In the US, elections take place like this: Citizens elect
delegates, delegates elect nominees, and nominees become presidents. The circus begins in Iowa on Feb 1st.
The Socialist Party of America presidential candidate Eugene
Debs’ poster hangs in Bernie Sanders’ Senate office. Sanders is no Debs, not
even close.
The sole purpose of these liberal “outsiders” within the
Democratic Party is to keep the Left locked inside of a party that no longer actively
represents any of their interests Bernie Sanders had a choice. He could have
run as the outsider he claimed to be. He could have run as an independent. He
could have chosen to have run as a the democratic socialist he describes
himself as, or even offered his services to the Green Party that share more of
his policies than the Democrats. He could have been a threat to the status quo.
But he didn’t because Sanders really is at heart a Democrat (the alternative
conclusion would be that he is political coward, unable to put his career as a
politician on the line.) He chose to lend credence to a party that has
brutalised nearly every progressive policy he claims to champion.
“If Socialism,
international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly,
unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited
and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a
false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare. Let those desert us
who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their
own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going,
for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity,
are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the
Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own
assumed superiority,” answered a real socialist presidential candidate ,
Eugene Debs
Sanders said on ABC News that if elected president he will
not end the United States’ controversial and mass-murderous drone program in
the Middle East. He said he would maintain the targeted killing campaign but
suggested he would adjust the program so that “drones don’t kill innocent
people.” The military-industrial complex was pleased, no doubt. Bernie repeatedly
called for the murderous House of Saud to boost its military profile as if the
intervention to suppress Bahrain’s Shi’ites and the bombing of Yemen is not
enough. Sanders has been heard telling voters and journalists that the
viciously reactionary and monarchical, jihad-fueling state of Saudi Arabia
needs to step up its military aggression in the Middle East to help make the
region and world more secure from terrorism and to “save the soul of Islam.” When
he is asked about wars and says Saudi Arabia should pay for and lead them,
nobody has followed up by asking whether the wars are themselves good or not or
how the theocratic murderous regime in Saudi Arabia which openly seeks to
overthrow other governments and is dropping US cluster bombs on Yemen will
transform the wars into forces for good. Since when is THAT “socialism”? It’s a
bizarre and alarming position to take. As Sam Husseini recently argued at
CounterPunch:
“What? Why should a
U.S. progressive be calling for more intervention by the Saudi monarchy? Really,
we want Saudi troops in Syria and Iraq and Libya and who knows where else?
You’d think that perhaps someone like Sanders would say that we have to break
our decades-long backing of the corrupt Saudi regime — but no, he wants to
dramatically accelerate it….[this even] after the Saudis started bombing Yemen
with U.S. government backing earlier this year, killing thousands and leading
to what the UN is now calling a ‘humanitarian catastrophe,’ and suffering that
is ‘almost incomprehensible.’ Progressives in the U.S. are supposed to look
toward the Saudi monarchy to save the soul of Islam? The Saudis have pushed the
teachings of the Wahabism sect and have been deforming Islam for decades. This
actually helped give rise to ISIS and Al Qaeda. It’s a little like Bernie
Sanders saying that the Koch Brothers need to get more involved in U.S.
politics, they need to ‘get their hands dirty.’”
Bernie’s repeated reference to Hillary Clinton as a “good
friend” and his related refusal to offer any substantive criticism of her. Why
would a “socialist” and “independent” politician and “activist” be “good
friends” in a supposedly adversarial political culture with a fabulously
wealthy and notoriously mendacious arch-corporatist and militarist major party
politico like Hillary Clinton, who forcefully backed George W. Bush’s invasion
of Iraq and applauded her husband’s elimination of public cash assistance for
poor families through a vicious welfare “reforms” that has had disastrous
consequence for the nation’s most vulnerable.
Sanders may appear to be the friend of social movements with
his campaign rhetoric, but his crusade is by its nature primarily about “who’s
sitting in the White House,” not building militant grassroots organization and
“who’s sitting in the streets” (Howard Zinn’s well-known dichotomy). After 2016
Sanders is not going to turn over his organization with its apparatus, lists
and expertise to the leftists.
“If America is the
land of the get-rich-quick scheme, the American left is the province of the
get-power-quick scheme. It’s always looking for the one tactic, the one
protest, the one election that will change everything. [In reality, however],
Building power that’s strong and flexible takes years in the trenches
developing organization, trust, community, leadership, action, and theory.
Taking an electoral shortcut to power means fracturing movements as those with
the least power are pushed to the sidelines. Leftists may thrill at finding a
‘socialist’ horse on the electoral merry-go-round, but if they hop on board
they’ll be the ones taken for a ride” ” - Arun Gupta on CounterPunch
“Bernie, is making socialism legitimate in America again?” He
is not running as a “socialist” at all. He does not criticize capitalism’s
profit system, the underlying political-economic regime that is wired for the
endless upward distribution of wealth and power and the ruination of Earth’s
ecology. When quizzed by reporters on what socialism means to him, Sanders
simply says that the United States can learn a few things from Scandinavian
states when it comes to having a stronger welfare state, socialized health
care, stronger unions, and the like. He is diluting the meaning of the word
socialism (which for actual socialists refers to workers’ control of production
and the democratic running of the economy for people and the common good, not
the profits of a capitalist elite) as much as advancing it. Bernie blames the
US billionaire class for the increase in poverty, joblessness, homelessness,
and even war. It also makes it clear that Bernie believes the system that
created this relatively minuscule group of billionaires can reform itself given
the right person at the helm with a large popular movement behind them. This
belies the idea that he has a socialist understanding of how capitalists
accumulate wealth.
In other words, Bernie Sanders is no socialist. Instead, he
is a ‘progressive’ in the tradition of Teddy Roosevelt or FDR. Like both of
those men, Sanders believes that capitalism can work if it is properly tethered
and monopolies are broken up. Similarly, Sanders progressivism
understands–perhaps not consciously–that in order for the US population to have
such benefits as universal single payer health care, free college education,
homes for all, and a revived dependable infrastructure, other people in other
lands will have to pay for it via the global capitalist economic system erected
and maintained by Wall Street and its lessers around the world.
But a cardinal rule for a socialist is to tell the truth.
The Democratic Party is not our friend. Nor can it be reformed to do our
bidding. The purpose of the Democratic and Republican parties is to keep us
enslaved. To pretend otherwise is to sow confusion and carry the ball for the
other team.
Nothing has held American working people back more than
organized labor’s obeisance to the two corporate parties, together with
confusion on this issue by many on the left. Albert Einstein warned, “You
cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” Yet Sanders would have us
believe one can simultaneously oppose and build the Democratic Party. Sanders
raises all kinds of interesting populist issues in his speeches, but he is
seeking the nomination of a party that is the proven enemy of the working class
and he has promised, citing the lesser-evil doctrine, that he will endorse the
Democratic nominee whoever it happens to be. So we can see that progressives
like Sanders are not really opposed to standing on principle. It’s just that
they have replaced the principles of working class solidarity and telling the
truth with the “principle” of lesser-evil politics.
Bernie Sanders focuses on money issues, taxing the rich,
spending on the poor, but has thus far been permitted to engage in the general
practice of speaking only about the 46% of federal discretionary spending that
it not military. Nobody has asked him about the 54% that by the calculation of
National Priorities Project is military. Nobody has asked him if Eisenhower was
right that military spending produces wars.
Let’s imagine for example that Bernie Sanders won the 2016
presidential elections. What do you think would happen? Could he bring radical
change in the structures of power of the capitalist system?
“Suppose that Sanders won, which is pretty unlikely in a
system of bought elections. He would be alone: he doesn’t have congressional
representatives, he doesn’t have governors, he doesn’t have support in the
bureaucracy, he doesn’t have state legislators; and standing alone in this
system, he couldn’t do very much. A real political alternative would be across
the board, not just a figure in the White House. It would have to be a broad
political movement. In fact, the Sanders campaign I think is valuable — it’s
opening up issues, it’s maybe pressing the mainstream Democrats a little bit in
a progressive direction, and it is mobilizing a lot of popular forces, and the
most positive outcome would be if they remain after the election.
It’s a serious mistake to just to be geared to the
quadrennial electoral extravaganza and then go home. That’s not the way changes
take place. The mobilization could lead to a continuing popular organization
which could maybe have an effect in the long run,” explains Chomsky
Bernie Sanders doesn’t want to replace or overthrow
capitalism. He thinks capitalism can be
fixed or tamed with reforms. By
contrast, we socialists understand that the essence of capitalism—private
ownership of major industry, resources and the exploitation of labor by
appropriating surplus value (profit)—is antithetical to democracy. In fact, for all of Bernie’s talk about
“democratic socialism”, he turn a blind eye to the lack of economic democracy
that is the very hallmark of the capitalist system. Because Sanders is in favor of tweaking
capitalism but opposed to dismantling it, he ignores the systemic lack of
democracy in the workplace and the economy—the very aspects that most affects
people’s lives. For as long as Sanders limits his critique to reforms of the
existing system, he is unable to propose concrete, workable solutions for the
big problems we face such as climate change, for example. Gentle prodding by
the State hasn’t changed corporate behavior up to now and we shouldn’t expect
it to succeed in the future. As long as
there are profits to be made by disregarding regulation and legislation,
corporations will do so.
Sanders’ policies are not socialist, but rather they actually
pose a threat to socialism. If elected, Sanders’ policies would likely moderate
the capitalist model both domestically and globally, but they would leave
intact the fundamental global injustices inherent in the capitalist system. And
when those capitalist policies implemented by a self-proclaimed socialist
ultimately fail to address these global injustices in any meaningful way, it
will be socialism that will be discredited. ‘socialism-lite’ greases the path
to right-wing reaction.
While a vote for the reformist
candidate of a capitalist party might make some people feel good, no one should
expect it to change much. If Sanders wanted anything even approaching a
“revolution,” he wouldn’t be diverting the meager resources of socialists into
the system he claims to be against. Remember he’s promised to endorse whatever
candidate is put forth by the Democratic Party, that same Democratic Party which
is but one component of capitalism. Sanders plays the good cop against the bad
cop Clinton and the evil cop, the Republican candidate.
If you plan to vote for yet another lesser evil in 2016, go
ahead but vote or no vote, all that matters is what you’re going to do for the
other 364 days to help bring down this global system of oppression and
exploitation. Instead of a candidate who comes along and says, ‘I want to talk
to you and tell you what I’m going to do for you.’’, the people ought to say,
‘Well, you can come listen to us …we’ll tell you what you want, and you can try
to persuade us that you’ll do it; then, maybe we will vote for you”. People should
get together and discuss, talk about, and argue about what they want. That’s a very different form of democracy.
"I am not a Labor
Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a
Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where
you are. I would not lead you into the Promised Land if I could, because if I
led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as
your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition" - Debs
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