Why is this fundamental?
Why is this fundamental?
We are building a political party. In America’s rigidly two-party system, this is a proposition full of contradictions. We engage in this challenging task in a way that is “non-delusional.” Meaning, we expect a high level of discipline to the task of strategically building power based on the opportunities that are available to us at any given time and in any given geography. We realize that we do not have the luxury of not caring about election outcomes – the lives of our people and our communities depend on it.
Are we a party or a faction?
There is a question that has nagged at us since our founding – is WFP a faction of the Democratic Party, or are we an independent party? The short answer is: both. For people who have been on the journey with the WFP for a while, this balancing act will be familiar. But for those who are new to the party, this can be very confusing. For new employees of the party it can feel disorienting. For organizations or individuals who we are recruiting to be part of our political project it can be perceived as strategic incoherence or a lack of a clear ideological orientation…or just delusional!
In the end, we are both a party at the same time we aspire to be a party. This is the idea of “party as a process.” Here's an analogy that may help to understand what we mean. In the early days of the US labor movement, unions were illegal. They were considered criminal conspiracies. Workers had to fight for unions to be able to exist. The way they did this was by acting like a union.
At the WFP, we are doing the work of a party even when the laws in the country make it very hard to challenge the two-party cartel. We are clear-eyed about this contradiciton. We have spent more than two decades finding ways to win despite the rules being stacked against us, all while making strategic plays to change the rules and un-rig the system.
The party as infastructure
Most WFP voters (and many people who volunteer with WFP, for that matter) will not need to understand what makes us a party in order to be motivated to support our candidates. What’s more, most people who come into contact with our party will not want to join us because we tell them that we are a party. Rather, they will want to join because they have an experience of political empowerment that being part of a party can give them.
However, for WFP staff and our key leaders (including our closest elected allies), it is important that we have a clear understanding of what we mean when we say the word “party.” In the past, we have used a definition that included four parts: A party is 1) people coming together, 2) to engage in elections, 3) in order to advance a platform, 4) guided by a clear ideology. However, this definition is overly broad and could apply to organizations that do not have party aspirations, let alone the word “party” in their names!
Therefore, let’s deepen our understanding. Parties structure electoral competition and to do so they have or are building certain kinds of infrastructure.
Why are organizations fundamental to WFP’s model?
Why are organizations fundamental to WFP’s model?
Both nationally and in state chapters, it is an essential part of the WFP identity and strategy to build through and with member organizations, primarily labor unions, other worker-centered organizations, community-based groups and advocacy organizations. While we also want to recruit individual members, starting with existing organizations is a priority. Why?
We are seeking to be a party of the multi-racial working class. To do that we need to consciously reach beyond the white intellectual progressive elite. Over the past four decades, the Democratic Party has increasingly abandoned the working class, and while there is residual loyalty given the pro-worker, New Deal history of the Democrats, an alarming number of working class voters, not just white but increasingly people of color as well, are dropping out. Others are turning to the Republicans despite, or in some cases because of, their toxic version of working class politics. It is the mission and the strategy of the WFP to provide another narrative and political reality.
The vast majority of working class people have never heard of the WFP and are unlikely to be reached through our social media efforts given the silos we all occupy in cyberspace. To reach any kind of scale, we need to reach people through the unions and community organizations that have already done the work of building a working class base. If we can persuade those organizations to affiliate with the WFP, we then have the opportunity to reach their members with our message. Once an organization has agreed to affiliate, we need to focus on this second step, reaching out to their members to also join the WFP as individual members, and vote for our candidates. This should be part of the agreement, or at least part of the conversation, when affiliation is discussed. In some cases, we work closely with an organization and their members first, and that leads to affiliation.
Labor unions, community groups and advocacy organizations bring political credibility and visibility to the WFP. Their affiliation with WFP sends a message not only to their members but also to the political actors, the press, and the general public that the WFP plays a role as the electoral arm of those organizations. It transforms the WFP into an aggregator of political power and experience, rather than just one more “non-profit organization” or advocacy organization in a crowded field. Our pathway to progressive power depends upon us being able to aggregate, align and build upon the power of our member organizations and members.
Member organizations can provide substantial financial support to the WFP and to the candidates we support. While individual donations are necessary, aggregated funds from other PACs are game changers. It provides a credible counter-weight to corporate PACs and that credibility encourages and multiplies individual donations as well. While many member groups don’t contribute significant resources, those that do can significantly increase our impact.
Why are individuals fundamental to WFP’s model?
Why are individuals fundamental to WFP’s model?
We are organizing individuals at different levels of engagement within the WFP. All these levels of engagement really matter to our ability to win elections, grow and wield governing power, and build a political party. Depending on your role within the party, or the particular circumstances of an election, or the stage of development of your state or place-based chapter, you might focus on one group of individuals more than another. Building any of these groups counts as organizing at the WFP. However, a mature WFP structure should have them all. That is, you might have a particular election that isn’t building Leaders and Party Stewards in a meaningful way, but you shouldn’t come to the end of a year or two organizing in a place and still not have begun to build these groups.
It is actually possible to win elections without a large base of committed individual Activists and Leaders. But it is impossible to build durable governing power without them. In an ideal world we would be winning elections by leveraging the power of a strong base of Activists, Leaders and Stewards. But our experience has been that this is not a precondition for electoral victory. However, just winning elections is not enough for sustaining our power. Therefore, just being a successful “electoral shop” is not what we seek. Investing in developing a base of committed individuals who vote, volunteer, fund, and steer the WFP is the key that unlocks our ability to hold governing power over time in any geography.
Having our own base of individuals is a source of independent power. For often very good reasons, member organizations of the WFP have to take politically cautious positions. For example, their need to represent their member’s interests in the legislature can create a tendency towards supporting incumbents, or defining the alignment of elected officials in overly narrow terms defined by organizational self-interest. However, having an active base of individuals inside the party can create a counterweight to these tendencies.
The roles individuals can play at WFP represent different levels of commitment, responsibility, and closeness. We should not expect individuals to travel between these groups in an exclusively linear way. For starters, most people at each level won’t move “up,” and that is okay. We need far more voters in the world than we need Activists or Leaders. People might also move “down” – their lives and level of interest in politics may change over time. Most importantly, plenty of people will enter the party at the level of Leader, not by moving up from our Activist ranks, but rather because they are institutional or community leaders in their own right. We want a mixture of origins, roles, and tendencies in a healthy group of Party Stewards.
An enormous part of the role of WFP organizers in our model is leadership development. We have and will continue to generate lots of political education content that can serve as an entry point to the party, inviting people to become Members, Activists and voters; train Activists to do good work; and help develop the skills and ideology of Leaders. Woven into all of this, it is the job of WFP organizers to help make meaning of political events, illuminate the political landscape, and tell the kind of stories and encourage the kind of discussions that generate political sophistication.
Today, we probably have only a handful of people we would call Party Stewards in the whole country. These are people with a high level of political sophistication combined with a deep and unwavering dedication to building the WFP. However, if every chapter had 2-5 Stewards, combined with some national ones, those people could have an exponential impact on WFP’s growth as a party. They would contribute electoral expertise as well as strategic thinking and mutual ownership of WFP.
Therefore, we must prioritize developing Stewards, NOW! But developing this level of party leadership takes time, collective work and discussion, led by senior WFP staff and organizers. We currently have no program for recruiting or developing leaders with the experience and political sophistication, usually from other arenas, movements, or institutions, to become WFP Party Stewards, so this will need to be developed.
Why are governance structures fundamental to WFP’s model?
Why are governance structures fundamental to WFP’s model?
WFP benefits from having a balanced governance structure of institutions and individuals. It is often the participation in discussion and debate around endorsements that is most productive for building WFP as a party. Individuals often pull institutions to be more radical and institutions often pull individuals to be more strategic. The WFP is governed at the national level by the Working Families Party National Committee (WFNC)
In most cases, the work of WFP governance happens at the state level. and is called a State Committee. Political Parties in the United States are primarily state and local formations, due to the way the laws that govern our elections are structured and the entire system is organized. We’ve made an intentional decision to build vibrant state party structures where institutions and individuals who represent the working class can come together to make decisions on strategy and politics, and in particular our candidate endorsements. Specifically, we have decided that these governing bodies should include labor unions, community based organizations, individual activists, and social movement leaders.
As we have become a national party, we have also been investing in building a national governing body. The Working Families National Committee (WFNC) plays formal roles such as chartering new states and accepting new national organizational members, settling state-level disputes, and determining and running the party’s presidential endorsement process. It also serves informal functions such as being a place for State Chapter leaders to meet and learn from colleagues in other states. And it is a hub for the ideological and strategic alignment of the party. The Working Families Executive Committee (WFEC) is elected from members of the WFNC every two years. The WFEC serves as the governing body of the party when the WFNC is not in session, and it therefore generally has a more robust role in determining the strategy and direction of the national party.
The make-up of our governing bodies is rooted in our political analysis and goals – we need to assemble a coalition capable of winning governing power. One of the fundamental principles that the WFP was founded upon, and is true on both the state and national level, is that building a political party capable of having the power we want it to have requires that we organize both individuals and organizations. It is incredibly rare in politics that a single constituency or affinity group can amass a majority of anything on their own. We believe we need to hit the sweet spot of assembling the coalition of forces that we need to build a multi-racial working class voting and governing bloc. Therefore we do the work to bring these forces together with all of their different orientations and experiences and analysis. It is what defines the politics of the WFP.
It is clear that our state committees also contain some of the core antagonisms of race/class/gender inside the left’s potential governing coalition. We don’t shrink from that. We lean into it. And because of that, and the binary nature of political decisions, it's hard to hold our coalition together. But that’s our job. It’s not our job at all costs, but it is our job because it's a prerequisite for durable power.
Page updated
Report abuse