Sometimes I wonder if the extreme left just may have a
point…
Just days before Bernie Sanders (unsurprisingly) endorsed Hillary Clinton, the
small and super-red Spartacist League wrote on its website, under the headline
“Fake Socialists Pimp for Imperialist Sanders” that “Sanders attracted support
from college and other petty-bourgeois youth, as well as a layer of workers, by
inveighing against Wall Street and promoting reforms. At the same time, he is a
stalwart champion of bloody U.S. imperialism—from his support to the 2001
Authorization for the Use of Military Force that launched the war on
Afghanistan to his Senate vote endorsing the Israeli massacre of Palestinians
in Gaza in 2014. Like Trump, Sanders also pushes chauvinist protectionism,
which serves to set workers in the U.S. against their class brothers and
sisters abroad.”
The Spartacist League then references a previous article on the subject
published in their paper Workers Vanguard, titled “Bernie Sanders: Imperialist
Running Dog”. The Spartacists continue: “To put it plainly: the
pseudo-socialist groups that support Sanders have done their best, within the
limits of their forces, to reinforce the ties that bind the working class
politically to its class enemies. As revolutionary Marxists, we offer no
political support on principle to any party of the bosses—not only the major
parties of the U.S. ruling class, the Republicans and Democrats, but also
small-time capitalist parties such as the Greens.”
That's right, the Green Party is no alternative either. Apparently, several
pro-Sanders leftist groups have switched their allegiances to Jill Stein, the
presumptive nominee of the Greens.
The stalwart Spartacist League is of another opinion: “Although it may sound
more radical than Sanders’s, the Green Party’s platform is nothing but
bourgeois liberalism, devoted to a utopian-reactionary fantasy of small-scale
capitalism hostile to economic growth. For those disgruntled liberals who won’t
hold their noses and vote for Clinton, the Greens provide a way station on the
road back into the Democratic Party, typical of `progressive' bourgeois third
parties in the U.S.”
But don't you worry, there *is* a solution to the current Sanders-Clinton mess,
and it aint the BLM (also attacked in the article). No, the solution is “a
multiracial, internationalist, proletarian party capable of leading the working
class, at the head of all the oppressed, in the struggle for a victorious
socialist revolution. On an international scale, working-class rule would lay
the material basis for a global society without classes, in which material
plenty has made poverty a thing of the past, imperialist wars are no longer
possible and race and ethnicity have ceased to have any social significance.
Such a party will be forged over the political corpses of those who pervert
`socialism' into a tool to defend the current outlived social order.”
Amen! I admit that I laughed out loud when I read this. Come on, what decade is
it? “Petty bourgeois”, “running dog of imperialism”, “fake socialists”,
“utopian-reactionary fantasy”… HA HA HA! Sounds like something your local
unfriendly Maoistic outfit might have written in a grand mimeographed bulletin
circa 1975. The only solution, apparently, is “victorious socialist revolution…on
an international scale”. Maybe Geezus (or whoever these guys are secretly
worshipping…Gerry Healy? General Jaruzelski? Nina Hartley?) will come back,
too, and establish his kingdom on Lower Manhattan.
Or they might just vote for Donald Trump. I mean, we're talking about the
Spartacist League here, remember? They don't defend Muslim fundamentalists
against “imperialist attack”, secretly support Israel and oppose open borders,
so what's keeping them from joining the sealed Trump train?
Did I say that the extreme left sometimes makes sense? Get real, I was only joking…
