Discussion On the Future Of the American Labor Movement
What Next for the Labor Party?
by Jerry Gordon,
Chair,
Ohio State
Labor Party
Immediately
after the November 2002 election, the labor movement began moving into high gear
preparing for the '04 Democratic presidential primaries. While labor was split
on whom to back as its preferred candidate, there was consensus and unity on the
overriding goal of defeating Bush. It was understood from the beginning of the
process that whoever emerged as the Democratic nominee would receive labor's
full backing.
So labor once again put all of its eggs into the Democratic Party basket. And
once again that basket was smashed to smithereens. Labor continues to pay a
terrible price for supporting one of the bosses" parties as the way to defeat
the other.
The results of the November 2 election have created a new opportunity for
demonstrating again that labor cannot rely on the Democrats to protect and
advance workers' interests. The need today, as in the past, is for labor to
build its own mass independent working class party, the same as the union
movement has done in other industrial countries. The challenge facing the Labor
Party is to convince organized workers that it can be that party, or at least
help pave the way toward its formation. To effectively carry out this mission,
the Party must adopt a correct strategy and put in motion steps to transform
itself from its current weakened state to one where it is looked to for
leadership.
Evaluating the Labor Party's
Past The British Experience
Other Forms of Electoral
Action The Labor Party's Position
in the 2004 Elections
He
is pro-war, calling for waging the war against Iraq more ?smartly? and
increasing U.S. troops by 40,000. He said he could get more countries to
commit troops to defeat the Iraq insurgency. He categorically rejected calling
for withdrawal of U.S. and foreign troops and letting the Iraqi people decide
their own future.
He
called for a tougher line against Iran and North Korea, and said something had
to be done to get rid of the democratically elected Chavez government in
Venezuela.
He
offered ultra-hawk John McCain both the vice presidential nomination and the
Secretary of Defense position.
He
voted for the Patriot Act and never called for its repeal.
He
ignored the special needs of African Americans and other oppressed
nationalities. He previously called for weakening affirmative action.
He
previously came out against teacher tenure protection.
He
rejected single-payer universal health care, calling instead for subsidies to
businesses to encourage them to provide coverage.
He
voted to gut welfare rights protection and to shred the safety net.
He
voted for NAFTA, the WTO and the other “free trade” agreements.
Then, of
course, there is the matter of Kerry's conduct after the polls closed and the
preliminary results were announced. He rushed to concede the election to Bush
before many votes were counted, despite widespread voter suppression and fraud.
This was followed by his nauseating concession speech calling for cooperation
and unity with the Bush administration. (“In the days ahead, we must find a
common cause. We must join in common effort, without remorse or recrimination,
without anger or rancor.”) Decision Making in the Labor
Party
Some Specific Proposals
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The pamphlet
should urge labor to spearhead the formation of a new coalition made up of
unions and their natural allies—unorganized workers, communities of color,
the women's movement, immigrants, family farmers, supporters of civil rights
and civil liberties, low income and impoverished workers, gay and lesbian
groups like Pride at Work, and progressives from across the board. Such a
coalition, with a consistent working class program, could be a magnet for
winning over and bringing to the polls the 40% of eligible voters who did not
bother to vote on November 2, but who could be motivated to do so in the
future by a coalition that truly represents their interests. A suggested name
for the proposed new coalition: “Labor Party”—either the one we are
currently working to revitalize or one that remains to be created, which would
no doubt incorporate much of our program, tradition and vision.
Build the Labor Party!
We need a full
blown discussion within the Labor Party as to what to do next. Such a
discussion, however, cannot be confined only to projecting plans for the future.
It must begin with a long overdue review and examination of our past, drawing
lessons from our experience—both positive and negative. Conducting an in-depth
evaluation of the past is essential before charting any new strategy; otherwise
we risk repeating the same mistakes made previously.
Let's begin by asking if it was correct in 1996 for supporters of a labor party
in the U.S. to replace Labor Party Advocates (LPA) with the Labor Party. In
retrospect, I believe it was not. A political party, as commonly defined, is an
organization whose objective is to win political power. A central focus of its
activities should clearly be in the electoral arena. After all, that is where
major decisions affecting the lives of the working class are made. The idea of a
“non-electoral labor party” is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms.
From the beginning, there was a strong disinclination within the Labor Party to
run candidates. The documents approved by the founding convention provided no
opening to do so. The contention was made that in order to run candidates for
office, you must have substantial support from unions, recruit a sufficiently
large membership, win allies in the community, and generate adequate resources
to finance a campaign. Running candidates without significant backing in the
labor movement would only result in a marginal vote that would discredit the
Party, while diverting it from concentrating on its priority campaigns.
But if all this was true and if the Labor Party was not in a position to run
candidates, and would not be for an indefinite period, why not continue with LPA
and take more time to lay the necessary groundwork, so that when the party was
finally established, it could begin running candidates from the start?
Three advantages might have accrued from such a progression. First, major unions
open to the idea of ultimately establishing a labor party but not ready to act
on the idea in 1996 might have been more willing to join an advocacy formation
and, in the course of time, as a result of further experience with the
Democratic Party and association with others in LPA, been in on the ground floor
to constitute the new party.
Second, as an advocacy group, the LPA could have avoided the situation of the
Labor Party's proclaiming itself a political party competing with the bosses'
two parties, only to have its affiliates campaign for and contribute money to
candidates put up by one of those two parties. When the time finally became ripe
for establishing a labor party based on the unions, it could have been with the
understanding that union affiliates were bound to support that party's
candidates and none other (as is the practice with other labor parties around
the globe).
Third, LPA could also have avoided the Labor Party's single-dimensional method
of functioning, i.e., focusing on campaigns on issues but avoiding the electoral
arena. LPA could have engaged in the same issue campaigns—which all agree are
indispensable, whatever the form of organization—while at the same time
making a central part of its work promoting the objective of running independent
labor candidates for elective office.
In any event, we are a party now and I am not proposing here that we change
our name back to an advocacy organization. However, what we can do, even as a
party, is assume more of an advocacy function than we have previously, urging
unions to field independent working class candidates for political office as a
preparatory step for the day when the Labor Party can field candidates appearing
on the ballot as Party candidates.
The forerunner
of the British Labour Party was the Labour Representation Committee (LRC)
created on February 26-27, 1900 at a conference in London hosted by the Trades
Union Congress. Delegates from over 70 organizations attended including some
unions, the Social Democratic Federation, Fabians, and the Independent Labor
Party. This conference voted 102-3 in favor of the working class seeking
representation in Parliament. The conference created no formal “party” and the
new formation had no members, only organizations affiliated with it. Yet in
that very first year of its existence, two trade unionists active in the LRC
were elected to the House of Commons!
How could that have happened so quickly? Because the LRC—and the British
Labour Party whose establishment would soon follow—arose out of the
tempestuous struggles of the working class during the previous two decades.
Those were years of sharp class struggle, marked by the successful organizing of
unskilled workers, which changed the face of the British labor movement from one
dominated by skilled workers defending their relatively privileged status in the
economy to a force more directly engaged in conflict with the employers and
their two principal parties—the Conservatives and the Liberals. Strikes,
demonstrations and mass meetings; actions by police, armed guards and courts to
break strikes; recruitment of scabs; massive unemployment; formation of the
Eight Hour League; women workers playing a much more prominent role in working
class struggles; inroads made in organizing agricultural workers — these were
all the order of the day.
Inevitably, the Trades Union Congress came under pressure to break from its
alliance with the Liberal Party so in 1906 the LRC gave way to the Labour Party,
whose growth was meteoric. From 1906 to 1914, the number of constituency parties
affiliated to the Labour Party rose from 73 to 179. By 1918, Labour had replaced
the Liberals as the main opposition party to the Conservatives, and in 1924 for
the first time the Labour Party formed the government, albeit as a minority
party.
The British experience is cited here to show that in that country as well as in
other industrial nations, labor parties were created at a time when labor was
experiencing an upsurge, whereas in the U.S. the labor movement had been in
retreat for decades immediately prior to the birth of the Labor Party. Other
labor parties had the capacity and consciousness to run candidates from the
get go. That was not true in the same way for the Labor Party in the U.S.
At the Labor Party's 2002 Washington D.C. convention, delegates who strongly
favored independent labor political action and the running of Labor Party
candidates where possible, proposed an Electoral Commission to explore what
initiatives might reasonably be taken. But even though the Labor Party's
convention held 1998 in Pittsburgh had approved running candidates if certain
criteria were met, the proposal to set up a commission to help implement that
program was rejected.
I believe that
the Labor Party made a major mistake in viewing electoral action only through
the narrow prism of running or not running Labor Party candidates. If we were
not in a position to run candidates in our own name -- with possible exceptions
here and there—the Party should have adopted as one of its main priorities a
policy of urging affiliated and unaffiliated unions, wherever possible, to run
independent candidates from their ranks for office, perhaps local office at the
beginning. This would have been a transitional step, one that might have helped
us acquire valuable experiences in preparation for the day when the Party would
be in a better position to compete directly in the electoral arena, putting up
Labor Party candidates. The main point is this: electoral action should be a
central activity for a labor party. Such activity has too often been viewed
with a jaundiced eye by many in the Labor Party, who mistakenly thought we would
achieve sizable growth by participating in campaigns on issues like jobs, health
care, education, and labor law reform. Such campaigns are essential but
they do not sufficiently distinguish the party or provide it with the needed
visibility the way that running candidates would. Nor have the Party's campaigns
on issues resulted in the kind of membership growth that had been envisioned or
hoped for.
The experience of the Greens and the Working Families Party, while their
approach to electoral politics differs fundamentally from ours, does at least
prove that there are opportunities for third parties to contest successfully
with the two major parties. These two parties have elected more than 200 of
their candidates to local offices. Many people in this country are thoroughly
disgusted with both the Democratic and Republican parties, and are searching for
an alternative voice. The Labor Party should help provide that alternative, if
not under our own banner at present then at least by encouraging unions to do
so.
The Labor
Party's founding slogan was “The Bosses Have Two Parties, Now We Have Our Own!”
Many of us who met in Cleveland in 1996 certainly did not anticipate that only
eight years later the Labor Party would, in effect, be calling for the election
of the presidential candidate of one of the bosses' two parties.
Some may claim that the Labor Party took no such position, but to make such a
claim is to engage in a form of contorted verbal gymnastics that defies all
reason.
The Party's position, as expressed in a number of articles in the Labor Party
Press, was unmistakable: “Bush is a menace, he must be defeated.” But how could
he be defeated? The obvious answer, though unstated, was to elect Kerry. No
matter how the formulations were hedged, or qualified, or followed by warnings
that Kerry and the Democrats should not be relied upon, or that the struggle for
our goals would have to continue after the election regardless of who won, the
message was clear: “Defeat Bush at all costs! Elect Kerry.”
By way of a recent example, there is this statement in the September/October
2004 Labor Party Press: “Persuasive arguments have been made that Bush is truly
the ‘greater evil’ and must be defeated in November.”
The Call to the Party's October 17-18, 2003 health care conference in Chicago
stated in part, “Most of us have concluded that the removal of the Bush
administration and a large number of senators and congressional representatives
who support its hostile agenda is our highest political priority in the next
year. It is clear that the crisis in health care has reached epic proportions in
the United States and that the current political misleaders are very vulnerable
when this issue is fully explained to the electorate. Please join us for what
will be an exciting, challenging exchange of ideas and what can be a decisive
event in our preparation for putting George W. Bush and his cohorts on the
unemployment line where they belong.”
The Ohio State Labor Party's State Council unanimously disagreed with this
formulation. In a September 20, 2003 memo sent to the national office, the
State Council wrote:
“The statement's political line [referring to the one quoted above] contravenes
what the Labor Party is, what it stands for, and, more specifically, its
position on electoral action.
“Our ‘highest political priority in the next year’ is to build a movement
independent of both political parties which fights for the interests of the
working class. Our particular focus is on those issues which the Labor Party has
prioritized: Just Health Care, workers' rights, and tuition-free higher
education. To this list, we would add opposing the U.S. war on the people of
Iraq and the occupation of that country, a position which the Labor Party
correctly adopted.
“The Labor Party's statement quoted above implicitly calls for electing
Democratic Party politicians at all federal levels. There is no other way to
read it. If our ‘highest political priority’ is ‘putting George W. Bush and his
cronies on the unemployment line,’ how else can that realistically be achieved
in 2004 other than by electing Democratic Party politicians to replace them?
(Emphasis in the original)
“The statement is clearly in violation of the letter and spirit of the Labor Party's position on electoral action, which emphasizes,
‘The Labor Party is
unlike any other party in the United States. We stand independent of the
corporations and their political representatives in the Democratic and
Republican parties. Our overall strategy is for the majority of American people— working class people—to
take political power. Within that framework of class independence, with the
ultimate goal of achieving power, we accept the electoral tactic of running
candidates.”
From the very inception of the Labor Party, the understanding was that while
affiliates were free, on their own, to endorse and campaign for any candidates
they wished, the Labor Party would not endorse candidates put up by any other
political party or call for their election. That agreement was breached here
when the Labor Party adopted the position it did regarding the 2004 presidential
election.
Leave aside for the moment the basic point that as designated representative of
the Democratic Party, Kerry's fundamental allegiance was to the millionaires and
billionaires who control that party. Look at his record:
He
had no jobs program. He vehemently opposed government-sponsored measures to
put the unemployed back to work, including a public works program. He said it
was up to the market to provide jobs.
No, there is nothing “persuasive” about supporting Kerry, no matter how
reactionary Bush is. In every presidential election, the bosses put up
candidates from each of the major parties, one of which, to one degree or
another, is invariably worse than the other. The key point for our purposes is
that both candidates are in fundamental agreement on the overriding issues of
concern to the working class, and both are loyal servants of the employers. The
bottom line is that there is no justification for the Labor Party to call for a
vote for either of these candidates. We talk about convincing labor to break
with the Democratic Party. But our efforts to do this are undermined when we
concede that there are persuasive reasons for voting for their candidate.
Before
projecting a path forward for the Labor Party in this post-November 2 period, it
is important to review how important policy decisions are made by the Party.
Start with the three Labor Party conventions. While criticisms can be made of
the inordinate amount of time given speakers at the expense of more in-depth
discussion and debate by delegates, these conventions represented a high form of
internal party democracy. Delegates were able to introduce resolutions and have
them debated and voted upon. They could campaign in advance for adoption of
resolutions they favored, which partially offset the abbreviated time allowed
for debate.
But observing democratic decision making in the Labor Party and ensuring that
affiliated organizations and members have a real voice in helping to decide
policy questions leave a lot to be desired, and changes are surely in order. To
cite one major example: Well before the 2004 election, the Interim National
Council (INC) should have issued a draft statement outlining its proposed
position on the elections and inviting comment. That was not done.
Moreover, more needs to be done to involve members in the life of the Party. For
example, soon after the Party's founding convention a proposal was made to
establish a Health Care Commission made up of representatives of Party
affiliates actively involved in health care work. The idea was that these
representatives would meet every six months or so to report on the work of their
groups, learn from each other's experiences, discuss how they might be able to
coordinate their efforts, and decide what recommendations they might make to
strengthen the Party's health care work as a whole. Unfortunately, the proposal
to form such a commission was rejected.
A proposal was also made to convene regional Labor Party conferences. The
purpose of such conferences, as envisioned, was to bring Party members together,
evaluate work on the principal campaigns, and provide a forum for ideas and
suggestions as to what the Party should be doing or doing differently. Without
such conferences, concern was expressed that local Labor Party chapters would be
functioning in isolation and denied the opportunity to learn what other chapters
and affiliates were doing and thus gain a wider perspective and understanding.
However, the proposal to hold the regional conferences was rejected.
Looking to the
future and drawing upon the above, I propose the following for consideration by
the INC:
The Labor
Party has survived this very difficult period with its affiliates still on
board, a national leadership due to meet this December, a paper that continues
to be published, and a national organizer, Mark Dudzic, who is a dedicated trade
unionist and committed to maintaining and building the Party. It also has a well
constructed program and pools of activists in a number of areas who are working
to implement that program.
In assessing the Labor Party's prospects for the future, two questions have to
be asked. The first is whether the goal of a mass labor party based on the
unions remains something worth fighting for. For those who answer that question
yes, the next question is whether there is any other formation on the scene
today that can better advance the labor party perspective than the Labor Party.
I submit there is not.
If there is one lesson to be learned from what happened November 2, it is
that we need a mass labor party in the U.S. now more than ever.
The Labor Party is no different from workers' parties in other countries.
All have gone through difficult days and most have rebounded. The British Labour
Party has in the past experienced a decimation of its ranks in Parliament, only
to recoup later and experience rapid growth.
Today's British Labour Party is no model for us, but that only underscores the
need for continuous internal debate within the Labor Party regarding the Party's
direction, which will permit a change in direction where necessary.
Hopefully, more Party members and those who have left the Party but still
believe in the cause of independent working class political action will now join
in helping the Party resolve its problems and move forward. We need to seize the
moment and do whatever we can to transform the great disappointment that labor
is experiencing as a result of the November 2 election into determination to
chart a new course that will lead to breaking out of the two party stranglehold.
The Labor Party has a role to play in making this happen.
November 22, 2004