Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> Hi, Jenny:
>
> Let me get to the point that you raise in the latter part of the post
> first of all:
>
> At 6:40 PM -0400 10/12/02, JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:
> > >Most likely,
> >>there will be no electoral campaign unless and until the leaders of
> >>the endorsing unions decide it's time to run one.
> >
> >In what sense would it be a 'labor' party if the unions involved didn't have
> >the primary say?
>
> I'm not necessarily saying that it's wrong for the endorsing unions
> to have the primary say in the Labor Party. Such a structure does
> raise several issues, though:
>
> (1) Currently, the majority of American workers are unrepresented by
> any union, but in the Labor Party they will have a marginal voice at
> best if they join it. Why should they join only to be marginalized
> in it, especially given that those who are interested in Third
> Parties are the ones who deeply care about having an equal chance to
> have their voices heard in a political party of their own, the chance
> unavailable through the Dems and the Repubs?
This is the point that has bothered me most since I first heard the proposal for a Labor Party about 10+/- years or so ago in an address Tony Mazzocchi gave at a plenary of an early Radical Scholars and Activists conference in Chicago. There is simply too sharp a split -- a split that tends to be antagonistic even -- between "organized labor" and the vast majority of the u.s. working class.
Carrol