My take on Bernie Sanders:
It’s interesting to see an actual major party presidential candidate who denounces the corporatists with as much fervor as Sanders, and the positive response he is getting. That said, Sanders is not one of us. He is a statist, centralist traditional Marxist economic determinist, and not a revolutionary anti-imperialist, let alone an anarchist. As a politician, he has a lengthy history of compromising with militarism or US imperialism for political or economic reasons.
The revolutionary anarchist movement in North America needs to establish and maintain a specific hierarchy of priorities: revolutionary anti-imperialism comes first, followed by resistance to the domestic police state, followed by the class struggle, followed by social and cultural issues (environmentalism is something of a wild card issue depending on one’s perspective). The majority of the Left in the United States, including the anarchists, have adopted a nearly reverse order of priorities by placing cultural issues first (gay rights, transgenderism, political correctness), followed by economic issues (“Fight for Fifteen”), followed by anti-police state issues (though the focus and critique is largely limited to race issues), with genuine anti-imperialism being last.
Sanders program is, at best, a variation of European social democracy (which has been very easily incorporated into the global-plutocratic imperialist system).
By Bill Kauffman
The American Conservative
