Once again on Sanders and socialism
20 February 2016
At a town hall event Thursday night in Las Vegas, jointly hosted bythe MSNBC cable channel and Telemundo, Democratic presidential
candidate and self-described “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders was
asked by one of the moderators to explain what he meant by socialism.
Sanders
has attracted broad support from working people and youth by basing his
bid for the White House on denunciations of social inequality and the
political domination and criminality of Wall Street. His claim to be a
socialist, far from alienating many workers and youth, has attracted
them to his campaign, an indication of the growth of anti-capitalist
sentiment. According to one prominent poll released on Friday, he trails
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton nationally among Democratic
voters by only 3 percentage points.
In reply to the question about
socialism, Sanders said: “When I talk about democratic socialist, you
know what I’m talking about? Social Security, one of the most popular
and important programs in this country, developed by FDR to give dignity
and security to seniors… When I talk about democratic socialist, I am
talking about Medicare, a single payer care system for the elderly. And
in my view, we should expand that concept to all people…
“When I
talk about democratic socialist, I’m not looking at Venezuela. I’m not
looking at Cuba. I’m looking at countries like Denmark and Sweden…”
This
response bears careful scrutiny. It makes clear that, despite his talk
of a “political revolution” against the “billionaire class,” Sanders is
not an opponent of the capitalist system or the two-party political
monopoly through which the American corporate-financial elite has ruled
for more than 150 years.
There is nothing anti-capitalist in
Sanders’ so-called “socialism.” Socialism is not a reform of capitalism,
it is its opposite. It is based on the abolition of private ownership
of the means of production—the major industries, transport,
telecommunications, banking—and their transformation into public
utilities under the democratic control of the working people. It
replaces production for private profit based on the surplus value
extracted through the exploitation of workers under the wage system with
production for the benefit of society as a whole. It supersedes the
anarchy of the market by organizing economic life on the basis of
rational planning.
It overcomes the contradiction between
globalized production and the nation-state political framework of
capitalism by uniting workers internationally in the struggle for a
world socialist federation. It is a revolutionary change that can be
achieved only through the independent political mobilization of the
working class and the establishment of a workers’ government.
Sanders
opposes all of this. He contends, in the name of “socialism,” that the
existing economic and political set-up can be reformed along the lines
of the programs that were instituted in the 1930s (Social Security) and
the 1960s (Medicare). Neither of these programs, while representing
significant gains for working people, challenged the basic class
interests of the American ruling elite. Precisely because the economic
and political power of the ruling class was left intact, these programs
have been under constant attack. They have been increasingly whittled
down and are now targeted for extinction.
Where, moreover, did
these programs come from? They were not the result of the beneficence of
the American capitalist class. They were wrenched from the ruling elite
in the course of bitter and bloody struggles of not only the American,
but also the international working class. The most important factor
behind the enactment of the social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s in
America was the socialist revolution of 1917 that established in Russia
the first workers’ state in world history.
That world-transforming
event provided a mighty impulse to the struggles of workers in the US
and around the world, and it inspired in the ruling classes of every
capitalist country fear of something similar happening to them. The
outbreak of the Great Depression in 1929 discredited capitalism in the
eyes of millions in the US and internationally and fueled a growth of
class struggle that erupted in general strikes in three major American
cities—Toledo, San Francisco and Minneapolis—in 1934.
This was the
context in which Franklin D. Roosevelt, a resolute defender of the
capitalist system and the interests of the American ruling class, felt
compelled to implement a series of social reforms, including Social
Security, whose basic purpose was to avert social revolution in the
United States.
The next major social reforms, Medicare and
Medicaid, the government health programs for the elderly and the poor,
were enacted under conditions of rising social struggles and mounting
political discontent. This was the period of the mass civil rights
movement, which was, in essence, an extension of the class battles that
gave rise to the industrial unions in the 1930s, and which was animated
by an egalitarian ethos. It coincided with anti-colonial struggles that
shook Asia and Africa. It was accompanied by urban rebellions that swept
America’s cities, militant strikes of industrial workers and the first
stirrings of the anti-war movement.
But even at the height of its
global economic dominance and political influence, American capitalism
was unable to overcome endemic poverty, unemployment and oppression. In
1964, Lyndon Johnson proclaimed his “War on Poverty,” but that quickly
collapsed as American capitalism was overtaken by its international and
internal contradictions. Since then, the Democratic Party and the ruling
class as a whole have shifted ever more violently to the right,
abandoning any policy of liberal reform.
The past 30 years have
been dominated by a relentless ruling class offensive against the
working class, which has been escalated, under the Obama administration,
in the aftermath of the capitalist breakdown of 2008. Sanders often
notes that in America today, the richest 20 individuals own more wealth
than the bottom 50 percent of the population—more than 150 million
people. Yet he embraces and praises the president who has overseen the
greatest transfer of wealth from the working class to the rich in
history.
As he said Thursday night, “Bottom line is, I happen to
think that the president has done an extraordinarily good job. I have
worked with him on issue after issue.”
In recent days, pro-Clinton
economists such as Paul Krugman and Jared Bernstein have attacked
Sanders’ reform proposals, including free tuition at public colleges and
universal government-provided health care, as wildly impractical and
unrealizable. This is an attack on Sanders from the right, based on the
standard lie that “there is no money” for social programs. However,
Krugman and the others are correct in one critical regard. Sanders, no
less than his pro-Clinton critics, accepts and defends the existing
economic system. Proceeding from that starting point, his reform
proposals are indeed utopian.
Outside of a mass struggle that
directly challenges the bases of capitalist rule no genuinely
progressive changes can be achieved.
As for Sanders’ supposedly
“socialist” models—Denmark and Sweden—both have for the past two decades
been busy dismantling the welfare states established after World War II
and imposing ever harsher austerity measures on the working class.
Their turn to social and political reaction is exemplified by their
savage attacks on refugees. Sweden last month announced it would expel
some 80,000 people fleeing the imperialist wars in the Middle East, and
Denmark announced plans to seize the assets of asylum seekers.
Sanders
does not represent the growing opposition of the working class to
inequality, war and repression. He does not articulate the growth of
anti-capitalist sentiment among the masses. He represents a response by
the ruling class to these developments. His central political function
is to prevent the emergence of an independent political movement of the
working class by channeling social discontent back behind the Democratic
Party.
Barry Grey
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