JASON SCHULMAN
The traditional explanations as to why the United States is the only “advanced capitalist” country with no labor-based party have probably been heard by every socialist at least once. In the late nineteenth century the level of prosperity in the U.S. ensured that economic grievances were inadequate to support the founding of a labor party—so goes Werner Sombart’s famous argument in *Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?* Anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism by white workers in the 1890s also supposedly reduced the viability of a movement for a workers’ party. The early presence of universal manhood suffrage for whites is also said to have removed the kind of class-based political grievance that led to the formation of labor parties elsewhere, and the basic institutional features of the American political system (federalism, presidentialism, and single district, winner-take-all electoral districts) simply made it too difficult for most trade union leaders to see a labor party as an electorally viable project.
And then, of course, there is the “liberalism thesis” made famous by Louis Hartz in *The Liberal Tradition in America*: that the prevalence of an egalitarianism of social status minimized or eliminated the status-based grievances and class-consciousness that would have made a labor party possible, that the dominant liberal ethos of the U.S. was so “socialist” that “Americanism” effectively became a “substitute socialism” which ensured that American workers would see no need for a party that was explicitly of their social class.
Political sociologist Robin Archer, of the London School of Economics and Political Science, seeks to explode these explanations in *Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States?** *(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007). The problem with the conventional wisdom on this question, Archer claims, is that it relies on comparison with Europe—the “Old World.” Archer opts to compare the U.S. with its most similar New World counterpart, Australia. In the 1890s both countries suffered form the worst depression of the nineteenth century and the unions of both countries were utterly defeated in a series of major industrial confrontations. Yet Australian unions’ response was to establish one of the earliest and most electorally successful labor parties in the world. The nation-wide Australian Labor Party took office for the first time in 1904 and again in 1908. These were short-lived minority governments, but in 1910 the ALP formed a majority government with the support of exactly 50 percent of the electorate. This level of support for a social-democratic party would not be equaled in any other countries until the New Zealand Labour Party and the Swedish Social Democrats took office in 1938 and 1940, respectively. In the U.S., however, the American Federation of Labor retained its commitment to “pure-and-simple” unionism and the Democratic Party, despite the best efforts of labor party advocates in the U.S. When the U.S. union movement as a whole rejected the option of building a party, it became firmly entrenched as settled official policy.
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http://theactivist.org/blog/why-is-there-no-labor-party-in-the-united-states