Do We Need a Labor Party?

Not exactly.

Labor makes, the world takes. (Image: Getty)

When I went around the country on book tour, one of the most common questions that came up from the audiences full of labor movement people was: Don’t you think America needs a labor Party? Indeed, I have heard this sentiment voiced in union-friendly conferences and essays and group chats for years. It represents a yearning for a political party that replicates the solidarity of the labor movement itself. For many people who understand the importance of unions, it makes perfect sense.

And yet. Do we need a Labor Party? Ehhhhhh.

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Lest I seem negative, let’s first unpack the sentiment behind this common dream. It is rooted in the same mode of thinking that drives all Third Party Dreams, an affliction that is common on the left. The first step is the thought: “The Democratic Party sucks.” And yeah! Yeah it does! Just sit there and envision, you know, Rahm Emanuel and Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin and Larry Summers all welcoming you into their party, and it makes you want to leave the party, immediately. Perfectly understandable.

Part of the impulse to flee that party comes from the tendency to see political parties like brands, like sports teams to support. The Democrats have done so much bad shit and contain so many bad people that their brand is polluted and therefore the only reasonable move is to start a new party that is unpolluted. I get the sentiment. But that is not an accurate or even useful way to think about what a political party is. It’s better to think of the Democratic Party as an arena, where politics takes place. All of the special interests and all of the members of the party, including the shitheads, are in the arena, pushing and pulling for control of the party. It is just a place where politics is done. In a two-party system like ours, all national electoral politicking has two parts: First you win the fight in your own party, then you win the fight against the other party. Moving the Democrats to where they should be is simply the necessary step one of winning. The fact that there are shitheads in the arena who disagree with you is the reason why you need to wage the fight within the party. If you exit the arena and form your own party, you will find that the shitheads you left behind will control the Democratic Party by default, while your own arena looks pretty empty.

This is why I say that the answer is not a new Labor Party—the answer is for labor to take over the Democratic Party. I wrote in my last essay here about the benefits of remaking the Democratic coalition so that labor sits at its center, and all of the other factions of the party branch out from there. In the immediate wake of the unusually pro-union Biden years, this sort of movement of the party’s center is more possible than it has been in my lifetime. Even if that were not true, though, the advantages of forming a new party would be incredibly uncertain, and possibly nonexistent.

Would it feel better to wear a t-shirt that says “Labor Party” with a picture of Eugene Debs on it than to wear a t-shirt that says “Democratic Party” with a picture of Bill Clinton on it? Yes. Would it be more fun to hang out in a party where the other people there where Shawn Fain and Sara Nelson and Dolores Huerta than to hang out in a party with a bunch of guys who left their Obama administration jobs and went straight to work for Uber and bought a $3 million house in an exclusive neighborhood and then stuck a “Black Lives Matter” sign in the expansive lawn? Sure. Of course. Fuck those guys. Unfortunately, the idea that taking the faction of people that you most agree with and forming your own party is an effective route to power in America is just not true.

You can’t win em all.

There are only so many hours in the day to work, and so many resources to be spent on political action. How should organized labor use those time and resources to produce the most beneficial outcome for working people? Would it be best to withdraw the union money and membership from the Democratic Party and use our time to start a new party and do all of the logistical work to try to get ballot access and build offices and conduct enormous communication campaigns to get name recognition in order to get our new party off the ground? Or, would it be best to channel all of that time and energy into moving the Democratic Party to where it needs to be? When answering this question, keep in mind that the Democratic Party has roughly half of the elected positions in this country currently, and your new party would have zero.

Keep in mind also that by exiting the Democratic Party, you leave it, and its infrastructure and resources, to the shitheads that made you dislike it in the first place. They are now more powerful. They now have less opposition. They now have more control over the party. Again, it is easy to see how your own mental metaphor can determine how you think about this. If the party is just a brand, then fuck it! Leave the shitheads with their shitty brand that sucks! But if the party is an arena where politics is conducted, you have gained nothing by leaving and forfeiting the game to them—except the responsibility for building a new arena across the street from scratch, and hoping that one day many years or decades from now it becomes so big and popular that it puts the other arena out of business.

At which point the shitheads in the other arena would just come over and be in your arena again anyhow.

Another helpful way to think about this for union people is to think about your own union. It is also full of people who disagree with you! It’s not like unions, which would make up the backbone of a new Labor Party, are totally ideologically unified. Maybe you are a Teamster and real labor radical and then you look up and the president of your union is speaking on stage at the Republican National Convention. Dang. Maybe you are in UFCW and you’re ready to organize a million new workers and then the international president is lazy and doesn’t feel like doing it. Dang. Unions are their own arenas of internal political actions. It often takes years or decades of titanic struggle by internal reformers to turn bad, lazy, or corrupt unions into good ones. Shawn Fain, currently the darling of the labor left, only won the presidency of the UAW after just such a struggle. If the UAW members who were fed up with their union’s bad leadership years ago had thrown up their hands and left the union, there would be no Shawn Fain today—or if there was, he would be president of a tiny new union with a tiny amount of power rather than president of a big union with a lot of power. The same is true for national politics.

I do not want to sound as though I am being dismissive of the impulse to tell the Democratic Party to go to hell. On the contrary. I completely identify with it, which is why I think this is all worth discussing. So let’s discuss some alternate things that can be done that would make the appealing aspects of a Labor Party more plausible. First—and this applies to all third parties in the US—it is impossible to escape the trap of third parties in our current system, which is that third parties tend to sap votes from the major party closest to their own politics and thereby benefit the major party that is farthest from their own politics. This is a familiar quandary resulting from our two party, winner take all system of elections. There is also a familiar and well understood solution to this quandary: Proportional representation. Many fine nations have it! Instead of having a geographic district where the highest vote-getter gets the lone seat, you award seats based on the proportion of votes that a party gets. If you have proportional representation, third parties make perfect sense—if your party gets 20% of the votes, you get 20% of the seats, rather than getting 20% of the votes and helping to elect Republicans all the way down the line.

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Americans have a wretched habit of seeing our existing political and economic setup as one handed down by god that is superior to all others and that it would be absurd to discuss changing. This is dumb. Allow me to quote an American Bar Association Task Force white paper: “For Congress, proportional representation, while certainly a big change, may not be quite as big a lift as some may assume. The exclusive use of single-member districts to elect the House of Representatives is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. Rather, it comes from the Uniform Congressional District Act, a law passed in 1967. States could start using proportional representation to elect their congressional delegations if that law were simply amended to make that possible.” In fact, there is already a bill in Congress to move to ranked choice voting and proportional representation. And although Republicans—the party that most depends on voter suppression and the subversion of the democratic will in order to maintain its position—would likely be the stumbling block to such a change, their opposition could be sapped by internal politicking as well. Proportional representation is nonpartisan, or bipartisan, or maybe quasi-partisan. Minority factions on the right who are dissatisfied with Republican leadership have the same incentive to open a genuine space for multiple parties as those on the left who are dissatisfied with Democratic leadership. This is an issue that the socialists and the fascists can agree on! A more representative political system for good and bad people alike! Huzzah!

Rather than storming out of the Democratic Party and forming a new party and then toiling on the margins of the power, it makes infinitely more sense to first reform our system so that a third party could actually have power, and then go make your new party. Instead of rushing off to form the Labor Party, make “passing the Fair Representation Act” a pillar of organized labor’s political agenda. It would be a healthy step towards getting unions to focus their political capital not just on bread and butter issues for their own membership, but on improving our democracy. Unions are inherently democratic institutions that can and must be the backbone of improving democracy in our political system. Structural issues are just as important as wages and working conditions. Consider the filibuster: the PRO Act, labor’s biggest legislative priority, will never pass as long as the filibuster is in place. Therefore the filibuster is a labor issue. Consider the Electoral College: unions may go all out to ensure that Trump does not get the most votes in this election and still watch him “win” because of our antidemocratic Electoral College system. Therefore the Electoral College is a labor issue. Winning proportional representation is very much in line with these things. Our system is riddled with flawed, dangerous, and undemocratic structures and processes. Clearing them away and rebuilding something better is part of the responsibility of living in a democracy.

If you want to build a new Labor Party that does stuff in local and maybe state elections, a version of DSA or the Working Families Party, sure, fine. I do not really think it is the most effective use of our time but maybe it would pay off in the long run. Nationally, though, we have a lot of other things to do, right now. And more simply, think of it like this: We already have a labor party. It’s called the labor movement. The political parties are just the tools we push around to get what we need. If you’re fed up with electoral politics, put your energy into building new unions. The long term payoff for that is absolutely guaranteed.

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• Related: Remaking the Coalition; What Will You Do If The Election Is Stolen?; The Hole at the Heart of the Democratic Party.

• Yesterday I recorded an episode of Doug Henwood’s radio show that was me and Sohrab Ahmari of Compact Magazine debating the alleged “Republican working class agenda,” which I wrote about recently. The funny thing was that I said at the beginning “When right wingers say they are going to talk about their agenda for labor they never talk about unions and spend the whole time talking about immigration instead,” and then that is exactly what happened. Prophesies fulfilled! I will drop a link here whenever the episode is online. In the meantime, if you are interested in these issues you would enjoy my book, “The Hammer,” available now wherever books are sold.

• When I published my most recent update on the state of this publication last week, I got feedback from a number of people asking if there was a way for them to give one-time donations to this site, apart from becoming paid subscribers. I had to give this some thought. If there are people who genuinely cannot afford to become paid subscribers, but still would like to chip in to support How Things Work, that could be a good thing. On the other hand, if I created a one-time subscription mechanism and then people who would have become paid subscribers say to themselves, “Hey, it will be cheaper for me to just throw in a few bucks once instead,” that would actually be quite bad for the site’s financial sustainability. Ultimately I decided that I trust you, the readers. On top of the front page of How Things Work you will now see a tab that says “Donate,” where you will find a link to Donorbox that allows you to make a one time donation of any amount. I will use this money to support my reporting for this site in the coming year. In the long term, How Things Work will succeed only by building a sufficient base of paid subscribers. If you’d like to support the site, I encourage you to become a paid subscriber, first and foremost. Links to both options are below. And I am still keeping this site paywall-free so that you can read it even if you can’t afford to pay. Thank you to everyone for subscribing, supporting, and reading. Independent media is cool.