"The recent publication of the fifth (revised) edition of the Digest of decisions and principles of the International Labor Organization (ILO)'s Committee on Freedom of Association offers an apposite moment to critique a body of widely, but uncritically, referenced global labor norms. Reconstructed without their obscuring phraseology, these rules are easily seen as a code that regularizes the exercise of state violence against workers' associational activities, particularly those that transcend labor's "guerilla fights" with capital and pursue emancipatory objectives. Paradoxically, one of the few social spaces beyond their reach, and beyond the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state generally, is the very sphere in which they are produced, the meta-bureaucracies of the United Nations (UN) system. The ILO and UN-system workers, who constitute an often-overlooked autonomous class formation, toil under unique structural conditions, notably the absence of a global state, which offer great potential as a site for emancipatory proletarian projects on a global scale."

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