One Reason I Support Bernie Sanders
From a strategic standpoint, no one else in the United States has done more to open up the public space and discourse about the word Socialism, than Senator Sanders, imho. Even though he's not a “pure” socialist.
Don't get me wrong, Occupy Wall Street and other movements have played instrumentally important roles in helping shape the narrative and open up that space, but, that an elected member of the imperialist US government, openly claiming the label of a socialist in 21st century America, and wearing it proudly, is pretty fucking amazing if you ask me.
Professor Wolff would seem to agree.
[video:https://youtu.be/zW4BtH4K91s]
To the “purist” among us, I say compare and contrast the US candidates from the Socialist Equality Party, who, are more “pure” socialist, at least according to the WSWS.
[video:https://youtu.be/SO4dsScqzNs]
Honestly, I have no clue as to who these two people are, the SEP's presidential and VP candidates. I've watched their campaign videos, and to me, they are about as “exciting” or “inspiring” as, well, cardboard. Again don't get me wrong, their “analysis” of the ill's that plague our society world wide, are spot on.
US capitalism and imperialism is destroying our world right before our very eyes, so a few people can be ultra, insanely rich, and at the expense of the rest of the world's population. (I don't disagree with that analysis)
Well, Bernie's not a true socialist. Well, he's not a true “democrat” either, so the fuck what? This guy Joseph Kishore, according to the WSWS, he IS a “true” socialist.
Joseph Kishore—Socialist Equality Party candidate for US President writes at the WSWS
The working class must mobilize now to demand a massive allocation of resources for health care and treatment, and to ensure that all those who are impacted by the economic fallout are compensated and received financial support. The trillions of dollars which are held by the global super-rich must be confiscated to develop the necessary health care infrastructure around the world without regard to national boundaries.
In our election campaign, Norissa Santa Cruz and I will fight to mobilize the working class to fight for these demands as part of a political offensive, in opposition to the Republicans and the Democrats, against inequality, war, and the capitalist system.
Now think for a moment, Joseph Kishore, the Socialist Equality Party candidate for US President , who is backed by "the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), the leadership of the world socialist movement, the Fourth International founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938", who claims "I will fight to mobilize the working class to fight for these demands as part of a political offensive, in opposition to the Republicans and the Democrats, against inequality, war, and the capitalist system."
How is this guy going to "mobilize" anyone with zero name recognition, not to mention an unknown track record advocating for policies that benefit every day Americans.
Now think for a moment, who is actually mobilizing the working class in America? What kind of "name recognition" does this guy Joseph Kishore have? Has your neighbor, co-worker, friends, family, ever heard of this guy? Does he have about a million volunteers across America, actually already mobilizing voters?
The WSWS usually has nothing but disdain and polemic ire for Senator Sanders, deriding him as a puppet / sheepdawg of the Democratic establishment, to suppress the hostility to capitalism and bring back into the fold the lost little sheep (ie we the people).
The WSWS writes about Senator Sanders,
"These gestures cannot disguise the fundamental fallacy of the Sanders campaign: the claim that he can carry out a “political revolution” under the auspices of the Democratic Party, a party of big business and American imperialism, symbolized by the presence on the debate stage of two billionaires, a naval intelligence agent, Barack Obama’s vice president, and Klobuchar, dubbed the “favorite Democrat” of Senate Republicans.
The role of Sanders is to trap leftward-moving sections of working people and young people within the straitjacket of the Democratic Party and the two-party system, thus blocking any challenge to American capitalism."
Think for a moment, what the fuck has the WSWS done to "mobilize" the working class to overthrow capitalism?
Bernie Sanders 2015 campaign was a truly revolutionary moment! Who in their right mind would have thought a self identified "socialist" could fund a political campaign for president of Imperialist America, with only the backing of working class people, who can only afford very small donations, who, if not for the rigging of the democrat primaries, would very well might have become president in 2016?
Tell me, who is Joseph Kishore again? When's the last time you saw this guy on any MSM boob tube program?
Think for a moment, Bernie's Medicare For All proposal, IS a direct challenge to the "capitalist" system in how we deal with healthcare in this country. To even think we, as a society as a whole, are ready to overthrow capitalism is rather absurd. We haven't a clue of how to actually do that, and it be somewhat fair and equitable across the board. Heck, we can't even agree on what the term socialism means....
The Fourth International was founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938, but their political party's candidates, in the 21st Century, has ZERO name recognition, and has ZERO political clout in America.
Think for a moment, the Fourth International has had 82 years to develop the strategy and tactics to mobilize the working class to overthrow capitalism, and they can't even put forth a candidate that has any type of name recognition, what so ever.
Please, don't get me wrong, I do not mean to disparage the SEP party's candidates personally, only the lack of success of the "strategy and tactics" of the SEP party, and to a greater extent, the Fourth International, here in Imperialist America. So far they have failed to achieve any type of political clout or name recognition, what so ever.
I'll freely admit, Medicare For All is probably my last hope of getting any type of actual healthcare, before I die from lack of healthcare. I don't think I'll make it to 65/67 to be able to get any social security, if it even exists by then. I'm 56 now, and feel 80. I don't think I can really survive another 4 more years without real healthcare.
So, if I have to deal with some cognitive dissonance in supporting Bernie, (he doesn't live up to my expectations on this policy or that policy) so be it. He's the only one offering me any hope of continued survival.
Comments
that being said...
[video:https://youtu.be/TjjqQmza0Kw]
C99, my refuge from an insane world. #ForceTheVote
WSWS has some writers who make less sense than Buttercup
They decorate their essays with negative-sounding buzzwords even when the meanings are mutually exclusive or nearly so. What's more, they use them like Humpty Dumpty - exactly the same way the Mainstream Media does, to make the words mean whatever they want them to mean.
It's very quickly getting to the point where no two people can agree on the meaning of anything - and that's a very dangerous situation.
There is no justice. There can be no peace.
"It's very quickly getting to the point"
We have Literally been at this point since the beginning of time.
RIP
I ignore their Bernie posts but they are valuable
at getting out up to date coverage of what is happening regarding Julian Assange and Wikileaks.
In fact they have a whole section of articles under 'The Campaign to Free Julian Assange',another section called 'Free Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning!' and 'The Persecution of WikiLeaks',so I appreciate their work in that area in particular and I ignore anything they post about Bernie Sanders.
Steinbeck...
"In Pacific Grove a part of our social life was politics; we argued and contended and discussed communism, socialism, labor organization, recovery. Conversation was a large part of our pleasure and it was no bad thing. With the beginning of recovery and the rebirth of private business, strikes began to break out. I went to see them to find out what it was about, felt them, tasted them, lived them, studied them and did quite a bit of writing about them. Fantastically, a few people began to buy and read my work even when they denounced it. I remember one book that got trounced by the Communists as being capitalist and by the capitalists as being Communist. Feelings as always were more potent than thought."
"The Communists were active, forming united fronts with everyone. We had great shouting arguments about that. They were pretty clever. If you favored justice, or the abolition of poverty, or equality or even mother love, you were automatically in a united front with the Communists. There were also Lovestoneites and Trotskyists. I never could get them straight in my mind except that the Stalinists were in power in Russia and the others were out. Anyway, they didn’t like each other. The Stalinists went about with little smiles of secret knowledge and gave the impression that they had sources of information not available to ordinary people. It was only later that I realized this was not so. We were all united in a dislike for dictators (Stalin was not a dictator if you were properly educated in dialectics).
As it turned out, the Kremlin didn’t tell the American Communists anything. Someone told me later they didn’t trust them.
Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”
" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "
Me that's who!
Different people, different experiences, different expectations. I am perplexed by the people that were and are surprised by Bernie …
RIP
In my college years
I would listen to the ranting of the various political factions, and it always seemed that nobody was pure enough for the Troskyites. If sheer moral umbrage could change the world, they would be running everything by now. Against all reason, it seem that there is more to it than that.
The point of Sanders reclaiming (and perhaps redefining) "socialism" is not to win an academic debate, but to neutralize a term of propaganda that has been weaponized by the Right who would claim with a straight face that even Obama was a socialist. While the Right sputters over a term that has lost its impact over a generation of disuse, Sanders is free to talk about policy.
"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone
A high percentage of those
that gravitate to the far, far left when they're young later end up as far right-wingers like Janice Rogers Brown and conservo-chat host Michael Savage. It's the authoritarianism and rigidity of the polar opposites that is attractive to those that can flip left to right. They seem to find a larger welcome mat on the far right than they did on the far left.
Some of my best freinds
. . . ahem, back in the day were SWP and CPUSA. They used to battle in earnest over beers and I'd chime in my two cents but at the end of the day, we were still talking to each other. The RCP and PLP Maoist types, I thought, were much more dicey. And then some of the Maoists devolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees led by Lynn Marcus -- later known as US Labor Party while Marcus became Lyndon LaRouche. They were the worst and often engaged in actual fisticuffs, commandeering microphones at rallies, and infiltrating and breaking up this or that lefty group. I've noticed that now that LaRoche is dead, they are popping up again with a bit of an online presence.
Critical mass? Not back then and even less now. And there's still more and more factions emerging in whatever remaining group.
The bottom line
is that the American system of government must change. Bernie is a start. The millennials, GenZers, and Alphas (the newest generation) will take it from there.
Bernie is providing the necessary leadership to the AOC’s who will get us there.
Be optimistic!
"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11
"I don't think I can really survive"
we are not 'meant to' by the standards of the
current 'bleed 'em dry' health insurance model
not to belittle your conundrum
many here are in the same boat
facing potential medical bills with
poverty versus end-of-life enjoyment
we're left with limited choices
if they want to take everything we've worked for
our entire life just to show a profit
in some screwed up business model
count me out
question everything
I'll give you another reason
Should he win and gain the "bully pulpit", he'll open up a lot of conversations long overdue in this country.