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Yesterday Ralph Johansen raised two issues: how to address the Sanders enthusiasts; and what about the Democratic Party majority who are wary of Sanders’ far-reaching reforms? I’ll take up just the first for now. Agreed, the Bernie activists aren’t bound by the No Vote for Capitalist Parties principle. This particular document wasn’t addressed to them directly, although it does indicate our approach. It was addressed to a left audience (and therefore posted here) in order to explain why our traditional position needs changing – a position we’ve shared with many on the left. The Sanders movement is an important development that no one on the left, including my group, found a satisfactory (i.e., revolutionary) way to connect with. The DSA by and large dove in uncritically. The ISO in 2015-16 stayed aloof, counterposing the Green Party. But that went nowhere, since the Sanders activists believed that his campaign offered genuine hopes of transforming America politics and achieving concrete reforms that could relieve the economic precariousness they were facing. The Greens weren’t a contender. Socialist Alternative straddled those two approaches, pretending not to be working in the Dem Party but in reality behaving more like DSA. Both SAlt and the ISO called for Sanders to run independently, knowing full well (I assume, since he made it absolutely clear) that he would support the Democratic nominee, both last time and this. That meant reinforcing illusions in bourgeois politics. What should have been tried, in my opinion, is an approach like Lenin’s “critical support.” Not just offering a few criticisms (or even worse, “reserving the right to criticize” without doing so), but telling the truth about the racist, imperialist, anti-working-class Dem Party and the candidates who accommodate to it. We and others could not get much of a hearing if we said it’s a capitalist party so don’t vote for its candidates. We might have gotten a hearing if we’d said, OK, let’s put Sanders to the test of office. Let’s elect him and see whether the Democrats adopt his program and whether he mobilizes his movement to come out into the streets to fight for it. He hasn’t done that so far, even though there were several key opportunities during Trump’s reign when that deserved to be done. Why hasn’t he? Because his strategy is purely electoral. His “political revolution” means political in the everyday bourgeois sense, i.e.,electoral. But his supporters will more easily see the limitations of his strategy if he gets into office. That would be a step forward toward creating an independent working-class party. Now that Sanders is in all likelihood out of the race, the issue for the Sanders activists is what to do next. This I think our statement does deal with. We’re not advocating critical support for Biden in the Leninist sense. Voting for him would be purely defensive, to get rid of Trump. A few years ago it might have been comforting to think that Trump’s incompetence tempered his malevolence. In the present crisis they reinforce each other. Keeping him in power would not only boost the drive to autocracy, as we argue in our statement. It could doom us all. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
