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The Trouble with Bernie

A primary campaign within the bourgeois electoral system is not a mass movement. That's something that people really don't get in the whole back-and-forth about Bernie Sanders. The rallies and so forth are purely about building the individual candidate and their platform. There is no space, aside from standing outside the campaign and doing agitation and propaganda work, to present a revolutionary program. You can't join the Bernie movement and say you are for a program of transitional demands; people are there because they are Sanders supporters and want his platform.

There is some good being done in that there is popular discussion of the term "socialism." But in itself the term is useless. The President of the French Republic is a member of the Parti Socialiste, and yet he oversees austerity and pro-business and anti-immigrant measures and has initiated wars through NATO. The corrupt neoliberal Partido dos Trabalhadores in Brazil has done little good even though its name means Workers Party. The Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela, in reality a left populist party, raised the profile of socialism for a time but has discredited those ideas through its corruption and economic failings.

In reality, the one good thing that revolutionaries can take from this is to use the opening that Sanders does provide to talk about what we want when we talk about socialism. But that means talking about something very different from Bernie Sanders's platform. It means we talk about workers' control and a social revolution that take us outside of the bounds of capitalism. Which you can't really do while saying that Bernie Sanders is a good candidate and you should support him.

Critical support of Sanders might be possible if he were running as an independent. That would mean REALLY critical support. You have to be able to say - Bernie Sanders is not in favor of stopping drone wars in foreign countries, he's not in favor of open borders (which means in practice that he'd continue the deportation program favored by the Democrats), and his economic program is quite modest and has protectionist elements that internationalists can't support.

If Sanders were running as the candidate of an independent workers party, we could say, "We have our own program, we have these criticisms of Sanders, but we will vote for him as a workers' candidate." Not because he is the best candidate - but because he would be running as a workers' candidate and seen as the candidate of the working class. The goal of revolutionaries in critical support is to gain a hearing from workers who are supporting a candidate, not to help that candidate as a lesser evil.

But he's running as a Democrat, which throws the whole equation off balance. In principle, revolutionaries relate to the bourgeois workers parties differently because they are creations of the working class. You can't just say "we want to smash this party" because, to the workers, it is something that belongs to them. So you can take an attitude of patient explanation, you can support the candidates with heavy criticisms, and you say to them, "See, the leaders of this party will always betray you." And you win over the best and most class conscious of its rank and file.

We can't take that approach with the Democratic Party. The goal of revolutionaries is to smash the Democratic Party machine to bits. We openly and vividly want to tear the whole thing down. The very first reality that a revolutionary in the United States needs to accept, and in a way this is a sine qua non for revolutionary politics, is that there is no future in the Democratic Party. It's a creation of the ruling class and serves its master. Once you wander into the Democratic Party, even in an oppositional way, you accept its rules and you are trying to fight the ruling class for control of a ruling class instrument, on terrain of their control. And that always ends in tragedy and betrayal.

I am confident that people who support Bernie Sanders today will be part of a future revolutionary party. But before that happens, it is an absolute necessity for them to break from the Democrats. We can't sugar-coat that. If you say you want a revolution, you need to have it outside the walls of the Democratic Party. I honestly think that you have a better shot at a revolution than you do of improving the Democrats from within. 

And if you look at the Sanders “movement” - a lot of what happens is not really revolutionary politics but people complaining about this and that aspect of the Democratic National Committee or superdelegates or how their candidate is being handled in the bourgeois press. We can honestly say, we agree, this is profoundly undemocratic. But that’s the nature of the beast, that’s what Sanders accepted when he ran as a Democrat. Acknowledging the really undemocratic nature of the Democratic Party and the primary/caucus system is a good thing.

Yet at the end we are presented with the idea that, by not supporting Bernie Sanders, we are standing outside of a mass movement and watching it go by. But the gap between what Sanders actually stands for and what revolutionary socialists want is so broad that it actually doesn’t help to support him. Sanders supporters expect you to support what Bernie Sanders is actually for. When you say actually you have a different program, you’re putting yourself outside of his campaign anyway. Realistically, revolutionaries in the US are in the position of peeling off the “ones and twos” who can break with bourgeois politics. The Sanders campaign is not a shortcut for us. At best it will present us with a few more opportunities to find these “ones and twos,” people who become interested in socialism because of the campaign or will go to “What is Socialism?” type events and be won over to revolutionary politics. But the Sanders campaign hasn’t done that work for us already - no matter how many times he says “socialism” or “political revolution.”

Orienting to Sanders supporters without an oppositional, break from the Democrats type of approach is a tremendous strategic mistake. It requires you to drop the first and most important gain that people make when they join a revolutionary organization, that is the break from the Democratic Party, and in return all you get is the milquetoast liberal platform that Sanders puts forward. There is a tactical way to use the hubbub around Sanders to help find a few more potential revolutionary socialists, but it requires an honest and sweeping critique of the Sanders platform that you can’t bring into a primary campaign.

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Against Economic Nationalism

tl;dr: forget “They Took Our Jobs” - demand “Jobs for All!”

1. The natural ideology of American populism in the neoliberal age is economic nationalism. The pure expression of this is opposition to the idea that “they are sending our jobs overseas.”

2. This opposition is reactionary, looking backward to an imagined golden age of factories filled with well-paid white male workers. This epoch was brief and its benefits are vastly overstated.

3. Workers in other countries - Mexico, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, anywhere in Latin America or Asia or Africa - are not less deserving of jobs, at good wages, than workers in the USA. There is a major current of rage against brown and yellow people in the “they are taking our jobs” rhetoric.

4. Populism, by embracing economic nationalism as a panacea, thereby sets the (white) workers in the USA against the workers of other countries on the basis of this othering. This takes the emphasis off of the corporations, who remain relatively faceless and without agency.

5. As an economic program, this is a pipe dream. Without erecting tariff barriers, a “protected” US economy could not compete on low-cost labor intensive manufactured goods put out by companies in underdeveloped countries. The wage differentials are too severe.

6. Moreover, it ignores the reality that manufacturing has been returning to the USA, but in a largely negative context - in right-to-work states in the South, with cheap labor forces, particularly for Japanese auto corporations and similar concerns. This is the measure of a “race to the bottom” that capitalists have been angling toward with neoliberal, anti-union and anti-worker measures.

7. It further ignores that job loss due to automation is more severe than job loss due to offshoring. Economic nationalism would cause this process to intensify as corporations try to offset increasing labor costs.

8. International workers’ solidarity is the only protection against wage cutting. If all workers were paid a fair wage, offshoring would hold no threat. This requires coordination of a type anathema to economic nationalism; we cannot stand alongside workers in China while demanding  their jobs. It requires us to vigorously reject these calls, whether from right or left populists.

9. This solidarity is the duty of workers in advanced countries. When workers in underdeveloped countries call for their strikes and struggles to be recognized, we have a duty to do so. This is often a material need: our boycotts and hot-cargoing and other campaigns can actually make a difference. (Edit to add:) This also includes opposition to free-trade agreements such as NAFTA, CAFTA and TPP, which are assaults on workers’ rights and the environment around the world.

10. A positive program in contradiction to economic nationalism is implied by the transitional demand of a “sliding scale of wages and hours,” that is, wages being fixed to a certain amount per week with hours reduced until there are enough job openings (because of reduced work hours) to create full employment. This has its popular form in the “30 for 40″ demand - reduce the workweek to 30 hours while keeping the pay that workers had at 40 hours.

11. Armed with the 30 for 40 demand, and a demand for a living wage indexed to inflation, we must then fight back tooth and nail against those in the trade unions and on the left who wheel out the economic nationalist program. We must expose the racist and utopian-capitalist roots of this slogan, no matter who brings it up.

12. Our banner can never be “American Jobs for American Workers.” Instead we demand jobs for all, a reduced workweek, a living wage, and a war against all the capitalists. As automation makes work unnecessary, then its fruits must belong to all of humanity. We do not fight just for jobs in America but for a socialist world.

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Every communist member of parliament must bear in mind that he is not a legislator seeking an understanding with other legislators, but a Party agitator who has been sent into the enemy camp in order to carry out Party decisions there.

Theses on the Communist Parties and Parliamentarism

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Why an Old Mole?

It seems like a silly thing to call a revolutionary socialist tumblr. But it’s a Shakespeare quote that Hegel sort of used and then Marx twisted to show the working of history beneath the surface of the earth, only erupting later in a revolutionary outburst. I like this metaphor. It’s a good way to look at how social change works. There is a long, slow process that has been going on for a long time and it’s now showing its face.

This particular thing is mostly for extended thoughts. It’s not full blown articles, and it’s not anybody’s particular line. Mostly it’s me thinking aloud about revolutionary ideas and sharing those ideas.