Bernie Sanders ended his second presidential bid in April—endorsing Joe Biden and urging his supporters to vote for him. Since then, the political climate in the U.S. has been transformed. The Covid-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic crisis and large scale unemployment, followed suddenly by the mass uprisings triggered by the murder of George Floyd, have thrown the presidential election that had been the focus of many on the left into the shade.
Elections can be a useful, if imperfect barometer of mass sentiment—but they are not the arena in which the mass of disenfranchised people assert their power. The nationwide eruption of Black Lives Matter protests in particular has reconfirmed Howard Zinn’s well-known statement that “the really critical thing isn’t who is sitting in the White House, but who is sitting in—in the streets, in the cafeterias, in the halls of government, in the factories. Who is protesting, who is occupying offices and demonstrating—those are the things that determine what happens.”
The mass protests rapidly and dramatically altered the national conversation about the system of racist policing and the right to fight back against it. The demand to “defund the police” has left local officials scrambling to embrace various police “reforms”—in an effort to stave off anything more substantial. Who could have predicted just weeks earlier that the tepid New York Times would run an op-ed piece by Black activist Mariame Kaba on June 12th entitled “Yes, we mean literally abolish the police—because reform won’t happen.”Kaba argued, “We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.” [Just nine days earlier, in contrast, the Times had run a piece called “Send in the Troops” by Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, proposing the use of federal troops to crush the protests.]
Not surprisingly, Joe Biden’s response to defunding the police has been sorely lacking, demonstrating how the uprisings have propelled mass consciousness far leftward, leaving Democrats in the dust. Biden is categorically opposed to defunding the police; on the contrary, he has proposed adding $300 million to police department funding across the country. Bernie Sanders’ response has not been all that different from Biden’s. Sanders called for higher wages for police in a letter to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. He later explained his position to The New Yorker, “I think we want to redefine what police departments do, give them the support they need to make their jobs better defined. So I do believe that we need well-trained, well-educated, and well-paid professionals in police departments. Anyone who thinks that we should abolish all police departments in America, I don’t agree.”
Whither the Left?
The emergence of such a powerful, radicalizing movement—one that seems to have great staying power and which promises to spill over into other arenas and to embrace multiple demands—places great responsibility on those who are attempting to build a revolutionary movement that can take on the capitalist system as a whole. Unfortunately, the revolutionary left has been in crisis in the United States. To cite one example; the largest revolutionary group, the International Socialist Organization, dissolved itself in the spring of 2019.
The one success story has been the growth of the more heterogeneous and politically moderate socialist organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Sanders’ two presidential runs were largely responsible for the DSA’s seemingly unstoppable rise to become the largest socialist organization in the U.S. left in the space of a few years. Many who had formerly committed to building a revolutionary organization abandoned that project over the last several years joining DSA and embracing Sanders. Sanders’ exit from the race has posed the issue of what should come next for the DSA—and more broadly, the left as a whole.
Before this current wave of struggle, the question loomed whether the DSA could maintain a firewall between backing the progressive Sanders and the neoliberal Biden. While there was some talk of going “Beyond Bernie,” in actual practice the bulk of DSA’s efforts were geared toward the Sanders campaign. DSA’s National Political Committee issued a statement that the DSA “will not be endorsing Biden,” but this formal position obscures as much as it reveals. According to a report by Andrew Sernatinger, 4 of the 13 members of the National Political Committee (NPC) of the DSA voted in favor of voting for Biden in swing states.
Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara seems to agree with the minority on the NPC. He wrote, for example, a May 28th article in the New York Times titled rather unsubtly: “You’ve Probably Heard Socialists Won’t Vote for Biden. Don’t listen to that. We may not like him, but we don’t want him to lose.”
Sunkara makes a classic lesser-evil case in the article:
I share the belief that having Joe Biden in the White House would be far less damaging to most workers than another four years of Donald Trump. Mr. Biden is at odds with the progressive, labor-oriented wing of his party, but every poor and working person in America, along with every socialist, would be better off butting heads with a White House filled with centrist Democrats than one filled with Trump appointees.
Likewise, the liberal Nation published an open letter on April 16 signed by a long list of “former leaders” of the 1960’s era Students for a Democratic Society, arguing that “work[ing] hard to elect” Biden” is the left’s “moral and political responsibility.” They added, “we are gravely concerned that some of [Sanders’] supporters, including the leadership of Democratic Socialists of America, refuse to support Biden, whom they see as a representative of Wall Street capital.”
Left wing intellectual and author Mitchell Abidor voiced support for the former SDS leaders’ open letter in a New York Times opinion piece baiting those who voice principled opposition to supporting Democrats: “Jacobin and its readers and members of the Democratic Socialists of America are largely white, largely college educated, largely American citizens. If Mr. Trump is re-elected, they could spend the next four years suffering little more than the pangs of political outrage. But millions of less fortunate people would suffer real consequences.”
Paul Heideman, writing at Jacobin, “defended” the DSA against Abidor’s attack—not by further articulating the reasons for the NPC’s refusal to support the neoliberal Biden but by giving credence to Abidor’s argument. He wrote, “The great irony of this is that many, many DSA members embrace a position that is not far distant from Abidor’s.” Heideman cited an article by New Jersey DSA members advocating a vote for Biden in “swing states.” As an aside Heideman added that he, too, is “sympathetic to arguments for swing-state voting” for Biden.
Both Heideman and Sunkara’s pieces assure Democratic Party liberals that the DSA won’t get in the way of a Biden victory in November. Sunkara explains that “88 percent” of Sanders supporters voted for Hillary Clinton, and that he expects the same thing to happen in the fall. What this shows is that there isn’t an effective barrier between supporting Sanders and supporting Biden. Sunkara then explains how he thinks DSA fits into the picture:
The small but resurgent socialist movement in this country is developing a political approach that can speak to millions of alienated Americans. Like center-left liberals and progressives, during the coming presidential election and beyond we aim to defeat right-wing populism. The difference is that we refuse to do so on the centrist terms that we believe helped create it in the first place.
How else to interpret this except as a reassurance that DSA is better positioned than center-left liberals and progressives to convince people on the left who are fed up with the Democrats to support Biden.
Sunkara claims to want to “defeat right-wing populism” but not on “centrist terms.” But how is supporting Biden (if he wins the election) not defeating Trump on “centrist [or center-right] terms”–since Biden himself is center-right?
Biden represents the racist, neoliberal status-quo
This is precisely the problem with lesser-evil voting for the left. Millions are dissatisfied with the racist, neoliberal, capitalist status-quo. Many of them have taken to the streets against a system (under both parties) that has militarized the police, created a system of racist mass incarceration, and has bailed out Wall Streets while “defunding” desperately needed social services. A vote for Biden is a vote for a return to the pre-Trump racist, neoliberal Democratic Party status quo. Some look at Trump and express a whimsical desire for the return of Barack Obama, forgetting that Obama deported more than three million immigrants; bailed out Wall Street but not Main Street; and sanctioned increasingly militarized police forces to attack the Occupy movement, the Standing Rock protests, and Black Lives Matter protests in places like Ferguson and Baltimore. In 2015, he unapologetically called activists protesting the murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore “criminals and thugs.”
You cannot defeat the danger of the right by supporting the status quo, because it was disillusion with that status quo that brought us the likes of Trump. In the words of Marxist Hal Draper, “you can’t fight the victory of the rightmost forces by sacrificing your own independent strength to support elements just the next step away from them.”
Sunkara remarked once in a 2016 debate that “The Democratic Party is structurally a party of capital” that cannot be “realigned”–describing his support for Sanders at the time a “one-off engagement with the presidential campaign of a self-described socialist.” He’s clearly moved from this position. But the idea that DSA was just “using” the Democratic Party for its own purposes was always a dubious assertion, given that DSA-backed candidates such as Sanders, AOC, and Rashida Tlaib do not support a break of any sort, dirty or otherwise, from the party.
To demonstrate his loyalty to the Democratic Party, Sanders has even demanded that his primary delegates sign a 5-page document pledging not to criticize Biden on social media and threatening disciplinary measures including “removal from the delegation” if these rules are violated. One can only hope that the majority of Sanders supporters see this as an opportunity to move “Beyond Bernie.” The question is, where do the newly radicalizing layers of activists go as their commitment to revolutionizing society deepens? Many Leftists, including former leaders from the International Socialist Organization, have joined DSA, endorsed Sanders and have been advocating the very same reformist politics that they once criticized—though they may claim otherwise. Asserting that your ultimate aim is “revolutionary” may seem to be a sort of protective shell, but it is actually more of a salve that soothes the conscience.
The tragedy of the U.S. revolutionary left today—or even of a broader left committed to building independently of the Democratic Party—is that it is as yet far too small and scattered to exert any major influence over the course of this tremendous struggle that is unfolding. That gap between potential and reality needs to be closed over the coming months and years. Millions of people, including many who have never attended a protest before, have been out protesting non-stop for weeks on end. Society has been transformed in the process.
As revolutionary socialists have long understood, mass struggle changes consciousness more quickly in a matter of weeks or months than years of ordinary, hum-drum life under capitalism. As Lenin once wrote,
The real education of the masses can never be separated from their independent political, and especially revolutionary, struggle. Only struggle educates the exploited class. Only struggle discloses to it the magnitude of its own power, widens its horizon, enhances its abilities, clarifies its mind, forges its will.
In periods of isolation or defeat, workers are more easily prone to turn their suffering and bitterness on each other, or on those who the ruling class scapegoats for society’s problems. But the experience of struggle teaches solidarity to workers and the oppressed, calling into question divisions of race, gender, sexual orientation, language, and nationality that are deliberately fostered by the ruling class. They learn that whenever the employers or the state can pit them against each other, they are weak; and when they unite, they are much stronger than they ever expected before.
Upturns in struggle raise new questions for movements, as the ruling class mobilizes everything in its arsenal to trick, divide, deter, and repress mass struggles that threaten its interests. As a result the question of organization and politics becomes central in determining how far the struggle can go—whether it is halted, or whether it moves forward to more ambitious and far-reaching goals. This is the potential now facing the left. Let’s hope it can rise to the promises and challenges that this new struggle presents.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
