Why Bernie’s “Democratic Socialism” Can’t Stop Capitalism
By the Austin Revolutionary Organizing Collective
As talk of the 2020 elections becomes inescapable, many self-declared socialists have been captivated by the glitz and glamour of the Democratic Primaries. Once again, a looming battle between a “corporate Democrat” and a “democratic socialist” holds their rapt attention. As in 2016, they hope a grassroots movement for Bernie Sanders can strike a blow against the “establishment.”
What has changed is their level of organization: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), now boasting tens of thousands of members, has now formally endorsed Sanders’ campaign and will lend their numbers to door-knocking, phone-banking and voting in the primaries.
We believe that this is an ill-advised and doomed strategy, and we wanted to take a moment to challenge potential comrades to examine the “democratic socialist” plan critically. Our hope is that this will press any true revolutionaries in or sympathetic to DSA-into abandoning their electoral schemes and joining the struggle for socialist revolution.
Defining Democratic Socialism
DSA-style “democratic socialism” is defined by the idea that US society can build socialism and respect the liberal rights claims of everyone in capitalist society at the same time. They reject the need to suppress any political institutions or to forcibly expropriate any property on a large scale. Sanders would almost certainly reject these ideas out of hand, as he has already condemned self-described democratic socialist movements even though they too fell short of these critical tasks — like the Bolivarian movement in Venezuela.
The focus, instead, is on taxation and establishing new public institutions to operate in the otherwise private sector. They aren’t going to nationalize healthcare, they are going to tax the rich to fund a single-payer Medicare system that will pay private health care providers. They aren’t going to expropriate the energy industry; they are going to tax the rich to build non-carbon infrastructure used by private energy companies and utilities. They don’t need to seize idle property and turn it over to the homeless or those with inadequate housing; they are just going to — again — raise taxes and expand public housing programs while reforming some other private programs through new regulation.
Maybe the more ambitious among them intend for these public institutions to crowd out the private sector over time, but they intend to allow property rights and market forces to play out. This is the heart of Sanders-style democratic socialism.
How Do You Make Them Pay?
This raises an important first question for the socialists backing these policies and the candidates pushing them: how much can you take from the private sector before they stop giving it to you — either by willfully resisting you or when they hit material limits in their ability to pay up? How much can you tax these entities before they break down altogether and you cannot get the taxes any more — a big problem if you are expecting them to generate value on a perpetual basis? And what if they say no? How much can you demand of powerful economic institutions before they use their power to undermine your ability to demand it of them?
In Venezuela right now or in Chile in the early 1970s, for example, socialist leaders who decided to respect bourgeois property rights learned that the private sector would simply sabotage the economy and then blame the socialists for the fallout. Large chunks of the electorate that had gone along with the left before the crises lost faith, and the left’s power to resist was eroded dangerously.
“Democratic socialism” of this sort is a delicate balancing act of retaining the economic function and basic political powers of the very entities you want to economically exploit and rein in politically. If the answers to the questions above (and these questions have specific, objective, and quantifiable answers — none of which Sanders or DSA have been compelled to give) are not commensurate with the costs of the programs the democratic socialists want, then the “socialist” program is impossible on its own terms.
Does Capitalism Work or Not?
This brings up a second major problem. Socialist political economy is rooted in the idea that capitalist production is doomed to perpetual decline and decay over time; an idea even mainstream observers are increasingly incapable of answering — see their fretting over “secular stagnation.” If this is true, then where will the democratic socialist program get its ongoing financing as the institutions it relies upon degrade and fail?
It appears that the average Sanders supporter has actually internalized capitalist propaganda about perpetual growth and the private market as the “engine of economic development.” They simply want to harness it for social good, but this isn’t actually socialism.
Why not? Well besides rejecting the fundamental ideas of socialist political economy, it raises the third problem at hand: how “good” is the source of the value they intend to extract? The surplus they are looking to redistribute is, like all surplus value, the product of exploited labor. If they are extracting it from one set of workers to distribute to another set, then they are simply accomplices to capitalist exploitation. They argue, however, that they are distributing it back to the same workers in the form of health care, jobs, education, a “just transition” to a climate-protective society etc.
But why adopt an absurd plan to exploit workers, capture some of the fruits of that exploitation (but not all — again, they are not talking about a total end of the profit system) and send it back to the workers in a different form, as opposed to expropriating the productive forces altogether and giving them to the workers for their own direct benefit?
What About Imperialism?
One big reason: the workers in the US benefiting from the democratic socialist program are not the workers generating the surplus the socialists aim to redistribute. This is a question DSA members and Sanders supporters need to answer, concretely: what proportion of the surplus value enjoyed by US capitalists is extracted from workers outside the United States? What will be done to return those resources back to them, and how does that affect calculations of the value necessary to fund these programs?
Marxists from Vladimir Lenin to Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik have demonstrated that the world’s “advanced” economies are fueled by plunder from their colonies and neocolonies, using warfare, sanctions and monopsony purchasing power to drive down wages and remuneration for resources. The wages paid to American workers could purchase substantially less if workers in Honduras, Haiti, Bangladesh and Indonesia were not kept suffering in sweatshops and plantations for mere pennies, conditions maintained by continuous US intervention — including bases maintained in these countries, training missions for their militaries, and arms sales to shore up the regimes.
It’s clear to us that Bernie Sanders has no plans for returning exploited value back to workers in the Global South, because without this massive surplus there wouldn’t be enough money to fund social programs and allow capitalists to profit. We already know Bernie doesn’t consider workers of color in other countries part of his “99%” — as mayor of Burlington, he had anti-war protesters arrested for trying to stop weapons being sent to right-wing paramilitaries in Latin America.
Sanders and his supporters in the DSA are presently engaged in a divide-and-conquer strategy against the worldwide proletariat, a political line known historically as “social chauvinism.” It is a collaboration with capitalist exploitation when actual socialists are duty-bound to resist and destroy it.
Redirecting Military Spending Isn’t An Option
This is the source of a fourth big problem for the democratic socialist scheme: you can’t simply repurpose imperialist military spending for your plans. First things first, what are the displacement effects of such a policy? The core of the US industrial system would be completely disrupted, and along with it billions upon billions of dollars of services to those industries and billions more in commerce reliant upon all of that in turn. Would the political and economic consequences of such a decision interrupt the democratic socialists in carrying out their program, or could they survive them long enough to deliver their objectives? There are empirical points that can help frame this question, but we have yet to see any DSAers or Bernie supporters provide them.
But even beyond this, if the United States military is qualitatively weaker than it is today can we still count on the surplus arriving to fund all of their plans? How many countries with governments pliantly delivering their labor force up to the mouth of US capitalism will stop doing so? Which commodities will see radical re-pricing as the gun is taken away from their producers’ heads? Will we abandon the security umbrella for petrodollar bargain at the heart of the world financial system, and how do we keep it going (and how socialist is that?) if we have a dramatically smaller military? What will be the impacts to the US dollar and to global capitalism altogether if we do abandon it? What will all this do to our economy and how will that undermine the democratic socialist strategy for capturing the money there for their own ends?
The fact that such disruptions and upheavals undermine the democratic socialist program is all the evidence we need to determine that it is not revolutionary, that it relies upon the perpetuation of systems of exploitation and corruption that cannot be tolerated or sustained, and that it is an imperialist ideology which all true communists and socialists must resist as much as we resist Trump or the neoliberal garbage typical of the Democrats. Any electoral effort in the US today is guaranteed to face the same limitations, and this is ground for rejection of all such strategies for the time being.
Bad News: Bernie May Win
We hope authentic revolutionaries in DSA or around the Sanders campaign will wake up to this and ditch those efforts, but unfortunately many will not. The consequence is a very serious one: Bernie Sanders is without a doubt in second place for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. He is behind only a deeply flawed candidate with a history of fatal political blunders. Per Trump’s persistent popularity deficits the Democrats’ nominee is likely to be president the year after next. There is a very substantial chance that Bernie Sanders gets into the White House in the next 20 months and will commence trying to deliver on all of these promises.
If, as these problems suggest, it is impossible for him to deliver what he is promising then the longer-term consequence of his victory is liable to be a snap towards reaction that makes Trump’s election look pleasant and progressive by comparison. The promise of an anti-socialist savior come to restore American power and boost economic performance without the self-indulgent pathologies of Donald Trump should terrify us all. If the bulk of the self-described left is compromised by an opportunistic collaboration with failed, liberal pipedreams we will have little with which to resist it.
The alternative we are working towards is an actually socialist — that is to say, communist — agenda. Rather than a dependency upon capturing some of the surplus of capitalist production, it directly expropriates the means of production. It overcomes sabotage by suppressing the political institutions of the bourgeoisie as a class and a cancellation of all the rights and titles of their social position. The individuals will still exist, but their class will not.
If you value liberal concepts of “democracy” over the demands of the socialist project then you might be able to honestly support the electoral programs put out by the democratic socialists today. Even still, you must confront the practical questions raised here, and will likely need to dramatically dial back your expectations — the dissolution of social democracy in Europe in recent decades should only underscore this.
If, on the other hand, you are an actual socialist committed to the end of capitalism in our lifetimes, the victory of the proletariat and the survival of human civilization on free and equitable terms you have no more business supporting Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez than you do their Republican colleagues. We must know better, and we must prepare for an actual revolution. As remote as it may seem it is still far more reasonable to expect that than a scheme to make capitalism deliver socialist ends.