Biden or Trump: No Road Ahead

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

By Sudip Bhattacharya

“I am your retribution,” said Donald Trump, the king of the sunlight-challenged, the prophet of those hollering through dried and cracked lips.

It’s been months since the presidential race officially began, although electioneering never really ends. The United States thrives on political circus, with a mass media uninterested in the issues, save for gas prices and whether a candidate is sufficiently patriotic. 

Trump is set to be the GOP nominee. He humiliated Ron DeSantis and is on track to overwhelm Nikki Haley, the so-called moderate. As his popularity has grown among the Republican base of bootlickers and crypto-fascists, with segments of the disaffected sprinkled in, there’s been reasonable fear and anxiety surrounding his potential return to the White House. 

“It will be the end of democracy, functional democracy,” Bernie Sanders stated recently.  

In his sole and hopefully only term in office, Trump relished cruelty. From separating families at the southern border to his explicit support for law enforcement, Trump’s agenda is clearly a destructive one, steeped in white supremacy, a conspiracy-charged and anti-human American exceptionalism, and an extreme pro-business posture. Trump’s coalition was a ragtag assortment of Christian evangelicals eager to eradicate transgenderism, whites who view racial equality as a threat to their identity, and a rainbow coalition of the greedy, selfish, and insecure. 

Still, it would be a gross oversimplification, and dangerously naive, to attribute all oppression and anti-democracy to Trump. His Republican rivals are hardly paragons of compassion — especially as it relates to people of color and trans folks. Currently, the DeSantis regime in Florida is committed to dismantling educational equity. DeSantis and his braindead allies are vigorously repelling any challenge to Eurocentric or otherwise whitewashed humanities curricula, accusing his truth-seeking opponents of pushing “indoctrination.” Oh the irony. 

Haley too is a bottomless well of the very right-wing insanity that outlets like Fox News have fought hard to normalize. Although now Fox has been outpaced in its cravenness and conspiracy theories by other far-right blogs and “independent” news sources. 

But what about the #Resistance, led by Joe “Anti-Busing” Biden and Kamala “Don’t Come” Harris? It bears repeating that Democrats and Republicans are not mirror images. Republicans are worse. At least there are progressives in the Democratic Party. But, at the leadership level, the average Republican and average Democrat are remarkably similar. 

Both refuse to challenge the very undemocratic electoral college system. And both are doing nothing to stop the Supreme Court from laying waste to reproductive and voting rights. Sending fundraising pleas doesn’t absolve Democrats’ failure to combat these severe infringements on freedom and autonomy. 

When it comes to the very nature of the American economy, leaders of both major parties insist that basic necessities — whether it’s housing, healthcare, or clothing — must be distributed through the private sector. Both parties expect Americans to rely on business interests for their daily bread. And they call that precarious dependency “freedom.”

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To wake up each day when it's still dark, then prop yourself behind a desk or stay on your feet until they’re swollen. To return to your apartment exhausted but with another dozen emails in your work inbox, many written in the passive-aggressive tone typical of managers and their paranoid bosses. Is that what it means to be free?

Claudia Jones, the foremost theoretician of the Communist Party USA, didn’t think so. More than anyone, she understood the shortcomings of American capitalism.

“American monopoly capital can offer the masses of American women, who compose more than one-half of our country’s population, a program only of war and fascism.”

Jones made this remark following the end of World War II — just as Democrats were advocating a return to “normal.” By the war’s end, the Harry Truman administration began intensifying the Cold War and concomitant anti-communist purge within the country’s major unions and mainstream politics. Jones warned her comrades this wasn’t just a phase. With Truman’s blessing, major companies were firing their female employees and ordering them home to work for far less as domestic laborers. Jones saw that the Democratic Party was itself a vessel for the same retrograde policies the country allegedly fought in the war. 

Much like Biden’s current support for the far-right regimes in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and India, the United States, following World War II, continued to develop ties to anti-communist, anti-democratic, and arguably neo-fascist regimes across the world. Though the United States portrayed itself as somehow anti-colonial, it sided with anyone willing to build a world safe for counterrevolution — from white supremacists to Islamists. As Charlotta Bass, the first African-American woman on a presidential ticket, stated in 1952:

“Yes, it is my government that supports the segregation by violence practiced by a Malan in South Africa, sends guns to maintain a bloody French rule in Indo-China, gives money to help the Dutch repress Indonesia, props up [Winston] Churchill’s rule in the Middle East and over the colored peoples of Africa and Malaya.” 

In 1952, Bass was the vice presidential nominee of the Progressive Party — an attempted vehicle for channeling the radicalism of the interwar period to challenge the duopoly. It was the right strategic move. What followed, however, was more purging of radicals and communists from major institutions and intensified suppression of the Left broadly.

This cycle repeated in the early to mid-1970s when groups like the Black Panther Party faced attacks from law enforcement and the labor movement itself, which had become just another coalition partner of the Democrats — a party that hated labor unrest. Soon, the labor movement, or what was left of it, would descend into a hollow business unionism that aligned itself with some of the worst elements in American political life. 

Despite inevitable and often overwhelming resistance, the American Left still needs to cultivate a socialist constituency — a social base of people willing and able to move beyond the two-party system and replace capitalism with something far more humane and just. What’s required is a constituency that is pro-socialist, pro-Palestine, pro-humanity, against climate change, against the companies that command us to use paper straws while they pollute the water we drink, and against the scourge of American empire and the various monsters its money and weapons empower. 

But there’s a problem. The commitment necessary to do this, the capacity and leadership that’s so foundational to such a daring agenda, is lacking. The American Left has no Bass or Jones to guide it. Sanders is better than most but he too, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, still supports Biden, despite the bodies piling high in Gaza. Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have criticized Biden. But how far can that criticism travel when neither has been willing to use any type of leverage against the Biden administration regarding Palestine?

There are insightful and brave voices scattered across the United States. But many of them are too consumed by meeting the daily demands of living, waking up, sipping stale coffee, and grinding their teeth while riding a bus stuck in traffic. 

Not to mention that building an independent social force will involve heartbreak. Some challenges will trounce us before we conquer them. Who amongst us is willing to sacrifice their time and energy? Who amongst us is willing to fail many times before they succeed? 

Look to the streets. You’ll find many people expressing the same commitment to basic humanity. These are the people who fight for $15 and against a genocide their tax dollars are financing. But it takes organic, transformative leaders to cohere those miniature uprisings into a tidal wave of undeniable resistance. 

Yet, where is our Bass? Where is our Jones? Where is our soul? 

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He’s written for outlets such as Jacobin, Black Agenda Report, Protean Magazine, Truthout, and Current Affairs, among others.

Taking a Closer Look at Vivek Ramaswamy's Supposed Anti-War Record

By Jon Reynolds

With a stiff drink, a heavy heart, and a strong sense of masochism, I recently subjected myself to the first round of Republican presidential debates. While the clown show lived up to expectations of being a tragic showcase of democracy gone wrong, the aftermath has been even more disturbing, particularly the flood of pundits and news stories claiming that Vivek Ramaswamy is anti-war.

Ramaswamy himself has even adopted the title, telling Israeli media in late August that “Israel needs to be in a strong position to defend itself. And the United States will be at Israel’s back. But I think that that’s a very different thing from automatically sleepwalking ourselves into war. I’m an anti-war president. And the way I’m going to do it is by deterring war, be it ending the war in Ukraine and deterring China.”

And yet, as is often the case with supposedly “anti-war” politicians operating in the two major political parties, there is more to the story, and Ramaswamy, like every other Republican on the GOP debate stage — and every other Democrat currently running for president — is far from anti-war.

IRAN AND CUTTING AID TO ISRAEL

During the debates — which were hosted by Fox News — Goddess of War, Nikki Haley, worked eagerly to out-hawk Ramaswamy on foreign policy:

“You want to go and defund Israel. You want to give Taiwan to China. You want to go and give Ukraine to Russia. You will make America less safe.”

Like clockwork, Ramaswamy played right into it:

“I will lead Abraham Accords 2.0,” he said. “I will partner with Israel to make sure Iran never is nuclear armed.”

Nevermind that politicians have been fearmongering about Iran building a bomb for decades, or that Iran has said it does not want to build a bomb, or the consensus of US intelligence agencies, which have repeatedly stated Iran is not pursuing nukes.

Moreover, despite claims to the contrary, Ramaswamy doesn’t actually want to flat-out cut aid to Israel.

First, Ramaswamy said Israel should not get more aid than its other neighbors after the year 2028, when the current US aid package of $38 billion expires. But secondly, and perhaps most crucial to his comments about Israel, is that it’s questionable if he actually wants to cut aid to the country at all. Shortly after the Republican debate, Ramaswamy appeared on Israeli TV and offered a very different view:

“I said that if Israel was so strong that it would not need our assistance anymore, it would be a sign of success for inter-country companies. I want to be clear: we will never stop aid to Israel until Israel says it is ready for it. Relations between Israel and the US will be stronger at the end of my term than they have ever been, and more than they will be under the other contestants.”

In other words: don't count on Ramaswamy to break the decades-long, bipartisan tradition of arming Israel to the teeth.

“I love [Israel’s] border policies,” Ramaswamy said during the GOP debate. “I love their tough on crime policies. I love that they have a national identity and an Iron Dome to protect their homeland."

Or, put another way, the border policies which routinely cost Palestinians their lives are the same border policies “anti-war” Ramaswamy admires.

And if that's the case, just imagine the horrors awaiting Mexican people living along the southern border of the United States.

RAIDING MEXICO

“A lot of what he [Trump] did makes total sense to me," Ramaswamy told Russel Brand in early August. “I’m saying a lot of the same things.” But, in some cases, “I’m going further than he ever did. I said I’d use the military on our southern border."

Ramaswamy’s proposal apparently involves exploiting the fentanyl crisis and using it as justification to launch drone strikes into Mexico to “eliminate” drug cartels.

As reported by Politico in April, Ramaswamy said using military force on cartels without permission from Mexico “would not be the preferred option” but we would “absolutely” be willing to do it, adding that what the cartels are doing “is a form of attack” on the United States. “If those cartels meet the test for qualifying as a domestic terrorist organization for the purpose of freezing their assets, I think that qualifies them for the US president to view them as an eligible target for the use of authorized military force.”

And what could possibly go wrong considering how much success the US has endured trying to kill its way to victory in the decades-long failure known as the drug war.

Perhaps it would be more surprising that Ramaswamy wants to take Trump’s border policies to the “next level” if he wasn't so utterly infatuated with the former president and obsessed with strengthening his legacy.

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TRUMP "THE SINGLE GREATEST" PRESIDENT IN MY LIFETIME

During an August News Nation Town Hall, Ramaswamy referred to Trump as “the single greatest president” in his lifetime.

However, the problem with Ramaswamy’s love for Trump — and a seriously gigantic red flag — is that Trump is not anti-war.

While in office, Trump amped up Obama's drone wars, boosted military spending, bombed Syria and pledged to “keep” their oil, cut up the Iran nuclear deal, and dropped the largest non nuclear bomb in America's arsenal on Afghanistan.

Trump also mulled killing Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, whereas Ramaswamy claims he wants to pardon him, and they both share the same views on Chelsea Manning, who shared classified info with Wikileaks exposing US war crimes in Iraq:

“I will pardon Julian Assange because his prosecution was fundamentally unjust,” Ramaswamy tweeted in June. “Chelsea Manning, the government officer who actually leaked the information to Assange, had ‘her’ sentence commuted by President Obama because ‘she’ was part of a politically favored class: she’s trans — yet Assange now sits in a foreign prison for doing what the DC press corps does every day. This is wrong & I will fix it. We can’t have two tiers of justice: one for trans people, one for everyone else; one for violent Antifa/BLM rioters, one for everyone else; one for Trump on government document retention, another for Biden.”

COLD WARRIOR

It’s in our “vital interest” to make sure China “doesn't control the global semi-conductor supply chain in Taiwan,” Ramaswamy said in June, adding: “until we achieve semi-conductor independence, we will ensure Taiwan is not invaded by China” by ending the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

This should be good news, right? Ramaswamy wants to end the war in Ukraine. But how, you ask? By convincing Russia to break their alliance with “our enemy” China:

“The Russia-China military partnership outmatches the US on nuclear capabilities, on hypersonic missiles, on China’s naval capacities,” Ramaswamy said, later adding: “Worst of all, through the Ukraine war, we’re actually pushing Russia further into China’s hands. So, I will end that war.”

“The top military threat we face is the Russia-China alliance,” he said during an early August interview with PBS. “Our top adversary today is communist China.”

“I’m a George Washington America First conservative,” he tweeted on August 21. “Just as Nixon opened China to win the Cold War against Russia, the next president must open Russia to defeat China, starting with a peace settlement in Ukraine.”

WE’VE BEEN HERE BEFORE

“We talk about nation building,” Ramaswamy said during the early August News Nation Town Hall. “We have a nation to build right here back at home.”

But 23 years ago, another politician running for president also made this promise:

“I think what we need to do is convince people who live in the lands they live in to build the nations,” George W. Bush said during the 2000 presidential debate with Al Gore. “Maybe I'm missing something here. I mean we're going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not.”

Three years later, he was nation-building in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

While on the campaign trail, Obama promised to end the US war in Iraq:

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”

In early 2008, Obama reiterated that he was “opposed to this war in 2002. I have been against it in 2002, 2003, 2004, 5, 6, 7, 8 and I will bring this war to an end in 2009.”

Well, the war in Iraq didn’t end. In fact, Obama added more conflicts to the tally while his other anti-war campaign promises slowly fizzled out, such as investigating torture under the Bush administration or closing down Guantanamo Bay.

Trump was a deviation from Obama and Bush in the way that he campaigned and the things he campaigned on. Unlike Obama and Bush, Trump made comments about “loving” torture and wanting to “bomb the hell” out of ISIS. Trump’s campaign — and his presidency — was US imperialism with the mask off.

And still, the bulk of his campaigning had less to do with promoting actual policy and more to do with promoting his own image as a businessman, a non-politician, and most importantly, as an “outsider” to the establishment. Yet once elected, Trump’s promises of “draining the swamp” came to an abrupt halt as he spent his first term adding Bush-era neocons like John Bolton to his cabinet while dutifully continuing all of the wars started by Bush and Obama since 9/11.

Ramaswamy, like Bush, claims he is against nation building. Like Obama, he makes comments that are passable on a surface level as anti-war. And like Trump, he is marketing himself as a businessman, a non politician, and an outsider.

With recent polling showing a majority of Americans turning against the US proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, and general burnout from other wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s not at all surprising that so many of us desperately latch on to any politician who even remotely seems to promote a message of peace.

Unfortunately, between parroting neocon talking points about Iran, praising Israel’s oppressive border policies, regurgitating cold war propaganda about China and Russia, pledging to launch drone strikes inside Mexico, and praising hawkish presidents such as Trump, Ramaswamy hardly deserves to be called anti-war.

The Left, the Election Crisis, and the 'Elephant in the Room'

By Larry Holmes

Republished from Workers World.

The head of the U.S. Postal Service is sabotaging delivery of ballots through the mail. Trump is acting like he won’t step down even if he’s defeated in the elections. And it appears that right-wing and neo-fascist forces, who have guns, are getting ready to go into the streets after the elections to support an attempted coup. Every group and activist ready to fight fascism in the streets should be making preparations right now to intervene in the event of any fascist developments in November.

The political crisis in the ruling class that is playing itself out in the presidential election is not really about Trump, any more than it’s about saving democracy, decency and all the other stuff that Democratic Party leaders are shouting about.

This crisis is about the capitalist system starting to break down and fall apart, and what must be done to rescue capitalism and U.S. imperialism from demise.

This crisis has been building for a long time.  The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the course of the crisis; it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning police station.

What will the working class do?

The working class is the elephant in the room. In the past, when communist and socialist political parties were strong, especially in developed imperialist countries with large working classes, when a political crisis developed in the ruling class, the response by a militant communist would be: “What is the working class going to do about this?”  Communist leaders like Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, or Harry Haywood would ask their comrades: “How can the working class intervene in this crisis to defend its own class interests?”

During the times when these noted revolutionaries were active in Germany, Italy, and the U.S., it was understood by all the cadre and militants in the working class that the working class was ultimately the only class that could change the big equation — and finally, end capitalism. Moreover, it was understood that if the working class did not intervene during a political crisis, something very bad might happen, like the faction within the capitalist class prevailing that was considering the desperate option of turning to fascism.

On the other hand, there was the prospect that if the working class intervened in the political crisis in a correct and strong way, the political crisis could be turned into a revolutionary crisis, meaning that the working class would exploit the differences within the capitalist class, as well as its instability and weakness, to  make a socialist revolution.

The expression “the elephant in the room” means that people are talking around the real issue because they don’t know what to do about that issue. Very few revolutionaries are asking what the working class will do about the current election crisis because the question seems irrelevant.

Notwithstanding the amazing work stoppages that many pandemic frontline workers have engaged in to protect their safety, and the many other signs that militants in the working class are pushing back and carrying out more strikes, the working-class movement as a whole in the U.S. is weak organizationally and politically.

Thus, the expectation is that the working class is not going to intervene in defense of its class interests beyond voting for the Democrats, with some even voting for Trump. Militants should be neither angry nor frustrated with workers for voting for Biden. The way that they see it, they don’t have any other choice.

For revolutionaries, the main political battle regarding support for the Democratic Party is with other forces on the left who say that they are socialists and are opposed to capitalism, but will find some rationale, mostly fear, for supporting the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party’s abandonment of the working class to globalization, austerity and pauperization, paved the way for Trumpism. The Democrats will not change, cannot change, and exist these days mostly to co-opt movements and then kill them.

The only way that the working class is going to find a way out of being held hostage to the Democrats is to begin learning how to organize as a class and act like a class that is independent of the capitalist political parties. This is true, not only in relation to the electoral struggle, but even more importantly, to the full rebirth of the class struggle against capitalism. This rebirth is already underway. However, it will not advance to the next level without the intervention of revolutionary class-conscious militants.

There’s no end to the questions surrounding the election crisis. What’s going to happen before the elections? What’s going to happen during and after the elections? How can progressives and revolutionaries respond to any development? From the perspective of a Marxist-Leninist, the biggest question is still: What can be done to insure that the U.S. working class begins to do all that is necessary to intervene in a crisis? Not now when it’s too weak, but soon, and the sooner the better.

Even in countries where the labor movement is close to one of the capitalist political parties, or there is a social democratic party that mostly supports what the capitalists want it to support, if an attempted coup or a fascist attack occurs the labor movement calls a general strike.

The election crisis should serve as a wake-up call. Yes, the working-class movement is weak. But revolutionaries can no longer afford to use that as an excuse to remove the working class from the discussion. Once we do that, we have surrendered.  Whatever ideas or demands revolutionaries put forward, they are of only symbolic and educational value if there is no army capable of fighting and defeating the enemy. That army is the working class, and the battlefield is the class struggle.

It should come as no surprise that many people, especially women, are saddened by the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and are worried about who Trump will choose to replace her. When the working class is not organized as a class to defend its own class interests, who else can the people turn to in order to defend themselves but politicians and important individuals?

How did this happen to the working class?

Over a long period that began after the U.S. established itself as the dominant imperialist power in the world, generally speaking, the leaders of the labor movement – who were once relatively militant, and some even anti-capitalist — underwent a transformation that rendered them in many cases little more than appendages to the capitalist system.

Explaining how this happened over the course of the past three-quarters of a century is too much to go over here. But make a note:  How this happened should be studied and discussed. It’s important for every militant to know what happened.

Also important to know is that appearing to become an appendage to the system and the status quo is neither a natural nor a permanent state for the organized labor movement. It is an aberration that must — and will – be reversed. The conditions that led to the conservatism of the labor movement no longer exist, and as such, their conservatism is going to be replaced with revolutionary class struggle.

It should be noted that by and large, most of the left, including organizations that consider themselves Marxist and even revolutionary, have tended to base themselves on movements and struggles that were incorrectly seen as separate from the working class and the labor unions. The reason for this is that the labor movement seemed dormant.

Organizing and activity that seemed friendly to anti-capitalist views and organizational recruitment existed in the antiwar movement — and to some extent in the anti-racist movement and the women’s and LGBTQ2S+ movements. In truth, all of these movements are different fronts of the working-class movement, although that is not how they are viewed in most cases.

This unfortunate view is a product of the political weakness of the existing working-class movement. It’s time for such narrow and exclusionary views to give way to more inclusive and revolutionary views of who and what make up the working class today.

To some extent, the origins of these narrow and false ideas about what the working class is and who is in the labor movement are products of a tacit (and sometimes not so tacit) agreement that union officials and leftists made after the anti-communist witch hunt – which forced many communists and socialists out of the unions – began to lift somewhat in the early 1960s.

The agreement was this: Radicals must stay out of the labor unions and refrain from trying to influence the working class with their radical ideas.  In exchange for agreeing to stay away from the working class, progressives and radicals could organize against the war in Vietnam and around other issues, but apart from obtaining some labor endorsements and having a few labor speakers at a rally, antiwar organizers were to stay away from the workers.

Opening of struggle over need for strikes

The examples of professional athletes protesting racism by refusing to play, and health care workers, Whole Foods and Amazon workers, and other workers walking off the job to protest being forced to work in unsafe conditions, has ignited a new struggle within and outside the organized labor movement over the need to carry out more and bigger work stoppages, and bring back the general strike.

Around Labor Day, a group of about 40 regional labor unions representing millions of workers issued a statement calling for conducting mass, nationwide work stoppages in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. While no concrete plans or dates for these actions has been announced, this development is a clear challenge to the conservative top leadership of the AFL-CIO and the unions that formed Change To Win.

This is good news, and it’s about time. These developments in the labor movement must be supported, joined, and pushed strongly by everyone who considers themselves progressive. It is nothing less than scandalous — and unacceptable — that the AFL-CIO’s top leadership has done little more than release a statement or two in response to the worldwide uprising sparked by the police murder of George Floyd in May, and the murders of others like Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.

How is it possible that millions of people could be marching in the streets day after day on every continent, and yet the leaders of the U.S. labor movement cannot bring themselves to organize a one-hour nationwide work stoppage in support of this uprising?

A strategy to fuse all movements into a new working-class movement

 The scope of the election crisis is too big.  The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic is too big.  The scope of the capitalist crisis is too big.  And the scope of the racist attacks, whether by the police, FBI, or fascists, is too big to be addressed without a serious strategy towards the development of a revitalized working-class movement.  The attacks on the working class that are already underway — with much more to come — are too big for anti-capitalist radicals not to have such a strategy.

No matter how long it takes, or how many obstacles there may be, it is imperative that a fusion of the mass movement in the streets develop against racism and fascism, and that it include all sectors of the working class that are either not organized or are under-organized: migrant workers, incarcerated workers, gig workers, street vendors, sex workers, the unemployed, people with disabilities, the homeless, the most oppressed people — and the organized labor movement.

It should be understood that the global uprising against racism this past spring and summer was, at its root, a working-class uprising.  The participants may not have  been conscious of this — and the uprising was not called in the name of the working class. But that does not change the fact that it was the multinational working class protesting in the streets. Going forward, future uprisings will be more class-conscious, with more of the many sectors of the working class in motion.

This fusion must come from below, and must not be led by the Democratic Party, or any other organization that is tied to the status quo and is an obstacle to real struggle. It is not necessary, and, in fact, it would be a mistake for the movement in the streets, or any other section of the working class that is not in the organized labor movement, to subordinate itself to conservative labor leaders.

The goal of fusion is to expand the working-class movement, to tear down the boundaries and antiquated conceptions that limit and divide the working class, and to push the entire working class in a revolutionary direction.

The formation of Workers Assemblies and a Workers Assembly movement may prove very helpful in this process

Whatever happens on or after Nov. 3, organizing the working class is the prize we must work for and stay focused on. We should be confident about our victory.

Larry Holmes is First Secretary of Workers World Party.

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.

Learning from our Elders: Kwame Somburu and Scientific Socialism

By Colin Jenkins

A dear friend of mine passed away in 2016. He was a lifelong revolutionary activist and quite possibly the most interesting man in the world (sorry, Dos Equis guy). His name was Kwame Somburu, formerly Paul Boutelle.

I came into Kwame's life through chance when, after a journey that resembled more than a dozen lifetimes, his eclectic path led him to Albany, NY. It was 2012, and Kwame was well into his 70s when he entered the capital district activist scene. He was a bit of an enigma, presenting a uniquely powerful blend of principled conviction and carefree humor. Unlike many activists, he was immediately lovable; not bitter, not rancorous, not pushy, and not self-inflated. He was grizzled, yes, but in an old-school way, where you could almost see the wisdom oozing from his pores. He had every reason in the world to possess a runaway ego, but nonetheless carried a calm humility that could not be mistaken. In an oft-aimless world, he was the personification of guidance.

Kwame undoubtedly carried the emotional scars of growing up Black in America, as well as the spiritual exhaustion of being on the front lines of struggle for five decades. Yet he was bulletproof, unfazed by the cruel confines of American society, which he had long broken from in his push to lead a fierce and principled revolution against the roots of this society: capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy.

Kwame's list of achievements and experiences would require an entire book to do them justice. He had run for public office nine times throughout the 60s and 70s, once as the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. He spent these decades speaking on the street corners of Oakland and Harlem, giving lectures at Oxford and the London School of Economics, and appearing on numerous TV and radio shows, most notably partaking in a contentious debate with William F. Buckley in 1968 on Buckley's popular show, Firing Line.

Kwame was active in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (early 60s), participated in the 1963 March on Washington, co-founded Afro-Americans Against the War in Vietnam (1965), spoke at numerous Black Power Conferences through the 60s, and assisted in organizing 400,000 people from the Native Sioux, Puerto Rican, and African-American communities to rally at the United Nations in 1967.

In 1970, Kwame served as the chairman of the Committee of Black Americans for Truth About the Middle East, an organization that spoke out against the U.S.-supported crimes of the Israeli government. Representing an early voice in support of the Palestinian struggle, Kwame toured Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria as a guest of the General Union of Palestine Students. In 1993, Kwame engaged in a speaking tour throughout Europe to discuss Malcolm X, the film about his life, and in defense of Black Nationalism and Socialism.

Despite all of this, Kwame's most endearing quality was his ability to inject his principles into humor. After living a few years in upstate New York, he regularly joked that there was "only one kind of white supremacy that cannot be denied…snow." He always made a point to immediately correct someone's usage of "history" by responding with, "it's herstory…because you can't have man without womb-man." He talked about his nationally televised appearance-turned-debate with William F. Buckley like a pugilist would talk about an old street fight in their prime: "Buckley had no idea how to respond to historically-informed analysis…he was a mental midget."

Kwame was proud of his performance on Buckley's show [ watch the entire episode here -Eds.], and rightfully so. He would encourage folks to watch it whenever he had the chance. He did this not in a boastful or braggadocios manner, but in a way that was meant to empower those of us in the trenches-as if to say, "here I was, a Black man in the belly of the beast and from modest beginnings, largely self-taught, staring down an Ivy League-educated white man and conservative icon who came from one of the most privileged paths imaginable." On national television. And not only staring down, but bodying on all levels-intellectually, ideologically, logically, historically, and morally, ala Malcolm X at the Oxford debates.

He masterfully defended the Cuban revolution to Buckley, justifying the harsh treatment of Cuban reactionaries by explaining that if a people's revolution occurred in the US, "I'm sure there will be a lot of Mississippi sheriffs who would be put on trial." To counter Buckley's misrepresentation of socialism, Kwame accurately described his party as "a party which represents social forces that desire change" due to a deadly and exploitative capitalist system and its embryonic Native genocide and "500-year slave trade" that resulted in the deaths of "100 million black people." When pressured further about his beliefs, Kwame brilliantly flipped the script, telling Buckley, "What are you representing? You're representing George Washington, you're representing Custer, you're representing an imperialist, oppressive, racist system. So, don't attack socialism on the assumption that the system you represent-which is full of lies, hypocrisy, and murder-has been so perfect. The only thing capitalism has done is to provide opportunists like yourself with the opportunity to be parasites on the backs of oppressed people." When Buckley tried to shut Kwame down by claiming, "American Negroes are free," and that he would "get more Negro votes" if he ran, Kwame nailed the coffin by snapping, "I'm sure of one thing… if you went down to Mississippi and told Black people they were free, you would be running and it wouldn't be for office."

During our time together, Kwame described his ideological development in his own words: "In 1960, after a few years of independent study (from a scientific perspective) in many and varied historical/contemporary areas, but mainly African and African American history, the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, and acquired knowledge from life experiences, I declared myself to be a Black Nationalist-class definition-and a Scientific Socialist." Within a multitude of wisdom and guidance, it dawned on me that this unassuming portion was perhaps his most important-scientific socialism.

Or maybe it wasn't so unassuming. When describing his political orientation, Kwame was intent on always including "scientific" before socialist. Whenever bluntly asked if he was a socialist, Kwame would quickly respond "scientific socialist," always with an emphasis on the scientific part. If engaged in a political or theoretical discussion, he would sometimes refer to socialism, only to quickly correct himself with a "that is, scientific socialism." He wanted folks to understand that socialism goes deeper than utopian idealism; that it is rooted in a scientific, materialist analysis. It's safe to say the commitment to this message was obsessive. So much so that it may have been easy for many to view it as a trivial quirk.

And while I always appreciated his relentless effort of being literal, I too underestimated the importance of the emphasis. That was until 2015, when Bernie Sanders emerged as a formidable candidate for president.

To those of us in radical circles, Bernie was always viewed as an interesting member of the entrenched political class-a man who spent his entire career as a U.S. Senator flopping back and forth between maintaining the imperialist state and serving as a thorn in the side of wealthy capitalists. Bernie was known for his Senate hearings, where he would routinely grill a CEO or financier, denounce economic inequality and poverty, and put on a valiant show in the name of morality. In a bit of a stretch and with some exaggeration, he could be given some credit for helping to spark the Occupy movement. However, not a whole lot beyond that. Despite his entertaining interludes, capitalism and its war machine always continued unabated, running roughshod over much of the world and many Americans.

Despite his predictable impotence while serving as a cog in a rotten machine, Bernie's emergence onto the national stage was beneficial in one way: It paved the way for the fateful return of the term "socialism." As a result, socialism has entered public discourse once again, millennials in droves are now referring to themselves as socialists, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have experienced historic swelling in their ranks, from 5,000 members in 2016 to 40,000 in 2018 , and it led The Guardian to ask the question, " Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America ?" even several months before the 2016 election. This development also indirectly helped authentic socialist candidates, like the Socialist Party USA's (SP-USA) Mimi Soltysik, the Party for Socialism and Liberation's (PSL) Gloria La Riva, and the Workers World Party's (WWP) Monica Moorehead to gain more momentum in their abbreviated tours across the country.

However, along with this sudden resurgence has been a lot of backlash and confusion. The backlash has come in the form of sensationalist tactics that are undoubtedly the product of an intentionally dumbed-down society. Red-baiting is being deployed from both sides of mainstream politics-by conservatives through their typical anti-intellectual and ahistorical knee-jerk reactions, and by liberals through a bizarre and equally ahistorical conflation of Trump, Russia, and Communism, which has reached the absurd level of associating the hyper-capitalist boss, Trump, with the hammer and sickle, a symbol that stands for industrial and agricultural workers uniting in opposition to capitalist bosses. The latter development has led to the chronic overuse of the term "democratic socialism"-a redundancy born of red-scare and cold-war propaganda-by those who moonlight in liberal spaces.

The confusion has come in the form of hordes of young people embracing a term that they have not researched or read up on. If you ask a few dozen, newly-ordained "socialists" in the United States what socialism is, you may get a dozen different answers. Many will be sure to insist that "socialism is not communism!" out of a residual fear still emanating from corporate media. Many describe socialism as nothing more than New-Deal liberalism, a tame form of capitalism that includes stronger social safety nets - an explanation surely rooted in the Sanders candidacy and Bernie himself. Others may give half-baked answers, vaguely referring to Nordic countries, cooperative business models, and even Guaranteed Basic Incomes in an attempt to separate themselves from the confusion.

In coming full circle, the answer to this backlash and confusion is found in my late friend, Kwame Somburu, or more specifically in his unapologetic, principled, and informed embrace of scientific socialism: The use of scientific methods, rooted in the work of Karl Marx (a materialist conception of history and dialectical materialism), that adequately analyze both the structure and evolutionary functioning of the capitalist system to expose inherent contradictions, exploitative and alienating underpinnings, surplus value, and the laws of accumulation of capital.

In "plain, proletarian English," scientific socialism is genuine socialism-an accurate breakdown of capitalism and a realization that it must come to an end if we have any hopes of living in a just and sustainable world. It means a constant, deliberate focus on pinpointing and destroying all forms of oppression, or as Kwame succinctly put it, "analysis of capitalism/imperialism, fascism, racism, and colonialism" with the purpose of "worker's revolution, colonial revolution, self-determination for all peoples, and relevant contribution towards a working-class world revolution." This does not mean a tightly monitored form of capitalism; it means no more capitalism. It does not mean government control; it means worker control of the means of production. It does not mean guaranteed income for all; it means workers, families, and communities finally enjoying the fruits of our labor. It does not mean "bread lines"; it means reducing massive amounts of waste through community-run production and the de-commodification of basic human needs. It does not mean equality; it means justice.

Although he never waned, Kwame would be rejuvenated by recent developments. But he would also be praising the merits of scientific socialism like never before. In a time of confusion, let's follow Kwame.

This was originally published at Monthly Review .

A Humanist Capitalism?: Dissecting Andrew Yang's 2020 Presidential Platform

By Charles Wofford

One of the most delightful experiences I've had as a leftist is when I hear someone who has no apparent class consciousness express, seemingly from nowhere, a remarkably perceptive comment on class society. I recall a coworker once mentioning aloud how strange it was that we were all so frightened of the boss and what they might do to us. Entrepreneur and 2020 democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang of Venture for America has given us another example with his essay, " Humanity is more important than money - it's time for capitalism to get an upgrade ." Throughout the article, Yang advocates for a new capitalism, based on three principles: that humanity is more important than money, that the individual person ought to be the unit of the economy rather than the dollar, and that markets exist to serve "common goals and values." In the end, Yang explicitly calls for federal government intervention to "reorganize the economy."

There is little to disagree with in Yang's moral analysis and his point that capitalism does not serve the interests of the great mass of people. To be clear, I also think the government ought to reorganize the society along more egalitarian lines. But Yang also appeals to certain widely accepted economic beliefs about the "invisible hand," and self-interest and competition being the main drivers of economic prosperity. As a result, Yang's case is subject to the same critique that Marx made of the classical political economists in his 1844 economic manuscripts :

"Political economy starts with the fact of private property; it does not explain it to us. It expresses in general, abstract formulas the material process through which private property actually passes, and these formulas it then takes for laws. It does not comprehend these laws - i.e., it does not demonstrate how they arise from the very nature of private property...Precisely because political economy does not grasp the way the movement is connected, it was possible to oppose, for instance, the doctrine of competition to the doctrine of monopoly, the doctrine of craft freedom to the doctrine of the guild..."

Translation: Like the classical political economists, Yang looks at the capitalist world in which we live and simply takes it as a natural order, whose economic tendencies are unchanging laws. Because he does not understand the historical origins of the divisions of labor that make up capitalism, Yang can posit such oxymorons as "human-centered capitalism." Because he sees capitalism in the misleading and pedantic terms of supply-and-demand ("capitalism prioritizes what the world does more of") he thinks we need to merely demand a more just world and capitalism will provide it. Yang is clearly not involved in activist spaces, otherwise he would know that people have been making radically humanist and egalitarian political demands for longer than capitalism has been around, and at no time has capitalism worked toward those goals. If Yang read up on the founding of the United States (particularly Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10), he would know that the founding fathers intended this anti-egalitarianism. If Yang read up on Hamilton, he would know that many founding fathers thought the wealthy were the natural representatives of all people - a complete fabrication and a lie.

Yang argues for a conception of markets that meet human needs rather than compelling humans to meet the needs of markets. But then he talks about how we can change our behavior as economic subjects in order for the market to provide what we want. The contradiction seems lost on him: if markets are to be geared toward human need, then the question is not an economic one, but a political one. The question is not "how do we read the market?" The real question is "how do we get the power to create a human-centric society?" And this is the conceptual problem behind Universal Basic Income (UBI). Yang justifies it in terms of the productivity it may increase. But that's not a humanist concern; it is a capitalist-economic concern.

A brief history of how capitalist relations came to be is in order. Yang never defines exactly what he means by capitalism, but he suggests that it goes back over 5,000 years, conflating it with the invention of money. In reality, the notion of capitalism - private, for-profit ownership of industry with wage labor and commodity production - has its origins in 17th-century England. Over the centuries the city dwellers of the country - who were mostly merchants and exchangers by profession - had acquired so much money, and thereby power, that they were able to appropriate common-owned land in England. Up until the late 18th century, most of the land in England was commons: the people who lived there had rights to the land irrespective of whatever the "owner" may wish to do with it. Modern concepts of ownership did not exist at the time. As the merchants in the cities grew more wealthy, they bought out or often outright stole commons land in order to expand their holdings, and thereby their businesses. By the late 18th century, the merchant class (who Marx called the bourgeoisie, which literally just means "city-dweller") had bought parliament itself, and started passing parliamentary laws of enclosure to finish up the long consolidation process the bourgeoisie had begun over 100 years prior. At the end of this process, a tiny number of people concentrated in the cities owned some 98% of the land and industry in the UK. 99% of the population, formerly peasants, had to go work for them in a condition called "employment" in order to live. They were now wage laborers: the proletariat. This is the origins of what we now call capitalism. It did not come about through some peaceful transition, but through a violent process of robbery by a small class of an entire country. One of the relevant points to take from this history is that the peasants of England did not voluntarily employ themselves to the nascent bourgeoisie. They were compelled to go to work in the factories because they had been robbed of their own access to the means of existence. None of this has anything to do with freedom; it is all coercion.

The standard economic view of money is that it is a neutral means of exchange. However, if any one individual or clique acquires enough money then they may purchase and bribe politicians, control entire fields of media coverage giving them huge influence on political opinion, and they may commit horrible crimes with impunity because no one will take them to court, etc. In short, having enough money allows one to shape society to one's whims at the expense of others. The conclusion is that money is not merely a neutral means of exchange; it is a form of social power. A society focused around human need, and not markets and money, would therefore have, at the very least, strict limits on the amount of money any individual may possess. Ideally, it would abolish money altogether. But this is against the capitalist premise, which is about free exchange.

With this in mind, where does Yang propose that the government get the power to do these things that he suggests? Short of forcibly expropriating the wealth of the 1%, I do not see a way. Money is a form of social power, and the government is a prime target for that power. Yang has perhaps watched one too many episodes of the television show The West Wing, which shows some fairy-tale vision of politics as an honest journey of visionaries. Yang does not seem to understand that it's all about accumulation of wealth, exploitation of resources, the maintenance of power systems, and that capitalist society is unavoidably inhuman.

David Harvey gives a beautiful example that may help to illustrate the point. In almost every major city in the world today one can find thousands of high-rise condominiums existing in the same city as thousands of homeless people. The condos are empty except for a few weeks of the year. They were not purchased to be lived in; they were purchased to be speculated on in a housing market. This housing market grew to such proportions and has been given such reign that it caused a housing crisis which foreclosed some 4 million people of their homes. Those who lost their homes are not the same people who speculated on the housing market; those people are doing just fine. What does this show? Precisely that the market itself, if allowed to grow unchecked, may wreak havoc upon a society; a truism that seems obvious to everyone except business people and economists.

Ok, so we control the market via government regulation. But those market owners do not like that, and they lobby against regulation laws, they bribe politicians, they control the media discourse etc. Those without the money do not have any real recourse within the system to stop them, for the system has been hijacked via its own methods. So it's not as simple as "well, the government can just do this." The government has long ago been bought out by the capitalists, and politics is treated like another market now. Since the 1980s laws have been made such that it is all but impossible to reregulate the markets. The solution is that we need a completely new system, because "capitalist democracy" (so-called) has fallen past the event horizon into unworkability. This means the end of capitalism, and it means a newer, more direct, less representational form of government. It means public banking rather than private banking. It means the redistribution of wealth from those at the top who have robbed from all of humanity through a coercive system. Interestingly, this would also entail smaller government in many ways, as institutions like the FBI, the CIA, the military industrial complex, and others which exist to protect the status quo would be abolished. Just to drive the nail home, it would also mean the abolition of the Constitution and its replacing with something more progressive and centered around human values rather than defending the "minority of the opulent." (Madison)

Harvey rightly blasts the UBI idea as simply a front for Silicon Valley to get more effective demand for their products. The UBI is really a subsidy to Silicon Valley, not a method of providing for the people. That Yang is an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley is no coincidence.

In other ways, Yang's entrepreneurial training implicates him in the very values he attempts to refute. His "human-centered capitalism" is not a society that is in fact based on human need, but simply around the old fallacy of "meritocracy." A moment's reflection would tell us that a truly humane society would not be meritocratic, as the notion of "merit" is inherently politically implicated. Who defines what counts as merit? A truly humanist society would allow all people the means to develop to their fullest potential on their own terms.

Yang proposes a "parallel economy around social good." The capitalist economy would simply allow this parallel economy to get plump before taking it over. That is exactly what the capitalists are currently doing with the internet. If Yang's "parallel economy" were possible, it wouldn't be needed.

Yang writes, "Most entrepreneurs, technologists and young people I know are chomping at the bit to work on our problems." Our problems are known and have been known for at least 100 years. The problem is capitalism: private control over the means of production. The solution is socialism: worker control over the means of production. The means are popular revolution, which is above and beyond electoral politics. Unless and until you are speaking that language, your "human-centric" ideology is just a sham. Technology will not save us on its own; otherwise it would already have done so.

Lastly is Yang's line about how a humanist capitalism could "spur unprecedented levels of social activity without spending that much." This sounds like the opposite of a humanistic anything, and very capitalist. Why? Because Yang is thinking of more ways to get people to work more, produce more, engage in more activity. But we are already working ourselves to death; American worker productivity is higher than it's ever been. We don't need new ways to do more; we need new ways to do less. We need a new concept of what it means to "contribute" to society. A humanist society would not be obsessed with getting people to work, producing, exchanging, etc. but would rather leave them in relative peace while providing at least for their basic needs. But this is what the entrepreneur is trained to do: produce more, take more risks, and be more daring in the market. In this mindset, people are inherently viewed as commodities, tools to be used by the entrepreneur. We need to move beyond capitalist thinking if we are to move beyond the problems of capitalism.

In conclusion, Mr. Yang's proposed solutions are impressive to those armchair theorists and liberals who lack a deeper understanding of capitalism. They will not solve our problems. They may, in fact, empower capitalism to appropriate even more of our lives. I cannot help but suspect that Mr. Yang is just the liberal version of Donald Trump: the "successful" businessman who is "outside the system." Yang is noticing that there is a political market for progressive values and he is attempting to cash in on it.

He is, after all, an entrepreneur. But treating politics like a business is part of our problem. We've seen how capitalism can posture around the idea of "freedom." Do we not think it could do the same with ideas like "humanism?"

Charles Wofford is an activist and PhD student in historical musicology.