“Sometimes people say, you know, you’re 78, all that stuff, and you’ve been doing this for a long time — But should I be quitting now? When you look out and you talk to these beautiful, beautiful young people who want to move this country forward in such a decent, humane way, it really does inspire me. And to the degree that I have gotten those folks involved in the political process, yeah, I am very proud of that. I don’t know that I’ve ever done anything in my life more important than that.”
I will forever be grateful to him for helping radicalize me. After the revolution, I will pat him on the shoulder and shake his hand right as I lower the blindfold and light him his final cigarette when he's against the wall.
I consider Bernie a Moses-type figure. He didn't get us to the promised land, but he showed a lot of us the way
Bernie is a Strasserist socdem w/ imperialist characteristics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Naumann Plenty of Jews sold themselves out in the inter-war period, unfortunately.
lol, social democracy is the horseshoe, idiot.
"productive forces" don't totally make up for class struggle, not if we're doing revolution.
stop using "mao" as your handle if you don't understand the "key link"
imagine saying Strasserism doesn't exist and then calling Mao irrelevant all within a few posts lol
Strasserism isn't actually anti-capitalist, unless you believe Nazis. That's BECAUSE it's anti-communist, and on this point the same is also true of Three Arrows etc. Like I said, the horseshoe is much more concentrated between these two poles. Center-"left" & center-right
SocDemocracy merely has dog-whistle smatterings which almost always co-opt & countermand existing revolutionary sentiment in a quickly mobilizing disjointed working class.
I am not fantasizing about executing SocDems, but believe that these fancy pants libs are counting on any serious class-conscious revolution simmering down so that they don't have to watch their more lumpen cohorts execute communists/anarchists. Though it has come down to that before.
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the term "Strasserist" specifically for Bernie himself, but the same can't be said of the movement as a whole. Some of these SocDems, of which Strasserism was a flavor, do straddle the line between bowdlerizing the history of liberal democracy during crisis & exculpating their own complicity/complacency in imperialism & tailism.
This was in late March 1933 right before a large World Jewish Conference rally was scheduled to be held in NYC to protest the Reich. Jewish SocDems and conservatives in Germany were both anti-Zionist & largely pro-capitalist
“Each of the four Jewish organizations immediately set about fulfilling its obligation as best it could. Brodnitz, Naumann, and Stahl beseeched their friends and associates to flood U.S. and British government offices and Jewish organizations with every form of denial and disclaimer. Doctors, lawyers, professors, bankers, prominent journalists and their newspapers, professional and civic organizations of every category-they all tried by cable, phone, and letter to convince Jewish organizations to call off the Madison Square Garden rally.23
"SHOCKED AT GROSS MISINTERPRETATION OF RECENT GERMAN EVENTS STOP SAVE FOR FEW MOLESTATIONS BY INDIVIDUAL TOUGHS NO HARM DONE TO JEWS STOP LATTER CONTINUE UNDISTURBED IN BUSINESS AND OFFICE STOP NO LEADING JEWISH PAPERS SUPPRESSED STOP GERMANY HAS POSITION WELL IN HAND STOP STRICT DISCIPLINE IS MAINTAINED SIGNED AMERIKA INSTlTUT BERLIN."24”
Self-hatred is fine and all, but without a clear analysis of class/identifying forces of reaction, it's just naive self-important masochism. Fascism really is an outgrowth of these less principled minimum programme movements in liberal democracies
You’re actually surrounded by Maoists, and you’re about to meet some Maoists in real life too.
Comrade... please start reading On Practice, On Contradiction, and so on.
Looks like you might have fell for a Eurocentric psyop?
The revolutionary Communists around the world (you know, the ones you look up to) have been solidly Maoist for the last fifty years. The radical sections in the West have also been Maoists.
Think about what you’re saying.
NYT 2015
"BURLINGTON, Vt. — When Bernie Sanders, a self-declared socialist, served as mayor here in the 1980s, he often complained that the United States had its priorities wrong, that it should be diverting money from the military to domestic needs like housing and health care.
So when dozens of antiwar activists blocked the entrance to the local General Electric plant because it was manufacturing Gatling guns to fight the socialists in Central America, the protesters expected the mayor’s full support.
Instead, he lined up with union officials and watched as the police made arrests, saying later that in blocking the plant, the activists were keeping workers from their jobs."
:clapping hands: more :clapping hands: military-industrial complex :clapping hands: trade unionists :clapping hands: blocking :clapping hands: anti-fascist :clapping hands: action
How can Sanders visit Nicaragua and pretend to hold common cause with struggle there while defending the craft unionists producing the Contra's machine guns?
Oh right, because he's an imperialist New Left loon
Dude didn't always do the best thing, but he always tried to do the right thing.
He's the candidate I thought Obama was in 2008.
Pushing New Jersey into the ocean would be devastatingly cruel to the marine fauna.
He is a league above any other presidential candidate I've seen in my life, and the most prominent political figure of the left in America. Of course he's got problems, and he has made decisions that leftists have questioned, but it's hard not see a principled, compassionate person behind it all. And more importantly, I think his style of politics, combative but not caustic, has done a great deal of good for left wing movements and candidates in this country.
Leftist purity testing is cancer. Embrace them and further radicalize them. We have all been socdems once.
complaining about purity testing is literally buttigieg tier bullshit
vague carrot&stick promises of social democratic reform in the imperial core is not the promised land imo... not unless you're Strasserite I guess
damn, i guess we should all pat Bernie on the back again for endorsing Joe Biden!
That's cummunism !
social democrats have sold out the far-left and communists almost every time throughout history.
they want to maintain bourgeois standards of living while going through the performative ritual of addressing class disparity.
it is not for nothing that places like Norway & Finland & Denmark found it so easy to transition from being collaborationist quisling states to the "Nordic model".
Ethnonationalist social welfare with some universal approaches merely preserves these Scandinavian monarchies & ruling classes.
this is :100-com:% correct. hot take incoming
i think there's still a case to be made for using electoral politics as a beacon and for publicity—as a means, not an end. i simply don't think we're going to see meaningful insurrections in the imperial core. as long as we don't go full lib brain and stop thinking about anything else (like those /r/s4p holdouts...) because of this, i think it is sane to support politicians who apply recognize class divisions and apply materialist analysis to some extent. we can connect with sympathetic folks while organizing etc etc.
you're right on the last point, i think.
but I also believe that at the end of the day "left unity" and "death to America" are mutually exclusive when it comes to social democracy. not even once.
Bernie's angle had class conscious connotations, but was more "MAGA" than anything else.
If "recogniz[ing] class divisions and apply[ing] materialist analysis" in Congress just means the occasional :20 second clip of AOC roasting some old rich CEO or Trump fall guy on CSPAN, then I'm not sure we're going to get anywhere through these "means".
Obama but he’s wearing a ski mask and pointing a gun at Bernie’s grandkids
This is Bernie and always has been. He has loyalty to the dems
He was an independent most of his career. He's too friendly with them for his own good, but he pretty transparently ran as a Democrat because that's the only real platform that was available to him.
People shouldn’t make excuses for Bernie based on the assumption that he has some short of hidden power level or socialist values or beliefs
He literally called for giving workers some ownership over the means of production.
We can move on without shitting on the guy. No one wants to be part of a movement that burns its members at the stake when they fail. He did some good things, he's a spent force now, nothing productive will come of beating a dead horse.
think about where he went wrong and where he falls short
Absolutely essential stuff.
personally attacking the guy
I don't see this doing anything productive, and to anyone who's not a terminally online leftist (like all the libs in here) it at best sounds bitter and catty. At worst, think of how crucifying Sanders while simultaneously defending Cuba or the Soviet Union comes off to any normal person. "Wait, you're willing to go to bat for [scary communist boogeyman] but you hate that old dude from Vermont?" It's the fastest way to turn off people who are beginning to radicalize.
that may not be the best thing to start out with
If it's a common part of regular discussion in leftist spaces you don't need to start out with it -- someone wanders in and hears/reads it.
I'm not saying "don't tell people leftist states do a lot of good things, actually." I'm saying that if you combine something that radical with blunt shitting on the most popular politician in the country, that's going to be too much for some people who are otherwise ready to consider more radical ideas. And there's no reason to do the latter, so why do it? It can only hurt us, especially considering so many people find this place and others like it because they like what Bernie has to say and then start digging deeper.
Bernie has also participated in it. Voting for three wars is three too many. There are also limits to electoralism which has to be talked about when there is a discussion on Bernie.
These are all legitimate criticisms that should absolutely be discussed, but note the difference between this, stuff like "he seems like a decent guy but he deserves criticism," and some of the comments that pop up that make you think he might as well have been in the Bush Administration. There's a way to criticize while being respectful of the good things a person has done, but we're not great at that yet.
Newly-radicalizing folks who wander in here aren't going to be turned off by "he's a decent guy who did some good things, but he's not a saint and here are the receipts." They might get turned off if they see a bunch of "fuck this guy and the horse he rode in on, he's dead to me" takes. That just lacks perspective, and it's going to be extra jarring right next to a thread about how North Korea might be good, actually. People take time to change their opinions and deprogram the propaganda they've internalized -- too hard of a sell can cause them to tune out.
People love to jump to one end or the other in explaining bernies mindset, but my own opinion has always been that he never thought he’d really be able to get M4A, even if he became president. The goal was always to get a conversation going. Like, obviously he wouldn’t prevent it from happening, but without mainstream support by the establishment, it wasn’t going to happen and he’s always just been one guy. That’s why he pushed so hard for his legacy to be all about “not me, us.”
The goal was always to get a conversation going.
Certainly was the goal in 2016. He didn't even start running a real campaign until he got an unexpectedly large, positive response.
Anyone who feels betrayed by Bernie is either hopelessly naive or very young. He was never going to be the one to break off and lead a vanguard party or spit in the face of the Democrats; his whole career is built on compromising and working with shitlibs while still maintaining his integrity. It’s a complete aberration in American politics he was able to grow any modicum of power at all. He was never going to throw that away just to tell the libs to fuck off, as much as we all wanted it. He made plenty of mistakes and we should criticize them, being far too nice a la Corbyn, my friend Joe etc. But make no mistake his rise to prominence has been a massive boost to the left.
The USA is not turn of the century Russia, there is currently no baseline broad support for even social democratic reform among the working class, there is no strong sense of class consciousness or solidarity. But we’re a hell of lot closer post Bernie than before and it’s up to us to keep that momentum going.
He sold out, but short of a miraculous victory he was always going to. And that’s fine, he’s on the inside, he’s been playing this game his whole career. But we’re not and we don’t have to.
It's definitely awkward because every time I think about Bernie endorsing Biden I can't help but think of how Tara Reade must feel, but I can't hate Bernie. If he hadn't run in 2015 I might've remained unengaged with politics and never moved left.
It does feel like we are in the accelerationist timeline. We just have to be ready to capitalize on those moments to show people things don’t have to be this way. If America were to collapse into revolution today I’m not sure we’d end up with a left movement in power. We’ve come so far since the tail end of the Obama years though and as you say the BLM protests have been an encouraging sign.
Liberals, cast aside your cult of personality. Kill your heroes and become your own. Bernie is dead to us. We need to save ourselves.
It's absurd to claim Bernie ever had a cult of personality -- look at what happened when he dropped out. The ideologically-committed leftists shit all over him and the left-ish Democrats who just wanted healthcare sighed and settled for Biden. Don't repeat what was always just a reactionary talking point.
If there's no cult of personality then there's nothing to mourn here.
The guy's been a ton of young people's gateway to the left. Let them feel their pain.
Oh get off it, anyone who’s here already knows this was never going to end with the Bernie campaign. You can be upset about one thing and know that there’s still work to be done.
Lol its true but liberals hate to see it. He's been sidelined and all his proposals tossed overboard, he gave up whatever leverage he had for absolutely nothing. If many people join the Communist Party it will not have been completely in vain.
“These are the people who run the world,” he said. “Of course you’re taking on people who are enormously powerful. They own the system. They are the system. They are the system — and it is not easy to make those changes, OK? And it will not happen overnight. And that’s why I’m not pessimistic about the future. We are making progress in our fight. All right?”
