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A Labor Party
From Labor Action, Vol. 12 No. 38, 20 September 1948, p. 2.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’ Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Perhaps Murray or Green would argue that there are some or a few friends of labor in Washington. If there be such, they surely haven’t fought for labor in the way that true friends fight – the way that the true friends of the Southern employers fight proposals to abolish Jim Crow, for instance.
The real truth of the matter is that once labor showed it was on to the crooked dice of boss politics and refused to play that game any longer, once it turned its back on the old parties and struck out on the path to independent politics, it would receive a thousand times more consideration from the boss politicians than it does today.
Because then the old parties would be put on the defensive, they would be put on their best behavior, they would try by many means to convince labor that they were still its friends, they would know that every further exhibition of labor-hatred on their part would only hasten the success of the labor-party movement.
4) The fight to build a labor party is too difficult.
Answer: We do not for a moment minimize the tough work involved in building a labor party – the thousand and one legal restrictions which the old parties have drawn up to protect their political monopoly, etc. But that is no reason to duck the fight. The fight is, after all, not impossible. In many states there would be no fight at all. The Wallace-Stalinist movement, much as we disagree with its politics, has shown that much.
Every argument advanced to show the difficulty of organizing a labor party was also advanced, generations ago, against those brave characters who undertook to build the trade-union movement. Yet the union movement was built, at what cost only its intrepid pioneers know.
5) Look at what happened, in 1924 to LaFollette.
Answer: Well, really look at the 1924 elections – and what has happened since. In 1924 the official union movement came out for old Robert LaFollette for president, on a third-party ticket. He was a progressive boss politician of his day, nothing more. He didn’t run on a labor-party ticket. He didn’t have a labor party behind him. His platform wasn’t particularly attractive to labor. Leading Democratic and Republican union officeholders knifed his campaign. The whole union movement in those years numbered only about four million. Yet LaFollette won about five million votes, more than 12 per cent of the total.
But look at the union movement today! Four times as large. About 16 million trade-union members. Why, if a campaign were organized with a whole heart, if the proper educational work were done, if a platform were adopted which answered the needs of the exploited, if they were drawn into the work, made to feel truly that it was their party, the labor party in its very first try could soar far beyond LaFollette’s record, and could capture scores of state offices and congressional posts. By the second election the labor party would be ready to aim at the White House and the establishment of a labor government.
After all, labor has learned a thing or two since the LaFollette campaign. It has been through the long depression and the second long war. It has had to endure post-war inflation. It has had to endure the continuing indifference of both old parties to its needs. It is ready for change, to a much greater extent than it was in 1924.
Those are the stock arguments against the labor party, and their answers. But there is one new argument, advanced only recently by the editor of Labor, a weekly newspaper published by the railroad unions. The argument deserves inclusion if only for comic relief.
6) Labor should be smart like big business. You don’t see the bankers and industrialists try to build a new party of their own. No sir, they work through the old parties.
You bet big business works through the Democratic and Republican Parties! Those parties belong to them. All the machinery of those parties, and of the government which those parties administer, has been adapted and modified so that those parties and the governmental machinery serve big business. So why should the rich organize a new party when they are so loyally served by the two existing parties, eager and trained to do the bidding of the rich?
The editor of Labor must have had a tiny hole in his head when he let that howler get into print.
THE largest social class in the United States is the working class. The organized workers alone total more than 16 million, and with their families constitute almost a third of the population. The unorganized urban and rural workers bring the total to well over half the population.
In addition to the working class there are 8 million farm families and an even larger number of middle-class families whose breadwinners work as salesmen, lawyers, small proprietors, dentists, accountants, clerks, artists, etc. The remaining 5 per cent of the population is made up of the very wealthy and the upper middle class. Exceptional members of this group can also be won to the working-class cause.
Our chief problem is to consolidate our own class and to aim to win over substantial numbers of the lower middle classes in the city and country and to neutralize the remainder?
How does the working class win allies? The bureaucrats at the head of the union movement – the Greens, Tobins, Murrays, Dubinskys, Hutchesons, Lewises – don’t know. Indeed, they never even ask the question, because they reject the very idea that the workers should organize politically as a class. To their mind, the workers should tag along after big business and its two- headed party system.
But supposing a labor party is organized, as it certainly will be: How will we win support of the masses?
There will be thousands of clever liberals eager to tell us: “Look as much like the Republican and Democratic Parties as possible. Wave the flag. Sing a-men. Then the masses will follow you.”
No, then the masses will not follow the labor party. Why? Because the two old banker-controlled parties can always wave the flag more furiously and convincingly than we can, can shout twice as pay-triotically over twice as many radio stations and in twice as many newspapers. Because it is just exactly this old blarney that the masses are sick to death of.
The people sense that only a radical solution of the social problem offers them hope. For years they have seen the labor leaders support the old-party candidates, hail each election as a “great progressive victory,” and then, a few months later, curse the government as “the most reactionary ever.”
When labor comes out always at the same tree, it has lost its way. The people sense this. They saw what Roosevelt’s liberal phrase-mongering has added up to. They are listening carefully for what they want to hear. Once they are convinced that the union movement has a political program for all the exploited and is determined to advance that program, the people will flock to the labor party.
The great General Motors strike of 1946 showed this. When Reuther advanced the slogan of wage increases without price increases – a union’s way of telling the public it will protect the public interest against the corporations – opinion polls showed that the people were overwhelmingly for the United Auto Workers and against General Motors.
Why? Because here, for the first time, a union was thinking in broad social terms, was not only protecting its members but protecting the public interest. Of course the people want this, and of course they will respond.
You cannot win broad support by the old, narrow-minded, selfish trade-union politics of tailing the old parties, seeking wage increases and forgetting about price increases, engaging in jurisdictional strikes against the interests of the workers involved and of the public.
A labor party that breaks cleanly with the hateful double-crossing capitalist parties, that boldly proclaims a new program of progressive demands for the masses and a new concept of government, that expresses its determination to take over control of the nation’s destinies in the name of and in the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people, will win the support of the overwhelming majority.
It will take a little time and a great deal of education, but it will win.
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