Yesterday’s “Obama Socialists,” Today’s Bernie Boosters

Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign has nothing to do with winning people to socialism. It’s all about getting disaffected “progressives” and youth to vote Democratic in 2016. Sanders has placed much of the socialist left in a quandary, as reformists and opportunists dream of having an audience in big-time bourgeois politics. Some still want to maintain a pretense of independence from the Democratic Party of war, poverty and racism, while others want to go all the way, hoping to pick up disappointed Sanderistas when he endorses Clinton. Those who seek to maintain a pretense of independence from the Democrats call on Sanders to run as an “independent.” But historically, capitalist “third parties,” from La Follette’s Progressive Party to Nader and the Greens, are obstacles to working-class independence. Genuine revolutionary Marxists and communists, in contrast, warn against the Sanders swindle and call to build a party on the model of the Bolsheviks and the program of Lenin and Trotsky.