Читать книгу Bigger Than Bernie - Micah Uetricht - Страница 8
ОглавлениеClass Struggle at the Ballot Box
The potential for socialists to use elections to spread our message and build our movement should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Sanders’s 2016 presidential run showed that socialism actually had mainstream resonance. Two years later Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Bernie Sanders, ran for Congress and won, along with Rashida Tlaib and dozens of other democratic socialists at all levels of government. Without these and other successful national, state, and local campaigns around the country, we wouldn’t have the rejuvenated Left that we have today.
Some socialists are uninterested in electoral politics, especially ones that have anything to do with the Democratic Party. The argument is that the party is a “graveyard” for the kinds of self-organized working-class movements we need to build in order to change the world, because the party isn’t actually a workers’ party—it’s a party that has included organized labor, African Americans, feminists, environmentalists, and others with progressive ideas over the years, but those groups are stuck in an uncomfortable electoral alliance with capitalists. The Democratic Party is very adept at absorbing the energy from vibrant, disruptive working-class movements, bringing some of the leaders of those movements into the halls of power and conservatizing them, and completely squashing the transformative potential of organized challenges to the status quo.
These arguments aren’t totally wrong. There are numerous possible pitfalls to using elections to change the world under capitalism, pitfalls that well-meaning socialists around the world have fallen into over the last century. And the Democratic Party is a fundamentally capitalist party, not a workers’ party. In the long term, if we’re going to win the kind of world we want, we’ll need to ditch the Democrats and start a party of our own—one that isn’t predicated on an alliance with the capitalist class.
But we can and should use elections to overcome the very real problems that detractors of electoral politics are identifying. Yes, the capitalist state is arranged against our project. And, yes, it is powerful—so powerful, in fact, that the only way to prevent annihilation at its hands is to give our movement a mass character that can fight the forces that seek to bury it.
Small groups of self-organized socialists and emboldened workers can play a very important role in changing the world. But without millions in our corner, we’re no match for the United States’ entrenched political machinery (not to mention its armies, police, and surveillance apparatuses). The only way we’re going to build a durable movement to change the world is by building a very big movement to change the world. The socialist electoral campaigns that have played out over the last several years show us how we might go about solving this puzzle.
An Uneven Playing Field
We shouldn’t have any illusions that the capitalist state will be easy to transform toward socialist ends. That’s because the state isn’t neutral territory: under capitalism, the state is fundamentally biased toward capitalists and pro-capitalist policies. For one thing, elected politicians and unelected high-ranking officeholders in government are often capitalists or beneficiaries of the capitalist order themselves. The average member of Congress, for example, is worth over a million dollars. More importantly, because capitalists have power over the means of production, they have power over what average people need in order to survive—and that power bleeds over into the electoral sphere, where capitalists have an outsized and undemocratic ability to influence what elected officials do and don’t do, and shape political outcomes.
Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited and abused by your boss is not being exploited and abused by your boss, because that means you don’t have a job and thus can’t support yourself and your family. And just as capitalists can fire workers and leave them without the means to survive, capitalists can also withdraw their investments from entire regions or countries, leaving those countries high and dry without jobs and income. This is what’s called capital flight, or in its most retaliatory form, a “capital strike.” Workers can strike by withholding their labor, but capital can also strike by pulling investments.
Because the vast majority of us are dependent on those investments, capitalists have us over a barrel. They can punish governments that enact policies they don’t like, for whatever reason. Did a pro-worker government pass high taxes on corporations to fund social welfare programs, or tell a factory owner to pay workers higher wages and stop poisoning the air and water with noxious emissions? Those corporations can simply pull their investments from that city, state, or country. Capitalists can always take their ball and go play somewhere else; workers and governments can’t.
The result for that government will then almost certainly be a crisis, because without those investments, workers who worked for that corporation could lose their jobs, all the secondary economic markets that were stimulated by that company’s investments will suffer, and the government will lose much-needed tax revenue from those investments. It’s a trump card that capitalists can play against governments whose policies aren’t to their liking. It’s not insurmountable— leftist governments have options open to them like capital controls, which can prevent capitalists from pulling their money out of a given territory. But it makes life for any left party trying to antagonize capitalists very, very tough.
Because of these structural constraints, we can’t simply vote the new world into being. However, socialists can engage in electoral politics in a way that democratically builds the working class’s capacity for self-organization. There are status quo electoral politics—in which social change is entrusted exclusively to elected politicians, left to their own devices after victory—and then there are class-struggle electoral politics.
Class-Struggle Electoral Politics
Class-struggle electoral politics are about using elections to popularize socialist ideas, clarify class lines, energize people to fight on their own, and build movements beyond elections. Running class-struggle electoral campaigns is about empowering the working-class movements that are necessary to remake society.
There’s usually little point in running for office if you’re not trying to win—especially now, when socialist ideas are popular and winning is a real possibility. But class-struggle electoral politics aim to use elections to do three things beyond simply trying to win: raise the expectations of ordinary working people, unite them against a common capitalist enemy, and promote mass working-class movements outside the state.
A class-struggle politician is someone who refuses to accept prevailing ideas about society and insists that a different world is actually possible. All people deserve a good education, a safe and comfortable home, quality health care, clean air and water, and free time to enjoy their lives. But in our society, these things are often luxuries enjoyed only by the rich. Most politicians tell working-class people that it’s impossible for the government to provide these things in full to all people, but that fortunately we can look to the market to fill the gaps. Even those who claim to be sympathetic to achieving a better world often argue that the resources just aren’t there, even as the wealthy make record profits and get huge tax breaks.
Others pay lip service to much-needed reforms as good ideas but claim they are politically impossible, without even fighting for them. This group, to which many liberal American politicians today belong, might say they support some social welfare programs. But they typically insist on complicated, divisive, and often degrading means testing to ensure that only those who “deserve” the benefits get them—all for programs that are woefully insufficient even for those who do receive the benefits. They write off universal social programs as a fantasy. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic former Chicago mayor and chief of staff for presidents Clinton and Obama who champions the party’s pro-corporate, rightward turn every opportunity he gets, wrote in an October 2019 op-ed against Medicare for All, “Our approach to health care needs to be centered on political reality, not a pipe dream.” After the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton famously denigrated Bernie Sanders’s argument for Medicare for All or free college tuition for all as akin to a promise of giving every American a pony.
With so many politicians dismissing transformative political change in this way, it’s no surprise that many working-class people are resigned to a diminished quality of life. A class-struggle politician aims to turn that resignation into hope and determination. This is what we mean by “raising the expectations of the working class.”
A good example of this in recent decades is the fight for single-payer health care. When Sanders first introduced his version of a single-payer bill to Congress in 1993, he said, “The American people believe that health care must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy.” He supported the policy before introducing the bill and has supported it since, throughout entire decades during which it was written off as a fantasy. On the campaign trail in 2016, he used his massive platform to convince people that working-class Americans deserve Medicare for All, and that it is completely politically possible to achieve it, as long as ordinary people and politicians alike are prepared to fight for it.
We haven’t won Medicare for All yet, but as overwhelming numbers of Americans now support it—recent polls have regularly found that majorities of people and even occasional majorities of Republicans back a universal public health insurance program—Sanders’s approach has been vindicated.
There’s no better personal example of this transformation in action than the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the millennial socialist who seemingly out of nowhere won a race for the House of Representatives in 2018. At an October 2019 Sanders rally in Queens, New York, in front of twenty-six thousand people gathered on a sunny day in front of the East River, the Manhattan skyline in the background, Ocasio-Cortez told a story:
Last February I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan … I didn’t have health care, I wasn’t being paid a living wage, and I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things. Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country, that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.
It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education, and a living wage.
Sanders did not wait until the idea for Medicare for All had been fully poll-tested and trial-ballooned before beginning to agitate for it. Instead, he stepped out ahead of the populace. He made demands that were ambitious and struck a chord with people and spoke to their suffering—spoke to, for example, the hardship of underpaid young workers like Ocasio-Cortez. In the process, he expanded the horizon of people’s political imaginations.
Still, it’s not enough to make ambitious demands. A class-struggle politician also has to explain why those demands haven’t been met, focusing on the obstacles thrown up by the ruling class and on the underlying dynamics of capitalism that empower the wealthy few. They must use every opportunity they can to tell a new story about society, one that offers an explanation for why so many people suffer while a select few enjoy their lives in relative comfort. This new story has an antagonist and a protagonist: the bad guy is the tiny capitalist class, and the good guy is the huge and diverse working class.
For a class-struggle politician, the adversary does not go unnamed. As one corporate lobbyist complained in May 2019 in the New York Times, “To a hammer, everything is a nail. And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.” This clarifying and polarizing message is a very good thing indeed—both because it happens to be true (the rich have incredible control over our lives and everything that transpires on our planet, and are the ones responsible for most of our worst ills), and because it’s extremely effective political communication.
Politicians from both major parties routinely issue vague calls for unity and harmony. But class-struggle politicians know that class conflict will never disappear under capitalism—it’s inherent to it. The only question is whether the working class will succeed in fighting back. So they don’t paper over conflict. They call instead for a specific type of unity: that of the working class in struggle against a common enemy.
Among the working class, class-struggle politicians urge solidarity across lines of difference. Bernie Sanders explained this in a speech at that same October 2019 rally, when he asked the 26,000 in attendance to look around them and identify someone who seemed different from themselves. “Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” he asked. “Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care as a human right even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors even if you are native born?”
Finally, a class-struggle politician is someone who understands that the only way to actually make lasting change is to build and harness the power of working people outside the state. They know that even when they’re in office, they will be up against the formidable power of the capitalist class. To truly transform society, they understand that they need huge numbers of ordinary people to build mass movements that can exert pressure of their own.
As Sanders put it in an October 2019 interview with CNBC’s John Harwood:
BERNIE SANDERS: Right now you have a Congress and a White House that are dominated by a corporate elite who have unbelievable amounts of money and influence over the political and economic life of this country. I’m not going to be dominated by those guys. I will take them on and I’ll beat them.
The way we beat them is with the understanding that real change has never taken place without millions of people standing up and demanding that change. That is the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, the environmental movement. I will not only be commander in chief of the military, I will be organizer in chief. I will be organizing with a strong grassroots movement.
We already have the nucleus. It’ll be involving the labor unions, the African American communities, the Latino community, the young people of this country. All people who believe in justice, working-class people, who are prepared to stand up and fight and take on the corporate elite …
JOHN HARWOOD: But even if you get elected, even if it’s successful to the point that Democrats win a small majority in the Senate, is [conservative Democrat and West Virginia senator] Joe Manchin going to vote for your program? Is [conservative Democrat and Montana senator] Jon Tester going to vote for your program?
BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. Damn right they will. You know why? We’re going to go to West Virginia.
Your average politician sits around and he or she thinks, “Let’s see. If I do this, I’m going to have the big money interests putting 30-second ads against me. So I’d better not do it.” But now they’re going to have to think, “If I don’t support an agenda that works for working people, I’m going to have President Sanders coming to my state and rallying working-class people.”
You know what? The 1 percent is very powerful—no denying that. The 99%, when they’re organized and prepared to stand up and fight, they are far more powerful.
Bernie Sanders has been exemplary on this front not just in word, but in deed. His campaign in 2016 was unconventional in many respects, but it was what he did afterward that showed the extent to which he believes in using electoral politics, as both a candidate and office-holder, to build movements of the working class outside the state.
Organizer in Chief
Sanders told John Harwood that if he won, he would be the “organizer in chief.” No president has ever articulated their role this way—not even President Barack Obama, who was himself a former community organizer. What would being an “organizer in chief” look like? What Sanders did after losing the 2016 Democratic primary to Clinton gives us a good idea.
Naming and Shaming
Sanders has both personally gone after major corporations and wealthy CEOs, and used his campaign machinery to support striking workers and other protests. For example, in June 2018, Sanders took the stage at a rally attended by hundreds of Disneyland workers in Anaheim, California. “I want to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry,” he said. “Tell me how that is right.” He added, “The struggle that you are waging here in Anaheim is not just for you. It is a struggle for millions of workers all across this country who are sick and tired of working longer hours for lower wages.”
The union that represents the workers, UNITE HERE, was at that point in contract negotiations with Disney. Sanders chose to use his platform to help them win their contract fight. A few days later, he wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he publicized the workers’ testimonies he had heard in Anaheim and wrote,
What these workers are doing, standing up against the greed of one of the most powerful and profitable corporations in America, takes an enormous amount of courage. If they are able to win a livable wage with good benefits from Disney, it will be a shot heard around the world. It will give other low-wage workers at profitable corporations throughout the country the strength they need to demand a living wage with good benefits.
The next month, Disney agreed to pay its unionized workers at Disneyland a minimum of $15 an hour; in August, it followed suit at Disney World in Florida. Sanders didn’t create the fight at Disney himself, of course—workers there were already unionized and fighting for better pay and working conditions. But he used his massive bully pulpit to support these workers, in a way that went far beyond the typical photo ops that Democratic candidates pause for on picket lines and at union conventions during campaign season.
Then, in late August, he blasted Disney for securing large tax breaks for itself while many of its workers were still paid so little. After that, Sanders generalized the fight by introducing legislation in November to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour—a change that would affect 40 million people, or 25 percent of the workforce.
