‘People’s Summit’—Sanders Faction Exploits Workers’ Anger

CHICAGO, June 11—Bernie Sanders’s second People’s Summit attempted to draw in and mislead 4,000 progressive-minded people. Much like UK’s Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, this faction of the Democratic Party aims to build liberal fascism with the backing of young people.
Rebuilding Democratic Party
While a good part of the working class hates the Trump administration, they also hate the Democrats. A national poll found 62 percent of people felt the Republicans were out of touch with the public, compared to 66 percent for Democrats (ABC, 4/23).
Taking place the day after the Labour Party in London won the second-largest number of seats in Parliament, the People’s Summit sought fresh blood for the murderous anti-worker organization: the Democratic Party. Sanders said, “The current model and the current strategy of the Democratic Party is an absolute failure” (The Nation, 6/15). The Democratic Party faces a “widening breach” within their leadership and ranks, many bitter and trying to recover after its election failure. While some faction of the Democratic Party has reacted by moving to the right, the Sanders faction has continued to build faith in liberalism.
Using a lefty face, the Sanders faction, which includes Elizabeth Warren, is advocating for liberal fascism: mild reforms of wages, healthcare, and education while disciplining both the ruling and working class for a world of war. One of their main concerns is how best to sell a party of imperialism and war to a divided working class of an empire in decline. This faction seeks to assimilate those fed up with business as usual.
Bernie Con
This summit charged people up to $200 to attend and hear Sanders and other misleaders try to persuade workers that “we can vote out racism, sexism, imperialism and capitalism.” Progressive Labor Party was also at the summit to give a different message to workers: only communist revolution can destroy capitalism.
The People’s Summit was mainly a “Comic Con” for Sanders supporters. There were classes with topics such as “Building a Movement that will Win,” “The Rigged Economy” (but hardly talk about capitalism), or “Voices of Resistance & Power.” The Sanders faction has co-opted language of mass fightback but hardly any Black or Latin workers were to be seen, neither on the panels nor in the audience.
They also had a session on “Down-Ballot Revolutionaries” led by Khalid Kamau, a Black Lives Matter activist turned politician, which focused on getting those under 35 into office at all levels of government. This session shows how important it is for the bosses to funnel working-class anger into state-sanctioned politics. It also exposes how desperate the Democratic Party is for younger leadership.
They talked about “building a movement” but the summit failed to invite or even talk about the fightback or the local organizations from Chicago, the very city in which this conference is being held.
Sanders and his group allowed various revisionist groups to have information tables at this summit.
Classic Misleadership
During this summit, the talk going around was about “resistance” but Sanders and his cronies don’t say take to the streets and fight racism and sexism. They preach voting for change. Hardly any of the misleaders at this conference encouraged the attendees to join the local protest against the Neo-Nazi group Act for America and kkkops at a rally that took place on the Saturday of the conference (see CHALLENGE, 6/28). Most of the people there didn’t even know it was going on.
A PL’er talked to some workers at the summit about going to the rally and joining with the party and other anti-racists. One conference attendee said, “I paid a lot of money to be here and I want to get my money’s worth.”
Honest Workers Ready to Fight
But out of the dead-end of Sanders’ ideas, there were workers, young and old that truly wanted to fight back against capitalism and imperialism. One of the only highlights of this summit was the meeting of Black workers at the end of the conference. Again like all capitalist movements, Black workers were marginalized and issues were ‘pushed to the back’ if they were talked about at all.
During the meeting, a Party member gave a speech about how only communism can truly destroy racism and sexism and that Black workers are the key to revolution. Most of the workers in the meeting were interested in the party and took CHALLENGE. Many didn’t know about communism or had disagreements, but they too were interested in Progressive Labor Party’s fight to abolish racism and sexism.