Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs

We have now had the second of the Democratic Party nominees debate where Biden and Bernie were the main focus. Sanders is a self-styled “socialist” has frequently cited the influence of Eugene Debs, the one-time multiple presidential candidate for the Socialist Party of America. If Debs was to rise from the grave would he feel pleased at the progress of his cause? Support for Bernie Sanders is offered as the antidote to the Wall St elite, but is it? Sanders is running as a Democrat. Has he talked about the once thriving active American socialist tradition? Sanders, instead, describes his socialism as “Scandinavian”, his models are Finland and Sweden not the presidential electoral platform of Eugene Debs. 

When Sanders, in his campaign to win the Democratic nomination, says that the United States can learn from the Scandinavians about having a strong welfare state, socialised 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 by the people for 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 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. Bernie Sanders is no socialist but a progressive left liberal. Sanders believes that capitalism can work if it is properly tethered and reined in.

Capital is still in the private hands of the ruling class. There is not yet socialism. He would see clearly that America, despite its great technological advances is spending more money on war and business subsidies than it spends on education, health and general social uplift. For Debs palliatives were not the solution. The only possible cure was to cut off the root of the problem and establish an industrial democracy. Half-measures as proposed by Sanders cannot meet such a challenge. Tinkering with and fiscal policy has always proven bankrupt. Welfare policies will do little to correct the deep-seated structures of regional and social inequality. Legislative reforms, aimed at the most blatant abuses of corporate power, will falter, for the CEOs will hold the government to ransom through their control of desperately needed investment. So much so that a reform-minded Sanders government will buckle under this pressure, and will pass business-friendly legislation, cutting social services and suppressing the basic rights of workers. It is not speculation but a conclusion reached by reading actual history. Capitalism has failed, and so have efforts to reform it. Why return to old policies that have proved wanting and believe they will now work. For socialists such as Debs, the needs of people, not profit, are the driving force of society. The system cannot function if common working men and women were to take matters in their own hands!

It is well worth offering the analyse of Debs when it comes to the US electoral circus.

“...Parties but express in political terms the economic interests of those who compose them. This is the rule. The Republican party represents the capitalist class, the Democratic party the middle class and the Socialist party the working class. There is no fundamental difference between the Republican and Democratic parties. Their principles are identical. They are both capitalist parties and both stand for the capitalist system, and such differences as there are between them involve no principle but are the outgrowth of the conflicting interests of large and small capitalists...”

“...To the workers of the country these two parties in name are one in fact. They, or rather., it, stands for capitalism, for the private ownership of the means of subsistence, for the exploitation ol the workers, and for wage-slavery...”

“...As a rule, large capitalists are Republicans and small capitalists are Democrats, but workingmen must remember that they are all capitalists, and that the many small ones, like the fewer large ones, are all politically supporting their class interests, and this is always and everywhere the capitalist class. Whether the means of production—that is to say, the land, mines, factories, machinery, etc.—are owned by a few large Republican capitalists, who organize a trust, or whether they be owned by a lot of small Democratic capitalists, who are opposed to the trust, is all the same to the working class. Let the capitalists, large and small, fight this out among themselves. “

“...The so-called progressive programs of the Democrats under Bryan and Wilson and the Republicans under Roosevelt are merely so many apologies for the crimes of capitalism. The standpat capitalists under the leadership of President Taft offer few apologies, but boldly take their stand for the existing order as it is...”

“...Unlike the platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties, the Socialist Party platform is a plain and simple declaration of principles and policies which all may understand. It was not framed merely with a view to winning votes. Its utterances are straightforward and to the point. There is no ambiguity; no evasion of vital issues; no possibility of double construction. There is no attempt to compromise with capitalism; no effort to throw a sop to the enemies of labor; no adherence to the miserable fiction that the interests of labor and capital are identical. The Socialist Party, in short, proposes to place the workers in possession of all the wealth they produce and to insure to every individual full and free opportunity to labor. The elector who casts his vote for its candidates may do so with the positive assurance that whenever the opportunity arises every pledge of the party platform will be carried out to the letter. The Socialist Party does not disguise the fact that its ultimate aim is the entire abolition of rent, interest, and profit...”

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders does a disservice to Debs’ legacy and his commitment to working-class political independence. Sanders is not helping the working class to organize, speak and act for itself. By trying to get Democratic politicians to say and do what the left wants them to say and do, the left has been engaged in a pathetic and hopeless attempt at political ventriloquism. It is dependent politics, powerless politics. It is readily admitted by many in the liberal progressive movement that both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are controlled by moneyed interests. And as much as Bernie Sanders has identified with “socialism”, we know that the Democratic Party represents corporate interests. So no matter what the candidates say or do, they are still being controlled by the two-party system which is disempowering. 

Frederick Engels told American socialists when the labor movement in New York City nominated the non-socialist reformer Henry George for mayor in 1886, “...The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement...”

Sanders may have the rhetoric of inequality down pat, but he is running as a Democrat – as a member of a political party that is owned and controlled by a relatively small number of millionaires and billionaires. Should he become president, he would also become part of what is derided as “the Washington establishment” and which kneels before the Wall St corporations. Bernie Sanders believe it is possible for both capitalists and the working class to coexist in a system where capitalists can still make lots of money, but where workers are afforded security and a decent standard of living. Marxists espouse a theory that poverty, unemployment, and class oppression are not side effects of capitalism but a vital part of it. This is the simple harsh reality. It is something that Sanders’ hero Eugene Debs understood only too very well.