Preamble: --On the uses and limits of Bernie, we should consider the context (time/place) of the audience, BeBernie 2023 and Beyond: Uses and Limits…
Preamble: --On the uses and limits of Bernie, we should consider the context (time/place) of the audience, Bernie's content, and the political situation: --Audience (considering the process of critical education): i) Beginner: the ideas may indeed be revelatory; after all, we all start from the default status quo. ii) Experienced: if the idea does not keep up with the experiences of the audience, it may become a limitation at a certain point. --Bernie's content vs. political situation: i) My expectations for the content of Bernie's 1st campaign (2016 Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In) is comparatively much more lenient, given the context of his debut as a censored senator from Vermont. ii) For his 2nd campaign in 2020, expectations had to rise and keep rising as his small-donors fundraising started shattering records. We all watched how the campaign crashed the party before the party crashed it. iii) In the aftermath, my critical expectations are raised even higher: we have to learn from such a missed opportunity, sabotaged by the Democratic Party, where the prospect of a third party had been debated by those around Bernie. ...To those who see themselves as "pragmatic" and cannot fathom the third party option, this same "pragmatism" not so long ago scorned Bernie entering the 2016 elections. The context (audience/Bernie/political situation) changes; if you do not keep up, you end up a "pragmatic" loser. ...Bernie's platform was never going to be allowed to waltz into the White House by itself. The critical question was always how much popular power could Bernie unite to force his platform into office. ...What are the uses and limits of Bernie now, with close supporter Cornell West running for a third party in 2024?
The Good (for beginners): --Rhetorically (important given Bernie’s crucial role as a lead communicator of social needs in the home of the Red Scare), a couple techniques stood out:
1) US context: --To frame political action for social needs as common sense (even “American”) rather than “radical” (foreign/scary), Bernie recites popular US historical figures. This centers around FDR’s 1944 speech recognizing the need for economic rights (and thus the limits of FDR’s 1933-39 New Deal reforms):
As our Nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness. We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.
--This is followed by the most successful Socialist presidential candidate in US history (I do wonder if Bernie's direct acknowledgements of "socialism" has actually decreased), Eugene V. Debs:
I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence [ex. debt/compound interest/speculation raising cost of living].
...Bernie compares greed-addicted Wall Street speculators vs. essential workers with precarious low-wage jobs. As a public communicator focusing on inequality/class, this really should be Bernie's bread-and-butter. There is so much more he can elaborate on regarding Wall Street's debt-fueled passive income (capital gains/debt-leveraging speculation/compound interest) resulting in sky-rocketing cost-of-living (esp. housing prices, medical/education debts): The Bubble and Beyond --Of course, MLK, particularly the radical direction (The Radical King) MLK took when he combined antiracism with anti-capitalism (1968 Poor People’s Campaign) and anti-imperialism (protesting the US war on Vietnam). --Several other popular US presidents are invoked, including Eisenhower (continuing FDR’s wartime restrictions on profiteering into postwar boom), LBJ’s “Great Society” programs, and Theodore Roosevelt taxing robber barons:
[…] a Republican who possessed considerable wealth of his own, recognized that taxing extreme wealth was necessary not merely to collect revenues but to preserve and extend democracy. “The absence of effective state, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power,” he warned in the 1910 “New Nationalism” speech, where he outlined a plan to “change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which it is not for the general welfare.” At the heart of Teddy Roosevelt’s plan was an ambitious wealth tax that targeted both the income and the estates of the robber barons of his time.
2) Moral values?: --Bernie flips conservative elites’ rhetoric of “moral values” to target capitalism’s system goals of endless accumulation/money-power (moralized as “greed”) and how this fails the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) found in all major religions. --Have you noticed the glaring contradiction where conservative elites avoid the most significant driver disrupting social relations (be it “traditional” or any sense of community): capitalism?
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois [capitalist] epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned […] -The scary pamphlet
--Substance: beneath the rhetorical tactics, the substance is grounded in structural critiques rather than individuals (“a couple of bad eggs”):
3) System goals and Social costs?: --Bernie considers what happens when social services are commodified (buy/sell on market), with healthcare taking a chapter. How do the system goals change (Thinking in Systems: A Primer)? What are the social costs of private profit-maximization? How does (supposed) market efficiency/optimization serve profit-maximization and how does this conflict with social needs? Other social costs of profit-maximization include financial crashes/bailouts, climate change/ecological crisis, endless wars, legal bribery (lobbying), Big Pharma’s drug prices, etc. --Nothing excites me more than seeing political economic structures described in an accessible, engaging manner that captures both the human needs as well as the big picture abstraction, which is why I always recommend Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails. --It’s not just conservatives that avoid the big picture structures of capitalism; liberals also avoid this, leaving a vacuum for right-wing “populism” to parody public concerns during crises by acknowledging something is wrong (Trump’s “American carnage”) but immediately scapegoating visible minorities to avoid structural causes: The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. This is why Bernie’s structural critiques are crucial to defusing Trumpism.
4) Alternatives?: --Bernie’s platform is built on: i) Social Commons (social services/public utilities): revive (take out of profit-maximizing one-dollar-one-vote markets and into public as human right) and expand, esp. healthcare, education, publicly-funded elections (we should note Bernie’s huge success using only public small contributions in his 2020 campaign)/money out of politics, technology, media (Bernie notes manufacturing consent is more prevalent than “fake news”: see Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies) etc. ii) Redistribution (taxing wealth/white-collar crime rather than labour) iii) Predistribution by changing capitalist property rights: Bernie only hints at this in the context of the workplace (i.e. worker co-operatives, worker representation on corporate boards). I’ll cite Richard D. Wolff (Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism) on how redistribution is inherently conflictual compared to predistribution: for 2 children, give one child 2 popsicles and then demand this child to hand over 1 to the other child (this is maldistribution from capitalist property rights requiring redistribution), vs. give both children 1 popsicle each (predistribution).
…See comments below for the rest of the review ("The Bad/Missing")…...more
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