What happens to a Bern deferred?

The left has an audience to engage among those Sanders supporters who want to continue seeking a "political revolution" in all the struggles in every corner of society.

July 28, 2016

https://socialistworker.org/2016/07/28/what-happens-to-a-bern-deferred

THE DEMOCRATIC National Convention has been a multi-day process of party leaders imposing "unity" behind Hillary Clinton on the disgruntled delegates representing millions of people who voted for Bernie Sanders--with Sanders himself pitching in to help.

For party leaders, Operation #YouAllBetterBeWithHer has been a success in the most important ways. They could rely on Sanders urging supporters to ignore his one-year-plus worth of criticisms of Clinton as the chief emblem of a corrupt political system. On Tuesday night, after the roll call of delegates, Sanders made the motion for the convention to unanimously accept Clinton's nomination.

The Clinton campaign felt confident enough by Wednesday to tempt the outrage of liberals by wheeling out a Republican to make the case for a Democratic president: New York City's billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But the tears, bitterness and acts of rebellion of many Sanders supporters--both inside the convention and outside on the streets of Philadelphia--are an indication that there are numbers of people trying to figure out how to keep journeying toward a "political revolution" now that their candidate has jumped ship.

The question now, to paraphrase the poet Langston Hughes, is: What happens to the dreams of those millions of people now that they have been deferred--most plainly of all by the candidate who gave expression to their hopes for an alternative to a rotten, rigged status quo?

Will the Bern dry up and become another example of a failed effort to transform the Democratic Party into a vehicle to achieve social change?

Or will some numbers of people energized by Sanders' left-wing message and inspired to act on that message be drawn into a resistance outside the Democratic Party--perhaps first by voting for Jill Stein, the left-wing independent candidate for president, but in any event joining the many struggles against injustice and inequality, before, during and after the election?

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WHEN SANDERS officially endorsed Clinton at the start of July, party leaders assumed, with the typical arrogance of America's political elite, that Sanders would simply deliver his supporters--representing more than 13 million primary voters, about 43 percent of the total--into the embrace of the Clinton campaign and its corporate backers.

But Sanders supporters, including the delegates chosen in the primaries to go to the Philadelphia convention, didn't fall in line quietly.

The Clinton campaign made some attempts at wooing the Sanders backers, but for each such gesture, there were at least as many outright insults toward progressives. Like the choice of neoliberal, hawkish Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine to be Clinton's running mate, which disappointed people far beyond the so-called "Bernie or Bust" crowd who had hoped a liberal like Elizabeth Warren would be the pick.

Even more galling were the leaked e-mails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC)--revealed by the muckraking organization WikiLeaks--that confirmed long-held suspicions: that the Democratic leadership, from DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on down, were actively helping the Clinton campaign to gain an advantage in the primaries.

When Wasserman Schultz was forced to step down because of the controversy, Clinton outrageously hired her as the "honorary chair" of her general election campaign. It's a largely symbolic role, but Clinton's action underscored her contempt for the outrage of Sanders supporters about the blatant favoritism.

So rather than welcoming Sanders supporters as they accustomed themselves to a nominee they had opposed and took consolation in what Sanders had claimed was "the most progressive platform in the party's history," the Philadelphia convention opened with a significant minority of delegates--not to mention non-delegates and protesters--feeling freshly wounded and reminded of everything they dislike about Clinton.

Thus, the overwhelming sound inside the Wells Fargo Center on the first day of the convention was booing.

Boos of U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings that were nearly drowned out by chants against the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Boos of Sen. Al Franken and comedian Sarah Silverman when they praised Clinton--and Silverman's scolding rebuke that the "Bernie or Bust people" were being "ridiculous" didn't exactly quiet the crowd.

Even Sanders was booed earlier in the day when he addressed a private gathering of supporters, telling them, "We have got to defeat Donald Trump, and we have got to elect Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine."

Sanders wasn't booed when he gave the highlighted convention speech on Monday night, but he didn't get the response he might have expected. As he tried to claim that Clinton was on the same side as him on issues he spent the past year blasting her about--from getting money out of politics to making health care affordable--the TV cameras focusing on his delegates showed tears, head-shaking and dull stares.

The following night, more than a hundred delegates staged a walkout after the official roll-call vote. Many of the protesting delegates headed out of the convention hall to an impromptu rally to greet them organized by the Green Party's Jill Stein.

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THE PARKS and streets outside the Wells Fargo Center had already been the site of days of protests that were similar to many demonstrations in the U.S. in recent years: energetic and rapidly radicalizing, but also largely disorganized.

Thousands of people endured almost 100-degree temperatures for a march to call for clean energy on Sunday; for rallies organized by the Green Party and Bernie or Bust; for demonstrations called by different Philadelphia-based organizations fighting racism and poverty.

Many of the protesters were Sanders supporters in revolt against being told to get behind Clinton. They carried homemade signs with slogans like "Unity behind corruption is not unity" and "#ClintonLiesMatter." Chants of "Jill not Hill!" were popular, reflecting significant support for the Green Party candidate among the hardest edges of Sanders backers.

Unlike Cleveland last week, where a highly militarized police presence caused the protests outside the Republican National Convention to be smaller, the Philadelphia police for the most part took a more restrained approach, at least as of midweek--perhaps because city officials, all of them loyal Democrats, didn't want to antagonize Sanders supporters more than their party's national leadership already had.

Unlike some of the festivals of protests that have taken place outside political conventions in the past few decades, there was no union presence to be found, and few signs of participation from social movements.

One exception was the march for Justice for Berta Cáceres, the indigenous activist in Honduras murdered in March by assassins connected to the regime that came to power in a 2009 coup that supported by Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State.

In the evenings, hundreds of protesters dropped by the Friends Center for the Socialist Convergence, which featured panel discussions with members of various socialist and left-wing organizations and tendencies on a range of topics. Drawing more than 200 people on each of its first two nights, the Convergence attracted a layer of people radicalized by the Sanders campaign, as well as providing spaces for collaboration, formal and informal, among radicals of different stripes.

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BUT FOR many Sanders supporters, the main focus was on what was happening inside the Wells Fargo Center, where even loyal opposition was viewed as high treason.

Clinton supporters, as well as many mainstream media accounts, treated the boos and chants for Bernie as shocking outbreaks of disloyalty, rather than the raucous back-and-forth that used to be the norm in U.S. political conventions. Those who deviated from the Clinton campaign-approved script were treated as if they were contributing directly to electing Donald Trump.

"I will be respectful of you, and I want you to be respectful of me," scolded Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio when she was interrupted by Sanders supporters--as if the leaked DNC e-mails hadn't shown just how little respect the Democrats have for those who won't follow the party line.

"We are all Democrats," Fudge added, "and we need to act like it." She and other mainstream party figures claim that voicing opposition to Clinton will hurt the image of party unity.

No doubt many Clinton supporters are sincere in their desire to project a united front against Trump. But there's something else at work in this argument. It's also a message to the party's base that being a Democrat means "unifying" behind the pro-corporate policies they're going to get from Hillary Clinton for the next four to eight years--or else face the Republican bogeyman.

To judge from opinion polls, many Sanders voters are starting to accept this logic, at least to the extent that they plan to vote for Clinton. But the events inside and outside the convention show that a minority doesn't. And that minority is angry--even if their anger is portrayed in the media as the mark of a Trump admirer--and rightfully so.

The importance of the Sanders radicalization shouldn't be judged on its impact on the Democratic convention. On the contrary, as SocialistWorker.org has argued since Sanders got into the race, the Democratic Party is designed to absorb and neutralize left-wing challenges.

But in reviving interest in socialism and raising expectations that mainstream politics can actually reflect the concerns of working people, the effects of the Sanders campaign will continue to be felt long after the election is over. The important next step is to draw those Sanders supporters who want to continue seeking a "political revolution" into all the grassroots struggles and political battles taking place in every corner of society.

Sanders himself has shown that a challenge confined to the Democrats will dry up like a raisin in the sun. But a left that organizes independently of the two-party duopoly can be revitalized by the new generation mobilized by Sanders--but inspired to go beyond him and fight for a different world.

Is Conversion Possible?

 

https://danieltutt.com/2016/07/23/is-conversion-possible/

What if we began to view leftist revolutionary thought as inextricably tied up with the problem of religious conversion? After all, a convert to revolutionary positions is far different than the merely philosophical conversionary model of Plato and St. Augustine, which is a cognitive level conversion. For Plato, conversion is when the individual develops a newfound commitment to a different regime of sense; conversion means that the individual sees the light of truth in a different way. This is, in fact, not enough for leftist conversion. Revolutionary conversion must not only abandon the world as it is, it demands a two-part commitment: that one take up the spiritual re-setting of their life along the direction of the revolution (this we find in traditional religious conversion), and secondly, one must commit to revolutionizing the material and social relations of the world (this we do not find in traditional religious conversion and is the most important addition of leftist philosophy to the phenomenon of conversion). This latter commitment gives conversion an ontological affectivity, i.e. converting entails a complete break with an individuals previous life when one becomes a revolutionary and a material mutation then follows.

We can therefore perform a re-reading of leftist ethico-political thought along the question of conversion into the revolutionary imperative. In this re-reading, leftist ethicists that fail to develop a theory of conversion fail precisely in that their theory fails to meet the demands of the revolution. Sartre is one example of such a failure. In his late turn to Marxism, Sartre said that true morality consists of a permanent conversion into revolutionary action, thereby punting on what it in fact means to convert. One must lead a life of constant conversion. In this position, Sartre effectively suspended the question of politics and morals, where to convert is to enter into a space in which the ethical imperative itself becomes eligible to be re-formatted along the creation of a new revolutionary subject. We find something like this in Lukács’ ethics as well.

In the recent work on St. Paul which was begun with the deconstructive master Jacob Taubes in the early 1990’s, followed then by Derrida and extended by Agamben, Zizek and Badiou — we are presented with a theory of Paul’s conversion that set the grounds for a genealogy of secular leftist conversion. In other words, these texts argue in different ways that St. Paul gave leftist thought a new form of universality, and the means by which a new theory of the ‘all’, beyond the limited confines of Jewish chosenness, functioned. But is this in fact an accurate genealogical claim?

In Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, a philosophical self-help tomb — he strongly argues that these readings of Paul, what he terms as ‘neo-Jacobin readings’, are in fact false. I won’t provide a book review of Sloterdijk’s text because Nina Power already gave a good summary of the book here. Rather, I want to look at his theory of conversion, particularly of how he reads conversion as a seminal aspect of leftist and post-Marxist thought.

Sloterdijk is tempted to agree with the conservative Heideggerian historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who argued that conversion does not exist. Spengler maintained there are only re-occupations of vacant positions in the fixed structure of a culture’s field of options. Conversion should therefore be re-designated as metanoia, a Greek term that means ‘a change of heart’, where the individual seeks out a new trainer and adopts a new vertical regime which entails a different Big Other. Sloterdijk argues that true conversions involve secessions from life, where the individual engages in an ascetic acrobatics — thus conversions happen all over the place in modernity but they are metanoetic shifts into a new regime of symbolic immunology. Thus, he argues, St. Paul’s conversion was not something that presented a new form of universality to the world of his time, it was an individual shift at the level of Jewish zealotry to a newfound Apostolic devotion. Since Paul already had relations with Christians for some time prior to his experience on the Road to Damascus, when he was overwhelmed with the light he called out to his Lord, using the very language of the Christians, before he had even accepted the Christ as his savior. This subtle point allows Sloterdijk to show that all religious conversion is plain and simple metanoia, which is given its first basis in Plato’s cave allegory, where conversion is,

“meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out a change of sight from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place ‘without turning the whole body’” (299).

The idea of conversion entailing a coincidence with the revolution of material and social relations would come about, in an interesting way, only after the scientific development of anesthetics. Anesthetics, for the first time, allowed man to enter into willfull states of un-consciousness – which was soon modified into a new form of bourgeois asceticism that turned against life and against asceticism itself in the form of laughing gas and opiates. Socialist and communist thought would eventually propose a model of conversion based on the necessity of man to develop a new awareness of what Sloterdijk calls the ‘vertical axis’. The vertical axis in modernity is steadily in decline and this creates a spiritual crisis — leftist thought thus enters into the fray to re-claim the vertical but devoid of the transcendent God. In an ingenious conservative reading of the October Revolution, Sloterdijk indictes the Soviet philosophers as the first ‘saints devoid of conscience’ which he argues is the most significant contribution of the Leninist moment to moral history.

With Sloterdijk’s periodization of conversion, he argues that metanoia changed after 1968 to something more concerned with bringing the commonplace back — to a horizontal re-adjustment from a sick and violent prior period obsessed with the secular vertical. Post 68, according to Sloterdijk, metanoia is no longer compelling at the level of revolutionary temptation — this is, incidentally a central part of Badiou’s philosophical fidelity thesis for which St. Paul provides the model. There is today a realization that “one does not save oneself by changing the world” to quote Godard’s 1982 film, Passion. What we lack is a desire for the passionate conversion that would ontologically affect the world — this itself helps explain why the question of St. Paul has returned to captivate leftist philosophical thought.

Žižek (2013) "Karl Marx and Hegel" (Full)