It’s easy to spot right-wing capitalist mouthpieces, the politicians who build racism by attacking immigrants, poor people, and what little remains of the social safety net. But the more dangerous enemies are the liberals, whose main job is to deceive and pacify the international working class. Ranging from Pope Francis to Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, these fake leftists are falling over one another to bemoan the profit system’s growing economic inequalities.
The latest darling of the lethal ruling-class liberals is Bernie Sanders, the U.S. senator from Vermont who is challenging Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party nomination for president in 2016.
Why are these liberal misleaders gaining influence and so much attention from the bosses’ media? Workers around the world are angry. If their anger is directed at the capitalist system and organized around the class-conscious outlook of the Progressive Labor Party, it will be game over for the bosses. PLP fights for the working class to gain power. We’re building a mass party in more than two dozen countries to win workers to build a communist world of true equality, and to smash this racist, imperialist system with communist revolution!
As the U.S., China, Russia, and other imperialist rivals intensify their fight over oil and other resources, they use their politicians to win the loyalty of the workers they oppress. Their first lie is “we’re all in this together,” a promotion of patriotism and all-class unity that divides the international working class. The second lie is that the capitalist system, which cannot exist without the brutal exploitation of our class, can somehow be reformed.
Sanders: Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing
Bernie Sanders is being promoted by the liberal finance capitalists as an alternative for workers and youth disillusioned by Barack Obama’s presidency and by Hillary Clinton—the same role candidate Obama played against Clinton in 2008. But when recently confronted by activists from Black Lives Matter, Sanders—a long-time supporter of the hyper-racist Israeli state—had nothing to say about racism. His bankrupt solution to the system’s problems is to make workers part owners of the companies they work for. This reactionary idea would make workers even more vulnerable to the cyclical crises of capitalism, chaining them more tightly to the big banks for loans.
Every four years, the U.S. working class is fed a new “savior” candidate, yet the result never changes. Workers continue to suffer, with Black and Latin workers hit hardest.
The ruling-class Center for American Progress (CAP) think tank praised Sanders three times in its 2013 paper, “Growing the Wealth: How Government Encourages Broad-Based Inclusive Capitalism.” Who runs CAP? Its top donors include Citigroup and the Rockefeller and Soros foundations. Madeleine Albright, the secretary of state under Bill Clinton who justified the sanction-driven murder of half a million Iraqi children, serves as a director. CAP’s chairman is John Podesta, formerly Bill Clinton’s chief of staff and currently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman. This is the same Bill Clinton who promoted the racist mass incarceration of Black youth, the hiring and arming of 100,000 more cops, and the destruction of welfare and educational opportunities for mainly Black and Latin workers.
Sanders has ruled out an independent, third-party candidacy; he is running strictly as a Democrat. Both he and his party’s leaders know he has little or no chance to prevail. His job is to build enthusiasm among workers and youth for the boss-controlled electoral process, and then to throw his support to whatever Democrat wins the nomination. Sanders’ constituency represents many of the people the U.S. ruling class needs to embrace its agenda for wider imperialist wars, and in particular for a military draft. These are the workers and youth PLP must win to our ranks to fight for communist revolution!
A recent piece in Counterpunch (7/21/15) recounts Sanders’ role as a cynical ruling-class tool as early as 1990: “[Sanders] went to the Kennedy School at Harvard for six months and came back with a new relationship with the state’s Democrats…. Bernie has become an ardent imperialist. Sanders endorsed [Bill] Clinton in 1992 and 1996.”
Like every liberal imperialist politician, Sanders and his pro-worker mask present a grave danger to our class. As a U.S. congressman and senator, according to Street (7/21/15), Sanders voted for:
Sellouts Love Sanders
Nineteen of Sanders’ top 20 contributors, according to Open Secrets.org, are among the largest trade unions. These unions have sold out our class by collaborating with the bosses to defeat working-class fightback. Their traitorous leaders haven’t led a significant strike in over three decades.
The other top Sanders contributor is the American Association for Justice, a creation of billionaire imperialist George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Sanders is no friend of the working class. He is deeply intertwined with the highest circles of the U.S. ruling class.
Whether Sanders, Clinton, or some other capitalist shill becomes the Democrats’ choice for the next electoral circus, workers have no stake in any election. Every capitalist democracy is a dictatorship of the bosses. Every capitalist ruling class aims to channel workers’ frustrations into support for some lying capitalist candidate. PLP says, “Don’t vote, revolt!” We fight to organize the international working class to end the capitalists’ dictatorship, build a communist world, and smash racism, sexism, and imperialism once and for all. Join us!
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Sanders-Style “Socialism:” What’s In A Name?
Bernie Sanders has made headlines as a self-proclaimed “socialist,” whatever that means. In the mid-19th century, at the dawn of the modern communist movement, there were many competing political ideas. The movement founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels believed in a two-stage theory of revolution. They proposed that workers must first fight for socialism, a system that would entail armed revolution and a workers’ dictatorship but also temporarily retain the wage system and certain inequalities. In practice, however, in both the Soviet Union and China, socialism led not to communism but back to capitalism. In Road to Revolution 4 (1982), PLP broke with the two-stage theory and put forward the idea of winning workers directly to communism.
When Marx and Engels labeled their seminal 1848 document the “Communist Manifesto,” it was in part to distinguish themselves from countless socialist groups proclaiming a confusing mix of programs. Politicians like Sanders love to call themselves “socialists” precisely because the term is so vague. It’s no accident that “Nazi” stood for “National Socialist German Workers’ Party.” In the 1920s and ‘30s, the Nazis employed the term “socialism” to mislead frustrated workers away from support for the world’s first socialist republic, the Soviet Union.
We cannot afford to make the same mistake. Workers must not buy the “socialist” label, especially from capitalist fakers like Bernie Sanders.