[lbo-talk] Chicago mayor takes legal action over strike

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at aapt.net.au
Sat Sep 22 02:52:56 PDT 2012


At 8:42 AM -0400 21/9/12, Wojtek S wrote:
>
>The absence of a Labor party in the US can explain quite a bit, but it
>itself begs the question - why such a party has not been established
>here?
>
>My own hypothesis is - in a nutshell - that democracy came to the US
>too soon. The US considerably expanded suffrage to virtually all
>white males way before any other country did. This institutional
>development was unprecedented in history and that lack of precedence
>had profound consequences for setting the institutional path of
>development. Contrary to neoliberal pretensions, humans are not
>innovators but followers and imitators. They follow and imitate even
>when they innovate, as the Old Man aptly observed in the opening to
>his "18th brumaire."
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm

[...]


>I think that history, or rather path dependence, matters quite a bit
>and can shed some light why the US does not have a labor party like
>most other industrialized countries do.

Are you familiar with how labour parties operate, where they exist? As I understand it, they are mainly focussed on using the electoral system to attempt to gain political power. But in particular, to gain political power in order to implement a political platform favourable to labour, to workers and labour unions.

They do this by nominating candidates who adhere to the labour platform, the politcal platform determined by the members of such a labour party. This is possible under electoral systems that allow a political party to nominate candidates. That is to say, electoral systems that are radically different to the US electoral system, which makes it impossible for the members of a political party to determine who its electoral candidates shall be.

From my limited understanding, the US did have some promising labour parties at the turn of the twentieth century, who were starting to get some electoral traction. Then the electoral system was amended so as to make it virtually impossible for a political party to determine its own candidates, they were instead determined by "primaries", that is to say anyone and/or his dog could get in on the act of deciding who would be the Labour Party (or whatever) candidate.

It must necessarily follow that any labour party would henceforth have no control over who its candidates for electoral office might be. So obviously any labour party would have even less control over what its political platform would be. In fact a cohesive political platform was impractical for any political party under such a system.

So my hypothesis is that not only does the US lack a labour party, it lacks ANY political parties as we might understand them in the democratic world.

The US may very well have got democracy too early, but that is not the problem, the problem is it lacks the essential elements of democracy now.

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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