FOR A NEW COMMUNIST PARTY

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by raomk in Current Affairs, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, Left politics, USA

Tags

CAPITALISM, communism, Crowds and Party, Left politics, Occupy Wall Street’s, Socialism, US left politics

So no, I don’t envision the Democratic Party as being that. That’s not at all what I have in mind. I’m thinking of a radical left party to which elections are incidental. Elections might be means for organizing, but the goal isn’t just being elected. The goal is overthrowing capitalism. The goal is being able to build a communist society as capitalism crumbles.

Transcribed from the 23 January 2016 episode of This is Hell! Radio(Chicago)

“The goal isn’t just being elected. The goal is overthrowing capitalism. The goal is being able to build a communist society as capitalism crumbles.”

Chuck Mertz: Real change, the kind of change that Occupy Wall Street had hoped to start, can be achieved through—I know you’re going to find this hard to believe—a political party. I found it hard to believe, until I read Jodi Dean’s book Crowds and Party. Jodi is here to explain to us how a political party can bring about real change.

Welcome to This is Hell!, Jodi.

Jodi Dean: Hi! Thanks.

CM: Great to have you on the show.

Let’s start with Occupy. What, to you, explains the impact that the Tea Party had on Republicans, relative to the impact that Occupy seems to have had on the Democratic Party? All of the sudden there were “Tea Party Republicans.” There weren’t “Occupy Democrats.”

JD: That’s a good point. The Tea Party took the Republican Party as its target. They decided that their goal was going to be to influence the political system by getting people elected and basically by trying to take over part of government. That’s why they were able to have good effects. They didn’t regard the mainstream political process as something irrelevant to their concerns. They thought of it as something to seize.

The problem with many—but not all—leftists in the US is that they think the political process is so corrupted that we have to completely refuse it, and leave it altogether. The Tea Party decided to act as an organized militant force, and too much of the US left (we saw this in the wake of Occupy) has thought that to be “militant” means to refuse and disperse and become fragmented.

CM: So what explains the left turning its back on the collective action of a political party? It would seem like a political party would fit into what the left would historically want: an apparatus that can organize collective action.

JD: There are multiple things. First, the fear of success: the left has learned from the excesses of the twentieth century. Where Communist and socialist parties “succeeded,” there was violence and purges and repression. One reason the left has turned its back is because of this historical experience of state socialism. And we have taken that to mean that we should not ever have a state. I think that’s the wrong answer. That we—as the left—made a mistake with some regimes does not have to mean that we can never learn.

Another reason that the left has turned its back on the party form has been the important criticism of twentieth century parties that have been too white, too masculine, potentially homophobic; parties that have operated in intensely hierarchical fashion. Those criticisms are real. But rather than saying we can’t have a party form because that’s just what a party does, why not make a party that is not repressive and does not exclude or diminish people on the basis of sex, race, or sexuality?

So we’ve got at least two historical problems that have made people very reluctant to use the party. I also think that, whether or not you mark it as 1968 or 1989, the left’s embrace of cultural individualism and the free flow of personal experimentation has made it critical of discipline and critical of collectivity. But I think that’s just a capitalist sellout. Saying everybody should just “do their own thing” is just going in the direction of the dominant culture. That is actually not a left position at all.

CM: So does identity politics undermine collectivism? And did that end up leading to fragmentation and a weakening of the left? Because there are a lot of people we’ve had on the show—and one person in particular, Thomas Frank—who say that there is no left in the United States.

JD: First I want to say that I disagree with the claim that there is no left. In fact, I think that “the left” is that group that keeps denying its own existence. We’re always saying that we’re the ones who don’t exist. But the right thinks that we exist. That’s what is so fantastic, actually. Did you see the New York Post screaming that Bernie Sanders is really a communist? Great! They’re really still afraid of communists! And it’s people on the left who say, “Oh, no, we’re not here at all!”

The left denies its own existence and it denies its own collectivity. Now, is identity politics to blame? Maybe it’s better to say that identity politics has been a symptom of the pressure of capitalism. Capitalism has operated in the US by exacerbating racial differences. That has to be addressed on the left, and the left has been addressing that. But we haven’t been addressing it in a way that recognizes how racism operates to support capitalism. Instead, we’ve made it too much about identity rather than as an element in building collective solidarity.

I’m trying to find a way around this to express that identity politics has been important but it’s reached its limits. Identity politics can’t go any further insofar as it denies the impact of capitalism. An identity politics that just rests on itself is nothing but liberalism. Like all of the sudden everything will be better if black people and white people are equally exploited? What if black people and white people say, “No, we don’t want to live in a society based on exploitation?”

CM: You were saying that the left denies its own collectivity. Is that only in the US? Is that unique to the US culture of the left?

JD: That’s a really important question, and I’m not sure. Traveling in Europe, I see two different things. On the one hand I see a broad left discussion that is, in part, mediated through social media and is pretty generational—people in their twenties and thirties or younger—and that there’s a general feeling about the problem of collectivity, the problem of building something with cohesion, and a temptation to just emphasize multiplicity. You see this everywhere. Everybody worries about this, as far as what I’ve seen.

On the other hand, there are countries whose political culture has embraced parties much more, and fights politically through parties. Like Greece, for example—and we’ve seen the ups and downs with Syriza over the last two years. And Spain also. Because they have a parliamentary system where small parties can actually get in the mix and have a political effect—in ways that our two-party system excludes—the European context allows for more enthusiasm for the party as a form for politics.

But there’s still a lot of disagreement on the far left about whether or not the party form is useful, and shouldn’t we in fact retreat and have multiple actions and artistic events—you know, the whole alter-globalization framework. That’s still alive in a lot of places.

“I think holding on to the word ‘communism’ is useful, not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make socialists seem really, really mainstream. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what we should have at a bare minimum.”

CM: You mentioned the structure of the US electoral system doesn’t allow for a political party to necessarily be the solution for a group like Occupy. Is that one of the reasons that activists dismiss the party structure as something that could help move their agenda forward?

JD: We can think about the Black Panther Party as a neat example in the US context: A party which was operating not primarily to win elections but to galvanize social power. That’s an interesting way of thinking about what else parties can do in the US.

Or we can think about parties in terms of local elections. Socialist Alternative has been doing really neat work all over the country, organizing around local elections with people running as socialist candidates not within a mainstream party. I think that even as we come up against the limits of a two-party system, we can also begin to think better about local and regional elections.

The left really likes that old saw: “Think Globally, Act Locally.” And then it rejects parties—even though political parties are, historically, forms that do that, that actually scale, that operate on multiple levels as organizations.

That we have a two-party system makes sense as an excuse why people haven’t used left parties very well in the US, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

And one more thing: there is a ton of sectarianism in the far left parties that exist. Many still fight battles that go back to the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and haven’t let that go. That has to change. We don’t need that kind of sectarian purity right now.

CM: You ask the question, “How do we move from the inert mass to organized activists?” You mention how you were at Occupy Wall Street; you write about being there on 15 October 2011 as the massive crowd filled New York’s Times Square. And you mention this one young speaker, and he addresses the crowd; they’re deciding if they should move on to Washington Square Park or not, because they need to go somewhere where there are better facilities. You then quote the speaker saying, “We can take this park. We can take this park tonight. We can also take this park another night. Not everyone may be ready tonight. Each person has to make their own autonomous decision. No one can decide for you. You have to decide for yourself. Everyone is an autonomous individual.”

Did that kind of individualism kill Occupy Wall Street from the start?

JD: Yeah, I think so. A lot of times I blame the rhetorics of consensus and horizontalism, but both of those are rooted in an individualism that says politics must begin with each individual, their interests, their experience, their positions, and so on. As collectivity forms—which is not easy when everyone’s beginning from their individual position—what starts to happen is that people start looking for how their exact experiences and interests are not being recognized.

I think that the left has given in too much to this assumption that politics begins with an individual. That’s a liberal assumption. Leftists, historically, begin with the assumption that politics begins in groups. And for the left in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the operative group is class. Class is what determines where our political interests come from.

I try to do everything I can in the book to dismantle the assumption that politics, particularly left politics, should begin with the individual. Instead I want people thinking about how the individual is a fiction, and a really oppressive fiction at that. And one that’s actually, conveniently, falling apart.

CM: You write about Occupy Wall Street having been an opening but having had no continuing momentum. You mention that the party could add that needed momentum. That’s one of the things that parties can do. The structure of the party can continue momentum and keep the opening alive.

When you say that a party could be a solution for a movement like Occupy, you don’t mean the Democratic Party, do you?

JD: I’ve got a lot of layers on this question. My first answer is that no, I really mean the Communist Party. My friends call this “Jodi’s Fantasy Revolutionary Party” as a joke, because the kind of Communist Party I take as my model may not be real, or may have only existed for a year and a half in Brooklyn in the thirties. And I don’t mean the real-existing Communist Party in the US now, which still exists and basically endorses Democrats.

My idea is to think in terms of how we can imagine the Communist Party again as a force—what it could be like if all of our left activist groups and small sectarian parties decided to come together in a new radical left party.

So no, I don’t envision the Democratic Party as being that. That’s not at all what I have in mind. I’m thinking of a radical left party to which elections are incidental. Elections might be means for organizing, but the goal isn’t just being elected. The goal is overthrowing capitalism. The goal is being able to build a communist society as capitalism crumbles.

Second, it could be the case—as a matter of tactics on the ground in particular contexts—that working for a Democratic candidate might be useful. It could be the case that trying to take over a local Democratic committee in order to get communist/socialist/radical left candidates elected could also be useful. But I don’t see the goal as taking over the Democratic Party. That’s way too limited a goal, and it’s a goal that presupposes the continuation of the system we have, rather than its overthrow.

CM: But how difficult would it be for a Communist Party to emerge free of its past associations with the Soviet Union? Can we even use the word “communist” or is it impossibly taboo?

“It’s fantastic that Occupy Wall Street’s narrative of the 99% and the 1% asserted collectivity through division. This is class conflict. There is not a unified society. This is the collectivity of us against them. This narrative produced the proper collectivity: an antagonistic one.”

JD: We have to recognize that the right is still scared of communism. That means the term is still powerful. That means it still has the ability to instill fear in its enemies. I think that’s an argument for keeping the word “communism.”

It’s also amazing that close to half of Iowa participants in the caucuses say that they are socialist. Four or five years ago, people were saying socialism is dead in the US. No one could even say the word. So I actually think holding on to the word “communism” is useful not only because our enemies are worried about communism, but also because it helps make the socialists seem really, really mainstream, and that’s good. We don’t want socialism to seem like something that only happens in Sweden. We want it to seem like that’s what America should have at a bare minimum.

One last thing about the history of communism: every political ideology that has infused a state form has done awful things. For the most part, if people like the ideology, they either let the awful things slide, or they use the ideology to criticize the awful things that the state does. We can do the same thing with communism. It’s helpful to recognize that the countries we understand to have been ruled by Communist Parties were never really communist—they didn’t even claim to have achieved communism themselves. We can say that state socialism made these mistakes, and in so doing was betraying communist ideals.

I don’t think we need to abandon these terms or come up with new ones. I think we need to use the power that they have. And people recognize this, which is what makes it exciting.

CM: You write, “Some contemporary crowd observers claim the crowd for democracy. They see in the amassing of thousands a democratic insistence, a demand to be heard and included. In the context of communicative capitalism, however, the crowd exceeds democracy.

“In the 21^st century, dominant nation-states exercise power as democracies. They bomb and invade as democracies, ‘for democracy’s sake.’ International political bodies legitimize themselves as democratic, as do the contradictory and tangled media practices of communicative capitalism. When crowds amass in opposition, they pose themselvesagainst democratic practices, systems, and bodies. To claim the crowd for democracy fails to register this change in the political setting of the crowd.”

So are crowds today, the protesters today, opposed to democracy? Or are they opposed to the current state of, let’s say, representative democracy?

JD: Let’s think about our basic environment. By “our,” now, I mean basically English-speaking people who use the internet and are listening to the radio and live in societies like the United States. In our environment, what we hear is that we live in democracy. We hear this all the time. We hear that the network media makes democratic exchange possible, that a free press is democracy, that we’ve got elections and that’s democracy.

When crowds amass in this setting, if they are just at a football game, it’s not a political statement. Even at a march (fully permitted) that’s registering opposition to the invasion of Iraq, for example, or concern about the climate—all of those things are within the general environment of “democracy,” and they don’t oppose the system. They don’t register as opposition to the system. They’re just saying that we want our view on this or that issue to count.

But the way that crowds have been amassing over the last four or five years—Occupy Wall Street is one example, but the Red Square debt movement in Canada is another; some of the more militant strikes of nurses and teachers are too—has been to say, “Look, the process that we have that’s been called democratic? It is not. We want to changethat.”

It’s not that we are anti-democratic. It’s that democracy is too limiting a term to register our opposition. We want something more. We want actual equality. Democracy is too limiting. The reason it’s too limiting is we live in a context that understands itself as “democratic.” So democracy as a political claim, in my language, can’t “register the gap that the crowd is inscribing.” It can’t register real division or opposition. Democracy is just more of what we have.

CM: We are so dependent. We use social media so much, we use Facebook so much, we use so many of these avenues of what you callcommunicative capitalism so much. How can we oppose or reject this system without hurting ourselves and our ability to communicate our message to each other? Can we just go on strike? Can we become the owners of the means of communicative production?

JD: One of the ways that Marxism historically has understood the political problems faced by workers is our total entrapment and embeddedness in the capitalist system. What makes a strike so courageous is that workers are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re not earning their wage for a time, as a way to put pressure on the capitalist owner of the workplace.

What does that mean under communicative capitalism? Does it mean that we have to shoot ourselves in the foot by completely extracting ourselves from all of the instruments of communication? Or does it mean that we change our attitude towards communication? Or does it mean that we develop our own means of communication?

There’s a whole range here. I’m not a Luddite. I don’t think the way we’re going to bring down capitalism is by quitting Facebook. I think that’s a little bit absurd. I think what makes more sense is to think of how we could use the tools we have to bring down the master’s house. We can consolidate our message together. We can get a better sense of how many we are. We can develop common modes of thinking. We can distribute organizing materials for the revolutionary party.

I don’t think that an extractive approach to our situation in communicative media is the right one. I think it’s got to be more tactical. How do we use the tools we have, and how do we find ways to seize the means of communication? This would mean the collectivization of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and using those apparatuses. But that would probably have to be day two of the revolution.

CM: Jodi, I’ve got one last question for you, and it’s the Question from Hell, the question we might hate to ask, you might hate to answer, or our audience is going to hate the response.

How much did the narrative that Occupy created, of the 99% and the 1%, undermine a of collectivity? Because it doesn’t include everyone…

JD: Division is crucial. Collectivity is never everyone. What this narrative did was produce the divided collectivity that we need. It’s great to undermine the stupid myth of American unity, “The country has to pull together” and all that crap. It’s fantastic that Occupy Wall Street asserted collectivity through division. This is class conflict. This says there is not a unified society. Collectivity is the collectivity of us against them. It produced the proper collectivity: an antagonistic one.

CM: Jodi, thanks so much for being on our show this week.

JD: Thank you! Take care.

This article first published in http://antidotezine.com/

Who is Jodi Dean ?

According to Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Jodi Dean (born April 9, 1962) is a professor in the Political Science department at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.^[1] She has also held the position of Erasmus Professor of the Humanities in the Faculty of Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam.

Dean received her B.A. in History of Princeton University. She received her MA, MPhil, and PhD from Columbia University. Before joining the Department of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she taught at the University of Texas in San Antonio. She has held visiting research appointments at the Institute for the Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, as well as McGill University in Montreal and Cardiff University in Wales.

Drawing from Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, she has made contributions to contemporary political theory, media theory, and feminist theory, most notably with her theory of communicative capitalism; the online merging of democracy and capitalism into a single neoliberal formation that subverts the democratic impulses of the masses by valuing emotional expression over logical discourse. She has spoken and lectured in the United States, Canada, Ecuador, Peru, England, Wales, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Austria, Norway, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Turkey. She is the co-editor of the journal Theory & Event.

Crowds and Party

by Jodi Dean

How do mass protests become an organized activist collective?

Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state—such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world—they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise—they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together. Dean shows how we can see the party as an organization that can reinvigorate political practice.

Hardback, 288 pages

ISBN: 9781781686942 February 2016

Ebook ISBN: 9781781686720

Reviews

“In this enthralling and exhilarating book, Jodi Dean shows that, contrary to neo-anarchist cliche, the party form and class struggle are very far from being outmoded. The revival of the party has produced a surge of enthusiasm in contemporary left politics—an enthusiasm that Crowds and Party both explains and stokes up.”

– Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism
“Jodi Dean’s new book isn’t just a timely reminder that to change our thoroughly and deliberately atomized society demands collective action and militant organization; it is also a passionate analysis of the fractured passion of shared political commitment, linking the enthusiasm of group experience with the sustained and steady discipline of popular empowerment.”

– Peter Hallward, author of Damming the Flood

Is a “Socialist” Really Unelectable? The Potential Significance of the Sanders Campaign

07 Sunday Feb 2016

Posted by raomk in Current Affairs, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, Left politics

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2016 US Elections, Bernie Sanders, CAPITALISM, communist, imperialism, Socialism, US Left

by GARY LEUPP

According to a survey taken by Pew Research Center in late 2011, 49% of 18 to 29 year-olds in this country had at that time a positive view of socialism, whereas only 43% viewed it negatively. (For older people, the negative figure was 60%.) The same poll showed that this age group was more inclined to view capitalism negatively (47%) than positively (46%).

I have not seen an updated poll but doubt that many youth have become more supportive of the existing system in the several years since.

These figures surprised the researchers, but they should not be so hard to explain. The main reason is surely the failure of capitalism to better young people’s lives or give them hope. The collapse of manufacturing, the scarcity of good jobs, the high costs of education and crippling college loan debts, poverty that keeps them at home with their parents—that’s what capitalism means to them.

The Occupy Movement (beginning three months before this poll was released) drew dramatic attention to income inequality; its most enduring legacy is the popularization of the awareness of that staggering statistic Bernie Sanders keeps repeating: one-tenth of the top 1% controls 90% of the country’s wealth. Views are surely also affected by the receding impact of Cold War brainwashing, the sort inflicted on people of my generation from childhood via such insidious anti-Soviet propaganda as the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons.

(I’m quite sure my first exposure to words like “capitalism” and “imperialism” were in those conversations between the animated trench coat-wearing spies Boris and Natasha. In those days, in this country, the very term “capitalism” was avoided due to its use by communist critics; “free market economy” was the preferred euphemism.)

Post-Cold War Revival of Interest

Then (when I was in my 30s) the Cold War ended, suddenly, unexpectedly, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of Soviet client regimes in Eastern Europe, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and dissolution of the Soviet Union. This complex series of events was, in this country, generally depicted as an “inevitable” collapse of a “system that failed.” Neocon theorist Francis Fukuyama crowed that capitalism had decisively triumphed; he even pronounced “the End of History.”

This was of course a response to the Marxist conception of capitalism as one mode of production, with an origin in time, and a terminus in time, just like other antiquated modes of production including slavery and feudal serfdom. A system that produces the basis for collective ownership of the means of production and for state planning designed to serve the needs of the masses. Marx did not think socialism would be the “end of history,” but that it would—over an indeterminate span of time—produce ever greater equality and ultimately lead to a classless society (communism). He (echoed by Lenin) envisioned the ultimate “withering away of the state” and was perhaps optimistic about the prospects of attaining that end within a century or so.

Mao Zedong more realistically suggested that the transition from socialism (in which, he emphasized, classes and class struggle continue to exist) to communism would be a tortuous path with ups and downs, including periods of capitalist restoration. In any case, in the Marxist view, the “end of history” is anything but the triumph of capitalism. It is the end of the human record as a chronicle of class struggle, which began with the emergence of class division in the Neolithic period (following at least 100,000 years in which modern humans were not divided into classes and lived in a state of “primitive communism”). It is the beginning of (and return to) classless society.

If that long-term ideal and prognosis seems unrealistic, so in Marx’s time television, nuclear weapons, space travel, the mapping of the genome, would all have seemed hard to imagine. The human mind is capable of spectacular achievements. Surely the construction of an egalitarian society is among them, and in the short term, at least, the construction of a society far less unequal, less unfair and less misery-producing than capitalism.

The cocky declarations of capitalism’s triumph have, post-2008, given way to more sober evaluations of the contradictions within the system, and at least tacit recognition that is will be crisis-prone for the foreseeable future. Youth need not be steeped in Marx or his vision of historical change to at least be attracted by this much-vilified “socialism” (of some stripe) as an alternative. As the World Social Forum organizers say: another world is possible.

The Sanders Phenomenon

Perhaps Sen. Bernie Sanders read about the Pew poll in 2011 and began to think that it might be feasible to run for president a few years later, specifically as an unapologetic “democratic socialist.” Perhaps he projected that he’d have the youth on his side. (Indeed, of the voters in the Iowa caucuses he received over 80% of the 18-29 year-olds’ votes.)

When Sanders announced his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination last April, the pundits raised their eyebrows. A socialist? Interesting, they thought, mildly amused. They could not deny that Sanders was a popular senator, and for the most part mainstream politician serving in Congress for a quarter of a century; he had to be indulged, treated with a modicum of respect.

Clinton supporters in the Democratic Party however, including Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas), by September were openly questioning Sanders’ “electability.” But as Sanders’ star rose and crowds mushroomed, he met with greater recognition as a potential threat to the system’s (favored) candidate who was expecting a coronation. Hillary Clinton started to attack the senator’s record on gun control; Sanders replied he had a D- rating from the National Rifle Association. She had her daughter Chelsea charge (in Iowa on Jan. 12) that his health care plan would “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance”—an accusation quickly and easily refuted.

A poll released on Jan. 12 showed Sanders leading Clinton in the Iowa primary 49 to 44 per cent (up from 40 to 51 on Dec. 15). So it was definitely time to make the S-word an issue. On Jan. 19 David Brock, the head of Clinton’s super-PAC “Correct the Record,” appeared on Bloomberg TV to gravely address “the elephant in the room.” “He’s a socialist,” growled Brock. “Think of what the Republicans will do with the fact that he’s a socialist in the fall.” (The Sanders campaign responded that Brock is “a mud-slinging, right-wing extremist” who tried to destroy Anita Hill, the African-American woman who 25 years ago accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment as Congress considered his nomination as Supreme Court justice.)

Brock followed up on Jan. 21 by claiming ridiculously that “black lives don’t matter much to Bernie Sanders.” The same day, “Morning Joe” on MSNBC highlighted Sanders’ self-identity as a socialist, featuring a clip of Clinton-supporter Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) declaring: “I think it would be absolutely impossible for a self-declared socialist to win states like Missouri.”

But on his program, Joe Scarborough (former Florida Republican Congressman) surprisingly declared he thought it quite possible Sanders could win, to the evident consternation of a Clinton supporter among his guests firmly declaring Bernie to be unelectable. Co-host and daughter of Cold War strategist Zbigniew Brzezinsky, Mika Brzezinsky, just looked puzzled as usual.

Flipping the channel I watched Chris Cuomo, son of the New York state governor and super-opinionated co-host of CNN’s “New Day,” interrogating another Democratic strategist about the popularity of a “self-avowed socialist” and radiating indignation.

Cuomo seems even more alarmed now, after the virtual tie in Iowa. You just want to tell him: “Look at the Pew polls, you clueless child of privilege and power, who uses your cushy job as a pulpit as a ‘journalist’ to channel Clinton campaign talking points. Don’t go so apoplectic. Young people don’t share your revulsion at socialism. A lot of them like the idea.”

The South Carolina “Firewall”

But let us assume that this line of attack, emphasizing the “unelectability of a socialist in America” becomes intensified over time. It likely won’t work in the New Hampshire primary, where Sanders is better positioned to win than he was in Iowa. (And the jury’s not really even out yet on the result of the Iowa contest.) Hillary’s hurting, but her campaign posits the South Carolina primary as her “firewall”—a sure victory after a likely setback in New Hampshire.

African-American MSNBC anchor Joy-Ann Reid (and open Hillary supporter) has been opining that Sanders would have a hard time “as a white, elderly socialist from a liberal state” to win the South Carolina primary. But you have to wonder. If young whites in Iowa stunned the pundits, might not young blacks in South Carolina do it too? Is Reid suggesting that African-Americans are more disposed to love capitalism than others in this country, and to prefer 68-year-old white Wall Street women to a 74-year-old socialist white man? Because the Clintons have done so much for the African-American community?

The Sanders campaign might be able—in its direct, matter-of-fact way that strikes many as refreshingly honest—to point out that when Hillary was a Goldwater Republican (in college in 1965), Bernie was organizing civil rights protests with the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He doesn’t wear his Civil Rights credentials on his sleeve though. They were part and parcel of his youthful commitment to his particular conception of socialism.

The campaign could point out that the Clintons have hardly on balance contributed to racial justice in America, considering that the massive wave of incarcerations of young black men for victimless crimes in this country surged during the Bill Clinton presidency, leading to the current state of affairs in which there are more young African-Americans in prison, not only than young blacks in college, but more than young blacks in slavery in 1860. (It’s worth mentioning too that Hillary’s signal achievement as Secretary of State was the U.S./NATO-led destruction of North Africa’s most affluent nation, Libya, resulting in a vicious wave of racist attacks on various black African communities. She’s done so much for black people!)

One should not assume that black voters in South Carolina are so enamored of the Clintons that they will ignore such issues, while recoiling from “socialism.” The history of ostensibly socialist movements is in fact filled with African-Americans, including Harry Haywood, D. E. B. DuBois, Huey Newton, Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael and many others. The celebrated poet Langston Hughes was a self-described socialist and prophet of revolution. Dreams deferred, he wrote, might explode.

Among the most prominent and respected African-American supporters of Bernie Sanders is Cornel West, formerly a professor at Harvard and Princeton and now at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. Author of the best-selling Race Matters (1994) and many other works, he is a Christian philosopher who studies the prophetic tradition in the African-American Church and integrates aspects of Marxism into his thought. He is a leader of the Democratic Socialists of America.

Like Sanders, he inveighs against the mainstream media, understanding this to be an arm of corporate America, leveling his sharpest attacks on the cable channel most slavishly devoted to the Democratic Party establishment.

“MSNBC and company—this is the Karl Rowanization of black journalists,” he declared recently, referring to Carl Rowan, the African-American journalist in the 1960s who had his own TV show and whom West calls “the most honored mainstream Negro of his day.” (Rowan attacked Malcolm X and disparaged Martin Luther King. He served the power structure that employed him, as does anchor Joy-Ann Reid in her unabashed allegiance to the Goldman-Sachs candidate Hillary.)

West, who on his Facebook page calls Sanders “a long-distance runner with integrity in the struggle for justice for over 50 years,” clearly believes that Sanders can win significant support among African-Americans in the South Carolina primary, maintaining momentum and defying those whistling in the dark about his “unelectability.” And one can predict that the more threatening Bernie becomes, the more raised eyebrows, knitted brows, and worried frowns will appear on the faces of media “experts,” “news analysts” and “senior correspondents” whose training does not allow them to see things as they really are.

Let them (as MSNBC’s least-liked anchor Chris Matthews has been doing) lecture the Bernie kids on how he’s just an idealistic “revolutionary” whereas Hillary, while sharing the same basic goals, realizes (given her maturity and vaunted “experience”) that change has to be “evolutionary”—as though there have been consistent, positive, incremental changes in the world due to her efforts over the last two decades. Let us see how effective this arrogant condescension will prove.

A Teaching Moment

This could be a teaching moment. Let us suppose that as Bernie is more and more barraged with such primitive red-baiting and the supporters simply get more whipped up. In Iowa 43% of likely voters identified themselves as socialists (whatever they meant by that) according to a January poll. When you tell people who don’t share your tired old Cold War blinders, and are attracted to a self-described socialist, that they can’t really be serious, that they can’t really expect to win, because…well, there’s just too much opposition to socialism—you just might provoke some heated debate. A national conversation about what socialism entails might finally become possible. That would be a good thing.

A lot of people on the radical left—which is where I locate myself—have focused their attention on trashing Sanders as just another bourgeois politician, not a “real” socialist but someone trying to mobilize the youth vote (as Obama did in 2008) to maintain the Democrats in power. Some argue that he’s a “sheepdog” herding his followers ultimately into Hillary’s camp. (This view presupposes of course that she is the inevitable nominee.)

Those questioning his socialist credentials (and his call for a “political revolution”) argue that he is really campaigning for the system. He’s hoodwinking the people.

Some examples. Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Philadelphia, declares, “Capitalism is the problem workers face. Sanders’ platform is for reforming capitalism. The SWP points to the example of the Cuban Revolution, where working people overturned capitalism.”

The Socialist.Worker website similarly contends: “We need to win the new left born out of Occupy, public-sector union struggles and the Black Lives Matter movement to breaking with the Democratic Party and building an electoral alternative as a complement to struggle from below. Bernie Sanders’ campaign inside the Democratic Party is an obstacle to that project.”

Steven Argue of the Revolutionary Party warns, “The left and working class in general has much to lose by backing Bernie Sanders…a scoundrel faux socialist, war monger, and supporter of America’s brutal police.”

The Revolutionary Communist Party contends: “The Bernie Sanders campaign—like those of every candidate who the ruling class allows to be taken seriously—essentially takes as its starting point stabilizing, strengthening, and ultimately enforcing the whole structure of a world dominated, exploited, and oppressed by the U.S. empire. And telling people that those interests are their interests.”

And: “Throw off your blinders and get into BA [RCP chair Bob Avakian]! A whole better world really is possible and you need to be part of the solution and not—like Bernie Sanders—part of the problem.”

What is more important now: sectarian sniping or popularizing an ideal?

Reading these ringing declarations by left sects, I think to myself: What is more important? To broadcast to people what they already know—that Sanders’ conception of “socialism” is really Scandinavian-style capitalism (capitalism with a “human face”) and not socialism in the Marxian sense, which results from the overthrow of the capitalist class?

Or: to note and appreciate the historical significance of Sanders’ campaign in returning the very term “socialism” to public discourse and emboldening people to openly identify with a concept anathema to Wall Street, the 1%, and the entire (widely hated) political establishment?

Cornel West appears to choose the latter option. This is all the more interesting in that he has been friendly for years with the RCP that’s trashing Bernie while West stumps for him. The irony is that the above-mentioned Avakian owes West big time.

Chairman Bob left the U.S. in 1980 for Paris and was not seen again in public until, with great fanfare, his party announced in 2003 that he had given talks on the East and West Coast and that these were available for purchase on DVD. It was not clear then or now that Avakian had permanently returned to the U.S. from Paris; the RCP refuses to comment on his whereabouts. But since few had seen him for twenty-three years, his sudden reappearance if only on video was a cause of jubilation among his followers.

Cornel West wrote words of praise for Avakian (as a “long-distance runner in the freedom struggle against imperialism, racism and capitalism”) that appeared as a blurb on the cover of his autobiography published in 2005. (Notice the similarity to his recent description of Sanders.)

He signed a statement in 2007 that appeared in the New York Review of Books—“Dangerous times demand courageous voices. Bob Avakian is such a voice.” The expensive ad was essentially designed to show anyone interested that Avakian had lots of well-known friends and that if the state went after him, they would have his back. Many intellectuals asked to sign, including Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky (not to mention myself), politely declined, noting that Avakian was under no specific legal threat and that the ad seemed designed to imply that he was in order to get signers to publicly aver that they “have come away from encounters with Avakian provoked and enriched in our own thinking,” declare that his “ability…to freely function” was “a concern,” urged that people “engage with the thoughts of Bob Avakian and bring them into what needs to be a rich and diverse dialogue,” and “[serve] notice to this government that we intend to defend” Avakian’s rights “to freely advocate and organize for his views.”

West was one of the signatories. West also urged support for RCP bus tour in 2012 designed to promote Avakian and interviewed him for a PRI radio program in 2013.

But the slowly resurfacing Avakian hadn’t given a public talk since 1980. As I understand it, the plan was for a dramatic Second Coming at a prestigious venue in the company of well-known public intellectual. Thus in November 2014 West joined Avakian for a “dialogue on revolution and religion” at the historic Riverside Church in Harlem. An overflow crowd heard the long-winded Avakian preach for two hours, interrupted increasingly by calls from the crowd for him to wrap up and let West take the podium. West spoke about half an hour, and then there were questions from the audience.

It wasn’t really a dialogue, and had little analytical content, but that was probably not the point. “BA”—as he’s affectionately called by adherents of his cult (officially, the “culture of appreciation, promotion and popularization” of a man the RCP officially describes as “a rare and precious leader” who as “as simple fact” is the only person who could have developed Marxism such that “today being a communist means following Bob Avakian and the new path that he has forged”) had shown that he was real and ready for prime time.

In sum: West has helped midwife the public rebirth of BA, who thinks Sanders is in the enemy camp. But West is a far firmer ally of Sanders than he is of “the rare and precious leader.”

Who’s got blinders on?

What does it tell us that even the public intellectual closest to the RCP—someone who longs for a revolutionary uprising as much as Avakian—is implicitly denounced by the RCP as “part of the problem” by supporting Sanders? It shows that the party is totally out of touch with reality. All it can do is say “drop your blinders and get into BA!”

And the other radical left sects tend to similarly dismiss or attack the Sanders campaign as being short of really revolutionary, really socialist. As though there’s any party out there really rooted in the masses, able to develop what Mao called the “mass line”—any party whose burning potential is being stymied by Bernie’s sudden popularity!

West’s endorsement of “Brother Bernie” is in his words “not an affirmation of the neo-liberal Democratic Party or a downplaying of the ugly Israeli occupation of the Palestinians” (which Sanders has not significantly opposed). Of course not. It’s a gamble that Sanders’ ongoing attack on Wall Street and open acknowledgement of a “democratic socialist” identity will lead to an electoral victory that will curb the power of the top stratum of capitalist parasites and diminish the prospects for more imperialist war.

Such a result would not (of course) constitute socialism. It would not mean a real “revolution” in the Leninist sense. It might be a replay of Roosevelt and the New Deal (a series of measures largely designed to prevent a revolution in this country in the 1930s). But should we prefer to that outcome a victory of a Clinton or Cruz—-on the premise that such a presidency would exacerbate social contradictions to the point where the people (under the leadership of rare and precious leaders leading tiny sects whose rank-and-file members spout rhetoric they themselves hardly understand) will rise up in a repeat of the Bolshevik Revolution?

In 1980 at age 24, already filled with contempt at the whole U.S. electoral process and viscerally opposed to any participation in it, I compared Carter and Reagan and hoped Reagan would win. Because I thought Reagan would so provoke the masses by his vicious cuts in social spending and his crazed Cold War mentality that his election would hasten the day of the needed revolution. I was overly optimistic and badly mistaken.

These days I think that the election of a Cruz or Rubio—idiots who could easily trigger more war in the Middle East, North Africa or Ukraine, while abetting the further concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, immiserating more millions—could possibly produce a revolutionary situation, where (to paraphrase Lenin) the old system can’t continue in the old way, the masses can’t live in the old way, and there is revolutionary leadership. But I don’t hope for the election of either; the prospect indeed fills me with dread.

Because I see no genuinely revolutionary party on the horizon remotely capable of effectively communicating with, much less leading the masses. I only see left sects trailing after each new mass movement, like Occupy or Black Lives Matter, striving to lead, recruiting a few new followers here and there, but more often than not alienating those they seek to influence by their wooden dogmatism, antiquated rhetoric, personality cults, lack of strategy and (often) the haggard zombie-like affect of their members trying to recruit.

On the other hand there is Sanders, a European-style social democrat calling for a “political revolution” and energizing the young generation to support him. In U.S. political history, this is not insignificant. Nor is it principally a bad thing. The Sanders campaign, whatever else it is, is a sign that young people are becoming okay with (some concept of) socialism. That can only be good for those seeing themselves as advocates of “real” socialism.

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, (AK Press). He can be reached at: gleupp@tufts.edu

This article First Published in counterpunch.org

Their Socialism and Ours: On Sanders

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by raomk in Current Affairs, International, Left politics, Readers News Service, USA

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'Socialist' Bernie Sanders, Berni sanders, Sanders, Socialism, US Elections

by JORDAN MARTINEZ on JANUARY 25, 2016

A specter is haunting Socialism – the specter of Sanders. The presidential run of Bernie Sanders, a nominally “independent” Senator from Vermont, has garnered at least nearly 200,000 claimed volunteers and $73 million in donations in 2015. His campaign has been heralded by the Left for it’s unabashedly populist rhetoric, with economistic calls for a “political revolution against the Billionaire Class.” There’s apparently just one problem: he’s running as a Democrat.

Sanders and the Democrats

In spite of how some on the Left might portray him, Bernie Sanders did not just wake up one day and say we need a political revolution, nor was his decision to run as a Democrat an incidental mistake. Sanders has long played a role as a false alternative from the Democratic Party, the primary run being only the most recent blatant shattering of his myth, although many supporters still cling to the pieces of “independence.” Bernie Sanders became involved in third party politics beginning in 1971, with his membership in the anti-war Liberty Union Party and his candidacy under their name for various statewide Vermont political positions from 1972 to 1976, before leaving the Party and orientating towards local elections. On the national level, the exit from LUP was underpinned by Sander’s support for Democratic presidential candidates- Jimmy Carter beginning in 1976, and campaigning for Walter Mondale in ’84.[i]

In 1981, Sanders successfully ran for Mayor of Burlington, Vermont as an independent, unseating a six-term Democrat incumbent. A new liberal progressive coalition formed to drive the electoral bids of Sanders, the precursor to the modern Vermont Progressive Party. From 1983 to ’87, Sanders would continue to win re-election against both Democrat and Republican challengers. Sanders was noted for his ardent anti-war positions, and opposition to certain imperialist policies of the federal government, a marked contrast from his current stances. In 1986, Sanders ran for Governor of Vermont, apart from the Liberty Union Party (who fielded their own candidate), solidifying the past division between himself and a layer of grassroots third-party supporters who buoyed his earliest campaigns. Despite continued “progressive coalition” support, Bernie’s electoral momentum came to a halt in 1988, following a failed run for the US House of Representatives. After seeing out his Burlington mayoral term, Sanders briefly departed from political activity. When returning to active political activity in the 1990’s, a new Bernie Sanders was formed. As the Vermont Liberty Union Party describe the rightward consolidation:

Bernie–out of office for the first time in eight years–then went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats. The Vermont Democratic Party leadership has allowed no authorized candidate to run against Bernie in 1990 (or since) and in return, Bernie has repeatedly blocked third party building. His closet party, the Democrats, are very worried about a left 3rd party forming in Vermont. In the last two elections, Sanders has prevented Progressives in his machine from running against Howard Dean, our conservative Democratic Governor who was ahead of Gingrich in the attack on welfare.

The unauthorized Democratic candidate in 1990, Delores Sandoval, an African American faculty member at the University of Vermont, was amazed that the official party treated her as a nonperson
and Bernie kept outflanking her to her right. She opposed the Gulf build-up, Bernie supported it. She supported decriminalization of drug use and Bernie defended the war on drugs, and so on…..

After being safely elected in November of 1990, Bernie continued to support the buildup while seeking membership in the Democratic Congressional Caucus–with the enthusiastic support of the Vermont Democratic Party leadership. But, the national Democratic Party blew him off, so he finally voted against the war and returned home–and as the war began–belatedly claimed to be the leader of the anti-war movement in Vermont.[ii]

A very clear affinity to the Democratic Party was then established. Democratic leader Howard Dean clarified the relationship Bernie Sanders has to the Dems on a 2005 episode of Meet The Press. Responding to a question on Sanders’ socialism in the run up to an upcoming Senate bid, he said “Bernie can call himself anything he wants. He is basically a liberal Democrat, and he is a Democrat that–he runs as an Independent because he doesn’t like the structure and the money that gets involved. And he actually has, I think, some good points about campaign finance reform. The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time And that is a candidate that we think… (w)e may very well end up supporting him. We need to work some things out because it’s very important for us not to split the votes in some of the other offices as well.”[iii]

For Sander’s loyalty to the Democrats, the current primary campaign opposite Hillary Clinton is the first time in the 21^st Century he has faced a DNC-backed challenger for electoral office. Even with a decades long electoral success resume, no independent party has been built with the seal of Sanders’ approval. Instead, he has given consistent endorsements and funding for Democrats nationally including, through PAC fronts, right wing Democrats.[iv] Disgracefully this is matched by his active campaigning against other independent campaigns, even of those by the Vermont Progressive Party which was founded by Sanders supporters. On the independent campaign of Ralph Nader in 2004, Sanders said, “Not only am I going to vote for John Kerry, I am going to run around this country and do everything I can to dissuade people from voting for Ralph Nader.”[v]

Unfortunately, even armed with history, the role of Bernie Sanders as a loyal opposition has been ignored by much of the Left. To posit that perhaps paradoxically running openly as a Democrat allows the opportunity of potential success for a “Socialist” candidate is fatally flawed, an understanding that cannot escape Sanders. The campaign has long been doomed as a non-starter, exactly because of the Democratic Party machine Sanders has aided and continues to provide pseudo-independent cover to. The Democratic Party, surprise surprise, is not actually democratically structured. Instead the primary process is overly determined outside of the caucuses by “super delegates,” primarily currently elected Democratic Party politicians. These super delegates control 20% of the overall delegate vote, and five hundred out of nearly eight hundred have already pledged support for Clinton. [vi] These pledges are not even coming exclusively from party hardliners, even presumed Sanders endorsers like Sherrod Brown of Ohio have gone into the camp of Clinton. Hillary then has the greatest party backing of any Democratic Party primary candidate at least since 1980. Only two House Representatives have endorsed Sanders, no senators, no governors. [vii]

As for the other 80% of delegate votes, derived via the caucuses, the picture isn’t much prettier. While the first two primaries of Iowa and New Hampshire look likelier by the day to swing towards Sanders, they represent a fraction of a percent of the number of delegates required at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. Additionally, New Hampshire and Iowa- along with Sanders’ Vermont- are three of the nations five whitest states. Demographics will give an inevitable electoral challenge to Bernie Sanders, particularly in the South, who was polled last June at only 9% support amongst non-White Democrats nationally. Clinton however enjoys generally positive name-recognition and support amongst Black Democrats. [viii] This is in large part due to the complicity of the extra-parliamentary wings of the Democratic Party.

The majority of unionized workers now belong to a union which has endorsed Clinton, an affirmation of labor activist Steve Early’s warning that if “organized labor plays it cautious and safe, jumping on the Clinton bandwagon instead of rallying around Sanders, it will be just one more sign of diminished union capacity for mounting any kind of worker self-defense, on the job or in politics.” Much of the institutions of the Black community are also firmly embedded in the Democratic Party machine, and thusly the Clinton campaign. [ix] In September, Sanders reached out to the Congressional Black Caucus, holding a meeting for the Caucus generally panned as a failure with only six CBC participants. This is half the number of CBC members who have already endorsed Clinton, twelve, a full quarter of CBC members. [x]

The lock-step march of the Black elite behind the Clinton campaign in the form of intellectuals like Michael Eric Dyson, over fifty Black mayors and the U.S. Black Chambers (of Commerce) endorsing Clinton, conservative church leaders, and continued patronage by Democratic Party front groups like the Urban League and the NAACP, communicates less the monopoly Clinton has over the political imagination of Black workers, and more a deep political disconnect. This political disconnect between the Black elite and the Black working class continues the political crisis exemplified by the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore. To this, Democratic Party offers no solutions, most certainly none desired by much of the Black youth who have ruptured with the old guard.

In September of 2014, in the wake of the Ferguson protests, over thirty elected Black Democrat St.Louis County, Missouri officials formed the “Fannie Lou Hamer Coalition.” While invoking radical rhetoric, the Coalition endorsed a Republican for the Missouri State House, citing an anti-incumbent and anti-Democrat mood. As one Republican supporter said: “We’re so baptized into voting for Democrats. . . . Look at all the Democrats that have done wrong to you.”[xi] At the Coalition’s launching press conference a 27 year old Black factory worker and hip-hop artist, a resident of the neighborhood Mike Brown was murdered in, “told the coalition that most of the youth are not going to follow them, but they will follow young men like him who have been on the ground since day one of the protests.” A coalition which pendulum-like swings from Republicans to Democrats is hardly a solution to the political fissures erupting in Black America. Numerous new organizing efforts have used the rhetoric of a New Civil Rights Movement, while funneling that energy into co-optionary dead ends. “Our generation is tired of this… It’s the young men who have being doing the fighting, but it’s still the young men who are not being heard. If it wasn’t for us fighting, these organizations wouldn’t be forming right now.” [xii] Unfortunately nor does the dominant organization emerging in this new period, Black Lives Matter, offer any alternative to the two-party system.

The Two-Way Street of Pressure Politics

The Black Lives Matter organization, headed by intellectuals Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi, for a lengthy period strategically maintained an anarchistic abstention from the 2016 elections in terms of endorsements, while tactically simultaneously disrupting various election rallies. BLM came to strain under the new terrain of party politics. Rightist branches of the network, like that in Boston, embarrassingly appealed to the moral faculties of politicians,[xiii]while more controversial actions like the shutdown of Bernie Sander’s Westlake Plaza speech in Seattle haven’t been principally defended. On the Seattle incident, BLM addressed it in a statement, saying “(r)egardless of the merits of this individual action which, among some, are still up for debate, one isolated incident cannot be the basis of judgment for the movement as a whole.” This is a shameful distancing from the actions of BLM activists, if “one isolated incident” was correct, then absolutely it should not just be defended- including its “merits”- but held up as an example for the “movement as a whole”! While they claim that their “work is not funded or driven by any political party nor is it influenced by local or national candidates,” this is clearly contradicted by the electoral orientation of the network. Flowing from this work, came the inevitable reckoning with reality. [xiv]

Black Lives Matter aided in creating a political vacuum in the modern Black Freedom Movement, by not definitively pointing to alternatives to the two-party system, while simultaneously placing demands on that system. This vacuum was readily filled by liberals like DeRay McKesson who, with his liberal Campaign Zero, met with Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and requested meetings with Republican candidates as well. Quickly, Campaign Zero took headlines and their platform began to define the movement, propelling BLM to build a relationship with the Democratic Party. Where McKesson called for a town hall candidates forum, BLM one-upped with a petition for a debate. However it was made clear on an episode of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry’s show that, radical language aside, the differences are minimal. Alicia Garza clarified the trajectory of BLM as such:

I think the big thing that we`re concerned about is that thus far, the Democratic Party has not done the work that it needs to, to genuinely engage black voters. And we have been doing that work. So has my colleague, DeRay. And certainly, again, it`s less a question of the format to us. We want to make sure that the Democratic National Committee is having serious conversations at every single level about how to address the crisis facing black communities today. And what we think that does not
mean is resting it on the shoulders of black folks to do that work for them. “

“I think what`s relevant is the question of our access to the democratic system. And what`s also relevant is the question of how democracy works right now, which to be honest, and to be frank, is locking out people like the members of our network from participating in genuine ways.

The issue with the lack of response from the DNC, and this is not a new demand, right? There`s lots of conversation happening in the DNC about opening up the process so more people can participate. And actually opening up the process so candidates can get closer to movements without being sanctioned for doing so.[xv]

Garza, rather than pointing to a break from the Democrats, instead gestures towards further inroads between “movements” and the DNC. The failure of pressure politics was put on full display, when Alicia Garza appealed to the very DNC resolution endorsing BLM, which BLM had supposedly rejected, as leverage to demand a full debate on #BlackLivesMatter with the Democrats. This was a furthering of BLM’s general strategy of confrontational pressuring, rather than challenging, of the Democrats.

What is made clear here, is that rather than the campaign of Bernie Sanders and the 2016 Democratic Party primary election cycle being an across the board gain for the “Left,” it in fact has been a rightist influence on large swaths of the Left, both on recent movements, as well as long-standing organizations. This is an inevitability where generally the working class have no independent institutions to resist electoral conservativism. American Leftist political parties in their current idealist (liberal) form, disconnected from specifically working class activity, cannot replace the role of institutions. Other examples can be made reflecting this reality.

Nominally the Green Party has maintained an independent position from the Democratic Party, with a Jill Stein campaign underway already. However, within the rank-and-file fissures have formed on the issue of Bernie Sanders. This is most visibly the case in Maine, where leadership members intervened to silence discussion of supporting Sanders, sparking threats of a wide-scale departure from the GP. The creator of the “Greens for Sanders” Facebook page, Maine State Party Treasurer Daniel Stromgren, claimed that “the majority of our 40,000 voter membership is going to vote for Sanders if he beats Hillary.” This claim was reinforced by Benjamin Meiklejohn, State Party Senior Advisor: “Statistically speaking, if you look at the numbers, between 80 and 97 percent of our own party’s members will not vote for the Green presidential candidate in the general election.” [xvi] For the Greens, the Sanders campaign cannot be boiled down merely as a short term tactical orientation, as due to the present ballot access laws, organizing here and now is a necessity to maintain a presence in upcoming ballots and consistent openings for electoral challenges to the Left of the Dems.

As Bruce Dixon writes “Currently the law keeps Greens and others off the ballot in more than half the states. Precise details vary according to state law, but if a third party candidate after obtaining one-time ballot access receives about 2% of total votes, a new ballot line is created, granting ballot access to any potential candidate from school board to sheriff to US congress who wants to run as something other than a Republican or Democrat. That, many participants agreed, would be a significant puncture in the legal thicket that now protects Democrats against competition on the ballot from their left. But a nationwide trans-partisan ballot access campaign to create a national alternative to the two capitalist parties is something left activists must begin serious work a good 18 months before a November election, essentially right now.”[xvii]

This again points to the barriers Bernie Sanders builds impeding potential third-party victories. An orientation towards the Sanders campaign, without simultaneously concretely building an alternative (not just vocalizing in favor of one), reveals a level of disingenuous populism. This is why Green Party candidate “Dr. [Jill] Stein is asking for [Sanders] supporters to think about helping her party now with ballot access in order to have another option on the ballot in November as a “Plan B” for them.” [xviii] “As of July 2015, [the GP] are on the ballot in 20 states, reaching 55% of the population. In play for 2015 is 9% of the population. In 2016, [the GP will] be fighting for another 26% of the population. About another 10% of the population lives in states with the most challenging ballot access laws.” [xix]

Of course, it is absurd to speak with any seriousness of an independent Bernie Sanders campaign, even aside from the ballot access laws. Sanders himself has made clear his intentions to not run as an independent multiple times. [xx] Additionally, his ties with the Democratic Party have been strengthened through the primary. In November, the Sanders campaign agreed to a join fund-raising agreement with the Democratic National Committee. “The move, which comes more than two months after Hillary Clinton’s campaign signed such an agreement in August, will allow Sanders’ team to raise up to $33,400 for the committee as well as $2,700 for the campaign from individual donors at events… (Sanders) also recently lent his name to a fundraising letter for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, according to a campaign adviser, in another indication of his slowly growing ties to the party’s infrastructure.”[xxi] The majority of Sanders supporters are just as tied to the Democratic Party, with a recent poll showing Clinton with 59% and Sanders with 26% of the party’s support, and of primary Sanders supporters- 59% also comfortable with a Clinton nomination. With Clinton consistently polling around merely 15% unfavorability amongst Democrats, the number of Sanders supports who will find it within themselves to vote Clinton in 2016 is sure to rise.[xxii]

Dead On Arrival is my assessment of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the movement of “Sandernistas.” Even where a movement for Bernie is a Left rather than Rightward shift, it is a zero-sum game to the DNC’s benefit. This is why the DNC has allowed an “insurgent” their platform, even highlighting Sanders’ campaign in email blasts.[xxiii] Whereas, in the midst of inner-party disputes, “progressive” Howard Dean had his 2004 primary run brutally taken down by a Clinton led leadership. A precursor to Sanders, Dean and his 140,000-strong “Deaniacs” movement broke records at this pre-Citizens United time with over $15 million raised, and an average donation of $25. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on attack ads against Dean by DNC insiders, culminating in a failing third-place at the Iowa caucus, and the infamous decontextualized “scream” for which he would be politically eviscerated. “Howard Dean was assassinated in broad daylight. Unlike Kennedy’s ‘grassy knoll,’ Dean’s killers are not hiding—it was the Democratic Party itself, and more specifically the Democratic Leadership Council.”[xxiv]

No less will Sanders campaign be eventually suffocated by the DNC, however, whereas Dean’s campaign was partially the product of a rift within the leadership of the Party, Sanders hardly could be said to have the Democratic Party, leadership or structures, in his cross hairs. Calls for a movement then coming from campaign offices, are marching orders into the DNC. Even explicit calls for a broader movement must be questioned by the previous measure– “A campaign has got to be much more than just getting votes and getting elected. It has got to be helping to educate people, organize people.”[xxv] Is this a statement of pressure politics, or the politics of rupture? Given what we know, this is clearly the former, a “socialism” not even passing for reformism. This is a repetition of history which should remind Leftists of all the calls after the 2008 presidential election to “hold Obama’s feet to the fire.” We should not fight to hold the state accountable, but to undermine it, as the Capitalist state can never be accountable to the oppressed.

Sanders, or Soviets?

Unfortunately, following decades of degrading labor and anti-capitalist movements, the Left is dominated by liberal ideas even on the fringes. Amongst Socialists, the conception of “movement” is less Trotskyist and more Alinskyist. Saul Alinisky was the author of Rules for Radicals, published in 1971, it became a bible for NGO “community organizers.” Inherently reformist and economistic, Alinskyism sees working class action in a utilitarian lens, as a means to an ends, rather than an expression of class consciouses. The ends in this case often are the winning of narrow reforms or pre-determined “leaders” being placed into positions of power. Given the recent history of various pressure campaigns like 15 Now and Black Lives Matter, whether intentionally so or eventually subsumed as such, the following critique of Alinskyism seems prophetic on its gains and limitations:

(T)he Alinsky form of opposing power is not sufficient, of course. That model takes a basic insight–one almost entirely absent from our national discourse these days–about the need to fight if you hope to win, and the need to oppose power with power, and does almost as little as possible with it: it defines powers narrowly, challenges them with a deeply formulaic strategy, and wins predictably narrow victories. These victories are actual victories, which should be a slap-across-the-face wake-up to the countless liberal and progressive organizations and ‘movements’ out there that never give the [few] people they involve in their campaigns an opportunity to experience the empowerment of actually winning something. But the victories of Alinsky groups are generally narrow and local; rarely if ever do they contribute to the creation of a new political circumstance in which similar groups of citizens will not have to form and fight and win in other places to achieve the same basic gain. They do not catalyze political change, really–just the resolution of a particular community’s ‘unique’ problems.[xxvi]

Returning then to the question of accountability, only institutions of the working class can ever hold their own “to the fire.” However, Sanders is not of the working class but a career politician, and is thusly an impediment to class independence where workers are expected to, in popular front fashion, liquidate themselves into his campaign – a liquidation evidenced by Socialist Alternative’s “Movement4Bernie” front group, whose website contains not a single criticism of Sanders. After decades of genuine workers institutions and organizing efforts being repressed by state violence, such as the case of the Black Panther Party, such institutions are vitally needed as the basis for “accountability” to bare any material meaning. Without them, elected Leftists, particularly those who carry no analysis of the extra-parliamentary wings of the Democrats, are forced into a centrism – swinging between, at worst, realpolitik allies, and at best, spontaneous class activity.

Proletarian institutions historically mean the commune, the soviet, the class-struggle based neighborhood and workplace councils. They build upon and transcend spontaneity, and they are the basis of dual power and thusly a new society: “All power to the Soviets.” The construction of such institutions, and the preparation for them to fulfill their historic role – this is the real task, which history in motion does not concede time to vacillate on. For Sanders though, Socialism has nothing to do with the “withering away of the State,” nothing to do with actual working class democracy and power. Instead, while appearing to be working class centered, Sanders is first and foremost state centered – in this historical context, centered on the Capitalist state. This overrides whatever promised reforms he may be campaigning on, as this places him at odds with the working class. Sanders, by defining Socialism so loosely as simply anything the government does, including the police and military(!), empowers the 70 members (in 2009) of the Democratic Socialists of America serving in the US Congress to continue their delusion that they are “Socialists” by reinforcing the state. [xxvii] This is why the head of the DNC, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, can refuse to answer what the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist is when asked. Her response, “the more important question is, what’s the difference between a Democrat and a Republican?” may also be shared by the leadership of SAlt and much of the soft-Left.[xxviii]

Murray Bookchin wrote of Sanders as Mayor of Burlington, Vermont in 1986, describing him as “a centralist” with an “administration, [that] despite its democratic proclivities, tends to look more like a civic oligarchy than a municipal democracy.” Bookchin concluded his criticism, which included details of a Burlington waterfront sellout, thusly: “This ‘managerial radicalism’ with its technocratic bias and its corporate concern for expansion is bourgeois to the core — and even brings the authenticity of traditional ‘socialist’ canons into grave question. A recent Burlington Free Press headline which declared: ‘Sanders Unites with Business on Waterfront’ could be taken as a verdict by the local business establishment as a whole that it is not they who have been joining Sanders but Sanders who has joined them. When productivist forms of ‘socialism’ begin to resemble corporate forms of capitalism, it may be well to ask how these inversions occur and whether they are accidental at all. This question is not only one that must concern Sanders and his supporters; it is a matter of grim concern for the American radical community as a whole.”[xxix]

The numerous Sanders campaign promises have limitations exactly because of the restrictions of the capitalist state which he is tied to in his “Sewer Socialism” even more than he is tied to the Democratic Party. The economic program of Sanders, which could be generalized as a Keynesian one, is a 2016 version of Obama’s “Hope and Change,” and just as sterile – sterile, as a result of the constraints of the Capitalist system in crisis. In the midst of all this talk of taxing the “Billionaire class” lies a economy struggling with a marginal recovery post-Great Recession and teetering on collapse. The assumptions present in the economic outlook of Sanders are completely at odds with a Marxist outlook. Whereas liberal economists look at the drop of investment in productive sectors of the economy, as opposed to speculative investment, as a political issue of mis- or non-allocated funds, which the state must thusly appropriate to direct the marketplace, Marxists actually have an analysis founded not in (politically Left) Keynesianism, but in (politically Right) classical Liberalism. The world is then flipped on it’s head from the perspective of a Keynesian. The root causes of the 2008 long depression – Ponzi speculations, fantastical casino betting, and easy credit – are in reality the superficial expressions of a low rate of profit, the ability for the Capitalist class to turn a dollar into two dollars. Government investment outside of particular circumstances, which both Keynes and Krugman have acknowledged to be a World War economy, are an encroachment on the profits of corporations.[xxx] This encroachment cycles further drops in investment, as the promise of profitable returns is lowered. On this, New York University professor Michael Rectenwald wrote that,

As it stands, over the past forty-plus years, we have witnessed a tremendous curtailment of investment in social reproduction, such that the withering of state and private property investments has resulted in a shrunken and shrinking fixed capital base, along with the continual sloughing off of even more layers of variable capital [the labor power of workers]. Given the new, vaunted robotic automation that is promised, even more layers of workers could lose their jobs, thus offsetting or more than offsetting any gains Sanders or Clinton might achieve in employment. And if this were not bad enough, the increased technology investments in robotics [to the detriment of labor] would have the effect of further drawing down the rate of profit, thus serving to further stifle investment in production and thus labor. Likewise, the increasing introduction of robotic automation would enlarge the already growing layers of displaced workers.[xxxi]

On multiple fronts then the Socialism of Bernie Sanders, and the Socialism of much of the Left is found lacking. In common discourse it has become a trope to posit Sanders as the “good,” contrasted to the “perfect” that is a pie-in-the-sky Socialism. At this historical juncture however, the perfect is not the enemy of the good; in fact, the good is the enemy of the perfect – and it’s not even very good. Whereas the “Left” is supposedly a spectrum from liberals and progressives to radicals and revolutionaries, on the crucial issues before us today of the economy and the state, Marxism is not simply a ratcheting up of “progressive” rhetoric, but is it’s own logic entirely. Stoking illusions in the ability for the Capitalist state to respond to the needs of the people is a doomed strategy, one having already played out under Syriza in Greece. The only correct political response to Capitalism in crisis is the organization of a working class conscious of itself as having interests separate from the ruling class and the Capitalist state.

Jim B further wrote in his previously quoted 2006 article that “(i)n the end, real organizing and ideology are deeply linked. When the left has either one of these without the other–as with the Alinsky-based models (real organizing without ideology) and countless 20th-century manifestations of intellectual socialism (ideology without real organizing)–the right has the opportunity, if it has both (as it does in the U.S. today, in spades), to beat the living shit out of us.”[xxxii] While the Far Right, emphasized most by ISIS, are consolidating in the wake of the failures of the Left, whether it be Syriza’s capitulation to austerity in Greece or Chavizmo’s historic electoral loss in Venezuala, we must build up the conscious forces of the historic revolutionary Left amongst working and oppressed communities. A strategy of autonomy from the state matching that of the Far Right is both a tactical maneuver to undercut and transcend divisions within the working class, while also a strategic necessity in building towards a situation of dual power.

While it may seem laughable to contrast organizing around Bernie Sanders to organizing for a revolution, that is precisely the situation we’ve found ourselves in 2016 – closer to the precipice of another economic crash, with the Far Right much better positioned to take advantage. Immediately, campaigns around democracy – “the lifeblood of Socialism” – should be introduced for every facet of working class life, such as campaigning for community and tenant run public housing. Mass movements should not be treated as means, but as the basis for new expressions of class organizing. Ultimately, the “vanguard,” as the highest expression of class consciousness, can only appear out of class struggle. That the United States is populated by numerous “vanguard” parties, each an exception to the history of such organizations as the central bodies of co-operation and debate between genuine working class leaders, should cease to be the norm. Replacing today’s Left should be one which is both rooted, and emanates from, the working class and their conditions. Nothing else can move us. forward.

[i]“A Vermont Socialist’s Guide to Bernie Sanders,” SocialistWorker.org, accessed December 29, 2015, http://socialistworker.org/2015/06/11/a-vermont-socialists-guide-to-sanders.

[ii]“Liberty Union Party | Bernie the Bomber’s Bad Week,” accessed January 3, 2016, http://www.libertyunionparty.org/?page_id=363.

[iii]JoetheElectrician, Meet the Press – May 22, 2005 – Howard Dean, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSFVsHlocxM.

[iv]“‘Socialist’ Bernie Sanders Funds Scumbag Democratic Party Campaigns,” Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist, accessed December 29, 2015, http://louisproyect.org/2014/11/03/socialist-bernie-sanders-funds-scumbag-democratic-party-campaigns/.

[v]“A Socialist in the Senate?,” accessed December 29, 2015, http://socialistworker.org/2006-2/610/610_11_BernieSanders.shtml.

[vi]“Bill Clinton Rallies Superdelegates as Hillary’s Campaign Hints at Growing Roster,”Bloomberg.com/politics, accessed January 4, 2016, http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-10-28/bill-clinton-rallies-superdelegates-as-hillary-s-campaign-hints-at-growing-roster.

[vii]Aaron Bycoffe, “The 2016 Endorsement Primary,” FiveThirtyEight, accessed January 4, 2016, http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2016-endorsement-primary/.

[viii]Nate Silver, “Bernie Sanders Could Win Iowa And New Hampshire. Then Lose Everywhere Else.,” FiveThirtyEight, October 11, 2015, https://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/bernie-sanders-could-win-iowa-and-new-hampshire-then-lose-everywhere-else/.

[ix]“Hillary Clinton Is Pulling Away From Bernie Sanders With Union Endorsements,” The Huffington Post, accessed January 4, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/hillary-clinton-union-endorsements_564677a2e4b045bf3def3588.

[x]Sophia Tesfaye, “Bernie Sanders Tries to Meet with Black Leaders but Nobody Shows up: Only 6 Congressional Black Caucus Members Attend,” accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/bernie_sanders_ties_to_met_with_black_leaders_and_nobody_shows_up_only_6_congressional_black_caucus_members_attend/.

[xi]“Black Voters in St. Louis County Direct Their Anger at the Democratic Party – The Washington Post,” accessed January 3, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/black-voters-in-st-louis-county-direct-their-anger-at-the-democratic-party/2014/10/14/e6957b8a-4f02-11e4-aa5e-7153e466a02d_story.html.

[xii]“Black Dems Form ‘Fannie Lou Hamer’ Political Organization,” St. Louis American, accessed January 3, 2016, http://www.stlamerican.com/news/local_news/article_5509968c-3e8c-11e4-b8fa-d3c00efcf341.html.

[xiii]“#BlackLivesMatter Performs a Self-Humiliation at Hillary Clinton’s Hands | Black Agenda Report,” accessed December 30, 2015, http://blackagendareport.com/blacklivesmatter_humiliated_by_Clinton.

[xiv]“Two Years Later, Black Lives Matter Faces Critiques, But It Won’t Be StoppedBlack Lives Matter,” accessed January 5, 2016, http://blacklivesmatter.com/two-years-later-black-lives-matter-faces-critiques-but-it-wont-be-stopped/.

[xv]“Melissa Harris-Perry, Transcript 10/25/15,” MSNBC, October 25, 2015, http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/melissa-harris-perry/2015-10-25.

[xvi]“Conflict Erupts in Green Party after Censorship of Sanders Supporters | Fighting the Tides,” accessed December 29, 2015, http://tides.bangordailynews.com/2015/07/13/home/conflict-erupts-in-green-party-after-censorship-of-sanders-supporters/.

[xvii]“Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders: Sheepdogging for Hillary and the Democrats in 2016 | Black Agenda Report,” accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.blackagendareport.com/bernie-sanders-sheepdog-4-hillary.

[xviii]“Plan B? Green Party Candidate Jill Stein’s Message to Bernie Sanders Supporters,”Florida for Jill Stein 2016, accessed January 10, 2016, http://jillstein2016.gulfcoastgreens.org/plan-b/plan-b-green-party-candidate-jill-steins-message-bernie-sanders-supporters/.

[xix]“Ballot Access,” Www.gp.org, accessed January 10, 2016, http://www.gp.org/ballotaccess.

[xx]“‘This Week’ Transcript: Fallout From Baltimore,” ABC News, May 3, 2015, http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/week-transcript-fallout-baltimore/story?id=30757510.

[xxi]Gabriel Debenedetti, “Sanders Campaign Inks Joint Fundraising Pact with DNC,” POLITICO, accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/bernie-sanders-2016-fundraising-dnc-215559.

[xxii]“Most Bernie Sanders Voters OK with Hillary Clinton Winning,” USA TODAY, accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2015/12/16/bernie-sanders-voters-hillary-clinton-poll/77414862/.

[xxiii]Josh Marshall, “The Official Opposition?,” TPM, May 28, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-official-opposition.

[xxiv]“What Bernie Sanders’ Supporters Can Learn From Howard Dean,”Www.counterpunch.org, accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/12/what-bernie-sanders-supporters-can-learn-from-howard-dean/.

[xxv]“Bernie Sanders: ‘I Am Prepared to Run for President of the United States’ [Updated on March 19],” The Nation, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-i-am-prepared-run-president-united-states-updated-march-19/.

[xxvi]“Activism, Incorporated,” Www.counterpunch.org, accessed January 11, 2016, http://www.counterpunch.org/2006/10/07/activism-incorporated/.

[xxvii]“How Many Socialists Sit in Congress Today?,” WND, accessed January 5, 2016, http://www.wnd.com/2010/08/191609/.

[xxviii]“No Really—What’s the Difference Between a Democrat and a Socialist?,”Bloomberg.com/politics, accessed December 29, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-07-31/no-really-what-s-the-difference-between-a-democrat-and-a-socialist-.

[xxix]“Murray Bookchin, ‘The Bernie Sanders Paradox: When Socialism Grows Old’ (1986),” accessed December 29, 2015, http://murrayhatesbernie.tumblr.com/post/127378873094/murray-bookchin-the-bernie-sanders-paradox-when.

[xxx]“Krugman and Depression Economics,” Michael Roberts Blog, May 27, 2012, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/krugman-and-depression-economics/.

[xxxi]“Syriza and Sanders: ‘Just Say “No”’ to Neo-Liberalism | Insurgent Notes,” accessed December 29, 2015, http://insurgentnotes.com/2015/07/syriza-and-sanders-just-say-no-to-neo-liberalism/.

[xxxii]“Activism, Incorporated.”

This article published on thenorthstar.info

The road to revolution

06 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by raomk in Current Affairs, INTERNATIONAL NEWS, Left politics, UK

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Marxist Student Federation, revolution, Socialism

The road to revolution: the work of the Marxist Student Federation in 2016

This document is a brief outline of the ideas and tasks of the Marxist Student Federation (MSF) UK, to be discussed, amended and voted on in Marxist societies around the country and at the national conference of the MSF in February 2016.

These proposals are designed to provide a skeleton for the work of the MSF over the next year. They should be supplemented by reports and resolutions from the groups that make up the Federation, to be submitted, discussed and voted on at the national conference.

Amendments, resolutions and reports should be sent to contact@marxiststudent.com by Friday 22 January 2016. The national conference will take place on Saturday 13 February 2016.

——————————————————

One solution: revolution

This year has seen movements of students and young people all over the world, demanding an end to cuts, privatisations and austerity. In just the last four months of 2015 South Africa, Greece, Brazil, Italy, and the USA all witnessed massive youth mobilisations.

Everywhere young people have taken to the streets in the face of attacks from a whole series of governments, from Obama in the USA to Syriza in Greece. This assault on living standards cannot be reduced simply to a question of ideology. It has far deeper causes.

In reality these attacks are the product of a capitalist system that has exhausted itself. It is unable to provide a better life for successive generations. What young people are experiencing today is not a product of badly managed capitalism; this is the only life that capitalism has to offer our generation. As long as governments prop up the capitalist system they will be forced to carry out austerity, regardless of their political positions.

Students and young people in Britain must take this lesson on board. We support the demand to tax the rich, but we argue that in a crisis-riddled system managed by the rich for the rich we need to go much further. Likewise we support free education, but we recognise that under capitalism this will never be fully realised – to make this a reality something more is needed.

We therefore argue for a fundamental, revolutionary change in society. We fight for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a socialist system based on democratic working-class ownership of the economy so that it can be planned in the interests of need and not profit. Only on this basis can we solve the social and economic problems that are causing the rebellion of young people all over the world.

Defend Corbyn, fight for socialism

The election of Jeremy Corbyn is a welcome step forward because he stands for an anti-establishment, anti-austerity programme that offers many people, particularly young people, hope for the future. Inevitably Corbyn is under attack from the Tories, the capitalist media and the right-wing of the Labour party because of his support for radical, socialist change. Marxists should participate wherever possible in the fight to defend Corbyn against these attacks, including by advocating the mandatory reselection of Labour MPs.

During his campaign for election as leader of the Labour party Corbyn put forward the idea of a National Education Service (NES). Marxist students should campaign for an NES that provides free education for everyone from cradle to grave, including:

The introduction of real living grants for all students and an end to tuition fees.
Allow parents, teachers, staff and students to run educational institutions democratically and put a stop to academies and privatisations.
The introduction of free education throughout an individual’s lifetime and an end to the extreme division of labour under capitalism.
Education to be funded through expropriation of the economy and the introduction of a socialist plan of production based upon the nationalisation of the major monopolies, banks etc.

These demands, if implemented, would put an end to exploitation under the capitalist system. They act as a bridge between a popular but ill-defined idea about what education should look like and a socialist society based on common ownership.

Corbyn’s political programme is generally good as it stands, but we should go much further. He is seeking a solution to the problems faced by working class people within the broken capitalist system. Marxists must highlight the lessons from Syriza’s experience in Greece, in which Tsipras was forced to give in to the blackmail of the capitalists. If you accept capitalism you must accept the logic of capitalism, and that logic requires austerity. The only solution is to break with the capitalist system.

Students and workers: unite and fight

The power to change society lies with the working class, which has never been more powerful than it is today. The proletarianisation of the middle-class, epitomised by the 98% vote for strike action by junior doctors in December 2015, is complemented by the falling living standards of students. School and university students are often forced to work to support themselves while studying. At University College London and other universities students are threatening rent strikes over the spiralling cost of living.

Students must ally themselves with workers to change society. Supporting strike action, attending picket lines and demonstrations, and spreading revolutionary ideas are all ways in which students can unite with workers. One concrete issue uniting students and workers that can be taken up by Marxists is the Youth Against Blacklisting campaign which aims to get blacklisting construction companies banned from university campuses.

The Tories recognise the potentially powerful union between students and workers and are cynically using the excuse of “terrorist threats” to implement their ‘Prevent’ strategy. This aims to divide students amongst themselves, to divide staff against students, and targets any students advocating “political change”. Marxists must campaign against ‘Prevent’ by arguing for a socialist solution to religious extremism, and for an end to racial profiling and the victimisation of political students.

The revolutionary road ahead

Marxism, or scientific socialism, is the historical memory of the working class. By studying the successes and failures of the revolutionary movements of the past Marxists aim to help guide the revolutionary movements of the future. Promoting the ideas of Marxism is the primary purpose of the societies that make up the Marxist Student Federation. Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.

Capitalism is in turmoil. A new crisis of capitalism threatens to plunge the world into a new depression. Revolution and counter-revolution are on the order of the day. Our task is to prepare now for this new epoch that is opening up before us.

Theory is a guide to action and comrades in each Marxist society must consider how best it can apply the ideas of Marxism to the situation in which we find ourselves today. Campaigning for socialist policies, and building those campaigns with workers and students all over the country and internationally, is essential for spreading the ideas of Marxism.

The Marxist Student Federation is expanding and strengthening its forces year-on-year. If we continue to fight with clear ideas and an audacious approach Marxists will play a pivotal role in defining the future political landscape of Britain and the world.

NOTE : This article was first published on Marxist Student Federation

The Future of Socialism in the US: An Interview With Kshama Sawant

23 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by raomk in Left politics, USA

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Kshama Sawant, Socialism, Truthout

By C.J. Polychroniou, Truthout | Interview

Why is there no socialism in US national politics? This question has haunted historians and political analysts since the German sociologist Werner Sombart raised it more than 100 years ago in an effort to explain an apparent anomaly: The United States was the only nation in the industrial world that did not have an organized labor movement directed toward socialist goals. In fact, socialism itself was regarded by most Americans at the time as a foreign idea, which helped to explain why there was no socialist party functioning on a national level, but instead only sectarian left groups at the local level.

“The socialist vision is an anathema to the establishment.”

Sombart’s explanation for the absence of socialism in the United States as a vital alternative path to the organization of the economy along capitalist principles and values was attributed to capitalism’s own vitality and what he regarded as the love affair that US workers had with the free enterprise system. For all practical intents and purposes, he might have also included anti-intellectualism, as US culture was not hospitable to intellectuals, and socialism could not have been what it was without the influence of the intelligentsia.

In the present day, while socialism has yet to establish firm roots across the United States, new political and social developments may herald more promising things to come for the spread of the socialist vision in US society. Turn-of-the-millennium developments such as the rise of the anti-globalization movement and the emergence of the Occupy movement have both been fueled by late capitalism’s growing tendency to create economic bubbles and to concentrate wealth into fewer and fewer hands. Meanwhile, the appearance of Bernie Sanders on the national political stage and the re-election of Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant, an avowedly open socialist, are highly important developments for the future of socialism in the United States.

The case of Sawant seems to be of particularly great significance because it shows that political candidates do not have to make ideological compromises in order to get elected. In fact, Sawant’s radical political message ensured her re-election in the state and local elections of November 2015, as she revealed in an exclusive interview with Truthout.

C.J. Polychroniou: Your re-election to the Seattle City Council has to be seen as an even more important step for the advancement of the socialist cause in the United States than your election in 2013, when you ran on a platform advocating a $15-an-hour minimum wage and were of course the first independent socialist elected in a major US city in decades. What was your message to voters this time around?

Kshama Sawant: Well, let me start by saying that the city of Seattle and the state of Washington are home to some of the world’s wealthiest corporations, and there is an economic boom going on here for sometime now. At the same time, however, wealth is highly concentrated, many young people are left behind because of unemployment and the lack of decent jobs paying decent wages and salaries, and the working population and retirees in general are experiencing declining living standards, which is of course the general pattern throughout the country. In addition, we have the most regressive tax system in the nation. So my re-election campaign focused specifically on those issues: affordable housing, funding education and transportation, and progressive taxation.

Tell us specifically about the housing and homeless crisis in Seattle.

Rents in the city of Seattle have been rising faster than in any other major US city. Working people and people of color are being driven out because they cannot afford the high rents. In addition, we have a very serious homeless crisis, which only last year increased by 21 percent. The housing crisis is a real and deep crisis in Seattle, although neither Democrats nor Republicans have been willing to tackle the issue in any meaningful and effective way. They are against both rent controls and raising taxes for the rich.

Obviously, people responded to your concerns about the housing crisis and your message about economic inequality and did so while you ran a campaign as a socialist. Aren’t you the least surprised about this?

Not really. Take for example young people who were very supportive of my re-election campaign. They are aware that they won’t see the middle-class living standards of their parents. So they understood what my message was all about. Same goes about retirees and people of color. My support came precisely from those constituencies that are most directly affected by the inequalities and injustices produced by the capitalist system. My campaign mobilized over 600 volunteers. And I did run, of course, as an open Socialist Alternative candidate.

How were you treated by your opponents and the mainstream media in general?

Naturally, I was attacked by my opponents for being a socialist and the mission of the mainstream media was to discredit me, especially since they did not take us seriously the first time out. The Seattle Times, an establishment newspaper, was particularly vicious towards me. I was also attacked for caring about international issues and not merely local issues. The socialist vision is an anathema to the establishment.

I intend to find out what socialism means for you, but first I would like to have your views on capitalism. For example, you have said that capitalism is not working. Yet, many will rush to challenge this view by pointing out the recent economic “success” of nations like China and India that have moved away from a command economy and, as result, have experienced historically high rates of growth and growing middle classes. Do you question this “fact”?

It is true that capitalism has raised the standard of living in China and India and did so in many Western countries in the past. But we must not forget that the gains under capitalism have been achieved for the most part through class struggles. This is the case about the eight-hour workday, the unionization of workers, social benefits and so on. But capitalism is no longer achieving growth that benefits even slightly the working-class populations. Under finance capitalism, we have bubbles, volatility and chaos. Under finance capitalism, there is a tension between a booming economy and young people.

“Socialism has to start from somewhere. And this is what we are trying to do in Seattle for the United States.”

I believe that capitalism cannot offer a sustainable future. Human needs are simply not in congruence with a capitalist economy, which thrives on the maximization of profit. As for the financialization of the economy, the transition from industrial capitalism was made precisely because the system was no longer sustainable and it needed new profit-making venues. Now, every aspect of society is wrapped around financialization, making the many poor and the few ever richer.

Austerity has emerged as the official economic dogma pretty much throughout the advanced capitalist world. In your view, is austerity a response to sovereign debt and deficits or something more sinister?

Austerity is being imposed by the financial elite and the banksters, who, of course, control much of the political process. It is a means for the capitalists to generate more profits and to rollback working-class gains. It is a rational process, an excuse to sovereign debt and deficits, and I think most people understand that. The problem is that few politicians are willing to speak out on behalf of the people and against the elite.

You were involved in the Occupy movement. What do you consider to be the most important aspect of Occupy?

Occupy brought to the forefront the reality of economic inequality and made it a central component of political debate in the country. Occupy went further than previous resistance movements by naming an enemy: the richest 1%, the financial elite that buys politicians and gets itself bailed out by the government while the rest of us, the 99%, are paying for the costs of the bailouts and getting ripped off by those at the top of the economic pyramid.

However, figuring out a strategy for change requires that we get to the root of the problem of inequality, class and power in society. It requires a deeper understanding of the political economy of capitalism. Working people produce the vast wealth of society, but we only receive a small part of that in wages, while the capitalists extract huge profits from our labor. So the challenge is the re-emergence of the labor movement as a serious force in US society. A labor movement that sees the working people as a central force to change the world and end all forms of oppression and exploitation. So the task is of a double nature: to promote unions, as they are the strongest organizations we have to improve our living standards, and to fight to transform unions. Rebuilding unions as fighting organizations requires, again, building an alternative to the present dominant structure. [It requires] vision and strategy in labor.

What is socialism for you?

Socialism is the vision of a global society that allows a high standard of living in a sustainable manner without oppression and exploitation. Socialism is by definition an international project as it is nearly impossible to be established and thrive in a national setting. A socialist nation in a capitalist sea will result in the deformities that socialism experienced in places like the Soviet Union. So, as socialists, we must always work for the spread of socialism throughout the world and not confine our activities to our own local or national setting.

Are you implying then that the trend toward world socialism is a prerequisite for the realization of the socialist vision?

Yes, because no single country can have all the necessary resources to sustain itself and run a socialist economy. The history of socialism teaches us that capitalist countries will do everything in their power to strangulate a socialist nation. But, obviously, socialism has to start from somewhere. And this is what we are trying to do in Seattle for the United States.

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Tag Archives: Socialism

FOR A NEW COMMUNIST PARTY

Crowds and Party

Is a “Socialist” Really Unelectable? The Potential Significance of the Sanders Campaign

Their Socialism and Ours: On Sanders

The road to revolution

The Future of Socialism in the US: An Interview With Kshama Sawant

“The socialist vision is an anathema to the establishment.”

“Socialism has to start from somewhere. And this is what we are trying to do in Seattle for the United States.”

Crowds and Party

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“The socialist vision is an anathema to the establishment.”

“Socialism has to start from somewhere. And this is what we are trying to do in Seattle for the United States.”

Share this: