Opinion of Bernie Sanders

[TNF]

Just another run-of-the-mill imperialist masquerading as a radical. Sanders fits well in the American 'socialist' tradition that includes the sell-outs who voted for and supported World War I and the Vietnam War.

[TNF]

lol, you guys are worse than the tea party. Your movement will go nowhere if you can't even accept Bernie.

HP, but for reasons different than most.

I don't think I'm going to take advice on political organization from a libertarian, a group of people that have not achieved anything of note, anywhere, at any period in human history. At least those of us on the Marxist left can point to the Russian Revolution of 1917 has an actual, concrete example of what it is we are in favor of establishing and how that would work. Unlike your ideology of course, which claims no successes and amounts to infantile screaming about how you shouldn't be 'forced' to do things you don't want to do by people you regard as sub-human on account of them not having money.

[TNF]

True Leftists need to be banned from talking about foreign policy, forever. Seriously, I'd rather attend a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld* than listen to any more of their sh-t.

*I was about to say Dick Cheney, but.... no. Let's not take things too far.

So you think Bernie is right to vote for funding for American military adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. all the while millions of Americans suffer from the lack of basic necessities of life? I'm not sure why it makes sense for anyone on the left to support the idea that American foreign policy, which has created more problems than it has solved, is something to be heralded and maintained, at the expense of those who have nothing and will continue to have nothing so long as resources, time, and energy are wasted on putting holes in working class people in the Arab world.

[TNF]

True Leftists need to be banned from talking about foreign policy, forever. Seriously, I'd rather attend a lecture by Donald Rumsfeld* than listen to any more of their sh-t.

*I was about to say Dick Cheney, but.... no. Let's not take things too far.

So you think Bernie is right to vote for funding for American military adventurism in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, etc. all the while millions of Americans suffer from the lack of basic necessities of life? I'm not sure why it makes sense for anyone on the left to support the idea that American foreign policy, which has created more problems than it has solved, is something to be heralded and maintained, at the expense of those who have nothing and will continue to have nothing so long as resources, time, and energy are wasted on putting holes in working class people in the Arab world.

Because I actually value human lives far away just the same as human lives in the West, maybe?

Do you really believe that the United States government is interested in human lives in the Middle East?

[TNF]

Does HP mean "doesn't agree with 100% of my policies" now?

For me HP means advocating the use of American military force anywhere on the globe in the interest of American capital, which Sanders is on record as being in favor of.

[TNF]

I'm not saying you're a horrible person. I'm suggesting that you might be putting just a bit too much stake in what politicians say their motives are as opposed to what they actually are. The United States government does not care about human rights. That much is evident in its alliance with reactionary regimes in Saudi Arabia and Israel and its close trading relationship with the People's Republic of China. Human rights is just the most convenient foil by which the American ruling class drums up support for conflict/regime change that will allow its members to take control of markets and resources abroad.

[TNF]

There hasn't been a communist society because communism is the absence of scarcity, government, and class society. There have, however, been brief glimpses of socialist societies throughout the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Socialism was rolled back in Russia precisely because of the failure of the other socialist revolutionary movements that were ongoing from 1917-23. Lenin recognized this and wrote of the growing danger of the bureaucracy in his latter years; unfortunately, the whole revolution ended up being undone in about a ten year period precisely because of bureaucratic mission creep and the destruction of the organs for workers' control and management of production throughout the course of the Russian Civil War.

I would classify Russia between 1917 and 1918 as a socialist society, before the organs of workers' control were destroyed and much of the working class dying on the frontlines of the Civil War. From 1918 to 1921 you had still had some degree of workers' input in production and control but not complete mastery, and by 1921, you had the ban on factions within the Communist Party and, ultimately, the takeover of the factories by state organs rather than by organs of workers' power. Even with that in mind though, Russia limped along as a democratic society (although one with severe defects) until the defeat of the Left Opposition and the seizure of power by Stalin in the late 1920s. I would also classify the Paris Commune of 1871 as a socialist society, areas of Germany under revolutionary control during 1918-1919 as socialist, Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War as socialist (although again, with severe defects, given the inability of the anarchists to really control the territory they claimed), Hungary in the course of the 1956 Revolution, and the anti-Stalinist revolutions of the late 1960s and early 1970s as revolutions which gave us a glimmer of what a socialist society would ultimately look like.

I don't think that the failure of these revolutions negates the prospect of socialism being built in the near future. A person looking from the vantage point of 1814 might claim that the defeat of the French Revolution by Bonpartism 'proved' that liberalism could never be successfully implemented, but the person claiming that would have ultimately been proved wrong by the convulsions that would eventually sweep feudalism out of Europe and establish global capitalism. The fact that the 20th Century socialist revolutions were not successful or did not have staying power does not discount the possibility of future, successful socialist revolutions anymore than the rise of reaction in France discredited the possibility of liberal revolution elsewhere.