Bernie Sanders is a Democratic socialist. So am I. The word “socialist” evokes negative energy among large parts of the United States; this is the residue of a powerful propaganda campaign during the Cold War to undermine the socialist tradition.
Socialism was reduced to the gulag. Rational discussions about socialist ideas was virtually forbidden, with political parties associated with this tradition made illegal for a time. Tied to Sanders’ legs is this negative weight, but he — unflinchingly — continues to drag his feet forward.
There was no real socialist movement in the United States until the period of industrial growth in the late 19th century, when workers found themselves victims of the class struggle by the owners. There are two words that immigrant workers learned immediately — “job” and “boss”; it was impossible to survive without them. Trade unions developed in opposition to terrible working conditions and appallingly low wages. The socialist dream was imposed on the workers because of the unpleasantness of capitalism.
Out of these struggles the workers founded in 1876 the first major socialist party, the Workingmen’s Party of the United States. The next year, the party, whose leaders included immigrants from Germany who brought the ideas of Karl Marx to the United States, played an important role in the landmark Great Railroad Strike of 1877.
In 1878, members of this party won five of the seven seats of the Kentucky state legislature, which means that the Marxists ran the government in Kentucky. This party would eventually become the Socialist Party, out of whose long tradition of struggle comes Bernie Sanders.
In 1908, years before he published his powerful Chicago poems, Carl Sandburg wrote a little pamphlet for the Socialist Party called “You and Your Job.” Written in the form of a letter to Bill, Sandburg opens with a long section on how a person Bill knows has lost his job. It is easy, Sandburg writes, to say that it is the fault of the unemployed person that he is without occupation: he is lazy, he is incompetent, his failures are his. But, Sandburg asks, the man had no choice about coming into the world, and his entire development in the world has been conditioned by society.
“What you do yourself is individual,” Sandburg writes. “What you do or with or for others is social. Get the distinction, Bill? Well, paste it in your hat and fasten it in your memory. But don’t lose it. If I can get you to keep in mind this difference between what is social and what is individual, I’ll hammer you into a Socialist.”
Sandburg’s insistence on the idea of the social or of society is so compelling in our own time. It is getting harder to experience society in a civil manner: political discourse seems to have emerged from the sewers. This is not merely a problem of this politician (you know whom I mean) or that one; it is a problem associated with the erosion of social institutions that could otherwise make our individual lives richer.
If people have a hard time getting a job, or if jobs themselves are more stressful, or if commute times increase, and if medical care is hard to attain, and if pensions deteriorate before higher expenditures (including taxes), and if it just gets harder to deal with everyday life — well, then it is easy to expect tempers to fray, anger to rise and a general social misery to be on display.
Civility is not just a matter of attitude. Civility is a matter of resources. If we used our considerable social treasure to ensure a decent livelihood for each other, to ensure medical and elder care, to ensure that we tackle our pressing problems in a collective way, well, then there is the key leisure time to rest among friends, to be a volunteer in our communities, to get to know one another and to be less stressed and angry.
Neither is “hope” an individual feeling; it has to be produced by people doing things together, building communities, fighting for their values.
One of the great lies of our age is that there are simply not enough resources to do all the things that the socialists believe are necessary. It was easy enough for the governments since 9/11 to spend over $6.4 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former ending, essentially, where it began with the Taliban back in the saddle. There is at least $32 trillion in tax havens, much of that money squirreled away by US billionaires and corporations.
Twenty-two of the richest men in the world — most of them from the United States — hold more wealth than all the nearly 700 million women who live in Africa; one of those men, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, is worth $109 billion and has an ambition to be the world’s first trillionaire. There are no roadblocks to his desire, few regulations on his business practices; poorly compensated Amazon workers, meanwhile, rely upon public assistance to make ends meet (“It feels like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck,” writes Emily Guendelsberger of her time as an Amazon employee in “On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane”).
Imagine what all these resources could do to build a decent society: well-funded schools from pre-K to university, well-funded public transportation that can supplant fossil-fuel cars, well-funded public housing, well-funded hospitals accessed by universal health care, well-funded arts and community centers, and above all, a four-hour day at a full day’s wage so that there is time to help rebuild society.
When Kurt Vonnegut was asked whether Dresden should have been bombed by the Allies, he answered that it was — after all — bombed; the point was how one behaved after the bombing. The withdrawal of resources by the billionaires effectively bombs society, which is why the question on the table is how you behave in the midst of the carnage.
Perhaps better to imagine a better world than be stuck in this one; the name of that better world is socialism.
Vijay Prashad is the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.