Why is this fundamental?
Why is this fundamental?
The WFP seeks to be the political home of the multi-racial working class. In reality, this not where we are now. Changing this orientation is a key shift the WFP must make. Maurice has written that the next task of the US progressives is to “build a multiracial working-class majority big enough to win a transformative agenda that lifts America out of 2020’s roiling crises, and truly transform people’s lives.”
A party for, by, and of the multi-racial working class
It is our goal that the multi-racial working class should be in the leadership of a far-reaching political project that will build governing power and transform our country at the systemic level. The problem is that everything in America is pulling the members of this class in different directions. To the degree that this class is currently consolidating in any way towards a shared political orientation, it is AWAY from our politics. In short, we have been treating the “multi-racial working class” as an answer, but in fact it is an open question that we have yet to systematically address.
We observe that part of the main struggle in America today is the Democratic Party’s strategy to forge an alliance between urban working class voters of color, (multi-racial, but mostly white) urban professionals, and better-educated/higher income swing voters in the suburbs. This Democratic Party strategy is limited and fragile at best, and a generational electoral disaster at worst.
Multi-Racial Working Class: Some general strategic principles
It is tempting to to take a “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach to addressing the challenge of cohering the multi-racial working class into a shared political project. And to some degree geographic differences within WFP states will require a lot of flexibility. However, WFP has lacked a set of general principles to help staff and leadership act in alignment towards the goal of building a political home for the multi-racial working class.
The term “multi-racial working class” gets thrown around a lot, but we wish to define it with precision at WFP. While some use this term to indicate working class communities of color, at WFP we use it to mean a bloc that knits together poor and working people of color (particularly Black, brown, API and indigenous people) with poor and working white people.
We must build multi-racial, multi-geography coalitions. If we are serious about winning governing power, we know we need to build considerable power in working class communities of color in urban areas as the bedrock of our work. And we know that building power in those communities is not sufficient to wield governing power in almost any state. For example, the road to controlling the Senate (and increasingly the House) must run through forging alliances between Black and brown voters on the one hand, and working class white voters on the other, as well as between urban districts and suburban/rural districts.
We must win with the electorate we have, while building the electorate we need. In an ideal world, WFP would recruit and field working class candidates, build multi-racial, working class coalitions of voters behind those candidates, and in the process of doing so grow the base of WFP’s support within these communities. In the real world, we rarely find election opportunities that allow us to do all the things, all at once. Our task is to over time expand the tiers of the working class that we can reliably count as the bloc to elect our candidates. We do this by winning elections with candidates who are compelling to working class voters, and we do it by organizing well upstream from elections. As a party we are committed to working year-round and doing the “two years before the election stuff.” That is, the conversations with local leaders and the organizing we do to cohere a different bloc of voters. The Democrats are not investing in that, but this is the long-term commitment we are making.
WFP must play a role in closing the gap between “the progressive movement” and multi-racial working class communities. This gap – shaped by the professional class composition of many social movement activists – has been exacerbated by a recent turn inwards among many social movements, with a tendency to prioritize correct ideas over building power in working class communities. At the same time there is a huge right-wing effort to convince working class people that there is a “values chasm” between them and progressive activists. Just like we do with working class communities, we should not treat progressive social movements as monoliths; they can be disaggregated. We should practice the discernment to work with the sections of the progressive movement who are explicitly invested in overcoming the divide between progressive movements and the multi-racial working class.
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