[D66] What does Bernie Sanders mean by political revolution, anyway?

[A.OUT]

louisproyect.org:

January 16, 2020
What does Bernie Sanders mean by political revolution, anyway?
Filed under: Bernie Sanders,Jacobin — louisproyect @ 9:42 pm

Something’s been nagging away at me for the longest time. I was reminded 
of it when reading Daniel Denvir’s “What a Bernie Sanders Presidency 
Would Look Like”, article number 7,631 reminding Jacobin’s readers to 
vote for the democratic socialist. He writes:

Sanders consistently argues, “Beating Trump is not good enough.” This is 
an understatement. The world quite literally depends upon a political 
revolution. And only Sanders has a plan for that.

So, what exactly does a political revolution involve? Outside of the 
Trotskyist movement, Marxism does not refer at all to such a phenomenon. 
Whether it is people who come out of the pro-Moscow, pro-Beijing, or 
*pro-Coyoacán cathedrals*, the word revolution stands on its own. It is 
qualified by bourgeois or socialist, with France 1789 or Russia 1917 
being accepted by all Marxists as examples of such revolutions.

For Trotsky’s followers, the term political revolution entered the 
vocabulary as a way of describing mass movements trying to overturn 
Stalinist bureaucracies but that left post-capitalist economic 
structures intact. Suffice it to say that there have only been attempts 
at consummating a political revolution, such as Czechoslovakia in 1968. 
Generally, such movements have either petered out or been suppressed, 
leaving behind a passive, undemocratic, neoliberal regime in their place.

You can find numerous references to political revolution in Jacobin, a 
journal that, in its fan-boy (except for Meagan Day) devotion to Bernie 
Sanders, refers to it as constantly and as fervently as Maoist 
newspapers of the 1960s referred to the dictatorship of the proletariat.

For Branco Marcetic, it is tantamount to seizing power as indicated by 
the title of his article “Bernie’s First Political Revolution” that puts 
his election as Mayor of Burlington in 1981 almost on the same level as 
Fidel Castro riding victoriously on a tank into Havana in 1960. A “a 
deeply entrenched city establishment” was replaced by one that would 
“place that power in the hands of the working people of the city”, 
according to Sanders—making it sound like the Paris Commune to continue 
with the analogies. Sanders did push through some badly needed reforms, 
such as adjusting the property tax burden to fall more on corporations 
than on homeowners. While the local New England Telephone Company was 
probably pissed off about paying higher property taxes, I doubt that 
they worried much about being nationalized like the oil refineries in 
Castro’s Cuba. When Shell Oil refused to pay the new, higher taxes 
needed to build socialism, he made their refinery public property. 
That’s what you call a real revolution.

For Keeanga-Yamahtta and Taylor Maurice Mitchell, the political 
revolution was the election campaign of Working Families Party (WFP) 
candidates Kendra Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke who were running for city 
council in Philadelphia last November. Brooks and O’Rourke promised 
“affordable housing, school funding, wages, and a local Green New Deal.” 
I am not exactly sure if promising “wages” is particularly revolutionary 
but perhaps the Jacobin authors were just overlooked by the eagle-eyed 
editorial assistants at America’s leading democratic socialist journal. 
With respect to the WFP, I don’t want to sound like a Debbie Downer but 
it is not exactly the kind of party that has revolution on the agenda, 
either in Sandernista or Marxist terms. In 2018, the NY WFP, the most 
powerful in the country, allowed Andrew Cuomo’s name to appear on their 
ballot. To return the favor, he pushed for a new law that would make 
getting ballot status so onerous that it effectively shut off the 
electoral access to any party to the DP’s left.

In Jacobin’s most recent contribution to political revolution theory, 
Chris Maisano maintains that “If we want to make Bernie Sanders’s 
political revolution a reality, we can’t just propose bold policies to 
make people’s lives better — we have to rebuild popular confidence in 
the possibilities of politics itself. And we can’t rebuild that 
confidence without democratizing the United States’s decidedly 
undemocratic political institutions.”

Written as a way of avoiding Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to be elected, 
Maisano urges the Sandernista movement to avoid his big mistake: tending 
not “to foreground a vision of radical democratic reform and popular 
political empowerment.” Yes, Corbyn did propose economic benefits to the 
working-class but as long as they remained alienated from electoral 
politics, there was always the danger that they would vote for a slug 
like Boris Johnson. To avoid Donald Trump beating Bernie Sanders in 
2020, it is not sufficient to call for Medicare for all. You must 
energize the masses, something that Sanders has made happen:

Sanders has made a massive contribution to the cause of political 
regeneration by introducing the concept of “political revolution” to 
American political discourse. This is the sort of overarching, 
integrating theme the Corbynite project lacked and which the British 
right found in Brexit. It also differentiates him from Democratic Party 
politicians who have no problem proposing ambitious spending programs 
but lack Bernie’s lifelong commitment to a genuinely insurgent, 
anti-establishment brand of politics.

Looking back into American history, Maisano believes that the 
abolitionist movement could be a guide to fleshing out “political 
regeneration”:

How might we start making “government of the people, by the people, for 
the people” a substantive reality and not just a line from a textbook? 
One possibility is the formation of a convention movement to discuss and 
promote measures for overhauling our country’s broken political system. 
It would take inspiration from the Colored Conventions Movement that 
swept northern black communities before the Civil War, which articulated 
numerous demands and promoted the establishment of new political 
organizations. These would be informal gatherings lacking official 
sanction, but over time they could potentially gain legitimacy and serve 
as a source of popular pressure and demands that politicians would 
ignore at their peril.

This historical reference brings us back to the question of how Marxists 
view the term revolution. For them, it boils down to class war with the 
stakes of property relations placed on the agenda with burning 
intensity. For black Americans, this meant abolishing slavery as part of 
a thorough-going bourgeois revolution that placed the class interests of 
northern industrialists, yeoman farmers, workers, and slaves above that 
of the plantation owners bent on extending their form of property 
relations into the western states.

If you were serious about taking inspiration from the Colored 
Conventions Movement, you’d have to make abolishing wage slavery a top 
priority even if it discomfited Nancy Pelosi or Tom Steyer for that 
matter. That’s what Eugene V. Debs campaigns stressed, after all. The 
democratic socialist—or I should say, revolutionary socialist—who would 
never resort to circumlocutions like a “political revolution” that 
boiled down to electing progressive Democrats, WFP’ers or any other 
careerist hoping to make the kinds of millions that Bernie Sanders has 
stashed away.

IN THE struggle of the working class to free itself from wage slavery it 
cannot be repeated too often that everything depends upon the working 
class itself. The simple question is, can the workers fit themselves, by 
education, organization, co-operation and self-imposed discipline, to 
take control of the productive forces and manage industry in the 
interest of the people and for the benefit of society? That is all there 
is to it.

The capitalist theory is that labor is, always has been, and always will 
be, “hands” merely; that it needs a “head,” the head of a capitalist, to 
hire it, set it to work, boss it, drive it and exploit it, and that 
without the capitalist “head” labor would be unemployed, helpless, and 
starve; and, sad to say, a great majority of wage-workers, in their 
ignorance, still share in that opinion. They use their hands only to 
produce wealth for the capitalist who uses his head only, scarcely 
conscious that they have heads of their own and that if they only used 
their heads as well as their hands the capitalist would have to use his 
hands as well as his head, and then there would be no “bosses” and no 
“hands,” but men instead—free men, employing themselves co-operatively 
under regulations of their own, taking to themselves all the products of 
their labor and shortening the work day as machinery increased their 
productive capacity.

Such a change would be marvelously beneficial all around. The idle 
capitalists and brutal bosses would disappear; all would be useful 
workers, have steady employment, fit houses to live in, plenty to eat 
and wear, and leisure time enough to enjoy life.

That is the Socialist theory and what Socialists are fighting for and 
are ready to live and die for.

–Eugene V. Debs, “Labor’s Struggle For Supremacy”, International 
Socialist Review , Vol. XII, No. 3. September 1911