Bernie Sanders view of the future

An Interview with Bernie Sanders from New Republic

- Years ago, there was an old guy in my neighborhood named Pete. His hair was white and disheveled, and he liked to wheel his small shopping cart up and down the street and hand out political flyers to everyone he met. Some days the flyers were about the dangers of nuclear power. Some days they were about the perils of free-trade agreements. But they were always handwritten, they always took up both sides of the page, and there was never a margin in sight. For Pete, margins were a missed opportunity, a plot by the establishment, an artificial convention created by a world that mistook the urgency of the situation. The truth has no use for margins.

Bernie Sanders is a little like Pete. He doesn’t have a shopping cart, and his political positions are significantly more coherent. But like Pete, he has no patience for anything that threatens to distract him or others from the pressing matters at hand. When I arrive at his Senate office for an interview, he does not want to chat about the last time we met, at a tribute in Vermont to the late journalist Michael Hastings. He does not want to look back at his historic campaign for the presidency and consider what he might have done differently. He does not want to talk about Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings or the incivility of some of his supporters. He does not mention that tomorrow is his seventy-fifth birthday. He wants to talk about policy, and the nuts and bolts of organizing, and whatever else is needed to bring a greater measure of justice and equality to human affairs. He lives by the Marxist-Calvinist tradition of everything for the cause. He doesn’t have time for roses. Too many people need bread.

BS; Should we have done things differently, in retrospect? The answer is, of course.

- This single-mindedness of purpose is at the very heart of his appeal. Other people live in this world, and abide by its niceties. Sanders looks forward to the world yet to be, the world as it should be. He set out to lead a revolution, and he nearly succeeded. His agenda is a cross between Das Kapital and Deuteronomy. He rails against the Trans-Pacific Partnership with the same hatred that the rest of us reserve for the New York Yankees, or the New England Patriots, or some other, more leisurely expression of American empire.

Now, after laboring for years as a lone voice on the left, Sanders suddenly finds himself speaking for millions. It’s an unexpected role, and not without its pitfalls. Having won twelve million votes in the Democratic primaries—a showing that exposed the deep rift between younger voters and the party establishment—Sanders faces a new challenge: how to continue to pressure the party from the left without tearing it apart in the process. The internal tensions have been apparent from the start: In August, when Sanders launched his new organization, Our Revolution, key staffers resigned in protest over the group’s structure, which permits it to accept contributions from billionaires without revealing the donors.

On a hot afternoon in September, we speak for nearly an hour in his office on the third floor of the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Whenever the conversation turns to something he doesn’t care about, Sanders doesn’t nod politely, or find a way to change the subject. He looks away, or scowls, or dismisses it out of hand. But when the talk turns to tax policy, or student debt, or the minimum wage, he leans forward and speaks with passion and urgency. He looks like a man who sees a margin that needs filling.

- Let’s start with a postmortem on the extraordinary campaign you ran. You came very close to defeating Hillary Clinton, who’s the closest thing America has to a political dynasty. Looking back, is there something you wish you’d done differently? Something that might have put you over the top and enabled you to win the race?

BS; Well, I think every day we all wish we had done something different yesterday—certainly in something as complicated as a presidential campaign. Of course there were things I wish we had done differently. But at the end of the day we did much, much, much better than anyone dreamed we could have. People who study the campaign will see that it was a very, very effective campaign. Should we, in retrospect, have done things differently? The answer is, of course we should’ve.

- Give me an example.

BS; I don’t really want to do that type of postmortem. It doesn’t matter. We put together a great campaign with some fantastic people, given the time constraints. But the difficulty is that in a campaign, you’re moving very, very fast. You are starting with three or four people, and then within a few months suddenly going up to a thousand people in many, many states throughout this country, hiring people you really don’t know, trusting that they will be able to do the kind of work they need to do. Corporations do this slowly and steadily, but you don’t have that option in a campaign. And of course you’re running not one campaign, you’re running 50 campaigns, and hiring this state leader here and that one there. So not every person we brought on was of the quality, in retrospect, that we would’ve liked to have had.

In retrospect, you also always think, “Should I have spent more money in a state on television? Should we have spent less money in a state on television?” There’s always that kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking. But at the end of the day, we showed that there are millions of people in this country who are sick and tired of establishment politics, who want real change, and who are prepared to stand up and fight for that. My hope is that that movement continues to go forward.

BS; We showed that the gap between Democratic leaders and grassroots folks is very, very wide. (From a Sanders Rally in September.)

- After 35 years in politics, this was your first campaign at the national level. What surprised you most about the whole process of running for president?

BS; One of the disappointments—not really a surprise—was the media. The very great reluctance of the media to cover the serious issues facing the American people. There was a study that came out a couple of months ago, which showed that only 11 percent of the campaign coverage dealt with issues. For much of the media, coverage was all about the ups and downs of a campaign day, which obviously benefits somebody like Donald Trump very, very much. He’s great for the media, because you don’t know what he is gonna say. So I found it disappointing that we had a hard time getting some of the very serious issues we were trying to raise out through the media.

On the other hand, I was also surprised and gratified that CNN would sometimes cover an entire rally. That would give us an opportunity to beam out directly, through television, to people in many parts of this country who had never heard a progressive message before.

The other thing that I would say is that I left the campaign, quite honestly, more optimistic about American politics than when I went in. We went to 46 states, and I saw great people. That’s not just rhetoric—that’s reality. Just wonderful, wonderful people in all walks of life trying to do the right thing.

- You fared badly among black voters during the campaign. Fewer than one in four supported you. Why do you think that is?

BS; The answer is not complicated. The answer is a fairly simple one: Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton have developed very strong roots within the African American community over decades. They are very popular within the black community, and that’s that. Among older African American women, it was like ten to one. We were really getting decimated. But by the end of the campaign, we were winning a majority of young black and Latino voters, which was very, very impressive. In fact, in some communities we wound up winning the Latino vote overall.

- I’ve spoken with longtime supporters of yours who feel that you lost in part because despite your own record in civil rights, you didn’t seem comfortable talking about race in a way that—

BS; [Interrupting] OK, see, this is an issue I’m not really—what I don’t want to do is get into me.

- I’m not raising this to talk about you. I’m interested in hearing your take on racism. Do you see it as primarily a class issue—a by-product of economic injustice? Or is it a separate and distinct problem of its own?

BS; It’s a complicated answer. It’s a good question, but I prefer not to get into it right now. [Stony glare, followed by silence.]

- All right, let’s talk about the young voters you mentioned. During the primaries, almost three-quarters of voters under the age of 30 cast their ballots for you. What do you say to your younger supporters who don’t plan to vote for Clinton because they see her as too establishment-oriented?

BS; Look, I ran against Hillary for over a year, so I understand where she is coming from. For me, this is not a tough choice. I am a United States senator, and I know what would happen to our government if Donald Trump became president. I think Donald Trump is the worst candidate for a major party that has surfaced in my lifetime. This guy would be a disaster for this country and an embarrassment to us internationally. A man who is a pathological liar. Somebody who, to the degree that he deals with issues at all, changes his position every day. That is clearly not the kind of mentality we need from somebody who is running for the highest office in the land.

What is particularly outrageous and disturbing is that the cornerstone of his campaign is based on bigotry—trying to turn people against Mexican-Americans or against Muslims or against women. To my mind, it’s very clear that Donald Trump would be an incredible disaster to this country, and I will do everything I can to see that he is defeated.

- But is there a case to be made for Hillary, solely on her own merits?

BS; On a number of issues, I believe Hillary Clinton’s positions are quite strong. I was happy to negotiate an agreement with her in the party’s platform which said that she would support making public colleges and universities tuition-free for families making $125,000 or less. That is pretty revolutionary. That will not only transform the ability of people to go to college, it will have an impact on kids in elementary school today who know that if they study hard, they can get a college education. She and I also agreed to a doubling of the expansion of community health centers. That’s tens of millions more people who will have access to primary health care and dental care and low-cost prescription drugs and mental health counseling. I want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and I think Clinton is open to moving in that direction, to at least $12 an hour. She supports infrastructure projects that will put millions of people back to work. She understands the significance of not acting on climate change, while Donald Trump does not believe that climate change is real, which is a real threat to the planet.

So what I would ask people is to take a hard look at (a) what a Donald Trump presidency would mean for this country, which in my view would be a disaster, and (b) how Clinton’s views on a number of issues are fairly good. That is what we should be focusing on—not the personalities of the candidates, but what their policies will do for the middle class and working families of this country.

- You certainly played a major role in pushing Clinton to the left on some key issues, at least in the party’s platform. But many of your supporters don’t believe that Hillary really supports those positions or will make good on those promises. They see it as something she did in the platform to appease the left.

BS; I think that Hillary Clinton is sincere in a number of areas. In other areas I think she is gonna have to be pushed, and that’s fine. That’s called the democratic process.

Right now, you have a majority of Republicans—of Republicans—who believe we should raise taxes on the wealthy. Do I think Clinton is prepared to do that? Yeah. Do I think she is prepared to do away with loopholes to get rid of outrageous tax breaks for large multinational corporations? Yeah, I do. Do I think she is serious about climate change, and that we can push her even further? Yeah, I do. Do I think that under Clinton we will raise the minimum wage? Yeah, I do. I’m not quite sure it will be 15 bucks an hour, but it will bring millions of people out of poverty.

Through the work of millions of people, we created a Democratic platform which is far and away the most progressive platform in the history of the United States of America for any political party. Our job the day after the election—and hopefully after Clinton is elected—is to make sure that that platform is implemented.

So what I would ask of young people is to turn off CNN. Let’s assume that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and you and everybody else are not perfect human beings, all right? Let’s take a look at the needs of ordinary people and which candidate will be better on that as president of the United States. On that approach, there is no debate to my mind that we should elect Clinton.


- Sanders supporters protest outside a Clinton rally in East Los Angeles last May.

- Let’s talk for a minute about that post-election process of putting pressure on Hillary. At the Democratic convention, things turned ugly. Some of your supporters disrupted speeches and heckled opponents. And it hasn’t stopped—at your latest rally for Clinton, some of your backers showed up to chant “Never Hillary.” It seems to me—

BS; When did this happen?

- On Labor Day, at your event with Hillary in New Hampshire.

BS; You see, it’s interesting that you mention this. Was this written up? This is again the media. We had 400 or 500 people there. It’s true that there were a few people there from the Green Party, but I don’t recall hearing anything.

- Well, let’s stipulate that only a small number of your supporters have engaged in that kind of disruptive behavior. Even so, it seems to me emblematic of the challenge you face. If Hillary wins, you need to challenge her strongly from the left to achieve your goals. But you also need to make sure that happens in a way that doesn’t tear the party apart or create an opening for the right. Is that a tension that’s controllable?

BS; Our campaign took on virtually the entire Democratic establishment. We had the endorsement of one United States senator. We had six members of Congress. We had zero governors, zero large-city mayors, zero state party chairs. That is what we took on. And what we showed is that there is an enormous distance between what goes on here, in the Democratic Party, and the real world out there. So the Democratic Party, if it is going to survive, is going to have to open its door to people who are a little bit louder, a little bit coarser than the fine men and women who go to the $10,000-a-plate fund-raising dinners. They are going to have to let other people in America in the door and start representing their interests.

The only way you make change is by rallying large numbers of people to stand up and fight back. And the day after the election, that is exactly what I intend to do. My job is to help rally the American people and say, “Yeah we’re going to make public colleges and universities tuition-free, create a massive jobs program, rebuild our infrastructure, establish pay equity for women, raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. We are going to double funding for community health centers and move toward a Medicare for all, single-payer program of health care. We are going to deal aggressively with climate change. We are going to demand that the rich and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.” Every one of those issues is a popular issue. And whether the folks here in Congress like it or not, the way change comes about—the way we were able to write the Democratic platform—is not because everybody liked Bernie Sanders. It’s because they realized, “Oh, we better do this, because there are people out there who believe in this.”

- I can’t think of a presidential candidate who has ever succeeded at turning their campaign into an ongoing movement. How will you succeed where everyone else has failed?

BS; I think your statement is probably right. It is very difficult. What we have done is taken the campaign and transferred the nuts and bolts of that, in a much reduced fashion, into an organization called Our Revolution. I am not a part of that. Legally, as a United States senator, I can’t be. But the goal of Our Revolution is to get people involved in the political process, from school board on up to the United States Senate. We are going to be working with organizations like MoveOn and trade unions to help people financially and give them the confidence they need to successfully run for office. We will also be working on state ballot items that deal with terribly important issues: Citizens United, automatic voter registration, controlling the cost of prescription drugs, Medicare for all.

- In some ways, you’re talking about building a modern political machine. Democrats used to have a structure that did exactly what you are describing—getting people elected, from the school board and dog commissioner on up. That really doesn’t exist anymore in the fashion you’re talking about.

BS; It’s a challenge, and I don’t want to suggest that it’s easy. One of the great crises we face—and what the campaign demonstrated—is how far out of touch most Democratic leaders are with their constituents. That we can go into state after state and take on the entire Democratic establishment, in some cases win landslide victories, tells you that the gap between the Democratic leadership and grassroots folks is very, very wide. It is enormously important that we revitalize American democracy, that we get people thinking about the issues that impact their lives and their families’ lives and their neighbors’ lives, and start figuring out the route forward to address those issues.

Now, you may think that’s pretty simple. If you are not feeling well, you go to the doctor, right? The doctor makes the diagnosis and provides the treatment. And yet that is not what we do in talking about politics. That is certainly not what television does in talking about politics, and Americans know it. What are the problems facing the country? Do we really even discuss them? One of the successes of our campaign is that we hit a nerve and said, “Yeah, these are the issues. Why isn’t anybody talking about them?”

- Sanders made a film about his hero, the socialist Eugene V. Debs:
BS; He was a man who had the common touch, who was very close to the people.

BS; When you asked before about economics and race—well, we have more people in jail than any other country on earth, and they are disproportionately African American and Latino and Native American. We have youth unemployment rates in communities which are 30, 40, 50 percent, yet we are shocked, just shocked, that when kids have no constructive opportunities to earn a living, they engage in illegal activity. Who talks about that? Who talks about the reality of what goes on in Native American reservations in this country? I have sat in a room with people who make $7.25 an hour, OK? You don’t see that on television. Somebody’s got to talk about what poverty means in this country, and how you cannot live on $8 or $9 an hour.

BS; In some areas, Hillary is gonna have to be pushed. That’s fine. That’s called the democratic process.”
So the strength of the campaign was that people turned on the TV and said, “Oh my God, somebody is talking about my life. Somebody is talking about what this country can become. Somebody is asking why the United States can’t have a national health care program when every other major country on Earth does.” It’s about putting the questions out there, getting people to think about it and say, “OK, I can do something about it.”

And in the midst of all of that, you are going to have to take on the Koch brothers and the billionaires who are spending huge sums of money to buy the elections. That’s also an issue that’s not being talked about. You tell me—do you watch television? Tell me if I am wrong. How often do you hear the words Citizens United? And you know why? Because Citizens United is the best thing that ever happened to television. Is it not? They are making God knows how much money.

When it comes to campaign finance, journalists always talk about who gives the money, and which candidates receive the money. But they almost never talk about where the money ends up. Candidates don’t keep the money that flows into political campaigns. Most of it winds up being pocketed by major media companies. It ends up in advertising.

It ends up in advertising, primarily television. Best thing that ever happened to television. So you need to break through that crap, break through the media, and get people to play an active role in resolving the issues that impact their lives and creating a democratic society.

- Your plans for Our Revolution remind me of what the Moral Majority and the far right did between Barry Goldwater’s loss in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s victory in 1980. They did a lot of work at the local level to run people for school boards and get local candidates to focus on the issues that mattered most to them. That was a successful movement that emerged from a losing campaign—one that changed the course of a major political party.

BS' That is absolutely right—you have to start from the bottom on up. What the Democrats do now is, “Oh, we’ve got an election—how do we go out and raise money from rich people to buy television ads and pay for consultants so we can elect somebody to the United States Senate?” I understand that—that’s one way to do it. But there is another, more fundamentally important way, and that is to build a movement of people. The Christian Coalition in fact did do that.

I don’t think that anybody would debate that the gap between Democratic leadership and grassroots America is very, very wide, and that has a lot to do with the fact that over the last 30 to 40 years, Democrats have spent so much time raising money. People are just astounded by the amount of time somebody like Hillary Clinton spends talking to 20 people so she can walk away with a few hundred thousand dollars, rather than relying on ordinary people.

One issue that will affect working people is the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the trade pact being pushed by President Obama. You tried to get a commitment in the party’s platform to not hold a vote on TPP, but you were unsuccessful. Are you worried that there is going to be an attempt to pass it in the lame-duck session of Congress?

Yes. The president has been adamant in his support for the TPP. I spent a half-hour with him on the phone talking about the issue. He is dead wrong, but he feels very, very strongly about it.

The corporate world virtually never loses on trade. Since I’ve been here, they always win. Wall Street, drug companies, corporate America—that is a very heavy-duty group. When they push with their unlimited sums of money, they can make things happen. I will do everything that I can to rally the American people to understand that TPP is a continuation of disastrous trade policies, and that it should not be passed.

- So why does President Obama think it’s a good idea?

BS; He sees it as a geopolitical issue. He does not pretend, as previous presidents have, that this is going to create all kinds of jobs in America. His argument is that if you abandon the TPP, you’re gonna leave Asia open to Chinese influence.

- So he’s not making a NAFTA argument—that a rising tide of trade will lift all boats.

BS; After Obama became president, he severed his ties with the grassroots that got him elected.”
Right—that mythology seems to have disappeared. But one of the interesting things about the TPP, in particular, is not just that it’s gonna force American workers to compete against people making pennies an hour in Vietnam or slave labor in Malaysia. It also includes an investor-state dispute system. If my state of Vermont, or the United States government for that matter, passes a piece of legislation designed to protect the health of the American people or the environment, then that government entity could be sued by a multinational foreign corporation, because the legislation would impact the corporation’s future profits. As an example, Obama did the right thing in killing the Keystone pipeline, because he concluded that it would add to the crisis we’re facing from climate change. But the United States is now being sued for $15 billion by TransCanada, the owner of the pipeline, because NAFTA bars governments from taking actions that limit the profits of a multinational corporation. And the lawsuit doesn’t go to an American court. It goes to a three-person tribunal, which is made up of corporate lawyers.

Under these trade agreements, the president must accede to corporate profits. If a poor country wants cheap prescription drugs for malaria or for AIDS, and a corporation says you can’t use a generic product because we can make more money by keeping the brand name, then people will die in that country, and likely the tribunal will sustain that. This is a world of insanity, and it’s enshrined in the TPP.

- We are coming up on the end of eight years under President Obama. What do you think was his single biggest achievement, and what was his single biggest failure?

BS; There’s a criticism today that the economy is not where we want it to be; I make that criticism every day. But let’s not forget for one second, let’s never forget, where this country was when Obama came into office. We were losing 800,000 jobs a month. A month! We were running up a $1.4 trillion deficit, and the world’s financial system was fairly close to collapse. Other than that, things were pretty good when Bush left office. [Pause] That was a joke. In other words, the man came into office inheriting economic hardship, the worst since the Great Depression.

- And two wars.

BS; And two wars! And, on top of that, we had our Republican leaders meeting literally on the day of the inauguration and deciding that they would do everything they could to obstruct anything the guy wanted to do. That’s what he faced when he came in.

Now, you and I can acknowledge that this country is very, very far away from where we want it to be. But compared to where we were eight years ago, it is day and night. And to some degree, Obama’s intelligence and strength have made that happen. We are living in difficult times, but the stock market hasn’t collapsed, employment is not at 14 percent. So you ask me a major accomplishment? That’s a pretty good accomplishment.

On a personal level, I am always impressed by his discipline, his incredible focus, and his intelligence. When you are president of the United States and exposed to media 24 hours a day, it is so easy to say stupid things to get yourself in trouble. He has done that very, very rarely. No president I can recall has had the kind of discipline and focus that he has, and that is no small thing.

BS; The day after the election, we begin the effort of making Clinton the most progressive president she can become.

- So what do you see as his (Obama's) biggest failure?

BS; He ran in 2008 a brilliant campaign. One of the great campaigns in American history. He rallied the American people, he gave the American people hope. He put together, to some degree, the kind of Rainbow Coalition that Jesse Jackson had talked about. But what he did after becoming president was essentially to say, “Let me thank all the people who helped get me here, but I will take it from here. Mitch McConnell and I will sit down and work out the future.” He misunderstood that Republicans had no intention to negotiate anything. He severed his ties with the grassroots that got him elected, and you can’t take on the powers that be in this country—the power of the media, the power of Wall Street, the power of corporate America, the power of the drug companies—unless there is a mobilization of millions of people to demand fundamental change. Intellectually he understands that, but for whatever reason he did not implement that.

- At the same moment that Obama shut down his grassroots machine, Republicans were creating one of their own. But as we’ve seen with the Tea Party, it’s easy for that kind of operation to become a Frankenstein monster. Part of the challenge of organizing the dispossessed is that the pent-up frustrations you tap into inevitably take on a life of their own. Do you think you can tap into that energy on the left and make it productive?

BS; That’s a good question. Let me repeat: I think it is a very, very difficult task. I don’t say, “Hey, let’s snap our fingers and create a broad-based grassroots Democratic movement involving millions and millions of people.” It is a little bit easier to say than to do.

Somebody reminded me just the other day of something that happened during the Progressive era, during the early part of the century. The Progressives signed up 60,000 actual teachers to go out into communities and educate people about the issues of the day. Certainly social media and bright young people can play an enormous role in that effort today, in a way that we have never seen before. But the goal remains to educate and to organize. You are right in saying it is not easy, and no one can predict what the end result will look like. But it is absolutely imperative that we do that. Absolutely imperative.

- I can’t think of any presidential candidate, certainly in our lifetime, who has shared less about himself personally than you have. So let me ask you a personal question in the guise of politics. I know that Eugene Debs, the socialist organizer and presidential candidate, is a hero of yours. [Sanders smiles and points to a bronze plaque of Debs on the wall of his office.] When did you first come across him, and what effect did that have on you?

BS; When I was in college, I began to read a lot about socialism, and obviously Debs was right in the middle of that. Extraordinary man—people of his period described him as a Christlike figure who would literally give you the shirt off his back. He had money in his pocket, he gave it away. He was a man who had the common touch, who was very close to the people, who had incredible courage, who stood up and opposed the hysteria of World War I, when the government wiped out the Socialist Party. He ran for president when he was in jail—did you know that?

- It was in the 1920 election. He got a million votes while he was in jail.

BS; If they counted all of his votes, which we have reason to believe they didn’t. So this is a man of great integrity and great courage, and if you read what he wrote—wow, it still reads brilliantly today. In the mid-1970s, I did a video on Debs. I did that because I spoke at the University of Vermont during that time and I asked, “Has anybody here heard of Eugene Debs?” Very few hands went up. It just struck me how sad it was that our young people have very little understanding about American history. I would have continued making films like that if I hadn’t been elected mayor of Burlington.

-You’d be the Ken Burns of the left?

BS; That’s right. Or what’s his name, who died recently. The one who wrote that book.

- Howard Zinn?

BS; Yeah. I mean, it was just invaluable stuff, to take a look at American history in a way that most history books and PBS do not.

- Other than Debs, is there someone in politics past or present who you particularly admire?

BS; Yeah, I’ll tell you. The more I read, the more I was impressed with Martin Luther King Jr. Now everybody says, “Well, of course he was a great hero and he led the civil rights movement.” But what was extraordinary about this man was his incredible courage. The establishment said to him, “Congratulations, you got a Voting Rights Act and we’ve done away with segregation in the South—my God, what an unbelievable achievement. Now you can rest on your laurels.” But his conscience said, “You know what? I talk about nonviolence every day, and yet an incredibly violent and horrible war is taking place in Vietnam. And yes, that war is being supported by the guy who signed the Voting Rights Act, but I have to come out against it.” And then he said, “I get money for my organization from wealthy white liberals, but you know what? In this country we have an awful level of income and wealth distribution, and what does it matter if I integrate a restaurant when people can’t afford to eat at that restaurant? I am going to put together a Poor People’s March on Washington, even if the media does not pay any attention to me anymore, to demand a change in national priorities so we don’t give tax breaks to the rich, we don’t fight a war in Vietnam, but we pay attention to the needs of ordinary people.” Whoa! What incredible courage. That’s not what you are going to see on television, but that is the truth about the man’s life. He knew what he was doing.

- It goes back to the question I asked you earlier. King went from looking at racism as an issue unto itself, to seeing it as part of a system of economic injustice. People forget that when he was assassinated, he was in Memphis to support a strike.

BS; Exactly. He was there to deal with the garbage workers fighting for decent wages and working conditions. Which is of no interest to the media at all. So going back briefly to your question: Do you remember what the 1963 March on Washington was called? The full name of it? It was called the March for Jobs and Freedom. And “jobs” came first.

What King understood is, what good is it if you give people the right to go to Harvard University if you can’t come up with the $40,000 a year that it takes to attend? If you are sitting in a low-income community and youth employment is 50 percent, and your dad has no job and you have no money—that’s what matters. That it is not just a black issue, it’s also a white issue. One of the horrors in America today—and this is sad, but interesting—is that the life expectancy for working-class whites, especially women, is going down precipitously. That has a lot to do with despair: bad jobs, no jobs, turning to drugs, turning to alcohol, turning to suicide. So the ability of Trump to gain support among people by running a campaign based on bigotry has to do also with people hurting economically and needing someone to blame. The two things go together.

- Any final message you want to share with your supporters, who themselves feel some despair that their choice is between Trump and Clinton?

BS; I would ask people to take a look at history and to understand that change never, ever, ever comes about in a short period of time. To take a look at the struggles of the civil rights movement, of the women’s movement, of the union movement, of the gay movement, of the environmental movement, and to understand that all of those movements took years and years and are still in play today.

It’s not gonna happen overnight. You gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going.
In the campaign, what we did is show the American people that the ideas the establishment had thought were fringe were really not fringe—that millions of people want to transform this country. It’s not gonna happen overnight. The fight has got to continue. And if you are serious about politics, then you gotta put your shoulder to the wheel and keep going. Sometimes the choices that are in front of you are not great choices, but you do the best you can. And the day after the election, you continue the effort.

Anyone who thinks that Hillary Clinton will not be more sympathetic, more open to the ideas we have advocated than Donald Trump obviously knows very little. So the day after the election, we begin the effort of making Clinton the most progressive president that she can become. And the way we do that is by rallying millions of people.

You ask me about my personal life. I’ve got seven beautiful grandchildren, and I want them to be able to grow up in a decent country. We all have the responsibility to work as hard as we can to make that happen—understanding, as has always been the case, that there are gonna be obstacles in the way. Look up what happened to Eugene Debs. He spent his life working to build a socialist movement, only to see it destroyed. Then ten years later, FDR picked up half of what Debs was talking about.

That’s how the world works. We don’t have the luxury to give up, OK?

-Thank you for taking the time to talk.

BS; Thank you very much. [Turns to his aide.] Well, Josh—any crises that we face? No? Well, you know where to reach me.

NOTE: Three comments on the Presidential debate to follow.

Vote for Hillary Clinton ?

Clinton seems to have established a commanding lead over Trump in the contest for the US presidency - at least in the opinion polls. Trumps's barbaric treatment of women seems a tipping point for now. Trump's latest demand, that Clinton take a drug test before the last debate, comes from the sniffiest political candidate that has ever put themselves in the TV circus ring. And so the carnival continues.

There are many commentators on the US election that start their pieces with words like 'unparalleled' and 'without precedent'. What they mean is that Trump has turned this campaign to be US President into a unique, political farce in modern times. But they are wrong. Figures like Trump have popped up across the world in various countries in the modern era, including in the USA. They commonly erupt into the top of the political maelstrom at times of acute crisis. And they do exactly what Trump is doing. They seek to tie together an utterly disgusted and despairing base in the population, who have not defined either the root of their decline or a line of march to resolve their problems, with the most marginal, least integrated and buccaneering section of the ruling class; a group that define 'their' nation as the beginning and end of all wisdom, and who are savagely jealous of their richer, global relatives and the control they exercise over the state. These events are the initial makings of a genuine political revolution.

In countries with the full franchise, the political revolution (the mechanism by which one faction of the ruling class 'overthrows' another) travels first via the vote. It does not stop there - as we shall see in the case of Trump. (And as we have already seen in the case of Berlusconi and many others.) It always feeds most off marginalised groups and disaffected layers of the population - as they constitute the necessary cannon fodder in the battle for the leader's dominance.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European periphery, which was nailed indelibly by those who could afford a voice in western society as the equivalent of the end of the socialist 'experiment,' the ideological conditions were laid for marginalisation of huge sections of the traditional working class in that region of the world. These ideological conditions obviously depended for their impact on the material conditions of the day. They did not spread uniformly across the globe. In Latin America, the Cuban example had greater weight in radical politics. Working class and poor peasant movements continued to grow in parts of the sub continent in both their independence and power. In Asia the Chinese experience played a key role. The anti imperialist wars in Southern Asia had success, but now the Chinese market can seek its hegemony over South East Asia. The Russian and European experience were not themselves critical among the potentially insurgent classes in that region. It was to be the opposite in Africa. In Africa, both the South African and the Nigerian labour movement had their directions changed by leaderships that, after 1989, turned definitively to national solutions focusing on indigenous capitalist development (unsuccessfully.) It was a reverse turning point across that Continent.

In the West, particularly in the USA, where the new ideology was materially underpinned by the reality of globalisation and the change in the contract between the worker and capital, increasingly insecure layers in society among the working and middle classes were driven lower and lower in their wealth and self organisation. Accordingly they became more and more vulnerable to the politically frantic and irrational bombast offered by giant, wealthy, and crucially 'succesful' egos. The political psychology that attracts the Trumps of this world is not difficult to understand. These new 'heroes' are flushed with resentment having been sidelined by the 'real' establishment in their countries and despised among their traditional elites. Regarded with contempt themselves, they describe to their crowds of followers how they are loathed and rejected - but 're-imagined' by them as the dreadful experience of 'the common man' (and women when they remember.) This poisonous brew is sometimes literally enhanced by the hi-jinks and loss of inhibition by its creator as s/he 'tests the limits' of established political systems and social mores. Starting in the mid 19th century and Louis Napoleon, political history is 'entertained' by such figures regularly, whenever the traditional rulers are fragile, fracturing and failing, but their opponent classes are angry but still uncertain.

But what of Hillary?

She is also, in her way, at the extremes of the traditional political world. Before her shot at the White House the next Clinton is already drenched in the riches accumulated from her efforts to become the leading mascot of the US's big corporations. A few months after Clinton left her office as Secretary of State she began to sweep up over $26 million in speaker fees alone. The price of Hillary's wisdom was a lot to do with who she found it most important to talk to. Wall Street Bankers, Goldman Sachs and the rest were privy, until Wikileaks, to her thoughts. And her thoughts were wide ranging. Lloyd Blankfein, the Chief Executive of Goldman Sachs was told that Hillary favoured intervening (militarily) in Syria secretly. At another conference she told her listeners that the US might have to 'control' North Korea.
'So China, come on. You either control them or we're going to have to defend against them.' (This apparently meant US missile defenses in the region.) At another time she explained that you had to have one approach for the inner circle and another to the rest. Bang on.

The US public would expect Hillary would think and act in a hawkish way about the US's approach to its perceived international interests. What is more surprising to them and to the rest of the world is that she chose to lay all these policies out, in some detail, before she had any position, over several months, to bankers, for money! In this case they are literally getting what they paid for. For millions of people in the US, this is too much to stomach. Hillary Clinton has not only acted as many prospective Presidents may have acted in the past, she has gone further, been specific and explicit about what the bankers can expect for their buck and ended up rubbing the ordinary Americans' noses in it.

At one time it was too much for Bernie Sanders. He demanded the tapes from those very meetings during his own nomination campaign for the the Democratic Party's presidential candidate. Although Hillary's managers denounce the Wikileaks revelations as a Russian intervention into the US Presidential election - that is only so because Hillary refused American Bernie Sanders' demand to see the transcripts. The decision by the Sanders camp to endorse Hillary Clinton was a mistake, if for no other reason than it damaged the credibility of Sanders own criticisms of Hillary and her corrupt relationships with big money.

Hillary Clinton is not going to contest with the political system and its surrounding 'scene' on behalf of anybody else than those who already dominate its stage. It seems that the last chance for that hope died during the eight years of Obama's presidency, when he refused to mobilise his popular support against the hardening rightwards of the Republican Party, as it started to build its bunker to protect itself and its wealth against the results of the economic crisis and China's growth. Her 'message' to the US population is the weakest of any Democratic Party candidate since WW2. She wants to 'unify' people. She wants to maintain women's rights and civil rights and individuals rights. And she wants the US to get back to sorting out the world. Her hard core comments on international politics are not unrelated to the world wide grip of many US based corporations. Her defense of individuals, and groups and genders and ethnicities is not unrelated to a desperate desire in the US's hierarchy to avoid facing or even naming the increasingly obvious, growing, gangrene of inequality between the huge social classes who have to work - and the super rich. Trump may not have the slightest interest in changing that -though he plays with it. Hillary Clinton wants US voters to look elsewhere and pretend that the system is ok.

Traditionally radical socialists both inside and outside of the US argued that the critical step in US politics was the formation of an independent political party that would represent labour. In this perspective both the Democrats and the Republicans represented branches of the US ruling class, and neither of their Presidential candidates should be supported. The US Communist Party altered their view when they believed a 'reformer' had been chosen by one of the main parties, and later in the 20th century if a candidate appeared more inclined to 'peace', (with the USSR.) There has been a powerful argument among Sanders' initial supporters about voting for Hilary. His positive endorsement of Hilary and his claim that after his agreement with her that she is the most radical Democrat Party contender for years, has stilted the momentum of the movement that Sanders had begun to build. Most importantly his nomination has undermined its fiercely held independence. A better stance from the point of view of the importance of a new, radical independent movement might have been not to have endorsed Hilary Clinton but simply to have called for a vote against Trump. In current American politics that would not be seen as the same thing.

A position of a 'no' vote either for the Democrats or for the Republican Party presidential candidates is understandable and defensible from a radical perspective. Such a view would give precedence to the emergence, development and most of all to the independence of the movement that first grew around Bernie Sanders. But whether people vote for 'none of the above' or, holding their noses, for Hilary Clinton - as a vote against Trump - a great victory would be gained if a genuine and self-organised, mass action movement was able to begin the battle against the billionaires, their government and their system, thereby creating real hope and new ideas among the millions of Americans who already know that something is seriously wrong.  

Teresa May defines Brexit

The British Conservative Party Conference is now over. The Tory ranks, represented at their Conference, appear pleased with their new leader and her new policy. Certainly virtually all of the traditional media seem entranced. While assorted reporters, analysts and even TV comics smirk at Labour leader Corbyn for his old hat inspiration deriving from what they call '1970s policies', May is the subject of acute admiration for her rehash of Joseph Chamberlain's municipal reforming zeal, in Birmingham, when he took the mayoralty in 1873, a whole century earlier. The mainstream media have commented widely and with favour on May's insistence that she is bringing back 'an industrial strategy', thus stealing traditional Labour Party terminology. But the same media have almost entirely missed May's resurrection of the term 'working class' back into mainstream political vocabulary. Since Blair we were all supposed to believe that the working class had disappeared. Instead the working class, May has discovered, not only exists but has had to carry the burden of inequality in the last period. (She elects to ignore the beginning of austerity and its unequal distribution since 2008, as well as her own 6 years at the heart of that austerity government.) Indeed, May is going to turn the Tory Party into 'the party for the working class.'

Moving behind the confusion of commentators about May's lurch to the left when she supports the working class and to the right when she promotes Grammar Schools and wants employers to count their migrant workers, the essence of her political aim is clear for those who really want to see. First, what of her appeal to Britain's working class?

This is in fact a very old strand in Tory thinking. From the time of the vote partly won by workers in 1867 and finally completed for all in 1928, leading Tories have offered a host of mechanisms designed at least to split the British working class vote. From Disraeli's 'One Nation' Conservatism to a series of minor concessions sprayed out, including Chamberlaine's new roads and proper sewage arrangements in Birmingham, the Tories first used the immense wealth provided by Empire to assuage at least the most 'priviledged' parts of their historic enemy. Latterly, and in the absence of the historic wealth of the British ruling class being so accessible, the fire-sale of public assets, most dramatically council houses, had the same splitting effect.

In periods where ruling class control is more fragile or where new possibilities for accumulation present themselves, then the wholesale theft and manipulation of social property is often opened up. The peasants in post Tudor England found themselves as temporary owners of what turned out to be unlivable plots of land, then quickly sold off to new landlords, when the 'enclosures' of vast tracts of what had been common land were sold off by Parliament in the 17th and 18th centuries. In modern times versions of these tactics are often repeated as with Prime Minister Thatcher's cheap sale of council houses, dressed up as 'property owning democracy' in the 1980s. The initial political effects of such 'bounties' are designed to reduce the insurgency of subordinate classes.

Today, in the absence of Empire, and as the 'family silver', as ex British PM Macmillan once called it, has mostly been sold off, PM May's offerings to the working class are more meagre and rarely have any real content at all. May proposes places on boards of companies to workers (a 1970s idea if ever there was one.) She has taken the edge off some of the more outrageous attacks on the poor, as with the inspections of the sick who are chronically ill, that were indefensible anyway. On this basis she now announces that the Tories are the new party of the working class. But on the three main problems that the working class in Britain face, incomes, the health service and housing, she offers next to nothing and worse than nothing. Private house building will get further stimulation. Borrowing for major infrastructure as a gift to big multinationals will carry on. (The previous Tory regime had already started this program.) Meanwhile no social homes will be built. The health service (one of the least well funded in the EU) will continue having to cut a further £20 billion by 2020 and austerity will continue - at least on the wages front. In fact incomes will take a further hit as a result of rising inflation caused by the 14% (so far) devaluation of sterling.

There is one 'offer' to the working class that May believes will distract from her empty bag of beneficence to the working classes. Like Tory leaders in the past she is promoting racism as a means of dividing those who would naturally oppose her. 'Brexit means Brexit' she insisted, following her miraculous ascension into the Tory leadership and the post of Prime Minister. Well, now we know Brexit means racism. We are going to count the immigrants in the workplaces, build up the number of British doctors in the NHS, cut back 'foreign' students who want to study the Arts or History and even risk free trade with the EU because the priority is to stop open immigration from Europe. This is the hardest, ongoing racist programme presented to the British people by a government in modern times.

At the core of May's concerns are the 4 million UKIP voters, many of whom left Labour at the last General Election. That is the 'bounty' she expects as a result of a 'hard', read racist, Brexit. May and her advisors have a simple project. She hopes, as the economic waters get choppier (across Europe in particular) that she can split the working class, and in the process, marginalise the Labour Party for good. It is a vigorous new effort to consolidate a overtly racist, endless austerity Tory Party as dominant political force for the next period. This is the 'new world' and the 'quiet revolution' that she hopes will be bent to her purpose.

Letter from Greece.

Athens, October 3, 2016

  

Dear all,

as you know the grassroots social solidarity movement that developed in Greece the last five years, came about as the evolution and maturation of the mass anti-Troika mobilizations of 2011. It constituted a significant venture of a different kind of social organizing and an example of efficient response to the austerity on a national and international levels.

Through the triptych solidarity – self-organization – resistance various collectives were formed on the basis of equitable participation and mutuality. Their efforts shaped novel criteria and a new perception for social and political action and dealt efficiently with the everyday battles against the poverty that affected the society on multiple layers. The solidarity movement brought the hope that there are ways of collective effort and action which can bring results and that can lay out the foundations for deeper social transformations.

The political support of the international movement has been significant in such effort. It succeeded very quickly to respond to the negative representation and hostile atmosphere against the Greek people. It reinstated the truth about the crisis in Greece and how this related to the struggles and fates of all the people in Europe and beyond. At the same time, the material support of the international solidarity movement to the local solidarity structures in Greece has been priceless, as it guaranteed their ability to be financially and politically independent.

Solidarity for All, which kicked off in the fall of 2012, all these years has worked within the solidarity movements with full respect to the autonomy of the various structures. It acted with constant and diligent concern for resolving occurring issues and needs, for the logistical and media support of the activities of the movement. It contributed considerably in the foundation of solidarity networks along its various sectors, or, on a regional and nationwide level among the variety of solidarity actions. Thus it created the conditions for exchange of experiences and the formulation of common projects and mutual support. Simultaneously it organized larger nationwide campaigns and facilitated the interconnection of the solidarity movement with international solidarity initiatives and social movements.

In this manner the solidarity movement managed to give substance to the hopes of the people in Greece. It contributed significantly to the defeat of the pro-Troika establishment in Greece in January 2015 and again in the battle of the OXI (NO) referendum in the summer of 2015. The solidarity movement rooted in the neighborhoods stood as the best “representative” of hope in practice, manifesting the potential for a different route beyond the imposed realisms of “TINA”.

The political change in January 2015, but mainly, and in a tragic manner, SYRIZA’s U-turn after the determined OXI of the Greek people, brought the solidarity movement before big challenges and new kinds of dilemmas. This had a direct impact on the work of Solidarity for All, which despite the efforts of many people has reached a definite closure of its circle and work.

Important issues, such as the relationship between state-government-party-movements-society have not found an answer, or at least an attempt for one. On the contrary prevailed, in an automatic way, the instrumentalization of all the grassroots movements for governmental aims, which resulted in a breaching of our foundational principle of the autonomy of the movements and the solidarity structures. After the July’s 2015 turn and the signing of the third memorandum, those issues acquired a new dimension. Severe objections in critical policies of the government brought it often face to face with the movements and the needs of the society.

The three founding members of Solidarity for All, who sign this document, estimate that there is no room anymore to carry on our efforts for the development of movements of solidarity – self-organization – resistance, as we aspire within Solidarity for All. We feel obliged, in the name of our common steps all these years to inform you about our decision to continue in new endeavors outside Solidarity for All. We consider ourselves fortunate that we put all our efforts and contributed in the making of this fantastic (ad)venture of social solidarity. In the formation of a movement that supported, inspired and created a model of grassroots organizing, from below, that now other people, especially in Europe, share, too.

Always active.

Before the impasse we pave new paths.

For ever with you.

Myrto Bolota

Christos Giovanopoulos

Tonia Katerini

Comment:
The writers of this statement include nationally and internationally respected, prominent, activists in the Greek people's 8 year battle over the relentless imposition of deep austerity. Constructed by the IMF, the European Council and the European Bank, but in close collaboration with a series of Greek governments, now including that led by Syriza, the Greek people have been the victims of a cruel and despotic experiment conducted by Europe's rulers. Their resistance contains the richest experiences that have yet emerged in the modern era in their creation of new, alternative models of politics and even society. The evolution and crises of those models is of critical importance to all those who seek an alternative to capitalism.

Also see Blog 13. 7. 16. The Left in Greece - and Britain!

The appeal of Labour's 'broad church'

The bitterness apparent among many Labour's MPs at the Labour Party's national conference is accompanied by constant references to the need for the Labour Party to be a 'broad church' - if it hopes to win enough voters to form a government. Labour's conference has been lectured on this matter, most recently by the 'ever so 'umble' Sadiq Khan, who has managed to forget the huge numbers of Corbyn supporters who battled for his Mayoral victory in London. After his success, Sadiq Khan then supported Owen, Corbyn's opponent in the Labour leadership contest, who failed dismally to conquer the broadest church of members that the Labour Party has ever assembled. For the ex Blairite, frustrated and angry Labour MPs, who think they have lost their birthright, Labour's expansion into the largest party in Western Europe is, for them, part of the reason that they have less and less of a 'broad church' appeal across the nation!

Of course at the height of his pomp Blair et al had anything but a 'broad church' approach to either the Labour Party he led, or to the country. His most important act (the one that ended up killing half a million people and provoking a new wave of war across the Middle East) was based on a small cabal of ministers and civil servants that thought the American connection was more important than the truth, than human life, than the huge opposition, leading to the biggest demonstration in Britain that there has ever been, and certainly more important than the future of the petty Labour Party, which has subsequently failed to recover its base in society.

The Corbyn leadership on the other hand has taken the first step towards a renewal of left politics in Britain by bringing together the largest number of politically active people who want radical change since 1984 and the great Miners Strike. This is already a 'broad church' (although taken together with the Peoples Assembly, the initiatives to defend refugees and the many industrial actions and campaigns now bubbling away, the term 'church' might be more accurately be replaced by 'movement.')

But right wing Labour MPs regard Corbyn's' and the wider movements' efforts as a barrier to the 'broad church' they hanker after. Their 'broad church' is one that embraces the class enemy. In practise it is a very narrow affair indeed. 24% of the electorate will do. Parliament's business should be narrowed down to those issues that line up with the City of London and the multinationals' interests, or dealt with elsewhere. Labour MPs should largely follow a national consensus, created by leading financiers and industrialists and the media they own, as with the 'need' for austerity since 2008, the 'need' for Trident, and the 'need' to involve private interests in public services etc. This consensus, with spats on the margins, has been the application of the 'broad church' policy by Labour (with a few honourable exceptions) since 1997.

The battle inside the Labour Party today is a class battle. It will not go away or be peacefully reconciled. One or other side will win. If the right wing Labour MPs win, it will be at the cost of the Labour Party itself. Because the Labour Party, long before Corbyn won his leadership victory, had already seen the sliding away of its social base, in Scotland, towards UKIP and now with the Constituency boundary changes. The Party itself was emptying fast. Corbyn's leadership therefore emerged because the traditional Labour Party was facing extinction.

Corbyn's battle to build up Labour again and remove the domination of Labour's right wing, is nothing less that a key lynch stone in the construction of a new consensus, a new class consensus that faces up to and then challenges the existing political and economic consensus. Regrouping and then gathering those who have suffered most in the tempests of an economic and political system that works for fewer and fewer people, is only to make clear the deep divisions long hidden (for reasons of ego, greed, stupidity or malice) by the 'broad churchers'.

Building up a broad movement of all those prepared to fight the status quo will involve meeting face to face with the fear of immigrants, or of Russia's military intentions, or of the threat of international terrorism, as millions are endlessly told no other story. But moving millions starts with hundreds of thousands standing together with all those in society who have been left to rot. It is nothing less than the task of constructing a new consensus, based on the lives and experiences of millions, to counter the 'broad church' so loved by Labour's uncomfortable right wing MPs.

A Short draft Essay on a strategic weakness of the current Left in Britain. (Comments, criticisms and alternatives welcome.)

A Short draft Essay on a strategic weakness of the current Left in Britain.
(Comments, criticisms and alternatives welcome.)

1

When the British Parliament took on its modern form, after the English Revolution of the 1640s and later the Restoration of 1660 to 1667, Parliament had a real and decisive purpose. The compromise between the new classes, the Merchants, the City of London and the post Tudor landowners now in alliance with the traditional aristocracy and the monarchy, against the more radical forces unleashed in the 1640’s, required an heterogeneous instrument to take the recomposed ruling class’s political and economic interests forward. It also needed to legitimate the suppression of those that still favoured a radical, democratic, alternative to monarchy and the ‘Lords of misrule’.

There needed to be an organised political and economic discussion between all the elements of the new dominant, social amalgam. Despite the frictions and contradictions, and the relentless movement in the direction of capitalist accumulation, in the English then British circumstances of the time, neither the royal court nor any republican parliament could do it alone The parliament that was created was corrupt, gerrymandered, dominated by ultra-rich cliques but, until the late 19th century, ultimately immensely effective in promoting the unified interests of a new and evolving capitalist class.

As Parliament was essentially a committee of an adolescent, fragmented and only latterly a fully-grown, single, ruling class, it had to debate and resolve a common interest on major questions of state and finance. This included the retreat from the American colonies, the hundred years of war with France, down to the Corn Laws. But then everything changed. And Parliament had now to deal with two, antagonistic social classes that could not share a common interest, which, naturally, changed everything.

The first uprising of the British working class per se was centered on the nature of Parliament and democracy. Indeed the actions of the Chartists (1820s to 1840s) drew together a new working class from its entire multitude of circumstances and conditions. This new working class was first born through a direct political struggle rather than through social experience of large-scale industry. It was defeated but left a profound legacy that paralleled (sometimes indistinctly) the later, trade union base of mass working class struggle in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The successful 100 year battle by labour and by women for the franchise; the overthrow of Empire; and now all of that capped by the reorganisation of capitalist economics via globalization, has rendered the original role of the British Parliament marginal, indeed dysfunctional in its historical terms. The adaptations that Parliament made to these new realities were always insecure; always underpinned by the effort to get the big decisions out of the place. That state of affairs remains true for both the main classes, albeit for different reasons. Which is why, despite much greater venality of the parliaments in the past, so many millions regard ‘their’ current parliament as worthless and rotten to the core.

Since the rise of labour and political rights for women, Parliament now has one signal purpose and two main functions for Britain’s rulers. Parliament, sometimes by concessions during a period of working class advance, presents itself as providing access to the system of society for those who do not own it. Also by that means the endless measures designed to ‘free’ capital and restrict labour are legitimated among the population as a whole. And those have been its main concerns on behalf of a capitalist class challenged in Britain since the full franchise was won and labour organised itself at work and then politically. Parliament reached the apogee of its concessionary role in 1945 when the USSR had defeated Hitler and, as the future Lord Boothby said at the time,
‘If we do not give them reform, they will give us revolution.’

Since then the British capitalist class, broadly abetted by the leadership of the Tory and the Labour parties, have collaborated in the gradual shift out of Parliament of all the great decisions concerning wealth and power in Britain. Parliament has increasingly become an echo chamber for strategies decided by others, in different places and, once in a while, as with the 2008 crisis, a means of distributing their failures. Parliament has therefore become more and more marginal, uncertain, hapless, with its membership driven in the main by individual ambition.

(This is another example of how an historical trend can emerge from a kaleidoscope of personal ambition, from the fear of one’s opponents and the desire for short-term gain. Despite the fractured chaos of actions and reactions there emerges a pattern of both individual and collective development, invariably conflicted and contradictory, but shaped by a coherence, over-determined by overall class interests and struggles.)

2

The most recent political developments in Britain demonstrate the grossly deformed and impotent character of Britain’s modern parliament.

The Scottish referendum for independence, initiated by an SNP led Scottish Parliament, following the political collapse in Scotland of the post Blair Labour Party, turned into a triumph of modern, democratic, debate. A huge proportion of the Scottish people participated in discussions, meetings, conferences and arguments, at every level, over months, more and more focusing on the sort of society that Scotland could or should be. There was an upheaval in Scotland of political discussion. When the high level debate in Scotland is measured against the intervention into the Scottish referendum of the British mainstream political leaderships and of Britain’s Parliament, which amounted to the crudest threats in the last two months, their embarrassing threats hit the lowest possible level in the debate. The British Parliament’s ‘success’ in frightening the mainly middle classes of Scotland has simply left a wound that will not heal. As British economic conditions worsen over the coming years as Europe as a whole reels at the latest failures of globalisation with or without Brexit, so the demand for a new referendum in Scotland will grow and Scottish society will further polarise. The British Parliament and its main parties categorically failed to respond at any strategic level to the Scottish people and their debate. They have therefore been sidelined in Scottish political life. Even the Scottish Tories have had to ‘nationalise’ themselves in the face of British turmoil.

The British Parliament then launched its own referendum, which had been spat out from a factional effort to stitch back together Britain’s main political party, the Tories. The evolution of the truncated discussion that there was on leaving the EU was entirely controlled by mainstream party leaders, a self-censoring BBC and shrieking, racist hysterics from the billionaires’ broadsheets. Social media did not counter these influences as it was broadly unavailable to the over 40s. People ended up watching a debate between various Donald Trumps, in set-up forums. And the mass of British voters were kept well out of any serious discussion.

Part of the EU referendum’s low level debate and gross failure to focus on the key questions was, of course, because the referendum itself posed a non-question. Whether the British people should remain in an international organisation set up by a continent’s rulers to deal with globalisation - via neo-liberalism, or instead whether to be a single nation state as a means of dealing with globalisation - via neo-liberalism, is not much of a choice. Both ex ‘remainers’ and ex ‘leavers’ in the political mainstream are at pains to insist that it is business very much as usual. The necessary tax concessions to global companies and the accompanying destruction of the social wage and living conditions to appease the dominant corporations of the world will continue.

However, there were political formations that Parliament and its rules had completely excluded, who were able to fill the ‘real meaning of the referendum’ gap among sections of the UK population, primarily UKIP. The British EU referendum was not a debate about the future of British society but rather a means of registering an anti status quo, anti immigration view of the world held, albeit tentatively, by millions of people. There were no mainstream debates at all on the real reasons that basic services were running down or on Britain’s role in the catastrophic wars that have injured the planet and millions of its people.

Why is Britain’s Parliamentary structure culpable? Because it was unable and unwilling to lead the discussion on who really had wealth and power in the EU or in the UK: on why services were declining: on who was responsible for war and cuts: on what sort of society British people want. Instead it had whistled up a referendum from the head of one crafty politician that thought he could put Humpty Dumpy together again. Britain’s voting rules had totally ignored then excluded 5 million voters for UKIP and the Greens in the 2010 General Election, whose voices and argument would have then been heard across the nation, both positively and negatively, months before the vote. If Parliament had actually represented those who voted for something at the General Election, then the character of the coming referendum could have been exposed. Certainly, as the antics of UKIP MPs in Parliament became more visible across a range of issues, the debate would have had the chance of becoming something more substantial and significant than it was.

More broadly and more desperately still, the British peoples’ finest achievement, the NHS teeters on the brink of disaster. Parliament fouls its own greatest moment in the last 100 years by its abject failure to defend the people’s most important service. Maintaining and developing the NHS should be Parliament’s most important job. It is of course a class issue, but Labour leader Blair, Labour’s most successful Prime Minister in terms of office, led the now Tory charge to dismantle it. Parliament is the only place within the British state that has the systematic and overt function of ‘reconciling’ class differences in the modern era (albeit depending on the balance of social forces in the country.) On the NHS the Labour leaders forced no positive compromise, they simply started to give the NHS away. Who among the British working class wanted that?

In other words Britain’s political system distorts and holds back Britain’s political life. Like its lop-sided economy, its ‘permanently’ unresolved national questions and its deep failure to hold up living standards of the majority over the last 20 years, Britain’s Parliament has been built in modern times on the principle of no principle. That is to say that the political system is an accretion of ad hoc measures mainly taken in the immediate, day-to-day interests of Britain’s real rulers – sometimes under pressure from the working class and its compromised leaders and sometimes, as in the case of the NHS – not.

3.

Within the framework of the continuing failure of Britain’s political system; (think of the current joke where 24% of voters voted for what turned into a government in 2010 that has now replaced its Prime Minister, its Cabinet and most of its policies, yet fully expects to sail on for another three years) where is the Labour Party?

The title of this essay suggests a strategic weakness in the left’s approach. This weakness is most fully revealed by an examination of the question of power. The execrable Owen, Labour Party challenger to Corbyn’s leadership and puppet of big pharma for many years, with a programme ‘virtually the same as Jeremy Corbyn’s’, wrote down his differences with Corbyn in a recent interview with the BBC’s news political editor Laura Kuenssberg (13 September 2016.)  He chose the word ‘power.’ What he meant was Labour winning its own 24% of voters and forming a government at the next election in 2020 could only happen with anybody other than Corbyn (i.e. him) at the helm. But that is a complete fantasy, even were the weathercock Owen able to take Labour’s tiller.

The Labour Party is now, and for the immediate future, barred from that sort of ‘power’. Courtesy of years of Blairite management and wars, Labour has lost its mass base in Scotland (and 30 or more MPs.) It is losing its traditional bases in the North, particularly the North East, to right wing populism spearheaded by UKIP. The anti EU vote in the North and in Wales shows further trends away from Labour. And now the Tories are preparing a re-composition of constituencies that threaten a further 30 Labour seats. In other words Labour’s Parliamentary crisis has nothing to do with Corbyn’s leadership (nor, as claimed by some on the left, because the remnants of Blairism in Parliament are now splitting the party and this is putting voters off – although no doubt it is) but it is rather the longer term break up of Labour’s traditional political base inside the British working class in general. And despite all the hope, energy and momentum, as things stand, including the emergence of a public faction of Blairite MPs which makes things worse, even Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party will not win the 120 odd seats needed to win a traditional Labour government in the next General Election.

In Britain, working class people cannot now rely on traditional parliamentary means to install a government that they feel represents them and their class (whether or not its leadership compromises that goal). And Parliament’s current structure reinforces, indeed promotes, such a dismal future.

4.

How could a Corbyn led Labour Party get into government? How can working class people be represented politically in the Britain that is today? Some of the far left in Britain advise reliance on the ‘historical process.’ Fed up with MPs and all their works, working class people will adopt soviets (called Councils of Action in the English translation) as their platform for power. Apparently that is where the ‘historic process’ is leading. Unfortunately ‘history’ has the habit of making fun of soothsayers and it is probably more useful to start from the place where the only state leader who lived with soviet power started, from the ‘concrete analysis of the concrete situation’ – and leave ‘history’ to do its own work. Taking theoretical abstraction to the highest level of the concrete is indispensable for any sort of clarity in class politics.

There are three pillars that need to be constructed for a Corbyn led government to come into office (when the real trouble will begin!) Later this essay will examine some of the continental European experiences but first and absolutely indispensable for any Corbyn led government is a mass movement against austerity, war and racism, which is rooted in every community. The Peoples Assembly, with the support of key and currently fighting unions, is at the centre of such a project today. Thousands of its supporters have joined up to Corbyn’s Labour Party because, not surprisingly, they want a government that will deliver their goals. But it is the movement of hundreds of thousands, of millions of people, being part of something momentous that brings a sense of potential power - through unity and action - to those who are denied any access to power. A mass movement in action describes who your enemies are and who will be your natural friends – and who you need to be together with, to unite with, to win what you need. It is a crucial part of the apprenticeship of ‘a class for itself’. A Corbyn government will need an immense mobilisation in action. Even some of the more extreme political outriders of the western ruling class understand a distorted version of that most modern truth in the course of their own candidacy and trajectory to power. Only the rising sea of a class movement will lift a Corbyn led Labour Party to success.


Second, British politics is not a previously coherent structure now full of holes left by the retreat of the main parties from their traditional bases in the main social classes they once rested on. It is more accurately described as a set of bunkers designed for defense and attack against potentially insurgent classes that might threaten ruling class rule. Parliament (underpinned by Empire and the emergence of malleable trade union bureaucracy) was a mechanism within this endless struggle that was redesigned by the franchise laws in the late 19th and early 20th century to reduce friction, concede ground when necessary and create the national myth of a common interest between opposing classes. As this function has become less and less needed or desired, so new formations have emerged to create new versions of political life that might create new bridges now that traditional ones have fallen.

In Scotland the SNP argue that the national interest is the common interest between classes but not in neutral terms. They propose a new social democratic society, unavailable south of the border, as the end result of embracing the national interest. The Greens similarly argue for a new ‘social contract’ between the classes based on the ‘human’ principle of survival against ecological catastrophe – and again this would be a most radical contract, unavailable in the current status quo. Plaid Cymru embraces both concepts, again within a left social democratic perspective.

A Corbyn led government can only come about at the centre of a network of alliances that share the objective of a substantial shift in favour of the working class, albeit starting from a broad social democratic perspective. Those who want a substantial shift will never believe that the old, traditional Labour Party will provide it. Those who might become interested in a substantial shift will see no sense whatsoever in the idea that this is the exclusive property of the Labour Party alone. Those who have already consciously abandoned the Labour Party as part of their despair at all mainstream parties, will require a new alliance to renew their confidence that something different is happening and something useful could be done. On Trident, on war, on immigration, on racism, on austerity, such a new programme could be put together. It has to be put together to win a new majority of voters. A Corbyn led Party needs to start now to build the social and political bloc and the associated alliances to make a fresh start and give a fresh appeal to millions of people who despise Britain’s traditional politics.

Finally there is the reform of Parliament itself. In virtually every respect the British Parliament is a scandal: from the ministers, who are embedded in senior positions in companies a fortnight after they have left office, to the 800 plus Lords, (117 new ones so far this year), who together with the Commons form the largest parliament in the world per head of the population. (India for example has half the number of parliamentarians with 20 times the population.)

Right at the heart of the British political system is this parasitic cesspit of the House of Lords, constantly reproducing itself through patronage and party donations by the rich. Meanwhile the ‘elected’ house at Westminster consolidates a political life that no longer exists in the country; a government and opposition that largely represent their members own ambitions; the British state machine - and a small minority of its population. All together this is a structure deeply out of kilter with the society it is supposed to lead. It is not framed by the needs of the British people. It is a poisoned anachronism.

Reopening the discussion and insisting on the demand for fair votes is only part of the reform bill to be presented to our rulers. But it is nevertheless essential. There is no need here to rehearse the dangers and mistakes that have arisen as a result of a voting system where only a few hundred thousand votes count in a handful of constituencies. The government is arguing their plan for equalising the size of constituencies (despite the 2 million new voters unaccounted for and special role of cities in all peoples’ lives) on the basis that everyone will now have a fair vote. In our current system that means that every voter will have the same utterly, infinitesimal chance of making any difference with their vote. This lowers all votes to the lowest common denominator. Corbyn’s Labour has to shout from the rooftops for fair votes; that the referendums showed that every vote (and voter) should count. Dissolving this point into a school class discussion about voting systems is the worst thing to do. This argument belongs as part of a series of measures to clean up Parliament and the Parties; to take wealth out MP’s and Party pockets; to sent their Lordships packing; to change Party, Government and Parliament’s relationship with the people; a major point that will be expanded in part 6.

A mass movement of active millions; alliances building new political fronts on key policies and the reconstruction of voting and Parliamentary democracy are all preconditions for a Corbyn led government; preconditions for wide ranging inroads on the bastions of wealth, power, including state power, and privilege, which are all choking our society to death.

5.

A series of significant, anti-globalisation parties sprang up across Western Europe from the beginning of this century. In some cases the collapse of traditional social democracy and the rise of radicalising movements, from both the left and the right, either created serious pressure on traditional social democratic parties, or as in the case of Greece, removed them virtually entirely from the scene.

The UK Labour Party has not avoided this development. But like other nations across Western Europe it evolves its own unique combination of these wider trends. The impact of Blair’s Labour’s war mongering, the rise of the national question in Scotland against Labour’s support for austerity and the alienation of parts of Labour’s traditional base - as the party supported austerity and promoted cuts and UKIP provided the political ‘solution’ of immigration - broke down Labour support both from the right and the left. The mass movements against war and austerity gathering on the left have now made their own political move by ‘entering’ Labour’s withering and empty party structures at the party’s base. They are busy trying to create their own ‘new party’ from its ruins. Britain’s version of the European experience of new parties may be quirky but the fundamentals are the same.

Looking at some aspects of the left and parliaments in other European countries; popular movements and associated parties erupted either along side traditional social democratic parties or even replaced them from the left. (This is not always the pattern regarding traditional left parties. As with UKIP’s ‘bite’ into traditional Labour support in Britain, so the ‘bite of the French Front National into traditional Communist Party areas has been very deep.)

In Spain two year old party Podemos fights austerity from the left and continues to contest with the main social democratic party neck and neck in the polls while the social democrat leadership refuses to break with austerity and challenge Spanish political corruption. In Portugal a small left bloc has supported a new social democratic coalition, whose new leadership has promised to challenge austerity.

Political conditions in Greece have gone furthest in this connection. Social democracy was wiped out as a result of its corruption and its relentless support for EU led austerity. The mass movements, first in the squares and then in social solidarity and anti-fascism, actively and consistently involved hundreds of thousands of Greek people and touched millions in a country of ten million. History sped up in Greece and the political formation that placed itself at the head of those mass movements (with a rather more ambivalent relationship to some of the mass actions) rapidly replaced Greek social democracy, but sadly not only in form but also in content! Syriza now implements EU led austerity. New people – old politics is the slogan on Athen’s walls.

The Greek movements remain intact (although smaller) and have even been renovated by the turn they made to Greece’s refugee crises. The movements remain by and large independent of Syriza and are a tremendous pressure on the government. An estimated 60% of the Greek population has taken part in some sort of action to support the refugees. The movements and some key unions are the working class ‘bunker’ as the debate begins across society as to whether any strictly parliamentary force and focus can meet the Greek peoples’ need for a political leadership that will really reject austerity. Meanwhile Greece’s right is reorganising and preparing its next steps.

It is patently obvious from even this small collection of European experiences that any simple formula that new left parties can simply re-conquer the ‘space’ left by moldering traditional social democratic parties in their dissolution is suspect. Equally a strategy for ‘scooping up’ traditional social democratic / communist party votes, where the goal is a majority or at least an effective minority in Parliament, makes little sense.  

To get to the heart of the matter it is necessary to understand that most Western European parliaments have deeper roots in society that in Britain. Many of those parliaments came out of the successful defeat of Hitler and German occupation. In Spain and Greece’s case, popular sentiment supporting parliaments devolves from the overthrow of fascist and military regimes as late as the 1970s. And although there was a hiatus in the British Parliament’s history between 1945 and 1948, it entirely missed the democratic reforms, including proportional representation systems of voting, that the new European parliaments popularly embraced. Nevertheless, some mass hostility to various degrees, for the political class, is universal across the whole of Western Europe including Britain. Substantially, what this condition means is that any new political formation (whether inside or outside formal social democratic structures; whether in alliance, coalition or face to face battle with social democratic parties, even whether social democracy has already been replaced in parliament) has to challenge the role of parliament itself.

In whose name should this challenge be made?

6.

Parliament and all its members have to be re-formed, root and branch. The Corbyn led Labour Party needs to spend as little time as possible on those MPs who are organising against the new party (which is re-forming itself in line with its own future objectives.) The essence of such a reformation is an utter change in its relationship with the people and particularly working class people who need it. Focusing this new approach to Parliament and the people just on one or two questions by way of example, how should the new Labour Party act?

It should act as though it were responsible to mass of ordinary people who are going to live in a country with nuclear weapons, with all that implies, or not. First the mass membership of the party itself needs to organise their debate and their decision, in preparation to lead society. This should take as long as it takes. Second a mass discussion should be opened, from social media to town halls, where all the implications of the decision are available, but where those national media that are privately owned are obliged to provide equal weighting to the arguments if they wish to participate. Then the argument should be put to a referendum. Perhaps the Labour Party’s position would be defeated. It would nevertheless retain its view and continue to campaign. The significant point is that this potential leadership in Parliament would be responsible to, and subordinate to, the people. All key questions on wealth and power and the nation’s future - secure funding for the NHS, military engagement, minimum wages and wealth taxes - could face a similar process.

There is no sign that the Scots were ‘put off’ from (mostly) democratic debate in nearly 18 months of fierce campaigning. Work was still done. Children went to school. Society managed to continue. And the substance of the matter was not avoided by a Parliament, and dealt with by an unelected elite but instead decided by Scottish people.

In this context what do MPs, elected by fair votes, become? They are not delegates that take a position already decided into a conference. They are not, as they are now called, representatives, who ‘re-present’ their own position (usually on something of second rate significance) because the people who voted for them are too busy to think. They are to be, to borrow a phrase, tribunes of the people. Their business is to lead the debate of the people on the critical matters in their lives, and to take responsibility and be accountable for that. In other words Parliament becomes the sounding board and the direct instrument of the people ‘to get things done.’

The ‘common sense’ lies can be confronted. How can ‘equality of opportunity’ mean anything but its opposite when a select group inherit vast wealth as infants, barely born? How is a policy for peace reconciled with active warmongering in several of the poorest countries across the world? These ‘newspeak’ phrases are part the cultural web of hypocrisy that can be torn away – if the leaders in Parliament walk alongside the people who have elected them in a great rising for truth and for institutional change.

The key to this change in the relationship between a Parliament, led by Labour and its allies and the people it serves, is that leaders must mobilise the people to win their own victories. In the case of the battle with austerity, enquiries and commissions of those who have been most damaged should be established around the country.  Those who have suffered most should be encouraged to speak out against their conditions. Together with their new political formations, they would collectively debate and resolve those national actions that Parliament needs to take to end their misery and to build genuine equality. Informed referendums; local organisations acting not just to work out local solutions but to carry them out; great conferences, carnivals, social movements that confront the damage in the lives of the majority, all these forms and formats have their place in a real and developing democracy.

Over the next weeks and months there will be a serious and significant battle to democratise the Labour Party itself, now the biggest political party in Western Europe. But this will mean very little if Labour does not put a bold plan to the people to democratise Parliament, which then offers a lead on the key political and economic issues of our time. And that will only succeed if Parliament in turn is transformed to be able to promote the rising into democratic life of the great majority of society.