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Bad things happen when workers lack political representation.

A major reason why the US welfare state is so meager, its union movement so frail, and its working class so divided is that the United States is the only advanced capitalist democracy where parties of big business have always monopolized the political arena. The morbid symptoms of this impasse are everywhere today, from the rise of Trumpism, to the Democratic establishment’s stubborn opposition to Medicare for All in the midst of a pandemic, to the deepening polarization of national politics along partisan lines free from any focus on redistributing wealth and power.

Identifying this problem, unfortunately, has proven to be much easier than effectively overcoming it. Radicals have tried and failed over the past hundred years to make a clean break from the Democrats and Republicans by founding third parties. Yet realignment efforts to transform the Dems into a social-democratic formation have not been any more successful. In response to these setbacks, some socialists have recently questioned the goal of building a workers’ party with its own ballot line.

Given how much the US Left likes to debate its relationship to the Democratic Party, it’s surprising that nobody has yet drawn lessons from the international example most similar to our own: British socialist efforts a century ago to develop a political voice for working people. Britain’s experience not only illustrates why workers need their own party — it shows how we might get there.

Like the United States today, the UK had an entrenched two-party system in which the Liberal Party was politically hegemonic over workers and their organizations in the late nineteenth century. Aiming to win over the Libs’ working-class base, socialists avoided the twin perils of marginalization and co-optation by organizing in and against the party, building workplace militancy, confronting establishment Liberals when possible, and allying with them when necessary.

The result was a decades-long dirty break, culminating in the founding of the Labour Party in 1906 and its displacement of the Liberals as one of the UK’s two main parties in 1918. Though we can’t predict the exact form that such a break will take in the US context, a similar strategy is our best bet to build independent class power and to win the changes that working people so urgently need.

First Steps

As in continental Europe, working-class politics in nineteenth-century Britain emerged from within organized liberalism. While Conservatives held the support of a sizable minority of workers, most supported the Liberal Party, which was popularly associated with the extension of electoral suffrage and, by the century’s turn, socioeconomic reform.

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