Two-party system under strain
The two-party system is showing signs of strain. Polls indicate a growing distrust of both Democratic and Republican politicians. Fuelling this unease is the fact that in the past two decades, real wages have fallen while the gap between capitalists and workers has widened. Productivity has risen, but the owners have taken the lion's share.
Unfortunately, so far the political repercussions have been mainly manifested in right-wing developments — the Perot candidacy in 1992, his formation this year of the Reform Party and the far-right campaign of Pat Buchanan.
The union movement and most of the left have been shackled to the Democratic Party since the 1930s, and remain so in this election year.
However, there are some stirrings toward a break to the left of the Democrats, as Clinton and Co. move to the right.
One development was the formation five years ago of Labor Party Advocates, which was initiated by the International leadership of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), the union I belong to. Today the LPA has been endorsed by unions representing 1 million workers.
These endorsements in no way mean that LPA has a million supporters. LPA membership is in the thousands.
The founding convention of LPA will be held in June, and the organisation will change its name to Labor Party. Besides establishing a structure and an initial program, the convention will debate whether or not to run candidates against the two major parties.
There are two aspects to this debate. Since everyone involved knows that the new Labor Party will not yet be a mass formation, there is the tactical question of whether the LP will be strong enough to launch credible election campaigns, and if so, whether these should be on a local, state or national level.
A more important debate will concern the fundamental orientation and direction of the Labor Party. Will it forthrightly break with the two parties of big business, and declare its intention to challenge them both, whatever the outcome of the above tactical discussion? Or will it see itself as a pressure group on the Democrats?
The leadership of OCAW remains the most important force in the LPA, and has not clarified its stand on this question of basic orientation. In an interview in the Progressive, Robert Wages, international president of the OCAW, outlined a perspective of adopting the strategy of the Christian Right, which has built itself as a force in the Republican Party.
The fallacy of such an analogy is in the class differences. The conservative Christian Right is a capitalist organisation politically, working in a larger capitalist Republican Party. The LP, if it followed this scenario, would be a workers organisation trying to influence the capitalist Democratic Party. Experience has demonstrated that every attempt to do this has failed to result in ever breaking with the Democrats or even influencing them very much.
It is interesting that this same analogy has been used in discussion of electoral strategy in the Committees of Correspondence (CoC). The CoC emerged as a regroupment effort initiated by a section of the Communist Party that split during the death throes of the Soviet Union. Charlene Mitchell, a national leader of the CoC, also thinks the left should follow the example of the Christian Right in working in the Democratic Party. She also proposes that the CoC endorse Clinton.
This discussion will be one of the most important at the July convention of the CoC, and already sharply opposed views have been presented within the organisation.