Organized labor has fallen on somber times in the “global village.” Capital’s erosion of working-class gains since the Great Depression has succeeded to the point where workers organized in unions now represent scarcely more than a tenth of the U.S. work force. This has been made possible partly by capitalism’s global expansion, which by the 1980s had effectively proletarianized the bulk of the world’s population; multinational capitalists have redesigned the way they invest their capital, maximizing their ability to shift it cheaply and efficiently to whatever part of the planet promises them the highest possible profit.
Global job combat
It is not hard for capital to sack workers and break unions in the U.S., with huge numbers of unemployed or underemployed workers entering the emerging labor forces of competitor economies in Asia, Latin America and Africa. As in previous periods of “primitive accumulation,” the servants of capital have engineered barbaric new forms of repression there to ensure that the path to anticipated profits would be smooth.
By the beginning of the 90s organized labor in the U.S. had been reduced to the status of a “pressure group within the Democratic Party” run by salaried officials having a vested interest in maintaining their professional niche—even to the detriment of their own organizations (according to a 1994 pamphlet put out by the Trotskyist group, Solidarity). [1]
Against this backdrop, a union-based organizing committee calling itself the Labor Party Advocates (LPA) has stepped forward with a drive to generate support for the creation of a latter-day U.S. version of a Labor Party:
LPA represents a strategy to break out of the box we’ve been in. We hope you will consider joining with several thousand other trade unionists at every level of the Labor Movement who have committed to this new strategy and are determined to create a political party that speaks for us for a change.” [Emphasis in the original] [2]
LPA is laying its foundations carefully before proceeding to any very visible efforts to mobilize what polls show to be a “deep disillusionment with the Democratic Party” among workers. [3] The LPA’s thesis, as Nader sees it, is that the Democrats have fallen from grace and have degenerated into a “self- perpetuating club of politicians” who seek only to feather their political nests. This varies somewhat, as you might expect, from the above-cited Solidarity pamphlet’s view: Solidarity “argue[s] against participation in the Democratic or Republican parties and promote[s] the idea of an independent political party in which the agenda is set by the membership.”
Democratic control
For Solidarity, “socialism is first and foremost democratic control by the working class”— rather than both common ownership and democratic control by society—so it is not surprising they should frame the question of forming a Labor Party as merely a device for breaking capitalism of its worst habits. (A fundraiser ad for the “Eugene V. Debs Five Score Club Card” in Labor Party Advocate [Sept. 1994] announces that Debs “stood for a vibrant trade union movement with a political party organized by and for the American worker.”)
The question, however, that workers never seem to ask themselves when they discuss organizing is, what can you really do within the boundaries of capitalism that the system can’t ultimately turn to its advantage? Capitalism will never stop changing, and resisting capital will always be the number one priority for labor organizations. The role of unions will always be defensive.
Looking-glass names
LPA supporters probably do speak for most workers in believing a Labor Party would signify “a big group of common people making a plan together for the future.” But the whole concept of a “Party of Labor” makes about as much sense as would something calling itself “The Capitalist Party.” Once you get past the looking-glass names political parties usually give themselves, the vast majority of them actually are just organizations whose purpose is to coordinate, negotiate or “allow” capital accumulation.
“Labor” parties cannot manage the accumulation of capital to anyone’s advantage but a capitalist’s. Capital has to view everything through the spectacles of profit. Many people seem to believe society can humanize capitalism by inducing capitalists to arrange wealth production chiefly to meet people’s needs, relying only secondarily on the profit motive.
This is nothing if not a counsel of despair, since—if people really did come first in this world we have suffered to be created for us—society would have no use for such a narrow and irrational mechanism as the profit motive. Humanly speaking, our world does not require being divided up into the competing (and authoritarian) monopolies of human social production we call “enterprises.”
Sooner or later a labor party must either separate into hierarchical layers with conflicting interests, or else become eclipsed by or absorbed into the parties of capital. The record shows that, thus far in world history, no Labor Party—neither Britain’s nor Israel’s, nor their equivalents (e.g., Canada’s NDP, Germany’s SPD, the former Soviet Union’s “Communist” Party)—has managed to avoid the fate of turning on its own constituency and settling down, at best, to the comfortable decadence of an opposition party defending the interests of capital against those of the working class. LPA is already evincing a breathtaking disinterest in the lessons of the past—and showing a dogged determination to repeat exactly the same errors.
Capitalist virus
As workers we all need to ask ourselves whether capitalism really has anything left to offer us. We need to think instead about establishing in its place a moneyless world commonwealth in which we no longer have an interest in bombing, shooting, executing, torturing, terrorizing or victimizing each other—all at the behest of a nest of cynical parasites whose favorite sport is to divide us into warring factions. What we need is to eliminate the virus of capital, not play medic and race around scavenging for political, social anti economic hand-aids.
A. D.
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The footnotes marked in the article were missing from the article.
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