Bigger Than Bernie. Micah Uetricht
ring true. We are in a rare, perhaps brief, window of political opportunity. Let’s seize it to go beyond the Bernie Sanders campaign and win socialism in our time.
Contrary to conventional wisdom about the viability of class politics in the beating heart of global capitalism, Bernie Sanders’s rhetoric—calls for justice, equality, security, and shared prosperity in the form of free education, affordable housing, free high-quality health care, full employment, a secure retirement, and a clean environment for all—hasn’t scared off masses of people. Instead, by polarizing politics along class lines, insisting that the reason many are denied these basic rights is that wealth and resources are captured by the top of society and kept there by design, Sanders has inspired the masses: 13.2 million voted for Sanders in the Democratic Party presidential primary in 2016, and his 2020 presidential campaign broke records for individual donations and volunteers.
Even his adversaries are often forced to respond to him— some, mostly Democrats, by half-heartedly adopting his popular demands in order to appeal to a constituency that is clearly moving left on key issues like Medicare for All; others, both Republicans and Democrats, by reviving the Cold War specter of authoritarian socialism to scare people into opposing an ambitious vision for social and economic change.
Socialism is now on the tip of the nation’s tongue. In 2015, when Bernie first began running for president, it was the most-searched word on Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. Tens of thousands have joined the Democratic Socialists of America, and millions more talk about the merits of socialism over capitalism in conversations with their friends, families, and coworkers. Democratic socialist politicians are running and winning at the local, state, and national level. The sun is rising again on the idea that capitalism cannot provide the freedom and prosperity that it promises, and that the wealth created by all belongs to all.
What’s most important about Sanders, however, isn’t the policy ideas he’s popularizing, or even his role in detoxifying the word “socialism.” Yes, Medicare for All and tuition-free college as well as full medical and student debt cancellation would transform millions of lives. Likewise, the fact that socialism is no longer anathema has opened up new possibilities in politics (and has significantly increased socialist magazine subscriptions and socialist magazine employment, for which we are both grateful). But what matters most is how Bernie has promoted the idea that nothing he or any other candidate can do in office will win the kind of change we need without a political revolution of millions of people, a mass working-class movement taking to the streets and workplaces and fighting on its own behalf.
Sanders has played an important role in sparking that movement, and demonstrated that electoral politics shouldn’t be seen as something contrary to or apart from its development. “He has absolutely infuriated the liberal establishment by committing a major crime,” said Noam Chomsky in an interview with the Intercept. “It’s not his policies. His crime was to organize an ongoing political movement that doesn’t just show up at the polls every four years and push a button, but keeps working. That’s no good. The rabble is supposed to stay home. Their job is to watch not to participate.” Sanders’s greatest contribution to American politics is that he continues to convince people that their own participation is necessary to win a better society.
If socialists had the opportunity to design the ideal scenario leading up to a viable democratic socialist presidential campaign, we would have scripted something very different. Ideally, a campaign like Sanders’s would have been the culmination of a long path paved with many smaller victories. Socialism would already be a powerful movement in electoral politics, the workplace, and civil society, and the candidate would rise organically through the ranks of this dynamic, popular, and organized movement.
Unfortunately, both socialism and working-class movements were nowhere near ascendant when Sanders first ran for president. Instead, in a strange feat of reverse-engineering that few socialists saw coming, his campaign helped revive those movements.
After decades of marginalization and defeat, US socialist politics are entering a new era. When future histories of the American socialist movement are written, Sanders will play a prominent role. How does his life fit into the broader trajectory of the American Left?
On the one hand, Bernie’s formative years aren’t that different from many people his age on the Left. Born to a Jewish immigrant family (a demographic that has played key roles in the history of the American Left), he dove headlong into the political upheavals of the 1960s, joining the civil rights and socialist movements. As those upheavals subsided, he, too, retreated momentarily—to the idyll of rural Vermont. That story tracks closely to what we hear from many fellow travelers who were young and active during the last period of American social unrest and mass agitation.
On the other hand, especially after the 1970s, Sanders has managed throughout his career to stand both outside the main currents of the socialist movement and outside the American political mainstream. He has largely walked alone, remaining politically independent of the Democratic Party and avoiding its open embrace of neoliberal policies and abandonment of the labor movement, while also carving a successful path as an elected official. We should be grateful he did; otherwise, Sanders wouldn’t have been able to hold the unique position he has held over the last four decades, culminating in his presidential runs and his contribution to the revival of socialist and working-class movements. Sanders’s unique political biography has a lot to teach us about how to weather periods of left marginalization and defeat by remaining true to leftist principles—and how to strike again when the iron’s hot.
Socialism and Sanders
Socialism has a long and storied history in the United States— never dominant, but at times popular and powerful.
Thomas Paine, one of the country’s founding fathers (and its most radical), was an ardent critic of economic inequality and rule over the many by the few. Socialism didn’t exist as an ideology in the late eighteenth century, but Paine believed in a society shaped by the ideals of democracy and equality, and even proposed the creation of proto–welfare state programs and taxing the rich. In the early nineteenth century, American utopian socialists inspired by thinkers like Robert Owen and Charles Fourier worked to create enclaves apart from society where labor was undertaken for the common good and not for profit, and where each community member had a say in the decisions that affected their lives. Those experiments didn’t have much staying power, but they were important early efforts to realize the values of socialism in the United States.
As the Industrial Revolution progressed and the world saw the rise of an industrial working class toiling in factories and mills, especially throughout Europe and the United States, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels began writing, arguing that those workers had both the strategic power in society as well as the material self-interest to fight for and win socialism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, workers throughout the United States, many of them influenced by Marx and Engels’s theories but most simply interested in winning better lives for themselves and their families, began organizing unions to fight for dignified working conditions and fair pay—and waging some of the bloodiest battles in all of world history against bosses, police, and even soldiers.
Those battles ebbed and flowed past the turn of the twentieth century, with major strikes and union organizing kicking off in railroads, steel factories, and other industries, and even citywide general strikes like the one in Seattle in 1919. The Socialist and Communist parties also grew during this time, with the socialists electing over a thousand officials all over the country—from the “sewer socialists” who led Milwaukee, Wisconsin, for decades to two members of the US Congress.
The most prominent socialist political leader during the first decades of the twentieth century was Eugene V. Debs, whom Bernie Sanders cites as a personal hero. (Sanders made a documentary about Debs in the 1970s, and reportedly has a framed portrait of Debs in his office in Washington, DC.) Debs led militant strikes as an officer with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen