From: "Tom Condit" <tomcondit-AT-igc.apc.org> Date: Mon, 10 Jun 1996 18:19:48 +0000 Subject: Labor Party convention A New Organizing Approach to Politics As passed by the Labor Party Convention, June 8, 1996 [This is the revised resolution submitted jointly by the Constitution and Program Committees, as amended from the floor by delegates from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Caucus. The SEIU amendment deleted repeated references to recruiting "hundreds of thousands" of members before the Labor Party would engage in electoral activity. (The SEIU Caucus had originally moved to strike the entire last paragraph, but dropped that proposal.)] Our labor party exists in order to build a powerful movement around our new agenda for working people that promotes and protects our rights. We believe that the best way to build this movement is to develop a new, dynamic organizing approach to politics that rejects politics as usual. * Our organizing approach to politics will promote a new agenda by recruiting and mobilizing hundreds of thousands of working people to engage in common non-electoral political activities throughout the year, not just on election day. * Our organizing approach to politics will recognize that electoral action comes only after recruiting and mobilizing workers with sufficient collective resources to take on an electoral system dominated by corporations and the wealthy. * Our organizing approach to politics will rely on building a movement that promotes actions to force elected officials and candidates to speak to our issues as we define them. Therefore, we propose that the Labor Party commit its resources to a strategy based on mass recruitment and political actions that go beyond the electoral process to shift the national debate towards our agenda. * We call on the Labor Party to mobilize working people in a bold experiment to develop effective -- non-candidate / non-electoral -- political actions that turn our organizing approach to politics into reality. * We call on the Labor Party to develop innovative organizing efforts, such as a campaign to restore the right to organize a union, or a constitutional amendment campaign to put the right to a decent job at a living wage directly into the Constitution. * We call on the Labor Party to go union to union, local to local, door to door to gather support for the Labor Party and its program. * We call on the Labor Party to call a second convention in two years to assess our campaigns, our recruitment process, and to develop the next steps to building our new organizing model of politics. * Finally, the Labor Party shall appoint a committee on developing our future electoral strategy to report to the second Labor Party convention. The Labor Party will not endorse candidates of any kind, will not run people for office, and will not spend any Labor Party resources on electoral campaigns, before an electoral strategy is adopted by a national Labor Party convention, nor before we prove capable of recruiting and organizing sufficient numbers of working people around a new agenda. --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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