Hi, I am sure the reasoning SJ has stated is sound, and the change
warranted in this particular context. Quite apart from that, however, the
term "socialist union militant" shouldn't perish because of Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders was at one time an American social democrat (SP-YPSL). This
means he was then, as now, a supporter of US imperialism. He was also
active in CORE in Chicago in 1962-64. As we know, CORE was founded during
WWII, as a kind of Musteite-pacifist civil rights organization. It had a
religious tinge and was successful in the North, organizing around housing
issues. CORE was explicitly anti-communist and opposed to self defense
against race terror (condemning, for example, the Deacons for Defense). The
Shachtmanites, led by Rustin, targeted CORE for takeover in the early
1960s, to use as a vehicle in their "realignment" operations--specifically,
to corral black voters into the KKK-loving Democratic Party. So as a young
American imperial social democrat, Sanders was involved in CORE activities
and became a leader of protests and sit-ins while a student at the
University of Chicago.
[image: image.png]
CORE organizer Bernie Sanders arrested as one of the leaders of protests
against segregated University of Chicago housing, 1963.
But Sanders' current of social democracy no longer exists. It basically
died with the collapse of Soviet communism. The SP still exists in name,
peopled by the few descendants of the small group of Midwesterners that
carried on as the SP after 1972-73 ("Debs Caucus, Dave McReynolds). At that
time, Bayard Rustin and Charles Zimmerman realized Shachtman's dream of
becoming a *purely *anticommunist organization (the SD-USA), while "left"
opponent Harrington created the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee
(DSOC), later the DSA. The former group became neocons, the latter group
neo-liberals (before dying out only to be miraculously revived from a Wall
Street office during the Occupy Wall Street movement).
But Sanders himself moved to the left, away from either wing of
Shachtmanism, toward a kind of vague socialist-populism. After graduating
from UChicago in 1964, he may have returned to NYC for a few years. By 1968
he was in Vermont, however, part of a very loose alternative movement
largely made up of New Leftists. Most notably, the Liberation News Service,
an SDS organization based in DC and Boston, broke up into a Maoist faction
and two Vermont communes (the history is described amusingly by Raymond
Mungo in his memoirs, *Famous Long Ago: My Life and Times in the Liberation
News Service* and *Total Loss Farm*).
During this time Sanders wrote for an alternative newspaper called the
Vermont *Freeman*, advocating for alternative schools, Reichian psychology,
sexual liberation, cooperative socialism, and so forth. He and Michael
Parenti (from the University of Burlington) helped revive the Liberal Union
movement, a 19th-century New England-based reform movement, which a hundred
years earlier attracted American reformers, including Fourierists,
Spiritualists, and advocates of civil rights for blacks and women. I don't
know its interim history, but from 1970 the Liberal Union was an antiwar,
alternative radical party (in the European sense) in Vermont. Sanders ran
for office several times in the 1970s on the Liberal Union Party ticket,
losing each time (Vermont was still Republican then). In one of these
campaigns, the Liberal Union Party called for the abolition of the CIA.
Clearly, Sanders moved to the left in the 1970s. His former YPSL-SD-USA
"comrades" worked with the CIA. In 1980 he endorsed and was a registered
elector for Andrew Pulley, the SWP candidate in the presidential elections.
In March 1981 he was elected mayor of Burlington as an independent, backed
by his old Liberal Union friends and with the tacit support of the Citizens
Party of Barry Commoner. In May of that year, as mayor, Sanders appeared
with Pulley and other SWPers at a Burlington forum on the SWP's COINTELPRO
case. Some of the *Militant*'s coverage of that event, including Sanders'
remarks, is available here:
https://vtdigger.org/2019/04/14/poisoned-press-original-plot-stop-bernie-sanders-didnt-work/
During the Reagan years and the US imperialist war on Central America,
Sanders occasionally made supportive comments about Cuba, the FMLN, and the
Sandinistas. He created a sister-city link and visited Nicaragua in 1985.
In 1987 hosted Nora Astorga in Burlington. When she died in 1988, he
publicly praised her life and pondered whether US imperialism had caused
her cancer. The following year he toured Cuba, and created a Vermont cable
channel to show Nicaraguan and Cuban films.
Sanders was reelected twice to two-year terms as Burlington's mayor. For
the six years he served, he routinely described himself as an independent
socialist. In those days, he does not appear to have been anything more
than that. He was certainly not a Shachtmanite social democrat then. He was
closest to the SWP, whose 1984 presidential ticket (Pulley again) he
appears to have supported. When he was married in 1988, he traveled to the
USSR. He had over the years cooperated with Soviet efforts to oppose the
deployment of US nuclear missiles in Europe.
In 1987 he lost in his run for governor as an independent. He had been a
high-profile mayor then, and when his bid for higher office flopped (he got
14% of the vote), he took a job as an instructor at Harvard's Kennedy
School of Government. This happened in 1989 and may have been a turning
point. Vagaries of Vermont Republican-Democratic politics provided Sanders
with an opening to run for Congress in 1990. He was elected and reelected,
formally as an independent and self-described socialist, from 1990 to 2004.
However, he founded the "Progressive Caucus" in the US congress, whose
members are of course all Democrats.
In 2005 he began campaigning for the Senate. He was endorsed in his bid by
Charles Schumer, on of the most war-mongering politicians in the Democratic
party, as well as Harry Reid and Howard Dean. This would indicate a second
turning point, since a positive vetting by Schumer and Reid means that
Sanders was certified as a loyal soldier in US imperialism's war machine.
Because of this vetting, and because of his voting record in Washington,
Bernie Sanders is not a socialist but rather is a US imperialist
politician. A case could be made, however, that in the 1970s and 1980s, he
was a kind of socialist, in the way of some of the lesser known,
independent movements coming out of the US New Left. They could not survive
as independent movements, and would have had to move left or right--toward
the hard left or toward the Democrats (or toward the Democrats via the hard
left). But it is easy, for those of us who were around then, to remember
the kind of politics Sanders espoused. We found them in CISPES, for
example, or CAFIOT, or around NBIPP, or independent feminist-socialist
groups, and so forth.
That Sanders was part of that milieu once, and the label socialist, which
brought him success as a municipal politician in the 1980s, still sticks to
him despite being part of the US war machine, shouldn't stop us from using
that word whenever we want to. Since Scheideman, Noske, Gerhard Shroder and
Morris Hillquit called themselves socialists, we have always had to qualify
what we mean by the term.
