[Marxism] RE: LP's Mark Dudzic: A Revitalized Labor Movement Needs a New Vision

["Douglas MacDonald" <dmacdonald94591@xxxxxxxxx>]

Alan-

Please consider this a formal submission to the Organizer Newspaper:

The Labor Party and brother Dudzic must stop giving any credence to the
notion of "spoiler" when debating the merits of a Labor party.  By doing
so, he and the Labor Party doom themselves to perpetual servitude to the
Democrats.  The new call for the Labor Party will result in nothing but
failure if it cannot at least call for class independence and a clean
break from the Democrats and Republicans. The call actually gives
support to the Democratic Party by stating a need to avoid "swing"
states!  How can a call for an independent national Labor Party begin by
underscoring the need to defer and therefore support the Democrats?

We must grow independent Labor politics from the bottom up.  We must
start running candidates EVERYWHERE, especially where it is most likely
we will win.  We must not be afraid to challenge liberal democrats and
confront them for their duplicitous policy positions and support for
imperialism. Pilot programs are a poor foundation onto which a National
Party is founded.  The Labor party should call for CAMPAIGNS to be run
now and forever until we are able to claim the reigns of power.  We must
make no bones about this.  How else is someone to take Labor seriously
if we don't even take ourselves seriously?  The language that Dudzic
uses thinly veils the lip-service that the top unions give advocates of
class independence.  This half-hearted call is just more of the same
deference to the Democratic Party that killed this organization years
ago.

Dudzic basically calls for a popular front with democrats in the most
important elections to ensure one of the boss's parties beats the other
bosses party.  This is the same class collaboration that the Green Party
US espouses most notable during the 2004 election.  Such half-hearted
breaks with capital present false hopes to millions of workers and in
the end will only sow resentment and distrust among millions.  Until the
"Labor Party" can unequivocally commit to run candidates against
Democrats in any and every district that resources allow, regardless of
spoilage, the Labor party will remain a cruel joke.

As Eugene Debs so famously said, "I'd rather vote for something I want
and not get it than vote for something I don't want, and get it."

-Douglas MacDonald, Community-Labor Alliance





-----Original Message-----
From: The Organizer [mailto:ilcinfo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, March 09, 2005 2:39 PM
To: Recipient List Suppressed:
Subject: LP's Mark Dudzic: A Revitalized Labor Movement Needs a New
Vision

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The Debate Continues:
A Revitalized Labor Movement Needs a New Vision of Politics

Mark Dudzic, Labor Party National Organizer

March 5, 2005

The debate over the future of the labor movement raged at this week's
AFL-CIO Executive Board meeting. Although the Sweeney camp prevailed by
a narrow margin on a series of technical and organizational issues,
nothing was resolved. But the passions sparked at the meeting and over a
large part of the past year insure that the discussions will continue
well into this summer's AFL-CIO convention.

This is a good thing. It would have been tragic if our future as a
movement had been papered over with a superficial compromise around a
set of structural and financial proposals. It is a tribute to the
principled leadership of many of the participants that this did not
happen. All of us concerned with labor's future must use this
opportunity to fully confront the profound crisis facing the labor
movement. In particular, we at the Labor Party believe we must fully
confront the fact that how we engage in politics has an enormous impact
on labor's revitalization.

Fight for Survival

The debate is not really about the proper allocation of per capita money
between organizing and the relative roles of the AFL-CIO or its
constituent unions in providing services to its members. The stakes are
much higher. Teamsters President James Hoffa expressed this sense of
urgency at the post-Executive Board press conference on March 2nd:
"American workers and workers the world over need a strong U.S. labor
movement. Without it, the inexorable global race to the bottom will lead
to further inequality, further erosion in basic wage, labor and social
standards, and further limits on political democracy. .....Continuing on
our present course simply insures further decline. It is therefore time
to change."

However, it should come as no surprise that the debate has first focused
on structural changes in the AFL-CIO. Founded fifty years ago, in a very
different time, the AFL-CIO's purpose was to consolidate and administer
a postwar system of labor relations. That system was premised on U.S.
global economic dominance as well as capital's acceptance of labor as a
"limited partner" and the mediation of this relationship by the federal
government. None of those premises exist today, yet the AFL-CIO has
changed little structurally.

Over the past 25 years, labor has suffered a non-stop onslaught from
corporate America. Although our movement has, at times, heroically and
brilliantly defended our interests, it has not been able to either
restore the postwar "ideal" or create a new reality to ensure a strong
and vibrant labor movement. Neither high market density nor aggressive
membership mobilization has prevented entire industries such as
meatpacking from reverting to Dickensonian conditions. Despite a
ten-year commitment to shifting resources and changing internal union
cultures to focus on new member organizing, labor has not successfully
organized a single "new economy" sector. And on the political front,
labor has poured unprecedented human and financial resources into
political mobilization yet has never been more politically marginalized.


Proposals for Change

This is the context in which both the volume of proposals and the
passion of their partisans must be understood. Even the most traditional
labor leaders realize that our movement is at a "tipping point" from
which there is no return. This passion no doubt will lead to internal
reforms and new strategies that are necessary for the labor movement to
organize effectively and rebuild density and bargaining power.

But we in the Labor Party believe that the discussion urgently needs to
address how the labor movement fundamentally does its politics. It is
here that the debate is at its weakest. More than twenty international
unions have submitted written proposals or comments on the future of our
movement. None come close to articulating a grand political theme to
regain the offensive. Instead, the proposals take it as a given that
labor will continue to operate within the confines of the failed
two-party system and that the concerns of working people will continue
to be subordinated to the few-and-far-between bones thrown to us by the
Democratic Party.

Some unions, it is true, include a call for labor to engage in broader
social reform organizing outside of the electoral cycle. The Service
Employees International Union (SEIU), for example, calls upon labor to
lead a "national campaign for quality health care for all." And the
American Federation of Teachers (AFT) lists a number of "values and
interests" that the labor movement should advance on behalf of all
working people. But these well-intentioned suggestions are not coupled
with any serious plan of action or commitment of resources.

Political Independence Is the Key

Labor's dependence on a spineless and corporate-dominated Democratic
Party to carry its political water has much to do with our current
crisis. The practice of putting all of our eggs into the Democratic
Party's basket has been an unmitigated disaster. Any approach that calls
for putting more eggs in that basket, or bigger eggs, or putting the
eggs in faster is doomed to failure.

The failure to create a class-based labor party has hobbled the American
labor movement almost since its inception. Unlike workers in nearly
every other industrialized nation, U.S. labor has with few exceptions
attempted to pursue working class interests within the confines of the
multi-class Democratic Party. While the New Deal coalition that
dominated American politics for nearly fifty years produced some
remarkable gains in the social wage for working people, it also was
incapable of pursuing many of the more expansive projects on labor's
agenda - like labor law reform - that could count on substantial and
united opposition from employers. Further, the collective bargaining
regime established after World War II (and enshrined in today's AFL-CIO)
led unions to negotiate as benefits what became social rights in other
countries: health care, hours of work, leave policies, retirement
benefits, etc. Working for gains for union members exclusively helped
create the public perception of the labor movement as a
"special-interest group" rather than a social movement.

Over the past 25 years, as the forces of globalization and deregulation
gathered strength, a resurgent employer class went on the political
offensive and labor was politically helpless to defend its interests.
This is where labor's political demobilization proved decisive. Even as
labor placed more and more effort into electing Democrats, the
candidates it supported did less and less to advance labor's agenda.

This employer offensive, buttressed by a well thought out ideological
assault, succeeded in setting the terms of political debate. The
architects of this assault had a plan and a strategy to repeal the New
Deal and dismantle the collective bargaining regime. They moved
systematically toward this goal, taking advantage of every legislative,
administrative and judicial opportunity without compromising their
ultimate goal.

Today, they are very close to victory. Worse, they have crafted a
message that couples pro-corporate economic policies with a populist
social conservatism. They have turned the class anger of millions of
mostly white workers into anger against liberal elites. And, to be sure,
'union bosses' occupy a prominent place within this elite demonology.

Unable to transcend its own corporate ties, the Democratic Party proved
incapable of opposing these developments. It has allowed the right wing
to dictate the terms of the debate. It has consistently responded to
these attacks by moving farther to the right and away from its
relationships to labor and the other social movements that had
constituted its popular base. And, lest we forget in these dark days of
the second Bush administration, it squandered its moment in power in the
1990s by showing the corporate world its willingness to be stewards of
their interests. Clintonism produced failed health care reform, NAFTA
and the elimination of whole swathes of the social safety net. A renewed
Clintonism will do nothing to advance the revitalization of the labor
movement.

We Need Our Own Party

The imperative is clear: we cannot revitalize and expand our labor
movement without building an independent politics of labor. In early
1996, on the heels of Democratic Party support for NAFTA and a new voice
in the AFL-CIO, a sizeable percentage of the labor movement thought the
moment was right to come together to found the Labor Party. >From the
start, we took a realistic approach to the task of building independent
politics. We realized that in a winner-take-all two-party system, labor
could not completely disengage from its alliances with the Democratic
Party. Instead, we concentrated on building the resources and support
necessary to run credible campaigns while presenting a vision of what is
possible when working people have power. We believed that with a
newly-invigorated labor movement - one that vowed to implement new
models to organize a million new members a year - the critical mass
needed to allow our party to flourish and grow would be forthcoming.

But we do not have an effective labor party today. The labor movement as
a whole has not yet met the challenge of creating and sustaining one.
Instead, labor continued its broad retreat through two presidential
election cycles, a major recession, terror and war. As our movement
grows weaker, the need for a new class-based politics grows greater.

Few union leaders and activists could deny that labor needs its own
political party and that the Democrats have failed us. Many of those who
have contributed their proposals for change to the current debate make a
case for independent politics. CWA activists Bob Masters and Hetty
Rosenstein, for example, in their perceptive paper "No Short Cuts:
Mobilization and Politics Must Drive Labor's Revival from the Bottom Up"
call for "a reform program that puts far greater weight on political and
ideological change."

But many in the labor movement remain skeptical about putting any
resources into the creation of a labor party. The imperatives of waging
a never-ending defensive fight for our very survival seem to rule out
the possibility of engaging in a more expansive politics. This is a
self-defeating and self-limiting perspective.

Others suggest abstaining from politics altogether. This is not a viable
solution. Workers need active day-to-day representation in the political
sphere. Unions do not have the luxury of withdrawing from politics
altogether or engaging merely in symbolic acts of protest. We need to
continue to fight the defensive battles that can have life or death
consequences for their members.

A New Vision of Politics

Playing defense is not enough. Even if we won every defensive battle
against the Bush administration over the next four years, we would still
be politically weaker in 2008 than we were in 2004. Creating a new
political vision is central to labor's re-invention of itself. A new
vision can: 1) provide a bridge to the unorganized; 2) allow us to
articulate our goals and visions for the future; and 3) provide a
compelling narrative to unify and mobilize our members. And finally, in
the end, it will be the political sea changes that will spark a
revitalized labor movement.

There is much that we can do today to build a new politics without
abandoning the field of battle or playing the spoiler. To regain the
political offensive, the AFL-CIO should include the following in its
plan to revitalize the labor movement:

1. Take up issues that speak to the core concerns of all working people.
Labor must gain control of the terms of the debate on issues such as the
skyrocketing cost of health care, affordable housing and access to a
college education. Our positions on these issues must be bold and
unambiguous, not shills for any particular candidate or either of the
political parties. Labor must present a clear picture of what politics
would look like if it were conducted on behalf of the vast majority of
Americans who work for a living.

2. Shift resources to a long-term project to build political
independence. Just as labor needs to move resources from servicing
current members to organizing new members, so in politics we must begin
to invest in our political future. We recognize that substantial
resources must continue to fund the defense of daily attacks on our
movement. But labor must begin to put money and organization into
expansive political projects to allow us to regain the offensive. Labor
should start today by allocating at least 20 percent of its political
resources to promoting independent politics through well-financed,
strategic, issued-based campaigns.

3. Seek out opportunities to run pilot programs and electoral campaigns
at a local or regional level. Every two years, nearly 90 percent of all
Congressional races are not seriously contested. Politicians who betray
or ignore labor are seldom called to task. Once we move out from the
swing states, opportunities abound for independent political initiatives
that don't involve playing the political spoiler.

4. Take back politics for our members and for all working people. If we
ask our members what they think of politics today, many will tell you
that it is nothing more than a corrupt, rich man's game. Workers are
crying out for a new political direction and long to stop playing
defense. Labor must launch an education and discussion process to speak
to more than the crisis imperatives of the next election cycle. Such
discussion will help spread a new vision of an energized, vibrant labor
movement that is fighting on behalf of all working Americans.

Labor stands at a crossroads. A revitalized movement is essential for
the well being of all working people as well as a democratic and
peaceful world. Given the depth of our crisis, technical or facile
solutions are not nearly enough. Radical steps are needed. Any real
discussion of the future of the labor movement must include how we can
build real political power.

Let's get this discussion started now.

Please send us your comments at debate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

To engage in the current debate over the future of the labor movement,
visit these websites:

www.aflcio.org/aboutaflcio/ourfuture

www.unitetowin.com
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