“It's gonna be
different this time.”...oh, yeah...
But it won’t be. It's easy just believe the speeches, and
when you're inevitably let down—yet again-- you can blame the candidate for
lying instead of your own gullibility in falling for the same trick over and
over and over again. Conceding the system cannot be made to work in our
interests exposes many folk for not being all that serious about making a
better world. If you think Bernie Sanders is the answer, you’re asking the
wrong questions.
Hope can be positive by inspiring people into political
action, but it can also be exploited by the ruling as a deceptive lure to catch
the unwary. Obama, for example, fished for votes using “hope” as his hook,
reeled in the voters and caught the presidency. The new messiah of hope is
Bernie Sanders. Many are attracted to Sanders’ liberal, progressive platform.
Bernie is proposing; universal health care and fully fund public schools, free
college education, job creation, etc. However, be in no doubt, if elected, a
President Sanders would abandon much of his campaign promises and “fall in
line” as quickly as Obama did. The corporations would effectively vetoed the
job and social programs that people would have enthusiastically voted for.
Critiquing Bernie Sanders from a socialist perspective can be very lonely.
People who see hope in the prospect of a President Sanders want cheer-leading
no criticism because it might “hurt the campaign”. On foreign affairs Sanders
has Afghan blood on his hands having voted for the invasion. Sanders may have
voted “no” for the 2003 Iraq war, but he voted several times for the ongoing
funding of the war/occupation. Sanders voted “yes” to support Gaddafi regime
change, logically following his earlier support for the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia. He also acquiesces to the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians.
Sanders was completely silent when Obama decided to funnel supplies to Syrian
jihadists. We should not be at all surprised that Bernie Sanders is an American
nationalist when it comes to defending American business interests abroad. When
facts fail to dim forlorn hope, can we change minds and hearts? Socialists seek
to understand the fears and anxieties which underlie people placing hope in the
ideas of those who say they want change but yet campaign as a member of the
duopoly, the Democratic Party.
The SOYMB blog doesn’t do prophesies but on this occasion
this blogger will predict that the next president of the United States of
America will be Hillary Clinton. It is all about lesser evilism. What the blog
would like to point out is that the constraints the capitalist class are
imposing upon politicians are so austere that only far-reaching system change,
propelled on by people power, can change things for the better. To put it more
simply the only solution is revolution. We argue that even if Bernie Sanders
were actually to become President, it would hardly matter for constraints are
too constraining and he too would have very little option but to accommodate
the capitalist class and their agenda.
Bernie calls himself
a “socialist.” “Calls himself” is the operative phrase. If “socialism” means
what people thought it did for roughly two hundred years — if it means that a
society’s principal means of production are socially, not privately, owned —
then Sanders is no socialist. He is only what the media call “liberal in
spirit”. If he was elected there would be a number of cosmetic changes but the
fundamental problem, capitalist property relations, would remain essentially unchanged.
But even if he doesn’t mean the same as we do when he talks about socialism,
the blog can thank him for at least bringing the term back into vogue,
particular in America where it had disappeared from popular discourse since the
days of Eugene Debs running for the Presidency. Perhaps we can re-claim the
term “red” again for these days “red state” is one that is controlled by the
Republican Party.
Under Eisenhower, the top tax rate was 91 Percent. Was he a
socialist? if you look to the three Scandinavian nations - Sweden, Norway and
Denmark - that Sanders refers to as models for his particular vision of
"Democratic Socialism" (which is not by any means a comprehensive
state-run ownership of production or property), they are capitalist - not
socialist - nations with a strong safety net. The Scandinavian governments
might provide everything from health services to free college tuition to
livable pensions (with variations among them), but their economies are not
socialist; they are strongly capitalist. If one is an advocate of true
socialism, the Scandinavian nations are not a good example of such a model.
That is because they are economically structured as capitalist nations,
although they allocate a greater percentage of the gross domestic product for services
than the US does. These services address needs that individuals in the United
States generally pay for out of pocket, with the exception of programs such as
Medicare and Social Security (both of which workers and employers pay into with
each paycheck). In this context, Sanders' "Democratic socialism" is a
modified form of capitalism, one that reins in the most glaring excesses of
capitalism, raises taxes and social accountability on the wealthiest, and
offers a broad government network of public services for the common good.
Norway - because of
its vast wealth from North Sea oil - is particularly prosperous. According to
the pro-corporate think tank, the Tax Foundation, "Denmark’s top marginal
effective income tax rate is 60.4 percent. Sweden’s is 56.4 percent. Norway’s
top marginal tax rate is 39 percent." The business-friendly Tax Foundation
concedes that the Scandinavian nations are more tax-friendly to corporations
than the US: While Scandinavian countries raise a lot of revenue from individuals
through the income tax, payroll taxes, and the Value-added tax, they don’t
really raise much more revenue than the United States from capital and business
taxes and don’t have much higher marginal rates on capital income.... Marginal
corporate tax rates in Scandinavian countries are around the OECD [Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development] average of 25 percent and much more
competitive than the United States’ rate. Denmark’s corporate income tax rate
is 24.5 percent, Norway’s general corporate income tax rate is 27 percent, and
Sweden has a corporate tax rate of 22 percent. The U.S. marginal tax rate on
corporations is much higher at 39.1 percent (average of federal and state). The
Scandinavian nations spend much less of their national budgets percentage wise
than the US does on the military, for example. This allows them more funds to
be put toward benefiting citizens of the nations.
Some socialist groups are starting to support Bernie Sanders
and are now arguing why it is important to support him even though recognizing
that Sanders is no socialist himself. He considers countries such as Denmark,
Finland, Sweden and Norway as models to emulate, all capitalist, albeit with
strong social safety nets, but where the wealthy still enjoy a preponderance of
political power. They have little in common with the socialism envisaged by
Marx and Engels where the working class itself would be in control.
The Democratic Party is a party that embraces
capitalism. It calls for the reform, not
the abolition of capitalism. Sanders
routinely supports Democrats when they run for office. He, in other words is
only a reform capitalist candidate. He stands on the other side of the class
line dividing the working class from the capitalist class. When Marx and Engels
spoke of working class independent political action, they were thinking in
terms of class independence. In other words, a political party entirely under
the control of working people, representing their interests and their interest
alone.
“The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and
they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter
in what form so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven
further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.”
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/communist-league/1850-ad1.htm
In his 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, Marx
firmly rejected supporting “progressive” bourgeois or “democratic petty
bourgeois” candidates but urged workers to run their own candidates. “The
democratic petty bourgeois,” he argued, “far from wanting to transform the
whole society in the interests of the revolutionary proletarians, only aspire
to a change in social conditions which will make the existing society as
tolerable and comfortable for themselves as possible.”
Marx insisted that workers must “work for the creation of an
independent organization of the workers’ party” and went on to explain:
“Here the proletariat must take care … that workers’
candidates are nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic
candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election
should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of
achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to
preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their
revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention. They must not
be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the
workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of
reaction the chance of victory. All such talk means, in the final analysis,
that the proletariat is to be swindled.”
Sanders campaign does not rest on an anti-capitalist
platform or working-class movement, he does little to encourage the creation of
such a movement. The Sanders campaign is about him getting elected and doing
things for working people; he is not encouraging working people to do things
for themselves. There was no thought given to building a real working-class
movement but simply to encourage the unions and working people to remain an
appendage to the pro-capitalist Democratic Party. The goal is not to create a
socialist society for the working class but to encourage the working class to
create socialism for itself.
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