Following the Democratic Party’s 2024 loss – made possible by the Democrats’ longer-term abandonment of their working-class base in favor of “moderate” wealthy suburbanites and Wall Street financiers – it’s worth returning to the experience of the US Labor Party in the 1990s.

The limits of that effort are well know; most obviously, there’s no Labor Party today. But it is equally clear that failing to develop a working-class alternative to the Democratic Party will only result in workers continuing to drift into the arms of an ascendent right-wing MAGA politics. A new approach to labor left politics is desperately needed.

That’s what this event tries to begin to think through by asking: What lessons can be learned from an earlier effort to organize an independent labor party? What did it take to launch the US Labor Party in 1996? How can that effort inform current work to build a serious, working-class alternative to the two corporate parties?

Panelists:

• Carl Rosen, General President, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America. Former participant in the Labor Party organizing efforts.
• Katherine Isaac, coordinator Campaign for Postal Banking at the American Postal Workers Union. Former Secretary-Treasurer of the Labor Party.
• Howard Botwinick, Associate Professor of Economics at SUNY Cortland, former Vice Chair of the New York Labor Party.
• Mark Dudzic, longtime union activist and former national organizer of the Labor Party, and current chair of the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.

Sponsored by DSA National Labor Commission, Socialist Register, Rank & File Project, UAW Region 9A, United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America.