Building solidarity.

Solidarity is a key notion on the left. It pops up a lot in leaflets and speeches, in calls to mobilize for demonstrations, attend forums, or participate in boycotts. We call on ourselves to express solidarity with striking workers, with victims of child labor and sweated labor, with Sandinistas, Zapatistas, French transit workers, East Timorese, or the African National Congress.

For all its moral urgency, this notion of solidarity is a member of the same conceptual family as noblesse oblige. It exhorts us to go do something that shows our support for some them, and typically a them someplace else.

I don't mean to dump on this kind of support work; it's important and should be done. It can realize victories that advance progressive interests everywhere, and it can be an indispensable tool for political education. It is also, though, a kind of passive or secondhand politics. It encourages people to respond to injustices committed by the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations against others, not themselves.

I got to see this aspect of the left's rhetoric of solidarity at the Labor Party Founding Convention, where it stood in stark contrast to a different notion of solidarity historically associated with the labor movement. Labor solidarity rests on a more pragmatic foundation. Building solidarity in this context is about constructing and maintaining a we to fight in concert for common objectives.

The slogan AN INJURY TO ONE IS AN INJURY TO ALL isn't just an ethical statement about how we should understand our relations to others. It's a prescription for action: We must treat an injury to any one of us--even those we don't like--as harmful to all if we intend to maintain the unity we need to reach our common goals.

This is the symbolic power of the "Solidarity Forever" lyric, "the union makes us strong."

Workers in a particular shop are in the same basic position and share the same basic interests relative to their employer. Recognizing these common interests is the essence of union, the foundation from which the bargaining unit, the trade-union local, the international, the federation of internationals, and the party arise.

Because its glue is concrete objectives, union solidarity necessarily requires negotiation, compromise, and toleration of difference. It's no accident that trade unions are the most racially integrated voluntary associations in American life. People don't always overcome their prejudices, but they have to learn to accommodate each other. That necessary accommodation, and the pragmatic, mutual interests it serves, can subsequently break down racist, sexist, nativist, or homophobic tendencies.

The labor movement has by no means always lived up to this potential. That's one of the reasons it has fallen on such hard times. Business unionism and willing participation in the system of racial and gender hierarchy have led to defining the boundaries of the "we" too narrowly, even to the point of actively organizing to preserve white, male privilege. Too often, unions have upheld a false distinction between "economic" and "social" issues to avoid challenging racial and gender injustice. Nevertheless, the model of union solidarity is our only path to building the kind of mass movement we need to realize a progressive national and global agenda.

The processes through which the Labor Party's program and constitution were developed and adopted gave an object lesson in the power of union solidarity. The committees that drafted the two documents each worked as a collective.

The program committee, of which I was a member, over a three-day period constructed a program document based on more than 160 resolutions submitted by chapters and individual members, results of research and workshops conducted by the Labor Institute with several thousand unionized workers, and intense deliberation among ourselves. We made all our decisions through deliberation and consensus, talking through each section until we agreed on its substance and language unanimously.

Once the program committee had generated a consensual draft, we met with the constitution committee, made up of representatives of five of the major endorsing union bodies, to receive their suggestions and concerns. Although the committee differed seriously on certain issues, we struggled, negotiated, and compromised until we all could unite comfortably around each section of the program document. Everyone on the committee came away proud of what we had accomplished and enriched by the process.

I know that I'll be grateful forever for the experience of working with a truly exemplary group of colleagues: Howard Botwinick of the Central New York Labor Party Advocates (LPA) chapter; David Campbell of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, Local 1-675; Kit Costello of the California Nurses Association; Linda Jenkins of the Communications Workers of America, Local 1180; Cathy King of the Northern New Jersey LPA chapter; Don DeMoro of the East Bay LPA chapter; Les Leopold and Mike Merrill of the Labor Institute; and Calvin Zon of the United Mine Workers. I treasured the opportunity to partake of their insight, good judgment, principle, and comradeship, and to be part of what may turn out to have been a historic moment with them.

The committees recognized that supporting each other's work without reservation was necessary for moving the convention's agenda along. We also understood that such support could emerge only from a participatory process in which we negotiated consensus on our proposals for the larger body and then explained the consensual positions--including the negotiations and compromises reflected in them--to the constituencies represented. This in turn was the basis for building a wider solidarity, as the union delegations caucused among themselves and determined whether and how to operate as a coherent bloc on the convention floor.

The importance of this solidarity-based democracy was clearest in the debate about electoral politics. A joint proposal from the program and constitution committees prohibits Labor Party entities from running or endorsing candidates for office at least until the 1998 convention. This proposal went to the major union delegations just as the program and constitution drafts had.

One major union delegation, the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU), dissented from the larger union consensus and introduced an amendment from the floor that would have permitted state and local entities to run and endorse candidates. After considerable, lively debate, the amendment was defeated, largely (but not exclusively, since many LPA chapter delegates also voted against it) on the strength of the other unions' bloc voting.

The debate about participation in electoral politics underscored two quite distinct conceptions of politics among the general delegation. On the one hand was an idea of political action that is ultimately a form of bearing witness, taking a public moral stand as a self-justifying act. In this view the most important criteria shaping the positions and strategies that we adopt are existential, primarily a matter of indicating who we are and what we stand for and believe.

On the other hand was a view of politics as an incremental organizing activity. From that perspective, positions and strategies must be tempered by the need to appeal to people who don't already agree with us on all points but who can understand that we address their interests as no one else does.

The practical principle is to try to create a program and vision that can reach and educate the broadest possible base without sacrificing a working-class agenda for governance. This is the mindset, for instance, that shaped the program's emphasis on the economic and class content of what are often characterized as "social issues."

The idea is to build a coalition on the model of union solidarity: developing a base, consolidating it, expanding it, consolidating again, and so on. This is what the joint committee's political-action statement meant by an "organizing model of politics," a strategy based on intensive, issue-based organizing of the old-fashioned shop-to-shop, door-to-door technique. The paramount objective is to reach out to people who aren't already mobilized in left politics, to begin a conversation that builds a movement.

Proponents of the witness-bearing approach came disproportionately--though again not exclusively--from the at-large and chapter delegations, and the union delegations were most solidly rooted in the organizing approach, though many people from the chapters also supported the organizing view. I suspect that the nature of trade-union work imposes a practical and strategic discipline often lacking these days on the left.

These two fundamentally different notions of politics underlay the convention's electoral politics debate. No one who argued for running candidates responded directly on the convention floor to the several, very practical opposing arguments. These were: 1) opting for an electoral strategy would by law cut off access to the trade-union treasury funds needed to finance the Party; 2) a number of key international unions and locals that have endorsed the Labor Party would withdraw their support if we were to enter electoral politics at this point; 3) other unions that would consider endorsing us wouldn't do so if we were to go the electoral route prematurely; 4) we don't have the strength to be successful electorally, and running losing campaigns only demoralizes our base and drains resources because political candidacies are an ineffective vehicle for organizing; and 5) even if we were to win some offices, we aren't strong enough to keep officeholders in line, to keep them from--or help them avoid--rolling over for corporate interests.

The responses to these very concrete and practical points were uniformly abstract and evasively moralistic--the stuff, that is, of bearing witness. (And when did engaging in electoral politics get to be a litmus test for the left anyway? Did I forget to set my watch ahead one morning and miss a big shift?)

The failure of disciplined strategic thinking on the left is a serious problem. It reflects and stems from the extreme demoralization and isolation that has plagued us for two decades. We'll never be able to build the kind of movement we need unless the left can find its moorings and approach politics once again as an instrumental, rather than an expressive, activity. Emulating the model of union solidarity would be a big step in the right direction.