South American branch had fallen under the control of the CIA. Whereas other Western union federations were happy to turn a blind eye to CIA influence, Gallin moved quickly to shut down and purge the operation. Similarly, his hostility to Stalinism and the warped orthodoxies of the official left also marked him out for his contemporaries. The book recalls how he would get funny looks from visitors to his office when they noticed the portrait of Andreu Nin on the wall. Nin, leader of the Trotskyist-influenced POUM, had been murdered in the Spanish Civil War by Stalinist agents.
The book is far from entirely autobiographical, and space is given to historical analysis and treatments of important political figures. Andreu Nin is not the only hero of the revolutionary, anti-totalitarian left to be mentioned - there is also a piece from 1963 on Victor Serge. Serge, the famous Left Oppositionist, critic and novelist, is currently fashionable amongst leftist academia. Reading Gallin's piece, written shortly after Serge's memoirs were first translated into English forty years ago, provides an interesting insight into the impact that they must have first had on a world still dominated by the Cold War.
There are also many essays addressing the organisational problems that face the labour movement. The most recent of these deal with the problems of bureaucratism, and of how to organise informal and domestic labour. Gallin writes knowledgeably about the concrete specifics of each situation, but keeps his solutions clear, concise and intelligible. The consistent thread through his argument is the importance of democracy and transparency, the idea that a union's job is to fight for the class interests of its members, a job that is only possible if the union is accountable to the rank and file.
Gallin observes that the current crisis of the trade union movement is, in part, a political crisis. Across the world, social democratic parties that were traditionally allied to the unions have drifted to the right, weakening their links with organised labour in the process. However, this theme isn't really expanded upon, and the question of political action is left slightly vague. At one point, Gallin jokes that he has always had “syndicalist deviations”, that he has had a tendency to prioritise economic struggles over the question of political organisation. I think there is probably some truth in this, and I would have liked to have read more of his thoughts on what trade unionists should do next with regard to party politics.
Nevertheless, Solidarity is a well-written and, in parts, fascinating read. It is offers a sharply critical and humorous insight into the workers' movement spanning decades.
• You can buy the book here
