Bernie Sanders is no Eugene Debs

Socialist Worker
May 26, 2015
by Howie Hawkins



Drawing out the lesson from these failed revolutions that the middle class proprietors and professionals could not be trusted as allies of the workers in the battle for democracy and workers rights, Karl Marx told exiled German revolutionaries in London in 1850 that the workers needed to form their own party to look out for their own interests:



Sanders has now gone into coalition with the billionaire class he professes to oppose and that finances the Democratic party. Sanders won’t see the billionaire’s money. But he has made it crystal clear that he will support their candidate by promising to support the winner of the Democratic presidential nomination.


That was not the case when the United States had a viable Socialist Party. The political independence of the Socialist Party is a major reason why it was viable, why it had power, why it elected many of its candidates, why it was central to the political dialogue of the country. After the demoralizing and self-defeating experience of fusion (cross-endorsing the more progressive Democratic and Republican candidates) that undermined and ultimately destroyed the Greenback Labor and People’s Parties of the recently past Populist era, the Socialist Party of America put into its constitution a ban against endorsing the candidates of the capitalist parties.

debs1912`In his opening campaign speech as the party’s 1904 presidential candidate, Eugene Debs said:

The Republican and Democratic parties, or, to be more exact, the Republican-Democratic party, represent the capitalist class in the class struggle. They are the political wings of the capitalist system and such differences as arise between them relate to spoils and not to principles. With either of those parties in power, one thing is always certain, and that is that the capitalist class is in the saddle and the working class under the saddle.

Eugene-Debs-Prisoner-for-PresidentAs a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sanders does a disservice to Debs’ memory and his commitment to working class political independence by displaying a Debs portrait in his office. By choosing to run for president in the Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders has shown he is no Eugene Debs.

Sanders is confusing people about what socialism is. Socialism is not so much a social theory, a platform of policies or social ownership of the means of production. Socialism is, above all, the movement of the working class for their own freedom and power in a full democracy.


As Frederick Engels told socialists in the U.S. when the labor movement in New York City nominated the non-socialist but progressive reformer Henry George for mayor in 1886:

The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organization of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers’ party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first program of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement–no matter in what form, so long as it is only their own movement–in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves.






SANDERS HAS attracted significant money and energy from progressives. In the first 24 hours after his announcement, his campaign reported raising $1.5 million from 35,000 donors and signing up over 100,000 volunteers. So the independent left is now debating how to relate to the Sanders campaign.


Some even argue that the Sanders campaign is a movement. We’ve heard that claim before with the candidacies of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Barack Obama. Bruce Dixon of Black Agenda Report aptly described these candidates as “sheepdogs…charged with herding activists and voters back into the Democratic fold who might otherwise drift leftward and outside of the Democratic party.”

No self-activating movements or organizations came out of these campaigns, and there is no reason to expect the Sanders campaign will be any different. The Sanders campaign is enlisting people in an election campaign, not an ongoing political organization. The Sanders campaign may be a bridge for some to positions as Democratic operatives, as it was for some in previous sheepdog campaigns. But it is not building a political organization that is independent and opposed to the capitalist parties.

The group Socialist Alternative has welcomed Sanders’ Democratic candidacy, while calling on him to continue running as an independent after the Democratic primaries. Socialist Alternative’s position is naïve at best–or worse, deliberately misleading. There is no way that Sanders will break with the Democrats on the presidential race. We should take him at his word: he’s backing the Democratic candidate. Sanders has a long record of supporting Democrats for president, including Gore, Kerry, and Obama, while harshly criticizing independent challengers on the left like Ralph Nader.

It’s one thing to tell Sanders supporters they need a Plan B–an independent left candidate–when he loses the primaries. It’s another to spread illusions that Sanders can be persuaded to be that candidate.

If Sanders wanted to do it, he would have paid petitioners out now getting him independent ballot lines in the 50 states and D.C. He doesn’t, and he won’t. If he did, the Democrats would bar him from the debates and primary ballots for being disloyal to the Democrats. Some states, such as Michigan, have sore-loser provisions that would prevent him from running as an independent after running as a Democrat. It’s disappointing to see Socialist Alternative spread illusions that Sanders will ever break with Clinton after the primaries, or that he even could do so as a practical matter of getting on the ballot.

From an independent socialist point of view, all the money and time going into Sanders’ handoff to Clinton is time and money that could be going into getting Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy on every ballot in the country–the only independent left campaign in 2016 with any prospect for doing so. The Greens have 21 ballot lines already and most of the rest can be secured by petitioning in 2015. Doing so now would leave 2016 for campaigning.

One of the weaknesses of recent independent campaigns by Ralph Nader and the Greens is that the ballot access drive did not really begin until the year of the election, making the campaign mostly a desperate scramble to simply get on the ballot. With most ballot lines secured in 2015, the campaign could focus in 2016 on broadcasting its message and on field organizing to build local organizations, register new voters, identify supporting voters, pull them to the polls on Election Day, and continue after the election with local movement and electoral activity.


I had a similar scenario develop in during my 2014 Green Party campaign for governor of New York. Zephyr Teachout, a liberal Democrat running a primary challenge against the more conservative Democratic incumbent Andrew Cuomo, attracted the support of progressives in the Democratic Party and won a respectable 34 percent of the primary vote. Analysis of the general election results shows that about half of Teachout’s vote came to the Greens in the general election, and that it constituted about half of the Green vote. Our 5 percent showing was the best ever in New York for an independent left candidate for governor, except for the Socialists, who received 5.7 percent in 1918 and 5.6 percent in 1920.

If Stein’s Green campaign can draw a significant segment of Sanders supporters to it after the primaries, it could help the Green Party to make a quantum leap in the vote it receives in 2016 over previous elections. That would provide momentum for local, state and congressional elections in the coming years.

While the Debsian Socialists of a century ago were clear about their independence from the Democratic Party, they were also clear about wanting to draw progressives in the Democratic Party into the Socialist Party. As Debs stated in that same 1904 opening campaign speech quoted above:

Where but to the Socialist Party can these progressive people turn? They are now without a party and the only genuine Democratic Party in the field is the Socialist Party, and every true Democrat should thank Wall Street for driving him out of a party that is democratic in name only, and into one that is democratic in fact.

Progressives in the Democratic Party are going to need a Plan B after Bernie Sanders throws his support to Clinton in about 10 months, after the March primaries seal the nomination for her. We should be building Plan B now.



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