The Bernie Sanders movement, despite being viewed cynically by some hardcore socialists, is a vital step towards genuine socialist revolution in the near future. By normalizing the terminology of socialism, and by putting ideas like single payer health care into the mainstream, Sanders has prepared the country for a genuine upheaval of capitalist institutions and systems.
Socialism, as George Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, is what every society should be trying to achieve: “From one point of view, Socialism is such elementary common sense that I am sometimes amazed that it has not established itself already. The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that every-one does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.”
A system where exploitation of labor is allowed, even in “reformed” or “regulated” doses, is incompatible with this goal. Under capitalism, there will always be people who are enslaved or abused by businesses, and this alone makes capitalism unacceptable. Only now, when capitalism is threatening to upend civilization through economic and ecological collapse, is society becoming ready to get rid of it.
Around forty percent of young Americans, polls in the last few years have shown, view socialism favorably, compared to around thirty percent who view capitalism favorably. The rise of Democratic Socialists of America, along with more radically anti-capitalist groups, shows the mobilization that’s gone with this trend. As the most educated and most economically deprived generation in recent history, American millennials are trying to drastically change society towards democracy and egalitarianism. And the movement they’re part of goes beyond the United States.
“What’s so specifically important about this is that in a period of growing political radicalization among young people, among workers, they start to look for oppositional information, they become interested in socialism, revolution, terms like ‘equality,’ those terms which previously would bring thousands of readers to the World Socialist Web Site, now were bringing no readers to the World Socialist Web Site,” Said World Socialist Website’s David North in January. “In other words, they were setting up a quarantine between those who may be interested in our site and the WSWS. From being a bridge, Google was becoming a barrier, a guard preventing access to our site.”
The socialist movement’s path to power is filled with systemic obstacles, ones that go past the censorship North mentioned. For decades, the American consciousness has been flooded with intense demonizations of socialists and anti-imperialists, coming from propagandists in both the Republican and Democratic parties. Gaslighting, the tactic of convincing a victim that they’ve imagined the wrongs that have been done to them, is what this campaign has centered around.
Those who disobey the system are always told not just that they’re mistaken, but that they should be grateful for what capitalism and the war state have given them. The rich have become worshipped, and the vulnerable have become hated, under the elimination of solidarity with the poor that always happens when neoliberalism takes over.
Censorship, as we’ve seen, has been capitalism’s next response to disobedience- followed by violence. But ultimately, when a state reacts with violence, it can strengthen the resistance. Those who protested the Dakota Access pipeline in 2016 were attacked with dogs, rubber bullets and grenade attacks. They were maligned by the corporate media, ignored by politicians, and, in some cases, systematically intimidated by the FBI through false explosives charges. Still their actions inspired hopes for nonviolent resistance across the nation, and the anti-pipeline movement has been a lot stronger since the events at Standing Rock.
This victory isn’t isolated. The movement against corporate capitalism and militarism is a lot bigger than the media has shown us. In the last two months, worker strikes have broken out in Germany. Teacher strikes have been happening in the U.S. in recent weeks, and they’re still growing. Protests against the Syria and North Korea war efforts have happened in the last year.
The marches to end the gun industry’s hold over government show what the younger generations are capable of. All it could take to overwhelm the corporate state is the creation of another Occupy-like mass protest movement, which could snowball into something much bigger than Occupy under this political environment. When the protesters go after not just the gun lobby, but after the military and the banks, capitalism will be under attack like never before.
