The Labor Party Question In The
United States- An Historical Overview-Fight For A Worker Party That Fights For
A Workers Government
By Frank Jackman
These notes (expanded) were
originally intended to be presented as The Labor Question in the United States
at a forum on the question on Saturday August 4, 2012. As a number of radicals
have noted, most particularly organized socialist radicals, after the dust from
the fall 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 Labor Party experiences of the late 1990s. However, the
scope of the early work and that of those radical in the latter work could not,
I felt, be done justice in one forum. 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 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 it 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 focusing 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, included the famous Terence Powderly-led Knights of
Labor, including (segregated black 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 “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 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 James P. Cannon Internet Archives for more, much more
on this movement, He, 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.)
So much then for 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 are not able to
recruit directly then you have to look at some way station effort. That is why
in his 1940 documents (which can also be found at the Cannon Internet Archives
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.
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 Labor Party archives
indicates, 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 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.
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