This piece originally appeared in our recent print edition of the Post-Democrat.

Each year, the Democratic Party proffers up candidates totally detached from the reality of working class people. Each year, they swindle billions in campaign donations and corporate financing to line the pockets of candidates whose net worth would give the average voter a heart attack. Each year, millions of Americans fall slowly back into the dull rhythm of reformism. Regardless of the “actual” outcome of any given election, the winners and losers are often the same; the two parties win, and the people lose.

It’s time to break the duopoly and acknowledge the facts: the Democratic Party will never deliver on the demands of working people because the Democratic Party itself is in direct opposition to the goals of most Americans on some of the most important policy debates in this country.

Many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, agree that the richest country in the world should provide its citizens with a national healthcare system, with free college education— that two centuries of endless wars perpetrated by the U.S. government should finally be put to a close.

These are noble goals indeed, goals that many working class Democrats and Republicans would readily agree upon: that it is our obligation to care for our sick and elderly with dignity, that our youth should receive some of the best education in the world, that if war can be avoided, every alternative must be exhausted.

The Gaza Genocide has laid these contradictions bare before the whole world. Most Americans have little trouble recognizing the great crimes against humanity Israel and the United States have committed in Palestine. One may very well wonder, then, why even the most “progressive” Democrats can barely stomach what the United Nations officials have rightly declared a boldfaced genocide. In fact, most Republican and Democratic politicians have organized resounding support for the Gaza Genocide and Israel’s illegal occupation for decades despite popular resistance from both bases.

If even the most “progressive” and leading elements of either party refuse to tell the truth about a genocide that has been livestreamed to the American people for the past two years, what makes you think they have the spine to stand up for you here, in your own country? We don’t have to speculate. The ongoing terrorism and lawlessness of I.C.E. and Homeland Security have answered this question for us. Naturally, the two-party duopoly and their capitalist-billionaire handlers believe the working class is totally expendable, at home and abroad.

Against the interests of the working class, the two-party duopoly agrees with its capitalist-billionaire allies on nearly every major policy debate in the country: they want to expand capitalism and their superprofits, they want to maintain their ongoing wars and military occupations, and they want to do everything they can to divide the working class so they can maintain power indefinitely.

Let’s single in on another issue: national healthcare. Most Americans want it; most of your politicians don’t. That’s because the demand for a national healthcare system is a radical demand. It’s radical not in the sense that it’s a new or groundbreaking idea to create that system; it’s radical because its implementation would require a total rupture in our political system. As it stands, there is no mechanism by which this government could implement such a system. A fact that few of its establishment proponents actually mention. No executive decree, no act of Congress, no state or local law— none possesses the requisite legal authority. Even if that legal hurdle was overcome, could one simply imagine the capitalist-billionaire owners of some of the largest companies in the world simply giving up their stranglehold on American healthcare?

There is only one political entity with the power to create such a system: the people.

The people will nationalize the hospitals, expropriate the insurance companies, commandeer the pharmaceutical industry, eliminate the debts— the people will build a healthcare system that works for us, not the billionaire-ruling class. It is from the people that any government, movement, or organization derives its power. Without our work, their system of misery grinds to a halt, and we can begin building its replacement. When working class people are organized around their common interests, there is nothing that we cannot accomplish.

To reach that level of organization, we must practice politics in a way that transcends our current system, not submits to it. Electoralism, protesting, and nonprofit organization may be meaningful tactics to work within institutions; however, they are only that, tactics in service of a larger goal and objective: organizing working-class power. There is a natural limit to the possibilities of working within the system.

No amount of grassroots organizing or voting will usurp the Democratic or Republican party from their marriage to capitalism and the billionaire class. No amount of protests, no matter how big, will stop the endless and ongoing American occupations. And no amount of nonprofit organizing or mutual aid will be sufficient to supply every person with the dignified food, shelter, education, and healthcare that we know that working class people deserve.

To achieve our demands, to build working class power—we must never lose sight of the fact that the solutions we know the working class needs will require a radical break from the status quo and the institutions that support it. Our nation must “undergo a radical revolution of values,” as the late Dr. Martin Luther King once said. “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution… we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The Democrats, Republicans, and their capitalist-billionaire allies have made their positions clear. They want a monstrous capitalism; they seek to produce infinite exploitation, war, genocide, and misery at home and abroad. Their insatiable desire for domination and destruction threatens to make Earth itself uninhabitable for life as we know it. They are willing to do everything they can to maintain their power over the planet; we must do everything in our power to wrest control from them.

This is our historic opportunity and mission as organizers and working class people in the United States. We must make our position resolutely clear: that we stand with the oppressed and colonized around the world, that the capitalist-billionaire class and their parties do not represent the working class, and that we will reshape society in our image. Our immediate tasks are simple: we must build the organizations, the movement, and the parties that will dismantle capitalism, expropriate the billionaire class, and begin again the struggle to make the working class the arbiters of our own destiny. A better world tomorrow is only possible if we have the imagination to build it today.

“These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” (Speech at Riverside Church, April 4, 1967).

Michael Bones is an alias.