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from Libertarian Labor Review #16
Winter 1994, page 1
Editorial
A Labor Party: What For?
With the Democrats' recent passage of the North American Free
Trade Agreement, the political impotence of the AFL-CIO's reliance
on that party to defend its interests was as clear as it has ever
been. The AFL-CIO mounted its largest lobbying effort in decades,
doing everything short of a general strike to persuade Congress to
vote NAFTA down. For their efforts, Clinton denounced unions'
efforts to "bully" the Congressman they bought and paid for into
voting their way. And top Democrats did not hesitate to voice their
contempt for the business unions, assuring reporters that the AFL-
CIO and its affiliates would continue to support the Democrats
because they had no other alternative.
This debacle seems likely to give new impetus to ongoing
efforts to form a labor party. Even before the NAFTA vote, the most
prominent of these groupings, Labor Party Advocates (which is
heavily supported by leaders of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic
Workers and the United Electrical Workers) announced plans for a
founding convention. Although LPA initially said it would only
organize a Labor Party when it had secured the support of 100,000
unionists, it appears to have plateaued at less than 5,000 members.
Thus, the founding convention appears to be a last-ditch,
desperation effort to get their party off the ground.
Yet there does appear to be growing support for labor party
efforts (and indeed for third parties in general--as evidenced ny
the National Organization for Women's efforts in this direction,
among others), sparked by widespread and growing disillusionment
with the Democrats. As UE secretary-treasurer Amy Newell put it,
"Every month that goes by under the Clinton Administration is
additional fuel for our fire..."
As Sam Dolgoff notes (in The American Labor Movement: A New
Beginning), agitation for a labor party is almost as old as the
labor movement itself and has on a few occasions come close to
capturing the official support of the American Federation of Labor.
State-wide efforts in Minnesota and New York in the 1930s had
substantial success before they were absorbed into the Democratic
party. Yet labor party enthusiasts might do well to examine the
record of labor parties around the world before embarking upon this
well-trod path.
In Belgium, our fellow workers recently found it necessary to
take to the streets in a general strike to protest plans by the
coalition Socialist-Social Christian government (each closely liked
to the two largest labor federations) to enact a "social pact" to
hold down wages and slash social spending. A similar pact was
recently pushed through by Spain's socialists.
In Canada, the labor-backed New Democratic Party lost nearly
all its seats in the recent national elections, apparently because
of widespread disgust with its role in enforcing capitalist
austerity in the provinces under NDP rule. In Ontario local unions
refused to allow the provincial NDP government to participate in
Labor Day celebrations. The NDP won provincial elections in 1990 on
a platform of labor law reform, pay equity, progressive tax reform
and public auto insurance. But when corporations threatened to use
its economic power in a sort of general strike by capital, the
government quickly threw in the towel. The "labor" government
abandoned public auto insurance, abandoned most of its labor law
reform package, and gutted social service spending. Ontario workers
understandably concluded that they could get these sort of anti-
worker policies from any capitalist government, and so did not vote
for the "socialist" NDP in the federal elections.
These are not isolated examples. Every labor and socialist
party in the world which workers have voted into office has ended
up betraying them. This is because labor parties are incapable of
addressing the real cause of anti-labor governments. As Dolgoff
wrote,
A capitalist democracy is a competitive society where
predatory pressure groups struggle for wealth and
prestige and jockey for power. Because such a society
lacks inner cohesion, it cannot discipline itself. It
needs an organism which will appease the pressure groups
by satisfying some of their demands and prevent conflicts
between them from upsetting the stability of the system.
The government plays this role and in the process... the
bureaucratic government apparatus becomes a class in
itself with interests of its own....
Labor parties are no more immune to the diseases inherent
in the parliamentary system than are other political
parties. If the new Labor Party legislators are elected
they will have to "play the game" according to the
established rules and customs. If they are honest they
will soon become cynical and corrupted... Most of them,
however, will find their new environment to their taste
because they have already learned to connive when they
were operating as big wheels in their own union
organizations... A course in the school of labor fakery
prepares the graduates for participation in municipal,
state and national government....
Tactics must flow from principles. The tactic of
parliamentary action is not compatible with the principle
of class struggle. Class struggle in the economic field
is not compatible with class-collaboration on the
political field. This truth has been amply demonstrated
throughout the history of the labor movement in every
land. Parliamentary action serves only to reinforce the
institutions responsible for social injustice--the
exploitative economic system and the State.
The strength of the labor movement lies in its economic
power. Labor produces all wealth and provides all the
services. Only the workers can change the social system
fundamentally. To do this, workers do not need a labor
party, since by their economic power they are in a
position to achieve the Social Revolution... As long as
the means of production are in the hands of the few, and
the many are robbed of the fruits of their labor, any
participation in the political skulduggery which has as
its sole purpose the maintenance of this system amounts
to both tacit and direct support of the system itself.
Rather than diverting workers' resources and energies into
forming yet another political party, sincere working-class
activists would do far better to build genuine, class-conscious
unions and to work with their fellow workers to build a new society
through direct action in their communities and at the point of
production. Labor parties can play no part in this struggle.
Notes:
1. "Paying for health," Left Business Observer #57, Feb. 16 1993,
pp. 2-7. Figures vary widely for the numbers uninsured and
underinsured; David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler (The
National Health Program Book, Common Courage Press, 1994, pp. 24-5)
estimate that about 37 million Americans are uninsured at any one
time, and that 1 in 4 (63.3 million) were uninsured for at least
one month in a 28-month period from 1986-88.
2. Thomas Bodenheimer, "Health Care Reform in the 1990s and
Beyond," Socialist Review 1993(1), pp. 18-20.
3. David Rosenbaum, "Economic Outlaw: American Health Care," The
New York Times, Oct. 26 1993, pp. 1, D22.
4. Himmilstein & Woolhandler, The National Health Program Book, p.
89.
5. Himmelstein & Woolhandler, The National Health Program Book.
6. Himmelstein & Woolhandler, p. 183.
7. Robert Pear, "Congress is Given Clinton Proposal for Health
Care," The New York Times, Oct. 28 1993, pp. 1, A24-A25.
8. Judith Ebenstein, "Big Brother, Manager" (Letter), The New York
Times, Nov. 16 1993, p. A26.
9. "Cost Control," Left Business Observer #58, April 26, 1993, p.
8.
10. Himmelstein & Woolhandler, p. 188.
11. "Placebo" (Editorial), The Progressive, November 1993, p. 9.
12. "The Clinton health plan: A union Q&A," On Campus, November
1993, p. 4.
13. See my "Peter Kropotkin's Anarchist Communism," Libertarian
Labor Review 12, Winter 1992, pp. 19-24.
14. G.P. Maximoff, Program of Anarcho-Syndicalism, p. 32;
originally published in Russian in 1927. English translation by Ada
Siegel included in Maximoff's Constructive Anarchism (Maximoff
Memorial Publishing Committee, 1952). Reprinted 1985 by Monty
Miller Press, Sydney, Australia.
15. Alexander Berkman, ABC of Anarchism, London: Freedom Press,
1977 (Excerpt from 1929 edition of What is Communist Anarchism),
pp. 72-3.
16. in Sam Dolgoff, ed., The Anarchist Collectives: Workers' Self-
Management in the Spanish Revolution, New York: Free Life Editions,
1974, pp. 99-101.
17. Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, pp. 119, 133-34.
18. "National Health Plan Now!@!" Black and Red #5, July/August
1993, p. 1. The article criticizes the emerging Clinton plan and
quotes several advocates of a single-payer system, but offers no
details of what sort of national play they advocate.