Bernie Sanders, Naomi Klein and More Launch “Progressive International”
https://socialistaction.org/2020/06/08/climate-and-social-democrat-celebrities-launch-progressive-international/
June 8, 2020
By GARY PORTER
On May 10, climate activists, social democrats, anti-imperialists,
left-wing commentators and critics launched a new international project.
In September, the sponsors will meet for the inaugural Summit of the
Progressive International (PI) in Reykjavik, Iceland. It will be hosted
by the Prime Minister of Iceland and the Left Green Movement. This new
project occurs in the context of a raging viral pandemic, economic
depression, an escalating nuclear arms race, and rapid global warming
that puts humanity on the verge of catastrophe.
Billionaires force workers back to work, without protection from
COVID-19, by cutting financial support. “Essential” workers who, it
turns out, are often low-paid racialized workers, sicken and die, as
unemployment skyrockets. Hospitals, stripped by 40 years of neo-liberal
cuts, cannot handle the sick. Imperialist drones, bombs, brutal economic
sanctions and assassinations by special forces never stop.
The contradictions and crises of capitalism multiply and magnify like
gaping wounds, leaving open sores across the landscape. Witnessing all
of this, billions of people are desperate to find a way out, including
those who are forming the Progressive International.
But the list of 64 members of the PI Council posted on its website does
not include radicalizing youth, the poor or very many workers. Most are
intellectuals and professional politicians. The rise of authoritarian
governments, violence, anti intellectualism, hostility to science and
experts, and the decline of civilized discourse, strand these
intellectuals and parliamentary figures in darkness and fear. None of
them look to the power of mobilized workers and farmers, or even
consider that a serious possibility. PI appears as an effort to bolster
resistance to the tide of crude ignorance, chaos and destruction
represented by Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Duterte, et al.
Who are these people? From Canada, there is author Naomi Klein of The
Leap Manifesto and Green New Deal fame, together with her media-savvy
partner Avi Lewis. While supporting the BDS movement against apartheid
Israel and for a green transformation of society, including the
elimination of inequality and the creation of ‘more democratic’ state
institutions, Klein and Lewis offer no clear analysis of class society.
They stipulate no clear commitment to fighting for workers’ power, to
replace the capitalist state, and to institute workers’ control of the
means of production in order to meet human needs, rather than deliver
profits to billionaires. NDP MP Niki Ashton, another council member from
Canada, holds similar views, though she is somewhat clearer on the
importance and potential power of the unions.
The biggest names from United States are Bernie Sanders from the
capitalist Democratic Party, now a Joe Biden campaigner, and Noam
Chomsky, a long-time critic of the imperialist role of America in the
world, who happens also to be a Democratic Party-Joe Biden supporter.
Yannis Varoufakis, a former Finance Minister for the Greek social
democratic SYRIZA government, is a member of the Council. To this add a
long list of ministers and legislators from across Latin America, Europe
and Africa. They profess to be on the side of workers and oppressed
peoples, but their record is one of neo-liberalism and support for
global corporations and capitalist state institutions. Liberal and
social democratic journalists and cultural figures round out the
64-member council.
The PI has no program at this stage. Presumably, that will be considered
at the conference in Iceland.
Where will they stand on the rule of profit over human need? Where will
they stand on imperialist economic and military domination of the third
world and indigenous peoples around the world for the purpose of super
exploitation and robbing them of their resources? Where will they stand
on the need to establish workers’ power and build a new workers’ state
based on the complete destruction of the legislative, legal,
bureaucratic and repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
Are they reformers of capitalism, albeit perhaps radical reformers, or
supporters of the end of exploitation by a worker-led revolutionary
overthrow of capitalism and the struggle for socialism? In the end, do
they support capitalism or workers’ power? The record of the individuals
involved is not encouraging.
The idea of PI was born in December 2018, when the Democracy in Europe
Movement and the Sanders Institute in the US issued a call proclaiming
“it is time for progressives of the world to unite.”
On the launch of the group Monday, May 10, Chomsky in an interview with
the Guardian said that the urgency created by the COVID-19 crisis has
caused a deepening of economic inequalities and the rise of the far-right.
So, as autocratic neo-liberalism represents one way, “the other way is
to try to dismantle the structures, the institutional structures that
have been created; that have led to very ugly consequences for much of
the population of much of the world, [and] are the source of this pandemic.”
The activities of the PI initiative are erected on three pillars: the
movement aimed to forge a global network; the Blueprint to develop a
policy for a progressive international order; and the Wire which offers
a communication service to the world’s progressive forces.
Its stated objectives are “to promote the union, coordination and
mobilization of activists, associations, unions, and social movements in
the face of the advance of authoritarianism.” They say they aspire to a
“democratic, decolonized, egalitarian, liberated, united, sustainable,
ecological, peaceful, post-capitalist, prosperous and plural” world.
This compendium of liberal and social democratic values serves as its
programmatic foundation.
What do we know about these people?
Fernando Haddad, the Brazilian PT´s presidential candidate, former
Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa and former Bolivian vice president
Álvaro García Linera, were all part of “progressive governments.” None
of them produced fundamental change in their countries´ economic and
social structures, which continued to be capitalist and dependent, with
extremely high rates of poverty, a growing deterioration of everything
public and a retreat concerning workers´ fundamental rights. This led to
their demise, and opened the door for right-wingers like Jair Bolsonaro,
Lenin Moreno and Jeanine Áñez to come to power in their countries. Some
of them declare themselves defenders of the welfare state and claim to
defend public health, but when they governed, they weakened public
health care to pay external debt to the imperialists. Rather than defend
ecology, they maintained extractive and polluting models of production
to guarantee extraordinary profits to corporations.
Alicia Castro, union leader of the bureaucratic Argentine CGT and
ex-Congresswoman of the Alianza, brought de la Rúa to power. That
government killed dozens of grassroots activists during its downfall.
The same can be said of Bernie Sanders, who generated great expectations
by speaking of socialism in the heart of the empire and raising popular
proposals, like universal health insurance in a country where you can
die without medical attention if you don´t have money. His recent
support for Joe Biden, a candidate for the US economic establishment, a
racist and misogynist leader of the imperialist Democratic Party,
completes his record, for the second time as a Judas goat who leads his
young followers to the camp of blood-drenched capitalist politicians.
So, what are the odds that Progressive International will advocate an
end to usurious debts to foreign capital, the nationalization of banks
and resources, and to put foreign trade under social control, to reverse
privatizations, carry out significant agrarian reforms, or impose
permanent progressive taxes on the wealthy? Isn’t that what an
international party on the side of the working class ought to do? But
the record of most of these people shows that they are defenders of the
private property of businesses and banks, that their model of liberty is
the farce of bourgeois democracy, which they propose to broaden just a
bit, at most. They want to put a human face on the capitalist system,
which it is impossible to humanize, and which is becoming ever more brutal.
Perhaps the rapidly deepening multiple crises of capitalism will push
some of these leaders to the left, toward understanding that the problem
is capitalism, and that workers’ power is the first step to a solution.
That would be a welcome and very positive development.
But this group is not composed of young militants. As a group they are
mature, entrenched, established figures with developed views and many
years of experience. That experience, for the most part, is professing
policies to reform the most exploitative, oppressive and brutal aspects
of capitalism. When in government, they accepted the burdens of
indebtedness, the primacy of profit over human needs, and the duty of
exacting neoliberal cutbacks.
Revolutionary socialists already know the source of all our existential
crises is the capitalist system, and that the only force on earth
capable of overthrowing capitalism is the organized, class conscious
working class. Only an educated and experienced revolutionary party,
with deep roots in the workers’ movement, will be capable of focussing
the uprising of the workers, when it comes, against the instruments of
state power. We also know that the struggle is international in scope –
it is a war against imperialism on a global scale.
The Progressive International is not the distillation of these vital
lessons. It is born from the failed and utterly diversionary effort to
reform capitalism, to salvage it from its death agony. The PI may foster
some interesting debates, but its basic mission is dead on arrival.
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Carl Sagan
“Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder
and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to
nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will
prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront
the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the
Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will
penetrate its deepest mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos