The House Socialists and the Field Socialists

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I that Bernie Sanders advocates—from single-payer wholeheartedly support the populist programs health care, to free college tuition, to taxing the rich and more. But borrowing from Malcolm X (see the ar­ ticle below), Bernie is a house socialist and I’m a field socialist.

Bernie doesn’t want to replace or overthrow capi­ talism. Like all house socialists, he thinks capitalism can be fixed or tamed with reforms. By contrast, we field socialists understand that the essence of capital­ ism—private ownership of major industry, resources, banks, and the exploitation of labor by appropriating surplus value (profit)—is antithetical to democracy.

In fact, for all of Bernie’s talk about “democratic so­ cialism,” he and other house socialists turn a blind eye to the lack of economic democracy that is the very hallmark of the capitalist system. Because Bernie is in favor of tweaking capitalism but opposed to disman­ tling it, he ignores the systemic lack of democracy in the workplace and the economy­—the very aspects that most affects people’s lives.

Bernie rightly denounces the unequal distribution of wealth, where the top 1% owns more than the rest combined. But like all house socialists, Bernie fails to identify important institutions as being controlled by and serving the interests of the 1%.

Congress, the Democratic and Republican parties, the national media, the police and the military are all captives of the 1%.

In a class-divided society, all important institutions are wielded as tools of the dominant class. Field so­ cialists understand that these institutions answer only to the needs of the 1%, even though much effort is made by official propagandists to convince us that they serve us all. Bernie and other house socialists aid the 1% in the criminal charade of pretending that government institutions, the police and the military exist and operate independent of the class divisions in our society.

This is why it’s no surprise that Bernie and other like-minded house socialists are military hawks. They see the U.S. army as “our” army rather than a weapon of the 1%. This is why Bernie has voted for nearly every war appropriations bill. This is why Ber­ nie supports drones and U.S. military involvement in the Middle East; why he supported military action in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere.

This is why Bernie supported sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s that caused the deaths od more than half-a-million children and he supported U.S. military action in Kosovo in 1999. This is why Bernie refuses to denounce the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine but supports billions in military aid for Israel, Saudi (Photos) Democrat Bernie Sanders states that Eugene V. Debs is one of his heroes. But Debs stressed that working people needed their own party. Debs left the capitalists’ Democratic Party and ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket— even from his jail cell in 1920.

Arabia, and other brutal U.S. client states that serve to extend the reach and protect the interests of the 1% overseas.

Field socialists oppose imperial war-making, under­ standing that the individuals and institutions of the 1% that exploit us here at home cannot be trusted to defend our interests abroad.

In contrast to the hawkish house socialists, field so­ cialists demand: “All US Troops Out Now!” “Dismantle All US Military Bases Abroad!” “Not One Bomb, Not One Bullet for the Wars of the One Percent!” “Money for Jobs, Not for War!”* Because house socialists like Bernie limit their cri­ tique to reforms of the existing system, they are un­ able to propose concrete, workable solutions for the (continued on page 10, in “No to Trudeau’s Middle East military mission creep”)