File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-07-10.220, message 30


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.


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