Capitalism, COVID-19, and Crisis: A Class Analysis

(Photo Credit: Mark Lennihan, Associated Press)

By Ikemba X

The Capitalist/Imperialist Class

In the past week, the global economy experienced its worst week since 2008 (following a series of “Worst Weeks”, it keeps getting worse), and the economic crisis is sure to deteriorate as time marches on. Three years of growth in the market have evaporated, unemployment has seen a spike, multiple industrial sectors have slowed to a crawl or stopped moving altogether, and the trillion-dollar injection into the market by the Federal Reserve did almost nothing to stop the free fall (other than transfer toxic assets to the public). If the recession hasn’t already hit us, we’re in for a catastrophe when the bills are due. The following is a brief outline on how we got here, and how much worse it's going to be this time around.

The modern capitalist economy simply cannot function without large amounts of fiat currency in the form of government-backed loans. As the bourgeoisie continues its song and dance of improving the means of production, increasing production of commodities, and better perfecting the division of labor, the price of operating such vast and complex industrial armies and machines is simply too much. In order to compensate for this massive cost, the bourgeoisie in the global core have forged an alliance between industrial and finance capital, exporting ever increasing amounts of production overseas, so that cheaper labor can be exploited. At home, the use of credit, loans, and ownership of companies into shares have allowed capitalists to continue their operations, though the market has grown more unstable than ever before. The financial crisis in 2008 drove capitalism to the brink of collapse, and it was caused specifically by inherent contradictions in the system. The rate of profit has continued to fall, production has become more expensive and commodities are produced in greater volumes for lower prices. Any panic in the market has a ripple effect, and the harsh truth is that a large majority of the world’s “wealth” is artificial, mere symbols in a computer program that rely solely on blind faith. If the bourgeoisie becomes scared enough to taking out its money and halting production, the whole rotten structure collapses. If not for the action taken by the Feds over the past few decades, including multiple bouts of quantitative easing under Obama, the global market may very well have imploded long ago. It took almost a decade for the economy to mostly recover from the 2008 crisis, for the working class a recovery never really came, and some of its effects are still felt in more isolated sectors of the economy today. 

Leading up to the COVID-19 scare, there was an already existing crisis in imperialism and capitalist production. Notably, the Trade War between China and the United States has had negative effects on the rival imperialist powers, who were willing to threaten economic crises while jockeying for hegemony in the world market. The global energy sector was also entering a crisis, with Russia and the OPEC countries at an impasse on restricting oil production, which had the effect of flooding the market with oil. The overproduction of commodities in this critical sector of the economy was causing problems for the bourgeoisie in the United States, who have responded by seizing oil fields in Syria and beating the war drums, threatening Iran with invasion. Meanwhile, European nations are experiencing a contraction of unified dominance as Brexit causes a fracture in European imperialism, and a potential crisis in the UK with the looming threat of a No-Deal Brexit. This would have significant ripple effects on the global market, as the UK is one of the largest economies in the world. 

It is important to remember that this crisis was caused purely through the anarchy of capitalist production. Once the capitalists were bailed out following 2008, imperialist plunder continued and the bourgeoisie recovered, leaving the proletariat to fend for themselves and foot the bill. This time around, production really has stopped, and the effects on the capitalist economy will be disastrous. The Chinese economy today makes up 16% of global Gross World Product, is the second largest economy in the world, and has the largest pool of cheap labor, as well as being a rising imperialist power, offering predatory loans to African countries. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, factories responsible for 70% of China’s exports have simply ceased to operate or have cut production massively, and travel to and from the country has been shut down completely. Several other countries have shut down massive sectors of their economy such as the airlines, and Italy has shut down its country altogether. Therefore, this latest crisis isn't caused by capitalists being unable to pay for their ventures, but rather there simply is no movement of capital, and no production of commodities. With this monumental economic halt/slowdown, we are staring in the face of a crisis the likes of which we have not seen in almost a century. The COVID-19 is sending the capitalist system into a freefall, and as always, the bourgeoisie and their governments will do everything in their power to make sure the workers absorb the brunt of this fall.

The Proletarian Situation

The situation in the United States is dire for the proletariat. For starters, there is a debt crisis, $14 trillion consisting mostly of mortgages, car loans, student loans, and credit cards. Deepening wealth inequality has accelerated the fall of real wages, and today (even before the arrival of COVID-19) most proletarians are in dire straits. Half of Americans make $30 thousand a year or less, and 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford a $400 crisis. Real unemployment was sitting at about 5% and has now spiked to almost 20%, and underemployment or those who have given up on finding jobs represent a forgotten sector that the US government is fine keeping in the dark. With the COVID-19 scare, layoffs are rising at an unprecedented rate, and those who aren't being fired are having their hours cut. In a country where health insurance is tied to employment, a pandemic which causes a spike in unemployment is probably the worst-case scenario for a proletarian.

The COVID-19 scare has also affected the mentality of the working class, who have begun panic buying commodities. This almost immediately resulted in a shortage of goods, which has ripped away the veil which hid the scarcity that does exist in capitalism, just like any other system. Lean manufacturing, or Just-in-Time manufacturing, provided us all with the hallucination that there was always an abundance of products for us to buy. However, after being put under pressure, the lie has been exposed for what it really is. In a nutshell, the transportation system has been developed enough that capitalists can rely on the nomadic lifestyle of proletarians in that industry. There is no large-scale storage of goods, but rather far-away sites that remain available whenever products are needed. Such a system is incredibly volatile, and any disruption in the distribution chain can cause an immediate and drastic shortage. We saw a glimpse of this with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, when the natural disaster destroyed the colony of Puerto Rico. The result was that there was a global shortage of IV bags, since Puerto Rico was the hub of production for these goods. Now, imagine a crisis like this, but in multiple industries on every level of the production process, and not just based on production itself being shut down, but also on the transportation industry being paralyzed (like what we’ve seen with the decline in airline traffic and mass layoffs of truckers). China produces most of the world’s steel and, as stated before, their industrial production has been slashed in 70% of factories. And that is just one country. Globally, we are already seeing crippling shortages of medical supplies, most notably in Italy, the United States, and Iran, which has been the hardest hit of the three due to imperialist sanctions.

There has also been a growing trend of social distancing and self-isolation as a result of the pandemic. The cultural effects of this have the potential to negatively impact us all. Sowing fear and distrust of each other, the COVID-19 scare threatens to further divide us, further alienate us, and further fuel xenophobic and racist tendencies among white proletarians, as indicated by the recent uptick in racially-motivated attacks against proletarians of East Asian descent. This directly plays into some of the most reactionary and chauvinistic ideas in the US, expressed clearly by the Bourgeois slogan “China Lied, People Died” and scapegoating, such as labeling COVID-19 as the “Chinese Virus.”

In December of last year, the service sector accounted for 97% of new hires according to the Labor department. Additionally, the US economy relies heavily on consumer spending, and while the rush on grocery stores and online shopping may offset this in the short term, less and less people will be able to sustain this spending as incomes dry up in the coming months. Couple this development with the above-mentioned fact that most workers live paycheck to paycheck, and we see a crisis in consumption of commodities, one of the basic causes of capitalist crisis.

In short, the situation looks bad for the proletariat. Congress can’t even pass basic measures, and the clock is ticking. There have been discussions in Congress about a potential UBI bill, but if this crisis continues for several months, one-time checks will not be enough to stop the bleeding. Successive monthly checks may stop the bleeding in the interim, but the ripples effects of mass unemployment are sure to carry well into 2021, if not multiple years beyond. In other words, we’re going to see a crisis the likes of which the world has never seen before.

What Can We Do?

There have been some policies proposed by Social-Democratic elements of the Democratic Party in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures proposed are attempts to treat the symptoms, and not cure the problem. Things like Medicare for All and nationalization of the healthcare system, as well as nationalizing any industries which seek government bailouts, do not get rid of the underlying economic problems which lead to the crisis we are faced with today. Medicare for All in theory protects us all from the virus, but we have seen clearly that the capitalist system of production and distribution has utterly failed the Italians, who have been hit by a chronic lack of medical supplies for their patients. In other words, what good will universal healthcare be if the medical industry itself cannot handle the demand. Currently, the for-profit system in the US offers less than 1 million hospital beds, in a nation of 330 million people. Additionally, our aim should not be to simply treat the sick. We must have a centrally-planned economy, with systems in place that prepare large storages of medical supplies we need for when viruses like this are unleashed on the world. We need an economic system that does not collapse after one month of a fraction of its production being cut. 

Activists should be cautious moving forward in their political work. The most important thing we can implement right now is Serve-the-People survival programs, specifically in terms of food and medical supplies. In doing our work, make sure to have hand sanitizer, gloves, and masks on hand for use and distribution. We should also not allow social distancing and hygiene practices to be spurred on by panic, and use them with clear heads, knowing full well that we are protecting the lives of others through these actions, not just ourselves.

The large-scale demonstrations are coming. No society can have mass unemployment and shortages of basic materials without intensifying the class struggle as a result. We must be prepared to go among the masses where they organize, and organize our own demonstrations, building strong links with the people. Go to the masses, learn from them, and educate them. Most of all, stay safe. Use the time given to us in this crisis to study theory from revolutionary teachers such as Marx, Lenin, and Mao. Do not hesitate, and do not be afraid of study. Study the conditions of the people. I strongly recommend we all crack open Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done” again, in preparation for the coming months.

The Great Bernie Bust and Why It Was Seemingly Inevitable

By Daniel Lazare

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

It is now all but certain that Joe Biden will be the Democratic candidate. 

Well, that was fun, wasn’t it? The Bernie Sanders boom captivated the global left. Everywhere else, social democrats seemed to be on the rocks. Britain’s Labour Party was a shambles, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s France Insoumise was losing steam, while Syriza and Podemos were hardly more than memories of radical opportunities lost. Only in the United States did the story seem any different, thanks to Sanders’ long march through the Democratic Party.

But that was before the ‘Super Tuesday’ cataclysm on March 3 and then ‘mini-Tuesday’ a week later, when six states voted, including the all-important Michigan. After losing 10 of 14 states in the first, Sanders needed a sharp rebound in the second to remain viable. He did not get it. He came in 16 points behind Joe Biden in Michigan, 25 points behind in Missouri, six points behind in Idaho, and a whopping 66 behind in Mississippi. Only in North Dakota and Washington state did he eke out victories by 6.1 and 0.2 points respectively.

Sanders will still have a sizable bloc of delegates going into the Democratic national convention in July. But since he has promised to rally around whoever gets the nomination, he will have no choice but to pay homage to the odious Biden on bended knee.

This is certainly a dramatic turnabout. Hillary Clinton messed up so badly in 2016 that even the most skeptical Marxists assumed that the nomination was Sanders’ for the asking. But they proved to be wrong. What happened?

One possibility is that American exceptionalism turns out yet again to be nothing more than a myth and that any notion of the US left bucking international trends is a pipedream. Comparisons with Britain are striking. Jeremy Corbyn’s landslide leadership victory in September 2015 presaged Sanders’ dramatic breakthrough in the 2016 Michigan primary, while Corbyn’s disastrous performance last December paved the way for the latest debacle.

But in another sense the Bernie bust shows that the US is exceptional after all -- in a purely negative sense, that is. Not only is the American two-party system exceptionally old and suffocating, but it is exceptionally entrenched. In 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt bolted from the Republican Party to run as a Progressive, he was able to gain ballot access in all of the then 48 states. Today, the same feat would be impossible, thanks to sky-high registration requirements, designed to cripple upstart parties before they can even get off the ground.

Indeed, 1912 would be the last time that one of the two top vote-getters would be anyone other than a Republican or Democrat. (Roosevelt came in second behind Democrat Woodrow Wilson, while Republican William Howard Taft was third.) Since then, Americans have voted ‘Repocratic’ with depressing regularity. Since polls show overwhelming support for a third-party alternative, it is not because they want to, but because they effectively have no choice.

But the US system is not only restrictive, but exceptionally regulated. “Normally, democracies regard political parties as voluntary associations entitled to the usual rights of freedom of association,” the social democratic website, Jacobin.com, observed in 2016. “But US state laws dictate not only a ballot-qualified party’s nominating process, but also its leadership structure, leadership selection process and many of its internal rules ...”1  Rather than parties, as the rest of the world understands the term, the result is more akin to a couple of state-sponsored churches with intricate government-imposed rules concerning the selection of bishops and parish priests, weekly services, and so on.

It is a travesty of democracy every step of the way. Nonetheless, Sanders hoped to use a free and unbiased primary system to somehow leapfrog to a higher stage of development. He was wrong, not only because the party establishment turned against him at a crucial moment, but because primaries turn out to be shaped by moral assumptions that powerfully affect what voters say and do.

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist blessed with occasional moments of insight into America’s unique political system, summed up the problem neatly in the wake of Super Tuesday. The primaries, he wrote, showed that:

“Democrats are not just a party; they’re a community. In my years of covering politics, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like what happened in the 48 hours after South Carolina - millions of Democrats from all around the country, from many different demographics, turning as one and arriving at a common decision. It was like watching a flock of geese or a school of fish, seemingly leaderless, sensing some shift in conditions, sensing each other’s intuitions, and smoothly shifting direction en masse. A community is more than the sum of its parts. It is a shared sensibility and a pattern of response.2 ”

All those geese and fish call to mind Edmund Burke’s famous description of the people as “thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak,” as they silently chew their cud. But Brooks is right: rather than rational and deliberative, political parties in America are indeed leaderless mobs, held together not by a common program and ideology, but by a shared sensibility. In the case of the Democrats, that means devotion to the tradition of Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Martin Luther King junior, even though they stood for very different things. But anyone who dares point out that FDR refused to support an anti-lynching bill or that King opposed LBJ’s war in Vietnam will be accused of failing to participate in the higher consciousness that the Democratic Party demands.

Worst candidate

That is why the party leadership was able to turn the race around so neatly. The process began two days after Sanders’s impressive 47% win in the Nevada primary, when house majority whip Jim Clyburn intervened on Biden’s behalf. When CNN asked Clyburn what he was “hearing from the Democratic caucus in the house about having, potentially, Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, at the top of the ticket,” he replied:

“I was in Texas about three weeks ago … I talked to the faith community down there, and they were very, very concerned about whether or not we’ll have somebody on the ticket that will cause down-ballot carnage. That’s our biggest problem among my members. We want to see somebody on the ticket that will allow us to expand our numbers, not having to run as some kind of a rearguard campaign, in order to keep from being tarnished with a label. So our candidates are really concerned about that.3 ”

They were concerned, in other words, about seeing their careers go up in smoke, thanks to someone using an s-word that they regard as irrelevant, threatening and unnecessarily disruptive.

But it was Barack Obama’s phone call to Pete Buttigieg four days later that really did the trick. Despite Obama’s disastrous later years, Democrats remember his administration as a golden age, especially after Trump. Hence, his influence is overwhelming. After months of Yoda-like silence, therefore, all he had to do was make a single phone call to Buttigieg on March 1, telling him to withdraw in favor of Biden to trigger an avalanche. Suddenly, word was out that Sanders was getting ahead of himself and had to be reined in.

With that, David Brooks’ school of fish reversed course. As he says, the response was not deliberative or rational, but intuitive. Democrats felt that Sanders was heading in the wrong direction and that Biden would be the wiser course. So they acted on instinct -- and radical-left hopes were dashed.

The debacle bears out American exceptionalism in another way as well: ie, by showing that the direction of American politics is now exceptionally disastrous. To be sure, the US is not facing national break-up the way the UK is. But it is hard to imagine a worse Democratic nominee to go up against Trump. The list of Biden’s Jerry Lewis-like pratfalls and missteps is too long to go into. Suffice it to say that he joined with the notorious southern racist, Jesse Helms, to oppose school bussing as a remedy for de facto segregation in the 1970s and then authored key legislation in the 1980s that ramped up the war on drugs and led to the mass incarceration of millions of poor people and members of racial minorities. He voted in favor of the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and, as vice-president, backed US intervention in Libya, Syria and Yemen -- all of which have turned out to be catastrophic. Thanks to a motor mouth he can never quite control, he let the cat out of the bag in 2014 regarding US policy with regard to Syria and al Qa’eda: “Our allies in the region were our largest problem in Syria,” he told a Harvard audience:

“The Turks … the Saudis, the emirates, etc - what were they doing? They were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war … they poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of military weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad -- except the people who were being supplied were Al Nusra and al Qa’eda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.4

The fact that Obama ordered Biden to apologize to the Saudis and others for his indiscretion confirms that the administration was not only unable to control their pro-al Qa’eda activities, but was determined to cover them up.5 ”

All of which will provide Trump with more than enough ammunition in the fall. But Biden suffers from another problem as well: significant cognitive decline. The contrast with the smooth-talking politician of just a few years ago is startling. Words tumble out chaotically, non-sequiturs abound and ideas break off in mid-sentence. Here he is trying to explain how to make up for the effects of school segregation in a presidential debate in September:

“…Make sure that we bring into the help the -- the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need - we have one school psychologist for every 15 hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy … now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. We have to make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four and five-year-olds go to school - school, not day care, school. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t want to help, they don’t want - they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, the -- excuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.6 ”

Exceptionalism

There are dozens of examples of such garbled word salads. Trump will undoubtedly make full use of them, just as he will make full use of Biden’s disastrous misadventures in the Middle East and his role in the Burisma scandal in the Ukraine. This does not mean that he will win -- after all, a lot can happen in the eight months prior to the November election. But, even if Biden prevails, he will be the American equivalent of a Konstantin Chernenko -- the semi-comatose commissar who ran the Soviet Union for 13 months in the mid-1980s and helped drive it into the ground.

That will be the final expression of American exceptionalism -- a brain-addled serial war criminal who is rushing the empire with exceptional speed to its demise.

Daniel Lazare is the author of, most recently, The Velvet Coup: The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the Decline of American Democracy (Verso).

Notes

1. . S Ackerman, ‘A blueprint for a new party’ Jacobin August 11 2016.↩︎

2. . D Brooks, ‘Biden’s rise gives the establishment one last chance’ The New York Times March 5 2020.↩︎

3. . The full exchange can be viewed at www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/02/28/rep-james-clyburn-democrats-concerned-down-ballot-carnage-sot-newday-vpx.cnn.↩︎

4. . The quote begins at 53:30 at www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcKVCtg5dxM.↩︎

5. . M Landler, ‘Saudis are next on Biden’s Mideast apology list after Harvard remarks’ The New York Times October 6 2014.↩︎

6. . The full quote is available at www.youtube.com
   /watch?time_continue=6&v=4AYVwgcAOMY
   &feature=emb_logo.↩︎

Everyone's a Socialist in a Crisis

By Tom Bramble

Republished from Red Flag.

One of the most prevalent ideological mantras of Western capitalism is that the market should rule. But as the latest health and economic crises demonstrate, capitalists soon forget their worship of the market when times get tough. They scream for government money, and plenty of it. It turns out that “the market” is fine when it comes to whipping workers to accept lower wages, but when it comes to lower profits, the market can go hang.

Every student with the misfortune to have studied economics at school or university will know that “the market” is the god before which we must all kneel. Markets bring consumers and producers together to ensure an equilibrium of supply and demand, the textbooks tell us. We may all be individuals each pursuing our own private interests, but this selfish endeavour miraculously results in an optimum outcome for all.

You don’t even have to step inside a classroom to have received this lesson. It’s rammed home in normal times in every newspaper, in every news bulletin on the TV, in every politician’s speech. Just listen to them. Governments can’t expand spending on Newstart because “the markets” won’t allow it. Governments shouldn’t ramp up public housing because that will throw property markets into a spin. Competition should be opened between universities because a market in education will sift out the bad providers from the good.

The champions of the market, if challenged to explain how it is that markets consistently result in supplies of goods lurching from shortages to gluts, point to the economic dysfunction of the old Soviet Union as proof that if “planning” replaces the market, a much bigger disaster ensues.

It doesn’t take an Einstein to see what rubbish this is. The last thing any capitalist wants is “free competition”, because that might squeeze their profits. Just look at how the supermarkets have destroyed small shops or how any new industry that emerges is soon dominated by three or four companies globally.

But there’s another angle to this. Capitalists preach “the market” for the working class – stand on your own two feet, don’t rely on the government – but themselves sponge off the public big time. Just look at the billions in subsidies and tax concessions the fossil fuel companies, huge enterprises for the most part, extract from state and federal governments in Australia. The vehicle manufacturers raked in hundreds of millions a year from the Australian government for decades until deciding it wasn’t enough and went overseas. This is why big companies and industry groups hire armies of former politicians to lobby on their behalf in the offices of premiers and prime ministers – there’s money in government coffers and they want it.

And while the capitalists talk about “the market” setting wages for workers, in reality, they don’t really allow the market to do the job. They use the whole apparatus of state repression, the industrial tribunals, the police, the courts to suppress workers’ rights to organise to pursue their demands.

But when a crisis hits all the bullshit about the market is thrown to the winds. And that is just what we are seeing now. Faced with the collapse of the capitalist economy, for the second time in a dozen years, with massive bankruptcies on the table and the stock market plunging by more than 30 percent and more to come, fervent advocates of the free market are now embracing government intervention to save their skins. As the Financial Times put it on 18 March, “World leaders have been forced to tear up the traditional economic playbook in response to the historic jolt to the global economy”.

In the United States, the heart of free market capitalism, capitalists and politicians alike are demanding huge government handouts. As the New York Times explained on 17 March: “Business groups, local and state leaders and a growing chorus of lawmakers and economists begged the federal government to spend trillions of dollars to pay workers to stay home and funnel money to companies struggling with an abrupt end to consumer activity”.

Politicians and their advisers who just a week ago were scorning the idea of “helicopter money”, government payments to businesses and consumers to stimulate the economy, are now trying to outbid each other to push the figure up. The Trump administration, proclaiming a state of war in the fight against coronavirus and the economic crisis, will shortly launch a huge fiscal stimulus program pumping more than US$1 trillion into the economy in two stages, including potentially $1,000 handouts to spur spending. And there will be more to come.

In other times, Trump might have denounced his proposals as “socialism”. Not today. He now boasts that his new package will be “big and bold”. His chief adviser, Larry Kudlow, says that Trump has agreed to do “whatever it takes” to address the crisis. Senator John Cornyn, second highest ranking Republican in the Senate, for whom government intervention is normally anathema, explained: “Our economy, our whole economy is in jeopardy”. Some in the Democratic Party, which in recent years has become the favoured party of Wall Street, are proposing a monthly payment to every American for the duration of the crisis. Alongside this direct injection of funds into the economy, the US Federal Reserve Bank is pumping trillions of dollars into the banks.

As in the US, so too in the rest of the world. The European Commission, which has long insisted that member states keep their budget deficits to 3 percent of GDP, has lifted limits on government borrowing. In 2015, it refused to allow the Greek government to hike spending when faced with unemployment of 20 percent, but is now telling governments it’s open slather. The future of European capitalism is at stake, so nothing is off the table. The Swedish government is allowing businesses to defer tax payments for up to a year at a cost equivalent to 6 percent of GDP. Britain has unveiled a £330 billion package of emergency loan guarantees to business and £20 billion in fiscal support.

Tory chancellor (treasurer) Rishi Sunak, said: “This is not a time for ideology or orthodoxy, this is a time to be bold ... I’ll do whatever it takes”. Pedro Sanchez, Spanish prime minister, triggered what he called “the biggest mobilisation of resources in Spain’s’ democratic history”, including €100 billion in state loan guarantees. French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, who has put up €300 billion in state loans to business, told the press: “I will not hesitate [to use] all the means available to me”.

The European Central Bank, which estimates that the crisis might result in the euro area economy shrinking by more than 4 percent this year, is set to inject more than €1 trillion into the European banks in the next nine months. “Extraordinary times require extraordinary action”, says ECB president Christine Lagarde.

In Australia, the Coalition government which has made “balancing the budget” a central feature of its platform, is now spending $18 billion, three-quarters of which will go to business. It is now lining up a new wave of spending commitments for business, both of a general nature, valued at more billions, and also to specific sectors like tourism, sports, arts and entertainment and the airlines which will total more than $1 billion.

The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry is urging the federal government to provide wage subsidies to workers, equivalent in value to Newstart to all businesses experiencing a sharp downturn. It is also asking the government to provide concessional loans of up to half a million dollars, with 80 percent of the debt guaranteed by government, as well as wage subsidies to cover sick leave entitlements. Nothing but corporate welfare of a kind that they have long decried when applied to workers themselves.

In the short term, working class households will get some benefits from this cash splash. In Australia welfare beneficiaries will be getting $750 in their bank accounts. In the United States it is likely that Americans will receiving close to $1,000. But this is just short term relief to get the economy moving. The long term benefits will go to the capitalist class in the form of tax cuts and other financial concessions.

The current crisis demonstrates not only that all the ideological nonsense about the virtues of the free market is quickly thrown overboard when capitalist interests are threatened, but also that the idea that governments are essentially powerless in the face of the markets is rubbish.

Governments are not helpless victims who cannot do anything in the face of “economic reality”. In the normal course of events, when we demand things like better welfare, health care or education, governments tell us that it isn’t possible.

Workers every day face their own personal crises – lack of money to pay the rent or the possibility of defaulting on their mortgage because the boss didn’t call them in for work this week, overdue utility bills that must be paid or risk being cut off, expenses for children’s education that fall due, the fear of redundancy. These are crises that are experienced personally but are really a collective crisis of everyday life for working class people. But when we ask for governments to respond, we are told that addressing these things collectively is not possible, and that this is just the way things are.

But when the capitalist system goes into crisis, governments act promptly. It turns out that political decisions about the economy are possible and it is wholly possible for governments to tell the markets to go jump. The president of the eurozone financial ministers committee summed up the prevailing attitude today: “Rest assured that we will defend the euro with everything we have got”. European finance ministers are looking at deploying a firefighting fund set up during the last eurozone crisis, with €410 billion of capacity. In the case of Spain, the Financial Times reports that an inner circle of government has assumed “command economy powers”. The Spanish government will take responsibility for guaranteeing medical, food and energy supplies.

Most of the time we’re told that “the economy” can’t afford a decent standard of living for workers – higher minimum wages, liveable Newstart allowances, a massively expanded public housing program to get people out of the private rental market, free university education. Budgets have to balance. Businesses have to be competitive. Taxes have to be kept low.

And now, all of a sudden, we’re finding that the economy can, apparently, afford things that we have long demanded. Governments around the world are now laying out money on things that just weeks ago they would have attacked as unaffordable.

The Morrison government has been attacked even by the Business Council for not lifting the Newstart allowance. And now it’s spending $4.7 billion on a one-off $750 payment to millions on welfare. State governments too are ramping up health spending. In Western Australia, the government is freezing utility bills and public transport charges, doubling energy assistance payments and making sick and carers’ leave more available for public sector workers who either have the virus themselves or who need to care for others.

The Hong Kong government has handed out $1,000 payments to citizens. The Italian government, faced with one of the worst outbreaks of COVID-19, is suspending mortgage payments. In New Zealand, the government has raised all welfare benefits, permanently, by NZ$25 a week and doubled winter energy payments to beneficiaries and age pensioners. In France also, benefits are being hiked and made more widely available.

It’s not that governments have suddenly discovered a big pot of gold in the basement of the central banks. They say that they are taking these measures to both protect public health and to save the economy. But it’s obvious which takes priority. The new measures constitute the largest bailout bonanza in world history, carried out through state-administered transfers of public wealth and current and future debt to billionaires and big business: socialisation of losses, privatisation of profits. The outcome will be to further transfer, consolidate and concentrate wealth, just as has occurred since the GFC. While there is discussion about small handouts, nothing serious is being proposed to halt the mass layoffs now gathering steam.

In pretty much every spending package, subsidies to business, government loans and tax concessions account for two-thirds or more of the funds outlaid. Things that directly benefit workers – the big majority of the population – account for only one-third of the money. Just think of Australia: $13 billion to business, $4.7 billion to those on welfare.

When you think of the humiliating restrictions imposed on Centrelink clients, business is being showered with money with no strings attached. In Australia, the federal government is offering subsidies to bosses to keep apprentices and trainees. But all that does is encourage bosses to sack the trainee at the end of the six months and take on another one, with another government subsidy. No real jobs created, just a steady flow of money flowing into the bosses’ pockets.

But it’s not just a question of the money being disbursed. Other sacred cows are being slaughtered. The sanctity of private property, for example. The Spanish government has announced that it is requisitioning private hospitals and healthcare providers for the duration and developing plans to house and feed the homeless.

President Trump announced a series of extraordinary measures on 18 March, seizing on the powers vested in him by the Defence Production Act to steer production by private companies to overcome the shortage of masks, ventilators and other health supplies. Playing catchup on testing for COVID-19, Trump is deploying two Navy hospital ships to New York City and the West Coast. Astonishingly for the United States, whose president made his fortune in real estate, the Housing and Urban Development department will suspend foreclosures and evictions until at least the end of April. The federal government is also requiring employers to provide sick leave to workers infected with the virus. In California, the governor has announced plans to buy hotels to house some of the state’s 150,000 homeless people.

In Austria, healthcare workers with children are provided access to free childcare to allow them to continue working. In South Korea, the government is offering emergency child care to parents still at work, with class sizes limited to ten and supervised by trained teachers. In Australia, according to the Guardian, discussions are underway to underwrite home mortgages and even employment guarantees.

It turns out that these things, too, can be done.

So, in an economic emergency, few of the usual rules apply. Governments can marshal the resources and can threaten the narrow interests of private businesses. Hardcore libertarians despise these measures as rampant socialism. From their perspective, they’re right: the very existence of such programs is condemnation of the free market capitalist model that they promote. But they are best seen only as another approach to the management of the capitalist economy.

The fact that governments across the OECD are now prepared to spend trillions of dollar to save the financial system from collapse only confirms that the world economy cannot be left safely in the hands of “the market”. And, the situation clearly confirms that when the capitalist class and governments deem it necessary to save their system, lots of measures they once denounced as “unaffordable”, not permitted by the condition of “the economy”, are actually affordable and permitted. Governments can act when required. The ideological justifications of yesterday are revealed as threadbare. But nor are government interventions of this nature geared towards the interests of the working class, only the interests of the bosses.

The New White Moderate: Liberalism, Political Coercion, and the Failed Electoral Strategy

(Illustration by Nat Thomas/St. Louis Public Radio)

By Joshua Briond

There’s a Jacobin article circling around titled, “Where Do We Go After Last Night’s Defeat?”  published a day after Bernie Sanders’ defeat on March 11th, 2020. The author writes, “the bad news is that the Democratic Party isn’t going anywhere. The good news is that today’s common-sense political demands are, almost unthinkably, democratic socialist ones.” The overarching theme of the article is that the almost undefeatable nature of the Democratic Establishment, in an historical context, is not a reason to move beyond bourgeois politics, but rather justification for being reluctant to look outside of the realm of the two-party system for solutions to our current reality. According to the author, this argument is supported by the fact that the Sanders’ movement, or rather moment, has won the “battle of ideas,” as if that’s something worthy of boasting. As if winning the “battle of ideas” within this arena has ever fed an empty stomach or liberated anyone. The article displays a lack of understanding of what socialism entails, far beyond mild liberal reforms, further proving Sanders’ moment has widely led to a miseducation of socialist ideals. In the end, the author provides the perfect encapsulation of self-congratulatory American chauvinism, symbolism, and unearned arrogance, largely present on all sides of the electoral political spectrum.

To begin, the article credits what is referred to as “five years of “Sandersism” for the “genuine leap forward in politics in the United States, a leap that dwarfs the past half-century of liberal stupidity and backwardness,” unknowingly and unapologetically depicting the vast disconnect present between Sanders’ moment (electoral canvassing) and colonized people (and our organizing and movement efforts). Which precisely demonstrates why national electoral canvassing, specifically as it relates to bourgeois elections, cannot be categorized as “working-class” organizing or movements when it is systematically disconnected from, and neglects the, most marginalized among us. For example, the article takes a braggadocious tone to make a note about how “in five years, we’ve moved forward fifty,” entirely neglecting to mention how state political repression and mass media’s anti-communist smearing following Black radical movements and uprisings in the last 60 years or so affected the political psyche of millions of people. And also how movements and moments, such as Black Lives Matter, #NoDAPL, and others, took place within the last five years and were instrumental in the shift in public discourse and moving politicians, including Bernie Sanders, further left (even if only performatively), with regard to racial and economic justice and state violence. 

The article, in true social-democrat fashion, reeks of liberal idealism and exceptionalism while complacently lecturing us on how our material reality is bad, but not so bad that we can’t endure our continued social and political subjugation with patience while waiting to vote for the next seemingly progressive politician(s) during the next election cycle. There is no emphasis on the local grassroots organizing (beyond campaigning among the electorate) that is already being done by non-white people who receive little-to-no support from the white moderates masquerading as “allies” and “progressives,” who chronically neglect organizers until it’s time to convince us to vote for their preferred candidate. The author tells us we should “reject” the “fantasy that now is the time we all throw ourselves into third-party work or militant protest activity” and that “there is nowhere for us to go.” Which prompts a question: who is this “us” he speaks of? C.L.R. James once wrote, “What Negro, particularly below the Mason-Dixon line, believes that the bourgeois state is a state above all classes, serving the needs of all the people? They may not formulate their belief in Marxist terms, but their experience drives them to reject this shibboleth [principle] of bourgeois democracy.” The entire article reflects an approach that is not only a product of a widespread culture that lacks political imagination beyond liberal idealizations but has not intellectually or politically struggled with persons of the Black race before, at least not ones who are poor. The author is clearly not from the same hue as the colonized and oppressed people, in desperate material need of far more than even what his beloved Democratic Party is willing to offer, on their best day. But what’s fascinating is just how confident the author is throughout the entirety of the piece with his shit-eating and ramming the politics of electoralism down our throats. And all of this despite the disappointing losses by the most popular progressive politician in the US in back-to-back elections to morally and politically inferior candidates. I pondered on the possibility that maybe this article wasn’t written for me, or us, as in non-white people—but its “colorblind” and race-neutral approach clearly depicts otherwise. However, even the worst of what the white-American community has to offer is undeserving of such a disturbingly bleak and imperious political outlook. 

In his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes about the white moderate who will constantly say, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action" and who “paternalistically feels [he] can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a more convenient season." And I ask, how is this descriptor laid out by the late great MLK, regarding the white moderate in the 1960s, any different than the rhetoric displayed by liberal reformists masquerading as “leftists” in the article? By telling us we need to remain patient for the US political stratosphere to miraculously adopt a conscience and allow moderate and largely temporary reforms through the electoral approach and the Democratic establishment. This is telling the most oppressed people that you can paternalistically set the timetable for our liberation.

The author writes that there are 12 million members of the Democratic Party, the largest membership number of all parties in the US—as a means of emphasizing an unfounded and irrelevant point about the American people’s reliance on the party—while failing to connect the dots to the lack of alternative political options being presented for people to resort to, which leads to a coerced “support” for millions of people who consistently “vote blue.” The author deliberately fails to recognize that the US has a population of over 300 million, and it doesn’t take a mathematician to understand that there are millions upon millions of people who are not members of the establishment and/or simply do not vote—due to disenfranchisement, socio-political status, and/or strategic disinvestment. Millions of people, largely made up of the colonized and/or racialized, who are disinvested and have long rejected the two-party system and are desperately looking for an alternative to their current social, political, and economic material realities. Instead of defeatism under the guise of electoral hopefulness within the Democratic Party, we should be proving to them that socialism, beyond the electoral and welfare statist approach that Bernie offers, could serve as that alternative. 

We, in America, never truly “choose” our political representatives—the ruling class does—even with the largely performative and symbolic facade of allowing some of us to cast votes every couple of years. Sure, we’re granted the opportunity to emblematically “choose” our next plantation owner or subjector-in-chief, but only after having our beliefs filtered and heavily influenced by the stranglehold that mainstream media, or rather mass propaganda machine, has on our psyche. With that, the electoral college stands as a means of allowing ruling elites to have the last say of who they want as their figurehead of empire run by corporations—oftentimes regardless of the popular-vote results. This, along with the fact that we’re constantly forced to choose between possibly slightly improving our material reality and the continued brutalization of those in third-world and global-south countries. It’s nothing more than constant political coercion. A democracy is not just being “allowed” to “choose” your representatives but having representatives that actually politically and morally align with its peoples’ material interests, with a fighting shot to win. If we can understand this illegitimate process and American hypocrisy, as the often “transporter” of democracy, we have to understand how the game is rigged from the jump—and we end up losing every time regardless of who is occupying office, as the ones with the most power and influence are oligarchs and corporations, and their financial interests. So how can you, as a self-proclaimed leftist, progressive, or radical, advocate for the continued reliance on a system that is inherently rigged against us? 

The fact of the matter is: Bernie Sanders is losing. And unless something drastic happens in the coming weeks, he will not be the democratic nominee. The electoral strategy has proved, once again, to be largely ineffective as a legitimate threat to capitalist exploitation and imperialism. So, you would think the most obvious solution would be to align ourselves with organizers, movements, and ideologies that can bring about the radical shift that marginalized people need to survive, right? But no, the new white moderates, leeching onto a party that has proven time and time again that those of us who want something radically different than milquetoast neoliberal establishment candidates and politics, are not welcomed. And honestly, it’s about time we listen. This conception asserted by the author, that somehow “we’ll get ‘em next time,” despite not offering much of a historical context or substantial answer as to why we should be optimistic about this approach or how we could achieve such a thing, is not just politically naive but downright potentially fatal—especially as we approach pending human-induced climate doom and deteriorating material conditions. It’s leading people into a burning building indiscriminately with little care for the lives that’ll be harmed and/or lost, in the meantime. 

Bernie Sanders should be seen as the compromise candidate that he truly represents. A physical embodiment of capitalism’s last hope, the “peaceful” alternative to sustain capitalism, imperialism, and pending climate doom, beyond its life expectancy and to avoid addressing the actualities of what this country is, at its roots, for a couple years longer. Instead, it’s clear that these self-proclaimed “progressive” political figures are considered end-goal saviors to many of these white moderates who claim that the Bernie Sanders’ or Elizabeth Warren’s of the world are merely a means to an end. And, as we’ve seen time and time again, their work will be finished if and when they succeed in electing them to the most powerful office in the world. If the DNC will not accept the mild reforms that Bernie Sanders is offering then that should tell us all we need to know about the reality in which these gains will not be attained through the ballot.

The new white moderate bombards us with disingenuous questions such as, “what’s your solution then?” when they encounter those of us who do not vote, as if opting not to engage in the coercive nature of lesser evils every election cycle, or refusing to vote for and electing the next terrorist-in-chief, is somehow more morally repugnant than the contrary. As if divesting from national electoral politics and not electing imperialists who are sure to enact terror on colonized people globally isn’t a substantial alternative, in and of itself. The new white moderate is desperately clinging on to the glimmer of hope that the Democratic Party and the United States of America, in their entirety, are not beyond redemption. They constantly tell themselves this because believing in the contrary would force them to reckon with not only their sense of identity, which they’ll find is inextricable with Americanism, but also with the reality that everything they think they know about their beloved country, and all of its institutions and global affairs, is categorically false. The claims implied in the article, that the Democratic Party is just simply incompetent, are not true. But minimizing their structural issues to something like incompetence largely lets their existence as a for-profit-over-all-else political party off the hook for its crimes while implying that these issues can be fixed with a slight overhaul in leadership. Democrats heavily rely on the lesser-of-two-evils approach that we see every election cycle. It is all they know and is very much deliberate; it’s not incompetence. As the author notes, they are perfectly fine with masquerading as the “opposition” party to Republicans, even in the Donald Trump regime era—while resisting little-to-none of their fascist policies or acts—as long as it means disallowing even the most mildest of reforms that could potentially come from a Bernie Sanders presidency. 

White moderates are no longer just raging, traditional centrists intent on maintaining the capitalist, white-supremacist status quo, but instead are also self-proclaimed “progressives” and “leftists” telling colonized, racialized, and oppressed people to wait our turn to begin building something revolutionary, something bigger than us all, while they continue underperforming and flat-out losing their electoral strategies. These new white moderates, masquerading as “progressives,” “leftists,” and oftentimes even “radicals,'' are very much keen on allowing the US—with their beloved Democratic Party at the forefront—to maintain its status as the unjust global police of the world, as long as they’re reaping the benefits of such a position through minimal “domestic” progress through welfare statism. And this is why they can so easily advocate for the continued dependence on the liberal establishment. With a condescending smugness, the author writes: “And, of course, there will be some wacky proposals that promise us a shortcut to power. Sectarians will encourage everyone to funnel their rage into ill-fated third-party efforts, and some will demand an insurrection at the Democratic National Convention.” But what’s more “wacky” or “ill-fated” than proposing to reconcile oneself to age-old tactics that are bound to continue to fail—with little-to-no evidence that a different outcome is even remotely possible? What is more doomed than sitting on your hands while people continue dying, and allowing the rage derived from the disappointing defeat of the most well-known progressive politician since FDR to funnel into more electoral opportunities coming along in the future instead of taking said rage and strategically and politically putting it toward building a sustainable movement toward people power, on the ground and in the streets? This failed electoral strategy, while disguised as being optimistic and pragmatic, is nothing more than a politically-naive and deliberately-obtuse attempt at preserving the dead end that is the Democratic Party, an organization that has historically served as a hindrance to radical movements because of its subservience to capital. It justifies futility. Because god forbid we do something beyond gathering signatures, door knocking, and bar-hopping between book clubs.

On Capitalism's Co-optation of Black Liberation: An Excerpt From Jared Ball's "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power"

By Jared Ball

The following is an excerpt from Jared Ball’s upcoming book, "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power” from Palgrave Pilot/Palgrave Macmillan (May 2020), republished from the author’s personal site.

The book will be released on May 25, 2020. Pre-order it here.

The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power demonstrates:

• The claim that African America has roughly $1 trillion in “buying power” is popularly repeated mythology with no basis in sound economic logic or data. While the myth has a longer history it is today largely propelled by misreadings and poor (false) interpretations of Nielsen surveys and marketing reports produced by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the Terry College of Business housed in the Bank of America Financial Center in Athens, GA. and where, as their website explains, their bias and purpose is in their founding mission. The center was, “Created to convey economic expertise to Georgia businesses and entrepreneurs, the Simon S. Selig, Jr. Center for Economic Growth is primarily responsible for conducting research on economic, demographic, and social issues related to Georgia’s current and future growth” (emphasis added).

• “Buying Power” is a marketing phrase that refers only to the “power” of consumers to purchase what are strictly available goods and is used as a measurement for corporations to better market their products. Most of the contemporary and popular understanding of the myth of buying power is derived from, and maintained by, a commercial Black press whose own commercial interests (attracting advertising dollars from the largest White corporations) supersede any journalistic mission to properly inform. “Power” here has nothing to do with actual economic strength and there is no collective $1+ trillion that Black people have and just foolishly spend ignorantly to their economic detriment.

• The myth of “buying power” functions as propaganda working to deny the reality of structural, intentional and necessary economic inequality required to maintain society as it is, one that benefits an increasingly decreasing number of people. To do this the myth functions to falsely blame the poor for being poor. Poverty, the myth encourages, is the result of the poor having little to no “financial literacy,” or as resulting from their bad spending habits, when in reality poverty is an intended result of an economic and social system.

Anyone at all familiar with any part of the Black public sphere will have heard one form or another of the following: “If we just used our money like other communities… If we didn’t spend so much on hair, cars and weed… we could make our dollar circulate like ‘they’ do and be far better off!” More specifically, those familiar with like-spaces would have heard reference to “the numbers,” that “Black America’s economy makes it among the most powerful national economies in the world…” and that “… we have a $1+ trillion that we just misuse…” From the most isolated and forcibly marginalized radical activist spaces to the most commonly populated spheres of Black public discourse the refrain is consistent and always suggests the same; that at least a solid portion of the Black oppressive political pie is comprised of a financially illiterate backwards mass incapable of correcting itself to take proper advantage of a freedom which waits just slightly beyond their feeble grasp. The suggestion that Black people lack “financial literacy” and, therefore, ignorantly refuse existing opportunities to advance economically obliterates the realities of capitalism as an economic and social system or conditions that system creates.

The idea is as simple as it is wrong but is masked by a surrounding powerful and heavily propagated mythology. The “buying power” of Black America, it is often repeated, now said to have crossed $1 trillion annually, is foolishly squandered but with some unity could be harnessed to overturn the centuries-old and eerily consistent economic deprivations suffered still. However, “buying power,” as a concept popularly held, is entirely misunderstood and has been by so many for so long that it continues to confound and inhibit conversations about economics in general, the specifics of the Black economic condition, and what might be done about it. And while all communities, all segments of all communities, businesses, municipalities, etc. have their “buying power” assessed it is only in relation to Black America that the concept becomes truly mythologized. Beyond that, the myth is politically weaponized with a very particular perniciousness and pervasiveness metastasized to the “conceptual original sin” of American racism (Downing and Husband 2005). The misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of buying power, by those both friendly and hostile to the Black community, is unparalleled anywhere in political, economic, or media analyses.

Black America does not have an annual $1+ trillion that is collectively, by some choice, spent frivolously rather than harnessed to the betterment of the collective. Here we must develop upon the difference between power as economic strength as is conventionally understood and buying power, a concept developed by business, advertising, marketing, and government interests and where power is defined only as a group’s ability to enrich those interests. Genuine economic strength is measured in wealth, assets, land, stock, etc. and with a clarity in the differences between wealth and income, the latter being what one earns in exchange for labor, the former being income earned from the labor of others.

“Power” in the phrase “buying power” does not mean what many assume is a kind of genuine wealth, sovereignty, or autonomy. Once consigned to the phrase “buying power” that latter term loses all popularly (rightly)-held assumptions of its meaning and becomes something very different, almost dangerously different in terms of how that difference is carried to, and with what impact it has on, various audiences, and Black America specifically. In the form of its association with the word “buying” power means only the ability to spend what available money (or credit) is available on only the specific goods similarly made available for purchase. Having access to rims, fronts, hair or weed is one thing, while access to capital, stock, land, expanding business, etc. is quite another. Black people can buy marijuana just not the increasingly legal dispensaries emerging into a multi-billion dollar almost exclusively White industry (Ross 2018).

Buying power, spending power, or purchasing power are all interchangeable and applied to nearly every possibly grouped segment of society and are also applied to corporations and local, state and even national governments. But the concept, or more appropriately said, the marketing formula, is used with a particular pernicious effect, when it comes to Black America and, as such, deserves this special focus and attempt at dispelling. Nowhere else, for no one else, is buying power used as a bludgeon with such regularity and persistence within communities, both in terms of media attention and as a method of “political organization,” as is the case with Black America. For solutions to come it is true that those spaces where Black politics are most often discussed and where the futures of Black people are most seriously considered must rid themselves of this and other mythologies related to the economy of the United States and the role Black people play within. This would include challenging the prevailing wisdom, as it applies to this subject only, of past and present luminaries.

Bernie Sanders and "Playing the Game" of Bourgeois Politics

Bernie's raw assessment of the US in 1978 was right on. Bourgeois politics are a funny thing. As someone who has become a career senator of this very state of "poverty, wage slavery, and mind-destroying media and schools," you have to wonder how much he has either (1) compromised his principles, or (2) changed his views to maintain this career. 

Is he the best of the rotten bunch? Clearly. Does he still seek some justice for the US working class? Of course. Does he hammer away at corporate corruption and excess? Absolutely. But what price has he paid and continues to pay along the way? Enabling and supporting imperialism, endorsing a power-hungry crook like Hillary Clinton, inevitably endorsing a belligerent Joe Biden, backing the racist & classist Democratic Party, calling Hugo Chavez a dictator, belittling Cuba as an evil dictatorship, playing into the Russiagate nonsense, etc.

Is he playing the power game? Perhaps. Are these "necessary evils" the price of admission? Probably. But at what point does playing this game start to mock the importance of principle and integrity? What does it say about someone who is able and willing to play this game? And what effect does this spectacle have on the much-needed formation of a class-conscious proletariat?

Bernie and Bloomberg Lost the Same Way

By J.E. Karla

It is ironic that both Michael Bloomberg and the “democratic socialists” pushing for Bernie Sanders made the same basic mistake in their failed presidential campaigns. In both cases they made the error of believing that subjective forces were the primary factor in political change -- a voluntarist neglect of objective conditions which they could never overcome. This is a consequence of their shared idealism, the philosophical foundation of all petit-bourgeois politics.

For the Sanders socialists, led by activists in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), their assumption was that grassroots mobilization tactics -- notably door-to-door canvassing -- would activate enough poor people, young people, and leftists to overwhelm the Democratic Party. They argued that a set of tactics expertly deployed would be enough to awaken a dormant objective force that could upend US politics.

They have instead falsified their own hypothesis, demonstrating that either no such force exists in the United States, or that it is not available to these political aims. Had they not blown off their own theoretical development they might have maintained a materialist analysis which would have kept them from wasting millions of dollars in donations and labor time in such a fruitless pursuit. 

They would have started with the premise that the primary objective factor in all historical change is the class struggle. From there they would have investigated the class character of the United States -- an imperialist settler state, the hegemonic power of global capitalism -- and recognized that the primary purpose of its political system is the continued suppression of colonized people inside and outside its borders. They could then have seen that there is not a single aspect of the elected machinery of the US state that is governed by simple majority rule -- that from the Iowa Caucuses to the Democratic National Convention to the Electoral College to the US Senate and gerrymandered House of Representatives, to unelected and lifetime-appointed judges, conservative minorities have the structural advantage over more progressive majorities. 

They would know that internal colonies within the US are the only domestic forces with an interest in fighting the system of value extraction that underwrites the ruling class, the middle class, and the labor aristocratic “working class.” They could then empirically verify that not only do large majorities of these colonized communities refuse to participate in the electoral system obviously rigged against them, but that there are centuries of well-established efforts to exclude them from the system -- mass incarceration, reduced polling places, privately-funded political campaigns which exclude candidates drawn from these communities, even “common sense” obstacles such as voter registration, exclusion of immigrants and youth from the electorate, and artificially-limited voting locations and periods. 

These communities also know that every time they do start to gather momentum towards mass enfranchisement their leaders are harrassed, intimidated, and killed by the very FBI liberals have learned to love in the era of Trump. Knocking on their doors and politely asking them to ignore all of this is actually insulting, exposing a glaring blind spot in the Sanders movement. 

It is true that objective historical forces created problems for the status quo, too. The dismantling of liberalism after the last crisis has left young people, in particular, declassed and open to social democracy. It promises to restore their former imperialist subsidy now being hoarded by the bourgeois elite. But that elite has a class fraction within it dedicated to cultural production, and this cultural production fraction has an allied element of the petit bourgeoisie -- the liberal political class, with the press at their vanguard. They objectively control the Democratic Party, and had Bernie kept winning, had moderate candidates kept splitting the vote, etc. some other tack would have been taken to deny Bernie the nomination -- they openly discussed many of them on cable news and on Op-Ed pages. 

There was never any chance that Bernie could win, and there isn’t any now. 

The silver lining comes from Bloomberg’s version of this error. Not only did Mike Bloomberg lose, which is wonderful in its own right, but his error stems from a failure to appreciate the bottom-line objective factor in politics: the masses make history. He believed that they were instead a passive substance that he could shape to his own ends with the application of money and professional political communications. But even in their inchoate condition, even with the distortions laid upon their subjective capacities through generations of bourgeois political violence, those hundreds of millions of expertly placed dollars could not budge them whatsoever in the direction of such an obvious fiend. 

Bloomberg’s voluntarism reflected his class position, just as DSA’s did theirs -- the bourgeois billions versus the petit bourgeois begging. The way forward out of this mess is a refusal to play objectively rigged games and to build institutions of mass political power that fundamentally reject ruling-class systems, elections, NGOs, and thus social democracy. Those are the subjective forces that have the potential to seize upon the objective advances of the class struggle and guaranteed crises of capitalist contradiction to come, especially if they are built to fight the attacks that will come early in their development. 

It remains to be seen how many of Bernie’s true believers are actually committed to revolution, and how many just wanted a few new benefits extracted from the very masses they tried -- and failed -- to speak for.  

Ruling-Class Fears of an Inevitable Communist Resurgence in the U.S.

By Rainer Shea

Republished from Rainer’s blog.

The more the popular backlash against neoliberalism develops, the more apparent it becomes that American society is heading towards a resurgence in pro-communist sentiments and organizing. The current presence of this Red revival is hard to see on the surface, since Bernie Sanders’ FDR liberalism is still the main American political faction that’s associated with the term “socialism.” But as the class struggle continues, an actual manifestation of socialism and communism will begin to enter the mainstream.

The rise of communism in a highly unequal, post-recession American economy will be inevitable because whenever discontent grows around the miseries of capitalism, communism enters the conversation to some degree. There’s a lasting power to an idea that’s based in an irrefutable analysis of how capitalism perpetuates oppression and inequity, and that presents a tried and proven solution to capitalism.

From my perspective as a fairly well learned Marxist-Leninist, the only reason why not all poor and working class people embrace this idea is because of how good capitalism is at marketing “solutions” which reinforce the current system. Over 40% of Americans now favor socialism over capitalism, but the first political strain they encounter that associates itself with the word “socialist” isn’t Leninism, Juche, or Maoism. It’s Bernie Sanders’ vision for a capitalist welfare state that continues the American imperialist project under a vaguely “socialist” banner. One doesn’t encounter actual socialism until they enter the somewhat fringe realm of anti-capitalist organizing, and they aren’t willing to embrace factions like Marxism-Leninism until they’ve unlearned the propaganda about the existing socialist states.

Yet the more these disaffected people grope for answers to our capitalist crisis, the more accessible communism becomes. “People are willing to listen and they ask what socialism is,” the American Marxist leader Gloria La Riva said in 2016. “This year we have seen the fog of anti-communism being lifted from the minds of many, after more than 70 years of exclusion.” The factor behind this cultural shift in communism’s favor wasn’t so much that Sanders had brought socialist terminology into the mainstream, but that widespread angst over inequality had led many people to question old narratives.

Again, it was inevitable that this opening for communism would appear in the 21st century, because our neoliberal order was designed from the start to create major contradictions within capitalism. The last half-century’s paradigm of privatization, austerity, deregulation, and regressive taxation has been possible only through thoroughly dismantling the centers of social cohesion and pro-labor organizing. The crushing of unions throughout this time, precipitated by the decades-long American campaign to suppress and malign communists, pushed the left to the margins during the 1980s and onward. In the 90s, the Democratic Party was turned solidly towards a corporatist agenda, correlating with the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent weakening of the global socialist movement.

It was because Western society had committed itself to growing highly unequal that this post-Cold War capitalist triumph would soon be undone. The income gap in America has since risen to its highest level ever recorded, and the eight richest people now own as much wealth as the bottom half of the global population.

The latter statistic relates to the development of neoliberalism in the other core imperialist countries, and in the Third World countries where the U.S./NATO empire has carried out neo-colonialism. This extreme global inequality is why poor and working class people in Haiti, Honduras, Iraq, Lebanon, Chile, Ecuador, and Argentina have been protesting against neoliberalism during the last year. It’s why anti-austerity protesters in France have been sustaining civil disobedience efforts since October of 2018. Despite the relative apathy of Americans so far, there’s also been a vast uptick in American strikes during the last two years. After decades of declining living standards, the backlash from the masses is growing.

In America and abroad, the capitalist power establishment is responding to this social discontent by trying to divert its energy away from class struggle. The efforts from Washington to turn the Lebanon protests into an anti-Hezbollah campaign are an example of how bourgeois propaganda is seeking to distract people from actually moving towards revolution. Something similar has happened in Hong Kong, where the recent protests that have gained traction because of economic discontent have been turned into violent anti-communist demonstrations by relentless U.S. propaganda and organizational manipulation.

This is how the capitalist state has long strangled the emergence of an effective class revolt: co-optation, infiltration of movement leadership, and narrative management. During the era of the Black Panthers, which is arguably the last time communism entered the American mainstream, the government went so far as to assassinate the Black Panther Party’s leaders. The capitalists will do anything necessary to safeguard against a revolution, including mass executions of communists like the ones that took place under Pinochet.

In recent years, the ruling class has been waging a war on dissent in response to the last decade’s rise of class consciousness and online alternative media platforms. There have been unprecedented censorship measures from tech companies, the U.S. government has been forcing outlets like RT to register as foreign agencies, and an atmosphere of McCarthyism has re-emerged amid paranoia about foreign agents and “Russian propaganda.” In the last year, the president of Veterans for Peace has been violently arrested for aiding anti-imperialist protesters at the Venezuelan embassy, and the anti-imperialist journalist Max Blumenthal has been detained on false charges. These attacks on dissent, as well as the anti-BDS laws and the campaign to prosecute Julian Assange for exposing government crimes, show how the system will respond when communism gains further prominence.

BDS, the journalism of WikiLeaks, the efforts of anti-war activists, and the other recent sources of opposition to global capitalism and imperialism represent seeds for the coming Red surge. While communism and its staunch anti-imperialist principles aren’t supported by everyone involved with these anti-establishment strains, there’s a potential for a lot more people to join the efforts of the most committed class insurrectionists. This is why the political and media class recently made a hysterical effort to vilify Cuba, and why Trump vowed in his second state of the union address to defeat socialism in Venezuela and elsewhere. There’s more cause for ruling class alarm the more that class consciousness advances around the globe.

At least among the liberal capitalists, there’s a desire to return society to its post-Cold War state so that the neoliberal order will become stabilized again; this is what the Bloomberg/Biden faction of the Democratic Party is frantically trying to accomplish by beating back at the populist Sanders faction. But the center was never meant to hold, because neoliberalism is designed to perpetuate a cycle of increasing inequality and inequality leads to instability. Some individual capitalists seek to reverse this process of inequality by adopting Sanders’ vision for a welfare state, but the capitalist class is overall determined to preserve the neoliberal order.

They’re determined to preserve neoliberalism because it’s the system that’s for so long allowed the corporatocracy to produce meaningful profits. Neoliberalism was adopted because capitalism was experiencing a recession during the 1970s, when the welfare state was last in a dominant form. Since then, neoliberalism has bought the capitalist class four decades of stability.

Yet in accordance with Marx’ prediction about capitalism being destined to consume itself, that orderly period is now on the verge of ending. The looming economic crash could be the catalyst that makes anti-capitalist civil unrest break out not just in France and much of the Third World, but throughout the rest of the imperial core. Welfare statists like Sanders won’t be able to turn this collapse around; the political future of the capitalist world is fascism, where the state cracks down in a desperate attempt to prevent revolution.

The more traction that communism gains, the more the capitalist class will resemble Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist Brazilian president whose state of mind Eric Nepomuceno recently described as follows: “The basic mission of the Brazilian right-wing extremist [Bolsonaro] is to give final combat to a communism that he detects, hiding everywhere even in his fridge every time he looks for cold water, and that makes him sleep very few hours every night, and always with a gun on his bedside table.”

Revolutionary Struggle With the New Afrikan Black Panther Party: An Interview with Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is Minister of Defense for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. He carries out his duties while imprisoned in the US. This interview originally appeared on his website.

What can we learn from the history of revolutionary struggles about the transition from bourgeois forms of security and policing to proletarian forms of state security

As a class question, we must of course begin with distinguishing between bourgeois and proletarian forms of state power. The state is nothing but the organization of the armed force of one class over its rival class(es). The bourgeoisie, as a tiny oppressor class that exploits or marginalizes all other classes to its own benefit, organizes its institutions of state power (military, police, prisons), that exist outside and above all other classes, to enforce and preserve its dominance and rule over everyone else.

To seize and exercise state power the proletariat, as the social majority, must in turn arm itself and its class allies to enforce its own power over the bourgeoisie.

Which brings us to the substance of your question concerning what lessons we’ve learned about transitioning from bourgeois state power (the capitalist state) to proletarian state power (the socialist state). In any event it won’t be and has never been a ‘peaceful’ process, simply because the bourgeoisie will never relinquish its power without the most violent resistance; which is the very reason it maintains its armed forces.

Well, we’ve had both urban and rural models of such transition. Russia was the first urban model (although subsumed in a rural society), China was the first successful rural one. There were many other attempts, but few succeeded however.

What proved necessary in the successful cases is foremost there must be a vanguard party organized under the ideological and political line of the revolutionary proletariat. This party must work to educate and organize the masses to recognize the need, and actively take up the struggle, to seize power from the bourgeoisie.

In the urban context, (especially in the advanced capitalist countries), where the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are entrenched, this requires a protracted political approach focused on educating and organizing the masses and creating institutions of dual and alternative collective political and economic power, with armed struggle prepared for but projected into the distant future (likely as civil war).

But in the rural context, where revolutionary forces have room to maneuver because the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are much less concentrated, the masses may resort to relatively immediate armed struggle, with political work operating to keep the masses and the armed forces educated and organized, and revolutionary politics in command of the armed struggle. This was Mao Tse-tung’s contribution to revolutionary armed struggle called Peoples War, and with its mobile armed mass base areas these forces operated like a state on wheels.

But the advances of technology since the 1970s, have seen conditions change that require a reassessing of the earlier methods of revolutionary struggle and transition of state power.

The rural populations (peasantry) of the underdeveloped world who are best suited to Mao’s PW model have been shrinking, as agrobusiness has been steadily pushing them off the land and into urban areas as permanent unemployables and lumpen proletarians, where they must survive by any means possible. Then too, with their traditional role as manual laborers being increasingly replaced by machines, the proletariat in the capitalist countries in also shrinking, and they too are pushed into a mass of permanent unemployables and lumpen.

So the only class, or sub-class, whose numbers are on the rise today are this bulk of marginalized largely urban people who don’t factor into the traditional roles of past struggles, with one exception. That being the struggle waged here in US the urban centers under the leadership of the original BPP, which designated itself a lumpen vanguard party. As such the BPP brought something entirely new and decisive to the table.

As the BPP’s theoretical leader, Huey P. Newton explained this changing social economic reality and accurately predicted their present development in his 1970 theory of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” and met the challenge of creating the type of party formation suited to meeting the new challenges of educating and organizing this growing social force for revolutionary struggle.

The BPP was able to create a model for developing institutions of dual and alternative political and economic power through its Serve the People programs creating the basis for transition of power to the marginalized under a revolutionary intercommunalist model instead of the traditional national socialist model.

The challenge in this situation where such work has been met with the most violent repression by bourgeois state forces is developing effective security forces right under their noses to protect the masses and their programs.

This is the work we in the NABPP are building on and seek to advance.

What has your experience of being a hyper-surveilled, incarcerated revolutionary taught you that is broadly applicable to the secure practice of revolutionaries in general

For one, the masses are our best and only real protection against repression. So in all the work we do, we must rely on and actively seek and win the support of the people, which is the basic Maoist method of doing political work and is what the imperialists themselves admit makes it the most effective and feared model of revolutionary struggle.

I’ve also learned that a lot of very important work fails because many people just don’t attempt it, due to policing themselves. Many fear pig repression and think any work that is effective must necessarily be done hidden out of sight, fearing as they do being seen by the state.

Essentially, they don’t know how to do aboveground work, and don’t recognize the importance of it, especially in these advanced countries. They think for work to be ‘revolutionary’ it must be underground and focused on armed struggle. And even those who do political work they stifle it by using an underground style which largely isolates them from the masses.

I think Huey P. Newton summed it up aptly when he stated,

“Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious notion that the vanguard party should be a secret organization which the power structure knows nothing about, and that the masses know nothing about except for occasional letters that come their homes in the night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. Such contradictions and inconsistencies are not recognized by these so-called revolutionaries. They are, in fact, afraid of the very danger they are asking the people to confront. These so-called revolutionaries want the people to say what they themselves are afraid to say, to do what they themselves are afraid to do. That kind of revolutionary is a coward and a hypocrite. A true revolutionary realizes if he is sincere, death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this … realization, it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary.

“If these impostors would investigate the history of revolution they would see that the vanguard group always starts out aboveground and is driven underground by the oppressor.”

Do you see it as a vulnerability to have our leaders organizing from prison? Some comrades refuse to engage in party/mass organizational work if it is conducted from prison. Don’t we sacrifice our best leadership if we don’t work directly/organizationally with our incarcerated leaders?

It can be a disadvantage, because it slows down development. But it is also an advantage, and our party is an example of this.

Historically, most revolutionary parties began on the outside and ended up targeted with repression, which included imprisonment of its cadre and supporters — fear of repression served as a deterrent for many would be revolutionaries as it was intended to do. For the NABPP, we developed in exactly the opposite direction. We began inside the prisons and are now transitioning to the outside.

Our cadre are getting out and hitting the ground going directly to work for the people. Look at our HQ in Newark, NJ where our chairman got out and has in less than a year led in developing a number of community STP programs, organizing mass protests that have shut down a prison construction project, given publicity and support to the people facing a crisis with lead in the water systems, etc.

So unlike the hothouse flower we’re already used to and steeled against state repression. The threat of prison doesn’t shake us — we’ve been there and done that. Like Huey asked, “Prison Where is Thy Victory?,” and John Sinclair of the original White Panther Party said, “prison ain’t shit to be afraid of.” And it was Malcolm X who was himself transformed into the great leader that he was inside prison who called prisons, “universities of the oppressed.”

All of my own work has been done from behind prison walls, and I have the state’s own reports and reactions of kicking me out of multiple state prison systems to attest to the value of what I’ve been able to contribute.

So, I think that, yes, some of our best leadership is definitely behind these walls.

Consider too that some of our best leaders developed inside prison: Malcolm X, George Jackson and Atiba Shanna aka James Yaki Sayles, for example. Which is something our party has factored into its strategy from day one. We’ve recognized the prisons to be potential revolutionary universities. Since our founding the NABPP has actively advanced the strategy of “transforming the prisons into schools of liberation,” of converting the lumpen (criminal) mentality into a revolutionary mentality.

In fact we can’t overlook remolding prisoners, because if we don’t, the enemy will appeal to and use them as forces of reaction against the revolutionary forces. Lenin, Mao and especially Frantz Fanon and the original BPP recognized this. What’s more, with the opposition’s ongoing strategy of mass imprisonment, massive numbers of our people have been swept up in these modern concentration camps. We must reach them with the politics of liberation. They are in fact a large part of our Party’s mass base.

How do you vet leadership and cadre? On what criteria to you make your judgement? Organizationally and personally.

Ideally this is determined by their ideological and political development and practice. But we expect and give space for people to make mistakes, although we also expect them to improve as they go. So we must be patient but also observe closely the correlation between their stated principles and their practice.

How should underground work relate to aboveground? How can the masses identify with the work of underground revolutionaries without compromising the security of the clandestine network?

Underground work serves different purposes and needs. One of which being to protect political cadre and train cadre to replace the fallen. Also to create a protective network and infrastructure for political workers forced to go to ground in the face of violent repression.

In whatever case the aboveground forces should actively educate the masses on the role, function and purpose of underground actions while ensuring that the clandestine forces consist of the most disciplined and politically grounded people. It must also be understood that these elements do not replace the masses in their role as the forces that must seize power.

In your assessment, has the balance of forces between the police and the potential of revolutionary mass action fundamentally shifted over the past 5 decades? How does this affect our ability to form organs of political power among the masses?

What shifted, but I don’t think is generally recognized by many, is the PW theory is today too simplistic. Today we must organize and create base areas under the nose of the bourgeoisie with the growing concentration of marginalized people in impoverished urban settings. As I noted earlier the traditional mass base of rural peasants who feature in the PW strategy is shrinking. And Maoist forces in rural areas have been pushed to the furthest margins of those areas unable to expand.

There is little opportunity for New Democratic revolution in these countries, which calls for alliances with the native national bourgeoisie who are now being rendered obsolete by the rise and normalization of neocolonialism and virtual elimination of nation states.

***

BOOKS BY KEVIN “RASHID” JOHNSON:

PANTHER VISION

Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense New Afrikan Black Panther Party

"The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense challenged the prevailing socio-political and economic relationship between the government and Black people. The New Afrikan Black Panther Party is building on that foundation, and Rashid’s writings embrace the need for a national organization in place of that which had been destroyed by COINTELPRO and racist repression. We can only hope this book reaches many, and serves to herald and light a means for the next generation of revolutionaries to succeed in building a mass and popular movement.” --Jalil Muntaqim, Prisoner of War

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

DEFYING THE TOMB

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson
With Russell 'Maroon' Shoats, Tom Big Warrior & Sundiata Acoli

PLEASE NOTE THAT DEFYING THE TOMB IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON AS AN EBOOK

"Your mission (should you decide to accept it) is to buy multiple copies of this book, read it carefully, and then get it into the hands of as many prisoners as possible. I am aware of no prisoner-written book more important than this one, at least not since George Jackson s Blood In My Eye. Revolutionaries and those considering the path of progress will find Kevin Rashid Johnson s Defying The Tomb an important contribution to their political development." --Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

WRITE RASHID

Rashid has been transferred out of state yet again, this time to Indiana. He is currently being held at:

Kevin Johnson
D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C
Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Road
Pendleton, IN 46064

Bernie Sanders Should Run Solo if Democrats Dirty-Break the Democratic Process

By David Goodner

Two nights ago in Tacoma, during a rally for Sen. Bernie Sanders attended by thousands, Seattle City Councilor and Socialist Alternative leader Kshama Sawant called for an independent Third Party for the working class. 

Last night on the debate stage in Nevada, every Democratic presidential candidate except Sanders refused to commit support for a plurality primary winner, escalating the possibility of a screwjob during a potentially brokered convention in Milwaukee this summer.

Bernie Sanders is likely to continue to rise in popular support and cleanly win the Democratic party nomination and then the White House in November – making this a moot point. At this time, mass popular social movements should take advantage of the momentum and continue to work with or alongside the Sanders campaign to challenge the party from the inside, exposing the sharp contradictions that come with fighting for social justice in a system that is designed to cater to capital.

However, Sawant's call for a third party this year absolutely makes sense if billionaire Michael Bloomberg buys the nomination outright or there is convention fuckery in Milwaukee that robs Sanders of the nomination. 

If either of these happen, it is imperative that the movement respond in kind by winning a Sanders presidency on a third-party ballot. There is no time to wait. An independent Sanders run against two bipartisan billionaires could realistically win a plurality of the general election vote, but we don't just want an independent sitting-in as president, we also need a new party structure that grows and lives on beyond Bernie.

Independent candidates can gain ballot access in most states by submitting the required number of petition signatures by August or September. These numbers can range anywhere between a few hundred and twenty thousand, but all are doable for a movement that has already shown impressive turnouts on the ground.

Small groups need to quietly begin working in the few states with earlier ballot access requirements. This doesn't have to be widely advertised or become a distraction from our main work right now, but it must become a priority if and when the Democratic party sabotages the movement by obstructing Sanders’ ascendancy.

We also need to ramp up movement organizing around the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee. If Sanders is going to win the nomination cleanly, he'll need backup inside and outside the convention hall. And if he loses, there must be a powerful and immediate response on the ground. The city itself will be militarized with riot police. We will need 50,000 or more people ready to contest for space in the streets in addition to all of our delegates and observers inside. 

If Bernie Sanders is not the nominee this year, the core of an independent workers (third) party must be formed from: 

1. Bernie Sanders and the Sanders campaign, including Squad surrogates AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Andrew Yang, and all of their followers; 

2. The Democratic Socialists of America;

3. The umbrella network of community organizations dedicated to electoral power independent of the Democratic Party, such as National Nurses United, People's Action, and their allies; 

4. the groundswell of Black, Arab, Muslim, Hispanic, and Latino organizations already backing Bernie this year;

5. The remnants of the Green Party and Libertarian parties.

The current momentum that has been generated by the Sanders campaign is impossible to ignore. More importantly, the corollary movement that is building alongside this momentum, which has radical characteristics that appear to be carrying folks beyond the limitations of not only the capitalist political arena and the Democratic party, but also beyond Sanders himself (a good thing), is setting a foundation that can successfully uproot capital’s grip on the public agenda.

The presidency of the United States has always served as the CEO of global capital and imperialism. Ignoring its occupant will inevitably bring us closer to a fascistic reality, something we are witnessing in real time. Getting Sanders in this office, while representing a small step in the right direction, can slow this tide. Therefore, it behooves us to keep our eyes on the prize and push to elect him state-by-state on the Democratic Party ballot - by doing electoral politics better and cleaner than everybody else. 

But we have to keep our eyes open, too. We need to start anticipating the rearguard and flank attacks inevitably coming our way, instead of always reacting to them after the fact like we have been doing. If Billionaire Bloomberg wins the Democratic party nomination, or a brokered DNC convention robs Sanders of the same, we have to respond in kind. The rhetorical and practical groundwork for a third party run needs to be laid now.