If you don’t want to take Roy’s word for it, The Atlantic‘s Molly Ball offers more evidence that Sanders’ loopy ideas do not equal real socialism.
Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, surprised the party establishment and the commentariat this year by becoming the last candidate standing against Hillary Clinton. I wanted to know how the socialist movement felt about his candidacy. So I sought out Puryear, who is running for vice president on the ticket of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a socialist organization that expects to be on about a dozen states’ ballots this November. The ticket is headed by Gloria La Riva, a San Francisco–based labor and antiwar activist who has been agitating for social justice since the 1970s.
Until recently, socialist was effectively a slur in political circles. (In 2011, a formal complaint was lodged against a Republican congressman who referred to Democrats using the term, and it was struck from the Congressional Record.) But this year, Sanders, with his youth movement and his calls for “political revolution,” reintroduced the label to polite company. At enormous rallies across the country, his fans told journalists they were proud to call themselves socialists. For a political movement long confined to the fringes of American discourse, Sanders would seem to have done an enormous service.
But as it happens, the real socialists—the ones toiling, lonely, in the trenches; the ones who never felt a need to temper their philosophy with a mitigating adjective like democratic, as Sanders does—are strikingly ungrateful. Puryear’s party, the PSL, issued a statement last August, when Sanders began to gain traction, tartly rejecting his campaign. “His program is not socialist,” it noted.
He does not call for nationalizing the corporations and banks, without which the reorganization of the economy to meet people’s needs rather than maximizing the profits of capitalist investors could not take place … He is clearly seeking to reform the existing capitalist system.
The crowds at Sanders’s events, the PSL contended, showed popular hunger for a far-left platform. But Sanders wasn’t really providing one—he was, they implied, guilty of a bait and switch. Some in the socialist blogosphere (like all fringe political movements, socialism has a lively and disputatious Internet presence) have gone further. Socialist Action, a Trotskyist organization, accused Sanders of a pernicious “lesser-evil politics” designed to hoodwink workers into supporting the corrupt Democrats.
