Socialism burst on the American political scene with Sanders’ strong bid for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. Not a one-time fluke, Sanders currently ranks at the top of the crowded 2020 Democratic field.

[GUS SPOILER ALERT — BERNIE WAS SHAFTED ONCE MORE IN 2020, THIS TIME BY JOE BIDEN-THE-CROOK AND THE "DEEP STATE". IN 2024, BERNIE SUPPORTED KAMALA (HARRIS) WHO, TO SAY THE LEAST, WAS VERY ENTHUSIASTIC WITH VERY LITTLE ELSE TO SELL THAN ANTI-SEXISM AND ANTI-RACISM]

    By: Paul R. Gregory

The 2018 elections of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Rashida Tlaib to the House added momentum to the socialist chic sweeping the country.  In the past few years, candidates identifying themselves as socialist have won more than 50 state and municipal offices, the latest being the election of five candidates to the Chicago city council.

[GUS NOTE: AOC SEEMS TO BE CONFLICTED AND UNHINGED]

Sanders has spent a long political career obfuscating his true political beliefs. The media rarely pushes back on his standard platitudes, such as “we must create an economy that works for all, not just the very wealthy.” His two-minute video, promising to explain his brand of socialism, leaves the viewer clueless, probably deliberately. Sanders insists that he is not a “socialist” but a “Democratic Socialist,” as if the difference is self-explanatory. When pressed further about his Democratic Socialism, he resorts to filibustering about the Scandinavian-like paradise of free medicine and education, guaranteed jobs, livable wages, and other free things he intends to introduce when elected. He does not bother to note that the Nordic states rank among the most free-enterprise economies of the globe.

Understanding what Sanders means by Democratic Socialism has taken on a sense of urgency with his candidacy. He is bolstered by positive views of socialism among majorities of young people and Democrats. His primary opponents line up to sign on to a Green New Deal, increased marginal tax rates, Sanders’ own “Medicare-for-all,” and other “progressive” measures. Oddly, socialist candidate Sanders has proven to be a formidable fundraiser.

The Democratic Socialists of America is America’s largest socialist party. It has grown from 6,000 to 60,000 dues-paying members in the last eight years and counts two members of Congress – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Rashida Tlaib -- in its ranks. AOC has become a media favorite and her Green New Deal has become a mainstay of the progressive agenda.

Unlike Sanders, the Democratic Socialists are not reticent to explain in detail their core principles in party brochures and in-house periodicals, such as The Jacobin and The Socialist Call.  In writing for a sympathetic audience, they are candid in spelling out the principles of their brand of Democratic Socialism, which include:

First, Democratic Socialism wants more than an expansive welfare state.  In their writings, Democratic Socialists emphasize that their brand “is not just New Deal liberalism.” It must go beyond checking the worst of capitalism with progressive legislation.  Progressive gains, they argue, are inevitably transitory and will be reversed as long as the economy remains organized around capitalist profits.

Second, capitalism is a zero-sum game in which the rich get richer by making the poor and working class worse off. Capitalist profits are based on the exploitation of labor. The less the worker gets, the higher the capitalist’s profit. Capitalism is a “race to the bottom” as capitalists seek out the lowest wages and thereby lower living standards the world over. In addition, capital strike -- the withholding of investment or threats to take capital elsewhere -- gives the capitalists “power to determine whether or not we have jobs and thus the ability to provide for ourselves.”

Third, the poor, working class, and other underdogs can overturn the capitalist order only if they are organized. Grass-roots organizing begins with community organizers and then moves up the chain. As long as workers, the poor, minorities, women, LGBT communities, immigrants, and the unemployed remain divided, capitalists will continue to enjoy their power advantage. In their fight against economic exploitation, mass incarceration, police brutality, gender violence, LGBT intolerance, job and housing discrimination, and deportations, “normal people — when they’re not organized — have next to no power.”

Fourth and most important, capital must be publicly owned because there is no real democracy with private ownership of capital. Democratic Socialists grant that the poor and working class can vote for progressive causes, but capitalists can counter this by using their wealth to bury progressive legislation. “As long as a handful of elite capitalists get to call the shots, the playing field will be tilted in their favor.” The Democratic Socialist solution: Transfer capital to worker or municipal ownership. Corporations must be owned and controlled by workers or directed by state planners or regulators. Finance should be nationalized so that major investment decisions are made by public authorities. How Democratic Socialists will go about transferring private capital to “true democratic control” is unclear, because the “people have to decide.”

https://www.hoover.org/research/how-socialist-bernie-sanders

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MEANWHILE:

David North, the chairman of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site and of the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) in the United States, spoke at book launches in Sydney and Melbourne over the past week. The events were part of a visit by North, who has played a leading role in the world Trotskyist movement for more than 50 years, to the SEP in Australia.

The meetings, last Saturday in Sydney and the previous Wednesday in Melbourne, were well attended, testifying to a growing interest in a socialist and revolutionary perspective.

The two books that were launched, The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide and Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War, provide an outline of the global crisis of capitalism, its origins and a genuine socialist alternative. 

In his opening remarks at the Sydney book launch, North placed the analysis in the books and today’s situation in a broader historical context. 

It was impossible, he stated, to understand the horrors of the Israeli genocide in Gaza without an examination of the tragedies of the 20th century, including the Nazi Holocaust of European Jewry, facilitated by the betrayals of Stalinism, which had helped the reactionary Zionist movement acquire a mass base of support. Similarly, the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine was rooted in developments stemming from Stalinism’s final betrayal, its 1991 liquidation of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism.

North called attention to recent attacks on Trotskyism, citing a work by British academic John Kelly, who denounces its insistence that the alternatives confronting humanity are “socialism or barbarism.” Instead, Kelly asserts the ongoing viability of social reforms within the framework of capitalism.

North outlined the bankruptcy of these claims, advanced by political opponents of a socialist and revolutionary perspective. The agenda of the ruling elite, represented in the US by the fascist Donald Trump, was “the elimination of all that remains of social reform, the repudiation of the Constitution, mass deportations in the United States, unlimited powers to a president… So who can seriously claim that the Trotskyist depiction of this epoch as the death agony of capitalism is inaccurate?”

North emphasised that this program, which was not unique to the ruling elite in the US, but was being implemented by capitalist governments everywhere, would produce growing opposition. 

“We are living today in very serious times,” he said, noting the immense dangers posed. However, the globalisation of production, the growth of the working class and technological advances had created unprecedented conditions for the unification of working-class struggle on a global scale. The critical issue, he stressed, was the crisis of revolutionary leadership, which had to be overcome by the building of the ICFI and its sections, including the SEP in Australia. 

Following North’s opening remarks, a panel discussion began with him answering questions about his books from SEP (Australia) Secretary Cheryl Crisp and Assistant National Secretary Max Boddy.

Boddy asked why the ICFI had initiated its annual online international May Day rallies in 2014, the opening reports of which are contained in Sounding the Alarm: Socialism Against War. 

In reply, North pointed not only to the technical possibilities of the internet, but the ICFI’s identification of a growth of imperialist militarism following the 2008 global financial crisis. The Trotskyist movement had identified parallels between that period and the one preceding the outbreak of World War One. 

Boddy asked North to respond to the claims, advanced particularly in academia and at the universities, that Marx’s analysis was no longer relevant in an era of “diverse identities.”

North stressed Marx’s enduring relevance, including his identification of the “objective basis of socialist revolution,” which continued to be vindicated in developments today. North reviewed the manner in which Marxism had formed the basis of the greatest revolution in history to date, the October 1917 socialist revolution in Russia. 

Crisp noted that one of the speeches in The Logic of Zionism addressed the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell, who had taken his life in public protest against the genocide. Crisp asked North to comment on his polemic against those who had glorified Bushnell’s tragic suicide as a viable form of political action. 

North drew a parallel with the 1938 murder of a Nazi official in Paris by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. Trotsky had been alone in defending Grynszpan. But he had explained, as the IC had decades later in the case of Bushnell, that such individual actions did nothing to raise the political consciousness and understanding of the working class, the only means of effecting a revolutionary transformation of society.

In Melbourne, North fielded a range of questions from the audience, including how and why Trump had won the presidential election, how the fight for social equality could be advanced, and about the situation within Israel itself.

In his concluding remarks at both events, North urged those in attendance, hostile to the deepening capitalist barbarism, to become active participants in the fight for socialism, by joining the SEP.

Seventy-five copies of the two books that North launched were sold, and attendees were able to speak to the author, who signed his works at both events. Overall, more than $2,300 in literature was purchased.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/12/17/cazp-d17.html

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