How to Build a Labor Party:

Our Approach to Labor Party Advocates

From International Trotskyist No. 4, Fall-Winter 1991.

Introductory Note: One of the fundamental tenets of Marxism is that the working class must achieve political independence from bourgeois parties in order to free itself to overthrow capitalism. In the United States in particular, many Marxists believe that the formation of a Labor Party would be a desirable step in this direction. In 1991, Workers’ Voice (under its original name, Revolutionary Trotskyist Tendency) published this article discussing the organization then known as Labor Party Advocates, and analyzing how the left should approach it.

In 1996, five years after this article was published, Labor Party Advocates purportedly transformed itself into an actual Labor Party. Unfortunately, this did not represent any reduction in the level of organized labor's support for the Democratic Party. In recent years, little has been heard of the Labor Party. As of March 2009, its official website shows no sign of having been updated since 2006. (Click here to open the website in a new window.) Reading our 1991 article on Labor Party Advocates should demonstrate why none of this surprises us.

Click here to view text of article in a new window: How to Build a Labor Party

Humanists for Revolutionary Socialism was founded in 2008 by a group of former members of the now-defunct organization Workers’ Voice (formerly RTL, formerly RTT), and carries on its political tradition. To that end, our website includes scanned copies of selected articles from International Trotskyist, our predecessor group’s theoretical journal. Click on the article title below to open it as a PDF file, which you can read online or print. To open the file, you will need a PDF reader, such as Adobe Reader® (available as a free download from Adobe’s Website).

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