Union leader calls for formation of labor party But on what basis will it be formed?

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'Mazzocchi has been arguing for a labor party based on the unions for the past ten years. His agitation has taking more concrete form' Tony Mazzocchi, who is currently secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, has established an organization, Labor Party Advocates, devoted to advancing the idea of an independent workers' party based on the trade unions. But before we take this development up, some preliminary remarks will put it in proper perspective.

The need for an independent party representing working-class interests has been widely felt among working people almost from the founding of the United States.

There have been a variety of workers' parties going back to the early part of the 19th century. From then until the beginning of the 20th century, there were numerous attempts to establish such parties, most of which were locally organized as "Workingmen's Parties." The great majority of these attempts to organize workers politically were initiated by trade unions, which also constituted the mass base of these primarily electoral formations.

The most successful of them succeeded in electing representatives to local and state governments and, more rarely, to the U.S. House of Representatives. And at the turn of the century, the increasing number of votes received and the growing number of local labor party candidates elected, especially in New York state, scared capitalists and their political representatives.

The Democrats were most active in taking measures to block this threat and became quite adept at co-opting parts of the labor program for the purpose of cutting it off.

Capitalist politicians, however, had to pay a price in exchange for blocking the threat of a growing movement toward independent working class political action. They were compelled to pass some of the laws championed by the trade unions and parties of the workers. Thus, for example, progressive legislation was passed which we now take for granted, such as universal public education and against child-labor.

Role of radicals

The movement for working-class independent political action had its ups and downs. It reached a high point when Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president of the United States in 1920, received nearly a million votes—from a much smaller number of eligible voters in those days—while imprisoned for his opposition to the first imperialist world war.

Debs had started out as a railroad union leader and supporter of Democratic Party "pro-labor" candidates. But in an earlier imprisonment for his labor activities he broke with the Democrats and became a socialist, fighting capitalist injustice for the rest of his life.

The movement toward a mass party of labor subsequently took a different course with the victory of the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the formation of the Communist Party of the United States. The early American communist approach to political action was, of course, far more rounded and complete than even that of the Socialist Party of Debs.

The communists brought to the American working class an understanding that electoral activity is only a small part of working-class political action. They taught workers that the responsibility of a workers' party is to organize the defense of class interests on every level—in the streets and in the workplaces, as well as at the polls-and not just on election day, but every day of the year.

But that promising development was short-circuited when the Stalinized U.S. Communist Party in 1936 broke with the principle of class independence and gave back-handed support to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party candidate for re-election as president of the United States.

Since then, independent class political action has fallen to its lowest ebb since the founding of this nation. The Stalinist turn to the politics of class collaboration removed the main obstacle and opened the flood gates to class collaboration. By 1940, the labor 16 SOCIALIST ACTION TAN Solidarity Day, 1981.

recently become bureaucracy, reformist Socialists and Stalinists were united in support of Democratic Party capitalist politicians.

Bankruptcy of class collaboration But as early as the 1960s, the bankruptcy of this strategy led to sections of the labor bureaucracy occasionally endorsing Republican Party candidates in a desperate and hopeless attempt to warn their "friends" in the Democratic Party that they shouldn't take their support for granted.

This, of course, frightened no one. The only real result has been to further contribute to the mis-education and to the increasing sense of despair of working people. This is graphically registered in the uninterrupted increase in the rate of worker abstention from voting. This in turn led to a massive decline in the ability of the bureaucrats to deliver the vote for their chosen candidates.

Things went from bad to worse when first George Wallace, then Ronald Reagan, proved able to win support from workers by appealing to a combination of racism and a growing rebellion against the relentless shifting of the tax burden from the rich to the poor.

Since then virtually the whole spectrum of capitalist politicians has adopted the tactic of heaping taxes on workers (while cutting taxes on the rich) and blaming the higher taxes on those social services reaching the poor-Blacks, Latinos and immigrant workMAY 1991 Joseph Ryan/Socialist Action more ambitious, ers in particular.

In the late 1970s, the setbacks suffered by labor reached such intensity that the phenomenon appeared of bureaucrats making empty "labor party" threats. This demagoguery, of course, is not new.

Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers union from his election in the 1940s until his death in 1969, had been notorious in his advocacy of a Labor Party based on the unions—always sometime in the future, "but not now."

Lip-service to the labor party idea given by such ex-militants, however, had originated from a genuine mass sentiment in the auto and other industrial unions in the 1930s and 1940s.

Most of the Walter Reuther types really believed it when they first advocated formation of a labor party. Reuther himself had risen to the head of the union movement on the crest of the labor upsurges of that period. But he began to shed his progressive positions, including support for a labor party, as he rose in the ranks of the bureaucracy.

The spate of labor party threats of the 1970s and early 1980s, however, is even more cynical. Those that began mouthing this slogan had always been unmitigated class collaborationists. They were among the loudest advocates of the strategy of supporting the "friends of labor." Coming from not a single capitalist could possibly take their labor party threats seriously.

Other labor fakers, like Douglas Fraser, a former president of the UAW, uttered plaintive protests against "one-sided class war," which some observers believed also to be an implied threat to turn it into a two-sided war—that is, to fight back. But, coming as it did from spineless, long-time supporters of "cooperation" with the bosses, it was merely intended to appeal to the sense of fairness of their capitalist friends to please ease off on their antilabor offensive.

Mazzocchi's Labor Party crusade Tony Mazzocchi is not in the same category. He is a long-time progressive and even radical militant in the American labor movement who has not broken with some of the best of his early positions. He was, for example, a militant local leader of his union. He has been in the forefront of the struggle against "Jim Crow" segregation and for full equality for Blacks.

He was an early opponent of the nuclear arms race and against U.S. military intervention into the affairs of the neocolonial countries of the world. And more recently, he has emerged as a champion of reform of the American labor movement.

Mazzocchi has been arguing for a labor party based on the unions for the past 10 years. His agitation has recently become more ambitious, taking more concrete form. He has initiated a modest campaign to organize the nucleus of a national organization, Labor Party Advocates (LPA), strictly limited to promoting the idea. He has been going around the country signing up supporters.

Early this year, the Socialist Action national office received an invitation to attend a meeting in San Francisco along with two brief tracts. The first was an invitation to join LPA, explaining the purpose of the organization and why a labor party is necessary. And the second went into more detail in question-and-answer form.

In his explanation of its purpose, Mazzocchi correctly emphasizes the primarily educational function of LPA at the preTony Mazzocchi sent time. His letter of invitation and pamphlet advance good arguments for a break from capitalist politics and for the formation of a labor party based on the unions. Thus, Mazzocchi's campaign can play a positive role.

His letter correctly recognizes that the LPA is not yet, in fact, a labor party. So that while declaring that the new organization "has a single purpose: To organize a Labor Party in the United States," he also correctly declares that the LPA "will neither run nor endorse candidates for political office." (There is no such thing as a "labor party" worthy of the name that is based on a few hundred, or even a few thousand activists.)

The declaration rejecting endorsing candidates seems clearly intended to block the temptation to support those candidates, like Jesse Jackson, who are not truly based on the unions, nor independent of capitalist politics. This intention is made more explicit in one of the questions he poses in his pamphlet. He asks:

"Aren't trade unions too small a base on which to build an alternative party? Shouldn't we at least be joining with others (continued on next page)