The Socialist Challenge Today by Leo Panitch

Author:Leo Panitch
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2020-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

5

SANDERS’S CHALLENGE:

ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY BEYOND

“RESPONSIBLE CAPITALISM”?

“Election days come and go. But political and social revolutions that attempt to transform our society never end.” The speech with which Bernie Sanders closed his Democratic primary election campaign in 2016 began with these sentences; it ended by expressing the hope that future historians would trace all the way back to the “political revolution” of 2016 “how our country moved forward into reversing the drift toward oligarchy, and created a government which represents all the people and not just the few.”1 It is tempting to treat as ersatz the rhetoric of revolution deployed here, taking the meaning of the word from the sublime to the ridiculous, or from tragedy to farce. The last time an American politician vying for the presidency issued a call for a political revolution it came from Ronald Reagan. But for all the limits of Sanders’s populist campaign, the national attention and massive support garnered by a self-styled democratic socialist who positively associated the term revolution with the struggle against class inequality in fact represented a major discursive departure in American political life, which can be a resource for further socialist organizing.

Of course, the specific policy measures advanced by Sanders were, as he constantly insisted, reforms that had at some point been introduced in other capitalist societies. But when the call for public Medicare for all, or free college tuition, or infrastructure renewal through direct public employment, is explicitly attached to a critique of a ruling class that wields corporate and financial power through the direct control of parties, elections, and the media, it goes beyond the bounds of what can properly be dismissed as mere reformism, even if the demands hardly evoke what the call for bread, land, and peace did in 1917. And it is no less a significant departure, especially in the US, to make class inequality the central theme of a political campaign in a manner designed to span and penetrate race and gender divisions to the end of building a more coherent class force. By explicitly posing the question of who stands to benefit more from high-quality public health care and education and well-compensated work opportunities than African Americans and Latinos, Sanders highlighted the need to move beyond the ghettos of identity.

The key question was whether Sanders’s campaign could lay the groundwork for an ongoing political movement capable of effecting this “political revolution.” Sanders’s argument during the campaign that he could be sustained in the White House amid a hostile Congress and imperial state apparatus by a “mass movement” marching on Washington, DC was not very convincing. Much more serious was his call after he lost the primary campaign for a shift from protest to politics at every level, including “school boards, city councils, county commissions, state legislatures, and governorships.”

The very fact that the Sanders campaign was class-focused rather than class-rooted may have been an advantage here. It opened space for a new politics that could try to become more “rooted” in the sense of being

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