Recently, a group of radical liberals, left-populists and self-described “socialists” penned an open letter to “middle class” liberal stalwarts like filmmaker Michael Moore, The Nation editor Katrina van den Heuvel, academics Barbara Ehrenreich and Michael Eric Dyson, and Democratic Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., etc., appealing to them to help build a protest on Dec. 16 in Washington, D.C., and then join them in a longer-term effort to build “political organizations independent of the Democratic Party and its satellites.”

The ultimate goal of this groveling project is the creation of “viable and competitive third parties” in time for the 2012 presidential sweepstakes. Indeed, the initiators of this new movement even tell us which organizations will be these “third parties:” the “middle class” Green and Peace & Freedom parties, the at-death’s-door Labor Party, and the inept Socialist Party USA. These four are to compose what amounts to a singular party on the federal level,
with “strategic mergers” of state parties to avoid candidates running against each other.

Looking at the authors of this open letter, we can see right away how these four parties became anointed as the vehicles of electoral salvation. Most of the initial signers of the letter are members of the “Avocado Greens” caucus in the GP, collectives like Z Magazine and Monthly Review that want a socialist-tinged populist party like Venezuela’s United Socialist Party of Hugo Chavez, and members of self-described socialist groups like Solidarity, the
Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, and various “left” figures.

It is not unsurprising that such an open letter has been published at this time. With President Obama lining up with Congressional Republicans to impose greater austerity on poor and working people, while at the same time giving hundreds of billions in corporate welfare to the exploiting and oppressing classes, they know that working people and their families will be hit hard, and many workers will be looking for ways to fight this austerity.

However, the goal of this rabble of radical “middle-class” academics and intellectuals, protest politicos, bloggermouths, and dispossessed politicians is not to foster working-class resistance, but to control it — to manage it so workers’ anger and frustrations don’t get “out of hand,” and can then be channeled right back into the corporatist order through elections.

The well-known working-class revolutionary, Eugene V. Debs, described quite well in 1925 what kind of “third party” such a project as that proposed by the authors of the open letter would be: “A ‘third party’ of such a nature would at best align the dwindling ‘little interests’ against the ‘big interests,’ seek to patch up and prolong the present corrupt and collapsing capitalist system, and failing utterly to effect any material change or achieve any substantial benefit would finally fizzle out and add one more to the list of ‘third party’ fiascoes.”

That whirring sound those members of the Socialist Party USA and the other self-described socialist organizations are hearing is Debs turning in his grave so fast that you could use his bones to bore through granite. But we doubt even he could penetrate the thick skulls of those who call themselves socialists (and even Marxists!) want to build this “third party.”

Working people need their own political movement — their own political party; a party composed of, led by, and acting for and in the interests of the 200 million workers and their families. Such a “third party” as proposed by the authors of this open letter would only be a conscious obstacle to the building of a mass party of the working class. The Workers Party not only rejects this project, but will warn workers of the dangers of this “third party.”