The socialist left in America is faced with two separate but inter-related issues concerning the emerging, yet still very modest, labor party sentiment now circulating in the secondary and tertiary ranks of the trade union bureaucracy. The first great divide — and one all too familiar to the readers of these pages — is our orientation to such a movement, and the second, and somewhat separate issue, concerns the concrete, specific circumstances which confront us and from which we can evaluate the prospects for translating these sentiments into the reality of a full-fledged party.
It must be acknowledged from the outset that a trade union party is no substitute for a revolutionary socialist party. Its political dynamics are shaped and thereby limited by the social role of the trade union bureaucracies themselves.
Knowing full well, moreover, that such parties are not merely non- revolutionary apparatuses but devices for suppressing revolution, as the lessons of history abundantly confirm, why then did Lenin and Trotsky “impose” the struggle for a labor party on the nascent American communist movement in the 1920s and what relevance do these arguments continue to have for the socialist left today?
The organizational independence of sections of the American working class from the capitalist party structure would signal a giant and welcome step forward in its political maturation. It would mark the first stage in broadening worker militancy beyond the immediate and narrow scope of confrontation with the individual employer or industry and would provide a framework conducive to socialists for linking and integrating these struggles with the larger systematic problems of social oppression and exploitation.
What distinguishes revolutionary socialists from sectarians is precisely the desire to overcome their sterile isolation by participating in and even of sharing, if necessary, in the experience of reformist politics, whenever and wherever that marks a stage through which the working class passes. This is done not to embroider illusions about such politics, but, on the contrary, as a point of departure to attain the political competency needed to organize a broad socialist current capable of mounting a decisive challenge, in the first instance, to the labor bureaucracy.
The sectarian impulse, that a “workers party” must by built in immediate opposition to existing trade unions, is a declaration of abstention from the preparatory propaganda, agitation and action needed to gain mass support and authority. It is an abstract demand for revolutionary politics aimed at those not yet convinced of the limitations of reforms or prepared to repudiate their readerships by those who have done nothing to earn the confidence of the very class they seek to influence.
This of course is all ABC for those in agreement with the orientation of Workers’ Liberty. The decisive question is not the inadequacies of the American Labor Party’s current program, which in vital ways represents an unprincipled compromise with some of the more backward impulses of American labor, but whether this type of reformism is now on the social agenda at all. There are special problems that confront such politics, largely distinct from those reactionary obstacles which plague the organizational potential of any would-be third party in this country.
For reformism to be translatable into reality, capitalism has generally either entered into ascendancy or enjoyed a lengthy period of prosperity. Only when reassured by extra layers of protective economic fat does it become clear to the ruling class that a menu of concessions provide the cheapest and most expedient means for preserving social cohesion. If the flowering of New Deal liberalism in the midst of the Depression seems to contradict this, it must be borne in mind that the ruling class was constrained to spawn its reforms from within the tightly controlled confines of one of its own political institutions, the Democratic Party. By transforming the Democratic Party into the political equivalent of a company union, the ruling class managed with one stroke to bottle the working class with Jim Crow reaction and pre-empt the drive for an independent reform party of labor.
Should that scenario have failed and an authentic labor party surfaced in the teeth of ruling class opposition, the political limits of reform would have in all likelihood quickly clarified themselves. After all, 1937 alone witnessed the greatest wave of strike activity in the history of US labor.
The genius of New Deal liberalism; powerfully reinforced by the advent of war, was to have entangled labor within the innumerable tentacles of capitalist influence and control, depriving labor of the very institutional independence needed to assimilate the lessons of struggle and attain consciousness of its own unique social interests and historic aims. By thwarting the drive towards working class political autonomy, liberalism at the same time kept the forces of ruling class authoritarianism at bay and thus prevented the radicalization of society at both ends of the class divide.
This later proved indispensable in fighting the cold war. The Democratic Party became the party of bourgeois internationalism — of “guns and butter” — freeing American imperialism to confront Stalinism abroad without fear of a second potentially anti-capitalist front being opened at home. Its success paralleled the success of European social democracy insofar as both fed on the thirty year post-war economic recovery. The American labor bureaucracy was able to fortify its position through the political leverage, bargaining power and patronage that the existing Democratic Party arrangement offered, without being pushed or challenged from below. It even managed to advance its status by tailing the civil rights movement’s campaign to suppress the openly racist wing of the party. But the crusading social vision behind which the early CIO rallied all the progressive forces of society was smothered by the choke-hold of Democratic machine politics. The union leadership itself, devoid of independent conviction or direction, was seen — in an oversimplified fashion, no doubt — as just another pillar of the Establishment.
Had Stalinism ultimately been defeated by a progressive or revolutionary force, that is, by one based on the Eastern European and Russian working classes acting in their own interest, this would undoubtedly have had a profound and catalyzing effect on American rank and file political quiescence, perhaps even jarring it from its long time political inertia. But the fossilization and disintegration of Stalinism rapidly matured instead against a mutually exhausting arms race, the ramified impact of which contributed powerfully, if somewhat less dramatically, in bringing the postwar capitalist prosperity as well to a resounding close.
With the end of economic prosperity and the winding down of the Cold War, the premises of Democratic Party liberalism were under assault on every front. Indeed the Democratic Party of Roosevelt and Johnson was a functional relic, the lubricant of an obsolete machine. Because the interventionary state, of which the permanent war economy was but one component, could only prop up demand as a substitute for flagging accumulation by absorbing increasing layers of economic resources, it came to be identified with prolonged stagnation. The form of economic interventionism associated with Keynesianism could never be anything more than a holding operation under such circumstances, artificially maintaining the value of assets whose very devaluation and consolidation is in any case a precondition to the restoration of capitalist profitability. The restructuring of capitalism was therefore increasingly forced to resolve itself beyond the confines of the state, whose field of operation became, in turn, increasingly constrained against the threat of capital flight. The old semi-monopolistic heavy industry, where American union density was most deeply entrenched, began to fragment. The international fluidity of capital, now promiscuously in search of cheap labor abroad, acted as whipsaw to introduce successive assault waves against domestic employment stability — from contracting work out, to permanently replacing striking workers, to re-engineering jobs. The economic framework of even the rather anaemic American welfare state began to corrode, and the “modernizers” of the Democratic Party led by Clinton began the painful task of aligning the institution to the demands of the time.
Having grown fat during the cold war when their services were needed, the bewildered leaders of American labor found themselves at the end of the day increasingly without a program, a vocabulary, an ideology or a political vehicle to mobilize the rank and file in defense of their elementary class interests. What else could have been expected? The bureaucracy had for decades found themselves presiding over the demise of the strike, the increased bureaucratization of the negotiations process and the abdication of the unions as an viable and aggressive organizing venture. Even so and much to the chagrin of the labor tops, a downsized capitalism no longer looked to the still relatively expensive services of unions and their readerships as a necessary overhead cost of social stability. The working class base, for its part —fractured, disoriented and increasingly wary of politics as a means of social redress — has been left devoid of any generational memory of significant union triumphs or successful remediative government concessions. Its confidence in its own class power has dwindled, and its consciousness hurled backwards. The burgeoning abstention from the rituals of bourgeois democracy that has ensued might be celebrated by some unthinking souls as a mark of reflexive rebellion. But it would be a monstrous mistake for socialists to confuse such alienation from the two party system as stems from rampant cynicism with politicalization.
It is into this breach that the Labor Party steps. As a political sentiment, the labor party movement is thin and isolated, little more than a shop stewards’ movement for now. Wary of challenging Sweeney and his new regime, it has disavowed mounting, at least for the time being, an open electoral challenge at any level to the Democratic Party in the vain hope of slowly bringing the labor bureaucracy on board. But if the bureaucracy tolerates this movement, it does so in a time honored fashion. Even such reactionary entities as Meany and Beck now and then put the Democrats on notice by pointing to the existence of such attitudes within the ranks and embellishing these sentiments with the hint of concealed sympathies for such politics on their part as well. The labor bureaucracy, however, is not about to open up (much less relinquish) its political action committees, now among the entities within the trade union movement most fortified against rank and file interference, for fear of loosing whatever remaining influence they retain in Democratic circles. It is these PACs that control vast bankrolls of union dues earmarked for political purposes and which mobilize community and rank and file electoral action. That is why the capture of the PACs is indispensable in translating the labor party sentiment into a political reality. The question much debated in socialist circles as to whether the Labor Party should presently endorse independent candidates, little more than an educational gesture — though meaningful enough for that reason alone! — largely misses the point. What highlights the lack of determination and resolve on the part of Mazzocchi and his followers is not their refusal to endorse an immediate electoral strategy, but their failure to recognize the need and prepare the movement for an open attack to democratize the PACs, to wrench them from the hands of the union tops and to take direct responsibility for them. It is hard to comprehend how unions can be politicized without introducing politics into the unions. That is to say, the Labor Party movement must come to see itself as a resolute force for democratization of the AFL-CIO, not merely a political adjunct to the status quo. Without the power that the PAC mechanism commands, the Labor Party would remain isolated as a labor version of the liberal Americans for Democratic Action — a sterilized Democratic Party pressure group. Accommodation between it and the existing labor bureaucracy would assume a retrograde form of “lesser evilism” familiar to students of American labor history.
Endorsements of Democratic Party candidates on an independent labor line under such circumstances would transform the Labor Party into an overflow tank, whereby disenchantment with the national Democratic Party can be registered, while Democratic power itself is reinforced.
Entering this next stage promises an immediate confrontation with the very bureaucracy Mazzocchi is now tiptoeing around. But like the last great departure in the American labor movement — the rise of the CIO — a meaningful labor party movement requires treading over the union timeservers who seek to restrict and contain it, perhaps even splitting the union tops in response to an upsurge from below. And this struggle is just the precondition for a Labor Party… Then the hard part begins.
Barry Finger
