A conversation with Adolph Reed, Jr.

Stay focused on the long run

Adolph Reed, Jr. has been a core Labor Party leader since the party's founding. A member of the Interim National Council, he's also been active in the Chicago chapter, and has spoken to union and community groups around the country about the need to build the Labor Party. This year, he relocated from Chicago, where he taught at Northwestern University, to the New York area, where he'll be teaching at the New School for Social Research.

Photo: ©Michael Kaufman

One thing that I've figured out in the course of our work so far is that it's a slower and more painstaking process to build this party than many of us had imagined that it would be - and I never did think it would be easy. Even with the best intentions, gearing up any union body, from a local union to an international, is like steering a battleship. It takes a long time to get everything in place. It takes a long time to get the institutional optic into focus - even after you make the formal determination that that's what you want to do. And then it takes a long time after that to figure out how best to operate and implement internal recruitment on the ground inside the union.

And all that's assuming an unambiguous commitment to the Labor Party. I think this is partly just because of the nature of unions - they're like any big organization. And unions also have a lot of other stuff on their plates to deal with. They're getting whacked a lot.

I think one of our challenges has been to find a way to instill in union staffers and stewards and rank and file activists a sense that doing the Labor Party work isn't an additional task, but rather part of everything else they're doing, part of internal union education and organizing It's almost like there are brain lesions - things that are obvious to do, but people just don't think to do them in this context.

We do need people, basically staff, to help encourage and support the Labor Party organizing that unions are doing. I think we really need internationals to pony up some staff members, and for the state parties - which will be anchored in unions - to designate staff people to do the routine Labor Party work.

That's on the union side. On the community side, I think we've learned the same lesson. It's hard and it takes a long time to build. It's by and large true that in the unions, you're building the Labor Party one member at a time. But it's definitely true in the community work. And the challenge is to stay focused on the long run and to resist the temptation to think about overnight goals, because it will just make you frustrated.

I think there's a temptation to want to broaden the scope of the Labor Party - both territorially (moving to bigger Labor Party units) and functionally (having the Labor Party do a lot of different things). But I think that since we're trying to build a membership organization with practically no paid staff, what we need to do is move in exactly the opposite direction - to move to smaller and smaller units. I think the key is finding small groups of people who can take on small, not too daunting tasks - tasks that they can fit around the other work they do in their community. We need to find people who will take responsibility for putting the sign up in the bodega, or making a pitch at their block club meeting, or signing up people in their building. The kind of tasks that don't put heavy burdens on people, that don't require them to become full-time organizers. It's pretty much the way a political machine operates. I tell people, Amway should be our model!

So thinking about the 28th Amendment Campaign, for instance... We were always very clear that the real power of this campaign was getting out and making connections with people in the community. Nobody who has gone out has had any trouble getting people to sign the petition. Everybody who's gone out has had a lot of trouble getting people to join the Labor Party, or to host meetings in their neighborhood. The strategy we stumbled on in Chicago is that you target a neighborhood, identify activists in that neighborhood, and then have one-on-one meetings with them. You work out relationships with those activists and organizations. Then, in a way, you can use the 28th Amendment Campaign to consolidate your relationships - which is kind of the inverse of the way we imagined this work originally.

I don't see diving into electoral work as the way to organize the Labor Party. I think we need to be very careful about it. There's a lot at stake. The moment we launch any kind of electoral campaign, we've got all these funding questions to deal with. And the last thing we want to do is jump out there in an election where we can only get ten or fifteen percent of the vote.

My hope for the convention is that we have good discussions on the issues that people are concerned about, like the electoral proposal - but that the focus be on organizing. I hope we have a lively discussion on organizing and that we leave with the central commitment to put organizing above everything else. We need to recognize that we are in this for the long term, and that we've got to be able to build a membership base to be able to do anything - including the electoral work, if that's what floats your boat.

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