Unity in Diversity

Over the weekend of May 2-4, 1997, 150 people from over 90 organizations and from 19 states, the District of Columbia, and Mexico attended the National Independent Politics Summit/97 in Decatur, Illinois.

This was the third Summit in the last 21 months organized by the Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN). From its inception the IPPN has had several distinguishing characteristics: the IPPN has been a multi-racial organization with significant leadership from people of color and a commitment to fighting racism, mainly because the people of color-based Campaign for a New Tomorrow (CNT) has been an initiating force in the organizing. Other initiating organizations which share this perspective are the Greens/Green Party, USA, the National Committee for Independent Political Action, and the Peace and Freedom Party. Without the commitment made by these four organizations, the IPPN would not exist.

The IPPN has been unique in its consistent work to reach out to and attempt to involve all of the main national third party or independent groups in a unified effort.

The IPPN has been explicit about supporting the building of organizational bases and candidates independent of both the Democratic and the Republican parties. The 1996 National Slate of Independent Progressive Candidates brought together 65 candidates; all except two ran on a "third party" line or in non-partisan elections.

Finally, the IPPN has brought together at its national Summits a range of diverse organizations—labor, people of color, women, lesbian/gay/bi-sexual/ queer, youth/ student, Black worker, welfare rights, populist, community-based, socialist, farmer/rural—without their having to submerge their identities. "Unity in diversity" certainly fits as a description of the IPPN.

The Decatur Summit was different from the first two in a number of ways. Most significant was the rank-and-file labor involvement that was much in evidence in Decatur. The IPPN has had connections to there since the 1995 Pittsburgh Summit. In 1995 a coalition of 25 Decatur unions successfully elected a trade union activist to the city council and helped defeat a pro-corporate, anti-labor mayor. In November 1995 three out of four candidates running for School Board on a pro-labor slate won office as voter turnout doubled from the election several years earlier. This combination of militant labor action and independent labor electoral activity was an important IPPN model.

A high point of the May event was a panel on the "Lessons of Decatur" with speakers from the Staleys, Caterpillar, and Bridge- stone/Firestone struggles, as well as from the local Teamsters and AFSCME unions. One key lesson was the importance of the labor movement being true to the old union slogan, "an injury to one is an injury to all." Another lesson, articulated by former Staley worker Lorell Patterson, is the need for labor movement support for community organizations so that labor and community groups can learn to work together.

Summit/97 included a five-hour Mini-Institute on Proportional Representation (PR) & Public Financing of Elections, as well as 14 workshops, including Building Labor/Community Alliances, Dealing With Sexism/Building a Healthy Process, Third Parties Working Together, Working with Progressive Democrats, Campaign for Family Farms and the Environment, Involving Young People in the Independent Political Movement, Living Wage Campaigns, Nuts and Bolts of Independent Electoral Campaigns, Dealing with Racism and Building Multi-Racial Unity, Fund-Raising Strategies, and Labor Law Reform.

Speakers included Larry Solomon, former President of United Auto Workers Local 751, Mike Griffin of the War Zone Education Foundation, Claire Cohen of the Campaign for a New Tomorrow, Kwazi Nkrumah, co-convenor of the Greens/Green Party, USA, Roger Bybee of Wisconsin Citizen Action, Gwen Patton of Project South, Rob Richie of the Center for Voting and Democracy, Veronica Menesis of the National Farmworker Ministry, Mike Ferner, former independent city councilperson from Toledo, Ohio, Karen Kubby, socialist city councilperson from Iowa City, Iowa, and Sheila Garland-Olaniran representing the National Welfare Rights Union.

One of the positive things about Decatur was the number of young people present. This was due in part to outreach by the IPPN as well as the growing involvement of young people in progressive politics.

The Decatur Summit passed a number of resolutions, including endorsements of the June 21 national march in support of the striking newspaper workers in Detroit and the Labor Party’s campaign to amend the Constitution to guarantee a living wage job for all Americans. It elected a new National Steering Committee and affirmed its intention to organize another National Slate of Independent Progressive Candidates.

As positive as the Decatur Summit was, the truth is that the movement for a political alternative to the Democratic and Republican parties has by no means gotten it all together. First, neither the New Party nor the Labor Party sent official representatives to Decatur, despite invitations to do so. However, several leading members and prominent supporters of the Labor Party are on the IPPN Advisory Committee and six Labor Party chapters were represented at Decatur. The Wisconsin New Progressive Party, the New Party’s largest local group is affiliated with the IPPN, and Progressive Minnesota, another New Party chapter, designated a representative.

One reason for the existence of four third party national groups has to do with constituency differences. The Greens are primarily based in the environmental movement, the CNT in communities of color, the New Party in community organizations, particularly ACORN, and the Labor Party in the trade union movement. Although all of them go beyond those primary constituencies, some more than others, there are histories, styles of work and political differences which impact upon the possibilities for unity.

There has been some reluctance, apparently, on the part of the New and the Labor Party to become involved because of a view that the IPPN doesn’t have the resources to become a serious political force. Yes, IPPN has limited resources, but we are not trying to compete with existing third party groups. We are trying to help build a network, not a new organization, that links existing groups and individuals who want to build a unified progressive alternative to the two parties.

Finally, there are strategic and tactical differences in relationship to electoral activity that affect the possibility for unity. In 1992 Ron Daniels, leader of the CNT, ran as an independent candidate for president. A number of Green Party groups supported his candidacy, but neither the New Party nor what was then Labor Party Advocates did. In 1996 the Greens ran Ralph Nader as an independent presidential candidate; neither the New Party nor the Labor Party supported this effort. The New Party has focused on supporting candidates at local levels, a number of them Democrats, most of them running in non-partisan elections, with very few running on a third party line. The Greens, on the other hand, believe that the New Party’s "fusion" approach toward the Democratic Party is, in their words, "confusion" and have run in national and local elections as forget-the-Democrats Greens.

At the Labor Party founding convention in Cleveland last June, the issue of whether to run candidates generated a great deal of debate and behind-the-scenes maneuvering. This led to a compromise which postponed the decision until 1998.

The winner-take-all U.S. electoral system has affected every third party effort down through history, making it very difficult for a new party to gather sufficient energy and a critical mass of electoral victories to become a major force. It is not the only reason for the Left’s weakness in this country—institutionalized racism, government repression and the co-optation of much of organized labor have certainly had a big role to play—but it is certainly the primary electoral reason.

What if a common project was developed to unify the different third party and independent politics groups on a local or state basis to mount campaigns in 1998 and 1999 to change electoral systems to some form of proportional representation? What if, in the year 2000, either by the emergence of an independent presidential candidate who could command the support of all of our groups, or by the dramatic enlargement of an all-parties-developed National Slate of Independent Progressive Candidates such that there were a thousand or more independent candidates signed on, this issue of proportional representation, as well as the many other pressing survival and policy issues, were thrust forward in a major way into the national debate?

There is historic precedent for this. In New Zealand, from 1991 to 1993, five small political parties came together to form the New Zealand Alliance. Their first common project was a national referendum to change New Zealand’s electoral system to a form of proportional representation. As a result of their victory in 1993, the Alliance holds over 10 percent of the seats in Parliament and, with the Labour Party, forms the chief opposition to the government.

We are not going to get a national system of proportional representation by the year 2000, or even 2004. But if all of the third party groups begin to talk together now about the possibilities for joint collaboration on an on-going campaign to change the U.S. electoral system, maybe by the turn of the century we’ll have a U.S. alliance of our own.

 

Ted Glick is the National Coordinator of the IPPN. Some of the analysis here is his and not the collectively-developed IPPN position. Contact the IPPN at PO Box 170610, Brooklyn, NY 11217; 718-624-7807; fax 718-643-8265; indpol@ igc.apc.org; www.ippn.org