After more than a year of laughable cheerleading and very telling silence, it seems as if the rest of the “middle class” left is finally waking up to the corporatist reality of Barack Obama’s White House.

I suppose it’s not their fault that they took so long. Indeed, many of them have been so entrenched in and around the Democratic Party that any sign of life is noteworthy.

But what has been especially interesting to note is where their attention has turned to these days: building a new “workers party.”

Take Bill Fletcher of Democratic Socialists of America (a “socialist” appendage of the Democratic Party). In his speech to their Convention last November, recently released and circulated online, Fletcher spoke about how, “It’s Time for the Left to Get Serious.”

For Fletcher, part and parcel of “getting serious” is the building of “a party of the Left, a formation that, while not focused on running candidates for office in the near future, becomes a vehicle to unite activists from various progressive social movements.”

A little farther down the spectrum is an unsigned article from this month’s People’s Tribune, the “mass paper” for the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.

“Nothing can move forward until a broad section of people breaks with the twin parties of corporate power and begins to express itself politically,” states the PT article.

“A workers party is a key ingredient in this process. Here we are not talking about a third electoral party such as the Green Party.... A workers party would be an organizational center for political activity as well as elections. Such a party would create political programs to achieve the immediate demands of the class. Revolutionaries must prepare for and assist in the building of such a party.”

Nice words. But the issue here is not what is being said, but what is not being said.

Traditionally, when the “middle class” left starts talking about needing a “party of the Left” or a “workers party,” it actually means a party where the self-appointed leaders of “progressive social movements” and officials from the corporatist labor unions rub shoulders and make all the decisions, and where the actual workers who are members of the “workers party” are sent out to do menial tasks, like sell newspapers or organize street protests to pressure the Democrats.

To put it another way: the same class-based division of labor we see in capitalist society is replicated in this so-called “workers party,” with the “middle class” managers, officials and professionals acting as the political, theoretical and organizations leaders, while the workers are ... the workers, there to “fill in the gaps” and do the heavy lifting.

While one could certainly call such a creature a “party of the Left,” it is in no way a party of, by or for working people. Rather, it is a leftist party of the “middle class,” dragging the working class behind it like luggage.

While these leftists are welcome to unite behind the corporatist union officials, liberal pressure-group social movements and celebrity-activists they regularly tail, we cannot let them get away with attempting to label such a motley crew as a “workers party.”

There is only one political party in the United States today that is organized, led and fighting for the interests of working people. Yes, that’s right. You’re looking at ’em.

Sure, I expect some of you out there are scoffing at the thought, even laughing at the idea that our small party is the real thing.

That’s understandable. But consider this: For over a century, working people have been told we needed these “middle class” elements to be our leaders. And what has it got us?

More to the point, after more than a century of being told we need such people to lead us, is it any surprise that the first real break away from such a perspective would start small and grow over a period of time?

There is no need to build a sham “workers party” dominated by the “middle class” when working people can join and build the Workers Party — our party, your party. You want to get serious? Then get serious.