>Yoshie writes:
>>Had the Labor Party acted more quickly and aggressively while the US
>>economy was still in the middle of the boom, we might be facing a
>>different political landscape today, but it's too late to mourn the
>>missed opportunity.
>
>Interesting theory. Are you a member?
No, I remain an interested observer, as my understanding of the LP was and is that it wants to sign up union locals first of all, rather than individuals currently unrepresented by any unions (btw, here's a website of GESO at OSU, a grad employee union in the making, <http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/students/geso/>). Here's what I thought of the LP in 1999: <http://nuance.dhs.org/lbo-talk/9911/1098.html>.
> >Whether we like it or not, we are in for hard
>>times, perhaps even a hard landing. It's time for the Labor Party to
>>reassess its strategy, confronting the reality of the empire, or else
>>it will not have any political future.
>
>I have my own views on what the LP could do differently, of course, but
>wouldn't agree that the main obstacle to success of the Labor Party is a
>failure to "confront the reality of the empire," whatever that might involve.
> Plenty of parties seem to do that full-time, without the glorious success
>you or I might expect.
I'd be very interested in your thoughts on what the LP could do differently, if you care to discuss it here.
As for the LP and the empire, here's a short list of problems:
(1) Today, even just fighting bread-and-butter trade union struggles of necessity brings you up against the wall of "national security" and Taft-Hartley, especially if your union represents workers whose work is of strategic importance to US economy, to say nothing of doing anything bigger than that, like making the LP a powerful social force to reckon with;
(2) After the end of the Cold War, capital has no reason to make the sort of compromise that it once made with unions (in exchange for support of anticommunist US foreign policy);
(3) Contradictions of neoliberal capitalism are now coming to a head -- US economy may be possibly in for a Japan or worse yet a hard landing, with unforeseeable effects on global economy as well.
How will the LP confront (1), (2), and (3)?