Three Distinctive Challenges for the US labour Movement and the US Revolution

Ron Lare

1) The new Labor Party illuminates the interdependence, in the U.S., between the need for: (a) A mass, working-class party essentially connected to labor. (b) The need to replace the leaders of the current union bureaucracies, who will not break with the Democratic Party. A barometer of progress is the relative success of Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), many of whose leading activists support the Labor Party. Yet TDU is the only mass opposition movement in a U.S. union. Despite its success in assisting the election of Teamster President Ron Carey, this has not resulted in Teamster Labor Party endorsement. (c) The need for a higher level of trade-unionization, class struggle and victories. The AFL-CIO's proclaimed new emphasis on organizing more members is welcome. However, the AFL-CIO's success in recruiting new members is about as limited as the Labor Party's success in recruiting AFL-CIO leaders. The U.S. unions lost another 100,000 members in 1996. Beginning with Ronald Reagan's firing of striking PATCO air-traffic controllers, the last 17 years have seen the development of a very significant, ongoing national strike support movement. But from PATCO to Hormel to Staley to Caterpillar to the recent Detroit newspaper strike, this movement, important as it is, is more known among the masses of workers for defeats than for victories. Today's U.S. workers lag behind the workers in other capitalist nations in experience with leftist parties and mass organization. The fragmentation and marginalization of socialists in the U.S. continues. Extended accumulation of experience via a Labor Party- type formation is a stage through which U.S. workers likely must pass on the way to a revolution. While an increase in militant fighting will speed this process, it cannot substitute for it. A Labor Party must decide to become an opponent and competitor of the Democrats (including running candidates for office!), not just a pressure group. *The Labor Party is not even permitted to support non-Labor Party candidates running independently of the Democrats and Republicans. This prevents a non-sectarian approach to independent candidates who have run based on forces such as: striking newspaper workers' in Detroit, locked-out grain processing workers in Decatur, Illinois, striking miners in Virginia, Black Workers for Justice organizing in a North Carolina town, the U.S. Presidential campaign of black candidate Ron Daniels, Tennessee gay activists against AIDS, the Greens, the New Party, and women's initiatives. This reminds one of the British SLP's refusal to approach other parties to the left of Labour.

2) Compared with black workers in Britain, as important as they, are, black workers in the U.S. are a greater proportion of the workforce and more critically located in the economy. The U.S. labor movement is divided by white racism. The unifying anti-racist momentum of past mass movements is largely dissipated: the relatively integrated CIO movement, the Civil Rights movement of the 1960's, and the later stages of the movements for school desegregation and affirmative action. These struggles continue in some form, but have declined and left space for white racism. As with the labor movement, it is not only militance and mass mobilization which are needed, as shown in the lack of organization-building based on the L.A. Rebellion and the Million Man March. The concrete political way forward is not clear to revolutionaries, let alone to the labor and civil rights movements as a whole. There is substantial pressure even in the NAACP, and therefore in the labor movement, to abandon school and housing desegregation as goals. Perhaps the vanguard of African-American workers will advance toward revolution under the banner of black nationalism. Or, along the path if not under the banner of "revolutionary integrationism," perhaps prepared by CLR James's black transitional organizations. Or--in a variant I do not predict but want to pose--U.S. blacks might adhere to international revolutionary movements, while not necessarily demanding a national territory from the U.S. They might still leave white U.S. workers far behind and counterposed to a U.S. black anti-imperialist movement finding its allies outside the U.S. (there was a hint of this during the Vietnam war). Black and white workers' "going their own ways" is dramatically contrary to what has advanced the fighting ability of the U.S. labor movement to date. If "going their own ways" is necessary to revolution, then it must mean a lengthy delay in revolution. This would mean a lengthy delay in the overthrow of U.S. imperialism and its attacks on revolutions around the world. This would call into question more than the name of what the SWP/US called the "American" Revolution Yet even if--rather, especially if--black nationalists are wrong about U.S. revolutionary perspectives- -if the previous conditions for the progress of the U.S. labor movement are the future conditions for the progress of the U.S. revolution, the labor movement must make huge strides against white racism and toward black leadership for any combination of black and white workers' action to bring down U.S. imperialism.

3) The U.S. labor movement needs internationalist consciousness generally. It needs international labor solidarity campaigns. It needs links to international revolutionary movements. U.S. imperialism is economically weaker than in the past, relative to other imperialist economies, but it is still the strongest economy. This and the U.S. military's "post-Soviet" international dominance distort U.S. workers' consciousness. This is reflected in the Labor Party's call for "adequate national defense." Fortunately, there are powerful countervailing factors. These include the effect on U.S. workers' of the increasing internationalization and interdependence of the world's economies, the inevitability of other imperialists' military challenges to U.S. dominance, the increasing importance of Mexico to the U.S. economy and the increasing proportion of U.S. workers of Latin American origin, etc. Yet the national chauvinist side of the campaign against NAFTA and the UAW's strikes (in part to "keep jobs from going to Mexico") starkly illuminate the deep contradictions in U.S. labor movements' approach to the other workers of the world. A big challenge will be the U.S. labor movement's response to the next sustained imperialist war.

OTHER CHALLENGES

Among the omissions from the list above are the struggles for women's, lesbian-gay, and youth rights. I want to prompt international discussion of the question "Which problems are most distinctive to the U.S. labor and revolutionary movements?" (in this short article unfortunately with very little reference to program). The three issues I have chosen above are debatable as to both the content of each, and as to which issues should be on that list. I want that debate. However, I do not want to suggest that concrete progress on those issues can be abstracted from progress on those listed below.

1. Nothing is more important than the fight against sexism and for the promotion of women's leadership. The women's liberation movement in the U.S. has profoundly strengthened the fighting morale and organizational experience of working class women, even if there has been little chance for mass expression of this progress since the 1940's.

2. Lesbians and gay men have made gains defending and promoting lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights, have changed the progressive labor movement's very definition of democratic rights, and have challenged the ideology of the nuclear family essential to capitalism.

3. In response to the next major imperialist war, youth in the U.S. will probably move forward ahead of other oppressed sectors including workers. Anti-Racist Action (ARA) and the movement to save Mumia's life show the creative rebellion of youth. These are not yet mass movements, but are still in some ways more widespread and rapidly growing than the Labor Party (speaking of activists, not the total memberships of affiliated unions) or the trade-union opposition caucus movements. These struggles and gains of U.S. women, lesbians and gays, and youth are strong enough that only fascism could decisively reverse them. They are not on the above list only because I think their U.S. manifestations are not as different from those in other countries as are the U.S. manifestations of the three problems listed above. Finally, I have left out the ultimate challenge of building a revolutionary party, because I am concerned here with other mass movements necessary to the success, although not of course to the initiation of that party or parties.

* For more analysis of the U.S. labor movement today, see especially the second half of "The Founding of the Labor Party" in the TL/ US "Workers Struggle," Vol. 2, No. 1, Fall 1996.