Q: I bought your newspaper at a Hands Off protest. I agree with many of the points in the article about Bernie Sanders, but I disagree with the main point. I do not believe Bernie should use his momentum to start a new party. Why can’t Bernie do what Trump and MAGA did to the Republican Party—change its priorities from the inside?
A: Communists must work tirelessly to point out the impossibility of reconciling the interests of the exploiters and the exploited. Trying to take over one of the class enemy’s parties does exactly the opposite—it blurs class lines.
The working class makes up the majority of society. Through our collective labor, we produce all new economic value. Some of that value is paid to us in wages. The rest, which Marx called “surplus value,” is kept by the capitalists as profits.
At its root, the class struggle is about who controls this surplus value. This fight is irreconcilable because every dollar more in the capitalists’ pockets is a dollar less in ours, and vice versa.
In its insatiable thirst for profit, capitalism has created productive forces capable of producing much more than can be sold on the market for a profit. This causes periodic crises of overproduction.
As Marx explained, “Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a universal war of devastation, had cut off the supply of every means of subsistence; industry and commerce seem to be destroyed; and why? Because there is too much civilization, ‘too much’ means of subsistence, ‘too much’ industry, ‘too much’ commerce.”
The working class has no interest in maintaining this irrational system. Our interest is to use society’s immense productive capacity to meet human needs, not enrich a tiny sliver of humanity.
But bourgeois ideology exercises a powerful influence on all classes. Most workers are not yet conscious of our fundamental interests. We need a workers’ party to help change that and to organize the struggle against capitalism.
The class basis of American political parties
The Democratic and Republican parties are organs of capitalist class rule, deeply enmeshed with the bourgeois state. Through super PACs, lobbyists, and donations, capitalists and corporations exert influence on their politicians and policies. It benefits the ruling class to have two capitalist parties—one serves as a safe outlet for dissatisfaction with the other.
Although he’s a billionaire, Trump is not an establishment figure. He tapped into rage brewing beneath the surface of American society and mobilized it to reshape the Republican Party in his own image. Trump rode to power on demagogic appeals to disaffected workers, but he didn’t change the GOP’s class nature.
Trump altered the party’s style and some of its policies, but he didn’t fundamentally “change its priorities.” His program—from trade war to cutting down the federal bureaucracy to retrenching American imperialism—still aims to secure and defend the rule of the capitalist class.
Democrats will change their political rhetoric in hopes of returning to power. But a rhetorical shift doesn’t change which class they represent. / Image: Nathan Congleton, Flickr
Can the Democrats be “changed from the inside”?
Democrats have held the presidency for 20 of the last 32 years. They’ve overseen a massive decline in working-class living standards, while the combined wealth of America’s billionaires increased from $240 billion in 1990 to $4.56 trillion in 2021. Under Biden, they wasted billions on imperialist wars in Afghanistan, the Middle East , and Ukraine. They illegalized the railroad workers’ strike in 2022. They are a bourgeois party through and through.
That’s why the Democrats are less popular than ever. In a period of crisis and sharpening class struggle, their status quo politics aren’t very attractive. They will change their political rhetoric in hopes of returning to power. But a rhetorical shift doesn’t change which class they represent.
The labor leaders have been acting as a pressure group on the Democrats for decades. Despite the massive resources of the AFL-CIO and its nearly 13 million members, its political influence on the party has failed to secure even the most modest concessions for the working class—much less take it over.
The Democratic establishment has admirable means to prevent a takeover of the party, as they demonstrated during Sanders’s two presidential runs. Their candidate is not elected by a simple vote of the membership, but by a series of Byzantine caucuses and primaries. Even if a pro-worker candidate were to win, they could be vetoed by superdelegates at the convention.
The Democrats’ executive committee, the DNC, is a self-perpetuating body even more insulated from the rank and file. If that weren’t enough, they have the capitalist media and a seemingly endless supply of billionaire donors.
Time for a knockout blow!
Now is the time to strike against the hated Democrats—precisely because they have been weakened.
Sanders could do this. His tour is drawing the biggest crowds of his political career. Millions of workers are hungry for a militant alternative to the capitalist parties. If Sanders were serious about fighting the oligarchs, he would break with the Democrats and use these rallies as a launchpad for a new party. Instead, he is drawing people right back into the dead end of lesser evilism.
Whatever Sanders does, workers will test new political forces as they come to understand that capitalism offers no solutions. That’s why the RCA is committed to building a mass communist party that can organize workers for the titanic class battles ahead.