[blind-democracy] Re: The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders

  • From: Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 20 Sep 2015 21:38:52 -0400

Actually, I don't agree with you. People who are considered to be
traditional liberals, are supporting him with very little question. This
includes people like many of the writers at The Nation. People further to
the left, people with all sorts of leftist leanings are writing articles
questioning whether or not he should be supported. Even though you may not
define some of these people as far left, most of us on the left, do. I've
said before that there are all these factions on the left, all of them
purists, and they spend lots of time arguing about whose politics are the
correct politics. And then, of course, while people argue over political
theory and tactics, the Right organizes, gathers money and takes over the
country.

Miriam

-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Roger Loran
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Sent: Sunday, September 20, 2015 8:25 PM
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Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and
Support Bernie Sanders

I notice that the examples this author gives of the far left are hardly
what I would call left at all. That kind of gives you a clue about what
perspective he is coming from, doesn't it?

On 9/20/2015 11:48 AM, Miriam Vieni wrote:

Here's an article that pretty much explains my position.
Miriam
The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
Posted on Sep 19, 2015
By William Kaufman, CounterPunch

A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in
Phoenix
in July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
permission of the author.
In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
an
ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
any
further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn,
or
even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the
radical
left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined
to
challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
essentially the same political impulse?
The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
in
fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
or
even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the
GOP.
Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign
that
warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
into
the Democratic Party?
This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass
hypnosis,
prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable
of
Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies
the
oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of
ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small
detail:
an army.
Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
“messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each
MSM-covered
appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
solutions—primal
truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
isolated
islets of far-leftdom.
To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere
diversion,
to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
life,
a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
echo
chamber. Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
and
issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary
Americans:
$15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social
Security;
revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an
end
to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate
groups;
free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing
order.

As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders’s
progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and
solutions
can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
the
Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around
issues
of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
or
party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
that a bad thing?
Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the
audience
for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not
be
commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it’s an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited
rather
than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
us. We can’t afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can
have
a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of
2015—not
by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial,
commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
its
leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street
of
any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn)
and
ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
even
who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
Then
ask them if they’ve ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You’ll
get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
work;
(b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, “reality” TV shows,
or
cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club to try to
make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come
is
when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
battle-ready
proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
the
face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left
party
and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
independent “solution” is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
exigencies, Sanders’s far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it
is
a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
challenges and possibilities of the moment.
Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists’ thinking
tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned
to
masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
movement
against the status quo. Here’s an example of such a critical tactical
consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on
Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to
demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
“principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
array
of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF”
or
“Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on. Now
the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
the
war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
middle-class
radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.

So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
indifference. Now let’s tick off a checklist of some of the most common
far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief
rebuttals:
Sanders is “sheepdogging” for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
can be easily herded into to this or that politician’s pen. This argument
would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a
refreshingly
frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
loses
the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
This is really a corollary of the “sheepdogging” thesis, and the answer to
it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is
commanding
a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters
and
activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
Sanders is not a “true” socialist: This is another “so what?” coupled to a
“who cares?” Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative,
who
would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
turn
be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
has
unearthed the Holy Grail of “true” socialism? It’s a hopeless, absurd
quest,
on a par with defining “God” or the meaning of being. We need only recall
that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
“socialism now” or “nationalize the means of production”—they reached the
masses by advancing the very concrete “land, bread, and peace,” sensibly
grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again
the
Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of
purveying
their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are
viewed
as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
to
abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the
next
point:
The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
parties
like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every
dollar
or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from
the
latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
boldness
and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
uniquely
explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have
unleashed
energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
future
independent organizing efforts.
Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the
most
curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
wrote
a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
as
though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, “Simply put, you have a
better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
becoming the next president.” But many of those who deride Sanders’s
chances
will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein’s
statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders’s steep odds are
not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they
simply
prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let’s pose this
question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot
Sanders
comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
would you do?
Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected
because
he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
of
his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
and
cure-all for the world’s ills; he expressly states his intention of using
his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for
themselves.
As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the
working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the
power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It
is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
a
grassroots political movement in this country.
The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey
will
depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not
advances
in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to
humanity
by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
truly
massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they’re merely
isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
and
potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
working,
struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
humanity.
The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
Plato’s vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we
suspect
that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The
Sanders
campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile
belief.
It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans
can
be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
person
of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
can go.
William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
be
reached at kman484@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.



http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The Far Left Needs to Relax a Little and Support Bernie Sanders

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_left_needs_to_stop_worrying_and_
support_bernie_sanders_20150919/
Posted on Sep 19, 2015
By William Kaufman, CounterPunch

A crowd listens to Sen. Bernie Sanders at a town hall meeting in Phoenix
in
July. (Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0)
This piece originated at CounterPunch. It appears here with the kind
permission of the author.
In this presidential summer of our discontent, the radical left has been
fighting hard—not chiefly against capitalism and its galloping calamities,
it seems, but against . . . Bernie Sanders. Scarcely a day passes without
an
ominous recitation of Sanders’s manifold political shortcomings—Sanders
exposés (read examples here, here, here and here) seem to have become a
thriving cottage industry for the far-left commentariat.
It should come as a startling revelation to no one that Sanders is not and
has never aspired to be the next Lenin or Trotsky or even Bob Avakian. We
readily concede that his record will not pass every litmus test of
anti-imperialist and revolutionary probity—no need to belabor this point
any
further. But then what are we to make of Syriza, Podemos, Jeremy Corbyn,
or
even Jill Stein—and other assorted leftish flavors du jour—all of them
seemingly quite palatable to these same ideological arbiters of the
radical
left? These other examples and Sanders are cut from essentially the same
political cloth: left social democrats or democratic socialists inclined
to
challenge entrenched corporate interests through established political
institutions rather than overthrowing them from without. Then why the
radical cheers (however mixed and muted in some cases) for these other
leftish types and jeers for Sanders, even though they all represent
essentially the same political impulse?
The answer lies in a hallowed, inviolable principle of the U.S. far left,
in
fact its most revered first commandment: thou shalt not support, endorse,
or
even smile at a Democrat. This prohibition is not merely a mindless
ideological reflex—it arises from the hard truth that the national
Democratic Party is as much a subsidiary of the corporate class as the
GOP.
Obama’s crass subservience to the interests of the one percent has erased
any doubts about this institutional fealty except among hardened
neoliberals, tribal Democrats, and the entire on-air lineup of MSNBC. And
there is no doubt that past left-talking presidential primary challengers
such as Jackson and Kucinich have functioned more as safety valves than
catalysts for popular unrest, dissipating it and re-channeling it into the
manageable confines of the two-party arena of mock combats. The question,
then, is this: Is there something different about the Sanders campaign
that
warrants support from radicals who have rightly spurned previous forays
into
the Democratic Party?
This key question immediately begs another, even more fundamental one: How
to awaken tens of millions of people from the entrapments of mass
hypnosis,
prostration, and indifference and into the first halting steps toward
recognition and self-emancipation? The quandary is as old as the parable
of
Plato’s cave—that mythic netherworld of darkness and illusion inhabited by
us fallible mortals. The solution—the way out of the cave into the
liberating light of knowledge—is as stubbornly elusive now as it was then.
But simply naming the problem of the “false consciousness” that stymies
the
oppressed—as endlessly and vehemently reiterated by the legions of the far
left for a small eternity—does not by itself yield a solution, as the long
history of leftist impotence and isolation attests. It is understandably
frustrating for the leftist sects and sages to have all the answers except
that most important one: how to lead the “masses” out of the darkness of
ignorance and ideological deception into enlightenment. The leftist
groups—with their obscure tomes of theory, their blogs, their conferences
and meetings, their tinker-toy bureaucracies, their streams of manifestoes
and critiques, their insular feuds and splits and fiery excoriations of
left, right, and center—are self-declared leaders without followers,
generals with an invincible plan for battle who lack only one small
detail:
an army.
Ten parts bellowing grandiosity to zero parts real influence, the far left
fails a litmus test more important than any it applies to Bernie Sanders:
Marx’s call not merely to interpret the world but to change it. So we must
ask: at this moment of gathering darkness for our species and planet, in
this pivotal presidential campaign season, who is making greater strides
toward triggering the mass enlightenment that is the key to empowering the
oppressed: Sanders or his left critics? If politics is the art of
communication, then Sanders must be judged the winner, hands down.
In fact, the Sanders campaign represents a breakthrough for progressive
“messaging” of remarkable scope and impact. Sanders, with his calls for
political revolution against the billionaire class, is not just another
standard-issue, forked-tongue, feel-your-pain Democrat; at each
MSM-covered
appearance he blasts out piercing alarms about the radical inequities and
irrationalities of the status quo, along with sorely needed
solutions—primal
truths that would otherwise lie dormant and buried in the scattered
isolated
islets of far-leftdom.
To dismiss these crucial inroads into mass consciousness as mere
diversion,
to deride his proposals as milquetoast Keynesian stopgap, betrays the old
far-left allergy to the complexity and cacophony of the large stage of
life,
a debilitating preference for the safety and certitude of the tiny left
echo
chamber. Sanders’s campaign, whatever its flaws, is thrusting front and
center to a mass audience a whole series of principled, critical demands
and
issues (many of which overlap with those raised in splendid isolation by
Jill Stein and the Green Party), the realization of which would markedly
advance the material well-being and future prospects of ordinary
Americans:
$15 an hour minimum wage; union card check to expand organizing rights;
improved Medicare for all; expansion (not retrenchment) of Social
Security;
revamped progressive taxation to reduce income inequality; a Wall Street
transaction tax; a rapid transition to renewable energy to combat climate
change; opposition to the ecocidal, neo-fascist TPP, NAFTA, and WTO; an
end
to the militarization of local police forces; cracking down on hate
groups;
free tuition at all public universities and colleges to alleviate student
debt peonage; paid family leave; and so on. If realized in the aggregate,
these demands would challenge the neoliberal logic of the prevailing
order.

As a tactical matter, then, the Sanders upsurge is an invaluable tool for
the mass dissemination of left themes and solutions right now—a priceless
benefit that far outweighs the realpolitik lapses that preoccupy the
left-echo-chamber Sanders refuseniks. Now notice that I just used the word
tactical. Allow me to explain. Whatever the rough spots in Sanders’s
progressive resume, especially on foreign policy, it remains a stubborn
tactical reality (and perhaps I will also be forgiven for using the word
reality) that it is only through the vehicle of the his presidential
campaign as a Democrat that these kinds of progressive issues and
solutions
can flood the airwaves and touch the tens of millions of desperate but
ill-informed Americans who most need to think and hear about them—in most
cases, for the first time. This is the unique and irreplaceable value of
the
Sanders candidacy: it is strewing seeds of mass consciousness around
issues
of class and inequality and the environment in a way that no other person
or
party could accomplish right now. Radicals need to ask themselves: How is
that a bad thing?
Whatever the outcome of Sanders’s campaign, the sheer scope of the
audience
for his progressive checklist, his slashing denunciations of the economic
and political tyranny of the billionaire class, are green shoots in an
otherwise barren political landscape—and who knows how they might flourish
in the future? This is a major breakthrough that has the potential, in
countless molecular ways, to burst through the Democratic institutional
framework in which it is now embedded—and, by the way, Sanders would not
be
commanding that mass audience were it not in that framework: hence the
Sanders Paradox. To be sure, it’s an inconvenient paradox for inveterate
anti-Democrats of the left, but one to be acknowledged and exploited
rather
than condemned or ignored. The near-zero collective political IQ of the
country urgently needs raising by any means possible and necessary, and
sooner rather than later, given the catastrophes that are bearing down on
us. We can’t afford to disdain any advances right now, no matter how messy
or divergent from our ideal scenarios.
Yes, we urgently need an independent activist left party, one that can
have
a real impact. We also need socialism now, drastic carbon reductions and
crash investment in renewable energy ten years ago, and so on. But the
realization of those all imperatives presupposes the power of an aroused
citizenry armed with at least a rudimentary understanding of the major
issues. That is, most assuredly, not the American electorate as of
2015—not
by a long shot. Buffeted by outsourcing, unemployment, underemployment,
consumer and student debt peonage, underwater mortgages, and the rolling
thunder of environmental/climate/resource crisis, the mass of Americans
still lead lives of quiet desperation—and it remains mostly quiet because
they are diverted from their gnawing anxieties and uncertainties by the
toxic glitter of corporate culture, a ceaselessly dripping toxin that
mollifies, numbs, and stupefies. In the words of Robert Crumb,
What we kids didn’t understand was that we were living in a commercial,
commodity culture. Everything in our environment had been bought and sold.
As middle class Americans, we basically grew up on a movie set. The
conscious values that are pushed are only part of the picture. The medium
itself plays a much bigger part than anyone realizes: the creation of
illusion. We are living surrounded by illusion, by professionally created
fairy tales. We barely have contact with the real world.
The result is a woefully detached and undereducated populace, in most of
its
leisure hours transfixed before glowing rectangles. Walk down the street
of
any average American town or city (not Berkeley or Seattle or Brooklyn)
and
ask people if they know who Bernie Sanders is, much less Jill Stein, or
even
who the vice president is or what the three branches of government are.
Then
ask them if they’ve ever heard about anthropogenic global warming. You’ll
get a surprising number of blank stares, because an alarmingly large
percentage of Americans spend most of their waking hours either (a) at
work;
(b) watching the NFL, professional wrestling, NASCAR, “reality” TV shows,
or
cotton-candy dramas and comedies; (c) surfing the Internet (and mostly not
for news); or (d) chasing down sales at Wal-Mart or Sam’s Club to try to
make ends meet. As for civic engagement, the closest most Americans come
is
when they wait in line at the DMV, pay their taxes, get stopped by the
police, or watch Judge Judy. And the small percentage who do take in a bit
of news are getting hosed with a steady stream of lies from the Fox News
Channel, MSNBC, CNN, or the happy talk crew on the late local news.
So this is the audience the left must address: not the doughty,
battle-ready
proletariat of far-left daydreams, but the massively depoliticized and
demoralized casualties of the culture industry and neoliberal piracy. In
the
face of the major inroads Sanders is making against this mass reign of
indifference and ignorance, urging the virtues of an independent left
party
and movement as an alternative is like urging the virtues of fusion energy
over solar panels—a great-sounding idea, but one that has no purchase on
reality for the foreseeable future. The mass of Americans is not going to
advance miraculously from widespread political nescience to applying for
membership in the ISO in a single great leap. The far-left push for an
independent “solution” is a practical nullity right now and will remain so
for some time to come—and hence amounts to self-indulgent posturing in the
face of the calamities looming on a near horizon. Blind to these tactical
exigencies, Sanders’s far-left detractors merely reinforce the political
isolation that they seem to brandish as a badge of virtue; in reality it
is
a symptom of political debility, a fatal estrangement from the tactical
challenges and possibilities of the moment.
Lest some radical critics feel sullied by the intrusion of the word
tactical, I must insist that there is no shame in leftists’ thinking
tactically at times—in fact, it is a necessity if we are to stay attuned
to
masses of people in a way that gives heft impact to any conceivable
movement
against the status quo. Here’s an example of such a critical tactical
consideration: At the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement in the late
1960s and early 1970s, I was part of a coalition that was mobilizing
hundreds of thousands of people in the streets around the concrete (and
principled!) slogan, “Out Now!”, peaking in the April 1971 march on
Washington DC that brought 1 million people to the nation’s capital to
demand an immediate end to the war. At that time a chorus of very
“principled” far leftists scorned these powerful outpourings—which
materially aided the besieged Vietnamese workers and peasants—because the
key demand did not, in their view, go far enough or did not address an
array
of other issues: they argued that we should declaim “Victory to the NLF”
or
“Smash Imperialism” or “Defend the Rights of Palestinians” and so on. Now
the tactical consideration was that pinning the actions to these far-flung
ultimatist, simon-pure demands would have winnowed the million marchers to
maybe five thousand, thus depriving the action of all material impact on
the
war while deepening the delusional self-regard of a few enraged
middle-class
radicals—and damn the Vietnamese workers and peasants in the process.

So much for the general considerations that make at least some degree of
critical support for the Sanders campaign a no-brainer for radicals hoping
to make even minimal headway against the headwinds of mass ignorance and
indifference. Now let’s tick off a checklist of some of the most common
far-left complaints about the Sanders campaign, along with brief
rebuttals:
Sanders is “sheepdogging” for the Democrats: This is self-fulfilling
prophecy that presupposes that the mass of Americans are indeed sheep that
can be easily herded into to this or that politician’s pen. This argument
would carry more weight if Sanders were merely feinting left, with vague
Obama-esque marketing slogans. But clearly he is propounding a
refreshingly
frank and specific set of policies to reverse the ever-intensifying
inequalities and injustices of the status quo, slashing with finely honed
specifics against the abuses of the billionaire elite. Even if Sanders
loses
the nomination, the progressive issues and solutions he is purveying to a
mass audience will embed firmly in popular political thought and action,
making a future breakaway into political independence easier, not harder.
Sanders has vowed to support whoever is nominated by the Democratic Party:
This is really a corollary of the “sheepdogging” thesis, and the answer to
it is simple: So what? A bald, rumpled seventy-three-year-old is
commanding
a mass audience not for sex appeal but for his passion and clarity on
substance; he is galvanizing a huge groundswell of issue-focused voters
and
activists who would otherwise not be engaged in politics at all. A whole
generation of voters will be more receptive to any future left
campaigns—including independent ones—thanks to his exertions,
notwithstanding any personal endorsements he makes a year from now.
Sanders is not a “true” socialist: This is another “so what?” coupled to a
“who cares?” Any of the 5,757 varieties of socialists ranging from Bernie
Sanders to the Spartacists will tell you that they alone are the true
socialists and that all the others are frauds. The Fox News Channel
considers Obama a socialist; the Democratic Socialists of America would
ridicule this foolishness, but they in turn would be called out as faux
socialists by Trotskyist groups like the ISO and Socialist Alternative,
who
would in their turn be denounced as fraudulent by the ultra-Trot World
Socialist Web Site (Socialist Equality Party), who would in yet another
turn
be reviled as mountebanks by the Mad Hatter-Trot Spartacists. Who, then,
has
unearthed the Holy Grail of “true” socialism? It’s a hopeless, absurd
quest,
on a par with defining “God” or the meaning of being. We need only recall
that the Bolsheviks, socialists who actually made a revolution rather than
merely bloviating about it, deployed as their main agitational slogan not
“socialism now” or “nationalize the means of production”—they reached the
masses by advancing the very concrete “land, bread, and peace,” sensibly
grasping that desperate workers and peasants were more interested in
tangibles than abstractions. This is a lesson well worth pondering for the
armchair revolutionaries leading the charge against Sanders.
Elections are a trap and diversion from real organizing: See once again
the
Bolsheviks, who regularly ran in election campaigns as a means of
purveying
their ideas—it worked pretty well for them. As long as elections are
viewed
as a tactic in a broader movement-building strategy, it is simply foolish
to
abstain from the reachout opportunities they afford. This leads to the
next
point:
The Sanders campaign subtracts energy and resources from independent
parties
like the Greens: Supporting the Sanders campaign right now vs. building an
independent party and movement is not a zero-sum game in which every
dollar
or ounce of energy devoted to the former is necessarily subtracted from
the
latter. Sanders is posing progressive and class-based issues with a
boldness
and bluntness and honesty that set him apart from past progressive
Democratic primary aspirants. And no recent left-leaning Democratic
presidential aspirant has sparked anything close to the firestorms of
enthusiasm springing up around the Sanders campaign. This combination of
mass momentum and programmatic boldness make the Sanders campaign a
uniquely
explosive force in American politics right now. If Sanders cannot win the
nomination and endorses Clinton (or whomever) with the usual less-evil
incantations, he will, by dint of the power of his campaign, have
unleashed
energies and insights into the political sphere that will have a life of
their own well beyond his campaign and will redound to the benefit of
future
independent organizing efforts.
Sanders cannot win the nomination or the general election: This is the
most
curious of the far-left objections to the Sanders campaign. Arun Gupta
wrote
a whole article for CounterPunch on just this issue. The entire essay
traffics in MSM horse-race probabilities rather than political substance,
as
though Gupta were a hedge-fund manager assessing a possible investment
rather than a radical seeking the most favorable vehicle for spreading his
ideas. He adduces from various sources that (1) Sanders cannot win the
nomination and (2) he cannot win the general election—a point that would
seem to be moot in view of (1). He prophesies, “Simply put, you have a
better chance of Jennifer Lawrence or Idris Elba calling you up and saying
they want to be your friend with benefits than Bernie Sanders has of
becoming the next president.” But many of those who deride Sanders’s
chances
will be supporting Jill Stein of the Green Party, whose likelihood of
winning the general election is on a par with any of those critics winning
both Powerball and Mega-Millions on the same day. Yet Jill Stein’s
statistical-hopelessness-unto absurdity will not deter the Bernie contras
from touting Stein or some other quixotic lefty independent in the general
election. So it appears the far-left deriders of Sanders’s steep odds are
not so averse to lost causes after all—purists in this as well, they
simply
prefer causes that are lost unto near-invisibility. And let’s pose this
question to those who argue from probability: What if the long shot
Sanders
comes through and wins the nomination and/or general election? Then what
would you do?
Sanders will not be able to implement his proposals even if elected
because
he will face opposition in the Congress and the Courts: Sanders himself is
the first to acknowledge this point, which is based on a misunderstanding
of
his purpose in running—he is not presenting himself as a personal savior
and
cure-all for the world’s ills; he expressly states his intention of using
his campaign—and his nomination and election should they come to pass—of
spurring the American people to organize to win these goals for
themselves.
As he stated in a campaign speech in Iowa last month:
Let me tell you something that no other candidate for president will tell
you. And that is [that] no matter who is elected to be president, that
person will not be able to address the enormous problems facing the
working
families of our country. They will not be able to succeed because the
power
of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of campaign
donors
is so great that no president alone can stand up to them. That is the
truth.
People may be uncomfortable about hearing it, but that is the reality. And
that is why what this campaign is about is saying loudly and clearly: It
is
not just about electing Bernie Sanders for president, it is about creating
a
grassroots political movement in this country.
The case for radical support for Sanders amounts to this: before we can
arrive at point omega from point alpha, we have to traverse points beta,
gamma, delta, and so on. There are no magic superleft flying machines that
will propel us nonstop over all those intermediate steps from neoliberal
despotism to radical democracy—we know this if we are organizing on the
ground rather than theorizing in the clouds. The tempo of that journey
will
depend chiefly on advances in the consciousness of the masses, not
advances
in the vehemence of far-left declamation.
Some leftists can fantasize that they are doing a great service to
humanity
by scoffing at the tactical tradeoffs that are essential to building a
truly
massive, powerful grassroots movement—but in so doing, they’re merely
isolating themselves even further from the arenas of real political work
and
potential mass outreach, like a swami meditating in a cave. Such radicals
remind me of the holy men described by Swami Vivekananda:
The highest men are calm, silent and unknown. They are the men who really
know the power of thought; they are sure that, even if they go into a cave
and close the door and simply think five true thoughts and then pass away,
these five thoughts of theirs will live through eternity. . . . These
Sâttvika men are too near the Lord to be active and to fight, to be
working,
struggling, preaching and doing good, as they say, here on earth to
humanity.
The hour is late. We face planetary emergencies of unprecedented gravity.
Some reputable scientists say that it might be too late to avert them.
Plato’s vision of humanity trapped in the dark cave—our cave of collective
ignorance—is no mere parable: it a prophecy turned all too real. We must
nevertheless choose to act as though there is a way out, even if we
suspect
that our choice is more an affirmation of faith than of reason. The
Sanders
campaign has mustered enough of an audience to bolster that fragile
belief.
It is not a panacea—it is a tentative first step of hope that Americans
can
be roused in sufficient numbers to help save humanity from itself. No
person
of conscience should refuse to join in that step and push it as far as it
can go.
William Kaufman is a writer and editor who lives in New York City. He can
be
reached at kman484@xxxxxxxxxxxxx.

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