Re: (minor corrections) Re: P&F: electoral death of pink socialism

On Sat, 31 Aug 2008, ross wrote:


>,,,
> Which would be correct. The whole traditional Trotskyist strategy in the
> US was predicated on the struggle to build a labor party ... a fight
> which is not necessary up here North of the Lakes, because there is one.
> Our fight here is to keep it away from Blairism, a fight which those of
> us in the Socialist Caucus have been pursuing for years now with some
> success.
>
> --
> Ross in Toronto
>

This is certainly an exaggeration at best. The SWP didn't even *come 
out for* the labor party slogan until about 1938 or so, after years 
of discussion. For the first decade of American Trotskyism, the SWP 
opposed the slogan, and, until the birth of the CIO, rightly so, given 
that the condition of the AFL then was as bad as that of the AFL-CIO 
now.

The slogan was quite irrelevant and downright wrong during WWII, when 
a labor party would have been a pro-war Rooseveltian party, as indeed 
the New York American Labor Party was. It was revived after WWII 
during the great postwar labor offensive. After it sputtered out, it 
was no longer relevant in its original form, as there have been damned 
few moves to working-class political independence ever since.

Without pressure from the ranks of labor for political independence 
from the Democrats, and at least some belief by them that their 
leaders might want to do something about it, it is not a useful 
slogan, just creating illusions where none exist. Better to just go 
ahead and build a revolutionary party in the meanwhile.

-jh-