https://socialistaction.org/2017/07/07/this-is-not-our-revolution/
This Is Not ‘Our’ Revolution!
/ 10 hours ago
July 2017 Bernie 2By WAYNE DELUCA
The special House election in Montana at the end of May saw Republican
Greg Gianforte defeat Rob Quist, a Bernie Sanders-endorsed progressive
Democrat. This feat was made remarkable by the fact that Gianforte had
physically assaulted Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs the day before the
election.
Exactly how Quist, a folk singer noted for his cowboy hats, was meant to
be a progressive is somewhat unclear. His platform stood for small
business, never mentioned single-payer health care, failed to call for
any change to America’s imperialist foreign policy, talked up tax
reform, and embraced the fairy tale of “clean coal” pushed by energy
conglomerates. There was a very modest call for economic
nationalism—taxes on companies “that ship American jobs overseas”—but
barely a major challenge to the orthodoxies of the modern Democratic
Party. Quist’s appeal as an outsider was simply a question of his image
and his willingness to stand with people like Sanders identified with
the “left wing” of the Democrats.
Quist’s opposite also lost his election. Jon Ossoff, who came in as a
surprise first-place finisher in a jungle primary, failed to defeat
Republican Karen Handel. Ossoff was a tabula rasa, a candidate without
really any substantial policy platform. He represents the “Resistance”
of the so-called establishment wing of the Democrats, attempting to
essentially run a candidate against the Republicans by hanging Trump on
them as an albatross.
But despite considerable outside support, Ossoff’s campaign, too,
withered and lost. The Sanders wing crowed at this, claiming that only
they would be able to run substantial candidates with energetic support
and defeat Trump and the Republicans at the polls.
July 2017 Quist:Sanders
Democratic Party candidate Rob Quist with Bernie Sanders.
As Quist and Ossoff were losing, a candidate in Philadelphia chosen by
the Sanders wing was winning his election. Larry Krasner, a civil rights
attorney, won the Democratic primary in the race for District Attorney.
Krasner ran a campaign to the left of the other candidates, and the
Democratic decision makers in the city failed to coalesce around a
single candidate, with all other comers being flawed.
Krasner was supported by Reclaim Philadelphia (a group that had its
beginnings among Sanders’s primary campaign volunteers and staff) and
the Philadelphia branch of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA),
with hundreds of phone bankers. Krasner won a plurality (around 38% of
the vote), and turnout only added up to about 17% of voters, but his
victory was hailed nationally and by groups such as Socialist
Alternative as a progressive win.
Mere days later, Krasner was making friends with the head of the
Fraternal Order of Police, which has spent the last 35 years campaigning
for the state to murder political prisoner Mumia Abu Jamal.
These were three of the campaigns that shaped the dialogue when Bernie
Sanders took the stage at the People’s Summit on June 9 to 11 in
Chicago, a gathering of the self-declared left wing of the Democratic
Party. Supporters included National Nurses United, Our Revolution,
Progressive Democrats of America, and Democratic Socialists of America.
Sanders presented his grand strategy to “open up” the Democratic Party’s
ranks to youth and trade unionists, and bring about a political
revolution. This does not mean a revolution against the racist,
imperialist, capitalist government of the United States but a
transformation of the Democratic Party into something that is, well,
sort of “progressive.”
Exactly what this means, as we see in Quist’s case, is unclear. The
“progressive” and establishment wings of the Democratic Party are less
about substantial policy issues, which Sanders and the groups supporting
him are muddled on, and more a pair of brands vying for the affection of
the Democratic voting base.
The “establishment” brand, until the catastrophe of Hillary Clinton’s
loss, typically sold itself as cool, collected, and competent. Its brand
was very much that of former President Obama, whose supporters would
often share images branded “Everyone Chill the F— Out, I Got This.” Now
it wants to build its credentials as a “resistance” to Trump, as seen in
the recent sit-in on health care held by New Jersey Senator and likely
2020 presidential candidate Cory Booker.
The “progressive” side has primarily branded itself around support for
Sanders, who has put forward a cantankerous form of New Deal liberalism
and support for single-payer health care. Especially after the recent
near-victory for Jeremy Corbyn’s revitalized Labour Party in Britain,
the chorus from this section has been “Bernie Would’ve Won.” It has
taken up the idea of class, although often in muddled terms such as
“middle class” (an amalgam based on income rather than on the
relationship to production) and Sanders’ “billionaire class.” In
retribution the establishment wing has taken up the mantle of being
feminist and antiracist, despite its obvious failings in advancing the
liberation of women, LGBTQIA+ people, and oppressed nationalities.
Advancing this, Our Revolution has put forward a plan to “retake” the
Democratic Party by convincing former Sanders supporters to run for
Democratic county committees. A tedious and bureaucratic process, this
serves not to build power under the radar for progressive causes, but
rather to rebuild the very machinery that the establishment wing of the
Democrats long neglected.
Unfortunately, once Democrats are elected, the right wing of the party
structurally holds all of the cards and will demoralize and disappoint
its young adherents—just as it did those who went into the party after
the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
More vigorous than Our Revolution, Democratic Socialists of America has
seen an uptick in running candidates, mainly as Democrats. DSA has grown
significantly since Donald Trump’s election, and has swapped its old
“realignment” strategy for an “inside/outside” relationship to the
Democrats. It also has encouraged its members to run as “open
socialists.” Unfortunately, this has made no difference in policy;
DSA members are mostly running for local offices on good-government
platforms. Their being known as socialists is only remarkable because of
the long and ugly history of repression of the left in the United
States. The campaign content is less radical than the Sewer Socialists
of early 20th-century cities like Milwaukee.
None of these forces or strategies can overcome the class character of
the Democratic Party. It is a party of capital, and has never been
otherwise. It is not the openly draconian face presented by the
Republicans, but the Democrats remain a prop of forces in Wall Street
and Silicon Valley that want a relatively flexible, dynamic, and modern
capitalism rather than the brute laissez-faire model desired by the
energy and manufacturing companies that group mainly behind the
Republicans. Capital in the United States has the luxury of two parties.
A strategy rooted in the Democrats can never be anti-imperialist. The
“progressive” wing of the Democrats, including Sanders, continues to
support the state of Israel and its brutal occupation of Palestine. The
Democrats have never been an antiwar party; Obama was president for
eight years and never had a single day of peace. Many support
imperialist bombing and intervention as long as it can have a
humanitarian gloss, as was seen in pressure on Obama to bomb Libya and
Syria.
For socialists the strategy of backing candidates in the Democratic
Party primaries is a dangerous mirage. Groups like Socialist Alternative
thought that they could endorse Bernie Sanders in the Democratic
primary, only to switch to an independent candidate in mid-stream once
he was defeated. Instead, they wound up as builders for Sanders’s long
operation in the Democratic Party, and have lost credibility when they
speak about independent working-class politics.
Socialists run in elections not because we believe that capitalism can
be reformed, as the “progressives” in the Democratic Party do. Socialist
campaigns are a method of bringing revolutionary socialist ideas to a
broad audience and allowing voters to register their discontent with the
capitalist system and its attendant racism, sexism, imperialism, and
other oppression. As Lenin put it, our model is to be “tribunes of the
people,” speaking against every wrong and laying bare the unpleasant
truths of our society.
Modern capitalist parties are more like corporate brands than
substantial political organizations; the success of Donald Trump should
make that painfully clear. We cannot win by associating ourselves with a
brand that is not clearly based on the working class and its allies and
oriented toward goals that are in their interest. Even the halfway-house
of the Green Party is no way to build a mass-action-oriented socialist
movement.
As groups like Our Revolution and DSA turn more of the anti-Trump
sentiment into ground work for the Democrats, their role—and the legacy
of Bernie Sanders—will be in rebuilding this discredited capitalist
party, not in building toward working-class power and socialism. We need
to do the opposite—build an independent party of workers and the oppressed.
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July 7, 2017 in Democratic Party, Elections, Marxist Politics and
Philosophy.
Related posts
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Sanders, socialism and the U.S. left in crisis
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