NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/misc/activism/progress/9797

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From: New Liberation News Service <[e-mail]>
Subject: LPA Detroit Conf.:REPORT BACK
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/* Written  4:38 pm  Jan  4, 1993 by [e-mail] in
igc:labor.newsline */
/* ---------- "LPA Detroit Conf.:REPORT BACK" ---------- */
Reprinted from The Organizer, 4017 24th St., Suite #19, San
Francisco, CA, 94114 USA
1(415)641-4610 Subscriptions: $12(US) for 1 yr.  International:
$30 By ALAN BENJAMIN

A major step forward on the road to independent labor political
action was taken last December 5-6, when close to 250 union
activists gathered in Detroit at a labor educational conference
sponsored by Labor Party Advocates.  The conference was titled
'After the Election: Where does labor turn now?' Union officials
and rank-and-file activists came together to lambast the
Democratic and Republican parties as the parties of Big Business
and to call for labor to break with these parties and form its own
political party - a labor party based on the unions.  Most of the
participants came from the Midwest, as the conference was
organized as a regional event by the Detroit and Cleveland
chapters of LPA, but labor activists came from as far away as
California, Virginia, Utah, New Jersey and New York.
Representatives of the Canadian labor movement also attended.  The
Metro Detroit AFL-CIO sent a conference mailing to its membership,
as did numerous UAW locals in the Detroit area. The large presence
and active participation of rank-and-file unionists, many of whom
were not yet members of LPA, made for a rich and lively
discussion.  The conference was divided into three educational
panels, followed by comments and questions from the audience.
There was a time slot for workshops and a special session to
listen to, and discuss with, Tony Mazzocchi, former
secretary-treasurer of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union
and initiator of LPA. [A report and commentary of the discussion
with Mazzocchi will be printed in next month's issue of The
Organizer.] While the panel topics were different, they all
addressed the three central themes promoted by the conference
organizers:  (1) the need for working people to break with the two
parties of Big Business and establish our own party.  (2) the need
for unions and their supporters to run independent labor
candidacies in 1993 and beyond, and (3) the need to build Labor
Party Advocates as a dynamic, active organizing committee for a
labor party.  Role of the Democratic Party During the first panel
on 'Labor and the Democratic Party,' Millie Phillips, president of
the San Francisco chapter of CLUW, stated the need for a clean
break with the Democratic Party most forcefully when she said:
'We cannot be diverted by the 'friends of labor' argument. We must
expose the Democratic Party, along with the myth of 'progressive'
Democrats, for what it is: an absolute con job. ... We don't need
alternative parties that can lead us back into the Democratic
Party again. U.S. labor history is peppered with these. ... My
view is that the labor movement should break immediately,
decisively, irreversibly and definitively.' Phillips is a member
of the editorial board of the newsletter published by the Labor
Party Organizing Network (LPON), an organization that was formed
out of the July 25-26 National Conference for Independent Labor
Political Action held in San Francisco. LPON's stated goal is to
'promote labor-led coalitions to field independent candidates
beginning with the state and local elections in 1993.' [See
Phillips's full speech in this issue.] Other panelists, notably
Baldemar Velasquez, president of the Farm Labor Organizing
Committee (FLOC), and Lynn Henderson, editor of the rail labor
newspaper Straight Track, echoed these views. Both warned that the
Democrats are, in fact, the greater evil because they implement
the policies of the Republicans while posing as friends of labor.
[See excerpts of their talks in this section.] As could be
expected at a labor gathering involving participants from diverse
political backgrounds and experiences, not everyone on the panels
agreed with the central conference themes.  Frank Valenta,
president of the Greater Cleveland AFL-CIO Federation of Labor,
argued that labor should remain in the Democratic Party. 'I'm in
LPA but I'm a realist,' Valenta said. 'The only way we'll get a
labor party is to get the heads of the AFL-CIO to support a labor
party. Until that day comes, we have only one alternative: stay in
the Democratic Party and fight to be heard.'
 Valenta was a lone voice among conference panelists and found few
- if any takers - for his views among the audience. The
overwhelming majority of conference participants vented their
anger at Democratic Party betrayals and harbored no illusions
about Bill Clinton.  'I've been a Democrat all my life, but not
now,' said James Gibbs, president of United Mine Workers Local
2490 in Virgina. Gibbs went on to recount the struggle of the
Pittston strikers against the bosses and the twin parties of Big
Business.  Constructing international fightback Under the
discussion, Ralph Schoenman, an editorial board member of both The
Organizer and the LPON Newsletter, raised an additional dimension
in the fight for a labor party - i.e., the fundamental importance
for labor to construct its fightback on an international level.
'Capital,' Schoenman stated, 'has based its entire strategy on
global reach.  Industry is shut down in the United States in order
to open in China, Turkey, Nigeria and Mexico. More than 300,00
jobs lost to autoworkers are transferred to Mexico.  'What is the
concrete expression of this? (1) Breaking trade unions in the
United States and using naked terror to prevent their existence in
those countries to which industry is transferred. ...
'Privatizing, contracting-out, jointism, enterprise zones,
elimination of entitlements - the entire assault upon working
people can never be resisted town by town, region by region, or
country by country.  LPON has a central fundamental thesis - that
independent politics requires a coordinated workers' international
fight against capital, against the 'reformers' who front for the
most vicious assault upon working people and trade unions.  'LPA
must join in with workers breaking with the political parties of
the bosses. We must organize internationally, and we must base our
fight for a labor party on the fight of workers for their own
political parties in every country.' The issue of labor candidates
The second panel, titled 'Prospects for Independent Labor
Political Action in 1993 and Beyond,' heard unionists talk about
their experience running independent candidates for office.  Norm
Leavens, organizer and past president of the Communications
Workers of America Local 1040 in New Jersey, described the union's
aborted attempt to run a slate of 15 candidates against the
Democrats and Republicans in the 1991 statewide elections.
'Democratic Governor Florio wanted 25% wage givebacks and up to
10,000 public-sector layoffs. We said no. So we targeted 15
districts where Democrats were running.' But, as Leavens
explained, the CWA leadership was not interested in projecting a
real course for independent labor political action. The purpose in
running these candidates was simply to threaten Democratic
legislators into not voting the layoffs demanded by Florio in the
state budget.  'In the end, the CWA withdrew the candidates, but
our local and many other locals didn't agree. We could have
elected a state senator and two assemblymen to organize the fight
against the cuts. Instead, we ended up getting the layoffs.'
Leavens, who like Millie Phillips is a member of the editorial
board of the Labor Party Organizing Network Newsletter, has joined
with other New Jersey unionists in forming the Labor Committee for
Independent Politics. As a result of this committee's efforts, the
Industrial Union Council of New Jersey (the organization of those
unions that used to be part of the CIO) recently agreed to field a
series of candidates in the 1993 elections. Some of them will be
running as independents, but others will run as Democrats.
Leavens and other union officers are now calling on the executive
boards of the 400-odd locals affiliated with the IUC to urge the
IUC leadership to run these labor candidates as independents only.
[The Organizer will report more fully on this ongoing campaign in
our next issue.] Another panelist, James Gibbs, gave a detailed
account of the fight to get UMWA District Director Jackie Stump
elected as an independent to the Virginia state legislature. He
was followed by Ellen David Friedman, co-chair of the Vermont
Organizing Committee, who described the 20-year struggle,
beginning with Bernie Sanders's first efforts in Burlington, to
build what she called an 'independent political progressive
movement.' Friedman gave the distinct impression that she and her
organization, which emerged out of the Vermont Rainbow Coalition,
had definitively discarded the 'inside-outside' strategy toward
the Democratic Party. [See excerpts from Gibbs's and Friedman's
speeches in this section.] The discussion under this point was
most instructive. Although the conference participants were fully
aware of the fact Tony Mazzocchi and his supporters in the
leadership of LPA are opposed to unions running independent labor
candidates for public office (calling it 'premature'), speaker
after speaker got up to endorse the idea.  Jerry Gordon, an
official in the United Food and Commercial Workers and a
conference organizer, heartily congratulated Leavens and Gibbs and
called for 'one, two, three more New Jerseys and Virginias.' A
welfare worker in Chicago and a UAW member in Cleveland stressed
the importance of raising a political platform during elections to
galvanize workers and all the oppressed into struggle.  Supporters
of The Organizer newspaper explained that running independent
labor candidates was a crucial step in building the labor party
movement. It registers a break with the Democrats in deeds - not
just in words - and provides the opportunity to involve union
members and community activists in an organizing campaign around
the key planks demanded by working people.  While recognizing that
LPA could not yet run candidates in its own name - given that it
has not yet held a convention and formulated a political program
- conference participants spoke favorably of the efforts
undertaken by the Labor Party Organizing Network in promoting
independent candidates fielded by labor-led coalitions.
(Supporters of LPON reported that they sold close to 130 copies of
the premiere issue of the LPON Newsletter at the conference.)
Perspectives for building LPA Following the second panel, in the
late afternoon of the first day of the conference, workshops were
held to discuss whatever issues conference participants wished to
take up. The largest workshop focused on the task of building
Labor Party Advocates in the coming months.  The two workshop
moderators - Carmen Martino, the single LPA staffperson, and Mike
Merrill, a professor of labor history at Rutgers University -
introduced the session by insisting that the discussion be
restricted to one agenda item
- namely, recruiting new members. They reiterated Tony Mazzocchi's
goal of recruiting 100,000 members in 100 metropolitan areas and
insisted that no LPA convention could take place until that goal
was met.  (The December 1991 issue of the LPA newsletter had
raised the possibility of holding a national LPA convention in
1993, but this proposal appears to have been dropped.) Martino and
Merrill also reported that Mazzocchi would be forming an advisory
committee this spring to assist him in LPA's organizing efforts.
(Mazzocchi was unable to attend the first day of the conference as
he was in New Orleans at a conference on Labor and Environmental
Justice.) The discussion under this report was wide-ranging. One
issue on people's minds was that of democracy within LPA. Workshop
participants were not convinced the advisory committee proposal
addressed the problem of establishing a formal democratic
structure within LPA. Jane Slaughter of Labor Notes stated that
the 'most undemocratic organization of all is one without any
structure.' Others pointed to the need for a national conference
or convention in the not-too-distant future to elect a steering
committee and adopt the basic planks of LPA's platform. Supporters
of The Organizer argued that it was totally mechanical and
artificial to establish the goal of 100,000 members before
organizing a convention. 'The best way to recruit those 100,000 is
to build visible citywide recruitment chapters, hold regional
educational conferences such as this one in Detroit, and then
progress to a national conference.' The response by Martino and
Merrill was abrupt and did not sit well with the LPA activists.
'This is Mazzocchi's idea. It's his call. If you have another
strategy, go do it. See you in Dallas or Detroit. Someone has to
call the shots. It's Tony. So ease up.' Walter Parks, a member of
UE Local 1155 in Chicago and a prominent activist in the African
American struggle, replied: 'My union sent me to this conference.
I'm in LPA. I carry LPA card no. 200, but I don't have ownership
here. We must develop democratic forms. We must develop grassroots
democratic structures and get in touch with each other on a
national level. I came here to know when we are going to do
something, and how we can take part in the decisions of these
issues.' While the workshop didn't resolve all the issues to the
satisfaction of all the participants, a few important advances
were made. All spoke of the importance of holding citywide, state
and regional educational conferences of LPA and of building active
and visible recruitment committees in every city where this is
possible.  New Party vs. Labor Party The final panel on Sunday,
the second day of the conference, dealt with the history and
experiences of labor parties in the United States and elsewhere.
One of the presentations on this panel - by Rutgers Professor Mike
Merrill - caused quite a stir and revealed some major political
deficiencies on the part of someone so intimately tied to the core
group in the leadership of LPA.  Merrill argued that the
Democratic Party in the 1930s and even more recently had, in fact,
been a labor party. This was because it had significant electoral
support from the working class, the unions had a direct
organizational role in the party, and it had a pro-worker
platform.  But with the weakening of the unions due to the
globalization of the economy, Merrill continued, and the fact that
the Democratic Party was now 'candidate-dominated' - as opposed to
'issue dominated' - the Democratic Party had ceased to be a labor
party and could not, in his opinion, be renewed.  During the
discussion period, this author took the floor to explain that what
defines the class character of a party is who finances it, who
runs it, and whose interests it serves. Based on these criteria,
the Democratic Party was and has always been a party of the
bosses.  The labor party movement in the 1930s, I explained, was
derailed into the Democratic Party by those - notably the
Communist Party - who argued that Roosevelt's New Deal Democrats
had become a labor party and that the formation of a separate
party of labor would be divisive.  I added that using Merrill's
criteria for defining a labor party could disarm the labor party
movement today insofar as it left open the possibility that the
Democratic Party - making a similar populist left lurch as it did
in the 1930s to contain an insurgent labor movement - could again
be viewed as a labor party. I stated that this definition of the
Democratic Party was 'potentially dangerous.' Immediately a number
of panelists and conference participants took the floor to take
issue with my response to Merrill's presentation. 'There are no
dangerous ideas in a working-class discussion,' said Elaine
Bernard, former president of the British Columbia New Democratic
Party and currently executive director of the Harvard University
Trade Union Program.  Ellen David Friedman, the representative
from the Vermont Organizing Committee, and Jane Slaughter, a
staffwriter for Labor Notes and a member of the political
organization Solidarity, insisted that 'we shouldn't call ideas
dangerous [note: the exact term I had used was 'potentially
dangerous'] even if we don't agree.' In the course of this
exchange and subsequent discussions, to the great surprise of many
conference participants, two of these speakers - Ellen David
Friedman and Elaine Bernard - revealed that they were members of
the New Party. For her part, Jane Slaughter's organization,
Solidarity, has come out in support of the idea of building local
chapters of the New Party.  The New Party supports
cross-endorsement of Democrats. It views support to Democrats as a
question of tactics - not principles. It openly calls for
reforming the Democratic Party and therefore represents a major
obstacle on the path of building an independent labor party in
this country. Membership by these speakers in the New Party belies
any claim they could have made during the conference about the
need to break with the Democratic Party. It also helps explain
their hostile reaction to a comment by this author insisting on a
clear class analysis of the Democratic Party.  Unfortunately,
because of lack of time and because the issue of the New Party
only came up at the end of the conference, it was not possible to
have a complete discussion of the problems raised by the emergence
of the New Party.  Many of the conference participants undoubtedly
went home without fully understanding what was behind the heated
exchange over Mike Merrill's presentation. [For more on the New
Party, see the accompanying article by Scott Cooper.] What is
increasingly clear, however, is that if there is to be a genuine
labor party movement in this country, there must be a sustained
ideological struggle against those who would once again derail
this movement into the Democratic Party.  The Dec. 5-6 LPA
conference marked a first moment in the discussion about the New
Party. It represented an important step forward in the fight for a
labor party in this country. It showed that the potential for
building a real organizing committee for a labor party exists
among the ranks of labor. The political discussion over
perspectives will not end here. It has just begun.