Salar Mohandesi: The Afterbern: How Bernie Sanders has changed the US and what we do now

Salar Mohandesi writes about The Afterbern: How Bernie Sanders has changed the US and what we do now.

What we have emerging, then, is a new, diverse cohort of predominantly young people, the majority of whom belong to the working class or a collapsing “middle class,” now open to socialist ideas, clamoring for systematic change, and who are increasingly networked, trained, and experienced in organizing. The vast majority of these people are, like Bernie, not socialists in any specific historical sense, but they are willing to fight for major changes. The potential here is enormous, and for this, we have to thank the Sanders campaign, whether or not we like Bernie’s social democratic politics.

The major question, of course, is what happens next. It’s very possible that these young, politicized Sanders supporters will be incorporated into the Democratic Party. If Bernie wins the nomination, the risks are enormous. But even if he doesn’t, which seems far more likely now, he may produce the same effect if he throws his weight behind Clinton at the Convention in July. Or possibly, if Hillary emerges victorious, she may tap someone like Elizabeth Warren to serve as Vice President as part of some calculated strategy to win over Bernie’s supporters. It is also safe to assume that the Democratic Party will itself try to make the most of this opportunity by organizing many of these young people into its ranks. All this highlights the great contradiction of Bernie’s campaign: he would not have reached — and radicalized — such a vast audience if he did not run as a Democrat, but in working within the Democratic Party, he has potentially wedded this new audience to perhaps the greatest counter-revolutionary force in the United States.

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This is normal for the start of a revolutionary process. People want to fix the system from within. When this fails, then they either choose despair or radicalization.

It is significant that people are still relatively radical after seven (7) of Obama's inertia. The desire for change generated by George W Bush was channelled by Barak Obama into a safe Democratic presidency. Obama was successful in limiting the damage from the radical demands of the people.

Our chances for such a qualitative leap are more propitious than they have been in decades. The established political configuration in the United States hasn’t been this vulnerable since the 1970s. The Republican Party is undergoing a profound structural transformation, and Trump’s impending nomination has provoked defections and a potential mutiny. The Democratic Party is being pulled in two directions and may be headed for a contested convention. Record numbers of Americans are leaving both parties ­— 43% now identify as Independents, as opposed to 30% as Democrats and only 26% as Republican. Across the board tens of millions of Americans are rejecting “establishment politics,” turning to either Trump or Sanders.

We should also be encouraged by the fact that many of these newly radicalized Sanders supporters may already be prepared to break with the logic of the political system — according to one poll, for instance, one third of Sanders supporters say they won’t vote for Clinton in the general election. But without a viable alternative in the form of an organizational presence, we won’t be able to transform this inchoate #BernieOrBust sentiment into revolutionary politics. And if, against all odds, Sanders wins, it is very likely that only a unified, alternative organization embedded in today’s many ongoing struggles can prevent radicalized Sanders supporters from integrating into a fundamentally unreformable Democratic Party. In short, we need an organization to fuse together the millions of enthusiastic people who may otherwise disperse or find themselves subsumed and then disorganized by the state apparatuses.

With such exceptionally high stakes, the far left, usually so minuscule and ineffectual in this country, needs to devise a shared, coherent organizational strategy. Now, more than ever, we need an organization to continue radicalizing newer generations, keep people engaged in contemporary struggles, unite disparate movements, articulate different sectors of the working class, preserve continuity between waves of struggles, fashion a common project, and, above all, seize power — by which I do not mean simply winning a couple seats in Congress as some purely electoral party, but overthrowing capitalism through a mass revolutionary upheaval that unfolds both against and within the state apparatuses. There hasn’t been this much interest in radical change, nor this much anger against capitalism in the United States since the 1970s. If we, as committed socialists, miss this moment, the future will never forgive us.

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Co-option by the Democratic Party has been successfully used in the past to defuse radicals. Will it work in future?

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Jim Casey: Thanks Daily Telegraph, I welcome a debate about the overthrow of capitalism

Jim Casey writes “Thanks Daily Telegraph, I welcome a debate about the overthrow of capitalism”.

As a union leader used to speaking shorthand to comrades, I framed capitalism as an idea that could be overthrown. On reflection, it is something that is more likely to collapse under its own weight — we cannot adhere to a belief that is so obviously unable to make the transition into the future that awaits many of us and all of our children.

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This is a dangerous attitude to have—the collapse of Capitalism would be catastrophic. There would be mass starvation, mass migrations, genocide, reversion to a much more primitive economic system that Socialists called Barbarism.

We cannot simply wait for Capitalism to collapse. We must prepare an alternative economic and associated political system in order to save humanity from disaster.

This is not about a gotcha moment for Rupert Murdoch, it’s about having a national conversation about the kind of economic system we think will work in the challenging times ahead.

Economic policy is developed by communities and national conversations, not individuals or the most powerful elites.

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Casey is being too bland here. Yes, we need a discussion, but about a new economic and political system.

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Doug Enaa Greene: The rise of Marxism in France

Doug Enaa Greene describes The rise of Marxism in France.

Engels recognized the danger of a Boulangist dictatorship as spelling the end not only to the socialist movement in France, but the Third Republic itself. For him, the question was not just how to analyze Boulangism, but how to fight it.

Engels was enraged at the passivity of the POF, writing of the general's ties to royalists and that his threat of war would be used to kill off the workers' movement. Engels warned the socialists not to let their hatred of the radicals and the Republic blind them to the threat of dictatorship.

You will get him all the same, the good Boulanger whom you crave, and the Socialists will be his first victims. For a First Consul has got to be impartial and, for every time he lets the blood of the Stock Exchange, he will place another curb on the proletariat, if only to even things out.[39]

Engels told the workers that the defense of democracy was vital, so vital in fact, that its defense could not be left to the bourgeoisie. Rather the preservation of democratic freedoms needed to be led by the socialists, utilizing revolutionary means.

However, Engels' castigated Lafargue's tailing of Boulanger, warning that it was not the job of socialists to just go along with the tide, even if it appeared momentarily popular, stating that such a course was bankrupt. Rather, socialists needed to take a long-term view and not just follow whatever was popular:

But if we are not to go against the popular current of momentary tomfoolery, what in the name of the devil is our business?[40]

MWhat Engels stressed to Lafargue and Guesde was that the options before them were not simply between the Opportunists and Boulanger, but that there was a third option of independent political action by the working class. He urged the socialists to put up their own candidates, opposed to those of both camps. When the Marxists put up their own candidate in Paris in 1889, Engels hailed it as “at least one step in the right direction by proclaiming the necessity of an independent socialist candidature.”[41] As Engels, reminded Lafargue, “For the past twenty years we have been advocating the formation of a Party that was distinct from and opposed to all bourgeois parties.”[42]

What Engels advocated to the POF, was not renouncing the fight against Boulanger or seeing it as just another inter-bourgeois affair, but that the working class needed to protect democratic freedoms with their own revolutionary means, as opposed to relying on the good graces of the ruling class or the ballot box. And in order to defeat reaction, the working class needs their own flag in the field — an independent political party with its own revolutionary agenda.

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Engels' critique of the POF (French Workers' Party) proved to right as later events revealed:

By the early 1890s, the POF had its first electoral breakthroughs, winning control of several municipal governments and electing Guesde and Lafargue to the Chamber of Deputies. The socialists seemed poised for greater gains in wake of the Panama Corruption scandal, which exposed the underlying bourgeois nature of the Third Republic. However, the POF suffered a serious setback by remaining aloof from the Dreyfus Affair. Guesde believed that the Dreyfus Affair, similar to the Boulanger Crisis, was a feud between two bourgeois factions in which workers had no stake. This time, their neutrality backfired as it became clear that reactionaries, conservatives and royalists were threatening to overthrow the Republic itself. Reformist socialists, such as the great orator Jean Jaures, thus stepped into the breach and rallied to the defense the Republic. Many Guesdists abandoned the movement's neutrality in order to collaborate with bourgeois republicans and reformists in a pact of “Republican Defense“ to defeat reaction.

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As revolutionaries, we can stand aloof from the democratic struggle. Politics is in both the mass movements and the electoral process.

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Links Magazine: Thinking and voting outside the two-party box: Interview with US Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein

Thinking and voting outside the two-party box: Interview with US Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein.

We say that not only do we have to bring the revolution to our workplaces, our schools and our streets, but we have to amplify that power in the context of the elections. The elections should not be allowed to silence what's really happening in the struggles that our frontline communities are leading.

Elections need to be used as a megaphone for the struggles for social, climate and racial justice. That's how we've defined the purpose of our campaign from the very start.

At the end of the day, the real engines of change are the social movements, but it's critical that they fight for power in the electoral arena, because that's where you can concretize change.

Just look at the labor movement in the first half of the 20th century. Not only was it alive and well in the streets and in workplaces, but it expressed itself in the voting booth with the Socialist and Communist Parties, and with the Farmer-Labor Parties and the Progressives and Populists. It really fought the battle on all fronts.

In fact, one can argue that the day the labor movement gave up its own political voice—by joining the Democratic Party as part of a New Deal coalition—was the day real progress ended. The third parties lost their agenda and identity inside the Democratic Party, and social and economic justice has been backsliding ever since.

Third parties are not only legitimate, they are absolutely necessary, because they, along with social movements on the ground, create the conditions for real change. So now is the time to gather our courage and stand up—just like the workers at Verizon, the students on the campuses, and the young people in Black Lives Matter.

Now is the time to bring that kind of courage into the voting booth—to forget the lesser evil and fight for the greater good.

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Political parties should be the voice of the social movements. Social movements are not beholden to political parties.

It is the duty of revolutionary parties to gather and preserve the experiences of mass movements so that they can educate future generations of revolutionaries. It is also the responsibility of these parties manage the dialetic between Marxist theory and revolutionary practice arising from these movements.

For an alternative in the coming Australian elections, vote Socialist Alliance.

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