Seven Oaks Magazine.

Adolph Reed, Jr. is among the most incisive and engaging political writers and activists in the United States today. A leading figure in the U.S. Labor Party and professor of political science at the New School for Social Research, Reed is the author of several books and essays that appear regularly in leading publications such as The Progressive and The Nation. In a year when the limitations of America’s two-party system are at their most obvious, Seven Oaks editor Charles Demers sat down with Reed to discuss party politics, the war, and broken clocks.

Seven Oaks: I’d probably be safe in assuming that the majority of our Canadian readers would not be familiar with the Labor Party.

Reed: I think so, yeah.

SO: Do you want to just say a few words about that project?

Reed: Sure. The Labor Party was founded in 1996 [with] 1400 to 1600 delegates from nine national unions and 350 to 400 locals and district councils. At the founding convention in Cleveland we adopted a program and a constitution, the basic thrust of which was — the program anyway — was to lay out an agenda for what the country would look like if it were governed by and in the interests of the vast majority of people who live in it. Among the key elements of the program are a call for a constitutional amendment that guarantees every resident of the United States the right to a job and a living wage, a job destruction penalty law that would require any firm with a hundred or more employees that lays off workers as a result of downsizing or outsourcing to pay . . . two months pay, severance, per year for each workers laid off as a result of downsizing, $25,000 per worker to the community to cover the costs of dislocation, revitalization of the public sector . . . a program of national health care, on the Canadian model, basically, with a single payer, and a number of other items. Right now, we’re mainly organising around three issue-based campaigns. One is what we call “Just Health Care,” which is a campaign for national health care, again on a single payer based on the Canadian system. A campaign for free public higher education that would eliminate tuition and fees for all students attending two-year [and] four-year public colleges and universities. And a campaign for worker rights.

SO: Now, the States is pretty much the only wealthy industrialized country that doesn’t have a broad, labour-based political party, no?

Reed: That’s correct, and we think that’s one of the reasons that we have the bizarre kind of welfare state that we have.

SO: The third party that’s gotten the most attention in the last few years, though, hasn’t been the Labor Party but the Green Party, and then Ralph Nader just as an individual. Have people in the Labor Party seen the emergence of the Greens as a positive or detrimental factor?

Reed: That’s a good question. Some of our members — we adopted an electoral strategy at our convention in 1998 and it’s different from the way the Greens operate. The Greens’ view is that you can build a movement through running electoral campaigns, and we take a different view. We’re not at odds and, in fact, the Green Party and Ralph’s campaign in 2000 adopted our program as their economic program, actually. We didn’t support Ralph; we don’t endorse non-Labor Party candidates. We don’t think that you can build a movement through running candidacies at the national level or the local level, and we do think there’s no substitute for organizing on a grassroots basis. And what the experience of the last 20 years has shown, or the lesson we take from the experience of the last 20 years is that we’ve been out-organized by the Right, and that we need to focus on trying to rebuild the base for our kind of politics.

SO: So what would be the view of the emergence of a candidate like Dennis Kucinich who, during his candidacy, it seems, reached some people with what some are terming a ‘progressive vision’?

Reed: Yeah, well I think a lot of our members liked Kucinich’s campaign, liked Kucinich’s ideas — I think most of us did. I think he actually adopted our higher ed[ucation] campaign. We were on a program together in South Carolina and afterward he started talking about free higher ed[ucation], which is great. We felt all along that our issues were the key issues and you can adopt the issues without adopting us, basically. We didn’t think that Kucinich’s campaign had a chance to get off the ground, because of the way the money interests control the Democratic Party. I guess one way I tend to think about this is that, at some point, if and when we become strong enough, progressive Democrats like Kucinich, and maybe some others like my late friend Paul Wellstone would have left the Democratic Party to run under the Labor Party aegis. But we’re not strong enough, yet, to do that.

SO: From the outside looking in, this election seems more crucial, or somehow more important than past elections. Or at least that’s the way it’s being painted, that this is an indispensable election. Would you agree with those views?

Reed: Well, I’ll say this: Almost all of our affiliates, right, all of our trade union affiliates are committed to the view that George W. Bush has to be gotten out of the White House. And I can say personally, and this is not speaking for the Labor Party, that I think this is the most dangerous administration that’s been in the White House in my lifetime and probably 150 years, last hundred years at least. Having said that, I think it’s also the case that no matter which way this election comes out, we’re going to face the same problems on the Wednesday after the election as we faced on the day before, and we need to be prepared to organize, to keep organizing, and to hit the ground running the day after the election no matter which way it turns out. Yes, I think George Bush needs to be defeated, there’s no question about that. But you know, John Kerry’s not — he has his own contradictions; I’ll put it that way.

SO: Well, I mean even a broken clock is right twice a day —

Reed: [laughs] I love that phrase, by the way.

SO: Yeah, it’s one of my favourites. The Republicans have tried to paint him as a plutocrat who’d be totally out of touch with American working class needs — left to stand on its own, I don’t see any problems with that sentence.

Reed: It’s kind of true. He’s been the tool of Wall Street as much as many of the other Democrats have been. It’s sort of ironic, and it’s kind of interesting for us to figure out how to work around [the fact] that the Republicans have been able to use the language of populism to fasten some section of American workers onto what’s really a reactionary political agenda that undermines their own interests. And again, I don’t think this is something that can be really over the course of an election cycle. I certainly understand that people get really concerned about the danger posed by the Bush administration and want to do something about it, but it’s also the case that we didn’t get into this situation overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight. We need to maintain a perspective that looks down the road. Which is not to say that we kiss off the 2004 elections. It’s kind of like what the Chinese used to call “Walking on two legs” — you’ve got to be able to fight the struggle we have to fight today, and not lose sight of the more important struggles we have to fight down the road.

SO: Okay, keeping on this subject of a broken clock, and how it’s right twice a day, and also right-wing populism which is, of course, an issue in Canada and the States — like it did around issues like free trade, NAFTA, the hyper-chauvinism of rightists like Pat Buchanan has provided a space where people can be critical of, and even oppose, the war in Iraq, while staying within the framework of this macho, conservative ethos. Is that an opportunity for progressives to point out the dissonance in the right wing message, or have those people arrived at that conclusion already too far-gone?

Reed: That’s a really good question. I think it depends. There’s been some debate inside the Left about how to think about things like the militia movement, right? And I guess my take on that is that there are some people who are committed ideologues, and committed racists and committed xenophobes, and you can’t do much with them. I think it’s a waste of time to try and win people away from that sort of ideology once they’re committed to it. However, I think that it’s also the case that there’s anxiety and concern out there, and the Democrats aren’t really speaking to it. And we’ve been saying from the beginning, for us, that the real question is who is going to speak to, who is going to give credible and effective voice to, the concerns that working people have? The Democrats have abdicated the field, and it looks like it’s the right wing, or the dangerous forces around Buchanan and others, or people like us. May not be us necessarily, but people like us, who can speak openly and honestly from within the class. And I think that’s a big challenge for us, and I think that’s a struggle that we need to fight. Their opposition to the war is ambivalent, in many ways. You know personally, I know one of my frustrations constantly — feels like a lack of empathy that so many people have. It frustrates me, for instance, that so many people seem to hear the word ‘occupation’ and . . . not understand that once you start out with ‘occupation,’ then Abu Ghraib is an inevitable outcome. Of course, it’s not — and the evidence is coming out now — of course it’s not an isolated incident, it’s part of a pattern, because that’s what occupation is. I think Americans have been very fortunate, and this is not a novel observation, they have been very fortunate in that there hasn’t been a serious war fought on American soil under the conditions of modern warfare, so it’s easy for people not to understand that there’s not such thing as a ‘smart bomb,’ you know, that you don’t target a bomb that hits the level of the flat where the terrorist live and not kill people next door to him. I do find myself getting really, really upset and frustrated at what seems to be a fundamental lack of human empathy that you can’t imagine we’re killing people. We’re killing innocent Iraqis, and others. But it’s also the case, and this doesn’t get reported, this doesn’t show up in the news at all, that very many people in this country, even — perhaps especially — in the so-called ‘heartland,’ where people are supposedly conservative, who are very much concerned about this war. They’ve been concerned about it even before the invasion of Afghanistan, because it’s their kids who are going. It’s the sons and daughters and husbands and wives of the Wal-Mart clerks who are going to fight this war.

SO: You said that abuses like we saw at Abu Ghraib go back to ‘occupation’ — some might say they go back to San Quentin. Or, you can’t have a president who was the governor who carried out the most executions of any governor in U.S. history — that of course those kinds of abuses would be exported to Iraq.

Reed: Absolutely. I think there’s no question of that. And I saw a couple of days ago that the Defence Department lawyers had given Bush briefs that indicated he’s above the law, he doesn’t have to respond to any law — which on the one hand is outrageous, and on the other hand just underscores the way they’ve been operating since the very beginning. But I think that’s right.

SO: In your essay on “Fayttenam” you talked about GI mobilizations against the war, which I think is an episode of U.S. history most Canadians have never heard about. Could you briefly tell us about it?

Reed: Sure. That’s one of the untold, or the forgotten stories of the Vietnam War. There’s a great book by H. Bruce Franklin called Vietnam and Other American Fantasies that documents a lot of this. The big story of the anti-Vietnam war movement in the U.S. was the movement inside the military. By 1970-71 the army was beginning to dissolve from within, not just soldiers on the ground in Vietnam but sailors, who were insulated, right? I mean you can’t say the soldiers were concerned about being killed, because all they did was launch the B-52s. But they sabotaged the main aircraft carriers in the Pacific theatre. Even at the beginning of the war, or the pre-beginnings in 1947, there were mutinies of American merchant marines who were held up from de-mobilizing to support the return of the French troops to Indochina, and their argument against it was that they didn’t fight WWII to reinstate French colonialism in Indochina. And this is part of the story that’s completely untold. But there was very significant, substantive opposition to the war that mushroomed among the troops in the field [that made] the military extremely concerned by 1969-1970.

SO: Does a move away from the draft or conscription-based army make that kind of development less likely today?

Reed: It has so far, and that’s one of the principle reasons why they moved away from it. Now the problem is that they’re selling the military now sort of in the same way they tried to sell it then. You go into the army, you learn some skills, you get money for college. Not only do they not pay off with the college money, but more and more people are understanding that they don’t want to be there. And there’s been expressions of opposition from troops in the field in Iraq so far that we didn’t see in Vietnam until much later in the war. I read about a year ago that when the U.S. military put out these playing cards with the main Ba’ath demons, the troops had put out their own that had Rumsfeld and Bush on them. And this is early on. I think another untold story of this war is the mobilization of parents and spouses of the troops over there, who are in opposition. There’s very, very significant opposition to this war among the American people.

SO: The crisis of legitimacy that is coming from this quagmire in Iraq — is there any chance of that compounding the corporate crises of legitimacy that we were starting to see with things like WorldCom and Enron? For people like yourself who are working to make those links clearer do you find — as terrible as this sounds — any hope in these kinds of developments?

Reed: That’s another interesting question. I think you put your finger on the nub of the issue — that the connections don’t get made spontaneously, and that it really takes political organizing to get past the fog of propaganda that comes from the corporate media. I don’t know, I’m hopeful. I think there’s a lot of suspicion, right, across the board. Even among people who vote Republican, or a lot of people who vote Republican. There’s a lot of suspicion about this government, and it’s not just this administration, but the entire government. There’s a lot of suspicion about corporate irresponsibility, and corporate theft. The problem is that it just needs to be galvanized, to take a political expression. And that’s the hard part. But that’s what we’ve got to do.