Originally posted at BostonSocialism.org
Contact: Chris Morale FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Tel.: (339) 203-9157
Email: contact@bostonsocialism.org
Date: 8/11/2015
WHAT DO SOCIALISTS SAY ABOUT THE SOCIALIST CANDIDATE?
Boston Activists to Debate Bernie Sanders’ Candidacy
Boston, MA – On Thursday, August 27, the Boston branch of the International Socialist Organization will hold a panel debate on Bernie Sanders’ Democratic candidacy for president at the Montserrat Aspirer’s Community Center, 358 Washington Street, Dorchester. The public forum will begin at 7:00 PM and conclude at 9:00 PM.
The public forum is called “Should Socialists Support Bernie Sanders?” The event will include leading left-wing and socialist activists from across the Northeast region.
Independent U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders’ entry into the presidential race has sparked major debate among progressives and socialists of all stripes.
Bernie Sanders’ candidacy to be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee has drawn thousands of progressives and liberals to hear him speak at campaign stops across the country. Many on the political Left are excited about Sanders’ call for a “political revolution” against the control of big business over the political process.
But not all progressives or leftists are following Bernie Sanders, whether into the Democratic Party or elsewhere. At a recent campaign stop in Seattle, Black Lives Matter protesters stormed the stage to protest Sanders’ “lack of support for the Black Lives Matter movement,” as their press release reads.
Ashley Smith, a board member of the International Socialist Review journal and a speaker on the August 27th panel, is another voice opposed to the socialist Left campaigning for Sanders.
“Sanders refused to consider an independent presidential campaign not because he had little chance of winning, but because he didn’t want to compete for votes with the Democrats’ eventual nominee,” Smith wrote in a May 5th article for Socialist Worker. Though sympathetic to the excitement drawn around his campaign and some of Sanders’ rhetoric, Smith opposes the Left’s support for him. “By steering liberal and left supporters into a Democratic Party whose policies and politics he claims to disagree with, Sanders—no matter how critical he might be of Hillary Clinton—is acting as the opposite of an ‘alternative.’”
Sanders adopts the socialist title, but whether grassroots socialists and leftists will support his candidacy is still a live issue. Thursday’s panel will seek to open up political space for Boston’s progressive and left-wing community to debate this issue out in the open.
About the Boston International Socialist Organization
The Boston International Socialist Organization is a branch of a nationwide socialist organization. Our members are involved across the country in helping to build struggles for economic and social justice today, while building a political alternative to a world of racism, war, and economic hardship. To learn more, visit www.bostonsocialism.org, e-mail contact@bostonsocialism.org, or call 617-902-0476. Find us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/bostonsocialism.
###
In Seattle it makes sense for Kshama Sawant (who endorsed Bernie by the way) to run as a Socialist Alternative party candidate for office. I have been talking to some activists back in the Boston area who are thinking of pursuing something similar at the Boston municipal level, which would be a great idea. It’s a good end run around machine politics and a return to the sewer socialism that governed places like Milwaukee for the first half of the 20th century.
Across America the candidates for the various socialist parties got less than .006% of the vote in 2012. If Bernie can get 40-60% of the vote for a major party nomination, that is a big deal. As it is right now, he is inching towards 40%, beating Clinton in NH, and exploding in Iowa. Anyone who wants socialism to become a mainstream idea should work within the party as the libertarians have in the Republican party.
Where Ron Paul once stood alone, he has now been joined by his son in the Senate and as a plausible presidential candidate in his own right, Mike Lee, Justin Amash, Walter Jones, and many others. Obviously, I disagree with these folks, but that segment of the right has co-opted portions of the Republican party to the point where criminal justice reform, state’s rights approach to drugs, Patriot Act and NSA opposition, has become a more mainstream position on their side of the aisle.
If Bernie wins, a more realistic prospect now than at the start of his campaign, he is likely to beat the Republicans and America will have elected a real socialist just four years after our President had to deny repeatedly he was one. If he performs well, it will show that this is a real force within the Democratic party and it will inspire similar candidacies down the ballot.
Stay on the sidelines for another century and see how that works, or, work with the Democrats. Norman Thomas proposed the New Deal while FDR was running as a Bourbon Democrat, and yet, it was Thomas’s proposals he ended up enacting. FDR was a close to a social democrat as America would get in the White House, until this year…
I was wondering whether this would come up. Back in 1934, Upton Sinclair, who had been a long-term member of the Socialist Party, won the Democratic Party’s nomination for Governor of California. It helped to further split a decimated Socialist Party in the USA and many friends of Sinclair’s became former friends.
I hope the Sanders campaign is studying what happened in that campaign. Sinclair wrote a fine and humorous book about his run. Well worth reading. Here is something I wrote about it awhile ago: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/09/29/906194/-End-Poverty-in-California