Now Random House has released Ted Morgan's A Covert Life, a bio of Lovestone. Needless to say it got raves from the Forward and Commentary, organ of the arch-right American Jewish Committee. However it also received a favorable write-up in the March 28 New York Times Book Review. This is monkey-chatter. Many movements fought Stalin, including the Nazis.
None is approved of for that alone.
Each is judged by the totality of their organizational 'politics,' internal and external, not by their opposition to Stalinism alone. Re the AFL and then the merged AFL-CIO, many unions were bastions of bureaucracy, mafia control and primordial American racism. It had to open the well paid cutters local to Blacks. There is nothing new in Berman's panegyric. He sees himself as the ideological heir of the Shankerite wing of the CIA's working class collaborators.