Views in brief

Against shaming Sanders' supporters

IN RESPONSE to "Should Palestine activists vote for Sanders?": The article does not fairly characterize the argument of Palestine in America, which does not gloss over Sanders' weaknesses on Palestine, and does not entail "ton[ing] down criticisms of otherwise indefensible positions on Palestine."

Like most articles of this type, this piece picks the weakest pro-Sanders arguments and refutes them (although it mentions one of our main arguments in passing near the end). Also, contrary to what Mr. Elasady claims, our article does not criticize people who choose not to vote for Sanders, and says so explicitly; rather, we criticize the shaming of those who choose to support Sanders, and here are our actual reasons: http://palestineinamerica.com/2016/03/bernie-sanders-election-2016/.
Rima Kapitan, San Marcos, Texas

Sanders' support for Israel

IN RESPONSE to "Should Palestine activists vote for Sanders?": Sanders is a Zionist. He lived on a kibbutz. He approved every appropriation for Israel while in elected office. He will "support" the Democratic candidate for president "if he does not win the nomination." Which means he will support that arch Zionist, Hillary Clinton.

He is part and parcel of the Democratic Party, a political organization which is so servile to Israel as to be its protector and enabler.

Why would anyone sympathetic to Palestine vote for Sanders? To do so would perpetuate, as well as validate, the crimes of and contribution to Israel.

Sanders is another of the cardboard stand-ups of the imperialistic enterprise, of which Israel is worst.
Michael Severson, Santa Rosa, California

Protest, but let Trump speak

IN RESPONSE to "Trump and the system that spawned him": I strongly support your basic message here, but I have reservations about the tactic of trying to shut down Trump's rallies, as was done in Chicago.

Vigorous, but nondisruptive, rallies to protest his racism are definitely needed outside his venues, and silent protests inside his rallies can be useful. But the goal of actually disrupting and forcing the cancellation of his rallies is almost bound to backfire in a number of ways. For example, when we hold our own rallies, we will have a weakened defense when right wing mobs disrupt them; how can we use a free speech defense when we ourselves disrupted their rallies? Further, although there are obviously lots of Trump supporters who are unreachably racist, xenophobic, etc., there are also lots of workers who are fed up with politics as usual and are curious about Trump; shutting down Trump's rallies makes it all the harder to reach such workers. A better tactic would be to exercise our freedom of speech rights to sell the socialist and movement press outside his rallies.

Finally, I suspect that Trump engineered the debacle in Chicago as a set-up. The Chicago police and the university police both claimed afterwards that they did not advise the cancellation; that was Trump's idea. He wanted to start fights and to make our side look bad. Unfortunately, if I'm right, we played into his hands.

I think it's actually a setback for the working class when we shut down Trump's rallies. You're right that he isn't a fascist; we aren't fighting a fascist movement on the streets, like in Germany in the late 1920's and 1930's. He's a right-wing demagogue; we should be competing with him for the ear of workers, not fighting against the workers who are curious about him.
Chuck Cairns, Ray Brook, New York

Reforming capitalism isn't enough

IN RESPONSE to "Saving capitalism or getting rid of it?": Excellent analysis. I have read Robert Reich's book and have come to roughly the same conclusion: that Reich accurately diagnoses what's going wrong with modern capitalism, but fails to draw the logical conclusion and see that the current trend isn't the result of capitalism done wrong, but is the logical outcome of capitalism done right.

It is in Capitalism's DNA to create inequality, to enrich the rich and impoverish the poor, and Reich's and Bernie Sanders' vision for how to deal with capitalism's excesses is to pit our democratic institutions and the working population in an endless fight against the natural drift of the economy.

Capitalism, like previous systems of exploitation, creates a class of powerful people that increasingly sees itself as entitled to constitute itself as a formal ruling class, rhetoric about "democracy" be damned. Everyone is supposedly equal under the law, but they are highly unequal under the market. And increasingly, the class that rules in the market begins to rule the government as well, in order to lock in and extend its exalted position. Thus, the investors currently are busily engaged writing "trade" agreements that will govern millions of people's lives, people whom they are not bothering to consult in the formation of these societal rules. Clearly, they see themselves as entitled to dictate to the rest of us.

To "reform" this state of affairs by leaving this class of investors in charge of the economy while trying to clip their political wings through regulation is a recipe for a society perpetually at war with itself, a house divided, if you will. We have better things to do than constantly struggle against the power of concentrated wealth. We have a just and egalitarian world to build and a planet to heal.

Also, we have done the welfare state thing already, and it eventually unravelled. We need a better plan than to repeat the short-lived (three decades) post-Second World War welfare-state capitalism that ran aground during the 1970s. We cannot recreate the global conditions of production and exchange, of power and politics that made that time period what it was.

Capitalism warps our human relationships into the fetishization of things, creates perpetual insecurity, and is rapidly approaching the point of no return in cannibalizing the planet, while generating increasingly wild boom and bust cycles. We cannot live with this system, reformed or not. We need to reject reformist socialism--or pursue it as a mere first step--and set our sights on revolutionary socialism, which we ought properly to call Marxian communism (i.e. worker ownership and control of their workplaces) as opposed to Stalinism (i.e. state-capitalist "Communism") or "democratic socialism/social democracy (i.e. capitalism with a socialist face).

That is why, in the preface to the Communist Manifesto, Engels makes the point that he and Marx were very careful not to call it the "Socialist Manifesto," since "socialism" was such a wide field that it included all kinds of utopian reform movements, none of which actually challenged the exploitive nature of capitalism.

This is the eternal question facing socialism--reform or revolution--and after a century of reformist social democracy, we can see that capitalist exploitation of the working class and the planet has only worsened. Conclusion? We have no other choice, if we are honest with ourselves, than to choose revolution while avoiding the pitfall of Stalinism.
Erik Parsels, Asheville, North Carolina