Labour Alliance Research Articles

Development Paths in a Settler Society: The Challenges of the Communist Movement in Brazil

This article addresses the challenges faced by the Communist movement in Brazil by revisiting the contradictions inherited from a colonial mode of accumulation. This was originally a class system based on slavery and composed of the metropolitan colonizer, the settler, and the colonized class. After independence in 1822, which entailed a settler rebellion against the metropolitan colonizer and the continuing exploitation of the colonized, the settlers reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally and oversaw the transition to a capitalist mode of production. An interclass, bourgeois–labor alliance occurred in the mid-twentieth century but was limited to the ranks of the settlers and underpinned by the myth of “racial democracy.” It included a degree of confrontation with imperialism coupled with industrial development but reproduced the colonial mode of accumulation internally. This article sheds light on the contradictions that followed, including the military regime installed in 1964 and the neo-colonial transition in the 1990s, under finance capital. In light of the bourgeoisie’s shifting alliances at the expense of the sovereign aspirations of the working people, an interclass alliance has become impossible. Only a truly popular political project is capable of liberating the nation and that is the only one the Communists should espouse.

Workers and generals: military-controlled transitions and labor movements in Brazil and Egypt

ABSTRACT Under which conditions can combative labor in the Global South negotiate state and society relations and constrain the encroachment of their respective militaries on politics? This article argues that the domestic and international legitimacy these militaries enjoy during the transition away from authoritarianism is a key factor shaping labor movements’ organizational and mobilizational capacity, labor alliances with other social classes, and labor’s capacity to negotiate democratic citizenship. The argument is investigated by examining Egypt and Brazil, where labor strikes delegitimized authoritarian capitalism and inspired the rise of independent and anti-corporatist unions and federations. In Brazil, the military lost its legitimacy domestically and internationally, providing opportunities for labor’s democratizing role. Conversely, the Egyptian military held power locally and internationally, thwarting prospects for independent unions to maintain their autonomy from the military and to forge alliances. The research combines historical and archival research with qualitative methods, including interviewing and fieldwork in Egypt and Brazil.

African Labour’s Cold War


 
 
 This article examines the conflict over “free” trade unionism within the Ghana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) during the 1950s and early 1960s. It demonstrates how labour leaders sought to anchor economic rights in ambitious development planning and extend their influence across the continent in the wake of decolonization. In contrast to colonial-era concepts of free trade unions as apolitical associations, anti- colonial and postcolonial leaders recognized the transformative political potential of labour organizing. On the basis of GTUC publications and the correspondence of its leadership with the International Conference of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) in Brussels, this article shows how Ghanaian labour leaders attempted to leave behind colonial-era dependencies while subordinating Cold War rivalries to what they per- ceived as the special, historically unique situation of newly decolonized countries. Ghanaian leaders eschewed existing models for international trade unionism, leading to a brief period of disaffiliation from the Western-oriented ICFTU as they attempted to chart their own path by mobilizing labour across the African continent. Ultimately, these attempts failed, and the forceful bid for a pan-African labour alliance under the Nkrumah government alienated many other African nations as leadership experienced increasing protest at home.
 
 

Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman, By Jim Moher

Walter Citrine’s (1887–1983) career at the centre of the labour movement involved some crucial events such as the establishment of minority Labour governments, the General Strike, the development of the Labour Alliance, the purge of the Communist left in the trade unions and labour participation in the wartime coalition government. Jim Moher, in his recent biography of Citrine, attempts to reveal what other historians of the period have overlooked. Walter McClennan Citrine was born in Liverpool in 1887 the son of a seaman and a Scottish hospital nurse. His father was evidently a heavy drinker and the Presbyterian Protestantism of his mother was an early influence on him. Citrine, as was the norm at the time, left school at the age of twelve but with an ambitious desire for self-improvement. Moher devotes a section of the text to Citrine and shorthand (pp. 43–4) as it gave him the edge over other trade union activists. Many will recall that Citrine’s most influential publication was his ABC of Chairmanship (1920 and 1939). In 1906 he had joined the ILP which Moher describes as a ‘ginger group’ outside of the Labour party. There is little discussion of the political context in which Citrine grew up, for example, the term ‘syndicalist/syndicalism’ is introduced frequently in the text without the concept ever being explored. Differences are too often explained in terms of personality rather than politics.

Organizing Informal Workers Globally: Comparing a Global Union Federation and a Global Informal Worker Organization Network

With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labour organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation (IDWF)—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International (BWI). For both cases, I draw on five sources: secondary literature; archival material from the two federations; seven semi-structured interviews with experts on and members of these federations, plus a meeting with a small group of BWI leaders; and observations of several IDWF and BWI events. This comparison yields two striking findings. First, despite contrasting environments and historical legacies, the two federations show much convergence in strategy. Second, they clearly differ in their degree of adherence to the standard trade union model, as a result of differences in assets and challenges. The BWI is strongly wedded to the conventional model and struggles to reach informal workers, while enjoying a robust inflow of membership dues. The IDWF is committed to welcoming a variety of organizations and readily mobilizes informal workers, while suffering from an anemic inflow of membership dues. These challenges must be met not just for the survival of the BWI and the IDWF but also for the prospect of organizing globally to defend informal and precarious workers. Abstract With economic globalization and with the precarization and informalization of work, efforts have increased to build global labour alliances among formal workers on the one hand and to organize informal workers on the other. These two endeavours overlap considerably. Global labor organizations have taken on a growing role in organizing and advocating for informal workers. I explore this overlap by comparing two global labour federations: one arising from heterogeneous networks of informal workers—the International Domestic Workers Federation—and a longstanding one of formal employees that has increasingly attempted to include informal workers—the Building and Wood Workers International. The contrast reveals similarities, divergences and trade-offs, with important implications for the future potential for building global organizations of informal workers.

Love's Next Meeting: The Forgotten History of Homosexuality and the Left in American Culture

I am thrilled to be reviewing a work of queer history in this journal. Too often the queer and labor movements seem separate, and this division is blamed on their historical emergence. Aaron Lecklider asserts otherwise. Love's Next Meeting turns to the archive and to literature to explore how sex, class, perversion, labor organizing, and antiracism interpenetrate.I'll focus here on the first half of the book, which has the most to say about workers. While acknowledging “the failures of the left to build a cultural movement centralizing sexual dissidence as a political concern,” Lecklider also locates and analyzes how queer people, queer desires, and queer concerns shaped leftist thought and activism (6). He implies that the failure to center sexual dissidence had the effect not of prohibiting queer engagement but, rather, of nurturing it, since queerness operates better as a campy style of critique than as a “political concern.”Chapter 4 focuses specifically on labor in part via the example, made famous by Alan Bérubé, of the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union. As more gay men were drawn to this work, they felt increasingly comfortable being identifiable and using the union to fight for their rights as gay workers. Lecklider points out that the union also challenged the homo/hetero binary by virtue of its class and labor alliances (122). Because the union embraced dissidence and militancy, it resisted the pull of middle-class assimilation. At least for a while.When workers seek to advance class ranks (to enter the middle class, usually) either by joining or by resisting a union, they do so by adopting middle-class sexual styles. Ultimately, these middle-class sexual styles—restraint, monogamy, separation between domestic and work spheres—come to define what gets read as gay, lesbian, queer.Lecklider devotes an entire chapter to the workplace. Often sexuality is understood as separate from work, and even from class, and this book brings them back together by examining archival and literary contexts in which “sex and labor were intertwined” (143). He finds numerous instances in which the radical nature of labor activism both feeds and draws from sexual deviance.As people without class privilege who occupied stigmatized (often racialized or feminized) jobs and risked association with the despised Communist Party, workers could forge queer and interracial alliances, since they essentially had nothing left to lose. During the 1940s, the Marine Cooks and Stewards went beyond enabling this radicalism to embracing it. “The tendency of members to associate with the dispossessed, rather than aspiring to respectability, suggests how tightly deviant politics was stitched into the fabric of the union culture” (121).This embrace of deviance as an organizing strategy has the potential to radicalize union efforts today, and this book's valuable lesson is that it's not new—it has a very long history. Labor historians Michael Goldfield and Toni Gilpin have documented this past practice, and Lecklider adds the crucial perspective of queer history. If “labor is a highly sexed enterprise” and if “leftists imagined labor as a site of queer possibility,” then Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse pickers, and the adjunct faculty and janitors in my own local are adding a new chapter to an existing practice (143, 145). Solidarity appeals to workers whose conditions of labor isolate and stigmatize them, and the workplace brings all kinds of people together and provides them with a common experience, which can mute bigotry and foster community.So, history doesn't corroborate a division between queer and worker politics and activism, yet Lecklider acknowledges that recently they have swum in separate streams. Anti-fascism and the Cold War elevated consumerism and domesticity. When the left erased its earlier overlap with homosexuality, it “was not an unintended consequence of building a gay rights movement. It was a strategy born out of a commitment to rejecting a broader revolutionary struggle” (295). Separately, each could embrace capitalism, linked to middle-class sexual and social norms and to the myth of American exceptionalism. Love's Next Meeting offers an alternative history—labor's historic embrace of deviance—which serves as warning, as model, and as pure campy fun.

Free Trade's Organized Progressive Opposition

Abstract Populist, protectionist, and progressive opposition to globalization are renascent among voters and politicians, but which of these ideologies have successfully inspired interest group mobilization? To answer this question, we collect original data on thousands of groups’ participation in highly organized coalitions opposed to US trade policy and globalization. Examining the types of groups that compose coalitions, variation in activation across issues, and coalitions’ written statements, we find that their motivations are mainly progressive, focused on the environment, human rights, economic justice, and reducing corporate power. We also focus on progressives’ labor union allies, showing that their participation in anti-trade coalitions is driven by both sincere progressive and classic protectionist motives. Thus, a progressive–labor alliance espousing mainly demands for fair trade, not plain protectionism, dominates public activism against US trade agreements. This interest group opposition has no match on the political right, suggesting that the recent efflorescence of populist anti-globalization may not last, even as progressive fair traders use their superior mobilization to endure.

Kesadaran dan Perjuangan Buruh Jawa Timur Dalam Menolak Upah Murah Di Era Pandemi

At the end of 2021, the East Java labor alliance flocked to carry out demonstrations at several important points, such as the Grahadi Building in Surabaya and district or city offices from each region. This demonstration was attended by workers from various regencies or cities in East Java, such as Gresik, Surabaya, Malang, Kediri, and so on. This action was carried out with the aim of demanding an increase in labor wages by 2022. Unlike the previous year, the demonstration was carried out in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic in Indonesia. Departing from this reality, the author was prompted to analyze the existence of awareness and struggle of East Java workers in demanding wages during the Covid-19 pandemic which was analyzed using Karl Marx's theory of Awareness and Class Struggle. This research utilizes a qualitative approach with a literature study method. The source of this research comes from secondary data, namely online news, books, and journals. The results of this study show that even in the Covid-19 pandemic situation in Indonesia and in the pouring rain, all East Java labor alliances still take action to take to the streets in rejecting cheap wage increases in 2022, as predicted by Karl Marx.

The Transnational Labor Alliances Database Project: Methods, Problems, and Progress

This article provides an overview of theoretical and empirical efforts to understand the multiple dimensions enabling and hindering (transnational) labour organising in the context of globalised production. It situates the contributions to this special issue in the broader debate on the role of labour and workers’ agency in global value chains and production networks. For this, it brings together chain and network approaches with labour studies in a highly productive dialogue. Focusing on labour as a transnational actor, the article further identifies different approaches of and actors within transnational organising and provides empirical insights on the complexity of the politics of scale in organising efforts. Four key issues are identified as complicating labour organising along global value chains: (i) asymmetrical power relations within organising, particularly between the global North and South, (ii) the continued importance of the local and national scale, (iii) difference and dividing lines between workers, and (iv) the red-green divide. The article argues for the importance of a multi-scalar and intersectional perspective on transnational organising beyond binaries. Such an approach recognises the key role of local alliances as well as the possibilities and limits arising from transnational organising initiatives to confront globalised capital.

Why Do some Labour Alliances Succeed in Politicizing Europe across Borders? A Comparison of the Right2Water and Fair Transport European Citizens' Initiatives.

Under what conditions can organized labour successfully politicize the European integration process across borders? To answer this question, we compare the European Citizens' Initiatives (ECIs) of two European trade union federations: EPSU's successful Right2Water ECI and ETF's unsuccessful Fair Transport ECI. Our comparison reveals that actor‐centred factors matter – namely, unions' ability to create broad coalitions. Successful transnational labour campaigns, however, also depend on structural conditions, namely, the prevailing mode of EU integration pressures faced by unions at a given time. Whereas the Right2Water ECI pre‐emptively countered commodification attempts by the European Commission in water services, the Fair Transport ECI attempted to ensure fair working conditions after most of the transport sector had been liberalized. Vertical EU integration attempts that commodify public services are thus more likely to generate successful transnational counter‐movements than the horizontal integration pressures on wages and working conditions that followed earlier successful EU liberalization drives.

“Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham

Reviewed by: “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism by Peter Buckingham Michael Phillips “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism. By Peter Buckingham. Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2020. Pp. x, 403. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-755-2.) Thomas Aloysius Hickey, the fiery leftist journalist who cofounded the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance and inspired the formation of the Renters’ Union, which fought for the redistribution of land in Texas, died of throat cancer in 1925. He subsequently sank into obscurity. As noted by author Peter Buckingham, pioneering Texas labor history scholars Ruth Alice Allen and James R. Green began researching the life of the Irish immigrant who became a dynamic force in the Socialist Labor Party and the Knights of Labor before he settled in Texas. Neither was able to produce a comprehensive Hickey biography due to a lack of adequate archival sources. Buckingham, however, discovered a rich trove of papers collected by Hickey’s widow, Clara Boeer Hickey, donated to the Southwest Collection at Texas Tech University, where two of the radical’s nieces were professors. This find has allowed Buckingham to produce a vivid portrait of a volatile, pugnacious man who, through his newspaper The Rebel and his tireless public speaking, helped bring socialism to its high point in the Lone Star State in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Hickey had long rejected the Catholicism of his youth, seeing the church as a cowardly collaborator in the British oppression of his homeland. Once in Texas, Hickey appreciated the impact of emotional, evangelical Protestant revivals and brought that style to his political proselytizing. Though Buckingham may overstate Hickey’s role, Hickey’s activism was a major reason that the Socialist Party gubernatorial nominees in 1912 and 1914 surpassed the Republican standard-bearers and that the Socialists became the second most popular party in the state, behind the [End Page 141] dominant Democrats. Finding an explicitly revolutionary message in scriptural passages describing the land as a bounty provided by God to be shared equally by all, Hickey became a star in socialist encampments in which he freely quoted from the bible. He powerfully tapped into the religious sensibility already characteristic of the Texas Left. An outsider, Hickey quickly grasped he could mobilize farmers to battle the rapidly escalating levels of land tenancy in Texas by evoking Christ more than Marx. Unfortunately, Hickey also advanced another central tenet of the Texas catechism, white supremacy. In New York City after his arrival in the United States, Hickey absorbed the anti-Black racism of the Irish immigrant community, which stemmed from fierce job competition. Hickey portrayed African Americans as intellectually deficient, and as sexual predators and enemies of white labor. Buckingham argues that the racism in Hickey’s writings was sporadic and that as he got older, perhaps influenced by the growing racial consciousness of his friend Eugene V. Debs, he moderated his views. One of the few weaknesses of this book is that Buckingham strains too much to absolve Hickey of his bigotry. Nevertheless, Hickey condemned the 1916 lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco and, rejecting the virulent anti-Mexican racism in Texas, welcomed Latinx tenant farmers into the Renters’ Union and hailed Mexican revolutionaries as role models for the Texas rural underclass. A key strength of “Red Tom” Hickey: The Uncrowned King of Texas Socialism is Buckingham’s detailed and nuanced understanding of revolutionary politics in Ireland that influenced the Texas radical, the interminable internecine struggles within the socialist movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the role of Texans who were involved in Woodrow Wilson’s administration in crushing socialism in their home state. This solidly researched book should be of great interest to scholars of labor history, American radicalism, and Texas history. Michael Phillips Collin College Copyright © 2021 The Southern Historical Association

Asian American Studies and the Fight for Worker Justice

This essay explores higher education–labor partnerships in the contemporary era between Asian American Studies (AAS), the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance (APALA), and AAS community partnerships. With the intensified attacks on workers, unions, and Asian American, Pacific Islander, and other communities of color, the importance of higher education and labor and community partnerships will be a valuable resource to expand critical research and participatory education. These partnerships embody the community studies’ roots of AAS. Using three case studies, this essay highlights these partnerships and concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges students can experience when working in labor union spaces and recommendations for building university-labor partnerships.

Student protests and organised labour: Developing a research agenda for mobilisation in late neoliberalism

Students have a long history of protesting the introduction or rise of tuition fees. However, political parties do not often endorse their demands. Even the centre-left, which is known for its redistributive policies, does not necessarily ally itself with the student opposition to fees. In this article, the author focuses on the impact of social movement–organised labour alliances on the opposition of political parties to government policy. The author argues that such alliances have a unique impact on centre-left parties, especially in relation to non-labour issues. Two examples of this alliance are presented, emerging from the quite different political contexts of Germany and Turkey. In Germany, student movements failed to block the introduction of tuition fees in 2006. However, in 2008–2011, after students established a deeper alliance with organised labour, tuition fees were scrapped. In Turkey, student movements had been protesting tuition fees for a quarter of a century before an alliance with labour gained the support of social democrats in 2011. These case studies suggest that labour–movement alliances are effective in shifting social democratic politics in higher education policy because of labour’s experience and know-how in alliance building with centre-left parties and the student mobilisation’s potential to make tuition fees an electoral issue cross-cutting party allegiances. This finding suggests that scholars need to take the degree of engagement in opposition alliances into account, in addition to union density, in order to more accurately measure the political power of organised labour. This point has implications for analysing a variety of policy outcomes in policy areas exposed to permanent austerity measures.

Émigré Politics and the Cold War: The National Labor Alliance (NTS), United States Intelligence Agencies and Post-War Europe

AbstractThis article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

A ‘Brooding Oppressive Shadow’? The Labour Alliance, the ‘Trade Union Question’, and the Trajectory of Revisionist Social Democracy, c. 1969–1975

Conventional accounts of the decision of a group of influential British Labour MPs to leave the party in 1981 to found the new Social Democratic Party (SDP) focus on more immediate intra-party constitutional reforms after 1979, or on party divisions over the single question of Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community (EEC). This article suggests that a wider array of longer-term factors informed the decision to seek an alternative vehicle of social democracy, particularly the critical response to the so-called ‘trade union question’ in British and Labour politics from the late 1960s in a wider ‘post-revisionist’ critique of traditional social democracy. It identifies the centrality and cumulative role of a new ‘post-revisionist’ social democratic critique of the privileged position and influence of an increasingly assertive (left-wing) trade unionism after the failure of Labour’s In Place of Strife legislation in 1969 in the later schism of British social democracy.

Labour as a Transnational Actor: Alliances, Activism and the Protection of Labour Rights in the Philippines and Pakistan

ABSTRACTThis article highlights how and why the dynamics of transnational labour activism are not fully captured in theories of transnational advocacy networks (TANs). The article develops a new theoretical framework for analysing labour transnationalism that takes into account the unique capacity of workers to physically disrupt production by withdrawing their labour (structural power) and the unique capacity of organized labour to invoke employment relations institutions at the national and international levels (institutional power). It demonstrates the utility of this theoretical framework through an analysis of transnational labour campaigns spearheaded by factory workers in the Philippines and Pakistan. The case studies reveal that while transnational labour alliances (TLAs) do share some characteristics in common with TANs, the mechanisms through which TLAs sustain and escalate transnational campaigns can only be understood with reference to the unique structural and institutional capacities of labour.

The Ghana Trades Union Congress and the Politics of International Labor Alliances, 1957–1971

AbstractThis article explores the motives of Ghana’s Trades Union Congress in securing development assistance during the era of decolonization and early independence. African interests and agency in these complex processes of negotiation have not been sufficiently untangled to highlight the decisions that African trade unionists made as they aligned with, and fostered, international networks and alliances to meet particular development goals. By highlighting the perspectives and actions of Ghana’s trade union officials, the article demonstrates what Africans sought to achieve through connections to international trade union organizations. The Ghana case illustrates the ways in which African trade unionists actively engaged in the variable and competing politics and policies of local, regional, and global trade unionism in order to strengthen their union apparatus and meet shifting needs.

Organizing The Ordinary City: How Labor Reform Strategies Travel to the US Heartland

AbstractIn New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, formal alliances between labor unions and community organizations have spurred successful workplace and policy organizing campaigns. As a result, the institutional form of the community–labor coalition is travelling to smaller, less unionized and more politically conservative cities, where the replication of established organizing strategies must contend with political, economic and institutional differences that often go unnoted. Comparing community–labor alliances in Indianapolis, St. Louis and Chicago, this article identifies heretofore unobserved conditions of possibility for successful urban labor organizing in the US. Compared to smaller cities, Chicago and the large urban areas from which ideal practices are abstracted feature higher levels of union membership, significantly more funding of basic social and neighborhood services, and larger immigrant communities. Operating with minimal human services and limited recourse to the social and institutional networks of immigrant workers, labor coalitions in St. Louis and Indianapolis face recurrent barriers to identifying workplace problems, mobilizing low‐wage workers and sustaining citywide reform campaigns. This indicates geographical limits to the current organizing model and highlights the limitations of urban scholarship derived from large cities unrepresentative of urbanity as a whole.

Workers, parties and a “New Deal:” A comparative analysis of corporatist alliances in Mexico, and the United States, 1910–1940

Mexico experienced the twentieth century’s first social revolution, a decade of struggle from which emerged a new political regime – a post-revolutionary authoritarian or single-party state one – with President Lázaro Cárdenas as leader by 1934. This post-revolutionary creation included organized labor and peasants, a strong interventionist state and a hegemonic party. Cárdenas’ U.S. counterpart, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, too, was leading dramatic ‘New Deal’ institutional and political revolution in the 1930s and 1940s that spawned a new order of expanded federal government, a renovated Democratic Party, and new movements and interest groups, notably, labor. Both nations featured the same major actors: the state, political parties, and organized labor. Both presidents calculated that preserving labor alliances was crucial for formation and legitimization of a new political order, for maintaining conditions conducive to private-sector investment and economic growth, and for political and economic crisis management. Labor’s growing role reshuffled corporatist alliances within and between international neighbors. This study places Mexico and the United States in comparative context in the early twentieth century and analyzes elite control and inclusion of organized labor in transformation of political landscapes in two different political regimes – a democratic one couched in an established constitution and a post-revolutionary authoritarian one born of a bloody upheaval.

The Making of a Myth: The National Labor Alliance, Russian Émigrés, and Cold War Intelligence Activities

This article examines the role of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right organization of Russian exiles, in U.S. intelligence operations during the early Cold War. Drawing on declassified archival documents and émigré sources, the article discusses how the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used the NTS in covert operations to undermine Communism in Europe. Early operations to penetrate Soviet borders failed, as NTS members who were sent into the USSR were quickly rounded up amid suspicions of internal betrayal. Following Soviet attempts to kidnap and assassinate NTS leaders in Germany in 1954, the CIA adopted a new approach, using the émigré organization as a tool of political and psychological warfare. Borrowing political strategies used by the exiles themselves, the CIA promoted a false image of the NTS as a powerful underground organization in order to provoke the Soviet state into costly and destabilizing countermeasures against it. As a result, the NTS became a mythical organization, and the intelligence agencies of both superpowers sought to manipulate it to their advantage.