Portside

In the 1990s, hundreds of U.S. labor activists came together to form the Labor Party. The initiative was the brainchild of Tony Mazzocchi, the passionate leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (which, after two mergers, is today part of the United Steelworkers). Mazzocchi held true to the dream of an independent political party rooted in the labor movement over which working people would have ownership. He was fond of pointing out: "The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own."

By the mid-1990s, it seemed as if Mazzocchi's dream was on its way to becoming a reality. In June 1996, nearly 1,500 trade unionists met in Cleveland to found the Labor Party. It was an impressive turnout, marked by a sense of excitement and debate as well as daunting challenge. By any measure, the delegates had a formidable task ahead of them. Periodic attempts to form labor parties in the U.S., going back as far as the 19th century, had all eventually flopped. But coming out of the 1996 convention, the Labor Party had strong leadership, institutional backing, favorable external conditions, and high hopes.

A decade after the founding convention, the Labor Party still existed in name, but outside of a few local pockets it was essentially defunct. For several years it twisted and turned through a series of interesting experiments and navigated some tricky internal tensions. Organizers did their best to sustain the Labor Party through difficult circumstances. But ultimately it failed to last.

In 2013, it is still hard to find much thoughtful analysis of the history of the Labor Party and the lessons we could derive from it. (An exception is a recent essay by Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac.) This is unfortunate, because many of the dilemmas that the Labor Party confronted remain with us today. Moreover, its strategies for overcoming those obstacles and its vision of how a genuine working class party should operate may prove useful in thinking about how to move beyond the current impasse. It's vital that we engage with the history of the Labor Party in order to make better sense of the path forward.

This interview is meant as a contribution to that process of reflection. It is intended to serve as both an introduction to the history of the Labor Party as well as a critical look at its life and legacies. It surveys the lead up to the Labor Party's founding, its basic goals and philosophy, its strategic orientation, and its development over the course of a decade. It gauges the Party's successes, shortcomings, external obstacles, and internal debates. It also tries to extract lessons from the Labor Party's history and to offer some insight into the perils and promise of the current conjuncture. The interview is organized into four parts: Origins and Philosophy; Party Life and Internal Debates; The Labor Party and Left Strategy; and Looking Back, Looking Ahead. It was conducted in late 2012 over both email and telephone.

Mark Dudzic has a long history in the American labor movement. He became the National Organizer of the Labor Party after the death of Tony Mazzocchi in 2002. Before that he was president of Local 8-149 of OCAW for nearly two decades. He is currently the National Coordinator for the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare. A unifying thread over the course of Dudzic's career has been his constant engagement with broad questions of how to strengthen labor's power and independent political voice. As Dudzic says below, "We need to encourage a broad and open discussion of Labor Party history and lessons within the labor movement." This interview was done in that spirit.

PART I: ORIGINS AND PHILOSOPHY

Tony Mazzocchi was instrumental in developing the idea of the Labor Party and helping it to get off the ground. Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the party's founding, can you talk about Mazzocchi, who he was, what he envisioned, and why he was able to play the role he did?

Tony was an extraordinary and visionary leader. He was born in 1926 in Brooklyn. At 16, he joined the Army and fought in World War II. After the war, he bummed around on the GI Bill for a while and then hired into the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics factory in New York City where the workers were represented by a union that would become the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (now part of the Steelworkers). Over the next 30 years he was elected shop steward, chief steward, local president, international executive board member, OCAW Legislative Director, and OCAW Vice President. He ran, as an opposition candidate, for OCAW President in 1979 and 1981 and lost both elections by less than 3% of the vote. He was elected OCAW Secretary-Treasurer in 1988 on a unity slate and then served as the Labor Party National Organizer from 1992 until his death in 2002.

Mazzocchi was involved in most of the progressive initiatives embraced by sections of the postwar labor movement, including the civil rights struggle and movements against nuclear proliferation and the war in Viet Nam. He led the fight for the passage of the Occupational Health and Safety Act in 1970 and worked to establish the first labor and environmental alliances. He framed these issues as a fight against corporate power.

His worldview was shaped by his experiences in World War II and the postwar GI Bill--where he witnessed the capacity of the state to mobilize immense resources to both wage war and to redeploy them for peaceful purposes--and by his exposure to the New York City labor left before it was crushed during the Cold War years. He was the prototype of the worker intellectual and had a voracious appetite for knowledge and culture that he shared with those around them. He had an inclusive leadership style which served him well in the hundreds of union halls he visited in his career. Most of all, he had an unshakeable confidence in the capacity of working people to create change.

So the attempt to build a labor party consumed much of the final decade of Mazzocchi's life. But the inability to sustain a viable, independent working class party has been one of the historic frustrations for the American left. Can you explain the context surrounding the lead up to the Labor Party's formation in 1996? What factors made Mazzocchi and his allies think that the 1990s were an apt time to initiate such an ambitious project?

The impetus to launch a labor party movement came out of two trends in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first was the collapse of the post-war collective bargaining regime and the rise of neoliberalism. This trend emerged in full force in the late 1970s and was responsible for the orgy of union busting, deindustrialization, and attacks on the social insurance model of the Reagan years. At first, most of the institutional labor movement assumed that this was a temporary aberration and that their "seat at the table" would be restored by appealing to more reasonable sections of the corporate ruling class and more vigorous political action and lobbying directed at Democrats and moderate Republicans.

By the late 1980s, a growing section of the labor movement was beginning to realize that neoliberalism had triumphed and the new structures of global capitalism had marginalized the labor movement and made it virtually impossible to pursue working class interests through the (admittedly flawed) postwar pattern of negotiation and compromise within multi-class political parties. The failed Kennedy and Jackson insurgencies led many to conclude that the Democratic Party could no longer be expected to represent even a compromised version of working class and popular interests. This realization was more widely held by leaders at the local and regional levels of the labor movement but by the 1990s a growing number of national leaders also began to realize that labor's days were numbered and the old system was collapsing.

It should be noted that Mazzocchi laid out this perspective as early as 1979. In his campaign for president of the OCAW in that year, he warned that the 1980s were going to "come at us like a freight train" and that the union needed to transform itself by building new alliances and girding for a fight.  His opponent ridiculed him for being an alarmist and predicted that the 1980s would be "just like the 1950s, the 1960s, the 1970s. Sure, we'll have our fights, but there is no need to run around saying the sky is falling."

The other emerging trend was the re-birth of a "labor left" which, with few exceptions, had been red-baited out of the institutional labor movement in the 1940s. A new generation of leaders and activists began to emerge who had come of age in the 1960s and were committed to a vision of social unionism. Many had ties to movements to empower women and people of color. Many were radicalized by fights against concessions and union busting. In addition, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War weakened the ties between the institutional labor movement and U.S. imperial foreign policy resulting in a new tolerance, and the occasional embrace, of viewpoints that would have been beyond the pale during the Cold War years.

By the mid-90s, the labor movement was undergoing a bit of a resurgence. A number of creative and militant fights against concessions had captivated an activist base and a new generation of leaders embraced an "organizing model of unionism." In 1995, the "New Voices" slate swept into office in the only contested election in the history of the AFL-CIO promising to organize a million new members a year. All of these efforts came up against the reality that the Democratic Party was dominated by corporate interests and was obstructing the potential of a revitalized labor movement. President Clinton's advocacy of the NAFTA agreement was, to many, the final nail in the coffin of the Democratic Party.

How would you describe the Labor Party's basic philosophy as it got underway? What, concretely, were its central goals, and what were its strategies for achieving those goals?

In one of the early educational sessions prior to the launching of Labor Party Advocates, an OCAW member came up with the Labor Party's slogan: "The bosses have two parties. It's time we had one of our own." Different forces brought different perspectives to the table. Some had an ideological commitment to a labor party as part of a broader socialist project. Others just wanted to teach the Democrats a lesson that they couldn't be taken for granted. In between, there was a broad base of folks who wanted to build a labor-based political party as the cornerstone of an anti-corporate movement that built working class power. There was a palpable disenchantment with the Democratic Party and the Clintonian version of neoliberalism.  Many looked to the Canadian New Democratic Party (which many International Unions with Canadian members participated in) as an example of how a minority party could help set the terms of political debate. The newly formed Brazilian Workers Party and other working class political insurgencies around the world also provided context for understanding how a party of labor could function in a neoliberal world.

There was never an explicit initial organizing strategy and opening goal but I would say that there was a broad consensus on how to proceed. The goal was to move a significant section of the institutional labor movement into a commitment to work towards a break with the Democratic Party and active support for the launching of the Labor Party. We started with a recognition that the labor movement could not afford to immediately disengage from all of its political entanglements in a two-party, winner-takes-all system. We called for movement-building to precede electoral politics and for building a working class constituency rather than just mobilizing an already activated base. We recognized that efforts to build a movement by convening a body of self-appointed leaders with a shopping list of demands for the working class to follow were doomed to failure. Rather, we focused on building a broad movement of working-class institutions, leaders, and activists to speak on our own behalf. We avoided the expediency of identity politics and liberal talking points and instead organized around broad class-based interests and concerns.

The Labor Party promised a "new organizing model of politics." What did this mean?

The "new organizing model for politics" said that electoral politics was situated in the broader project to build working class organization and politics. It said that we would enter electoral politics from a position of strength. We set substantial requirements for electoral intervention to assure that any effort was serious and geared towards building capacity. Standards included formal support from a substantial portion of the labor movement in the targeted constituency, the ability to raise enough funds to run a credible campaign and the presence of an organization in the constituency that could mobilize voters and activists at the precinct-level. Candidates had to be accountable to a formal Labor Party structure and the Labor Party would not run or endorse candidates on other party lines.

This model recognized that, for working people, the stakes for breaking with the Democratic Party were high and that any formal electoral effort had to be serious and strategic. It also was informed by the failures of many "insurgencies" within the Democratic Party and by labor-based political parties elsewhere in the industrialized world where candidates and elected officials were not held accountable to working class constituencies and were co-opted or corrupted.

Who were the key players involved in the internal discussions that shaped the Labor Party's early groundwork and founding?

Many of the early players in labor party advocacy came out of the OCAW. The union had a unique history of rank-and-file control and militant activism. In 1988 a slate led by Bob Wages and Tony Mazzocchi won national office. They pledged to explore the possibility of building a labor party and embarked upon an internal discussion and education program that resulted in the commitment of significant institutional support for the project and the mobilization of local leaders and activists who became organizers in their workplaces and their communities.

Other unions followed similar paths. Some like the UE (United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America) and the west coast longshore union (ILWU) had been historic advocates of independent working class politics. Others, like the Mineworkers (UMWA) and the railroad Maintenance of Way workers (BMWE) had undergone internal transformations similar to the OCAW or, like the California Nurses Association, had emerged from a period of internal struggle to embrace a new vision of social unionism. Organizations that sought to organize marginalized and excluded workers like the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the Kensington Welfare Rights Union (KWRU) also responded to the call. In addition, Mazzocchi was in contact with hundreds of rank-and-file activists and union dissidents who saw the labor party movement as a central part of a program to build working class power.

From the beginning, we were careful to ensure that the leadership of the labor party movement consisted of people who actually represented workers and could bring institutional commitments and resources to the table. The first meeting of the interim steering committee of Labor Party Advocates (the organizing committee that evolved into the Labor Party in 1996) took place in Chicago in 1993. The 80 union leaders in attendance represented over half a million workers.

You mentioned some of the unions and other organizations that got behind the Labor Party initially. Could you explain why these specific unions and groups - and not others - got behind the Labor Party idea?

A lot of the groups that came to the Labor Party either came from traditions where they were looking for an alternative political strategy, like the UE and ILWU, the remnants of the CIO Left from the 1940s, or they had undergone some kind of internal transformation based on confronting the new realities of the 1980s with the labor movement. This is what happened with my union, the OCAW. It was happening with a lot of local unions, a lot of groups. The Teamsters were coming together around reform movements. Ron Carey was elected Teamsters President in 1991, rejoining the AFL-CIO (which set the stage for the Sweeney victory in 1995) and embracing an aggressive mobilization and bargaining strategy. So those were the kinds of people that came together on this. They were looking for an alternative. They were responsive to the message and they had leaderships that were either trying to be accountable to rank-and-file movements within their unions or were trying to start those movements themselves.

You also mentioned "social unionism" and you associate many of the Labor Party supporters with this idea. Can you explain more what you mean by "social unionism" and why it was important to the project of the Labor Party?

I would say that social unionism, at its most fundamental, understands that workers are a class with interests that go beyond a particular bargaining relationship that they may have with an employer. It understands also that employers are part of a capitalist class which seeks unrestricted, hegemonic control in all spheres of society. In practice, this understanding means that unions must align the interests and struggles of their members with those of the entire working class and contest capital for power in all social spheres. It is the old solidarity unionism--"an injury to one is an injury to all"--writ large.

To read the rest of this interview, please go to http://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/

Mark Dudzic served as the National Organizer of the Labor Party and is currently the National Coordinator for the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare. He can be reached at mdudzic@igc.org. Derek Seidman teaches history at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. He can be reached at seidmand@dyc.edu.