Yeah! Now If We Inly Had Some Choices to Choose from
1991 1991-10Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 9 →
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ARL relations with the Southern Dixiecrats.
Class-conscious voters have never been welcome in the Democratic Party. When anti-Vietnam War demonstrators in Chicago were being hammered by police in 1968 because they wanted to influence the Democratic Party convention, they were not invited to present their views on the convention floor. These were not the comfortable middle-class voters the party was looking for.
Incumbent congressional representatives do not welcome hordes of new voters in their districts either. If the new voters are poor they are likely to raise issues that make the politician very uncomfortable. The occasional calls for bigger turnouts on election day are not directed to the dispossessed.
Vote with their feet Meanwhile, the dispossessed see no point in voting for politicians who offer them nothing. Current mud-slinging election campaigns make both parties look repulsive. "There is no one here to vote for," say more and more workers, who stay home in droves.
They are sitting at home in frustration as the crisis of capitalism bears down on them ever more heavily. But they will not sit there long. As in the 1930s, they will express their grievances through mass movements that will fill the streets.
Now the time has come for the workers' own party—a labor party. This is not a project for the distant future. It is a realistic goal already being projected in union circles.
Tony Mazzocchi, secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union (OCAW) has formed "Labor Party Advocates" to begin down the path toward forming a labor party based on the unions.
Union leaders, who have gained absolutely nothing from Washington for years, can no longer deliver their members' vote for the Democrats. Many will be looking for a way out of their dilemma.
The biggest obstacle on the road to a labor party will be the tired argument: "A labor party is fine for the future, but this year we have to defeat the worse evil in the Republican Party."
But millions of non-voters in America have already decided that lesser-evil politics is an endless cycle leading nowhere. They are ready to take another road. • ON OCTOBER 1991 9