The limits of Sanders’ democratic socialism

Bernie Sanders’ attempt to secure the US Democratic Party’s presidential nomination has made clear, even if (when) he fails in this electoral challenge, that there is a huge constituency in the United States for wealth redistribution, universal state provision of health care, free education and an end to corporate control of the political system.

Tens of millions of people want human need placed before corporate greed and are prepared to back a candidate who says he will deliver that.

The Vermont senator has managed to do what the far left has been unable to do: find a mass audience. Ideologically, there is a left wing opening in US society, particularly among young people – something that is cause for celebration.

The old tropes about the US working class being hopelessly conservative or scared into the arms of reactionaries by the sniff of socialism now just don’t stack up. On the contrary, it seems much clearer that the establishment and corporate media that have long peddled that line are the ones really feeling bernd by the thought of higher corporate taxes (which they interpret as an attack on their constitutionally guaranteed liberty to exploit, exploit, exploit with little interference).

In fact, those in the Democratic establishment – professional politicians and corporate types who claim to be the embodiment of progressive politics – are leading the charge to brand Sanders unelectable and his policy proposals pie in the sky.

One obvious question, given this, is why Sanders is attempting to run in a party that is hostile to his policies and not simply beholden to but controlled by the very corporate interests he seeks to oppose. The question, however, betrays a certain naivety about the nature of the Sanders “political revolution”. On one hand, this relates to the organisational aspect of the campaign. Sanders last year said:

“[N]o matter who is elected to be president, that person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the working families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign donors is so great that no president alone can stand up to them.

“That is the truth … And that is why what this campaign … is about [is] creating a grassroots political movement in this country.”

Yet next to nothing has been done to build the organisational structures that would allow the participation he rightly claims to be the only basis of real, lasting change. There is little indication of any democratic apparatus being forged – as opposed to the standard electoral campaign email and phone lists and pleas for donations to compete financially with the corporate-backed Clinton. Those things are necessary to win an election, but they are incredibly limited and stock standard; inconsistent with any project of “political revolution”.

Mass movements that challenge the status quo consciously develop their own structures of power; they train leaders at all levels. That process steels and develops multiple layers of activists.

That the Sanders campaign does not seem to be doing this might be an indication that the electoral mobilisation cannot (perhaps, yet) be coalesced into something stronger – i.e. that it expresses a mood that is not a movement. But it seems that there also is no intention to do so. This organisational weakness does not flow axiomatically from, but certainly is related to, serious political weaknesses.

Notwithstanding his capacity to show what is possible, and his obvious strengths in relation to the cesspit of opponents he is up against, both Democrat and Republican, Sanders is not an unambiguously anti-establishment candidate. Vermont Democratic leader Howard Dean, speaking on Meet the Press in 2005 about an upcoming Senate race, noted:

“Bernie can call himself anything he wants. He is basically a liberal Democrat … The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders votes with the Democrats 98 percent of the time. And that is a candidate that we … may very well end up supporting.”

In fact, the Democratic Party – a solid party of neoliberalism and war – has not run an official candidate against Sanders since 1988. In 1999, Vermont anti-war activists who had previously campaigned to get Sanders elected mayor of Burlington attacked “his descent into de facto membership the Democratic Party”:

“Bernie became an imperialist to get elected in 1990. In August, 1990 – after the Bush administration enticed Iraq into invading Kuwait – Sanders said he wasn’t ‘going to let some damn war cost him the election’, according to a staff member who was present at the time.

“Since 1991 the Democrats have given Bernie membership in their Congressional Caucus. Reciprocally, Bernie has become an ardent imperialist … Sanders continues to support sanctions even though the Iraqi body count has now passed 1.5 million. Just as he has supported every bombing of Iraq since 1992.”

His more recent record is just as chequered: supporting the murderous US drone wars, calling for courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden to face trial, referring to former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez as a “communist dictator” but the warmongering, neoliberal, two-faced Hilary Clinton as a friend, among other things. As author Paul Street noted at the US website Counterpunch, “Real socialists don’t embrace racist imperialism, the House of Saud, Israeli apartheid and terror, the Democratic Party, the Pentagon System …”

There are fundamental principles at issue here. The US military machine is responsible for the murder of millions of people the world over – rivers of blood and misery in aid of the domination of the corporate elites Sanders claims to stand against. Yet, if he were to make it to commander in chief of that filthy empire, his main proposal is to tax the proceeds of imperialist exploitation a bit more.

Leftists in the US, like those of us residing in US-allied imperialist states, as a point of principle must stand against the military-industrial complex that degrades working class youth to the status of cannon fodder, and daily threatens, oppresses and murders our working class brothers and sisters and their political leaders the world over. Sanders’ “democratic socialism” fails on this crucial question – there simply is no attempt to build the anti-militarist bloc in the biggest and most ruthless imperialist power the world has ever known.

Sanders’ campaign can be celebrated on a number of levels – most importantly for galvanising a constituency around class politics. But excitement about the reach of his message should not blind socialists to his, and his campaign’s, limitations.