Les Leopold has long occupied a distinctive position within American labor intellectual life. Les is part educator, part movement historian, and part strategic diagnostician of working-class decline. As co-founder and executive director of the Labor Institute, he has spent nearly five decades translating the abstractions of political economy into concrete, understandable, and usable tools for union educators and rank-and-file organizers. His work—from Wall Street’s War on Workers to Runaway Inequality—has consistently argued that the central conflict in American politics is not primarily cultural or partisan, but structural: the systematic transfer of wealth and power upward.
The new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own, extends this argument into explicitly electoral terrain. His wager is that working-class Americans already hold broadly shared economic preferences across racial, regional, and partisan lines, but lack an organizational form capable of expressing them independently of the two-party system.
His career emerged in the aftermath of deindustrialization, union decline, and the consolidation of finance capital. Unlike many academic political economists, he has consistently prioritized pedagogy over theory-building: workshops, training manuals, and popular education materials designed to make systemic critique legible to workers themselves.
This orientation matters because The Billionaires Have Two Parties is not written as a theoretical intervention but as a strategic manual. Its empirical backbone is a multi-state poll of working-class voters in the industrial Midwest, which finds broad support for policies such as price controls on pharmaceuticals, limits on corporate layoffs, and expanded public employment. The implication is clear: ideological polarization is far less entrenched at the level of material interest than electoral behavior suggests.
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