The Possibilities of the Sanders Movement: Left Forum Day 2

The Saturday Plenary at Left Forum 2016, Black Liberation and the Sanders Groundswell: Prospects for Left Unity, featured four speakers who focused on the potential for the Sanders campaign to effect a viable third party for the left in America.

The talk touched on the Black Lives Matter, the Sanders campaign, and the potential for a left-wing unity ticket in 2016 or the future.

[K]eeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a Philadelphia activist and an Assistant Professor at the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University, spoke first.

“The support for the Sanders campaign did not come out of nowhere,” Taylor began.

She placed the popular support for Sanders in the context of the anger and bitterness of the unkept promises of the Obama presidency.

The black working class has been destroyed by imprisonment and police oppression, Taylor continued, and the white working class is similarly oppressed.

So while the Sanders campaign is an expression of this frustration and anger, she said, the left should take advantage of the moment his candidacy presents.

“Let’s not narrow down who we are,” Taylor said, referring to the intercine secarianism that pervades the left, “It’s time to make things more broad. There is so much promise and possibility.”

[N]ext to speak was Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant. Sawant is a member of Socialist Alternative whose election presaged Seattle’s adoption of the $15 minimum wage.

The Sanders campaign and political movement it inspired “is the next step of a political process that began in the Arab Spring,” Sawant said. “It’s a sign that things are changing that he is doing so well.”

Sawant hopes that Sanders will reject the Democratic Party and run a third party campaign.

“A poll just came out showing 65 percent of Americans want third party alternative,” she declared. “And that 91 percent of those under 28 want a third party alternative. We need an alternative to come from the left.”

Sawant said she hopes Sanders joins with Jill Stein of the Green Party on an independent ticket.

“I urge all of you to join us in calling for this,” she concluded.

[N]imtz spoke next. He had a hopeful message about the future of the left and the movement that could be built in the wake of the Sanders candidacy.

Problems abound in creating a viable third party, Nimtz said.

“The winner take all system of elections… the divisions in the working class… the ruling class divides and rules,” Nimtz said. “Until these divisions are resolved, there is no possibility of reforging a labor party in this country.”

Still, Nimtz sounded a somewhat hopeful note in the face of an uphill battle with the ruling class.

“I think we’ll find out the working class is less divided than they want us to think it is,” he said. For one thing, “Trump has revealed the American Dream is over for wide swaths of the Caucasian working class.”

This is important because the white working class has been known to put its sectarian impulses ahead of progress.

“Labor and white skin will never win until labor black skin is free of discrimination,” Nimtz thundered. “Let me repeat that: Labor and white skin will never win until labor black skin is free of discrimination!”

[B]ookchin spoke last. She called the Sanders campaign “remarkable” for what it has already achieved and said it was far past time for the left to take the initiative in creating a new movement.

“It’s time to take our cues from the horizontalist movement of Black Lives Matter and the Sanders campaign,” she said. “It’s time for the creation of a new left.”

The need for a new left movement has reached a critical juncture, she said. Our society and the planet can’t wait any longer.

“Neoliberalism is sucking the life out of our communities,” Bookchin said.

“We cannot confine ourselves simply to a politics of resistance. We need to build an alternative.”