Warren vs. Sanders: Reform or Revolution

There are some on the left who would have you believe that Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s presidential platforms are “basically the same.” As a result, these folks claim, the two candidates are more or less interchangeable. It does not matter which one of them wins the Democratic nomination.

This view, however, is misguided.

No doubt the two candidates are running on similar progressive, social-democratic platforms of Medicare for All, taxing the rich, robust efforts to combat climate change, and the like.

But these similarities are more a testament to how successfully Sanders has pushed left discourse and the idea of what is “politically possible” in the last four years, than they are an indication of how “radical” Sen. Warren is. Indeed, many of the New Deal-style policies Sanders proposed in 2016 which the corporate media promptly dismissed as “fringe,” “radical,” and of course, “too expensive,” are now mainstream pillars of most of the Democratic candidates.

But the major difference between Sanders and Warren is that Sanders is running as an anti-capitalist who is genuinely committed to using his candidacy to spark, in his words, “a political revolution.” His campaign slogan, “Not Me. Us.”, stresses Sanders’ understanding that it is grassroots, working-class movements that truly transform society — not so much who is in the White House.

(We can, of course, certainly debate the efficacy of attempting to “vote” socialism into existence or, for that matter, attempting to do so through the thoroughly capitalist, imperialist, neoliberal Democratic Party.)

Warren’s campaign, on the other hand, is focused primarily on reform, rather than revolution. She wants to tweak around the edges of the system with some much needed improvements. And, to be clear, working-class people would benefit immensely from many of Warren’s proposed reforms.

But she maintains that she is “capitalist to my bones.” Warren is, as Jacobin’s Shawn Gude puts it in a story from February, “a regulator at heart who believes that capitalism works well as long as fair competition exists…” Yet when, throughout the history of capitalism, has “fair competition” ever truly existed…?

Readers will have to forgive me if, as a socialist, I prefer the genuine article — Bernie — over an imitation. The aforementioned Jacobin article calls it a choice between Eugene Debs or Louis Brandeis.

The question of reform versus revolution has long been a central debate among socialists. The overall goal of socialism is a working-class revolution to overthrow capitalism and the ruling bourgeoisie. But socialists also understand the importance of legislative and electoral reforms that can ameliorate the suffering of the poor and working class in the here and now — raising the minimum wage, rent control, universal health care, greater protections for LGBTQ people and other oppressed groups, etc.

Ideally these two goals — revolution in the long-term; reforms in the here-and-now — should not be juxtaposed against each other, but mutually reinforcing. History shows, for instance, that successful campaigns for a particular reform (say, same-sex marriage) can have the effect of mobilizing the working class, organizing those who were previously unorganized, and raising workers’ level of class consciousness.

But, for socialists committed to the long-term goal of full communism, reforms can only get us so far. Reforms under capitalism should be viewed as one stage in the longer, protracted struggle toward revolution. They cannot be an end in and of themselves, lest we abandon the goal of revolutionary socialism, entirely.

The esteemed Marxist theorist, Rosa Luxemburg, understood this correlation. In the introductory paragraph of her classic 1900 essay, Reform or Revolution, Luxemburg asks, hypothetically:

“Can the Social-Democracy [socialism/socialists] be against reforms? Can we contrapose the social revolution, the transformation of the existing order, our final goal, to social reforms? Certainly not.”

She goes on:

The daily struggle for reforms, for the amelioration of the condition of the workers within the framework of the existing social order, and for democratic institutions, offers to the Social-Democracy the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal — the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour. Between social reforms and revolution there exists for the Social Democracy an indissoluble tie. The struggle for reforms is its means; the social revolution, its aim.

Sanders seems to understand this. If the Vermont senator is a Bolshevik, Warren is a Menshevik.

Luxemburg was a member of the German Social Democratic Party (or SPD) during the early part of the 20^th century. The SPD was one of the largest and most prominent socialist parties in Europe at the time. She wrote Reform or Revolution as a polemical response to fellow SPD-er, Eduard Bernstein, a moderate socialist whose reformist or “opportunist” co-opting of Marxism threatened to subvert the goal of revolutionary socialism.

Bernstein believed that class struggle was no longer necessary to achieve socialism. He argued that capitalism had “improved” in their time and was no longer prone to economic crisis. Workers’ living standards, Bernstein pointed out, had improved, largely due to the proliferation of unions and worker cooperatives throughout Germany at the time.

As a result, Bernstein came to believe that socialism would more or less develop on its own. A working-class revolution was not necessary to bring it about. Rather, socialists need merely increase their presence in Parliament, and try not to scare off potential business allies with “antagonistic” rhetoric and radical policies.

Bernstein, in the words of socialist writer, Hal Draper, was seeking “socialism from above,” administered by the government, Parliament, political parties and the state, rather than a “socialism from below,” which is won by the working class. He had essentially abandoned Marxism in favor of a sort of “socialism lite.”

Even worse, for Bernstein socialism was “no longer an economic, but rather a moral imperative,” as Paul D’Amato explains it in his socialism primer, The Meaning of Marxism.

“[T]he ultimate aim of socialism is nothing,” Bernstein infamously declared, “but the movement is everything.”

One of the weaknesses of reformism is that it forces the working class to put its faith in some leader or savior to liberate them (be it Barack Obama or Robert Mueller). The working class, under reformism, does not achieve its own liberation.

“Class struggle plays no role, except as a means to exert pressure on the top,” D’Amato writes of reformism. “Workers do not learn through their own action how to construct a new world. They are at best a mere stage army, or, worse, a passive voting bloc.”

But the biggest problem with reformism is that the ruling class rarely voluntarily relinquishes power on its own. It must be taken from the bourgeoisie by force.

As D’Amato writes:

If socialism is really to be the expropriation of wealth and the socialization of production, that means depriving the bosses of their power and taking away their wealth and their ability to extort any more wealth. Whether you propose to do this in small installments or all at once, the ruling class will resist with all their might…. That is why capitalist states have police, armies, and prisons. The purpose of armed force is to act as a last line of defense against any attempt to challenge capitalism.

Thus, the state is not a neutral, empty vessel that socialists can merely fill with “progressive” members of Congress, and just sit back and wait for them to deliver us the socialist goods. If only it were that easy. As Lenin argued, it is not enough for socialists to merely seize the state. It must be smashed to pieces and replaced with a new one.

In other words, the reformist-path does not lead to the same outcome as the revolutionary one.

The proponents of reformism, Luxemburg wrote, “do not really choose a more tranquil, calmer and slower road to the same goal, but a different goal. Instead of a stand for the establishment of a new society they take a stand for the surface modifications of the old society.”

To that end, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) was correct to condition that its endorsement of Sanders this spring is for him alone. The DSA will not endorse any other Democratic candidate seeking the presidential nomination, should Sanders lose the primary. This is a bold move considering the degree of “lesser-evilism” voter shaming we can expect in next year’s election.

Sanders’ campaign represents a major, historic opportunity for the working class. He is the first self-described socialist in nearly a century to have a serious shot at becoming president. Our choice, then, as Luxemburg famously put it, is between “socialism or barbarism.”

Choose wisely.