Third Party | The Digital Dispatch

The historical precedent for this strategy presumes that there must first be an independent organization of the working class. One that is cohesive, disciplined, powerful, and ready to guard its independence with ferocity. If such an organization were to exist today, then perhaps that organization could use a major party ballot line to further build power and momentum for a few years prior to a pre-planned break.

It is silly, in my view, to try to shoehorn any of the current crop of folks who are using the Democratic Party ballot line, into a strategy which requires conditions that don’t currently exist.

In other words, if you’re citing the prospect of an eventual break from the Dems as part of your justification for supporting a candidate with a D beside their name, thinking that power will be built first within the two-party system and then lopped-off in a way that it will accrue to an independent party of the working class, I think that you have it precisely backwards.

From Socialist Worker:

The Democratic Party is a capitalist party, not a party representing the working class. No matter who votes for it–and, of course, the majority of Democratic voters are workers–the party apparatus itself is set up to reflect, and to some extent, organize the political interests of big business.

The mechanisms by which this takes place are hidden in plain sight: a campaign finance system that channels corporate money to political candidates; a network of think tanks and academic institutions that articulate the positions of Corporate America; a lobbying machine that applies continual pressure to legislators, the executive branch and the unelected government bureaucracy, at the federal, state and local level, to carry out the corporate agenda.

Read the full editorial. Declaring independence from the 1 Percent | SocialistWorker.org.

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