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Birth
of Labor Party signals emerging political polarization
November 16-17,
1996, the LRNA held a conference on League work in relation to the
Labor Party. The following is excerpted from the main report to
the conference.
The ingredients for intensified class conflict are at hand. These
times call for a party that unites the immediate struggles of the
people and introduces the question of class into the politics of
this country.
The specific decisions we make at this conference on League work
in relation to the Labor Party will set the pace for how we as revolutionaries
answer the call of history and prepare the American people to think
and act in their own interests. The building of some sort of people's
party is a necessary stage of the revolutionary movement; in that
sense, it is inevitable. The formation of the Labor Party makes
completing this stage possible, but it is not an automatic process.
In fact, the window of opportunity to take the struggle this next
step ahead could be open only a short time.
What makes the objective circumstances today so favorable to advancing
the revolutionary movement a step ahead and preparing for the future
stages of the movement?
We here are all familiar with how the economic revolution is destabilizing
the economy and our society. Production without labor adds something
qualitatively new to the economy; it is disrupting an economy built
around distribution according to value and money.
But what makes it possible for revolutionaries to do something about
all this is the social consequences of this economic revolution:
the extreme polarization of wealth and poverty and the new character
of the spontaneous struggle for immediate needs. In other countries
and at other times in history, such extremes of wealth and poverty
have been impetus enough for the formation of various forms of people's
or workers' parties. Today, there is an added impetus. The creation
of a new class has added something new to the ongoing struggle over
the distribution of society's wealth and has begun its process of
qualitative transformation. The demands of the day - whether they
be the demands of the homeless veteran, the laid-off third generation
auto worker, the minimum-wage health care worker, or the permanently
downsized middle manager - cannot be met within the capitalist system.
This moment calls for and makes possible a political organization
of the struggle for immediate needs.
Just as the L.A. rebellion of 1992 signalled the social response
to the economic revolution, the formation of the Labor Party (LP)
signals the beginning of the political response. All things physical
and social develop in stages. Polarization is a necessary and unavoidable
stage of any process of transformation. Economic and social polarization
have laid the basis for the beginning of political polarization.
Ninety-nine percent of the wealth gained during the 1980s went to
the top 20 percent of the wealth holders in this country (and the
top 1 percent gained 62 percent of that). People feel they have
been wronged. Mad, surprised, confused, and too often misdirected,
they are setting out to right those wrongs. As an organization of
the immediate struggle that introduces the concept of class into
the debate about what to do about the situation, the Labor Party's
formation begins the political polarization.
The Labor Party adopted a program of struggle aimed at class identity
and class unity. Its structure is aimed at unifying the practical
struggles of employed and unemployed alike. The Labor Party has
the potential to express and push forward the next important stage
of development of our class and the revolution. It can be the organizational
vehicle for the class to move from the stage of social awareness
to the stage of social consciousness.
And the LP was formed just in time to unite the social response
to the economic conditions and the coming political reaction and
crack down. On the one hand, low voter turnout expressed how little
the population feels represented by any of the candidates; on the
other hand, there were some important votes against reaction. The
response to the welfare law has been a healthy combination of moral
outrage and realization of self-interest. People are just as outraged
at the thought of children starving as they are amazed that this
law is a direct attack on the protections of the employed as well
as the unemployed. The "welfare reform" law allows companies to
replace employees with workfare recipients who are forced to work
in exchange for anything from a small check to "substance abuse
counseling." The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the addition
of even a fraction of these low paid workers into the work force
will lower the wages of the bottom 30 percent of the currently employed
by 13 percent. Now that the elections are over, look for the fights
over welfare and health care to be unleashed. We're already seeing
winter "riots" against attacks on affirmative action as well as
against uninterrupted police terror. And we should avoid any preconceptions
about what other forms the social response will take.
This kind of social response calls out for a party that unites the
struggle just as much as it calls for the consciousness of the struggle
to move to the stage of class identity. The formation of the LP
provides the opportunity for the movement to take its next important
step ahead. Imagine how several million people fighting for the
LP program will change the political climate in this country. Imagine
how a "people's party," serving as an organizational center for
the struggles of the day will empower the new proletariat to fight
for its interests as a class. Imagine the possibilities for educating
millions of these fighters about what kind of world we could have
and their role in fighting for it.
If we have any hesitations, let's ask ourselves whether any of the
scattered struggles can get what they're after by fighting on their
own? It would be dishonest of us as revolutionaries not to push
ahead to the unity that's becoming possible.
To align the League to the new and changing environment, the National
Committee spelled out two interconnected aspects of League work.
One, aim the League comrades' work in the mass movement at building
the Labor Party into the kind of "people's party" this stage of
the struggle demands and makes possible. We should be clear about
the direction we're headed in: the mass work our comrades are involved
in rightfully belongs in the Labor Party. This will not be accomplished
overnight. It will take careful assessments, calculated planning,
and a lot of education and agitation all the way around.
This will take an all-out fight for the decisions of the Labor Party's
founding convention. There's no guarantee that the "ultra-left"
won't succeed in making the LP its plaything. Nor is there a guarantee
that the LP won't be reduced to simply a trade union party. This
is the first real political struggle the League has to take on.
This means planning for specific tasks. Bring people, their organizations
and their struggles into the LP. Make it the organizational center
of the struggle for immediate needs. Use the LP and the fight for
its program to educate and rally the greatest possible numbers to
an independent political position, to advance consciousness from
the social awareness of the scattered struggles to the social consciousness
of a unified, class, political fight. Broaden and diversify the
mass base of the LP.
But we should move with caution. Just because we understand this
stage, that doesn't mean we can simply make it happen when and where
we decide. If we grasp the concept of stages of development and
the importance and possibility of completing the current stage,
we will stay on track no matter how long it takes to complete it.
Ten years ago, many of the union members who form the base of the
LP wouldn't even defend themselves or each other, because they weren't
aware of any real problems or because they saw no effective way
to move. But objective conditions have forced them to take an important
step ahead. We should take care not to get so far out in "left field"
that we separate ourselves from the important process of political
awakening that's going on.
And two, all this means stepping up the League propaganda to meet
the opportunities of this moment. The more people fight in their
own class interests and against the system, the more our League
propaganda can get across a scientific understanding of what they're
for - the communist reorganization of society to create a world
that fosters the full human potential, not only physically but culturally
as well. The more the Labor Party develops as a class organization
of the immediate struggle, the more the League can develop as an
organization of propagandists. The more the LP lives up to its potential
as a people's party, the more the League as an organization can
gather together the revolutionaries around the theory, politics
and strategy of the revolution.
Here, too, we have to move with careful consideration. Shifting
the League to what it has to be and do as an organization of revolutionaries
will also be a step-by-step process. Our guiding principle is to
strive to be an organization of revolutionaries inseparably connected
to the spontaneous movement.
The outcome of this process is by no means certain. It took the
hard and careful work of experienced and conscious people to form
the Labor Party at the right moment. Its formation makes the next
stage of the revolutionary movement possible. The immediate task
before conscious revolutionaries is to get in there and fight for
it.
To appreciate the urgency of our tasks, we should consider the alternatives
to completing this stage. Without an organizational center for a
unified struggle, without a sense of class identity, ideology, morality
and unity on a mass scale, how easy it will be for the ruling class
to manipulate the discontent, to get some to do their dirty work
and to use others as political cannon fodder. And then in what form
will a police state come? Anti-immigrant terror? The ruling class
is demonizing and criminalizing the poor and a whole generation
of young people. Will prison labor and child labor become the only
way for people to compete with the robots for jobs?
How many years have revolutionaries in this country had to fight
and educate and hold together without any real possibility for advancing
the revolutionary movement a step ahead? Sure, there were fights
that had to be fought - like winning the right to unionize, fighting
the lynch mobs and segregation laws, and ending bloody, imperialist
wars. At each point in the history of our country, the revolutionaries
of the day answered the call of the day and rallied the American
people to fight those battles to their conclusions. And at every
step of the way, there has always been the need to educate the American
people about what's happening and what to do about it; and somebody
had to ensure the continuity of the fight for the science of revolution.
At every step along the way, revolutionaries stepped up to those
challenges, too.
But at no other point in our history have the objective conditions
been as favorable as they are today for advancing the actual revolutionary
movement such a decisive step forward and toward the actual resolution
of the communist reorganization of society.
Our country is at the brink of two very different but very real
possibilities. We will either suffer the grip of a cruel and powerful
police state, or the American people will take their interests and
their future into their own hands and unleash a fight that holds
the power to overturn this rotten and corrupt economic system. Objective
developments brought our country to this fork in the road. People
will determine which route our country takes.
Let's pull together the heroic work of our comrades, our scientific
understanding, and our tools of agitation and education. Let's develop
a plan of work and move as one, decisively, to play the role history
has handed to revolutionaries.
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