You’re Invited to a Panel on the US Labor Party
Democrats are MIA in the fight against Trump. Could labor provide a more compelling alternative?
The first month of Donald Trump’s second presidency has been an unrelenting flurry of disturbing announcements and grim news. From the vicious assault on immigrants, to dumbfounding tariffs, to a proposal for the US to “clear out” Gaza, to the repulsive Elon Musk being given free rein to loot the federal government and terminate the jobs of public sector workers, Trump seems determined to fulfill the worst of his campaign pledges.
Democrats, meanwhile, seem to have nothing to offer by way of opposition, not even of the cringe “Resistance” variety that characterized Trump’s first term. Needless to say, their failures on the campaign trail last cycle and in office the last four years (and the decades prior) are a major part of what landed us here. Having given up on any kind of robust social democratic program and orienting increasingly toward a professional-class base and elite corporate donors, the Democrats keep losing working-class voters, and with them the party’s ability to combat the country’s increasingly virulent right wing.
Readers of Left Notes will know that Neal and I have consistently argued that workers need a party of their own, and our current political moment makes that clearer than ever. The political obstacles to forming a successful third party in the US are, of course, significant. One of the most promising pushes to form such a party in recent decades was the Labor Party, launched in the 1990s and active through the early 2000s. The Labor Party, spearheaded by Tony Mazzocchi of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), was officially formed in 1996 by a coalition of national unions including OCAW, the United Electrical Workers, the United Mine Workers, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and others, as well as hundreds of regional and local unions across the country. (More about the history of the Labor Party here. You can check out its old site, which is still live, here.)
Even with this significant backing from organized labor, however, the effort fizzled by the mid-2000s. Still, we think it is worth revisiting the Labor Party experience with an eye to strategic implications for today. What was the vision? Why and how did so many unions get on board with it? And what, ultimately, went wrong? To that end, we’ve been working with other socialists and labor activists to organize a national Zoom panel with some of the Labor Party’s leading activists about the effort. Our hope is to draw some lessons about if and how a similar project could come together in the not-too-distant future, given that the need for independent working-class politics seems especially pressing.
You can RSVP here. We hope to see you there!