they can to tell a new story about society, one that offers an explanation for why so many people suffer while a select few enjoy their lives in relative comfort. This new story has an antagonist and a protagonist: the bad guy is the tiny capitalist class, and the good guy is the huge and diverse working class.
For a class-struggle politician, the adversary does not go unnamed. As one corporate lobbyist complained in May 2019 in the New York Times, “To a hammer, everything is a nail. And to Sanders, everything is an issue created by millionaires and billionaires.” This clarifying and polarizing message is a very good thing indeed—both because it happens to be true (the rich have incredible control over our lives and everything that transpires on our planet, and are the ones responsible for most of our worst ills), and because it’s extremely effective political communication.
Politicians from both major parties routinely issue vague calls for unity and harmony. But class-struggle politicians know that class conflict will never disappear under capitalism—it’s inherent to it. The only question is whether the working class will succeed in fighting back. So they don’t paper over conflict. They call instead for a specific type of unity: that of the working class in struggle against a common enemy.
Among the working class, class-struggle politicians urge solidarity across lines of difference. Bernie Sanders explained this in a speech at that same October 2019 rally, when he asked the 26,000 in attendance to look around them and identify someone who seemed different from themselves. “Are you willing to fight for that person who you don’t even know as much as you’re willing to fight for yourself?” he asked. “Are you willing to fight for young people drowning in student debt even if you are not? Are you willing to fight to ensure that every American has health care as a human right even if you have good health care? Are you willing to fight for frightened immigrant neighbors even if you are native born?”
Finally, a class-struggle politician is someone who understands that the only way to actually make lasting change is to build and harness the power of working people outside the state. They know that even when they’re in office, they will be up against the formidable power of the capitalist class. To truly transform society, they understand that they need huge numbers of ordinary people to build mass movements that can exert pressure of their own.
As Sanders put it in an October 2019 interview with CNBC’s John Harwood:
BERNIE SANDERS: Right now you have a Congress and a White House that are dominated by a corporate elite who have unbelievable amounts of money and influence over the political and economic life of this country. I’m not going to be dominated by those guys. I will take them on and I’ll beat them.
The way we beat them is with the understanding that real change has never taken place without millions of people standing up and demanding that change. That is the history of the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay movement, the environmental movement. I will not only be commander in chief of the military, I will be organizer in chief. I will be organizing with a strong grassroots movement.
We already have the nucleus. It’ll be involving the labor unions, the African American communities, the Latino community, the young people of this country. All people who believe in justice, working-class people, who are prepared to stand up and fight and take on the corporate elite …
JOHN HARWOOD: But even if you get elected, even if it’s successful to the point that Democrats win a small majority in the Senate, is [conservative Democrat and West Virginia senator] Joe Manchin going to vote for your program? Is [conservative Democrat and Montana senator] Jon Tester going to vote for your program?
BERNIE SANDERS: Yeah. Damn right they will. You know why? We’re going to go to West Virginia.
Your average politician sits around and he or she thinks, “Let’s see. If I do this, I’m going to have the big money interests putting 30-second ads against me. So I’d better not do it.” But now they’re going to have to think, “If I don’t support an agenda that works for working people, I’m going to have President Sanders coming to my state and rallying working-class people.”
You know what? The 1 percent is very powerful—no denying that. The 99%, when they’re organized and prepared to stand up and fight, they are far more powerful.
Bernie Sanders has been exemplary on this front not just in word, but in deed. His campaign in 2016 was unconventional in many respects, but it was what he did afterward that showed the extent to which he believes in using electoral politics, as both a candidate and office-holder, to build movements of the working class outside the state.
Organizer in Chief
Sanders told John Harwood that if he won, he would be the “organizer in chief.” No president has ever articulated their role this way—not even President Barack Obama, who was himself a former community organizer. What would being an “organizer in chief” look like? What Sanders did after losing the 2016 Democratic primary to Clinton gives us a good idea.
Naming and Shaming
Sanders has both personally gone after major corporations and wealthy CEOs, and used his campaign machinery to support striking workers and other protests. For example, in June 2018, Sanders took the stage at a rally attended by hundreds of Disneyland workers in Anaheim, California. “I want to hear the moral defense of a company that makes $9 billion in profits, $400 million for their CEOs and have a 30-year worker going hungry,” he said. “Tell me how that is right.” He added, “The struggle that you are waging here in Anaheim is not just for you. It is a struggle for millions of workers all across this country who are sick and tired of working longer hours for lower wages.”
The union that represents the workers, UNITE HERE, was at that point in contract negotiations with Disney. Sanders chose to use his platform to help them win their contract fight. A few days later, he wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he publicized the workers’ testimonies he had heard in Anaheim and wrote,
What these workers are doing, standing up against the greed of one of the most powerful and profitable corporations in America, takes an enormous amount of courage. If they are able to win a livable wage with good benefits from Disney, it will be a shot heard around the world. It will give other low-wage workers at profitable corporations throughout the country the strength they need to demand a living wage with good benefits.
The next month, Disney agreed to pay its unionized workers at Disneyland a minimum of $15 an hour; in August, it followed suit at Disney World in Florida. Sanders didn’t create the fight at Disney himself, of course—workers there were already unionized and fighting for better pay and working conditions. But he used his massive bully pulpit to support these workers, in a way that went far beyond the typical photo ops that Democratic candidates pause for on picket lines and at union conventions during campaign season.
Then, in late August, he blasted Disney for securing large tax breaks for itself while many of its workers were still paid so little. After that, Sanders generalized the fight by introducing legislation in November to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour—a change that would affect 40 million people, or 25 percent of the workforce.
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