Politics is undergoing major change in this country. The corporatization of government has placed severe limits on what the politicians and the two major corporate parties can do. At the same time, the vast majority of Americans face the destruction of their way of life. Today's two- party system is splitting and polarizing, opening the way for something new.

The next stage in the development of the proletarian movement, which may only come together after other attempts at political realignment, will be the development of a working class party that better reflects the interests of those who were once at the heart of the system, but have lost their usefulness to it as technology has replaced them. They are a new class with no ties to capital.

Revolutionaries have an important role to play in the fight of the working class for political independence and have no choice but to participate in each stage of the process, remaining clear about what the needs of the time are, and propagandizing based on what is politically driving the process rather than getting lost in its ups and downs. Remaining disengaged to see what happens or until some "perfect" party arises is not a choice for those who want to influence the process.

Revolutionary activity in this process needs to be guided by an historical and theoretical framework. This article will examine the objective forces that shape how new political parties develop by looking at another major political shift in the U.S., the period that resulted in development of an entirely new Republican Party just before the Civil War. The period when a developing industrial capital was forced to fight for a free labor system in the U.S. provides lessons for our times that can help guide revolutionaries in the current political situation.

Development of the Republican Party

There are several lessons for the modern revolutionary from looking at the objective development of new political parties, specifically at the development of the Republican Party before the Civil War. First, political development goes through particular stages that respond to new technological-economic and social change. Second, this process starts with the destruction of the old party system and creation of a new one. Third, although multiple attempts to build a party responsive to a new political period often take place, the party that succeeds reflects an ability to identify the new needs and how to truly meet them.

Political development in the half-century between 1800 and 1850 went through major change based on the dramatic changes in the economy, geographic size, and population of the United States. The use of the steam-powered cotton gin led to a gigantic increase in cotton production and the expansion of slavery in the agrarian South, while in the North, the use of steam power in factories - and the development of the steamboat, the steam-powered locomotive, and the steam-powered printing press - transformed the means of production, transportation and communication.

As these new technological advances were being applied to production, the possibility of the new United States creating its own market became a necessity for developing the industrial system. The economic foundation of America had been land speculation and a slave system producing for export. A home market, however, required a system of home production and distribution. The construction of the Erie Canal and then the connection of the East and Mid-Western U.S through the railroads in the first half of the 1800s created the conditions for this home market. Fueled by industrial production, this market ultimately meant that the two labor systems within U.S. capital became competing, rather than complementary systems. This competition became the economic engine that drove the nation towards the Civil War and the destruction of the slave labor system.

This same half-century was a time of major social change, driven by the same economic process and affecting the development of a new American politics. Antebellum reform movements, formed around the turn of the century and which peaked in the 1830s and 1840s, were diverse and increasingly broad. Often led by northern evangelical Protestants, they included movements against poverty, poor education, drink, and slavery. An ideology of "free labor" grew alongside and out of these social motions, eventually becoming the integral ideological underpinnings of what became the Republican Party.

The ideology of free labor was based on a different idea of labor than we have today. Everyone directly involved in production of goods, from laborers and farmers, to planters and small businessmen, created "value" and depended therefore on human values such as honesty, frugality, diligence, punctuality and sobriety. This was seen initially in a very different moral light than the moral opposition to slavery. In fact, large sections of the northern working class opposed emancipation, because they feared the effect of large numbers of freed slaves on the labor market.

The anti-slavery movement was small and often isolated from other motions more central to the growing free-labor ideology of industrialism and urbanization. From 1834 to 1838 riots against anti-slavery speakers and the distribution of anti-slavery literature broke out both in the North and the South. In 1835 a mob led abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets by a rope and in 1837 rioters attacked Elijah Lovejoy's press in Alton, Illinois and murdered the editor himself. The clearest, most ardent abolitionists were also often the most anti-political. Only at mid-century did a significant section of the abolition movement, based largely in frustration with the lack of effectiveness of moral suasion, become an active force in creation of a political party that could fight, at least, against the slave power, if not, against slavery itself.

The antebellum period further helps the modern revolutionary understand the objective development of new political parties by showing the destruction of the old party system and creation of a new one. During the American Revolutionary War, the merchant capitalists of the North were united with the slave-owning capitalists of the South in a common fight against the British government's efforts to curtail the economic expansion of all the 13 colonies. The creation of a free-labor economy and society was supported by a free-labor morality and ultimately a free-labor politics.

After the independence of the United States was won, and the Constitution of the United States was ratified in 1788, this unity between Northern and Southern capitalists continued for decades in the new republic. This unity of Northern and Southern capitalists was expressed in the rise of political parties in the United States, which included within the same party representatives of both those who exploited slave labor and those who exploited free labor. The Whig Party and the Democratic Party were both examples of this trend.

However, the political unity of North and South that marked the first decades of the existence of the United States began to split apart in the early 1800s as different political forces attempted to represent the needs of a society that was fracturing politically around the issues of free labor, immigration, and slavery. What began to be the "crisis of the Union" took decades to come to fruition, but ultimately the unity of those political parties, which originally included representatives of both North and South, was broken apart.

The battle was joined when Northern settlers headed west and Southern slave-owners sought new land to replace depleted soil. By the early 1800s, the question was: would the federal territories in the Midwest and West enter the Union as free labor states or slave labor states? In 1854, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act undid the fragile political truce established by the legislative compromises of 1820 and 1850, both of which had permitted slavery in the South, while banning it in the new states in the North entering the Union.

In this environment of turmoil, new parties, including the Anti-Masonic Party, the Liberty Party, the Free Soil Party, and the anti-immigrant Know-Nothing Party, came into being. While many were short-lived, these parties reflected strivings in the social motion to address different aspects of the economic and social situation politically. Those that addressed the central political need of industrial capital, a free labor system, helped pave the way for a new political party that survived, the Republican Party. Those that addressed peripheral issues, like immigration or the gold standard, did not.

The pre-Civil War newly organized Republican Party was not a party of abolition. It did rely, however, on promotion of a new "free labor" economy built around the new technology. Westward migration was seen as a way to turn the "dependent poor" of a new permanent working class into prosperous yeomen farmers. The Party was therefore opposed to the expansion of slavery into the new territories, challenging the old North-South unity.

Furthermore, anti-slavery reformers increasingly understood that their "free labor" society faced the political hegemony of a Southern "slave power," and propagandized the Republican Party to deepen the party members' understanding of what was at stake; if they didn't abolish slavery, they couldn't win the war. Ultimately, the Republican Party went into the war with a platform of preserving the Union, but came out of it as the party of the Emancipation Proclamation.

It took development of a political party that best represented the objective social forces against a slave economy to win the Civil War, but it was the confluence of social, ideological and political factors driven by a new economic reality that allowed that party to reflect the needs of the times.

Lessons for our times

The Republican Party was organized 150 years ago to express a broad agenda to promote "free labor" capitalism. This time around political party development is taking place under qualitatively different conditions. While steam cheapened the value of labor power in the 19th century, the introduction of the silicon chip into production in the 1970's began to replace labor altogether at the end of the 20th century. Human life is becoming worthless within the capitalist system. New economic relations are destroying old social relations in society. The capitalist class is maneuvering to maintain profits and control in an economy that no longer needs the large industrial workforce it needed in the first half of the 20th century. Its agenda today is how to maintain control, not how to provide for the needs of these or any other worker.

As a result, the old bonds that tied workers into the industrial system are being broken, creating a developing new class with no ties to capital. The anti-concession struggle, the struggle against NAFTA and the outsourcing of jobs, social movements against growing homelessness, rebellions in Los Angeles (1992) and other cities against criminal police repression were all reflections of early resistance against the fallout from the changes in the economy. Today a social movement on an even broader basis is beginning with social struggles taking place alongside a process of political polarization.

As in the previous century, a series of new political parties have appeared on the scene over the last two decades. Many reflect the character of the "third" opposition parties that have arisen through U.S. history to advance a particular reform or reforms without challenging the system itself. The formation of the Labor Party in 1996 took an important step beyond "third" opposition parties by establishing an anti-corporate program that was explicit in its class position. Its impetus and support among significant sections of organized labor was rooted in the Democratic Party's NAFTA "betrayal" (signed 1992, implemented 1994).

The Labor Party welcomed the unemployed into its ranks and adopted a specifically anti-corporate program that championed the cause of both employed and unemployed workers. This was an important step forward in the politicization of the struggle and one which revolutionaries wholeheartedly supported. The party formed, however, before the social movement existed that could have sustained it.

Nevertheless, the founding of the Labor Party was an early signal of what is to come. The non-owning class has no choice but to fight for its interests. Practical demands for work, housing, health care, food, and water are determining the character of the social struggle today. It is in the battle for these basic needs, in the battle over whose interests the government will or will not protect, that the participants have the opportunity to develop politically, to recognize the limits of capitalism, and the need to fight as a class.

By directing these demands at the government and exposing class interests, as the fight grips the combatants, revolutionaries fighting within these battles help to form up this new class to prepare for a struggle for power. As more combatants fighting in the interests of this new class see that protecting the private property of a few deprives the vast majority of life itself, it will be possible to develop the leadership necessary to fight to reorganize society so that the wherewithal for life is guaranteed to all.

A social movement requiring a class party is beginning to develop. Impulses toward class unity arising in this movement require not only a break with the old political unity, but efforts to unite an entirely new class to fight for its interests. Ultimately, the goals of the capitalist class require mobilization of a section of society for a fascist solution.

The development of a class party and its political battle for class interests will be both an expression of and a tool to advance our class's political development. We must take this next step if the vast majority of us are to survive and live in peace. Through the work of revolutionaries, the new class can be formed into a political force that operates in accordance with its independent class interests and can move forward toward the transformation of society.

 

October.2008.Vol18.Ed5
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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