Rai 01-04 

The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution (Part 2)

Mark Wain

March 28, 2016 

Part 2

In Reference (1), MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked whether Susan Sarandon, the Academy Award-winning actress and a Bernie Sanders’ supporter, would vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump, her answer was: I don’t know.  I’m going to see what happens. She continued by saying: Some people feel Donald Trump will bring the revolution immediately if he gets in then things will really, you know explode; the status quo is not working, and I think it’s dangerous to think that we can continue the way we are with the militarized police force, with privatized prisons, with the death penalty, with the low minimum wage, with threats to women’s rights and think that you can’t do something huge to turn that around. 

Her answer, Mr. Hayes considered being out of this world … political purity could lead to calamity… it defies logic that a progressive would find anything redeeming about the Trump candidacy… monumentally insane to argue that a Trump in the White House would be preferable to a Clinton in the Oval Office.

Hayes is wrong. (For a more enlightening view, see (2)) Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are anti-establishment and revolution-minded candidates. Their differences lie in the fact that the former is a capitalist roader and the latter is a democratic-socialist-roader. It’s true that Donald Trump says whatever he likes to say and Bernie Sanders says only what his political revolution guidelines permit. They are the ice-breakers in a thousand-foot deep-frozen political world decaying for more than a hundred years. Besides, the masses have waited patiently for quiet long time to wake up to the political siren calls. They do not want to wait for another one-hundred-year before breaking away from the frozen planet of politics and the deafening silence. Revolution is a grand festival of the people who will get experience in practice. Also, as Lenin said: “It is far more difficult—and far more precious—to be a revolutionary when the conditions for direct, open, mass and revolutionary struggle do not yet exist,” we should positively encourage all revolutionaries move forward without delay. 

The Rev. A. R. Bernard of Brooklyn, NY said: “The country was at a crossroads, socially and politically.  I never thought that an openly announced socialist would ever be on a presidential ticket. And, this is nothing against Bernie Sanders, but socialism is great in theory. But we’ve seen what it is in practice with the birth and collapse of the Soviet Union in Russia and what it left in Europe.” (See (3)) His approval of Bernie Sanders’ socialism is remarkable for very few thinks Sanders’ call upon socialism means much to the solution of the country’s problems, some may even chastise him for desecration of socialism.  

The truth of the matter is socialism, just as any other doctrine, is not stationary but progressive; its strategic development is the result of class struggle over the years involving hundreds of millions of people all over the world, whose power of recall and replacement of the leadership never materialized until China’s Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s, by then it was too late to rescue socialism from sudden change of properties. After the two major and pioneering socialist countries – the former Soviet Union of Russia in the 1950s and the People’s Republic of China in the 1980s – were defeated by their own political elite when under the besiegement of the international monopoly capitalism, socialism as viewed and taught by Karl Marx based on, among others, French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines has failed to sustain its viability. The working classes of both countries lost power to the elite who henceforth restored capitalism for a long time afterward without essential change. Had Marx or Lenin witnessed the battle, what could either of them do to salvage the fiasco situation? 

It is a historical fact that socialism revolution led by an all-powerful vanguard of a powerless working class is problematic, if not outright futile, for capital would strangle it in its cradle by means of capturing a fort from inside; on the other hand, participatory socialism led by people is a viable doctrine, nonetheless. In (1972) The Capitalist System – A Radical Analysis of American Society, Richard Edward, Michael Reich and Thomas Weisskopf posited: “Participatory socialism requires the elimination of bureaucracies, not by new state or party bureaucracies, but by a self-governing and self-managing people with direct chosen representatives, subject to recall and replacement. Participatory socialism entails a sense of egalitarian cooperation, of solidarity of people with one another; but at the same time, it respects individual and group differences and guarantees individual rights. It affords to all individuals the freedom to exercise human rights and civil liberties that are not mere abstractions but have concrete day-to-day meaning,” (p.4) and in the footnote so cited, they wrote: “By these criteria, no country has yet achieved participatory socialism. China and Cuba, however, have tried to avoid individual, competitive material incentives by stressing social incentives for economic development; and to some extent they have also placed economic development in the proper context of overall balanced social development. Hence these countries can be contrast favorably with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.” They might as well have added that China’s Cultural Revolution was indeed such a participatory socialist revolution. In terms of radicalization of the U.S. society, they continued: “Our vision of a radical social transformation of the United States clearly involves far more than formal changes in political and economic institutions. Such changes must be part of an ongoing process of change in social and cultural consciousness that will constitute a revolution of social relations among people.” The new democratic revolution herein proposed is just such a political-cultural-socialist revolution in its infancy. 

The establishment loves Hillary Clinton for a good reason – doing their bidding faithfully. But then the masses would suffer more than their fair share. The country cannot afford another aristocrat of the Clinton dynasty to rule it because only the rich, powerful and influential will benefit from any dynasty. Even if Bernie Sanders were to be outvoted by Hillary Clinton who could then be elected the president, she would inflict heavy losses on people’s fundamental and long-term interests as capital and people’s interests are completely opposite to each other. On the other hand, revolution will not stop under her reign and may become even more violent than otherwise because her ruthless rule as a pro-establishment and anti-revolutionary hardline politician would set off great unrest among people. 

Early missteps Bernie Sanders took on his campaign may hurt his bidding for nomination. Even if he were to lose the nomination, his message of a political revolution would forever and profoundly lie embedded in the minds and hearts of the masses. Hillary Clinton may win the nomination and may even take the office but she has already lost her trustworthiness and honesty among not only the Republicans but among most of the Democrats. She would have been the lame-duck president before taking over the presidency as far as the public opinion was concerned. 

Revolution will be the main theme of the political arena, and neither conservativeness and establishment nor business-as-usual and politics-as-usual will ever regain power as held complete sway over the masses as in the bygone years. 

What are the specific demands of the revolution that pro-establishment politicians vow to disagree?  Other than fundamentally overhauling the corrupt political system including the campaign-finance system by repealing the 2010 Citizens United Decision of the Supreme Court, the specific demands are: cleaning up Wall Street, indicting bandit-like bankers, stopping the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., abolishing or inhibiting the non-working Trans-Pacific Partnership and other trade treaties or agreements, levying much higher taxes on the wealthy (the maximum rate for individuals back in 1961 was 91 percent), doubling the statutory corporate tax rate from 35 percent (tax avoidance schemes have dropped the effective rate to about 15 percent for two-thirds of the corporations; 50  U.S. corporations including Apple, Google and Microsoft park $1.4 Trillion funds overseas to avoid tax), putting an end to Obamacare and enacting a government-run single-payer health care system, carrying out a free public higher education, fighting against: privatizations of public enterprises; cuts to social security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education, capital’s monopoly on wage levels and its refusal to raise the hourly minimum wage to $15 , eliminating the world’s policeman syndrome of the government, repealing the imperialist shock and awe, foreign regime change and the perpetual warfare quagmire,  capping and cutting military budget annually, abolishing military policies that outdate their usefulness in the post-cold-war era, transforming the energy system away from fossil fuels to energy-efficient, sustainable, renewable non-radioactive energy, cleaning up environmental garbage, and making up for the deficiency among people in gaining socialist knowledge and much more.  

Why are pro-establishment anti-revolutionaries so confident about their conservative stratagems against the people? Capital is a “master of the universe” in not only using the old tried divide-and-conquer strategy but also polarizing people into partisan groups annoyed with each other and into opposing partisans with growing hostility as Lynn Vavreck described in an article: (4) An age of “party-ism” has arrived in which people should especially be aware of its danger and determined to fight hard to restore unity that has lost to capital’s manipulations behind the scenes. Solidarity of people with one another is intrinsic to their social being because they hold the same long-term and fundamental interests. 

References

(1) https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/03/29/what-susan-sarandon-said-about-trump-was-out-of-this-world/

(2)http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2016/04/03/with-new-effort-group-hopes-to-show-donald-trump-has-a-multicultural-                                

(3) http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/10/nyregion/hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders-bring-their-battle-to-brooklyn   

(4)  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/upshot/american-anger-its-not-the-economy-its-the-other-party 

The End of Part 2 of  “The Coming of a New Democratic Revolution.”