The people of the United States are slowly getting out of a deep fog of anti-communist propaganda and colonizer culture. There are so many lies that people will need to recognize before they can join the fight for a revolution, and most people unsurprisingly have a long way to go in their political education. In other words, the American left is largely made up of liberals-people who see reforming capitalism as a worthwhile goal. To advance class consciousness among these people, we leftists will need to not tether ourselves to liberal leaders.
By this, I mean we need to take every opportunity not to reinforce the illusion that figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other “progressive” Democrats are enemies of capitalism and imperialism. When Illan Omar said last week that she believes Sanders “will fight against Western imperialism and fight for a just world,” many on the left were inclined to agree with her, because it would be such a good thing if this were true about Sanders. But it’s important for leftists to point out the inconvenient realities about these figures, rather than go along with the narrative that pro-capitalist politicians in the imperialist Democratic Party represent truly radical change.
In his essay Combat Liberalism, Chairman Mao warned that revolutionaries harm their own cause when they refuse to engage in criticism of anti-revolutionary ideas or people. He specified the following behaviors as ways that people can fall into this habit:
To hear incorrect views without rebutting them and even to hear counter-revolutionary remarks without reporting them, but instead to take them calmly as if nothing had happened...To be among the masses and fail to conduct propaganda and agitation or speak at meetings or conduct investigations and inquiries among them, and instead to be indifferent to them and show no concern for their well-being, forgetting that one is a Communist and behaving as if one were an ordinary non-Communist...To see someone harming the interests of the masses and yet not feel indignant, or dissuade or stop him or reason with him, but to allow him to continue.
How could an honest revolutionary not speak up to counter the deceptive claims that America’s social democrats are basing their brand off of? How could we not point out that the Bernie Sanders who Omar hails as an anti-imperialist isn’t actually opposed to the concept of U.S. imperialism? That Sanders has supported the horrific 1999 Yugoslavia bombing campaign, that Sanders has crafted a resolution which is normalizing the War on Terror in Yemen, and that Sanders has legitimized the U.S. coup effort in Venezuela by calling Nicolas Maduro a “vicious tyrant?” Or that Sanders’ pro-imperialist positions aren’t at all unusual among his fellow American “progressive” politicians?
Are we supposed to pretend that the Scandinavian model which Sanders aspires to would bring about the end of U.S. imperialism and erase the inequities that global capitalism has created? Because the social welfare systems that the Nordic countries adopted in the 20th century didn’t take the capitalist class out of power, nor end these countries’ alignment with U.S. interests, Scandinavia has followed the rest of the capitalist world’s path towards imperialist expansion and neoliberalism. Amid rising inequality within these countries, their companies have been profiting off of Western imperialist operations, continuing Scandinavia’s long history of enriching itself through imperialist violence.
How can we accept that Sanders’ brand of FDR liberalism (which was the political paradigm that had initially interrelated with the imperialism of Scandinavian social democracy) represents an agenda of liberation for the victims of empire?
If the Sanders camp were to succeed in implementing American social democracy, living standards would be raised for American citizens while neocolonialism and the War on Terror would continue in a scaled back form. Climate collapse would at the same time escalate in avoidably severe ways, because the social democrats want to continue capitalism and capitalism can’t solve climate change. This would be a future where the pillaging of the planet and of human life goes on, but with more social programs in place throughout the First World so that the system can be more stable.
And it’s not even likely that such a compromise within capitalism is still capable of occurring; the United States and the other capitalist nations are becoming increasingly fascist and anti-democratic as neoliberal capitalists react to the system’s instability by turning to the authoritarian right. The plutocracy won’t allow figures like Sanders to come to power, and figures like Sanders won’t ultimately challenge the plutocracy’s sabotage against them because they’re determined to play by the rules of bourgeois democracy. This was demonstrated when the Democratic Party establishment blatantly stole the primary from Sanders in 2016, and then Sanders and his political machine pretended that their loss was legitimate before throwing their support behind the “winner” Hillary Clinton.
Is this what we revolutionaries should accept for the sake of politeness? A “socialist” political brand that’s actually violently opposed to genuine socialism? Communists in bourgeois democracies have had to confront this question since liberal capitalist reformism first came into existence. And history continues to show that the correct way we should relate to social democrats isn’t to pretend that they’re on our side. It’s to approach them as what Joseph Stalin described them to be: “social fascists.”
Stalin’s social fascism theory posited that social democrats represent the moderate wing of fascism. In the wake of the violent social democrat-facilitated campaign that resulted in the murder of communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg in 1919, Stalin wrote this in his 1924 work Concerning the International Situation:
Fascism is the bourgeoisie’s fighting organisation that relies on the active support of Social-Democracy. Social-Democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism. There is no ground for assuming that the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of Social-Democracy. There is just as little ground for thinking that Social-Democracy can achieve decisive successes in battles, or in governing the country, without the active support of the fighting organisation of the bourgeoisie.
As I write these words, Bolivia’s poor and indigenous people are experiencing their biggest threat in a generation amid this weekend’s fascist coup against the country’s socialist president Evo Morales. Once again, the complicity of the social democrats has played a crucial part in the violent suppression campaigns of the bourgeoisie. Morales’ opponent Carlos Mesa is with the Revolutionary Left Front, a party that identifies with reformism, social democracy, and progressivism. Mesa and the other “leftist” enemies of Morales have exploited the Bolivian right-wing’s violent political terror campaign of the last month in order to carry through their goal of ousting Morales.
Like during the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and all the other instances of capitalist atrocities, the distaste for blatant bourgeois violence that many social democrats have expressed in response to the Bolivia coup is contradicted by the social democrats’ support for bourgeois power. Sanders, Omar, and Ocasio-Cortez may have so far put out statements which condemn the foul play of the Bolivia coup, but all of their statements have ended with a similarly worded caveat about Bolivia needing fair and democratic elections. They haven’t clarified that the threat against Bolivia’s democracy has come entirely from Morales’ right-wing opponents, who have violently protested in response to Morales’ victory last month, tampered with the vote count process, and then claimed that the resulting election irregularities prove Morales needs to be immediately ousted.
This notable detail in how social democrat leaders have responded to the coup reflects upon the larger culture of complicity in imperialism that’s been present in the American social democrat movement. During last year’s elections, two-thirds of the “progressive” Democratic candidates were completely silent on foreign policy, while the ones who did mention foreign policy almost all merely articulated their desire to respect veterans and the troops. This year’s “Socialism Conference,” which is sponsored by Jacobin magazine and the Democratic Socialists of America, featured U.S.-funded regime change activists. And we can’t forget that two months ago, Sanders said after denouncing Maduro that “We need international and regional cooperation for free elections so the Venezuelan people can create their own future.” This was effectively a call for Venezuelan regime change, showing that Sanders (and many of his allies) will only oppose imperialism when it’s relatively convenient to do so.
Will we accept a “left” leadership that can’t be trusted to fight for our Third World comrades, much less fight to overthrow the bourgeois power structure that will always seek to keep the world’s proletariat subservient? Many on the American left will continue to accept this leadership for now, mainly because politicians like Sanders represent seemingly the only option for improving the First World proletariat’s material conditions.
But as the global economy moves towards collapse, and as America’s looming social unrest clashes with an encroaching fascist police state, our society will at some point resemble the stark class conflict that post-coup Bolivia has entered into. And when this moment of class confrontation comes, the American left will have no choice but to adopt the militancy and mass civil disobedience that Bolivia’s indigenous socialist resistors are now engaging in.
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