[ Bernie Sanders is angry about capitalism. You should be too.
Here are eight lessons from our favorite democratic socialist’s new
book.]
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EIGHT LESSONS FROM BERNIE SANDERS’S NEW BOOK  
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Yaseen Al-Sheikh
February 23, 2023
Jacobin
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_ Bernie Sanders is angry about capitalism. You should be too. Here
are eight lessons from our favorite democratic socialist’s new book.
_

Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks to members of the press outside the West
Wing of the White House on January 25, 2023, in Washington, DC. , Alex
Wong / Getty Images

 

It’s an exciting and frustrating time to be a socialist in the
United States of America. On the one hand, the two presidential bids
launched by Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020 helped precipitate a
resurgence of anti-capitalist political organization and labor
militancy, with organizations like Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA) and Starbucks Workers United
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racking up electoral
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and unionization wins across the nation. On the other hand, economic
inequality still plagues us, and there’s no sign of meaningful
change coming from Congress anytime soon.

Sanders, who now serves as the new chairman of the Senate Committee on
Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, has a new book
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you that you’re right to be angry.

_It’s OK To Be Angry About Capitalism_ covers everything from the
limitations of the Senate when it comes to passing legislation like
Build Back Better, to the intense struggle for a Medicare for All
system that enshrines health as a right to all, to the challenges of
the future like automation and mobilizing a working-class coalition
for change. Here are eight highlights from the book that drive home
the challenges of the day and what Bernie Sanders thinks we ought to
do about them.

1. The Capitalist Economic System Is the Problem

Here is the simple, straightforward reality: The uber-capitalist
economic system that has taken hold in the United States in recent
years, propelled by uncontrollable greed and contempt for human
decency, is not merely unjust. It is grossly immoral.

Right from the get-go, Bernie rejects the phrase “the older you get,
the more conservative you become” as an outright falsehood. In fact,
for Sanders, it’s very much the opposite. As time goes on, the
capitalist system only makes Bernie angrier. A consistent theme
throughout the 2016 and 2020 campaigns was that the very system we
live under is an abjectly immoral one.

It may seem like something we’ve heard before, but it ought to be
repeated, since it grounds our argument for a better future in a
normative objection to the inequality and hierarchies of capitalism.

2. Demand More, Demand the World

I don’t tell people to be satisfied with what they get — or to
accept that some things will never be gotten. I tell people to demand
more.

While campaigning for the Democratic nomination in the state of
Wisconsin in 2016, Clinton derided
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Sanders’s political agenda as “pie in the sky stuff” in an
attempt to portray herself as the sensible candidate. Evidently, the
Democratic voters of Wisconsin did not find
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pie in the sky to be all that bad. Sanders writes in his new book that
he doesn’t think it his responsibility to tell the working class
what it can and cannot achieve, but instead that it’s his, and a
much broader movement’s, responsibility to push for more and more,
for “upending uber-capitalism” as he puts it.

3. The Problem of Inequality Is Systematic

The fight against American oligarchy — and the plutocratic
arrangements that foster it — has nothing to do with personalities.
Inequality isn’t about individuals; this is a systemic crisis.

There is an ongoing class war in the United States, and the
billionaire class is unquestionably on the offensive. In Sanders’s
view, it’s important not to get bogged down in the individual quirks
and idiosyncrasies of men like Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, but rather to
stay focused on the very system that allows them to accumulate their
wealth in the first place. It is a system that exploits the worker,
it’s a system that erodes democracy, and it’s a system that, as
Bernie argues, goes against values of human decency.

4. Medicare for All Is a Central Demand of Our Time

Too often, Americans lack the sense of safety and belonging that
people enjoy in countries with a robust health care system that, in
every case, is based around a universal health care program. No wonder
so many of us succumb to diseases of despair.

The cornerstone plank of both the 2016 and 2020 presidential bids
launched by Bernie was Medicare for All, so it’s no surprise that he
dedicates an entire chapter to assailing the disaster that is American
health care. Not only do we as a country spend more for less per
capita on health care, we are also witnessing a marked _decrease _in
life expectancy. Sanders even goes on to say that, because of these
conditions, Medicare for All might be the most integral part of a
political revolution in the United States. In a very literal sense,
the fight for Medicare for All is a fight not just for decency in one
of the richest countries in the world, but a fight for our very lives.

5. You’re Either on the Side of Workers or You’re on the Side of
Their Bosses

_Which side are you on_? These days, corporations like Starbucks and
Amazon don’t hire gun-toting thugs. Instead they hire anti-union
consultants and pollsters and politically connected lobbyists — many
of them Democrats — to thwart union organizing. But the fundamental
premise remains: you’re either on the side of workers and organized
labor, or you’re not.

Invoking the famous labor anthem “Which Side Are You On?” written
by Florence Reece of Tennessee, Bernie draws a clear line in the sand
on the issue of labor. Either one is with the working class, or
they’re against the working class. Sanders hits this note repeatedly
throughout the book, that there is a class war ongoing in this
country, and in the sixth chapter he does not flinch from how this
applies to our struggle today. To be clear-sighted is to acknowledge
what Amazon, Starbucks, and a plethora of politicians from across the
two-party system are trying to do, which is keep the workers down.

6. New Technology Won’t Solve the Old Problems of Ownership and
Control

The machinery may have changed, but the imbalance between economic
elites and the working class has not. Nor has the injustice that
extends from that imbalance.

In a chapter largely focused on the future of the economy as it
pertains to technology, Bernie centers an important question that
doesn’t get asked very often. When it comes to how automation might
occur, or how artificial intelligence affects certain jobs, who
actually gets to decide how this develops? Do workers have a say? Will
workers still have dignity? Who should actually be in charge of
industries and the broader economy?

These are questions that Eugene V. Debs asked
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hundred years ago, and while we’ve certainly evolved technologically
since then, the questions are yet to be answered.

7. A Democratic Society Demands Equal Education for All

Historically, progressives were at the forefront of education debates,
battling to establish free public education, to open schools to all
students, to build great schools in urban and rural areas, and to
fully fund them. There was a forward motion to our activism.

In a chapter on education, Sanders takes a look at the advances
we’ve made since the modern era began. We’ve achieved public
education for children up to roughly eighteen years of age, but is
that education working? Are our teachers treated fairly? What about
those who want to go to college? For those who want to advance the
struggle for a prosperous and democratic society, we must return to
our roots and seek not only to reform but also to expand education and
access to it.

8. There Is No Middle Ground in the Struggles to Come

There is not a middle ground between the insatiable greed of
uber-capitalism and a fair deal for the working class. There is not a
middle ground as to whether or not we save the planet. There is not a
middle ground about whether or not we preserve our democracy and
remain a society based on equal protection for all.

Toward the end of the book, Bernie threads the needle on all the
aforementioned issues and much more by making the case in as certain
terms as possible: there is no middle ground between the dignity of
the working class and the wants of the capitalist class, and there is
in fact no middle ground between democracy and extreme inequality.

Sanders not only wants people already engaged in politics to move
toward his program, but he wants millions of people to organize
wherever they are: in their neighborhoods, in their workplaces, and on
the electoral and educational planes as well.

A Legacy That Will Continue

Regardless of whatever Bernie Sanders might choose to do in 2024,
whether that be retire, run for reelection, or launch a third bid for
the presidency, he wants you to not only be angry, but energized to do
more. Ever since he won his mayoral bid in Burlington in 1979 as an
open socialist against the entrenched political establishment of both
parties, Bernie has stressed the centrality of mass movements to
political change.

This centrality of the working class to his theory of change is what
inspired the phrase “Not Me, Us” and it’s still what fuels him
close to half a century later. So yes, it is okay to be angry about
capitalism, and it’s even better to do something about it.

Yaseen Al-Sheikh is a writer, activist, and a student at the
University of Texas at Tyler.

“Nationalism,” the new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe
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