Why America Never Got a Labor Party

Yeah. The question is, why doesn’t the labor movement either create its own labor party, or why doesn’t a labor or socialist party come to the unions in the way you had in Europe? There are a number of factors that go into this, and it’s a matter of judgment which ones you prioritize.

In my opinion, one of the most convincing points the scholarship makes on the fundamental contrast between how and when labor parties rose in Europe and the United States is the fact that, in the very early nineteenth century, the United States was unusual in that it got very close to full enfranchisement for white men across the class divide.

This is what’s called early democratization in the United States. Women still don’t have the right to vote, and of course the enslaved black people in the South had no question of any right to vote. But it’s quite significant that in the North, white men got the right to vote. And even in the South, if you’re a property-owning white man, you’ll have the right to vote. In Europe, this is just not on the agenda. They don’t get full enfranchisement for a hundred years after that. Now, why should that matter?

The reason that matters is that, in the United States, because white men have the right to vote, political parties, which are all elite-dominated, need their votes. And so parties incorporate and co-opt these working-class white men into political networks, even before the trade unions are ever formed. So, in order to advance their economic interests, much of the white working class now has a political outlet without relying on unions.

In Europe, that’s simply out of the question. There, when the working class really started to develop in large numbers — after 1850 — it found itself completely shut out of the electoral system. It had no voting rights. So in Europe, industrialization came before democracy. In the United States, you had democratization before industrialization.

This had huge implications. As their numbers grow, European workers are confronted with needing both political rights and economic protections. So they struggle for trade union rights and for a political party to fight for them at the same time. Because they don’t have any access to politics, all existing parties are dominated by employers and by landlords. So that means, in order to have political representation and political leverage of any kind in an era where they have no real political rights, they have to create parties of their own.

And because the European ruling class has its own parties, and the middle class has access to them, the parties that workers create are by default workers’ parties. They have to be workers’ parties. And because they have to cater to these workers’ needs, they’re not only staffed with workers, their agenda becomes a working-class agenda. And topmost in that agenda is the right to vote. They are demanding the right to vote.

Workers found that their labor parties were fighting for three things: economic protections, legislation that would protect them and allow them to form unions, and representation within the state.

So when the unions came around in the late 1880s and ’90s, it was natural for them to ally with these parties because the parties were already doing the work of fighting for workers’ rights. There’s a natural alliance between unions and labor parties because both of them are shut out of the system.

Both of them came from the same constituency, and that constituency had two kinds of interests: political and economic. And it finds that a political party is the best way to advance its political interests. No other party will do it. And the unions were the best way to advance their economic interests because, of course, employers wouldn’t do it. That’s what’s going on in Europe at that time.

What happens in the United States is that, because they had democratic rights before they could even have unions, when the working class had economic demands, they had some institutional entrée into the state, even though it’s elite-dominated and comes through bourgeois parties.

So American workers didn’t have that same imperative to create their own party. Instead, they formed networks with existing parties and were patronized by those parties to get something out of it. So, over the nineteenth century, through the 1880s and ’90s, the desire, the imperative, the need to form their own party was tremendously weakened. The motivation isn’t there because they already had some kind of access to political institutions. That’s a fundamental difference between Europe and the United States, and the Americans never recovered from it.