Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare

By Ben Arthur Thomason

A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfare, and popular culture, particularly when considering the interventions by the West and its regional allies. A key pillar of Western imperialist projects next to the hard power of bombs and economic sanctions is the soft power of diplomatic maneuvering, media and cultural imperialism, manufacturing public consent for war, and inventing realities to maintain ideological hegemony. The complementary dialectic between hard and soft power in the US led imperial project in Syria built on historical ventures in Muslim majority countries and evolved propaganda and civil society hybrid warfare strategies that may become foundational for 21st century warfare.

Complementing hard and soft power: the UK FCO media and civil society consortium

Early in the Syrian conflict, through a scheme code-named Operation Timber Sycamore, the CIA partnered with Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar to flood Syria with weapons, many of which ended up on the black market or in the hands of extremist groups. In an echo of the CIA’s Operation Cyclone, where Mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan were supplied with billions of dollars in arms including Raytheon manufactured anti-aircraft guided Stinger Missiles, the US and its allies supplied Syrian rebels, including Salafist groups like the Harakat Nur al-Din al-Zenki Movement, with Raytheon produced anti-tank guided BGM TOW missiles.

Supplementing the hard-power pressures of sanctions and lethal aid to militants was a soft power strategy that combined diplomatic pressure, propaganda, and civil society programs. Western governments and NGOs funded, supplied, and trained pro-opposition Syrian journalists, newspapers, magazines, radio, and TV stations. Pro-rebel outlets that sprung from this support were needed because Western journalists largely stayed out of reporting from rebel-held Syria for risk of being kidnapped or killed, despite the purported moderation of the Western backed Free Syrian Army and attempts to downplay the strength of extremist forces in Western media. Perhaps the most important organization, at least that we have significant documentation of right now, was a consultancy firm, Analysis Research Knowledge (ARK), and their search and rescue and media production group, Syria Civil Defence (British spelling), popularly known as the White Helmets.

Figure 1- An example of ARK’s “rebranding” projects for armed militias to sell the “moderate rebels” image (CPG01737 ARK 1.3.1, n.d.: 1)

ARK’s modern form was established as ARK FZC in 2011 and is based in Dubai, though its roots go back at least to 2009 when it was formed in Beirut, Lebanon as ARK Group or ARK Lebanon. The United Arab Emirates avoided full involvement in the arming and support of Syrian militants, instead opting to become an important partner in diplomatic and civil society efforts against the Assad government. ARK was started by former British Foreign Commonwealth Office (FCO) employee Alistair Harris, who got his start serving in the Yugoslav Wars. Contracting under the UK FCO, ARK first established a program for collecting and documenting alleged war crimes and set up an opposition media program called Basma Syria (Basma meaning smile in Arabic). In 2012 ARK, led by employee James Le Mesurier, a former UK military intelligence officer who also got his start in the Balkans during the Yugoslav Wars, established the search and rescue teams that would become the White Helmets. The group sold itself as a grassroots citizen activist humanitarian group and became media darlings in the West. 

The White Helmets were the bridge between the civil society and propaganda aspects of these soft-power pro-rebel operations. Not only did they provide services such as search and rescue, medical transport, fire suppression, and post-battle clean-ups and reconstruction, they filmed and photographed themselves doing all these things. They were often first on the scene reporting on bombings, skirmishes, and alleged chemical weapons attacks. The most famous accusations against the White Helmets, lobbed by Russian and alternative Western media, were that they collaborated with terrorist groups and staged fake attacks and/or rescue missions. Yet perhaps the more interesting and revealing thing about the White Helmets that can be confirmed is that they were a key part of a wider propaganda and civil society operation to support anti-Assad forces in Syria and justify and encourage foreign intervention led by corporate contractors working under the UK FCO.  

As the military war dragged on, Western backed militias needed to administer the areas they conquered as well as fight an information war. Since these rebel-held spaces were too dangerous for Western journalists, Western states raised a local media infrastructure through local proxies. US and European NGOs and governments funded, trained, and supplied outlets like Aleppo Media Center while ARK and its fellow UK FCO contractors set up their own media outlets like Basma, Moubader, and Syriagraph, establishing TV, radio, and magazine production for themselves or partner organizations. Other FCO contractors like Albany Associates Ltd identified and trained select spokespeople from and developed communication strategies for violent sectarian Salafi militias like Ahrar al-Sham and Jaish al-Islam. One prominent ostensibly grassroots media outlet for the Battle of Aleppo, Revolutionary Forces of Syria, was directly run by an FCO consortium member that partnered closely with ARK, The Global Strategy Network (TGSN), directed by Richard Barrett, former director of counterterrorism at MI6. These outlets then fed propaganda to their “well-established contacts with numerous key media organisations [sic] including Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, Orient, Sky News Arabic, CNN, BBC, BBC Arabic, The Times, The Guardian, FT [Financial Times], NYT [New York Times], Reuters and others.”

Figure 2- One of several maps of Syria showcasing ARK’s media and civil society operations in Syria. “ICSP Beneficiaries” refer to local Free Syrian Police units while “Media Stringers” refer to freelance journalists trained and or employed by ARK (ITT Lot C – Technical Response)  

UK FCO contractors like Adam Smith International and ARK tried to create civil society infrastructure to provide essential services that could compete with Syrian state services. They set up a Free Syrian Police (FSP) as well as municipal governance, education, and sanitation services, while the White Helmets provided emergency fire, transportation, and rubble clean-up services. The FSP alone received hundreds of millions of dollars through US and European funding and had its own scandals of corruption and connections with terrorist groups. The White Helmets alongside media outlets set up with extensive help from Western governments and NGOs like Aleppo Media Center, or media outlets directly run by Western government contractors like Revolutionary Forces of Syria, audio-visually recorded and disseminated these services from local Arabic speaking audiences to global, particularly Western Anglophone audiences. For ARK, their civil society services and “media products” were one and the same. The US and European states spent over $1 billion on these media and civil society initiatives refined through constant polling, focus groups, data analysis, and target audience segmentation to maximize their media and public opinion impact.

Figure 3- ARK “Project Schematic” showing how civil society initiatives immediately became propaganda for local and Western audiences. The events for September-November were planned by ARK to both provide rebel governance and turn their services into pro-rebel, anti-regime propaganda. (ARK 1.2.1 Methodology, c2017)

Target Audiences: The Home Front

The White Helmets became the star group of this initiative not just because they provided local services and produced propaganda at the same time; they also gave the opposition to Assad a singular humanitarian face that could shroud the sectarian and theocratic violence that characterized the bulk of the Western backed armed opposition that eventually coalesced into ISIS. Among Western media and celebrities, that’s exactly what the White Helmets became. 

The program of influence peddling and manufacturing public consent for intervention in Syria made it to the highest levels of Western entertainment with the 2016 Oscar winning documentary The White Helmets, profiling the ARK created group. The documentary created a narrative of Russian and Assad military devils bombing helpless civilians who relied on angelic White Helmets as their only line of defense, scrubbing all rebel militias from the conflict except ISIS. It was made possible by the cheap labor of the White Helmet workers, with whom ARK had previously produced several Arabic-language documentaries, the money and government connections of oil and industrial interests through philanthropies like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the enthusiastic endorsements of US and UK media. The organization that led the impact campaign for the documentary and the White Helmets targeting celebrities and the media as well as Western halls of power was The Syria Campaign (TSC). TSC was started and heavily funded by a Syrian expat, US educated billionaire oil CEO and major UK Tory party donor, Ayman Asfari, whose company was convicted and fined in 2021 by a UK court for paying millions of dollars in bribes to Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE for oil contracts. Even before the Syrian Civil War started Asfari had his hands in dirty influence peddling with the UK who led the propaganda and civil society war against Syria, the UAE, who served as a regional conduit for those efforts, and the Saudis, who helped lead the hard power militia war against Syria.

While The White Helmets documentary tugged at viewers’ heartstrings over the brutality of Syrian and Russian air power, the Syria Campaign and the White Helmets pushed for the US and its allies to establish a no-fly zone over Syria. This was the same kind of intervention that was instrumental in lynching Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and throwing that country into chaos and strife it still has not emerged from. Despite the risk of inciting a hot war with Russia that a no-fly zone in Syria implied, this policy was pushed by powerful political leaders, including the 2016 Democratic party presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Cynical weaponization of real and alleged atrocity stories to justify intervention and create easy good vs. evil stories for the benefit of US backed rebel factions in Muslim countries is not new. Journalist Joel Whitney (2016) showed that the weaponization of refugees and training pro-rebel activists to encourage and film atrocities has historical precedent in Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan. The resumes and CVs from leaked UK Foreign Commonwealth Office documents also point to these programs repeating and building off each other through history, particularly in the destabilized Muslim majority regions of the world in the past 30 years. Several prominent employees with leadership roles in these government contractors in Syria have long resumes before joining ARK and other FCO contractors. Their employee profiles demonstrate a pattern of receiving military, media, civil society, and government transition positions in places like Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, sometimes in that order and often including several sub-Saharan African countries like Somalia, Sudan, Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria as well. These ventures have occurred before and will continue.

Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries. 

It must be said that these efforts failed in important ways. While nearly all Western mainstream corporate media and politicians fell in line behind the White Helmets and the consortium’s pro-intervention narratives, war weary Western publics, particularly in the US and UK, were skeptical and unconvinced. Outlets like the Syria Campaign, the Guardian, and the BBC were quite troubled by the popular pushback they got which, despite their best efforts, could not be smeared as all Moscow agents or their useful idiots spreading disinformation. Russia and Syria did have their own propaganda strategy to counter Western media, and this is an inevitable reality of modern warfare. Their tactics included accusations against the White Helmets that, while containing important grains of truth, were overly simplistic and designed to paper over the brutal acts they engaged in as belligerents in a generally brutal war. Yet it is striking that, after so many criminal imperialist adventures in the region, public skepticism and disillusionment toward institutional narratives pushing humanitarian intervention in another Muslim country would be dismissed by political and media professionals with such pious Cold War style deflection and finger-pointing. These went so far as to include a sting operation and media smear campaign led by yet another organization created by ARK against academics investigating Western intervention in Syria. This ideological disciplining of public discourse is particularly outrageous when critical investigations into what Western states and their allies were doing in Syria without substantial, if any, public consent or knowledge reveal disturbing patterns of violence, manipulation, and good-old fashioned corruption and self-aggrandizement.

Movements Aren't Won or Lost in Elections: Putting India Walton's Campaign for Mayor of Buffalo in Context

(Photo: Friends of India Walton)

By Russell Weaver

India Walton — the progressive, working-class, 39-year-old, Black mother-of-four who stunned Buffalo’s Democratic establishment with her June 2021 upset win in the Mayoral Primary Election — appears to have lost her bid to become the city’s Chief Executive. As of this writing, she’s received 41% of the General Election vote, with unnamed write-in candidates (but, presumably, Primary loser and 16-year-incumbent, Byron Brown) winning the remaining 59% of ballots cast. 

Some observers, including Brown, have been quick to characterize Walton’s loss as a “rebuke” of her leftist brand of politics, stating that her General Election performance should serve as a “warning” to Democrats that leftward movement will cost the party at the ballot box. To paraphrase the celebratory words of New York State’s Republican Committee Chairperson on election night, Brown did not simply beat Walton — he defeated a socialist movement in Buffalo.  

Funny thing about movements, though: they’re not won or lost in an election. Rather, movements progress through phases of an iterative, nonlinear process. Engineer-turned-activist Bill Moyer, who’s frequently credited with steering the Chicago Freedom Movement toward its focus on fair housing in the 1960s, labeled this process the Movement Action Plan (MAP) – a concept he originated, developed, experienced, and refined through a lifetime of organizing. 

In brief, MAP proposes that successful social movements pass through eight phases: 

1. During “normal times,” systemic problems like economic inequality or housing insecurity are not prominent on the public agenda. The problems, and the policies that sustain them, are relatively overlooked by the public and mainstream media.

2. Small networks of organizations and activists with expertise on a systemic problem use official channels (e.g., media, courts, public hearings) and organizing campaigns to focus attention on that problem.

3. Growing attention to the problem produces “ripening conditions” wherein more organizations and people become sympathetic to the movement’s positions. To Moyer, by this stage some 20-30% of the public are aware of and opposed to the problem.

4. One or more highly visible “trigger events” animates the problem, clearly illustrating the need for change to a broad audience. During this “take off” phase, people and organizations flock to the movement in greater numbers. For Moyer, the fraction of the public aware of the problem and opposed to the policies or institutions responsible for it reaches 40% in this stage (recall: Walton won over 41% of General Election votes).

5. Seeing the movement’s gains during “take off” as a threat to the status quo, powerholders mobilize their disproportionate power and resources against it, blocking its more transformative demands from being implemented. At least some members of or sympathizers with the movement see these unachieved demands as failure. This “perception of failure” leads to attrition.

6. The movement’s experiences with external pushback and internal attrition help sharpen its analysis of power and of the social, economic, and institutional relations that produce and sustain systemic problems. It uses that analysis to build or expand prefigurative institutions that model solutions to those problems (e.g., in India Walton’s case, community land trusts like the one she co-founded to promote affordable housing in Buffalo). Over time, “re-trigger events” bring problems back to life and again draw people and organizations to the movement in numbers. In Moyer’s experience, this is the stage of “majority public opinion,” where most people come to see a problem in terms of the policies and institutions that create and sustain it. Thus, it’s also the stage where most people come to oppose the status quo and the powerholders who uphold it.

7. No longer just opposed to the status quo, a public majority embraces what were previously “feared” alternatives (i.e., the movement’s more transformative demands), creating the environment for structural change. In Moyer’s terms, this is a stage of “success,” where incremental proposals no longer pacify the public as they once did. Instead, old policies and institutions are changed or dismantled, new ones are built, and people and organizations from the movement begin to replace powerholders who still seek to block transformative social change.

8. Finally, in what Moyer called “continuing the struggle,” the movement works to extend successes, fend off attempts to undo progress, and transcend the boundaries (spatial, social, or political) of its prior victories.

The champions of the status quo sounding the death knell on Buffalo’s progressive movement either aren’t thinking at the MAP temporal scale; or, more likely, they’re intentionally conflating Walton’s election loss with evidence that progressive politics aren’t capable of taking root in the existing political-economic system, thereby attempting to accelerate attrition from the Buffalo-based movement that Walton’s come to represent.  

Don’t fall for that tactic.  

Walton’s campaign pulled back the curtain on Buffalo’s “resurgence” narrative, highlighting how the city’s pro-growth economic agenda has exacerbated inequality, creating wealth and benefits for affluent developers and property owners while making life more precarious for the disempowered masses. She helped elevate systemic problems like housing insecurity, food deserts, and care deficits to the public agenda. And, perhaps most importantly, she advanced alternative policies and institutions — public—community partnerships to build networked land trusts, participatory budgeting, a public bank, and more — that have the potential to address those problems at a structural level.  

Not long ago, these proposals — which her opponents breathlessly call “radical socialist” — might not have won much favor in a “moderate, business friendly” city like Buffalo. But Walton just captured over 41% of the general electorate, while bringing scores of people (especially young people) into progressive politics. Her campaign was a trigger event that helped the movement reach “take off” (stage four). Her loss will be perceived by some as a failure (stage five). But, in truth, it’s a transition point.  

The speed and ease with which establishment Democrats and Republicans joined forces to drag Brown over the finish line as a write-in candidate laid bare the real fight. It’s not about shifting power from one political party to another — but from the opulent minority to the working-class majority. Notably, Walton seemingly won over Buffalo’s working-class communities. On that backdrop, and with the Mayoral election in the rearview mirror, Buffalo’s progressive movement looks poised to drive headstrong into MAP stage six: institution building.  

By working outside of elected office (for now) to continue building the prefigurative, people-centered organizations that Walton’s campaign promised to everyday Buffalonians, progressives in the city can institutionalize their recent gains. That way, when the next “re-trigger event” calls Buffalo’s collective attention to the city’s worsening inequality, concentrated poverty, housing insecurity, or related problems — and such an event will inevitably occur, given the choice to keep a developer-friendly strategy in place — the movement will have ready-made infrastructure on which to greet the general public, whose eventual rejection of business-as-usual will come with demands for transformative alternatives (stage seven).  

India Walton might have lost an election, but she also might have helped Buffalo progress more than halfway through the stages of a winning social movement. Now isn’t the time for despair, but for sustained building and organizing: “success” is arguably just a stage (or two) away. 

Russell Weaver is a Rust Belt-based geographer and data analyst who studies economic democracy and spatial patterns of inequality. Follow him on Twitter @RustBeltGeo 

Sanders Supporters: It’s Time to get Disillusioned

By J.E. Karla

The word ‘disillusioned” has a negative connotation in our society, implying that illusions are good for us. In a life-or-death situation, however, illusions are fatal, and the fantasy that capitalism will give us the tools we need to destroy it threatens billions of lives. The oppressed of the world need actually radical Bernie Sanders supporters to snap out of it, right now. The rest of this essay is addressed directly to these earnest, disappointed supporters.

Your greatest illusion is probably the belief that Bernie Sanders somehow advanced the left over the last five years. He did not. Mass political energy rising up in the Occupy, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock and other mass movements got pushed into this campaign, now with nothing to show for it. This is an empirical fact, with vote counts and delegate totals to prove it. Even after tens of thousands of dedicated volunteers and hundreds of millions of dollars raised, Bernie regressed badly since his last failure in 2016. 

Yes, the coronavirus wreaked unforeseen havoc, but why should a crisis of capitalism work against an allegedly anti-capitalist campaign? It’s because Bernie’s style of opportunism is an open compromise between the ruling system and mass demand for change. When this contradiction erupts, the opportunists have to choose between either their imagined aims or their concrete collaborations with the class enemy. 

Bernie chose the latter, standing down in order to protect the system. The ruling class needs immediate unity behind the state in the broadest sense — not just the government, but the entire apparatus of capitalist power — if it is to survive this crisis. Bernie immediately fell in line, just like a US Senator is supposed to. Now his supporters can choose to follow this lead or to denounce this surrender. Which will you choose? 

If you believe that the exploited masses have the power to rise up and set ourselves free — i.e the basic idea of all revolutionary politics — then the question becomes which choice validates that concept: advancing Joe Biden’s ambitions, or refusing to further play the capitalist game? Bernie’s primary political objective is now the election of Joe Biden as president. Sticking with him out of a sense of reflexive loyalty is a clear betrayal of the masses.   

This is also the answer to the “lesser of two evils” logic Bernie and his allies in the Democratic Party are trotting out, now for the umpteenth time. For a child in a Palestinian refugee camp, a woman working in a Sri Lankan sweatshop, someone toiling in a coltan mine in Central Africa, or a Yemeni family praying that the drones miss them again today, the US elections change nothing. Not only is there no difference between Biden and Trump, there was no hope even in Bernie Sanders after all. 

Indeed, when it comes to key questions like the struggle against NATO, the IMF, WTO, and the US dollar, Biden may actually be to the right of Trump. This looks topsy turvy until you get good and disillusioned. Marx and Engels say in The Communist Manifesto that communists “are distinguished from the other working-class parties by this only… in the national struggles of the proletarians of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the common interests of the entire proletariat, independently of all nationality.” We either take this materialist perspective, or fall into the same opportunist trap over and over again. 

If you’ve spent any time over the last five years enthralled by the Bernie campaign, you’ve seen the consequences of this error. All of your work and money has been handed over to a befuddled rapist hack for the credit card companies and military industrial complex. The only way out of this hole is to stop digging. It’s time for you to give up on this illusion, once and for all.

The good news — kinda — is that we’re in great collective shape for a period of study. Start with the great dissector of opportunism — Vladimir Lenin. Read State and Revolution, and then Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. For a great look at how those dynamics have developed into our present age give John Smith’s Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century a read, followed by Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik’s A Theory of Imperialism. Get some disillusioned former Bernie supporters together and study as a group — it will help you stay accountable. 

It may feel less “active” than what you were up to with Bernie, but remember that you would have done much less harm if you’d done nothing at all. If there’s any hope of a silver lining in this experience it will be folks like you turning this heartbreak into a spirit of real resistance. Follow that spirit the next time a mass movement is urged to go electoral, and remind them of your one-time folly.  

We know that this will come up again sooner or later because no one comes out of this system without thinking a lot of very destructive things. Bernie supporters often point out the isolation and self-absorption of much of the left. You’re right; we have our own illusions we need to snap out of too. But the same system that worries about you being “disillusioned” tells you that it’ll help you slit its throat if only you play by its rules. Remember what you’ve learned, and don’t believe it again.

Bernie is Dead, Long Live the Revolution: A Few Thoughts

By Zach Medeiros

The jig is up. Caught between the pincers of a corporate media and the Democratic establishment, and hopelessly hamstrung by his own unwillingness to launch full-frontal attacks on the system, Bernie Sanders has been defeated again. As in 2016, the individuals and classes who run the Democratic Party, along with those who lick their boots and deposit their checks, have chosen to lose to Donald Trump again rather than tolerate the most lukewarm form of “socialism” imaginable. They did everything in their power to convince voters that Bernie Sanders was less electable than a racist rapist fossil who can barely string a coherent thought together, a man who is intimately involved in some of the most destructive domestic and foreign policy decisions undertaken by the United States in recent generations. Joe Biden is a step down from Hilary “Super Predator” Clinton, if such a thing seems possible.

The callousness of this decision is matched only by its stupidity. If Bernie Sanders had managed to win the presidency, the kinds of reforms he champions would probably give the shambling corpse that is US capitalism and imperialism a much needed shot in the arm, while distracting those who might otherwise join an actual revolutionary movement. Alternatively, the right-wingers in the courts and Congress could have squashed any changes a Sanders administration tried to get through. They had many options, but they decided to go with Joe Biden. Think about that for a moment, and let the horror that passes for democracy in this empire wash over you.

Now, I'm not going to gloat about Bernie dropping out. I’ve written about Bernie’s profoundly flawed ideology elsewhere, and the threat he didn’t pose to this monstrous system. There are far too many good, decent, struggling people out there who backed Sanders for understandable reasons for me to drive the knife in deeper. In Bernard Sanders, millions of people, particularly young people, saw something and someone different than the usual filth that characterizes Amerikan politics. While there are some who only backed him because they wanted some decent health care on top of the usual imperialist, colonialist pie, there were and are many others who saw in a Sanders presidency the possibility for transformative change that would make a meaningful difference in their lives and the lives of their loved ones. Many of these supporters are working class or precariously positioned colonized people, with real reason to fear a second Trump term but sick to death of the Bidens of the world.

Intellectually, US Americans are trained to be passive, idealist, and hyper-individualistic in our understanding of politics. We’re taught to look to pro-capitalist politicians, and particularly presidents, as almost magical saviors able and willing to vanquish all of our designated enemies and cure all our ills, real and imagined. Voting them into office is supposedly our highest political duty, and when they fail or disappoint, we must only use the systems, tactics, and strategies the ruling class allows to “hold their feet to the fire,” or some other such nonsense. This is how most of us, including the most diehard revolutionaries, are raised from birth, and it would be hypocritical to play the enlightened ones and chastise those outside the radical Left who believed in Sanders now. Politics are about nothing if not education, and we must be mindful of everyone’s capacity to develop.

All of that said, we need to recognize what actual socialists and other revolutionaries, above all colonized people, have been saying for years: you cannot and will not build past-its-prime social democracy, let alone real socialism, from inside the Democratic Party. You cannot and will not win power except through the mass leadership of the most oppressed and marginalized people in this society. You cannot and will not save Amerika from itself, and it does not deserve to be saved. Bernie Sanders has lost two presidential elections in a row now. There have been many before him who tried to push this country to the left from within the Democratic Party and failed. It is no shame to make a mistake; the shame lies in repeating it again and again. If you ever had a shred of hope in the Sanders campaign, refocus that. Multiply it a thousand fold, and put it into action building and supporting genuine revolutionary movements. Destroy imperialism. Smash colonialism. Grind capitalism into dust. Fight for the liberation and emancipation of the millions and billions of human beings kept down by every form of chauvinism and exploitation.

As Mariame Kaba said, let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.

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.↩︎

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.

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.  

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.

Do Recent Escalations with Iran Stress the Urgency of a Sanders Presidency?

By Jonas Ecke

The recent US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, was a reminder, if any was needed, of the dangers of US militarism. It also raises the question: Who, in the US, could offer a realistic alternative to this country’s ingrained militaristic path-dependency?

At first sight, Bernie Sanders seems to be the ideal candidate. Whenever Sanders talks international politics on the Democratic primary campaign trail, he urges the US to take on a global role not based on militarism, but on multilateral efforts to address challenges that transcend nation-states, for example persistent extreme poverty and impending planetary extinction.

Of course, we know that speeches on war and peace held by politicians who do not command much political or military might should be taken with more than a grain of salt. This caveat is certainly true for politicians from the Democratic Party, who are more willing to provide rhetorical support for global human rights initiatives, peaceful conflict resolutions, and multilateralism compared to their Republican peers, yet seem unwilling or unable to deliver on these values once in office.

Let us consider the last three Democratic Presidents: Before President Carter armed the Mujahidin in Afghanistan and provided arms for horrendous human rights abuses in East Timor, El Salvador, and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 80s, candidate Carter promised a new kind of foreign policy centered on unalienable human right norms. Ushered into the White House with promises of a “peace dividend” after the conclusion of the Cold War, President Clinton would deliver weapons into the hands of abusers in Turkey, Indonesia, Columbia, and Israel. These policies were pursued even though the world had become more peaceful as a whole.

And then, of course, there was Obama: An erstwhile critic of the Iraq war and skillful orator whose speeches peaceniks could project their political dreams, President Obama would go on to support proxy fighters in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, increase the drone strike program tenfold, and join France and other nations in toppling Gadhafi in Libya, contributing to the kind of instability that he decried on the campaign trail. In Obama’s last year in office alone, the US dropped 26,171 bombs.

In early stages of their careers, all of these politicians tried to resonate with vast segments of the US population who want a foreign policy not dictated by weapon merchants and a foreign policy elite that is disconnected from the real costs of war. Once in office, however, every one of them fell short of expectations and/or fell in line with US imperialistic endeavors.

Is there reason to believe that Sanders is any different, that he would somehow escape the dangerous ideation that Realpolitik necessitates destructive militarism, if he were given the chance to enter the Oval Office? It’s a question of high relevance as the US might enter into another war in the Middle East.

Sanders’s Track Record on Foreign Policy

Sanders’s political record and election platform, which are explicitly centered around a more peaceful US foreign policy (if this is possible), show a commitment that makes him more likely to abstain from the militarism of his Republican and Democratic predecessors. Not just his words, but his actions – from his time as a protestor of the Vietnam War via his opposition to Reagan’s brutal Nicaraguan proxy war and the 2003 Iraq invasion, to his recent senate resolution to stop US military support for Saudi Arabia’s devastating air campaign in Yemen – give hope that he would steer the path.

Sanders’s famed authenticity and passion do not only shine through when he talks about today’s frivolous levels of economic inequality, but also when it comes to foreign policy. Particularly in his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Sanders delivered lessons on the long history of tragic blowbacks from interventionism and regime change for a younger generation. Referring to Henry Kissinger’s role as a mentor to Hillary Clinton in a debate in Milwaukee, Sanders stated, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.” He then recounted how a military campaign and coup masterminded by Kissinger contributed to the genocide in Cambodia.

All of this is not to say that Sanders is without fault. After all, he is a career senator for an imperialistic state. As such, he has occasionally compromised on foreign policy issues in his long senate career, for example when he approved General James “Mad Dog” Mattis – who directed the bloody campaign against the Iraqi city of Fallujah – in the senate in 2017.  Sanders has also not categorically ruled out the continued use of drones, and moments of pandering to America’s war culture have broken through from time to time. Overall, though, it is safe to assert that Sanders has allowed the courage of his conviction to dictate his foreign policy choices far more often than most others.

If Sanders becomes the 46th president of the United States, his constituents would have to become more educated about foreign affairs and consistently hold him accountable. Herein lies another advantage of Sanders: He is not a politician who seeks to become a technocrat who implements reforms within circles of initiated “experts,” and without much public input. Sanders is spearheading a movement of predominantly, but not only, young US citizens, who have soberly reflected on the many failures of the post-9/11 militarism they have experienced in their lifespan and are committed to continuously engage with the political system. As Noam Chomsky points out, this quality represents an unforgivable sin among the powers that be.

Will It Matter?

Contrary to what his Democrat party detractors – who seem to believe that access to D.C. think tanks, halls of power, and universities equals foreign policy expertise – claim, Sanders has for the most part instinctively arrived at the right decisions on various foreign policy crises from Yemen to Nicaragua. His track record stems from his ability to avoid, in his own words, the “old Washington mindset that judges ‘seriousness’ according to the willingness to use force.” Rather than engaging in futile and immoral military adventures abroad, Sanders promises to finally adequately fund foreign aid programs. These programs only cost a fraction of what’s spent on the military, but could offer shelter, protection, and perhaps even opportunities to the millions who have been displaced by conflicts. As the “severe global funding shortages” for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, epitomize, the displaced have been all but abandoned by an international community that cannot resolve the conflicts that cause the displacement.

If the past few months are prologue, the world will be an even more dangerous place by the time Sanders might take office. In the Middle East, global powers such as the EU, Russia, and the US, as well as regional actors such as the Gulf Council states, Iran, and Turkey, will continue their disastrous strategy of funding violent proxies, both offensive and defensive, as they have already done in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The whole region might be pushed to the brink by the dangerous escalations of Trump and the US “military–industrial–media complex” on Iran.

Recent history suggests that it may not matter who occupies the Oval Office, as the US war machine, its financial benefactors, and its complicit media seem to churn on out of systemic necessity. The nation’s economy has become largely dependent on the arms industry, as weapons remain one of the most exported products from the US. Thus, the only way to keep this market stimulated is by using and recycling munitions, as well as providing weaponry to foreign states. If Sanders attempts to undermine this process, there could be a heavy price to pay. However, if enough Americans back a Sanders presidency by holding its proverbial feet to the fire, a different path may begin to be carved out. At the end of the day, someone must (and will) occupy the office. The most realistic prospect for an urgently necessary de-escalation and the rebuilding of whole societies and bilateral relationships will be having Bernie Sanders at the helm.

The Capitalist Coup Called Neoliberalism: How and Why It Went Down

By Colin Jenkins

Rich people have always had class consciousness because... they want to stay rich. This collective consciousness led the "founding fathers" of the United States to set up systems of governance that would, first and foremost, protect them (the wealthy, landowning minority) from the landless, working majority (slaves, indentured servants, laborers). Since then, the rich have had undue influence on every aspect of US life: housing, food production and distribution, education, media, and politics. As capitalism has developed well into its late stages, this has led to large concentrations in wealth and power, and thus influence.

In order to maintain control, the rich have learned over time that minimal concessions must be given to the working class to avoid societal unrest. Marxist theorists like Antonio Gramsci and Nicos Poulantzas described this process as using the state to steady the "unstable equilibrium." This instability is produced by capitalism's tendency to pool wealth at the top while dispossessing the majority. For much of the 20th century, capitalists in the US were successful in maintaining an internal equilibrium, mainly due to their ravaging of the so-called "third world" through colonialism and imperialism. With this massive theft of resources throughout the global South (Africa and Latin America), a robust "middle class" was carved out from a mostly white sector of the US working class. This "middle class" consisted of workers who were provided a greater share of the stolen loot than their class peers, and thus awarded the "American Dream" that was widely advertised.

The US "middle class" was a crucial development for the rich because it provided a buffer between them and the masses. Due to the relative comfort they were allowed, "middle-class" workers were more likely to support and collaborate with capitalists, even at the expense of their fellow workers who were left struggling for scraps from below. After all, for there to be a middle class, there must be a lower class. Under capitalism, the lower class is the invisible majority by design. The capitalist class shapes dominant culture from above, the middle class serves as the standard bearer of this culture, and the lower class clings to survival mode in the shadows of society. The key for the rich is to keep the invisible majority in check. The "middle class" has always played a crucial role in this.

Despite this balancing act that was maintained for decades, capitalism's internal contradictions became predictably volatile heading into the latter part of the century, culminating into what economist Michael Roberts refers to as the profitability crisis of the 1970s . As the capitalist system was approaching this crisis, US society had already begun confronting social ills stemming from systemic white supremacy, patriarchy, and the Vietnam war. Naturally, this moved into the economic sphere, as workers and students began to successfully tie together the array of social injustices to the widespread economic injustice created by the capitalist system. The existence of an invisible majority, the victims of capitalism and its corollary systems of oppression, was uncovered. This scared the rich, enough to where they felt the need to fortify their previously unshakable privileges. After the groundswell of liberation movements that formed during the 60s, which was fueled by a wave of (working) class consciousness from below, the rich decided to organize and weaponize their own (capitalist) class consciousness to protect their assets, collectively, from the threat of democracy.

In examining what had gone wrong in the 60s and why so many people had the audacity to demand more self-determination, the notorious Trilateral Commission convened in 1973, bringing together economic and political elites from North America, Europe, and Japan. The Commission, as described by Encyclopedia Britannica , "reflects powerful commercial and political interests committed to private enterprise and stronger collective management of global problems. Its members (more than 400 in the early 21st century) are influential politicians; banking and business executives; media, civic, and intellectual leaders."

In 1975, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki published a report for the Commission, titled: "The Crisis of Democracy: On the Governability of Democracies." In assessing the various movements that gained momentum in the 60s (racial justice, economic justice, anti-war, etc.), the report determined that these "problems" stemmed from an "excess of democracy." Huntington specifically noted that, "the vitality of democracy in the United States in the 1960s produced a substantial increase in governmental activity and a substantial decrease in governmental authority." The solution to this, according to the report, was to reverse direction - decrease "governmental activity" and increase "governmental authority" to restrict democratic impulses from the masses and maintain the capitalist power structure internally, while retaining "hegemonic power" internationally. In other words, rather than government serving people and regulating capitalists, government should serve capitalists and regulate people.

Since maintaining a "middle class" had become such a fragile proposition, the capitalist class forged a new direction. Rather than rely on this historical buffer and continue the concessionary and fickle balancing act , they decided it would be more effective to simply take ownership of the legislative and judicial process. This process began when executive officers from several major corporations joined together to form private groups like the Business Roundtable, for the purpose of "promoting pro-business public policy." In other words, to make sure that the "excess of democracy" which occurred during the 60s would never return. Why? Because any such mass movement toward relinquishing power to the people is a direct threat to capitalist profit and corporate America's existence as a collection of unaccountable, authoritarian, exceptionally powerful, private entities. The Business Roundtable, which included executives from corporations like Exxon, DuPont, General Electric, Alcoa, and General Motors, gained instant access to the highest offices of the government, becoming extremely influential in pushing for corporate tax cuts and deregulation during the Reagan era.

Since the 1980s, the Business Roundtable has run roughshod over American workers by using the federal government to:

- reduce consumer protections,

- obstruct employment stimuli,

- weaken unions,

- implement "free trade" agreements that spur offshoring and tax havens,

- ease environmental protections,

- increase corporate subsidies,

- loosen rules on corporate mergers and acquisitions,

- open avenues of profit in the private healthcare system,

- privatize education and social programs,

- and block efforts to make corporate boards more accountable.[1][2][3][4] [5]

As political momentum developed within corporate America, additional players jumped aboard this strategic and highly coordinated capitalist coup. While groups like the Business Roundtable targeted legislation, the US Chamber of Commerce (CoC), a "private, business-oriented lobbying group" which had already served as a popular vehicle for turning (capitalist) class consciousness into action since 1912, shifted its focus onto the court system. Since then, the CoC has used its immense resources to influence US Supreme Court decisions that benefit big business, a tactic that has become increasingly successful for them over time. The CoC's business lobby had " a 43 percent success rate from 1981 to 1986 during the final years of Chief Justice Warren Burger's tenure," a 56 percent success rate from 1994 to 2005 (the Rehnquist Court), and boasted a 68 percent success rate (winning 60 of 88 cases) during John Roberts first seven years as Chief Justice. The CoC improved even more on its pro-corporate, anti-worker attack in 2018, winning 90 percent of its cases during the court's first term. As Kent Greenfield reported for The Atlantic ,

"One measure of the [2018 term's] business-friendly tilt is the eye-popping success rate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the self-proclaimed "Voice of Business." The Chamber filed briefs in 10 cases this term and won nine of them. The Chamber's victories limited protections for whistleblowers, forced changes in the Securities and Exchange Commission, made water pollution suits more difficult to bring, and erected additional obstacles to class action suits against businesses. Only the geekiest of Supreme Court watchers monitor such cases. But the Chamber pays attention, and it pays off."

Groups like the Trilateral Commission, Business Roundtable, and Chamber of Commerce have taken prominent roles on the front lines of the 40-year, capitalist slaughter of American workers, but if there was a single, powerful element that solidified this coup it was a memo written in 1971 by Lewis Powell. The Powell Memo, or Powell Manifesto, as it has come to be known, made its rounds among corporate, economic, and political elites during this crucial time. Powell, a corporate lawyer, board member of nearly a dozen corporations, and soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice, sent the memo to the Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Eugene Sydnor, Jr., as a call to action for corporate America.

Powell's memo was a diatribe against any and all elements that would dare to question capitalism. While giving mention to "Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic," the memo focused on what was viewed as the most immediate threat - the same "excess of democracy" referred to in the Trilateral Commission's report. "What now concerns us is quite new in the history of America," wrote Powell. "We are not dealing with sporadic or isolated attacks from a relatively few extremists or even from the minority socialist cadre. Rather, the assault on the enterprise system is broadly based and consistently pursued. It is gaining momentum and converts" throughout the working class. Powell took special interest in those "from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians" whom he regarded as small in size but "the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking."

Powell's memo laid out a blueprint for the capitalist coup that is now referred to as neoliberalism , including everything from identifying and listing the enemies pushing for self-determination, criticizing the business community for its apathy and lack of urgency in recognizing this growing threat, suggestions for how business executives and the Chamber of Commerce may proceed in obstructing these democratic impulses from below, and even laying out detailed plans on how to infiltrate campuses, the public, media, the political arena, and the courts with pro-capitalist action and propaganda.

Reclaim Democracy, an activist organization based in Montana explains,

"Though Powell's memo was not the sole influence, the Chamber and corporate activists took his advice to heart and began building a powerful array of institutions designed to shift public attitudes and beliefs over the course of years and decades. The memo influenced or inspired the creation of the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the Cato Institute, Citizens for a Sound Economy, Accuracy in Academe, and other powerful organizations. Their long-term focus began paying off handsomely in the 1980s, in coordination with the Reagan Administration's "hands-off business" philosophy."

At a time of monumental capitalist regrouping and coalescing against the "dangerous rise" of self-determination, the influence of Powell's manifesto is difficult to underestimate. It provided ideological fuel to the birth of a substantial corporate lobbying industry, which produced immeasurable pro-business and anti-worker legislation for decades to come. The memo also served as a wake-up call to capitalists throughout corporate America, supplementing the formation of groups like the Business Roundtable and urging forceful actions from the US Chamber of Commerce. The results, according to Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, were undeniable:

"The organizational counterattack of business in the 1970s was swift and sweeping - a domestic version of Shock and Awe. The number of corporations with public affairs offices in Washington grew from 100 in 1968 to over 500 in 1978. In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in Washington, but by 1982, nearly 2,500 did. The number of corporate PACs increased from under 300 in 1976 to over 1,200 by the middle of 1980. On every dimension of corporate political activity, the numbers reveal a dramatic, rapid mobilization of business resources in the mid-1970s." [6]

The real-life effects of this capitalist coup have been disastrous for most. US workers have experienced declining or stagnant wages since the 1970s. As a result, many must rely on credit (if lucky enough to qualify) even to obtain basic necessities, which has resulted in skyrocketing household debt across the board. The debt-to-disposable income ratio of American households more than doubled from 60% in 1980 to 133% in 2007. Meanwhile, any hope of saving money has disappeared. While the household "savings rate roughly doubled from 5% in 1949 to over 11% in 1982, it looks like a downhill ski slope since then," and registered in negative territory by 2006. Conversely, as designed, the rich have benefited immensely, to the point where income inequality has increased to pre-Great Depression levels . Those who orchestrated the coup (the top 1%) claimed about a quarter of all wealth during the 1980s, and now own over 40% of all wealth in the country. To put this in perspective , the bottom 90% of all Americans combined account for barely half of that, claiming 21% of all wealth.

And, perhaps most importantly, the coup helped fund the growth of a massive capitalist propaganda machine to convince the working class to support our own demise. This includes everything from a co-opted and recalibrated liberal media, a rise of right-wing talk radio, and the birth of the Fox News network - all designed to do one thing: "inform and enlighten" workers on the wonders of capitalism and American exceptionalism, the friendly nature of big business, and the "excessive" dangers of self-determination.

As Powell noted in 1971, "If American business devoted only 10% of its total annual advertising budget to this overall purpose (of marketing and selling the idea of capitalism), it would be a statesman-like expenditure." And statesman-like it has become, running interference and garnering " manufactured consent" for a capitalist coup that has been cemented over the course of four decades, six presidential administrations, a Wall Street run amok, and a massive transfer of generations (including future) of public revenue into private hands.

Notes

[1] "The Business Roundtable and American Labor," a report by J. C. Turner, General President International Union of Operating Engineers, AFL-CIO (May 1979). Accessed online at http://laborrising.com/2013/07/union-organizing-and-the-business-roundtable-and-american-labor/

[2] "The Anti-Union Game Plan," Labor Notes (July 2, 2018). Accessed online at https://labornotes.org/2018/07/anti-union-game-plan

[3] Lafer, G. (October 31, 2013) "The Legislative Attack on American Wages and Labor Standards, 2011-2012," Economic Policy Institute. Accessed online at https://www.epi.org/publication/attack-on-american-labor-standards/

[4] Gilbert, D. (2017) The American Class Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (SAGE publications)

[5] Goldfield, M. (1989) The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States (University of Chicago Press), p. 192

[6] Hacker, J.S. & Pierson, P. (2011) Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer - And Turned Its Back on the Middle Class (Simon & Schuster)