The Labor Party Question In The United States- An
Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For A Workers
Government
Click on the headline to link to the James P. Cannon Internet Archives for an
online copy of his 1940s documents on the labor party question in the United
States in his time.
From The Pen Of Peter Paul Markin
These notes (expanded) were originally presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a panel forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012 by a radical historian familiar with this history. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall 2012 bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
These notes (expanded) were originally presented as The Labor Question in the United States at a panel forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012 by a radical historian familiar with this history. As a number of radicals have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from the fall 2012 bourgeois election settles, regardless of who wins, the working class will lose. Pressure for an independent labor expression, as we head into 2013, may likely to move from its current propaganda point as part of the revolutionary program to agitation and action so learning about the past experiences in the revolutionary and radical labor movements is timely.
I had originally expected to
spend most of the speech at the forum delving into the historical experiences,
particularly the work of the American Communist Party and the American
Socialist Workers Party with a couple of minutes “tip of the hat” to the work
of radical around the stillborn Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s.
However, the scope of the early work and that of those radicals in the latter
work could not, I felt, be done justice in one forum presentation. Thus these
notes are centered on the early historical experiences. If I get a chance, and
gather enough information to do the subject justice, I will place notes for the
1990s Labor Party work in this space as well.
*********
The subject today is the Labor
Party Question in the United States. For starters I want to reconfigure this
concept and place it in the context of the Transitional Program first
promulgated by Leon Trotsky and his fellows in the Fourth International in
1938. There the labor party concept was expressed as “a workers’ party that
fights for a workers’ government.” [The
actual expression for advanced capitalist countries like the U.S. was for a
workers and farmers government but that is hardly applicable here now, at least
in the United States. Some wag at the time, some Shachtmanite wag from what I
understand, noted that there were then more dentists than farmers in the United
States. Wag aside that remark is a good point since today we would call for a
workers and X (oppressed communities, women, etc.) government to make our
programmatic point more inclusive.]
For revolutionaries these two
algebraically -expressed political ideas are organically joined together. What
we mean, what we translate this combination as, in our propaganda is a mass
revolutionary labor party (think Bolsheviks first and foremost, and us) based
on the trade unions (the only serious currently organized part of the working
class) fighting for soviets (workers councils, factory committees, etc.) as an
expression of state power. In short, the dictatorship of the proletariat, a
term we do not yet use in “polite” society these days in order not to scare off
the masses. And that is the nut. Those of us who stand on those intertwined
revolutionary premises are few and far between today and so we need,
desperately need, to have a bridge expression, and a bridge organization, the
workers party, to do the day to day work of bringing masses of working people
to see the need to have an independent organized expression fighting
programmatically for their class interests. And we, they, need that party pronto.
That program, the program
that we as revolutionaries would fight for, would, as it evolved, center on
demands, yes, demands, that would go from day to day needs to the struggle for
state power. Today such demands focus on massive job programs at union wages
and benefits to get people back to work, workers control of production as a way
to spread the available work around, the historic slogan of 30 for 40,
nationalization of the banks and other financial institutions under workers
control, a home foreclosure moratorium, and debt for homeowners and students.
Obviously more demands come to mind but those listed are sufficient to show our
direction.
Now there have historically
been many efforts to create a mass workers party in the United States going all
the way back to the 1830s with the Workingmen’s Party based in New York City.
Later efforts, after the Civil War, mainly, when classic capitalism began to
become the driving economic norm in America, included the famous Terence
Powderly-led Knights of Labor, including some integrated black and white locals), a
National Negro Union, and various European social-democratic off -shoots
(including pro-Marxist formations). All those had flaws, some serious like
being pro-capitalist, merely reformist, and the like (sound familiar?) and
reflected the birth pangs of the organized labor movement rather than serious
predecessors.
Things got serious around the
turn of the century (oops, turn of the 20th century) when the capitalist s in
the “age of the robber barons” declared unequivocally that class warfare
between labor and capital was the norm in American society (if not expressed
that way in “polite” society). This was the period of the rise the
Debsian-inspired party of the whole class, the American Socialist Party. More
importantly, if contradictorily, emerging from a segment of that organization,
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, Wobblies) was, to my mind the first
serious revolutionary labor organization (party/union?) that we could look to
as fighting a class struggle fight for working class interests. Everyone should
read the Preamble to the IWW Constitution of 1905 (look it up on Wikipedia or the IWW website) to see
what I mean. It still retains its stirring revolutionary fervor today.
The most unambiguous work of
creating a mass labor party that we revolutionaries could recognize though
really came with the fight of the American Communist Party (which had been
formed by the sections, the
revolutionary-inclined sections, of the American Socialist Party that split off
in the great revolutionary/reformist division after the success of the
Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917) in the 1920s to form one based on the
trade unions (mainly in the Midwest, and mainly in Chicago with the John
Fitzgerald –led AFL). That effort was stillborn, stillborn because the
non-communist labor leaders who had the numbers, the locals, and, ah, the dough
wanted a farmer-labor party, a two class party to cushion them against radical
solutions (breaking from the bourgeois parties and electoralism). Only the
timely intervention of the Communist International saved the day from a major
blunder (Go to the <i>James P. Cannon Internet Archives</i> for
more, much more on this movement. Cannon,
and his factional allies including one William Z. Foster, later the titular
head of the Communist Party, were in the thick of things to his later red-faced
chagrin).
Moving forward, the American
Communist Party at the height of the Great
Depression (the one in the 1930s, that one, not the one we are in now)
created the American Labor Party (along with the American Socialist party and
other pro-Democratic Party labor skates) which had a mass base in places like New York and the
Midwest. The problem though was this organization was, mainly, a left-handed
way to get votes for Roosevelt from class conscious socialist-minded workers
who balked at a direct vote for Roosevelt. (Sound familiar, again?) And that,
before the Labor Party movement of the 1990s, is pretty much, except a few odd
local attempts here and there by leftist groups, some sincere, some not, was probably
the last major effort to form any kind of independent labor political
organization. (The American Communist Party after 1936, excepting 1940, and
even that is up for questioning, would thereafter not dream of seriously
organizing such a party. For them the Democratic Party was more than adequate,
thank you. Later the Socialist Workers Party essentially took the same stance.)
That is a summary of the
historical aspects of the workers party question. The real question, the real
lessons, for revolutionaries posed by all of this is something that was pointed
out by James P. Cannon in the late 1930s and early 1940s (and before him Leon
Trotsky). Can revolutionaries in the United States recruit masses of working
people to a revolutionary labor party (us, again) today (and again think
Bolshevik)? To pose the question is to give the answer (an old lawyer’s trick,
by the way).
America today, no. Russia in
1917, yes. Germany in 1921, yes. Same place 1923, yes. Spain in 1936 (really
from 1934 on), yes. America in the 1930s, probably not (even with no Stalinist ALP
siphoning). France 1968, yes. Greece (or Spain) today, yes. So it is all a
question of concrete circumstances. That is what Cannon (and before him
Trotsky) was arguing about. If you can recruit to the revolutionary labor party
that is the main ticket. We, even in
America, are not historically pre-determined to go the old time British Labor
Party route as an exclusive way to create a mass- based political labor
organization. If we, however, are not able to recruit directly then we have to
look at some way station effort. That is why in his 1940 documents (which can
also be found at the <i>Cannon Internet Archives</i> as well) Cannon
stressed that the SWP should where possible (mainly New York) work in the
Stalinist-controlled (heaven forbid,
cried the Shachtmanites) American Labor Party. That was where masses of
organized trade union workers were to be found who still held to the old labor
traditions.
Now I don’t know, and
probably nobody else does either, if and when, the American working class is
going to come out of its slumber. Some of us thought that Occupy might be a
catalyst for that. That has turned out to be patently false as far as the
working class goes. So we have to expect that maybe some middle level labor
organizers or local union officials feeling pressure from the ranks may begin
to call for a labor party. That, as the 1990s Socialist Alternative “Justice”
Labor Party archives indicate, is about what happened when those efforts
started.
[A reference back to the
American Communist Party’s work in the 1920s may be informative here. As
mentioned above there was some confusion, no, a lot of confusion back then
about building a labor party base on workers and farmers, a two -class party.
While the demands of both groups may in some cases overlap farmers, except for
farm hands, are small capitalists on the land. We need a program for such
potential allies, petty bourgeois allies, but their demands are subordinate to
labor’s in a workers’ party program. Fast forward to today and it is entirely
possible, especially in light of the recent Occupy experiences, that some vague
popular frontist trans-class movement might develop like the Labor Non-Partisan
League that the labor skates put forward in the 1930s as a catch basin for all
kinds of political tendencies. We, of course, would work in such formations
fighting for a revolutionary perspective but this is not what we advocate for
now.]
Earlier this year AFL-CIO
President Trumka [2012]made noises about labor “going its own way.” I guess he
had had too much to drink at the Democratic National Committee meeting the
night before, or something. So we should be cautious, but we should be ready.
While at the moment tactics like a great regroupment of left forces, a united
front with labor militants, or entry in other labor organizations for the
purpose of pushing the workers party are premature we should be ready.
And that last sentence brings
up my final point, another point courtesy of Jim Cannon. He made a big point in
the 1940s documents about the various kinds of political activities that small
revolutionary propaganda groups or individuals (us, yet again) can participate
in (and actually large socialist organizations too before taking state power).
He lumped propaganda, agitation, and action together. For us today we have our
propaganda points “a workers’ party that fights for a workers (and X, okay)
government.” In the future, if things head our way, we will “united front” the
labor skates to death agitating for the need for an independent labor
expression. But we will really be speaking over their heads to their
memberships (and other working class formations, if any, as well). Then we will
take action to create that damn party, fighting to make it a revolutionary
instrument. Enough said.