[lbo-talk] [Pen-l] What the Corbyn and Sanders campaigns represent

[Robert Naiman]

It's worth noting, though, that Sanders is mobilizing a lot of people to do
more than be mere "supporters." There is an attempt to turn volunteers into
real organizers - people who organize events on their own; people who talk
to people they don't know on their own and try to have "organizing
conversations" with them, like a union organizer would; people who try to
recruit, train, and supervise other volunteer organizers. They are really
trying to create a "movement" that will last beyond the campaign and be
pushed forward but not be dictatorially controlled by Sanders and his
lieutenants. Whether and to what extent they will succeed is another
question, but I think that they are trying is beyond dispute. One point
that Sanders has hit over and over: in 2008, Obama mobilized this huge
movement which if it kept going could have won much, much deeper change.
But when he got elected, Obama pulled the plug, told everyone to sit back
down, I've got this now, now it's an inside game, go back to watching TV.
Sanders has said over and over: I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to
tell people to sit back down. I'm going to tell them to keep going.

Robert Naiman
Policy Director
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org
naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
(202) 448-2898 x1

On Tue, Sep 15, 2015 at 9:04 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgand2 at gmail.com> wrote:


> I’ve often argued that any serious mass protest against declining living
> standards would express itself both inside and outside the established
> left-centre parties - with the initial impulse registering more strongly on
> the inside than on the outside.
>
> Accordingly, I’ve supported equally those radical activists who have
> entered these parties to try and encourage this development in opposition
> to the neoliberal direction of their leaders. This includes participation
> in the Democratic Party in the US, whose base in the unions and allied
> social movements, program, leadership, rivalry with the dominant right of
> centre party, and behaviour in office is virtually identical with that of
> Labour in Britain and the Socialist parties in Europe and elsewhere.
>
> This view has been criticized by many of my friends on the Marxist left,
> who consider so-called “entryism” into these left-centre parties as a
> graveyard for radical politics. In some cases, they continue to distinguish
> between the “bourgeois” Democratic Party and the flawed “workers’ parties”
> in England and on the continent. But in the main they denounce these
> parties and run or support their own fringe candidates against them.
>
> The movements behind the Corbyn and Sanders candidacies in the Labour and
> Democratic parties appears to confirm that the initial stages of any
> radicalization from below will first appear most strongly in the major
> left-centre parties. In times of distress, people understandably turn first
> for relief to what is nearest at hand, to the parties they know and
> support, and particularly to those party figures who speak directly to
> their needs.
>
> As Richard Seymour observes in the article linked to below: “It is often
> assumed by Marxists that capitalist crises are polarizing events. That is
> not always straightforwardly true…the dominant reflex (is) to seek a
> reassuring center ground, to trust in a middle-of-the-road figure who would
> at least be relatively honest and fair in the handling of the crisis.”
>
> Ultimately, whether these movements flare out and are turned back into the
> party mainstream, as has typically happened, or whether they develop beyond
> the confines of the established parties and electoral system will
> essentially depend on whether capitalism is able to again recover from the
> latest of its recurrent crises. Less important are the intensions and
> leadership qualities of Corbyn and Sanders.
>
>
> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/jeremy-corbyn-labour-benn-kendall-blair-leadership/
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