Bernie Sanders

By Varshini Prakash and Sarah Meyerhoff - In These Times, May 24, 2018

With global temperatures rising and midterm elections approaching, 2018 is the year the climate movement must take bold action towards a fossil-free future.

Across the country, young people face daily reminders that our society doesn’t serve our futures. We suffer from unemployment and underemployment that is well beyond the national average, with young people of color struggling disproportionately to find work and economic opportunity. We are straddled with historic student loan debts. And in a moment when we should be working quickly to avert climate catastrophe and transition to an inclusive, fossil-free economy, many of our elected officials remain passive as the Trump administration attacks our air, water and land. 

As youth leaders in the climate justice movement, we believe now is the time to embrace a bold political vision that addresses climate change while working to end racialized economic inequality.

A centerpiece of that vision is a federal jobs guarantee, a policy through which the government directly employs anyone who wants a job but doesn’t have one. The jobs guarantee has deep roots in the U.S. progressive tradition and is seeing growing support from scholars and movement leaders who tout its potential to put Americans to work while helping to rebuild our infrastructure, schools and healthcare system. With Sen. Bernie Sanders developing a jobs guarantee proposal, as well as a score of down-ballot candidates and Democratic presidential hopefuls also voicing support, the policy is sure to feature prominently in the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.

Climate scientists say that the next few years may be the only ones we have left to avert catastrophic global warming. A jobs guarantee program with a strong focus on stopping and preparing for climate change—a climate jobs guarantee—might be the last, best hope to quickly marshal public support and resources behind climate action. Simply put, this is a can’t-miss opportunity for the climate movement—and for our generation.

By Black Rose Anarchist Federation - It's Going Down, December 23, 2017

This analysis was developed by ongoing discussions among members of the Black Rose / Rosa Negra (BRRN) Anarchist Federation’s Analysis and Strategy Committee and sent as a discussion document to our August 2017 convention, where it generated deep discussion and further feedback.  It is organized into four sections: an analysis of ruling class power, an analysis of social movements, a statement of basic organizing principles in light of the current moment, and some suggestions for the federation moving forward.

Its main points are that we see real potential to build popular power and social anarchism in the coming period. The U.S. ruling class is fractured, the political terrain has shifted dramatically, and there is mass discontent with corporate politics as usual. This provides numerous opportunities for pro-organizational revolutionary anarchists to intervene as social movements arise. At present the mass discontent is being channeled by the institutional left – unions, non-profits, and other institutions traditionally aligned with the Democrats — into explicit reformism and electoral politics. We argue for promoting independent social movements outside of the institutional left while putting forward within new and existing social struggles the need to advance class struggle, collective direct action, direct democracy, and a vision of libertarian socialism.

By Michael Schreiber - Socialist Action, May 11, 2017

On April 29, more than 200,000 people marched in Washington, D.C., in a powerful show of determination to rescue the earth from the ravages of climate change. Over 370 sister marches took place simultaneously across the United States and in countries around the world from Britain to Brazil, and from Mexico to Kenya and the Philippines.

The size of the crowd in Washington far surpassed earlier expectations by the organizers and the National Park Service. At precisely 2 p.m., virtually the entire march, which at that point extended more than 20 blocks along Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House, grew quiet as people sat down as an ensemble. Drums kept the rhythm as the marchers thumped their chests to show that while coming from many backgrounds, their hearts beat as one.

In addition to the colorful puppets and banners carried by organized contingents, most of the marchers brought hand-lettered signs, with slogans reflecting a variety of related social concerns (such as “Black Lives Matter”) in addition to that of the environment.

Although the organized trade-union contingents were meager, spirited groups of Native Americans, LGBTQ people, and communities of color—including a number of Washington, D.C., youth—made their presence felt.

“In the face of a federal administration that would rather reap profits than protect people, our communities are rising up,” Jeremiah Lowery, climate justice organizer with the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said in a press statement on the eve of the march. “In Washington, D.C. and around the world, it’s low-income communities, communities of color, and workers who are bearing the brunt of the climate crisis they did the least to contribute to.”

There is no doubt that the threats by the Trump administration to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords and to rescind environmental measures put in place by Obama—which themselves were far from adequate—were responsible for swelling the numbers of people who joined the demonstration.

By Neil Loehlein - Socialist Worker, February 27, 2017

DONALD TRUMP'S presidency is sure to bring intensified attacks on U.S. workers. He has promised massive tax handouts to corporations, rollbacks of labor and environmental regulations, cuts in social services, attacks on abortion providers, and incarceration and deportation for undocumented workers.

Yet, in a grim twist of irony, anxiety and insecurity about the dismal conditions of U.S. workers, felt by many people, was a critical factor in Trump's "victory" last November.

One major component driving the sense of insecurity is the increase in jobs considered contingent or nonstandard over the past 10 years. Irregular hours, variable earnings, temporary or on-call employment, and a lack of job security are some of the aspects associated with this type of work.

This isn't a phenomenon of small businesses, either. In a majority of cases, these work arrangements involve large companies employing outsourced labor instead of directly hiring their workforce.

In an economically uncertain climate, bitterness at working a contingent job--or fear of falling into this type of work--was likely a factor in convincing some number of working place people to vote for Trump out of desperation at the economic conditions they face.

The shift, insofar as it took place, was neither universal, nor the result of the positive appeal of Trump's right-wing program. Most important of all, as Charlie Post explained in International Socialist Review, Hillary Clinton failed to mobilize traditional Democratic voters.

Faced with a choice between a corporate Democratic candidate with little to offer but more of the same and a populist demagogue who promised to bring back jobs to the U.S., a small section of workers--particularly older, white workers in a couple Rust Belt states that have experienced significant job losses in manufacturing over the years--chose the latter.

They will be tragically disappointed. Trump may have promised to "bring jobs back" to the U.S. during his campaign, but he has been ambiguous about the types of jobs he would create and how he plans to create them.

Trump claims he will revive manufacturing jobs lost to other countries through trade deals like NAFTA. But that facts say something different: Only a minority of U.S. manufacturing jobs were lost to "offshoring" to countries like China or Mexico. Studies show other factors, like automation, played a bigger role.

As Lee Sustar wrote at SocialistWorker.org, Trump's broader plans for government spending cuts, deregulation and privatization will only lower living standards for workers overall. At best, his proposal for infrastructure investment may create some highly skilled jobs in construction, but nothing on the scale required to fix the dearth of decent-paying jobs.

Trump's current hiring freeze on federal workers may even lead to the loss of hundreds of well-paying jobs. Plus, deregulation of labor standards and the spread of right-to-work states under Trump's leadership could easily lead to a further proliferation of contingent employment.

The deteriorating conditions for workers that feed working class discontent will only get worse if Trump is allowed to get away with his reactionary program.

By Paul Street - CounterPunch, February 9, 2016

“If you’re going to shoot the king, don’t miss,” Niccolò Machiavelli wrote in The Prince (1505). “The injury that is to be done,” Machiavelli added, “ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote something similar in his journal in September of 1843: “Never strike a king unless you are sure you shall kill him.”

I first ran across a version of this sentiment many years ago (exactly where I do not recall) while I was researching some U.S. Black and labor history.[1] As I recall it was more class-specific, something along these lines: “if a peasant takes up arms against the king, he’d better well kill him.” The idea was that a high noble might be able to get away with challenging the king but a peasant certainly could not. If peasants and artisans were going to rebel, they’d better make a full revolution of it.

“No Desire to Get Rid of the Profit Motive”

Nowadays I think the aphorism applies to capital and the capitalist class. Take Bernie Sanders. He has called himself a “democratic socialist” and campaigns against “the billionaire class,” drawing large and approving crowds. He has taken more than a few at least rhetorical shots at the king, which in the U.S. is big capitalist and corporate-financial power – what Edward S. Herman and David Peterson have called the “the unelected dictatorship of money.”

In reality, however, Sanders, for all his sloganeering about “revolution,” has not remotely proposed that we figure out how to kill the king of capitalism. Sanders is at most a social democratically inclined New Deal liberal. His vision for America is one in which commanding heights economic decisions and ownership remain firmly in private, profit-taking hands while the government intervenes to a limited extent with the purpose of partially regulating some business activities and distributing income and wealth and social benefits in a more egalitarian and humane – less neoliberal – way. And as Bill Blum recently argued:

“Social democrats and democratic socialists [like Bernie Sanders] have no desire to get rid of the profit motive. Last November, Sanders gave a speech at Georgetown University in Washington about his positive view of democratic socialism, including its place in the policies of presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. In defining what democratic socialism means to him, Sanders said: ‘I don’t believe government should take over the grocery store down the street or own the means of production.’”

“I personally could live with the neighborhood grocery store remaining in private hands, but larger institutions are always a threat; the larger and richer they are the more tempting and easier it is for them to put profit ahead of the public’s welfare, and to purchase politicians. The question of socialism is inseparable from the question of public ownership of the means of production. The question thus facing ‘socialists’ like Sanders is this: When all your idealistic visions for a more humane, more just, more equitable, and more rational society run head-first into the stone wall of the profit motive … which of the two gives way?” (William Blum, “Is Bernie Sanders a Socialist?”)

Answer: the profit motive. The “private sector” (I use quote markets because Big Business draws heavily on public subsidy and protection while wreaking monumental and multi-dimensional havoc on public experience) still rules under Bernie’s recommended “political revolution.” He can call himself a socialist but he says nothing about the need for a social revolution to expropriate the expropriators and remove the masters of wealth and property from the disastrous private ownership and control of economy, society, politics, and culture – from private/corporate ownership and control of the means of production, finance, distribution, and communication.

The vast global U.S. military Empire – intimately bound up with American capitalist class power at home and abroad – also continues under Sanders’ “revolution.” He doesn’t even take rhetorical shots at King Capital’s evil twin imperialism. Sanders is strikingly mute on the Pentagon system, no small silence given the devastatingly destructive impact of the nation’s giant military industrial complex on social and environmental well-being within and beyond the U.S. “homeland.”