Interview by Derek Seidman

In the 1990s, hundreds of US labor activists came together to form the Labor Party. The initiative was the brainchild of Tony Mazzocchi, the passionate leader of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union (which, after two mergers, is today part of the United Steelworkers).

Mazzocchi held true to the dream of an independent political party rooted in the labor movement over which working people would have ownership. He was fond of saying: “The bosses have two parties. We need one of our own.”

By the mid-1990s, it seemed as if Mazzocchi’s dream was on its way to becoming a reality. In June 1996, nearly 1,500 trade unionists met in Cleveland to found the Labor Party. It was an impressive turnout, marked by a sense of excitement and debate as well as daunting challenge.

By any measure, the delegates had a formidable task ahead of them. Periodic attempts to form labor parties in the US, going back as far as the nineteenth century, had all eventually failed. But coming out of the 1996 convention, the Labor Party had strong leadership, institutional backing, favorable external conditions, and high hopes.

A decade after the founding convention, the Labor Party still existed in name, but outside of a few local pockets it was essentially defunct. For several years it twisted and turned through a series of interesting experiments and navigated some tricky internal tensions. Organizers did their best to sustain the Labor Party through difficult circumstances. But ultimately it failed to last.

It is still hard to find much thoughtful analysis of the history of the Labor Party and the lessons we could derive from it. (An exception is a 2012 essay by Mark Dudzic and Katherine Isaac.) This is unfortunate, because many of the dilemmas that the Labor Party confronted remain with us today.

Moreover, its strategies for overcoming those obstacles and its vision of how a genuine working-class party should operate may prove useful in thinking about how to move beyond the current impasse. It’s vital that we engage with the history of the Labor Party in order to make better sense of the path forward.

This interview is meant as a contribution to that process of reflection. It is intended to serve as both an introduction to the history of the Labor Party and a critical look at its life and legacies. It surveys the lead-up to the Labor Party’s founding, its basic goals and philosophy, its strategic orientation, and its development over the course of a decade.

It gauges the party’s successes, shortcomings, external obstacles, and internal debates. It also tries to extract lessons from the Labor Party’s history and to offer some insight into the perils and promise of the current conjuncture.

Mark Dudzic has a long history in the American labor movement. He became the national organizer of the Labor Party after the death of Tony Mazzocchi in 2002. Before that, he was president of Local 8-149 of OCAW for nearly two decades. He is currently the national coordinator for the Labor Campaign for Single Payer Healthcare.

A unifying thread over the course of Dudzic’s career has been his constant engagement with broad questions of how to strengthen labor’s power and independent political voice. As Dudzic says below, “We need to encourage a broad and open discussion of Labor Party history and lessons within the labor movement.” This interview was done in that spirit.