With a lineup of pro-war, neoliberal 2020 candidates like Pete Buttigieg, Beto O’Rourke, and Joe Biden, the Democratic Party establishment is trying to maintain a routine of quadrennial election circuses that can’t continue for much longer. No more is America in the relatively stable state that’s allowed for corporate capitalism to exist thus far. Our society has reached a point where unless major reforms are soon made to alleviate inequality and the struggles of poor and working people, a revolution will occur.
These reforms are what Bernie Sanders and his wing of the Democratic Party promise to enact: Wall Street regulation, universal healthcare, free college, expanded social security and food stamps, higher taxes on the rich, a raise in the minimum wage. Such policies are the only thing that can save American capitalism. Without them, the suffering of capitalism’s victims will continue to get worse, and the growing outrage against America’s vast wealth inequality will ultimately be articulated through vast outbreaks of civil unrest. Our society is as ripe for a class uprising as it was in the 1930’s, and what the Sanders Democrats offer is a social release valve that would placate the people before they decide to rise up and destroy the system entirely.
What I’m talking about is not wishful thinking. With half of Americans being in or near poverty and a third of the country’s households struggling to afford food, shelter, or medical care, people in the country overall haven’t been this poor or indebted in decades. This has created the conditions for great social unrest to soon break out. As the World Socialist Website’s Andre Damon assessed in 2017 about how the political establishment is trying to deflect from this reality: “The United States is a social tinderbox. The Democrats are attempting to create a ‘narrative’ that social anger is the product not of unprecedented levels of social inequality, police violence and unending military conflicts, but ‘fake news’ promoted by Russian intelligence. Organizations and individuals who criticize government policy are, according to this logic, the hired agents of foreign ‘enemies.’”
If the Democratic leadership continues to hold this dismissive view of the struggles of ordinary Americans, they’ll provoke a massive class confrontation. Either the ruling class will compromise by allowing for the establishment of Sanders’ model of social democracy, or the people will try to force through much more radical changes.
For this reason, the outcome of 2020 election could be a major factor in whether American capitalism has a future. As inequality continues to grow, and as the world’s consolidated and unstable financial system heads for a crash that will likely be worse than the one from 2008, these next few years in particular could be when the United States starts to see the kinds of mass protest efforts that are now happening in France. And if the president during this time is Donald Trump or a corporate Democrat, the demands of the people won’t come anywhere close to being met.
For the millions of largely young working class Americans who are now investing their hopes in Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign, a repeat of the stolen primary from 2016 would be the event that shows them it’s time to take matters into their own hands. It would prove to American leftists (for the second time in a row) that our democracy is fake, and that the system needs to be torn down.
Even the Democratic elites’ fellow plutocrats and establishment insiders are worrying about a revolution soon coming. Last month, billionaire Cartier owner Johann Rupert stated his fears of the poor rising up, saying: “We are destroying the middle classes at this stage and it will affect us. It’s unfair. So that’s what keeps me awake at night.” Several weeks ago, billionaire investor Ray Dalio warned that capitalism will be overthrown if changes aren’t made to the system, writing that “We are now at a juncture” between a modified capitalist future and a future where another system wins out. As the French newspaper Le Monde diplomatique assessed earlier this year about the ruling class’ instability in France and abroad: “Elites have not felt such fear in half a century, and it’s not the usual fear of losing an election, failing to ‘reform’ or seeing their shares slide on the stock market, but fear of insurrection, revolt, and loss of power. The [Yellow Vest] street protests on 1 December 2018 caused some to feel a sudden chill.”
Elites like Dalio, who embraces increased working class benefits instead of scorning them, are the ones who know what’s needed to protect their status. When Washington Post columnists write op-eds denigrating Sanders, when CNN producers collude with the Democratic leadership to fill Sanders’ town halls with former Clinton allies, and when the DNC uses various mechanisms to ensure that they can block Sanders from getting the nomination, these elites are ruining what may be their last chance for a truce with the forces of lower class rage.
To my social democrat friends who are supporting Bernie Sanders, I say: if the Democratic Party steals the presidency from your candidate again next year, don’t despair. Join me and the other Marxists in mobilizing mass civil disobedience efforts against capitalism. Let’s show the oligarchs that if they won’t allow us our democratic and economic rights, we’ll make their system unable to function.
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