[What is the most viable path to a working-class party in the
United States? How to Implode a Two-Party System from Within.]
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WANT A LABOR PARTY? LEARN FROM THE UK  
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Eric Blank
July 11, 2023
Labor Politics
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_ What is the most viable path to a working-class party in the United
States? How to Implode a Two-Party System from Within. _

,

 

_[I went on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show
[[link removed]] yesterday to make a
case for why Cornel West should run for president in the Democratic
primary, not as a Green. This tactical debate, however, is linked to a
deeper strategic question: What is the most viable path to a
working-class party in the United States? To answer this question, I
spent months researching how unions and socialists in the UK moved
towards independent mass politics by (initially) working within their
Liberal Party over a century ago. I tell this
forgotten-but-surprisingly-relevant history below — and draw out its
lessons for the US today.]_

Given how much the US Left likes to debate its relationship to the
Democratic Party, it’s surprising that nobody has yet drawn lessons
from the international example most similar to our own: British
socialist efforts a century ago to develop a political voice for
working people. Britain’s experience not only illustrates why
workers need their own party — it shows how we might get there.

Like the United States today, the UK had an entrenched two-party
system in which the Liberal Party was politically hegemonic over
workers and their organizations in the late nineteenth century. Aiming
to win over the Libs’ working-class base, socialists avoided the
twin perils of marginalization and co-optation by organizing in and
against the party, building workplace militancy, confronting
establishment Liberals when possible, and allying with them when
necessary.

The result was a decades-long dirty break
[[link removed]],
culminating in the founding of the Labour Party in 1906 and its
displacement of the Liberals as one of the UK’s two main parties in
1918. Though we can’t predict the exact form that such a process
will take in the US context, a similar strategy is our best bet to
build independent class power and to win the changes that working
people so urgently need.

First Steps

As in continental Europe, working-class politics in nineteenth-century
Britain emerged
[[link removed]] from
within organized liberalism. While Conservatives held the support of a
sizable minority of workers, most supported the Liberal Party,
[[link removed]] which was popularly
associated with the extension of electoral suffrage and, by the
century’s turn, socioeconomic reform
[[link removed]].

This situation posed a serious tactical dilemma for worker activists,
because the Libs were led by “men of rank, wealth . . . belonging to
what are called the upper classes,” as one letter to the editor
[[link removed]] in
a labor newspaper put it, and thus couldn’t be trusted to fight for
the workers. For this reason, the Labour Representation League (LRL)
was founded in 1869 to fight for working-class legislation and to
elect workers to Parliament, with or without the Liberal Party’s
endorsement.

Funded by members who joined for an annual subscription of one
shilling, the LRL stressed the political independence of working
people. One of its leaders explained that the “working classes had
come to the conclusion that the middle classes were but the sorry
representatives of labour in Parliament, and for the future they
intended to look after themselves.” Yet sensing that founding an
independent party was premature, the LRL fought for the mantle of the
“true” Liberal Party.

In the 1874 general election, the LRL endorsed fifteen workingmen for
Parliament — significantly, the only winners were the two
candidates, both mine workers, who had also received an official
Liberal endorsement. And because the UK, like the United States, has a
“first past the post
[[link removed]]”
electoral system, in those constituencies where LRL candidates ran
against official Liberal candidates, the progressive vote was split
and Tories were generally elected.

Faced with the difficulty of winning as independents and the risk of
being seen as spoilers, “Lib-Lab-ism” — running working-class
activists, usually union representatives, as official Liberal
candidates — became labor’s dominant approach for decades. Any
chance of actually electing workers passed through running as Liberals
because, as one observer noted, advocates of labor representation
could not “seduce the great mass of their fellow workingmen from
their allegiance to the Liberal party.”

Historian Henry Pelling describes
[[link removed]] the
situation as follows:

The Liberal Party was not a monolithic structure: and the acceptance
of the leadership of [Liberal leader] Gladstone
[[link removed]] on
general questions did not necessarily mean that the labour interest
need forego its special organization. In the circumstances of the
time, there was no reason why the Labour Representation League should
not continue to exist among, and indeed to struggle against, the other
elements of the Liberal Party.

In 1885, twelve Lib-Labs were elected to Parliament and the number of
labor candidates elected locally rose from twelve to two hundred
between 1882 and 1892. Most voted with the Liberals, especially
its radical
[[link removed]] wing, on
general political questions, taking autonomous initiatives mostly
around pro-worker legislation like the eight-hour day and labor law
reform.

Some leftist critics lambasted Liberal-Labour MPs for their ties to a
capitalist party, arguing
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their moniker itself was a contradiction, “as if a man could be a
sober drunkard.” While it’s true that their identification with a
business-led party muddied their political independence, such
condemnations of the Lib-Labs were short-sighted.

Whatever their limitations, Liberal-Labour
representatives _did _constitute a distinct
[[link removed]] working-class current in
national political life and, as such, a step forward in the process
of class formation
[[link removed]].
Flash forward to today and you can see a similar process unfolding
with democratic socialists recently elected to local
[[link removed]], statewide
[[link removed]],
and national
[[link removed]] office
on the Democratic Party ballot line. Like in the UK, a consistent
growth in the US left’s electoral power over the coming years will
necessarily put us on a collision course with the tens-of-thousands of
Democratic politicians and operatives whose careers and prestige
[[link removed]] depend
on preserving the status quo.

A Slow Separation From Liberalism

Both of the party-building strategies dominant on the US Left over the
past century — realigning
[[link removed]] the
Dems and making a clean break
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— were also attempted in Britain. In the UK, it eventually became
clear that neither approach was working.

While some Lib-Labs argued for the eventual formation of a distinct
labor party once labor was better organized, leaders of the moderate
socialist Fabian Society articulated a strategy of permeation
[[link removed]], which,
like US realignment politics
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meant working collaboratively inside the Liberal Party to transform it
in a socialist direction. In a few isolated working-class
constituencies like the rural Durham coalfields
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“working-class radicalism . . . took control of the party and
moulded Liberalism into its own image.”

Yet on a national level, the rise in worker representation in these
years was still far lower than the size of the working class in the
population as a whole. And for a growing number of labor activists,
the fault for this lay with the Liberal Party itself.

The obstinate refusal
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most Liberal organizations to accept working-class candidates proved
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be the most decisive political factor causing organized labor to
eventually break with the party. In contrast with the modern
US primary system
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Liberal candidates were directly chosen by local party machines,
leading to an endless series of selection conflicts between
upper-class liberals and organized workers. Ramsay MacDonald, an
ex-liberal who would eventually lead the Labour
Party, concluded that “we didn’t leave the Liberals. They kicked
us out and slammed the door in our faces.”

Labour’s process of separating from liberalism, however, lasted all
the way up until 1918, by which time most other European countries had
long since witnessed the formation of mass socialist parties. One
reason for this delay was the heterogeneity
[[link removed]] of Britain’s working
class, whose distinct ethnic, regional, and skill layers became
disillusioned with Liberals and organized at different tempos. Another
factor was the Liberal Party’s political flexibility. Seeking to
head socialism off at the pass, the party gave itself a new lease on
life in the first years of the new century under the stewardship of
radical “New Liberals” like David Lloyd George
[[link removed]],
who championed welfare policies such as national pensions and
insurance.

But most consequential of all was the relatively democratic nature of
Britain’s political regime compared with low-inclusion
[[link removed]] countries
like Germany. A relatively early and widespread conquest of popular
male suffrage made it both possible and necessary for the Libs to rely
on working-class voters, and to attempt to incorporate their
representatives.

At the same time, Britain’s use of “first past the post” voting,
in which whichever candidate received the most votes won all the
representative seats, rather than proportional representation
[[link removed]],
generated strong pressures to work within the Liberal Party so as to
avoid “spoiling” the anti-Tory vote. In contrast, the German
state’s semi-authoritarianism undercut
[[link removed]] the
political space for liberalism, alienated workers, and pushed the
country’s socialist movement to affirm a strict opposition to all
other parties and the imperial state.

Failing to see how distinct contexts required different strategic
approaches, Britain’s first socialist party — the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF)
[[link removed]] —
attempted to copy the same class-struggle isolationism pioneered by
the German Social Democratic Party. Ironically, this overly sharp
affirmation of political independence cost the SDF’s founders the
working-class base they had built while previously operating within
the Liberal Party. After federation leader H. M. Hyndman issued a
manifesto in 1881 denouncing all Liberals as hollow hypocrites,
worker-radicals quit
[[link removed]] the
organization. Middle-class socialists filled their place.

Doctrinairism mired the SDF in marginality until its dissolution in
1911. Hyndman privately expressed his “disgust” with what he saw
as workers’ lack of class consciousness, and he publicly lambasted
the pragmatic socialists who helped found the Labour Party. The latter
responded by ridiculing the SDF’s sectarianism and lack of popular
support, noting that at its current pace of electoral growth, it would
take “about two thousand years” to win elections. “German
formulas,” they argued
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were not a recipe for success in Britain.

The trajectory of the SDF underscores an important lesson: socialists
may be so successful in separating from liberals that they end up
permanently separating from workers in the process. But for political
independence to be _working-class _independence, you actually need
the support of working people. Instead of judging tactics by the
yardstick of their formal radicalism, it makes more sense to assess
whether they are in practice promoting independent class organization
and mass action.

There are no recipes for what this looks like, no timeless formulas
for socialist success. Contrary to the assumptions of many
radicals past
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formulated for semi-authoritarian Germany
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not to mention tsarist Russia
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are not particularly suitable roadmaps to victory in capitalist
democracies
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Because working-class independence is so strategically central for
socialists, it’s understandable that many have adopted a kind of
simplistic analysis of “the more political independence, the
better.” But as demonstrated by the SDF’s self-imposed
marginalization, bullheaded insistence on certain forms of political
independence, no matter what the political context or cost, can
actually undermine socialists’ ability to build powerful,
politically independent organizations.

Pragmatic Socialism

Credit for founding the Labour Party largely goes to those socialists
— organized into the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1893 — who
organized within the working class as it actually was, not as they
wished it to be. One of their central contributions was to help forge
the militant “new unionism” that rocked Britain from the 1880s
onward by uniting skilled and unskilled workers in trade unions and
militant industrial actions. Activists of the soon-to-be-formed ILP
played prominent leadership roles in most of these battles, including
the historic 1889 Great Dock Strike — a struggle which, as one
strike leader later noted
[[link removed]],
“marked the beginning of that close alliance in thought and purpose
between the Trade Union Movement and the Socialist Movement which
produced in due time the Labour Party.”

Socialists also pursued the less glamorous but no less important work
of transforming unions
[[link removed]] from
the bottom up — efforts that were essential for aiding organized
labor in confronting employers and, eventually, the government. With a
rise in strikes and union organizing up through 1918 came repeated
efforts by ruling-class politicians — via both the Liberal and
Conservative parties — to curb the movement by limiting labor
rights, most notably through the infamous 1901 Taff Vale
[[link removed]] decision
that held unions financially liable for damages incurred during
strikes. Anti-labor counteroffensives, in turn, pushed union activists
to combine industrial struggle with stronger labor representation in
Parliament.

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Without this workplace-based upsurge, British workers probably would
not have had enough class solidarity, organizational capacity, or
experiences of antagonism with the Liberal establishment to build
their own party. But labor unrest on its own did not bring about the
rise of independent working-class politics, as indicated by the
continued marginalization of the SDF as well as the inability of US
workers to build their own party in analogous
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of labor
[[link removed]] unrest.

One more factor was essential for Labour’s emergence: socialist
efforts to unite the working class politically through its various
stages of development. Class formation, the process of cohering
individuals into a collective political agent, is never automatic.

An important early step was taken by flamboyant mine worker union
leader Keir Hardie in Scotland, where the antagonisms between
organized labor and Liberals had become more acute than elsewhere in
the UK. Hardie had pushed for his local Liberal Party organization in
1888 to accept him as their candidate for Parliament. When it refused,
he ran as an independent.

Politically, however, Hardie’s continued identification with the
national Liberal Party was indicated by his campaign
handbill’s slogan
[[link removed]] “a
vote for Hardie is a vote for Gladstone,” the Liberal leader.
Despite soundly losing the race, Hardie founded the Scottish Labour
Party (SLP) later that year. Supporting electoral efforts both inside
and outside
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local Liberal structures, Hardie’s organization called upon
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national Liberal Party to adopt the SLP program if it wanted to
prevent a split with the base.

Hardie remained agnostic on the question of whether the Liberal Party
could be reformed — but he was certain that the future of
working-class politics lay in winning over
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organizing its popular base, which continued to generally identify
with the party, if not with all its leaders and policies.

This orientation to Liberal workers proved successful in the UK’s
first big breakthrough for independent politics, when Hardie was
elected in 1892 to Parliament as an independent. His
campaign manifesto
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his stance as follows:

Generally speaking I am in agreement with the present programme of the
Liberal Party so far as it goes, but I reserve to myself the absolute
and unconditional right to take such action irrespective of the
exigencies of party welfare, as may to me seem needful in the interest
of the workers.

Despite this political ambivalence, Hardie’s election as an
independent — combined with his fiery rhetoric and his insistence
(provocative at the time) on wearing a deerstalker cap
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in Parliament — made a splash in the British political scene. Buoyed
by the victory, Hardie joined together with like-minded socialists
across the UK the following year to found the ILP. Because of its
founders’ overarching desire to attract working-class liberals, the
ILP kept socialism out of its name and focused its efforts on winning
over
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unionists to independent politics.

Hoping that working people were finally ready to break from
Gladstone’s party, both the ILP and Hardie now attempted to take a
more antagonistic stance against the Liberal Party. Yet the results of
the 1895 elections made clear that this hope was premature: the
ILP’s twenty-eight independent candidates were all badly defeated,
as was Hardie himself. Chastened by the debacle, the ILP under Hardie
and MacDonald’s leadership was pragmatic enough to recalibrate.
Dropping their aspirations to turn their organization directly into
labor’s mass party, ILPers softened their approach to Liberals and
doubled down on pushing unions to take steps toward forming an
independent party.

While preaching
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the emancipation of labor, and while continuing to run independent
candidates in industrial strongholds, ILP leaders were by 1899 also
publicly indicating their willingness to forge a “working
agreement” with anti-war Liberals and to support the formation of a
Liberal government, insofar as it would benefit the working class.
Their new strategy was summed up in MacDonald’s maxim
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“independence is not isolation.”

The most thorough study
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labor politics in this period concludes that “whatever the
compromises forced upon [ILP leaders] by their decision . . . they
deserve credit for their perception that this was indeed the path to
political success.” As demonstrated by the SDF’s
continued weakness
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the alternative to ILP pragmatism was not the creation of a
revolutionary workers’ party but the creation of no workers’ party
at all.

Leftists in the United States today would do well to learn from the
efforts of Britain’s Independent Labour Party. Effective socialist
politics is always a terrain of wagers, tactical flexibility, and
pragmatic adjustments in response to events. Unfortunately, there’s
no way to completely avoid bending to the pressures of co-optation or
marginalization — and when the Left and organized labor remain weak,
the latter is often the greater danger.

Integration and isolation are both slippery slopes, yet too many
socialists still only see the dangers of co-optation because they’ve
already rolled to the bottom of the slope of marginalization.

The Labour Representation Committee

The ILP’s political efforts — combined with an increased interest
among various unions in independent political action during the late
1890s — finally bore fruit in late February 1900, when 129
socialists and union delegates, representing a third of organized
labor’s members, came together in London to jointly discuss the
sponsorship of working-class parliamentary candidates.

Roundly rejecting the SDF’s proposal
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found “a party organisation separate from the capitalist parties,
based on a recognition of the class war [and socialism],” the body
instead adopted Hardie’s counterproposal to establish
[[link removed]]

a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips,
and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to
co-operate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in
promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour, and be
equally ready to associate themselves with any party in opposing
measures having an opposite tendency.

The resolution as well as the body’s adopted name, the Labour
Representation Committee (LRC), were modest. ILP leaders correctly
assessed that most workers and unionists, including those present at
the conference, were not yet ready to completely break with the
Liberals, let alone to adopt socialism. Though the SDF quit the body
and denounced the ILP’s “treachery,” the approach of Hardie and
MacDonald — the latter of whom was chosen to be the LRC’s
secretary — was necessary to keep the existing delegates on board
with a small but significant step toward independence, which could
pave the way for winning over the rest of labor in the years to come.

Most workers and unionists in these years continued to support the
Libs. Eight Lib-Lab MPs were returned in the 1900 election, compared
to only two LRC-endorsed candidates, Hardie and Richard Bell, a
railway union leader who had received national Liberal Party support
and who had endorsed the Liberal candidate running for the other seat
in his constituency.

Pushing for class independence and socialism while wooing the Libs’
popular base was not an easy task. Hardie lamented that “the keen
edge has been taken off our Socialist propaganda by our growing
association with the Trade Union movement.” Yet even with union
support, LRC candidates generally continued to lose in three-cornered
contests [[link removed]] in which they
opposed both Tories and Liberals. But independent labor candidacies
were now often strong enough to keep Liberals from winning by
splitting the vote in these elections.

Despite these local LRC-Liberal conflicts — and in part because of
them — both formations searched for some sort of agreement, first on
a local and then on a national level. The existence of multimember
parliamentary districts
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rapprochement because, as Hardie put it, “if the Liberal party would
be content to select one candidate, and leave [the LRC] with one
candidate, that fact alone would be productive of good fellowship, and
would work to their mutual advantage.”

Since workers were still much the weaker partner in any such alliance,
the LRC decided in 1903 to strengthen its bargaining position by
consolidating its independent organization, tightening its candidate
selection processes, and raising money from its unions and members for
a national parliamentary fund. For their part, Liberals were eager to
take back the reins of power — their last majority government had
ended in 1885 — and they were pessimistic
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their chances of doing so without the tacit support of Labour; this
meant finding ways to reach electoral agreements on a local level,
since Britain does not have a presidential system.

It was in this context that MacDonald, with Hardie’s support, struck
a behind-the-scenes deal with Liberal chief whip Herbert Gladstone for
the 1903 general election to minimize vote splitting by letting each
other run uncontested against the Tories in a large number of
constituencies. Though in hindsight the pact appears to have
facilitated the party’s demise, in the short term it was a boon for
the Libs, helping them sweep to power in 1906. And for the LRC, the
pact resulted in the election of five MPs in 1903 and twenty-nine in
1906 — of these, the overwhelming majority had run in constituencies
without a Liberal candidate. Ironically, it was a deal with the party
of the bosses that made possible labor’s big independent political
breakthrough.

The 1906 general election was a watershed in British politics, even if
Labour was still the Liberals’ junior partner. After three decades
of autonomous labor representation within the Liberal Party, Lib-Lab
MPs were for the first time outnumbered by independent labor
candidates. Conscious of the political turning point, the LRC
responded to the 1906 election by changing its name to the Labour
Party.

British workers finally had their own mass party. But it would take
another twelve years of alliances and conflicts with Liberals before
their final political divorce papers were signed.

Forging Independence

Labour’s result in 1906 was a major political breakthrough. But
because the Labour Party’s electoral wins had depended on an
alliance with Liberals, who were more powerful and influential than
ever before, British leftists still had to walk a difficult
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tightrope.

On the one hand, excessive identification with the Liberals threatened
to undermine Labour’s very raison d’etre by undercutting the
spread of class consciousness and the fight for working-class
interests. Accommodating a party that, as Hardie pointed out, was no
less than the Tories “dependent upon the purses of the rich for its
very existence” would demoralize Labour’s base and obscure to
working-class voters why they should vote Labour rather than Liberal.

On the other hand, if they attacked Liberals too strongly, this could
make it harder to push pro-worker reforms in Parliament. And though
most of the adopted legislation fell short of Labour’s desires, the
Liberal-Labour alliance _did_ win substantial reforms from 1906
through 1914, including reversing the anti-union Taff Vale judgement,
taxing the rich, granting governmental health insurance and sick pay
to millions, providing free meals to school children, granting
government pensions to many seniors, establishing minimum wage laws
and labor protections, and expanding education access for
working-class children. An overly antagonistic stance risked helping
the Tories retake power, which could spark a backlash from Labour’s
base and imperil progressive legislative efforts past and present.

Without a clear way out of this dilemma
[[link removed]],
the Labour Party muddled forward with an ambivalently independent
approach. At the same time as ILPers continued to preach socialism —
“to make Socialists is the one vital thing,” argued
[[link removed]] MacDonald
— and as Labour gradually increased the number of constituencies it
contested up through 1914, both continued to de facto ally with
Liberals in electoral contests and in Parliament. Indeed, the
closeness of the 1910 general election results meant that the newly
elected Liberal government became dependent on Labour and Irish MPs
for its continued existence. Unlike with the previous Liberal
government, independent Labour MPs now no longer
[[link removed]] sat
in Parliament’s opposition benches.

Discontent with Labour’s strategy spread among party activists. Yet
the spectacular inability of revolutionary socialists, both inside
[[link removed]] and outside
[[link removed]] the
Labour Party, to garner any sustained electoral support testified
[[link removed]] to
the prematureness of their appeals for all-out war against the Libs
— an approach, MacDonald noted, that often seemed to be more
anti-Liberal than pro-worker.

In contrast with leftist denunciations of the supposed cowardice of
Labour and ILP leaders who were grappling with this dilemma, Ralph
Miliband later argued
[[link removed]] that
while Labour could have searched for ways to more loudly voice its
independent views on political life, in those years of conflict, “it
was inevitable that the Labour Party should side with the Liberals
against the Conservatives.”

Labour’s socialist leadership, to quote historian R. I. McKibbin
[[link removed]], “had made the best of
what was, in every way, a bad situation.” It wagered that by staying
the course and patiently accumulating power, Labour would at some
point in the future be able to displace Liberals as Britain’s
“second party.”

To the surprise of many, this wager was eventually vindicated when,
due to their controversial leadership of Britain’s participation in
World War I, Liberals dramatically split
[[link removed]] in 1916–18. With its
hitherto allies suddenly weak and divided
[[link removed]], Labour’s leadership
seized the moment, pivoted
[[link removed]] to
full opposition against all parties, and outpaced the Libs in the 1918
general election. A half century after workers took their first steps
to represent themselves in Parliament, Labour had finally become
Britain’s main political alternative to the Tories.

For all its significant weaknesses
[[link removed]], the
Labour Party over the coming decades won major
social-democratic reforms
[[link removed]] and helped
crystallize relatively high rates of class consciousness and
class organization [[link removed]]. The
fact that Britain today has public health care
[[link removed]] and
unionization rates
[[link removed]] that
are more than double that of the United States helps underscore the
continued relevance of an old
[[link removed]] socialist
axiom: workers need a party
[[link removed]] of
their own.

Prospects for Today

While US leftists until recently have attempted to realign
[[link removed]] the
Democratic Party or make a clean break from it, Labour’s rise in
Britain underscores the viability of using the Democratic ballot line
to build up independent working-class organization in the direction of
a mass workers’ party through a split in the Democratic coalition
[[link removed]].

When progressively inclined workers
[[link removed]] and
their organizations overwhelmingly
[[link removed]] support a
liberal party, and when electoral rules entrench a two-party system
through the spoiler dilemma
[[link removed]],
the benefits of working within (and even identifying with
[[link removed]])
such a party often outweigh the costs. Democratic
socialism’s rebirth
[[link removed]] since
2016 has clearly borne this out. And Britain’s experience can help
us further think through how to deepen our efforts to organize the
Democrats’ multiracial
[[link removed]] working-class base
[[link removed]] away
from the party establishment, and to forge a majoritarian electoral
instrument to enact radical social change.

The starting point for successful left politics is not how
to delegitimize
[[link removed]] the
Democrats and form a new party [[link removed]] as soon
as possible — it’s how to expand independent working-class
political agency, which requires different tactics at different stages
in the class formation process. Mass politics, politics for the
millions
[[link removed]], is
necessarily context specific.

For the foreseeable future, we should join Sanders and Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez in fighting to push out corporate politicians and money
from the Democratic Party. This, not calls to form a new party, is
what it looks like today to effectively agitate for a mass workers’
party.

Of course, working within a corporate-dominated
[[link removed]] party
or supporting establishment candidates
[[link removed]] does
pose considerable dangers, as evidenced by countless examples of
co-optation in US history. But this is a risk, a hazard of effective
politics, not an inevitability.

Whereas realigners in the 1960s
[[link removed]] worked
inside official channels and maintained friendly relations with
Democratic leaders, leftists can take a different approach by using
primary challenges to openly confront the party establishment and
build up their own independent profile and organizations in the
process.

This points to a limitation in the campaigns of Ocasio-Cortez and most
of today’s prominent anti-corporate electoral insurgents, including
Sanders in 2020
[[link removed]].
Though their candidacies have been essential for spurring membership
increases in groups like the Sunrise Movement and Democratic
Socialists of America, they have not generally found ways to use their
resources to directly build up these year-round mass membership
political organizations or to found new ones.

But without a massive growth of working-class organization, it is
unlikely that we’ll be able to change the relationship of forces
sufficiently to prevent the nascent left electoral upsurge from
getting absorbed or crushed — or that we can generate the power
necessary to win Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, police defunding,
or the democratization
[[link removed]] of
the US political regime. As the defeat of Sanders and Jeremy
Corbyn made clear
[[link removed]],
electoral insurgencies can only go so far
[[link removed]] when
most working-class people remain unorganized
[[link removed]] and
have not experienced
[[link removed]] the
government deliver significant improvements in their lives.

That’s why it’s so important to fight for legislative
[[link removed]] wins
and to build what socialists Jared Abbott and Dustin Guastella call
a party surrogate
[[link removed]].
The fate of these efforts, in turn, is inseparable from the expansion
and transformation
[[link removed]] of
the labor movement. On this question, Britain’s later experience is
particularly instructive: though industrial struggle was essential for
the party’s rise, Labour leaders after 1918 increasingly tended
to discourage
[[link removed]] rather
than promote workplace militancy, thereby undercutting their own
policy agenda and their working-class base
[[link removed]].

The rise of Labour in the UK illustrates what a dirty break might look
like, but contextual differences will certainly shape its form and
rhythm in the United States. Racial divisions
[[link removed]] and
geographic unevenness
[[link removed]] —
in terms of electoral laws, economic development, and party
identification — are even more pronounced here. And because
America’s presidential
[[link removed]] system,
its ballot access restrictions
[[link removed]],
and its single-member
[[link removed]] electoral districts
are further impediments to forming third parties, and because
the undemocratic
[[link removed]] nature
of our political regime is a major block on pro-worker legislation,
struggles for democratic reforms
[[link removed]] will
likely be more central.

At the same time, the US state-run primary system deprives party
leaders of the normal levers of power to arbitrarily exclude
candidates. Even if Democratic leaders, like their British Liberal
predecessors, wanted to contain an ascendant working-class left, the
principal means to do this are their well-funded
[[link removed]],
but far-from-guaranteed
[[link removed]],
electoral efforts to defeat insurgents in primary contests.

Due to America’s unique electoral arrangement, it _is_ possible
for workers to seize the reins of the Democratic Party through a clean
sweep of the presidential and congressional primaries, followed by a
radical overhaul of party and funding structures. But since this would
require an enormous degree of independent working-class power, some
sort of split may well occur first. Before we’re sufficiently
powerful to sweep national elections, the Left will probably become
strong enough for establishment Democrats to devise
[[link removed]] mechanisms
to push us out (e.g., by reforming
[[link removed]] primary laws
[[link removed]]), or strong
enough to win democratic reforms like a national popular vote for
president or proportional representation, thereby ending the spoiler
problem.

Fortunately, socialist strategy today doesn’t depend on these
speculations. A proto-party
[[link removed]] orientation
remains our strongest political wager despite the impossibility of
knowing whether it’ll be corporate Dems or the Left who will end up
leaving the party. Even for those activists attempting to transform
the Democratic Party into a social-democratic institution, the only
realistic path forward is to organize working people independently of
the billionaire-funded establishment.

Faced with crisis
[[link removed]] upon crisis
[[link removed]],
there’s no time to lose. By forging working-class power
[[link removed]] within
the belly of the Democratic coalition, we can build the party — and
win the world — that we need.

ERIC BLANC is Assistant Professor Rutgers Labor Studies; author
"Revolutionary Social Democracy" & "Red State Revolt"; Bernie 2020
national surrogate, EWOC, DSA.

He posts at LABOR POLITICS. [[link removed]]

* Labor
[[link removed]]
* Electoral Politics
[[link removed]]
* United Kingdom
[[link removed]]
* Labor History
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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