Jamelle Bouie’s latest article on the Sanders campaign makes a flawed argument that provides a teachable moment on socialism. His argument is:
1) Sanders is not really a socialist, he is a Democratic (big D as in the party) candidate.
2) He is not unique as a Democratic candidate, which has a tradition of strong leftists in the primaries, if not the general election.
3) As a Democrat he, like those before him, falls short…
4) Because the yardstick of the Democratic party is one’s ability to appeal to many discontiguous demographic segments rather than any single uniting ideology.
I think that is not a bad argument, and point 4 in particular is sound, but it does miss almost all of what Bernie Sanders has said for the last several months and even decades before that and what socialists have said for a couple centuries. Here is a different argument:
1) Socialism is a political extension of the Marxist argument that economic relations are the fundamental driver of human society.
2) Sanders’ is a socialist, as evidenced by his focus on economic relations, even to a fault.
3) As a socialist he, like many of those before him, falls short…
4) Because the yardstick of socialism does not inherently account for other axes of oppression.
Before he started blundering on every question related to race, the main criticism of Sanders was that he was a one issue candidate. Yes; exactly; there is no purer expression of being a descendant of the Marxist tradition than always focusing on why money flows from hundreds of millions of people to hundreds of people. The policies that characterize a socialist state change with the times, and so it makes sense that Sanders doesn’t recommend the same ratio of wheat to alfalfa production as Trotsky or whatever Bouie’s litmus test for socialism is. The way in which a socialist analyzes society does not change. It remains fixed on economic relations. Like Bernie Sanders.
The simplicity of that analysis can become a bludgeon when it is used to diminish other axes of oppression. Saying that issues of race or gender or sexuality are less important than those of class is the plague of Marxism done wrong and Sanders, along with thousands of dreadlocked bros throughout America’s higher education system, has not done a great job of refuting that idea. The socialist argument isn’t that free college and single payer healthcare will make cops stop murdering black people, but that there are economic drivers behind that criminal justice system. Racism and racist violence are and have been profitable in America, and that, rather than some divinely inspired or biologically innate disposition to racism, is how we have gotten here.
The socialist answer is not satisfying for people in a state as besieged by institutional oppression as America. Marxism offers a framework for understanding structural exploitation but not for particular events, not for their efficient causes and their intersectional tangle. Sanders has often lacked the nuance and empathy required to persuasively offer the socialist vision as amelioration for actual harms.
The Democratic party, on the other hand, offers no cosmology, no sense of why the past led to today or of the shape the future should hold. It will give or at least promise a series of bandaids for any problem that appears to endanger its candidates’ electability. That is its concept of “accountability” and if you dig a little deeper there too you find its concept of “the people."
A Sanders presidency is not a revolution in the sense of 1917. Given the American system of checks and balances, it seems unlikely he would be revolutionary in any but the FOX news sense of the word. But Sanders’ campaign has made an awkwardly principled stand for economic relations as the fundamental problem to address, and that message– and the idea that a political candidate can represent a mode of analysis rather than a selection of interests– has been heard by more people than the Democratic party would like.
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