PHILADELPHIA — Dennis Richter, the Socialist Workers Party candidate for vice president, spoke at a campaign event here Sept. 21 that drew 21 people. One of the central questions he addressed was the need for working people to organize independently of the bosses, and their parties and government.
“In the ongoing war between labor and capital, the Democratic and Republican parties have no solution for workers,” Richter said. “While the governing capitalist representatives may enact some minor reforms, even these are not lasting. We need to break with the two capitalist parties and build a party of labor, based on the unions.
“When workers have experience and confidence from working together in the class struggle, more will see themselves as a class, begin to understand their power and how to use it.”
And they’ll come to recognize the fact that “every fight is a political struggle,” he added.
During the discussion one participant asked Richter, “Just what is a meritocracy?”
Richter pointed to the book Are They Rich Because They’re Smart? Class, Privilege, and Learning Under Capitalism by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes. It explains that this social layer is “a high-earning and professional and upper middle-class layer. … Its members truly believe that their ‘brightness,’ their ‘quickness,’ their ‘contributions to public life’ give them the right to ‘regulate’ the lives of working people, who can’t be trusted to know what’s in our own interests.”
“The meritocracy claims to ‘feel your pain’ and promises to help the struggling people of the world,” Richter said. “But in reality it is a multiracial layer that fights to maintain the status quo and its own usefulness to the ruling class. The meritocrats fear losing their positions and having to become wage workers like me.”
Kamala Harris and Barrack Obama both rose to prominence out of this layer, which increasingly dominates the Democratic Party today.
In the discussion, Richter also explained what he meant by a party of labor. “Sometimes when I mention a party of labor, people’s frame of reference is in electoral politics.” They think “I’m referring to something like the Labour Party in the U.K. that runs the bourgeois government there.
“But we’re talking about something entirely different — a party of labor based on the trade unions, farmers and all the exploited workers that can bring our weight to bear in the class struggle.
“Our campaign program is straightforward: for workers and their allies to take power from the imperialist rulers and into our own hands,” he said.